This selection, chosen by managing editor Krista Cox, is from Welcome to Midland by Logen Cure (Deep Vellum 2021).
Rainmakers, 1891
Eighteen months and not so much as a spit of rain. Dirt stained the horizon red; tumbleweeds lined fences around scorched fields.
They say war makes the rain. Day and night, the boys tore at the sky, counted the government’s dimes. No more hand-wringing, no more prayer. They flew bomb balloons, dynamite kites, shoved explosives down prairie dog holes, cannons reported in heaven.
The engineer would happily show his letters, austere signatures of all the decorated officers you please—they told it the same— raging battle then invariably violent rain.
The last balloon blossomed into a globe of fire, illuminated every object for miles—then several dark seconds, silent and open as the mouths of onlookers—
the inevitable crack, concussion, birds taking flight and somehow distant lightning.
Logen Cure is a queer poet and educator. She curates Inner Moonlight, the monthly reading series and podcast at The Wild Detectives in Dallas. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Welcome to Midland (Deep Vellum Publishing), was shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards. Learn more at www.logencure.com.
Krista Cox is the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, The Wardrobe, and Doubleback Review. She’s a poet and editor and currently pursuing her master’s in clinical mental health counseling. Mostly, like everyone, she’s just trying to stay hydrated while she fights the system.
This selection, chosen by managing editor Krista Cox, is from Welcome to Midland by Logen Cure (Deep Vellum 2021).
Rules
They say sit like a lady, stand up straight. They say boy or girl; heaven or hell; the Lord taketh away. They say tomboy like bless her heart like prayer request like she doesn’t know what’s good. Say sin; say sorry; say you were wrong. They say no means no; they tell so many lies. They say be a good girl, don’t say a word.
Logen Cure is a queer poet and educator. She curates Inner Moonlight, the monthly reading series and podcast at The Wild Detectives in Dallas. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Welcome to Midland (Deep Vellum Publishing), was shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards. Learn more at www.logencure.com.
Krista Cox is the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, The Wardrobe, and Doubleback Review. She’s a poet and editor and currently pursuing her master’s in clinical mental health counseling. Mostly, like everyone, she’s just trying to stay hydrated while she fights the system.
This selection, chosen by managing editor Krista Cox, is from Welcome to Midland by Logen Cure (Deep Vellum 2021).
Dream in Which I Am Wile E. Coyote
I am Carnivorous vulgaris, Famishus famishus, other fake Latin terms for hungry,
all ribs and red-rimmed yellow eyes. I know only one desire.
My desert is vacant apart from the roadrunner. I am forever chasing, wielding knife and fork, down highways disappearing into orange horizon. Every time I get close, the music swells.
I think ACME can save me, a better blueprint could tip the topsy turvy laws of physics in my favor. I imagine picking my long, sharp teeth with a purple feather.
I know there is no death here. I plummet from cliffs, crush myself with anvils, explode and explode and explode and still live to paint the next perfect railway tunnel.
The train is always coming.
That blasted meep-meep echos in the rust-red canyon. I am strapped to a rocket. I am lighting the fuse.
Logen Cure is a queer poet and educator. She curates Inner Moonlight, the monthly reading series and podcast at The Wild Detectives in Dallas. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Welcome to Midland (Deep Vellum Publishing), was shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards. Learn more at www.logencure.com.
Krista Cox is the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, The Wardrobe, and Doubleback Review. She’s a poet and editor and currently pursuing her master’s in clinical mental health counseling. Mostly, like everyone, she’s just trying to stay hydrated while she fights the system.
This selection, chosen by managing editor Krista Cox, is from Welcome to Midland by Logen Cure (Deep Vellum 2021).
Permian Sea
My father told me once all this desert was vast inland sea: all mollusks and trilobites, amphibians bigger than my imagination. He pointed westward, explained the Guadalupe Mountains are an enormous ancient reef. All this, he said, everything was water.
Then the sea stagnated, temperature skyrocketed, acid rained from the sky, everything died: the most massive extinction in recorded history. All those fossils, oil now. Of course.
