*

     
     One night the crying of the soldiers overwhelms him. He can’t control the feeling that it’s just a movie, something waiting for the future, or the magnitude of his imagination. He can’t take responsibility. He hears specific words now. Lush, whore. Liar. How? Don’t tell me that. I trusted you. No. I don’t trust you. Bastard. Don’t you think about it. I don’t care. No. That won’t help now. God, it smells in here. Just one more time and then. I swear. Christ. Woman. I don’t think I even know you.
     He doesn’t want to cry. He squints at the nuclear power plant off in the distance, the dark pipes of a pure white smoke. They plume into the bright sky, slowly changing shades. He opens the window. The smell of his mother’s lilac bush clings thickly to the sunset. He thinks about the H-bomb. Wouldn’t it be perfect if a bomb fell on his house, right now? The chandelier chimes in the hallway below. He’ll use the noise to his advantage.
     He ties one end of the rope vine to the radiator and he wraps the other end around his waist. He feels the heat from the pipes running out through the vines, building up in his veins. He eases over the edge of the planter, careful not to catch his shorts on the metal clutch. He’s clinging to the windowsill. He feels steady. There’s an overhang 4 feet away. He tries to swing himself, but suddenly the rope vine feels too hot. The radiator heat unravels through his veins. The liquid in his stomach turns to steam. He breaks his hold. He dangles for a moment, then he falls.
     At first he doesn’t realize he’s falling. It feels like the ground moves up to meet him. Then it seems to happen very slowly, and in waves, like swinging back and forth. He only falls in one direction, but a roaring rushes up into his ears, then pushes down. By the time he hits the ground, he’s in a trance that makes the blow feel soft. He barely even hears the thud, which rings through the dark of his head like a swarm of mosquitoes.
     

*

     
     He wakes up in a bright room in a cast. His mom leans over him and smiles. Her lips look blue and ugly in the light. Her voice is still panicky, training her words into one long shaky sentence. She says, it’s okay, you fell, but on your arm. You were trying to climb out the window, which you knew you shouldn’t do, you know that, but you were alone. I love you. Don’t you know I love you? Do we have an understanding? We were wrong. We thought you were a big boy now. Are you a big boy now? We thought you knew these things. I told you to play quietly until you fell asleep. You were supposed to fall asleep. You weren’t supposed to fall out the window. She gathers her face in her hands.
     His cast is green just like his army men. He asks his mom, where’s Dad?
     She wonders if he really is a big boy, if he’s big enough to hear her tell the truth. She doesn’t know the truth is filled with bombs and hissing streams of smoke, with shrieking sounds and actions like the silencing of bodies and her son, who does know better, is supposed to tell it all. But he can’t even tell her. She says, sweetheart, just in case he isn’t big enough. Sweetheart. Daddy had to go.
     He’s coming back though, right? Not for awhile. He says, when. She says, I don’t know. How could she not know, though. His mother is a bad mom.
     She tries to stroke his hair. Her hands are wet from crying. They just make the strands of hair stick to his forehead. He wishes he could roll away onto his side, but his good arm is pressed up against the guardrail. He is trapped there in his bed, without the soldiers, soaking up the salt inside his mother’s tears.
     

*

     
     He hears the whispering of his mother’s skirt as she moves throughout the kitchen. There are other sounds, of course, the clicking of her shoes, the hissing of the tap, the shuffling and throwing out of certain envelopes. When his mother comes to mind, he always hears the swishing of her skirt. He knows that every movement of the skirt, however gentle, could cling, catch, and snag, could kill his mother’s nylons.
     She’s still getting used to making dinner for two people. Most of the time, she makes too much. Their serving bowls are white along the outside, trimmed around the inside. In the middle of each bowl, there is a pattern of delicate silver dashes. Most nights, between the two of them, they only finish half the food. The bowls sit in the fridge with bits of beef, creamed corn, and runny lines of beet broth, dirty food splashed up around the silver circle. Collecting in the sink, all the dishes are violently stained. To him, the dark stained lines look like slit throats.
     His mother tries her best to make nice dinners. She makes things with cheerful names like Sunshine Salad, Buttermilk Chicken, and Angel Food Cake. She makes too much food because she wants to fill the table. She wants to place a bunch of different colored bowls between them. She wants to fill his belly, fill his face with thoughts that maybe she can speak to.
     He eats quietly. He tries to be polite. The food always looks better than it tastes. The chicken is soggy. The noodles are slimy. His mom doesn’t make them from scratch anymore.
     
     
     
–––––––
Meghan Lamb is a haunted hotel. She doesn’t do anything too horribly disruptive, just billows some curtains and fogs up some mirrors. Sometimes she fondles an exceptionally lovely man with her chilly transparent fingertips. She curates the reading series Dark of the Male, Light of the Female: Women Writing About Horrible Things. (How she does this is anyones’guess.) Her first novel, Silk Flowers, is forthcoming on Aqueous Books in 2013. This makes perfect sense. Many hotels are published authors.

To begin with a familiar object: In a GUITAR, a set of strings vibrates hundreds of times in a given second producing a frequency that is then funneled into the “body” of the guitar, where these frequencies collide as air does above certain bodies of water. The sound then travels through any artificially lit room, eventually “dying off,” and thinning down to a powder (dust). But as Roberts has written so cogently about, it may be argued that these sounds do not die off but in fact continue on ad infinitum, still existing in the room, but at a frequency too low for any human to hear. Books for instance emit a low level drone not unlike voices thrown in a large-sized church, though minus the golden light.
     Colored wind, as we’ve shown, has no sound. Roberts posits, though not in this study but in his previous Phonetic Kingdom, that the fate of all animals is to produce their one sound continually all their lives. This is of course to maintain a stasis of wind (98-102). Humans are the only animals to display visible distaste at having to produce their given sound all their lives. Always in search of other sounds, sounds that feel “more like them,” a phrase that in an eschatological context means nothing, humans exist in a class apart, and possess what Roberts calls, “The Gray Phoneme.” Other human sounds sound more pleasing to other humans. It is only those who live on islands with a high level of organic tree growth that do not display “sound envy.” But this too is starting slowly to change (see E.G. Roberts, Studies on Panoplial Islands, pg. 124-197). “The ruination of color at present I have no doubt is linked to sound borrowing. 70-80 percent of humans in the U.S. exhibit such symptoms, while patients studied here seem immune. However, it seems when examining certain dry facts that [they] too are beginning to display early signs…of a jealousy of sound like those that have arisen in the middle western United States (see chart at beginning of Chapter 3). What proceeds is the long process of sound erasure. Since sounds and colors share the same basic properties, we may comfort ourselves with the thought that death is generally prompt, bloodless” (213).
     
