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Alamo

Written by Leonydes  Matis. Posted in Poetry. 

A shack where a house once stood
Shingles that hang on by a thread
This was once a home

Built by muscled men
Carefully crafted to withstand anything
Except time

A porch where many once sat
Is now a stiff wind from extinction
Rusted rockers turned from green to brown

A screen door shredded
From temple to tetanus

The roof appears to cave
While the foundation holds firm
A home that once slept six

A time capsule
Full of firsts and lasts
Nothing left but ruins and

Memories clinging to the insides
The house is empty
But the home still stands

Widow

Written by Leonydes  Matis. Posted in Poetry. 

*On August 9th 1914, British troops departed to Germany for WWI. By the end of the barbaric war, 3-4 million women were estimated to have been widowed. 
 
Baby August has told her first untruth. 
Buds bloom no more to meet a genial world. 
The widow seizes all the pendant flowers  
with which she sought to bid her spouse farewell.
An ave before he was enmeshed in war.
Candles alive to witness one more love 
have danced themselves to death and killed their flame. 
She cannot rid her coverlet of wrinkles. 
She cannot clasp a glass of wine without  
scowling askance at its momentous shade.  
She distrusts the cup; trusts more in malaise,
distrusts the very fairness of her skin. 
She finds her pallor does not need her hug
to blanch her husband; fear can do as much. 
Azures darken with the smoke of chimneys 
whilst vaguely through an open door, she hears 
her curtains, bandying with winds of fate. 
He breathes, he breathes—can she be widowed thus? 
She strips her newly funereal bed,
dethroning love through taking down his roses. 
Yet neglecting some petals on her sheets 
which mourned their king’s expulsion when— 
having washed them too—mistakenly—they  
tinged her covers in a cruel crimson. 
Then when she made some play of them in hand
the reddest of the petals poured their flush. 
Purpled sinks, bloodied hands but—of whose blood? 
She has read her husband’s fate upon their walls.
Interpreting the muteness of her home
and wordless corridors as signs to know,
that though he breathes—she is a widow.

Tick

Written by Leonydes  Matis. Posted in Poetry. 

             Sobriety: Day 0

I don’t know why this time was different
other than time, air & light that it is, was
filling less of me. For fifteen years I was a tick
that if pulled would pucker the skin before
the neck severed, head still buried & sucking
a last second or two, unaware the wine-red
blood had nowhere to go.

The Rioja In the back of the pantry had aged
since our first year of marriage. Like equity
& intimacy, so easy early on, we’d kept it wrong.
So when we opened the vinegar it had become,
you stopped at a glass while I finished the bottle.
On principle, I told myself. Tomorrow
I’m quitting. I’m quitting tomorrow. 

Physical
              Sobriety: Day 77

My doctor holds a vial of my blood up
to the light like a kaleidoscope, turns it,
shakes it, then hides it in his fist.
He makes a finger gun with the other hand
and shoots it. When he opens his fist,
it’s gone. He pulls it back into the world
from behind my ear and pours my blood
into a dutch oven which he bakes for
a few minutes while he waves a divining rod
around my torso. “How’s your spam
filter?” he asks. I put my hand on my side.
“I can’t really feel it anymore.”
The timer dings and when he lifts the lid
the whole clinic smells like goulash.
“Your late autumn light has stabilized,”
he says, my improvements perplexing him.
I inform him that I no longer partake.
“Ah, that would do it,” he says.
“You should also limit your intake of flattery.”
Not really a problem, I tell him.
“I can order a CT of your lusts if you want
but check with your insurance first.”
Here, he turns serious and meets my eyes
with a practiced air of pity.
“I’m afraid this means you’re probably
going to live quite awhile longer.”
I tell him I understand and begin rehearsing
how I’m going to break this to my family.

Islands 

             Sobriety: Day 84

Driving home from outpatient, a cry from nowhere pierces the hum. It’s my own gut-shot voice trailing blood across the windshield & dash, but I’m still surprised by it. Anxiety controls my sounds and movements like a cordyceps fungus controls an insect. More cries rush the hole made by the first so my throat becomes a fountain filling the cabin with locusts that die in mid-air and pile into drifts on the passenger seat. I’m alone, but I imagine someone watching my breakdown like I was a character in a show, because I can’t seem to process my emotions without involving someone else. This observer is more human-scale than twenty years ago when my wailing would have been prayer. I think the shape of these sounds is holier. Not supplication so much as islands erupting from an ocean. They will one day be habitat. The maps will need changing.

Freeze Tag
              Sobriety: Day 90

You’re told it's a benchmark. Like a toddler
pointing. Practically developmental. 
A sign the brain is knitting together,
picking back up where it left off. 
“Maturing stops at the point of addiction,”
as if the brain had been caught and rooted in place
in a game of freeze tag, waiting for someone
to crawl through its legs. You shouldn’t be so
offended. You’re the one who would look at
your wife and tell her with solemn sincerity,
uncapped marker still in your hand,
that you didn’t draw on the wall.
And like a child, you need recognition
so you text “90 days!” and when she texts back
a single emoji—meager scrap for the gaunt street dog
your soul has become—the anger you’ve nursed
in dark rooms burns its way out. You complain
that no one is praising you for what you’re not doing,
and are caught off balance when she gives it right back,
telling you how long she’s been running,
circling your unresponsive statue,
watching for any chance to unfreeze you. 

Pink Cloud
              Sobriety: Day 146

It was supposed to happen by now.
The dopamine fields strained to collapse
were supposed to flare and blossom to life,
if only briefly, like a wildflower bloom in
Death Valley after the rarest of rainfall.
Not a sustainable harvest, but a promise
of something worthwhile. The clouds are
gunmetal gray and the field crunches under
foot but if I just keep walking the
moisture regime may eventually change.
Topography may be more forgiving. 
The coins in my pocket more lustrous.
The people I meet will still care about coins
and none will remember the things I’ve done.

