[AUBREY LOZANO-COFIELD]

Hypnopompic: Proceeding Consciousness

My 6o-year-old dad lives with his parents next door to the home he raised me in. The tiny South Texas cottage he painted pink, thinking he chose beige. The one with uneven cuts of vinyl flooring he installed himself, the one my mom sold after their divorce to help pay their shared debt, leaving only my siblings and me to bind them now. His parents moved next door when I was 7, a year after we moved in. It felt like we grew up in one large house when dad installed a gate on the shared fence. It enabled us to run seamlessly from one to the other, buttered tortillas in hand, warm from Abuelita's kitchen.


I’m visiting Texas from Pennsylvania, where I live now. I’m sitting on my grandmother's floral couch across from him. 

“How are you, dad?” 
 
We sit cordially in the living room, my Abuelita making lunch nearby. He doesn’t answer me right away. His face veers out the living room window, the same view from our old living room window. He doesn't answer the question simply, and in truth doing so, giving me a simple answer, is the more unlikely scenario. In another life, my dad is a philosopher, a thinker, a man celebrated for his depth. In another life, his Mexican culture doesn’t constantly define manhood in opposition to him. In another life, my father doesn’t need to drink to laugh. 

“When you were kids, I took afternoon naps on our living room couch…” 

The truth is he slept on our living room couch even at night. 

He continues, “every afternoon, like clockwork, I’d wake up to the sound of a white-winged dove. That’s when I knew it was time to pick you guys up from school.” He’s remembering a feeling from 10 years ago. A stay-at-home dad, he picked us up from school every day in a blue Dodge minivan. 

I knew that exact bird call because, when I moved to Pennsylvania, I stopped hearing the distinct coo, a sound from a dream, very similar to an owl. When I return south, they remind me I’m home. 

I don’t say anything because he only needs me to imagine with him. I stare at him while he stares out the window at our old cul-de-sac. 

He continues, “the other day I took an afternoon nap here,” he pats the hunter-green couch he’s sitting on, “I woke up the same way, I heard the white-winged dove outside…” his voice is starting to crack and tears mount in both our eyes, “For a second I forgot where I was. I hesitated thinking I might be late to pick you guys up.”

He cried when he told me he cried, the moment his brain straightened out the truth.

[about]

Aubrey Lozano-Cofield recently received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She’s been published in NPR’s Worth Repeating, Southern Review of Books, The Motley Few, and she has a piece forthcoming in LatinX Literary Magazine. She’s currently working on a memoir that pushes structural boundaries and is always looking for an intriguing true story.

You can tip Aubrey on Venmo: @Aubrey-Cofield

[ANDREW SINCLAIR]

Explorations in Spacetime

I. Perpetual Motion 

You wave a bent twig up and down and in a circle, imagining a fireball before hurling the faux-flames toward your friend. She takes cover behind your yard’s great oak, and the make-believe embers wisp past her ear. Though you try not to show it, you get frustrated in the way she never gets hit, the way she always eludes the winds of your conjured tornadoes, and the way she jumps as you shockwave the earth. This is your yard—your domain!—after all, while hers is a few houses down the road. The only distance between you and her is a few effectual motions.

*

Bhāskara II was an Indian mathematician and astronomer from a time before thermodynamic knowledge curtailed dreams of perpetual motion with its so-called “conservation of energy” and “entropy,” from a time when master physicists could still daydream rose-filtered reveries about perpetual motion. Beyond pioneering differential calculus and nearly calculating the time in an astronomical year, he drafted an idea for Bhāskara’s Wheel, the first machine of its kind: a machine that—get this!—exemplifies a state of perpetual motion.

Spokes to the center wheel are filled with mercury, and, as it spins, the mercury dips and bobs like a balloon and perpetually shifts the weight in the wheel to one side. That weight pushes the wheel down, ensuring it turns forever—or at least, it’s supposed to. Bhāskara failed to account for the weight-shifted center of mass, so the machine doesn’t work. It crawls to a halt, as all things eventually do. It defies some natural law, our reality’s conventional motions.

The Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered centuries later, establishing perpetual motion as an impossibility. Because energy decays from a system, a perpetual motion machine would need to create more energy than is input into it, breaking the first law of thermodynamics. But, having come this far, a processual motion of failure after failure, why would the dreamers stop dreaming? They simply stretched their dream into a more spectacular dream, the dream of defying this world’s laws—this impossible dream of perpetual motion.

*

You two first talk when you sit across the aisle from each other on the school bus, before it clicks that everyone on the bus lives in the same neighborhood. When you see each other from your respective driveways, she yells out your name like it’s the first time you’ve seen each other in twenty years. Soon you’re running over to each other’s houses every day after school. You show her your video games, she shows you her dolls, and you hop on your scooters, drift up and down the winding road, sprint in circles around trees playing tag, and pretend to be people you aren’t—doctors and sorcerers and chefs. This is your burgeoning routine, your newfound perpetual motion.

