Hello, this is my April Fools Issue for Vertigo, published on the first day of international guitar month as well as the National pet month in the United Kingdom, by Bethanie Lee.

Yo mama’s so fat that when she fell no one laughed but the sidewalk cracked up.

Thank you.

I wrote this at 3am rawr…

She was alone. She was always alone. He was alone too–worn out, exhausted, sleepless, and more synonyms of the word tired. Every time she noticed him, she acted unfazed, unbothered, and even annoyed sometimes. She wasn’t shy, but she was shy around him, and more than shy, she was scared. He, however, was in simple terms, uninterested. But as one does, she liked to convince herself he cared for her. She liked to tell herself that when her eyes swept through the quads, eyeing every silhouette with the hopes of seeing him, he was doing the same. The moments she chose to remember were the accidental brushes of his fingertips against hers, every instance where they stood or sat close enough that their shoulders touched, and when her eyes subconsciously shifted down to his lips, analyzing his every laugh and smile. She couldn’t tell if he was truly happy or if he had drawn a smile on his lips in permanent marker. She also hated that he was too busy for her, hated how he continued on with countless sleepless nights, and on the nights he did sleep, he forced himself to wake up at the break of dawn and forced himself to pick up a pencil and do the work he was too tired to do last night. But she was glad at the same time that he didn’t pay much attention. Because one look at her, and he would figure her out all too easily. Because if he stopped and stared, he’d see that she was staring back. He would find that she thought of him and dreamed of him every night. He would know that she hadn’t felt this way about anyone else in years, maybe her entire lifetime and that as outgoing and extroverted as she was she could never bring herself to talk to him. He would realize she created scenarios of the two of them together, her by his side, holding him whenever he was too tired to get up by himself. He would run, she convinced herself. He would run. Would he run?

hey wanna go out. “no” april fools haha. haha. haha.

hey shawty, out of ten ur a nine
cause im the one you need

“Do you believe in the afterlife?” My mom asked me one day. There lay a sullen expression on her face that exaggerated the resting wrinkles scarred into her skin from long waking mornings, too much sun and too little sleep. My beautiful mother, usually smiling no matter how long the day had been, was asking me if I believed in life after death.

I smiled, touched her callused and bruised hand, and maybe she remembered this moment before she left.

I could name everything my mother loved: She liked waking up early, she liked cooking, she liked watching me sleep at night, and she loved reading me stories before I went to bed. Her eyes always lit up when she talked about my past. Stories of me were more hers than mine. Stories about how she cradled me for the very first time after sixteen hours of hard labor. She never regretted a moment of it because I was the aftermath.

Mom also used to tell me stories about her and dad, how they met, how they fell in love, and how hard it was for them to get married. Mom’s traditional immigrant parents wanted her to move back to China with them. They refused to pay her college tuition, they refunded her deposits, and mom, at 18 years old, worked three part time jobs to pay thirty thousand dollars every year. Mom met dad at college,