This weeks story comes to us from Y. Len. Y. Len’s spoken English is barbed with foreign accent and imposter words from several other languages. (Y. Len’s words not mine.)
Since 2021, Y Len has had seven short stories appear in magazines and anthologies and one was voted the best horror short story of 2023 by the Critters Annual Readers Poll. In 2025, the first professionally narrated story was featured in the Tall Tale TV podcast.
This story has [mistakenly] been rejected by:
- The New Yorker
- The Paris Review
- The Craft
Here are some of Y Len’s ready-to-read/listen links:
Time Transfusion – Tall Tale TV- Short Story Audiobook Blog
https://mrbullbull.com/newbull/fiction/i-dont-always-drink-beer-but-when-i-do/
What do you love about this story? This piece began as a dark psychological reflection on aging and grief, but at the time it quickly stalled. I set it aside for more than a year, certain it had reached a dead end. Then, unexpectedly, the story returned to me with a different perspective and a new ending—one that reshaped its entire meaning.
Hope By Y. Len
Hope loads the toaster and asks, without turning her head, “Do you remember the Johnsons invited us…”
She realizes the question implies he might have forgotten. Worse, it suggests she knows he forgets things. In hindsight, You do remember would’ve given the question a gentler spin, but it’s too late now. She bites her lip, bracing for him to cavil.
Her surprise, when he doesn’t, curdles into frustration with forgetting his name. Dan? Ben? Stan? She closes her eyes but sees only a red circle with a blurry-white horizontal bar in the middle. Oh well, does it even matter? After some forty years together, is it so inexcusable to forget seldom used details?
“As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days . . .” drones a voice on the radio.
Hope wants to turn it off, but there comes one of those . . . feelings? For lack of a diagnosis—she’s never seen a doctor about episodes like this—Hope thinks of them as SenSations with two capital Ss. This one makes her feel being behind a glass wall. She stretches her hand toward the radio, and the tips of her press-on nails scrape an invisible obstacle. A cobalt-blue chip breaks off from her index finger and falls to the dirty kitchen floor.
Clop-clop, clop-clop. The upstairs neighbor, Max—a sexagenarian—crosses his kitchen. So it’s seven twenty-five now; she doesn’t need to look at the clock. It’s happened day after day for years. Max’s cane thumps the ceiling like a metronome. Hope counts the beats. Seven. Then he opens a water faucet.
Hope opens the fridge. The cold inside smells of sour milk and something else, something going or already gone bad. Yogurt cups stare at her like regret bottled for later. He used to mock her homemade yogurt. But near the end, there wasn’t much food soft enough for him to swallow.
Of the four eggs left, one is broken, its contents leaking into the carton. The remaining three seem to whisper in protest as she cracks them open. The yolks spread over the pan—wide and glassy—like jaundiced eyes.
“Over easy and crisp bacon! Ready when you are.” Words ricochet from the tiled walls. She lowers her voice to ask: “How’s your stomach?” And bites her lip again. Why ask if she knows the answer? Now he’s going to grumble about the cramps he’s been having all night. Then he’ll say that greasy fried food in the morning is disgusting—which would mean that he’d slept badly or not at all. And how could it be any different? He had four snifters of Jim Beam last night and kept switching TV channels until two in the morning.
Then he’ll slam the hot pan on the table, ignoring the three-legged trivet. Today, the trivet is coated in something dry and reddish. Tomato paste? She doesn’t remember cooking anything with tomatoes or tomato paste, but she hopes anyway.
Then he’ll eat it all except for one piece of toast.
Outside the window, the sky hangs low and the gray morning promises to become a gray Indian summer day. Hope considers taking her coffee mug and the remaining piece of toast out to the garden. She’d have to wade through the hip-high grass by the apple tree, shake off last year’s leaves from the garden table’s cover . . . not just leaves, but also dead bugs, snails, spider sacs . . . and the chair’s arms may be spotted with black mold . . . She hesitates. Still, she could go . . . or not. She could rot there or here—
“What’s wrong with you?” His vowels sag, curling at the edges like old linoleum, and Hope braces for the follow-up: a “bloody this” or a “proper narky that.” None comes.
