TACENDA

Photographer - Tobi Brun

WINNER OF ‘THAT’S ABSURD!’ ANTHOLOGY CONTEST; COMING MAY 31ST, 2024

JAMIE GOOD

She wakes from the dream she has had every night she has sex with men. This dream is ongoing, without remedy, and still each night, the dream feels as real, as tangible, as the night prior, perhaps even more so. 

A playwright sleeps next to her, and with her, and he has no idea. Despite being a writer, he is still a kind man. He is so kind, in fact, that she continues to sleep with him, and the morning after she does not want to die. This can not always be said about sexual escapades, especially when it comes to the types of men she usually sleeps with, and so this is of value to her. This dream is but a small hiccup in their relationship. 

That is to say, she could tell the playwright about her dream, and he would comfort her, and would try to understand the dream. He might try to fix it—he has that tendency to try to fix, which annoys her, but not enough yet to mention it to him. Ultimately, however, the playwright would extend his ongoing kindness to her like silk tendrils, wrapping his little cellist (she is also a poet, and a pianist, but the playwright likes her as a cellist) in his placation, like an insect caught in a web who thinks not of his imprisonment or his death but how lovely it is to be macerating in the warm, gentle winds of summer, without the effort of having to beat his wings to enjoy midair. 

But she can’t tell the playwright about the dream because its origins are a touchy subject for them both. She can’t share the dream without also sharing when and where it started; the playwright would need to know to understand, he can’t help her if she doesn’t tell him. She might remind him that he can’t help her at all, this dream is even less in his control than it is in hers, but he is not so sure, and besides, how can he know that if she doesn’t tell him? But he might guess.  

The dream is this: every night, after sex, the cellist is too restless to sleep, but too tired to rise and clean herself, to set about another activity. This pains her, to lie in this state of in-between, an exhausted but unsatisfied consciousness. The cellist might like to bathe, or to read a book, or to make a drink, hot water with lemon, sometimes with gin, oftentimes with gin, everytime with gin, or perhaps the cellist would like to sleep, but perhaps not. The playwright falls asleep immediately after sex, his face seraphic.

But the cellist, in this state of inbetween, feels trapped, unable to move and only to bear witness, to experience the sensation of semen leaking out of her as spiders crawl towards it. This is neither fully cerebral, nor imagined; she can feel the spiders’ legs, their light touches, traveling towards the spreading sour-sweet dampness. She can tense the muscles in her abdomen and feel the semen’s quickening expulsion, she can hear it, she understands it is too what these spiders want, to eat, to crawl into her to feast on what remains inside. She can feel the spiders going into her, drinking in what has been taken from the playwright, laying eggs, biting her, mistaking her insides for his. Every night, the spiders come. 

Then she wakes. She is not sure if she dreamt the spiders or not; she must have dreamt them, because what else would she wake from? But then she is sure the spiders came before she fell asleep, right after sex, was she not wide awake, immobilized, the spider’s thin legs along her own? 

The cellist has begun to place her hands in between her thighs to sleep. This serves both as a barricade to the spiders entering her, and as shortcut; the cellist has taken to scratching at these spiders, batting them away, running her fingers up and down her legs to check that there are no spiders, but she could feel the spiders, she knows she could, they are there, but never once has she found one. 

So they are inside of her. She inserts fingers inside of herself, feeling around, scraping, but nothing is scooped from her except skin cells, soft tissue and blood, and the last of the playwright’s semen. Her insides pill and clump, something wet and solid, to be rolled between her fingers like paper. The spiders could have laid eggs and crawled away. The spiders could have already bitten her. 

The cellist has tried everything to rid herself of this dream, or the potential for it, without revealing to the playwright her dream. They’ve tried barriers, he has finished elsewhere onto her body, but the cellist is not without the fear, she can explain away all of their precautions, she knows still the spiders will come. The spiders still come. 

Three-hundred-and-thirty-seven days have passed since the cellist has developed this neurosis. When she thinks about this, she realizes it is not really that long, not even a year. And not every night does she experience this sensation, only on nights she has sex with men, and she is only seeing the playwright so it is only when the playwright spends the evening with her, or she him, does this occurrence take place at all. That is to say, now, she is only experiencing this dream with the playwright. 

After waking, or this perceived waking, she is able to move. She showers. She scrubs the inside and outside of herself, her thighs scratched red-raw, open like a mouth. She makes a drink. It’s her business what the drink is. She rubs lotion into her body. She twists her hair up and with metal that bites into her hair like a jaw. She looks at the clock which reads anywhere from eleven at night to four or five in the morning. 

The playwright lives in a large apartment, the second and third floor of a house he does not own. The ground floor and the basement are inhabited by the violinist who does own the house. The cellist has an extremely good reason for not going to her own house. It’s a great reason, even. 

The two men do not speak to one another. This was not always the case, and this previous history burdens this period of unspeaking further. Currently, the two men are halfway through a play they are three-and-a-half years into developing. The play grows and shrinks and grows and shrinks. It is something of a shared masterpiece, the magnum opus of both men, they think, and other times, they think the play is shit. The play is only halfway complete, and remains halfway complete, as the two men continue not to speak to one another. 

That is not to say there has come a standstill, or stagnation of progress made on the play. The two men still meet in the afternoons, sometimes on the second floor (the playwright’s), and sometimes on the ground floor (the man’s), sometimes in the morning. They work at the same lenient company. They never meet in the basement or on the top floor, as that is where the two men’s beds are, and this is where all of their problems lie. 

The playwright is both a playwright and costume designer. The violinist is not so much of a playwright as he is a poet, and a visual artist, and a musician.  Together, the two men are like five men, all working together on this play that may or may not come to fruition.

