sinkingcity – sinking city

Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader,

I’m happy to share that Sinking City has begun involving undergraduate interns—and as a result, the magazine has expanded. The interns have brought fresh perspectives and a contagious excitement to every issue. I couldn’t be more thrilled to have them with us. Their energy and belief in the future feel especially important in a world that grows more unpredictable by the day.

This issue brings to you two brilliant works of fiction. Wood’s Wings pulls us into a surreal world with its sharp, concise language. Peters’ Manuel brings to life a river, makes water sing and laugh in his work. Both stories are woven with tonal richness

The poetry in this issue holds us captive with surprising turns of phrases and their serious dedication to the real world. Romaguera’s piece invites us to view the political through the personal—like peering through a peephole. Michelle’s ghost builds a taut narrative with fluid, successive imagery.

We hope you’ll find yourself as moved by these pieces as we were.

Thank you for joining us.

Warmly,

Swetha Siva

Wings

These were the wings his body refused to grow. He felt them at his shoulder blades when he reached for them, hands back, his arms folded to an acute angle. He knew they had been there once. This was something he knew on a genetic level. His body was making him a liar.

It was early morning. There was blue light all around him and a persistent haze in his mind. He got back in bed, waiting to hear something, anything. He closed his eyes.

Usually he woke before his mother and lay in bed waiting for her to rise. He held an acute fear that she might’ve died in her sleep. A feeling of loneliness that crept over him this way. He did not know where he had gotten this inclination, toward seeing her death, but it was something he thought of all the time.

He heard her footsteps coming down the hall and waited for her to round the corner and reach the kitchen. He had scared her once. She had jumped into a wall and scowled at him. She had slivers of her dark hair bisecting her eyes then. The two of them had a still moment.

Now his mother was standing at the counter, waiting for the kettle to boil. It didn’t whistle like the old one did, the one that sat on the stovetop. He liked the whistle of the old one. She was hunched over it, watching.

He told his mother that he had had wings there.

She turned and looked at him, towering. She was a tall, slim woman. She towered over most people. This was something he had seen in crowds, her face high above everyone else, the way she stood singularly.

She said, “Where?” very slowly.

He turned and lifted his shirt and reached back for his shoulder blades. Then he looked back at her. She was pouring water from the kettle into a cup. The teabag rose up to the lip.

“You’re not looking,” he said.

She turned back to him and told him she saw them. Her face changed completely. She smiled grimly. Then she said to go get ready, and he went back to the semi-dark room and dressed.

When he came out ten minutes later, she was dressed too. She wore a t-shirt and jeans and hightop sneakers. She looked even taller then, for some reason. She had to kneel slightly to put her hand on his back and push him out the door toward the car.

On the schoolyard, he told another boy. The boy looked at him askance. Look, he said, trying to show the boy, pulling his shirt up. There was a heavy fog resting on the wetness of the blacktop. Girls played hopscotch. The boy laughed and climbed the slide. He waited for him to come down so he could show him again, but the bell rang.

He knew he had had those wings. He felt the memory of them there, the way they had sprouted from him. He saw them in breaks in the clouds. He felt their scars in the shower, the ridges of his shoulder blades. He mourned their loss.

In class, he drew himself with them. He shaded each feather, gave them dimension and scope. They burst from his back, unfolding huge and broad. They took up fore- and background. The drawing was crude.

He stretched with his arms pulled back at his sides, like he might if he had the wings. Every bit of floating detritus in his periphery was a feather falling.

He wasn’t paying attention. Ms. Andrews was talking but he could not hear her. He caught maybe every other word. He looked at the clock, watching the ceaseless motion of the red hand. It did not tick.

He was studying her face in the half-dream state. She was a heavy woman, her eyes a kind of blue-grey that seemed to change with the light. She had streaks of white through her black hair. A sort of distance to them.

Then she called on him and he stuttered, trying to find answers in the whiteboard. Some indication of what she had been saying this whole time. She wrote in looping cursive, beautiful in its antiquity. Strangely otherworldly.

She stopped his stuttering with a hand and told him to pay attention. For a while he did. He had his hands neatly folded over the wings drawings. He looked through his fingers at them at first. Then he was unlacing his hands, moving them to the sides of the desk. Something in the way the drawing looked, the image of himself with the wings, made him feel full. Something about them made him feel shaded in, as if he had acquired depth.

Ms. Andrews was at his desk. She took the image and examined it, measuring its composition. Wordlessly, she folded the piece of paper in half and walked back to the whiteboard, where she resumed the lesson.

Slowly, he gleaned that she was covering the planetary system. She said that when she was a girl, Pluto was considered an integral part of the solar system, but now it was not. Pluto was ubiquitous for the solar system, a kind of dawdling little brother at the back of the pack. Her face was mournful when she said this, as if something had been taken from her with force. Then she said Pluto was unceremoniously removed, redefined. Now it was some kind of trans-Neptunian object, but resolutely not a part of our solar system.

He recognized this feeling. The way she mourned the loss of something that others might regard as inconsequential or abstract. When the bell rang, he stayed after class. He approached her desk. He asked her if she had really cared for Pluto. She had a strange and quizzical on her face.

Then she said, “About as much as you can care for something that’s three billion miles from you.”

He looked at her and nodded. Then he went out.

At lunch, he sat by himself. He did not want to eat, but he drank the pouch of chocolate milk. He tore a hole in the plastic with his teeth and held it like he had seen his mother hold a bag of frosting when baking. That delicate way about it, like it was made of glass and it might slip from his hands if he wasn’t careful.

Emma Daniels sat in front of him. She was a slight girl with flaxen blonde hair.

She said, “Stephen Gallagher said you said you had wings.” She looked confrontational.

He drained the pouch of chocolate milk and looked at the dusting of freckles between her enormous blue eyes. Then he set the pouch down and said, “Stephen Gallagher is a liar,” which she seemed to regard as true for a moment.

“He said you pulled your shirt up and tried to show him your back,” she said.

He shook his head no. She stared at him with a look somewhere between scrutiny and sympathy. But she said nothing for a long time.

He was taking small bites of the mac and cheese on his tray. He was not chewing. He was beginning to speed up. He was nearly breathless. His cheeks swelled against the increasing mass. He held eye contact with her until she grimaced and left. He watched her leave. The way her legs moved under the hem of her dress. When she was gone, he stood and went to a trashcan and emptied his mouth.

The rest of the day passed slowly. It was a Friday, and the nervous and impatient energy was palpable in Ms. Andrews’ class. She stopped several times to quiet everyone. She begged them nearly. When the bell rang, she looked relieved.

