Category: Fiction

Chlorine Breakfast

Paula Turcotte

5:18 A.M.
Second snoozed alarm, ruder than ever. Right hand between my knees, left arm gropes for the phone. I’m up.

5:22 A.M.
I always leave the lights off while I brush my teeth. This feels like cheating: one degree closer to sleep. My bathing suit hangs stiff on the tub tap where I left it on Saturday. Mental note to make another laser hair appointment.

5:26 A.M.
The bunch of bananas I picked up at the convenience store yesterday are still disappointingly green. I twist one off anyway and cram it in the side pocket of my bag.

5:40 A.M.
I don’t remember driving here but somehow I am in the parking lot at the pool. I turn off the ignition and heave my backpack out of the passenger seat. The backpack is covered in a rubber-duck pattern, which I find equal parts amusing and embarrassing. It was a gift from Mom two Christmases ago. Before.

5:41 A.M.
Auto-doors slide open. The smell infuses my sinuses and warmth coats my skin and I breathe deeper in spite of myself.

5:42 A.M.
Locker room floors are always least disgusting at this time of day, before anyone has had a chance to drip on them, to shed loose hairs and whatever other detritus they’ve tracked in from the Outside.

5:43 A.M.
I’ve used the same lock since seventh grade gym class. 36-24-38. Could be a model’s measurements. Certainly not mine.

5:45 A.M.
I rip out some baby hairs putting my cap on. There’s a bald man in the next lane and for a moment I’m bizarrely jealous. I tuck in the strays at the nape of my neck and lick the insides of my goggles, which is objectively gross but necessary. Those anti-fog wipes you can buy don’t work for shit.

5:46 A.M.
Inhaling, I step into the deep end the way one might step off their front porch. Water seals my ear canals as I float upwards. When I started to think about death, I spent a lot of time looking up ways to die slower. Ten Out Of Ten Doctors Agree that swimming is a “gentle yet effective” form of cardio. Anything to avoid jogging.

5:47 A.M.
Today, I do math between lengths. Three swims a week, fifty-two weeks in a year, almost twelve years since I was eighteen. Subtract the two months I spent in the psych ward. One thousand eight hundred and forty-five swims. 

5:58 A.M.
This sport works for me because I’m forced to think about survival. No room to remember my stomach or Mom or my 117 unread texts in a little red bubble. One, two, three, breathe. Repeat, repeat, repeat. If I miss a “breathe” I will probably sink. I wonder if the bald man will try to save me.

6:30 A.M.
I haul myself onto the pool deck, spent. 

6:32 A.M.
Good: hot shower. Bad: seepage from the neighboring stall. Good: five more minutes of quiet. Bad: fluorescent lights remind me of the hospital. Good: water pressure. Bad: forgot my conditioner.

6:40 A.M.
I love the way my skin feels taut after I towel off. I squeeze lotion out in thick lines onto all of my limbs. My forearms feel the way E.T. looks: scarred, rough, foreign. Thirty seconds after I’ve put it on, the shoulders of my shirt are soaked through from my hair.

6:43 A.M.
I walk out without standing under the dryer. I’ve kept myself afloat once again. For a while.