*

More than a century ago, a perpetual motion wheel not too dissimilar from Bhāskara’s design (with metal spheres in the spokes, shimmering in the sun, rather than mercury) was assembled over a roadway cutting through Los Angeles. It was fixed in a café’s billboard, spinning day and night as Model Ts rolled just a few feet underneath. The spheres swayed back and forth, up and down in the machine like hot air. It was a marvel, a masterpiece of perpetual motion.

A masterpiece, that is, until a blackout struck, leaving the machine motionless. While this solved the mystery of how the machine materialized the dreams of fringe pseudo-physicists and those who dream of perpetual motion, it proved to the citizens of Los Angeles that nothing can move indefinitely, that nothing can remain in the same state forever.

Still though, wouldn’t it be grand? Something unchanging, forever in motion?

*

When second grade goes faster than it came, your motions stay the same, and as you make your way through fourth and fifth grade, your list of friends shifts like dirt on a baseball field amidst all the tumult of elementary school—the theft of Pokémon cards, all the mishaps of turncoat kickballs slapping the side of someone-or-other’s head. But you’re always there for each other. When you have a month’s notice of your nine-hundred-mile move down south in fifth grade, you keep on playing in your yards and bouncing on your mutual friend’s trampoline, dismissing the imminent farewell until just days before it comes. The effort to pretend nothing is changing, after all, takes less effort than to acknowledge time’s eventual motions.

II. Redshift, & The Expansion of the Universe

The girl down the street is not the only friend you have. There’s the boy from the next neighborhood over, and while your interests don’t align one-to-one—he plays football in his yard, and you prefer to stay inside to read The Magic Treehouse and Where the Red Fern Grows—you’re as thick and thieves, semi-inseparable. 

One day, when your teacher gives you the daily warm-up assignment to doodle based on the word “evil,” you decide to create identical pictures of the supervillain you had invented months prior: an evil baby, donned in a pacifier and a bonnet and shooting laser beams from his eyes. When the teacher confronts you both about it, fearing plagiarism, you explain this to her. She just smiles, shrugs, and says not to do it again. 

Every time you tell a joke, he laughs, and you always laugh when he laughs. While you prefer to invite the class out to Dave and Buster’s for your birthday every March, he invites his closest friends to a sleepover every September, orders pizza, and hooks up all of his consoles to every TV in the house. At recess you two gather all of your friends and play tag together. You have fun—even though he’s faster than you, even though everyone moves faster than you.

*

In the year before you move, you feel it. The motion of objects. Redshift. The way that light waves spread and slow and redden as celestial bodies shift away from us, whether from wild wanderlust or from dispersing as the universe spreads like a broken yolk, runny and raw. You know redshift. Everyone you know is starting to seem more red. 

* 

You and the boy have the same teacher in first and third grade, while you and the girl share a second and fourth grade class. This is a pattern you notice. The summer before fifth grade, you hype yourself up and count down the days until school starts again, expecting him to be in your class, but when the pattern falls through, when you’re thrown into a class with no one you’re close with—neither the boy nor the girl—you feel long-faced, double-crossed by fate. 

Lunch is the last haven where you can sit with your friends. Hard bench-tables are arranged in two long columns against each wall, and though it’s not mandated, the grade divvies up by gender. Girls stick to one side, boys to the other. This is how it’s been done since third grade, and you aren’t one for change, so you’ve always sat with the boy. While both your inner circles churned and stirred like gears, you’ve been one of his staples. 

Spring comes: You can tell by the clean smell of grass on the breeze and by the bricky A/C unit wheezing cool drafts into every classroom instead of dry-hot puffs of air that smell like toasted laundry. You’ve hunkered through two stranger-seasons, settled into a strict routine of silent work broken only by your noontime lunch-and-recess, and you’re used to it. But you notice something else, something different. 

When you plop your paper bag onto the lunch table one day, there’s new people sitting with the boy from the next neighborhood over, people you don’t know. You’re met with conversations that seem to talk around you, and you can never find a good place to jump into whatever conversation chugs on like a never-slowing rattletrap. Sometimes it’s about football or hockey, and other times it’s about some video game you haven’t played. No matter what, though, talking points orbit around you, always out of reach. 

* 

Hubble’s Law notes that far-away galaxies move away from Earth faster than neighboring galaxies do. 

You, the centerpoint of your observable universe, seem to remain stationary as the universe expands while all the galaxies at the fringes of your observable universe careens away as spacetime whizzes towards infinity. You’re helpless to stop it. Everything moves so fast, and any light those stardust-streams emit will shift red before teetering off of the spectrum of visible light. 

Once everything moving away from you surpasses a certain point in distance, you’ll never be able to reach it again. Do you wonder what that point is? How far can something go before being impossible to reach? 

