Category: Fiction

Torque

Kiira Rhosair

You have travelled a thousand miles and, as I stir coffee in my kitchen, pheromones are swirling between us, concrete enough to distil and scent; huge, round molecules invading nostrils and breaching blood-brain barriers, turning us into bodies. I take in all of you with half a glance, and it starts a whirlpool that will spin in torques, and plunge us deep into that sinkhole. So I breathe, blink the thought away and ask if you will have milk. You don’t take milk. Maybe, you say. You step forward and, you have never done this before. You touch my elbow and look at me. Torques reel and madden. Sinking feelings are fates written. We will plunge again and be flung a thousand miles apart. And you say, we should talk. I don’t want to talk. I want to say hello to the hairs straggling from the dip in your shirt but, I have never done this before. I put the coffee cup on the worktop and step back.

Kiira Rhosair

Taylor Stein

Max Eichelberger

I write this story for my friend Taylor Stein. I don’t need to tell you how strange memory is or that I can’t remember when I first met him. I have no idea where those words went but then neither do you.

In my earliest memory, he’s sitting in the lobby of the Georgia Terrace Hotel holding a magazine. His face is staring slightly up and to the right as if hooked. There is a small frown on his face and his eyebrows are raised fractionally below his preternaturally thinning hair. It’s an expression of apathy and disillusionment. I’m tempted to explain that he always looked that way, but those who know how he came to die cannot help but believe he had his numbers and their already apparent consequences burning in his mind.

When I walk to him my shoes wrap silently against the terra cotta tile. Everything is still except for my breathing (or is it his?) but I know this cannot be true. In fact, there is a sense of unreality about this memory, a small but charismatic difference between what it should be and what I remember it to be. An overwhelming impression of brightness reflects off the white marble, white grout, white blinds and white ceiling. Yet he is sitting in an armchair that seems extremely dark, even more than can be explained by contrast.

Like an ore’s vein, the feeling emerges discreetly. Yet in spite of how diligently I bore, and no matter how many times I turn the moment over in my head, I find nothing missing. It is immensely copacetic down to every detail. The concierge’s name to my left is “Jacq!” exclamation point and all. The couple behind me is arguing about the differences between a cup of doppio and lungo. A young girl is telling her friend that if you find half of a dollar bill you can return it to the bank for the other half. “What bank?”

For this reason, I know the memory to be fraudulent. At first, I imagined that this recollection was a function of reality, a gap that I perceived only in retrospect. As if among the architecture of the world there is something designed to whisper back that not all is at had seemed. This horrified me. With time it now reassures me because even if the universe may change this moment will not, which is a sad but certain hubris that causes no one any trouble as far as I can tell.

When I sit next to him the memory disintegrates. He tells me to look in the magazine at a small picture of an English princeling, a blurry bodied man pointing a flintlock in our direction and concealing himself behind a splendidly aristocratic shrub. “There’s so many stupid pictures, but this is one of the stupidest,” he says. Yet when I sit down he also doesn’t say anything but a Midwestern “ope.” Suddenly it is minutes—days, months—later and I am the one saying to him “There’s so many stupid pictures, but this one of the stupidest.”

I never, however, say “ope” in any of my memories.

Perhaps he explained his work that first day. When I think back to all the times he explained his work there is no beginning. They simply begin, typically at the bar. This is not unusual, there is never a beginning to anything he says, but as far as I know, the explanation begins halfway after I’ve sat down at the bar. If it was on that first day I met him, I wouldn’t know. Whether this is a failing on my part I can’t say but the absence strikes me as a sincere or true absence rather than a contrived one. That is, a habit of Taylor’s and not a habit of mine.

“It’s like a vast warehouse of data,” he says. The rest of the words he used I can’t, or won’t, recall but what I remember is that it constantly updated itself, compiled reports of impossible complexity and tracked meticulously changes to its own calculations. These reports it categorized according to a framework that was sensible in the haze of that late morning light though that’s not how I would describe my understanding now. It was for his doctoral thesis, which had been stretched to an impossible ninth year.