They met at work. The playwright works as a costume designer and the violinist works as a photographer, or a critic of photographs; it is unclear to the playwright. The violinist is a critic, the playwright decides. That is primarily what he brings to the play. He critiques.  He offers criticism. He criticizes. 

Neither man is sure what the play is about, and this suits them. 

And what does the cellist do? She teaches ballet. She is not exceptional at ballet; that is why she is young and teaching, instead of dancing professionally. Professionally, she is a cellist, and a pianist. It would benefit the two men to have her help with this play, once, some time ago, she did help with this play. For a while, it was discussed that maybe the cellist does perform in this play; she could be the clown dancing (she is not an exceptional dancer, this is true, but she is skilled enough), but now that is no longer on the table. 

It was originally the violinist’s idea to have the cellist dance in the play, and now he can’t believe he suggested such an idea. For one, she is not as great of a dancer as he was originally led to believe. He was blinded by something he continues to not confront, he realizes. Okay. Okay. That’s no secret. It is a secret. And anyway. 

The violinist restarts his train of thinking. Being beautiful is not the same as being a talented dancer; he can’t believe he conflated the two. Additionally, this is an absurd play, as in, the genre is absurdism. The cellist knows nothing about the absurd. The violinist has even tried to lend her his copies of theories and works of absurdists the cellist didn’t understand. She didn’t understand it. She returned the work and had nothing to say about it. She didn’t understand it, the violinist said again to the playwright, who dared to bring up that perhaps the cellist was right for the play after all, this two-person project could again become three, and this was the first and last time this expansion of creative thinking was brought to the table. The two men continue to work on the play silently. 

Still now, clandestinely, the playwright does seek her help; there’s a choreographed part of the play, with ballet, but it’s clowns doing ballet, a sexual, weird sort of ballet he says, he’s not sure if he understands, he is sure she doesn’t understand, the violinist’s opinion does sway him, even if he won’t admit it, but he won’t admit it, so would she offer her opinion?

Meanwhile, the cellist goes to work. Work is painful. It reminds her of her shortcomings (dancing) and keeps her from her passions (music). Poetry fits into none of this. After work, she is involved with two different orchestras: one she plays the piano in, and another she plays the cello in. But she is so tired after dancing! Sometimes, she dances even more than her students. 

Years ago, the violinist formerly played in both orchestras the cellist plays in, but when they met, he was then only playing in one. The cellist suspects he is no longer permitted to play in the other orchestra for reasons he will not share. 

The violinist tells the cellist it has worked out. He has too much going on in his life to be in two orchestras. The violinist is very talented, and multi-disciplinary. He has gallery showings of his work: paintings and photographs, and this supersedes the second orchestra, the lesser of the two orchestras. 

At the violinist’s orchestra practice, the two do not look at one another and they do not speak. Again, this was not always the case. The violinist and the cellist met playing together in this orchestra. 

They all know what hangs in the room between them, and they do not look at it. It is too close for their eyes to focus on, anyway, suppose they did want to look at it—they couldn’t. It’s blurry. 

The cellist is upset that the violinist remains speaking to the playwright (even though they are not speaking, but silent in a room together) but will not look at her (he will not look at the playwright either, but that is beside the point). The violinist and the cellist each have their own reasons for remaining upset, but not to the degree in which they relate to one another. That was a long time ago. 

Unrelated: The playwright doesn’t like the violinist’s poetry.

Unrelated: The cellist doesn’t the violinist’s poetry, either. 

Unrelated: The violinist thinks the cellist does not pursue music as vigorously as she ought to. 

Unrelated: The playwright is creeped out by the visual art of both the violinist and the cellist, believing the violinist to be given too much credit and the cellist to be given too much allowance.

Unrelated: The cellist and the violinist do not think the playwright is a very good writer. What could be worse than a writer, and a poor one? 

What could be worse: a painter, and a poor one. But unfortunately, the violinist is very talented. 

Here is a house with three people, in triangles of hatred. All three of them hate one another (to varying degrees) and themselves (to the same degree). The house is so full of tension it has actually compacted, like a spine; the house used to be six inches taller. The house is a bit sore. It’s growing stiff. 

The cellist has an extremely good reason for not going to her own house. It’s a great reason, even. 

What lingers from this hatred in all of its past and present is the spiders. The cellist can’t tell the playwright about these spiders, because that would be to acknowledge the origins, which of course they all know, but still, it is much less painful for everyone not to hear this spoken aloud. But it’s the origin of the dream, and the spiders came, and have continued to come since. And more to the point: the playwright was once in the same position as her. Truly, the same position as her. Might he have suffered the same dream? But it was so long ago, he might say. They’ve sorted it out now. That was then, and this is now, and it is behind them, so let’s look at what’s in front of them, what’s on them, inside of them. Maybe they would not talk about it at all, and have sex instead. This is a common way of addressing their relationship problems. 

So what would she gain from telling the playwright? The playwright will think she thinks of the spiders, or the origins thereof, when she is in bed with him, or afterwards. She doesn’t, she would tell him, afterwards she only thinks of the spiders, because they are crawling inside of her, but still, the playwright would worry. And that’s only afterwards! She didn’t mean to say spiders, she doesn’t think of them during sex at all. During sex, she thinks of him, him, him him. Yes, you. The playwright. My god! 

None of this is fair, thinks the cellist. She was not born yesterday. She knows the playwright thinks about what he worries she thinks about. He must. He must. She is not the only one to have experienced it. And this, they have it in common. They have it in common! Him, even longer! Even more! So why is she excluded from the play, and not the playwright?

She doesn’t want to be in the play. Last week, she came downstairs for a slice of lemon, for her drink, and caught sight of the play growing arms and hands, two long papery limbs. Disgusting. 