Of the Art of Bookbinding

Written by Christian Fisher. Posted in Student Section.

First Place Winner of the Novus Literary Arts Journal High School Creative Writing Contest

I know foggily of the way my grandfather used to sit in his chair and look at me. He was ninety-one, and I was eight. Combined, our ages could have nearly turned a century– I never knew him well. I know his stories and his sayings. Sayings so clever that, anytime in doubt, my father would attach his name to a clever, anonymous aphorism.

“That’s what Homer used to say.”

Or,

“Dad used to say that.”

I heard, through many, of his vivacity in business. Of how he made his fortune in Nashville from a deal written on the back of a napkin. He was a bookbinder and he, “could make paper do anything he wanted.”

He was stationed in an electric wheelchair for the latter end of his life. In his own bed, he died peacefully. I’ve heard his stories of his life as a Southern Gentleman, and of his severance and distance from some of those stories. My only memories of him are, most potently, checkers.

I hate the game checkers, now, because it doesn’t involve enough strategy. I would play my grandfather as he sat in his wheelchair. I played the black pieces and always lost viciously. I remember how he would peer, hunched, through his stacks of my murdered tokens at the game board. I remember how, after he’d beaten me, he offered to handicap himself by playing with his non-dominant hand.

He still beat me. I was stunned.

I always wanted to go fishing with him, but never did. I don’t like fishing, now, although it’s been a while since I’ve tried it.

My final memories of him are microscopically hollow. He was in hospice, and couldn’t speak. He was listening to something that I didn’t understand, and my dad only explained it to me as “one of his favorites. He’s listening to it so he doesn’t miss any of it.”

Now I know that my father could have meant anything– miss it, or miss it? He asked if I wanted to talk to Grandaddy.

I said no.

Grandaddy died, peacefully, on August 16.

It was a wonderful funeral, now that I think about it. He had, it seemed, hundreds of friends that popped out of southern homes to pay their due. I remember my dad’s eulogy, but only some of it. He spoke. Something along the lines of:

“And Homer returned from his first year of college, expecting to continue living with his parents. Everything was swell. He made it back and enjoyed the company of his family, who had been gently nagging him to move out into the world. Only then did he realize, when he wandered into his room, that his mother had sold his bed…”

And the funeral hall quivered with hollow, smiling, wet laughter, still missing this man that I knew nothing about.

***

As a teenager, I became remarkably interested in business. I was interested in blazing my own trail, mobilizing people, managing a company, and trying to provide the best service possible. My grandfather was not on my mind. I asked my father about contracts and signatures. How did so much responsibility condense into a scribble on paper? How could you be thrown in jail for scribbling on the wrong thing? Why did you scribble your name?

I asked my father how contracts were signed. He explained,

“Well, not everything has to be written down. People make contracts all the time without signing anything. Any time you take something out of a store, you promise, like a contract, to trade money for it on the way out.”

It blurrily made sense to me. My father noticed.

“Writing is usually just the best way to make sure everything is good in the deal. If you write down everything that you’ll do, and the other person writes down everything that he’ll do, then it makes it really easy. Signing the bottom is just the way that the government knows you promised to do something.”

It became a little clearer. “So you can just make a contract on anything? Fake stuff?”

“Well it’s not fake stuff, but pretty much. Grandaddy made his money from a deal on the back of a paper napkin.”

“Oh, that’s cool. How?”

“He was a bookbinder. I’ll tell you the story later.”

And I waited. And he told me.

***

When a person decided to order a new carpet, the carpet company would send them a sample book, including all the small, cut squares of carpet that they offered so that the customer could decide which carpet they wanted. The company had to buy the books off of someone, and those people ran a carpet-sample-book-making company.

However, this sample-book company was having problems affording their binding. The binding needed to be unique for such a strange book. It needed to be strong but flexible, and the sample-book making company didn’t know enough about the business of paper-binding to try and streamline the process. They had been getting their books bound in New York for twelve dollars each.

They contacted my grandfather, who was in the paper-binding business at the time. They met in the 40th Avenue Cafe, and the company, represented by three men, brought one of the sample-books for Homer to inspect.

“We need a better binding.” The cafe clinked around them and blue winter light shone through the large windows.

My grandfather looked at the sample-book. “Sure. I know what you mean.”

The coffee steamed and smelled dark. The company representatives looked at each other.

“I can probably do this for a quarter.”

A pause. “A quarter? A quarter of what?”

“A quarter. Twenty-five cents.”

“For the whole binding?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“I want thirty percent of the company.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m the best paper-binder in Nashville.”

“We can’t afford that.”

“You can’t afford these books. Watch.”

And he sketched out the comprehensive financials of the company on a paper napkin with a pen he kept in his breast pocket. He looked up at the men.

A beautiful young waitress swirled in, smiling, with arms full of hot food. A round of thank-you’s tittered through the four of them. She left, and as the men watched her leave, their politeness vanished as they looked back to my grandfather.

“Can you really do it for a quarter?”

My grandfather paused and his young eyebrows crinkled. “I can show you.”

He threw on his overcoat and asked them to follow his car to his office. His breath fogged after he shut the door, and he could hardly feel the keys as he clambered into the workshop. The men followed him in. The light flicked on, and my grandfather began to hum. He gathered the materials like a practiced craftsman, and the businessmen, suddenly apprehensive, shut the blinds and windows. Everything was illuminated by a single, bright bulb over my grandfather’s workstation.

He worked quickly– mocking up a sample-book in a few minutes and binding it securely. The men had never seen anyone work so fluidly. His hands danced. As far as they were concerned, dark magic coursed through his veins.

