Featuring new stories by Matthew Lawrence Garcia, Laura Grothaus, Joshua Henkin, John McManus, JoAnna Novak, Peter Orner, Lucy Tan, and Zahid Rafiq.
Matthew Lawrence Garcia, “Harmony”
The day Tupac died I was with a few boys and this girl Elena I was into. Not that she’d been reciprocating. We were at the New Mexico State Fair, fooling around with the few bucks we had, trying to win goldfish at the ring-toss game. Thing was, if you got one, you could point to another person and they had to take it out of the bag and eat it. On the spot. At least that’s how we did it. Sometimes a bystander would get grossed out or even say something to us. But it was hilarious as shit, even if we rarely won. That evening, though, this guy Mike nailed it and pointed to my best friend C, and since this girl Lucy was also there, who I kept telling C was into him, he just went for it and sucked it right out of the bag like a champ with the water and all. A few of us were hooting, and the lights from the carousel made the chilled air glow, streaks of red, yellow, blue alternating on us as rides kicked into gear.
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I loathe Beast Friends. I loathe their charming colors, their sunny dispositions, and their huge, smugly innocent LED eyes. Their personality is like a loaf of wheat bread holding a hymnal. But to be fair, Beast Friends are not unique within my loathing. I loathe Axalon and all their products. I loathe most technology because I know to be afraid of things I cannot see, like God and cell phone signals. I would prefer that Kate contact me by looking up at the sky and thinking hard, but she does not “abide such nonsense,” so I have a small, outdated mobile phone, whose keys I punch like faces of my enemies.
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When the phone rang it was Gwen’s mother, wanting to talk about the car. But Gwen couldn’t talk—she was busy—so she directed the phone toward the hubbub: the group of them in their cubicles seventeen stories high. It was an office of men—in their little alcove, Gwen was the sole female public defender among six—and she had started to develop certain manly gestures, her feet up on the desk, her hands clasped behind her neck as she balanced the phone between her ear and shoulder. She had even begun to crack her knuckles, a habit she disliked in others but that, without fully realizing it, she had taken up.
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It starts the night I found Dwight and his buddies by the river, pointing their dicks at a Moon Pie. “What are you queers up to,” I said, and they said they were playing Cum on the Moon Pie.
Did I want in? Dwight shook his head. Leave my cousin out of this, he said, but I liked the sound of this game, and I knew what to do.
They all had their shirts off. They’d been at the game, which is why they had C-H-I-E-F-S on their chests, one letter per boy. “Whatever you need, ask for it and you’ll receive it,” the reverend had said, and here it was. Sharpshooter, they called me after that, Dwight’s friends and the rest of the older kids who kept me under their wing after Dwight lost his marbles.
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My wife and I were drinking Gibsons outside at a supper club on Mirror Lake, trashing “the artist Eve Di Nardo.” To celebrate our tenth anniversary, we had come to Wisconsin.
Eve Di Nardo had been married to our friend Timo for years. Timo was a poet. He edited the literary magazine Substance! Nosense!, ran a guerilla reading series called EPA out of an old gas station, and was the author of a book-length poem about longboarding and chronic pain published by a Kenosha-based indie.
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From his bathroom window there was a view of an impenetrable clump of trees. Beyond the trees, maybe three quarters of a mile, flowed the Connecticut River. Even in winter, when the trees were bare, you wouldn’t be able to see it. Still, he liked the idea of a river view. He’d lie awake and stare at the water-stained ceiling tiles and try to imagine what went on here other nights, all the sordid or tender or indifferent nights. This well-worn bed. He was only ever able to conjure solitary sleepers like himself, not sleeping. Stacey always told him his greatest talent was for self-pity, that if self-pity were an art he’d be Picasso, etc., etc.
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Morning Gold lived on the lane in the shadow of the bridge, where people stopped for fruit, bike repairs, and quick eats. Good things sometimes happened to the people that lived on the little lane, but never wonderful, lucky things like this. Yi Zhong was the number one high school in Wuxi. Morning Gold was well into her first year at the local school and transfers were not common. But she had missed Yi Zhong’s entrance exam the previous year, and when it turned out there was a dip in enrollment, they allowed her to take the test one year late. When the good news came, Teacher Xu warned, “You will start at the very bottom. You will take your first year over again, and it still may not be enough.” But enough for what? Even if she failed out, she would have a better education than anyone she knew.
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From the second-floor window of the creaky wooden building, Nusrat could see the man’s back, his hair, and a shade of his face. She couldn’t see the dogs, though, even as they kept on barking. Waiting for the attendant to call her name, she went on looking out, at the man on the bridge, at the cramped alleyways, at the corrugated roofs of the old houses, at the dark smoke rising from the baker’s shop. This was her first time here. A distant cousin had mentioned this clinic a few days ago at a gathering mourning a relative. I was going mad, the cousin had whispered. She had a two-year-old daughter now.
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ASF Issue 80 Cover Art by Kyle Ragsdale.
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