Youssef Alaoui

Hassan believed that if he lifted his teacup and set it down ten times in a row at the same hour every day, it would lift and drop on its own by mere force of nature habituating itself to a consistent environment. One day, after two years of lifting and setting down his teacup, Hassan ventured out of Tamri. He went to Smimou to watch over his dear father who was fighting pneumonia with nothing but thé vert, fresh ginger, and honey. He left his neighbor Mehdi in charge of looking through his kitchen window to peer at the table.

Mehdi said of course he would help out, gladly. He had a fine view of Hassan’s window by sitting on his own garden wall. He smoked cigarettes and drank dark, sweet coffee from a small clear glass with faded gold patterns on it. He watched carefully each day, fifteen minutes at a time, for a week straight. After that he would shuffle down to the market to tend to his coffee stand until well past dark. During that week he did see Hassan’s teacup lift and drop on its own on three of those seven days. He declared it a miracle. He told the people at his stand. They all agreed it was more likely the work of the ifrit.

He placed a call to Hassan from the tobacco store in town. Mehdi lit a cigarette and listened. Hassan’s voice crackled over the wire and exclaimed with joy that, no he had not bargained with Lalla Qandisha. No, his house was safely far enough from the river and especially the ocean that boils and crashes under the cliffs outside of town. Mehdi shook his head, amused, and hung up once the salutations were exchanged. Long live your dear father. May you persist in good health under the protection of God. Take good care of yourself. He turned to the people waiting behind him and said that it was in no way a deal with the devil. This cup really did move on its own.

A few gasped. Three people went home immediately to begin their own patient experiments. Perhaps it had to do with sunlight and the hour. Maybe it had to be the correct angle of sunlight. They stood outside Hassan’s kitchen window and took measurements. How high was that window? On which corner of the table had he left the cup? A cup and a saucer, or no saucer? It was not clear which were the exact conditions. People from the coffee stand would arrive early to witness the event. Mehdi began offering coffee to them. Saad, a banana vendor showed up. They bought bananas and sipped strong coffee. They wouldn’t see it every day, but when they did, they all guffawed in joy and clinked their tiny glasses. They left money, small change from their pockets.

Hassan’s father was not recovering so quickly. Mehdi said, no worries my dear, everything is fine and under control. Take your time… He began selling coffee on the garden wall from dawn until 10:30 am, when he would have to leave to tend the stand. Some of the group would walk along with him. Sometimes they’d catch a ride on a cargo truck or saddle up with the scooter brigade. They would laugh and report on the miraculous cup haunted by evil spirits that rose and fell every day on its own in the morning.

But it was Hassan’s cup. He wanted his cup back. He wanted his life back. He began looking for answers to help cure his father with earnest. The pharmacist of Smimou recommended an antibiotic. His father wouldn’t take it. Herbs were what he wanted. Herbs. So he asked around and found an herbalist who recommended a tea made of thyme, mint, fenugreek, saffron, and ginger. The tea was to be taken with fresh garlic. The garlic was to be chewed raw. The tea was to steep for forty minutes. He left the bonne in charge of the tea. She made the tea and fed his father plain bread with triangular cheese wrapped in foil and chunks of raw garlic on it. Hassan made his own tea and thought of his teacup, his kitchen table, his kitchen, and his whole house. He longed for his own dull life and routine. He looked forward to being home again. He ate some bread with the triangular cheese and raw garlic. It was good. With this and fresh fruit, thought Hassan, certainly father would get well soon. He was already feeling better. He held his father’s hand and bid him goodbye.

When Hassan returned to his house, there were photographers waiting in the yard and and a crowd of ten people sitting on Mehdi’s garden wall. Mehdi was not there. He was at the coffee stand. These people were experimenters and felt the urgent need to discover more about Hassan’s experience with the teacup, from all perspectives of the kitchen window. A reporter hastily asked him questions as he walked up the path and put his key in the door. No. Yes. No. Certainly not. No, I do not believe in Satan. Yes ask anyone. I am just like anyone else in this neighborhood! No, I do not have a family of my own. Sorry. Okay. Okay. That’s really enough thank you. Goodbye. Then he sat down at the table and looked out the window. Twenty eyes peered in at him. Their eyes narrowed as his hand moved toward the teacup to fill it. He decided to leave it there and took out a tall glass he used for juice. They hopped off the wall. A few came knocking. He welcomed them in. They took measurements of the kitchen and asked him about the ifrit. No. No ifrit! Just routine. Routine. Hassan your breath smells strongly of garlic, they said. Are you possessed by the devil? What!? He kicked them all out. Everybody out! Out!