As an idea it was a solution in desperate need of a problem, but since I hardly cared what he talked about while I drank I said it seemed fine. This small encouragement was all he needed to sputter another paragraph so needlessly weighted by technical terms I didn’t let him finish before telling him that it had immense promise. I even muttered something about the practical importance of these infinite calculations, though I had nothing in particular in mind.

I don’t know what interrupted us or when. Maybe it was a waiter concerned with Taylor’s wide eyes leaning over the bar, shoulders scrunched like a gargoyle, neck visibly strained as he enunciated his mumblings. Perhaps we simply got too drunk. I have to consider that we didn’t get interrupted at all and that the dregs of that day are lost. Again, the details blur.

The day after I remember nothing. The week after I remember only one scene but it’s another moment to another story. In fact, if I attempt to remember what happened with Taylor chronologically I have nothing for you. It’s a jumble of brunches, of phrases, of recycled explanations and inebriations. The warehouse came up, as evidently it must have, and just as quickly is submerged underneath fried chicken, waffles, eggs benedict and mimosas.

Remembering the hotel itself is useless. When I try to gather around myself all the memories of those mornings in the hotel or its bar they become too innumerable to share. Every moment bleeds into the next in a preoccupying murmur of half-remembered perceptions that are neither the weight of a perspiring glass in my palm nor the kitchen’s endless aromas (though they are there, somewhere). The best I can do is write that I associate it with a feeling of belonging that is invisible but not imaginary.

I know I messaged him encouragingly afterwards, almost goading him on. He replied that he was adding new performances to hundredths of already improbably small measurements of time. This developed into weekly briefings, which I understood dimly. In these, I noted a handful of preoccupations. First, a treatment of van Helmont’s Lurianic theosophy as a theology midway through a long documentation document concerning π, and Helmont’s theory of “corpuscular” light-adapted for his array’s dynamic runtime memory commands to OS. “If he had lived among the Greeks, he would now be numbered among the stars,” wrote Leibniz.

There is a lurking question here about why I let this happen, why either of us let this happen. We found each other’s company complimentary. For me, drinking doesn’t describe how pitilessly I treated the bar. To have a sober anchor in my life was required. For him, he needed someone to explain himself to, a way to flee his loneliness.

Every new topic he explained to me ended up relating back to the program’s core ability to categorize and sort through vast amounts of data and that as the program tracked this data it could use that function to track itself in an infinite itemization. As we exchanged messages he became more and more grandiose. A message boasted that he could fill Fort Knox in “sixteen minutes and change.” By comparison, Edmund Gettier’s paper on knowledge concerns only three equations. Abel’s proof of the Abel-Ruffini theorem, first theorized by Babylonians, is a mere six pages. Simple math, he concluded, tells us whose genius has produced more.

I didn’t know what to make of that, and I still don’t, but I know I assumed a little pomposity was inevitable. Some people said they were visionaries just to say it. It gives a personality to the way they live. He wasn’t like that so I didn’t let it annoy me.

I don’t remember when we lost touch. Perhaps I don’t want to. It’s easy to say that the bubble burst and reality kept out by an unfathomable lye crashed into us. We grew up and became different people and it’s very hard to forgive someone for changing. The temptation is there but I can’t say it because we didn’t. I didn’t even realize it was happening.

The last I remember of him is his hands waving from underneath the bar’s finish. I mean this specifically. I don’t remember his actual hands moving, but I remember the distorted reflections of his hands slamming again and again into the barrier between him and me. Why I remember this more than what I saw when I raised my eyes ups up, as I must have done for hours, days and even weeks at a time, I can’t say. Perhaps his hands waived the whole time and I don’t remember it. But those hands remain, only partially obscured by the white rims of old pints and the red circles of cocktails.

Naturally, I might have been more present if I had known it would be the last of its kind. But I did not so I was not. Weeks, or months, later at a crowded brunch the conversation turned to who had last seen Taylor. I didn’t say anything because it didn’t occur to me to say anything. Someone spoke up and told us that his thesis defense failed. There were hard questions about his program’s value. He replied with fascinating but irrelevant details about Judaic Kabbalists, Seventh Day Adventists of Waco and numerology.