I was born here, to the pasture, spiny mesquites, cracked red earth. I imagined being born underwater, born a suggestion of what’s to come, something so basic it could survive when earth starts over, a nautilus, maybe, all tentacles, no memory.
I dreamed of it, the sea before its horrific death, before millions of years sun blazed over lifeless desert. Sometimes, waking I thought I heard the waves.
Logen Cure is a queer poet and educator. She curates Inner Moonlight, the monthly reading series and podcast at The Wild Detectives in Dallas. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Welcome to Midland (Deep Vellum Publishing), was shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards. Learn more at www.logencure.com.
Krista Cox is the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, The Wardrobe, and Doubleback Review. She’s a poet and editor and currently pursuing her master’s in clinical mental health counseling. Mostly, like everyone, she’s just trying to stay hydrated while she fights the system.
Practice for Becoming a Ghost (Susquehanna University Press, 2024) is a collection of sixteen short stories from critic and author Patrick Thomas Henry. It is a twisting, surreal book about ghosts, fate, and the void; I knew immediately it was going to right up my alley. Henry is an alchemist mixing Murakami, Kafka, Freud, and Nietzsche with extreme poise. The result is a dynamic and multivocal explosion of sensation, a biting jouissance that melts into a lingering awe.
Practice for Becoming a Ghost is the literary equivalent of a wandering merchant trading in oddities and marvels, offering everything from psychosexual fever dreams to fairy tales and imagist flash fiction. In one story, a “painting automaton” powered by a windmill is tormented by small children and birds (Henry 59). In another, a young intern describes two nightmare roommates: one with a golden retriever tattoo on his chest that he treats like a real dog, the other a domineering heiress who demands rent in the form of stories about textures. My personal favorite, “Of the Throat,” is about a schoolteacher, haunted by a love interrupted, who wages her own war against fate. Naturally, fate is embodied by a daytime-television psychic and those little paper fortune tellers you’d make in grade school.
It is this range that makes Practice for Becoming a Ghost so difficult to pin down. It is a thousand-pronged, teeming, multivocal rat-king of a collection operating by the logic of dream. Try and grab a hold of it and watch as it reconfigures itself before your very eyes, furious and gnashing, all tooth and claw. In one story, a demented man barely clings to life, ashing cigarettes into fishtanks and letting dishes pile up in the sink, while his daughter berates her husband, downing gin and tonics and referring to him almost exclusively as “ass-butt” (Henry 18). At one point she throws a bronze statue at him. In another, this one only a few pages long, two brothers are regaled with tales of battlefield horror by a veteran who thinks they’re playing war (they are actually pretending to be Mario and Luigi). Years later, after a deployment to Kosovo, one describes what he saw to the other:
“He asked if I’d seen any action. I whispered to him: underneath a debris-shadowed sky, I had seen the red clip of bullets, like fireflies blinking a message throughout an eternal night, sparking from the muzzles of their firearms. Hollow-voiced, I told my brother of the leaning walls that crumbled, shed bricks like tears as we marched past.” (Henry 119)
Henry has an eye for the tragic and a vibrant, compelling imagination. These moments where his dream worlds veer into nightmare are enthralling in all their bitter irony. Fittingly, Practice for Becoming a Ghost, even when it isn’t veering into nightmare, is fascinated with “the deep:” sea monsters, the subterranean, cemeteries, and the unspoken. In “Of the Throat,” the unspoken (i.e., what is stuck in the throat) seems to literally hold the power to kill. The final story, “Him in the Gorse,” is a fairy tale set in 19th-century Ireland involving a woman with terrifying premonitions and a poet who wishes to collect stories about faeries (who, in Irish folklore, are powerful illusionists). In prying a tale out of this young woman, the poet digs up a repressed past and sets in motion a chain of events that will forever alter the fate of both.
Interrogation of the depths is the thread that ties the collection together. Tellingly, collection begins with an epigraph from Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto, which reads:
“That road I had been on didn’t lead anywhere, this trip would never end—it seemed to me as if next morning would never arrive. It occurred to me that this must be how it feels to be a ghost. Perhaps ghosts are trapped forever in a time like this, I mused.”
