North Dakota Quarterly is proudly based at the University of North Dakota. This fall, for better or for worse, the Quarterly office witnessed the return of students to campus with its buzz of energy, the palpable anxiety, and feeling of potential (even in an age when the future feels increasingly decided). Almost inevitably our minds drift to the campus story or novel. Just this week, two colleagues have mentioned Stoner in conversation and another, Lucky Jim and This Side of Paradise. 

Of course, campus stories have many forms and do many different things and no good comes from trying to put them in too small a box. Jayne Wilson’s short story, “Dynamite” which appeared in NDQ 88.1/2, isn’t trying to be anything more than what it is. It’s not necessarily a campus story, but it feel right this time of year. Enjoy it and if you like it, check out more from the latest issue of NDQ here.

As you likely know, these days are particularly challenging for many cultural institutions, publishers, and little magazines. So even if NDQ doesn’t float your boat, If you can, consider buying a book from a small press, subscribing to a literary journal (like our UNP stablemate, Hotel Amerika), or otherwise supporting the arts.

Dynamite

Alice is in the bathroom with a white daisy still in her hair and she’s with some guy because they like the same band and I don’t have a reason with anyone.

The girls who rent the apartment are drinking from sippy cups shaped like different animals and dancing around in unicorn masks because of a theme no one else cares about, and I guess they just leave their Christmas lights up all year so now everyone looks sick and neon. One of them is the birthday unicorn but no one knows who. The music’s loud, the whole house’s loud, and I’m standing by the speakers next to some guy sitting on the floor who brought his acoustic guitar. No panties will drop, no girls will come, no one can hear him, but he still plays thirty seconds of something that’s probably terrible and says, “You like that?”

I don’t.

Crashing was Alice’s idea because there was nothing else this weekend and there always has to be something. We overheard the unicorns in psych class and Alice wiggled her eyebrows, so tonight she unboxed and picked the price stickers off the high-heeled boots my dad sent me for Christmas three weeks too late, and said, “I’ll break them in for you, Livs,” and zipped them over her calves. Then she scrawled, “A donation has been made in your name somewhere – Happy Birthday,” on the blank side of an index card and shoved it in an envelope. A lady never attends a function empty-handed.

She’d given the envelope to some guy who opened the door for us and reeked of Patron, and when Bathroom Guy found her we were five drinks deep and hip-bumping, and he didn’t waste time on introducing himself or on a segue from dancing with her to asking if she wanted to go somewhere quiet. She smiled at him in a heavy-lidded way and nodded toward the bathroom then grabbed my hand before walking off and reminded me, “Leave no man behind,” but I always remember.

Guitar Hero looks like he’s tuning up for an encore no one asked for so I move to a table of pawed food. One guy across the room, Reggie, always sits in the front row of my philosophy class. Last week we went over Blaise Pascal on theology. Our professor said, “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.” Reggie and I were the only ones who laughed.

The guy next to him is hiding his hands in some girl’s back pockets as she suckles on his earlobe and he smiles at me over her shoulder. He whispers something to her and she tugs on the neck of his t-shirt and kisses him on the chin then disappears behind the narrow wall to the linoleum-tiled kitchen where a pack of Cro-Magnons are playing beer pong. I take a can of cheap beer from the table and stand close enough to a group of girls in giant sweaters and mom jeans who all have identical bangs and are probably vegan, but Earlobe walks over to me anyway. I almost feel bad for Earlobe Girl even though those women always already know.

“Hey,” he says and it’s like cologne comes out of his mouth.

I open my beer and he stares at my chest and bites at his lip like how he probably practiced it in the mirror, and I imagine he’s junior varsity, hands like live fish. He wouldn’t know a bra was a front-clasp or what to do with it and I almost feel bad for him too.

He keeps staring and doesn’t move, doesn’t do anything, and I’m about to ask him what his problem is, but he says, “What, I don’t even get a hello?” and makes to take my hand, so I say, “No,” and shove my beer in his instead.

I cross the room and the light’s still on in the bathroom Alice is in, emaciated black shadows skirting under the door. No one’s dancing anymore except the unicorns and there are empty bottles where people should be, so I walk up the stairs to the small landing of bedrooms and slip inside the first open doorway to pass the time until Alice is done and we can get the hell out of here.