Meanwhile, the two of them (the playwright and the cellist) have become independently obsessed with beetles. For the cellist, this has been ongoing. She discovered beetles first. Yes, she would say, it does annoy her a little bit to see beetles come up in this play the two men are working on, the play she is excluded from.  For the past two days, the playwright has been sewing a costume of a giant beetle dressed as a king, and the cellist has been referring to it as King Beetle even though the playwright has been insisting that the beetle is not a king, only dressed so. Then why couldn’t she refer to it as a king, if it has dressed itself as so? Because it is not a king, the playwright insists, he knows she is using King Beetle in a derogatory way, and this is as far as they get in the discussion. King Beetle takes up nearly the entire second floor, the cellist thinks resentfully, even though King Beetle is taking up a single dining room chair. 

The cellist was continuing her series she started before she started seeing the playwright: portraits of mouths wide open, full of dermestids, eating the gums off of sets of teeth. The cellist loves the dermestid beetles for their vulture-like qualities, their insistence on only seeking sustenance from what is in a state of decay. Bird-insects. 

Meanwhile, there’s been some sort of pause with the two men’s work, and they’ve spent the last three weeks in silence, sitting at the kitchen table of the playwright’s, scribbling away on paper like two small children told to remain quiet or else. The play was at a critical point. The violinist and playwright had reached a creative peak. The play was almost finished. It was all coming to one massive culmination, the play had seized both of them by the neck and was banging their heads together like a toy monkey crashing symbols. Something was missing from it, something small, but crucial, and they were so close to knowing what, the play would be finished, a ten-act play, forty-thousand words, they guessed, a five-hour performance, a masterpiece. A play like this had never been done. They weren’t going to move from the table until they figured it out. 

Both men had stopped going outside to smoke; the playwright had stopped smoking entirely and the violinist sat smoking at the table, and because the two men were not talking, the playwright could not ask the violinist not to smoke in his house please, to which the violinist would remind the playwright that he, the playwright, does not own the house but is a tenant of the violinist, who does own the house. 

So the smell wafted around them, while the playwright ate slowly and with quiet fury, thinking, letting each cracker go soft and wet, fully liquid before swallowing the wheat-water, then another cracker. The manuscript of the last three acts was spread across them, notes and highlights and words burned out with the ends of cigarettes, a different word, a synonym, a substitution, an object, something better, written around it in the nearly illegible handwriting of the playwright. They were certain something was missing from the last three acts. Around them, half-finished and fully-finished costumes were thrown over chairs, dressed over mannequins, scattered across the floor, King Beetle proudly in the center. 

So the violinist was going to smoke in his house. The playwright was going to invite the cellist to play a melody on the piano again, he was sure a musical element was missing, and wanted to think while listening, and so the cellist was in a now three-occupied room. 

This was a mistake. Now neither men were thinking about the play and were instead thinking about what hangs between them. Communal misery. All suffocating, frozen the way one does when approached with something temperamental, dangerous, and volatile in a state of calm, not wanting the behemoth to startle.

If the violinist was honest with himself, he did want to provoke a little. But he wouldn’t. But this was his house, and honestly, it was beginning to feel feverish, an alleyway full of hot sun-garbage, was this not his home? The cellist was aware the violinist was thinking of her as garbage, and the playwright, who was eyeing his King Beetle costume; he didn’t want the smell to seep into the fabric.  Enough time has passed between the violinist and the playwright, goes the argument. Enough time has not passed between the violinist and the cellist. Why doesn’t she get that? It’s simple. 

No time has passed between the playwright and the cellist. They were inside one another this morning. 

This thought occurred to the violinist, who became so disgusted he went downstairs; he couldn’t look at anyone he said, and the cellist and playwright looked at one another. Shame joined all that hung unspoken and heavy between them: a thick, useless spider descending from a web, and the sex the playwright and the cellist had that evening was quick and furious, both wanting the other to finish so the sex could be over without the disatisfaction of a failed orgasm, so nothing more might hang between them. 

King Beetle was brought out and puppeted around after this, the playwright needed to think but again the cellist was immobilized and the spiders came and crawled and feasted and bit her, she could hear the spiders inside of her sucking out the semen, she could feel their sticky-warm legs inside of her, tracking the semen inside and out of her again like mud stuck to the bottom of shoes treading on carpet, and how far and how not far she was from her childhood, doesn’t everything repeat itself, how she was in this house with these two adults who hated her and loved her and hated her and cared for her and hated her with the burdened, emotional way of disinterested parents. 

The cellist woke up and did not wake up. The house sucked its teeth at her. King Beetle lay across the bedroom floor like a popped balloon. The playwright was downstairs not speaking again with the violinist, the two sat at the table, the playwright still unsmoking and honestly, thought the violinist, this was helping nothing, they’d be much better off if the playwright would just have a cigarette. The cellist could hear the silence creep down the house, through the walls like a spreading infection. The house should be amputated. The house should be cauterized. The house should be euthanized, she thought, aborted, deemed inviable. 

The cellist woke up again, convinced she was pregnant. This was not the first time she awoke with this distinct notion, yet another recurring and inescapable feeling. She went downstairs and told the playwright she thought she was pregnant, in front of the violinist, who laughed for a long, long time, announced he was hanging himself, and went outside to smoke. He was not going to hang himself, the playwright said, his eyes and mouth too open. The playwright smiled when he was nervous, or uncomfortable, and all of his teeth showed like an upset horse. Was she sure?

No, she said, but she had begun to have this growing premonition, something ongoing and worsening, and tonight she could stand it no longer. 

Nothing was open. It was eleven-thirty at night. They would go to see a doctor in the morning. A large part of the playwright thought the cellist was suffering some sort of anxiety disorder. Or worse. What could be worse? He didn’t want to entertain those notions. 

