At My Job I Work the Robotic Arms

by Kati Fargo Ahern | Sep 18, 2023 | flash fiction

On the line, I run a double-forklift. It’s a lot like a regular forklift, but the forks both spread out on either side and when they fan out, you have to catch the grooves of both pallets just so at the same time. And you have to do it FAST. Also, the balance point is trickier, especially if your pallet is stacked high with empty plastic disks that won’t get blown out from forms into bottles till later down the line. The disks weigh nothing, and it is a lot harder than it sounds. Also, on line 5, I work the robotic arms until they stop working, and I call the engineer.

When we are at work, Eugene talks about fantasy sports and the gun he has tucked away in his car. Anthony talks about superhero comics. Greg got so high he ran a forklift off the loading dock and needed a drug test and a lawyer. Anthony died last week at age 43.

At home, my daughter screams in the middle of the night if she has to cough or needs to pee. She plays with He-Man figures and My Little Ponies that we saved in a box for her. My wife gets drunk on boxed wine that saves for 30 days, but she has a hard time making it stretch for three.

At night, when my wife takes a shower, she meticulously swipes the edge of her razor blade against the bar soap because sometimes she gets mad and cuts herself. One time, the bleeding on her wrist didn’t stop for four days. But she doesn’t want to get flesh-eating bacteria from a warm, wet razor blade, so she cleans the blade against the soap. It creates deep, angry, soft grooves. The news says flesh-eating bacteria may be in all 50 states. Sometimes, she just showers, opens the door, and watches the paint peel on the ceiling because the fan doesn’t work. Other times she shampoos and washes and then flicks four, quick strokes against her skin so they look like bloody-beaded, five-lined music. Beyond a doubt, but full of hesitation.

When I am at work, I need to take a 15 minute break that my partner will cover. But my partner is so slow that I need to get him set up for my break so we don’t get behind. I sit in my car and watch videos on my phone and eat a sandwich light on the lunchmeat, heavy on the mayonnaise. When it’s hot, I need to turn the car on to run the AC. I dip my barbeque chips into the edge of my sandwich mayonnaise. I close my eyes and see the afterimage of line 5.

I have a friend who calls me when he’s driving across town to pick his family up Chinese takeout. We get 15 minutes or so of catchup on the kids, our wives, or some shows. Sometimes he tells me about some basketball or the latest fight. My wife says, “How’s Scott? How’s Joan?” and I don’t like to say because when our breaths are counted, we haven’t said that much.   

My daughter has a hard time at school. She writes her name in a kind of cursive she made up with a snake coming off the “t” like a sort of balloon. The snake is smiling. She calls it “snakeish.” Her teachers tell us to let her do it. When she writes thank you notes or cards to my dad or my wife’s mom, we include a parenthetical. We neatly print her message or her name. We explain what she means.

When the robotic arms stop working, there are a few things I do before I call over the engineer. I can punch a few buttons in a sequence, and sometimes, he doesn’t have to come. When he comes over, he comes over like he thinks he’s a god. His steel-toed boots are specially made because one of his legs is noticeably shorter. He walks with a limp. He smirks like a turtle. His teeth are braces-straight where each tooth looks a little too blunted, a little too uniform. His breath smells like mustard.

North Carolina is a “right to work state,” which is the same as saying you have no rights to work at all. It’s steamy-hot in the summer, and the winter is a surprising mess of grey sleet and icy rain. There’s good music and good shopping. The people drive on I-40 like they’d never like to get home. Like they are driving 90 mph for their lives or just finding out. My wife and I would like to move away someday, but we can’t decide on where we’d go. Our dog is so old he wears diapers inside. Our daughter watches the same movie on repeat.

One of my wife’s friends holds a book club every month at her house. She makes themed food, and sixteen ladies act like they have read the book. When I come home, my wife is always holding a book but never reading it. She either grips things too tight or touches so gently it’s like bathwater. You’d wonder how she ever picks anything up. One time, her friend asked about me.

“Does Jake like to go out after work and share a beer with his friends on the line?”

My wife said she just blinked.

“I don’t think he has any friends on the line.”

If I’d been there when her friend asked, I’d have also said no. When I get home, I go to sleep. I touch my daughter’s toes to say goodnight. I count her breaths and wonder. The next day is almost ready to begin.

