Joyce Englander Levy, Things the Size of Red Pepper Flakes | L*STS

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Things the Size of Red Pepper Flakes

Joyce Englander Levy

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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I make a quick red sauce pasta from scratch while the kids are outside playing ultimate frisbee and my husband is fixing a lock. I chop onions; add them to a warm pan of olive oil. Boil water in a separate pot. Add minced garlic to pan. Stir. Add ground beef. Check time. Break beef into small clumps. Let brown. Check when the game starts. Pour in penne pasta. Add diced tomatoes to pan. Stir. Yell to kids, “Dinner’s almost ready.” Drain, pour, check, stir, combine. Yell outside, “Dinner’s ready.” I shout as loud as I can, but my mothereze voice disappears quickly, like a bird call. 

I put the game on as everyone washes their hands. It’s already started. I find the red pepper, and I sprinkle a pinch on my bowl and two on my husband’s. We don’t normally eat in front of the television, but America is playing Bosnia and Herzegovina in the World Cup. The boys sit on the floor and use the glass coffee table. My husband and I sit in side-by-side Z-chairs, and we eat from our laps. I eat slowly. I’m not hungry. I’m watching the game.

The camera angle is wide, the players look small, like foosball figurines. A youth soccer coach on Instagram recommended kids watch one player, rather than the ball. He said to watch a player in your position, where he goes, how he moves, when he walks or runs, how he angles himself in preparation. I’m trying to watch the American center-mid. But it’s hard to follow the game this way. The camera follows the ball. The players’ numbers are too small to read. 

The first half is nearly over when the momentum tugs tight. I feel it coming. USA scores—Goal! We all jump up and scream. Suddenly, what the fuck? Ow. Ow. Ow. What the fuck? My eye. My eye! Is burning. I’m screaming, but no one can hear me over the cheering. Who even cares about soccer? I’m racing to the sink. I’m on fire. My eye’s on fire. It must have been a flying pepper flake. Breath of fire. I can feel the flake in my right lower lid, but mostly I feel the sting of capsaicin. My eye capsizing. I wet a paper towel and blot and blot. Everyone is now by my side trying to figure out what’s wrong. What have they missed? Why am I screaming and dabbing my face? They’re asking annoying questions. They can’t see the flake. “You’re not helpful,” I yell and run to the bathroom.

My husband comes back with advice. AI is helpful, which makes my husband helpful. I have to flush my eye. Flush it for twenty minutes with cool water. I stand naked in the shower with the hose angled to flush my eye. Water soothes the sting, but I can still feel the flake. My husband says to keep my eye open. I feel the flake, like a tiny acidic contact lens. Enough. I hold my eye wide open with my left fingers, and I shoot the water into the inner corner. I feel the flake disappear. I keep rinsing the compound away. I never even saw the red card.

∞

The deeper I go the more I want to learn. Specialize or you're an amateur, the world says to me from every direction. Today, I feel no matter how organized I am, it isn’t enough. No matter how much I work, research, or write—nothing is finished. There’s a pit in my stomach. A small pit. A little, empty, plumb pit. The second hand on the clock ticks. The minute on the digital clock on the stove goes from 44 to 45.

∞

My sister, brother and his family are visiting for the weekend. We’re sitting around the dining room table eating homemade pasta with basil pesto and roasted chicken. We’re playing Spontaneous Staring Contest; if you happen to lock eyes with someone, then you’re in a staring contest; the first person to blink—or look away—loses. My nine-year-old son is looking at me; I look at him: our pupils connect. His hazel eyes are relaxed, gentle, confident. My eyes sting with love. I blink.

∞

The doctor says the mole on my check looks like a basal cell carcinoma. She says, “It's tiny. I could biopsy it now, or we can wait. It’s tiny-tiny, and slow growing.” I choose to wait. I’ve learned biopsies leave scars. I’m not ready for a scar on my face. I’m not ready for aging.

∞

I go for a quick walk down by the river to check on the bald eagles. The lawn is long. Acorns hang heavy on the oak branches. The river is quiet today. The eagle nest is empty. The nest looks small, but I can see it, high in the trees and across the river, because it’s the size of a queen mattress. I scan the trees; I look for movement or a small white orb among the green leaves. I don’t sense the eagle’s presence. I walk back up the small dirt path, over the huge old maple stump, along the back of the barns, and I return to the house. I roll out my yoga mat in the living room. I’d prefer to practice outside, but the cat will be jealous, and I’ll feel guilty for not letting him outside. 

I lie on my back in tadakamudra. Movement evolves from there. The goal of practice, no matter what pose I’m in, is to soothe. I hold poses for long periods, feeling sturdy and calm, accompanied by fulfilling breaths. After a few supine poses, I move to my hands and knees, then down dog, then a few standing poses. I do headstand, and I meditate in sukhasana with jnana mudra. I lie down in savasana. I feel nothing, but I sense something. I bolt upright, I lift my shirt, and I see a little brown tick burrowing into my stomach. Even in the moment of seeing her, I still can’t feel her. She’s flat, not engorged. Her eight little legs are swishing like windshield wipers. I run upstairs, find the tick twister, slide it on, lift the tick out, seal her in a bag, take pictures, determine it’s a female dog tick, thank my sensitivity, take a shower.

∞

I’m back at the doctor. She wants to biopsy the suspected basal cell again. I’ve prepared myself for this. I acquiesce. When you have a lot of—beauty marks—dermatologists stare at your skin under microscopic lenses several times a year. They zoom in on your unique patterns of mole formations to look for deviations.  Dr. T injects me with novocaine and then she scalpels cells off my cheek. She places a band-aid on my face and tells me she’ll call in a week.

