Timothy Day

I was thrilled to be moving out of my parents’ house. A fresh start, a new beginning, a medicine cabinet absent of my father’s Viagra, etc. My new apartment came furnished, and, as I realized upon moving in, peopled. More specifically, it included a woman sitting on the couch in a sweater and plaid skirt, reading from a stack of magazines on the coffee table.

“I think you’ll find she really spruces up the atmosphere,” my landlord said.

“Oh,” I balked. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“Do you want to take her job away? Her brother’s on drugs.”

“My mother’s on the street,” The woman mumbled, eyes adrift within a vintage issue of Time.

“Her little boy,” my landlord added, “is practically two-dimensional.”

“Okay,” I relented. “I guess it’ll be nice to have company.”

The woman on the couch flipped a page.

“She’s not really here for that, dear,” my landlord said. “Think of her more as a picture in a magazine.”

During my first few days in the apartment, it became apparent that the woman on the couch took her job quite seriously. She was there when I awoke and there when I went to bed, eating only little granola bars that never disrupted her reading. Sometimes when I was out of the room I would hear her taking quick steps to the bathroom, closing and opening the door quietly before scuttling back to the couch.

After a week I moved my desk out to the living room, and together we filled the silence, clacking keys punctuated by the rhythmic turn of another glossy page. I tried talking to her one day, politely asking the name of her son, but she only looked up at me briefly, her eyes disapproving, before returning to a black-and-white issue of Life. I was eating raisins at the time and tossed one at her playfully, but this provoked no reaction. A minute later, I saw her hand slowly gravitate towards the black dot of raisin on her sweater, picking it up and bringing it to her mouth tentatively.

When I watched TV, I would occasionally catch her watching with me in my peripheral vision, but she lowered her gaze quickly as soon as I looked over, blushing as she ran her eyes across the page with dramatic speed.

I started listening for her exit as I lay in bed at night, the floor creaking underneath her cautious feet, the door marking her departure with a final click. At what time she arrived in the morning I had no idea, so the plan I devised required that I not go to sleep. After she left one night, I crept out of bed and returned to the living room, watching a couple of late-night movies. When she re-entered the apartment (at five a.m. exactly) I was ready, sitting in her spot on the couch with a 1955 Cosmopolitan. I wanted badly to see her reaction, but of course keeping my eyes down was essential to this whole operation, and I could only hear her uncertain steps across the room, the silence of her pausing in front of me, and then the steady sound of a more assured stride, out of the room and further into the apartment. I smiled, thinking that I had won (won what, I wasn’t sure), but when I rose and followed her through the hall, she spun around and darted past me, returning to her couch-post as if it had some sort of magnetic power over her. I stood at the edge of the couch and sighed, then lumbered to my room in defeat and went back to bed, hearing a page flip over as I pulled up the covers.

It went on regularly for another two months. I stopped trying to interfere. Sometimes I talked to her, but in the way one might talk to a pet, without actually expecting a response. Good morning, as I entered the living room after breakfast. Goodnight, as I retired to my bedroom. Hey there, as I breezed into the kitchen after going to the store. How’s Life? In both senses of the word, I mean — in general and in print. It was on a Wednesday when I came into the living room to find a note sitting in her place on the couch, folded neatly with a miniature paperweight on top of it. Today is my son’s birthday, it read. I will return to work tomorrow. I put the note in my pocket and tried to go on with my day, making coffee and sitting down to work at my desk. I waited to hear the thick, wavy sound of laminated magazine pages turning over, but of course it never came, and I suddenly felt uneasy in my own apartment. I looked over towards the empty couch, not really recognizing it, the entire room taking on an alien quality. I rose and brought my computer into the kitchen, which felt more familiar, but even from the other end of the hall, her absence loomed like slithering ectoplasm.

When she got back, I sat on the other side of the couch and told her I had missed her. The new issue of People, which I’d placed on her cushion as a gift, lay discarded on the floor. I thought I saw her smile a little, but this may have been imagined.

That night, she did not look down from the TV when I glanced at her during Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She even laughed a bit when Holly Golightley’s landlord walked into his door, which I thought was a dumb part to laugh at, but I took it. When I said goodnight and left the room, she gave a little wave. I smiled all the way to my pillow.

The next day, she never showed up. Her pile of old magazines on the table was gone. My landlord called around noon and explained that she’d been offered more money by another proprietor. I would never see her again. My mouth failed to respond; it seemed suddenly detached from the rest of me. I hung up and spent the remainder of the day in bed, as if I was going through a breakup. It hurt to think of her sitting on someone else’s couch, in someone else’s apartment, reading her same magazines. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t eat. I felt the world flying away from me at a million miles per second.