The room smells like perfumed body lotion and shampoo. There’s a whole coat rack devoted to neon scarves and headbands, and crumpled wrapping paper and opened boxes and greeting cards on the bed, and it’s probably the birthday unicorn’s room. Someone giggles out in the hallway and I see one of the vegans trip over nothing on the carpet then stumble, simpering, into the room across the hall with Junior Varsity Earlobe. They don’t bother to close the door or just forgot, and a few minutes later I hear them moving furniture and the music downstairs isn’t loud enough to drown it out.

I lay down on the bed and the stucco on the ceiling looks like stuff through a microscope and makes a million faces. I pull some of the birthday cards out from under me and almost all of them are handmade and have little drawings of unicorns parasailing and riding dragons and drumming in a unicorn rock band called Uni and the Cornies. I pile them up and put them on her pillow and from the wall behind me I hear the door of the next room open and close, then a bunch of low mumbling and pitchy tittering before the noises start following the patterns of the room across the hall. It’s mostly guy noises now, low vibrations and guttural groaning, and I have to laugh because they sound exactly the same and you can’t hear the girls at all.

In and out of those rooms men are the same, and if you kneel and unzip their jeans they tug your hair the same way and moan everything but no.

 

When I get back downstairs Alice is in the living room dancing with Bathroom Guy again, and he’s fingering her red hair and looking at her like he’s got a moan trapped in his throat, which is how all guys look at Alice. She sees me when I walk past Guitar Hero and says, “Livvie!” and shimmies out of Bathroom Guy’s hands. He calls after her with a really stupid look and she ignores him.

“C’mon,” and she takes my hand as we zigzag around the neon bodies. She swipes an unopened handle of vodka on our way out the door then she leans in and chuckles, “One of the unicorns hurled in the kitchen sink. Think it was glitter and rainbows?”

“And golden rays of sunshine.”

Outside, the one street lamp on the block looks pathetic and useless in all the dark. We’re passing frat row where the houses are love-matched with trees that smell like semen, and Alice makes eyes with a guy who stumbles out of one of the doors. She tells me about Bathroom Guy, whose name actually is Guy but pronounced Gee because he’s French but she says it like Guy anyway. He had rough hands and freckles on his abs and hair gel that came off in flakes and stuck to his face when he started to sweat. She tells me he had hot eyes but shouted “Godfuck,” like one word, at the end and then gave her his number after, like it was supposed to lead to dinner in a place with a chandelier.

She takes the daisy out of her hair and clutches it to her chest and says, “Be still my heart!” then tosses it over someone’s fence.

She pulls me into a corner store and salutes the guy behind the register. She passes me the handle of vodka to grab a large bag of potato chips and a smaller one, then looks at a rack of candy by the counter. She rips open a pack of Juicy Fruit and pulls out a stick then puts the molested pack on the rack again. Register Guy gives her a look but doesn’t say anything, and it wouldn’t have made a difference with Alice anyway. When we were six and I didn’t even know her name, my dad and her mom drove us to the mall in my mom’s car and she’d grabbed my hand and led me away from where they were standing in the lingerie department at Macy’s and took me around the whole floor, feeling at silk nighties and peeking inside the panties on mannequins. Later when my dad wouldn’t get me a chocolate bar from the little stand of suggested impulse buys at the Macy’s check-out counter, Alice reached inside the shopping bag in the car and took out the chocolate he’d bought for her mom, just passed it to me when they weren’t looking, like nothing belonged to anyone else.

She puts the stick of gum halfway in her mouth then rips off the rest and gives it to me.

“You end up with anyone?”

I roll my eyes and tell her about Junior Varsity Earlobe and his girlfriend and that I hope the vegan left him standing there with his pants undone like a toddler in the middle of potty-training.

She grins and opens up the bags of chips on the counter and lets the air out of them, then empties the small bag into the large one. Register Guy looks scandalized. She slides the empty bag and a five dollar bill to him and throws her arm around me.

“Poor Livs.” She kisses me on the cheek and trades me the bag of crossbred chips for the vodka. “It’s okay. You’re dynamite.”

 

Alice is nuking hot dogs when I get home from class and she’s standing in front of the microwave waiting till the meat almost explodes. She looks up when I drop my backpack on a chair in the kitchen and says, “We’re going to Bathroom’s place tonight.”