Paula Turcotte

The Deep End

Zoe Raven

I am not at my therapy session because I am swimming. I see you standing at the water’s edge at the deep end. The droplets of water look like jewels sat on your skin; they catch all the light in the room. I imagine you wearing one of those Met Gala gowns, the kind that are sheer and constructed solely of diamonds. The overhead lights emphasise the straightness of your nose, the curl of your hair. You look like a Renaissance statue: impressive, immovable, steady. Steady. I take myself to the privacy of the underwater world and hold my breath, count to seven. I let gratitude fizz inside me until thank yous bubble from my mouth. My eyes don’t close and they feel spiky from the chlorine, but my vision is sharper than ever when I emerge.
You dive in, and I can feel the current of you in the pool. The water is full of tides only we can feel, every molecule creating poles – pulling us together. There is only one other person in here, a ruddy-cheeked blockade of a woman: bulbous, strange, sexless – like a geriatric sow about to spew an impossible litter. She makes me feel sick. I laugh a little. I watch her get in the pool, but she won’t feel a thing through her thick, pink skin – she will have no idea what is happening between us. She lowers herself further into the water, only her eyes above it now – a primitive creature embarrassed of its crudeness. I tip my head back, open my throat fully, what comes out doesn’t sound entirely my own, it sounds like a sitcom laugh track and it booms off the walls. I have your full attention.
I swim to the edge. I want you to see me lifting myself out of the water. I need you to see this story I am telling you with my body – the one about Aphrodite rising from the seafoam. Stood by the steps, I roll my neck until it clicks, unclip my hair. I control the pulse of this whole place with the rise and fall of my chest.
I make sure I stand within your field of vision in the unisex changing rooms. You say hi and I notice that your teeth are unnaturally white, the same colour as the Hollywood sign – which makes me think of phoniness, fakery. I become worried that the water got it wrong. I realise it is possible that this is a trick, that I may have been sent a diversion – a false prophet. I am concerned that you are the kind of guy who makes up nicknames for himself and tries to make them stick; the kind of man who wears loafers without socks and ostentatiously jangles the keys to his Tesla. But your voice is low and barely perceptible. You don’t make too many noises, metallic or otherwise. Your mouth is softly creased in an elastic smile, your teardrop eyes point downward apologetically – as if somehow both theatre masks are contained in one face. Your pupils are blown like wide open portals. I am not sure of the colour of your irises, but I hope you’ve looked closely at mine and decided on their exact likeness – something spectacular and endless – but nothing as clichéd as the ocean or the sky.
I take my phone from the locker. There are seven missed calls from my therapist. I dictate a text message that explains I am busy studying and press SEND. My therapist knows that my dissertation is due tomorrow. Ethical issues in Posthumous Publication: Plath’s Crossing the Water. The words are ready to come now, they are collecting like a swarm of bees. They are making my teeth chatter. Each letter is buzzing in my veins like Morse code travelling down a telegram wire.
You’re grinning at me now, but I know that a smile can sometimes be used as a brick wall. Even if there is resistance, I have found a way to get my words past your skin, past the bones within. I know you’re feeling what I am feeling; a sense of premonition and déjà vu all at once. You look like someone I once knew, someone I know, someone I should know. I like being in your energy field. I want to be alone
with you.
I ask you to drive me to the church – the one that is signposted ‘12th Century Church’. You drive me in your Tesla, but that doesn’t mean anything. Not a single fucking thing. Sometimes things are just coincidences, jokes, even. You tell me, when asked, your date of birth and I get carsick googling your astrological chart. You’re a Pisces sun, Cancer moon – water signs! My ear canals flood with my own laughter. The elements are speaking to me, confirming what I already know. I was meant to meet you today. I check your Mars sign – the planet that represents your masculine energy – because I know I am going to kiss you, and I want to know how you’ll kiss me back. You’re 12 years older than I am and you have Mars in Scorpio, so it is possible you’ll kiss me first. I might need to let you take charge. I’ll call you Daddy if you like that. I turn the radio right up and sing along. Singing is good for my vibrations – it raises them.