A small part of him worried perhaps she was pregnant, and then what? They were halfway through their play. He wasn’t ready for a child. And what if the play was a success? What if it demanded a sequel? Perhaps the child would be fit to be in the play, he thought. King Beetle (now he too referred to the creature as King Beetle; he heard too much of its nickname) might need an heir, a successor. He did not tell the cellist any of this. He sensed she was resentful of King Beetle, and her resentment made King Beetle a shy performer, self conscious. 

All night the two men worked silently on the play, and when morning came they had two new characters who did not fit into the plot and whom neither man could remember creating, and three-thousand less words than when they started. The violinist stabbed his chained cigarettes into the play over and over and over again like bullets, the text illegible and charred. Everything around him, everything that came out of him, or came to him, or came from him, or came in him, or came in front of him, was shit. The playwright drove the cellist to purchase a pregnancy test. She purchased four. She needed to be sure, she said. 

At home, all four tests came back negative. Thank Christ, the playwright said. He felt even less prepared for fatherhood this morning than he had felt last night. The violinist said nothing about the news and went outside to smoke. He started smoking outside again. The playwright had too much of a presence in the room. It ruined his smoking. The cellist did not react. She looked at each test and threw it away. So she was not pregnant. But the feeling persisted. 

She felt that she was pregnant with herself, not that she had impregnated herself, but rather that she was two selves, the fetus and the mother, and failing in her performance of both roles. The playwright did not understand. She was afraid of both herself and pregnancy. But you’re not pregnant, the playwright said, but that didn’t matter, she believed that she was suffering a miscarriage, they had taken the test too late, it would have come back positive if she had taken it earlier. 

Her miscarriage was of herself. The playwright stopped listening because he didn’t understand, he was thinking about how King Beetle had been moved downstairs, not because of the cellist, but because now, like the playwright, the violinist needed to look at King Beetle while he worked. But now the violinist was alone with King Beetle! Suppose something should happen, and the playwright was not there!

The cellist has stopped talking and the playwright has not realized. She is experiencing her affairs privately, her miscarriage is taking place so far inside of her that no one can see it; it will be a long, long time before anything is expelled, for there to be any evidence something was wrong to begin with. But she knows about the miscarriage. She knows she, herself, the mother, the fetus, was not made to exist in the world. She could feel the fetus of herself rotting just underneath her heart. She moves through the world aware of this decay.

Downstairs, the play grows legs, and its tail absorbs back inside of itself, and begins to nurse from the house. 

The playwright eventually notices that the cellist has not spoken for an indefinite amount of time. He has not even seen the cellist move. He asks the violinist how long he has been gone for. The violinist says at least a month. The violinist! He has always lied, thought the playwright, he’s a liar. That’s a source of both the playwright’s and the cellist’s hatred (The playwright is a liar. The cellist is a liar). The violinist wants to be left alone with King Beetle, he wants the playwright to think he can be trusted for so long, a whole month. It’s been three hours, the playwright says, he has some choice words for the violinist the playwright wasn’t even aware he knew, and the violinist reminds the playwright he is the playwright’s landlord, the playwright is but his tenant, a creative serf. 

The playwright goes outside and asks the neighbor how long it's been. The house has pinchers that open and close slowly. Since what’s been? The neighbor wants to know, and the playwright can’t figure out what to tell him. The playwright goes back inside and looks at the cellist, who looks gaunt. The house smooths hair from the cellist's face in a way that is not romantic but is also not distinctly un-romantic. It is a caress. It is a caress, he can see it. He can see the outline of her teeth through the skin on her face, she is so thin. Jesus, the playwright realizes, it has been a whole month-and-a-half of silence, of the cellist doing nothing but lying in his bed, their bed, she has an extremely good reason, a great reason, even, for not going to her house, and now she is lying in his bed, their bed, it is their bed, he doesn’t mean to keep calling it his bed, and now she is lying in his, their bed, really, their bed, watching spiders lope across the ceiling. 

The spiders are loping. Loping and eloping, look at all those little egg sacs strung along the ceiling like christmas lights, but more than eloping they are quite literally loping, like gazelles; the spiders are galloping up and across the walls and ceilings, sprinting, to what, to what? The playwright wants to know, he has never really paid attention to spiders; they bore him. 

The cellist looks even more emaciated. Has it been another month of watching these spiders lope and elope? The playwright felt if he neared the cellist, he would be able to see her blood pulsing through her capillaries, the outline of her nervous system. He looks away and the cellist has gone out for a walk, she said, it’s all coming back to him now. 

On her walk, the cellist passes snail shells she thinks are empty, but are instead full of flies, and maggots. When she is almost home, she sees a ground beetle, belly up, ants eating its innards. Not once does she see anything alive.

The playwright takes her to see a doctor, who asks her how long she’s been sick for. What the cellist wants to say is that she’s been sick her entire life, something accidentally born but that should have been deemed unfit for life. 

The cellist wants to tell this doctor that she, the cellist, is ill-suited towards the world, that she shouldn’t be here, that she isn’t fit for life, not physically, but yes physically, so physically, and on the inside too, cerebrally, corporeally, in every since of the world she isn’t fit for the world, look. She’s like a sick embryo trying to attach to an inhospitable uterus. The embryo can’t implant! The conditions are not correct, and it must be expelled, or rot inside, or both. The world is a hostile environment and she is a hostile environment!

The doctor doesn’t know what the cellist is talking about, and starts recounting facts about inhospitable uteruses, causes of the hostile environment: infection, anorexia, and so on. Has the cellist always been so thin? When did she stop eating? The cellist is unconcerned with eating. She is in a period of her expulsion-rot. And there is already so much to expel-rot. Why should she consume any more? Why should she take in any more? Nothing else should enter her. It is unfit! She is unfit! 

The doctor is annoyed that the cellist is attempting to entertain him with her theatrics, when what he wants to know is why she was sick for so long, why she did not come in sooner.