     
Dealing primarily with Chapter 7, On E.G. Roberts’ My Time with the Spanish Revisionists. Doubleday, 1997, with occasional biographical digressions.

Air, Roberts reminds us, is soundless during fog storms. The absorbent properties of low lying clouds being maybe their single salient feature. This explains the loss of children following a particularly loud rainfall. Their voices do not carry and are then “thrown” back to them, into their mouths (choking). Roberts himself gave a child in the decidable fog storm that late that year swept the better southern coast, where Roberts was, at that time, living.
     Roberts’ loss in part explains his outspoken devotion to Spanish Revisionism. Near the lower horn of that warm country lived the Revisionists, a silent but violent handful of hard mouths. Roberts spent weeks in this area, tasting the local jarred food, observing. It is said that Roberts wrote “if not the lot at least the pith of his major work [here], on a stump overlooking what used to be the Sea of Japan” (Pankerson, 206). On said stump you may still visit and find, in Roberts’ own hand, the message “Melissa I’m free” carved into the stump’s “face.” Yearly party barges venture here. Deposited elderlies have a see, and for three dollars bring home with them a hand-sized photo (Memory Image). The mysterious Melissa is of course Roberts’ mother, the famous Weather Solutionist, responsible, among other things, of creating the first documented Cancelling Wind. It was this that lent the Cloth Boom its fervor. Drive down any long boulevard in a city’s sunny region and behold the surge of cloth homes. Interestingly Roberts himself never lived in cloth. In his words: “My mother was wrong about many things. It was she who said I would never notify anyone of anything. My mute-swan, as she called me. Well, look at what happened to my name” (See Roberts’ In These Words I Have Lived, pg. 14).
     
–––––––
Peter Zuppardo has had work in Monkeybicycle, which he is proud of. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, my friend Greg and I went on a mission trip with our church to this place called Dungannon, Virginia which is in the very bottom left hand corner of the state. We were there mostly to help people re-tar their roofs for a week, but this cool scary old guy named Oscar led us all through the woods to this really cool natural rock water slide and we spent a lot of time there.
     On the way home, at a rest stop, Greg tried to do a backflip off a water fountain and landed on his back in a puddle really hurting himself. His shirt was soaked and all the clothes were packed away in the luggage van but I happened to have an extra shirt in my little backpack. It was my favorite shirt. It was a Detroit Lions Barry Sanders football jersey and I didn’t want to let Greg wear it but I didn’t really have much of a choice. I remember being really nervous the whole time he was eating his french fries and dipping them in BBQ sauce because I didn’t want anything to stain the jersey.
     A bunch of years later Greg and I went on a hiking trip in the Shenandoah Mountains in central Virginia. We hiked along a river for days and would set up camp in the trees, hanging out food from branches so that bears couldn’t get to them. We hiked all the way to an eighty foot tall waterfall expecting it to be cool but when we got there, there were people everywhere pretty much ruining it, so Greg and I scaled the rocks to the side and made our way to the top where there wasn’t anyone at all. We were lounging in a really cold little pool for a while off to the side and then Greg got bored and started walking around. I didn’t see him for a while so I looked out and peered over the edge and there he was all the way down below standing where the water ended up. He gave me a thumbs up and I went back to lounging until a half hour later he was back near the top yelling out my name so I gathered my stuff and made my way over to the side trail where he was and then he told me that he had slipped and fallen right off the top and all the way down the waterfall to the pool below. I couldn’t believe it. “I thought you saw me and that’s why you looked over the ledge,” he said. “That’s why I gave you the thumbs up.”
     “I had no idea at all,” I said and then after a minute or two I asked him if it was fun at least.
     “I lost my glasses,” he said, “but when I got to the bottom and stood up there was this guy just sitting in the water in his lawn chair staring at me. After he realized I had fallen he said, ‘I just thought you was one of those thrill seekers.’”
     

Turtle Story

A few years back I was living on a sustenance farm in South Carolina not far from this little town called Pickens which is way out there in the North-West corner of the state right near the Smokey Mountains, across the way from Tennessee. I spent every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday working on the farm, just tending to the green beans and the tomatoes and stuff, and every Tuesday and Thursday working about ten miles away helping this guy named Matthew build a straw bale house. When my dad tells people this story he likes to make a joke about the three little pigs, and how I must never have learned anything from that tale. Anyway, this guy Matthew didn’t know anything about construction or about straw bale houses or farming or anything. He grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C. and went to college to become a statistician or something like that, but one day he was riding his bike and got hit by a car pretty bad. He became a paraplegic and was in the hospital and therapy for a long time and one day while in his hospital bed, he saw an article in a magazine about straw bale houses so he decided to take the money he got from the settlement and buy himself some land and build a house.
     So he went about and learned some things from books and talked to some people who had done it before and he got himself out of the hospital and fixed up with one of those cars that you can drive with your hands, and a nice wheelchair. He bought land in South Carolina because it was pretty cheap and there were far more lenient rules about what kind of structure you were allowed to build, and he went to it. He paid people to lay the foundation and get the frame up, but then he decided to do the rest of the work with volunteers, which is what I was. He paid me a stipend of a hundred dollars a week, which came out to something like five bucks an hour. And I liked the work, it was pretty interesting and I got to solve lots of problems and come up with good ideas on how to do things, but Matthew was pretty picky about what ideas he thought were good ones and what he thought weren’t good. Mostly his ideas were good ones and anyone else’s weren’t. But I can understand that I guess, wanting to be in control of the house you’re building, that’s fine and all, but he also had real problems dealing with his volunteers. I was there helping him only about two years after he’d had the accident and he seemed to still have a sort of entitlement complex, like the world owed him something, and maybe it did, but he wasn’t too nice to people sometimes and he would throw a lot of fits. Like if he had an idea for something and he wanted you to implement it. I would try and if it didn’t work out I would explain to him why and how it needed to be tweaked or something, and half the time he would just huff and huff and then wheel himself away saying, “If I could just get up there and do it myself, but I can’t.”
     After a while, I was his only volunteer left which I didn’t mind because he seemed more open to other ideas when there wasn’t anybody else there to hear him concede his, but when we’d break for lunch he would often start talking about something like dwarf apple trees and end up spilling his guts about how he was afraid he’d never find someone to love him because it would be a lot of work for them.
     On my way home from his place one day I saw a little box turtle crossing the road in front of me so I stopped my car and watched it. I must have been there two minutes just watching it and then a few cars started to pile up behind me, then a few more minutes, a few more cars. Eventually they started beeping at me and I went to make a motion in the rearview mirror that I was waiting for a turtle to cross but I didn’t know what kind of motion to make so I just threw my arms up and shrugged and pointed at the road in front of me.
     