He wanted to ask her more about Pluto. He wanted to know what role it had had in her life. How she saw herself in relation to it. But he didn’t stay to ask. He walked out into the hall and out to the street where he waited for his mother to show.

On the sidewalk, Stephen Gallagher walked by and sneered at him. Emma followed, a hangdog expression on her face now. He sat on the steps of the school, watching the street. He couldn’t tell how long he had been there, how much of the afternoon he had wasted. It wasn’t until Ms. Andrews came out that he had realized he had been there for too long. The sky was darkening down.

She asked him if he was okay, and he said he was. Her face expressed doubt.

His mother pulled up a moment later, gleaming with sweat, running from the car and apologizing. Ms. Andrews gave her a strange look that felt both conciliatory and reprobative. Then she wished them both a good weekend as his mother knelt slightly to guide him toward the car.

When they got in, his mother said they had to make a stop. She was breathing hard, and her clothes were damp at the neck and armpits. He had seen her like this before. Maybe a year ago. It had felt exactly the same. Before that, there were months of her coming home late in the evening, gleaming with sweat. She’d walk directly to the shower, right past him, past his father.

He thought about his father as they drove uptown against the skittering rhythms of cross-town traffic. Anytime they came to a stop behind the hazy glow of brake lights, his mother swore under her breath. He had his book bag between his feet and reached down to get a book. She stopped him.

“You’ll get sick,” she said.

Her face was urgently framed against the smudged window, a kind of pale palimpsest. His hands still rested on the zippered mouth of the bag, unmoving. She was beating her thumb on the upper curve of the wheel. Then she turned on the radio.

“Here,” she said.

It was an aria. A da capo aria. He felt the surge of the “B” section, the climbing voice running almost sidelong up the scale. This was something he understood, this great arc, like the apex of a flight. He closed his eyes. It would lift him, it would physically lift him out of the car, through the roof and into the sky now blackened and spotted with fractured lights. The voice crawled up to the highest note and held. It was jangling bright. He felt like he was starting to lift, but when he opened his eyes, his mother was parking.

“Stay here,” she said, “Don’t move.

He saw her heading toward one of those skyscrapers that dominated the skyline. The glower of lights breaking against the sky in the night, liquid, omniform. She disappeared behind the door.

Now he took the textbook out. He turned to the section on ornithology. It was a shallow text, not even beginning to cover the breadth of the subject, but he had read it several times. One section in particular. A skeletal comparison between aviary life and human life. This was an image he studied for hours, the similarities. The skeletons were nearly identical, nearly interchangeable. It was simply the skin, the organs that made humanity flightless. That doomed him to the hard soil. The way the outer layers adhered to his skeleton. Something so insignificant as to be almost cosmetic.

Sometimes, at night, he lay on his stomach on his bed, with his arms out at his side. He wanted to feel the weightlessness of gliding. That feeling at the top of the Ferris wheel where he was neither rising nor falling, but instead hung for what always felt like a moment too long at the apex, or tipping point. He’d close his eyes, trying to remove himself from his body that betrayed him. To feel for just one moment time stopping. But his mother always walked in and interrupted him.

Like she did now. There was a slight shuffle as she got in the car, enough to make him open his eyes again. When he did, he saw her looking down at the textbook. Then she looked at him.

“Birds are known carriers of diseases,” she said.

Then they drove off. They were heading downtown again, down toward the village, where they’d cross the bridge and be out of the city. The skyscrapers were receding in the rearview. He saw rooms lit against the sky, forms smearing against the night of the sidewalk.

“I’m sorry I was late,” his mother said. She was looking at the road still. He was watching the people passing on the street.

“It’s okay,” he said.

She put a hand on his knee and shook. An awkward form of motherly affection, as if she were trying to wake him from some melancholic dream.

“Your day was good?” she said, now glancing at him. “You learned things?”

“How do you feel about Pluto?” he said.

She said, “The planet?”

“The trans-Neptunian object.”

She thought about it. Her face was drawn up on the right side, a sort of smirking without emotion. A gesture she made when she was giving something deep, concentrated thought. “It’s a planet. Definitely. No question. Some things you just know.”

“And you know this?”

She tilted her head. “Yeah, I think so. This seems like something I know.”

“Isn’t that anti-scientific?”

She shook her head no. Then she said, “No, no,” but didn’t elaborate. He saw her face only in the sepia light of the streetlights they passed under. He didn’t press her.

They were rising over the bridge. That funny feeling he got when he heard the whipping of the wheel’s rubber against it. That feeling of precariousness that felt like he was always rising or falling. She held the wheel at ten and two and was slightly hunched over, her long body kind of wavering. Over the water, there were fleeting glimpses of light moving fast across the rippling skin. What bodies lay beneath? If he jumped, how long would he remain in flight before he hit the water?

On their street, they got out and walked up the three flights of stairs to the apartment. They went in and his mother went off toward the bathroom and he heard the shower running. Her voice came lilting through. A lovely, husky voice, a kind of intonation that gave words heavier meaning than they’d otherwise have. This was one of her talents.

She came out a little later with a towel wrapped around her head, dark strands spilling out. She wore a robe tied tight. She went toward the kitchen, passing behind him.

He sat on the couch and was back in the book, looking at the skeleton again.

When the doorbell rang, his mother looked at him. He rose and walked to the door and opened it. His father was framed there. He was slight, with thick glasses that made his eyes large.

“You ready?” his father said.

The boy nodded and went to his room, gathering his things. He put the book in the bag first. Then all his clothes. He heard them talking.

“Funny thing happened today,” said his dad.

There was a nonverbal sound from his mother.

“A man in a suit came to my apartment. I said I wasn’t interested. His foot was wedged in the door and there was an envelope. Guess what was inside.”

“Scott, please,” she said.

“Can you guess?”

“I don’t have time for this. I have to get ready.”

“I’m not mad, is the thing. There’s no harboring resentment. You understand. Ready for what?”

He came out into the hall. His mother towered over his father. She looked down the hallway at him. She looked tired.

She said, “I’ll see you next week, huh?” Then she rubbed his shoulder.

He nodded and followed his father down the stairs. His father was slumped, his shoulders an inverted convexity. He wore an oxford shirt that was at least one size too big. He was almost the same height as him. Still his father held a hand on his shoulder as if he were guiding a substantially smaller person than him.

They shuffled out to the sidewalk, into the dark night, then down to the subway platform. He only ever rode the train with his father. He liked the smell down there. That cellarly, vaguely industrial smell. The smell of damp exhaust concentrated.

They stepped into the car, and a man was yelling. He was exposed. The boy stepped closer to his father, and his father held an arm back, lightly grasping him. His father was sweating through his oxford shirt. Sometimes his father was prone to sweating like this, and he could make out the shape of his father’s undershirt. He couldn’t see his father’s face.