The cellist was extremely busy, she tells him. And she was busy! She was preoccupied with herself. Besides, she said, The house has a stomach-ache, and that takes precedence. It’s hot outside. It is so, so hot outside. The house doesn’t do well in the heat. 

The cellist is asked to take another pregnancy test. It comes back negative. The cellist gives blood, and three days later that test returns negative too. No parasites. No tapeworms that will have to be cut out of her, pulled and pulled and pulled like tricks clowns perform at a circus, the strings of multicolored tissues all tied together, attached to the feet of a dove. 

In the house that continues to shrink, the cellist drives her palms into her navel, elbows jutting forwards, shoulder blades separating and coming around to meet her chest. She can’t stop putting more pressure. It is nearly excruciating. 

I am certain that something is growing inside of me, she tells the playwright, pressing harder still. He tries to pull her hands away from her stomach. He reminds her of the pregnancy test, the blood test, how there can’t be. 

I know there is, she said. I know it, I know it, I know it. The playwright goes downstairs, to King Beetle and the violinist, neither of whom speak, or give him any such troubles. The cellist goes for another evening walk. A routine. She sees a slug, ants and maggots again feasting on what remains of a carcass. She wonders if she will ever see her dermestids in real life. The violinist and the playwright accidentally make eye contact. The tension is something rope-like and gelatinous, something each man wants the end of in his mouth, pulled taut between them. 

The play is one hundred-and-twenty-thousand words. It is an entire novel, it is too long for a novel, and still it is not finished, and still neither of the two men know why. There are so many pages. Okay, so it is more than one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand words. The play has become something mechanic, and structural, towering over them. And they are tall men! Not the playwright, he is a little stout and has the beginnings of bow-leggedness. Not the violinist either, he could be tall, but he is stooped, and has poor posture from sulking, and hunching over from the cold when he goes outside to smoke. This stoop exaggerates his skinny legs and round, bloated torso, the playwright notices, the violinist could pass for a spider. 

The playwright refuses to take off the King Beetle costume. He had to sew allowances in the costume as to make it fit him; he made it for someone much smaller (who?), but these allowances are a small price to pay for consolation that the violinist is not touching King Beetle. The playwright will not take the King Beetle costume off even to bathe or have sex with the cellist. This is fine with the cellist. She is thinking about how today on her walk, a bug flew into her eye. She is not all that sure the bug came out, and then what happened to the bug? Does it stay trapped underneath the skin below her eye? She knew someone as a child who used to pull that skin open like a pocket and stick their fingers into it, their knuckles touching their eye. The cellist can’t think of this without feeling squeamish, without thinking she might vomit. The bug stays. But now what? Is that tiny bug, a fruit fly, she thinks, or a gnat, trapped indefinitely. Will it rot underneath the skin of her face?

King Beetle finishes inside of her, and the spiders come. 

She lies awake. Next to her, King Beetle’s snores are muffled by a fabric face covering. The house is feeling a bit antsy. The house is tossing and turning. 

Downstairs, the violinist stands on the balcony and smokes, holding onto the railing for balance. Someone should feed the house a bit of ginger, to settle it. Someone should feed the house a bit of gin, to settle it. No. What is good for a toothache? Rum. He thinks of child-rearing, rubbing rum fingers on teething gums. He is a poet.  

Enough about children, the violinist is smoking, and he wants to enjoy it. He can’t do so thinking about children, especially given all that’s just not happened with the cellist. The violinist is permanently smoking. He can’t un-purse his lips, like in the stories children are told about crossing their eyes, and their eyes sticking so. Children again! But they can’t uncross their eyes! He can’t un-purse his lips, he is chronically puckered, as if about to kiss. More poetry. He doesn’t even write poetry. Yes he does. But he doesn’t. He plays the violin and smokes. He drinks out of glasses around his cigarette, the wine staining the yellow butts somewhere closer to green. Nicotine has dulled his appetite and he becomes skinnier, more spiderlike, thin, jumpy limbs that threaten and flirt with the balcony, his stomach swelling with wine and expanding ribs. He’s been having a lot of girls over lately. They are girls, the playwright and the cellist insist, King Beetle agrees, the rotting embryo agrees, the mother agrees, even the house agrees. These girls are college-aged, most aren’t even twenty, and the playwright and the cellist have to listen to the sex through two floors of the house, the sound bursting through the storeys like arteries. 

The cellist goes for another walk, not wanting to listen to the blood-moans. It’s not even that late at night, only eight, and still light out, the air carried over the bay, thick with the smell of salt and fish still alive, swimming in an ocean warm and empty like a stomach. She inhales and it feels like pool water going up her nose, the chlorine irritating the cartilage around her nose. She finds more empty snail shells, insects and worms anxious to crawl out with each disturbance. Another bug flies into her eye, and she worries she can’t blink enough to expel it. 

She goes home and lies in bed with King Beetle, who has had a day. They lost an entire section of the play, act six and half of act seven. The play is too small to see. The cellist doesn’t understand. Lost as in missing? Scrapped? Forgotten? King Beetle wants to talk about the play but can’t, and the words agitate him, vibrating in his body so his entire form trembles, shaking the bed. This upsets the house, who can’t cry anymore, and instead wails and rocks, heavy and careening. Some of the spider’s webs are irritated too, and the spiders begin their descent downwards. King Beetle rolls on top of the cellist. The spiders are hungry, but they can be patient. They can wait, and they do, and King Beetle comes, and she comes, and the spiders come. 

She is certain they are biting her. She has been certain this whole time of their biting, but tonight she can feel it, she knows she can feel it, and how could she have missed this sensation the whole time? And these spiders, all the same, all the brown recluse, the Loxosceles, violin-spiders, fiddlebacks. 