Cat Funeral

Another thing that happened while I was living in South Carolina is we had a funeral for the cat. They had this orange tabby cat who was really old. She had mange and smelled horrible and could barely even eat her food. It had been that way for quite some time they told me, long before I got there even. They figured she would just die naturally one of those days out in the woods somewhere but she always came on back in the morning. I don’t think she ever left. I think she just crawled under the deck every day and came out only to try to eat something. For some reason they decided to finally have her put to sleep. Maybe it was just that I was asking questions about her and they started to feel bad or something. Like, “Oh, yeah, her. She’s still here? Huh, how about that.” I wasn’t trying to say they should put her to sleep or anything, I was just curious about her.
     But they took her into town to the vet and had her euthanized and then they brought the body back and came knocking on the cabin door with her. I answered the door and they said the wanted to have a little ceremony for her and would like for me to be a part of it so I said sure and I followed them down the hill and out to a little clearing near the utility shed. Jamie dug a hole and started to wrap the cat in an old towel he found. Ellen was crying. She stopped him and said, “Can’t we find something nicer to put her in?”
     “She’s just going into the ground,” Jamie said and then stopped himself and said, “Okay, yeah, I’ll find an old shawl or something,” and he did. It was black and white. They wrapper her up and laid the cat into the ground and we each shoveled a little bit of dirt on top of her. Then Ellen handed me a book and asked if I could read a poem from it, for the occasion. I took the book and looked at it, it was a collection of poems by Wallace Stevens, this old poet guy from the early nineteen hundreds who I barely knew. I flipped around through the pages to try and find something but it was taking too long so I just picked a poem and read it and it happened to be just about the worst possible poem for the occasion. I’ll find it for you.
     
Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
     
–––––––
Matthew Savoca was born in 1982 in Pennsylvania, and now lives in New York and PA where he works as a carpenter. Publishing Genius will put out his novel “I don’t know,” I said in 2013.

Three men hang as their captor looks on. The artist Francisco de Goya made the Simple Noose famous in his Disasters of War series.
     
The Noose will dredge up a bitter, all-knowing filth (A Simple Noose in a tree makes the specter of a many-armed death).
     
The Noose is surrounded by walls and held aloft over mud.
     
If the Simple Noose were a rose, and grew from the ground straight to the sky, in wild green fields, a breeze would blow them sideways, ripping them from their roots and tossing their seedlings onto the hot steaming pavement of a nearby road.
     
To loosen: The gentle hand of the Noose can soothe one to a blessed sleep, where every dream is a relief, and the caress of darkness is an answered prayer.
     
     
     
Slim Beauty Knot
     
The Slim Beauty Knot refers to every longing of man and woman recorded throughout history. It is the longing for a moment free from time and its cold meter. It is the pained desire for a place with no loss.
     
The Slim Beauty Knot ties down all things wanted and loved so they will never be missed.
     
It is the lightest knot, and the most forgiving. The Slim Beauty Knot holds you and never forgets you.
     
The Slim Beauty Knot has dark eyes.
     
It is the quiet, warm breath between happening and appreciating.
     
It is a length of rope treated with wax and made to last forever.
     
     
     
–––––––
Sam Ramos is from Austin, Texas and is seeking his Creative Writing MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He’s been published in Hobart, Jettison Quarterly, and Empire Builder, among others, and is currently working on a novel about love and violence.

Patient Zero’s room is a science fiction collector’s wet dream. There are action figures and The Twilight Zone DVDs and mint-condition Golden Age comic books stacked on all the shelves. A sonic screwdriver replica blinks on the desk, which itself seems to be modeled after some late 70′s idea of what a spacecraft should look like. Old movie posters plaster the walls: Back to the Future and Blade Runner and Planet of the Apes. Robot print sheets are stretched over the bed. A basic chemistry set sits underneath the mattress gathering dust.
     She was a good girl, the mother says, hiccupping into the father’s shoulder. She always wanted to be around for the end of the world. It was the one thing she could never stop talking about—
     Wait, the documentarian interrupts. The cameras aren’t running yet.

THE STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER

“I can tune pianos,” he says. “I can tune pianos and clean French horns—did you ever wonder how people get to the little valves?” He smiles, revealing teeth that flash in the low light. “That’s my secret. Not gonna put myself out of a job.”
     The repair shop is dark and cramped. The walls are covered with cracking, yellowed wallpaper. A bulb swings from the ceiling as the fan in the corner sputters and clicks. There are no windows. The only other light in the room streams from the glow of bright optic fiber. It threads through the base of a bassoon and weaves in and out of its splintered keypads, a glowing exoskeleton that makes the grains of wood stand out in stark relief.
     The repairman stands in the doorway to the back of the shop. He’s wearing dirty jeans and an old shirt that says “WILSON MIDDLE SCHOOL MARCHING BAND” in big, block letters. There are oily streaks on his hands and clothing from where he was just greasing up a tuba.
     He looks at me and then at the bassoon-lamp. “An eighth-grade kid dropped it,” he says, smiling again. “It cost ten thousand dollars.”

