Ian Sacks

I was the amazing human Post-It Note. I had paper skin and money hands. Prisha was the pretty woman who worked in the cubicle across from me. She was plump and wore a cinnamon perfume. I ran calculated risk analytics chained to my desk on our gray forty-seventh floor. Prisha spoke into a headset with a put-on smile on her face.

I was born at Synthique, Blacksite 17. Prisha was the daughter of an Indian man and Irish woman who moved here two decades back and opened up a pottery store. I was raised Ed P.R. Schumann, after the doctor who had often frowned and shown me presents he’d bought for his teenage daughter. He had taken his own life with a .22 during the raid.

One day I was sitting at my desk whittling down my paper money fingers on the keys of my computer; I was worried because three more George Washington faces were almost gone. I etched notes into the expanse of my flat, light yellow body until it was almost black. Prisha spoke into her headset and rubbed her eyes. I could see her crying. I could never hear what she was saying. That morning, she’d brought me coffee, and I’d put my flat, cartoonish face against my glass to drink it through my diamond-patterned air holes — twenty-seven total, I had counted — precision-laser-cut.

Then there was the accident. A bomb. A terrible thing. Red-haired Denton had become disgruntled running base relative value reports for Robert McKinley. He had made a homemade death mixture of soap and gas and set it off the floor below. I guess he felt life wasn’t worth living any more. It killed thirteen people. It tore a hole in Alberta’s young-at-heart. It split our gray-tiled floor to pieces so it looked like a scattered deck of cards.

I could see Charles, who worked next to Prisha, killed instantly from a jagged piece of metal in his skull. I was sad because I’d always quite liked Charles. The force hurled Prisha through the windows of the forty-seventh floor, and she must have felt like she was being lifted by the unseen hand of God her parents always argued over. It may even have seemed fitting, in the end.

The explosion broke my glass and singed the edges of my paper abdomen. I picked up a piece of ceiling tile. I broke the rest of my chains off my paper wrists.

Well, what do you think I did, among the smoke and fire? All the stillborn screams? I could hardly tell you; I could barely think. What I did was I dove out the broken window. I unfurled my body and felt the wind streams take me up. I felt like a flying squirrel. I pulled my paper arms toward me and plummeted. I understood now why I had been made this way.

I grabbed Prisha by the shoulders with flexible paper feet. I grabbed her hands in mine, and they felt soft and slick. I struggled to hold on. I parachuted down across the cityscape. Money leaflets tore off from my arms and legs and flittered down over the buildings like a ticker-tape parade.

Prisha’s eyes lit up with horror and excitement.

I guess we were falling.

“Don’t drop me,” she said. “Don’t drop me!”

I was there to lift her up. She was there to ground me.

In other words, we started a traditional relationship!

At EllianceLife. In 1992!

I said, “Guess I’m worth something after all!” Money kept on peeling from my arms and legs and fluttering to the streets below.

She looked up. “At least you’re letting me down easy!”

I was flaking bits of paper. They were pouring down around us. My arms hurt. My body was being torn to pieces.

We landed and looked at one another and we smiled.

I was torn to ribbons on the grass!

I set her down. She picked me up.

We watched the sun set over a blackened skyline, beyond the soot-choked hills, burning scraps of paper money raining over the poor houses in the north.

IAN SACKS is a 2012 creative writing graduate. He has lived in Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, which makes him the most accidentally Midwestern person he knows.

Lucas Dylan-Frances

She had found me in the library waiting not-so-obviously. I had seen her come in. I had seen her pants, which were the green of Venus’s coffin. Yet I pretended to become aware of her only when she walked closer. What can I say? I’m near-sighted in one eye. I try to make my half-truths align with my defects. I’m decent. But she doesn’t know this.

She put her backpack down on the table. Four-person table. She chose the seat diagonally across from me. Backpack directly between us. Strategic.

“What are you working on?” she asked.

I told her what I was working on. I told her a lot, if you want to know the truth. I’m like that. I can fill up a whole conversation with neat little facts about myself and not really tell you anything.

“I feel like I’m the perfect height. . .” I said.

“Oh,” she said.

“I mean, for a guy I guess I’m short, but I like it because I can run and hide and crouch behind things.”

“. . .”

“I’m dynamic.”

I asked if she wanted to get coffee with me. A girl who had served me hot americanos at a coffee place downtown was sitting at the next table. For some reason I felt bad. I was talking loudly because she had set the volume of the conversation. No qualms about letting the others hear us. But we were in a library. I was troubled.

She did not want to get coffee herself but would go with me. She was a Mormon. Mormons could not have caffeine.

“So can you do drugs?” I asked.

“No.”

“Bummer.”

She laughed. We walked to a cafeteria in which I found no coffee.

“Where’s the coffee?”

“How should I know?” she said. Good point.

I got my coffee from the other cafeteria and told her there was a coffee place in the city on Lafayette that sold coffee that tasted like cigarettes. “Irrelevant,” I excused myself.

I could not go back into the library because of the coffee. “But your things are in the library,” I said almost sotto voce, looking at her very seriously.

“But my things are in the library,” she said and went into the library.

I walked to a trash can and drank almost all of my coffee and walked back to the library. She was walking down the hallway from the library and I could see her and her green pants and orange backpack getting smaller as she walked in the same direction as I did. I shouted her name.

She turned. “Back so soon?”

The expression struck me as rather hackneyed and strange. It was not her expression, but she had used it with aplomb. Made it work. Whole cultural histories were issuing from her mouth. Obviously she was powerless against this.

