Hair Trigger 2.0 Issue Three

Hair Trigger 2.0, English & Creative Writing Department, Columbia College
Chicago, 600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605-1996.
Established in 2016, Hair Trigger 2.0 is an annually published literary magazine
affiliated with the English & Creative Writing Department at Columbia College
Chicago that welcomes a broad spectrum of fiction and nonfiction.
Submissions
Hair Trigger 2.0 is currently accepting fiction, creative nonfiction and visual art
submissions on a rolling basis for our second annual issue. We are specifically
looking for stories with an engaging, nontraditional voice that goes beyond
that of a blanket overall storyteller.
Please visit our Submit page at: http://ht20.colum.edu/submit
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Kenneth Daley, Chair of the English & Creative Writing
Department; Steven Corey, Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Stanley
Wearden, Provost; and Dr. Kwang Wu Kim, President of Columbia College
Chicago.
Cover Illustration: Abby Jo Turner. In a city so large. 2017
Cover & Layout Design: Jay Goebel
Copyright ©2018 by Columbia College Chicago.

Celeste Paed
Editor-in-Chief
Grace Smithwick
Managing Editor
Jeff Hoffmann
Assistant Managing Editor
Cora Jacobs
Faculty Advisor
Fiction/Nonfiction/Creative Nonfiction Editors
Courtney Gilmore
Cali Lemus
Zoe Raines
Kristin Rawlings
Reviews Editor
Tom Ronningen
Interviews Editor
Ash Dietrich
Social Media Manager
Bec Ucich
Special Features Editor
Maria Mendoza Cervantes
Typeset
Celeste Paed

Sophia Okugawa Stoller
Life on Mars
Eva Azenaro Acero
Childhood
Aïcha Thiam
Songs, Fitting and Inappropriate
Eva Azenaro Acero
Thursday
Aïcha Thiam
When Shirley Smiled
Eva Azenaro Acero
I Remember
J. Ray Paradiso
Like a Nutcracker
Chris Gavaler
1917: Van Doesburg & Modigliani
1918: Van Doesburg & Modigliani
Ashlee Bond-Richardson
Death Wish
Silas Plum
Cultural Commodity
Sherry Mayle
The Ghost of P. Wanda
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16
17
19
20
23
24
26
29
34
35
CONTENTS

Abby Jo Turner
In a City So Large
Jessica Powers
Family Pets
Abby Jo Turner
Late Night Treats
Brittney “Shay” Ellis
The Tyger
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49
50
CONTENTS

LETTER OF INTRODUCTION
As a fledgling magazine, we knew that change would be inevitable with
growth. When the newest set of editors sat down in September of last year,
we realized that it was up to us to create a magazine whose mission would
hold true regardless of who ran it. Our parent anthology, Hair Trigger, was
created to give voices to disenfranchised students who didn't necessarily feel
like they were represented in popular literature. Now in it's 40th year, that
mission still holds true.
Like Hair Trigger, the publishing industry has stayed fairly consistent
throughout the years, though most, myself included, wouldn't consider this
a good thing. Yes, the technology has updated, stories reach their readers
faster, and storytelling itself is more innovative and creative than ever. But
the industry itself, both editors and publishers, are as traditional as ever.
As an online multimedia magazine, Hair Trigger 2.0 challenges the status
quo, producing engaging and unconventional stories that cater to everyone,
regardless of genre, race, gender, or sexuality.
The last line of our mission states, "To do so, it starts with content."
In Volume 3 of Hair Trigger 2.0, you will find a wide array of prose, comics,
and art. As Marcel Proust, a French novelist, once said, "My destination is no
longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.” Hopefully, the stories in this issue
will make the tiniest difference in how you view the world.
A special thanks to all my editors, Courtney Gilmore, Cali Lemus,
Zoe Raines, Kristin Rawlings, Tom Ronningen, Ash Dietrich, Maria Mendoza
Cervantes; my managing editors Grace Smithwick and Jeff Hoffman; our
faculty advisor, Cora Jacobs; and to you, dear reader, for taking a chance on
something new.
— Celeste Paed, Editor-in-Chief

Life On Mars
Sophia Okugawa-Stoller
MY STRONGEST RECOLLECTION OF HIM IS SITTING BEHIND THE WHEEL OF THE
old Volvo. The radio eternally tuned to some scratchy station that kicked through the
speakers on the doors, vibrating my calf, but he never bothered turning the dial. He chainsmoked
Lucky Strike, the cigarette without a filter and hung his elbow out the window. I can’t
hear his voice. I don’t think he spoke much, but the stale cereal smell, the cigarettes, the
leather from his briefcase in the backseat and the faint musk of sweat when he removed
his hat is as clear as anything. This mixture is what paints the sharpest image of my father
that I may ever have.
At twelve, I was optimistic about life, but mostly for Mother’s sake. My father was one
year into a twenty-year sentence for embezzlement at the time. The police had taken him
from our house, early on a Tuesday morning. I had watched from the bay window as his
silhouette was calmly escorted to the car. Mother stood on the stoop, shouting confused
phrases like:
“Why?” and “what is happening?”
I was kept at an arm’s length from the trial itself, but I often wonder if witnessing
a court of law point its bony finger at my father and yell “guilty” would have been less
damaging than what I did see, which was Mother unravel like a spool of yarn, knotting and
fraying at the edges.
Appearance was the key to everything for Mother. She wouldn’t be caught dead with
a run in her stocking or a wrinkle in her silk dress. She had grown accustom to the lavish
life my father’s criminal endeavors had allowed. Expensive clutches and high heels on
the shelves in her closet looked like artifacts in a museum. I can see Mother now spritzing
herself with Chanel No. 5 and walking through the mist. When she past my bedroom door a
faint whiff of cherries and fresh cut flowers hung in the air. I always knew when Mother had
recently turned the pages in a book—the paper would blow a crisp decadent odor from its
binding or when she wiped her face on a towel—it would soak up the orange rind freshness
of her skin.
“Just let me put my face on,” she used to say as she pulled her silver makeup bag out
and stared one eye at a time into her compact.
After my father was sentenced, she stopped bothering with things like makeup and
roamed our apartment in her housecoat like a ghost. This frightened me much more than
being fatherless. Her skin had aged overnight and her museum of high fashion collected
dust. We were never low on vodka though, which she kept in the freezer, stacked on top of
greying hamburger meat. Food became something of the past. She was weepy and sleepy
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most of the time. When she took her afternoon nap on the sofa, she became so still, so
lifeless, that her chest ceased its repetition of ups and downs and I would shake her awake
to check that she was still breathing. She would yell and snort, very much alive, but the
panic would set in as soon as she drifted off again, becoming limp in that dead way that
liquor made her sleep.
After my father’s arrest, we talked about him as though he had just left the room and
I imagined him as being one step ahead of us all the time. If I spilled paint on the carpet,
mother might say, “Your father won’t like that,” as if he was just on his way home from work
and could open the door at any moment.
I could convince myself at times that my father was still sitting in the lazy boy in the
living room. As long as I didn’t turn it around, it could be real. I pictured him reading the
paper, resting a cold beer on his knee, letting it make a water ring on his beige slacks. I liked
eating my bologna sandwich at the kitchen counter so that I could stare at that chair. I even
thought I saw it move slightly at times or if I squinted in just the right way I could make out
the top of his head, but when I went to the front door and looked back, it was always empty.
The move to Maine was supposed to be our new start. Mother had applied for a
secretarial job at a dental office, and I was to finish out sixth grade at a new school. We
hadn’t said goodbye to anyone when mother decided to pack up and leave in the middle
of the night. There were no farewells to the town or to the few friends I had made at school.
I told myself that I would write them letters, but I never did.
My first day of sixth grade started with watching throngs of children rush into the
building like ants into a wall. Becoming queasy at the sight, I wanted to turn and run, but
the thought of Mother’s disheartened face was worse than my sour stomach.
“You are a man now; it’s just me and you kid, so you have to be a big boy,” she had
said as she fixed my tie with a forceful grip that morning.
I slunk into the line, picking up my pace. It seemed as if they were all rushing and I
feared that someone might step on my heel if I took a moment to breathe. The halls were
a light turquoise and the sound of lockers slamming made me jump. There was a loud
squeak every so often from someone’s rubber sole twisting on the linoleum floor and the
chorus of laughter and chatter made me feel as if they all had a purpose here, except for
me. The wrinkled piece of paper in my hand with my classroom number on it was shaking
when I heard my name.
“You must be Thomas,” said a woman, who I gathered to be my teacher.
I was unaware that I had been standing in the doorway of her classroom when she
started yelling.
“Everyone, everyone!” she said, but the class continued jabbering.
“This is Thomas Finney, our newest student, I expect you will all welcome Thomas,”
she said with a stern smile.
“Hi Thomas!” the class sang in reluctant unison.
I quickly took the only open seat I saw next to a boy, who was what mother would call
“healthy,” and kept my head down.
“Psst,” he said.