The cellist has all sorts of premonitions that King Beetle and the playwright and the violinist and her unborn child and the house are all tired of hearing, but she isn’t. There is something not right with the violin spiders. There is something not right with the violin spiders. They are not harmless, and there’s other kinds, she knows this, kinds that aren’t known about but something in her gut knows of them, and she’s convinced of the Loxosceles tenochtitlan, not yet discovered but she knows of it, she knows of it, King Beetle shudders, shaking her worries and thoughts off of him like a horse tossing its head to rid itself of flies, she’s thinking of horses now, everything reminds her of her childhood, her childhood hasn’t stopped but is ongoing, cyclical, she’s with her parents, she’s watching her neighbor’s horses, and she can’t figure out how to put the horses’ fly masks on, and the horses’ breath pained and agitated in quick snuffs, its nostrils flaring, and so many flies are on the horses eyes, directly on the cornea, crawling and crawling and crawling and she can’t even look into the horses’ eyes they are so covered in flies, doing what, the horses’ breath coming faster, and she can’t figure out how to put the fly masks on.

The Loxosceles tenochtitlan has crawled inside of her, and has bitten her. She knows this, she can picture its dorsal pattern, that distinct violin shape, the lesions of rotting flesh left after a bite, a foot across, more than a foot across, larger than her womb, larger than a face, wider than a child, the flesh blackened and inflamed and decaying and this is the cause of her hostile environment, the dead tissue around the puncture, and there are so many punctures. What if the beetles come now? What if the beetles crawl out of her portraits?

There’s nothing to be done, she thinks. Fine. Instinctively, she knows everything about these spiders; they are as much inside of her, a part of her, as ingrained as her genes, with all of its inherited knowledge, how she knows without being taught how to blink and swallow. 

She wakes up. But she didn’t sleep. What is there to wake up from? King Beetle lies completely still. Fine. The cellist gets up, and has gin and lemon and hot water. Two pairs of footsteps come down the stairs, whisperings, and neither pair of footsteps belong to the violinist. Fine. King Beetle is behind her, rubbing her lower back, working up to her shoulders. How long have you been awake for? He wants to know. I am always awake, she says. She meant to add, At this hour. It’s one o’clock. She wants to play the cello, and she can’t! Go to sleep! She can’t play with an audience. She can’t play with an audience. Go to sleep!

Jesus Christ, the playwright said. Where is King Beetle? He’s downstairs. It’s his turn? Whose turn? His turn. If the cellist was being honest with herself, she was beginning to think for a moment that King Beetle and the playwright were the same person, indistinguishable. But now she sees. It has divorced parents. There is joint custody. The playwright does not know what she is talking about. She is staring into the face of King Beetle. Where is the playwright? I’m here, King Beetle says. He is sweating so much the antennae hang down like rabbit ears. The costume is soaked through. 

It’s summer, and everything is in rot. It’s too hot. It only continues to get hot, and then what? More rotting. More rotting more rotting more rotting. And there’s nowhere to go! 

King Beetle is hungry. It’s eight a.m. Has she been taking what she was given by the doctor?

Oh God, the cellist remembers. She was given a whole assortment, all sorts of multicolored pills for her sampling, like confetti, like candy, like everything reminiscent of childhood. Antidepressants and anti-anxieties and antipsychotics. These aren’t for me, she decided, scattering them through the yard like birdseed. It is birdseed. The birds come and eat these multicolored pills and forget they are birds. 

The playwright cuts open a papaya and scoops out the seeds. They don’t sell papayas here, the cellist tells him. Where did you get that? King Beetle has no idea what she is talking about. The playwright is scaling the wall like a spider. The violinist delivers a bill to his, their kitchen. He wants to charge the cellist rent, because she is in his house so much. I have an extremely good reason for not going to my house, she writes on the bill. Great, even. She puts the bill on the kitchen table of the ground floor, the violinist’s floor, unpaid. She goes for another walk. She passes by someone dressed in too many layers for the heat: gloves, cap, long socks, a jacket pulled over a sweater pulled over a long sleeve. The cellist wears a short-sleeve dress of thin layers of cotton and she is sweating, the cotton winding itself around the knobs of her spine like strings, like a marionette puppet. Who is puppeting her? Everyone. She has never not been a puppet. The cellist asks the pedestrian if she is not hot, it is so, so hot outside, I’m practicing, the pedestrian says, and refuses to say more. 

In the evening, she makes a drink of just lemon and gin, the glass pulled from the freezer. Let it shatter! It doesn’t. This is fine. The cellist is used to disappointment. It is not the right sort of weather for hot water. King Beetle wants gin too. Fine, she says. The playwright has sex with her on the kitchen floor. The spiders come. Kitchen spiders, now tracking tiny bits of food inside of her. And what did she say? No more consuming. Nothing inside. Nothing inside! No one is listening to her. She is yelling this, nothing more inside of her, please, but the walls of the house swallow the noise, a one-way sound-mirror. She listens to the violinist having sex two storeys down. Only expulsion! Only expulsion! 

The play has begun to hunch, and shuffle instead of walk. 

She goes for another walk, after she wakes up. It is too hot to sleep. Outside, a senior citizen sits on a bench underneath a streetlight. The cellist can’t recall the last time she saw a senior citizen. She’s been terrible about leaving the house for orchestra practice and work. Her dance students are probably standing at the barre, leaning, or sitting, or gossiping. They should be stretching. Warming up!