The man was pacing half the length of the car and the boy’s father was backing him away slowly. The man’s eyes roamed wildly. His hair was frozen into a shock. He spoke at a rapid clip. He was muttering things the boy couldn’t quite make out. The only phrase he understood was “that’s what they do,” which punctuated every other sentence with a stab.

They had four more stops. They were backed up to one end of the car. The boy held his breath. His father said nothing.

A couple stops later, the man went out onto the platform. He looked back just as the train started to pull away. He touched the glass as the train pulled away, saying “no, no, no” before he reached the end of the platform.

When the boy looked up, his father was breathing hard. He didn’t say anything, and there was no indication of panic or worry in his face, but his oxford shirt was moving with his breath. He squeezed the boy’s hand as they walked out onto the platform and down to the car.

His father lived outside of the city now. Had been living there for the past few months. It felt like nowhere. The streets were wide and sprawling and quiet. There were trees arranged into canopies, a long stripe of sun coming through the shade. In the dark, it was almost impossible to see anything at all.

They drove through these streets pulling wide. He looked at the dim faces of houses. The light cutting through the blinds, the birds in the branches of the trees. All these dim eyes, the owls hooting and twisting their necks. He imagined their skeletons, spread out next to his own.

When they came to the front of the duplex, his father walked around the front of the car and opened his door. They went up the walk and across the patio to the leftmost door. Inside, it was sparse, a yellowed white, smoke-stained along the walls. There was a fold-out couch that he slept on.

His father went to the kitchen and put a frozen pizza in the oven. The whole apartment smelled of gas. He sat on the fold-out and turned on the TV. His father came back in to the living room and opened a window. Then he sat on the couch.

“Look, I don’t know what you heard,” he said.

The boy turned from the TV to his father.

“But you don’t need to worry,” his father said, “There’s nothing to worry about yet.”

The boy said nothing. He was flipping through the channels, across skittering gray static.

“Because whatever happens,” his father said.

The boy put his hand on his father’s knee and gave him a shake. There was a still moment between them. Then his father rose and went back into the kitchen. His choked breath was audible from the living room. It lasted several minutes. The boy wondered if he should go in there, but, after a few moments, it faded.

When he came back, they ate in front of the TV, which was something they never used to do. The pizza was still half-frozen. The chewed silently and watch a documentary about animals of the Amazon, which the boy had eventually settled on. His father fell asleep on the couch. He had a kind of rattling snore. And slacked, his face had a youthful quality that it did not possess when animated.

The boy went to the kitchen. The stove’s clock read 11:17. The time flickered. He took the book from his backpack and splayed it open on the table. He could not focus on the text. He read and reread passages over and over again.

It was quiet. The only sound he heard was the hooting of an owl. And when he looked up, it was on the windowsill. Its head twisted and twitched. Its beak parted and shut, these little half-gestures.

The owl and the boy looked at each other for a long time. The boy did not move. He felt he shouldn’t. He hardly breathed. After a minute, the owl walked onto the kitchen table. It stood before the boy, twitching.

Then, behind the owl, his father’s face came from the dark. Then the broom over his head. Then the impact.

Matthew Wood is a writer of fiction and poetry working in Los Angeles and a cum laude graduate of California State University, Long Beach’s Creative Writing program. He has had fiction published in carte blanche, Heartwood Literary Magazine, Chapter House, Washington Square Review LCC, and El Camino College’s Myriad, where he was awarded the Tom Lew Prize for Fiction. He is working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Manuel

Jerry Foster was wide awake. He could tell from the gentle sounds of the farmhouse that dawn some hours away. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a good night’s sleep.

The room was almost entirely black, although he’d left curtains open. Jerry rolled over and began fumbling with his clothes. He went to the living room and turned on the TV; staring uncomprehendingly at the screen. Then, wrapping himself in a sweater Helena had knit him, he slipped through the door. Helena had always said night walks were the best thing for insomnia. The TV’s light spilled out the window into the yard: it would be nice to hear voices when he returned.

The darkness was near complete. Jerry sighed. Several times he tripped on weed tussocks and roots as he crossed the near field. How many years now since he’d sown it?

For a time he stood by the edge of the dusty track that passed for a road. It was barely visible in the gloom and seemed already to have lost the warmth it had absorbed during the day. Vaguely, he recalled the first time he’d driven Dad’s old wagon down the track, the first time he’d brought Helena to the farmhouse. The bounty they and the boys had loaded in the truck. With a sigh, he put the homestead, with its sagging roof and empty barn, behind him and sauntered toward the bridgehead.

The singing of water, swollen with spring freshets and echoing up the ravine walls, told Jerry he was nearing the bridge. It seemed closer than usual: time was, he and the boys had grown barley right up to the bridgehead. Now faint furrows were the only token of their labours.

The familiar creak of planks under leather shoes was just audible over the sound of the water far below. The old man stopped in what he thought was the middle of the bridge. What light there had been was gone.

Jerry stared into the blackness. The yawning emptiness extended itself toward him, inviting him to dive into its perfect, forgetful simplicity.

He stood for a long time, listening to the thousand voices of the giddy water where it played and splashed among the ancient pylons. The county would never repair them, but the boys had promised to come up from Capital City to help replace the rotten stanchions next summer.

“Just a few months, old girl,” Jerry whispered. “Then you’ll be right as rain.”

For a time he looked wistfully into the gloom. Occasionally he thought he could see the water glitter, but perhaps his eyes were just playing tricks.

On the far cliff something rustled. A stone came loose. It clicked on the scrapes and ledges before splashing into the flow: a hollow plunk washed downstream.

The sound was well known. Jerry and Helena had often taken the boys to drop fieldstones off the bridge. Were the stones still down there, smothered by the icy rush? Slowly rounding into sedimentary oblivion? Their particulate carried to the sea with a million million others like them? One day, thought the old farmer, this river, this same river that has enriched the soil for thousands of years, will carry my bridge, my farm, my ancestors, even Helena and me, out to sea and bury us in the depths.

Blackness welled up from the chasm. Jerry leaned over the wooden railing. The image of himself careering into that soft, all-enveloping blackness flashed before him. His hands trembled. He set a foot upon the railing. The bridge itself seemed to sway and groan. The planks creaked.

Jerry waited… nothing. He turned back to the blackness. Then-

“Are you alright?” The voice was firm yet concerned: strangely foreign, yet easily comprehensible.

“Huh?”

“I said, are you alright?”

“Huh? Who goes there?” Jerry realised his face was wet and quickly wiped his cheeks with a grimy sleeve.

