Between poses, we eat Oreos and ginger snaps while the animators smoke on the patio. I keep pulling off your hood to run a palm over your buzzed scalp, frosted with bleach. You dip your head as though taking a sacrament. By now, we know the models, not personally or by name, but by their jawlines and hip creases. The drawing saddles are uneven wood, and sandbags still line the studio’s back wall from February’s flood. Paint pigment circles the drain in the bathroom sink, lit by the waving flames of votive candles. The soundtrack is spa-like and ambient, heavy on flute. Spooky, you lean over and jot on my sketchbook.
You went to art school, offer tips, gentle corrections. I want to learn this without learning, through blind seeing: no books or lessons, no regimentation—but I want your strokes on my page, the impressions of your fingertips and knuckles. You draw only in color, I only charcoal: a difference emblematic of something I can’t quite nail. You shy away from eyes and nose, preferring instead the suggesting shade of a high cheekbone, lifted by a thumb wetted on your tongue. Because you’re late, or you prefer the angle, you’re often on the floor in front of me, away from me. I smear charcoal across disproportionate masses while you hold a fistful of pastels and sit on the floor, cross-legged in your black boots. The bell rings to switch poses, and the model reaches for a stool, and I remind myself she’s the reason we’re here, that it’s foolish to think I can keep drawing you.
About the Author:
Miles Parnegg holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Los Angeles.
I try to calm him one last time, try to coax him into belly breathing with me, try to force his blaring nervous system into some semblance of order. It’s no use.
“If I have to stay here, I’ll die, DAD,” he wails, sounding more like a toddler than the 7-year-old he is.
I can’t always tell if his tears are genuine or forced, desperate attempts to manipulate.
I want to run my hands through his hair, the same wavy, auburn locks I had when I was a kid, feel his arms wrap around my back the way they do the few times a year he willingly hugs me.
I want to grab him, will his body to stillness, shut him up, tell him how spoiled he is.
It’s all so confusing sometimes, the pushes and pulls of parenthood—especially with my son.
He’s introduced me to all sorts of new terms over these past few years: neurodivergent, executive functioning, stimming. I had already heard of autism, of course, had seen the ravings of the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists who decided their internet research taught them more than medical school. I’ve only got an associate’s degree, but I guess I’m smart enough to sniff out bullshit peddlers. Either that or they just remind me of my dad.
Right now, though, I have to get to my second job, the only one I truly care about. Or at least I tell myself I have to work; I don’t know if it’s work or an escape at this point.
“Kirby, if you calm down, I’ll get you a snack,” my mom says in an annoying sing-songy voice, as if she’s talking to a puppy.
“Bye, bud,” I say. “Wish me luck.”
He doesn’t, just looks at me with a tearful scowl.
I grab my suitcase, roll it down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the side door of our story-and-a-half house, the screen door bumping against my shoulder as I clumsily try to retract the bag’s handle.
I load the black bag, one that’s accompanied me through the methy river towns and cornfield oases of the Midwest, into the trunk of my Ford Taurus, climb into the driver’s seat, and pull on my cheap neon-green plastic sunglasses. I shake my head and let out an audible sigh as I turn the key in the ignition and the dependable six-cylinder engine growls to life.
Will this ever get easier?
Enough with my single-dad problems. Time to kick some ass.
…
This crowd hates me. Which means I’m doing my job.
They boo and holler insults, most of which I can’t make out. It’s background noise; I’m too busy concentrating on the 200-pound guy in royal blue spandex across from me, trying to remember our carefully planned choreography. We need to take these people on a ride, let them think they know what’s coming, then dash their hopes. Thrill them, then leave them wanting more, so they’ll come back to this dumpy old American Legion hall next month.
My opponent, a young guy named Fulton from Chicago, stumbles out of the corner, ducks my flailing arm and kicks me in the midsection. He’s supposed to grab my head around his bicep, run up the corner ropes, and flip backward, sending me crashing to the mat. Shiranui, they call it. Or Sliced Bread. Whichever you prefer, Fulton doesn’t get quite enough momentum launching off the turnbuckle, and it takes all the strength in my lower back to heave him over my head and sell the move.
“Thanks,” he mumbles under his breath after we slam onto the canvas and he covers me. I kick out at two, push him into the ref, a guy named Nick who’s been around Dairyland Wrestling since I started helping out back in high school. With Nick temporarily stunned in the corner, I drive my right arm between Fulton’s legs for a low blow that outrages the crowd. It’s rare that I win clean these days.
Then I hoist tonight’s challenger onto my back and swing him around, dropping him to meet my lifted knee face-first. Nick recovers to slide down next to us and make it official.
One. Two. Three.
Before I stand and gloat, I whisper in Fulton’s ear. “All good. It gets easier.”
Then I’m up, grinning through exhaustion that’s both real and embellished, Nick raising my left arm and then handing me my belt.
The crowd bays. Kids a few years older than my son shout at me, tell me I suck. I wish Kirby could be here, yelling along with them, but we tried that once; it ended with him screaming and throwing popcorn until my mother could carry him out the back door.
A 30-something hipster in the front row claps for me, recognition I covertly soak in while glaring at him with indignation. A bearded guy wearing a Sting T-shirt tells me to go fuck myself, which is just as much of a compliment.
I walk toward the entrance, turn back to face the crowd, take in all the boos, bask in them, even, and hold up my prize.
It’s good to be the champ.
…
“Dad! I want some breakfast. Do we have bacon?”
My son expects a hot breakfast every morning, not the cereal I grew up munching while my mom got herself ready for work. If it were up to him, I’d fry bacon day after day and he’d eat only meat like the carnivorous dinosaurs he obsesses over. And then he’d shit bricks into our toilet for me to unclog.
He seems to have no idea I’m scrambling to get us going each weekday, get him packed and dressed for school, and make myself look at least presentable for my day job. Maybe I secretly want him to live that carefree … I sure as hell didn’t as a kid.
My back aches from last night’s exertions, so I pop a couple ibuprofen that will, in turn, make my stomach sore because I haven’t had time to eat breakfast. I’ll wait to take my Prozac until after I’ve mowed down a breakfast sandwich from Kwik Trip.
Kirby’s frozen waffle pops up from the toaster, so I plop it onto a plate and drizzle syrup into the four wells at the center—only those, nowhere else—the way he likes it. He’s contentedly watching cartoons, a trance I should break to give him practice coming to get his own food. But I’m tired, physically and mentally, so I slide open the silverware drawer next to the sink and walk his plate into the living room. He’s standing two feet from the TV screen, remote in hand, bouncing on his toes.
“Breakfast, Kirb,” I say.
