You feel it. That icy hand on your back while drying your hair. And your first instinct is the same: to look for Jim, your husband. You poke your head into the hallway and find him, in his socks, calmly flexing in the mirror. You open your mouth but make no sound. It’s something you can’t put words to.

After all, you’re rational people. You a PhD candidate, Jim an engineer. Scientific people, who would perhaps discuss such superstition over a bottle of wine, but not take seriously. No, you couldn’t say what you’ve come to believe — not when the hand pushed you on the stairs, not when the doors bolted and unbolted while the keys were missing, not even when the knife block shook so violently last night that you froze, dropping your plate of lightly-oiled baby spinach onto the tile. Jim just staring. Not at you, but into space.

But then, it must be traumatic, ending. Shedding this world like a skin. You bend to pick up a sock at the foot of the bed, then sit close to the window. An afternoon rain disfigures the world outside. There must be some undiscovered science, of portals, residues. The inward-folding energies of passage. You draw your hand up to the cold window and touch your own faint image, tracing it gently on the weeping glass.

Theory of Relativity Between Colorado and Iowa
Jonathan Starke
 
I was here (a) and she was there (b), and for whatever reason, the time (t), the miles (d), the way she turned, left, and never looked back (x), my arm was never long enough to reach her.

When I Said It Was Like Kissing My Brother
Mel Coyle
  
I lied.

Budget Travelers
Marianna Staroselsky

They arrive at Limbo Inn and realize immediately that the chlorine and fart infused lovers’ suite with its shared vents that lead to the Jacuzzi in which five bored teenagers have started an orgy is some sick joke some asshole that couldn’t decide between Heaven and Hell made up.
 
 

Into Each Life
Jason Vaughn
 
She had only wanted to thank him, on a drizzly night, by cooking his favorite supper, and yet his getting home late set off a cascade between them that started out sweet and funny (The one night I cook, huh? The one night you cook.), but crescendoed with them blaming each other for everything bad that had ever happened since the dinosaurs!; and now, stepping away into the low light of morning with more than she can carry, she hears last night’s rain still falling out of the trees.
 
 

Stone
Chris Fradkin
 
“Allison,” he cried, then she slipped off of the ledge; he watched her body spiral downward, almost floating like a leaf but in his heart he knew she fell just like a stone.
 
 

Marianne, 2010

For fuck’s sake, Charles, we’re just talking habits here. He knows she hates that he has a mouth full of chaos. Bad teeth. Bad. Yes, he agrees, disgusting.

Charles, really, she continues, this is pride I’m talking about here, Honey, simple old fashioned pride.

He blubbers and covers his mouth.

She picks up her leather case to leave, hesitates. Just can’t do this anymore—her voice trailing off, as she turns her black buckled pumps, tramps out the door.
 
 

Fire, 1970

Full moon over scrub oak. Crickets complain about the heat, but nothing moves. Humidity lays on suburban neighborhood, heavy. And then a white-orange flash.

The house shakes. Upstairs, everyone jars awake, except ten year old Charles, snoring. The Bunning family scatters as the house shimmies, belches flame. Shouting, and finally gathering in the backyard, as fire eats out the north side of their home. Accounting for all the kids. Except Charles, snoring upstairs, still. Charles? Not one of his six siblings asks. Neither mom nor dad notices.

Firemen find him, eventually, rolled up in the bathtub, little fists and teeth clenching. He spends the rest of childhood anemic, not eating, not speaking. His mouth never opens so far as teachers can discern. Never cries out when freckle-faced Pete Koenig, the bully across the street, beats him up.

Never even seems to yawn.

 
 
Miss Prissy, 2012

His teeth are improved. It has been a focus. Charles and his teeth: a new-found and strong bond, a fondness born of fanatical routine.

The new mistress likes his radiant white smile and the boyish cuteness of his pink bulbous flesh under a whip. Charles, she says, I can’t believe how much you talk and eat, eat and talk, naughty boy. Down on your knees and get busy or it’s a spanking for you—

Charles flosses and brushes six times a day. Doesn’t sleep much. Balls up in a blanket, listening all night in the low crackle of decay.