∞

Making an appointment for Mohs surgery is as fun as a pepper flake getting stuck in your eye. The small stuff makes my sweat smell like pine needles. I’m on the phone with a soft spoken woman who wishes she could speak to me in Spanish, who I wish I could speak to in Spanish. She asks me where I want to have the surgery. I say, “What are my options?” She wants to know when. I say, “I’d prefer never.” She is losing her patience with me. I’m losing patience with dermatology. I say, “I’m sorry but I’m having a hard time making an appointment for a scar on my face.” I know technically this isn’t what the appointment is for, but that’s what it feels like. “Can you please take the lead here and make this easier on me?” 

∞

I organize the files on my computer; I click, drag, name, and rename little rectangles; I fold the rectangles into little squares. Now I have folders that say Essays in Progress and Finished Essays. This is one of those tasks that’s been scratching at the back door trying to get in. 

∞

Don’t be fooled. The doctor will tell you it’s a small little mole. It’s outpatient. It’s no big deal. Then she’ll numb you, and that’s supposed to mean your nervous system can’t communicate any pain to your brain. But does the numbing itself perhaps instigate a state of danger? Do the axons and dendrites wonder why some part of the body has suddenly gone off-line? 

∞

The last time I was in Dr. T’s office she reviewed my old scars and said, “You don’t heal well do you?” I said, “I’ve been told I over heal.” Bright-pink jagged lines look like wounds traced over with a highlighter. 

The last time I left Dr. T’s office, when I was there for the biopsy, I reversed into a pole in the parking lot. I didn’t see it or sense it. As if that corner of my vision had been numbed too. 

∞

Dr. T, a young Chinese American surgical dermatologist who specializes in skin cancer, walks into the operating room with Dr. R, a young Black woman wearing glasses and a mask. 

Dr. T greets me and says, "Mohs surgery is slightly different. I'll remove the tissue from

your cheek, and then we'll put it under the microscope right away to make sure we have clear borders. This way we remove as little tissue as possible—since it's your face."

Tears surface and trickle down my smooth cheeks as I nod my head.

Dr. T measures the basal cell carcinoma and says, "Point four by point five millimeters. It's so tiny."

I say, "Can I put on a meditation?"

She says, “Of course.” She steps out as I grab my phone and put an ear bud in my left ear. Her attendant helps me to lie down and lean onto my left cheek. I listen to a healing meditation recorded by my friend Manjit.

Dr. T and Dr. R re-enter the room. The bed is lifted, so they can have my face right where they need it. This first part is quick. She numbs. I listen to Manjit’s recording, which encourages me to release the stress of the day through the soles of my feet. Dr. T tries to talk to me as she scrapes a hole into my face. I picture the roots of the carcinoma shriveled, shallow, and uncomplicated, and I try to disassociate.

After five minutes or so she says," Okay. Hopefully we got it all." 

∞

The problem with basal cells is their roots. They grow like plant roots, and can burrow into ligament, cartilage, and tissues around the nose, ears, eyes. Luckily we caught mine early

and it was slow growing. My husband has tried to convince me to see the bright side, but I don't know how to process a scar on my face before it's even there.

∞

I wait for the results. I read a book of poetry called Flower Grand First by Gustavo Hernandez. The subject is uncomfortable, important, touching. It's written by a man who came here from Mexico with his family when he was a boy. I feel that he's a good person who has had to live in hiding. I sense the stress and fear the family exists with. I wonder if they get their skin checked regularly, and what they do when they need surgery? I try to think of this surgery as a luxury. 

∞

Dr. T returns and tells me we're all clear. She can stitch me back up. I lie down. The pillows are stuck under my head at an uncomfortable angle that makes it hard for Dr. T to reach my face where she needs it. She asks me to lift my chin, but I can’t because of the pillows behind my head. We do our best. 

My face is turned a hard 90-degrees to the left to expose the right side of my face. My neck and cheek pulse with a sharp pain. Dr. T is trying to talk to me about what books I’m reading. How can she talk at a time like this? She pokes my skin with a needle and injects more novocaine. There’s a sheet, with a small hole cut into it, placed over my face and the entire top half of my body, perhaps to prevent blood from getting all over? Or to hide that I’m a person? I have no idea. I can feel the stitches going in. Not the needle—but the thread—tugging my face.

Dr. T says, “Are you in pain?” 

I say, “My body isn’t happy. I can feel the tugging.”

She says, “But are you in pain?” 

I am in pain, but she means, Can I feel the needle going through my skin? I cannot. I can only feel my skin being pulled and sutured. I feel like a piece of soft leather being stitched. I cannot answer no, but if I answer yes she will inject more novocaine and this will only slow down this awful procedure. 

Dr. T has a warm demeanor, but she doesn’t understand why I’m shaking. Perhaps if someone would put a hand on my arm, give my skin something else to focus on, something grounding. I tuck my legs in. I’m shaking as if I’m shivering but I’ve broken into a sweat. It’s somewhere between a hot flash and a cold sweat. I’m shaking as if I’m trying to lift a two-hundred pound dumbbell over my head. There is an undulation to the shaking, like my vagus nerve is physically waving for help. The doctor asks if I can be still. I’m trying. I’m trying to stop my eyes from welling over with tears. I’m trying to stop the tremors moving through my body. I’m trying to stop slipping into the present tense. I try to breathe slowly and to tell my body it’s all going to be okay. But I also keep feeling her tugging, tugging with a needle and thread through the skin on my face. Tugging. My face. 

I say, “This feels like a lot of stitches for point four by point five millimeters." 

She says, “I had to cut it into an american football shape so it doesn’t pucker.”

I say, “So you made the wound bigger?” 

“Yes.”

I’m trying to suppress the tears, but a few keep sneaking out. My chin is trembling from a singular point of no return. I’m typically an emotionally neat person. It’s sweet the way I’m trying to contain this excess. Like a little girl who has broken a faucet, and she’s standing there with a little hand over the spicket trying to contain it, and the adults around her see the water pouring everywhere, and they’re trying to fix the leak but they’re not sure where it’s coming from.