Mehdi came by a few days later to apologize for whatever he could muster. He had no idea how it all gathered force like that, but it was quite a sensation, an excellent story to tell and share and people would come from all over. Maybe Hassan could make a business out of it? No, he craved his old privacy. Would he continue to lift his teacup? No. Probably not. Well, maybe not. But, forces of routine are difficult to break. One cannot immediately sever oneself from the familiar without a transitional period, at least. That was what a few people were waiting for. Saad the banana vendor, who had been there many days observing the phenomenon from the street, was among them. He figured he could think through the matter in a single sitting. He knew people. He knew human nature. He knew mother nature. He perched on the wall with the coffee group.

What he saw there, he would not have believed had he not seen it with his own two eyes. Hassan sat there reading the morning paper and lo and behold, on the other side of his paper, unbeknownst to Hassan, his teacup lifted and landed three times in a row. Saad now saw it clearly. Others had checked Hassan’s house for wires. There were none. So he was forced to discount Hassan acting as if he was ignorant while orchestrating the entire event. He noticed something else as well. Near about five minutes before the teacup would rise and drop, his upstairs neighbor would let the cat out through the window. The cat, whose name was Mnou, would sun herself and watch the birds flit on the trees, watch the watchers sipping coffee and muttering on the wall, and eventually she would jump down to a branch and then a ledge, to access the alley below.

This was actually the magical event of the morning. Depending on how much sun she had absorbed, depending on her anxiousness to explore the shady alley and hunt rodents or whatever else cats do on their morning rounds, this first jump was the key to the amazing phenomenon that had transfixed Mehdi’s friends for the past few months. As Saad observed all that was occurring around him, the others were barreling their eyes through Hassan’s kitchen window, waiting for the phenomenon. But, above, due to the passage of Mnou’s four legs and tail thereby casting a shadow ever so subtle and interrupting the sunshine landing on the table, on certain days, the effect made the cup look like it had left its saucer and then land again. It was uncanny. Saad went back a few times after to confirm his new theory and it worked out. Yes Mnou was the mastermind. He kept his reactions subtle. He did not tell a soul. He left a batch of bananas at Hassan’s door every time he came to watch.

Hassan came by Saad’s stand later to thank him. No, no worries. It is my pleasure, Hassan. I believe what you believe. You need your privacy back. Routine is a blessing. Yes. Routine is God’s will. It is our way to honor ourselves and our ancestors. If I may make one recommendation to you, my dear, please never place your cup on the same corner as you normally do. Leave it anywhere but there, or if you do want to leave it there, do not do so every day. Your life will become less complicated. Of course. You may have a banana or two from my stand any time you like, my friend. They became closer in friendship after this. From then on, Hassan moved his cup around the table.

A film student at the university came to shoot Hassan’s teacup for a month for a school project. No one was vending at the garden wall. He had to bring his own coffee and bananas. He took some film and one photo at the same hour every day and documented the teacup’s migration around the kitchen table and the sun’s migration in the heavens, day over day. It became a stylized stop-motion animation. He played it at the film festival of Marrakech. The crowd loved it. It was so simple and beautiful. The colors were luscious. Live action, then a still frame. There were clouds and no clouds, bright light and dim light, and sometimes there were birds in the air reflected in the window. His window and frame became a photographic surface. It functioned as a palimpsest of still life in two directions; the inner world and the outer world, framed by the dusky white sill. It was an artistic salute to nature, to routine, to cozy life, to the home.

Over time, the watchers sitting on the wall dissipated. It was confirmed that Hassan’s teacup would not be the same as it was, or if it was to be, then one might have to wait a month or two for the conditions to be absolutely aligned and perfect. That was exactly what Hassan desired, to have his morning tea in private again, with his window returned to its original nature and function, bringing only sunshine to his mornings. He was reunited with his routine. He promised himself to not exploit that again by creating a new experiment. Hassan’s father fully regained his health. And never in their wildest dreams would anyone (but Saad) have ever guessed the magical powers of Mnou, the upstairs cat.