Thank you for thinking about joining our team here at eLove.com! Please fill out this short
questionnaire so we can figure out if our company would be a good match for you.

Question One: In a paragraph or two, briefly outline three of your previous romantic
relationships.

I. Jonathan
  A. He didn’t have me at hello.
    1. He was bigger than his photos.
      a. Which seemed to me a form of lying.
      b. Which seemed like he could crush me.
        i. Did I want to be crushed?
    2. As we walked to the restaurant I noticed he had a gimp.
      a. I wasn’t good at hiding my stare.
      b. He noticed me noticing his off-kilter walk.
      c. He didn’t explain it.
        i. Which seemed to me then also like a form of lying.
        ii. Today, I would not think it was lying.
    3. When we were seated he said: let’s get the gourmet cheese plate.
      a. That’s when he first had me.
      b. Later that night he had me.
        i. I asked him if he thought less of me because I wanted to have him have me. (He said no.) Weeks later he wanted to introduce me to his out-of-state sister. That’s when
      c.he won all of me over.
        i. Even the part that was skeptical.
        ii. Even the part of me that so desperately wanted to know what happened to his leg.
        iii. So when he stopped responding and never called and his sister’s visit came and went I didn’t believe it.
          (a) Even when my friend tried to break it to me gently.
          (b) Even when she said, sometimes he’s just not that into you, like the movie.
          (c) Even when she said, you’ve been had.



II. George
  A. He would only be seen with me at the café.
    1. He’d drink a black coffee.
    2. I’d eat a wheat bagel with vegetable cream cheese.
      a. If the café ran out of that cream cheese, I’d get the low-fat plain kind instead.
        i. They ran out often, because that establishment was notoriously bad at
knowing what quantities of items they needed.
    3. I pretended like it was normal, this situation.
      a. “This situation” being: us not saying hello to each other when passing in the hall.
      b. “This situation” being: us going at it at night.
    4. I pretended it was normal that we did it in his friend’s beds instead of my own.
      a. He didn’t want to meet my roommates.
      b. His room was too far away (he said).
  B. The first time we did it, he told me: that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
    1. The second time we did it he pushed me into every position conceivable.
      a. My body was sore and aching.
        i. My legs hurt.
        ii. My back hurt.
        iii. My arms hurt.
        iv. My neck hurt.
      b. After we finished, he said: see, now THAT’s the iceberg.



III. Marcus
  A. I can’t envision his room from any perspective other than from the bed.
    1. The bed took up most of the room.
      a. His studio apartment was just one room.
    2. We spent most of the time in that bed.
    3. We would eat in that bed.
      a. Often it was pizza.
        i. Delivered from the place down Belmont.
        ii. I don’t like much cheese on pizza.
          (a) Even though I like it on everything else.
          (b) He’d eat my cheese, plucking it off my slice.
            (1) Like he plucked the guitar strings when he sang the Decemberists songs to me the first time I came over.
      b. After we finished eating—my two slices, his four—he’d kiss me, sometimes.
        i. His lips would taste like oregano.
        ii. His kisses would make me cry.
          (a) I cried to him when I had to go back to school.
            (1) He sighed really heavily.
            (2) The heaviest sigh I’d ever heard.
            (3) Maybe it was because I’d watched The Notebook that night.
            (4) Maybe it was because I was twenty-one and that’s what you did.
  B. We made promises before I went back to school.
    1. I drove back to my university feeling calmer.
      a. I went to parties and didn’t flirt with any boys.
        i. Sometimes I wanted to
        ii. All the time I wanted to.
    2. He sent me an email.
      a. He didn’t even call me on the phone.
      b. It said: I’m going to get back with my ex-girlfriend.
      c. I opened it when I was in the library. Everyone around me saw my tears.
    3. I thought: what am I going to do now.
      a. I thought: maybe this is karma.
        i. Four years ago I broke up with this senior, A, via a MySpace message.
        ii. Four years ago I was a bitch.
      b. I thought: screw you.
      c. I thought: I’m going to take a nap now.
  C. On New Year’s Eve the next year, he texted me.
    1. He was drunk.
    2. I was drunk.
    3. He apologized profusely.
      a. He groveled at my feet, really.
      b. I milked it for all it was worth.
        i. He told me the ex-girlfriend he got back together with “kicked his heart’s ass”. He said he deserved it.
          (a) I agreed.
          (b) What is a heart’s ass?
      c. I told him I was in love now.
        i. I wasn’t sure, then, if this was true or not.
        ii. I said it anyway.