“I do, I suppose. But now that I’ve answered your question, you ought to answer mine. Are you alright?”

Jerry stared into the darkness. He couldn’t make out the figure.

“Where are you?”

“Right in front of you.”

“How’d you get here?”

“I walked. …are you alright? It’s awfully late to be standing alone on a bridge.”

“I just came out for some air,” Jerry gruffed, pulling himself to his full height. The direction of the voice suggested a shorter man, someone who was no threat. “What’re you doing here?”

“Looking for lost sheep. I’ve been looking for three days. Have you seen any strays?”

Jerry shook his head. “Not on my farm. Who’s lookin’ for ‘em?”

“You mean, what’s my name?”

“Sure, we’ll start there.”

“Manuel.”

“What kinda name is that? You from down south?”

“You could say that.”

“‘Kay, well, I’ll let y’know if I see anything.”

Jerry was not much for conversation and speaking to a shadow was even worse. He looked back into the blackness swirling beneath the bridge.

“Do you live nearby?” asked Manuel after a time.

“Just over there,” Jerry waved into the darkness. Manuel seemed to understand.

“You mean the run-down looking place?”

Jerry flinched. “That’s the best dern farm in these parts. Time was it grew the finest barley this side of Saint Louis. But that was…” he trailed off.

“I’ve heard of Foster Farm, but not for some years.”

Jerry was silent. The swirling pitch clawed at him. To enter that simple, all-encompassing darkness, to fly through it…

“Do you need a farm hand?”

“Huh? What kind of a way is that to find work?”

“Conversation is an odd way to look for work?”

“No- I mean…I thought you had work.”

“I do. But I was only hired for the one job… and you just said you needed hands.”

“Did I?”

“Not in those exact words.”

Jerry peered into the river chasm. He thought of the overgrown barley-field, the mouldering byer, Helena’s now-weedy garden plot. “Can’t pay till harvest.”

“I can wait.”

“Never met a jobber who’d wait for pay.”

“Fair enough, but you’ve probably never met anyone on a bridge in the middle of the night either. You could use the help, I could use the work, and we could both use the company. Roving is lonely work”

Jerry gazed into the ravine. The darkness was receding. He thought he could make out the dim form of the escarpment.

“Alright then. You come by Foster Farm when you’re done finding your strays, and we’ll talk.”

The two stood in silence for a long time. Jerry half expected to hear Manuel creaking away, but the other seemed content to wait beside him, listening to the giddy water.

* * *

Constable MacAlistair looked at what had been the bridgehead. “What happened?” he said, pulling out his notepad.

“Uh, well, the lower stanchions were pretty rotten,” said the sergeant on duty.

“How d’you know?”

“One of the boys pulled up part of a beam,” he gestured to an eight by eight lying some way off. MacAlistair kicked it. The wood grains came off in his boot tread.

“Shoot, it’s pretty far gone. Anyone injured?”

“No one’s reported.”

MacAlistair glanced around. “Who lives there?” He pointed to a derelict farmhouse on the far side of an overgrown field.

“According to the locals, that’s Foster Farm. No one’s home, but the TV’s on.”

Down in the ravine the river splashed and laughed over the rocks, slowly carrying the remains of the bridge out to sea.

Erik Peters is a teacher and avid medievalist from Vancouver Canada. Erik's work is heavily influenced by a range of mediaeval minds. His writing has been published in such journals as Takahe, The Louisville Review, Dead Mule School, Coffin Bell, Superlative Lit, and many more. You can check out all Erik's work at erikpeters.ca.

Ghost

n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear

—Ambrose Bierce

Grief-drunk girl taught to swallow the silt
of her leafy dread, spoon-fed like most kids

a diet of small deaths—cats and granddads, a
missed hemstitch—but then the hammer-squash

in sophomore year of dead best friend.
On a grainy 80s phone line, I learn of last

rites, last efforts, surgical teams, an accidental
mix of medicines, shuffled blame that

couldn’t undo the bulbous bloom of a teen
girl’s yellow and black heart, unwitting propeller

of poisoned brew. That’s when
he first shared them, Dad’s two rules:

Rule #1—life is never fair.
Rule #2—you can’t change Rule #1.

I’d lived with them for twenty years
by the afternoon the social worker

leaned against the granite-topped vanity
said she worried I was crying too much

as I lay, ordered still, in a hospital room
across from the one where, not a year

ago, I lost a son. I don’t tell her about the dreams
a second ghost child pushed out of me. Instead

I endure her advice: try to be positive, don’t stress
and remember, because one child didn’t live

doesn’t mean it will happen again.

Jill Michelle is the author of Underwater (Riot in Your Throat, 2025) and Shuffle Play (Bottlecap, 2024) and winner of the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry. Her newest work is forthcoming in The Florida Review, The Indianapolis Review, Pangyrus Lit Mag and Yellow Arrow Journal. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more at byjillmichelle.com.

ON WALDEN POND

by Thom Hawkins

I call Thoreau Walden and he calls me Walden, too

And together we’re convinced that Walden the Pond
used to be Walden the Man—
a man so unconvinced of demands on his person
that he ceased to be one—
he melted against the landscape
with the only evidence of his human form
a slight ripple when he laughs

(Walden and I spend hours chucking punchlines to see who can get the bigger splash)

Walden is jealous of Walden the Pond, and I’m jealous that he pays so much attention to him.
When I catch him immersed to his whiskers, I wish that I was the Walden he was immersed in.

And when Walden’s away
I try to convince Walden the Pond to change back into Walden the Man
and let me take his place—
but Walden just ripples at the suggestion and doesn’t move
and I can’t even convince myself to slouch
let alone accomplish what he has

Yes, yes,
there’s love here, too, on Walden Pond—
but we had to change its name to Walden

Thom Hawkins is a writer and artist based in Maryland. His work has appeared or is scheduled to appear in Oyez Review, Gargoyle, The Fieldstone Review, Poetry Box, Linked Verse, and Uncensored Ink's Banned Books Anthology. His video art and drawings have been displayed at exhibitions or in performances in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Thom has also appeared with the Baltimore Improv Group, Ignite Baltimore, and on The Stoop Storytelling podcast.

Cienfuegos

Abuela calls me hot tempered,
while also referring to me
as a man of 100 fires.

Abuela calls me Camilo,
anytime I let my beard grow
out, my hair grow wild.
Camilo Cienfuegos,
the champion of the people, killed.

US says Cuba
Cuba says US
But he’s dead, memorialized
saying Vas bien, Fidel,
which you can’t help but wonder
about the insincerity, insecurity
of having to tell yourself that,
in public for eternity,
in the police state you built.