The senior citizen is scratching at a sore on his leg, and scratching, and scratching. The cellist can’t look away. The senior citizen periodically stops, inspecting his hand, the fingertips of which are covered in blood and peeling skin, right up to the first knuckle. Sometimes he brings his hand to his face. It is too dark to see what he does with his hand so close to his face—is he smelling? Licking? She remembers being taught that with cuts and wounds, to put the blood back in her mouth, to reabsorb, so nothing is lost. The senior citizen scratches with new vigor, determination, on and on, checking his hand, scratching again. He’s going to claw right to the bone, she thinks, blood runs down the outside of his shin, staining his shoe. The cellist goes home. She wants the playwright to sleep with his arms around her. She thinks of the first night they slept together, before he fell asleep, before the spiders came, her body in front of his, both of them lying on their sides, she the smaller spoon. The playwright had wrapped his arms around her chest, and she can remember tipping her head forward, pressing her lips into his forearm, the very soft sigh she heard from him, how nothing needed to be said between them. 

At home, the playwright is asleep, and King Beetle has finished her gin. This is fine. She didn’t want gin, she wanted to play her cello. No, she really did want gin. She goes downstairs to pilfer some of the violinist’s gin. He doesn't notice. He is outside smoking. He is growing extra tufts of hair because it still gets cool at night. He could smoke inside, he thinks. Why doesn’t he? But the playwright is inside. The playwright never goes outside. It’s too hot. 

Downstairs, the play has been placed into the fireplace, intact, only smeared in charcoal. It is too hot to light the fireplace and burn the play. 

The cellist drinks the violinist’s gin, lies down next to the playwright, and wraps his arms around herself, a cocoon of warm and heavy flesh. The playwright presses his mouth into the back of her neck. He is so tired, and his head is so heavy. He is pressing his head so hard into her. She’s worried his nose will smush too, and he’ll suffocate behind her like this. 

The playwright wakes up first. It has been morning forever. The earth has never known night.

 The playwright doesn’t know where King Beetle is. The violinist has King Beetle. The violinist is refusing to give King Beetle back. This is it. The playwright shares the pilfered gin. They can’t have any sort of relationship, the playwright says. No, he says to the cellist. Not you and me. He meant the violinist. He’s done working with the violinist. The play is done. No, not complete. Done as in, the playwright is finished working on it. No, not finished. He’s sick of the play. It’s remaining partially-complete forever. It’s in the fireplace, didn’t she see? It’s about chess now. They’ve been playing the same game of chess all summer, didn’t she see? Chess, yes, chess! They’ve lost another four acts of the play, anyhow. Four acts. Didn’t I tell you? The cellist looks at him. I did tell you, the playwright insists. I did tell you. He looks hurt that she doesn’t remember. 

The play exists now in its final form, unfinished, and in the fireplace, awaiting its cremation. This is always how the play was going to go. He’s ecstatic. The whole house vibrates in excitement. The play is done! It’s in its final form! He and the cellist don’t even know how to go about celebrating; this was so unexpected. They finish the violinist’s gin, and have sex again on the kitchen floor, no it isn’t sex, it’s hungrier, the cellist wants the playwright’s entire body inside of her, not just a part of him, she wants the sounds of her teeth on his bones rubbing into her skull. 

The violinist knocks on their door. She is paying rent, he says. Or eviction. He’s dead serious. He does not care about this alleged extremely good reason, and he thinks the cellist is lying. He knows her. She is a liar. If anyone knows that, it’s him. Unlock the door. He knows her. The playwright and the cellist do not want to listen to this, and have even louder sex. The violinist understands now. He thought maybe that was what was going on, but now he knows for certain. He makes a loud remark about the cellist, to be heard over the noise the playwright and cellist are making, something about her sexual history, or tendencies, that the playwright did not previously know. The cellist didn’t tell him. He looks at her, horrified. The violinist is lying, the cellist says. The violinist insists he isn’t, and offers more damning evidence, more facts, how could he know that, and not the playwright? The playwright doesn’t know what to think. He can’t believe this. The violinist continues to talk through the door. The playwright is pushing the cellist off of him, he can’t look at her, he doesn’t understand, why she wouldn’t tell him, the door is open, the violinist is the only one dressed, and very dressed, is he going somewhere formal? 

What ensues next:

What ensues next: What should have been happening this entire time. 

What ensues next: Enough with King Beetle and the house and the fetus and the mother and the neighbor-strangers and the spiders. Too, too, too too many. It is just the three of them: the playwright, the violinist, and the cellist. It has always just been the three of them, the playwright, the violinist, and the cellist, even without these spiders, who have only come from a splitting, like a worm cut in half to make two new, living worms.  No more of this dividing and reconfiguring; it is time to take all of these splits and join them all back into the original, what began with a division through a combining, what shouldn’t have and divisions and combinations have continued since and that is where the spider-sickness originates. 

What ensues next:

What ensues next: But what are they to do with that? 

What ensues next:

What ensues next:

What ensues next: Palms and feet and tensed fingers everywhere: the floor the walls, her small, damp, body on top of his, and him, he too, he doesn’t know if he wants to be closer or farther, who he would hit, is he the mother or the father, the father, the father, the mother, her pulling a head back and open, unsunned white and at a right-angle, to give time to nose or jaw or teeth, he is larger than her and so is he, shocked but not in shock, he is there, three sets of clothes flung into open throat of the house, the gaping ceiling, three bodies dressed in what has been pulled too tightly and has snapped, the three entirely indistinguishable, the three entirely indistinguishable, he is there in between and outside and apart and inside, what closes and opens, too much straddled, not one of them stops him, his hands just where her ribs stop, his hands on top of her shoulders pushing her downwards, her ribs upwards and outsides and still and still and still, what comes from the house, what comes in the house, the house is the only one making sounds, loud sounds, its the house too-inside of her not the men, the house is tensing, waiting to jump, waiting for what comes, the spiders swaying in their corner-webs, quivering, beginning their descent downwards, patient and familiar and hungry.

Jamie Good is waiting for the fairies to come and abduct her back into the fairy world. Until then, she has not at all been a menace and has only ever been up to nice, everyday, perfectly legal things. Follow Jamie on Instagram @jamiempgood.