These two sentences voice the thread binding the collection together. Ghosts, and all other forms of earth-bound dead, are condemned to restless, solitary wandering. All ghosts are hungry, driven eternally to quench desire left unfulfilled in life. The ghost story is a nightmare of eternal alienation and unconsummated desire. The cyclical nature of desire and the hard kernel of alienation that cannot be resolved, if not part and parcel of “human nature,” at least present themselves as such and are universally felt by post-modern subjects. We are all hungry ghosts “practicing” for eternity, waiting for a dawn that never comes.
It is not just Practice for Becoming a Ghost that orbits this void; in truth, all art is libidinal. Unlike other modes, however, the surreal is uniquely suited to interrogate the relationship between the self, the unconscious, and the world. The surreal is always encountered violently, as extreme discordance between sense and thought. Like the analysis of a dream, the very act of making sense of the surreal brings to the surface what is repressed. What makes Practice for Becoming a Ghost unique is that it raises the question of eternal recurrence: would you repeat this life forever? It is with this Nietzschean flourish that Henry resolves the terror of the unconscious laid bare. “Of the Throat” ends on this note:
“The memento mori cease to arrive, but I redeploy them as decorations around the classroom. During recess, I watch as Wendy and the others gang around Enid. There are no fortune tellers. Whatever premonitions they may have contained, Enid has altered. This is a future unaccounted for in the medium of Sharpie on heavy stock paper.” (Henry 56)
The illumination of the unconscious and of the structures of global capital both call into question the notion of human agency. This realization threatens to destroy the very foundations of the world as we know it. The ghost story is still the story of our times, whether we want to admit it or not. Perhaps the intractability of this condition calls for a new understanding of the human condition. If we are all ghosts of ourselves, driven in ways we cannot understand, and condemned to repeat these same patterns forever, there is nothing left to do but embrace fate.
Natalie Gardner is a trans writer hailing from Knoxville, Tennessee. She is currently pursuing a BA in English with a minor in philosophy from the University of Tennessee. She loves transgressive fiction, hiking, and schlocky, B-tier horror movies. When she isn’t working, you can find her haunting the coffee shops of Fort Sanders and DIY shows across East Tennessee. Her work in the field of linguistics can be found in Feedback Review in Second Language.
Following the release of his debut nonfiction chapbook, Distance Sequence, Luke Sutherland spoke with Sundress intern Aylli Cortez about his creative process and influences. In this book, the narrator unearths his past to dwell on the persistence of trans love across physical and temporal barriers. Through hybrid forms and innovative craft decisions, Luke’s prose offers raw and earnest reflections on intimacy, ecology, the body, and the task of remembering.
Distance Sequence won the 2023 OutWrite Chapbook Contest and was published by Neon Hemlock Press in 2024.
Aylli Cortez: While distance becomes a barrier in the literal world, the narrator returns to their partner B through nonlinear vignettes. What made you decide to move back and forth in time rather than stick to a chronological sequence of events?
Luke Sutherland: Traditional chronology never comes to me easily. I find it generally not up to the task of translating memories in any real way. One of the push-and-pull struggles of memoir is contending with the fact that you’re narrativizing your life. Making a story of our personal experiences is a very human impulse; almost everyone does it, whether they write it down or not. There’s a fiction to this, and when we turn that self-narrative outward, letting others share in it, it can be very uncomfortable for both reader and writer. Non-linearity is a way of poking at the necessary artifice of memoir, while also an attempt to depict memory in the slippery way we actually experience it.
AC: One of my favorite sections in the book takes us to Olympic National Park, where the narrator and B share intimate moments in nature. As the narrator detailed their lush environment and tender exchanges with B, my attention was drawn to their sense of awareness—what they observe around them, and how they ponder their visibility as a transgender man. Where does the book take place, and what about this setting spurs you to reflect on the body? How does nature shape your writing?
