#bfczine

by Alix McAlpine

cold breeze from above / why is the air on so high / my nipple, a rock

puffy coat, duck boots / slipped on frozen trash water /winter in new york

half a dozen texts / then a flurry of dick pics / shoulda swiped left

by Tara Parian

I am a murderer. A cold-blooded killer. My entire life, I have been murdering insects. But why? What gives me the right to end these innocent bugs’ lives?

I fucking hate those weird, creepy centipede things that seem to love hanging out in NYC apartments, especially my own. You know, the ones that move so fucking fast when you’re trying to end its life, as if they actually think they’re worthy of living?

I hate them more than spiders, and I have been an arachnophobiac since the womb. One time, when I was a youth, I was sitting on the toilet, and one of those jackass spiders thought it’d be funny to chill next to me and watch me pee. I screamed bloody murder so loud that my mother came bursting into the bathroom thinking I accidentally flushed myself down the toilet.

As any good mother would, she squashed that eight-legged Peeping Tom in a goddamn heartbeat. So perhaps my murdery instincts have been nurtured into me.

I’m not sure why, but the more legs, the more I am completely and utterly terrified to my core. A few weeks ago, I was minding my own business, changing into my pajamas, and what did I see? A centipede slut ON my ceiling. I sprinted topless to the kitchen (praying my roomies were sleeping) and grabbed Raid, a hammer (?), and a chair. This could have went wrong in so many ways, but I was not about to let this whore think she could sleep with me tonight.

I stood up on the chair and slowly reached the hammer toward that bitch and smashed it into the ceiling, but I fucking missed, and she fell to the ground, nearly touching me on the way down. How dare she. And naturally, she crawled under my bed. I felt my eyes turn black and started spraying ferociously, inhaling the fumes as I did, without giving any fucks.

Suddenly she came running at me. When this happened, I was beside myself and too panicked to continue to spray. So there I was: half naked and hammering away at my floor. But she was too fast for me and disappeared into the slim dark abyss that is the space between the bottom of my dresser and the floor, where the backs of earrings and bobby pins go to die.

Who’s to say if the fumes actually had any effect on the bug, but as soon as the Raid cloud cleared, out of nowhere, I felt overwhelmed with a gut-wrenching, sickening feeling of…guilt? I have been a vegetarian for eight years because I feel badly for the animals, but never really stopped to think about the insects. I started to question my morals: Am I a worthless hypocrite? What kind of twisted monster have I become? I don’t even know the number of bugs I have assassinated. There I was, standing in my room, topless and sad, head hanging in defeat, and finally realizing, perhaps I’m not a cold-blooded killer after all. Perhaps I can feel remorse. Perhaps by confessing these sins I’ll get into heaven after all.

by Eric Sams  

Resolve awoke in her, perhaps in the same moment that her blood oxygenated — turned from wine-dark to crimson — later to flow down her arm onto my trembling fingers. And now we trembled together on different wavelengths. Me with honest fear, her with abundance. She was something wild that hadn’t yet found calm. It didn’t seek calm. It felt better wild, sweating, bleeding, focused, and low to the ground. It could strike again if it needed to.

Yesterday morning I hung onto my fiancée while a flurry of sobs shook her. When I looked down over her sweaty, trembling right shoulder I saw smears of her blood streaked across my right index finger. And the emptiness in me was larger than the space it filled. I told her that she was OK, that she was safe, and I couldn’t yet know whether I was lying to the sobbing, shivering little girl in my arms.

Was she OK now, was she safe?  

Mostly, she was confused. Just as she never lets herself do one thing at a time — can’t sit still for a whole goddamn movie without jumping up to do the dishes, or tell one story without branching into five subplots — she couldn’t let herself feel one thing at a time. And so I felt the fever through her clammy skin as she invited buffeting waves of shame, guilt, fury, and fear all in at once. I watched them fill her up, watched her concentrate on the effort it took not to start tearing off flesh. Watched them ebb and recede and leave her emptier than me. Watched her eyes turn from brown to a hateful ashen gray.

I let go of her to go to the bathroom for a Band-Aid and the chocolate-brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide. She sat on the floor, against the wall opposite the bed, and went icy. Went internal. I asked her what I could do. “Nothing.” I asked her if I could touch her. When I told her that it might sting a little, she looked at me like I was a child. I dabbed the gash on her elbow and she let herself flinch only the bare minimum that her muscles required of her. A hieratic acknowledgment. An involuntary tensing.