We walk through the churchyard not reading the headstones. You show reverence for no one but me. You don’t want to talk about anyone else, say anyone else’s name. There is a reward for that. I kiss you hard and you kiss me back. When we stop, you look up and I mimic you, following your line of vision, wanting to see exactly what it is you see. My eyes settle on the sun. It looks heavy, hazy, soporific – like a white pill in the sky. You focus my attention back down to earth by pointing out the crocuses, their purple heads that have zombied their way through the cracks in the graves. You tell me about flowers and nature, about the divine geometry of petals and spirals and honeycomb. You tell me about the sacred underpinnings of the universe. I want to match you energetically, mathematically. I want to present you with some kind of equation. I tell you about an idea I am channelling. I tell you that we – our bodies in this incarnation – are the Venn diagram of our souls. We are the intersection of the Venn diagram of our souls. It is not exactly what I mean, but my words are so quick, they are overlapping. You don’t flinch when I say soul. You just agree.
The church is cold, but I am warming it from my solar plexus, filling it with something golden. I am sure you are aware of what emanates from me; something auric and aortic – a life force. A force of life. I want you to say you are warmed by me, but if you speak now, we might miss more important things. I hurry you down the central aisle. We kiss at the altar. I feel every membrane of your tongue with every membrane of mine. We exchange a knowledge through our saliva, a wanting – but this is more than that. I remember you in a way that isn’t possible. I feel like I am learning something about myself from being near you, like I am regressed into a past life. I am on the brink of something. I feel like a sand timer that has been tipped, every atom of me is running one way, heading in a definite direction. When we part faces, you breathe into your upper chest, lift your chin. You look at me like you carved me from your rib yourself. I guide your palm to my sternum. I am asking you to teach me about the parameters of my body. The correct answer is that they do not exist. I need you to confirm that I am everywhere. I am everything. I get irritated at the idea you don’t understand. I squeeze your hand, dig my nails into your wrist. The stained-glass saints are throwing fragments of jewel-toned light across the floor. Orbs dance up the walls. Above the altar I notice a statue of me. It could be me: tender-faced, open-armed, haloed. I want you to see the resemblance: Me/Mary. I want you to see what I can do for you, what I can give to you. I want to absorb you into my being, make you feel this ancient wisdom. You zip up your coat, each connecting tooth makes a barrier, a resistance against what I am offering. The weather is changing within me, the pressure is dropping. My heart drops so low inside me I think that I could birth it. I ask if you love me, but I don’t let you answer. I put my own tongue in your mouth, put your hand inside my jeans. I turn away from you, press my palms against the cool stone wall, lower my pants. I close my eyes. I lose myself to the rhythmic pattern of it. My therapist told me that this is how I self-soothe, in the same way people rock themselves back and forth when distressed. But I am not at my therapy session today, so try not to think about that.
Outside again, I hold your hand, ask you to talk – to say something nice. But your voice is small and distant, like it’s lapping on a far-off shore. You have got away from me. I stand still for a moment. I close my eyes. I pray that something significant will happen, a little catastrophe, like a small meteor hitting the ground directly in front of us. Something that will bind us in a shared experience forever. But nothing falls. Nothing shatters. Nothing quakes.
In the car, you turn on the heater to warm the leather seats for the journey home. A family of foxes scuttle ahead of us, their eyes flickering in the hedgerow like roadside constellations. I think about Ted Hughes and his Thought Fox. I know this means something, and my synapses try to fire up an external connection with the universe again. I can feel something scratching in the corner of my own mind, something sly and vulpine. I think about my research, about what was written of Ted. About how his lover said he smelt like a butcher in bed. I can imagine it, the ferratin, the flesh, the animal within – but I also don’t understand it. I want to talk to you about it. I want you to drop the steering wheel, to hold my face in your hands, to tell me what that means. I want you to tell me what it means that I think about it every single day. I know these are questions for my therapist. But I am not in therapy today. I went swimming.
You tell me where the lever is so I can lay the seat back, relax. You reach over, run your fingers through my hair, comment on its golden colour. You say I’m really something. You tell me I am just your type, but the way you say it, the way you say ‘type’, all I can think is: blood group, Hitler Youth, breed of dog. I am struggling to stay awake. I let me eyes close and drift into a momentary half-dream where I see a pendulum. I am somehow witnessing it, above it, within it; part of the momentum, part of its physics. But I can’t make out what is either side of the swing. I wake with a jolt. I force my lids open and my eyeballs sting, they feel allergic to the air. I look at your sharp, stony profile. You turn your face to me. The way you say baby makes me sure I must already be crying. You put your hand on my thigh, squeeze lightly. I feel your fingertips against the pulse of my femoral vein. You squeeze again and say sleep. 