LS: The book spans the east and west coast, but the meat of it happens in the Olympic peninsula. All of my work plays with ecology. I’m always trying to get at the social construction of the ‘natural,’ both ecologically and morally. It’s a violent construction; we see this in everything from Zionist ecofascism (trying to make the “empty” desert bloom) to the criminalization of transition. Attempting to label certain expressions of human life as unnatural is deeply fascistic. On a practical level, the park is in Distance Sequence because that is where the events took place, but the decision to make it so central was strategic.
AC: Themes of queer love and longing crystallize in the narrator’s relationship with B. I noticed their interactions didn’t end when B moved away, and the narrator’s feelings didn’t fade when other loves entered the picture. This portrayal of “dykelove” and “transsexual love” as a generous rather than finite resource was so refreshing to me, and I liked how it emphasized community. Would you be willing to share your influences? I’d be curious to learn about the people and/or art that informed your notions of love.
LS: I love your phrasing of love as a generous resource. The most important lessons I’ve learned have come from my friends and lovers, especially other transsexuals, and especially disabled kinksters, who know radical care better than most. To that end: the documentary BloodSisters and Davey Davis’ newsletter are both indispensable. Southern Comfort and By Hook or By Crook also come to mind. Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrillio is one of the best novels about love, period. And it’s impossible for me to talk about my influences without mentioning The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.
AC: There are several parts where the narrator describes having a visceral reaction upon recalling painful events. When it came to narrating these moments, how did you manage your proximity to the text? The book also includes pictures of what appear to be journal entries. When did you start writing about these events?
LS: I started writing the bookalmost immediately after the events took place. I’ve never been one to keep a diary or document my life in a straightforward way. When I got home from seeing B, though, I couldn’t stop writing about it. The incessantness is what tipped me off to the fact that I was writing a book, not a private diary. I had recently seen Minari and read an interview with Lee Isaac Chung about how the arc of the film revealed itself when he made a list of eighty memories of his childhood—really granular, sensorial stuff. I thought: can I do that? Get down eighty moments in as much detail as possible? That’s how it started.
The most painful memories in Distance are ones my body has held onto without the permission of my consciousness. The game then, so to speak, was to try to remember something on purpose, to bleed on purpose, rather than allowing whatever alchemic equation that usually dissolves some experiences and preserves others to take over.
AC: The book is divided into twelve sections, each one focusing on a single or series of memories. Three sections share a recurring title: Memorywork. How did the “work” of writing these sections differ from the rest of the book?
LS: The ‘Memorywork’ triptych is me speaking directly to B. There is so much art about falling in love, and yet it is easy to forget what a difficult thing it can be. It is ecstatic, but pleasure and ecstasy aren’t always synonyms. Explaining your life to a new lover is in a way an act of dialogic memoir. The ‘work’ of memorywork isn’t labor in the capitalist sense, but it is effortful. I wrote the triptych the way I wished I could tell it to B but which distance prevented me from doing. Thinking of it that way, they are probably the most intimate chapters in the book, where the writer/reader veil is stretched thinnest.
AC: I’m drawn to the images that are scattered throughout the book: handwritten notes, travel photos, maps of hiking trails, illustrations of flora… I love how they surround and “hug” the prose, positioning the text among visual mementos. What urged you to include these in the book? What was the thought process behind their arrangement?
LS: It just made sense to me! Similar to non-linearity being true to the actual experience of remembering, including images made the text feel fuller. All relationships create ephemera, a mutual archive of sorts, but much of the relationship in the book played out through ephemera; it wasn’t incidental flotsam, but a driving force. Sharing it directly captured an intimacy that my text alone couldn’t. It’s also playful. What is an image, after all? When you’re looking at a scan of a handwritten note, is that image, or is that text? The two categories eventually start collapsing.
AC: The fluidity of your prose, your playfulness with form, was really immersive for me as a reader. Did these formal choices come naturally to you or were they the outcome of revisions? Do they stretch or sit comfortably with your practice of writing creative nonfiction?
