Therapy

_____“If I have to live with him like this, I think I’ll go nuts. I feel like a trapped animal, like I might have to chew my leg off to escape.”

_____That was Eileen, describing her marriage to Marvin, a misanthrope about twenty years older than she was. He’d lost interest in sex. She hadn’t.

_____We were in the same therapy group that met every month, only we called it a writers’ group, and some of us really were there for the writing. Patricia was writing a series of stories about zombies. Jenny wrote poems about her mom and about nature. I was farting around with a movie script about a woman who goes off the grid.

_____I was between jobs. Somehow I’d gotten stuck in the technical writing line of work. It started when I worked for an electrical firm, writing their codes and procedures, then a software firm that did computer games, and after that an insurance agency, methods and standards. Even when I tried to bust out of the mold – ad writing, promo work, speechwriting, anything – they always looked at my resume and told me I was a technical writer and that’s the kind of job I should be looking for.

_____“I told him, I said, ‘Mitch, I want to have sex,’ and he said, ‘Well, then go have sex, Eileen. I’m not stopping you.’”

_____“So are you going to have sex?” I asked her.

_____Eileen rolled her eyes. “That’s what my novel’s about, Karen,” she said.

_____Before the next monthly meeting I got a new job – technical writing for a company that makes microwave ovens and other appliances. Troubleshooting, assembly instructions. So I stopped coming to therapy. One day, several months later, at noon, when I was going out for lunch, who do I run into on Presidents Street? Eileen.

_____“How’s your novel coming?” I asked her. I explained about my new job, said I hadn’t been able to work on my script, so I’d stopped coming to the writers group.

_____“Me too,” she said. “I stopped writing on my book and moved out to my own apartment.”

_____I didn’t ask her if she was having sex. The question seemed too personal.

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Clueless

_____“You know ‘evil’ is ‘live’ spelled backwards,” the boy announced to his father from the doorway.

_____Ogden looked up from his laptop computer. He was sitting at the dining table reading the online version of the New York Times.  The boy was just starting to deal with pimples, he noticed again. Always a distressing time of life.

_____“You’re right,” Ogden replied after a moment, since Jeremy seemed to be expecting some kind of response.

_____“You just don’t get it, do you?” his son muttered, disgusted, and he turned to leave the room.

_____What was this all about? Ogden had a brief terrified thought that his son was suicidal.  “Jeremy!” he called, but his son ignored him, and Ogden heard the heavy tread of his boots on the stairs, heading for his room.  After a moment, Ogden turned back to his laptop.

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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Me and Sal Paradise, was published last year by FutureCycle Press. Two full-length collections appeared in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee, from Kelsay Books.

Gigi

I recently visited my buddy in Santa Clarita for his fiftieth birthday. It’s a treat, in a way, knowing all the things that might have killed you haven’t killed you–you can ease up on yourself a bit. It’s nice, too, seeing a good friend emerge from middle age. He likes his kids.  He likes his wife. I like them, too. The dog, though. Gigi, a poodle. Gigi is so old, she’s gone bald on her back, and what’s left of her fur has turned a strange type of purple, as if the purple had been applied by a generic brand of cosmetic powder. Gigi. Even the name is purple. On top of it all, Gigi is deaf and blind. She roams the house like Roomba, but joyless, seeking neither heat nor affection, bouncing from kitchen cabinet to garbage can, to the fridge, then back to the living room sofa and coffee table. Outside, Gigi roams from one side of the yard to the other. Fence to fence. Lately, however, a pack of coyotes have caught wind of Gigi. The coyotes live in the patch of wilderness that separates my buddy’s neighborhood from the next. Keen to Gigi’s disabilities, the coyotes have altered their game, abandoning the tactic of feigning gimp or playful, hoping to lure the dog into their grips.  Instead, the coyotes have begun baiting the back of their yard with strips of jackrabbit. 

            During the birthday weekend, I found myself standing in their backyard staring at the patch of desert, sipping a cup of coffee or a Knob Creek, depending on the time of day. I started wondering why a dog like Gigi would even be worth their trouble. By the time the coyotes ripped her apart, how much meat would any of the coyotes even get–just enough to make it to the next meal? Hardly worth the caloric effort or even a fair return on their investments. On the last evening of the trip, though, just before the drive back to LAX, my eyes somehow penetrated the tangle of sagebrush, I spotted one of the coyotes hanging about. The thing had been looking at me the whole time. Probably tracking movements, counting my drinks. He was thinking way past that rabbit.

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Tim Fitts is the author of two short story collections, Hypothermia (MadHat Press 2017) and Go Home and Cry for Yourselves (Xavier Review Press). HIs work has been published by journals such as New South, The Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Granta, Shenandoah, among many others.

The Angry Man

There is only one angry man in this house but there are many ways to see him. I like to think I am a girl on the verge of becoming something else; a monster, a beast, a worthy opponent. Girlhood; an entity so lost to me is one I will continue to seek despite the overbearing knowing that such an entity only exists in places rid of angry men. Or this is what I believed. 

There is only one angry man in this house but there are many ways to see him. I see him in the boys I have kissed at my ex’s party, in the ever-growing concave pools under my mother’s eyes, in the snide undertones of words exchanged in this household. I see him in my sister, taunting and mocking, begging to be challenged. I see him in my love language; the honey-sweet nothings that bask in my words of adoration, the cheap and rusted colognes I offer as gifts. I see him in my pitiful vanity mirror from which I have watched myself wane into a forced advancement of bigger breasts and everything else considered the embodiment of modern beauty. “You and I are the same,” the angry man silently taunts. No, we’re not. No, we’re not. Oh, but we are. We are of the same vile essence. We are the products of a barbaric augend and addend. We are the politicians, the riots, the abused and the abusive, the orphans, the killers and the dreamers. We are everything that passionately desires change. In that sense, then yes we are the same. I am the angry man and he is I. 

There is only one angry man in this house but there are many ways to see him. I, with a heart that holds enough vastness for two planets, am one of them. She, with her silent potency that leaks from her unstitched wounds, is one of them. They, with their foolish promise of a better land or a harmonious world, is one of them. He, who swears to his high-school love the stars, the moon, this life and the next to follow, is one of them. As you see, I have been gifted with the curse-like ability to perceive the angry man in everyone and everywhere but perhaps this isn’t true. Or maybe it is, I am terribly uncertain. But last week in my Philosophy lecture, Mr. Saunders said that everything returns. “Everything returns, everything finds its way back,” he said. And with that, I come to ask: Why in this form? Because of Hera, Eris and Medusa; because of the brave and important women who fought against men. “Thank you” I say. Thank you. But you see I am not you, I am not mighty nor powerful. Between the small crevices of life, between death and death, between this life and the next- what I will always be is just one of the many ways to see the angry man in this house. 

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Elisha Osorio is a student at The Winchester School, Dubai. She (unrealistically) aims to pursue journalism and creative writing in her undergraduate years. “The Angry Man” first appeared, with the title “What I am,” in The Bitchin’ Kitsch.