He takes the plate without looking away from the screen.
“Can I have some meat, Dad?” he asks while dropping into a seated position and spearing the whole waffle with his fork. It undoes my careful work with the syrup, which never seems to bother him once he takes possession of the waffle.
“Sorry, bud, we’re out of bacon and sausages. We can pick up some more after school.”
“I hate school,” he says reflexively.
I wince internally, because I know sitting in place and focusing for seven hours is even more taxing for him than it was for me. And yet what other choice do we have? He regularly babbles on about things he learns and imaginative scenarios he plays out with his buddy Jasper at recess.
“Remember what we say when someone brings us food?” I remind him before walking back into the kitchen to sip my coffee.
“Thanks,” he mumbles.
Twenty minutes later, after Kirby has brushed his teeth under my supervision and pulled on his preferred windpants (the non-scratchy ones) along with a Sonic the Hedgehog long-sleeve shirt, we’re out the door to run another weekday gauntlet.
I watch as he slowly buckles himself into his booster seat, strapped into the passenger’s side of the back so I can easily reach back and squeeze his leg while he’s absorbed in his own world. Most of the time, he just pulls his leg away.
We listen to rock music from the 90s and early 00s; it’s like a portal between our two worlds. He likes loud, heavy electric guitar riffs. Chris Cornell’s voice comes on the radio and I ask him if he knows who’s singing, trying to tap into a flash of knowledge he surprised me with at age 4.
“Dad, I just want to listen,” he says.
I back off, because I want to be the kind of dad who respects boundaries, even when it feels like I have to bounce between endless walls and constant harassment from him.
We drive along the riverfront, the reason Commerce became a town in the first place, now a neglected relic. If I ever make it big—or if one of the lottery tickets I buy every couple months hits the jackpot—maybe I’ll buy some of these buildings and revitalize them. Make it my thank you to my hometown, a more substantial display of gratitude than the performances I deliver at the Legion hall every month.
The trees are donning their fall costumes, putting on their own show for the people of Commerce. Kirby’s school is a 10-minute drive from our house, but I usually add a couple of minutes by taking this more scenic route. He should see the best version of his hometown.
I park on the street, walk him to the classroom doors, and wave to his teacher, a 40-something woman with a dyed-blond pixie cut and tattoos on both arms. I wish my teachers had looked like her. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt like such an outcast, more interested in drawing than playing football and self-conscious about needing speech therapy, while struggling to focus for tests.
I want to go home and sleep, but I have to go sell car insurance.
…
My music hits, but I wait until Kevin Martin’s voice reaches the chorus to stalk through the curtains, much to the chagrin of our crowd. My reputation precedes me, just like it always does, and I find I enjoy that. It’s predictable.
Boos ring out. A kid Kirby’s age stretches to give me five, but I just scoff at him, don’t even bother to fake him out by extending my hand and pulling it back. As the top heel, I’m above that sort of playful shit. I don’t need to build heat with little antics like some bottom-of-the-card act.
They used to cheer me, but I got bored with that. It was too basic, too simple. It couldn’t deliver that same sense of thrill I felt my first time in a ring down at wrestling school in Rockford at age 19. Don’t get me wrong—taking my first bump in the ring knocked the wind out of me, and I had bruises on my torso from hitting the ropes that first week. But I also felt something come alive in me, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Better than sex, the way the buzz lingered in my brain and body for hours afterward.
Now, almost 20 years later, this might be one of the last times I make this walk to the ring and step through the top and middle ropes.
Ever since Kirby’s formal diagnosis six months ago—confirming what we had all suspected for a few years—I’ve been steeling myself for the end. On one hand, I need this outlet more than ever. On the other, how can I devote so much time, so much energy elsewhere? What kind of dad would that make me?
“I don’t think you guys are ready for this,” my dad told me when he learned of the pregnancy. Considering his own failings as a father, it was a laughable take, even if I knew, at some level, he was right. Then again, who really is ready?
Kirby’s mother, apparently intent on proving my dad omniscient, skipped town six months into motherhood, to no one’s surprise but mine.
“I can’t just be a fucking cow!” she yelled at me on the night she packed up her Mazda and left to self-medicate and reconnect with her ex in Ohio. It’s subsequently dawned on me that the way she bellowed sounded a bit like the heifers on my uncle’s farm in Albany growing up, the ones my cousins and I gawked at while they mounted each other.
Tanya had shown up in town after I finished up at the tech school. She was a year older than me, the first girl that approached me at a bar (even if she was drunk), and the first one who sucked my dick. Never mind that she didn’t seem to remember having done so the next morning.
Our on-again, off-again relationship was a one-night stand I insisted on trying to drag across the better part of six years. She could be sweet, waking up and making me breakfast the morning after a show. But she’d tune out my ramblings about my long-term career plans because she never seemed to have any herself. And when she drank, she’d go hard and turn mean.
The mornings after, she’d sober up and cry, tell me how she needed me, how her dad had hit her while her mom just sat there, stoned. I’m ashamed of how my pride swelled on those occasions, eclipsing the hurt from her inebriated insults and the pity I felt for her. I was wanted, unlike how I felt most of the time, probably a vestige of my dad moving out when I was 8 and only periodically showing interest in me before or after.
I guess it’s the same feeling I experienced the first few times I got in the ring in front of a live crowd, the same feeling I’m chasing when I pull Kirby into a hug and he wriggles free.
Just in case these are the last chops I’ll deliver, I add a little extra oomph, stinging the babyface’s overtanned chest. I used to spend money I didn’t have on spray tans and hour-long sessions in cancer-causing tanning beds, an expense I’m grateful to Kirby for forcing me to cut. I don’t need that shit anymore; I’ll let my wrestling sell me more than my looks. Which is probably why I’m working this Legion hall month after month instead of professional arenas.
I made it there once, back in my earlier days on the indies, had a tryout match with one of the big promotions in Milwaukee that ended with a blown spot. Everyone involved knew it wasn’t on me, but the other guy already had a contract and a body I could only dream of—or kill myself pursuing—with pecs that bounced and traps that cascaded like mountains.
When I roll out of the way of a moonsault and then hoist tonight’s hero on my back to steal another win, I feel numb and distant, as if I’m watching the finish of our match from above the ring.
I’m done.
…
Kirby’s occupational therapist greets us as we walk into the cinderblock and metal building sitting amid an endless cluster of bland offices on the southern outskirts of town. She’s a cute brunette named Carly who is far more skilled—and patient—when it comes to working with kids like mine. I know it, and so does Kirby. A flash of warmth glows in his big blue eyes when he sees her, before his social awkwardness extinguishes it. He only mutters hello back to her.