Unfinished Equations

by Reneé Bibby | Sep 14, 2023 | flash fiction

I stand at the kitchen window, calculating the parabolic arc a murmuration of birds makes against the ridge of conifers. He coalesces at my elbow, tipping his moon-face up to me, to the scratch of blue sky beyond the box of this house. No longer a boy-shaped smudge or a specter.

You’re supposed to find children charming—I’d learned that lesson early. Oh, other mothers would say, looking fondly at their boys, don’t you hate to send them off to school? I’m a blade that cuts—sharp, and kids are tender things, better that my boys were in classrooms or sports practices or running wild through the neighborhood with a pack of others.

It’s an unkindness now, some cosmic karma that in this new house I’d bought precisely because it suited just me, that I should have to put up with someone else’s kid. His little pit-pats sound as he moves around the place at all hours, energetic as a Tasmanian Devil, flicking on lights and devices, chattering, and peeping around corners as if I were more entertaining to watch than any nature program.

A hundred mental orreries of our orbits, but none of my calculations can predict when or for how long our worlds would pull far enough apart for there to be only pure and creamy quiet, only to spin into conjunction again so that we are shadows to each other. There is no calculus to solve the gravity that crashes us together, clear, solid souls in the same space.

I could say something now about the mechanics of how birds fly, and he’d hear me. He’d drink it, gulp it down like ice on a hot day. His eyes are their own creatures. They are alive in his face. They tremble. They are braced for a boo! The whole of him is braced.

His mother had called from the kitchen, “What’s that goddamn song you’re humming?”

I’d glimpsed his mother, too. Late at night alone at the kitchen table, hunched-back and hair loosening from a ponytail, or tying on aprons early morning as someone outside honks for her to hurry up. She is spilled gasoline. She is the slick-black of his life, the lung-searing choke, and the shimmer of fumes that begs for the tiniest sparkle to ignite.

I do not understand the physics that binds me here. What purpose do I serve if I cannot snatch his words from the air to stop her from hearing his reply, “It’s the song the lady in my room sings.”

She is at his doorway, a scribbled face of rage, “Don’t you fucking talk about her. She’s not real!” 

She’s looked right at me in the hall, she’s locked eyes with me entering the bedroom that used to be mine, she’s heard my humming, too.

“You’re humming, again,” he says, at my elbow. “What is that song?”

The impulse to maintain the charade of distance rises up in me, a tsunami. But we are not separate. I cannot save him from his mother—worse, I was the reason for her conflagration. So, I say, “I am contemplating elliptic curves, L-series, infinite numbers, and fixed points. I am thinking the art of solving the unsolved and dedicating your life to that which only exists in theory. Is the unfished work what keeps me here?”

He’s not like either of my boys, who would not have stood still for my philosophizing. He’s careful to be neutral and quiet, but the animals of his eyes have softened, delighted to finally hear me.

His joy at something so simple is unbearable to witness. I look away.   

“What difference it would make if I solved anything unsolvable. Who would even know? Nobody but a little boy. I am watching birds and trees through glass because I can no longer be amongst them. And I am humming Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Because it is beautiful. But I don’t think you should hum it anymore where your mother can hear.”

He absorbs all of that with a tiny nod and turns closer to the window, strains to stand at the same eyeline as me, seeking the birds who have already fled, as I am the shadow bound to this house. Or is to the boy? A tender, trembling thing, who makes me wish for a body and warmth and presence again so that he might feel my hand brush the top of his head, down his shoulder to soothe every part of him that is burned and trembling and alive.

Odds and Ends

by Brett Biebel | Sep 11, 2023 | flash fiction

It was supposed to be chess club, but instead, it was Gambler’s Anonymous, and that’s what you get in Moline. That’s what you get in church basements. It might be fried chicken, or it might be stale donuts, and I should have left right then, but I didn’t. I stayed. I don’t know why I stayed. I wrote “Reg” on my nametag, which was maybe the first lie, and some guy was talking about basketball. He said that CBS music made him feel whole and complete and ready to bust through a wall, and he was going to listen to it tomorrow. He was going to watch every minute of every game he could. Every TV in his house was plugged in in the living room. He’d already called in sick. His heart rate was going to rise, and he would cry and scream ecstatically by himself, and it was going to be okay because he was a goddamn force of titanium will, and he swore. Swore to Christ. There weren’t going to be any bets.

