Signs and Symptoms

Excerpt

The first Marvin learns of the sign is in his car before work, scrolling through Facebook. Past the cat memes from mom’s friends, the club selfies from mostly Reg’s friends, and the increasingly shrill political pleas from his high school best friend who’d moved up to Los Angeles only to boil alive in the costs, the homelessness, the illegal dumping. Scrolling with groggy, trancelike intensity and no idea what he’s looking for every gray morning, here in the strip mall parking lot of Location #314 where he works, no idea what hole he aches to fill. Only one identifiable relief, as he drags the lives of his friends ever upward and out of sight: at least he’s out of the swiping game, for now.

Then, as if trying to blend in, the neighborhood group post rolls onscreen—a group he’d joined that was supposed to be like NextDoor but without the prejudice and the mystifyingly robust bazaar of free dirt. So much free dirt all the time! If the Inland Experience could be said to have natural resources, they were fill dirt and air for skydiving.

The picture is of a warzone, except it’s the Walmart—the “Walmart” sign on the Walmart, specifically. He looks at the time stamp: yesterday afternoon. Well, he doesn’t shop there, so. Of course he didn’t know.

In the photograph pinned under his thumb, the letters along the front of the building are black-stained, cracked. The W and the T have gone missing. The rest have been rearranged to spell “alarm,” the overfamiliar lowercase now unnerving.

Kristen Leigh Schwarz

Kristen Leigh Schwarz (she/her) grew up in Newhall, California, twenty-six miles outside Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where she received the MacDonald Harris Award for Fiction and an award from the International Center for Writing and Translation to work in Mexico. Her stories have appeared in the Santa Monica Review, Indicia, the American Literary Review, and St. Ann’s Review, among other places. Her story “Emperor of Umbrellas” was anthologized in Orange County: A Literary Field Guide. Her recently completed novel is represented by Susanna Lea Associates.

Patrick Ryan on “Signs and Symptoms”

Every story has a spark that set it smoking in the writer’s mind, and the spark that set off our new issue, “Signs and Symptoms,” was a news article about a physicist’s attempting to open a portal into a parallel universe. Author Kristen Leigh Schwarz read the article and couldn’t help but wonder, How might that go?

How it goes for barista Marvin is that a series of bizarre and troubling phenomena first are reported in the news and then begin to occur in his place of work. The parallel universe, it seems, is vacuuming things out of this world at an alarming rate. Marvin and his boyfriend, Reg, have to think fast: Should they call for help? Run for their lives? Go to a casino and play nickel slots until this world and everything in it have been sucked into the void?

I love “Signs and Symptoms” because it manages to be so many things at once. It’s weird, fantastical, a little frightening, extremely funny, and romantic. Yes, this apocalyptic yarn is romantic! Kristen Leigh Schwarz has pulled off a kind of magic trick with this highly original story that is simultaneously down-to-Earth and out of this world. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.