“Any updates?” she asks, turning to me.
She’s suspiciously nice, too nice for me to even fantasize about her like the pervert I am. I suspect that, deep down, she sees me as a meathead, the costume I present to the world to hide my inner nerdiness and other insecurities.
“We’re still trying out some of your emotional regulation strategies,” I say, hoping my use of OT-speak will impress her, “but he tends to fight me on them.”
“He’s not the first to sniff them out,” she says with a smile. “We’ll keep practicing, won’t we, Kirby? You ready to head back?”
He nods his head as a slight grin creeps across his face, and they walk down the hallway. I turn and head out the door to drive to the gym down the street for a quick lift. Like the meathead I am.
It’s a happy coincidence, one of the few in my life, these weekly opportunities for us to each work on ourselves. I need every chance I can get to maintain my muscle mass—or at least slow my march toward the middle-aged dad bod that awaits me.
I should probably instead call Tyler, the head of our little regional promotion, to tell him I’m tapping out. We’ve known each other since high school, when we both played drums in the band. He was two grades above me, the older brother I never had, the type who let me hang around but resisted laughing at my jokes, as if it was his way of keeping me on the proper rung of our pecking order. He’d been helping his stepdad, Jeff, run shows since he was in middle school, back when Stone Cold was slamming beers and flipping birds and making every boy with a chip on his shoulder want to hit his gym teacher with a Stunner.
I worry he’ll try to convince me to stick it out, that it’s really the best move for both of us, that I need to wait and see what he’s got planned for next year. I’ll postpone that call until later, I tell myself, as I pull into the parking lot.
I alternate between squats and overhead presses, sipping my protein drink in between and scowling enough to scare anyone away from using my machines. It’s the one time I live my character in the outside world, and it’s purely for utility; I only have so much time to exercise and need to be efficient.
Next, it’s on to power cleans, triceps dips, Russian twists, shoulder hangs, a quick jump rope and everything else I can fit in before I hustle back to the OT clinic, where Kirby silently greets me and defers all details of his work to Carly. Maybe I should take him with me to the gym sometime, let him unleash some of the molten energy that seems to be bottled up inside him.
He hands me a drawing as we walk out to the car. It’s of a boy surrounded by lightning.
…
I’m dropping my title belt, Tyler informs me. It’s the perfect opening for me to tell him my news, but I hesitate.
“Gunner is ready, we’ve been building him up for six months now,” he says. “It’s his time.”
I nod and grip his hand.
“I get it, Ty. See you out there.”
Gunner and I put on one hell of a match. Give these people who shelled out $20 a pop their money’s worth. Soar off the top rope and slam each other down, wrench each other’s arms and trade kicks to the gut while they down hot dogs and Pabst Blue Ribbons.
I go for my finisher, but he slithers free, just like we planned. The crowd gasps. They can sense something is afoot, that this isn’t like any of my past dozen title defenses, that Gunner might just unseat me. We have them hoping despite themselves, believing our story even though they know it’s all rigged.
When I flop my body forward and flip over to sell Gunner’s piledriver and he hoists himself onto the top rope, the noise is building, waiting to explode. They crave this ending. I gaze up at the dingy, discolored ceiling, watch Gunner pump his body through a frog splash and brace myself for the impact that will end my reign. The fans yell along with the ref’s count, and the party is on.
As I stumble my way to the back, my disequilibrium is only partially contrived.
…
My mother is asleep in the armchair when I get home. Kirby wears her out, especially when her fibromyalgia flares up. I rely on her more than I should, even though she tries my nerves with her incessant worrying.
“Do you think you should try a dairy-free diet for him?” she used to ask every couple of months when Kirby was a toddler and still didn’t say many words beyond “Dudda.”
I pull an afghan over her snoring body and hope like hell she won’t wake up until I’m already in bed. I don’t want to talk, even if she could manage to push aside her judgments of my lifestyle to listen.
I quietly roll my bag into my room, change into fresh boxers, and tiptoe across the hall to Kirby’s room. He’s curled up sideways across his queen mattress, which I bought so I could fit next to him during marathon bedtimes reading enough Eric Carle books to sear the words into my memory. He’s easier to get down these days now that naps are a thing of the past and he runs himself into the ground with rapid-fire thoughts, if not physical exercise.
When I stoop down to triple-check that he’s breathing, his eyes pop open. He rarely wakes up in the middle of the night.
“Dad, did you win? Do you still have your belt?”
I wasn’t sure he even knew I was the champ, let alone felt any sense of attachment to my title. The morning I told him I’d won the belt, he didn’t even respond, just complained I was blocking his cartoons.
“Nope, buddy, it was time for me to give it up.”
Tears fill his eyes and his chin juts downward.
“It’s OK, Kirb, it’s just someone else’s turn, that’s all,” I try to reassure him.
“You gotta get it back, Dad. Gotta be the champ.”
I brace myself for a late-night tantrum, but instead, he rolls over, curls his arm around his stuffed sloth, and closes his eyes. I crouch on the floor next to his bed for several minutes, scratching his back. His brow furrows, then relaxes, and a hint of a smile spreads from his lips up into his round cheeks. They were the first thing I noticed when the sonographer showed us the 3D ultrasound. My little bulldog.
I stand, pad back across the hall to my room, and gingerly ease myself into bed.
Maybe I’ll call Ty tomorrow.
Read by the author:
about the author:
Tom Ziemer is a writer who lives in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin (the self-proclaimed Troll Capital of the World) with his wife, Hannah, two sons, and two dogs. He is a former sportswriter for the Wisconsin State Journal and Wisconsin Soccer Central. His work has appeared in 101 Words, BULL, Revolution John, and ScribesMICRO. Find him on Bluesky @thommyziemer.bsky.social.
When Mr. Boppo Joined the Cohort | Sharon Lee Snow
The brisk Monday October night when Mr. Boppo flounced into the glass-walled English Department Classroom 301, we all looked up bleary-eyed from our critique group stories full of suicide ideation, suspicious yarns of days lost to raves from another era, and the usual amount of coming out tales to find a small man hovering at the door, costumed in a ruffled white tent of a shirt that bounced with a life of its own. Under a ridiculous pointed white hat, an equally white face with expectant eyes framed with black triangles smiled at us despite our obvious discomfiture. He headed straight to the empty seat beside me, bowed quickly to the class in general, and bounced his hula-hoop shirt with its red pom-pom buttons with a flourish as he sat down.
We turned to Professor Corelli – who we called Jim since we were grad students – but Jim didn’t seem to know what to do with the little clown either. He scrolled his enrollment rolls and looked up just as perplexed. “Mr. Boppo?” he asked the man. “You were approved for this class?”