LS: I always like fucking with form, but for this project in particular, that was the case from the beginning. I’m agnostic of genre, and the idea that creative nonfiction should ‘sit’ on the page in a certain way strikes me as very boring. Prose writers do themselves a disservice when they don’t consider the options that verse and experimental text rendering offers them. Why are we so stiff with our lines? A paragraph can be such a dull container.
So, this wasn’t a stretch for me, but the formal influence of Camelia Berry Grass’ Hall of Waters can’t be overstated. That book changed my writing, and Camelia is one of the most interesting essayists there is.
AC: Is this sequence finished? Do you envision your next project/s as extensions of this book, or as conversant with it?
LS: I’ve made a concerted effort to not think about whether the sequence of the book is over. When I started to feel myself dissociate from the present moment with B—thinking things like, how can I write about this later, what’s the thematic thread here?—that was my sign to back off. We have to actually experience the present if we have any hope of writing about it authentically later.
Most of my time lately has been focused on a novel about a trans punk band who start to experience bodily mutations. The novel and Distance Sequence are connected in that I am perennially interested in unconventional narrative structure, the mutability of bodies, trans intimacy, and the illusion of a distinct natural world. But it also feels like a bit of a relief to get back to full-throated fiction—finally I can stop thinking about myself for a while.
Luke Sutherland is a writer, librarian, and publisher on Piscataway lands, so-called Washington D.C. His debut chapbook Distance Sequence won the 2023 OutWrite Chapbook Contest and was published by Neon Hemlock Press. He was a finalist for the Larry Neal Writers’ Award, the Black Warrior Review Flash Contest, and the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. He is an interviews editor at smoke + mold and co-founder of the DC-area trans small press Lilac Peril. You can find him online as @lukejsuth. Photo credit to Farrah Skeiky.
Aylli Cortez is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His debut chapbook Unabandon was a winner of the Gacha Press Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2025. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY and a member of the Ateneo Press Review Crew. Find him online @1159cowboy or visit his website.
Have you ever loved something so deeply that you’d learn a new skill just to protect it?
That’s how I’ve always felt about my small collection of books and journals. I’ve always fantasized about the worst possible scenario coming true. Maybe an apocalypse by fire or ice. Maybe someday, I’ll just have to jam and leave everything behind. Not everything. Not my beloved books. I’ve dreamt that someday I’m going to get into welding, and I’m going to create the world’s most efficient, titanium, disaster-proof, portable bookshelf, so I’ll never have to worry about what’ll happen to my precious babies. While that is such a lovely thought, we all know I won’t be dedicating my life to welding, so I keep my book collection relatively small. Then, if anything should go wrong, I can save most of them.
I got my first bookshelf at sixteen, built it alone, and felt very proud. Most people have had a bookshelf in their house growing up, but how many have had bookshelves that are completely their own? Untouchable, sacred, an old-fashioned kind of server with many worlds tucked neatly into its slots.
Back then, I filled mine with all the right classics and things I knew I had to read if I wanted to be a serious writer. The only survivors from the collection are two Shakespeare plays, and The Alchemist lost a lot of the books from my first bookshelf during a big move. My favorites then were Anne Rice, Stephen King, some Greek tragedies, and more. It was seriously tragic. If I listed every title, you’d be reading all day.
Today, my shelves reflect my quest for some sort of wisdom. I love things that inspire deep thought, or even simple thought. I suppose it’s really easy to forget to analyze certain things less. You may notice I have a guilty pleasure for self-help, but there are a few fiction stories on my shelf that could be labeled “self-help”, so it’s all balanced out. Speaking of which! My plays and poetry are my most prized possessions. My comfort reads, believe it or not. There is nothing like quietly reading William Shakespeare’s plays so intensely and with such a serious face, only to be knocked out of it by a Shakespearean insult. Genuinely, it’ll make you laugh every time. The photo above is of the bookshelf in my office.