She turns toward a shriveled ashen face under the remnants of a Mohawk combed and gelled across the balding pate. Ears fuzzed with tufts of gray. Water droplets glistening on salt-and-pepper chest hair.
Wearing briefs, as faded with age as he is, the man whose name escapes her settles at the table. The briefs—living up to their Go Buck Naked brand name—stretch and sag. What better image of withering and decrepitude than a bulge of a man’s scrotum with no sign of that other part the scrotum is supposed to attach to?
Hope’s eyes dart up as she asks, “What’s wrong with you?”
“You know, I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“I know.”
He nods with a faint smile. “You do remember the Johnsons invited us for lunch today?”
“What?” Hope flinches. “I asked you that question just a minute ago.”
“You tried.” He chuckles. “I had a dream,” he says and looks around. “All this was in it. This gray morning, you, me, eggs and bacon, Max at seven twenty-five.” He turns his face toward the ceiling.
You’re a damn clairvoyant now? Hope stifles a laugh and says, as matter-of-factly as possible, “All that happens every—”
“And even”—he stabs the air with his index finger—”I saw your thoughts.”
The sagging skin on his neck shakes. Hope thinks of a turkey, then of their last Thanksgiving and the past in general.
#
In their salad days, Dan had been an arrestingly handsome hunky beefcake—loud-mouthed, tart-tongued, wasteful, affectionate and gentle. His laugh had a rasp to it, like gravel dragged through honey, and when he touched her—casually, possessively, reverently—her breath caught, every time.
He loved women, wine, gambling, and exotic food. In Marrakesh, he’d spent an entire afternoon sweet-talking an old butcher into revealing the secret spice blend for lamb tajine, only to forget half of it after three glasses of arak. He’d wanted to open a restaurant once—“a shack with silver cutlery,” he called it—but Hope knew it was the idea he loved more than the work.
They cooked together, often and loudly. Pilau in a dented cauldron from Istanbul, the kind you had to squat beside on the floor. Ben ate with his hands, scooping up saffron rice and chunks of meat, smearing turmeric and oil across his stubbled cheeks. At first, Hope demurred, brows raised and fork in hand. But after a few weeks—and a few persuasive kisses—she gave in. There was something primal and oddly romantic about plunging fingers into that steaming, fragrant pyramid. Shared mess. Shared pleasure.
He used to lift her easily—just scoop her up in one arm as if she were no heavier than a feather pillow. He’d done it at their wedding, in front of eighty guests, because the floor was too dirty for her heels. She pretended to be annoyed but buried her face in his neck and breathed him in: she adored every sweaty, maddening, impulsive inch of him.
Even when the pounds crept on, when the beefcake turned into a barrel and his knees started cracking, he remained inexplicably magnetic to her. It wasn’t just the physicality. It was the way he looked at her, as if she were still twenty-five and could break his heart with a glance. Even after a fight, even with bills unpaid and dirty dishes stacked to heaven, he’d whisper something obscene and ridiculous and make her laugh into his chest.
By fifty, he weighed over three hundred pounds, and it took effort for him to heave himself up the stairs. He still loved food and wine, but the sparkle in his eye dulled. He stopped gambling, stopped flirting with waitresses. Hope had told herself this was maturity, not surrender.
The first real sign—subtle, unsettling—was when he started losing weight.
No diets, no pep talks. Just clothes hanging a little looser. His belt cinched an extra notch. The creases in his skin stayed even as the flesh beneath them ebbed away.
Then came the silence. Stan, who used to interrupt the television to argue with it, now sat through evenings with his mouth slack and hands in his lap.
Shortly after that, her SenSations began.