I asked her not to sit on the floor, to come and sit on the bed, or, better, to lie down and let me hold her. I asked her, not in words, to cry. I asked her to exonerate me for not having been there, as I always should be, to fight her battle tooth and nail and sharp-edged elbow. I asked her to mop up the smattering of her blood off my index finger and replace it with mine. “Let me hold you, so that I can shoulder aside my feeling of impotence with the most impotent totem of strength. With a regret.”

by Tim Sheehan 

The belt Gene Pendergrass chose to hang himself with was from Sears. It was buy one, get one free. He picked one in black and one in brown. The brown matched his watchband but not his shoes. “Have a nice weekend,” the cashier said. “Thanks, you too,” he replied.

He couldn’t remember where or why he had purchased the lotion, but he chose it that day because it was the only bottle he had and he needed it. The bottle was blue. It was half empty.

The porn that Gene had paused on his laptop was chosen after roughly five minutes of searching. He selected it because it was guy on girl and the performers were white. They were both blond, and the man took her from behind.

Gene was tall, had a strong nose, and a not-strong, not-weak chin. His hairline was receding, so he kept his light brown hair purposefully short. He had shaved that morning, occasionally making eye contact with himself.

His ex-wife had the kids that weekend. He drank orange juice with pulp, his daughter’s favorite, whose finding out of her father’s intent he’d be most embarrassed by, among others. He listened to Derek and the Dominos. He tied the belt to the door.

Gene sat down, back against the closet door. His fingers unbuckled the belt he was wearing. He undid the button. He grasped the zipper and pulled down. He braced his back harder against the door, his feet steadier to the floor, and raised himself up. He slid his pants and underwear to his ankles. His shoes were off, sitting in a corner. His socks were on, one inside out. His T-shirt remained on. He slipped his head through the loop he had fashioned with the belt.

In the apartment across him, a woman was reading an editorial on bullying but was hardly comprehending. A pot of chicken noodle soup was on the stove. The smell permeated the hallway.

In the apartment above him, a man was on the toilet. His wife was writing a list in her head of all the men she had slept with in order. She couldn’t remember if Jacob was before or after Max. She got to her husband and kept listing.

Outside it began to snow.

Gene hit play on the computer. The volume was low. He pushed down on the lotion pump once. It was cool in his palm. He rubbed the lotion first on his hands, then on himself. He took a breath.

by Jen Winston

Winter without cold is like a kiss without a sound:

Does it even count?

The mwah is your proof of purchase

A record of the transaction that occurred here today

Without it, you merely touched lips

Skin could’ve easily been wrists or elbows

The sound is your receipt

Of something more

Get the sound, or get your money back

A 72-degree Christmas is nice in theory

But not if it still makes you feel S.A.D.

Seasonally affected to the point of ennui

Because, damn, Netflix really takes it out of me

And somehow, boredom is worse

Than stinging pain, or freezing rain

Because cold is the way it’s supposed to be

We’ve come to expect numbness in December

And this time of year, change is far too eerie

To be a good thing

I once spent the holidays in Key West

Around tourists

And “one tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor”

