Mark Miller is a librarian who splits time between Minneapolis and Tuscaloosa. He has published dozens of poems, short stories, and essays under his three pseudonyms.  His novel, The Librarian at the End of the World, is forthcoming from Montag Press in 2019.

Sleepwalking 

She regretted that he knew her secrets. But it felt good to write him things she would disclose to no one else. She was attracted to him, yes, but also repulsed by him. Two magnets is what we are, she thought. She was sleepy and didn’t trust him, didn’t even like him, in fact, and thought she should stop typing.  Yet here she was, driven more by bored inertia than excited energy, more even than her need for sleep. Okay, what do you want to know?

Anything you want to tell me, he wrote. She didn’t, at the moment, but could, if she wished, tell him everything. All the things. The sounds and shapes and colors of her childhood, the lover whose sweat she drank off his skin in ecstasy, the hole in the middle of her where god once resided. She wrote, when I face north I will tell you everything. South, nothing. Her mind was fuzzy.  Is there a reason why magnets exist? They do, obviously. But why?  I don’t even care what we are. Why are we, is what I want to know. Then she fell asleep and dreamed of window washers skimming the sky and cleaning glass. But there was nothing to see, inside or out. Emptiness on both sides.

She also dreamed of a man with no face, following her from car to car on a never-ending train.  No sooner would she enter a car and push halfway through its loitering commuters than would the door behind her open, revealing his presence. She hurried to the next door, crossed through to the next car, and pushed through the next crowd, only to look behind her again, and see his featureless countenance.

When she woke it was still night. The lump next to her rose and fell with her husband’s breathing. She tiptoed across the cold floor into the kitchen. She looked out the back window and traced the familiar tree limbs lit by the bulb poled in the backyard. She shivered.

The dreams meant something or nothing. The man meant nothing or something. Magnets attracted or repelled. Regardless of the science, there was no reason for it unless there was. Perhaps we are not magnets, she thought. That was too easy.

Outside she climbed the grey-brown branches with her eyes. She tried to imagine what color they would be if she painted them. What the eye sees and the mind knows are rarely the same. She couldn’t remember what he looked like. She would recognize him if she saw him, but now, alone in the dark, she tried to picture his face but could not. She was aware that for some time she had been willing herself not to feel the cold.  The sensation had registered on her skin, but she had refused to recognize its effect. Now she was shaking.

She crawled back into bed and realized her life was both truth and lie. It was profound in its discord of want and circumstance, alive with need and dead of hope, mundane in its routines. The things that gave meaning were the opposite of the things that gave joy, and she worked to maintain a grasp of both, much as it stretched her into odd contortions of self. In this way she was both true to herself and a lie to the world, and vice versa. No one would know what to do with her, nor could she figure out the puzzle of the world. The space between the pieces was the only place she felt honest.

She lay in bed as her husband snored. She thought of the man again for the last time that night. No, we are not magnets. We are nothing. But I tell him everything because he doesn’t judge me. He is the void I hurl myself into knowing there will never be a ground to break my fall. He can love me because he doesn’t have to depend on me. I can love him, and he will still not know me.  If I throw myself into him, he cannot hurt me. He is nothing at all. She closed her eyes to the dark room and, as always, could not remember what he looked like. Yet she knew when she woke she would imagine him again.

Carly E. Husick is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. Her favorite activities include watching Queer Eye on Netflix, binge reading YA novels, and playing with her new baby nephew. She has most recently been published in Gravel Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and FlashFiction Magazine.

Mail Order Fruit

            At seven her favorite food was apricots. She liked the way the tiny fruit fit in the curve of her hand, even then. There was something about the lightness of the fruit, the juicy gush and sticky rush of that first bite that made her grin, as if the tart aftertaste were lifting up the edges of her lips. Her mother kept them in a glass bowl that looked like curving translucent palm fronds supported the mountain of apricots, their fuzzed backs rolling against one another like the hills of the valley they lived in.

            At twelve her mother packed plastic baggies of dried apricots for her to bring in her lunch bag to school. She’d tried bringing the fresh fruit but it often got bruised by lunch time, a soft brown spot mushing against her teeth when she bit in before hitting the gnarled walnut of a pit at its center. The dried apricots looked, to her, like shriveled tongues and their insides tasted of velvet, soft against her mouth, smooth and rich as though filled with preserves. Her mother kept the dried apricots in a glass jar by the stove, the wrinkled flesh of the fruit piled high next to the Kosher salt.