Has it ever happened that on a cold Tuesday, while walking through a neighborhood that’s crowded at night and on the weekends but empty during the day, you passed a dry cleaners? Had you forgotten to pick up your own dry cleaning? You vaguely remember dropping it off. You were in a hurry, you were annoyed having to spell your last name. You took a grape Tootsie Roll from dish beside an ancient orchid with roots like insomniac thoughts. The ticket, of course, you lost months ago. Have you cupped your hands to the glass and looked inside the dry cleaner? Korean devotional posters, a pedestal, a roll of measuring tape, a flickering color-burnt television, and of course the motorized conveyance of plastic-wrapped clothing. You are quite certain it was the shirt and slacks that were paradoxically comfortable and slimming. These clothes earned compliments from both women and men. Wearing these clothes guaranteed good fortune. If you were put on these clothes right now, warm sunlight would interrupt winter. The telephone would ring out hope instead of paranoia. Do you have your wallet? Show the woman your ID. Remind her of your last name, which really isn’t that complicated. Can you afford to pay the dry cleaning bill? How can you afford not to? The woman at register has noticed you and is waiving you in. You walk away. This isn’t the dry cleaner. You’ve lost the ticket. It’s a Tuesday and you haven’t worked for months.
 
 
 

Matt Pine is a Chicago native. His work has recently appeared at the2ndhand, Red Lighbulbs, and Pif Magazine. You can find him online at mattpine.com.

Grandpa is battling a baby rattlesnake with the teeth of a plastic rake, brushing it with spasms into purple geraniums back out the gate of the pool area into the desert. This is the drill. He is a retired dentist, skilled at corralling the reptiles that torment his daughter.
His grandson enjoys the rattlers: smiling, waving his chubby arms at the mother snake coiling over his inflatable raft as it floats against the edges of the pool. Borne by the submerged snakes and their underwater currents the raft changes directions.

The toddler has witnessed rattlesnakes eating rabbits and a family cat. He is wearing his orange water wings, as always. The shadow of the lemon tree falls upon the face of the snake, but the boy can see the flickering tongue. The rattles remind the child of his wooden toy box in the closet of the garage by the golf clubs and cumquat tree where the extra refrigerator and miniature freezer hum and the secret backdoor leads into the sun, the smell of heaven, and the freshest fruit of a private garden.

The venomous snake seduces the baby. Two rafts have been punctured by fangs, perhaps this one is coming for revenge from the recent decapitations. Grandpa has been on a roll all summer. He stabbed a couple adult rattlers and enchanted another few away with the ease of a matador, the grace of a man pulling a tooth without pain.

Grandpa still has all his wisdom teeth. Sometimes he rides his golf cart into town and ties one of his infected incisors to a string and demands the door of the pub kitchen swing shut. This only happens when he loses too many hands of UNO and runs out of cash. The illegal Mexicans can be a ruthless bunch when they are losing, tossing knifes at the walls, but when winning they enjoy seeing the blood on the chin of the dentist. These men are Grandpa’s gardeners, his closest friends. They are four times younger and speak Spanish too fast for the old man to understand, but they dig the trenches for the monsoon season and harvest the best fruit from the top of the trees.

¨Get outa here ya demented savage,¨ says Grandpa.

