In Which We Smelled It In Time

by wendy zhao

An Index of Fears

by RACHEL MONROE

1

Today the girls are updating their index of fears. The previous index is, well, dated: moths, pop culture, earthquakes, facts, ex-boyfriends (theirs, other peoples'). But it’s 2012 and no one is afraid of these things anymore. The girls have earthquake-proofed their home, and they now keep ex-boyfriends as pets. The new index of fears will be alphabetized for easier reference. It will include more relevant, pressing fears: animals carrying other, smaller animals in their mouths; chimpanzees and what they might do to your face.

The smallest girl says something quietly. “What?” the other girls say. (Sometimes it gets pretty noisy in here.)

“But what if I fear having an index of fears?” she repeats.

The largest girl begins to hit her with the pages of the old index, the very large and heavy one from three years ago. The other girls join in. This is a good method for releasing tension, as everyone knows.

2

The brand new disease ravaged the village. "We've never seen anything like it," the elders cried. The disease had no name, and no cure, and hardly any symptoms. When you woke up the next morning, convinced that you'd caught it, I cried and cried and cried and cried. Stop crying, you said. What if it's contagious through tears, you said. Then you'd really be setting yourself up for something.

Like I said, there was no cure, and you lingered on for months. As far as I could tell, the only obvious symptom was that your sense of humor got much worse. You wouldn't leave a man with a disease, you said, You're not that kind of person. Due to the disease, it was unclear whether or not this was a joke. By now, just to be safe, I had figured out not to laugh at anything anymore. You're not that kind of person, you said again, more firmly, and I smiled at you sweetly from inside my quarantine suit.

3

The last time we met, you didn’t recognize me. I was welcomed into the antechamber, and your assistants anointed me. You were sitting in a large chair with your fingers folded. From the far end of the room, I thought you looked sad. Up close, though, I saw that you had just fallen asleep. When I showed you my wedding ring, you began to remember. “Oh yes,” you said. “There was a beach? And a hammock? Frozen drinks with twisty straws?” The acolyte who was washing your feet looked up, confused. “I tried to bring you a twisty straw,” I said, "But they confiscated it, your assistants." You refolded your fingers and your face turned stony. There were people - lots of people - who said that you were the Messiah.

4

I was in a canoe in the middle of a lake with my son. It was evening. The lake was ringed by lesser mountains, the kind that take only half an hour to climb, if you are moving quickly, which I usually do. I am fit; my son, less so.

My son believed that he had a magical talent for fishing - his mother was always whispering to him about his secret abilities, hidden royal lineage, magical gifts, all the ways he was invisibly set apart from other children. Three hours had passed and nothing was nibbling.

My son began to shout. Fish, I am your king. I command you to rise. A shadow of his voice bounced off the mountains, echoed back at us. And the water’s surface began to shiver.

5

My married friend tells me about her husband. I don’t have a husband, so I tell my married friend about my dreams. This week, they are full of small animals. First it was a tiny kitten, perched in my palm. The next night I dreamt of mice in the kitchen: one ran by my foot, a darling little mouse, and then a similarly darling mouse-sized chipmunk. The last small animal was a tinier mouse - he trotted across the dream-kitchen, holding something in his mouth, the way a cat will trot across the kitchen holding in his mouth a mouse he’s caught, and intends to take somewhere for torturing. In my dream, what this mouse was holding in his mouth was an even smaller mouse.

My married friend sighed. “It’s just that you’re ovulating,” she said. I sighed; she sighed. We sat together and considered the small things moving within us.

6

The government said that we should go down into the basement, so we did. Our family was having problems, but we could all agree on one thing: the government knew what it was talking about. We also agreed that the basement was the safest place. We had prepared it that way. Down there we had jars, canisters, casks, kits, jugs, trunks, racks, and other helpful things. Before we went down, we looked out the window one last time: the sky was wide, pale, wispy, innocent. But that's exactly what some threats look like, we decided. The worst ones.

In the basement, we felt it begin. Was the trembling from outside, or did it come from somewhere else? In the basement, we sat among all the things we'd saved, waiting for the shaking to stop, for someone to stop the shaking.

7

The three Russian men were in love. (Not with each other, though.) They jumped in the lake with their clothes on and kicked their way to the far bank; they picknicked on gooseberries, black bread, cheese, kvas. In the lake, after lunch, each one put his hand on his full belly, and pretended - for a moment only - that he was pregnant.