Potato chip crumbs confetti on our tablecloth and there’s a half-drunk glass of what I know is apple juice mixed with last weekend’s stolen vodka.

I grab the hot dog buns and two plates from the cupboard and say, “Called him after all?”

“I figure you gotta throw your B-list a bone every now and then. He kind of looks like Lewis, right?” and she’s talking about the wall-leaning bum poet she fooled around with all last year, and puts the plate on the table next to a stack of poetry books she bought for a class she only registered for because he said he would too. But he’s been gone all semester, supposedly studying poetry in Amsterdam but really studying post-coital hangovers with a Dutch girl Alice and I call Heidi. By the time he’d said anything to her about it, it was too late to drop the class, so Alice made the books de facto centerpieces full of drivel on the table.

She says, “Right?” again and I shrug because I think Bum Poet is a Bukowski spin-off who looks like anyone. He’s already built a website for his unpublished chapbook of derivative poems about roses and daises and other petaled things committing “botanical infidelity” and crap like that, and he’s somehow dating pretty much everyone because he thinks he’s a Bonobo monkey. But Alice said, “No big,” to having to share, and went to all his poetry readings, and even made him stay the night once and a breakfast that he didn’t eat.

“It’s like reforming a prostitute,” she said and I thought it was more like reforming a moron but I didn’t say anything.

She pulls out the chair across from mine and assembles a hot dog then hands it to me and grunts, “Oh, guess who posted a new picture?” and turns her open laptop around to show me Heidi’s very blonde online profile.

This one’s got her with her hand in her hair and her eyes closed and her mouth wide open enough to look like she’s a laughing free spirit, and the whole thing would almost look candid and genuine if she’d thought to crop out the bottom corner where her arm is outstretched to point her phone’s front-camera at herself.

Alice turns the screen her way a little and nods to where Heidi’s gone from “Single” to “In a Relationship,” and a comment from Bum Poet himself saying, “I love you.” She says, “Precious,” then closes her laptop and finishes her hot dog and makes herself another one.

I tell her that Heidi must be a Bonobo whisperer but she doesn’t laugh or say anything so I say, “Screw that guy,” and after we finish eating I put our dishes in the sink.

Alice pours herself another glass of vodka apple juice and takes it with her to our room to change and when I walk in after her she’s already in our closet, picking at tops she stole from her mother over the summer and fishing others out of our hamper and sniffing at them. Our beds are unmade, our underwear drawer is hanging open on the floor, and there’s a pile of clothes that migrates daily from her bed to the ugly gray shag carpet and back again. Lewis’s shirt is strewn across the top of it and one of the arms is inside-out and looks like it could be waving hello to us or trying to flip us off.

I pull a couple of my sweaters out of the pile then toss them in the hamper, and when I walk up to our closet and pluck my leather jacket off a hanger Alice says, “Livs?” and reaches her hand out, so I give it to her. She slides it on over a dress I bought last summer and still haven’t worn, then faces the mirror and shoves her hands inside the pockets and finds a tube of red lipstick I forgot about. She puts it on then tosses an arm around me and says, “You can just wear that, Livs,” and it’s just as well because we haven’t done laundry in two weeks so all I’ve got are jeans and different colors of the same sweater I have on and I couldn’t care less anyway.

When we get back to the kitchen, she sits and pours another vodka apple juice and makes one for me. She says, “Let’s be a little late, keeps ’em guessing,” and winks then takes a book of Bukowski poems from the center of the table and reads a few out loud. She gives me a look, says, “Who reads this crap, anyway?” and after I say no one, she smiles and throws back what’s left in her glass, tells me to wake her up in an hour, and puts her cheek against the open pages, her lips parting between the print.

 

Reggie’s outside Bathroom’s place when we get there. It’s a two-story townhouse apartment in a complex of identical two-story townhouses, and Reggie’s hair’s wet and he’s got a water bottle in his hand that says, “What the Foucault?” on it and a gym bag slung over his shoulder with running shoes swinging from the strap. He puts a key in the lock, the rest dangling off the keyring, then pushes the door open a little with his foot, and he doesn’t notice us until Alice says, “Spare a sip?” and loops her hand through his arm to reach for the Foucault bottle.

She takes a swig and says, “I’m Alice,” and gives it back to him, grinning wide and with teeth.

“Reggie,” he says back and he looks confused, then he sees me and says, “Oh, hey, Philosophy, right? How’s it going?”