The old man is wearing his swim trunks, his hearing aids on the glass table, belly protruding as he wrestles the venomous reptile with his weapon dragging dirt and fertilizer across the white stones. His movements are robotic. The infant’s mother is watching with her hands over her lips from the window at the kitchen sink. Grandma has just risen from her tequila nap, the strawberry polish of her fingertips on the blender and it glimmers in the sun as she listens for definitive evidence of the conclusion to this latest snake invasion.

The machine is full of crushed ice, Don Julio, and lemon. So is the blender. Grandpa has been drinking since he gave the baby his morning bath. Dusk is approaching as the invisible rattlesnake jumps the walls of the raft. The mother watches as the boy does butterflies with his arms.

The inflatable armbands of the baby are penetrated first, then the raft, and the infant lifts its hand embracing the invasion. He laughs and coos. The fangs slice into the boy’s wrist. The mother screams and the blender wails, the symphony of ice crushing against the image of a deflating infant sinking with this one bloody arm and rattlesnake submerging into chlorine.

Grandpa does a cannonball into the pool. Grandma spills her heaven onto the granite countertops as she scrambles to the windows. Bacon is simmering on a pan and Grandpa is swimming freestyle toward the disaster. The gardeners help the old man lift the baby from the edge of the pool, the snake still attached to his arm. The boy is not crying. In shock, he is not conscious of anything.

The dentist bites the snake while the Mexicans remove their t-shirts and use them as a tourniquet. Grandpa is bleeding from his gums as they shuffle into the pickup and head off in a cloud of dust. Grandma and her daughter are smoking cigarettes in the bed as they bounce across the desert.

After a wash of coffee and vomits, the hospital provides the finest amputation. The child recovers nicely. That first night home the old man ties the boy’s incisor to the door of his bedroom and slams it shut.

Matthew Dexter is an expatriate author, poet, and American freelance journalist living in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. His articles have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and abroad, including thousands of pieces—many of which were published under pseudonyms, because Mateo does not advocate meritorious wounded egos.

It’s one of those hazy Sunday mornings when everyone in town wakes up saying, “I drank too much last night.” You might hear it whispered by a woman standing in front of the stove, frying eggs and chorizo for her family, a thumping pain in her head, you might hear it from the lips of her husband, hair messy and damp from sweaty sleep, from their nineteen year old mustached boy, groggy, a foul smell in his mouth from too many tequila shots and going down on his girlfriend’s cousin visiting for the weekend from Arizona, from the early morning customers at the Cambodian-run Donut Palace, where a man in cowboy boots paying for a gooey bear claw suffers from a terrible hangover.

“I drank too much, that’s for sure,” says Fernando Lopez.

“We all drank way too much,” says Lucia Martinez.

“It had to have been that last Dos Equis,” says Claudia Lopez. “I knew once I got to four I should have probably called it a night.”

It’s noon, and they’re standing outside of Sacred Heart Catholic Church where mass has just ended. They’re enjoying complimentary glasses of lemonade, prepared by old lady Chole, a pious woman who most definitely did not have too much to drink last night.

Nearby, Francisco Lopez, neatly shaved and still half-asleep, stands in a rumpled tie, Russian Red like the color of his girlfriend Anna Martinez’s lipstick. They are barely touching, not because Anna suspects anything should be wrong between them but because old lady Chole is standing two feet away, her beady eyes squinting hard in their direction.

Francisco licks his dry lips. He’s supposed to be listening to Anna’s monologue on the evils of community college statistics classes, and how she’ll never be able to transfer to a good school like Pomona if she doesn’t pass this class. Francisco nods in agreement every two sentences or so, frowns, says, “I know, I totally get it,” with choreographed precision.

He could care less about Anna passing statistics and going to Pomona. He himself is only taking Algebra with overachieving high school teenagers with hearts set on Stanford and guys like himself, still living at home, playing video games competitively until the wee hours of the morning, jerking off to lesbian porn and hiding the sticky evidence on socks, later to be washed by their unsuspecting mothers.

What he’s really doing is paying attention to Anna’s chest, rising and falling in rhythm to her breathing, her nipples poking out from the stretchy fabric of her dress. He thinks of her cousin, in route to her home in Tucson, and how she refused to take of her top when he went down on her, only pulled up her tight skirt and slid down her panties so they rested awkwardly over her ankles.