The small man stood up and bowed again; this time, a proper bow.
“He’s one of them French clowns,” whispered my critique partner, Kelci, as she appraised him. “The sad ones.”
“I think you mean Italian, like Pagliacci,” I said.
Kelci didn’t appreciate my interjection, and I admit I was somewhat doubtful too. I wasn’t so sure of my clowns, and my opera knowledge was limited to what I watched on The Simpsons combinedwith my mother’s love of a great tenor solo from time to time.
In truth, I hated clowns. For no particular reason. Just like most people I knew tended to hate them.
We stared at the clown.
I was waiting for a French accent, or for him to begin belting out an aria, or jump to life, honking a horn and talking in a goofy clown voice. But a neutral North American accent simply stated: “I am Mr. Boppo.”
The class was silent, watching.
I expected a lot more questions from Jim, but he threw up his hands and said, “Welcome,” because he had tenure and one more year before retirement.
At that, Mr. Boppo sat down, scooted his chair closer, and joined our group. I figured he would sit back and take stock of the situation, but instead, he produced a neatly stapled short story. “I’m Mr. Boppo,” he said again, as he passed out the required three copies to the three of us already in the critique group. He waited for us to announce ourselves and to read his story.
Kelci was serious about the class and the MFA program. I could see her mind working. Was this experimental writing? Was this performance theatre? Was this some test? Wyatt, next to me, secretly worked gig jobs and studied pre-med as a practical backup to being an MFA student. Wyatt had zero patience for nonsense, but he could write like a son-of-a-bitch.
“Look, clown,” he began, but Mr. Boppo held up a hand.
“I’m just a student,” he asserted. “Same as you.”
So, our small critique group introduced ourselves and passed him our stories which worked out strangely well since we were short a group member with Emma home puking. I pulled Mr. Boppo’s story over to me, angry about it and Mr. Boppo in general. Still, I was intrigued. I picked up the paper, hoping for a fascinating insider’s insight into the circus, or about his unique life living as a clown outside of the circus.
But it was none of those things. The story was surprising from the first line. It sang, it cried, it was light like a communion wafer on the tongue, cleansing you of tired tropes and metaphors and themes. The noise of the elevator opening and closing outside our classroom door, the hum of students talking, and the bright fluorescent lights dimmed and went silent. I went to a new place I didn’t recognize. When I put the story down, I couldn’t remember what I read but felt like the weight of the girlfriend in trouble had lifted, that things were clear, beautiful even. I handed him a paper with marks written that I did not recall making, and he thanked me with a tiny bow from his seat.
I could see that everyone was reacting the same way to Mr. Boppo’s story. At the end of the evening, everyone in our group was at least somewhat entranced with the clown – even stoic Wyatt – and Kelci posed all of us for her Instagram post.
When I got home, Emma had finished throwing up and was curled up in a fluffy pink blanket on the couch, like a fuzzy, helpless kitten. Her face was gaunt, her skin white and translucent, dark smudges of bags under her eyes. My worry for her was a constant ball in the back of my throat, choking me. We both knew what had to be done but couldn’t explain why it hadn’t happened. Nothing was happening at all, and I was terrified.
I sat by her and stroked her hair and told her about Mr. Boppo.
She didn’t believe me at first, but then I showed her the picture of our critique group plus Mr. Boppo on Instagram, and she laughed but then grew worried. If clowns can join the MFA program, she mused, then what value did it have anymore? Why were we going into hideous debt for a clown college?
“I think it’s some kind of experiment,” I offered, trying to cheer her up. I couldn’t explain exactly how it felt reading his paper, so I brought out his remarks on my draft. “Let’s read them together,” I said, and she cuddled up next to me.
Initially, his markings didn’t appear to be language, and we looked at each other. “Gibberish,” she said, but then the writing began sorting itself out, smoothing out into a lovely handwriting like magical self-writing elvish runes. We watched as it took shape in the margins, swirling up and around paragraphs, curving around bad sentence structure and cliches as it went. In the end, an exquisite red vine of words, both encouraging and meaningful, flowed through my story pages. We leaned in and read it, sighing in places where he’d nailed a particular problem in the plot line, smiling at his kind support of a well-written phrase.
“It’s wonderful,” Emma said, looking brighter. “I must meet this clown.”
Our cohort took our classes together, so we were not surprised to see him in our class the following morning. Emma had put her makeup on and looked happier than she had in days. She took a seat next to Mr. Boppo, who stood up briefly, bowed, and kissed her hand. Emma giggled.
He looked exactly the same, as if he slept in his costume and makeup, as if they were not in fact applied but rather a part of him – or more specifically, him, himself. I found myself annoyed at how Emma continued to smile a little to herself. All the things I had been doing to cheer her up: her favorite foods, cleaning up puke, binge streaming through her favorite shows that I secretly hated…and now, a clown. It took a clown to make her smile again.
My suspicions about Mr. Boppo were back now that I was removed from his magic writing spell. And my pregnant girlfriend was giggling with him over something, like they’d been best friends for years now.
I felt like screaming out the obvious. Nothing good could come of this infection of our tight cohort group. Why is a clown in our class? But the class was moving into place like nothing strange was happening, even those who’d missed last night’s workshop.
Mr. Boppo looked up from regaling Emma with a witty remark that had her chuckling. He stared right at me. There was no mirth in those black clown eyes. The corner of his mouth quirked up.
Yeah, I made up my mind. I would bring down this fucking clown, this ridiculous Mr. Boppo. This imposter in our midst.
It wouldn’t be too hard, I figured. We were working on short memoir pieces, so that would provide some details on this clown. He couldn’t hide who he was forever. At that moment, the door opened. The students and I watched with interest as Professor Beadle strode into her class. Professor B was young, but also ran a tight ship.
“Good morn—” She halted to a stop in her practical black pumps, frowning at Mr. Boppo. She looked around and verified that we were indeed her 10 a.m. memoir class. She made up her mind and walked right over with a brittle smile.
“Good morning! Are you auditing our class today? I didn’t get any notice.”
He popped up and bowed. “Mr. Boppo!” he said with a flourish of his hand. “I’m a student, Professor.”
She sucked in a deep breath. Her brows knit together in pain. You could feel her thinking, just what I fucking needed. She nodded and went to the computer where she furiously tapped in her password to get to the enrollment page. With a resigned sigh, she stared hard at him as he smiled back at her with a circus-wattage smile. Then she shrugged and opened her slides. “Let’s begin.”