“Here.” my grandfather held up the mock-book, weighed down with lead squares in place of the carpet samples. He handed the still-sticky book to the representatives, who flipped through it, checked the binding, flipped it open and let it hang freely above the carpet, and were amazed when it held. They flipped it closed and blinked slowly in the dim light.

“How much did it cost?”

My grandfather shrugged, and counted some ingredients in his head. He looked at them.

“Thirteen cents.” The men’s heads spun like roulette wheels.

“Or thereabouts.”

***

And thus my family’s legacy was born on the back of a paper napkin. Everything was translated from the “fake stuff” to real, cold signatures scribbled darkly on official paper, where dollar signs really meant dollars and breaker lines split the page like pillars of the earth.

My grandfather was a father of three, like my father. He raised two girls, artists, and a grounded, working son. My dad was the youngest. Homer’s two elder daughters are my aunts– one is gently-estranged, and the other is so far down the limb in the family tree that she’s spying the ground, calling my father dubious names with her glass full of his liquor, holding antique grudges like the bones of a lost Tyrannosaur.

My father’s oldest sister, Laura, is wonderful in the way an older sibling is. She took my brothers and me on trips, expeditions, and adventures that circled the town, the circus, and the state. I would sit on the roof with her and watch the garbage truck shake the trash can into its vast open bed. I rode an elephant in the circus with her. She’d pick me up from class and do the chicken-dance with me in preschool. When she was done, we ate Krispy-Kreme and threw rocks into the creek that lazily circled a nearby office building.

Laura is wonderful.

And she loved Homer.

***

In Laura’s senior year of high school her class took a celebratory field trip, riding a thundering bus in lazy circles around the city.

They couldn’t leave the state because one of her classmates had a recital in town.

In the mid seventies, the drinking age in the South was eighteen years old. The seniors took full advantage of that rule, typically, but the rule for this final trip was that there would be absolutely no drinking. It was a silly rule. The kind of rule that, when suggested, only causes students to look at each other, wink, and use solo cups instead of wine glasses. It meant nothing.

Left in the hotel one night, my aunt and a couple of her friends stole away into the boys’ room. One of the boys, known for smuggling and sneaking, ran off to the liquor store down the street to buy three bottles of rum and two jugs of punch.

The drink was sticky sweet and seductive. My aunt Laura says she can still smell it.

Having barely drunk two cocktails, my aunt, her friends, and the boys jumped at the sound of the door hammering. One of the boys, drink still in hand, automatically rushed up to answer it:

“I got it!”

Frantic tinkling of glasses and bottles answered this claim.

“Wait! No–”

“Shhh!”

“Put it under the couch!”

“Don’t answer it!”

Before rational thought could reach his mind, he peeled the door open and had his cup seized by the supervisor, Mrs. Susan. She, dressed like a sleepwalker with the eyes of a devil, hair in a frenzy, screeched at the students to “Give it!” The students sputtered apologies and excuses, and through the confusion, she grasped the rum and dumped it directly onto the hotel carpet. Its dark color pooled quickly into a permanent, blotchy stain.

The students were silent.

***

“… Mr. Brown?”

“M’yes?” Homer sat up in bed groggily with the phone. His sagging smile lines were illuminated by the glow of the table-lamp.

“Um, sir, we’ve caught your daughter.” The man stuttered. “Drinking, she was, on the class trip. And we would like for her to return home immediately.”

“Hm?” My grandfather scratched his beard. “Drinking?”

“Yes, sir. We understand your frustration and are sorry for any sort of inconvenience–”

“She’s been drinking since she was fourteen.” He yawned.

“Um, well, yes, sir, but I–”

“I don’t see any problem.”

“Well, sir, you see– it- it was against the rule–” And he was cut off by a violent handoff of the receiver. Immediately came the screeching, high-pitched tone of Mrs. Susan.

“Mr. Brown–!”

Her tone was different. My grandfather stiffened in bed. He was awake.

“Come pick up your daughter immediately!” She inhaled. “Never have I ever seen such disrespect in this academy– it is an outrage!”

“Ma’am–” he felt warm.

“I am awestruck! Completely bewildered– she’ll stay in her room for the rest of the trip thinking about what she’s done. And I–”

“Excuse me…”

She did not stop. “I think- I think– you should be ashamed of yourself for raising such a daughter!” The pitch was wildly high. “I ought to throw her headfirst out of the academy–”

“Don’t you touch a hair on her head!” Thunderous. “I’ll sue the school for every damn penny you’ve got. You work for me, miss. I could have you begging on the corner of 5th Avenue by nodding–” He paused.

The other end was silent.

“Give the phone to Laura.” My grandfather said.

Mrs. Susan handed the phone to Laura. On the phone, Laura was crying.

“Oh my God, Dad, I’m so sorry.” She coughed and broke out again into sobs, “I’m so sorry. I feel awful, Daddy, I shouldn’t have–”

“What were you drinking?”

She sniffed. “What?”

“What were you drinking?”

“Um, rum and punch.”

My grandfather sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Rum and punch?” He adjusted and swung to the side of the bed. “Could’ve been anything else. I thought I taught you better. Must’ve been too sweet.”

“Yeah, it was. It was.” She sniffed again.

My grandfather laughed imperceptibly. “Of course. You wanna come home?”

“M’yeah.” It was pitiful and quiet.

“Okay. I’m on the way over. Your mother and I are leaving for Chicago in the morning. You won’t even have to repack your bags.”

He heard her suddenly beaming through the phone. “Really?”

“Of course.”

Relief passed through her. Her voice was still quiet. “Thanks.”

“Of course.” He adjusted the phone to the other side of his head. “Okay, honey. Gotta go. I’ll see you in a second.”

He hung up.

***

I’m sure the shadow of my grandfather still windily wanders the streets of Chicago, shaped to the slender forms of my aunt and grandmother as they skipped the sidewalks. I’m certain their laughter still echoes in the finest hotels in the city, and the rum stain is still sitting silently in the carpet of an unnamed hotel. I know that the same gale that blew his overcoat blows mine.

In downtown Nashville, I know that a certain paper napkin, darkened with pen, bounces like a tumbleweed along my streets. I know that the binding glue, on his desk, is still sticky.

I know the lone bulb still glows warmly.

But I also know that he will never be behind my checker pieces again. I know that he’ll never tell me his own stories.

I’ll never fish with him. I’ll never know what he was listening to before he died.

The world may never explain to me the cause of the sticky-sweet laughter that bubbled in the funeral hall. He’ll never teach me to bind a book.

I wonder if he heard me run away from him in his final hours.

I can never ask him.

All that I know is that, to this quiet and brilliant man,

I know I never said goodbye.

Disillusionment

Written by Christian Fisher. Posted in Uncategorized. 

        Emotion is a privilege. 
I've learned that. 
When you feel, let yourself feel. 

        I've never enjoyed crying so much. 
That moment where saliva pools in your mouth and your entire face burns, and tears fill your eyes as your chest sinks in submission. 

           Like you gave everything, and here you are, watching it all disappear. You just want power and dominance, but all you ever prove to be is a naive, average person. 

You've been terrified and miserable all your life, and all you ever crave is hurting someone else. 

You want to inflict fear and agony on everything around you, because that's interesting and comforting and it's familiar.
 
All we want as humans is to adapt, and when you spend your whole life trying to get used to the changing world around you, you begin to just want to manipulate it for once. 

        You just want it to change to your liking. 
You want to take charge over something for once, instead of groveling in submission to the world. 

So you design your own world, full of pain and torture, where you inflict it all and lead it all and enjoy it all. 

        You become sadistic and disgusting and horrible. 
It is classic human behavior, but something tells you that you're better than humanity. 
        You lie beyond the threshold of perfection and idealization. 
        You are superior. 

But, in reality, you define humanity and classic, cliche desire better than anything else. You're just another power-hungry piece of shit who thinks they're better. 
But you're delusional. 
So delusional. 

You designed a perfect world with narcissists and stupid, power-hungry, sadists, and in this world, you look down on them without realizing they reflect you perfectly.

        I am a parasite on humanity. 
The sort of thing that puts a blight on the world and causes life to be so fucking difficult. 
        I don't mean to be, but I also don't try not to be. 

        And in all honesty, I don't care

LIBERTY

Written by Christian Fisher. Posted in Fiction.

The second to last time Ellis saw Kat was as unexpected as the last.

The night was like any other in his young life. Having spent much of his middle school years the gangly odd one out, Ellis was late to the game and already beginning to feel hopeless having only just turned 18. Ellis had developed an unruly anxiety that manifested as a deep and abiding fear that he would leave for college without the secret code that would make him normal, the thing that made his older brother Neil a beloved member of their community whose homecomings filled their house with friends and girlfriends and parents and cousins all eager to see how the old sport was doing.

Ellis didn’t understand what Neil had that he didn’t. Why, when Ellis’s friends came over, did his parents never lavish them with attention? Why, in fact, did his friends rarely come over at all? Neil’s friends were like foster brothers, big men in North Face jackets whose booming voices carried up from the unfinished basement to rattle Ellis’s second floor bedroom and whose appetites could never be sated by the pancakes and nachos and pizzas his mother happily served up. After their visits the fridge would remain barren for weeks, Ellis left to fend for himself. If he ever complained, his mother would scold him for his lack of hospitality. 

This secret code, Ellis had come to believe, was what life was all about, and the fact that Ellis did not possess it was a sick joke played by the universe. Ellis stayed up late at night thinking of it; he thought about it during class, twisting it around in his mind like a math equation he couldn’t solve.

Why him, he could not tell. Ellis didn’t understand why his words always came out wrong. He didn’t know why he would find himself standing still at the edge of a gathering with nothing to add. He didn’t know why he sat alone each night paralyzed by some rootless anxiety coursing through his system.

All this Ellis could’ve weathered easily were it not for the virginal status his problems had caused. Once the hormonal olympics began, his stilted affect became conspicuous. When Ellis’s best friend Rick started ‘hanging out’ with Lauren, the cute girl in their AP Stat class, the one with the dimples, Ellis knew his days of peace were nearing an end.

Ellis tried to decipher what differentiated him from Rick. On any metric he could calculate, they were equals. They wore similar sneakers, they lived a few streets from each other, Rick’s house wasn’t much bigger or his parents more loving (in fact, if anything, they were worse, in Ellis’s estimation). They both drove hand-me-down cars with terrible mileage and stuffy seats. Even their hair were similar mops of dirty blonde curls.

Why, then, did Lance and Leon never bro around with Ellis the same way they did with Rick?  Why did Rick always have someone pushing to get his attention? When Ellis found himself spending his Sunday idly watching reruns of Ice Road Truckers, he didn’t know why he had not been invited to the lake trip Rick had posted on Instagram.

But it was the girls that stabbed his heart. As he watched his friends begin to return triumphantly from after-school hangs with tales of wet mouths and warm thighs, Ellis was left to nod along silently. They were being inducted into the world of the adult. They held secrets Ellis could barely imagine. He felt the gap between himself and his friends grow and grow until he felt like a childhood stuffed animal about to be thrown out in the spring cleaning.

Ellis made the pact one particularly dark evening as Rick posted Instagram stories from Lauren’s hot tub where Rick had brought the crew to drink, Ellis’s heart ripping open with each notification as he sat in the dark, waiting horribly long minutes for the next update. 

There and then Ellis decided, if it wasn’t going to happen naturally, he would force himself to change. He could torture himself forever about the ‘code’ he didn’t have but it wouldn’t change the fact that he didn’t have it. He decided to take his brother Neil as his model. Even if he didn’t understand it, he would now live as his brother did.