I imagine his face, staring upwards and to the right as if caught by some hook, barely acknowledging the faculty. But perhaps this is the Georgia Terrace Hotel infiltrating into places it shouldn’t be. When I imagine him again there is another picture but no less imaginative, a living sculpture of Pilate (Aetius’s adapted for this purpose) muttering “Quod scripsi scripsi.”

But even this is too dramatic. He went home to cut along his wrists’ brachial arteries and write a suicide note. When he tried to write he was distracted by a Netflix documentary about plastic lids. His note started well but segued into a list of archaic Greek poleis with seventeen well-drawn American flags at random intervals along the page. Using my friend’s login I noted that the documentary stopped at twenty-one minutes and forty-five seconds. It’s paused on an image of Jack Clement’s Solo Traveler Dart Container Corporation plastic coffee lid. A bleeding Taylor calmly pressed the green ‘A’ to await whatever might come is an image that will not leave me.

The note begins “For when there is contradiction, of the two proposals only one is true.” It’s a temptation to read into this something of his coming death but the superstition about last words is the result of absent-mindedness. There are no words that do not turn over in our hands every time we look at them. I mention this because I cannot contradict any divergence by other readers and listeners who sat there in silence but I know any difference if held to be absolute is a lie.
For the record, I don’t blame the faculty. The failure might’ve been productive. Even Newton complained that defending Principia took away from his other studies.

But history also tells us what Newton’s other studies were. After Principia Newton built off of the Clavis Apocalyptica, a numerological interpretation of the Bible, and Francis Potter’s Interpretation of the Number 666 (whose six hundred and sixty-six page is blank and it is written on page three “[666] is an exquisite and perfect character, truly, exactly, and essentially describing that stet of Government to which all other notes of Antichrist doe agree.”).

I see his suicide as part of a system we cannot escape, a naturally-occurring centrifugal governor correcting irregularities almost before they become evident. Imbalance in creation can never reach a conspicuous magnitude because it would make itself felt by extinction. He and his program were no exception. There was a regulator, an apparent one, though this was not obvious to him. Perhaps this is why all three monotheistic religions claim that the spider’s house is blasphemy, since it assumes that human beings are self-sufficient. (That this is a landscape of the mind and not a true landscape is irrelevant since many imaginary landscapes, like a San Diego postcard, are evoked as a true landscape: longboards, palm trees, sand.)

What I do know is that Taylor erected vast and evidently inextricable parentheticals, in which brevity and practicality seemed like scorn. With monastic persistence, something that no machine or business could adequately reproduce, he made an instrument of numbers and subjected it to intense scrutiny. He saw a structure that if it fell then it would fall like the sky smothering us all.

And this is why I volunteered to help clean out his apartment when he killed himself, to honor an echo of something faded by impulses I saw from a critical distance. Death comes with a lot of chores and I felt responsible.

As I sorted through his things, I saw the alkahest myth underlined in John Webster’s Matallographia, Philalethes, Milton’s “arcane mystery” of musical spheres and an imagined court transcript from Chrysomalus’s posthumous trial for Bogomilism (whose body was disinterred for the occasion in 1140). In equal parts naturally and gratuitously were pages of Newton’s heretical history of Rome (where an angel describes a Copernican solar system into Numa’s ear) made into paper mache balloons with PVA glue and fabric decoupage.

I noticed a mirror took up the top third of his west and east walls. Without any real insight, I thought about my friend and whatever impulse might have prompted him to put them there. As my thoughts wound down I let myself see the mirrors for the first time. Between the two angles, nothing was falling in but only reflecting their own beams of light in some horrific descent. Something about the repetition made me realize what I was remembering like breathing–beginning and rebeginning, over and over, again and again. It was Taylor’s words. They came back to me. They were not a koan, a parable, a rune or incantation; much less a croon or hymn but very close to a chant. Then it struck me as a mantra. An inculcation of his obsessions and perfections and imperfections that followed me out of the room like an epiphany.