“Do you want to go this way?” I pointed.

She did. We went down a stairwell.

“What do you know about me that I don’t know you know about me?” I asked.

Apparently she knew a lot. I ran a couple miles a day. I was a loner. What more was there to say? Her friends had sent her pictures of my car. “I know it’s black or dark blue,” she said.

“Dark blue,” I said quietly, feeling intruded on. “I don’t know anything about you.”

Her last name was of Swedish origin, and she hated the color brown. Her mother was a redhead. She took photographs. Portraits. Somehow I felt I could have inferred all of this.

I started talking about myself. I told her I was a bad person. I was unequivocal about this. I almost wanted to say, “Don’t get mixed up with me.”

“What does that even mean?” she asked.

I started talking about something else instead. We went to our different classes after that.

I backed up quickly in the parking lot and the principal held out a prohibitive hand. I moved my car toward him. He held out the same hand. He wanted me to slow down. I smiled and drove. I am a poor driver.

At night I called another girl. I told her I was fucking up too much and didn’t feel like myself. I knew she was tired of me. I would’ve been too if I had to listen to this. I said I understood the pantomimed nature of my phrasing. I could’ve been anybody right then. A stricken lover. A rebel whose veil is rent. I couldn’t go on talking to her.

She wanted to help. “Are you sure you really want to stop talking?”

I hung up and let her figure it out. Then I walked back inside my window from the roof. When I talk on the phone, I do it outside on the first-floor roof. The window leads directly out to it. My feet track in the detritus of roof and leave it all over the windowsill and bed.

I sat and checked my phone for the fourth time in thirty minutes. She did not care. I rubbed my face. I checked the fat on my stomach. None. Good. I listened to the French television program in the next room. The wood floor outside my room showed the extenuated traces of its blue light in the dark of the hallway between the rooms. A shunted theatre outside my door.

I went back out onto the roof and looked inside my warm room. I was shirtless and it was October.

If you want it, here it is. Here’s every girl I’ve ever been with. I never look at her until she’s already made up her mind about me. I don’t know her until she totters in front of me and insinuates herself into my day. Then we get to know each other. She is leggy and long and maybe taller than I am. She wears curvilinear eye makeup. Cat eyes. We communicate fiercely for the first couple months. I am always the one who forgets to respond. She feels like a transient attraction but in reality her insecurity works for the both of us. She doesn’t know that I will stop being interesting. And then, like the incitement of revolution, it happens. We explode quietly and internally. She realizes I was helpless in the most abject way. How I needed her. But any version of her. Interchangeable legs and makeup. That’s the cruelty. At some point she realizes that I am retreating to a white and expiating coda. I do not come back.

And when you tell them you’re a bad person they never know what you mean.

LUCAS DYLAN-FRANCES lives in New Jersey. He writes and runs. He is young but has ambitions. He hopes to live fast while he still looks good and go out in a three-piece white suit like Charlie Parker.

Eirik Gumeny

In the bright, garden-choked suburbs of northern New Jersey, there lives a princess. She is six-years old, a spastic fairy in a pink dress and a plastic tiara, dancing and skipping and waving her magic wand at everybody that walks by. And they all wave right back, smiling at the little sweetheart as she laughs and jumps and giggles and rolls across the lawn, playing with the boy next door.

The boy next door, with his cardboard sword and his broomstick stallion, her knight in hand-me-down denim. Doing his absolute best to defend her from the dragons they imagine and the Disney-diluted witches that might try to do them harm.

The parents stand shoulder to shoulder on the sun-porch, joking and whispering. Our brave knight, our little princess. Wouldn’t it be funny, they say, see you at the wedding, neighbor. Whisper and kid about first kisses, holding hands, an immaculate prom night. Smiling and waving and never giving an honest thought to the kids in the basement-boxed costumes. To the princess and her unrelenting smile, the one that says she knows she will be beautiful. To the clean-cut knight and his attempts at perfect posturing, the noble stance he tries hard to maintain.

The parents laugh some more and sigh and walk away, back to half-filled ledgers and still-potted plants, to thawing chicken and a busted head gasket. Forget about the cigarette-stained bars and back alleys, about asinine ideas hatched in college dorms and coffeehouses; forget all the beds and couches and cars, the cops and courts and dead friends and ex-wives and the world that always got in the way. Laugh and sigh and walk away.

And the kids keep make-believing, everyone playing pretend right along with them. There are castles to build and trolls to fight and daylight to burn. The knight doesn’t notice the sugar-fed delirium in her tiny green eyes, the unstable fury proclaiming that one day, one distant day, all the men she comes across are in for a world of hurt. And the princess can’t see the streak of idealism apparent on his face, the Boy Scout attitude that will get him knocked to the ground time and again.

And the passers-by keep passing by, never giving a second thought to the princess and her grass-stained knees, not concerned about the knight with the tangled hair. About the girl who wants the stars and the boy who wants to give them to her.

Smiling and waving and no one will look long enough to see the restless nights and the heated words, the void she’ll try to fill with whatever and whomever she can find, the broken lamp and the bloodied fists and his inability to sleep in an empty apartment. No one will look long enough to see anything, except a princess chasing butterflies and the boy next door who sits there staring after her.

“Storybook Romance” originally appeared online at amphibi.us in 2010.

EIRIK GUMENY was a boxing kangaroo who died, tragically and violently, in the ring in 1923, fighting Teddy Roosevelt and a time-traveling Muhammad Ali. Find out more at www.egumeny.com.