When Dr. T finally finishes stitching and cauterizing, she asks her nurse to put a bandage over the side of my face. She removes the sheet that was hiding my head and body, and she places a hand on my shoulder briefly. I see her warm brown eyes through my tears, she smiles, and then she leaves to check on another patient.

∞

Dr. R stays to talk to me. She says, “It’s okay, just let it out.” 

I can’t cry harder, and I can’t cry less. I want it to stop. I am trying to slow my breath down. Dr. R places a hand on my arm and it helps. I’m able to regain my composure. I breathe. I sit up. I say, “Thank you.”

I ask her if she’s expecting. She’s due in August. She has one more year of residency and then she’ll go on to be a dermatologist who specializes in detecting skin cancer, but she won’t do Mohs Surgery like Dr. T. It’s too stressful.

∞

Dr. T comes back in. She asks if I’m okay. She asks what I’m doing for the summer. I say I’m visiting with friends and family upstate New York. I ask her, and she says she’s working. I wonder if all of her patients are as difficult as I am. I imagine her spending her summer in the hospital, zooming in on moles on naked bodies. Using tiny instruments, looking through microscopic lenses, removing visible clumps of cells which have gone rogue. I know what she does is rare. The demand is high and acute. Small, painful, life-altering openings. 

∞

I leave the hospital, sit in my car, and take a few minutes to acclimate to the idea of operating heavy machinery. I pick up a tiny, prickly pine cone the size of a marble, which I found on a walk with one of my writing teachers in the nature preserve in Biscayne Bay. I check the mirrors several times before I put the car in reverse.

∞

I pick up my younger son from his guitar lesson, drive home, hang my bags over a kitchen stool. I call my husband; he’s about to pick up our older son from a friend’s, but he’s stuck in traffic. I hang up. My nine-year-old tugs on my arm and says, " Mom, did you know everything has a vibration? Here I'll show you."

He takes me by the hand into the living room. He turns on the amp he recently received for his birthday. He plugs the chord into the amp, and then he places the nodule—that would normally plug into the bass guitar—against my hand. A sound of vibrational static is amplified. He removes the silver nodule from my hand—silence. He replaces it—I sound like a car driving by.

He places the nodule against his own arm and he sounds like a hummingbird. 

He places the vibration detector on the low E of the acoustic guitar, the G of the bass guitar, the D of the double bass. Then he makes the carpet sound like a smothered a.m. radio. He taps the wood xylophone, a guitar pick, the small brass weight on the metronome. Each item generates a subtly unique sound.

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My professor, Julie Marie Wade, forwarded the L*sts submission opportunity. As soon as I saw this Essay Daily prompt, a light bulb went off. I have been developing a process for moving my writing from notebook to finished essay. Every morning, I write by hand, and then I type that raw material into a computer file titled the month and year of the date it was written. These files sit in a folder called Months and Years and they are like a gathering place for my ideas, thoughts, and memories. From there the raw material becomes essays, poems, or stories. When I saw the word lists, I realized how several of the short stories and snippets I had been writing belong together. I thought of the chopped onions, the red pepper flake, the tick, the beauty mark gone rogue, the scar, the microscopic lens, the acorns, the pupil's in my son's eyes, the little things that are overlooked and underestimated, which are portals to the big stuff. 

Joyce Englander Levy is the author of Pier 40, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press in 2025. She is an adjunct professor and an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Florida International University. Joyce has also been studying yoga and meditation since the nineteen hundreds, and she sends a bi-monthly newsletter on Substack called Look Both Ways, which explores intersections between mindfulness and life.

Ellen Birkett Morris, I'm Trying to Remember the Last Time | L*STS

 

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I'm Trying to Remember the Last Time

Ellen Birkett Morris

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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I’m trying to remember the last time:

I was not in pain

It didn’t feel like the weather was trying to kill someone

I went out of the house without a mask in my pocket

Watching other people’s pain on television was considered weird/unusual  

The mention of family did not summon the grief over losing my parents 

I could eat an unwashed piece of fruit without a thought 

Sat in an independent movie theater full of people

Rolled down a hill without worrying what I would do to myself

The last time my friends were made up solely of people I had met face to face

I was friendly with my neighbors whose Back the Blue window sticker contrasted with my Black Lives Matter yard sign 

I cried over a school shooting or war or the daily assaults from an administration off the rails 

Looked my neighbor with the Trump sign in her yard in the eyes 

I believed American Democracy would survive 

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My list of last times was prompted by the convergence of several events over the last six year. My managing an autoimmune condition in the middle of a global pandemic, realizing the changes wrought by aging, reflecting on changes in society brought on by technology, corrupt, cultish politicians, climate change, and what looks like some kind of mass surrender of what I believed were the values that brought us together as a nation. There is a sort of numb realization that I am not who I used to be, and our society no longer functions as it once did. Writing it was less cathartic than it was like waking up to a nightmare. I am not without hope, but I think our first step toward repair and reconciliation begins with a close examination of how things have changed. 

Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Beware the Tall Grass: A Novel, selected by Lan Samantha Chang for the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence. She is also the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award, and of Abide, and Surrender, poetry chapbooks. Her short story collection, Love Thy Neighbor, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Antioch Review, and South Carolina Review, among other publications. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council, and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

Dan Pinchbeck, Sleeper Service | L*STS

  

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Sleeper Service

Dan Pinchbeck

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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[This may be easier to read as a PDF]

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For every game that actually gets made, there's usually a whole load that don't make it. Some of them are never more than ideas, some get cancelled mid-way, some never make it out of prototyping. Sometimes it's because they just don't work like you'd hoped. Sometimes market forces or fashion conspire against them. I've long felt that a museum of lost games would be a wonderful thing, although in reality the combination of industrial grade NDAs and the weird secretive hang-ups of the games industry would almost certainly prevent it. So one of the advantages of having spent many years as an independent studio is that there's an archive of ideas I can share. I've already posted some of these on my Substack, but this one has been lurking and it's a particular favourite. It's an early internal concept doc that I made for the team (this will have been around 2016) for a follow-up to So Let Us Melt. It never got off the drawing board, as so many things don't, but I still think it would have made a really fun game. It was inspired by JG Ballard's "Thirteen to Centaurus" with shades of the old paper-based RPG Paranoia. Hope you like it. 