Max Eichelberger

Our Beautiful Bodies

Christopher Moore

The ground sears the sole of my foot as I step out of the hotel onto the concrete, and I give a hiss of pain, instinctively edging back inside. I’ve underestimated the strength of the heat, the sun already burning the stone even at this early hour. I’ve allowed myself to be deceived by the sight of the breakfast area still being cleared by the waiting staff, forgetting that in this resort, at this time of year, it doesn’t need to be the afternoon before a cloudless sky starts to do its work on the land beneath.

I consider what to do. Do I turn back, return to the lobby and take the lift back up to my room to retrieve a pair of sandals? No. Even avoiding the stairs, that journey will take far too much out of me, given how worse for wear I already am after the stupidity of last night. By the time I get back up to my floor, I’ll want to do nothing more than fall onto the bed and sleep for hours. So I clench my teeth, brace myself for a few moments of pain, and step purposefully back out onto the paving.

It’s every bit as unbearable as I expect, and I shift from one foot to the other as quickly as I can in my condition, searching desperately for any sign of Mum and Dad as I head for the poolside. I scan the rows of sun loungers, almost all occupied with lightly burnt holidaymakers, until I finally spot Mum waving to me, unable to hide her laughter as she sees me hopping from one foot to the other like a demented bird. Dad, meanwhile, is asleep with his book hanging precariously off the side of the lounger, his snores audible the moment I reach them and sit down on the spare seat they’ve saved for me.

Mum gives me the expected rebuke about how I should have had the common sense not to come down without my sandals, to which I retort that the journey back up to fetch them would have drained me, knowing full well that her reply, as it indeed does, will point out my foolishness in having had alcohol with a large meal last night. I can’t argue with her logic, so I grudgingly accept the telling off, and agree to her offer to rub some sunscreen on my back, turning round to face the pool as she takes the bottle from her bag, and applies some to her hands.

The water is full of children laughing and splashing about, some on floats being pushed about by their parents, and I feel the inevitable pang of envy at not being able to join them in my state, resigned instead to a gentle dip later on, once I’ve recovered from the frantic dash to get here. I resist the urge to feel sorry for myself about how unfair it all is, though, given that the extent of the discomfort I’m in right now is largely self-inflicted. Instead, I simply watch the scenes before me, breathing in slowly, and applying the relaxation techniques I’ve been learning in my meditation classes back home. As Mum rubs the Factor 50 across my back in a gentle rhythm, and I start to let myself be soothed by the sounds of the children playing, it begins to work.

And then I see him.

Frankly, it’s hard to miss him. Glancing away from the water, up towards the poolside opposite, I catch sight of him sitting with his eyes closed, while an older man whom I assume to be his father rubs some protection across his back, just as Mum is doing for me. Even with his eyes shut, he’s beautiful. Visibly tall, somewhere between lean and muscular, the upper body of a swimmer. Wavy, fair, shoulder-length hair, skin lightly tanned in contrast to the otherwise crimson torsos that surround us. I blink as I stare across at him, my body automatically seizing up, and I sense Mum looking to see what’s caught my attention. She remarks that he looks nice, and I can hear the smile in her voice. Dad, meanwhile, continues to snore loudly beside us.

He does look nice. More than nice. Face of a model, upper body of an athlete. And yet, there’s something in his features, something in his calm, contented expression as his eyes remain shut and he lets his father continue rubbing his back, that suggests he’d never seek out either the vanity of a modelling career, or the publicity of a sporting one. Someone modest about their aesthetic good fortune, not boastful of it. I imagine he leaves the people he crosses paths with a little bit in love with him. A perfect combination of gorgeous and unassuming.

Then he opens his eyes, and I know that must be true.