It’s hard to describe exactly how the room reacted to this. You’re not supposed to judge, I guess. You could tell, though, people thought it was a real shit idea, and I sat there, trying to hide my face. Trying to hide it without putting anything in its way, and I smoked a cigarette with this guy, after the meeting. He called himself Bigby. He said, “You don’t look right,” and the air smelled all cold and refreshing and dead, and I thought about all kinds of possible responses. “Who does, though,” or “Fuck off, asshole,” or maybe just kind of walk off like that. Like a goddamn scene from Chinatown or whatever, and all this must’ve taken forever because Bigby dropped some ash on my boot. I looked up.

“Seriously, man, you look like shit.”

“Drowned rats,” I said.

“What?”

“I used to walk in the door after practice, and my mom would say that. ‘You look like a drowned rat.’ I never really think about stuff like that.”

“I don’t think about much of anything.”

“Because thinking is overrated, I bet.”

“Don’t bet.”

“All bets are off,” I said, and I also think I fucking winked.

Bigby shook his head a couple of times, and then he left like I should’ve, and I followed him, followed him all the way home. Safe distance. Laying back and letting these pickups tuck in between. His house was in that part of town by the interstate, and there was a lot of brick and lawns trying as hard as they could, and he had a big front window. You could see practically the whole first floor. There was a picture of Jesus and an Old Style sign, and the real obvious thing was there was not one fucking TV. A bookshelf. Christmas tree lingering. I thought about how maybe the screens were all in the basement or all under lock and key or some shit, and I don’t know, man. Something about March. Something about snowmelt. It asks some pretty fucked-up questions, and I drove home thinking about all of them. Lies upon lies, and all I remember is the lights of the Burger King. Maybe that French fry smell is the only thing true.

The Cloud Lab

by Megan Callahan | Sep 7, 2023 | flash fiction

In science class, Margot teaches them about the magic of snow. “Evaporation, condensation, deposition,” she says. On the whiteboard she draws shapes connected by wiggly arrows. She’s tall and wiry, spine curved from decades of bending over small desks. Her face crumples like paper when she smiles or laughs. The kids like her white hair, her billowy floral dresses.

Margot peels open a cardboard box and distributes the musty contents: boots and wool socks; fleece-lined ski masks; colourful snowsuits with drawstrings at the waist. She leads them down the hall in a bumbling single file. Her own coat seems to swallow her; she hasn’t worn it in decades. “Gloves on,” she beckons. “Let’s go, zippity-zip.” At the end of the corridor is a plain white door. Cloud Lab, the sign says. Caution – Extreme cold.

The lab has milky walls and a high, vaulted ceiling. A digital thermometer reads -40℃. The children squeal and marvel at their misty dragon breaths. They race across the room, cheeks red as hibiscus petals. At the control panel, Margot twists a dial and punches in a code. A humidifier hums beyond the walls, pumping in air saturated with water vapour. Soon the domed ceiling is foggy with clouds.

“When I was little, we had blizzards.” Margot stamps her boots for warmth. “Clumps of snowflakes you could catch on your tongue.” Her students stare and blink. The word flake confuses them.

“Like cereal?” a girl asks

 “No,” she laughs. “No.”

She talks of snow piling on rooftops. Burying cars. Three feet, five feet. Up to your waist! “We could swim in it,” she insists. They groan and roll their eyes. She reverse-twists the dial and the humidifier quiets. “We’d pack snow in our fists and build forts in the yard. Barrel down hills on flimsy plastic sleds.” Above them, the clouds grow like swirling cotton candy. “And the cold,” she exclaims, throwing up her hands. “It prickled like needles. Chilled you to the bone.”

One boy laughs, another pelts questions: Was it dangerous, the snow? Could you be smothered or drowned? They’ve never felt anything like the Cloud Lab before. Cold is for ice cream; AC in peak summer; lakes when you cannonball from sun-drenched docks. None of them know winter. None of them know bone-chilled. Margot bites her lip. She gropes for clear answers. Every year, she runs the experiment and tries to explain. Something is missing, something has been lost, but she can never find the words to describe why it matters.