“By the way, thanks for driving Brenda to the bus station last night,” Anna says. “My parents are really grateful.”

“No problem, I was just hanging out with the guys in Jorge’s basement. I wasn’t doing anything exciting.” He doesn’t mention the countless shots of Jose Cuervo, sharing the topless photos Anna had sent him as an early birthday present to Jorge and the rest of the gang, driving intoxicated to Anna’s house to pick up her cousin, parking near the Greyhound station on graveyard Main Street, fumbling in the backseat of his car, in the dark, not bothering to think about the how or why but instead focusing on the I can’t believe this is happening.

“My parents want you to come to lunch with us. We’re going to Fortune House. I told them it’s your favorite.”

Francisco thinks of free egg rolls, spicy pork, chop suey, Cantonese noodles, hot and sour soup. An hour and a half later, he’ll go from saying, “I drank too much last night” to “I ate too much this afternoon”, reach for an Alka Seltzer and some ibuprofen, pull the blinds down in his room, and fall asleep until his mother shouts at him to come downstairs for dinner. In his dreams, he’ll get his girlfriend’s cousin to take her top off, he’ll get his girlfriend to take her top off, and they’ll rendezvous under a starlit sky, beat-driven music pulsing in the background. In his dreams, he’ll say, “I didn’t fuck enough last night.”

Shame
C. Wallace Walker

She’d never lied to him before and understood that he would never trust her again if he found out from someone else, but every time she tried to tell him about that night, the words smoldered to cinders in her mouth.

The Death of Grunge
Simon Jacobs

Sitting in the backseat, as the radio played softly in the background and yet another simmering, loaded silence passed between the angry girlfriend and the submissive boyfriend, the passenger decided that he no longer liked Pearl Jam.

By Way of Explaination
Matthew Joseph Weinkam

Before he even asked for my order I wanted to fuck him but it was really the way he repeated venti back to me that made me leave the note on the napkin with my number detailing exactly where and how it should happen.

Search & Rescue
Stephanie Thurrott

The lifeguards surfaced and dove, surfaced and dove, searching for my son in the yellow water, and as the sun burned my skin and the water washed my feet and my sister held my hand I rolled his name in my mouth like a rock and I hoped they would not find him.

A Multiple Divorcee
Stefan Milne

In stores I feel drawn to things I already own.

She starts before the sun rises and sets out for the shop because the dough has to be made and the coffee started and the chairs set up and the customers always arrive before she’s ready.  
 
The store is small but does good business and she can wear what she wants and the pay sucks but the management leaves her alone and these days, let’s face it, you take what you can get if you want to survive.  
 
She wants very much to survive.
 
By six o’clock the first commuters are standing in front of the doors with their travel mugs and their lousy tips and their iPods full of audiobooks that will take them all the way to The City.  
 
She thinks, If I’m not careful, that’s what will happen to me.
 
Another hour, another hundred bagels, fifty with cream cheese, some with butter, some without.  
 
The orders, they go on and on.
 
Do you have any non-dairy margarine? I’m vegan.  
 
Is this the only coffee you made today?  It’s too strong.  
 
Are you going to play this music all morning?  Do you have something else?  I don’t like it.  
 
Her co-workers joke behind the counter.  One is stoned, but still works very quickly which is something she can’t comprehend; when she gets stoned she just wants to go to sleep.  The other is four months pregnant and knows that she probably shouldn’t be on her feet all day but the father-to-be is long gone and no one cares about your problems when the rent is due.  
 
A screw fell out of her glasses this morning and she’s trying to get by with a tiny safety pin to hold the arm in place and she hopes that no one will notice and probably no one will but it’s driving her crazy and making her a little self conscious especially now, when the guy she kind of likes comes in to buy his usual:  Cinnamon sugar bagel, toasted, butter, to go.  She doesn’t know his name, but he’s nice to her and always tips, but only for her.  Only if she’s working the register when he orders.  The safety pin feels like it’s twenty feet high as she takes his money and smiles and watches him go out the door to the rest of his day.  His job.  His life.
 