Dan Pinchbeck is a writer, best known as the co-founder and creative director of The Chinese Room. Under his direction, TCR established itself as one of the most interesting and restlessly creative game studios in the UK, winning a whole load of some of the most prestigious awards in the industry along the way. He created, wrote and directed the games Dear Esther, A Machine for Pigs, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, So Let Us Melt, Little Orpheus and Still Wakes the Deep. Dan is now a full-time writer of literary dark fiction and horror and is represented by the Mic Cheetham Agency. 

Heidi Fettig Parton, Wanted: Lost T-Shirt, Perfect Green | L*STS

  

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Wanted: Lost T-Shirt, Perfect Green

Heidi Fettig Parton

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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I don’t miss P. I’ve never missed P. Not even the day after I broke up with him on the way home from a dinner party hosted by his friends, not mine. He couldn’t stop critiquing the host’s wine and cheese selections. His condescension reminded me of how he’d stood in my living room the prior weekend in tight-fitting, rust-colored corduroys. He stood in the glorious morning sunlight and pronounced my coffee “Absolute fucking shit.”

I wasn’t planning on breaking up with him that night of the party, but I guess I’d hit a tipping point. 

After I told him I was done, after P informed me that I owed him $300 for the espresso machine, the remaining few miles to my home passed in silence. Once home, I told him he could have his espresso machine. Not inviting him in, I ran inside to get it and then back out to his car, shoving it into the back seat of his Volvo. I would not miss P.

I don’t miss the B either. He was the only guy I dated in the early aughts who didn’t buy me some sort of kitchen gadget, aside from the guy who looked like a Viking—as in long-red-hair Norse, not football. He gave me eight pounds of dried lentils from the Y2K stockpile he didn’t end up needing. The Viking and I had been chatting on Match.com before our one date, and I guess I’d mentioned I often cooked up huge batches of lentil soup to keep my grocery bill down. Still, one date doesn’t count as “dating,” so B keeps his status as the only non-kitchen-gadget giver I dated post-divorce.

Instead of a kitchen appliance, B created a creepy website homage to our three-week relationship after I ended things. Honestly, I would have preferred an appliance.

When I divorced at 31, my ex-husband requested our portable culinary appliances, and I negotiated our entire CD collection in return, except for Depeche Mode and Fine Young Cannibals, two bands I’d never really cared for. Depeche Mode’s synth beat is too obvious or something. Plus, their tunes lack the floaty, layered melodies that redeem The Cure’s sometimes overly synthy sounds. I could’ve seen keeping FYC around simply to dance, but their tunes lacked the nuanced lyrics of a band like The Psychedelic Furs. If I was gonna dance alone in my living room post-divorce, it was gonna be to The Furs. I could leave DM and FYC back in the late 80s, along with my permed hair and high-teased bangs.

I made do with the piecemeal sets of dishes and utensils that remained after he’d packed his boxes. It wasn’t much. Not even a spaghetti spork in the mix.

The assortment of men I dated as a new divorcee seemed determined to remedy my kitchen-gadget-less life. 

When I dated T, three years after P, he let me keep the hand-propelled salad spinner he’d given me. Now this was a gadget I could embrace (and still use today). T didn’t charge me for the spinner either, even though we’d been dating less than two months when I broke up with him. He was a nice guy, but he had terrible breath, too many cats, and an entire bookshelf devoted to Dr. Who. I knew I wouldn’t miss his cats but might miss his ever-useful forest-green Subaru SUV, which he’d used to rescue my kids and me once; we were stranded at my daughter’s dance practice in a blizzard.

When I broke up with B, I did it in person at his apartment, which I think was pretty kind of me since we’d only been dating for three weeks. I could have broken up with him over email or text, but I did the decent thing. I delivered the news face-to-face. B had, after all, sat through an entire Irish step dancing show, comprised mostly of small children, to see me engaging in my latest post-divorce hobby. B was also a J.R.R. Tolkien fan. I’d read The Lord of the Rings trilogy multiple times, so this was a point in his favor.

I told B I was breaking up only because a former workplace crush, J, emailed that day to tell me he’d recently divorced. When J asked me to dinner the same night, I had abruptly canceled plans with B. After dinner with J, I just knew that we were going to become a thing, that we were going to dive into each other’s depths, and soon. So, I drove straight to B’s apartment to deliver the news. It was after midnight, but he still opened the door.

When breaking up with B at the threshold of his apartment, I quoted Ani DiFranco’s song “School Night,” which is all about difficult choices, to explain my abrupt turn from B (it was only the day before that he’d attended my Irish dance performance). B probably looked up the song’s lyrics after I left. This, in turn, might have given him the impression that breaking up had been a difficult decision for me. But it really wasn’t. I had to give the thing with J a chance. 

Twenty-five years later, I can see that the only real reason I broke up with B in person is that I’d left my favorite green T-shirt at his house a few nights earlier. This shirt was the perfect just-on-the-forest-side-of-olive-green color. The shirt had been washed to a delicious softness. Also, something about that shade of green (I’ve never found it again) made my sometimes-blue, sometimes-green eyes look like the kind of deep indigo that sets in right before a lake turns to ice. If you’ve never seen this color before, might I suggest visiting Minneapolis in late November?

When I asked B for my green T-shirt back, B denied having it, even though we both totally knew he had it. What was I going to do? Push into his bedroom and comb through his closet or laundry basket. (I bet he never washed that shirt!)