NUMBERS

I’ve been counting all morning. It’s exhausting, but it gives me something to do. Number of people in the church: ninety-nine, plus one for the body. What a nice, round number. How perfect. Number of figures in the stained-glass windows: five. One of them is supposed to be a Saint, maybe Francis of Assisi, but the artist’s rendering makes him look like a woman, all long hair and flowers and shit. Number of people in flip-flops: zero. I guess that’s supposed to be a sign of respect. It’s too bad. Maria loved flip-flops. She would’ve liked to see some here.
     I count the number of people in my family named Maria. There’s the one in the casket, and my mom’s sister and my dad’s mother and my dad’s third cousin and my grandfather’s first cousin and my first cousin on my mom’s side who’s only seven and keeps screaming in the church, but there are still more Marias so I keep counting and I think I stop at eight, which is odd because there are definitely more Marias in this family but I can’t think of them right now, so I start counting Johns because there’s my second cousin and my grandfather’s brother who’s my great uncle and my grandmother’s brother who’s my other great uncle and my dad’s brother who’s just my regular uncle and that other John who’s giving a eulogy-type thing right now at the lectern, but I can’t remember how I’m related to him at the moment. I’ll think of it later.
     Amount in dollars I paid for these pumps, the ones that are killing the arches of my feet: seventy. They’re Nine West’s, from the new spring collection, round-toed with five-inch heels and one-inch platform, non-skid soles. I think about sliding them right off. Maria would’ve liked that, but the other Marias who are still alive and breathing would consider it inappropriate, so I keep them on. Instead, I count the poppies lining the pews.

–––––––
Lucy Miao is a student at Johns Hopkins University. She prefers texting over phone calls and enjoys long walks on the internet. This is her first time being published.

–––––––
Sarah Jean Alexander has a degree in Journalism from Towson University and spends her time writing from her apartment in Baltimore. Her pieces are scattered throughout the internet. You can find more from her at sjwritten.wordpress.com.

The wifely woman and I always talked about our parents like a warning; what happened to me could happen to you, too. Our families were always one-upping each other’s crazy. But this time, the wifely woman said, “They worry.” She never defended my mother; we’d even given her her own superhero name, The Eroder, as in confidence, to go with her superpower. Suddenly she was supposed to be The Grandma. The wifely woman said, “Don’t you understand, a little?” I wanted her to clarify, but I could see my shaky footing getting shakier. Later, she stood by the sleeping kid and said, “He’s your bastard, why do I care more about him than you do?”

It Looked Like a Vibrator

I watched the boy play with the cat, in and out of a box. I had another assignment for work and I thought, kids and pets will go gaga! My product slumped in the corner, less interesting than its container. I thought, a break from kids and pets, no one will try to steal it! How could I sell what a kid couldn’t see as potential? I had to think: what was missing from innocence? The wifely woman came home and I recalled when she used to take off her clothes as she entered. Maybe I’d glimpsed an end of “selling it.”

We Didn’t Know Much About Children

I took the boy to the park wrapped in the wifely woman’s idea of warmth. He barely had room to shiver. The other kids played open-necked until they steamed. There was a half hour before the sun went down, and the boy believed in efficiency: his mother, death, etc. We’d accepted his lacks since we knew that half the bad genes were mine. We knew little about his mom. Sometimes I could see my dad in his disappointment.

The Wifely Woman Won the Bet

The boy was cutest when he was asleep, not being his own worst enemy, not comparing us to his mother. We watched his lips curl, his arms shudder. When his breath deepened, I wanted to bet on his dreams. Asleep, he was more expressive of fears and desires. The wifely woman bet happiness, of course—or, she said, escapism. I bet on his toughness, a furrowed brow. I bet he couldn’t get away from who he was. He blew out his cheeks and flapped his arms like a drowner. She shook him awake. He said he dreamed he could fly if he held his breath, which had us puzzled for metaphor.

Inheritance, Non-genetic #1

So I got the job, and for getting it I inherited a stack of papers one could call an office. I had no clue the color of the floor, I mean. For a mess of a man, I was organized. I hated clutter. My first week was a literal wash. I let the boy come in once his school let out, and he shredded like he could kill the past. I liked what it said about him, how he weathered the stares from coworkers who knew I’d never mentioned a son. His existence spat on the existence of the past.

Inheritance, Non-genetic #2

I paid the boy attention for the space he cleared, impressed by this silent exposure. I couldn’t get his mom out of my head—in the hospital, she’d been dirty with death. But maybe that was why he tidied with vengeance. I imagined Bruce Lee kicking the stacks of papers, exploding them on impact. The boy did one better. He put them in their place, like a movie about redemption. I was surprised by the sway of cleanliness, though I knew Christians who swore their showers on God.

When in Rome

Randy and I went to a Raiders game to remember losing. Or maybe because I wanted to lose in something I wasn’t playing. We watched the football scoot between gladiators, waiting for a lion to snatch a leg. One of the boys (they were boys now, younger than us) fell in a heap and didn’t rise. The crowd cheered. They were distracted from the score. They wanted bloodless blood. “We could still win,” Randy said. I said, “Not us.” He said the kid who’d gone down was important to the other team. I hadn’t been paying attention. The lion gnawed at my hip and I thought, this is my one day off.

What I Meant When I Said Sold Out

Sometimes at work, I thought, what is the point of work? Sometimes, I thought this wasn’t a symptom of work but a symptom of being human. I bossed the office now. I brought a cake to show I wasn’t serious. “I didn’t know,” Dumbo ears said. “You mean business.” I left it in the box from the supermarket. I wanted this to say, I care about you as far as buying and selling. As they ate, I ate my hate out.