I nod.

Alice tugs at Reggie’s shirt a little, tells him Bathroom asked her over then doesn’t wait for him to say anything before squeezing past him inside. Reggie says, “He’s upstairs, I think, feel free,” then gives me a half-shrug and lets me walk in before him.

Their living room smells like the kind of nightclub cologne inspired by Pine-Sol, and it’s dim and lit with candles in glasses and jars, all orbiting around a linty navy blue fleece blanket that’s been laid out on the floor with two pillows in mismatched cases, two sets of forks and knives on top of two dinner plates, two glasses, and a bottle of wine. A gray loveseat, a recliner, and three deskless desk chairs have been pushed against a wall with the rest of the furniture that looks depressed to be there, and across from them is a wooden coffee table being systematically tortured with water rings and piles of magazines and mail.

Reggie looks even more confused and calls Bathroom’s name at the bottom of the staircase.

I look at Alice but she’s sliding Reggie’s gym bag off his shoulder and after she drops it on the floor, she kicks off her shoes and sits on the blanket. Reggie moves to the window and opens the blinds a little then sits on the loveseat, and Alice says, “Livvie,” and uncorks the wine.

I move the candles to sit on the edge of the blanket and Alice fills a glass to the top with wine and gives it to me. I take a sip and glance out the window and across the complex I recognize the unicorns’ apartment. They’ve still got a birthday banner up above the front door because I guess they just never take anything down, and they’ve put an ornamental gargoyle on a patch of grass by the side of the house and it’s been knocked over, looks even less intimidating with half its face in the grass.

Bathroom comes downstairs yelling, “Reggie, this is early for you to be home, no?” in a thick accent, then, “I am having company,” before he sees Alice and me on the blanket on the floor. He blinks at me and says, “Oh.”

I blink back then put my glass down, but Alice catches my look and she takes the glass and finds my hand, leans in and whispers, “Leave no man behind,” and gives it back to me.

She stands up and Bathroom says, “Hey, beautiful,” and goes to kiss her and Alice turns her face a little so it lands on her cheek. Reggie makes to get up and says something about going upstairs to study for a test, and Alice takes his arm and says, “You can’t go upstairs while I’m down here,” then pulls him down onto the loveseat with her and he laughs a little.

Bathroom looks offended and she doesn’t make room for him on the couch so he sits on the armrest instead and just kind of hangs there. “I made dinner, that was the plan, no?” he tells her, then he looks at me and doesn’t bother to whisper, “You were supposed to come alone.”

Alice laughs. “Livvie goes where I go,” and doesn’t look at me, “she’s the sidekick.”

I stare at her.

But she’s telling Reggie, “You smell nice,” because Reggie smells like soap and fabric softener.

A door with some kind of stoner hemp tapestry on it opens on the far side of the room next to the kitchen and some guy stands on the other side of it in tight jeans with one pant leg rolled up, and an even tighter plaid shirt that looks like it was borrowed from a member of the Lollipop Guild.

He looks around the living room and grins when he sees Alice and me and tries to shut his door with his palm without turning around. He fails, has to get a peripheral look at the doorknob before he can close it.

Bathroom says, “You are home?” and Lollipop Guild says he’s always home and moves to stand by an old phonograph idling on a lost-looking end table. He says, “I’m Samir,” like it’s the answer to everything then pokes an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He has a sideways cap with the bill unfolded over hair that looks like it’s all bangs. He’s probably made of bean sprouts and the one eyebrow of his I can see is pierced, and his quest for irony has him spending all kinds of money on a fixed-gear bike and a blue-collar aesthetic that makes him look like he doesn’t have any.

Alice crosses her legs and grins at him and introduces herself then says, “That’s Livvie,” even though I definitely don’t want to know this kid.

He says, “Cool, cool, so do you guys live in, like, Wonderland or something?” and he and Alice laugh and I don’t.

He flips through the records piled on the floor next to the phonograph and looks at me, says, “This collection’s all mine, it’s my baby.”

“I didn’t ask,” I tell him, and when he pulls out a record and puts it on the turntable platter, I say, “I bet it’s Joy Division.”

“The Velvet Underground, actually,” and he gives me a look.

I shrug, say, “Same difference.”

He already hates me and he puts his cigarette in his pocket as something awful starts playing.