I looked around.
“Yes?”
“Is it true that your dad’s in prison?” he asked with the emotionless effect that less
brighter children often have. My heart skipped a beat and rose like a stone in my throat.
I could feel ears perk up as the other children awaited my reply. The teacher was blindly
going over the lesson plan for the day with white chalk on the green board. I was utterly
unprepared for this and what happened next was like a reflex. The same as when the doctor
had tapped my knee with that strange rubber triangle and my leg kicked him in the groin
involuntarily, but instead it was words that flung out in front of me.
“No, he’s an astronaut,” I said.
I couldn’t believe my own gall. The boy looked at me confused and suspicious.
“Oh really, ’cause I hear . . .” he began, but I cut him off.
“You heard wrong! He is on a secret NASA mission. I’m not even supposed to say
anything,” I said, digging into my spontaneous lie even further and yet again shocking myself.
It was as if someone were pulling the strings above me, moving my mouth. I heard
whispers, but kept my eyes forward, pretending not to notice. I stared at the teacher’s
back and felt my face growing hot pink with embarrassment. The bell rang and I ran to the
bathroom. I barely got the stall door closed before the waterworks began, uncontrollably
like a sneeze. I heard the bathroom door open.
“Hey new kid! You in here?” a voice said.
I quickly wiped my face on my blazer sleeve and slowly opened the door to find a birdfaced
boy with two other boys behind him standing by the sink.
“So is that stuff true? What Rudy asked you in class? Is your dad really an astronaut?”
he asked.
“Yah,” I said a bit downtrodden, waiting for the axe to fall.
I thought the boy might test me on my lie, ask me for proof and surely my life would be
over before it had ever even begun, but he just nodded to his friends with his chin up and
said.
“Wow, that’s so cool,”
Over the next few weeks my ingenious lie grew a little at a time and by the fall kids
were crowding around me at lunch to hear the latest adventures of my dad, the astronaut.
I came up with more and more detail to my story and tried to cover all my bases by telling
them to keep it secret. I said the information was of the highest clearance and could put my
father’s life in danger if any of it got out. My father, well the astronaut version of him, went
from being on a secret mission to inventing a new form of space travel that could make a
person invisible. He sometimes came to visit me, but only for an hour or so before he had
to go back to save the earth from a meteor that was always headed straight for us. I even
said that a rock from my driveway was a moonstone he had given me. I just kept answering
the questions as fast as they came and was even starting to enjoy myself. I was pleased
with my ability to captivate my audience, to widen their eyes. When I told them of how my
father had clung to the side of the shuttle when a piece of debris had knocked into it, my
classmates had gasped and I swelled with pride.
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Hair Trigger 2.0
By the time Christmas rolled around, it was common knowledge at my school that
my father would be sending me proof of life on Mars, so while I opened a pair of wool socks
Mother had given me I was busy thinking of what to come up with before the start of school
again. I noticed a small package wrapped in brown paper under the tree. I tore it open and
inside found a small stuffed animal that could neither be called a bunny nor a mouse, but
something in-between.
“Open the card,” my mother encouraged, seeing my expression at the out of date gift.
I opened the manila envelope, a drawing of a generic Christmas tree on the front.
Inside read:
“Merry Christmas kid, love Dad,”
I stared blankly at the words, wondering why he had given me a little kid’s toy when I
am not a little kid anymore. I couldn’t picture the person who had written the note and for a
moment, felt I might cry, but then it came to me, the most wonderful idea.
“It’s perfect!” I said, and jumped up to hug Mother.
“Well, I’m glad you like it sweetheart,” she said, almost spilling her vodka cranberry
on the couch.
That night I tiptoed into the kitchen and rummaged through the cabinets, not knowing
exactly what I was looking for until I found a honey jar. I scrubbed the label off with soap and
warm water in the bathroom sink. With markers I began scribbling on the stuffed animal
in black, turning its innocent white fur into a greyish mess. I then pushed the tiny creature
deep into the honey jar with my thumb, letting it slowly be engulfed by the thick bubbling
gold like I imagined the dinosaurs in the tar pits, frozen in their last positions. I licked my
fingers when I was done and placed it on my dresser to settle. Peering through the glass,
I was satisfied that it passed for one of those anatomy jars that hold a floating body part
that you might see in the background of a scary film. The honey had disguised the stuffed
animals fluffy, cheap fur into something more sinister. It had transformed it into proof of
life on Mars. I hid it under my bed the rest of Christmas break and shoved it inside my book
bag the morning of the first day back to school.
Walking through the halls that day, I was utterly pleased with myself. I had created
something wonderful. I might even have believed that I was an astronaut’s son, that I did
have proof of life on Mars nestled between my notebooks. When the time came for the
big reveal, after the first bell, I reached into the recesses of my bag for the jar. I must have
forgotten to tighten the lid; it must have turned upside down from the bumpy morning bus
ride because when I pulled it out, there on the linoleum floor next to the lockers, in a circle
of kids, a gooey, honey-soaked stuffed animal plopped out.
“Oh my god!” one kid screamed, and for a moment everyone backed away as if it were
alive, until on further inspection, someone yelled.
“It’s just a stuffed animal, you guys!” and my heart sank into my shoes, sliding
underneath my heels to hide.
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t come back from this. My life was over. I tried to
think of something to save myself, but before I could, a teacher walked over.
“Thomas, is this yours?” she asked pointing with her long finger, but I could only look

at her gold buckled loafers. The sticky piece of fluff was face up on the tile with its cute glass
eyes staring at me, beaten and exposed, much like myself.
“Yes ma’am” I said, with my head still down.
“Come with me,” she said sympathetically, and the room erupted into laughter as she
walked me away with a hand on my shoulder. After a talk about the consequences of lying,
she called my mother. I believed I was being punished, but I think she was trying to spare
me an afternoon of torment.
I waited for Mother on a wooden bench outside the principal’s office. When she came,
we sat in the car for a moment, me with my shoulders hunched over from shame. She
started the engine and we drove in silence. At a stoplight her blinker clicked its monotonous
note over and over.
“Thomas, tell me more about your father?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, thinking she was patronizing me.
“No really, just tell me a nice story about your father . . . the astronaut,” she said
tentatively. I could see that her eyes were clouded as she stared out the front windshield. So
I told her. I told her what I had told all the kids at school. How brave and kind and thoughtful
he was. How he was always thinking of us while he was busy saving the world from the next
great disaster. She smiled, but never looked at me.
“Your father is a good man Thomas,” she said. I didn’t know which father she was
referring to.
“Tell me more, will he explore wormholes next you think?” she said, in a desperately
hopeful tone. I looked at Mother, at her quaffed hair and her painted nails. She was almost
her old self again. Her eyes, outlined with thick black liner were filling with water and my
heart raced. I wanted so badly to keep the tears from overflowing and ruining her makeup
so I said,
“Yah maybe he will.”
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Sophia Okugawa-Stoller

Songs, Fitting and Inappropriate
Aïcha Thiam
YANN WOKE UP IN THE UNFAMILIAR ROOM, WITH THE SONG STILL IN HIS HEAD.
He had been humming it in his dream, which he was already starting to forget. Feist’s
“Bittersweet Memories,” rather fittingly. In contrast, something loud and abrasive was
presently blaring from the deck above him, but the partygoers were either too euphoric to
care, or his mood had gone too sour to salvage. A few hours must have gone by; through
the wide window on his left, the moon had since risen. The milky half-light, visible in slivers
under the curtains, striped the room black and pastel-blue, dappled with soft red halos
where string lanterns had been hung outside.
He had told them all that he was seasick (he had, in fact, been sailing with his father
every summer since he was six years old, but they couldn’t know that. She most certainly
could not). It hadn’t been the first lie that day, and it would probably not be the last, if he
intended to keep the peace. His brother James had given him a look, and Yann had stared
back, hard, daring him to contradict him in front of everyone. Let me have this. The only
reason I’m here, in the first place, is because of you. He needed, for the sake of his own
sanity, to get as far as humanly possible from the deck where most of the raucous guests
were gathered. Everyone was having such fun. It was unbearable. Ironically, once he had
effectively shut himself away in the small, elegant cabin, silence enveloping him like a quilt,
he had truly begun to feel ill. Presently, Yann felt worse still, and was starting to accept that
it had nothing to do with the gentle sway-lurch of the cruise ship.
In the right corner of the room, something—someone—shifted, and he recoiled slightly.
She was sitting on the arm of the cream settee, eyeing him as if she simultaneously wanted
and feared being there. She was bright-eyed, flushed, a would-be smile flitting on and off
her lips. A thought trickled in and he tried to stem it, aware of the callousness of it. Then he
remembered that he didn’t have to be nice to, or care about her. Has she been drinking?
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she breathed, eyes darting between him and the door. “I
was wondering where you had disappeared to.”
“Well. Here I am,” Yann said, looking her straight in the face. You have your mother’s
bold, insolent look, his father would often tell him growing up, but never unkindly. The times
had really changed; the woman before Yann looked anything but insolent, let alone bold.
The silence stretched between them. Outside the cabin, the lights flickered as guests
sashayed and staggered by, arms linked merrily, their voices distant, as if from another
world. From inside the room however, silhouetted against the red glare of the lanterns,
their shadows were stern, ghostly. Overhead, the first haunting bars of The Doors’ “People
Are Strange” began, to drunken hoots from the partygoers; Yann pulled himself from his
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Hair Trigger 2.0
reverie. What an inappropriate song for the occasion. He studied her again. Half crouched,
half-standing, she now seemed to be deeply regretting having come. Out of old habit, he
glanced at her forearms; her veins were blue lightning bolts, flecked here and there with
fading blemishes and discolorations.
“Are you having fun?” she finally blurted, almost desperately.
“I should be asking you that,” Yann shrugged. “It’s your wedding.”
She saw an opening, and lunged for it, effusively.
“Oh Yann, I know you’ve all just met, but you are going to love Samuel. Simply love him.
He rides horses, just like you used to, I know you are going to get right along. Ah, and he treats
me so well! I have never been so happy in my life, I finally feel like I matter, like I am valued—
not that . . . not that your father wasn’t . . . not to say that. . . ." She faltered under his gaze, and
when she spoke again, her voice was deliberate, contrite. “I would love for the four of us, you
and James and Samuel and I, to spend some time together moving forward. I really would. I
want to know about your life, what you’ve been up to, make up for lost years. . . .”
Yann had felt a savage, cruel pleasure at her flustered ramblings, but it had all but
evanesced. That which had been threatening to erupt inside of him all evening was coming
to the surface in deep, roiling waves.
“Wendy.” He made a point to call her by her name. “I think you misunderstand why
I’m here. I am, believe it or not, genuinely happy you finally got your life together, and I
actually have forgiven you. But I haven’t forgotten what James was too young to remember.
I’m only here because of him, and because he wanted the both of us to be present for you
on your special day, which is more than you have ever done for him—for us.” And then, like
an afterthought, knowing full well how petty he would sound, he added: “And by the way,
I haven’t been on a horse in almost twenty years, but you wouldn’t know that, of course.”
She stood as if electrocuted, her eyes shinier still, the grin now rigid on her face.
“Do feel better sweetheart. Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”
“No. Nothing whatsoever.” Yann turned his head toward the window until he heard
the door close softly behind her. He clenched his jaw, and picked at a hangnail, the way he
used to as a child, when pain helped him stay present. Somewhere above, he heard the
unmistakable roar of his brother’s laugh. Sweet, charming, mild-mannered James. At least
one of them was having fun.
Leaning back into the pillows, Yann hum-whispered distractedly, people are strange
when you’re a stranger, faces look ugly when you’re alone, women seem wicked when
you’re unwanted. . . . There was no getting this one out of his head anytime soon.