Ellis began to lift weights and joined the soccer team. He cut his hair, started drinking, and found ways to make the boys at school laugh. Ellis was a bit shocked how easy it had been. All he had to do was repeat their own jokes back, never disagree and nod along. Pretty soon he was at the parties, he was in Lauren’s hot tub.

Even after his success with Rick’s crew, Ellis still ended every evening of hard drinking crashing on the couch with Tommy Anderson while everyone else paired off and rushed to claim bedrooms. With the boys, he could simply mimic their behavior and it always seemed to work. But girls demanded more from Ellis. Their eyes asked for something he didn’t know how to offer.

It was a few scant weeks before graduation when Ellis, Tommy, Lance, Leon and Rick drove up to a party in the neighboring ‘burb, Liberty Village, which, while only 25 minutes away, felt worlds apart, for it had its own school district and strip mall.

Liberty, with its high-end boutiques, sit-down restaurants and fancy dine-in movie theater, was spoken of in equal parts loathing and desire by the residents of Commack Falls. Ellis never really understood this obsession as he had lived in Liberty before Ellis’s father, an electrician, had been pushed out of Liberty by the competition from a nationally franchised home improvement corporation and they’d been forced to relocate.

Ellis didn’t remember much about Liberty. This would be the first time he had been back since he was a kid. All he could really remember was green, exuberant green; massive lawns, parks that never ended.

They arrived fashionably late, the party was packed and they didn’t know a soul. Ellis noticed the clothes first; boutique athleisure and Travis Scott tees and even an Off White shirt he’d only seen on Instagram before.

Ellis and Rick pushed their way to the kitchen. The kitchen was stacked with high-end bottles of liquor and racks of beer. Ellis drank a Hamm’s, a High Life and a Bud in quick succession. As the alcohol warmed the edges of Ellis’s mind, he fell into a conversation with a girl whose name sounded like Jane or Jean; he hadn’t really been listening. Ellis nodded along as Jane or Jean talked about school, her friends. When Jean or Jane said goodbye without a second glance, Ellis felt more relieved than disappointed.

The night wore on and the boys drank more and more. Tommy dragged Ellis into a conversation with two block-chested bros with long curling blonde hair pulled tight under identical ball caps. Ellis began to imagine who he would have been if his family had stayed here in Liberty. Perhaps he would be one of these bros. Perhaps he would still have come to this party, wearing a designer tee and wandering home down well-paved streets to a house full of frozen pizzas and gourmet snacks.

As his mind wandered, Ellis noticed a girl staring at him from across the room. The eye contact sent a jolt of panic into his heart. He tried to focus intently on the two boys in front of him, feeling inexplicably guilty. He peeked back at her. She was still staring. He quickly averted his gaze.

Ellis turned back to Tommy’s conversation but couldn’t find a place to jump back in. He snuck a look back at the girl. She sat between two energetic friends, all three dressed in a gothic hippie style Ellis had never seen in Commack.

Was she checking him out? Was that what that looked like? Was that what that felt like? What was he supposed to do? Ellis decided that the only thing that would truly curse him now would be to ignore her and set himself up for a lifetime of cowardice.

So Ellis stepped towards her. As he got closer, the girl waved to him meekly. This confused Ellis. They faced each other across the room for a moment before Ellis remembered his mission and set out toward her once again. But before he could think of anything to say, the girl leapt forward and embraced him. She pulled away and asked him if he’d moved back to Liberty and exclaimed how excited she was to see him. 

This was not what Ellis expected. He stammered that no, he lived in Commack Falls and was only here for the party. He tentatively asked her name. An imperceptible shudder came over her face as if all her energy had dropped into her chest.

“It’s Kat.”

The name took a moment to sink into Ellis’s alcohol-slogged brain, falling smoothly past layers of thoughts and memories, landing, with a thud, in the pit of his stomach. Little Kat Werner. He’d almost forgotten her. Or in fact he had forgotten her, forced her out of his mind, along with all that didn’t fit with who he had become.

“Kat. Oh my god. Hi.”

“You didn’t remember me.”

“I just didn’t expect to see you.”

“Me neither.” Ellis felt sweat pouring down his face. He waited for her to say something else but she simply stared at him with those piercing eyes.

“How are you?” He finally managed to squeak out. Kat smirked slightly.

“I still live here so how well can I be?” If Ellis was older, he may have thought he was having a heart attack.

“I kinda thought you’d left Commack and moved somewhere far away… I don’t know why I thought that.” Ellis knew why she thought that, that he had never been back, never called, never opened that door ever again.

“No, I was still here. I just got… busy.” Ellis wanted to kick himself.

“Sure, we all got pretty busy in middle school. Big tests.”

“I really didn’t expect to see you.”

“Clearly.”

“Are you off to college? I’m going to Indiana. Accounting.”

“I’m supposed to. Not sure if I’m going to go or not. I think the whole thing is a bit of a scam really. I mean, what kind of education could we possibly be paying for that we couldn’t find on our own?”

Ellis remembered the drive to her house. It had been short, just down his street, over a little bridge, up that steep hill. He could remember the feeling of his head pressed against the cool glass of the car window waiting to arrive, the world spinning in front of him. The uncomfortable silence was punctured by Kat’s squeal as she grabbed Ellis by the shoulder.

“Oh my god. Did you ever finish Raccoonauts?” Ellis would sit behind Kat watching her play that game for hours. They’d hole up in her room and only come out when Ellis’s mother would call. Ellis remembered being told he could sleep over at Ryan’s house but not Kat’s, a boundary he never understood. He loved that room and especially loved Raccoonauts. He had felt something very close to happiness then, watching her curly head shaking with the ferocity of her button pushing. He had peed his pants once, desperate to hold onto that feeling as long as he could.