Mr. Boppo stayed attached to Emma’s side when class ended. I was even more annoyed then, because we knew nothing more about the mysterious clown now than we had at the beginning of the class. Professor B was delighted with his ability to parse dense material and create a discussion around Roxane Gay’s story so intense that everyone seemed disappointed when class was over. For all his talking, he had said, I realized, actually nothing.
“Good morning!” he said, bowing at me when I finally managed to insert myself between him and Emma as we packed up to leave.
“Great discussion, right, babe?” Emma was glowing like she used to when we’d started dating.
“I look forward to reading your memoir next week,” I told him, making a point out of grabbing Emma’s hand. A bigger man would have been grateful for anyone who got their clinically depressed girlfriend out of her funk. But staring down some challenge in his clown eyes, I found I wasn’t that man.
When the class made plans to grab lunch in the Student Center, Mr. Boppo came along as if he did this every Tuesday. Emma dropped my hand and joined the herd. I hung back with Wyatt, who had just finished an online quiz for his Organic Chemistry class. I wanted a reality check.
“Don’t you find him strange?” I asked him. “The whole thing – this Mr. Boppo clown?”
“Of course I do!” he said, stuffing his computer into his backpack. “Why is a fucking clown in our program? I worked hard to get into it and now they’re letting in any clown?”
“Well, there’s that, but him in general. Being a clown. Like all the time.”
Wyatt shrugged, tossing on his backpack. “There is something weird about it, yes, but I don’t have time to care.” He patted me on the back. “I’d watch my girlfriend if I were you, though.” And he winked.
In the lunchroom, Mr. Boppo regaled us with funny stories without monopolizing the conversation. Everyone laughed over their cold, shitty pizza slices. I noticed Emma had a better appetite and didn’t seem inclined to throw up in his presence, something I resented.
When we migrated to our next class, I walked behind the clown. He was asking Emma about her writing, and she hadn’t noticed when I slipped back. Surely someone else could see how ridiculous this all was.
“What do you think,” I whispered to Kelci, “about this clown?”
Kelci shrugged. “It’s odd. I find myself forgetting things. Like, what did we just talk about at lunch? And what did he even think about Roxane Gay’s piece? I wanted to remember it, but I couldn’t. Still, I like him. There’s just something about him.”
The week went on, and Mr. Boppo became a part of the cohort as if he’d never not been a part of it. Emma began washing her hair and putting on makeup again. Her clothes were clean, and there was color in her cheeks. Her eyes sparkled. She couldn’t wait to get to class, where she always sat next to Mr. Boppo, forcing me into an odd man out role.
Thursday evening, we all went out to the local student drinking hole after Jim’s class, as was often our custom. Jim came too. Emma was talking quietly with three girls from the cohort.
For once, I caught the clown alone, sitting at the bar by himself. I sat down and bought him a beer. “So,” I said to him. “How are you enjoying the program?”
“It’s great,” he said, smoothing his white tent shirt. “Such talented writers.”
I nodded. “You seem to know all about us, but we know so little about you.”
He smiled at me and took a sip of beer.
“What’s your name, for instance?”
“You know my name,” he said.
“That’s not a real name. What’s your first name? Where are you from? Why are you here? Why do you dress like a clown?” I spoke as fast as I could with an eye on our group slowly making their way to us.
Mr. Boppo leaned back. “You’re an angry man,” he said. “So much anger for a young man. You can’t appreciate that something can just exist. You can’t see the miraculous.”
“That’s just stupid,” I said, practically spitting as I whispered. “What are you here for?”
“That’s a good question, Evan,” he replied. He looked concerned, then nodded at Emma. “Don’t you have more important things to consider, though?”
After that, I really hated the clown. I began to hate his fucking guts. My whole existence became entwined with pulling off the mask of this clown, exposing him as a fake, as a fraud, a pretender. We had all earned our way into this program, and some sketchy guy in makeup had become the sudden darling of the cohort, the mascot of our MFA program. But who the hell or what the hell was he?
I spent my nights on the computer trying to smoke him out. There was nothing. Just a million references to Boppo the clown in cartoons or in general, but nothing about our Mr. Boppo. And the whole Pagliacci story worried me, with its sad, vengeful unraveling clown, the faithless wife. I began staying up until 3 a.m. just to get to my schoolwork. When I did sleep, my night was tormented with violent dreams that didn’t end well for clowns and with me getting nudged awake by a frightened Emma.
Emma would not listen to reason. “I feel better around him,” she said. “He makes me happy. What have you got against him? Everyone loves him except you.”
One late afternoon after we’d come home from class, she was still smiling. She wouldn’t show me what Mr. Boppo had written on her paper, the vines of beautiful writing swirling around her pages.
“I think we need to speak about what we’re going to do,” I said. I hated to do it while she was so happy, but for some sick reason, I felt a need to kill whatever joy the clown had given her. I also needed her strong enough to hear the truth. “We are running out of time.”
There. We’d danced around this for too many days. It was finally out.
She stopped smiling and stared at me. “Is this about the clown? Why are you so jealous of Boppo? Is it because he makes me happy? All you do is bring us down with your focus on what is wrong. In your writing and in life.”
That hurt, but was so off the point that I lost it.
“It’s not about school!” I screamed. “It’s about our fucking predicament. We are running out of options and it’s time we got our heads out of our asses!”
I felt bad when I said it, but only for a minute because she wasn’t looking sad or helpless or kitten-like at all. She was glaring at me, through me, like I was the clown, a buffoon, a piece of shit.
That did it. “Enough about that damn clown! That stupid, stupid clown! Who the fuck does he think he is anyhow? Mr. Boppo. I hate his fucking guts! And you need to stay the hell away from that psycho!”
She didn’t wait for me to finish yelling. She marched to the bedroom and threw things in a small suitcase, grabbed her computer, her marked-up story, and told me she was going to stay with Kelci.
I didn’t sleep that night and was even more furious the next day. This was going to be my chance, I thought. I was finally going to critique Boppo’s memoir piece. I couldn’t wait to read that bullshit and rip it to shreds. In front of everyone, I decided. Time to end this shit.
When we got into our groups, I was sad to see that Emma wasn’t in our usual spot, but glad on some level. Kelci flipped me off and went into the other group with Emma on the other side of the classroom. Wyatt joined me and Mr. Boppo to make the required minimum of three participants.
Mr. Boppo was serious today, watching me.
“I’m worried about you, Evan,” he said, handing me his paper.
“I’m going to find out your game, you fucking clown,” I whispered. “I’m bringing you down, Mr. Boppo.”
Mr. Boppo actually frowned, and I saw the paint crack on his forehead, which made me smile until he said, “Is this really what you should be focusing on? Is that really what you want?”