When Shirley Smiled
Aïcha Thiam
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I HAD STARTED TO REGRET THIS, MUCH SOONER THAN ANTICIPATED. EVERY
time I heard the clatter-splash of the pool water, my senses were jarred and I was alight
with panic again; it took all of five minutes, every time, to convince myself that I was fine.
Everything was fine. The children were fine. Their peals of laughter echoed throughout the
streamer-and-balloon decked lawn, as they chased, pushed, and launched themselves on
each other, with the energy only a gaggle of wild five year olds could muster. When their
parents had left them at my doorstep, I had expected them to change their mind, having
somehow sensed how utterly terrified and inexperienced I was.
Nothing would go awry as long as I watched them—her—closely.
A light touch on my shoulder made me start. Elliot smiled down warmly at me; before
he could say a word however, a cry of delight erupted from one of the children, bell-like in
the distance.
“Uncle Elliot!”
A little girl climbed out of the pool with alarming speed. Elliot chuckled as she locked
her hands around his forearm; he lifted her, dangling her as if she were a mere garland, her
dark curls bouncing prettily. In my arms, our kitten Dinah started to tremble.
“Happy birthday darling,” Elliot laughed. She vaulted back toward the other children
as soon as he lowered her. Elliot sat on the wicker chair beside me.
“Five years old already,” he said, in fond disbelief. A pause, then he added “she seems
to be having the time of her life.” When I still did not respond, Elliot’s tone became more
emphatic. “This is good, Violet. You did good.”
My gaze followed my daughter as she swam. When Shirley smiled, her entire face
wrinkled, her grey-blue eyes, those eyes that gave her away, disappearing into the folds. It
was dazzling, and it was disquieting.
“I didn’t even know she had friends,” I said quietly.
“Violet, children are like magnets toward one another at that age. Their lives couldn’t
be less complicated. Of course, she has friends.”
That’s not what I meant. My gaze rested on the children again, their heads bobbing
in the pool like colorful apples. They were playing a variation of tag, giggling and splashing
each other, but never too closely, never too comfortably, giving Shirley a wide berth, as
if they too, instinctively, knew what I felt. There’s something wrong with my daughter, I
thought for the umpteenth time, and the admittance was chased with the familiar, bonedeep
shame.
As if our trains of thought had been analogous, Dinah’s paws tightened on my

forearm. The kitten’s eyes were almost slits, but I saw that they were also trained in the
direction of the pool.
I knew Elliot would be considerate enough to not tell me that I worried too much, as
others so dismissively did. He knew only too well that it was worse than that. He had never
judged me when I had been unable to hold my own daughter, after she was born. He had
sat with me as I cried, on cold bathroom tiles, when my husband was away and I was alone,
yet again, in a too-big house. It was Elliot who had brought me to the doctor where I’d finally
had a name to associate with my despair: they had called it postpartum depression, an
entire life’s anguish summarized into two reductive words. Elliot knew me better than I
knew myself; it was the upside—or downside—of being twins.
Would he be so quick to defend me, however, if I told him how often, throughout the
years, I had turned the baby monitor off, unbeknownst to my husband, wishing that the
night would take my daughter from me? If I confessed about the times when I had driven
away, having left her on park swings with false promises of candy when I returned? Would
he be so condoning in regard to my sanity if I told him that sometimes, my daughter did not
look like my husband, nor did she look like me? That I recoiled from her as much as she did
me, some days, as if we were oil and water—that is to say fundamentally irreconcilable?
Would he be so understanding if he knew how all day, even as I watched her angelic
face plunge in and out of the water, an awful, wretched part of me had been praying in
tandem let her drown, let her drown, let her drown?
Silence unfurled between Elliot and I, a ribbon of words we were always on the edge of
saying, but could never quite bother to. I recalled other birthdays, quieter ones, worse ones,
so many years ago. I remembered mornings spent playing under kitchen tables, he and I,
pretending that we were not, in fact, hiding from a more exacting kind of horror, and I knew
he remembered them too; and while Elliot had always been more skilled at perching his
neuroses on shelves so far up even he could not reach them, I did not think it a coincidence
that having children and a family of his own had always been a hard, solid pass.
I had stunned us both twice: once, when I had chosen to get married, and again, when
I’d had Shirley. Elliot had called it “brave,” laughing in a way that did not quite reach his
eyes. I had not felt very brave in the last few years; I had not felt very brave just yesterday,
in fact, after I’d admonished Shirley for plucking the poor canary’s feathers. I’d retreated
into the kitchen, and Shirley had stood where I left her, her eyes on me, flashing in and out
of view as the kitchen doors swung inward and out. She could have been smiling. I had not
been sure.
I looked at Elliot, who was looking at Shirley. The veil that sometimes came over his
expression was hovering again, and I yearned to ask him whether he could sense it too,
that which I couldn’t quite place. It was like trying to thumb a page in a book which kept
fluttering by. Like carrying water with my small, brittle palm. Instead, I heard myself ask the
other one, the question that was always ready on my tongue.
“Elliot, do you think I’m turning into her? Into Mom?”
“Violet.” He said my name gently, a million tendernesses carried in that word. “You
need to stop doing this to yourself. You’re not a bad mother. Not even close.”
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Aïcha Thiam

Then what is wrong with my daughter? If it’s not me, it surely must be her. It was like
a mantra in my head. Her own father must have felt it, too. It was either that, or he could
sense just how much I had lost my mind, and preferred to be away, far away, from it all.
As if in response, Shirley swam to the edge of the pool, and reached for a pair of
goggles she had abandoned earlier. The kitten began to tremble again in my arms. Our
eyes met, brown to dazzling blue-grey, and for a fragment of an instant, gone were the hints
of the cherubic smiles, the cloying laughs, the saccharine display she put on for everyone
but me.
And then, just as quickly, the moment had passed.
22
Hair Trigger 2.0

Like a Nutcracker
J. Ray Paradiso
24
Hair Trigger 2.0
PAR TO PERK: YOU CALLED ME PAR FOR PARADISO; I CALLED YOU PERK FOR
Perkins. Do you recall when, where, how or especially why we met? Was it in fifth grade
at St. Vincent’s with Sr. Francis Xavier, who kept me after school every day? I thought she
hated me; you said, “Shit head, she likes you!” We didn’t match up, did we? I mean, you
lived in Quiche Lorraine River Forest; I lived on the pasta side of North Avenue. Your friends
were consonant-crispy Clark, Wendt and Kent; mine were vowel-weary Guerrero, Ippolito
and Allegretti. You swam with a future Olympian at the Butterfield Country Club; I played
wiffle ball with a butcher’s son in the alley. You wore black-on-black SFA – shirt, tie, sweater,
belt, pants, socks, shoes – long before black became, Is-there-another-color? I wore a
string tie over long-sleeve Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s shirts: alternating MWF blue, TR pink.
In our class photo, I’m flinching in the left corner of the room; you’re posturing with that
wise-ass, foxy-sly, smirk on your tilted face as if you, and only you, knew how to spell Des
Moines; how to smoke Camels and talk dirty, in tandem; and how to unclip Dianne Tatalia’s
bra with one hand in the dark. Your skin was Angel Gabriel; mine was Coppini’s Olio Extra
Vergine di Oliva. The tone of your voice was clipped, a gulp away from swallowing a mouth
full of marbles. Mine was late-Bridgeport like “Terdy terd n Wells.” Your Mother’s kitchen
smelled like baked cinnamon apples; ours like lasagna and meat balls or liver and onions.
Your parents were Mr. and Mrs. Chic Cosmopolitan; I lived with my always-in-bed-by-10pm
Gram and Gramp, 1-step from immigration.
Par to Perk: I h-h-honor r-r-rolled all through Fenwick High School; you dared Mr.
Ludwig to pimp you in Freshman Algebra. L-o-s-e-r, your parents UPSd you like a box of
small pox to Georgetown Prep in vanity-plate Garrett Park, Maryland, to get your shit
together. During breaks and vacations, we exchanged dueling “ass holes,” dip shits” and
“douche bags” before and after you “musted” me to wear Bass Weejuns never avec socks,
to say “tautologically redundant” and to read the Kama Sutra. In the summer of ’62, you
invited me to spend a month at your Grandparents’ cattle ranch in Culbertson, Nebraska.
We rode horses, drove jeeps, played ping pong, went swimming and convoyed a sporting
goods dealer to buy a (Did we really need a mahogany Chris Craft?) speed boat in Grand
Lake, Colorado. Your Grandfather (You called him Peepaw; his pals called him Mr. Kool
Aid for the drink he invented and banned from his home.) advised us only once, “Don’t
run the cattle, boys.” And, do you remember that Fourth of July, when he Mark IVd us into
town to buy fireworks at the general store? When the store’s owner said, “Sorry, boys,
fireworks are illegal in Nebraska,” you replied, “But, my grandfather sent us here.” “Who’s
your grandfather?” she asked before loading all-we-could-carry shopping bags chuck full of

fireworks, no charge. What she said next, those seven prized words, wins a “Spoken Word”
Grammy Award in my book, “Ivan Perkins? he’ll turn off my water!”
Par to Perk: You majored in International Relations at pate de foie gras Georgetown
University, two years before pro forma Mr. President, William Jefferson Clinton. I majored
in English at meatloaf Providence College, a few years after Boss Daley’s kid, Richie. Your
new friends’ names were princely like Courtney Babcock III and Raphael de la Cristo (I’ll
conserve space.) Colon. Mine were more Federal Hill like Joey Cerilli, Bobby Davignon and
Brian Serault. We met over St. Patrick’s Day weekend in NYC. Remember TVs flying from
windows, twisting with Joey Dee at the Peppermint Lounge and that insanely jealous dude
at the Roosevelt Hotel, dressed in a long black robe like the 17th Century French Jesuit
missionary, Father Jacques Marquette, hatcheting guest room doors, desperately seeking
his girlfriend? Do you recall, (How could you forget?) that night we raced to Lake Geneva
in your souped-up, candy apple, Bonneville convertible and those gas station yah-whos,
who challenged you to drag? We barely survived the (Sorry, forgot to warn you!) dead end
in the middle of Cornapolis. Commanding a death-defying, starboard, 2-wheely at the “T”
in the road, you one-uped Capt. James Lawrence’s “Don’t give up the ship,” screaming in
your best, affected, ancient Latin, psycho-babble: Carpe diem; Audaces fortuna iuvat; Veni,
vedi, vici. Then, for an encore, you electric-shocked me like my first sciatic kiss, announcing
you’re applying to Marine OCS: necessary experience for a career in politics, “guaranteed,”
you punched, when you run for office from Eponymous County, Nebraska.
Par to Perk: It’s December of ’67, and I meet you at high noon in The Store, a seeand-be
seen bar at the SW corner of State and Maple in Chicago. Like a Nutcracker I
saw just last week at Neiman Marcus on The Magnificent Mile, you’re posing in your U.S.
Marine Officer’s dress red-white-blue, a preview of rigor mortis, refusing to sit and wrinkle
your new duds, SHOW OFF. When that candy-ass, Bob Dylan wannabe, bartender wants to
card you, I wanna tear his fuckin’ heartless heart out. But, you’re cool, SFA cool, Peepaw
cool, Georgetown cool, NYC cool, officer-and-a-gentleman-cool: Perk cool. “Semper fi, Matha-fucker,”
I hear you thinkin’ as you stick your freshly-minted, U.S.-Marine- 2bar- Officerphoto-ID
in Walt Whitman’s sorry-ass face. Drinks up, you tell me OCS stories. “I left my
weapon in the wrong place just once,” you confess. “Slept with it, standing in my locker
for three nights, straight.” “Getting shot doesn’t hurt; you don’t feel it,” you swear, and I
wanna swear, “Perk, you’re fuckin’ brain-washed,” but don’t. “I’m shipping out for Nam
next month,” you boast. “Win the war. Come home. Get into politics. Hey, I’m not, like,
gung ho, but military service is required for what I wanna do.” Hugs reserved for Moms and
sissies, we shake hands, about face, stroll to our wheels, wave Adios, muse home.
Perk to Par: Like a Nutcracker? You’re the nutcracker, you chicken shit draft dodger.
Sorry, 2-A occupational deferment, same difference, dork! I gave you Christmas presents
from Brooks Brothers. You gave me grief every metre (It’s 3.28 feet, dummy!) of my trek
from St. Vincent’s to Fenwick to Nebraska to Georgetown to NYC to Lake Geneva to Chicago
to you-name-it and back. Challenging my logic. Questioning my sources. Doubting my
what ever. And, I won’t forget your horror show on our neighbor’s back lawn with What’s
her name? at my sister’s at-home wedding. What the fuck were you smokin’? And, oh,
25
J. Ray Paradiso

