CONVENIENCE STORE PRAYER — ELIZABETH HART BERGSTROM

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Come in, all you chain smokers and compulsive gamblers, all you bulimics and alcoholics. Let me lead you into temptation. From my bleach-baptized aisles I bring unto you Mega Millions lotto tickets, 73 configurations of chocolate and caramel and nougat folded into crinkling wrappers, 24-ounce cans of malt liquor, low-tar Camel Lights and full-flavor Marlboro Reds, and Cheetos to stain your fingers with their sticky orange pollen. I bring you Powerball drawn every Wednesday and Saturday night at 10:59 p.m. Eastern. I bring you 18-packs of Budweiser and liters of budget Merlot and boxes of laxative pills hermetically sealed into blister packs. I bring you cherry snack pies and chewing tobacco. I bring you the churn of the slushie machine, the smell of hot coffee, and the tolling of mechanical bells.
             I bring unto you everything you could possibly need in your quest to become nothing. Some will fight against this path, with their twelve steps or their Nicorette gum or their gods. But you will come back to me one day, for this is your true temple. Glazed, jelly-filled, pink-frosted with rainbow sprinkles. 
             And lo, my neon lamps will burn as bright as rubies. They will burn 24/7/365. I am the refuge of all exiles, welcoming you with doors that swing open at your touch. Come to me, world-weary, storm-tossed, empty and alone. Inside my walls, there is no weather, no time. Trade your coins for my Scratch and Win cards and sleek cigarettes. Bring me your shame, your failure, your relapse, and let me feed them until they grow strong. Kneel down on the tile floor that is identical to tens of thousands of others. Reach your trembling hand into my shelves and you will find it: here, only here, you will find what you need.

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Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom's work appears or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Post Road, Catapult, The Offing, Fourteen Hills, Hobart, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She's a queer, disabled writer who lives in Vermont.

NAME ORIGINS — NORA BONNER

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I named all three of my kids after kids I picked on. Angelica was actually angelic, more than mine. In the front of the second grade classroom, she doodled prodigy depictions of our teacher, Ms. Halsworth, down to the mole below her left ear and her pouty expression when we were too loud in the hallway. One day I spread a rumor that Angelica had a crush on a boy named James who had a reputation for picking his nose. Angelica had a hard time making friends after that, but relationship dramas don’t linger among the so-young. We forgot about it the next year, when she won the school-wide art contest for drawing a detailed Machu Picchu during our unit on South America.
             My middle child is named after a kid from middle school, Kalvin Cross, though mine is Calvin, like the cartoon. Kalvin, bearded already, looked like he was in high school. Maybe he’d been held back. He smoked, even as an eighth grader, behind the backstop before classes began. I stole his cigarettes and showed them to everyone, until the lunch aid confiscated the pack. When she asked where I got them, I told her. The next Friday, we all endured an assembly about gateway drugs. Kalvin got suspended for smoking on school property.
             Penelope dropped out of high school when she got pregnant over the summer between our sophomore and junior years. We called her Penny, but my daughter is just Penelope. I flirted with her boyfriend, Lance, then dated him after she left. Lance was all right, though he got mean during video games. Not as interesting as Penny, who was a very good volleyball player. I nicknamed Penny "Tree Trunk," because she was tall and formidable and looked like she could kick a soccer ball from here to Machu Picchu. But the second part of her name is what caught on. “Trunk,” the boys would shout at her. “Shake that trunk, Trunk.”
             My kids are fifteen, twelve, and ten, respectively. They haven’t asked about their name origins. Others have. I say they run in the family. I say I just had a feeling. Maybe I am telling the truth: that feeling is power, or the fear of power.
             I’m not saying I believe I ruined these lives. As far as I know, I did not. But I could have.
             I don’t know one person who hasn’t been ruined, in one way or another, by the people who brought them up. We all have the potential to ruin each other. We all have to find ways to remember our potential to ruin each other.

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Nora Bonner is a fiction writer and writing instructor from Detroit, Michigan. Her stories have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Shenandoah, Quarterly West, Fiction Southeast, Juked, the Indiana Review, the North American Review, Hobart, and the Best American Non-Required Reading. Currently, she lives in Atlanta where she is a PhD  candidate in the creative writing program at Georgia State. You can find more of her stories at www.norabonner.com.