And suddenly it’s snowing: a sprinkling, like confetti. The children fall silent. They squish shoulders and look up, captivated by the magic trick. Arms above their heads, mouths open, tongues out. Margot folds her hands and presses them over her heart. She remembers frost on windows, darkness in the street. And the rhythmic crunch-crunch of her father, shovelling.

“Touch it,” she encourages. “Each snowflake is different.” Her students catch flakes and slip-slide in their boots. They scoop up mounds and try to eat them before they melt. “More!” one girl chants, but Margot shakes her head no. The school has water restrictions: a strict weekly limit. But already they’ve lost interest. They complain about cold toes. Margot ushers them into the hall, where they immediately shed their layers. Snow puddles from their soles onto the speckled linoleum. Margot gathers their snowsuits. She unbuttons her coat. Somewhere deep inside is an ache that feels like homesickness, except she’s lived here her whole life.

Back in the classroom, the windows are open. The air is sweet and heavy with the scent of lemon trees. Along the road, the cacti bloom. Aeoniums reach for the sun.

Maid In America

by Christine H. Chen | Sep 5, 2023 | flash fiction

When I go in, the sink is bursting with unwashed dishes coated with moldy leftover scraps, half-filled glasses, cups that balance precariously on the counter rim, ripped open TV dinner boxes thrown on top; there isn’t room for me to set aside the cleaned dishes. The washing skills I’ve practiced back home come to good use.

“It’s real simple,” Lisa said, on my first day. “Just Windex the windows, Lysol the kitchen floor, Clorox the towels, you know, and then, Mr. Clean the toilet bowls, there’s also upstairs…”

This is not the country of brooms and pans, coconut brushes, or Pledge oil my mother used to shine our armoires. This is new territory. I’m learning that Americans can make verbs out of proper names. There are specific products with different colors for a given task.

Upstairs is a big room filled with a jumble of chairs and stools, various artwork framed in all shapes and sizes, boxes of clocks, oversized clothing, a jagged landscape of abandoned animals. I wipe bodies of deserted things with a cloth, rinse it with warm water, repeat. In the end, they still look the same. Forlorn and unclean.

Downstairs, Lisa pulls out a blue ice pop from the freezer while I have my arms soaked in a bubble bath of Palmolive detergent. I’m scrubbing a week-old worth of stuck grilled onions on dinner plates.

“Want one?” she says.

I shake my head with a smile, resist the temptation to ask why it’s blue, if it tastes like Windex in her throat, what she’d call that shade of blue.

“Where’re you from again?” she asks.

At this point in my life, I’m reluctant to speak English because I know I have a weird accent. When I tell her where I am from, her eyes grow big. I can see her mind goes in loops. “Oh, is that in Malaysia or Australia?”

I hate to disappoint her. She’s a nice lady in her thirties, long blond hair, freckles on her cheek that remind me of a cheetah. There’s a boyfriend with Oreo crumbs stuck on his T-shirt that lurks around sometimes. She doesn’t make me vacuum her bedroom. I’ve never seen her bedroom. She pays me $20 every Friday, enough to buy a nice stack of letter paper decorated with music notes and red violets to write to my parents back in Madagascar, a T-shirt with the Golden Gate Bridge, and I still have extra dollar bills saved in a Danish cookie tin. 

I explain that it’s a big island in the Indian Ocean. She says, “Oh right!” like she got it. I know. I’m confusing. I’m a dark Asian girl who speaks with a melange of accents Americans can’t put their finger on.

She sits back on her couch, licking her frozen blue ice, her eyes fixated on the screen where there’s a couple who’s yelling profanities at each other. Fuck you, go fuck yourself, piece of shit, cunt. I love saying American curse words when I’m alone in my dorm room. They don’t mean anything to me, but they are sharp, decisive bursts of sounds I imagine screaming from the open top of a Chevy on a deserted road, hair whipping air, like in the movies.

BRAIN, BRIAN

by Whitney Collins | Aug 31, 2023 | flash fiction

Marvin’s tumor is the size of an unshelled walnut. His doctor, who wears bile-colored Crocs, has told Marvin and Marvin’s wife, Cathy, that he plans on removing the tumor with a knife that’s not really a knife but a beam of light. When the surgery was first explained, Marvin saw a hot spatula cutting cold cheesecake, but now that the operation is tomorrow, he keeps seeing a red, plastic flashlight pointed at a dense, winter wood. Who goes there? He hears the surgeon call out, gleefully. Make yourself known!