Abuela always calls me Camilo
when my hair grows out,
as if she’s worried that
untethered,
I’ll become like him;
used, killed, by someone trying
to get away with using, killing,
solely for themself.
As if I were too precious to
have that happen to me,
even if Camilo was clearly too precious,
for us.

Camilo, the hero from the campo,
not the prestigious school boy
married into the other dictator’s family,
who inherited that claim that all dictators have
of another’s home.
Camilo, the one who actually knows what
an empty stomach grumbles.

Abuela always calls me Camilo, who Abuelo drove
side by side with in celebration,
Havana taken over by campesinos y colegios
y congresos, and for a moment, not by anything else.
When he gets excited that I travel, he’s happy I’ve seen
the world. But he has apprehension of what comes next
of me using what I saw, to try to make the world better.
Tonto Útil. He’s afraid of seeing me drive side by side
with him, celebrating, only to never be seen again.

Vas Bien, my father remembers that differently.
How Camilo was talking and how he asked
that as a question to Fidel. Vas bien, Fidel?
Is it ok that I keep going? Am I doing right
by our people, our island, our home,
our vision for a free and better Cuba?

Castro y Che
knew how to talk to the US press,
Camilo talked for the people,
for us.

Vas Bien, Fidel?
Sure, for me, but maybe not
for us.
Abuela calls me hot tempered,
while also referring to me
as a man of 100 fires.

For Abuelo, Abuela, Pops and Moms
all worried about me disappearing,
to flame out like 100 fires at once.
But I am not afraid of being the one,
destined to disappear.
But I am afraid of being the one,
cursed to stay on the road, alone,
wondering where my friends,
my family, my youth,
my loves, my dreams
of finding
home, went.

For nothing is as cold as the ashes
from 100 fires that have been
extinguished, quickly, then slowly,
for eternity,
for us.

Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who was born in Hialeah, Florida, and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has been published in Passages North, Catapult, Massachusetts Review, Islandia Journal, Latino Book Review and other publications. He is a VONA alum and Romaguera was a 2023 Periplus Fellow. He is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript describing the trips he has taken to Cuba, where his father was born.

Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader,

Thank you for your patience. We have stepped towards expanding the magazine, but that has come with its challenges. I am happy to say that our team now includes a group of undergraduate interns who have brought their energy, excitement, and perspective to the difficult selection process. With them, our team has had the pleasure of conversing over and savoring every piece sent our way. Our small editorial team has been managing whirlwind changes, but we are here now, with an issue featuring brilliant fiction, poetry, and visual art.

The previous editor, Megan Ritchie, hoped that Sinking City would ‘remain true to the many universes it holds’. I am happy to say that this continues to be the case in this issue. Be it the magical universe of sleeping boys in “Beauties, Awake” by Joe Baumann, or the shifting universe of “memory ubique” containing objects of fascination like ‘rope of moon and stars’. The pieces in this issue are thrumming with electric imagery.

Beauty-despite being an overused word, is most apt here in all its weirdness-appears everywhere in this issue. It appears in the snapshots flowing backwards in Gabrielle Griffis’ “Gala”. It stills around a moment brought to life by the whistling of Train no. 12424 in “The Train” by Pragjyotish Gogoi. It takes the shape of a ‘hexagon formed by the heat of a bee’s body’ in Benjamin Bellas’ strongly voiced poem. We hope you will find yourself pulled into these and more universes as much as we did.

Thank you for joining us.

Warmly,

Swetha Siva

Alien Species Turned Native

I stuffed my mattress with old photos and ticket stubs

and when it became too lumpy to sleep on,

I bought another mattress, stacked it on top,

and filled that one, too.

It worked for a while until the first mattress grew mushrooms

that spread all over. Now, I take their spores everywhere

and they’ve invaded everything—

I saw some growing inside my medicine cabinet,

noticed them at the bottom of the cup of pens on my desk,

found them in my French Vanilla coffee grounds this morning.

I play the same sidewalk games with my niece

that my parents played with me on our dead-end street.

When she runs across the yard and jumps into my arms,

I’m brought back to old summer evenings, the air weighing

me down, a strange ringing in my ears. It almost

sounds like screaming. I pull a mushroom from my ear

and toss it into the street.

The Boy I Loved at 20 played me an indie song

from the passenger seat of my car as we wound around

unlit back roads toward Stamford. When I hear it now,

I can feel in the back of my throat the itch of stale smoke

from his Marlboro Reds and a mushroom appears on my chest.

I refuse to take the song off my playlist, even though I have to

skip it every time. I don’t know why.

Usually, I clean them up right away, too embarrassed to let anyone

see the chaos I’ve caused. But last week,

I made a bouquet of my mushrooms and gave them to my new lover.

He put them in a glass vase

and kept them on our coffee table.

Steph Kleid is a New Jersey-based poet and writer who received her MFA from Manhattanville College where she is also an adjunct academic writing professor. Steph is drawn to narrative poetry and stories that explore femininity, the body, and love in its many forms. Her work can be found in Graffiti Literary Magazine and Sunflowers at Midnight.

Beauties, Awake

By Joe Baumann

When Thomas cannot sleep, he walks to the house of beautiful boys. The Missouri air is syrup, prickling fresh sweat on the back of his neck. The breeze is oven exhaust. He stares from across the street, imagining the house full of boys, all sleeping, piled like kittens on four-poster canopied beds. Curled in pairs on couches. Sprawled, heaped, tangled on shag Berber carpet. Drooped on wing-backed chairs. Their hair is mussed. Their armpits give off a cloying stink. Their muscles are taut and young, their skin fresh and clear. They are beautiful boys, waiting to be awoken.

Thomas has tried staring up at the ceiling of his dingy bedroom until his eyes water and his bedsheets strangle, overheat. He has tried herbal teas, melatonin, Tylenol PM, off-brand Tylenol PM, cough syrup. He has tried masturbation and alcohol and exercise and reading. But nothing works. So he walks down streets, the sky blue-black, streetlamps cutting through the grim like tiny fireflies growing larger as he approaches. He always stops beneath a willow tree across the street from the house. Night winds rustle the long vines of branches. The bark is cool against his skin. He leans and stares, imagining the boys emerging from the depths of their dreams to frolic through dark rooms. Thomas closes his eyes and pictures the flounce of their bodies, the rich chortle of their laughter, their grunts as they play, wrestling and shoving. He zooms in on their mouths as they eat or suck down water, bodies heaving for breath after bursts of anaerobic exercise, muscles tight and screaming. He feels hard heat in his center, a bursting waiting to happen.