Truthfully, I’d begun to sense B might be a jerk in disguise. I’d stayed at his apartment during a snowstorm the Friday before the Irish dance performance. That Saturday morning, I woke to find my car buried in hip-deep snow. B didn’t help me dig out my car. This really needled me because Strider (aka, Aragorn) totally would have dug me out. Instead, my leaving early seemed to piss him off, even when I had to pick up my two kids from my ex-husband’s home.

I feel like I should confess here that I did, in fact, mail P a check for $300 to cover the espresso machine he’d “given” me. I wish it had gone the way I told you earlier. But after the snobby dinner party and breakup in his Volvo, he sharply told me to “Get out!” when he parked in the alley behind my house. Honestly, I ran from his car to my back door, hurriedly turning my key in the lock. All the while, my heart vibrated into my throat. I locked the door behind me, pulled out my phone, and hovered my right index finger over the nine until his car pulled away.

After I broke up with the green-T-shirt thief, his usurper, J, and I dated for three years. When we didn’t last (he broke up with me), I was sad for a very long time. When the sadness finally began to disperse, I met my second husband, another Tolkien fan and a genuinely nice guy. He still is. Not “Minnesota nice”—he’s from Texas—but honest-to-God-push-my-car-out-of-the-snow-even-when-it-is-parked-on-a-hill nice. He didn’t have to give me any kitchen accessories. Instead, he moved into my house with the ragged assortment of utensils and gadgets his ex-wife had left him. Our household accessories magically filled in the holes in each other’s collections.

I don’t know when, but B finally took down his website homage to our relationship. Every few years, I’d check to see if it was still there. One year, it wasn’t. I neglected to capture the photo of me in my perfect green T-shirt before the website disappeared. 

I’ve been remarried for 17 years now, and, honestly, I don’t miss dating. Not at all. But I do kind of miss the wildness of those post-Y2K years. I miss the adventure. Sometimes I even still miss my green T-shirt—or at least the young woman who wore it.

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By the time I began writing this essay, I’d been obsessing over a favorite missing green T-shirt for nearly two decades. I’d originally purchased this T-shirt at a Twin Cities Goodwill, and so, I reasoned, I’d eventually find its replacement—if not the T-shirt itself—at another Twin Cities Goodwill. Whenever I go Goodwill hunting, combing through bins of vintage vinyl (most of it worthless, unless you dig The Lawrence Welk Show), I’d also flip through the green T-shirts (fortunately, the Goodwill categorizes shirts by color). 

Initially, I thought this essay was going to be about a former flame who (presumably) kept my favorite green T-shirt. Initially, I wrote him as kind and generous – and my narrator self as the asshole who dumped him (his hurt driving him to keep said T-shirt). But as I wrote, I began asking myself, “Was he really kind?” Why should my readers believe me on this account when I no longer believed me? Was I an unreliable narrator? As I enlarged the scope of the essay to include more of the guys I dated in the early aughts, I began to see that most of those men turned into frogs (all due respect to this very beneficial amphibian), as these relationships began to capsize. Months after I began this essay, Spotify’s algorithm handed me this song by Mipso, which is all about how “people change” (also the title of the song) when they walk away. Maybe people don’t change so much as they finally remove the veneer.

This essay is meant to keep readers wondering about what is and what isn’t real. Because that’s how it is when a relationship ends. These people we were once intimate with (to some degree or another) turn into strangers. But – and the end of the essay makes this point – don’t you sometimes miss mixing it up with strangers, don’t you sort of miss exploring “the strange” in your adult life? Not to mention pulling out the veneer, having a new love see you as nearly perfect, at least for a small while?

Heidi Fettig Parton’s recent work can be found in Brevity, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Beautiful Things @ River Teeth Journal, NDQ, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Pangyrus, Sweet, and The Keepthings. She teaches in the MFA program at Bay Path University and serves as executive editor of its literary journal, Multiplicity. Learn more at: www.heidifettigparton.com.

Emiland Kray, L’ambroise de Lotito: On Disordered Eating and a Connection Stronger than Life and Death | L*STS

   

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L’ambroise de Lotito: On Disordered Eating and a Connection Stronger than Life and Death

Emiland Kray

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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We’re not so different, you and I. In fact, I think we’re both hungry. A river of mineral oil lube cascaded through your pink fatty interior. How else would 9 tons of metal glide through miles of intestines? Maybe it was your unmatched gumption, you’re certainly not one to be underestimated. I’ve recently been imagining the terroir of gastric juices that slid over your tongue. Then I read about bicycle chains chomping gravel only then to have travelled down your throat 18 times. Did you lick the grease as well? This is food for the soul I thought while eating honeydew after vomiting a quart of bile. Food crunchy, food splinters, food divine. Did you savor the sawdust mouthfeel of your coffin?
     When I was sixteen or seventeen, I fainted onto a smooth tile floor with nothing to break my fall. My last memory is of the cyan blue fish tanks and cottonmouth, no doubt from the weed. I don’t know how long I lost consciousness. Would I wake up? My friends hovered over me as I came to while reclining on a tan sofa. I roused with a chipped tooth, a fractured jaw, and the skin under my chin hung like a tongue flapping helplessly against my neck. I was driven to a hospital where I was given 7 stitches and the demoralizing news that I would have to wait 6 months to eat solid food again. My first meal after my jaw healed had me gobbling baby carrots like there was no tomorrow. You were dead at this point, but if I could’ve, I would’ve feasted on 45 door hinges with you. Maybe we could’ve made it 46.  