––––––––
Matthew Salesses is the author of The Last Repatriate (Nouvella) and two chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). He is a columnist and Fiction Editor at the Good Men Project. Other stories in this series have or will appear in the Literarian, Puerto del Sol, NANO Fiction, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. http://matthewsalesses.com

––––––––
Tara Williams has an MFA in nonfiction from George Mason University, and her work has appeared in Quarterly West and Seeding the Snow. She lives in George, South Africa.

“What do you reckon’s in there?” Ernest said, staring at the crate.
     They’d been watching the ship for an hour, and there was still no sign of a crew.
     ”I don’t know,” Gus finally said, “but whatever it is, it can’t be good.”
     ”How the hell do you figure that?”
     ”How many times you seen a ship come in with no one on it but a box?” Gus said. “And the cats, what do you make of that? There isn’t even a rat boarded that ship. By now they’d be crawling all over the place.”
     Ernest stared across the water.
     ”I don’t know. Seems to me this here’s an opportunity. Could be treasure in there, a shipment of diamonds or something.”
     ”Could also carry some plague or an alien creature. Look at it. Don’t you think it’s weird nothing has moved since it came in? Even the breeze stopped blowing.”
     Ernest stared at the box. Gus was right, it was mighty calm.
     ”I googled the port name on the ship,” Gus said. “Nukehavistan is a former Soviet Republic suspected of having nuclear weapons.”
     ”Nukes?”
     ”That’s what I thought, but it doesn’t add up,” Gus said, staring at the glowing phone. “Says here it’s a land-locked country.”
     Gus read the entry out loud, struggling with the strange words: “The terrain consists mostly of flat stretches of gypsum and alkali, occasionally marked with deep craters and twisted metal structures. The capital is Silograd, famous for the Great Silo, a towering structure that can be seen from space.”
     He shut off his phone before the battery ran out. “If this is right and the country’s landlocked, there wouldn’t be no ships there. If it’s not, who the hell would put a single crate on a big old freighter and sail it from Russia to America?”
     They stared at the ship, its prow rusted brown. In the grass, not a blade was moving.

It rained all that night. Gus crawled under the tarpaulin with his guitar, and Ernest sat up in his rain gear, staring at the ship, water dripping down his hood.
     That Gus is a goddamned wuss, he thought. His big dream is to hop an empty freight train —or as he liked to say, grab an armful of boxcars on a hobo special— and ride all the way to Californi-a, as stupid a dream as Ernest had ever heard. There, he’d play some cornball yodeling songs on the Venice boardwalk and think that he could make enough money to get discovered and buy a Mustang convertible and get back his wife that left him a million years back. Then he could throw out the divorce papers he kept all wrapped up in plastic, and they’d live like one goddamned happy family just so he could be whipped again, the sorry bastard.
     As Ernest stared at the crate on the freighter, Gus’s dream seemed stupider than ever. And to think he, Ernest, had bought into it. Forget Hollywood. Whatever was in that crate could probably buy him a big mansion on Star Island, so he wouldn’t have to work and he could drink all day and screw whores at night, as many as he wanted. He could even buy one of those flat-screen TVs they used to watch games on in the store window when they lived on skid row, before Gus dragged them out to this goddamned toilet to become sea stiffs.
     So what if there was a nuke on the ship, or some deadly plague or something? You could always sell that shit and make out like bandits. And if it was plague, they’d all be six foot under by now in Gus’s bone orchard.
     Ernest dug in the pockets of his raincoat and pulled out a half-smoked cigarette he’d picked up under the bridge. He struck a match that miraculously stayed dry, but before he lit up, he snuffed out the flame.
     Something was moving in the brush near the ship. Ernest lay low in the hull of the dinghy, moving as little as possible so as not to disturb the water and cause ripples around his hiding place. He waited a few seconds, then peered over the side.
     It was hard to make out, but it looked like dark, naked bodies were moving in the brush. Then through the patter of the rain, he heard another sound —drums, beating hypnotic, syncopated, over and over until the sky lit up — and he realized he had lost track of time.
     The rain was falling harder now, and he could see the bodies shaking and turning. They were dancing around a small, grizzled man in a sagging loincloth that made him look more Hindu than Haitian. He was bony like Gandhi, but with the most evil grin on his face that Ernest had ever seen. And he was looking straight at him.
     Ernest lay flat in the hull and held his breath. You can’t let this scare you off, he thought. If anything, it proved that what was in that box was more precious than treasure or diamonds. He could sense it. It held not only wealth, but great power, and it was all his if only he could climb aboard.

By morning the rain had stopped, and the water mirrored a cloudless sky. The wind, which had never blown during the rains, was still dead. There was a silence all around the ship, as on a Sunday or a holiday. Gus checked his phone to see what day it was, but his battery was dead.
     ”I had a weird dream,” he said, and started relaying how he had been visited by a voodoo witch doctor in the night, when he noticed Ernest was gone.
     He stared at the freighter, thinking maybe his sidekick was up to one of his schemes, but there was not a soul on board. Even the cats, which should have been crawling all over the empty deck by then, were nowhere in sight. In fact, Gus hadn’t seen them since the ship sailed in.
     Chances were, he might need the phone to call emergency rescue if they didn’t get a move on and head down the river soon. Gus rummaged under the tarp and hooked his power inverter to the old car battery he used to charge up his phone or fire up the hot plate, but there was no current. Probably wet from the rains, he figured. He’d have to wait for it to dry.
     Gus put the inverter and battery out in the sun and checked the line he’d tossed into the water. It was slack. When he pulled it in, there was nothing on the end but a Styrofoam cup caked with mud. Though the river was filthy, and you could barely see two feet below the surface, Gus usually snagged a catfish or, if he was lucky, a snook to fry up and eat for a couple of days. Maybe the freighter had scared away the fish too.
     Gus was baiting his hook with a smushed worm when he spotted Ernest coming through the brush.
     ”Where were you?” he asked.
     ”Can’t a man take a piss without being read the riot act?”
     ”Sorry, I was just worried,” Gus said, and started to relay his dream.
     ”That’s just superstition, like your half-assed notions about what’s in that goddamned box.”
     ”But the cats, and the fish, I pulled–”
     ”Fuck the cats, I say we go up on that ship. Whatever’s in there’s got to be valuable. Besides, what the hell do we have to lose? I’m sick of being a sailor stiff.”
     ”I don’t think that’s a good idea. I was going to call emergency res–”
     ”And walk away from a million bucks, just like that?”
     ”Maybe we should move further up the river, that box is giving me the heebie-jeebies.”
     ”Maybe you should get us some supplies at the corner store,” Ernest said, feeling good that for once he was the one giving the orders.
     ”They’re probably closed. I think it’s a holiday,” Gus said.
     ”They’re goddamned Haitians. Go, and I’ll wait here.”
     Gus sensed Ernest was up to no good. Why would he so easily agree to head downriver and leave the freighter behind? He’d become greedy and couldn’t be trusted. Gus decided he would circle back around and watch Ernest from the brush.