* 

Everyone who sits at your table peels away one-by-one, splintering into other social circles. When the boy from the next neighborhood over joins another group, you eat with some of the only people who came to your last birthday party—the small high-pitched boy with a head rounder than a bowling ball, and the tall boy with a goofy smile. The boy from the next neighborhood over couldn’t go because he was at a football scrimmage, and neither could the girl down the roads because she was at cheerleading practice. You know it’s not personal—you understand that much—but you dwell on it. You sometimes remember how much it stung. 

When those last two boys leave the table, the girl from down the road and one of her friends, someone you know from your class, sit with you. The tables’ gender-locking had already eroded because of age; after all, you are nearly a middle schooler, no longer in the age of cootie-stoked paranoia. 

You three talk about the recent sci-fi movie, reference YouTubers you all watch, and whisper words your older siblings taught you. You get so caught up in all of it that you almost forget about the boy from the next neighborhood over, chatting with his own friends, so out of reach across the lunchroom. 

You two occasionally chat and play video games after school, but nothing is how it was. There’s more distance, you suppose. Everything is a tinge more red.

III. Wormholes

There’s something off in the bright-whiteness of the walls, in the sparseness of room decor. Your new math teacher—with his blocky glasses, receding hairline, and drone-speech—seems like the kind of guy to whisper “function over form” late into the night, to help him go to sleep, to help him cope with the guilt knowing his classroom also acts as a torture chamber for anyone half-drowsy. And that includes you, bedhead, having woken up only an hour ago and now near-ragdolling in your seat. 

It’s the first week of school, about a month after you move to South Carolina, and you know nobody. Everyone’s either taller than you or annoying, screaming in the back of class and borderline bouncing off the walls. You decide to keep to yourself, to doodle and, whenever it’s quiet, count seconds as you listen to clock-ticks and measure how much longer until you go home. Keep to yourself. If people want to approach you, then they’ll approach. 

* 

Where spacetime folds over itself like a blanket, you could poke a hole through the top of it with a pushpin and come out underneath, across the universe. 

You could punch a hole in the wind, jump in, and travel across the country. Travel to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and see what San Francisco looks like from a bird’s-eye view. You could figure out first-hand what’s inside the noses on Mount Rushmore. When a hurricane comes, evacuation would be a cinch! Everyone would just jump in their holes and get the hell out of Dodge. You could go back to Illinois too. At a moment’s notice, you could be anywhere, with anyone, with all the time in the world.

* 

Your social studies teacher doubles as your science teacher, and the two classes you have with her are back-to-back. You stay in her class after social studies and watch people wander in from the halls for science. Sometimes she gives you Jolly Ranchers for your good work, and it makes you feel golden. Bright colors of cherry or blue raspberry dazzle in your mouth with saliva and dim fluorescent lights, and they last until it’s time to go home. 

When she scolds you in passing for balancing a pencil between your face and glasses one afternoon, you manage not to cry, but you hate that tears well up in your eyes. Some days are loud. Kids scream and the teacher does nothing, too soft-voiced from throat cancer to do anything. On other days—hush-days—when the class is pooped and ready to go home, the teacher can lecture. Whether or not anyone is listening is an entirely different question. 

On one of the hush-days, you sit in the back of the room and notice that the kid next to you scrapes brass knuckles against the table’s unpainted side, out of eyeshot from the teacher. Either no one else notices it, or no one else cares, but it’s the first time you’ve seen a weapon up close, so you don’t know whether to be off-put or awestruck. Then you wonder why he would bring something like that to school; if someone else saw it, he could get suspended. Expelled, even. You mind your own business, because you’re not surprised something like this would happen at this school. You recognize it probably won’t be the last time something like this happens either, nor the worst thing you will ever see. 

In the coming months, you hear slurs called across classrooms, mockery, cafeteria fights with girls screaming as they yank each other’s hair. You aren’t surprised that something like that would happen at this school. You want to (so very badly) walk out the doors and sprint, to escape, book it to wherever you can, wherever else in the world—anywhere besides here. 

* 

Wormholes are unstable. Theoretically powerful, yes, but briefly-lived before their collapse. 

Even if they do exist, they’re too small for humans to travel through. Nothing more than a nick in the skin of spacetime, and, like our own skin, it would seal itself in less time than it would take to find it. A great amount of matter is necessary to prop one open, to sustain it. The matter would have to be a new type of matter too: exotic matter. Matter that might not exist in our universe. 

There’s so much we don’t know, and what we do know says “This won’t work.” Wormhole travel won’t be feasible for a very long time, not until long after we die. 

* 

The grade’s given recess at the end of the year, and everyone floods into the vast field next to the school. You keep to yourself and pace in circles around the yard’s perimeter. Summer is near, and the South Carolina heat warps the air, somersaults it over itself, and leaves a writhing crease in the distance like loose jean denim. 

If you could, you would take craft scissors from your backpack and cut it open. You would crawl inside, close your eyes, and fall through the warm spot in space and time. And when you choose to open your eyes again, you would be back in Illinois, back in first grade all over. There would be no piercing bright-whiteness on the walls, nor lunchroom fights, nor slurs hurled across the classroom like spitballs—only you, your friends, big oaks, after-school magic, and the rumble of scooter wheels rolling on asphalt. 