Distant Cousins

Jasmine Kasper

“Did you know that the only surviving relative of the giraffe is the okapi? Okapi and giraffes are the sole members of the biological family known as Giraffidae. Okapi are naturally solitary, shy creatures that live in densely forested areas, so they probably wouldn't be too interested in attending any family reunions, though.”

Jasmine Kasper is a multimedia artist and writer who focuses on nature, environmental stewardship, and health. Her goal is to make learning about the world around us a fun, positive experience. You can often find her outdoors, creating art, or frantically researching something interesting to share with others. Visit her portfolio website jasminekasper.com or get in touch over email at officialjasminekasper@gmail.com!

Blessed Bugs

Jasmine Kasper

"Praying mantises really are named after the way that their bent forearms resemble the way people fold their arms to pray! Many types of beetles have been observed lifting small objects, but there is no scientific proof that they've ever used this ability for baptisms. Likewise, there are surely ladybugs devoted to eating aphids and some seriously well-behaved snails, but unfortunately, the other creatures in this comic just aren't as real as the praying mantis."

Jasmine Kasper is a multimedia artist and writer who focuses on nature, environmental stewardship, and health. Her goal is to make learning about the world around us a fun, positive experience. You can often find her outdoors, creating art, or frantically researching something interesting to share with others. Visit her portfolio website jasminekasper.com or get in touch over email at officialjasminekasper@gmail.com!

Relationship Surgery

Photographer - Tobi Brun

relationship surgery 

Patients usually ask why we begin the operation on the hands, 

so I tell them: “well, that’s where the disease usually starts”.  

Most people think it dawns in the atriums of the heart, 

the wrinklings of the brain,

or the lobes of the liver; 

but really, the hands are the first to go. 

Too often, people forget that their hands

hold much more than car keys and cell phones; 

they hold memories. 

Like the way he massaged my shoulder blades during candlelit baths. 

They hold more than vanilla-scented chapsticks and crumpled up receipts.

Like the time we stayed up all night tracing freckles until we found our favorite.  

They hold more than dinner utensils and door handles. 

Like my fingertips caressing the small of his back when we made love on the floor.

They hold memories composed of everything (and everyone) 

that you’ve ever touched; 

ones that seep into the skin, 

filling the crevices of every cuticle, 

finding a home underneath the innermost recesses of your fingernail beds. 

This is where they live. 

It’s only when a healthy heart suddenly becomes a broken one, 

that they start their inevitable decay. 

They start their dissolution, a corruption of the soul at the cellular level. 

Once cherished, now discarded memories start to ooze and bleed, they instigate infection–

An infection of the spirit, one that remains unlinked to bodily funguses or disease. 

But when either affliction is left untreated, 

they fester all the same. 

I tell patients about these tangible records, these lingering moments that 

have become trapped beneath the fingernails 

of every person who has touched, 

or been touched, 

by another human’s existence in this world. 

“This is why we start with the hands”, I say. 

They hold more than car keys. 

Brenna Koenig is currently an Embedded Tutor in the English Department at California State University Northridge, where she is completing her Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature (Honors). She has previously worked as a supplemental instructor by co-teaching various levels of composition, rhetoric, and literary analysis to first-year college students. Outside of teaching and tutoring, she has written about a variety of literary topics that encompass both American and British literature in the form of novels, short stories, and poetry. She has also been published in the CSUN Sigma Tau Delta literary magazine, The Scarlet Review. Her research interests include, but are not limited to: the problematic conceptions of women in nineteenth-century domestic novels, applying gender, psychoanalytic, and Marxist criticism to canonical gothic works, as well as the lasting influence of the Holocaust on Jewish-American Literature and identity. As an avid reader, writer, and burgeoning teacher; Brenna continue to spread her passion for literature inside and outside the classroom.

Mid-Week Ritual

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Mid-Week Ritual

It is Thursday and I am tired of being a person again.

I look at my reflection through the steam and toothpaste splatter on my mirror and I start to pick

at my skin. I am racking my brain, pulling on my eyelashes, and pinching at my pores, seeking

some semblance of a response from myself. I keep adding things to my to do list I know will

never get done and I keep losing my fucking pen.

I pause to carve out a small space of solitude in my mind.

Please just give me a small space to die in private each week.

I have no desire to go to the grocery store, to fold the laundry, tidy up every room in my vacant

house, catch up with those I’ve been meaning to see and remember how long it has been, I do not

want to do the dishes, or pretend to be a person for a second longer. I can’t keep engaging in the

façade of normalcy for one more second or any pretense of personhood. I will think of this again

tomorrow and the day after that, fear the coming days of December, wonder why the passage of

time feels like something I never really understand; the days all dissolving in my mouth, their

taste long forgotten.

I have become passive; my mind feels old and stupid.

Let me sit quietly by myself.

I will put on the music I have been longing to hear, dance in my living room to the large voices

and heavy drums of Fiona Apple, and I will think about absolutely nothing. I will put my face in

my hands and savor this intimacy. I will retreat fully and completely into myself.

I’ll allow my thoughts to blend, I won’t try to distinguish among the myriad of lives coexisting in

the pit of my stomach, that all ultimately look the same. I can’t play the mother of the world; I

can’t even be a mother to myself. I want to fall asleep without ever actually closing my eyes.

I will let my thoughts come undone,

like red string unspooling from within, watching as they spill out of me –

I am hungry to know what I will say next before I even know how to say it.

I remember to text back, and I try to tell you that this is how I am feeling.

Lucy James is an avid reader and lover of words, a writer of all kinds particularly delicate with poetry and creative nonfiction. Devoting their life to trying to understand the chaos in everything, Lucy documents how it is for her– based in the Midwest. Lucy’s Instagram {HERE}