            At fourteen her mother met a new man and on the weekends she was shipped a town over to stay with her grandmother who had a floral wallpapered kitchen and a cuckoo clock that looked like a black cat. On the hour the cat’s tongue would dart out of its mouth and its tail would sway with the seconds. It bellowed like a ship’s horn instead of dinging and sometimes, on Sunday afternoons before her mother came to pick her up, she would follow the tail’s trajectory and nearly fall out of her seat at the blaring of the hour. Her grandmother made fresh apricot jam, slicing the fruit and boiling it down in a grey pot on the old gas stove, adding sugar by the cupful. She ate the jam, pale orange and quaveringly gelatinous, on scones her grandmother baked fresh every Friday. It sat rich and tart and sweet all at once on her tongue and the cat wagged its tail and stuck out its own tongue as though asking for jam.

            At twenty-one on a trip with some girls from her college she tasted apricot-wine. They were deep in the valley surrounded by vineyards, grape vines crawling up the hills around them. There were four of them, all taking the same history course at the local university, and they stood leaning against the butcher block bar while men in white button downs served them quarter cups of wine to taste. The apricot-wine was a pale blush color with little bubbles of carbonation floating through it like clouds. When she took her first sip of it she swore that she’d been blasted back to seven when she bit into her first apricot and was met with an explosion of sweet unexpected flavor married with the smooth furred texture of the apricot’s skin.

            At twenty-three her mother had signed her up for a mail order fruit delivery service that sent a carton of apricots to her door at the beginning of every week. At first she kept pace with the fruit. She ate it fresh, she boiled it down into jam, baked it into muffins. But when her mother got sick and she was called away from her small home, on the edge of the valley, to spend stretches of time in the hospital fetching ice chips, she fell behind. A neighbor, who’d been given a key for just such circumstances, brought the apricots into the house every week and set them on the kitchen counter to rest. These apricots never seemed to go bad as they had in her lunch bag as a child, they instead stayed perfectly round and sunset-colored, piling in the corners of the kitchen, spilling from what had once been the utensil drawer.

            When her mother died she brought home the glass bowl shaped of palm fronds and filled it with the fruit. She set the glass jar that had once held the dried apricots next to her own Kosher salt and filled it with the peach-colored globes. The fruit spilled from her cabinets, filled the entirety of her dishwasher, and carpeted the floor like a round-topped shag rug, soft against her feet. She tried calling the mail order company, tried telling them that her mother was dead, there would be no more payments, no more fruit, but the apricots continued to arrive. Each week a new carton of them appeared on her doorstep and she’d carry them inside. If they’d gone rotten she might have considered getting rid of them, but they stayed tart and sweet and tense at first bite the way they should, and she couldn’t bring herself to throw out the fruit that stayed, somehow, just as she liked it – on the cusp of ripeness.

            At twenty-four the apricots began to taste sour. It wasn’t just the ones that filled her kitchen, and now dining and living rooms. She’d thought of that as she brought the fresh ones into her home and bit into them to find the fruit’s flesh gravelly and sour and so she’d gone to the market and bought a singular apricot. She’d wrapped it in the cellophane bags that were kept on a thick roll by the fruit displays and paid thirty-five cents for it. She hadn’t even waited until she got home to sink her teeth into the soft flesh. It tasted rotten. Cloying and muddy. It tasted almost of death, the way her mother had smelled in her last hours – musky and rank and yet somehow unbearably sweet.

            At home there was another carton of apricots waiting on her door step. She kicked it away instead of scooping it up, as she normally did. When she opened her door she had to put her weight behind it and with a great heave she cleared a path in the maw of her home, a wedge devoid of apricots. When the door closed behind her with a creak and click that reminded her of the bellow of her grandmother’s cuckoo clock, she squinted against the dark to see the distorted shadows of her home cast onto the bumpy surface of thousands of apricots. They were everywhere. They coated her walls now, climbed her kitchen counters in pyramidic piles, they peered out of the crevices between her couch cushions and filled the gaps between her books. They sat in her kitchen chairs and lodged themselves in drawers and cabinets and appliances. They filled her sink. Still holding the cellophane bag from the market she first sat and then laid down on her kitchen floor. The fruits popped and burst beneath her weight and she felt the front of her shirt grow wet as they bled. She pressed her face into the rounded tops of the apricots and, closing her eyes, pretended she was skin to skin with her mother, feeling the soft fur of the apricots as the silken down that had once coated her mother’s cheeks.