From his hiding place, Gus watched his partner drag a long rope, coil it and hide it in the tall grass near the dinghy. The rope seemed new. Ernest must have stolen it from another docked ship when Gus was asleep. He probably also stole the large hook, which he brought to the same spot and also hid.
     Gus waited for Ernest to return to the dinghy before heading back. When he climbed onboard, Ernest was suspicious.
     ”Where you been? And where are the supplies?”
     ”The store was closed,” Gus said.
     ”You’re a goddamned liar. That store was open this morning, and they don’t close till nighttime.”
     Ernest stared out at a dark cloudbank blowing in. “Guess we can’t leave without the supplies,” he said. “Besides, there’s a storm brewing. No use moving on now. We’ll need to hunker down and wait it out. Why don’t you play us a song?”
     Gus felt Ernest was up to something, but he also felt he should do what he said if he wanted to avoid trouble.
     He unzipped the case and pulled out his guitar. It was the same guitar he had played in Annie’s apartment when they were still married, before he lost his job and the drinking took over.
     Gus strummed a few chords to make sure it was in tune and broke into what had become his favorite song.
          Tonight as I lay on the boxcar
          Just waiting for a train to pass by
          What will become of the hobo
          Whenever his turn comes to die.
     Ernest watched him sing, and dragged slowly on his half-smoked cigarette. He’d heard the stupid song a million times, but this time, he wasn’t listening. He was figuring how to toss that iron claw so it would hitch to a ledge or pole on the deck of the ship, and he could hoist himself up the rope. Gus stared at the clouds and kept singing.
          Will there be any freight trains in Heaven
          Any boxcars in which we might hide
          Will there be any tough cops or brakemen
          Will they tell us that we cannot ride.
     Ernest took his eyes from the crate and stared at that phony bastard Gus singing about hobos and freight trains. What the hell was a brakeman, anyway? And what did he know about hobos? Probably had the hots for him, the queer. Just look at him, his face all delicate and sweet-like when he yodeled like a goddamned girl.
          Will the hobo chum with the rich man
          Will we always have money to spare
          Will they have respect for the hobo
          In that land that lies hidden up there
     Gus finished singing, gave the guitar a little strum and looked up. The last thing he saw was Ernest’s contorted face, eyes filled with rage.

It was pouring. Ernest had checked Gus’s pulse, and sure enough, the bastard was dead, which meant the dinghy was his now. All he had to do was dispose of the body.
     He had been careful to deliver the blow with a rock, so there’d be no DNA or fingerprints pointing back at him. But Gus wouldn’t die, so he’d used the claw to put him away. Now his plan to board the ship was ruined. He needed to get rid of the evidence. All of it.
     Lucky for Ernest it was dark, and the rain was coming down, and no one could see what he was up to. He tied the legs with the rope, which he coiled around the body, then fastened the bloody claw with the sailor’s knot Gus had showed him.
     Gus was much heavier than expected for being so small, and it took effort to toss him overboard. The boat rocked as he splashed into the water, then rose to the surface, where he floated belly up, his mouth open as if he was still singing.
     Ernest grabbed the claw and heaved it over the edge. It sank with a plop, sucking the body down with it. No big loss, Ernest thought. There was no way he could have tossed the heavy claw up on the deck, anyway. He watched the blood spread and the water settle and the bubbles explode in the rain.
     All night, Ernest watched the water. He was torn. He should leave the scene of the crime, but the box on the ship kept him tied there. There was nothing he could do but wait and plot a new way to climb on board. For the first time since the ship sailed in, he realized how tired he was. He hadn’t slept in two days.
     Ernest watched the fat drops drip down his hood and form a pattern, like the rhythm of the drums he had heard the night before, when Gus was alive and everything seemed different. He closed his eyes and listened. Soon, he was asleep.

Ernest awoke before dawn. The first thing he did, even before checking if the body had surfaced, was scout the freighter. The box was still there. What’s more, hanging from its side was a rope just like the one he’d used to tie Gus. It couldn’t be the same one, but it called for him to climb.
     Ernest unhitched the dinghy, pulled out the oars and began rowing toward the ship. It looked even bigger the closer he got. The brown prow was so rusted it was a miracle it could stay afloat, and its gray side looked like a sky just before it rained.
     Not bothering to dock, Ernest grabbed the rope from the dinghy and began to climb, using his legs to push off the side. When he reached the top, the sun was rising. He scoped the deck, but it was empty except the box sitting in the center.
     As he approached, he saw the box was actually a crate, and it was smaller than it seemed across the river. He expected it to be sealed or at least padlocked, but when he reached the front, he was surprised to find that it had been left open.
     Ernest couldn’t believe he was really there, how far he’d come from skid row. Gus was gone, he was a free man now, free, and probably incredibly, unbelievably goddamned wealthy. He found it hard to stay calm. Ernest reached for the edge, closed his eyes, made a final wish and flung the crate open. Slowly, he opened his eyes and he felt faint, as if about to drop through the deck and just keep on falling.
     It was empty. Ernest felt that he was being watched, from the passing boat and the plane overhead and the dark figure across the river. He dropped to his knees and crawled into the crate. At any moment, the sailor stiffs would call for him with their guns.
     All day Ernest crouched in that darkness, sweating from the heat, listening for the footsteps. Only they didn’t come.