Thomas works as a barback in a popular Italian restaurant that claims everything is authentic and handmade but the walk-in refrigerator and its boxes of dried pastas would beg to differ. He keeps his mouth shut and washes out beer steins, rinses wine glasses, ices bottles of pinot blanc. His favorite bartender, Vivian, teaches him how to make the more complicated cocktails: Ramos Gin Fizz, Vieux Carre, Pisco Sour. She tips him out the best, and in return he makes sure her segment of the bar is always well-stocked, her mixers fresh and supply of coasters never close to running low. When she’s on the close shift he stays late to help her sweep and take nightly inventory even though he doesn’t have to. She only ever says thanks and cuffs his bicep with a grateful squeeze. Vivian lives with her mother, Thomas knows, a woman who’s been bound by a wheelchair for ten years thanks to long-undiagnosed MS. If this has weighed on her, Vivian doesn’t show it; she is always chipper and cheery, her face molded into a perpetual smile. Her skin is smooth, glowing, and although he can’t be sure, he’s almost positive she never wears makeup; at most, she brushes her lips with gloss and her eyelashes with mascara. Her voice is a boxy growl, like a smoker’s, even though he never sees her light up—she certainly doesn’t join most of the waitstaff for cigs out the back door of the kitchen, even though it means that, like Thomas, she rarely gets a moment away during a shift—and she’s constantly laughing, her chuckling sounding genuine, not the manufactured stuff tipped employees have to use to woo customers into giving a better chunk of change at the end of their meal.

Thomas works himself to exhaustion, trying to deplete the buzzy energy in his head. Vivian tells him to slow down when he nearly slips on the non-skid rubber mats behind the bar that grow slick with spill anyway. He half-smiles when she says this and works twice as hard, arms achy from how vigorously he scrubs drinkware. Vivian shakes her head, clucks at him, and pours martinis.

He leaves each night smelling of mid-list vodka, red wine, the char of steaks. His armpits are glazed with sweat and his feet throb, but no matter what, he can never sleep. It is only after visiting the house of the boys, after slicing through the night, his footsteps on the sidewalk gonging, after the slink back to his apartment, a studio above a boutique gym that features seven am Zumba classes and lunch-hour Crossfit, that he falls into fitful sleep, where he dreams of nothing but the boys: boys around, boys above, boys below.

Girls come to the house. They brings gifts of silver thread spun from their enchanted hands. They carry piles of glimmering hair on their heads. They flute songs from their elegant throats, powerful enough to make the worst overlords weep. To their hands come birds and chipmunks, mice and kittens. They breathe warmth and love and hope as they observe the beautiful boys, wandering room to room, oohing and ahhing over the slumbering youth. They reach out their willowy fingers toward their foreheads and curled hair, brush their hands against their hips and abs, run palms across their shoulders and backs. The boys never wake, though sometimes they snarfle, flop over, kick each other gently in the groins as they turn.

The girls offer themselves, their skills, their money, their powers. They bargain and they plead, and sometimes they are heard. Sometimes a boy awakens, stretching and yawning and uncurling himself from his bunkmates, careful and polite as he slithers out from their grasps, flexing his quads and fingertips. He pads downstairs to the foyer, guided by something invisible, a knowing where to go without being told, and he sees a girl waiting there, perhaps a girl with a magical voice, or a heap of gold, or a face shot with more natural beauty than a mountain lake. He walks out the door with her, leaving the other beautiful boys behind, the girl leaving something behind, too, their hands intertwined, his feet bare, her urgency palpable like a fog, and they vanish from the house. The other boys keep sleeping.

Is Thomas beautiful, too? He knows the answer is yes. Thomas takes care of himself, not just by going to the gym and lifting heavy weights for hours at a time and then running on a treadmill faster than anyone around him, setting his core muscles on fire with planks that last two minutes each. He also spreads moisturizer across his elbows and knees, runs it over his forearms. He owns a special jar for his face, which is clean of acne scars or skinfolds. If he keeps himself whippy with youth long enough, he thinks, something is bound to happen.

“What’s your story?” Vivian asks him one slow Saturday night, the bar dead, the dining room three-quarters empty. The manager has told Thomas to clear out the floor mats and refill anything Vivian needs for close and to then clock out early. Although he has nowhere to go, would rather spend another hour of another sleepless night losing time to cleaning martini glasses and learning wine and food pairings from Vivian, he does as he’s told. Then Vivian stops him at the POS computer.

“My story?”

She leans against the bar top, her white shirt crinkling at her throat. The collar is starched, her uniform-regulation black tie cinched tight. “Yeah. Your story.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Clock out,” she says, waving at the computer. “Then saddle up. A drink on me.”

Thomas has always liked direction, having someone else tell him what to do. For his workouts at the gym, he’s written down pre-made set lists he’s found online and never deviates from them. When his manager has a task outside the bounds of his usual duties, Thomas immediately acquiesces, never making complaint about unclogging a toilet or sweeping up a heap of broken glass in front of the expo line. If the bar is particularly slow, he offers no compunction about being asked to fill ramekins of crème brulee or helping to dice chicken.

“What’ll ya have?” Vivian says when he sits on the stool, work apron snaked in a heap in his lap. Her eyes glint auburn in the sconces dangling from above the bar.

“Um. Whiskey and coke?”

“Sure thing,” Vivian says, showing no displeasure at the simplicity, the childishness, of such an order: so many options, and Thomas chooses something so crass. She disappears down the bar, which is a long horseshoe, dark wood and soft lights meant to be romantic and, Thomas assumes, reminiscent of somewhere in Italy. Thomas has never left the country. He’s never left Missouri. He went to college only twenty minutes from home. It took all he had—materially, financially, mentally—to not move back into his parents’ house when he graduated.

Vivian returns with his drink, and he can smell the sharp cut of whiskey when she sets it down. Before sliding it to him, she says, “It’s not free, you know.”

“Oh.”

She laughs. “Well, I mean, you have to tell me your story instead of a pay a bill.”

Thomas bites his cheek. He’s suddenly, for once, quite tired.

The boys sleep through rain and crashes of thunder, the hard slash of lightning. They do not stir when hail batters the windows and knocks shingles from the roof. Siren wails do not pierce their dreams. Screaming children, the honks of car horns, blasts of music. Nothing pulls the boys from sleep before they are ready. Once each week, at the stroke of midnight that births Sunday, the boys wake of their own accord. They shuffle through the house, taking turns in the bathrooms, scrounging through the refrigerator, gnashing at sandwiches and bags of chips. They belch and drink water by the glassful. They smack their lips and rub at their eyes. They share their dreams, voices creamy with remembrances of flight and sex and circus freaks, islands in the sky, volcanos, car accidents. They trade places, finding new spots to slumber, new mates to cuddle up with, and, when dawn approaches, fall back asleep.