Wyatt ignored us and plowed right into the work. When he was done, he tossed his comments on our desks and began working on Organic Chem homework. I finished Wyatt’s excellent piece about the Christmas tree he and his single mom had made inside the car they lived in when he was a little boy, and then I went to work on the clown’s essay.
It was a short piece, slightly shorter than the required page limit, and I marked him off for that right off in gleeful, savage strokes. It began in a weird place, too, in the future, which seemed odd for a memoir. Try as I might, though, I could not escape the pull of his beautiful words, his magic art of storytelling. The memoir piece was like everything he wrote: deep, packed full of meaning without being pretentious, but light as well, full of airy hope and tears mixed, like a beautiful composition balanced with both salty and sweet candy, like hitting the perfect note on a beautiful aria. He was at once a child living in a world that only loved creatives when they were confined to specific places, and a man yearning to be more than this clown, pushing at the boundaries of allowed place and time.
When I finished, I was wiping away tears. I found I had written in the margins in a beautiful vine-like way, and the words were encouraging, wanting more of this story. I sniffled, handing it to Mr. Boppo.
Wyatt looked up once and shook his head, muttering something before going back to tapping on his computer.
“Thank you,” Mr. Boppo said, reading my critique. He smiled, and it was a normal smile, not his big-ass clown smile.
“It’s not been easy,” I said to him, picking up my story with his critique, knowing it was the same story as his, the future my future, the pain my pain.
“It’s not been easy,” he agreed.
“How will I know?” I asked him, understanding at that moment that he was going to walk out the door forever in two seconds. “What is the right thing? What the hell is real in all of this mess?”
He just smiled. “Art, beauty, truth. It’s not about the right thing. It’s about what is important, Evan, what is important…to you.”
He was at the door now, and only I was watching him leave. “How do I know what’s important?”
But he just bowed and shut the door.
Wyatt pulled his head up for a moment and stared at the closed door. “I thought that clown would never leave.”
Read by the author:
Sharon’s story was selected as the 2025 Honeybee Short Fiction Prize winner by Michael Czyzniejewski. Mike had this to say about the piece…
“When Mr. Boppo Joined the Cohort” is a story that works on so many levels. The surface weirdness of a sad French clown joining a fiction workshop in the middle of a term is a surreal type of absurdity that drew me right into the story. Then, as it plays out, the narrator’s insecurity over his writing, his relationship, and his life choices in general tells me that this author understands character and how to control narrative. It’s a terrifically weird and wonderful piece of fiction.
about the author:
A multiple Pushcart nominee, Sharon Lee Snow earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. Her award-winning short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Passengers, Burningword, New Plains Review, South 85, Gulf Stream, and other journals. She currently lives in Tampa where she teaches professional writing to college students and works on her short story collection. Connect with her on X and Instagram @sharonleesnow and her website: www.sharonleesnow.com
Remember when we were clumsy and gloomless? New lovers undressing in front of each other for the first time. I want to keep this story there. In the curls of your chest hair, in the uncrossing of my arms from my bare breasts. In the stroke of laughter from your lips as my fingers ran their way across your manhood. Oh, I said, surprised at my own bravery. Oh, I said, when you bravely found your way inside me. I want to keep the story there, in the sunlight that fell across your sweat-dappled forehead in the aftermath of our love. In the damp white sheet we turned into a tent and swore we’d never leave.
Regarding loss, I’m afraid to bring it into the story, worried what I might bring back to life. Like my marble belly so swollen with time and excellent time. And how I woke one night to find my innards scattered around my knees. They say that blood from the belly tastes sweeter than blood from anywhere else. How we held each other differently that night, how we wept tears we’d never weep again. Christening tears for what wasn’t born right. Can tears christen what wasn’t born right?
I kept dreaming I was a creature pulling out my wings to sell in a market stall, next to stacks of pomegranates and shovels. Once I lived in heaven with you, because I wanted to.
We didn’t ask for God that night. Or any night thereafter.
About the Author:
Born and raised in Palisades, NY, Mea Cohen is a writer now based in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her work has appeared in West Trade Review, OKAY Donkey, Big Whoopie Deal, Barely South Review, and more. She was nominated for best micro-fiction in 2024 and 2026. She earned her MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University, where she was a Contributing Editor for The Southampton Review. She is the Founder and Editor in Chief for The Palisades Review.
A Haunted House at the End of the World | Autumn Bettinger
Is this the end of the world?
“It may be, old girl. Are you ready?”
Marigold slid a wrinkled hand up the faded post of her house. The ghosts were heavy with the coming storm—anxiety manifesting in creaky floorboards and swinging tapestries. Marigold leaned over the porch railing as the first plump drops of the apocalypse battered her front garden. The other seaside towns along the bluffs began to wink out, obscured by the storm that ingested the world with a swirling, single-minded intensity.
The satellite images had been all over the media before the internet went dark—a storm cell so large it covered half the planet. Earth’s own great red spot, only the color of bruised and necrotic skin: mottled purple veined with oily black. Sickly. Contagious.
KA-CHUNK. The backup generator kicked in.
Marigold closed her eyes as the storm consumed, bloating on snapped branches and tsunami waves.
I will protect you.
“No need.”
The house shuddered. Marigold was nudged back inside by rolling porch boards that nipped along her fuzzy slippers. The door snapped shut behind her, and the locks chunked home.
“I’m happy to be here with you, at the end,” Marigold said as she shuffled towards the kitchen. The wind exploded. Rain drowned gutters and sloshed beneath the foundation.
Is it, though? The end?
“I don’t think we’re getting out of this one.”
Marigold settled herself in the breakfast nook. A cup of tea waited on the table. It smelled of garden lavender and lemon balm. The house must have hidden a bundle of those dried herbs from last harvest. Marigold’s favorite tea. The bond she shared with the house lay sticky with memories and murmured adorations. She mourned its destruction much more than the passing of her own unremarkable life.
We got out of that thing with Ron.
“Murdering my asshole husband was decidedly less complicated than surviving an extinction event.”
But you are resourceful and clever. You fed me so many.
“Killing men is easy. I’m just sorry you had to keep their weak souls inside you.”
Once they were a part of me, they loved you, like I do.
Hail whipped through shingles, softball-sized chunks of ice splintering rafters and shattering siding. Marigold sipped her tea as the house crowded around her with every last ounce of structural support. It coddled Marigold, collapsing into just one, tight room. It crumpled offices and bathrooms, slapped hallways against kitchen walls to reinforce this last bastion of safety. The storm sucked up the windows as the exterior shredded.