my Mother never forgave you for ditching my funeral. She got your Mass card, but do you
really think we’d buy your shit about having to take a draft physical on the same day in
cheesey, beer-and-a-brat Mil-VAU-kee? I understand you dreamed about “bestmaning”
at my wedding in the Grand Ballroom at NYC’s Plaza Hotel. In your dreams, shit head,
and, Y-e-s, my dream bride IS Miss World. Hey, I didn’t major in International Relations for
nothin’. Ok, I saw you at our Memorial Wall in D.C., fake-soldiering to Panel 36E Line 81,
solemnly making a pencil rubbing “Donald Dean Perkins Jr.” over Optima (Dig it?) typeface,
gravely trudging away - head stiff, face wet - like you were First Communion, God-spelled
to have known me. And, I feel you hugging me from earth and wind and fire and water,
often. And, I know I’ll be remembered, Perk forever, for as long as you tell and write our
stories and for as long as all those who hear, read and tell your stories, and for as long as all
those who hear, read and tell their stories, ad infinitum. Ergo, stop whining, dip shit! Now,
for your penance, un-ancient Latin this, Philistine: Quam celerime, rare avis, nihil obstat.
Imprimatur. Donec iterum conveniant, scribere ius, meus amicus. Scribere ius. Oh, mea
culpa, I forgot, you probably can’t translate it. So, here, I’ll do it for you, Par usual: “As quickly
as possible, rare bird, let nothing stand in the way. Let it be printed. Until we meet again,
write right, my friend. Write right.”
26
Hair Trigger 2.0

Death Wish
Ashlee Bond-Richardson
ELDRIAN’S HOUSE HAD MONSTERS IN IT.
They grew in his mother’s womb like parasites. The little monsters leeched all the
warmth and love from Alana and left him and his other mom with the bitter, rotten remains.
His mothers’ favorite thing to do was scream at each other, now because of those leeches.
They were at it again in the living room. Eldrian watched from the corner with one tiny hand
balled into a fist and the other holding a glass bowl of fruit. His face was red. His heart was
pounding. The monsters were still growing.
“We both wanted this!” shouted Alana. “We talked about it for ages! Just because now
we’ve got three on the way and I didn’t do it your way. . . .”
“Oh, you mean like sleeping with the first guy you saw at the bar? That’s not what I
had in mind.” Hazelle crossed her arms and glared at her wife.
“You know that’s not what I did!” Alana threw up her hands. Her nightshirt rose and
her stomach poked out.
“STOP!”
A deafening crash split the air as shards of glass flew in all directions. Both women
froze and spun where they stood. Eldrian stood in the middle of the floor, glass and fruit all
around him. “ENOUGH!” he shouted again, right eye twitching. The color drained from his
mothers’ faces. “I don’t want any more fighting! Just get rid of them!”
“Get rid of who?” Hazelle’s voice was quiet, suppressed with the weight of her stepson’s
fury.
“THE MONSTERS!” Eldrian pointed at Alana’s stomach and kicked a glass shard away
from him. “Just get rid of them! I don’t want any siblings! Siblings are stupid and I like being
alone. I used to like being your only kid before you went and got three monsters inside you!
Just stop fighting. I’m sick of it!”
“Honey, you don’t mean that—”
“Yes, I do! I hope some other monster, or fairy, or something comes and takes them
away!” He stomped down on a grapefruit. It squished and oozed under his shoe. Alana
rubbed her stomach and frowned.
“Why don’t we go to bed?” Hazelle said. Her tone was light and laced with worry.
“Everyone is a little tense. Some sleep would do us good.”
“Whatever,” Eldrian said. He turned and stalked out of the room, up the stairs, and into
his bedroom. The boy slammed his door shut and threw himself onto his fairy bedsheets.
He shoved his face into his pillow and screamed, kicking his feet against the bed. Eldrian
screamed and screamed until his throat was sore.
29
Ashlee Bond-Richardson

He sat up and wriggled his way under the comforter, then turned and stared out the
window. It gave him a clear view of the backyard and night sky. When he couldn’t sleep,
he watched the yard for signs of rabbits. But not tonight. The yard was silent. Maybe they
heard him screaming and ran away.
Eldrian fell asleep before either of his mothers came up to say goodnight.
30
Hair Trigger 2.0
Tap.
He stirred in his sleep.
Tap.
He opened his eyes.
Tap.
He watched a rock hit his window.
Eldrian yawned and sat up in bed. His eyes went wide. A woman stood in the yard,
illuminated by moonlight. She wore an emerald green dress and had raven hair that spread
down her back. He stared at her, transfixed, and watched as she beckoned him. What did
she want with him? A tickle wound its way up the back of his neck and he shivered. She
beckoned him again, more urgent this time. Against his better judgement, he got up and
tiptoed out of his room. He kept as quiet as he could until he was at the back door. Eldrian
opened it a smidge and poked his head out. The woman beckoned him again.
He went outside, feet shuffling across the grass. When he at last stood before her and
saw her up close, he recoiled. The woman was skin and bone. Her joints stuck out, taut
against her dry and peeling skin. Her legs were sticks and her face was pallid. Her eyes
were sunken in, dead and lifeless.
“What is your name, child?” she rasped. Her voice shook as she shook.
“My name is Eldrian. I live here. Who are you?”
“Call me Miss.” Miss extended a frail hand to Eldrian, who shook it with two fingers.
“Why are you in my backyard?” he asked her and crossed his arms. Didn’t this woman
know it was rude to sneak into people’s yards?
“I am here to grant you a wish, my dear. I visit all unhappy children and grant them
one wish. Is there something you want, Eldrian, more than anything else in this world?” She
leaned closer to him. “There is something I want more than anything else on earth.”
“What do you want?” His chest fluttered.
“I want food.” Her eyes bulged at the word and her breathing picked up. “Do you know
how long it’s been since I fed?”
“A long time, I’m guessing.” He stared at her bony legs and grimaced.
“Longer than you can imagine. I’m . . . I’m . . .” She put her lips next to his ear and
whispered, “starving.” The word spread through him like a chill. It crept up his bones and
sent a shiver through his spine. “Can you help me with that?”
“I think there’s some leftover fruit salad,” he told her, his voice quiet and unsure. His
heart beat fast in his chest. Miss gave a dry laugh that turned into a fit of coughing.
“Yes, that will do. Fruit for me and a wish for you. What does your heart desire?”

“I want my moms back. The nice ones who bought me candy and tucked me into bed.
And . . .” He leaned in close this time and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Get rid of the
monsters. I don’t want any siblings.”
Miss grinned and revealed a row of rotten teeth. “That, dear child, is a wish I can
grant. Now, turn around. Close your eyes.” She took a step back and he turned and faced
the house.
“Why do I need to turn around?” he asked her.
“I don’t want you to be scared, Eldrian. Now, count to five. When you’re done, I want
you to go back to your room and go to sleep. Don’t turn around, not even for a peek.
Understand?”
“Yes, Miss.” Eldrian closed his eyes as tight as he could and put his hands over them
for good measure. His stomach did flip flops and his heart was in his throat. His hands
shook with nerves and excitement. Would he really wake up tomorrow and be an only child?
“Count out loud for me, Eldrian.”
He nodded. “One.”
The sound of ripping clothing filled the air. Miss gave a strangled hiss from behind
him.
“Two.”
A gust of wind almost knocked him over and he gasped. The flapping sound of
something huge and wide followed. . . .
“Three . . .”
Flesh tore and separated. Bones snapped and cracked. He heard each and every
sound and winced. A gurgling sound came from Miss’s mouth.
“F-Four,” Eldrian whimpered.
A triumphant cry split the night sky and Eldrian felt something soar into the air above
him. He heard the flapping of wings and felt something hot drip onto his forehead. He
waited a moment and then . . .
“Five.”
Silence.
Eldrian opened his eyes. His entire body shook. He reached and ran his fingers over
his forehead. When he pulled them back, they were covered in blood. Black blood. His
heart skipped a beat as he wiped his forehead and fingers off with the inside of his shirt.
No evidence means it never happened. He didn’t see anything. He didn’t hear anything.
He didn’t—
There were dark pools of blood on the ground.
He froze, staring. Should he go inside? Miss did say go straight to bed. His wish might
not be granted if he disobeyed. . . . But there was blood in his yard. And it led into the house. . . .
Eldrian made a split-second decision and walked forward. He didn’t stop to think
about where he was going—he just walked. He closed the back door as he entered the
house. Eldrian climbed the stairs and stepped around the dark stains in the beige carpet.
He never looked behind him to see the pair of legs imbedded into the dirt.
A soft fluttering noise greeted him at the top of the stairs. He paused and listened
31
Ashlee Bond-Richardson