8

The girls were playing chess. Team chess! It involved cheering, extended narratives, emotional blackmail, kicks under the table, quadruple-crossing, the kinds of jokes that might also have been flirting. It was brutal, so the whole town came to watch. A fighter jet flew overhead, a spectating chimpanzee rested his head on his chin: from a certain distance, it was really quite depressing. The audience was sweating from empathy. This was the kind of chess that burned calories. Check! half the girls yelled; the other half cried. One did a cartwheel. The chimp knew something that no one else did: that it would never get better than this. That this was the absolute tops.

9

All day, near misses. The bird barreled toward your car but barely brushed the windshield with his wingtip. I almost drank the sour milk, but smelled it in time. You tripped and felt your body preparing for pain, then caught yourself. Still, your heart pounded. You sat on a bench to calm down, and I walked by, but I was on the phone. On the phone, a near miss: I almost told someone what I really thought, but then I was distracted by your face. Just to be clear: we had never met. When we were introduced two years later, I spontaneously hugged you. We both felt like we had been doing something wrong for a long, long time, and only now were we going to start to figure out what it was.

Rachel Monroe is a writer living in Baltimore. She tumbls here.

"Hold The Line" - Soul Sister Dance Revolution (mp3)

"Start a War" - Soul Sister Dance Revolution (mp3)

In Which We Go Up And Down The House

Higher Up

by HENRY RUBENSTEIN

"They get excited for a bit," Davis said to her. "A short while, and then they move on."

She asked why, petting his black labrador Reefer. Both were old beyond her imagining.

"My father was a tailor," Davos said. "He started at it when he was sixteen. He would help the other men in his trade - letting them use his machine when he could. Some of them were transient, and when they moved on from a place, it was considered bad form to return."

"I didn't know that," she said. The dog licked her shoe carefully, as dogs do.

He said, "It doesn't take much for a habit to turn into a credo."

He nodded off. Whether he did from sheer tiredness or an illness she could not have been aware of, I do not know.

She climbed the stairs. The house contained six levels.

The first level housed a large kitchen, such as might be featured in a medium sized restaurant, with a broiler, several ovens, some of them still operative, and a sizeable freezer. It was there on the linoleum that the dog often did its business, possibly because the floors had been easier for Davos to clean. The residue had not been cleaned well, however, and the smell was both reprehensible and familiar by this point.

The third floor contained Davos' bedroom, his study, his books and a a small kitchen intended for use by servants, with a dumbwaiter servicing the bottom three floors. This was where she cooked when he could eat something more than chicken broth.

The third level was the gallery. Perhaps at one time it only held certain paintings, but now it contained all the canvases Davos refused to hand out to museums. He had explained this part of the riddle the day before when she had asked. She noticed his eyes twitching as he spoke, and his gestures became almost incomprehensible, never matching the words completely.

"An institution that charges those who enter is not even a whorehouse, since there you are only expected to pay if you are serviced. What does a museum provide?"

She explained she had thought it was access to great works of art.

"I do not use the internet," he said, "Could you not see all of them there as well?"

She said probably some of the work, but certainly not all, could be found there.

"And my work?"

"Does it bother you?"

"It does not," he said, taking his fifth pill of the morning with a glass of water she handed him. "What bothers me is the idea of visitors paying someone besides myself to see it." She licked her lips.

"But possibly they - I'm sure they paid you for the paintings, or someone did, and so you had presumably been compensated."

"My father was a Marxist," he said. "He was not a Stalinist at all, but he did put stock in Marxism. He believed it was the solution to poverty." Davos' laughs turned into coughs, and he demanded the water again.

"He was a poor tailor."

"That's right," Davos said. "If I asked him for money, he always gave it to me. I was his favorite; when my brother asked he would comply sometimes, but usually not at all. He made me feel like I was above my brother."

"How did your brother feel?" she asked.

"I didn't care," Davos said. "I was accustomed to the idea of inequality. And so was my father."

Saturday she performed various meaningful tasks, such as shopping for groceries and answering correspondence. Sunday was her only day off, and he suggested she make use of it by abandoning the premises. One of her exes wrote her from time to time, and she did not mind the anachronistic interplay. It seemed to fit her life with the artist. But she felt that at base, she was the kind of person who preferred the idea of being in love to the thing itself.

She asked Davos about this the following Monday after she had returned from mailing another letter.

"My brother was like that," he said, "but it's no critique or insult. This was his best quality, the one I most envied. He was taller, more beautiful, had more friends than I did. And when he experienced a thing he gave himself over to it so completely it was like nothing else existed."

She thought whether she was that way, and asked herself whether it was something to be envied.

The fifth floor contained a fully featured lap pool, and it was there she checked to see if it had been clearned properly. It indicated the property had once been a hotel, but little else remained from that period. It was Davos' main source of exerise, the only time she ever saw him move quickly or break a sweat.

Her job, as he floated around, was to give him bottled water when he asked for it, and change the music at regular intervals if he called out between a stroke.

He preferred Tchaikovsky, but he also loved the great operas. Afterwards, he would explain the plot to her. Here were some of those summaries:

A woman believes she is in love, but takes it back.

A man doesn't understand himself, but he loves the smell of the woods, and the sway of the oceans.

A Jew pretends to be a Gentile for a short period. Afterwards, he has trouble forgiving himself until finally he is able to.

A woman falls in love with an extremely appealing man. She finds out he is cruel to others, but overlooks it.

A doctor playfully mistreats a patient, who he later learns is his mother. He weeps at length.

The sixth floor was an attic of sorts. It contained Davos' odds and ends, as well as the possessions of the man's daughter Virginia, who lived abroad. She was not permitted in the attic, and once he had caught her wondering what was up there.

"It's nothing secret," he told her. "It's only that I don't go up there myself. And if you did, you might find something to remind me of those days. Then, I would start thinking of them, perhaps only for an hour or two, maybe longer."

"She was a beautiful girl," she said. "She is, I mean, although I have no way of really knowing."

"She's a happy person. Not like me." He coughed, almost hacking up what was inside of him.

"I don't think I know how to be happy," she said.

"When I look at my dog," he said, "I see something completely different. Not an animal, but a place. My father believed that some part of his pets carried on in the next ones. Of course it was a part of him, not of them. The more I think of him saying that, the more angry I get. He was not a superstitious person, but that does not truly excuse it. Any lapse, not matter how small, constitutes a critical error, and unmans the thinking person."

She tried not to smile at that.

"You may laugh," he said, and fell silent for a minute or more. "On Sundays - that was the only day my father took off from work, and even then he sometimes went back into the store if a customer called him - he would take us into the mountains. We played cards, or talked with each other. I hope this is the last time I remember it. But there is little chance of that, is there?"

She was permitted to examine the paintings, although her duties afforded her little time in which to do so. The night themselves felt too short, she was continually awake longer than she thought she really should be. She could see Davos' work in her mind's eye, probably because she was afforded little other stimulation. Sometimes he painted people, and when he did they were almost in a state of transition, moving from one thing in order to assume another identity entirely.

One Sunday in June she was writing a letter in the local coffee shop. A couple was arguing behind her, at first about the woman's tardiness, and then about the man's expectations for their relationship. Because of the way the sun came in the window, they switched seats. The argument began and although she tried not to listen, it was entirely impossible to concentrate.

By the end of it, she had concluded the woman was Davos' daughter. On her way back to the second floor, passing by the post office, she left the letter she had written in the pocket of her jacket. There would be a time, in the near future, where it could be placed in the attic without attracting much notice at all.

Henry Rubenstein is a writer living in New York.

Paintings by Z.Z. Wei.

In Which We Moan As He Strokes Our Feet

You can find our Saturday fiction series here.

Host

by ERICA CICCARONE

They start at my feet and have taken over my ankles, my shins, and two of them have grown in my right knee. We hope that there will be no new ones. We hope that they will fall off soon, or hatch.

They are blue-ish beneath the skin, some small as eraser buds and others the size of peanut M & Ms. Some are raised, like mushrooms growing on a rock. Others are partially exposed, like coral. There have not been any more since last week, so our hope is that the medicine is working and soon they will disintegrate. Hopefully, the medicine will also kill the creature that is living inside of me. What I want to know is, what will happen to it after it dies? Will it come out of me somehow? Will I spend the rest of my life harboring the corpse of an egg laying creature?

When we first noticed the eggs, we were in the car driving back home from a long weekend at the shore. I was wearing my rubber duckies and my feet started itching. Not wanting to take off the monsters, I stomped my feet on the floor of the car. I clicked my heels together, slapped my toes against the dashboard.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked.

“My feet itch!”

“Christ, it’s those ridiculous boots. It’s not even raining!”

The possibility that it could rain seemed reason enough to don the yellow galoshes.