Someday she’ll leave too.
 
By noon her feet are killing her but the lunch rush is in full swing and now sandwiches have to be made and the soda machine syrup is low and people are complaining about the slow service and the heat and traffic and their jobs and their spouses and the war and the president and that’ll be $5.95 thank you very much have a nice day.  
 
She knows that the secret to life is right there on the tip of her tongue but three different guys want to take her out tonight and she doesn’t really like any of them but it’s better than sitting at home staring at the walls and there’s a movie out that she wants to see anyway.  
 
She hates going to the movies by herself.  Seeing the happy couples on their dates.  Holding hands.  Sharing popcorn.  Sodas.  
 
Kisses.
 
Midafternoon she sells a box of bagels to a Palestinian man who makes a comment about how ironic it is that he’s buying food from a Jewish business and no one is worried about him blowing himself up.  He leaves and she wonders what that must be like, to live in constant fear of someone walking into the store where you work and blowing up.  It’s a hard concept for her to grasp.  Too distant from her world, like staring through a telescope the wrong way.
 
The afternoon, it goes mostly like this:
 
Clean the counter and wipe up a spilled chocolate milk that some kid knocked over before crying for another one that her dad bought her to shut her up and collect the newspapers from this morning left laying around in crumpled piles with photographs of the war dead splashed across page one like an ad for a new car and check her cell phone to see if anyone called (not that she’s waiting for that guy from the other night to call back because that would be pathetic and no one did anyway) and back to the counter to wrap up the mayonnaise and the hot peppers and the cold slaw and the sprouts and take a break but don’t smoke a cigarette because she’s trying to quit but fuck it have one anyway and get mad because she had one and go back inside and try not to look at the clock because time crawls when your waiting to get off and it seems to her like she spends her whole life watching the clock and waiting but she doesn’t know what for.
 
But it’s right there.
 
On the tip of her tongue.

Waiting.

Kevin Jones’ work has been featured in The New York Times, Ink Pot, Prime Number, r.kv.r.y., and the anthologies Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform and Boomtown: Explosive Writing from Ten Years of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA Program. He lives on Florida’s Gulf Coast where he teaches writing and literature.

When his father found the stockings for the second time, Felipe was twenty-six and still living with his parents, no wife of his own. His father had gone looking for a lighter and, unable to locate one in the kitchen drawer or next to the ashtray on the coffee table, went into Felipe’s room for the Real Madrid matchbooks his son always carried in his back pockets. While reaching into a pair of flung-away pants on the dresser, he found the stockings balled up underneath. Felipe, late for work, had stripped and cast off his clothing, unthinking.

At that moment, Felipe was at the Farmacia where he worked as a technician, handing out bottles of pills and directing customers to the cough medicine and cotton balls. He wasn’t a faggot, he told himself. The fabric sliding over the pinprick hairs of his calves put him in mind of all the women he’d imagined being with over the years, all the women he’d wanted to touch, but hadn’t.

The first time he’d been caught, he was fourteen. His father walked in on him standing in front of a full-length mirror in nothing but black stockings, like the kind Spanish girls wore under jean miniskirts and leather boots, tripping-tipsy on calimocho. His father, a broad-shouldered man who stood a full head higher than Felipe, did nothing for a moment, his hand hovering over his chest. His father’s whole body swayed with the expansion and contraction of his lungs, as though he were floating, barely moving underwater. And then his father broke through. He grabbed Felipe by the throat, and shoved him into the bedroom wall. A picture crashed to the floor. His father’s fingers gripped Felipe so tightly that his nail beds went white.

“I will not have a fucking maricón in my house.”

Snot and tears dripped down Felipe’s chin, both of his hands trying to pry his father’s fingers away, when, suddenly, his father let go.

“Clean yourself up. Your mother will be home soon.” And he left the room and Felipe, who was on the floor, rubbing his neck, panting. They never spoke of the incident.