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Jorge Casuso recently lived on the Miami River. He is currently staying by the Port of LA. Samples of his work can read at jorgecasuso.com

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“Hobo’s Meditation” by Jimmie Rodgers © ’32 Peer International

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Kari Larsen’s chapbook, Say you’re a fiction, is forthcoming in the summer of 2012 from Dancing Girl Press.

     It was his 68th birthday and he wore his Annapolis tie for it. Savannah Anna had taken out her pink Easter Sunday dress and worked the wrinkles right out, then she had tried, fat hope against hope, to call Slim’s brother, some twenty-five miles away, over for Friday lunch—and more to the point, called him to come out for his own little brother’s big day—but the brother was not willing to come out their way, and categorically so.
     A drizzle fell and the weatherman expected more.
     The gravel parking lot had not yet filled at 11:30 and Savannah Anna figured not many would come to eat on account of the gray skies. She knew how older biddies could get. Her mother was one of those types—a woman who couldn’t even use a computer, a waiting-to-die sharecropper, a real nothing much, just something there sucking at the government tit.
     She never wanted to get that way for her Slim. She wanted to maintain vigor.
     In the cramped foyer of Robanna’s, a couple wizened men paid for the buffet at the cash register and toyed with toothpicks in their mouths. The umbrella bin was full. Puddles had collected on the parquet.
     Slim waited and scraped the back of his left hand with his other hand’s thumbnail.
     Robanna, proprietress, burst through the kitchen door— she a big blitzing pile of steamed plates and blonde hair— and nodded her hello over to Savannah Anna; she smiled at Slim, but Savannah Anna reckoned she knew of his 68th birthday and was trying with her soul to show some Christ. Frenziedly, quickly, she tabbed in things at the touchscreen, her extra-long lavender nails glistening under the ceiling fan light. Then she motioned the two of them over to their favorite and accustomed seats, spread the shining tablecloth, sighed, and let out, “Happy Birthday there, Slim!”
     “Bitch, he said back. “Unloving bitch!”
     Savannah Anna looked down at the tablecloth and started to count up all the blue checkers. She was hoping they had pulled pork spread on the buffet bar. And a fried chicken breast would be nice, she imagined. Her hunger gnawed up in her.
     “Hanoi, damnit, Hanoi,” Slim continued. He thumbnailed hard behind his gold wristwatch, deep into the sweated crevices.
     “Supposed to be getting Mountain Dew next week,” Robanna said. “Excited about that.”
     “Yes,” Savannah Anna said. “Something for the kids besides tea, I suppose.” She hoped they had made hush puppies as well. She liked hush puppies very much.
     “Get to the business!” Slim Hicks said. “Get to it,” he repeated, to no one in particular.
     “Danny said he’s gettin’ some cod and and some spot for ya’ll up there soon,” Robanna said. She lit a menthol and adjusted the pheasant clock on the wall above Savannah Anna’s head. Her thick hips swayed back and forth.
     Slim rolled up the Donsville Times in his grip and smacked Robanna where it counted, with vim, with grin.
     “Now, Slim, it’s your birthday,” Savannah Anna sung. “Shouldn’t you let Ms. Robanna give you your own spankings?”
     “Unloving bitch!” Slim shouted back.
     Savannah Anna stood and looked around the two dining rooms. She saw Granny Pinckney in the corner of the rear room with her son. She could not remember her son’s name, but she knew he had been a minister until he embezzled and went to Colombia or some other such land. Savannah Anna, in the spirit of tradition, usually waited for her Slim to walk up to the buffet first, and she’d follow behind, but she did not get the sense he was going to move presently. She did not know if he would maybe like a birthday cake. She remembered he did not react well to much sucrose.
     As she ate her deviled crab and her gravied rice, she tried to maintain a mousy quiet. That was what Slim had called it all those years ago; he’d said: “Eat with a mouse’s quiet.” And she had done her best, whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner, she had done her entire best.
     “Knock it down!” Slim said from behind his newspaper.
     Savannah Anna wondered why he had not gone up yet to the buffet islands to get what he wanted. She wondered if she needed to be doing anything special on account of his day.
     “Knock it down,” he repeated softly.
     The bell hanging above the entrance door clanged. Savanahh Anna knew how much her Slim hated the bell at Robanna’s place, for, sometimes, late on Friday night when they were both sitting on the back porch—she with her cold zinfandel, he with his beer—sometimes, he would silently mutter something about the bell on the door at the restaurant, how it stirred him, how it got up in him.
     “Coca-Cola best thing for it,” Slim said. He tapped his grimed fingernails across the tablecloth and looked up at the foyer. “I suppose I’ll get a little salad first,” he said, standing, beginning.
     Alone, Savannah Anna Hicks felt as though she could eat more forcibly while her husband piled up at the buffet, and so, she munched and she crunched and she smacked and she lapped. She nearly laughed.
     A new girl—a young girl, maybe even Donsville High School fodder and farrow, came up to check on the Hicks table. Savannah Anna told the girl that they were content with their food and that the tea was especially good. Savannah Anna was quite certain she had never seen the young waitress in Robanna’s place before.
     Slim Hicks devoured his shrimp. Slim Hicks devoured his catfish stew.