The itching changed to burning, like the blood in my veins was actually on fire. I tore the laces out of the boots and pulled them off, threw them onto the backseat. Off came the aquamarine socks. You know when you’re dreaming and in the dream you sort of know that you’re dreaming? That was how I felt when I looked down at my feet. A cluster of six on the right foot and three dotted the left foot in the shape of a triangle. Eggs.

I am getting used to my eggs. I sit on the floor in the living room eating popcorn and watching the game shows. Mom doesn’t want me sitting on the couch. She’s afraid that the eggs might spread, that the creature will somehow move to a new host. Can I blame her? She didn’t want me to sleep in my bed, either, but Aunt Patty intervened and Mom agreed to let me sleep there if I put down a piece of plastic. Obviously, I am not going to school. Nor am I going to ballet class or horse back riding lessons, because we don’t want the creature burrowing into Ginger either.

Because Mom works and she decided I shouldn’t be left home to alone to develop a psychological neuroses about my eggs, Aunt Patty comes by a few times a day. She works from home doing something with computers so it’s not too big a deal for her to stop by. We play checkers or pinochle and she brings me a turkey sandwich with lots of mayo and tomato, the way I like it. We think that the creature entered me in the sea, and because they say that the human body is something like 75% water, it doesn’t surprise me that the creature has chosen me as its host. What does surprise me, of course, are the eggs. They are growing, very slightly but noticeably. I cannot see them growing, but I keep a chart of their progress, their growth in centimeters. Nor do I see a new one emerge. It is as if that part happens very quickly when I am not looking. One minute, I had nineteen of them and Bob Barker was hugging some chubby housewife, and the next minute there were twenty. That’s the count right now. Twenty. I am hoping that this nice, round number will signal a stop to their growth. Aunt Patty said, “Just four more and we can start selling them by the dozen.”

The infectious disease specialist is in New York City, 1300 miles from where we live in Metairie, Louisiana. Mom’s always talking about going to the Big Apple to see “a show.” She pronounces it “BROAD-way.” When we made the trip last week, scraping together the Christmas savings, I felt overwhelmed by the bigness of it, so many people, like my identity could shift out of me and jump into another body, and I would return home at night with the personality of a forty-year old accountant named Barry. There was now something so unique and exceptional about me that I felt full and original and great. I wanted to run down Fifth Avenue.

The doctor’s office was on the Upper East Side, right by Central Park. Before we went into the office, my mother said, “His name is Dr. Dudu. He is from Bangladesh and he is very brilliant. Please do not laugh at his name.” I could tell she was trying not laugh herself. I nodded solemnly, but I was very excited to show Dr. Dudu my eggs.

Dr. Dudu was very tall. He had a thick, black moustache and the complexion of a polished saddle. I was wearing some slip-on sneakers and thin socks, and when I took these off, his face screwed up—not in horror like Mom and Aunt Patty — but with an expression of fascination and rapture, like he had just seen the light of God.

After he interviewed me, examined me, and drew blood, he determined that I had been infected with a creature. You’d think he’d speak in fancy medical terms that I wouldn’t understand, but he didn’t. He actually said, “You have been infected with a creature.”

My mother, who had been standing, sunk her hips into the counter and her hand rose to her throat.

“What?” she said.

“It probably chose Julie as a host when she was in the ocean. You are a very unusual girl,” Dr. Dudu said to me. “This happens very rarely.”

This notion thrilled me!

“Eventually, with treatment, the eggs will disintegrate and the bumps will get smaller and smaller over the next three weeks, until they disappear. But you will have some scars.”

I considered this briefly and shrugged.

“Three weeks!” my mother said.

“Maybe two.”

“Can’t you cut them off?” my mother said.

The doctor cradled my foot in his hand and looked at my eggs. “I would not do that. The eggs are beneath the skin. It would be like cutting into the yolk of an egg — extremely painful for Julie. And the scarring would be much worse. And besides, they would still grow back. They must dissolve naturally.”

“What if they hatch?” I said.

“The medication will kill them. You are not a natural host, so the eggs most likely are under-developed anyway. I will give you an ointment for them, to help the itching. You must not itch them.” He shook his finger at me sternly. “Promise me you will not itch!”

“I promise,” I said. I liked him.