His eyes are bluer than the water beneath us. Bluer than the sky overhead, bluer than the umbrella canopies sheltering us from the heat of the sun. They’re almost luminous, as he stares casually around the resort, smiling gently at the antics of the children in the pool, before squinting up at the sun for a moment. I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever seen more attractive eyes, and I’m not sure whether he can possibly get any more beautiful, when he suddenly turns and looks directly at me.

It’s like being struck by lightning. An actual charge shoots through my body as he stares at me, and I hear Mum chuckle behind me. It’s like his eyes see inside me, past the exterior and into every thought, every feeling and emotion currently swirling around inside my head. I’m convinced in that moment that he knows exactly what I’m thinking, that he’s some sort of low-level telepath, because the look he gives me indicates that he’s heard every one of my thoughts. And the fact that he then smiles at me as he engages in this burst of mind-reading is very, very encouraging.

Because right now, I’m imagining him, without a word, subtly nodding towards the beach, before standing up, revealing himself to be even taller than I expected, and confidently walking off down the pathway toward the sea, leaving my Mum to, with precision timing, finish her application of sunscreen to my back, and quietly urge me to follow after him. I imagine hurrying back across the concrete, the pain nowhere near as bad this time, and jogging down the path, away from the palm trees and sun loungers of the resort, onto the beach below. I imagine searching for him along the beach, before finally spotting a waving figure out in the sea, leisurely bobbing amongst the surf, and I make my way down to the water’s edge before wading out.

I imagine catching up to him quickly, and the two of us lying back and floating in the gentle current, properly introducing ourselves and exchanging small talk. Then I imagine him turning and, with a powerful kick of his toned legs, propelling himself forward like the professional swimmer he surely ought to have been, inviting me to follow after him in a spontaneous race. I do, and we slice back and forth through the waves with perfect synchronicity, as though in tune with one another, instinctively knowing the other’s patterns, styles and techniques, all the while laughing and flirting like we’ve known each other for years.

Then I imagine us wading back out, back onto the beach, my eyes unable to avoid the way his shorts cling to his waist, or the way the hair on the back of his legs is matted to his skin by the water, or the way the surf splashes gently about his feet as he takes the final few steps back onto dry land. I imagine following him back up to the loungers, where, after a few lengths in the pool, we sit down by the palm trees and eye one another expectantly. Both of us knowing exactly what’s about to happen next.

All my earlier discomfort is long-forgotten as I close my room door behind us, and take a long, proper look at him. If anything, he’s become even more handsome than he was before. Then, suddenly, his mouth is on mine, hurried, insistent. Desperate to be as close to me as possible. Swimwear soon lies on the bedroom floor, and we’re making love in the bed for what seems like hours, the two of us seeming to know exactly what buttons to press, exactly what places to tease, exactly how to make each other moan in delight. Our bodies, beautiful, fit, in their prime, move against each other even more harmoniously than our race back at the beach. As though designed for each other. By the time it’s over, I’m in tears at how good it was. At how right it feels lying there with him, hearing him murmur and joke and stroke my hair as we both relax into the afterglow.

Then I realise I really am in tears, or that at least one is slipping its way down my cheek as I find myself back at the poolside, staring across at him as my imagination finally runs its course, and the spell that transported me to the beach and then into bed with him finally breaks. He seems to frown, probably wondering why I look so emotional, before casually looking away again and back to the pool. Quite possibly having never smiled at me in the first place—there’s a good chance I imagined that too.

I stare at him for another moment, desperate to cling onto the fantasy for as long as I can. Then I see his father stand up and nod towards the snack bar further down the resort, before starting to walk off in that direction. I hope, for a precious few seconds, that his son will look my way again before he leaves, but he doesn’t. Instead, he turns, places his hands down by his sides, and slowly wheels himself along after his father. Calm contentment once again on his face as he goes. I stare after the wheelchair for another few moments, until, at last, Mum taps me on the back, and I surrender to real life again.
She asks me if I’ve taken my painkillers yet, and I admit I haven’t. With a knowing sigh, she urges me to do so now, especially after the idiocy of overeating and taking alcohol last night, and reaches into her bag for the spares she always carries with her. Offering me her bottle of water, she waits for me to swallow them down, which I do. The daily ritual to keep my chronic pain at bay fulfilled for another few hours.