THERE WAS ALWAYS BETH — EMILY JAMES

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And Beth always drove. Champagne-colored Saturn, we called it the Bullet, but it looked like ET with those the pop-up headlights. She’d pull up the driveway and do a quick high-pitched honk, the Alien Cry. Liza was the smallest of us, barely 4’11’’, but always sat shotgun because she’d brought the mixtapes. Sublime, Radiohead, Mary J Blige, cut off at the end and then click-clack and flip onto the other side. I brought the bud. Me and Cass squeezed in the back, Cass rolling the joint, hers always pulled best, embers falling onto bare legs, crumbs balanced on bumpy roads, they’d trickle into the cracks of our thighs, we'd pluck them from the suede with our uneven fingernails. This thing have shocks? We'd scream, Fuck! Beth would just stare, shake her head, her finger resting on the blinker, pointed like an arrow always ready to signal, always ready to turn, never letting her back rest against the worn fabric of the seat. Carrying all the stress of us from one road to the next, from 7-Eleven to the Palisades Mall, from anywhere to everywhere, just like she carried everything in her big house on the hill, a pool green from too much or not enough chlorine, her four little brothers and little white, oily-eyed, yapping scratching dog and a mom found in the broom closet with a stomach full of pills. Everywhere, like she’d carry us the rest of our lives, to and through all places and things, known and unknown, weddings and stomach cancers, babies in bellies who lived and died. Beth bought the cards. Beth cleared the casserole trays. Beth showed up first. But back when the future was just a pinhole through which none of us could see, Beth always drove, the damp cigarette scent pouring from the vent when we turned up the heat dial, when we smoked with windows closed, Upstate New York frost beneath our fingers. Beth never laughed, only sighed, until she cackled so hard she couldn’t breathe. Beth never sang, only nodded, lips tight and pulled, until she screamed, lyrics all wrong, high as a kite, head back and hands on the wheel, the road still ahead. We never thought then how one day we’d be swallowed, and how could we have imagined Beth as the first to go, when we were just the four of us unbuckled, driving and wailing and staring, sixteen and small in a world that had gotten too large too quickly, couldn’t hold us in, couldn’t take us away.

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Emily James is a teacher and writer in NYC. Her recent work can be found in Pidgeonholes, Pithead Chapel, Hippocampus, The Atticus Review, The Rumpus, JMWW Journal, among others. She is the recipient of the 2019 Bechtel Prize from Teachers and Writers' Magazine. You can find her online at www.emilysarahjames.com and tweet her @missg3rd.

CHICKEN — LACEY N. DUNHAM

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Morgan worked with a guy in the Marines they all called Crazy Dave who was a little apeshit. One day while out on patrol Crazy Dave found a chicken, scooped it up, clamped its beak and feet with wire, and handed it to the gunner, who tucked the frantic, squawking creature between his feet. The chicken lived at base for six months in a mesh cage behind the head until Crazy Dave was wounded and the MEDVAC carried him away. No one knew what to do with Crazy Dave’s chicken, and finally it was decided they would kill it and roast it over a spit. They were sick of MREs. They were sick of sand in their teeth and sand in their piss, too. They had the crazy idea that the chicken would cure their gripes. 

They got the okay from the Master Gunny, but no one had the heart to shoot it. 

“Seems wrong somehow,” one PFC said. “You can’t just point-blank shoot chickens.”

A beheading was deemed appropriate, and on the appointed day two lance corporals stretched its neck over a cinderblock and handed the axe to the new guy, fresh off basic and a little dim. He looked at each of them pleadingly and they growled back menacingly. He raised the axe and severed the head from the body in one clean blow. The chicken stumbled five yards from the cinderblock before collapsing. 

“Well, fuck,” the fucking new guy said, dropping the axe to the dirt. “I didn’t know it was going to do that.” 

When Morgan later told Doreen the story, his wife looked at him hard through the ticks and buzz of the computer screen, her image wavering with the poor connection as the dog nuzzled under her armpit for attention. She looked too thin, and her eyes were darker than normal. They hadn’t been in the same time zone for ten months. “Of course they do that,” she said. “What did he think would happen?”

“City boy,” Morgan explained.  

Not much later, the new guy was discharged after trying to slit his bunkmate’s throat with a butter knife he had squirreled away from DFAC. It scared Morgan, not because he had watched as the new guy crept forward on his toes, arm extended, knife in his fist to press it to tender sleeping skin. Nor because it could have been his throat with the cold metal against it. It scared him to death because Morgan understood the desire for an escape by any means far better than he should.