By the time I hopped off the examination table, I felt like I was taking the news very well. But that night in the hotel room, I felt differently. I couldn’t stop looking at my eggs. I began to imagine things. An alien race of creatures would be born from my feet, and they would kill me and my mother and leave the house to take over Metairie, New Orleans, and then the world. Or maybe they were actually bird eggs, or starfish eggs. I didn’t mind the idea of starfish being born from my feet, but wouldn’t it be painful? Where would the starfish go? I would probably have to collect them and take them back to the sea. And then what? Would the creature lay more eggs? According to Dr. Dudu, I would know that the creature was dying because I would experience symptoms of the flu. So now, we’re waiting.

Aunt Patty takes my temperature at lunch time.

“Ninety-eight-six,” she says every day, “and cool as a cucumber.”

I have been drawing pictures of the creature. I like to think that it has many eyes with very long eyelashes, and one of those flagellums. Basically, my ideas are a mix of cartoon monsters and microscopic photographs of amoeba in science text books. I am starting to miss school. When my friends call to find out where I am, I don’t mention the eggs. We decided on walking pneumonia: contagious and long-lasting, no one would try to visit me. “I’m feeling a little better today,” cough cough, “Just weak and,” cough, “tired. I’m so tired, I’m falling asleep on the phone.” I keep up with my homework and have discovered that I can easily get through life and school without teachers. Except that I need Aunt Patty to help me figure out a geometry problem from time to time. Sometimes I take the needle of the compass and press it against an egg, almost to the point of breaking the skin. I wonder what would leak out of it. Like the yoke of an egg. It is sometimes lonely here with my eggs. At least I have the dog. Yesterday, I woke up and the dog was licking my eggs. I haven’t told Mom and I hope the dog doesn’t die.

Three months later the eggs have spread up my legs. We have been to New York twice, mortgaged the slanted house, consulted more doctors and they have all said the same thing: wait. I wait, and I feel like a mother, waiting for a baby to complete the gestation cycle and be born into the world. School is over. My friends have stopped calling. I caught Reggie Boudreaux looking through the window at me as I sat on a towel in the living room, practicing yoga. I went to a specialist in New Age medicine who suggested it. I meditate, cross legged, breathing in and out, sending thoughts away as quickly as they appear. The eggs are large and bulbous now, and there are dozens. I cradle my feet in my hands when I am in full lotus and smooth my hands over my eggs.

My mother has ceased communicating with me. Aunt Patty comes less and less. Even the dog has lost interest in me.

One night years later, my boyfriend Michael consults my feet, which are pockmarked as a prehistoric egg. I have never told anyone the story. I keep my feet as a secret all to myself, something sacred, a thing of something like shame and homage together. But I like Michael. He has scars and burn marks from when he was younger and damaged. But he is better now. We are in our thirties, and it has been many years since the eggs started to fall off. But still, I wonder if the creature is still living inside of me.

“These scars, Jules,” he says. “Where did they come from?”

I try to tell him the story. With tenderness, I describe the day at Pensacola, removing my galoshes and tiptoeing into the water. I tell him that I stood there, fifteen years old, in a blue bikini, my mother sunning behind me. I tell him how calm I felt as I stood and waded up to my thighs, as I dipped my head into the water and held my breath and my hair spooled all around me like a mermaid. I tell him I wish mermaids were real. How I imagine they’d have problems like this all the time, how it would be no big deal.

“But what is it?” he says.

I tell him that at some point, as I bathed in the gulf, a creature entered my body. I tell him about my eggs, about the hard, certain texture of them. I tell him about the nine months I sat on the living room floor with them. I tell him how I grieved when they started to fall off, one at a time, into tiny carcasses, deflated and hopeless. It took years, I tell him, for me to stop missing my eggs. It was like a part of me was amputated.

“I felt that way when my mother died,” he said.

“I felt nothing when my mother died,” I said honestly.

And here we are, alone, essentially, on this earth, in each other's arms, and I have told him about my eggs, and we lie there, eyes locked, and I feel his foot graze my foot, his toes run up and down it, something starts to happen to me and I moan. I keep moaning as he strokes my feet. I see the surf of Pensacola and hear the waves; I feel the scruff of the bath towel under my butt and I breathe in, breathe out, sending all thoughts away, until I’m underwater again, my legs turned to a slick scaly tail, my hair floating around me, my neck slit with gills. I am part of the ocean, I am part mother and part ocean. I moan and he strokes my feet.

Erica Ciccarone is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find her website here.

"Blackberry Way" - The Wonder Stuff (mp3)

"There, There, My Dear" - The Wonder Stuff (mp3)