[about]

Andrew Sinclair is an eighteen-year-old writer and student in the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities’ Creative Writing program. His work has been previously published in Paper Crane Journal and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

You can tip Andrew on Venmo: @Andrew-Sinclair-53

[SARAH (QIUQI) BOVOLD]

A Day After Yuzuru Tried a Quadruple Axel

View this document on Scribd

[about]

Sarah (Qiuqi) Bovold, a nonfiction writer from Beijing, China. She holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Her works can be found in Drunk Monkeys and MASKS literary Magazine.

[LISA MUSCHINSKI]

foosball at the pub

& i say i call next & they look at me a little like really, u? but they say sure sure sure & then it’s me & three guys & they ask are u any good & i say yeah i’m pretty good & they think really, u? & i don’t respond. we start the game & i tell my partner i’m gonna boss u around and he looks at me like he doesn’t know how to feel so i tell him it’s okay just do as i say & the positions aren’t forward/D but sub/dom & he learns his place & starts to like being told what to do. it’s obvious who’s any good after the second point & it’s me & the older guy & we catch each other’s eye & it’s not sexy but it’s raw like sex & his eyes say i see you & mine say i see you too. the game is over & it’s the older guy & he says one v one one v one & it’s me v him & guys crowd around & some girls too & they know it’ll be a good game because it’s two good players. i hand him the ball because it’s his quarters & it’s game on & my cheek-length bangs fall in my eyes like sweat but i’m not sweating because i’m keeping my cool even if my heart’s in my mouth even if there’s ten people watching even if i know i’ll lose & it’s three balls later but i’ve scored one too & we lock eyes & we both smile & it’s not i wanna fuck but it’s i wanna win. i take a breath and some gulps of free beer & i press the ball against the hole’s slick wall & it’s between my midfielders & back & forth & back & forth & it’s to my forward & it’s a trick shot in the goal. he looks at me & i know it’s over because now it’s tied up & now i could win but i’ve lost my cool & it’s a heat in my cheeks & my heart’s on my sleeve & it’s getting in the way, so he takes the rest & it ends him to me & he’s won & he’s happy but he sees me, like really sees me, & it’s a handshake over the table & it’s good game good game.

[about]

Lisa Muschinski can be found drinking tea/beer (depending on the time of day) and writes for Boulder Magazine while also managing the social media of a local tea company. Her words are found or upcoming in FlashFlood, Fahmidan Journal, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Bear Creek Gazette, Dollar Store Magazine, and elsewhere. Check out her website (www.lisamuschinski.com) and Twitter (@lisamuschinski) for more.

You can tip Lisa on Venmo: @Lisa-Muschinski

[ADAM CHABOT]

Rearview Mirror

I remember the gold bangle, its ovular ends clinging to her tanned, aged-spotted wrist. Around her neck dangled an opulent display of gold and silver chains, perhaps the gaudy byproducts of a retirement slush fund, years of frugality or hard work manifesting in strange hauteur. In her left hand, she clutched a plastic cup sloshing with Diet Coke. 

A firm voice: “Hi. Do you mind? Yeah?” she said. 

She wore a maroon corduroy blazer with angular shoulder pads draped over a black turtleneck Her short artificially dark hair gelled into an undercut pixie made her face look smaller, her chin pointed and prominent, and her cheeks, eyes, and forehead smoother, everything delicately accentuated by calculated applications of beige eyeshadow and rosy blush. 

My four-year-old son, Oscar, and I were seated in a hard-plastic booth at the McDonald’s in Farmington, Maine—it was a father-son day where I let him pick our lunch destination—when this woman strode to us, her footfalls slapping the gray quarry tile. 

“I just have to…” she said, stopping at our table. Then with her free hand, she spread her fingers like claws, reached toward my son, and coursed her fingers through his hair.  

“My… This boy could make you a lot of money,” she said, wide-eyed, incredulous. She believed this revelation of hers could change our lives. 

--- 

Later, my wife was mortified when I told her what happened. 

“You let her touch his hair?” she said. “She’s probably some sort of child sex slave groomer or something.” 

“A child sex slave groomer?” 

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“What was I supposed to do?” 

--- 

Knuckle-deep into my son’s hair, the woman stopped and made an “oh” sound like someone pleased by the turn of a well-crafted poem. Her gold bangle combed the top of Oscar’s head, her ringed fingers hooked strands of hair like dead leaves tangled in a rake. I didn’t know what to do. The woman’s insistence, appearance, her weighty approach suggested a rationale, an ethos behind her violated public etiquette. But, Oscar’s always been a ham: he smiles at everyone, fearless in his childhood naivete. Maybe this woman was just too friendly, anachronistically benevolent to a young boy out to lunch with his father. 

Oscar looked at me undeterred by this woman encroaching on his lunch. To this day, he has never brought it up, never inquired, and by now, he’s likely forgotten the whole experience. 

“Have you considered getting him into show business? TV? Commercials?” These questions must have been rhetorical. She guffawed in disbelief when I replied with a basic “no.”  

“For photos, does he sit well? Take direction? Smile on cue?” she added, releasing her fingers.  

I actually could have answered those questions: “absolutely.” Oscar is very photogenic. My mother has added photos of Oscar in droves to her many overstuffed commemorative photo albums dating back to my infancy. Each book is a collage of elementary school programs, Little League rosters, images from Halloweens, birthday parties, and Thanksgivings, secondhand memories kept alive by a parent who sees value in everything. Even now, she would regale anyone with stories from my childhood as she recalled them. I never have my own memory of the stories, so over the years, I’ve remembered her smile, the way her voice wavers during the story’s exposition or its rises during the climax, her arms gesticulating, flailing with each new phrase. She loved reflecting on her days of wagoning my brother and me as three-year-olds down Main Street in Gorham, New Hampshire where we grew up, a small town where she could relish in a proximal, micro-celebrity status: the mother of twins born on different days. I don’t remember these wagon rides, but I can imagine my mother. The pride. Who wouldn’t want that attention? 

“You boys were something,” my mother once said. “Everyone said so. Everyone knew you guys.”  

Oscar scratched his head while clutching a French fry. This time, the woman waited for my reply, expectant. I said something but I can’t remember what. I know it wasn’t the truth. 

“The boy’s a gold mine. You’d be crazy not to do something.”  

And then she left. The cashier announced an order for a Big Mac. Someone was filling a cup with ice. 

The woman’s claims meant nothing but they existed, audible inside a rural McDonald’s and lingering in my mind like a distant train horn, a story I would tell without a conclusion. On the car ride home, Oscar fell asleep. In the rearview mirror, I could see the top of his head bouncing with each bump of Route 41. I called my mother without a real agenda, just to talk, perhaps for advice, but she didn’t answer.

[about]

Adam Chabot is the English Department Chair at Kents Hill School, a private, independent high school located in central Maine. He has other work forthcoming or recently featured in rough diamond poetry, FEED, The Red Lemon Review, Moss Puppy Magazine, and Windows Facing Windows Review, among others. He can be found on Twitter @adam_chabot.

[LILA DUBOIS]

Good Morning

This morning I stayed in bed until I hated my bed. It was five minutes. I can’t stand myself when I’m not doing anything, so I hated myself for five minutes. I got up and walked towards my closet without regard for my sheets or my pillow or blanket or the dirty clothes I slept with. They will stay there, getting brittle in the sunlight along the veins of the wrinkles. All day, frying up and crisping at the edges. I don’t see the reason to make my bed if I’m just going to sleep in it again. By that logic I will make my bed once in my life. Although probably, that day will come without me knowing it. Hopefully. So then I’ll never have to make my bed. I once asked a magic eight ball at a sleepover when I would die. It said no. I put together that it had to be a yes or no question. I revised. Would I die before friday? It said no. But it could’ve said yes. I wavered on neutral, but wished I dreaded the latter more. My aunt gave me her tarot deck when I was thirteen. It smelled like weed and rainy playground asphalt. She told me no it was not silly, no it was not a fortune telling gimmick, it was a guide from the spirits. An angel kiss. A universe nudge. I liked the idea that a power I couldn’t see for some reason wanted to help me. I tried to be impartial when I interpreted the cards, but that’s impossible. I always do it wrong. I avoid fate at all costs. I avoid pattern at all costs. I won’t do things when it’s decided that I should. I won’t to do things when it’s decided that I must. Sometimes people still make me do those things. Like once, for example, in the backseat of a car. I didn’t say anything, so it wasn’t their fault. The underneath of their fingernails smelled like onion powder. I mostly just laid there, about five minutes. But, of course, since I was doing nothing, I hated myself. For five minutes. Plus when sometimes I still do. But mostly it just feels like there’s magnets in my head all ripping away through my brain to find their pair. I hate feeling helpless to situation. I hate feeling like I’m walking in a hallway where my shoulders touch each wall. I hate feeling like those cows shuffling to the slaughter in the vests for autistic people. I’ll do terrible things to avoid that feeling. I’m selfish too much. I have simultaneous imposters’ syndrome and a superiority complex, though I do best when I think of myself as little as possible. I am easily my least favorite person to be with. My aunt, the one with the hot-boxed tarot deck, is one of my favorites. She’s crazy. In a good, bad, and neutral way. She’s very kind. She talks a lot so she always eventually stumbles upon something really profound. She’s given me lots of good angel kisses and universe nudges that way. I wonder if she knows how much I remember of everything she says, because really I do. I trust her implicitly because I don’t think she’s ever done something she didn’t want to. She’s also very productive. In my opinion, the American economy has ruined the idea of productivity by making it seem like work is the only means to that end, when I’ve found most work - in that sense - to be unfulfilling and fruitless. We’re a wasteful society when it comes to people’s time and energy. Ideally we’ll spend about 85% of our lives living. Give or take 10%. If I ever become so depressed I have nothing better to do than make my bed, you should check in on me. I’d hate to become brittle in the sun.