The neurosurgeon is as young as Marvin’s son, Brian. Brian no longer speaks to Marvin. Brian lives in Arizona with a girl Marvin and Cathy have never met but whose name is Begonia. They’ve seen a picture of their son and this girl. A dog that looked like a coyote was also in the picture. “Who wants a cartoon for a dog?” Marvin asked Cathy. “Who wants a houseplant for a girlfriend?”

Marvin was a terrible father, but the tumor has lessened the reality of this. The larger the tumor grows, the better the father Marvin was. And the faster Marvin walks, the faster the tumor grows. Which is why, every morning, he goes to the mall in his big white shoes, the ones that look like loaves of junk bread, and walks eight-thousand steps. He walks the length of Pinesap Plaza fourteen times, back and forth, and as he does, he recalls things he thought about doing with Brian as things he actually did. Camping under a swirl of stars. Shooting clay pigeons. Making cowboy beans in a cast-iron frying pan. “There’s Orion,” he hears himself say. “More pintos?”

In the early morning mall, the managers raise the gated storefronts with much audible ado. The mall fountains sputter to life. Together, the fountains and the gates sound like static, and Marvin’s mind becomes the roaring space between canyon walls. He passes stores. There’s Queen B., Banana Pants, Mr. Stupid. He stares at the things for sale and cannot remember what they are for. He imagines a pair of underwear on a potted begonia. A woman’s yellow sweater on a coyote. A whoopee cushion as a map of Arizona. Marvin moves his big white shoes faster. He forgets Brian’s thin shoulders and crystalline singing voice. He forgets Brian’s pitiful deer eyes, his milkweed hair. Instead, Marvin remembers throwing a football that was never thrown, laughing at a joke that was never cracked.

At the end of Marvin’s morning walk is Sprinkles, the ice cream kiosk. If Marvin times it right, he takes his last step when Dashel, the ice cream boy, flips over the OPEN sign. “Good morning, Marvin,” Dashel says. “The usual?” Marvin’s excitement is such that he can only nod. His head nods and the tumor nods, and fireworks go off in Marvin’s mind— red and green and violet.

Dashel scoops the vanilla while Marvin watches. It’s a sphere of snow rolled through a pristine field, the belly of a snowman that Marvin and Brian did and didn’t build. Dashel rolls the vanilla through rainbow sprinkles, a brain dragged through artificial memories. He puts the ice cream into a paper bowl and places a shelled walnut on top. He hands the ice cream to Marvin, and Marvin goes and sits on a bench by the fountains. Every morning, he sits there until the ice cream has melted and the sprinkles have bled, and all that remains is the walnut—floating in gray matter. Tomorrow, Marvin will have his brain, but today he has Brian.

Patrons

by Hillary Ann Colton | Aug 28, 2023 | flash fiction

The shades are pulled down by Mick before the summer sunsets. Mick is a regular: he spends every day, open to close, in the bar drinking Bacardi and Cokes and shots of Fireball. He buys drinks for everyone and tells them he loves them. He loves me the most; he’s proposed seven times. 

His facial veins match his red hair, and his arms are speckled in bruises that are as dark as frostbite. He’s in his early sixties with an adopted teen at home. He tells people his wife died from a flu vaccination, but he told me once that her body couldn’t take anymore, and he doesn’t talk about her until closing time. 

Mick throws a fifty down and says he’s gonna pick up a pizza on the way home. “Coming back?” I say. 

“You know it,” he says. 

And I do. 

Buffy refuses to sit on the left side of the bar because she has Mac D. She’s been divorced five times and loves to talk about her sex life. Most people sitting at the bar top have seen at least one of her nipples. Buffy drinks vodka sodas in a pounder and needs a napkin to wipe the lime off her hands after squeezing. 

She tries to hook her straw with her fat tongue and asks about me. I’ve learned my lesson with this question: no one actually wants to know. 

“Great,” I say, smiling and hopping a little. I feel happy after taking a shot in the back. “I have a date for WNGD.” Buffy grabs her phone and shows me a picture. She’s already told me this, so I know that WNGD stands for World Naked Gardening Day. She is sixty-two, and not only does she have a better sex life than I do, she is confident enough to pull weeds naked while a man she met online watches. 