“Oh my god. I forgot about that. We were obsessed.” Ellis felt like he would be sick.

“You play the second one?”

“I don’t really play many games anymore.”

“That one was… fun.”

Ellis felt a strange clarity as he studied Kat’s face. He knew this was the moment he’d been expecting all night, all year, maybe all his life, and that whatever he did now would determine the path of his future. He felt sure of this in a way he couldn’t explain. And really, if he thought about it, his choice was already made for him, he was only following a trail that had been built long ago.

A howl built in Ellis’s chest. He wanted to grab hold of her shoulders and plead that he never meant to leave, that he never meant to lose her, that they could go back and play Raccoonauts again if only they could escape this party, these boys, this code. If he could just say something, anything, a new life would open up before him, a life full of warm breath and love and feeling, far from the icy Commack winter that had settled on his heart.

But Tommy was calling from the living room and the words evaporated the moment they touched the hot air of the party. Ellis was aware, even as he mumbled that he’d be right back, that he would never see her again, and that the door to that life was shut for good. Ellis walked back to Tommy, Rick and the girl with the pukka shell necklace Tommy was chatting up, who might have a friend Ellis can talk to about school or soccer or tv and who might, if he tries hard enough, let him kiss her.

Ellis didn’t look back, knowing that if he did, he would not survive it. 


The last time Ellis saw Kat would be the last time anyone saw her.

Ellis had kept track of her life somewhat. It was hard not to, in the way that any successful once-upon-a-time citizen of a small town is a never-ending source of pride and envy. Ellis would never admit it but he followed her a bit more than most. He read her profiles, he watched her interviews, he enjoyed her work. To his wife Annie, Ellis’s interest in Kat was an easily understood affection for an old classmate. Ellis still looked for her name in the paper every Sunday and often looked wistfully out towards the cul-de-sac where she had once lived.

For Ellis had settled in Liberty after all. He’d spent his college years in Indiana, then a few years in Chicago. But the city was more trouble than it was worth and when Annie took his hand one day and nodded yes she did want kids and sooner rather than later, it was to Liberty that he took her.

Ellis had felt like a hero. He was not returning to Commack, where the houses rarely extended past the first floor, no, he would raise his children in Liberty where his neighbors mowed their lawns and he could send his children to play without fear. Indeed, Ellis had succeeded, in spite of what he had begun to feel was his inherent propensity for mediocrity. So Ellis and Annie settled into a modest four bedroom and got to procreating.

The years were blissful for a while. Their daughters were beautiful and carefree, his career advanced in slow but steady increments. Ellis settled into it happily,18 years lost in a blur of early morning coffee, commutes, work, dinners, weekends full of group activities and playdates.

A year after his youngest left for college, Ellis found himself promoted to project management supervisor, which allowed him to buy the new car Annie had been hinting at, but which brought an emptiness to his days he’d never felt before. Ellis spent hours staring at emails and spreadsheets, unsure what anyone needed from him. He made busy work for himself, micromanaging his subordinates and making up excuses. Mostly he just stared out at the industrial car park, listening to the hum of the highway until it was a decent hour to run out the door as if he was late to a meeting.

Ellis had trouble sleeping for the first time in his life. He would lie next to Annie for hours before slipping downstairs to watch the early gray light of dawn rise above the tennis court. In those long mornings, he found himself lost in foggy memories. It was as if he was catching a glimpse of a lost ghost town, the Liberty of his childhood. In those moments, he remembered how every lawn, street and fence had contained the universe, how they had rambled through the world, him and Kat, filled with magic.

One Saturday, Ellis woke to an email from Kat.Werner@Gmail.com. He excused himself from the living room mumbling about urgent work and headed to his rarely-used study where he read the email again quickly, then once more, slowly. Kat was sorry if her email was a disturbance but she’d found his address on a list sent around by the organizing committee of the Liberty school reunion and couldn’t help herself. She wrote tentatively; How was he? Where did he live now?

Kat confessed she didn’t know why she was emailing him, that maybe he didn’t remember her, but seeing his name had awoken memories of their time together and she felt compelled to write. She hoped Ellis was well.

That afternoon, Ellis sat down to compose a response. He had no idea how to start. He spent two hours at the computer procrastinating by playing his daughters in internet chess. Then he turned back to his open tab. Ellis told Kat it was wonderful to hear from her and he of course remembered her. How could he forget?

He stopped, unsure of how to broach the elephant in the email. Ellis feared that Kat would still see him as who he had been that night, fueled by hormones and insecurity, that he had erased whatever Ellis she had known before.

That night. he wrote back. He told her he was sorry too. He tried to explain he had been quite drunk the last time they spoke. But not just that, he tried to explain everything he had been going through then. His explanation became another thousand explanations. Once Ellis started he couldn’t stop. He explained how he was homesick every day of college, that he almost bombed out his sophomore year, and he only got his job in Chicago through the father of a friend. Maybe that same insecurity had led him to marry Annie only a year after meeting her, reasoning that for the first time here was a girl who wasn’t waiting for a chance to slip out the door. And maybe, he supposed, that same need had led him back to Liberty.

Soon enough, Ellis had written for four hours and had a 15 page email draft saved. He couldn’t send this to her. He took out most of the part about Annie and his kids, cut his ‘apology’ to a few sentences, and sent it.

Kat’s reply came less than two hours later. She was glad to hear from him, that she had been worried her email would have scared him off. She feared he had forgotten everything. What had happened after that, she wanted to know. She wanted to know about everything, every detail of his life, every boring anecdote he’d told thousands of times. She wanted to know about his wife, about his children, about Liberty; did the sign still have mold growing over the L or did they finally fix it?

The few details she provided about her life confounded Ellis. She was living just a few hours north of Liberty in Grand Mire, a resort town on Lake Superior where she was living in the basement of an old friend’s house. She was writing her emails on her friend’s laptop in the one cafe with public wifi.