Zoe Raven

House Sanguine

A. M. Johnson

For all my mistakes, let this be known: I never made my daughters. I found them.
Francina was the first — an accident. I found her on the grounds, in the garden, lying on cobblestone. It was winter, and my Francina was a stain of spring on the powdered ground. From a distance I thought her a curious, impossible bloom. As I grew closer, I realized it was a woman, crumpled like a forgotten handkerchief. I was timid, I admit. I circled the pink moment, unsure of what it meant. There was no bow, no ribbon, no tag with my name, but I felt inexplicably and inarguably sure that she was a gift left on the doorstep for me.

I heard then a wet sound, ugly, like a choking gasp. And in this way I was led to find my second daughter, Caterina. She lay not far from her sister, crumpled in much the same way, but paler and twitching in the chest. Her skin was green around her neck. A pool of vomit lay beside her shoulder. The mass was nearly black, still steaming from her body’s warmth. When I approached, she convulsed. I do not believe it was a reaction to me. Still, I stepped back, and watched her twist and groan.

Not far from the poisonous mass lay an open hand, almost as white as the snow. I followed the line and at the end of it lay Alcina, my youngest, lying on a blanket of her own blood. She was blue and dead, cold to the touch, and devoid of heartbeat when I touched her fragile, black-veined neck.

It was easy to carry the girls inside; they weighed nothing to me. I took the pink girl first, because her chest still rose and fell. When I held her in my arms, her eyes opened, wide and observant, before they fluttered, and closed. The green girl was a bit more difficult — alive, still, but fussy. She tried too hard to breathe, and thought me a monster through her death-addled mind. I made sure the first two were inside, lying flat before the hearth in the front hall, before I returned for the blue girl at last. Her body was ice through our clothes.

By the time I had laid them in a row, side by side by side, all three women were dead. All eyes had chosen to close before they died. An admirable thing, this — I instantly liked them. Rather than stare hopelessly into the coming wave of rigor mortis, as I had, they chose to yield to the inevitable with well-coiffed grace. They were strong in the final way. I paused, unsure again. I thought, perhaps I should let them die. But they were young, abandoned, and alone, and had come all this way. No one comes to the castle unless they are truly desperate. Desperate, and with mindful purpose. Yes, they must have left themselves as gifts, as offerings for me.

Though they could not hear my voice, I promised aloud that whenever they were done with life, I would let them go. I would let them, but I would not offer help, could not, for my gifted little girls.

For forty days and forty nights, I bathed my daughters. As the sun moved in the winter sky, so did my piece of cloth. Up and down the silk ran on their bodies, on their arms and legs and sleeping faces, cleaning the mess of their former lives. Their skin turned from white to red, and finally to brown. My blood dried on their skin, oxidizing, forming a fine, flaky paste. I labored, painting layer after layer of myself onto their empty shells, until my forearms ached. I scrubbed until my knuckles were numb. I pushed until sweat poured from my brow. I worked until I thought I’d failed, until I finally heard the fluttering beats of their hearts. At the sound, I think I cried from relief.

I chose my largest bath, the porcelain clawfoot tub. It was enormous, deep and long enough for even me to lay inside. The three girls fit easily, gently curled against each other’s chests. Little panting hummingbird breaths. Their hair, three different colors, lay together like a flag. I filled the tub with warm water, and scrubbed the blood paste from their skin. Once or twice they twitched, or tried to breathe. Precious gestures — my daughters were so ready to be alive again, kicking and screaming, so to
speak.

So I worked hard and hardy. I swabbed every speck of blood from every crevice, every shadow and nook. By the time I finished, the white moons of their toenails were spotless. Their ears gleamed seashell pink. The girls were clean, the water was drained. I folded myself as small as I could on the white marble floor. And I bit deep into the flesh of my forearm, let the blood flow down over their downy, flaxen legs.

My castle was silent except for the last drips falling into the waiting pool. I lay with my heavy head on my extended arm, eyes almost closed. Sun glinted off the solid maroon surface, wrinkling only at my barest of breaths. As flies swarmed the bodies of my daughters I picked them from the air and crushed them between my teeth. When I could no longer move my arm, I bit my tongue and opened my mouth. Inevitably, the flies came on their own, resting on my molars like sticks and stones. Either that, or they drowned in the bath. Fodder, I suppose.

I waited. I bled. And I remembered dying, being born again. The world was unfair when I woke from the dead. I lay at the bottom of a coffin, beneath an eternity of hard winter dirt. No mother to speak of, no bestower of second life. I was an anomaly, a pseudopod of my former self. So in the dark cold box, I dreamed. Summertime dreams — I pined for the days when warmth was total, inarguable, a fact beyond fact. But my first mother was long dead, having died when I was first born. And now I was dead, too. Except I wasn’t. I must remember, I thought in my coffin — I must not forget that I am not dead. In some inconceivable way, despite everything, I am alive. I have my hands. They are cold and I can tell, because I am not dead.