32
Hair Trigger 2.0
hard. It came from his mothers’ bedroom. Just a peek, he thought. Just a peek and then I’ll
go to bed. . . . He walked over and pushed open the door.
There, hovering above his mother, was a grotesque human torso with bat-like wings.
Intestines and nerves dangled from the bottom. They glided over the cream sheets and
left tiny red streaks as the creature swayed. Her raven hair was matted with blood. Miss.
Eldrian felt himself go cold and weak with terror. Her back was to him and he heard a
sucking sound. She shifted to the left and he saw her face.
His mother’s stomach was a sea of red. It was split down the middle and Miss’s hands
were deep inside. He watched, frozen, as she pulled out something glistening and shriveled
and plopped it into her mouth. She stuck her wet hands back inside and fished around.
Soft squishing sounds filled the room and a nauseous pit welled up in his stomach. She
was feeding on his unborn siblings.
Eldrian watched her pulled out the last fetus and suck it down her throat. She licked
each of her fingers, then ran one down the edge of the cut on his mother’s stomach. It
began to stitch itself together until all that remained was the smeared blood. Miss pulled
down Alana’s shirt and opened the drawer of her bedside table. She pulled out a hand
mirror and held it up to her face.
“Still rotten,” she said, eyes on her teeth. Her voice was stronger and sweeter, but her
teeth were still brown and yellow. “Still hungry. . . .” She was no longer skin and bone. Her
limbs had filled out and her skin was a soft pink color. Her eyes had life in them and her face
wasn’t sunken in. If he hadn’t been so terrified, he might have found her pretty.
Eldrian tried to clear his throat, but it came out as a cry.
Miss dropped the mirror on the floor and turned around. Her wings hit the bedside
lamp and sent it clattering against the wall. “I thought I told you to go to bed.” Eldrian tried
to speak, but his voice seemed to have dried up. His hands shook and sweat rolled down
his back.
“I . . . uh . . . I . . . Wh-Where’s my o-other mom?” His teeth clattered together. He felt
weak in the knees.
“There.” Miss pointed at the floor by the bed. He glanced over and saw Hazelle passed
out on the floor. She looked pale, but unharmed. “She passed out when I came in. Hasn’t
woken since.” She chuckled and he gagged.
“Were y-you just . . .”
“Eating your monsters? Yes. They tasted better than I’d hoped. Don’t worry, your
mother didn’t feel a thing. She’s in an enchanted sleep.”
Puke pooled in his mouth and he swallowed it.
“But do you see my teeth?” Miss flapped herself closer to him and he felt like he might
pass out. She bared her teeth for him and he caught the scent of rot and flesh. “They’re still
rotten and I can’t have that. So who’s your favorite mother?”
The question came out of nowhere and caught him off guard. “What are you talking
about?”
“Who’s your favorite mother?” Miss flapped backward and hovered between Hazelle
and the bed. “Choose.”

“I can’t do that! I love them both!”
“Choose!”
“Why do I have to choose?”
“If you don’t, I will, and you won’t like that. So pick. Who has the better heart?”
“I’m not picking.” Somewhere amongst the fear, he found his will. “I won’t pick.”
“Then off to your room. It’s way past your bed time.”
“I’m not leaving you here with my moms!”
Miss flew towards him and Eldrian screamed. He squeezed his eyes shut, but no pain
came. When he opened them, Miss’s face was inches from his. “If you don’t do as I say, I’ll
stick your siblings back where they belong.” Her voice was only a whisper, but it was the
deadliest sound he’d ever heard. “They’ll become worse monsters than you feared and
your mothers will never smile again. Do you want that?”
“No.”
“Then go. Sleep and all will be well.”
Miss pushed him backwards and he fell into the hallway. She grabbed the door and
he scrambled to his feet. “Wait! You asked which heart was better. Why?”
Miss smiled. “Goodnight, Eldrian.” She shut the door.
Eldrian didn’t remember how he got back to his room. He didn’t remember getting
into bed, or pulling the sheets over his head. There was only the lull of sleep, the pounding
of his heart, and the dream of Alana giving him candy, and Hazelle tucking him into bed.
33
Ashlee Bond-Richardson

The Ghost of P. Wanda
Sherry Mayle
MOM LOVED TO TELL THE STORY ABOUT HOW SHE ALMOST KILLED DAD.
“I grabbed that butcher knife and I told him, ‘You whore mongerin’ sonofabitch, you
take one more step and I’ll show you your guts! If you try to sleep tonight, I’ll cut your heart
out and leave you lay!’”
What started this specific quarrel isn’t important because Mom and Dad could make
a fistfight out of anything: holidays, grocery shopping, the TV contrast setting; when I was
twelve, they fought over gravy.
The gravy fight started one Sunday dinner when Dad decided he’d rather complain
about the gravy than eat it. He made a face and yelled, “This gravy is sour as owl shit!”
His mother, who came to dinner five times a week despite every indication Mom would
prefer she do otherwise, snickered and agreed the gravy tasted “worse than usual.” Mom
told them both to kiss her “rosy, red ass” and to fix their own dinner if they didn’t like hers.
Dad shook his head at Grandma, then said, “She just put in too much bakin’ powders
and won’t admit it.”
I sat on the couch beside him with a plate of mashed potatoes in my lap as Mom
got up from her seat, a large wooden rocking chair that creaked under its own weight, and
flipped it across the room so that it landed upside down at my grandmother’s feet.
As Grandma grabbed her pocketbook and fled, Mom bent inches from Dad’s nose
and shouted, “Bakin’ powders? You don’t put no bakin’ powders in gravy! What do you
know about cookin’ anyway! You can’t even wash a dish!”
With her index finger still pointed at Dad, Mom turned to me and began her onewoman
show to which I already k ;new the lines: “Sherry Marie, as God be my witness, your
whore monger of a dad let the dogs lick the dishes clean that night he had pissy Wanda in
my bed! While I was out of town, burying my dead mother!”
Pissy Wanda was an old friend of the family whose last name was never said. Her
given name had been prefixed with “pissy” because of her tendency to pee herself when
she drank, which was often. My parents had last seen her twenty years before I was born.
This hadn’t stopped Mom from including her in every argument with Dad since, so I still felt
as though I knew her on a first name basis—first name Pissy, last name Wanda.
While Mom and Dad’s fights could begin over anything, they always ended with Dad
being called a whore monger because of Mom’s superhuman ability to take any topic and
relate it back to her primary grievance: Dad supposedly slept with Wanda while Mom was
out of town, burying her dead mother. Mom always stressed the dead part as if Dad’s
infidelity would have been less offensive had she been burying her mother alive.
35
Sherry Mayle

For decades, Pissy Wanda was as much a part of my parents’ marriage as either one
of them. Even after the woman gave in and died, Mom still brought her up, dragging her
body into arguments as if she’d just shown up that morning demanding my father be given
to her.
36
Hair Trigger 2.0
It’s 9pm and my fiancé, Aaron, still isn’t home from work. He has a demanding job in Silicon
Valley that requires a lot of hours and a lot of passion. Either that, or he’s having an affair,
which I hear requires the same.
Sometimes I smell his jacket when he comes through the door. I’m sniffing not only for
another woman’s perfume, but even a whiff of hotel shampoo—anything that’ll confirm my
baseless suspicion that he’s been naked, sweating on top of someone else, and re-clothed
since I last kissed him goodbye at 8am this morning. So I hug him a bit too long because I
missed him so much, but also because I’m sniffing, and did I catch a hint of vanilla?
Only whores wear vanilla. Mom never said this, but I wish she had so I could blame
her for it. The voice in my head began impersonating her from a young age. By now, my
impression is nearly identical, so perfect that I can’t tell who’s impersonating who.
I had a boyfriend in high school. He was out of my league but didn’t know it because
I’d just lost fifty pounds and was taking my time about gaining it back. Mom warned me
often to be nice to him, always adding, “Or he’ll find somebody who will!”
I mocked her and then became convinced he was cheating on me within a month. I
had no evidence, just an inevitable dread I was happy calling women’s intuition. I’d tie up
the phone line every night, crying and begging him to tell me the truth, to just admit that he
wanted someone who wasn’t me.
“Why are you so jaded, Sherry?” Mom would plead. “You’re only fifteen! Nobody’s hurt
you the way I been hurt! I pity the day someone really breaks your heart, baby girl. They’ll
have to put you away!”
After five years, this boyfriend did break my heart. He left me for someone else,
someone who hadn’t choked him in fits of paranoia or gave him a black eye he’d had to
tell his friends was from a car door. Mom was right; I nearly did have to be put away. I drove
to his house drunk before I was old enough to drink. I broke in and crawled into his bed.
I sobbed and wallowed and tore at his sheets because he wasn’t there, and I knew that
meant he was with her.
Sitting on my couch now, I glare at the door as if I can will Aaron and lifelong fidelity
to walk through it. I strip a hangnail off my thumb with my teeth and it stings because I’ve
hit the quick. I try to watch television, but all my favorite protagonists are climbing into bed
with their best friend’s wife or their married business partner. Aaron messages me and says
he’ll be home soon. I feel relieved before I consider how good he is at covering for himself,
always checking in so that I don’t get too suspicious.
If only Dad had been so smooth.