The drink is strong; Vivian has mixed in some kind of bitters to augment the whiskey, which is definitely not the bottom shelf stuff reserved for the plebian consumers who don’t think to ask for a particular brand. Thomas muffles a cough.

What he’s given up to Vivian is his insomnia, his stories about being unable to sleep through the night, a years-long battle with his brain. This, apparently, was a good answer; she nodded and slid the glass forward, though she added, before checking on the last of her bar patrons, “That’s only enough for a few sips.”

While she’s gone, Thomas tries to decide what else to tell. He has not mentioned his nightly sojourns to the house of beautiful boys. That, he knows, would at best make Vivian shake her head and cluck, and at worst think he was an obsessive, stalker-like weirdo.

But the problem is that, as far as Thomas can say, he has no other story. He’s boring, graduate of a BA in Marketing program of which he remembers next to nothing; he went to college because he was smart enough to and everyone he went to high school with was doing the same. He doesn’t care about marketing. He doesn’t care about a whole lot.

When Vivian reappears, she smiles at him and tugs at the coaster beneath his drink, causing the glass to move away from Thomas.

“Well?” she says.

Vivian returns the drink when Thomas admits he hasn’t ever had a serious girlfriend. She looks pouty, doubtful, and Thomas is glad she can’t see the flare in his cheeks thanks to the low light. She disappears again to run a plate of fried calamari to the “one jackass still drinking” on the other side of the bar. Thomas can’t remember a time Vivian spoke like that about a customer, even people who ran her ragged, asking for one thing after another, forcing her to trot to the kitchen for the parmesan cheese or an extra plate and then a fresh roll of silverware and then another glass of malbec and then a to-go box and then a refill on their water. When someone leaves a bad tip or breaks a glass, sending expensive Beaujolais slithering across the bar top, she shrugs it off—literally—and keeps on keeping on.

Thomas takes a large sip, the whiskey burning as he holds it in his mouth, the carbonation of the coke popping against his tongue. He swallows and sips again, deciding he’ll finish the drink before Vivian comes back. He succeeds, barely, the back of his throat feeling sour and raw, his stomach gurgling in protest; Thomas realizes he hasn’t eaten since before his shift, and his insides slosh at the poor anchorage in his gut. Upon her appearance Vivian says nothing, takes the glass, and fills it back up. She says, “So no girlfriends, huh?”

Thomas says, “What about you?”

“Me?”

“No girlfriends of your own?”

Vivian laughs. “You’re funny.” She pushes the drink toward him, encourages him to drink, and he does, sucking it all down.

Sometimes when a girl emerges with her treasure, Thomas feels a leaping desire to clobber her on the head and run off with her prize. On other occasions he wants to slip inside as they depart, join the boys, that cavern of bready bodies. What a miracle that would be. What a terrific resolution to his story. Thomas knows he has no gifts to give, no magic, nothing special to spin out of his hands in return for a boy. So he stares with a jealous tinge in his mouth. Thomas watches the girls trot off, arm-in-arm with their newly-awakened beautiful boys, who look like foals discovering the world for the first time. He wants to bowl the girls over and clutch the boys himself, bring them back to his apartment and feed them cereal, lead them to his bed where they can lie in warm comfort, where Thomas can feel the tight shape of their bodies up close, can smell the sweet-sour of their sweat. Where he can feel anchored and no longer alone. Where he can finally sleep.

Because he drinks too much and staggers to and from the bathroom, Vivian offers to drive Thomas home. When she turns out of the parking lot, he points out that she’s going the wrong way and she replies with, “I have a better idea.”

Her house is a tiny bungalow in a seedy neighborhood full of wrought-iron fences and crumbling porches. On the way to the front door, he says, “You never told me your story.”

“Let’s just say,” she says, sticking her key in the lock, “that it’s tragic.”

A small foyer opens into a cozy living room with hardwood floors and a pair of floral-upholstered couches separated by a low coffee table the color of well bourbon. A television is on but muted, casting the room in an aquarium glow. Vivian waves for Thomas to follow her past the furniture and through a small archway leading into a kitchen, where she pulls a pair of glasses from a cabinet. The appliances are white to match the Formica countertops. Instead of mixing cocktails, Vivian pours water from the sink and hands one of the glasses to Thomas, who drinks half of it without pause. The room smells faintly of a past meal, something starchy and garlicky.

“We’ll have to stay quiet because of my mother.” Vivian nods toward one of the walls. “Her bedroom’s right there.”
Thomas isn’t exactly drunk, but he’s not exactly sober. He’s not quite clear on what Vivian wants, though he has ideas.

“How is she?” he says.

Vivian finishes her water and upends the glass in a drying rack next to the sink. She holds out her hand for his and he does the same.

“As well as she can be,” she says, then waves for him to follow her. Thomas expects that they’re headed for her bedroom and his heart starts to pound, his gait wobbling, but instead she leads him to a sliding glass door and out to a small back patio. The night air is dense with humidity and the chirp of bugs. Vivian throws herself down in a wicker chair. Thomas sits in the other. Between them is a glass-topped table. For a long time, Vivian says nothing. She cranes her neck up toward the sky and stares, so Thomas looks too: the black is cloudless so stars twinkle bright. He’s never learned the constellations, so he can’t piece together anything worth seeing aside from their shimmery jewel-like light.

Eventually, Vivian says, “It’s not easy, you know?”

“What isn’t?”

“Any of it.”

Thomas swallows. He nods, but then, realizing Vivian is still looking up, says, “I know.”

“What do you dream about?”

“You have to sleep to dream.”

She finally looks at him.

“Almost every night I lie awake for hours.” He’s not sure why he’s repeating all of this, but as soon as he starts, he feels a pressure release somewhere inside him. Maybe it’s the whiskey, still whirling through his blood, but whatever it is, he keeps going. “If I do sleep, it’s when it’s nearly morning. Sometimes I go out and—” He pauses. Then he tells her about the boys, feeling a tart tinge at the back of his throat when he imagines being there, among them, joyfully slumbering and then being chosen. His voice breaks on that word, just a little crack: chosen.

“Oh, Thomas,” Vivian says, her voice suddenly coated thick with sorrow. “We all want to be chosen, don’t we?” She looks up at the stars again, but this time only briefly. She slaps both of her knees, and he thinks she’s going to stand, boot him out, but she just says, “But what happens when we get chosen for the wrong thing?”

Thomas shakes his head. He tries to picture her mother, some tiny, crooked woman, an older version of Vivian that the real Vivian always has on her mind, a list of tasks a mile long always waiting to be ticked off one at a time, all for nothing but to keep her mother alive.