#
“In my dream I saw you loading bread into the toas—”
“Oh, please!” Hope stomps her foot. “I do that every morning. I do everything around here. You wouldn’t remember how to turn the damn thing on, would you?”
“Something else happened this morning before I came to the kitchen.” He goes on as if he didn’t hear her. “You were opening a package of bacon and broke your nail.” His brows arch as he jerks his jutted out chin at the blue chip on the floor.
There are two open packages of bacon in the fridge and one of them Hope doesn’t remember. This unwanted bit of knowledge makes her angry at . . . everything. At the world that shifts and gaslights her while pretending it’s solid. At the red circle with a blurry-white horizontal bar in the middle. At the . . . She clenches her jaw and turns to the stove where the cast-iron skillet spits hot bacon fat.
The skillet has a long, handy handle. The old friend has never let her down. All it needs is direction. A little momentum. She places both hands on the warm handle and squares her stance—feet a foot apart, shoulders squared.
In her youth, Hope enjoyed sports. For several months—until her wrist gave out—she’d been practicing Muay Thai. She still remembers the instructions. The power starts in the toes, travels up the calves, coils through the hips … But that’s how you punch someone with your fist. Wrong sport. She squeezes the handle with both hands. I need to shift, turn, and rise.
Her left wrist protests—still tender from helping him out of bed when he couldn’t manage the oxygen tank. She shrugs off the thought like a loose coat and imagines a putting green. The color is a welcome change from the predominant gray of the kitchen. A hole-in-one is coming.
She swings.
The eggs unpeel from the skillet, sailing through the kitchen like little Frisbees. They hit an invisible wall—her glass wall?—and slide down, yolks dragging slow yellow wakes. The bacon confetti rains down.
“With the frying pan, really, honey?” he says, shaking his head. Wrinkles bunch at his eyes like rays of sunshine in a child’s drawing. Then he laughs. Not like a lunatic. Like someone who finds it all hysterical: her thoughts, her rage, the absurdity of it. Even the idea that the things sliding down the wall might have been his brains.
“That’s it!” Hope drops the skillet onto the stovetop with a bang. “Now you’ve done it. Now I need a drink!”
“But honey, how do we get to the Johnsons’? You know I can’t—”
“I know.” Her voice drops flat. You failed the vision test three times. And you gave up. I’m the one who still drags this household forward.
She yanks open the fridge, grabs the half-empty bottle of Pinot Gris and sloshes it into a tall orange juice glass. It froths, pale and wild.
“If you’d just shut up and let me calm down,” she says, swallowing hard, “I might still be able to drive.”
She flumps down onto the stool, wine glass in hand, facing him. “And please, dar—”
The child-like pout of injury on his face, startled and wet, makes her gasp. His eyes flick downward. Her eyes follow.
A bulge pulses from his abdomen, stretching the flesh from within. Then the skin splits open like overripe fruit, leaking pink slurry. From the wound, a glowing jellyfish rises—its tentacles glistening, twisting like a nest of snakes. The smell of rot comes layered with chlorine and latex, like a hospital bathroom after a code blue.
She exhales, eyes squeezed shut. The glass hits her teeth before the wine touches her tongue.
When she opens one eye, the SenSation is gone.
He’s dressed now, stepping in close the way he always did, placing a kiss on her neck with a little sniff and a mock mustache twitch. “You shouldn’t have . . .”
“I know.” Just a drop. Just a drop to take the edge off. I’ll be fine.
#
So what if her favorite glitter knit wrap-style dress is a tad too elegant for lunchtime? The dress suits her mood. Now she needs a necklace to complete the image. Something simple but expressive.
“Can you see my thoughts now?” Her gaze stops at the pearl pendant in the back of her jewelry armoire.
“Not really, honey. Not all your thoughts,” a voice whispers in her head or from someplace behind her. Then continues, louder. “But I know everything you’re going to say. Sometimes I think you don’t exist at all. Not in this world. I made you up! You’re a figment of my imagination!”