The next morning, the doorbell rang and my heart skipped a beat, sinking when I answered it to find another woman, dressed in an identical plaid skirt and sweater, standing at the door with a stack of magazines under her arm. I shook my head and asked her to leave. It was too hard. I told her she could still say she was working here so she could get paid. That was fine with me. The woman nodded understandingly, reaching out and patting me on the arm before turning back down the hall.

Weeks passed. I didn’t feel up to going outside, but eventually I needed food, and so I trudged out in a stained T-shirt and sweatpants and walked to the market, where I stopped in the bread aisle as my eyes locked onto my old woman on the couch, examining hamburger buns with her skinny son at her hip. I was about to turn away when she noticed me and approached with a smile.

“So good to see you!” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

It took me a moment to recover.

“It’s good to see you,” I said finally. “You have no idea.”

“I’m sorry I had to leave,” she said. “It’s a great gig, though. Better pay and weekends off. Plus,” — and here she leaned in and whispered — “this landlord lets me read Penthouse.”

“I wouldn’t have said anything — “ I started, but then decided to let it go. “I’m happy for you,” I said. “Really I am.”

Her son tugged on her sleeve, and she told me she had better be off. We hugged briefly, and that was that.

I began taking my computer to the coffee shop below my apartment, sharing a room with several readers at once, but it wasn’t the same. I often imagined meeting someone there, the two of us carrying our tables out of the shop and up to my living room, pushing them together on the carpet. I could see us lifting raisins with uncertain grips, tossing them across the double-table, mouths catching in unison; chew, swallow, perfect.

TIMOTHY DAY enjoys bad puns, stuffed animals with ambiguous demeanors, and the sight of abandoned furniture in natural settings. His fiction has appeared or is upcoming in journals such as Menacing Hedge, The Apple Valley Review, Burrow Press Review, WhiskeyPaper, Literary Orphans, and others. His website is frogsmirkles.wordpress.com.

Annamarie Davidson

Jasper hadn’t known what to do, so he’d gone fishing. He sat on a dock, surrounded by a blur of green forest. The sky was pale. The wind had whipped the clouds into frothy, floating egg whites above him. It was like a goddamn Bob Ross painting, he thought.

Jasper’s hands smelled like bait. The fishy smell of freeze-dried death. Every time he scratched his nose or combed his long hair back with his fingers, he smelled it. It evoked the memory of an aquarium he had visited when he was a kid. One whiff, and he was transported back there. He remembered being given a tiny paper cup with chopped up fish parts for a quarter. He remembered the seals, the way they howled. The tank that was too small for their blubbery bodies. Their barks weren’t full of life. The yelping was just to remind themselves that they weren’t dead. It had made him sick back then, the smell of fish, the imprisoned creatures. He hadn’t wanted to dangle the fish pieces over the side like his brothers had done. Instead, he’d chucked the whole cup into the water so the seals wouldn’t have reason to jump up and bite off his digits. They may look cute, but those fuckers have teeth.

Hanging his feet off the dock, he thought about those seals. He wondered how the seals felt about themselves, being hand-fed pre-cut fish when all they wanted was the thrill of gliding through the ocean and chomping on a real, live, swimming fish. Probably not great for the old self-worth, he concluded. That’s why Jasper liked to fish. It made him feel he’d done something.

Birds weren’t even chirping. Where were the birds? There’s nothing scary about being alone, he thought, unless you’re boring. Then it’s fucking terrifying. Jasper always had the sneaking suspicion that everyone else found him boring. I guess I’ll never know if I was right, he thought.

He considered reeling in and recasting. No fish were biting. Where were all the fish? At 3 pm the sky turned orange. Not with the sunset, but with the radiation. It tinted everything the color of goldfish. A titian dust rustled through the trees. It hadn’t reached him yet. But it would.

Still, no bites.

Jasper was hungry, really hungry. His sandwich was sitting beside him on wax paper that crinkled in the wind. He wanted to eat it, but knew the melting mayonnaise and drying roast beef and sloppy pepper jack would be ruined by the fishy odor on his hands, so he didn’t.

He readjusted his legs and held the pole half-heartedly with his left hand. He had an impulse to look at his phone, an act indicative of his age during moments of silence and little stimulation. Then he remembered: his phone was dead. They were all dead. He had had 112 missed calls before the phones died. Hours ago, his girlfriend Amy had called him, frantic, screaming, crying. She was safe, well in relation to everyone else in Missoula, because everyone else was dead. She’d asked him, right before the cell towers exploded, why he was heading up to the lake, and if “heading up to the lake,” was a euphemism for suicide, and what the fuck, and why didn’t he love her, and why why why why why?

He’d replied, “I don’t know how to do anything about the fucking apocalypse, Amy. I do know how to go fishing. So, I’m going to go fishing.”