His tongue has suddenly stopped cooperating. Everything has gone dry.

Vivian vaults up from her seat. “Come on,” she says.

“Where are we going?”

She turns and looks him in the eye. “To get you one of those boys.”

New arrivals materialize as if from nowhere. After all, there can never be too many beautiful boys. When the boys wake, they are sometimes pressed up against a brand new body whom they will treat like an old friend. They will lead him on a silent tour, pointing out the washroom and the kitchen, which cabinet holds their cups and plates and where the trash can is. He will be wearing as much clothing as he needs for comfort and will have very few questions.

Because the boys are clean-slated, wiped blank, minds set on nothing but sleep.

What else, after all, does a beautiful boy need?

The house of the beautiful boys is only a few blocks from Vivian’s, so they walk. Thomas teeters from whiskey and shot nerves, and Vivian pats him on the arm a few times. They stop under the same willow tree Thomas usually uses for cover. He feels both a comforting familiarity and a knifing disappointment. Vivian stands on the sidewalk, hemming him in next to the tree. He looks at her looking at the house, her eyes appraising, squinched, lips pursed.

On his first day at the restaurant, she told him to call her Viv, something everyone else did but he simply couldn’t. Thomas still doesn’t know why the clipped nickname clogs his throat, even now, when he’s spangly with drink and slick with night sweat. He should be loose, willing, happy to uncinch the buttons that dig into his body, his tautest self coming unthreaded. But even now, as then, there’s something about the implicit intimacy, the immediate friendliness that he couldn’t and can’t convince himself he deserves.

Thomas has no idea what time it is. He could look at his phone, but that feels somehow sacrilegious, disallowed, as if he’s standing on a rickety plank that will split if he lets such an invasion occur. Thomas looks toward the house: perhaps this is the hour during which the boys are awake, their beautiful bodies bounding through the house like kittens at play, at feast. He feels saliva gather in his throat.

As Vivian starts to cross the street, she says, “Let’s get you your boy.”

Thomas manages to yell out, “What about you?”

She stops and looks back at him, head cocked just so, eyes narrowed in a question.

“Don’t you want one too?”

For a second she says nothing, giving him a once-over of some kind, looking for Thomas doesn’t know what. But then she laughs, craning her neck back and resting a hand on her stomach. “Oh, Thomas. I’m not into all that. You didn’t know?”

He feels his face go hot. “You’re—but you said.” He swallows another thick wad of spit.

Vivian laughs again, this time a tempered chuckle. She shakes her head. “No. When I say all that, I mean it. All of it.”

Thomas feels a hot gust of wind tear his eyes. He nods. Vivian waves her arm for him to follow her. “Now,” she says. “About that boy.”

What must it feel to be a beautiful boy in a beautiful house standing among other beautiful boys and hearing a knock on the door when there should not be one? What must the air in the room do, twisting and flipping into a sour concern, boys looking at one another, glancing at the door, breathing heavy and confused? And then when no one goes to the door and the knock repeats itself, this time on a window covered in a heavy drape, the glassy noise echoing in the silence? What then?

Do the hearts of those beautiful boys beat fast, and hard, a quickness and solidity they’ve hardly known?

Do they rub their eyes? Do they try to laugh their fear away?

What about when the knocking comes at the rear of the house, at the sliding glass doors they never open, never peer through?

What if they are being haunted? Or hunted?

And what, then, when the glass breaks into many tiny, jagged pieces?

Thomas isn’t surprised when no one opens the door at Vivian’s knock. He isn’t surprised, either, that she tries the front bay window, her knuckles pinging off the glass with a high-pitched tink. He isn’t entirely surprised by her frustration, or his disappointment, which is a flood of cool washing over his throat and chest. But he is surprised when she waves for him to follow her as she stalks around the side of the house, past a thick row of pines blocking the view of the neighboring house. Blooms of alstroemeria brush at his ankles, her knees, their feet. Thomas is again unsurprised when her knock at the back door, the view of the interior obscured by hanging blinds, is unanswered. He pictures the boys turning their heads, raising their eyebrows, thinking: this isn’t how things are to be.

But he is fully surprised when Vivian picks up a decorative rock, the size of a kitten, and heaves it at the glass.

The noise is like a world being swallowed by a whirlpool. Thomas’s teeth grind. His vision spins, as if he, and not the door, has been broken. Vivian takes up another rock and uses it to clear enough glass that she can reach through the jagged hole she’s made. She fiddles for the door’s lock, careful not to tear her skin on the toothy edge. When she finds it, she turns to him with a terrifying rictus on her face and says, “Come on, Thomas.”

“I don’t—I’m not.”

She swings the door open. It swishes on its track. The blinds behind it flutter like a flock of scared livestock. Vivian shoves them aside and gestures. “In you go.”

Thomas steps forward. The interior is dark and silent. It feels like he is about to climb down into a narrow, trap-laced hole. “You aren’t coming with me?”

Vivan looks almost sad as she says, “What’s in there isn’t for me, Thomas. We both know that.”

He doesn’t want to admit that this is true. Thomas feels a crushing weight: fear for himself, sorrow for Vivian, excitement for himself, loss for Vivian. A dizzying hope for the boys beyond, hiding in the dark.

“Come along,” Vivian says, her voice hushed, like this is the end of something. Perhaps, Thomas thinks, it is. “It’s for the best.”

“I know,” he says, stepping up to the door. He can still smell Vivian’s perfume, or maybe it is deodorant, smothered under alcohol and the sweat that rings her body each night as she plies her trade. He wonders if she feels the same jamming throb in her joints that he does. Of course she does, he decides.

“Don’t keep them waiting,” she says, but she is looking past him, up at the starry sky.

“I won’t,” Thomas says.

He steps into the dark.

Joe Baumann is the author of four collections of short fiction, most recently Where Can I Take You When There’s Nowhere to Go, from BOA Editions, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in
Fiction. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.

Cressida

by Richard Stimac

I’m too weak to visit my mother’s grave.
The neatly set rows of white marble stone
remind me too much of hydra’s teeth sown
in unplowed fields. I pretended to rave,
rent my himation, grovel like a slave,
or a Pythia, when, in a low moan,
mumbles riddles with answers only known
by God. The women told me to be brave,
to know that in time, the pain and grief
would end, as if a shadow, regret trailed
us, like Furies. Hecuba railed
against men: “It’s what they do. They, they, they . . .
“Vultures. Jackels. What are we, tell me, pray?”
When she died, I felt eternal relief.

Richard Stimac has published a poetry book Bricolage (Spartan Press), over forty poems, nearly two-dozen flash fiction, and several scripts. "Cressida" is part of a chapbook titled Trojan Woman.