The kitchen walls were so close, bent so deeply that Marigold could brush the wallpaper with her pale fingers. She smiled, love radiating between them as the roof buckled and plaster rained down, splashing into her tea and dusting Marigold like sugar. The room disintegrated.
“Buying a haunted house was the best thing I ever did,” Marigold whispered as the wind ripped them away.
About the Author:
Autumn Bettinger is a short-form fiction writer and full-time mother of two living in Portland, Oregon. She was the 2024 Fishtrap fellow, has won the Tadpole Press 100-Word Writing Contest, The Not Quite Write Flash Fiction Prize and the Silver Scribes Prize. All of Autumn’s published works can be found at autumnbettinger.com
Discovery of Newborn Girl on the Greenway, Newham, London | Leah Mullen
Discovery by a dog walker at 9.13 pm on Thursday, 18 January junction of Greenway and High Street South in East Ham child was taken to hospital, without any injuries police are appealing to find the baby’s mother.
The baby could’ve been laboured out of a Dickens novel, born as she was and left like an unexploded bomb on the pathside. The caul fell foul of the 10p plastic bag charge. She mewled against it, spiking her newborn panic in the stubby grass. The mother was gone.
The mother was trafficked in an anonymous hospital ward. The mother was fearing for her life, handcuffed in a cell, in a basement, in a cubicle on a boat. The mother was sent overseas for daring to come overseas. The mother was anonymously dead or drunk and loving it.
Wise Men? Too late in the season. Too far north for storks. Fortunately for this scrap of prey, too built-up for hawks to be buzzing the wasted verges. In the spring, hollers of sparrows murmured up from the long weeds there, surprising out of poppies and thistle along paths thick with joggers and crabapples. But January sprung almost sudden in the city with its grey promises: a season of steel wool, eczema, grass just stripes of prickle.
But the baby, for now just a collection of kicks in striped plastic, just a collection of scents, of blood, of milk, of meat to a wet and searching lurcher nose in the stubby grass, just a collection of slightly less grey promises: the baby
was found.
About the Author:
Leah Mullen is a New Jersey native who’s been living in the UK since 2003. She is a secondary school English teacher and advocate for the arts and humanities subjects. You can find her work in Five on the Fifth, Molotov Cocktail, Impspired, Literally Stories, and Mosspuppy . She has been shortlisted for several flash fiction awards, including the Bridport Prize.
I pulled the wrinkled dollar bill from the front pocket of my too-tight shorts and laid it next to the bag of M&Ms. The Cashier looked at me, then at the candy. I knew I wasn’t supposed to eat candy because of my diet, but he didn’t. Or at least I assumed he didn’t.
I lied when I told my mom I was going to hit tennis balls against the backstop near the courts in the apartment complex we lived in. My real destination was The Grog Shop, the convenience/liquor store in the lobby of our building.
He lingered too long with my dollar in his hand, “You don’t need these,” he said, “They’re really bad for you.” It was as if time stopped. I was frozen, unsure what to do, but certain I didn’t want to put the candy back. My humiliation gave birth to another lie, “They’re not for me, they’re for my brother,” I answered and made sure to put my racket on the counter so he could see I was an athlete, not an overweight twelve-year-old girl desperate for the M&M’s she would eat in secret.
About the Author:
Trish Cantillon is a native Angeleno, and lover of California. She’s published personal essays on Brevity, Hippocampus (one of top 10 most read essays in 2023), The Fix, Refinery 29’s “Take Back the Beach,” The Manifest Station andRavishly, among others. .
You decide to hold a yard sale, because it’s a nice thing to do, a homey, all-American thing to do. Also, you’re broke. You place a classified ad, mark the date, start stickering.
Night before the sale, Drunk Husband goes out drinking, and by dawn has yet to return. Nothing unusual there, but given his recent promises, it hurts. It’s for the best, you tell yourself. He’s sleeping it off somewhere. With all the hauling to do that morning, all the folding tables to set up. Linens, CDs, tapes, pot holders, trivets, posters, books, magazines, clothes, garden tools, shoes, clothes, unused wedding gifts and parental cast-offs, beach stuff, utensils, plant pots. Everything out the door, down the steps, onto the front yard for liquidation purposes.
It’s for the best. It is. It is. It is.
But then, Drunk Husband is rounding the corner. He’s tipping back a paper bag, stiff-legging it. Trespasser! he bellows at the old lady Q-tip who is your first customer. He’s half a block away, bellowing.
Then he gets close, hovers over her like an interrogator. The Q-tip drops an eggbeater and beelines it to her Cutlass, drives away.
Another customer appears. Scene repeats.
You tell Drunk Husband to go to bed, but he doesn’t hear you. Instead he does a King Kong through your cityscape of folding tables, picking things up and dropping them.
You cajole. He refuses. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Until finally, mercifully, he does go. He stumbles inside to use the bathroom, some time passes, and he doesn’t return. Peace falls again upon the yard.
More customers arrive. Sales are made.
But then, from inside the house, the bedroom window opens.
Trespassers!
It won’t be the final time he hurts you, nor the worst. But one day, twenty years later, remarried, middle-aged, you will watch the sunset through wildfire smoke, and this is the image which will surface. Drunk Husband’s face in the window that morning, round and red like the sun is now. Just as angry. Every bit as impossible to contain.
About the Author:
Alice Kinerk spends her free time attempting to make complicated desserts, most of which are tasty failures, such as the time she tried to make a croquembouche. She’s published dozens of stories. Read more at alicekinerk.com.
Taco Bell Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire | Susan L. Lin
Welcome to the Taco Bell Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to bare your heart and soul to a group of data analysts on the Internet. We appreciate your honest feedback.
Store Number/Location:
Date of Visit (MM/DD/YYYY):
Section I: True or False
Please respond to each of the following statements as truthfully as you can.
1. This was my first visit to any Taco Bell restaurant.
2. This was my first visit to this particular Taco Bell location.
3. Arriving at this restaurant was like finding an oasis in the middle of a hot desert.
4. Arriving at this restaurant was like finding powdered cinnamon in the middle of a hot dessert.
5. My food looked/sounded/felt/smelled/tasted like my childhood stuffed into a paper sack.
6. I was provided with sufficient napkins to soak up my nostalgic/bittersweet tears.
7. I was very satisfied with my overall dining experience.
8. I am likely to return to this location again.
Section II: Multiple Choice Fill-in-the-Blank
Please choose the word clusters that best complete the following sentences.
9. If I were holding a Taco Bell _____ right now, I would no longer feel _____ or _____.
A. Mexican Pizza; hungry; Italian
B. MTN DEW® Baja Blast® Freeze; my fingers; my thumbs
C. cash register; hopeless; short-changed
D. employee; horny; alone
E. all of the above
10. _____ is the reason Taco Bell _____ my _____ every day and/or night.
