​Photo by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE MORNING is I pour my coffee into a milk glass mug and migrate to the porch and sit in a camo camp chair and look at the glue on the surface of the porch that is there from when there was carpet, the putt-putt green stuff, and I think, Acid, I need acid to rid the porch of the glue, the squiggles and lines, colored like the clay I dug down to when I was a kid, and then the laundry smell overtakes me, the clean clothes tumbling in the dryer in the basement, that heavy damp smell, some lavender, coming out of a PVC vent painted black, the same color black as the shake siding, the black cedar shakes, black to keep the sun in all winter because it’s a cold place we live in, and it’s coming on, winter, blowing down, the aspen leaves rattling like baby toys, and the coffee is too hot, but I like burning my tongue because then I know I’m alive—it’s proof, irrefutable; my boyfriend told me last night his mom’s friend up and died from a heart thing, and my first thought was, Let’s fuck, and so we did, and I was only sad after I came, right after, about the dead woman I didn’t know, and thought then, Let’s fuck every night until we’re dead, and now the news on my phone, ticking away, the same old shit; the world is criminal and stupid and chasing its own tail, the news, and then a neighborhood cat I can hear, and then it’s on the porch, smoke color, white feet, and I take a picture of the cat and look at the picture, and the cat looks kind of possessed and evil in the picture, a Pet Sematary cat, mouth open, teeth white, slivery yellow eyes, but it’s not mean; it’s a nice sweet cat, and I’d try to keep it around if I wasn’t allergic, and then it disappears into the plant my boyfriend told me is a Mexican sunflower, tall, red flowers, and it’s shaking, the plant, from the cat, and I have nothing to do today but start drinking because it’s already too much, too fucking much, the cat knows it too; they must, free animals know these things. A last hack of steam from the dryer out the vent. The cat reemerges from the sunflower, stretches out on the driveway, in the sun, like he owns the fucking place. It’s a he, I see, little furry balls the size of marbles. Hell, I’d be like that too, assed out, lengthened. I go into the house for my liter of J&B and the half gallon of whole milk for the cat and pour the milk into a cereal bowl and the whiskey into my coffee—there’s so much sunlight so suddenly—and wait for the cat to take the first drink. I’ll leave my clean clothes—underwear, baby doll tops, a Sonic Youth T-shirt that’s falling apart, a pair of cutoff shorts—in the dryer for some angel to take out, fold, and put away in the bottom two drawers of the dresser that are mine. I’ll sit here and wait, or walk with the sun from the east to the west, into darkness. It’s my day to ruin. It’s my day to trash. The thought of your own heart murdering you—some kind of joke. I’m still waiting. No one flinches—not me, not the cat, not God. A bee flies up and away from the dusty yellow center of one of the red Mexican sunflowers, unable to fully take off, heavy with nectar, the sweetness, wasted.





JAKE LANCASTER is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction. His short stories have appeared in The Common, Forever Magazine, Heavy Traffic, TriQuarterly, CutBank, The Adroit Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Minnesota with his family, on the banks of the Mississippi River.