Image by PN art intern Danielle White, @yourdanidoodles.

Co-managing editor Zoa Coudret on today’s bonus story: With seamless shifts in point of view, "The Lovers’ Quarrel" both celebrates and satirizes the public theater of romantic relationships. This story invites readers to watch the drama but warns how easily the spectator can become the spectacle.

The Lovers' Quarrel

The lovers' quarrel spilled out onto the streets. The lovers attacked each other with epithets, quarreled over many things. They quarreled as to the proper term for their quarrel itself. They used curses: both ancient hexes from books of spells, and modern incantations purchased from a salesman in a street cart, who also sold chili dogs and umbrellas. Soon, the lovers' quarrel extended to chess, and they battled to an interminable number of draws. Were the lovers a perfect match because of their mutual love of the quarrel? Perhaps. Did we, the neighbors, place wagers on their competitions, such as sack races, paintball fights, and sheep shearing? Definitely. Their quarrels became big business. Thousands of dollars would change hands over a game of Connect Four, a Prince-themed Karaoke event, a challenge to name the most digits of Pi while drunk on Merlot. The lovers' quarrel lasted for weeks and weeks. We lived vicariously through their battles; they made the disagreements in our own relationships appear trivial by comparison. We held each other a little tighter. We were hungrier for each other’s touch. The quarreling lovers were surrogates for our doubts and pent-up frustrations. They took their aggression out on each other. They fought with life-sized remote-control robots. We all pitched in to help build the robots and the boxing ring. This, too, brought our little village closer together. I was an outlier here. My partner had left me, left this world, two years earlier. The spectacle of the lovers’ quarrel—as it spiraled out into a race to qualify as astronauts for an upcoming Space mission—had at first dulled my desire to find romance again. But working on these robots with someone new (whom the neighbors had conspired to pair me with and who herself was just getting over a lost love) had rekindled something. It jarred a memory from my childhood, when I’d pitted my stuffed animal collection against my younger brother’s in an imagined baseball league, complete with standings, statistics, and homemade trading cards. I’d always loved the competition, I told her—and immediately, she one-upped me with a story of a dollhouse murder mystery, related in intricate, forensic detail. Later, we would share what was left of the Merlot, play four hours of cutthroat Yahtzee, race dune buggies up and down the beach, then break into a final sprint, toward a beribboned finish line. All while our neighbors egged us on, chanting encouragements with the energy of witches’ curses, waving their bet slips in our faces, excited to find out who would win.

Matt Leibel lives in San Francisco. His short and very short fictions have appeared recently in Necessary Fiction, Lost Balloon, Heavy Feather Review, Electric Literature, Socrates on the Beach, and Best Small Fictions. You can find him on twitter at @matt_leibel.

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