She bites back angry laughter. With your imagination of a chicken? No, I take it back. Too insulting for chickens. A vegetable . . . a cabbage would be a better comparison. But she says nothing, for she is in a vulnerable position: he may lambaste her as drunk and therefore hysterical. She puts on the pearl pendant and looks in the mirror.
Every girl needs a “thing.” Long legs, high cheekbones, a dreamy look or sexy voice. Her voice has never been deep or velvety; when she gets angry, she shrieks. Instead, her “thing” is the jugular hollow at the base of her neck. Hindus believe this is where the Vishuddha Chakra is located.
She was eighteen when she visited the Royal Ontario Museum for the first time. “Ouh là là, but how delightful,” the ROM staff lady exhaled in her ear, her accent weaving silk around the consonants. “You move like a poem. Such an expressive neck …”
The old crone rounded her eyes and leaned in, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper: “Mon trésor, that, right there”—she brushed the air above Hope’s collarbone with a gloved finger—“is where sex lives.” She exhaled the word—se-exe—and then let it hang in the air like perfume worn with nothing else. A rapid murmur followed. Hope caught a few words—l’extase . . . la gorge . . . le secret féminin—before the woman mimed sewing her mouth shut with invisible thread.
Hope, dazed and delighted, nodded and repeated the motion.
With that deep hollow—and whatever lived in it—Hope had caught her . . . Dan? Ben? Stan?
#
He waves his phone. “Uber?”
“I’ll drive,” Hope says and puts a mint on her tongue. “I had only a drop, and besides . . .”
Not waiting for the “besides” he nods.
The traffic is light. Hope lowers the driver’s side window. It has rained recently, and the smell of wet dust lingers in the air. Silvery droplets hang from the maple trees. The pavement looks young for its years.
Hope notices a coffee stain on the upholstery of the passenger seat and frowns. As with the kitchen floor, she doesn’t remember the last time it was cleaned. “The car needs detailing,” she says. When he doesn’t disagree, she asks him to get an apple from the glove compartment.
“The glove compartment, really, honey?” With two fingers he takes out a green apple and looks at it for a long time as his upper lip creeps up and his nose wrinkles. Then he demands a napkin to wipe off the nonexistent germs. He does this all the time just to annoy her. But Hope likes apples. She takes both hands off the steering wheel and pulls a pack of Bounty napkins from her purse.
“Why don’t you say anything?” Hope asks after finishing the apple and stuffing the core in her purse.
Instead of answering, he smirks and shows her his phone. Scrawled across the screen is: Why aren’t you saying anything? He wipes the screen clean and scribbles something with his index finger.
“So what?” Hope isn’t sure where he’s going with this and keeps a neutral tone.
He shows the phone again with So what? on the screen.
“Are you trying to make me think I’m crazy?”
He flashes the phone with Am I crazy?
She falls silent and looks straight ahead. The light at the intersection changes from red to green just as they approach.
“No,” he says as if talking to the windshield, “you just don’t exist.”
“Yeah, right. And you do?” Hope wants to laugh, but at the same time she can’t help thinking: Do I exist? How do I prove to myself that I am not behind the glass wall?
“You don’t have free will,” he says.
Now that’s something that can be tested. Right now, let’s do it! She sets her jaw and floors the car.
He sighs, and in the tired voice of a kindergarten teacher, asks her to stop being silly.
She squints at the flying buildings and trees and waits for him to beg for mercy. He doesn’t say a word.
The jolt and the thud hit Hope simultaneously.
She hits the brake pedal and turns to face him. As he’s scribbling on his phone, the phone goes limp, melts and slides down over the back of his hand like the egg yolks did earlier. He makes a surprised sound and Hope lifts her gaze, stares into his eyes. The eyes of a dead man.
His face goes limp too. His left ear and cheekbone slide down. The left eye expands and pops out with a gentle “poo-ump” sound. It’s the sound that turns her stomach. Hope gropes between the seats and pulls her open purse up to her mouth.