The photos below are of the bookshelf in my bedroom. It also contains a few things that mean a lot to me at the moment: (1) my current read, 2001, A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clark. (2) My pending read, ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë, and (3) The most incredible Christmas gift I’ve ever gotten: a collection of introductory essays byCoretta Scott King on influential black figures. I hope to use them for a literacy workshop or pass them on someday, but I’m just reading them myself for now, and it adds a bit of substance to my day.
The bookshelf I keep in my bedroom is for the books that I want to give my immediate or partial attention, while the bookshelf in my office is for books that I know will inspire me if I’m having writer’s block or an all-out identity crisis, ha! It sounds odd as I write it out, but that’s my system, and I love it! Honorable mention to The Emerald City of Oz. Reading that has been part of my nighttime routine recently.
There’s also Dune by Frank Herbert: that’s my husband’s. He’s read it maybe five times, excluding the other books in the series. He’s told me it’s a lot to get into, and I want to take his word. I’m sure I’ll end up reading it and its sequels by the end of this summer. I have honestly taken a liking to science fiction lately, which is strange. I never thought I would.
Jahmayla Pointer is a three-time National Goofing Around Award winner and specializes in consuming gothic literature and horror films. Jahmayla’s playful and observant nature, and deep love of horror, magic, and literary thrills led her to pursue an English and Creative writing degree four years ago. She began taking creative writing workshops in her senior year of high school and fell in love with working with others on various projects. During her sophomore and Junior years at Southern New Hampshire University, she’s also done Men-tee and beta reading work for authors local to Cincinnati, most notably Victor Velez, author of A Triduum of All Hallows. Jahmayla was an ACES member briefly through which she received several beneficial developmental opportunities including courses through the Poynter Institute. During her downtime, she likes to spend time with friends and family, dance, write short stories, and of course, read in copious amounts. Something that means a lot to Jahmayla is grassroots work and helping people directly through mutual aid and acts of service, she puts this passion into action by working with a group of good friends to develop education tools and encourage high literacy in her local neighborhoods.
This selection, chosen by managing editor Krista Cox, is from Welcome to Midland by Logen Cure (Deep Vellum 2021).
Welcome to Midland
This is a town where the roads end. Over the wall at the end of my alley, nothing but mesquite brush and horizon.
Dirt fills the sky, advances a colossal wave, black blizzard, tripping streetlights midafternoon. Mother would stand arms akimbo squinting out the back door, Looks like Lubbock blowing in.
Folks would say we might just dry up and blow away. Bust followed that 80s boom: half the Tall City’s downtown vacant skyscrapers haunting vast empty parking lots, deserted mall storefronts, endless musak drifting the row of locked-down security doors.
It’ll turn around, they’d say. Always does. Oil is king and football, crown prince. Even when times are hard those Robert E. Lee Rebels are champs.
Somebody’s always saying it’s a great place to raise children. People around here, they’ve got character. They say pledge allegiance under God and mean it.
If you count yourself a patriot, a good Christian, well, don’t be afraid to be neighborly.
Logen Cure is a queer poet and educator. She curates Inner Moonlight, the monthly reading series and podcast at The Wild Detectives in Dallas. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Welcome to Midland (Deep Vellum Publishing), was shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards. Learn more at www.logencure.com.
Krista Cox is the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, The Wardrobe, and Doubleback Review. She’s a poet and editor and currently pursuing her master’s in clinical mental health counseling. Mostly, like everyone, she’s just trying to stay hydrated while she fights the system.
He paced the floor. He wiped the sweat from his neck with a cloth handkerchief. He opened his front door. The boxes were still there. Of course, they were still there. But Walter had hoped that somehow… by some miracle…
He picked up the phone, dialed 4 of the numbers. 1-800. His finger hovered above the next number, a 7.
“Just press the 7, Walter. You can do it.”
The last part he said in his mother’s encouraging voice.
If she were here, she would know what to do.
Walter pulled at his hair and hung up again. He inhaled, jumped a few times like a boxer about to launch into a ring, exhaled, and dialed the numbers again. He got all 11 of them pressed! But, when it began to ring, Walter thought about the voice on the end of the line, and he hung up again. The black eye peered at him through the window. Walter, exhausted, lowered the shade and went to bed.