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Lacey N. Dunham's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares (online), McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Midwestern Gothic, The Other Stories, The Collagist, and Full Stop, among others. The editor of five anthologies of writing which have received recognition in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR, she is currently Fiction Editor at Necessary Fiction and directs literary education programming for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She is a first-generation college graduate originally from the Midwest and now lives in Washington, DC.

OXEYE DAISY — JENNIFER LANG

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You confront him, hands on hips, say, So, did you enjoy that? and he asks what and you say, Your 80th birthday party, a little belated? But he doesn’t realize it’s belated, having lost track of time, no longer able to recall the day he was born. All the guests—your sorority sisters, his fraternity brothers, your friends from Lawyers’ Wives, his from high school across the Bay Bridge—gone, leaving only the two of you in the reception room still awash in UC Berkeley colors with blue-and-gold mini basketballs and plastic cheerleading pom-poms you placed on every table, and me: your second child, only daughter, grown woman with still unanswered why-questions. He tells you it was nice and you say, Good! your voice implying more along the lines of Good because I planned it by myself! or Good because it’s my turn next year and someone better do the same for me! when he leans in, toward you, while I lurk in the doorway, putting presents in bags, observing as you lean in, toward him, hearing his I love you and a loud smack, followed by your I love you, too, making me wince. I get your fifty-nine years of marriage cemented by two children, nine grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and adventures on every continent but can’t get beyond all the other buts. But his quarter-century betrayal. But your rash decision to stay together. But his diagnosis. Last but of all: your ensuing rage, ending in I-can’t-deal-with-him-anymore-so-I’m-moving-out at age seventy-eight. Honestly, you behave like a sixth-grade girl, plucking flower petals on a daily basis, altering the words I love him-I love him not as I stand, a witness, wondering how to solve the pronoun problem: who is really losing whose mind here—him, you, or me.

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American born, French by marriage, Israeli by choice, Jennifer Lang writes mostly about her divided self. Her essays have appeared in Under the Sun, Ascent, Hippocampus, Full Grown People and on Brevity’s One-Minute Memoir podcast. Honors include Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays nominations and finalist in 2017 Crab Orchard Review's Literary Nonfiction Contest. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Raanana, where she founded Israel Writers Studio and serves as Assistant Editor at Brevity. Find her at http://israelwriterstudio.com/ and follow her @JenLangWrites.

BEEPERS — EMILY COSTA

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The old man sells Dad beepers in a dark store that smells like we’re inside a cigarette. Other guys sit on folding chairs and watch. The old man sounds like he needs to clear out his lungs, like he needs to cough for a whole year to get it all out. He has a voice like a baby rattle. He has glasses halfway between regular and sun. They’re brown-yellow, but you can see his eyes. I don’t want to see his eyes, especially when he’s talking to me. He’s like the old man at the candy wholesaler. I don’t want to talk to them, these old men, but they always talk to me. Dad says she’s just shy, but they keep on me. At the wholesaler, I usually run off because it’s big enough to run off in. I run until no one is around and then I slide my hands over the big smooth bags of Frooties, the boxes of Sour Punch Straws. But the beeper store is small and there’s nowhere to go. I stay and watch them argue about price.
             Dad sells the beepers he buys from the old man. He sells them in a glass case in the front of the video store. Beepers are just one extra Dad is trying out. He sells incense, pogs, video games. He is thinking of selling ice cream, of buying the empty spot next door.
             Dad has a beeper. It’s just black. If I had a beeper, I’d get see-through blue or pink or purple. I don’t need one, though. I don’t go anywhere like Dad does. Dad goes everywhere. Sometimes I’m with him, sometimes he takes me and my sisters, but then Mom comes to pick us up at the video store. We give her a hard time about leaving. Dad lets us take candy. Later, we eat it in front of the TV without him.
             But we have a black cordless phone. We have an answering machine with a robot man’s voice and we check messages as soon as we get home. When we need Dad to call us, we dial his number, then our home number, and wait.
             When we want to say I love you, we press 1-4-3 and wait.
             When it’s an emergency, we press 9-1-1 and wait.
             We wait, we wait.

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Emily Costa teaches freshmen at Southern Connecticut State University, where she received her MFA. Her writing can be found in Hobart, Barrelhouse, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Memoir Mixtapes, and elsewhere. You can follow her on twitter @emilylauracosta.