Kat spent most of the email remembering Ellis. She had come to believe their time together was the most profound of her life. She believed they had been two halves of a whole, the only two souls that existed in the world. Her elaborate, looping writing style spun Ellis’s head right round. She must not have edited it at all, he surmised.

In his response, Ellis told her of course he remembered it all.

-Do you remember the games we’d play in your backyard? And that film we wrote?

We made your father play the part of the monster in the woods.

Kat wrote back immediately. Ellis was still in the study and was shocked to hear the ding of his inbox.

-He hated that. Complained the whole time. But he did do it, didn’t he.

So began a month of a free-flowing jagged exchange, a fervent 24 hour conversation. Their email chain grew, dozens of bite sized bits of memory. At first Ellis didn’t hide anything from Annie since there was nothing to hide. But when, one night, he found himself making an excuse just so he could check his inbox once more before bed, he realized he had been hiding all along.

What Ellis felt with Kat was something he couldn’t find anywhere else. Ellis took great pride in being a good father to his daughters, but he had always felt like he was playing a role. He was glad he knew his lines and felt the applause every time he saw the grown-ups his children had become. But his memories with Kat lit kindling in a hole in his heart he had forgotten had once been a bonfire.

So he kept emailing.

When Kat casually suggested Autumn was the perfect time to visit Grand Mire, it felt natural for Ellis to suggest he come up and see her sometime. She didn’t respond for a day. Ellis spent the morning staring out his office window. At noon, he walked to the bathroom and puked up his breakfast. He skipped the staff lunch and went straight home, where he discovered Kat’s email waiting for him.

Kat would love for him to visit but she knew he was very busy and may not have the time. It was short and Ellis could feel the fear in every word. Her fear filled him with relief.

He emailed back that he usually drove past Grand Mire when heading to Milwaukee for conferences (true) and he actually had one coming up shortly that he could extend for a night to swing by (false).

He told Annie that night about the conference sprung on him. They negotiated the specifics over lukewarm rotisserie chicken from Kroger’s. Ellis wrote back that night. He finally ended an email with “see you soon”.


They met at the Bear Tracks Resort & Lodge, near-deserted at 2pm on a Friday. Ellis was shown to her table by the squirrel-cheeked waitress who seemed moderately excited to have two paying customers at once. They embraced awkwardly. Kat patted his arm strangely. Neither spoke. Ellis was vibrating.

“Find this place okay? I know it’s a bit out of the way but it’s the only place to get some real grub around here.” Kat picked up her plastic menu and perused it over-enthusiastically. “They’ve got great breakfast food here. Oh and the coffee! Brilliant!”

Ellis took stock of Kat. While he had seen pictures of her online, most of the photos were from decades ago. Her appearance was different, sure; her gaunt face, her hair cut clumsily short, her hands stained with tar, but it was her energy that most surprised him. She was fidgeting constantly, leg bouncing, eyes fluttering to and fro. She burst in and out of conversation as if pouncing on prey.

As they ordered, Ellis became more and more perturbed. Maybe it had all been a mistake. Maybe the Kat he had imagined, and the Ellis he was sure she had constructed, would never appear.

“How’s your wife? Annie, right? I read it in the database- And you have kids right? Do they live at home?” Ellis had assumed she would have avoided the topic of Annie on pain of death. She looked away, scratching at the back of her ear.

“Annie’s okay. I have two daughters. Both in college. We’re adjusting.”

“Wow. Two kids in college. Incredible. We’re really grown up, huh.”

If Ellis didn’t know better, he’d have said drugs. But she was too conscious for that. Maybe drugs in the past, he wagered. Maybe she was simply another lost soul like Tommy who’d took a turn and started calling Ellis on every drunken night to complain how his life hadn’t turned out how he wanted. Maybe he should get back up, go home, and tell Annie the conference had ended early due to some poorly-refrigerated shellfish.

But then Kat leapt forward, grasped his hand tightly and looked at him with those big sad eyes. 

“Ellis. You’re wandering.” He smiled reflexively, heartlessly.

“I’m still… y’know. Reeling.”

“Me too.”

“I’ve thought a lot about seeing you again. Obviously.”

“Me too.”

“And now here you are. And I realize I had forgotten you’re a real person.” Her eyes grew red as she smiled, holding back tears. “I’m working through it. Maybe I’ll write you an email about it.”

They walked along the beach afterwards, holding their jackets tight against the wind. Kat didn’t have a hat or scarf, her curls bouncing dangerously.

“I never stopped.”

“What?”

“Thinking about you. Obviously I wasn’t thinking about you, more like my memories of you… Sorry, I’m rambling. This is a lot harder in person.”

“I get it.” Ellis didn’t really get it.

“Sometimes I would stop. And I would think… Is this really me? Is this the same girl who ran away into the park behind our houses and lived off berries and Lunchables? Who used to capture little insects with my bare hands? Did she become this?”

“Who did she become?”

“You wouldn’t understand.” They kept walking in silence. “I’m just scared that I may have ruined it already.” Kat shuddered. “I’m sorry. I knew I’d react to seeing you but not this much. Not ever this much.”

Ellis reached out to console her but she recoiled from his touch. For a moment, Kat eyed him, all signs of girlishness gone in an instant. Then a smile rippled onto Kat’s face and she pulled away. “This is so embarrassing, but I have this fantasy that always comes back whenever I’m sad or something bad happens or I just don’t know what. I used to say it was a joke but it was always real to me. Whenever people would ask, y’know, do you have a plan? Are you going to get married? Have kids? Have a family?

