Advice
after Joy Williams
Have you ever stolen anything? A camera? A tanning bed? Tell me. Shoplifting from a convenience store is much different than climbing down a chimney and entering a home. I wear sunglasses at all hours because I was conceived on a jet ski. My parents were seafaring land mammals. They left shortly after I sprouted. One drowning in the fountain of our local shopping mall. The other too tall to ride a rollercoaster yet stubborn enough to lose his head. Both, once dead, made the daily news. The school I then grew inside of knew me as famous, deranged, rage-induced, clueless. Stay away from the foster child, they’d howl. I was the orphan in the storm coat regardless of the season. I hung stockings. I forgave the crest. This is all to say I began sneaking out at an early age and stealing whatever I could find: church purses, tall wallets, stumbling drunks with enough cash to last me through spring. My volunteer families never discovered my villainy. I was always bouncing around yet cautious, a practiced cat burglar, blurring the line between fine-tuned and scum. If you’ve never been on the run, this story might not be for you, but let me tell you one thing right now before it’s too late: the more you think to hurry, the faster you’ll be sure to die.
Two Doctors
I live atop two doctors who never seem to leave. Not for work, not for food. Always their cars are parked outside. Always they’re hiding behind their retractable curtains. Never to be lifted, never to be revealed. Their children are cyclones or cymbal screams teething and motioning as if they alone are in charge of the world continuing to spin. I hear them – their stomps and their weeps – but I never see them. It wasn’t until recently, late one night, that I discovered the truth about the two doctors. I was coming home from a tavern called Lantern’s when I saw their front door half cracked. I knocked rather timidly, as I’m prone to do, and it wasn’t long before I was wandering down their autumnal hallway, orange shades of yellows and auburn tones of gold. Inside the final room is where I saw them both, both doctors older than me, much older than me, working on each other. We are in love, they said to me, as if I was welcome to watch, as if I’d been there all along. The husband was removing a bullet out of the ankle of his wife, who was bleeding onto the white floor where their children played with police cars and firetrucks, slipping on the blood, jumping in the splash, and it was the wife who was working on her husband, replacing a rib for a new rib, wearing a bib, each section like a weapon to be dealt out in folds. They’re doctors for each other, I muttered. They’re doctors in love. I said this so quietly even I didn’t hear and yet both doctors began to nod.
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Benjamin Niespodziany is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50, Booth, Puerto del Sol, Sixth Finch, Conduit, and others. His debut poetry collection was released in 2022 through Okay Donkey and his novella of connected stage plays is out now with X-R-A-Y. You can find more at neonpajamas.com.