Nesting

January 2025 | fiction

There is something very large building a nest in the parkway by the house I grew up in. The house where my father still lives. He takes walks in this parkway. It makes me nervous. I guess I first noticed it after my mother died. It looked like a large pile of brush in the clearing. Maybe from a storm or from the efforts to rid the area of an invasive species like buckthorn or thistles or the contents of my mother’s hospice supplies. But it was in a perfect circle.

The circle, the size of a small house, was furrowed in the middle, like something was lying there at night, and I wondered what could be so big. I thought of a bird the size of a hatchback car, and when I thought of the car, it was the car my father drove when I was four. A black Volkswagen Rabbit. I remember driving behind him in my mother’s car, in the passenger seat, and seeing the muffler drag on the pavement, making small orange sparks. My mother saying he would explode, and sometimes he did.

New things started to appear in the tree limbs of the nest. I saw my father’s pocket knives that fell between the couch cushions over time. Once, I saw a chair, and I had seen that chair before. It was in my parents’ living room when I was small. My father once threw its matching ottoman across the room. There were ash marks from my parents’ cigarettes on the seat of it, and a perfect circle burn. I would bring my father pepsis while he smoked and read to me. Scary stories or even just my name written on an envelope, so I would know it.

Once, during a fight, my father slammed an unopened pepsi can against the counter so hard it burst. My mother, in silence, cleaned it, while my father apologized, circling her. Now, the chair looked just the same, still stained with ash, and it was covered in leaves and empty pepsi cans and little, yellowed, sharp crescents, my mother’s fingernails that she tore off with her teeth.

My mother’s clothes weaved their way throughout the nest. My father has been asking me for years to look through her closet–her drawers for anything I might want. But there is nothing I want. I’m afraid to open the door. I’m afraid of what could be hiding in there, now. It would be dark. She wore black because she believed in black, but there were embellishments. Gold buttons. Large plastic jewels glued to the sweaters in purple and gold and silver. What is the bird that collects shiny things? What color is it? I’m very nervous.

The nest is getting bigger. My father has been doing work–making it more and more like home. The oriental rug that is soaked through with dog pee and baking soda lines the bottom. There are eggs, now, a bluish-green with spots of brown. I know that color. My father’s eyes are that color. He is stopping to rest more and more on his walks. And I want to tell him no. Do not stop here.

I can see something else in there. Something is moving. It’s crawling. It looks like it’s made out of the trimmings from my father’s beard he collected with his white electric razor. They would spill all over the sink in my parents’ bathroom and my mother would peck at him about it. The shedding. Brown at first, but as the thing moves, it goes gray, then white, then patchy and I can see the skin. It is not smooth. It is papery and thin and folds over itself like an envelope. I imagine it would be soft, but I won’t touch it because you are not supposed to touch the babies, or their mother will not come back. Your smell will get on them and she will know it. And this is what makes me nervous. I do not want their mother to know my smell. Though, I suspect, she does already.

 

Mary Thorson

Mary Thorson lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MFA from Pacific University in Oregon. Her stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Reckon Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Milwaukee Noir, Worcester Review, Rock and a Hard Place, Tough, among others. Her short story, “Book of Ruth,” was included in Best American Mystery & Suspense, ’24, edited by Steph Cha and S.A. Cosby. Her work has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, A Derringer, and a Pushcart Prize. She hangs out with her two feisty daughters, the best husband, and a dog named Pam when she isn’t teaching high school English, reading, or writing ghost stories. Lori Galvin represents her at Aevitas Creative Management. Thorson is currently working on a novel.

Comedown in a Club Bathroom

January 2025 | poetry

The boy’s feet are bound to the floor, body held before a mirror.

Cold lake, the glass spinning his near-naked body into fable, or cautionary

tale. How, how it sings back. Diamond-toothed doppelgänger.

The chambered hallways of his heart bisected, something like

a cathedral spire piercing through, thorny fingered; the enemy,

caught in his eye’s lazy gleam. The fluorescents whining overhead.

There is far too much skin to shed; it’s fastidious in its hold of him.

He doesn’t have the years required to unbind himself, to know what’s real;

can you blame him for mistaking a stranger’s touch for kindness?

Seismic: the hand clasping his wrist, roughing his chest, over his mouth.

He might never sleep again. Lips dry, eyes swallowing light. Every sound

scratching flesh. He doesn’t hear the night mother calling from beyond

the black-out curtains. When it rains, it pours his hot guts onto the black

and white tile. Germinates the future with his certainty that he will never

feel this way again. Even now: in the back of his skull,

a parable unraveling. An old preacher’s words like whiplash, hot sting

of bare thigh against the pew’s modest wood. Should he have known

how the past can come squirming up through a stomach, worms

up through mud during a storm? The living do their best not to drown here.

When did the dark grow talons so fine? He shudders, cold sweat.

Tired boy. Sick boy. Boy with a body of wet-dark tombs.

Cold mirror and his cold face staring out from the glass.

Glass defaced with crude sharpie sketches, a cock ejaculating across canvas.

A phone number. A name. The future, again and again.

His limbs fall one by one like autumn. His limbs are not his own anymore.

The high keeps coming, just as he was told. High beams

severing shadow in two. Everyone gets a piece when he gets this way.

He hopes you’ll stay.

 

Daniel Brennan

Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer and coffee devotee from New York. Sometimes he’s in love, just as often he’s not. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize/Best of the Net, and has appeared in numerous publications, including The Penn Review, Sho Poetry Journal, and Trampset. He can be found on Twitter @DanielJBrennan_

Chronoscope 262: March like thaw water

January 2025 | poetry

Sun again:

 

that geode cold light

that briefly splits the granite sky:

 

storms there: storms there:

darker because of this

temporary brightness.

 

The first shadows in a week

like inkfade ancient tattoos

impermanent crease crosshatched

on the last of the blue wash snow.

 

And the red and cream lilies

you stem snapped two days ago

despite again March like thaw water

still pollen fill the living room

with the smell of blossoming

which for them is the smell

of fade dying:

 

but not yet:

 

but not today.

 

 

John Walser

John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Spillway, Water-Stone Review, Plume, Posit and december magazine. His manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Prize, the Ballard Spahr Prize, and the Zone 3 Press Prize, as well as a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, as well as a Best New Poets, a Pushcart, and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie.