Something New

by Lizzie Rhys Derksen

My dog pees the bed, again, and I think about how hard it is to be a priest when you spend your days as a fulltime laundress. No intercessions for me; no visions; I’m busy following Ranger from room to room, fearing for the velvet sofa, swooping in with fresh linens, spray bottle in hand.
          I still say that doing the laundry is holy, if anyone’s asking. I have to admit that I adopted Ranger, the laundry perpetuator, as a small black puppy in full knowledge of his leaking condition. Don’t all humans believe they have a call? Don’t we all see ourselves as appointed stewards, whether of one primitive creature or the planet Earth? It doesn’t seem to matter much, which.
          As long as we have something to tidy (there’s a reason we call them holy orders). We all want to be the eczemic laundress, the crippled farmer, the harried and harassed French maid. Give us our sheets to change, our stumps to grind, our endless ashes to sweep. When, at eight months, the vet suggested some sphincter-snugging miracle drug, I rejected the suggestion because it seemed to compromise my service.
          Four years later, on this fine April morning, Ranger has peed through a sheepskin, a bath towel, the duvet and its cover. Stripping the bed, I still say that the priest class and the worker class are the same. I still proclaim this in a loud voice, if anyone’s asking.
          I put down the sheepskin, towel, duvet, cover, assume a receptive posture, and stand listening. No one is asking.

● ● ● 

I grab up the laundry again. What business do I have being a priest, anyway? Do I really believe there are eternal vistas of beauty unrolling before us? Do I really believe we are directly descended from Adam and Eve? Do I believe us to be the Lord’s gardeners, dog namers, divine sweeper-uppers? No, I believe we have run ourselves into a linoleum-covered corner and have no intention of backing out.
          Biohazard suits, but make it fashion? The exhausting male fantasy of mass exodus to Mars? The interminable scroll of digital memory, dragging behind us like so much toilet paper? Saran-wrapped strawberry fields? Forever?
          No thank you.
          My problem is that I find unholiness in everyday life. Descending the stairs to the basement, I have the nagging sensation that my role as Ranger’s laundress has become unsanctified. If, as I am secretly convinced, there is no point in the end, there is no point in the means, either. But what under heaven do I mean by “the end”? What I mean is the icon repeated endlessly in advertising and in curated images of aspirational life, what I mean is Blonde Woman On White Couch In White Room. This image, if you pay attention, is swiftly coming to outnumber all other images 10 to 1. It’s all part of the tidying of information; it’s easy to keep a complete digital record if every photographic composition is the same.
          Although maybe it’s the other way around—who’s-who re: the ends and the means? Let’s take a look at our sublime logic. Proposition A: The mess maker is necessary to justify the existence of the pristine priest. Proposition B: The pristine nature of the priest is necessary to justify the mess needing so urgently to be cleaned. Necessary conditions, but are they sufficient?

● ● ● 

Don’t forget the white coffee cup. You know the one. The one necessary to complete the picture of the blonde woman on the white couch in the white room. Sometimes she’s draped herself ineffectually with a throw made of white cashmere. (That’s right: Our interminable scroll of memory is ninety percent images of a clumsy novice who is still probably going to make it all the way to nun.)
          Putting my bedding into the machine, I feel a great animosity toward the stylist who perennially insists on that whitewashed tomb of a coffee cup. Though there is never any coffee in it, the white coffee cup is supposed to be the concession to the cyclical nature of life.
          Life, in which, every morning, coffee is brewed and consumed. Life, in which the human digestive systems steadily churns on. Life, in which the blonde woman presumably sleeps and wakes. Life, in which which the seasons presumably continue to change outside of the white room. Life, in which mess is made and cleaned up; in which the coffee is occasionally spilled, or run out of, or left to go cold, introducing an element of vital and ultimately profound variation.
          I let myself sink to the basement floor, passing through one favourite position of priestly maintenance—the push-up—and into another—the full frontal lie-down. The cold cement bites into my sweat-anointed forehead. The drain in the floor burbles. A pile of clean sheets shuddering on the dryer threatens to avalanche on to me, but, to my vague disappointment, doesn’t. Here I am, prostrating myself in the laundry room. Where the hell is the profundity in my variation?
          Variation is only profound if the regular (wash/rinse/spin) cycle is already profound. And if neither the variation nor the cycle is controlled by humans.