A. The color purple; catches; eye
B. Fast, cheap food; finds its way into; stomach
C. A fond childhood memory; permeates; thoughts
D. An unpleasant childhood memory; haunts; nightmares
E. all of the above
Section III: Short Essays
Please select two prompts from the list below and respond appropriately with well-developed thesis statements and supporting arguments.
11. If you were given the opportunity to create your perfect custom Taco Bell Chalupa, what would the secret ingredient be? Why?
12. If you were given the opportunity to design your dream Taco Bell hotel, what would the guest keys look/feel/sound like? Why?
13. If Taco Bell discontinued your favorite menu item tomorrow, would we trigger the apocalypse? Why or why not?
14. If Taco Bell brought back everyone’s favorite discontinued menu item tomorrow, would we finally achieve world peace? Why or why not?
Section IV: The “Are You a Robot?” Math Section
To confirm your humanity, calculate the solution to this simple algebra problem. Please show your work.
15. In the distant future, you’re exiting the last Taco Bell on Earth with a greasy paper sack full of delicious warm food. You are, however, in a foul mood because the restaurant was experiencing an alarming shortage of salsa verde packets. “How exactly is one expected to live más when all our basic condiments have been stripped away?” you wail, shaking your fist at the heavens. That’s when you notice a hot air balloon rising vertically into the sky at a steady velocity of 1.5 ft/sec from a launch pad roughly 30 feet away. Whoever is picnicking inside the basket waves an elusive red bottle above their head. “Fire sauce!” they yell. “Want to feel the flames?” You peer inside your bag. The Crunchwrap Supreme® at the top could indeed use a little kick. “Toss it my way!” you reply, but the stranger ignores your command. Instead, 22 seconds after the start of their aeronautical journey, they simply allow the hot sauce to fall from their open hands. How fast must you now run to catch the bottle before it shatters on the pavement?
Thank you for completing the Taco Bell Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire. We will never sell your personal information to third parties. If you choose to share your email address below, you will be entered to win a lifetime supply of reheated Doritos® Locos Tacos and the one-million- dollar equivalent of our Taco Bell x Dogecoin ‘90s throwback Chihuahua Pog® cryptocurrency.
About the author:
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her literary/visual art has appeared in nearly a hundred publications. She loves to dance. Find more at https://susanllin.com.
I bend to pick up another bottle and a sharp pain in my back makes me freeze, bowed to the sand. My hand flies to my back, but the pain mellows into something dull and pulsing.
I straighten and look towards my daughter. Ida is scanning the line of froth, sea stones, and litter while dusting caked sand from a mud-green bottle. She usually works early morning shifts, but today she’s free to accompany me.
Behind her, the bay is a mass of slow undulating bars. At its fringe, foaming sheets of water fall on top of each other, clapping for the two women who have foregone sleep to scan the beach for the previous night’s leftovers.
My knuckles punch my lower back but there’s a deeper pain it can’t reach, one that thrums through my chest and orbits my heart. I sigh, chase off thoughts of my cleaning shift later in the day, and look at the bottle I’ve picked up. The blue label tells me it’s a Flying Fish.
We’ve been the only people here for the entirety of early morning. So I’m surprised to see a figure break from the palm tree-lined strip far down the beach and struggle over the sand towards us. They’re indistinct, a rocking white column in the distance. Another Cape Town early riser.
Ida returns and drops an armful of beer bottles in our pile with a small crash. She has my deep-night skin tone, and it makes the sea spray along her cheeks sheen like the Milky Way. She inherited her beautiful round eyes from her father. They flick between the bottles and I’m sure that, like me, the numbers are tumbling and merging through her mind. Some rice and potatoes for dinner. Maybe a meatless meal.
She bends to pick a piece of litter from the mouth of a bottle and as she does, I see her premature greying crown, an iris of embers. Her arm hosts a thin landscape of boils, the same kind that erupted when her father died and again when we were thrown out of our apartment, left on the street with our belongings around our ankles. Even after I’d crushed and liquified a root of devil’s horsewhip and thickly applied the ointment along her forearms, the skin would settle only for a while until something else made it pucker and rise.
My heart burns.
“Hi there,” a voice says behind us.
I turn and see that the stumbling white column has arrived. A boy. He’s young, maybe as young as Ida. Like her, but not like her. He’s young. And soft as a marshmallow. He has pancake cheeks with a hint of stubble, a radish-like sunburn on the side of his neck, sand-white shirt and chinos, hair bright as a yolk. Blue eyes flicker to the pile of bottles between us.
“Sorry to – disturb you. Don’t suppose you’ve come across a watch? It’s black, got a silver rim. Left it here last night.”
I stare.
Now that he’s arrived, I see his shirt is crumpled, as though he’s slept in it. His eyes are bloodshot. An unwashed sour odour hangs around him, detectable under the sea breeze. I think of the ring of burnt-out wood at the other end of the beach where we found most of the bottles.
He meets my unwavering stare and his sloppy-adolescent grin falters. His gaze drops to my shoulder. He’s frazzled, like a brood of chickens spooked by a fox. His feathers are all awry.
“No, nothing.” Ida says. She gives him the down-and-up again look, raises her eyebrows my way, just an inch, and grabs a binbag for the bottles.
“Oh – ok then,” the boy mumbles. He fiddles with the hem of his shirt, and his eyes go to the boils on her arms and stay there.
I look at his rolled-up sleeves, his forearms. They’re smooth and covered in downy strands. They speak of starched sheets and cool white tiles, and I think of the neighbourhoods on the other side of Cape Town, broad pastel-coloured homes dispersed by private pools, streets embedded with topiary shrubs and palm trees.
“Well, I’ll just –” the boy says. He still doesn’t know where to look, what to do with his hands. I haven’t taken my gaze from him.
He throws one last, disconcerted look at the boils on Ida’s arm and crunches back over the sand. Probably back to his bed. Or to a meal, prepped, steaming and waiting.
Ida watches the boy and shakes her head sardonically. My hand is at my back again. She touches my shoulder and says affectionately, “I’ll give you a back rub after your shift Mama.”
The mention of my cleaning job brings a wash of weary dread, but I pinch her chin and smile up at her.
“I knew I raised you right.”
She laughs and walks back across the sand towards more bottles.
I throw the Flying Fish in the pile with a clink.
Listen as Corinne reads an excerpt from her story…
About the author:
Corinne is an author, digital nomad, and avid traveller. Her fiction has appeared in The Bond Street Review, Remington Review, Elegant Literature, inScribe, Cool Beans Lit and others.