A woman I’ve only just begun to recognize scoots down to sit by Buffy. She tells us about her tomato plants: where to get them and how to nurture growth. We don’t care, but we pretend to. 

When my patrons ask me how I am, I say I’m good, busy, but good. I could say that my life is messy, and I move from toxic to toxic, and I spend my time watching Kim K tutorials on how to contour my face in hopes that I’ll make more money if I am no longer myself. I’m good; I’m busy gets me a nod and smile as if my Daddy were calling me a good girl after I fetch him another beer. 

Mick’s back, and he says all his kid wants to do is play video games. I could say that it’s his fault because he’s never there, he’s here, but instead, I get us shots. “Damn kids these days,” he says. 

I pour beers for the men and vodka for the women and shake sugary liquor for the newly-legal. I allow myself a shot for every hour that passes because I tell myself I can’t handle the drunks when sober. 

Mick sits by Buffy and makes jokes about her wet wet pussy, and she laughs like she genuinely means it. People play pool together and request that I turn the volume up on the jukebox when their song comes on. Unfamiliar faces come and go and play pool and throw darts and dance and laugh and touch. 

A keg blows, and the tap sprays my face with white foam, making my mascara look wet. “I bet that’s not the first time someone’s blown in your face!” Clint says. A patron who wears four-hundred dollar cowboy boots and blazers and sells things on the radio. When I swivel the new keg to its place, my boobs nearly fall out and catcalls follow. I laugh like Oh well! and give them a little shake as I readjust. 

My oldest patron is named Dick, and he used to direct plays on Broadway. Without fail, he tips two bucks. He offers me fifty to take him out back and show him the girls. “Maybe for your birthday, Dicky,” I wink. He’ll be eighty-two in January, and I hope he’ll die by then so I won’t have to. 

The bar-back shows up, and we take a shot together. He hugs me, and the women tell us how cute we are, and the men pretend not to be jealous. We take a shot, and I know he’s in love with me, but I have a boyfriend that no one knows about because he isn’t allowed in the bar. Boyfriends are unpredictable, and mine’s a Gemini: moody like fire. According to the Zodiac Gods we are destined for each other. I don’t feel it when he’s cold, like winter mornings, but when he’s warm, I am a fucking Queen. I am everything. 

A month later, the tomato lady disappears, and it’s because she died of liver failure. Everyone at the bar will take a shot and cheer: “To the nice tomato lady!” 

In the new year, Lo, the pizza guy who drank Coors Light, will overdose. I just saw him the other night. He was sitting right there,” we all say. 

Jenn will crash her Honda into a nail salon. She was trying to quit, but the tremors––she lost control. 

Mick’s doctor will tell him to quit drinking, and for two days, he’ll switch to beer. A young drunk woman is scared of a man who got her a cab, so I sit her down and say: Don’t move. When I look up again, she’ll be gone. 

Steve will get a DUI, and we’ll all forget about him. 

An employee and friend will die of a seizure after two months of sobriety. We really loved her. We’ll attend her funeral and drink to her favorite shot: Tuaca and Red Bull. We’ll look at pictures of her when she was in her twenties, and we won’t recognize her because she wasn’t pickled. 

We cry at our losses and devour our poison and tell ourselves that only the good die young, so full of life, and we swear we won’t be like them. 

We won’t. 

Launch Day Conditions: 1986

by Elizabeth Conway | Aug 24, 2023 | flash fiction

Kerry found a hundred-dollar bill at the gas station near pump three. It was covered in oil. She carried the money inside to show the attendant, Jeremiah. “A hundred bucks! What are the chances?” Kerry said. “Lucky,” he said. She bought two cans of Dr. Pepper, and Jeremiah counted out her change. She slid him back a five. “Lucky,” she echoed. When she got home, Kerry called her sister. It was Sunday. Kerry always calls her sister on Sundays. 6:45 PM sharp. She told her about the hundred. The sisters agreed Kerry should buy a bus ticket and come down for a visit. Greyhound was offering a $55 roundtrip to Florida at the end of January; she would even have some mad money left over to burn. Lucky.