So I dug. I clawed till my fingernails were packed and pained. And when I finally broke through my coffin and climbed from the dirt which held me tight, I breathed winter air, inhaling pieces of snow. It was night. I bathed in the river. Mud ran thick down my face and arms, over my burial dress, which was heavy and ugly and rough. Colors ran through the fabric, all chartreuse and violet and vermillion and jade. I squeezed them into the river, which took them away. Water froze on my hair, in my eyelashes. I froze but I felt no pain. And I hated, suddenly, the way the gems were sewn into my skirts. I hated the garnets hanging in my ears, the emeralds choking my neck. I tore the rings from my fingers and dropped them in the water so that they might be washed forever. I swore then that I would wear white always. Never again would gaudy color touch my skin in the name of comfort that was not mine.

I tore the burial dress to pieces and walked back through the woods to my father’s castle. There I killed my father, my six brothers, and my uncle. I piled their bodies on a child’s sled and dragged them back to my grave. They weighed nothing to me. I dumped them in the hole where they had wanted me to lie, and returned as they had so often returned from this same graveyard: the lawful heir to our bloody home. And from that day on I grew constantly, until the bragging archways of my home, which had been once so grand, so impossibly tall, were now perfectly sized.

Now I sat on the floor of my castle and bled for women I did not know. I looked down the length of my arm, at its opened flesh like butchered meat, already drained and hung.

And I waited. And I bled.

Francina was the last to die, the first to wake. Days after our first meeting, she came stumbling into my quarters, coated in liquid blood, legs quaking like a newborn foal. Skin streaked red, hair matted and tacky, her arms wrapped tight around her breasts, as if there was any shame between us now. She looked at me, her eyes observant and wide as they had been in her first life. She stood in the doorway, staring where I sat at the rosewood vanity desk. I set down my paper and pen, and we understood then what had transpired, the deal we had wordlessly made.

She followed me to another bathroom, to a bathtub more fit for a human body. Her footsteps made wet sounds on the floor, growing stickier the further she walked. I filled the tub with hot water, while Francina sat behind on the toilet, watching my every move. I added rosewater to the bath. I explained to her that it countered the scent of blood. I realized then, with shame, that those were the first words I ever spoke to my daughter. A practical fact. Information that would let her live better. Was that the kind of mother I would be? Functional and nothing more? I held her hand as she climbed into the bath. I brushed the flakes of blood from her hair with my favorite ivory comb.

As she bathed, Francina told me the tale of how she came to me. They were sisters, she explained, despite their tri-colored hair. As infants they were birthed by the same woman — who died that same day. As adults they were poisoned by another, who married their father late and wanted money too much. My girls were clever, even then. They realized that their food tasted cruel this morning. So they ran to the castle at the end of the woods. They knew the Baroness would protect them — stories were told in the village of the tall woman who lived in the castle alone. Tall woman in white, who crushed wolves in her fists and drank of their blood. Smaller stories were whispered after, of her vengeance, and her law. The law of blood, Francina said, and her voice went soft. With fear or reverence, I could not tell.

She looked down into the water then, and said what I have always said: balance in all things. As blood spills, blood must return. I merely nodded, smiling to show her I was pleased.

A noise rang through the halls then, like a trumpet made of glass. It took me a long, wistful moment to realize it was a scream. By the time I realized, Francina was already out of the tub. She ran streaming from the second bathroom to the first, and I followed. I walked slow, giving them their due time. By the time I arrived, Francina was messed again, her arms and face touched with blood. She held and calmed her sister, or tried to. Catarina, who saw me as I ducked to enter the bathroom, screamed at the sight. Real fear in her eyes — I had the thought that she would never love me, and accepted it instantly. But to my surprise, Francina’s hand came down on the side of her sister’s face. Catarina was finally silent, staring then. She looked into Francina’s face, which I could not see, and listened to her sister speak. Catarina then turned her face to me, her browned and bloodied face, and bowed her head in apology.

It was then that Alcina woke, and woke crying, tears leaving white trails in her rusted skin. Having forgiven and forgotten, her sisters pet her head and whispered hushes and shushes to her ears. Catarina and Alcina climbed out of the tub, which I emptied, and scrubbed clean. The three returned to the new, fresh, hot water, which I laced with rose. They watched me with quiet eyes as I explained why.

A. M. Johnson