Another bomb went off, this time closer. It shook the dock. Orange-tinted grey ash rained down on the mountains and the trees and Jasper and his lunch, like flour being sifted into a bowl. I should have eaten my fucking sandwich, Jasper thought, shaking the ash from his hair, not daring to guess what or who the ash was before it was ash.

It seemed to matter less and less about his bait-stained hands. He grabbed the sandwich, unwrapped it, enjoying each action, each tiny crinkling of the waxy paper, the layers of meat and condiments, the little falling shredded lettuce. He took a bite of it, taking in each flavor in a way one only could with the certainness of finality. Even the fishy taste seemed like a sublime addition to the meal.

ANNAMARIE DAVIDSON is a writer with a background in stand-up comedy and a future in science fiction. Her first play, Seven Decembers, is debuting in Los Angeles this fall. When not writing about time travel and talking lobsters, she proofreads friends’ resumes in exchange for candy. www.annamariedavidson.com

Kate Imbach

I’m the only female swan in the office of a very successful start-up. Vanity Fair and Fortune have profiled our CEO, a handsome teenage grizzly bear. He has no idea what he’s doing. He lumbers around, throwing fish from the $100,000 custom aquarium (we still aren’t even profitable!) into his mouth, talking about how great salmon is for his fur while the rest of us fill out spreadsheets and make him rich. Only in San Francisco could you have a CEO who hibernates for six months a year.

The bear has a temper. If something displeases him during a meeting he roars and growls like a madman. During these outbursts I roll my eyes at the golden retrievers from sales while the bear’s assistant, an aggrieved sparrow, tries to feed him whichever cold-pressed juice BuzzFeed says is best for nerves. Watching a bird try to feed a bear an $8 bottle of juice is enough to keep a draft of my resignation letter in a secret folder, believe me.

The worm asks me to lunch almost every day, and occasionally out of professional decorum I feel obliged to eat with him. Last week as we waited for our orders in a café, he sank back into his sticky tube of a body, looked me up and down and asked, “Hey now, so how do you keep so fit?”

I told him through a pursed beak that I fly to work. He’s a worm who eats roast beef sandwiches for lunch, and he has the nerve to ask me questions about my body? Do you see what I have to deal with here?

Recently I went to a business dinner in Los Angeles with the bear. He drank too much in front of customers. He was an embarrassment aside from being a bear, which is saying something. When we got back to the hotel he said, “Bears mate for life too, you know.” He turned over his paw to display his room key, to ask me up without saying a word. I honked a terse goodnight and he went inside alone.

Once at a sales meeting I sat with ten males in the conference room listening to the retrievers explain why they weren’t making progress with a customer.

“We have tried everything,” one of them said, his tail stupidly thumping on the carpet. “We might need to consider lowering our price point.”

You would’ve thought someone just opened the car door at the vet! I was worried the bear might kill us all.

“All right, buddy,” he said. “Maybe we should try sending in the swan to sweeten the pot.” He winked and patted me on the tail feathers, right there in the meeting! Relieved to not have been killed and eaten, everyone laughed riotously. What could I do? I laughed along with them all, hating myself.

Today we are at the largest technology conference of the year in Las Vegas. We are press darlings. We are the brightest new menagerie of innovators from Silicon Valley according to everyone from Cat Fancy to The Verge. The bear, the worm and the retrievers are feeling like kings and want to celebrate at a strip club, which sounds about as appealing to me as being plucked for a pillow. But I am part of the team. I don’t have a choice.

Inside the club the bear puts his arm around me and surveys a lineup of strippers.

“What type of woman do you like?” he asks me.

Do I need this? Do I need to be sexually harassed, groped and have my life threatened on an almost daily basis by a horny five-year-old grizzly bear with an anger disorder and a habit of commenting on every single one of Rihanna’s Instagrams with the kissy face emoji? No. No, I do not.

I reach my breaking point. I lean in. I raise my wings and hiss, charging through the hallways and champagne rooms. Turns out an angry swan can create great hysteria around naked women and sad little boners. The women scream and the men hold up fists, like they have a chance of landing a punch on a swan in the dark! All eyes are on me and the room is deadly quiet aside from the song “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence, which lends a certain measure of gravitas to the situation. I spot the bear, the worm and the dogs in the swirling purple spotlights. They are staring at me with their tails between their legs. They are terrified wild animals. I think the worm is scared of me too but — as you can imagine — it is hard to say.

I have said my piece. I waddle elegantly towards the exit where a stunned bouncer stands with his back against the wall.

“Excuse me, sir? You should really think about calling animal control,” I say.

They can take that as my resignation.

KATE IMBACH is a writer and documentary filmmaker. For now she lives in Park City, Utah. She has a Master’s in Public Administration from Suffolk University, which is only one letter away from an M.F.A.