● ● ● 

I remain prone until my sense of drama runs out, while the washing machine chunks and thumps a few inches from my head. Then I get up, leaving the sheets.
          While I’ve been downstairs enjoying my dark night of the soul, Ranger has climbed onto the bare mattress and peed on it also. He looks up at my wail of vexation and I see clearly that I have betrayed him.
          When did the priest’s home become not only an unholy but also a hostile environment?
          Still standing in the bedroom doorway, I peer over my shoulder into the living room. What are these endless expanses of porous surfaces, if not physical and psychological traps for a small, leaky animal that has evolved to cringe at my least displeasure?
          I cross the bedroom and wrench open the window, spin on my heel, and march into the dining room. What is this airless box, hermetically sealed against the odours of life, and not incidentally against Ranger’s primary vectors of information? What is this table where I eat three times a day, three times a day denying a fellow creature’s polite requests?
          I pass the front door. What is this collar, this leash, as if we had the right to implicate other species in our sex games?
          Reentering the bedroom, I come face to face with my large and recently cleaned bedroom mirror. The pitted basement floor has left a lurid impression in my forehead. I turn away from it.
          There is Ranger, still basking on his back in the sun, his ribcage poking up like a little cathedral, his legs extended luxuriously across the mattress covered with black hair, saturated with pee.
          Of course, that’s not all it’s saturated with. Overlapping configurations of priestly sweat, cum, and menstrual blood extend like a map around him, while Ranger follows me with slightly crossed eyes and waits for me to banish him. The star on his throat is visible.
          Say I, the priest, pee the bed. Say I make my bed and piss in it, and make beds where other creatures like to piss. Say I don’t bother to make the bed, and simply add one more to the countless stains seeping into each other across the entire surface of this IKEA mattress. Say my proverbial white coffee cup runneth over.
          Say that, even though no one is asking. What then?
          I take off my tights and do not bother to fold them. I take off my dress as well, and lie down on the bed. My thigh is on the edge of the cold wet spot, but I refrain from moving it. Then I just lie there, feeling the last vestiges of the divine presence deserting me. Ranger, meanwhile, is making a feast of his own ass; his whole body is coiled around to reach, his eyebrows are raised at me over his hindquarters.
          As any priest or German housewife knows, relaxing for five seconds is the hardest thing. And it is not by relaxing that I finally manage to release a warm flood of piss that quickly spreads under me. I have to bear down, like a woman giving birth or equally like a woman expelling unwanted semen, and push it out.
          And now I have thrown the proverbial white cover (fitted sheet) off the proverbial white couch (bed) and now I am the one stretched out in a patch of quickly cooling pee. Ranger has rolled onto a dry section of the mattress and returned to the undeniably important task of grooming himself.
          Immediately, I understand that I have botched the sacrament. I am no more a priest in my filthy than in my pristine condition, and I find no more nobility in it. I have not even given in to a true secret impulse. My secret impulse is far more heretical. I could be denied eternal vistas (read: life on Mars) for it.
          But I will say it.
          There is a bodily urge to make way for something new.
          Those individuals (where have they gone?) who have conspicuously stopped asking might classify this urge as a symptom of drudgery-induced depression, maybe even a psychotic reaction to the fumes of tea tree oil mixed with industrial-strength laundry detergent, but I prefer to think of it as a kind of ultimate martyrdom, a last-ditch attempt to stop cluttering up the eternal vistas for whatever creatures are coming up after us.
          We are not a pretty sight.
          I cough, and a bit more pee trickles out of me. Ranger sneezes twice, and flips like a beetle onto his back. And now he begins washing his face, licking his foreleg and then swiping it over his ears and down his snout. One snaggle tooth is hanging absentmindedly over his left jowl.
          Grooming complete, he rolls over twice and rests his chin on my stomach, relieved that the dumb blonde priest has come to her senses.
          Here is a difficulty. I am forced to admit that, much as he is implicated in this whole corrupt system of priesthood, I find no pleasure in the idea of Ranger “making way” for something new.
          And exactly because he is only an auxiliary aspect of this obsolete order, I doubt I would be making way for an appropriate caretaker. Even if I no longer require a biological penance machine, and he no longer requires a laundress, I’m sure he still requires a dog walker. He still needs to be fed. And by someone who knows about his violent allergy to chicken.
          I fear that though I appear to be lying on a damp and highly absorbent mattress, I am really back in the linoleum-covered corner, from which even Ranger, on his four legs, has learned to back out. Also to sleep when he feels like it. Also to sing like a tenor dinosaur. Also nightly to chase a tennis ball in the school field. Like an especially holy sister at vespers, he repeats the same phrase and never fails to find new meaning in it.
          Lucky for Ranger. What about this shivering, defrocked priest? This image contains information that is not tidy, and perhaps not tidy-able. These questions are not helpful to an algorithm. I am not a good advertisement for myself, for priests anywhere. But I would raise myself if I knew what I was supposed to rise to.
          I’ll say one last thing: I feel weak. Like any good woman of the cloth, I’ve been up since dawn and haven’t broken my fast. If I can get up, I can make myself hot coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich. Is this an appropriate context for ascension? Is it even possible for a priest to purify herself in the shower? Is it sacrilegious to put on clean clothes after coming from the death bed?