Emblazoned on a tank top with confidence

As if no one had ever heard it before

People sat, wearing santa hats on the pier

Kicking at the cool, clear water

Forgetting hot chocolate

And snow angels

And how to stay warm without Instagramming it

My family spent too much time in the shops, boardwalks, and such

Because any time was too much

We browsed shot glasses, towels

Your name on a grain of rice

Dad wanted a keychain but they were sold out of Wayne

So he bought Ray-Bans

And felt good, numb again

I missed our house

I missed my coat

Especially the way I hated that coat

I missed the cold

Because the thought its sting

Seemed more appealing than feeling nothing

If a kiss is just a touch

It’s no different

Than a stranger on the subway

Who mutters, “Sorry,” then moves his hand

If a holiday is hot

It reveals its frivolity

Shows itself as just a distraction

From the time pool we’re wading in

If a kiss is just a touch

It’s easy enough

To forget it

If a holiday is hot

We may as well not

by Daniel Toy 

She cradles the boy in the butterfly shoppe, picking rosy glass from the seam of his scalp, lice-like. She’s careful as a surgeon, despite knowing she's already lost him. Around her, visitors continue to shriek, high-pitched and desperate, searching. They step over lifeless butterflies scattered across the floor, trapping orange wings in rubber soles. Danaus plexippus, she thinks reflexively. Milkweed reliant. Susceptible to the cold. They’d perish in a few weeks if they weren’t already gone. All parts of her usual sermon given to bored families and tourists, or anyone who happened to pass through the conservatory. Henry, her own little beauty boy, called her shoppe the Snow Globe House, referring to the 11,000 feet of reinforced glass that made up the dome of the building. Henry, he’d wonder why it was so warm inside whenever she brought him in with her.

They can’t survive in the snow, she’d say.

He’d ask then how can we.

The boy in her arms now loses warmth as more air seeps in through the cracks and holes above them, around. Who did he belong to? Apple-smooth skin that makes her aware of her own rough fingers. Brown eyes, even darker than Henry’s.

As the ground finally stops its shifting, she stands up and lays him out on a nearby bench — a single untouched thing. She motions to place a kiss on his head or to tuck hair behind his ear, but they’re not hers to give. Instead she reaches down and gathers a handful of debris: years reduced to leaf and glass in her palm. She smiles, wanting to laugh, but stops herself, acknowledging her selfish, misplaced interests.  

When Henry was 3, she’d rest her hand on his forehead to coax him to sleep. After years of the same gesture, she became attuned to his natural temperature. It helped her to sleep too, but any fluctuation — whether too hot or too cold — would upset her. Couldn’t he just stay the same every night?

How are you feeling? she’d ask, and he’d roll over or mumble or already be asleep. Wake up, she’d say. Henry, wake up. But children, she knew, were unconcerned with people who closed their eyes after them.

Those earlier years, waking up was the hardest part — her first thoughts always about him, worry each time she picked him up, held him, that he’d look at her as he would a stranger. And eventually that’s what she convinced herself she was: a stranger raising a strange child. She tells herself now that the resentment later happened independently, but in her darkest moments, maybe her realest, it had been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The butterfly shoppe, she realizes, had always held her heart.

She ignores her mounting pulse. The uninjured have all fled now, to safety or to somewhere else. She doesn’t know. The outside pollutants have contaminated the space around her, tainting the lemongrass dew, a scent she worries she’ll never experience in the same way again. Blood hides in places, she thinks, but less than could be expected, if you can expect something like that. She doesn’t know.

Then the red and blue lights, they bounce around the shattered dome, scattering over the scene: the red concealing, the blue exposing. She closes her eyes, listens instead to the repetitive screeching, somehow more tolerable. One night when Henry’s cries woke her, she carried him into the kitchen to show him the progress of their in-house butterfly, then in a state of chrysalis in a small makeshift garden. It had started to hatch, she noticed, but became stuck within the hard shell — an unfortunate but natural part of the process if ideal conditions weren’t met. Its wings could still move in place, but that’s as far as it would get.

Is it coming out? Henry said. He touch-tapped his finger to the hard plastic as if to wake it.

She could have explained why it wasn’t using the jargon she reserved for visitors to the shoppe — its possible parasitization by the OE spore or the up-and-down temperature of the house — but instead: It will, she said. Eventually.

After putting Henry back down, she carefully removed the shell from the container and worked at it with a pair of tweezers, understanding that trying to aid it at this point could only do more harm — illogical actions just to show her son something nice in the morning. Maybe if she could do this, she thought, she wouldn’t wake up with flightless thoughts.

When the wings fell apart in her hands that night, she threw it all in the garbage, and Henry, he didn’t ask any questions the next day.

She opens her eyes now to a man in a white disposable suit. He stands across the room from her, calmly waving a gloved hand toward the exit. Someone pushes her, she thinks, or guides her, or else her body naturally floats toward him, her hands grazing fallen milkweed and bee balm and honeysuckle. The boy on the bench has been removed, she sees: a blip of the night.

by Ayesha Mittal

I had a dream that you loved me.

You’re standing there, arms outstretched

And I’m young again,

Running towards you as fast as I can.

But I get closer to you and you frown.

You drop your arms and I slow down.

And then we’re face to face

But still so far away.

You squint, and you look at me,

And then you say,