But sometimes life just hands you the short straw, and not 1,600 feet of steel chain. Y’know? I used to hide while eating, and gnaw then spit until my jaw was sore. Or I would eat gallons of nothing, iceberg lettuce by the bucket, entire watermelons, huge servings of bananas. I think it was an oral fixation thingy. Like, I needed to grind and gnash nosh. I also brushed my teeth every time I got nervous, but that’s another problem for me to write about with another dead guy. Did you ever experience FOMO? I felt it a little with trail mix. Whenever I would grab a handful, I would organize the trail from the mix. One row of sunflower kernels, another of gold raisins, another of walnuts, another of pumpkin seeds, then another, and another, and another. I’d do anything to avoid actually putting them inside of my mouth. When I decided to finally fold, I would eat them in a ratio of perfection. 1 walnut, 4 sunflower seeds, 3 pumpkin seeds, 2 raisins. It would take me about two hours to eat a handful of nuts. This was disordered eating, and you knew this too. I would bite and taste, but never swallow, and you ate a waterbed and then two regular beds. How did you portion out all of the little plastic bitties?
     Rumors started though, when my weight dropped too much. Ew, I can see your ribs through your back! my sister yelled when I was stretching one day. I never saw the bones that she claimed existed. To this day, I have no memory of what I looked like in the mirror. Instead I have a pungent feeling, and urge to pinch my fat and encircle my thigh with hateful, measuring hands. I feel a fear of the bathroom mirror and being naked. It is not an urgent fear though, but it’s a white noise that peeks around corners and appears when the fork tines turn into dosing rods. Our physical differences couldn’t keep us apart, my bones would rattle so sweetly against the lining of your heart and your rotting gums. Thick skin, thick intestinal lining, shit dude, you even had crazy strong teeth. Do you think that’s because you ate 7 television sets? Or do you think you were destined for greatness? The rumors about you, though, are much more tantalizing. Like the time you ate an entire airplane, you fucking rockstar. How could you eat that all alone when all I wanted was a dinner for two? Maybe I can spit up my trail mix to season your food. Can you imagine pustules of raisins dripping down the glittering bodies of 6 chandeliers? It’s appetizing, isn’t it? Ever kiss with tongue while you’re having acid reflux? Asking for a friend.

But this is all to invite you, or perhaps your ghost to my last meal. It might give you a tummy ache, but I want to drink a flight of root beers and jet fuel with you. Can we reminisce about eating and not eating? I can tell you all about how my ex-boyfriend's mom made the most delicious pico de gallo (heavy on the lime juice), and I would eat it by the bowl! And you can tell me about eating shopping carts. I can tell you about how I kind of want to eat human flesh, a thigh, breast, or maybe rump. Maybe we can even discuss if sucking dick counts. Masticating or masturbating? Amirite?! And we can talk about the look in someone’s eye when you turn down food, or when you eat a pair of skis. The wetness of near tears pooling and cupping their eyes then tucked beneath the plumage of an eyebrow. Avalanches of furrows bake above their nose. Cheeks aquiver and flexing with thin tomato peel skin. Silence behind lips where you hear nothing as they swallow words and you swallow nothing. How you go to the bathroom after and pull up your shirt to examine your stomach. Then your belly button stares back at you, but you don’t remember the bones, you just remember feeling sadness and feeling thirsty, then wondering how you can be perfect and loved. And then you hold your breath on the scale, and bite your lip while pretending to bite an apple. How hunger is normal and desired. Food divine? Food evil. Food despicable. Food void. Food hate.

Please eat. I’m sure you’ve heard that too because we’re not so different, you and I.

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I am not unique in that while I grew up, I engaged in disordered eating. In a turbulent household, food was something that I felt that I could control, and with that came other experiences that put food and body image into different perspectives such as breaking my jaw after fainting. While doing research for L*sts, my initial idea was to make a list of my ideal last meal menu. The more and more I worked on it though the more uninspired I became. Then my coworker, Lee, mentioned this super cool guy who ate an entire airplane, and in that moment, I fell in love. His name was Michel Lotito (1950-2006). Upon actually looking up this superstar, he not only ate an entire Cessna 150 light aircraft, but his resume also includes: 45 door hinges, 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, 7 television sets, 6 chandeliers, 2 beds, 1 pair of skis, 1 computer, 1 copy of the textbook Gravitation by Misner, Thorn, and Wheeler, 1 waterbed, 1,600ft of steel chain, 1 coffin (with the handles), 1 Guinness World Records plaque, and assorted razors and bolts. From there, the essay happened like a waterfall where the research lined up with my personal experiences of eating habits and disorders mixed with compulsions, disgusts, subversions and also a very human element of grief that comes along with engaging in self harm. This L*sts essay is a conversation beyond the grave between myself and Mr. Lotito where we maybe share a meal, gossip, and try each others’ favorite foods.

Emiland Kray is a visual artist, bookbinder, and writer working primarily with book arts and game design. His work investigates the complexities of memories, dreams, and fear by manipulating our attachment to the familiar and the nostalgic. He was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada and in 2023 he received his MFA from the University of Arizona with a portfolio of traditional watercolor, book arts, and game design. Kray was the winner of a 2026 Standards of Excellence Award by the Guild of Bookworkers, a 2025 Distinguished Book Award from the Miniature Book Society, has work in notable special collections such as the Carnegie Mellon Library, Arizona Poetry Center, University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections, and the Lilly Library in Indianapolis. Kray continues to make art with a focus on community involvement and collaborative projects, through initiatives like Troctopus Press, The Octopus Anthology, and partnerships with several non-profits and public libraries throughout the American Southwest. With a focus on accessibility, you can find many of his books in libraries around the United States and find his games free to play online. Play some games | Look at some books

 

Patrick Madden, For the Last Time | L*STS

 

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For the Last Time

Patrick Madden

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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The secret horrour of the last is inseparable from a thinking being whose life is limited. . . . When we have done any thing for the last time, we involuntarily reflect that a part of the days allotted us is past, and that as more is past there is less remaining. —Samuel Johnson, “On Last Things”