Lizzie Rhys Derksen writes poems about Aunt Rachel, Rachel’s wife Susan, and their niece Lucy. She writes prose about the priest class, the worker class, and her childhood spent in a religious community in southern Saskatchewan. In her spare time, she makes movies and refuses to work with AI.

 Baking Cookies of Myself

by Tom Busillo

My Italian grandmother taught me how to bake. She’d start by taking out a large wooden cutting board and tossing flour on it as if preparing for a sacred ritual. Then, she’d lay me face up on the board and flatten me with a rolling pin until I was thin enough to cut. With the star-shaped cookie cutter, she’d punch out tiny chunks of me, placing them on a greased baking sheet to bake in the warm embrace of the oven. She’d carry me, still on the board, over to its door, and I’d watch in wonder as the cookies browned and rose. Despite my pleas, she always insisted they cool before I could eat one. We repeated this throughout the afternoon until all that was left of me was my mouth and a ribbony outline of my former body. When the final batch had cooled, she would start feeding them back to me so I could be whole again. Usually around this time, my grandfather would come in the back door with his two dogs after tending to his garden. He’d snatch a handful of cookies from the plate—parts of me, not yet returned—and start to eat them. My grandmother would hit him with a wooden spoon, telling him those weren’t for him, but it would be too late. Parts of me had been lost, and it is for this reason that I remain the size of a child.

Tom Busillo's (he/his) writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, PANK, The Broadkill Review, and elsewhere. He is a Best Small Fictions nominee and is the author of the unpublishable 2,646-page conceptual poem "Lists Poem," composed of 11,111 nested 10-item lists. He's now focusing on much shorter work. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.

 One of the Chosen Chambers

by Tom Busillo

Last night, an insect crawled out of the stump of your leg and began chittering and growing until it reached the size of a cat. I watched in awe, mesmerized by its blue and silver beauty, peacefully observing until it spoke to me, “I’m really helpful and I won’t hurt.” I couldn’t stop thinking this creature was the one thing in this world I would keep with me for the rest of my life. I ripped open my chest and let it crawl inside of me and felt ripples of contentment. Upon awakening, you spread your arms, and a sudden look of concern spread across your face. You couldn’t stop muttering “I’ve lost it, I’ve lost it.” When you finally turned to me after I kept asking what was wrong, your eyes told me you knew exactly what I’d done, but also knew better than to ask me for its return, for it had chosen me.

Tom Busillo's (he/his) writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, PANK, The Broadkill Review, and elsewhere. He is a Best Small Fictions nominee and is the author of the unpublishable 2,646-page conceptual poem "Lists Poem," composed of 11,111 nested 10-item lists. He's now focusing on much shorter work. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.

 A Malediction

by Lucie Bonvalet

1314, March 18: Jacques de Molay, the last of the Templars, is burned at the stake. As the fire is lit, he casts a malediction on several generations of Kings. A thin rain falls above the flames, and a wind blows sideways. Flames threaten to leap and lick the walls of the cathedral. In the crowd, no one speaks, no one moves. When the malediction is uttered, it echoes and ricochets on all the heads; each person present in the crowd feels the evil spell just under the skull; and they know it concerns all their future generations. No god attends the fire. But hail, flames, stones and wind, all are present in the voice of the man burning at the stake. The fire gives the voice its potency. The voice is not loud, but clear: each word, each syllable pronounced with slowness, care. The name of the King is voiced twice, at the beginning and at the end of the malediction. Each time he hears his name, Philippe feels penetrated, between the eyes, by something sharp and cold. The King stays much too long staring at the fire. He does not feel the rain nor the worried looks around him. He is still staring at the stake when all has turned to char, the last cinder, extinct. A shapeless lump, a piece of bone among the ashes. And a strong smell of something sugary, which oozes off the char. Philippe sees, or thinks he sees a thin mist that gathers around the lump, pale yellow, and then leaves, ascends. Near Philippe’s ear, a long sigh. On the wall of the cathedral, bright shadows sway in the remnants of wind: one torch, three crows, long leafy branches of linden trees, and the hand that holds the torch for the King. But where the shadow of the King should be, just below the torch, only a shapeless fragment of obscurity.