The next morning, Walter prepared his oatmeal, his coffee, his half a glass of orange juice. He placed the oatmeal in the middle of the placemat, put his coffee to the upper right, and set his orange juice in the middle above the plate where his mother always placed it “so that he wouldn’t spill.” Walter ate and sipped and looked at the yellow slip of paper sitting on the counter. He frowned as he cleaned up his dishes, washing them by hand, and setting them to dry on a hand towel spread out over top of his automatic dishwasher. He grinded his teeth as he wiped down the table.
He picked up the phone and dialed again. This time, he let it go through.
Anna Dickson James earned her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and is an Associate Professor of English at Garrett College in Deep Creek, Maryland. While she hasn’t lived her stories as written, she found that composing them helped her understand a time in her life when she, despite identifying as a feminist, gave up much of her personal power. Now, as a certified mindset coach she helps small groups of women find their strength and claim their autonomy.
Krista Cox is the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, The Wardrobe, and Doubleback Review. She’s a poet and editor and currently pursuing her master’s in clinical mental health counseling. Mostly, like everyone, she’s just trying to stay hydrated while she fights the system.
“Ever heard of it? It’s like a spray tan except with epoxy pore-fillers,” he said as he paid the cover charge with two brand-new, crisp 20-dollar bills. “They’ll last a good 6 hours without breaking down.”
He didn’t mind talking about it. Didn’t seem to be embarrassed about it at all.
“Epoxy? That’s safe to put into your openings like that?” I asked.
He flashed a perfectly white smile. “It looks great, right? Cinnamon Syrup, #492.”
Some people are synthetically beautiful, and they are a product of the products they use. But Brendan came into this world with stunning looks. The orange, pink, and purple lights of the club changed with the pulse of the music and slid across his face and down the sides of his body. Each color highlighted a different part of his beauty. Red, his sculpted cheeks and long, straight nose. Blue, his clear skin.
“Yeah,” I had to admit. “It does.”
“And it’s a natural antiperspirant.”
I imagined him dipped and coated like a candy apple, the deliciously sweet shell holding little orbs of sweat inside.
And yet there was something unnerving about him, even the way he moved his perfect body on the dance floor. Everything was so smooth that it was difficult for me to look at him without feeling confused and a little bit dizzy. He was an impossible but wondrous M.C. Escher construction come to life. He was an equation where 2+2=5. I could tell you in the moment that he was beautiful, but later, I couldn’t describe any of his individual features. It’s like his whole image was coated in Teflon, and my eyes slid right off of his body. Did he have shiny black hair and green eyes? Or curly brown hair and blue eyes? I couldn’t remember seconds after looking at him, and I wondered if he’d register on celluloid film.
Standing next to a guy like that? There was so much… pressure. And my feeble efforts of colored contacts, false eyelashes, and more than my usual 23 ounces of liquid a day (in the form of lattes and energy drinks) couldn’t hold a candle to his radiance. Even though we’d met at a venue with dim lighting, I couldn’t compete with the way that the lines on his body blurred, or how his skin glowed right at the line of his muscle, highlighting his perfection.
This worry made the creases of my forehead gouge deeper, and the powder on my nose began to cake. My nose. It too was an equation that didn’t add up, thin through the bridge but with a tumorous bulge at the end. Brendan kept looking at it, plucking at my insecurities with his stare.
“I can shade that for you,” he said in a stupidly earnest tone.
Anna Dickson James earned her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and is an Associate Professor of English at Garrett College in Deep Creek, Maryland. While she hasn’t lived her stories as written, she found that composing them helped her understand a time in her life when she, despite identifying as a feminist, gave up much of her personal power. Now, as a certified mindset coach she helps small groups of women find their strength and claim their autonomy.
Krista Cox is the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, The Wardrobe, and Doubleback Review. She’s a poet and editor and currently pursuing her master’s in clinical mental health counseling. Mostly, like everyone, she’s just trying to stay hydrated while she fights the system.