Over the years, Felipe had almost forgotten the feeling of frantic blood building in his head and face, his vision going spotty at the edges. The memory was crowded by the cheers they shared when their favorite football star, Ronaldo, scored his goal in fifteen seconds; by afternoons on the balcony, faces sticky-sweet with melón on the hottest days of July; by the weight of his father’s hand on his back, right between his shoulder blades, as he said, “Good boy,” whenever he was proud.

Since the first time he’d been caught, Felipe hid his stash in a gym bag in his closet, underneath his football jersey and shorts. Some sheer, some thick and dark, others thigh-high, white and lacy like the edge of a wedding invitation, and still more with tessellating ripples and diamonds. Felipe liked the way they felt when he ran his legs over one another while he lay in bed at night, listening to some distant guitar strumming in the Plaza de Cervantes, the summer heat settling in his room through the open window. Sometimes, as he walked from the Farmacia where he worked in Calle Mayor, past the drunk, middle-aged men outside of La Restauración, who were falling over their tables, flirting with the waitresses, the slick push-pull of his pants across the fabric underneath made him smile.

But tonight, his father was waiting for him, sitting in the sundown-darkened room smoking. For a moment, Felipe thought someone had broken in. The mattress had been flipped off the bed—sheets and blankets tangled, drawers ripped from the dresser and tossed aside; everything from the closet rested on the floor in a great heap, including the gym bag, which was open, overturned.

“Dad,” Felipe started, “what did—” He stopped. He watched his father grind the nose of a cigarette into an ashtray.

“You have a girlfriend,” his father finally said.

He was sitting on the chair in front of Felipe’s desk, grinning. But there was a catch of something else in his eyes. He gestured to the pile of hosiery that sat near his feet. “Maybe more than one?”

Felipe flinched when his father moved, though he only bent down to grab the pile of stockings up in one hand.

“Seventeen pairs—souvenirs, right? From each girl?” He looked at Felipe, waiting.

Felipe was aware of the ticking of the clock above his bed, the sweat on his neck and back, how warm it suddenly was. His hands tingled; his calf muscles were taut, ready to move. But then, Felipe saw that the catch of light in his father’s eye wasn’t that of a wild animal, but of one that had been caged and tethered.

“Tell me—they’re from your girlfriends, aren’t they?” his father asked, his voice hoarse.

Felipe swallowed and then nodded.

His father mirrored this gesture. “Of course, of course they are.” He picked up the overturned wastebasket, and dropped the stockings inside. “Felipe, this is how men are—all these girls—this is the way it’s supposed to be. I understand that. But your mother, she wouldn’t. She won’t understand. It would destroy her. It would destroy our family.” And he reached into his pocket, and pulled out the Real Madrid matchbook he had come looking for. He handed it to Felipe.

Felipe took the matchbook. His father was breathing as if he couldn’t quite get enough oxygen. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you? It would destroy our entire family.”

Heart throbbing all the way to his fingertips, Felipe trembled—not at the memory of his father pinning him to the wall, but at a vision of the future, of his mother ripping tissues into bits while she cried, wrapping her pink bathrobe around her body while she watched Felipe pack his bags with his books, his football gear, his stockings.

Bile rose in his throat, but he swallowed hard, and tore out a single match, striking it on the side. The fire flared, and then began to burn, traveling down the thin cardboard. It worked its way farther and farther. Five more seconds and his skin would melt. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt. Maybe it was okay even if it did, so long as he held on. In the dark of the room, Felipe could just make out the glint of his father’s eyes, which were unblinking.

“Felipe, please.”

The heat had already invaded his forefinger and thumb, like a craving, but in that moment of hearing his father’s voice crack, Felipe knew he wouldn’t let the flame touch him.

He flicked the match into the wastebasket. There was a thrill of heat, the fire passing from one pair to the next, spreading like a rumor until the whole pile was in flames.

“Good boy,” he heard his father say. Felipe tried to see beyond the blaze, to find his father’s eyes and the mouth that formed the words. But there was only light, and smoke, and a shadow that used to be a man.