Lucie Bonvalet is a writer, visual artist and teacher. Her writing can be found in FENCE, About Place Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, and SAND, and has been reprinted in The Best Small Fictions 2023. Her visual art can be found on Instagram at @lbonvalet. Originally from the Dordogne in France, she has lived in Portland, Oregon since 2004.

 Takeout Baby

by Ada Pelonia

The couple is led into a narrow room, with nurses clad in powder blue scrubs flanking them on their respective sides and a staff standing sentry by the door. The husband wrestles with the gilded band on his finger while the wife leafs through the pile of papers with a list of checkboxes.
          "He should have your eyes," the wife says, pressing the Sharpie on the "blue eyes" box until red ink bleeds through the dorsal page. She scans the document, marking the boxes that suit her liking: tall, lanky, hawkish nose—the husband peers at the list and asks, “What if she’s like—”
          The wife rests her palm on the dappled sheet, looking over her shoulder with a pursed smile. “We’ve talked about this, hon. It’s a boy.” 
          The husband recalls their conversation months after their last couples counseling session, how the therapist suggested a choice that would ground them together and rekindle the blaze that had whittled to dust over the past decade. 
          He stays mum, watching her flip the page pockmarked with crimson ink, marking the “confident,” “reliable,” and “ambitious” boxes—everything he’s not as he’d been told countless times. This is what they decided, the husband thinks as he squeezes his eyes shut. 
          “We’re good with this,” she says, pushing the folder to the nurses. The husband grips his ring from underneath the table, and then they wait. 
          In about three hours, the nurses deliver the baby, swaddled in a cotton blanket that goes beneath his tiny face, an uncanny semblance of the husband, now a father. They give the baby to the mother, and he stirs, puckering his lips, then lets out a piercing shrill. 
          "Why is it doing that?" The wife asks, panic lancing through her voice as she pushes the baby to the husband’s chest and covers her ears.
          "You didn't mark the 'no crying' option in the upper left corner,” the nurse says, pointing at the blank checkbox on the file. 
          The wife looks at the husband, the wailing newborn in his arms. “Let’s get a different one,” she says, grabbing the paper from the nurse. “Where do I sign?”

Ada Pelonia lives and writes in the Philippines. Her work has been nominated for Best Microfiction and has appeared in HAD, Eunoia Review, Gone Lawn, The Account, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Find her at adapelonia.weebly.com or on Instagram @_adawrites.

 The Ghost

by Ada Pelonia

In the decade I’ve lived in this hundred-year-old apartment, the ghost has turned into my dead pets, dead school teachers, and dead relatives. I never know what the ghost will turn out to be next, just a hint that it’s something related to me, and I couldn’t care less. It’s a nice apartment, and beggars can’t be choosers. But it’s never hurt me until now.  
          The ghost floats on the other side of the table with its arms wide open. I avert my gaze to the toast and cup of tea before darting a glance back at the ghost, its elbows now propped on the placemat, looking at me with that familiar shade of tawny eyes. 
          “Care for a hug?” 
          I take a bite of the toast, shaking my head. “My mother is alive.”
          The ghost shifts beside me, cold air caressing my hair. 
          “That’s your brother’s mother, silly.”
          I almost spat my toast, a familiar churning brewing inside my gut. I look at the ghost, the shabby plaid shirt and bootcut jeans reminiscent of silent cries in the corner of the room, clashing plates, and booming voice—the “biggest mistake” branded on my skin. Contrary to dolled-up days at PTA meetings during his kindergarten year.
          “No two siblings are raised by the same mother, like they say,” I mumble, staring at my tea. 
          “Could I have made it better? Your childhood?”
          “Too late for that, yeah?” I take a sip, hoping it drowns the rattling in my chest. 
          “Right. I’m sorry. No hugs, sure?”
          I stare at the ghost, recalling the last time I hugged someone, but nothing rings a bell. I take the empty cup and deposit it in the sink.
          “Please leave.”
          The ghost fades into a thick fog before vanishing like all the other ghosts have done, a sudden pang of grief wrenching my chest.
          When the night comes, I dream of her again in familiar shabby clothes. A homemade meal after school. Gentle coos in my ear and a tickle on the side of my rib. We laugh together. She asks how my day has been, if I’m alright and hugs me when I nod. I hold her face with my little hands, warmth spreading through my chest.