Kerry believes in luck. Believes in routines. She performs even the most mundane – like brushing her teeth two minutes on the top with her right hand and two minutes on the bottom using her left – in predictable patterns. Kerry doesn’t believe everything she does brings good fortune, but she’s unsure exactly which routines, which actions, control her fate, so she stays committed to them all. Like the Sunday phone calls and now the Dr. Peppers. She buys them again and again, carrying them home in the pockets of her brown jacket. The cuffs frayed; its last three buttons lost long ago. Kerry dares not throw it out: a good-luck uniform.

Kerry packs her clothes in layers shirt, shorts, shirt, shorts, then adds a heavy windbreaker — Florida can be unpredictable. On top of her clothes, she puts a framed photograph of herself and her sister at the Minnesota State Fair. In the picture, her sister is a toddler, and Kerry — six years older — holds her sister propped securely on her hip. They are standing next to a brown calf. Like the sisters, the cow looks directly into the camera. That was the year the tornado hit Fridley. It took out their barn, twenty-two of their cattle, thirteen people. Kerry and her sister hid in the laundry room, under the sink. The sky was yellow and green. Their mother kept the front door open, “I want to hear what it sounds like,” she said. She could hear a train. There wasn’t a train. The state fair calf survived. They sold it to a farmer from North Dakota, and for the rest of the summer, Kerry slept in the laundry room. Her mother didn’t argue. The summer storms waned. Later – later –  when the summer passed, when the storms moved on, Kerry moved back into her bedroom, and her sister’s appendix burst. In the room they shared, Kerry listened to her sister cry in pain and pulled her pillow over her head to muffle the moans that kept her awake. In the morning, their mom wiped vomit from her sister’s mouth before placing her in the truck to drive to the hospital. She stayed for a week. At home, Kerry stripped her sister’s bed and washed — and re-washed and folded and re-folded — the twin-sized sheets with a faded strawberry print. Kerry moved back into the laundry room and whispered and whispered — I’m back I’m back do you hear me, hear me — until her throat was raw to whoever, whomever was listening.

At the station, Kerry’s bus is late. Over an hour — delayed by the January snow. Kerry chews on her bottom lip. She checks her watch: 8:13, 8:13, 8:14… At 8:30, she stands up, puts her hands in her pockets, and pulls out a pack of Life Savers. She rolls the candy between her fingers until her knuckles ache. Then, he switches hands and does it again.  Kerry has never been to Florida. Never. “This is a mistake,” she says. Kerry grabs her suitcase and starts to walk out of the station as the bus pulls into her pathway. “This is a mistake,” she says when boarding. Her seat is next to the window. She shares her row with a man from St. Cloud who once played hockey for the University’s Huskies but lost his scholarship when his grades went to shit. “My grades went to shit,” he says. “When mom, got sick, who could care.” And then at the very first stop in Mora, Minnesota – population 2,436 — the televisions, cornered in the corners of the station where people ushered through for bathroom breaks, bitter coffee and easy food, suddenly synced with news outlets across the globe to broadcast the same, the same, the same. This just in. This is a mistake.

So when they watched the spaceship explode, when it burst in the Florida sky, disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean while crowds gathered for the countdown, while news stations went live, while children and their teachers watched in auditoriums across the country to celebrate one of their own who boarded the ship with an apple for luck — seventy-three seconds, then gasses, then fire so explosive, so hot it turned metal, turns bodies, into dust that disappeared into the atmosphere — Kerry stood up and screamed, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Forgive me!”

Eventually, she would get home – as would we all – and unpack our shirts as quickly as we could: shirt, shorts, shirt, shorts. Brushing the sugary candy out of our teeth, the University hockey player off the roster — top right, bottom left. Wash, rinse, repeat as the instructions instruct. The recipe, the rules. Wash, rinse, repeat – prescribed prescription. I’m back I’m back! But by then, it didn’t matter. It is already too late.

And so it goes. The gas station, the cans of Dr. Peppers, the brown jacket with frayed cuffs, hockey players from the north en route to the south, the calls to sisters in Florida. “When are you coming?” she asks. And Kerry responds, “I can’t. I’m sorry. Forgive me.” Now part of the routine, too. And then so it goes. For gracious, merciful, benevolent God in heaven, so it goes.