Alice points out the poetry books inside the small case in the corner of the room and Reggie tells her they’re his from when he took the poetry class Alice is in. She says she loves that class, especially the month they spent on Bukowski because he’s her favorite, and Reggie says, “I don’t know, I guess I never really got into poetry,” but Alice tells him he should. She tells him that everything looks different to her since she learned to appreciate it, and I can’t help it, I half-laugh, and she keeps going like she didn’t hear me, one hand on his shoulder and the other on his arm and he doesn’t move away.

Bathroom walks over to the phonograph, says, “What is this garbage?” and turns on the lights then gets down on the floor and crawls to blow out the candles around me. His hand catches and tugs at the blanket and my glass tips, spilling wine on the fleece and on my jeans, and I wanna say, “Don’t apologize,” when he doesn’t say anything. But he grabs the wine bottle beside me and takes it to the couch with him, holds it out to Alice, but she’s whispering something to Reggie, and Reggie’s smiling with his eyes closed and shaking his head and running a hand through his hair, and Bathroom pretends he doesn’t notice Alice’s fingers tracking stairs up Reggie’s thigh.

She’s looking at Reggie the way she learned to do with boys when we were in eighth grade, after we saw her mom and my dad in the den at her house and her mom sat us down, hands on her knees, and told Alice she could have a Halloween party. She bought Alice long purple gloves and a red dress with slits on both sides so Alice could go as Jessica Rabbit, and Alice took them because give her a reason and she’ll be anyone.

She invited the whole school and swiped me a black strapless leather dress from her mom’s closet and got me a mask and a headband with ears so I could be Catwoman. All the boys came and she slithered between them, hand always on someone, and they all loved it and she had them each for seven minutes in the den, but saved Cole Cruces for me because I liked him.

“It’s not a big deal, just grab his face and make out with him,” she told me. She was sitting on the carpet in her room in front of the full-length mirror and I was curling her hair, chunks of red strands twisted around the barrel like a long, rolling dragon tongue. She turned around and reached up to pull my mask up to my forehead, winked at me and said, “Just do it, Livvie!” then pulled it back down.

“I don’t think he likes me like that.”

“They don’t have to like you, Livs, trust me.”

When we found Cole alone in the kitchen, she pushed me inside. I walked up and asked how he was doing, got real close and said I hadn’t done our essay for English yet either and that Alice and I were thinking about going to Winter Ball too. I thought about putting my hand on his chest and getting up on my tiptoes to reach him, and I asked if he could go to a movie coming out the next weekend that I wanted to see, but he wanted to know if Alice was going too, and if I could find out when I said I didn’t really know.

“You’re dynamite, Livs,” Alice told me later, and she pulled my mask up again and put her chin on my shoulder. “You don’t have to like them either.”

Joy Division slinks back to his room when the song changes, and Reggie takes his gym bag and says he should really get some studying done, that it was nice to meet Alice and good to see me. Bathroom disappears in the kitchen and comes back to take Reggie’s place on the loveseat with a plate of bruschetta, but Alice is up the staircase too, a shadow on the landing before she slips into the dark.

Bathroom stands there looking stupid for a second before grabbing the wine and taking a swig and climbing the staircase with his wrist swiping at his mouth, red before he’s even drunk.

Between the blinds the other townhouses are quiet and a handful of windows have little lines of light sneaking out from between half-shut curtains. The unicorns have put their gargoyle back upright on the grass and from the complex’s parking lot, two girls climb out of a car and pull a giant canvas bag out of the trunk, each one holding one of the straps. I unfold my legs, stretch them out in front of me on the blanket and touch the spot of wet violet on my jeans, flick at tiny pillows of lint, and I watch them. One girl is shorter than the other and using both hands, and their voices are soft but their laughter carries as they high-five each other, teetering across the complex with the bag between them like a fat hammock between two unevenly cut trees. They’re headed for the unicorn house and when they reach the patch of grass, the shorter one bumps into the gargoyle and lets out a small half-chortle, half-yelp when it leans, tiny horns and triangle ears and twisted face tilting slowly, almost smiling as it falls in the same place.

 

I’m outside before Alice reaches the bottom of the stairs. She puts my jacket back on and lifts her hair out from under it and barely says, “Let’s get out of here.”

