“Fin” by Moe Frank-Niyogi
This is how it ends:
Teacher says, write a story with one hundred words exactly. No more, no less. You use five of those words for the best way to end a story, objectively: then everyone died, the end. Zeus, sensing an opportunity for irony, smites the school with divine thunder.
This is how it ends:
When you’re eleven you know there’s something wrong with you. It clicks in a grimy school bathroom stall, your sixth grade teacher shouting at you from outside. When you tell your mother there is denial in her gaze, cool and unyielding.
This is how it ends:
When you think about the future, what lies ahead, all you can see is a wall. White and sterile and stretching out for untold miles, without a door in sight. The wall is coming closer, and you cannot move. One day the wall will be everything. It will be the only thing you can see, and the only thing you can do is cry and shriek and claw at the slick, impassive surface, begging, humiliatingly, to be let in.
This is how it ends:
Read statistics, desperation crawling up your throat, a dead thing come to choke you. Read forty-one percent. Think: Why not me?
This is how it ends:
The pills, the cliff, the building, the knife, the roiling storm late at night, the lake, the ocean, the river, the countless unspecified bodies of water, the ache, the tearing, the man in the red cap, the lover with rough hands, the stone, the office job, the prayer, the cop, the street sign, the car, the good intentions, the rope–
This is how it ends:
God figures Its creations have fucked up enough that it’s time for a redo - and no ark this time, so stop asking!
This is how it ends:
The woman talking to you cuts herself off mid-conversation, saying Wait, I just need to check. You know that’s permanent, right? Do you also plan on having the–you know. The surgery? You start to laugh but choke on your hunk of crusty bread and asphyxiate before anyone can remember how to do the Heimlich. There are lilies and tastefully miniscule hors d'oeuvres at your funeral.
This is how it ends:
The syringe needle leaves a little bruise. You prod at it, frowning, but something warm and bright is blooming in your chest. The future is unrolling for you at your feet, a carpet, golden and tattered and shining, incandescent in the early evening light.
This is how it ends. It doesn’t.
“Dead Salmon Study” by Moe Frank-Niyogi
“One Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) participated in the fMRI study. The salmon was approximately 18 inches long, weighed 3.8 lbs, and was not alive at the time of scanning.” -Bennet et al.
The way it lay, damp and waiting quietly - deceased,
sopping only slightly in the MRI’s cage. Maybe they call it containment these days,
but the truth of it is
(always was)
that a dead thing cannot be left where everyone can see it.
They asked it what it thought of a person smiling.
A frown, that inscrutable hardening of the face.
I read the study and thought it to be unfair,
that they called the fish post-mortem, when clearly -
clearly it could live, at least enough to to feel,
to see a raised eyebrow,
a downward quirk of the lips, and say
hmmm, he doubts. Could witness the flat, stiff line of a woman’s mouth,
pressed tight with a furrow between her brow and ask
mother, what have I done wrong?
But they took that salmon, that poor, pinkish soul, sodden and hoping;
they took it and used it, burned up its spirit in the spirit of discredit.
How stupid an idea, that a fish could love.
How naive.
When they threw it out afterwards its body made a wet sound,
thwap against the metal of the Dumpster.