Ada Pelonia lives and writes in the Philippines. Her work has been nominated for Best Microfiction and has appeared in HAD, Eunoia Review, Gone Lawn, The Account, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Find her at adapelonia.weebly.com or on Instagram @_adawrites.

 Cryptomnesia

by Soramimi Hanarejima

On your way home, your gaze lands on a book someone is reading on the opposite side of the train car. On the cover is a color-pencil rendition of a brown rabbit, and this reminds you of a TV show you haven’t thought about in years—that urban fantasy with children who can talk with animals, each child only able to communicate with one kind of animal. The name of the show escapes you, but effortlessly you recall scenes from various episodes in vivid detail—though curiously you can’t remember anything about watching the show, like whether it was broadcast after school or on weekends and whether you watched it with your sister or alone while she was practicing for her flute lessons. Maybe that’s how much the show captivated you—to the point that everything else was pushed out of your mind as you watched.
          That’s very well what could’ve happened because the show captivates you now. To the point that you’re still thinking about it when you get home and during the next day and the day after that. Whenever you’re waiting for something—the train, the microwave, a customer service representative—your mind recalls scene after scene. You find yourself marveling at the ingenuity of the plot devices, then developing (or is it rekindling?) a fondness for the two main characters who are ever guileless, curious and clever.
          Soon you’re so fascinated by this TV show that you mentally reconstruct it story arc by story arc, season by season. After a week of replaying the show in your thoughts, you get to what must be the final season—everything converging toward a high-stakes climax as the children band together all their animal friends to stealthily sabotage a massive factory that’s pumping out all manner of pollution. Then, frustratingly, you can’t remember anything beyond that. Maybe you never saw the final episodes.
          Hoping someone can tell you what happened in the series finale, you turn to friends and family, describing the gist of the show to them because its name still eludes you. Although you have low expectations for getting any information this way, the endeavor leaves you utterly disappointed. The show doesn’t sound even vaguely familiar to anyone. There seems now nothing you can do but mentally replay the last episodes you remember over and over in case they illuminate some dim memory of how the show ended. But they never do.
          You’ve all but accepted that the show’s ending may be lost to time when your mom calls and says, “I mentioned the show you were asking about to my sister. You know how your aunt is quite the television connoisseur. She hasn’t seen any show remotely like that, but the description of it reminded her of a story that her husband was working on decades ago.”
          Maybe he saw some episodes of the show and borrowed ideas from it—or unintentionally plagiarized? Or did someone steal his ideas and write a TV screenplay based on them?
          “Can I check out the story?” you ask, curiosity thoroughly piqued.
          “I’ll see if he can send you a copy.”
          When it arrives, you’re surprised to find that the story is a binder-clipped sheaf of photocopied graph paper covered in diagrams—not the ream of cursive longhand pages you thought you’d get. Once you start interpreting the meticulous arrangements of symbols, it all comes back to you. That rainy summer morning during the week you were visiting your cousin, when she had a mandolin lesson and you were alone in that old country house.
          You wandered from room to room, ending up at your uncle’s desk where you found folder after folder containing little stacks of loose-leaf sheets filled with the kind of diagrams you had been studying at school—story schematics. You spent the rest of that rainy morning reading through plans for stories in various stages of development, none of them with titles yet, only labels on their folders—Retirement Project 1, Retirement Project 2 and so on.
          What you’re holding now is the set of schematics you were reading when your aunt and cousin came home with sandwiches for lunch. Your mind must have held on to this story and imagined it into a TV show, and you either forgot the ending or never got to read it.
          Now you’re mere minutes away from finding out what the ending is. But maybe you should stay with the possibilities a little longer. You can at least try to find out how close you’ve been to the end. So you flip to the last pages, careful to look only at their headers for the chapter title. The one at the top of the final page is Planning the Infiltration. Now there’s either one possibility or countless many to pursue and plenty of time to decide which.

Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of the neuropunk story collection Literary Devices For Coping. Soramimi’s recent work appears in Pulp Literature, The Cincinnati Review and The Offing.