Mum gives me a gentle pat, before settling down to sleep on her lounger while I settle onto mine, lying on my front and savouring the warmth of the sun on my back, still wet from the sun cream. Within moments, the exertion of the dash across the concrete earlier having tired me out, I’m starting to fall asleep.

I dream of two bodies, moving in harmony together. Fit, healthy and beautiful.

Free.

Christopher Moore

The Mind is a Crazy Place

Renee Lake

Vennie was born cold. Her mother said she was blue and had to be revived.

Her father said he started reading her the stories in the NICU and each one brought pink into her cheeks.

When she was five, they stopped reading her the tales. They worried she took them seriously.

She tried to explain how they made her feel: loved and hot all over.

They told her fairy tales don’t come true, that they don’t step from the pages of books and save you from real life.

They were wrong.

Fairy tales weren’t just stories in books, cool to the touch. They lit her skin on fire, heating her from the inside out.

They were like stepping into the sunshine after being inside a cold movie theatre. When you turn your face to the sun, your whole body lights up.

When she was eight, Wonder Hamster played with her when her parents would go out at night, flying around singing rhymes in his scratchy voice. He curled up next to her when they forgot to pay the gas bill, a tiny furry furnace against her skin.

Her mother told her she had a cold heart, but it wasn’t true. With her friends, lava flowed through her veins. She didn’t understand why they didn’t see that.

The year she turned ten, The Boy Who Could Have escorted her to and from school, making sure the bullies stayed away. His flaming red eyes winking in and out of the shadows.

They moved to a place where it always snowed. At night, cold and shivering in her bed, the Living Flames would come and dance around her, chasing away her goosebumps and the nightmares. Their blue and white insides burned so hotly that she’d sweat.

At sixteen, Vennie learned math from The Little Bat Girl, with her large eyes and wings protruding out of her back. She held her tongue in-between her pointed front teeth as she tried to explain the concept of imaginary numbers, her words scorching the inside of Vennie’s brain.

She asked them why she couldn’t go back into the book with them. The only response they ever gave was, “Not yet.”

Vennie thought that as she got older the fairy tale characters would disappear. Isn’t that the way with magic?

That didn’t happen. In fact, it got worse.

Vennie lost her job because she couldn’t tell Marrying Maria no when she wanted an evening of binge drinking. Vennie would wake up hungover and sick. Her companion would be bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, and ready for her wedding day, again and again.

Boyfriends and girlfriends left her, jealous of things they considered “make-believe” and “crazy”. She began dating The Fur Man of Everland. She called him Bob for short. While he was hairy, he also made her laugh. He made her skin boil in pleasure for the first time in her life.

When he left she clung to his coattails begging to go with him. Before he faded away he said, “Not yet.”

Her family pleaded with her, cried and cajoled, but she wouldn’t give up her only friends. The people who knew her the best. The people who kept her warm.

Eventually, they locked her away with words like “delusional” and “schizophrenia”. She felt like she was encased in ice, frozen in time: wandering the frigid halls in threadbare socks, afraid to acknowledge her friends, mind dulling without their companionship and warmth.

In her sterile white room, sedated and afraid, Little Golly Goldwin sang to Vennie of wonderful places and fantastic adventures. The ice around her started to melt.

During therapy sessions, Vennie refused to talk; instead, she laughed at Woodle The Tiny, a small deer with fiery eyes, that danced on the window sill.

Sunshine soared inside her. She didn’t want to ignore them. She wanted to be with them.

Duprey the Crimson Snake of the Tides would slither against her skin, reading classic novels in his British Accent. His scales were so hot to the touch that small blisters formed on her arms and legs. Before he left he said, “Not long now.”

It was no surprise to Vennie that eventually The Sunset Queen came for her, wrapping her in a searing embrace and promising her escape from her constraints. Vennie could only smile, glad to go with her, knowing she would never be cold again.

Renee Lake