[about]

Lila Dubois is an 19 year old waitress, musician, and student at the University of Pennsylvania who writes to explore the kaleidoscope of humanity in the seemingly mundane of everyday life (and also, for her own personal sanity). Her writing has been featured in various journals and recognized by the National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards; her music can be found on all streaming services. She works out of Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

[SHANNON FROST GREENSTEIN]

When HIPAA Totally Ruins Your Best Six-Degrees-Removed-from-a-Celebrity Story

Did you just say you want to hear the story about the best celebrity from which I’m six degrees removed?

You didn’t? Oh.

Well, why don’t I tell it anyway??


1st Degree: That Celebrity

So, there was this celebrity, right? Only I can’t say who.

Why, because of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), of course. It’ll have to suffice that you obviously would have known of this celebrity, because they were just that talented.

What’s that? No, it’s not Kevin Bacon. I’m talking about me here, and the six degrees between me and this huge celebrity, would you please pay attention?

ANYway, there was this celebrity, this really famous celebrity, and they died. I can’t give you any details, though, because HIPAA totally ruins this story. Let’s just say it was a sudden death, and it was a tragic death, and it was the type of death that people feel entitled to judge because our society views drug addiction as a character flaw.

Shit, was that too much to say? Am I in violation of any medical information protection laws?


2nd Degree: That Patient

So, there was also a hospital patient. I actually don’t know anything about him – apparently, once in a blue moon, HIPAA actually is good for something – but I do know he was in liver failure.

I also know at which equally famous hospital this was going down, but I can’t...yup, you got it, can’t tell you because of HIPAA. Now you’re starting to understand.

But, anyway, this patient desperately needed a liver transplant, and when someone needs a transplant – say, someone who is in the same area as a celebrity who has died, and is in need at the same time that a celebrity has died, and is offered a liver by a donor who passed in the same manner as a celebrity who has died – well, there’s a limited window of time for it to happen.

I’m sorry, what did you say?

No, of course the patient didn’t know whose liver he would receive when his transplant beeper went off, let alone that it could come from a celebrity who had just died in the same city at the same time with the same blood type and a liver to donate.

HIPAA laws, and all.


3rd Degree: That Med Student

Now, moving right along, there’s also a med student in this story. This med student was there when the patient and the patient’s family were told the liver was a match. He was still there when the patient and the patient’s family decided to turn down the transplant, because the donor had passed from a drug overdose.

The med student, of course, did know which celebrity had just passed, in which manner, in which city, and had just attempted to donate a liver.

HIPAA laws, and all.


4th Degree: That Med Student’s Fiancée

And, while all this was going on – and actually for a decade before – the med student’s fiancée had Anorexia.

I know, that came out of left field, right? But I swear this pertains to my best six-degrees-removed-from-a-celebrity story, even though it will totally end up just being ruined by HIPAA.

The fiancée had Anorexia and was spiraling downward; she had a lifetime of trauma, and felt desperately out of control. Wracked with torment, hating her body, hating the disease, she finally made the difficult decision to check herself into a residential program for intensive, fully-immersive treatment.

So, early one winter morning, she and the med student rented a car and drove in the dark to a well-regarded eating disorders facility, though I can’t give you any details about it because this facility is ALL ABOUT THE HIPAA LAWS.

Stick with me, we’re getting really close to the uncanny valley of my best celebrity encounter, removed by only six little degrees. Though, ultimately, I suspect it will be rather anticlimactic, thanks to...well, you can probably guess. #HIPAA


5th Degree: That Nurse at that Eating Disorders Facility

The fiancée would stay in the residential facility for two months, leaving only when her insurance company deemed she was well and refused to pay for further treatment. She worked very hard to heal, endearing herself to every single clinician – except, perhaps, the practitioner dubbed Nurse Rached by all the patients. Nurse Rached was precisely as bad as this moniker would suggest and then some, but – and this is essentially how I came to have such a famous celebrity story, so get ready – she also determined the sleeping arrangements.


6th Degree: That Roommate

Don’t you see what I’m getting at?

...

...

...

Well, women at this eating disorders facility stayed in dormitory-style housing, two patients to a room; and unshakeable bonds tended to form between roommates sharing the intense ordeal of processing trauma. The fiancée met her roommate that very first winter morning, thanks to Nurse Rached’s room assignments, the two became inseparable, and if it hasn’t dawned on you already, that roommate was me.

I mean, I’d love to tell you more about any part of this, but my hands are kinda tied by federal laws guarding medically-sensitive information. They really just decimate this whole story about my best six-degrees-of-celebrity encounter, if you ask me. Which you...sort of...did, though I bet you didn’t expect a story like this, and I bet you didn’t expect it to get ruined by HIPAA in the end.