YOUSSEF ALAOUI is a Moroccan Colombian American. His family and heritage are an endless source of inspiration for his varied, dark, spiritual and carnal writings. He has an MFA in Poetics from New College of California. His work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Big Bridge, 580 Split, Dusie Press, RIVET Journal, Paris Lit Up, The Opiate, Bioptic Review, Dryland, and nominated for a Pushcart at Full of Crow. His short story collection Fiercer Monsters was published by Nomadic Press of Oakland, CA. His poetry collection Critics of Mystery Marvel was published by 2Leaf Press of NYC. Based in SLO CA. www.youssefalaoui.info twt@iuoala insta@iuoala777

Davis MacMillan

Jesse decides to get good at chess. There are a few reasons for this. A big one is that it’s out there, in the culture. People are talking about chess. It also, to him, has always seemed like a smart people game, a game he should be good at as a demonstration of his intelligence and seriousness as a person. Plus, it’s a pandemic. There’s nothing to do and nowhere to go. That means plenty of time for the internet. 

He’s not the only person with this idea. According to the chess website he uses, he’s one of about three million. So it’s competitive, even at the beginning. 

Jesse has a plan though. He’s got a training regimen. More than that he has the willpower to play 100 games a day, and to chase these with chess puzzles and YouTube videos on strategy. He’s got the willpower to force his brain to focus on a board game all of the time. He spends his nights bathed in clips of wan and skinny men talking about the Sicilian and the Nymzo and the Dutch. He plays through old games. He convinces himself (like so many others) that he can find something new in a 100-year-old sequence of moves. 

There’s a thing that experienced players say: the more you know about the game the more it reveals itself as unknowable. Jesse hears (or reads) this a lot. For a while it seems woo woo and then one day it doesn’t. He has spent 18 straight hours running through the shadows of moves in his head. It’s not enough. He doesn’t know anything. 

It’s at this point that the offer is made. He’s down a YouTube rabbit hole, listening to some GM or other walk through the possibilities of the Vienna gambit. The next video loads. It’s clear from the beginning that it’s not a video. Or it’s a video and more than a video. A shadow appears in the shape of a person. It’s black, and the background around it is black as well, but in a way that seems to buzz. The video comes on with a sound like breathing. The figure speaks. “Hey Jesse,” it says. “Seems like you like chess.” 

“I do,” is all he says. Three letters, two words. It’s a phrase that’s changed lives before, but it still seems unfair that it should have the power to destroy his. 

What’s the cost? What’s the usual cost in moments like these? His mind, his body, his soul. I’ll have to possess you, the figure says. To get the job done. It’s perfectly safe. You’ll be able to watch. You’ll be able to learn. You can see everything in my brain. 

Jesse tries to wrap his mind around the offer. In a certain sense he’s already possessed. Isn’t learning about something, at least something this big, an act of possession? The knowledge comes in and shapes the brain to its needs, pushing everything else aside. The internet is the perfect vehicle for such possession. It’s a funnel of information: amoral and gigantic. Just like fucking chess, Jesse thinks.

The figure goes on. It’s not that I’ll make you better, it says. It’s that I’ll help you understand. Jesse thinks about the fact that the first chess computer was a man hidden inside a box, writing moves on a piece of paper and beeping and booping with his mouth. He thinks that he can become that box but in reverse: a computer inside of a person. 

“OK,” he says, condemning himself with one less letter. The figure tells him that they’ll start in the morning. Say your goodbyes. 

There’s no one to say goodbye to. There’s not even anything to do. Normally he’d spend the night learning. He’d spend it playing. But he’s about to learn everything. And the thought of playing as himself – with his flaws and failings and the glaring holes in his game – makes him sick. He tries to sleep. He can’t sleep. He sits in silence. He watches the sunrise.

Then it happens. It’s gentle at first, like a glove sliding over his entire body but from the inside. For a while he can still feel himself. Then he can’t. His hands go first. Then his feet. Then even his eyes are someone else’s. 

“Ready to begin,” the figure asks. Then it laughs. The computer starts up, the game opens with the gentle pop of a notification. He’s black. White moves its e pawn. The piece clicks into place. He barely has time to consider it before the moves flood in. They come first individually and then in lines. They spread out like the roots of a tree. The possibilities explode like a supernova: not outward but inward with a force that crushes him. They move faster. Pawns and knights and rooks and bishops and the queen all in a blinding glare. There’s no possibility of keeping up. He wants to tear out his eyes. He wants to go deeper and tear out his brain. He wants to go back to knowing nothing.

White moves. Black moves. The options explode in front of him again. If he had control of his body he’d pass out. He can’t. He’s trapped. “Enough,” he says. “Please.” The figure ignores him. It keeps playing. 

DAVIS MACMILLAN has had fiction in Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, JMWW, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.