The week after my senior prom, I lay in my bed staring at the wall. I hadn’t eaten much in four years, and in the week preceding prom, I drank nothing but Gatorade. Disjointed memories were pushing in, of prom and after-prom. My dress was so lovely. Blue taffeta! Short. All that dancing! Acid hits in the woods. Jumping off cliff ledges. Mudslides. Funny faces. French-kissing! Tequila! 

My mother knocked on my door. “Cassandra? Are you talking to yourself?”

“I’m a little feverish,” I said. “I think I may be hallucinating.”

I started seeing through things, I started seeing through the city. Beneath the heavy brick facades of old urban factories I could see the steel cages, their ancient strength, their ugliness. Old women on the train, I could see right through their skin to the pulpy balloons of soft muscle around their mouths, the tiny veins that lived there, straining like seams. There was a division there, in those things I could suddenly see.

Anglerfish

Who is this? you ask.

Your mother studies the photograph, frowns. A portrait, bent-cornered, the man’s face angled in muted light.

Your father’s friend, maybe, she says. But no, she can’t say who it is, or why the picture’s in her box of postcards and letters. She hands the photograph back. Indeed you’re unsettled. The face seems familiar. Your dad has been dead for twelve years.           

You carry the box out with others. There are many boxes. Dozens and dozens. The van downstairs is filling.

1. A HEART, but my heart, unlike yours, is not a whole, beating thing, veins and muscles and a steady stream of what we call blood but all know is the reassurance of life flowing, coursing, dancing. My heart died in pieces, breaking off from the whole to disintegrate into nothing; my heart, all that’s left of it, is probably just the size of two fingers pressed together, faintly beating against all odds.

A while before the whole Y2K thing, Jan, Lewwie and I were at the office. We’d been volunteered to monitor all the computers and coke machines to make sure they wouldn’t freak out and set the office on fire. I had the keys to the drink machines. It was ok—we’d brought fried chicken and champagne for later, and even some vodka and a bit of whiskey. We all work for The Latah Valley Countenance, a little newspaper. At least Jan and Lewwie do, and I do too, but I just deliver papers. They write articles. I’d just met them.

Mark swung his Jetta around the brick cube that looked like the orthodontist’s office he’d gone to as a teenager. No coincidence. The company’s flagship store fit the neighborhood’s medical/retail mix, to evoke feelings of healthful spending. He aimed for the gravel lot in between this and the next identical-looking building. He felt the anxiety he always felt whenever the company directed him to park here. Parking here meant he was in for a busy night. From the after-happy-hour rush until last-call rush, the paved lot would be filled.

As revelations of the US government’s once-secretive spying continue to shake up the world, I’ve decided to stand on the side of transparency by pulling the flimsy curtain back on the Drunken Boat fiction selection process. Warning: literary conspiracy theorists will be disappointed.  

A caveat:  Every literary journal is different—in its taste, selection, and editing process. Our process is not better or worse than others, but is one that has worked for us over the years.