Anyway, I left a month later, she got married, and we’re still really close friends. I’ll never forget her, just like I’ll never forgot rooming with the future wife of the med student who handled the transplant case for the patient who turned down a donor liver from a very famous celebrity because of the stigma of drug use during that time we stayed at a residential facility for eating disorders.

And THAT’s how I’m connected to...oh, whoops, I almost said it!

Do you even know how many HIPAA laws I would have violated???

[about]

Shannon Frost Greenstein (she/her) resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and persnickety cats. She is the author of “These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things” (Poetry, Really Serious Literature, 2022), “Correspondence to Nowhere” (Nonfiction, Bone & Ink Press, 2022), and “An Oral History of One Day in Guyana” (Fiction, Sledgehammer Lit, 2022.) Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre.

[MADYSON GRANT ORNELAS]

Trailer Princess

I’m certain no American has actually lived the full suburban experience we were
promised as kids. No guys are throwing rocks at my window to take back something they said and I’m no closer to being invited into the neighborhood bike gang of preteen boys waiting to adopt me into their newest Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I can’t help but feel a sense of loss at the screaming hordes of trick-or-treating children I’ve missed being part of during Halloween or annual cul-de-sac soccer games I’ll never have the pleasure of seeing. In lieu of the traditional travel pamphlet Americana, I was raised on trailer park manners and the rulings of being a landlord’s granddaughter in a trailer park in the upstate of South Carolina. While most parents told their children to study hard and work for a better future, my only rules were “don’t go in the woods or you’ll get shot” and “don’t go near the trucker’s lot or you’ll get shot,” along with “avoid the river on Tuesdays because that’s where the guy from lot six showers after his shift.”

It’s not to say I never had my share of suburban experiences. I’ve lived in America my entire life. I know people with five bedroom houses and real granite countertops whose plastic strips don’t peel off with the melted glue in the summer. But oftentimes, after going to their house, I find whatever connection we’ve had in the first place ends up being lost in favor of pointing out the movie set ability of their home. Every time I come back from one of those houses, I turn into a realtor as I describe the experience to my dad using terms like “open floor plan” and “lots of room for future growth.”

“They put the cereal away in the pantry.”

“But where was their shelf in the linen closet?” He asks, like he just witnessed the election of an untrained parrot to office.

“They didn’t have one. It was just towels.”

“That’s horrible.”

How does one function without the daily ritual of digging under sheets and pillowcases for their Cheerios? Where’s the character building, the immense growth that comes along with finding your Captain Crunch devoid of mothballs for once?



As kids, my brother and I lived perfectly fine in our triple-wide. He had his own room. I had a pink, 8x8 box with what could loosely be defined as the bare minimum of a walk-in closet and a wooden, castle-themed bunk bed I drew stars and ill-formed bobble-headed dogs and cats on. We even had a sunroom, complete with a fireplace and large wire birdcage home to a blue budgie who mysteriously disappeared right around the time we got the animal my dad fondly referred to as the “hell cat.” It’s possible she saw being eaten alive as a better alternative to what my brother and I put her through.

Despite the lack of a mother or clear feminine presence in the house, dishes were washed and put away with minimal complaining and, most days, the laundry was done by a woman who rented one of the trailers down the hill from us. We were the kind of trailer trash that could afford a maid. The top of the hick social ladder, somewhere between antebellum weddings and men who organize 50s era car shows.

It should be noted that, although we were living in a mobile home park, the house belonged to my father. The people to the right of us were true rednecks, with lawn bathtubs and blankets over the windows to show for it. All five homes were rented to tenants by my grandfather so, not to brag, but I was a bit of a mobile home park queen. Seven years old and I could name three different types of trailers and the best manufacturer to buy your homes from. While other little girls were practicing ballet in their multi-floored houses and swimming in neighborhood pools, I was learning the ins and outs of landlord law and the most legal way to kick out unruly tenants.

“You’ll want to make sure they leave the fridge and the stove if they haven’t brought their own,” my grandfather says, right along with teaching me my multiplication tables. “If the ceiling is peeling, let them take it.”

That was the worst thing about the park. Worse than the gun-waving womanizers behind us or the lesbian smokers living by the cattails with the red-eyed retriever. The trash we found cleaning trailers after the fact, when tenants moved on to a different park or whoever would take them. My cousin cleaned out one to move into as soon as he turned eighteen and enlisted my brother, fourteen at the time, to help. The couple formerly in the trailer were a pair of autoshop mechanics, one with an amputated arm from a childhood injury. Along with a stripper pole, bucket of shit, and bags of questionable leather clothing, my brother found multiple CDs in their cases labeled “Nikki and Nubby.” It was a very child friendly place to grow up.