My first memory of Mom and Dad fighting over another woman happened when I was six
years old after a liquor-fueled wedding reception on New Year’s Eve of 1997. We’re headed
home in Mom’s Chevy Caprice, and I’m buckled between her and Dad in the front seat. Dad
has one arm in the backseat and won’t stop squirming. Mom threatens, “Quit it right now,
you sonofabitch, or I’ll run this whole car up a telephone pole!”
I hear squealing from behind. My older sister by seventeen years is wedged in the
backseat between her best friend of the same age and our cousin who’s visiting from Ohio.
My sister’s friend is the screamer, and I can feel her legs kicking the back of my seat as
she attempts to squirm away from Dad’s claw hand. My cousin, a large man who within a
few years will announce he’s lending his booming voice to ministering the word of God, is
so drunk he can barely hold himself up. Now he jerks his head up and calls for everyone
to stop crowding him because Mom has placed a leftover cake in his lap for safekeeping.
“I can’t, he’s grabbin’ my knees!” the friend squeals. “Make him quit! Make him quit!”
Dad grabbed everyone’s knees. As soon as he came home from work, before he even
put down his lunch pail, he would grin and pinch the knee of whoever had been stupid
enough to sit closest to the door. He’d dig two large fingers into each side and tickle until
his victim hollered or my mother called him a dunce and made him stop. Mom always
apologized, then politely explained to company that Dad was an idiot, someone who’d
rather get a reaction than eat when he was hungry.
But that night in the car, amid high-pitched giggles, the smell of whiskey breath,
and her six-year-old whining that she’s uncomfortable because Daddy won’t sit still, Mom
doesn’t look at her husband and see an ornery kid oblivious to social cues. Maybe she
sees a sloppy drunk; maybe she’s watching a man who without inhibitions is willing to put
his hands on a girl young enough to be his daughter; maybe she flashes back to twenty
years before when it was Pissy Wanda who was in the backseat, giggling and flirting and
drunkenly pissing herself.
Mom suddenly reaches across me with one arm. I squint into the darkness to try
and follow what she’s doing. Dad cries out, then twists her arm, forcing her to release the
handful of his fleshy belly she’d been wringing.
We all make it home in one piece except for the cake; it’s upside down in my sister’s
lap. Mom is rabid, but we all file inside as if she isn’t threatening to knock Dad’s brains out
all over the sidewalk. As we pretend to sleep, the shouting continues from their room.
“If you wanted her so bad, why didn’t you just climb her ass on the dance floor?” Mom
screams. “Like you did with Pissy Wanda when you had her here! . . . You lyin’ bastard!
Cletus saw you and Conley with her on the front porch! . . . Well I don’t care if Cletus is crazy,
he wouldn’t lie to me! You probably passed her back and forth all night! . . . I oughta just
take Sherry and leave! That’s what I oughta do!”
But it’s Dad who’s leaving. He announces he needs to buy snuff and heads for the
door without pants. My older brother jumps out of bed and yells that he’s too drunk to
drive. My sister agrees, saying she’s sure he’ll die if he gets in the car. I cry and grab his
leg, but Mom says to get away from him. My brother is tackling him. Now they’re wrestling
through the house, and someone’s flailing—breaks the porcelain nativity scene Mom puts
37
Sherry Mayle

out every year for Christmas. Mom hasn’t noticed yet because she’s on her back in the
kitchen, kicking and wailing and praying for the good Lord to take her away.
Our cousin stumbles out from a bedroom. Unlike my siblings, he didn’t grow up with
Punch and Judy, so he threatens to call the cops. Dad abandons his journey to the tobacco
store and passes out. Mom cries herself to sleep, and everyone else beds down with one
eye open.
In the morning, I remember Mom sobbing over the nativity scene’s broken pieces. At
times, she was so loud I thought if her lord had any mercy at all, for her or for the rest of us,
he would come take her away. But he left her there, and he left Dad too, plucking his guitar
on the porch as if nothing had happened, which left me to count the days after the fight as
if they held more importance than the days before, as if I thought being able to guess when
holy hell was due to break loose might save me from it.
For years, I kept count of the days between fights, and for years, Mom kept putting out
that nativity scene with the fractured pieces—broken, but not broken enough to throw out.
38
Hair Trigger 2.0
Aaron is typing, and the sound is like hammers. He says he’s working, but I fantasize about
who he could be messaging instead. Maybe that whore he was involved with in college who
I like to say is older than my mother? Maybe his girlfriend from high school whose prom
picture his mother still displays in her kitchen? Or maybe she’ll be a brand new whore, a
leggy redhead from his marketing department whom I haven’t even met.
The possibility that in fact there is no whore, that maybe he is just working and I’m
suffering from a paranoid delusion brought on from years of observing and then re-enacting
dysfunction, also pops in, but I never let it stay for long because what if he is? The best thing
about paranoia is that I’ll always be able to say I saw her coming.
I don’t know if Dad slept with Wanda. What I do know is that Mom’s only source on the matter
was an unmedicated schizophrenic named Cletus who had only a casual relationship with
reality. I’ve tried to use his diagnosis to exonerate Dad during trials held only in my head,
but it never works. Mom is a convincing character witness, and she’s certain the word of
a man who lived next door in a shed is still more reliable than my whore monger of a Dad.
I’ve never asked Mom why she kept making the same accusation just to hear Dad
deny it year after year. Maybe she had her own doubts and wanted Dad to say some
combination of words that would prove his innocence once and for all. That’s what I wanted.
I watched a lot of Full House as a kid, and in that show, the twenty-two minute plot
always resolved with a long talk about everyone’s feelings while soft violins played on a track
underneath. Each character understood and accepted everyone else’s stated motivations,
there were never any arguments over semantics or misremembered events, and no one
ever screamed, “Fuck you, I’m taking Michelle and leaving!”
As a child, I think I was waiting for Mom and Dad’s sitcom ending. I was sure if they
would just sit down across from one another at our rickety kitchen table, they’d soon realize

it had all been a misunderstanding, that Cletus had only thought he’d seen Pissy Wanda
when in fact Dad had been holding a red-headed mop that reeked of gin and urine.
One evening, my paranoia climbs up onto my face. Just home from work, Aaron sees it
leering at him and asks, “What’s wrong?”
I glare at him and insist, “Nothing. I’m fine.”
He doesn’t take the bait, and asks me again. This makes me more determined than
ever to have a fight so I say, “I’m pretty sure you’re not at work when you say you are. . . .”
I lose my nerve and the rest comes out slow and low, like I’m confessing to having just wet
myself. “And I’m pretty sure you’re having an affair.”
His color gets pale and his jaw hangs, and for the briefest instant, I think, “Aha! I
caught the sonofabitch!”
But then he reaches for me and hugs me tight, squeezing me so hard that tears shoot
out like toothpaste. He whispers in my ear, “Why would you ever think something like that?”
Every faucet in my face opens up, and a mixture of salty snot pours out and gets
absorbed by the shoulder of his jacket. I start blubbering about the back-flips my mind
has been doing to prove everything he says is a lie. I tell him about ancient history, about
Mom and Dad and Pissy Wanda. I tell him I’m being split in two because I know he isn’t
with anyone else, and yet I can’t stop seeing it, that I know my parent’s relationship isn’t
ours, and yet I can’t shake the feeling we’re enemies. I know the right story up here, I say,
tapping my temples, but there’s a different story being told in a body that remembers being
six years old, two feet tall, and made of glass.
“I’ll help you,” he says. He takes my round face between his hands and promises,
“We’re always in this together. We help each other no matter what, and whatever I can do
to show you that this isn’t real, to help you get past this, I’ll do it. We’ll talk about it as many
times as you need to see that we aren’t them—we’re a team.”
Danny Tanner in the flesh couldn’t have given a better answer. All that’s missing is the
climactic swell of sitcom violins, and yet, the part of me that counts days and prepares for
the worst ending wonders if he’ll still feel so certain in five years, or ten, when my paranoia
has proven stubborn and stale, and I’m just a wife with an unsexy hang-up bearing no
resemblance to the cool girl persona I sold him on when we met.
I don’t say this out loud because to ask for absolute certainty, forever and ever, would
be childish. There’s no team of writers ensuring we get a happy ending or a season finale in
Disneyland. There’s only the two of us, doing our best to build a story together, to keep each
other from getting hit by a bus, and to remind one another that growth requires letting go
of what came first. Moving forward is throwing out the broken story in favor of one where I
don’t know the ending; moving forward is trusting that we might create a new story without
butcher knives or dead mistresses.
39
Sherry Mayle

Family Pets
Jessica Powers
42
Hair Trigger 2.0
MY FAMILY—MY MOM AND I, ANYWAY—ARE NOTORIOUS FOR HAVING ODD
pets and exotic animals. My grandma, on the other hand, is notorious for hating all pets.
My mom and I joke about catch phrases for my grandma: “Remember to spay, neuter, and
euthanize all your pets!”
Our first cat was Dusty. She was a gray, petite little barn cat who ended up being the
mother of many a kitten. If you have ever seen Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet, she was
the Flower of our fifteen-acre property. I’m not sure how many litters she had but I know that
at one point we had seventeen cats. Most of these cats lived exclusively outside; some of
them came from out of the woods rather than out of Dusty’s womb.
Wherever the cats came from, I loved them. I was five years old when my mom got
me an electric, battery-powered Barbie Jeep. It was pink and plastic and wonderful. I was
never very good at turning, and so my approach to navigation was to go as far as possible
straight ahead, and then scream until my mom would come to turn me and my Jeep. She
was always sure to face me in the direction with the longest stretch of open space. To go
with my Barbie Jeep, I had a Barbie backpack. It was in this backpack that I would sneak
kittens into the house. I would bolt out the door of our ranch-style home with bare feet and
across the gravel driveway—not feeling the piercing of my callouses.
I would find a kitten, any kitten, milling about the grass, lying in the sun the way cats
always do. Then I would find another kitten, and another. I would pick them up and put them
in my Barbie backpack. Here I will admit that my five-year-old self was a little inhumane
while shoving their tiny kitten heads into the bag, zipping it up to make sure they would stay
inside. After my rounds of kitten-napping, I would hop in my Barbie Jeep and drive as close
as I could to the house—always driving in a straight line, of course.
All I really wanted was to take the kittens inside and play with them. I felt bad that they
couldn’t come in, so I tried my best to get new kittens each time, giving each of them a taste
of the inside.
I would run across the kitchen into my room, Barbie backpack close in hand, trying
to be as sneaky as possible. This was always hard, considering my family spends most of
their time hanging out in the kitchen, and a little girl running across a wooden floor with a
meowing backpack is not exactly sneaky.
My mom always caught me.
“Jessie, do you have a kitty in there?” she’d say.
My grandma would look at me and then at my mom, looking like a cartoon villain,
ready to cast a spell on any cat that entered her home. It’s my personal belief that my mom

would have let me have all the kittens I ever wanted, maybe even let them live in my room,
if it hadn’t been for my grandma.
“No, Momma.” I would say, looking down at the ground, holding the moving backpack
close to my chest.
“Are you sure?” she would ask again.
I would twiddle my thumbs and try not to look at her.
“Can I see what’s inside?”
I would hand her the backpack with a frown and she would unzip the small backpack
to find two or three kitten heads eagerly poking out, finally free from my holding.
I don’t remember ever successfully sneaking a kitten into my room.
I do remember a farm which is firmly grounded in my childhood. This farm was owned
by Sue and Ralph. My mom and Sue were best friends because their two older boys were
also best friends, graduated high school together, and served in the Marine Corps for five
years together. When Ryan and Kenny were still in Iraq, my mom and Sue found comfort in
one another. On these days, my brothers, Seth and Nick, and I would play in the corn crib.
We would climb up piles of stiff ears of corn, the white light of the afternoon sun breaking
through the cracks of the wooden boards which housed all the maize. Once we would get
to the top, we would slide down to the bottom, riding the corn like Hawaiian surfers in the
Pacific Ocean. Our bodies would get covered in chalky dust.
There were many animals on Sue’s farm, my favorites being the goats and baby cows.
My least favorites were the resident turkey who terrified me, and the hissing ducks. I am still
not sure to this day what kind of ducks they were, but let me tell you, they were ugly.
It looked as if the ducks were diseased; their beaks were misshapen and discolored.
Their feathers were always ruffled as if in a constant state of frustration. I always thought I
was funny, coming up with pointless punchlines about ugly ducks.
One day, Sue was telling my mom about how she had too many kids running around—kids
are what baby goats are called. My mom, being the woman that she is, jumped at the
chance to take in a new pet.
We named him Wiliker. He was only a month or two old when we brought him back to
our little ranch house in the woods. He had brown fur with subtle black markings around his
eyes and feet, and a black stripe running along his back. Wiliker was a chipper little thing,
bouncing on his hooves all around our yard. He even bounced on our family vehicles—this
was an act of goat vandalism in my grandma’s eyes. Wiliker almost gave my grandma a
heart attack on several occasions.
Once, when my yuppie uncle Brent came over for Easter, I distinctly remember hearing
his voice yelling “GOAT! GET OFF MY CAR!” Brent was a polished and clean man with no
real country living under his belt.
43
Jessica Powers

