The Binding Thing Winner: The Robert Day Award for Fiction Selected by Akil Kumarasamy
David Lerner Schwartz They were bros passed over for the newest dating reality show, so they formed a coven. It felt, at first, like being wrong. Tasted like battery acid. Smelled like week-rotted kombucha SCOBY. Their first lesson about witchcraft: as the rules of the world blurred, so did their senses, their sense of self. Finally, they thought. And for how many years had men punished women for doing exactly this? It began after drinks. They’d been working on a master’s thesis about the love potion. They were also a chemist. They were also a veterinarian. They were also an ironsmith, well, an apprentice, who owned an impressive collection of shawls, and cloaks, and capes, and robes. They’d spent their lives togethering— during suburban nap time on plush mats and high-piled carpets and then at desks in public school and then on the sallow, sagging couches of their collegiate dormitory and then during yearly trips fishing and foraging, backpacking and camping, until relocating to their town of origination, the discovery of their equidistant haunt with the wicker backless barstools where their hands cast blue-glow phone-shimmer onto smiles from caught negs, disses. In short, they were destined to gather. This is how it started: they went back to their home, the one past the hill, up the too-many flights of stairs, and continued drinking in the den. They watched a recording of a football game, splice-edited with highlight reel and afterward commentary,