I walk a couple steps behind her down frat row and she lets me. One of the houses has all its lights on and its door wide open and people sitting on plastic chairs on the lawn, laughing and jeering as they watch four almost-naked people play ping-pong. Some guy in his boxers with Greek letters painted on his chest howls when he scores and tells the guy across the table to lose his pants. He sees us and says, “Hey, ladies! Hey, Red!” and raises his paddle in the air. “Can I play you next?”

Alice doesn’t say anything.

We reach the end of the block and she doesn’t duck into the corner store so we just keep walking and neither of us says anything until I ask how it went with Reggie.

“It didn’t,” she says, “he was busy,” and she puts her hands in the pockets of my leather jacket. “Besides, Guy invited me, so…” and she shrugs.

I nod.

She says, “He asked me to tell him about myself.”

“Bathroom?”

“Yeah.”

“God. What’d you tell him?”

She shrugs again. “I said I’ve never been on a real date,” and she chuckles. “They never believe me.”

I look at her but she’s looking out across the street and I can’t see her face. I fall into step next to her, match her footfalls, line our shoulders up until they’re a straight line and our arms are touching, then I lean a little into her and she leans back.

We get home and she tosses the pile of clothes from her bed to the floor and drops onto her mattress still dressed, shoes still on. I change into my pajamas then go to brush my teeth, and when I come back from the bathroom she’s a lump under the blankets like she was the time she skipped school to come over when I was home sick the day after my dad left. My mom called the attendance office and made chicken soup, but she knew I was fine. Alice knew too and knew why because her dad bailed two weeks earlier, after she’d told him about the den and he’d confronted mine at the grocery store as my mom and I came up at the wrong time, holding celery and peanut butter and carrots.

My mom told me I couldn’t have people over for a while and she knew Alice was the only person I’d ever had over, but when Alice knocked with a giant paper bag in her arms I let her in anyway. She had beef jerky, two pints of ice-cream, a BLT, and a movie with her that we’d watched a thousand times. We sat on the floor in my room eating from all the containers and watching the movie from a portable DVD player her mom had bought her, reciting the lines and yelling at everyone we didn’t like. When my mom came home to change for her other job just as Jack and Rose were steaming up a car, Alice and I looked at each other and in between panicked giggles I paused the movie and hid the DVD player in my closet as she lunged head-first under my pink comforter. I took my pillows and stuffed animals and piled them on top of her and told her not to move or breathe, and after she poked a hand out to flip me off, I left my room to kiss my mom and tell her I was okay, hoping she didn’t smell the food in my room or spot Alice’s green sneakers in the hall closet, tossed in the back on top of old slippers and a zip-lock bag of mateless socks.

She left in minutes and I went back to my room and grabbed the DVD player from my closet, then poked at the Alice-lump on my bed with my knee and told her to move her ass.

Alice swept the comforter and stuffed animals off her head and scooted over, then took a few of my pillows to prop herself up against the wall where I taped birthday cards and photos and posters, and asked me, “Does she hate me?”

“I don’t know,” I told her, and I got in next to her and tucked my comforter under my feet and remembered a time three years ago when I’d picked up the phone to call Alice and overheard my mom on the line telling my dad to stop, please, and she’d sounded like her lungs were trapped under the rest of her. “I think she knew and maybe he tried, but…can’t change a person, I guess.”

“Yeah, you can,” and she laughed, “you can make them worse,” and it was the only time we talked about it.

I put the DVD player on my thighs and started the movie again and we watched, real still and quiet, as the musicians played a rhapsody of embraced melancholia for a mob of fleeing cowards, and Alice took my hand and I squeezed hers, and we squeezed as the captain returned alone to the bridge of an uprighting ship and kept his hand on the steer. Squeezed until our palms stuck.

I turn the light off and the Alice-lump becomes a mountain on flatlands, nothing to see for miles. I find my bed in the dark then peel back my comforter and swivel my feet inside. Somewhere across the room I can hear Alice rustle and she says, “Livvie?” and I say, “Yeah?” But her mumbles are muffled by cotton and down feathers, a low hum of white noise lodged in her throat, and I can’t hear what she says next but I roll over to my side, one arm on top of the other, my fingers curled around my other palm, and whatever the words could be, I believe.

~

Jayne S. Wilson’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. She is of mixed Filipino-White descent, and is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories. Find her online at jayneswilson.com and on Twitter @thisJayneperson.

88.1/2