Wiliker had to be an outside pet, despite my burning desire to stick him in my backpack, the
same way I did with the kittens. Our cats were mostly outdoor pets as well, but we made our
closed-in porch as homey for them as possible. In the winter, we had electric space heaters
and heated water bowls to keep them from freezing. There were even many comfortable
surfaces on which the cats slept, including an old, tattered, Mickey Mouse stroller which I
once used as an infant.
Wiliker was an extrovert, always hanging out with the dogs and the cats. He spent
most of his time on the porch with them. Sometimes I wondered if he thought he was a cat
because he sure acted like one. He would curl up at night with the cats in the baby stroller.
When we sat around a campfire, he would jump up on the bench beside me or my mom and
curl into our laps like a sleepy cat.
There came a time when Wiliker was too big to pretend to be a cat. Instead he started
sleeping below the stroller, and although the ground was cold and hard, the cats still slept
next to him.
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Hair Trigger 2.0
Chickens have always been my least favorite pet to have. We went through many batches of
chickens and ducks, and although we never slaughtered and ate them, we did collect their
eggs. I think that’s all chickens are really good for: eggs.
We only ever had seven to ten chickens at most, and those numbers would deplete
even more when winter came. Sometimes we would find dead chickens scattered in our
yard, leftovers from a coyote’s feast. The few chickens we had never produced enough
eggs for our needs. We supplemented their fresh, multicolored eggs with perfectly white,
raindrop eggs from supermarkets. It is true that eggs straight from the chicken’s ass tasted
better, so they had that going for them, but not much else.
When I was in middle school, we had a rooster named Gonzo, later known as Cock the
Hammer. Gonzo was an angry chicken. We were never quite sure what it was that made
him so mad. My mom had a theory that he saw my stepdad, Adam, chop another chicken’s
head off, and vowed never to trust humans again.
In our defense, that was the only chicken we ever killed, and it was because she had
gotten bit by something and her wound was infected. There had been maggots crawling in
and out of the bald, torn, and fleshy part of her body, right above her leg, behind her wing.
She was suffering, so Adam got ahold of her and put her head atop a log, took his axe, and
cut right through her feathers, scaly chicken skin, and vertebrae.
After her head had been separated from the rest of her body, we saw the legend of
a chicken running around with its head cut off come to life. The fat, maggot-filled corpse
jumped from the log and ran around aimlessly for a moment before collapsing in the dewy
spring grass. Some other chickens had been witness to this, including Gonzo. Gonzo was
the leader of the flock and that’s why I think he took it to heart the most.
After that, Gonzo was never the same. Me and my two brothers, Nick and Seth, walked

up our quarter-mile-long driveway to wait for the bus. Gonzo took to chasing the three of us
down the driveway every morning.
There is a creek which runs through the property and cuts the driveway in half; at first,
Gonzo would not cross the bridge which connected the two parts. We would go outside every
morning and sprint as fast as our small strides would take us. Nick and I were only eleven
and twelve, while Seth was only five, just entering kindergarten. Gonzo would wait near the
house for us to come out. The three of us would peek our heads outside the door and see
him standing near the tree in the front of the house—the tree in which all the chickens slept.
We would huff and puff our way across the bridge until we would leave Gonzo in the dust. It
became sort of like a game: who could outrun the ruthless rooster the fastest.
It was all fun and games, until one day Gonzo was not afraid, and he got the guts to
cross the bridge. His pronged feet scrapped across the wood of the bridge along with our
squeaky sneakers. The three of us looked behind and let out sounds of terror. The angry
chicken was charging at full speed ahead. Seth was the weak link and lagged behind me
and Nick. Gonzo approached the smallest of us fast, his head bowed low, making his body
more aerodynamic with every step.
Seth was only a few feet tall and Gonzo used this to his advantage. The chicken flung
out his wings and raised himself in the air. It only took a few seconds before he was atop
Seth’s head. It looked as if Seth had special ordered a new hat from a taxidermist, except
for the fact that the hat was pecking at his scalp furiously. Seth let out cries, his face turning
red as a cranberry, and his hands flaying above his head, trying to expel the chicken.
Me and Nick stopped hot in our tracks, looking at one another, not knowing what
to do. Gonzo was relentless, his beak poking small holes in the skin of Seth’s head. I
instinctually called for my mom, until I realized she was too far away. There was a stick
long enough to put some distance between me and the fighting chicken, and I carefully
picked it up and took a step toward my baby brother. I closed my eyes for only a moment
as I moved the stick swiftly across the space above Seth’s head. I heard a sound that is
hard to describe leave Gonzo’s beak as he fell to the ground. Seth looked at me with red
puffy eyes.
“C’mon we gotta go! I see the bus!” we heard Nick shout from behind us.
I held out my hand and Seth took it as we ran. “Thanks, Jessie.” Seth looked so much
like he did when he was a baby in that moment, quickly wiping the water from his eyes with
his stained sweatshirt sleeve.
45
Jessica Powers
There is an animal auction somewhere along the border of Indiana and Illinois which my
family frequented when I was young. My stepdad always dreaded whenever my mom would
drag him to the musty, dirty place. There were rows of warehouses which contained animals,
and when the animal auction was not the main event, they contained various motor bikes.
The place was filled with hillbillies; people that wore boots covered in shit, ripped overalls,
and worn baseball hats bent to fit the wearer’s head perfectly, stained gray with sweat from
years previous.

46
Hair Trigger 2.0
Most of these people were grimy old farmer men, looking for livestock. Then there
was my mom. I think she came here to save the animals, to give them a proper home not
made for slaughter or abuse. She was the raven-haired beauty looking for pets in a sea of
cruel farmers. Once, she bought eight bunnies for twenty-five dollars just because I wanted
one. And when the auctioneer bumped up the lot mid-bid, she didn’t back out—she wanted
one bunny so to hell with it, why not take them all?
This is a distant memory for me, but I will never forget The Robot Peacock Man. The
Robot Peacock Man had smoked far too many cigarettes in his life and he had a hole in
his esophagus which connected with a device that he held in his hand to help him speak.
I remember holding my mom’s hand and looking up at the strange man, perplexed by the
way he could talk without moving his mouth entirely. I stared at his throat, fascinated—was
I encountering a real life robot?
“What can I do ya for, ma’am?” an electronic voice creaked out from the device in his
hand.
My mother felt me staring at the man and nudged me, “Stop it, Jessie, you’re being
rude.”
“It’s alright, ma’am, all the kids love it.” The Robot Peacock Man looked down at me,
his little black device still pressed into the hole in his throat, and smiled a smile with several
gaps down at me. I tried to smile back; tried to be polite, but I hid my face in my mother’s
coat. She patted my head kindly and spoke to The Robot Peacock Man, “I was just curious
to see what you’re selling. I noticed the white peacock over there and thought he was
beautiful.”
“Ahh, you have exotic taste I see. Well, sadly that boy is taken right there, sold ‘im soon
as I got here.” His voice reminded me of a video game.
I looked up at my mom and saw her disappointment. She really wanted to find
something different today, an animal she never experienced before.
“I do have this guy right here, if you’re interested.” The Robot Peacock Man pointed
to a traditional-looking peacock with short tail-feathers.
My mom looked down at me and we both looked at the classical peacock.
“How much?”
The man smiled his broken smile once again, as if his dark plans had come to fruition
at last.
“I’ll give it to you for $300.” His robot voice moved up and down.
“$250.” My mom was good at this sort of thing.
“$275.” The man smirked.
“$250 or I’m out.”
“Okay, deal.”
My mom proceeded to ask a lot of questions about what caring for a peacock entails.
They have very similar needs to that of a chicken and the man said that they fly like one too.
Not to worry, they would only ever get a few feet off the ground, if at all.
We named the peacock Pete. Not exactly a clever name, I know, but it fit. For the first
few weeks, we kept Pete in our barn. We could tell he was a scared bird and wanted him

to get to know us. We brought him food and water every morning and night, and soon he
started to come closer and closer to us as we approached. His feathers grew longer and
more vivid everyday, stretching three or five feet behind him. We were excited to see the
first time he would spread his feathers. My mom began making plans to get a peahen so
that they could have peachicks and we could have a whole family of exotic birds roaming
around our farm.
A few weeks after we brought Pete home and he had been living in our barn, my mom let
him outside. She put his food and water outside and made a door for him to get in and out.
Pete seemed happy with this set up for a few weeks, going in and out as he pleased, always
returning to his shelter at night.
It was summer and it was hot. We had our annual Fourth of July gathering and
everyone had “oooh’ed” and “awww’ed” at Pete. He was magnificent. Such a rareness as
his could not be found in places like Illinois. Our family relished in the sight of him every
morning.
One morning, he did not come outside—did not come out even when food was
presented. My mom was worried and so she went out looking. Pete was not in the barn.
Pete was not in the yard. My mom couldn’t help but look up. And sure enough, there he
was, at least 100 feet up a tall, thick oak tree. She stood out there for a while, just staring.
I watched her from our kitchen window; her hands were on her round hips. She brought
one hand above the bill of her baseball cap as an extension of its shield against the sun.
She squinted up at the bird, high in the tree, his turquoise and iridescent feathers catching
sunlight and gleaming down at her.
“Well that guy was a lying fucking bastard wasn’t he?” She slammed the door behind
her.
“Who was, baby doll?” Adam approached from inside their bedroom.
“The fucking peacock guy. It’s in the goddamn tree.”
Adam looked outside, and all he could say was, “Oh shit.”
“How the fuck am I supposed to get this fucking peacock down from this fucking tree?”
For the next several days, this was my mother’s task. She attempted to become the
peacock whisperer, to no avail. For the first few days, she tried putting Pete’s food at the
base of the tree. She saw him come down once or twice but she didn’t want to scare him
away completely, so she watched as he flew back up into the tree, his supposedly flightless
wings strong, and confident.
Eventually he began to fly from tree to tree and that’s when my mom took real action.
She made sure that she was fully stocked on Busch Light, and with a beer in hand, she
gathered an old volleyball net.
My mom woke up early each morning for three days straight, drank her beer, and
tried to catch a peacock with a volleyball net. She was a hunter prowling for prey, but each
night she came back empty handed—if you don’t count the beer and the volleyball net.
After three days, she gave up. And at some point, our beautiful bird disappeared.
47
Jessica Powers