A few weeks ago, before attending an academic conference in Norwich, England, I took a week to see the sights of London. A considerable portion of my time was spent visiting the haunts of Great Dead essayists, men such as Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt. Rarely were the homes and churches emplaqued or otherwise noted. Aside from Joseph Addison, who is buried in Westminster Abbey, their graves were unprotected from the elements and mendicants such as myself. I tried halfheartedly to keep my antennae open to possibilities for writing, but I also just wanted to live like a tourist for a while, hoping that this would calm my nerves a bit, keep my mind off the long list of things I ought to have finished already, hold at bay the entropy that rushes up to take hold of my consciousness and drag it downward. It worked on that score; but like all such diversions, it lasted only as long as the traipsing about, and when I returned to real life, I felt again the abrumant weight of my responsibilities and obligations.
     So perhaps it’s no wonder that the story I grasped from my British wanderings is one of no consequence. What happened was I found my fly down after several hours of group tourism about the seaside at Southwold, the setting for parts of The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. The realization came in the subfloor men’s bathroom of the Elizabeth Fry Building at the University of East Anglia, during a break in the aforementioned conference. Mentally retracing my morning, I deduced that I must have left my pants unzipped from the moment I put them on (one leg at a time). I chuckled contentedly, half-worried that I’d exposed my white underwear or caused a colleague some momentary displaced embarrassment but half-pleased that I’d done it again. Nobody had asked me if I was afraid of heights. And I could not recall any untoward attentions or, worse, evasions, but how would I know? I zipped up, washed my hands, and returned to my day.
     I was left thinking, or am thinking now, about those events that punctuate the multivolume tome of our life, not with periods, not with question marks or exclamation points, but with commas, perhaps, or apostrophes, hyphens amid compound adjectives, colons before lists, the stuff that marks the way, making our reading make sense, workmanlike, by and large glossed over, unnoticed. How often are we stricken with hiccups? When will we need to clip our toenails again? When awaits us yet another crick in the neck? Or perhaps my mind is leaning toward the periods, the last times, farewells to small things, embarrassing things, things we should know better (or know better than to). When will we finally master our habits, overcome our shortcomings? Have we lost our keys for the last time? Can we be sure we won’t again leave our blinker on for miles and miles? Will we never again forget to take the garbage out to the curb? Have we seen the last of leaving our clothes in the washing machine until they mold or whatever it is that leaves us with stinkshirt, as my father calls it? What about the things we’ve very nearly mastered, like putting our shoes on the right feet or buttoning our shirt in proper correspondence? Can we ever be certain, even with advancing know-all technology to serve us, that we yet won’t leave our clocks unbacked or unforwarded? Or can we look forward to that amused discomfiture of showing up to church in the middle of the Mass before or after the one we’d intended to attend?
     This is the case with leaving my barn door open. I’ve done it often enough in the past—I know I have. Likewise, I expect I shall do it again. This is not the sort of mistake one learns from, not a sin one repents and forsakes. By its very nature, zipper negligence is unintentional and absentminded. And while I certainly have cultivated the habit of zipping up whenever I get dressed or finish at the urinal, my mind often wanders, so I can be almost certain that I will find my brageta abierta in the future. I have tried to resist the thought that invades my mind trailing this harmless event: that all is vanity, or life is futile, that despite our best efforts, we can never escape the small embarrassments we bring on ourselves as we struggle to keep track of it all, as we innocently ignore our vulnerabilities. What’s more, the older we get, the more likely we are to lose our fine-minded refinements, so the probabilities of oversights increase. And for all of that, we can never be sure that we’ve seen the last of such peccadilloes. It would be nice, in a way, to know when we’ve made our last little blunders, though there’s a charm in not knowing, too, a blissful ignorance that hides from us the ticking of the clock or the tallying of days and moments.
     Of course, at some point, known or unknown, each repeatable offense or harmless exercise must reach its final occurrence, such as what I’m quite sure was my father’s last backward bicycle ride. It happened at Notre Dame, on a sunny, carefree afternoon, after a pleasing swim in St. Mary’s Lake. Attendant characters, in addition to our protagonist, were my wife, Karina; my brother Dan (since I learned it, I have loved how my choice to include or omit commas indicates that I have only one wife and more than one brother); my four children—Pato, Adi, Sara, and Dani (who rode in a seat contraption on the back of her namesake uncle’s bike)—and I (riding tandem with Adi). We borrowed the bikes from the dormitory that operates as a hotel for alumni each summer. Dad and Dan (and Dani) were up ahead with Pato, impatient with Sara’s training-wheeled meandering. That left the rest of us back there in the shade, making slow progress amid the dirt and gravel, across small washouts and gullies, along the circular trail that rings the lake. As we crested the insubstantial hill into the vertical sunlight, I gathered in an almost-instantaneous scene: My brother paused and smiling at an island in the parking lot, holding the back-heavy bike holding Dani; my son lost somewhere among the scattered cars; my father sitting on his handlebars and facing his seat, feet on the pedals, neck craned, head turned toward me but eyes peripherating the path behind his back. He is headed toward a curb, moving too fast, turning not enough to avoid a collision. As the electric impulses zip from my eyes to my brain to my mouth to shout “Dad!” his front wheel jumps up and jerks right (his left) just onto the border grass and into the octagonal base of a light pole. Momentum is enemy; ballast is imbalance; a man set on his rump above the front wheel means only one thing: a glancing carom off the pole, the back wheel shooting up, my father twisting to brace his headlong tumble to the street below. But the bike is six inches above the asphalt, on the grass. His hands miss the soft turf by a horizontal six inches, so his head crashes helmetless to the street, crumpling under the accelerated weight of his body and the metallic contraption that traps his feet and legs.
     In a second, Dan and I were at his side, helping him up, assessing his injuries. He got to his feet easily enough, if a bit groggily, blinkingly, behind his scratched glasses a slow trickle of blood, on his upper lip a raw exposed layer of skin. We left the bike where it lay and held his hands to show him to a nearby bench, to sit and think on the event. Already the children and Karina were with us, the former on the verge of tears, the latter on the verge of laughter. A red-haired woman who saw the whole thing asked, obligedly, “Are you okay?” My father mumbled an affirmative, and she continued past. I made the group’s first attempt at lightening the gravitas: “She’s thinking, ‘Are you okay, you idiot?’”
     Dad perked up, “She said that?”
     “No,” I said, immediately regretting my move but forced to follow through, “but she must be thinking it.” I thought to check his hearing when I got the chance.
     Our own questions weren’t much more profound than the woman’s, but we were persistent, making sure he’d kept his bearings and didn’t feel too pained or otherwise untoward. He stood up well under our scrutiny, though Dan, gently removing Dad’s glasses, noticed a pulsing gash in the folds above his left eye.
     Perhaps this was a moment to consider mortality, to imagine the world without my father, but our conversation was a mixture of immediate plans and gentle ribbing. Dad wanted to be sure the borrowed bike wasn’t noticeably damaged, so he announced his plans to ride it back to the dorm. Dan, keen to try out a role reversal, caught his words and remonished, “Ride it back, not backward.” He and Karina snickered, while I, ashamed of my prior failed attempt at humor, tried to remain stoic. Karina assuaged the children’s contagious crying with shushes and whispers that “Grandpa’s going to be fine.” They didn’t believe her.
     But he was fine, all things considered, and so was the bike, so he did ride away, soon enough, with the rest of us alongside and behind, as he made it back to the dorm, then continued on to the hospital, where he omitted the “backward” detail in his explanation and found that he’d fractured his skull, an untreatable misfortune (stay out of the boxing ring is about all you can do for it), and then, in the coming days, traveled on to Milwaukee, his boyhood home, where a handful of cousins would relish his tale for its pure ridiculability.
     For as long as I have known my father, he has talked about the summer projects that he and his friends would take on: juggling, walking on their hands, riding their bikes backward. I tried it all but mastered only a fraction of his feats and never quite got the balance and rhythm to ride my bike sitting on my handlebars. This was yet one more way in which I would never be my father’s equal. So it was a mix of sadness and pride that I felt, later, when reminiscing with my wife and brother, to have witnessed Dad’s last backward ride, the exclamation point ending that particular thread of his life.
     I might have expected that I would twist out of my stories into braided meditations as soon as I set off to narrate, that I would, one might say, unzip from the constraints of chronicle into confabulation. It is a mode, I hope, not utterly unpleasant, as it gives both a recounting of events and an attempt at an ordering not only of chronologies but, as Lukacs says, of “souls and destinies.” God rest us both, my father and me, long into the hereafter, of course, but now, too, for brief snatches of peace amid all our self-created chaos, our ineluctable destinies of descent and decay.

