Amelia Gray - AM/PM

When cold and warm fronts meet, at the right velocity and temperature, a hurricane forms. Tess remembered the morning of the hurricane seventeen years before. That afternoon, she watched the blue sky and white clouds from her seat on the bus and strained to feel something in the air. Seventeen years later, she felt her loneliness rise up to meet an overpowering urge and suppressed the desire to board the windows.

“Being with you is like a plate of hair,” Andrew said. “A dainty bone china plate, covered in hair. And everyone at the table is watching me and waiting to see if I’m going to eat it.”

Carla looked at him and yawned. “Being with you,” she said, “is like taking a sleeping pill.”

Is there too much suffering in the world, and not enough philosophy, or is it the other way around?

Press your right side to massage your ascending colon. Press your left side to massage your descending colon. Express the toxins you are able to express, and ignore the others.

Control the impulse to check the locks on your door.

The more bleach in the bedsheets, the greater Chastity’s impulse to roll around in them. A party would be thrown, she decided, the kind that would tell a small story in the contents of the dustpan the next morning. Detached sequins and mint leaves muddled by high heels, shrimp tails mixed in with a few shards of broken glass, a crust of bread. She rolled in her bleached sheets until they wrapped about her like a storm, and she fell asleep in the eye of it.

A man cultivates a terrible feeling in the woman who loves him. He turns the feeling of love on itself. The woman sees what love looks like in its grotesque selfishness. The price of her knowledge? An enthusiastic event, and another, and the actor will watch herself doing terrible things.

The girls were doing yoga in the living room. Missy played some calming spiritual music and lit a candle.

Chastity winced, feeling the wood floor under her thin mat. “I want the kind of man who goes looking for a war,” she said.

Missy aligned her hips up and back for Downward-Facing Dog. “There’s a few wars out there already,” she said. “Should be easy to find.”

“Not a real war,” Chastity said, after her third attempt at the Plow. “Nothing that would kill him.”

“What, you just want things that will make him stronger?” Missy exhaled through her nose and stood up. “Boring.”

“I want him to find something worth fighting for every day.”

“This, coming from the woman with the most dangerous party theory ever.” Missy raised her arms and took a deep breath. “I guess I could have seen it coming,” she said, exhaling.

Chastity felt it wasn’t a true party until something got broken and someone got hurt. “I want a man who knows what it means to fight,” she said.

“Slap a pair of skates on the girl and you’ve got a roller derby,” said Missy.

Hazel constantly felt the need to express something inside of her. With age, she would learn that everyone has that same feeling, and that the need to express comes from a sensible desire for community, but that reasonable people either forget the feeling or get tired of talking about it, as when all the gossip about an embarrassing acquaintance finally winds its way down and the friends stare at each other across the table, each thinking, now what .

Martha was face down on the bed with her feet draped over the closed violin case as if she was having them examined. She didn’t move when Emily walked in and sat next to her.

“I thought I’d join a bluegrass band,” Martha said. Her words were muffled by the pillow.

“You practiced?”

“I can play the songs, but it makes me nervous. Everything makes me nervous.”

“It’s normal to be nervous.” Emily rested her palm on the bottom of Martha’s left foot.

“Great,” Martha said, “I’m nervous and I’m normal .” She started to cry.

“Do you even like bluegrass music?” Emily asked.

Martha blew her nose in the center of the pillow. “I’ll wash it,” she said. “There’s just that feeling, you know? When something happens, and you have to let it happen and you get that feeling , like your heart is breaking? That’s how I feel about joining a bluegrass band.”

“I didn’t know you liked bluegrass music.”

Martha rolled onto her back. Her mascara had smeared into two dark smudges on her eyelids. It made her look like an animal with its fur or feather patterned like false eyes. “That’s just it,” Martha said, closing her real eyes and inadvertently widening the false ones. Emily could barely watch.

Olivia’s whole body shook, not like a leaf but like the tree itself, a deep kind of shudder that only happened at the hands of loggers. A tree feels its deepest movement in those final seconds. She once watched a program on television where a falling tree snapped at the trunk, creating a ten-foot-long catapult that tossed a logger fifty feet into the air. They called it kickback.

Betty and Simon drove down the dirt road playing Amish or Vietnamish.

“A Bible in every compartment,” he said.

“A compartment in every Bible,” she said. “Tet Offensive.”

“Non-offensive. What’s mine is yours.”

“What mines? Agent Orange.”

“Orange preserves.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “I Am Become Jebediah, Raiser of Barns.”

Betty leaned back and closed her eyes. “Good one.”

Goosebumps came more easily, though it was the middle of the summer. Tess sat in front of the fan and alternated between jerking sobs and laughter at the sound she made. That hiccup of breath was a terrible sound to hear in the dark, and she would laugh, rub her goosebumps down, and sob. She needed to make the decision to cut, because making the decision would bring instant pain and healing simultaneously. She was the kind of girl who climbed the tallest tree and cried to be let down, but she was also the kind of girl who would scramble and jump down on her own as soon as someone went in for the ladder. Here in the dark, she needed to decide.

Missy looked at her watch, and back at Chet. “Half an hour,” she said. She was sitting cross-legged on his chair, naked, watching him on his bed.

Chet yawned. “Until when?”

“It’s been half an hour since I felt good about this situation.”

“The sex?” He wondered when she might finally leave.

“This whole situation. It’s been about thirty-two minutes.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it,” he said, pressing his palms to his eyes for a second before removing them and blinking in the light. He was tired, he wanted sleep. “It was your idea, as I recall.”

“Don’t give me that. It was our idea, together.”

“You essentially teased me until I gave in.”

“You gave in. Fantastic.” She rolled onto the floor and covered her breasts with a phone book. “Now I’m a rapist, and a bad lay.”

“Jesus, Missy, you’re not a rapist.”

“I teased you, you gave in. You gave in like it was prom night.” She moved the phone book over her face. Chet reached to the side table for his glasses, which he polished carefully before placing them on his face. He looked at her breasts. Behind the phone book, she was crying.

“Don’t be dramatic,” he said.