A few weeks later, we got word of a peacock near the border of Indiana and Illinois,
the place that we bought the bird from. My mom’s theory was that The Robot Peacock Man
trained the birds to fly back to him, so he could sell them over and over again. This seemed
like a solid theory until several months later when we noticed that there was not only one,
but two peacocks living in our neighborhood. My theory was that Pete had come back and
brought his brother. My mom thought the neighbors were copying our choice of pets.
Either way, to this day, there are still two peacocks that roam around our yard and
those of our neighbors. They are owned by no one in particular, a pair of peacocks which
live outside the laws of petdom.
48
Hair Trigger 2.0

The Tyger
Brittney “Shay” Ellis
“Do not blame God for having created the tiger, but thank
Him for not having given it wings.”
—Indian proverb
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
—William Blake Songs of Experience
50
Hair Trigger 2.0
THERE WAS AN EERIE SILENCE THAT HUNG OVER THE MUGGY JUNGLE. THE
dense, heavy foliage was a predator all on its own, encroaching menacingly upon the
nightlife that had stirred once the sun had set. The quiet signs of life that had once been
humming, chirring, droning, pulsing—everything had come to an abrupt halt, the hush
falling over everything like a smothering thick blanket. Now it was silent out of dread and
trepidation, all quivering in anticipation, waiting, waiting. Only the balm of the first light of
day could sooth them from their sudden fears, for the night was dark and full of terror. Even
the whisper of the wind and the quiver of the earth seemed to be holding their collective
breaths as well, waiting for the danger to pass. Only the moon dared to move, and it did so,
trekking slowly through the sky. It climbed higher and higher to its zenith, a cold white sliver
of coin that was content in its absolute distance from the world it overlooked.
The stillness was disrupted by the appearance of a dainty, long-legged spotted
deer. Her tiny frame wobbled on unsteady, rickety legs as she moved at a pained pace.
Her right hind leg shook and trembled, thin rivulets of red staining her otherwise pristine
hide. She was alone and tired, distress making her heart pound frantically away in her
heaving chest. Like a frightened tiny bird, it fluttered frantically and pounded heavily
against her ribs. The strained hush all around betrayed her into a false sense of calm
and rest. She heard and saw nothing of her pursuer, and it lulled her to take a moment
to slow her pace. Her ears flicked to and fro as she limped on, delicately choosing her
steps with care.
Her injured limb pawed gingerly at the ground as she pushed onward, her nostrils
flaring and catching scents of reassuring familiarity: fresh water, damp earth, fresh and
rotting foliage all intermingling into a strangely alluring perfume. Then came the musk of
those she had lost not that long ago. Her herd. They were close. She could reunite with

them. There was strength in numbers and she could rest amongst them.
She wouldn’t truly be able to relax until she has returned to them. Fear was toxic
and it still held her in its grips. The pain in her leg reminded her of that and she could
still feel the agony of ghostly claws raking across her hide. The reminder prompted her to
continue moving forward, toward the familiar and welcoming scent of her herd mates.
Exhaustion had already been creeping up on her, but her brief respite allowed it to
catch up and settle to make its home in her bones. Every step was heavy and sluggish,
and sent pain racing up her injured limb, making her whimper and huff as she continued
her arduous trek. Her body trembled from the exertion of remaining tense and ready to
bolt, but she was so tired, oh so very tired indeed. She wanted to rest, here and now,
sheltered amongst the foliage, but she had come so far, too far to give up in her quest to
find her herd. She must make it back, she had to. Even in this nightmare scape of tricks
and darkness, she had to press on. Only the bone-white glow of the moon’s light lancing
through the undergrowth gave her a vague sense of comfort and hope. It helped her see in
the perpetual blackness of the night.
And yet, darkness made her shiver uncontrollably as the shadows continued to play
tricks on her eyes, and she found herself jumping at every rustle, quiver, and disturbance
around her. The night was dark and full of terrors, but not as black as the fur of her attacker.
He was darkness incarnate, it seemed like, a beastly monster with a mad fire in his
eyes. . . .
The doe snapped her fair little head up at a frightful concussive noise intruding the
quietness, her heart set to beating at a hundred miles an hour in fright. She was frozen,
her body quivering with tension, her legs locked and chest heaving. Her stillness cost her
precious seconds, her focus remaining on the wrong place. She began to move, too little
too late, much too late. A mass of shadows descended upon her, a silent phantom of fury,
fur and fangs. She screamed and kicked, struggling to fight back, but her strength was
waning quickly, and she was so much weaker than this monster biting and clawing into her
hide. Her pain grew a thousand-fold when it sliced into her neck, crushing her throat and
severing her artery. She could feel the warmth of her blood trickling down her slender neck,
her struggling began to slow, her frantic heart crawled.
The weight of a mountain crushed her and sent her sprawling underneath, too tired,
too weak to resist. The doe choked on her whimpers, her every breathe a struggle. Her
captor, her killer, snorted against her fur, adjusting his hold on her. She could hear and feel
the heavy rumble of his voice reverberating back into her. Her eyes rolled in her skull and
she briefly caught a glimpse of her tormentor.
His face was as black as the night around them, but it was his eyes that captured
her, stilling her already slowing heart. Like liquid gold, they burned with passion, with fire,
but with a madness and bloodlust that could never be slaked with just her blood alone. She
could see that she would not be enough, no one creature ever would be. He would always
want more. The doe tried to tear away, yet it was already too late. He had his fangs deep in
her throat and all she did was tear it apart. With a twist and a crunch, her world went black
and she knew no more.
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Brittney “Shay” Ellis

The black beast waited, patient and calm, as the doe’s body stilled and the sound
of her heart stopped completely. The regal creature lifted his head at last, gently prying his
jaws open and licked his lips as he stared down at his prize. A little torn, a little damaged—
but perfectly good meat to be had. His fur was black as the night, and the stripes hidden
in his pelt were darker still. His frame was heavy, muscled, powerful. The tiger flicked his
tail, his ears slowly rotating atop his head, the left first and then the other. He inhaled
deeply, the scent of his fresh kill intoxicating. The tiger licked his chops in anticipation. The
moonlight caught his eyes and they gleamed white in the soft luminescent glow. He purred
deeply, pleased at his catch as he turned his head to stare into the deep jungle and he
stopped. . . .
And then he looked right at me.
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Hair Trigger 2.0

Eva Azenaro Acero is an artist, illustrator, and writer based in Chicago. They have been
drawing since childhood, their work developing into a rumination on the collective trauma
of marginalized groups and the search for identity. Their work can be found online
at evaazenaroacero.com and on instagram @birdlets.
Ashlee Bond-Richardson is a graduating senior at Columbia College Chicago majoring in
Television Writing & Producing, with a concentration in story. Their work has been previously
published in the lab review. Post-graduation, Ashlee plans on attending graduate school in
Boston pursuing a career in book publishing.
Brittney “Shay” Ellis is a Californian native who served eight years in the Marine Corps,
is happily married with two kids, and has five cats to boot. She now attends Columbia
College with a major geared toward animation and a minor toward creative writing. She
hopes to one day work for either a movie company such as Dreamworks or Disney, or
perhaps a game company like Naughty Dog or Ubisoft.
Chris Gavaler is an assistant professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where
he teaches fiction, creative writing, and comics. He has published two novels, Pretend
I’m Not Here (HarperCollins 2002) and School for Tricksters (Southern Methodist 2011),
and two books on comics, On the Origin of Superheroes (Iowa 2015) and Superhero
Comics (Bloomsbury 2017).
Sherry Mayle hails from West Virginia but now lives in Oakland, California. During the day,
she pretends to be an adult at her adult-sounding job while at night, she writes about her
mother and then hyperventilates about what her mother might think were she to ever read
any of it. Most recently, she’s been published in The Rumpus - check out Black Ops for
Jesus. You can be her 8th follower on twitter @ContraryJezebel
Chicago’s J. Ray Paradiso is a recovering academic in the process of refreshing himself as
an EXperiMENTAL writer and a street photographer. Slick Lit Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine
and Dime Show Review have recently published his writing. His photography has been
widely published both in print and online.
CONTRIBUTORS
Through assemblages of defunct currency, discarded photographs, and long-forgotten
illustrations, Silas Plum challenges the idea of objective vs subjective value. He believes
strongly in the tired old maxim that the true value of an object is more than the sum of its
parts, that the gut is a truth-teller, and that the Aristotelian notion of learning-by-doing is
the best teacher around. Judge his worth at silasplum.com.
Jessica Powers is a Chicago native. She is currently attending Columbia College Chicago
for her Bachelor’s degree in Fiction. This is her first published work.
Sophia Okugawa-Stoller was born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia and is new to the
Chicago area. She began her creative journey through song writing and has expanded to
fiction and short stories since pursuing her bachelors at Columbia College.

Aïcha Thiam is a recent transfer to the Fiction Department of Columbia College Chicago.
She is a musician, artist and writer originally from Washington D.C. Some of her film
reviews can be found on l’ARgot, an online French-language magazine based in Montréal;
additionally, one of her works has appeared in Columbia College Chicago’s the lab review,
and another was featured in Heartbeat Literary Journal.
Abby Jo Turner is a cartoonist and illustrator currently based in Chicago. Her style focuses
on clean line work, shapes, and honest storytelling that is inspired by her own life
experiences.
CONTRIBUTORS

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Author