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One of the fascinating things about last happenings is how seldom we recognize them or even remember them. With the now-middle-aged kids I grew up with, I often think nostalgically (on Facebook, mostly) about our idyllic childhood and how we never knew we were playing our last game of manhunt or building our last fort in the woods or jumping our bikes over each other for the last time. But all those things came to an end at some point, and we didn't think to lament their passing until much later. For this essay, the proximate occasion (noticing my zipper had been down all morning) gave rise to that line of thinking for insignificant things, which then brought me to what I was certain was the last time my father rode a bike backwards, which, because he was injured (not seriously) and some decades older than me, got me thinking about the inevitability of death and the irreversability of decay. Samuel Johnson showed up conveniently in my reading and provided an epigraph, and all that was left was some polishing and threading to make the essay seem whole.

Patrick Madden's newest essay collection is Recenses/Recencies (11/1/26), and he also wrote Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016) and Quotidiana (2010). He co-edited Fourth Genre: 25 Essays from Our First 25 Years (2025) and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (2015) and co-translated the Selected Poems of Eduardo Milán (2012). He is co-editor of the 21st Century Essays series at Ohio State University Press, co-editor of the literary journal Fourth Genre, and vice president of the NonfictioNOW Conference.

This essay originally appeared in Sublime Physick (2016).

Timothy Dyke, Lest List | L*STS

  

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Lest List

Timothy Dyke

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests

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lest I come across as arrogant

lest I remind him of the time he crashed my VW bug

lest he retreats to demon metaphors

lest the reference to palm forests triggers the Merwin digression

lest I misunderstood the assignment

lest she asks me for the hundredth time if I’m seeing anyone

lest he drops to his knees and starts praying for my salvation

lest they are out of lavender syrup

lest we accidentally run into each other in Safeway

lest anyone accuses me of using A.I.

lest it was the 50 mg and not the 10 mg

lest I am overcome by spiders

lest I am ever expected to compose a sonnet

lest they ask me to join their affinity group

lest proclamation of love becomes mistaken for act of love

lest you confuse Neil Diamond with Neil Sadaka 

lest you confuse Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf

lest you confuse the Chris in the Star Trek movie

with the Chris in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie

lest this turns into one of those grief sessions where 

we are expected to hug and share feelings

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When I heard of the L*ST publication project, I knew I wanted to participate. I am drawn, as a reader and writer, to lists and to wordplay. I could not stop thinking about how versatile that L*ST construction is, and as I started replacing that asterisk with vowels, my brain zeroed in on the word, “lest.” It seemed to offer some potential for creating something interesting. What did the word mean exactly? I looked it up on dictionary.com: “for fear that.” I was inspired that a list of lests could imply a list of fears, trepidations, and dreaded outcomes. I immediately began working on my lest list. The sample dictionary sentence was: “He kept his notes by his side, lest faulty memory lead him astray.” If I couldn’t read the independent clause that comes before the comma, I would wonder what preceded the lest. I like that act of wondering. In my list, I have only supplied the clause that follows the lest. I will leave it to readers to imagine what comes before.

Timothy Dyke is a writer and teacher living in Honolulu, HI. His memoir, Backbends, was published by High Frequency Press in 2025. High Frequency Press will publish Century of Empathy, his hybrid work of autofiction, in late 2026.