I didn’t have my first encounter with someone from traditional “suburbia” until I was eight years old. A girl from my Sunday school invited me to her ninth birthday party with a shiny, holographic envelope sealed with a Hannah Montana sticker, every girl’s fixation in the early 2000s. We were too young to be caught in the pretty-boy clutches of One Direction or SOS and were charmed by Hannah and the peril of her secret identity, her mechanical walk-in closet and somewhat manic best friend. What’s more, she was attainable. Every other popstar or princess we were told to admire was from a medieval country about 400 years too early for us, or from a city as mythical as Los Angeles or New York. The girl who invited me, Mary Evelyn Gaddis, had officially earned my trust with something as sacred as Miley Cyrus.

Her house was about the size of four double-wides stacked on top of each other. Possibly more. She had real hardwood floors and clean white walls that reached to the heavens, or at least the second floor, with overgrown grey suburban couches spanning the entirety of semi-truck sized living room. The yard outside was perfectly trimmed not by a woman looking to get five hundred bucks off her rent, but her real, teen movie dad who wore polos and cargo pants like all men named “Greg” should.

In her room upstairs, Mary Evelyn sat me next to three other girls all with varying names beginning with M: a requirement I hadn’t previously listed on my collection of things I thought were required to be a rich girl in suburbia. Naively, I thought the only things previously needed were to be blonde, or have a love for Jeeps. But, of course, this was at the point in my life where I was limited to only one elevation in a floorplan. My knowledge hadn’t yet reached the heights of the second floor.

The three girls seemed unimpressed with me at first, despite the disaster they seemed to be caught in with Melissa, Mazie, and Mary Gaston (I know, double Mary’s at one birthday party, how cliché) fighting over the politics of who was actually Mary Evelyn’s best friend and whether they should play Twisted or Operation. It wasn’t until I volunteered false information about a boy Mary Evelyn liked and started a chain reaction of mini backstabbing that cultivated in traitorous knowledge of a love triangle between Gaston, Evelyn, and a boy who played soccer for the elementary church league did they find me interesting. If I didn’t have the means to be part of suburbia, I could at least con my way into it.

The two Mary’s stared at each other from across their Hannah Montana bean bags and went quiet. This, I knew well from my time in the trailer park. Men paid my grandfather for the right to hunt in the woods behind our house, and I had experience with looking predator and prey in the eye as they hauled their prizes up on trucks when leaving the park driveway. While the moment was still and there was no danger, it’s better to leave when you have the chance. Otherwise, you’ll end up with your leg in a bear trap.

I made an excuse to use the restroom as the girls fought over whose right it was to marry Jackson (“I gave him my candy on Halloween”/ “He gave me his dragon necklace!”) and faced the stairs. Through the slats in the banister, I saw her mother drinking on the puffy polyester couch and watching a daytime show of fabulous women in far-away cities fighting over who had the best house or the most successful husband. One of the girls holding a luxury purse complained about her housekeeper not cleaning her baseboards enough, that she could still see the dirt every morning when she took her dog out. I watched as Mrs. Gaddis sprawled between her daughter’s unwrapped gifts and the cheese plate she made for us earlier in the day, picking grapes off one by one and slowly rolling them into her mouth as she stared, listless, at the screen.

“Was that it?” My best friend asks later, while I’m recanting the tale to her as we try to paint my popcorn ceiling purple with nail polish from the top of my bunk bed. She’s hunched over the edge of the railing of the castle bed, reaching vainly with short, childish arms. “She was just laying there? Like a zombie?”

“Straight out of the movies.”

“Scary.”

I watch her cover the edges of the light and lay flat on my back like Mary Evelyn’s mom, all stretched out and emotionless. I spread my fingers and imagine the gifts at my feet and a blanket of wrapping paper, the soap opera on in the background and my daughter arguing upstairs. At my side, Bailey reaches for the center of the lamp. She still can’t reach it. 

[about]

Madyson Grant is a freshman majoring in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College. Her work has previously been published in the 2020 YoungArts Regional Anthology and the 2020 Kelly Writers’ House Summer Anthology. She has also been recognized for her writing by Scholastics, among others.

[CAMILLE LEWIS]

SourCandy

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[about]

Camille Elizabeth Lewis is an avid reader and fledgling writer who lives and learns with borderline personality disorder. Her recent publications include poetry in Anti-Heroin Chic, Brave Voices Mag, and Sledgehammer Lit. She can be found indulging heavily in the Plath fantasia and crossing off days on a calendar until the next instalment of the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series is released. Camille resides in South West England.

[AZIMUTH]

Banjo Epiphany

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[about]

Azimuth is a brother, friend, and globetrotter who occasionally writes and tries to grow things. His work has been published in The Sun magazine, The Daily Tar Heel, and Freedom from Religion News, among other outlets. He dreams of being able to dance salsa again one the pandemic is over, but is settling for very inconsistently learning how to play the ukulele his mother bought him five years ago. A Southern Gentleman at heart, he currently makes his home in West Oakland, California.