‘I’d say ‘well, yeah. I know who I’m marrying. All three of ‘em. There’s my first husband that I’ll marry young and passionately, who I’ll love with my whole body and soul… but that kind of thing never lasts, you can’t build a life on that. So we’ll divorce in some heart-breaking way. But once I’ve recovered, I’ll marry my second husband, an old friend who moved away. We’ve both had our first loves and first heartbreaks. We rekindle our feelings slowly, taking our time. We settle down, we have kids, we make a life… But those things end too. The kids leave, things stagnate, you still love them but you don’t love love them. You don’t think about them in the shower or when you’re wasting time on a lazy afternoon. They’re just facts then, not people, just facts of your life. So it ends but it ends amicably. Then I’m old and alone, and making do. Working on myself, my goals, my career. And that’s when I meet you again.”

Kat turned to Ellis. He felt as if he was seeing her for the first time.

“And we have both lived for so long and we are so tired of life but still living. We’ve gotten into trouble and gotten ourselves out of it and that comes with baggage but we’ve gotten rid of the baggage. We just don’t care anymore. We’re free! And so we meet, and we know that… We’ve always loved each other. From the very first moment I met you, you were mine and I was yours and all this other time was just the in-between. And now here we are, old and together and happy. And we’d get to do whatever the fuck we want.”

Ellis can’t help himself but lean in when she does. The kiss is unlike any he’s felt in years. Ellis wondered if she’ll ever pull away. But she does. And big droopy tears flooded down her face. And she seemed to have barely noticed Ellis’s lips at all.

“And I worry I’ve ruined it, Ellis. That maybe that was once my future and now it isn’t. That along the way it was taken from me. And now we’ll never find each other.”

“We are right here, Kat.” He pulls her in. He needs it. Whatever she can give.

He barely sees her place until it’s all over and the sun has set. Before that it was all just limbs and breath. He knew this was what he came for but it still shocked him when it happened. It had been unlike any of the sex he’d had with Annie. Even in their passionate early days, Annie had always been more interested in the moments surrounding sex than the sex itself. But Kat didn’t want anything from him except his body. Maybe it was different, sex in your middle age, sex without marriage, sex that didn’t have to match up to all the sex that had come for decades before.

He sat on the side of the bed and watched her breath. His heart beat out of his chest. The sunset was a gorgeous blaze of purple and orange on the lake.

Ellis did not want to be here when the sun came back up. After two decades, he’d thrown it all away in an afternoon. He needed fresh air. It was too hot in here, there was no circulation and the heater was blasting.

Kat woke up to smoke, huddling outside in a matronly nightgown. She came back in and wrapped her arms around his chest. He thought about when he will get home tomorrow and tell Annie he’d decided to skip the second day of the conference. He will sit on the couch with her and watch trashy tv before dozing off.

In the morning, they got breakfast at the little cafe in town. They ordered bear claws and coffee and watched the elderly patrons sip oversized lattes. Ellis reminded her he had a conference to get to. She simply nodded.

“Do you have any plans today?” Ellis asked to break the silence.

“I… cleared my schedule. I guess I’ll probably go out on Peter’s boat.”

“Who’s Peter?”

“He’s the only real friend I’ve made here. We go fishing most days. That’s what I do now. I’m a fisherwoman. More of a fisherwoman’s wife to be honest.”

“His wife?”

“Not like that. Just that I haul in the fish, do the busy work, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds relaxing.”

“Very Zen.”

They lingered for a few more minutes before Ellis couldn’t take it anymore and said he should really be going. At the last minute, Kat took his hand and, barely above a whisper, pleaded with him to stay. For a moment, he wavered.

“We’ll see each other soon, okay?”

“Okay.”


He didn’t hear for a few days. It was only in the second wave of the investigation that they found his emails. Ellis and Annie were eating dinner in front of the TV when they called. He assumed the local number was just some robo-caller trying to sell him spamware. Only after the show ended did he see the voicemail.

They’d searched for her body for a week but were calling the investigation off. They’d keep her case open the standard ten years but, the detective muttered into the phone, he shouldn’t hold his breath. The detective confessed that was a poor choice of words.

Peter was adamant she was alive. He said this was the kind of game she always played with him. He told the police that she had brought a strange bag onto the boat with her that morning, which had disappeared, even though she’d left her clothes and backpack on deck.

The police, her ex-husband, the media, and everyone else who knew her thought otherwise. Even Peter admitted the hard facts left little room for hope; he had only been below deck for a few minutes, not long enough for her to have swam very far, and he had looked for her for a half hour, trying to spot a head bobbing in the water.

While Peter protested quietly that she had been happy, it was easy for everyone else to build a case against her. Here was a tragic woman who chose a brutal way out. She was eulogized with the standard amount of passion. She was given the obituaries, the feuding critical re-evaluations, the mourning tweets, and then the slow fade into a Wikipedia article.

Ellis drove straight up to Grand Mire the night he heard the news. He told Annie his oldest friend in the world was gone. He booked a room at Bear Tracks. Every morning, he would eat at the same table they had sat at before heading out to the search and rescue boats.

Ellis told the police everything. He knew he’d just be the cheating bastard to them but he didn’t care. Maybe she had left a secret message for him and if he just cracked it, she’d reappear and they’d embrace again. He hoped to at least find some note addressed to him that told him why it had to end like this. She could explain he had just been part of some sick final game, a last hurrah in the world, a last fuck you to him and to everyone else she was leaving behind. 

He stayed long after the official searches were over and the boats cleared out of the harbor. He told Annie he couldn’t come home. He would wake up before sunrise and head out to the beach before anyone was awake. He’d listen to the waves and the wind and close his eyes and imagine they were Kat whispering just to him. 

Only Peter noticed. He, too, couldn’t sleep, and spent his mornings on his boat, watching the lake for signs of life. After a few weeks, Peter invited Ellis out on his boat with him. Peter took the same route he had taken that day everyday now. Together, they looked into the inky black water and waited for her to appear.