#
“Are you all right, ma’am?” Someone touches her left shoulder.
Out of the corner of her right eye, Hope sees the coffee stain on the passenger seat and a chunk of half-digested bacon on top of it.
“You passed out for a few minutes.” The voice belongs to a young, round-faced man, almost a boy, wearing the dark blue peaked cap with a red band around. The shield-shaped badge in the center reads Toronto Police.
Hope pulls a napkin from the pack and scoops the bacon. Tucking the napkin into her purse, she stuffs the purse under the seat. Then pushes it even farther back with her foot and sniffs cautiously. Nothing but the fresh air from the outside. “The Johnsons invited us . . .”
“Excuse me?”
“No, nothing,” Hope shakes her head, then asks what happened.
“A dog, ma’am,” the policeman says. “No collar. Apparently, a stray. It’s dead.”
Hope opens her mouth but nothing comes out and she makes passes with her hands, as if using sign language. Images flash in her mind. A man with no name but with familiar funny hair … A melting phone clutched in his hand … The red circle with a blurry-white horizontal bar in the middle.
“All right, ma’am. Judging by the braking distance, you weren’t speeding.” He pauses, but continues to stare. Hope slides her gaze along his . . . he is looking at her bejeweled jugular hollow. My pearl pendant. Simple but expressive. She lifts her chin ever so slightly. It doesn’t look like the cop smelled alcohol or bacon.
The policeman asks her to wait until he’s done with formalities, and Hope gets out of the car. It’s drizzling again and she is given a silvery foil blanket and wraps the shiny cone around her. Everything’s like in the movies: she’s a victim of circumstances, getting well-deserved help.
The corpse has been covered with a blanket, but from where she stands, Hope can see the left side of the distorted face with missing ear and empty eye socket.
#
Hope loads the toaster and says, without turning her head, “The Johnsons invited . . . ” She pauses, mouth open. The pause feels easy, then the right word comes. She closes her mouth and smiles to herself. Well. Just me, I suppose.
The toast pops up with a soft click. The warm and yeasty scent of browning bread fills the kitchen. She butters both golden slices, spreading all the way to the edges, the way he used to complain she never did. “Don’t half-ass the butter, Ho. If you’re gonna do it, do it properly.” The echo still lives in her head but now it doesn’t have a sting.
She places the slices on a plate. One for now, one for later. The second slice had always been his. For months, she’d left it there anyway. This time, she’ll eat it herself.
She pours orange juice into a tall glass. It tastes fresh and bright, like sun pressed into citrus.
Outside the window, the apple tree sways in the breeze. The tall grass is gone. Someone came yesterday—her neighbor’s nephew, maybe. She doesn’t remember asking. He just showed up, cut the grass, cleaned the table and her favorite Adirondack chair. She made lemonade.
Hope slips her feet into her garden clogs. Her glitter knit wrap dress catches the morning light like a wink from the past. She adds a denim jacket over it and doesn’t care if it matches.
She opens the door to the garden and breathes in. The air smells like acceptance. She walks slowly. No one follows.
As she approaches, the apple tree sheds a single leaf. It spins in the air like a slow-mo coin toss and lands near her feet. She pauses. One apple hangs low, red and swollen. She reaches up, plucks it and doesn’t bother to ask if he’d want one too. He didn’t like apples.
She settles into the chair with her plate, her book, her drink. Lets the silence sit beside her. Takes a bite of toast, then another.
The wind flips the book to a page she hasn’t read yet. The words blur a little, but it doesn’t matter. The world feels legible again.
Hope smiles at the bee that floats past. Somewhere beyond the fence, a dog barks, then another dog answers. She sips her orange juice and tastes both pulp and quiet.
He’s gone. She’s still here. She’s real.
When she closes her eyes, the red circle is gone. No blurry bar. Just a soft, steady gray behind her lids. The kind of gray that belongs to morning, not mourning.
Life, Hope hopes, will go on.
Breaking Into The Craft 