     The birthday cake had not been Savannah Anna’s idea—she knew better.
     Robanna, Savannah Anna thought.
     She could see a bit of lightning among the clouds through the transom window.
     Slim would not touch the cake.
     “Sodomy!” he yelled. “A horrible thing is happening,” he asserted.
     The bell under the front transom rang. Clang-clank, clang-clank.
     Slim pounded the butt of his fork down on the table and then wiped some drivel from his lip. “Horrible,” he sang again.
     The young girl had a name. Savannah Anna had asked about her, about Kaley Warrington. She was pale and well-breasted and shadowy; she played bass guitar and the standup bass to boot, she took little pills, loved men who could fish and men who could scrap—all of this coming from Robanna in an underbreath gossip, mentholated by cigarette puffs and in the sharpest of staccatos.
     And the girl came by again with napkins and the tea jug.
     “Rice tastes old!” Slim exclaimed. “Muddled up.”
     Savannah Anna nudged the cake toward him. The candles had long since died.
     Kaley Warrington spoke: “Would you like some coffee with your cake maybe? Maybe, sir? Maybe?”
     It came across to Savannah Anna as the most horrific whine down within the girl’s voice. Her lungs let loose like an industrial dishwasher, like a bullet train on the midnight burst—it pierced through the thick brown warm air of Robanna’s. Savannah Anna clenched her teeth. Savannah Anna braced herself.
     The transom bell clanged again and danced under the soft sunlight.
     When Slim Hicks looked up at the stream of coffee, he smiled. He took it in and became witness; he saw the beautiful pour, the flamingo arm, the shine of lips, the full promise of the new.
     Slim Hick turned 68 years old that year.

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Ric Hoeben homes it in eastern South Carolina, holds an M.F.A. from the University of Florida, and hopes his recently finished literary-crime novel, Oceans of Gold, will be a real smash.

     I ride Crumb’s gold couch over her mustard carpet, taking in a vast empire. The corner of my eye registers wandering ants, people. I watch them drag Brownie back and forth all day, stare at Crumb’s stacked toes, and pull the skin tags on her neck. I stretch them out and let them go again. She tells me about the Haints over breakfast and the crossword. She tells me to stop and look both ways before the railroad tracks (J.R. was killed at a crossing); to keep my hands inside the window (J.R. had his cut off by a tree); to eat or sleep if there’s anything wrong with me; to not care what I do as long as it’s honest work; to not befriend coworkers; and to walk in backwards so my glasses won’t fog up. I know now that one day my pee-pee will get hard like her brick house. I hold on to the hands of time until Little Westclox tells me I have to go. It’s a blessing she’s not around to see me become a monster.
     Everything in life is free. Student loans pay my way to Jamaica. As soon as I get off the plane I buy everything they sell me until I run out of cash. Come home a lot lighter from trading my name-brand clothes for blow. They call me R2K because I’m Ryan for the new millennium. Hit the credit card tent on campus and sign up for all seven. Free two liter and COLLEGE tee-shirt coming my way. In less than two weeks I got game. Strut into Man Alive telling them I’m going to a rave in Chicago. Get the shiny, shiny pants with platform heels. Ooh that polyester feels so silky close to my freshly shaved chest. Tan every other day. Swear my bleach blond hair came in before Eminem’s. Dose twenty mill Paxil, drink Erk and Jerk, chief blunts, and shove so much stuff in my nose I have to tell everyone it’s a cold because of my sniffles. D.J.’s and kegs charged to the game. Cash advances for strippers, bills, pizzas, gas, and rent. All you have to do is make minimum payment. So they bleed me dry twice a week separating the plasma from red blood cells. Get twenty on the first visit and forty-something on the second. On my birthday, I drive my car into the side of our house. I’m bald, broke and alone in my waterbed listening to the cassette tape of me interviewing Crumb back in the Eighties.

     I grew up in Olive Hill, Kentucky, where they speak in tongues, roll around on the floor, break into fits of hysteria, and fondle the occasional snake. They worship trees. They believe in the Haints. It’s all a bunch of foolishness. From Olive Hill to Soldier we would walk three miles to school, sometimes with no shoes. Daddy only bought one pair a year. If they wore out, then they wore out. We joined the service to get out of there. It broke my heart when I rode past home, waving goodbye on my way to Baltimore. Henry blew up in England. Paul was dumped off too deep in icy waters and had to drag Clyde to shore. I was a WAC in Baltimore. One day I became so exhausted from work that I laid down to rest. One of the WAC’s woke me up to tell me the white phosphorous plant had exploded and I had to work twenty-four more hours. The bidies were badly burned and covered in white phosphorous. We stacked all of the white bidies outside the barracks. One bidie was badly burned but still alive. We used donor skin from all of us to repair her. She ended up looking like a patchwork quilt.
     Every time they play Taps I cried over the boys who never came home. Clyde was back on leave. I was stationed in Philadelphia. He hadn’t slept in days. We went to the movies so he could rest. They interrupted the movie with news that war was over. Everyone ran outside. We hugged and kissed and they drank all night. All of my brothers came back from the war. Henry brought back a box of chocolates from France for Maw. Chocolates were rare in those days due to the rationing. On Mother’s Day we gave Maw the chocolates. She had a bad reaction. I picked her up and drove towards Soldier. It was too late though. She died in my arms. Daddy’s heart gave out. I learn the three R’s:
     1. Reading
     2. Writing
     3. The road to New Castle
     My brothers begged me to stay. Ever since Mom died, I cooked and cleaned for them, but I took that train. Paul stayed in the shack and paid a dollar-a-month electricity bill for the rest of his life. He had one light bulb, listened to Hee-Haw once a week, dug holes for the outhouse, fetched water from the well, chopped wood, worked the tobacco. He was lucky to meet Pauline. Clyde lodged on his tired sofa with Goldie chewing plugs and Moon Pies. They gradually returned back to nature. Henry was buck wild. He’d come around every few years to raid my medicine cabinet and fall in the fireplace. I’d tie him up in bed sheets until the cough syrup wore off.
     I met your grandfather after he lifted off without an instructor. His crash landing made the paper. He was a pilot, welder, shepherd, Notary Public, calligrapher, and car repo-er. He fit a plane in his fenced-in yard. He also knew the Truth. The churches I went to were fussy, big, cold, and lonely. They weren’t for me. Russell took me to meeting in other people’s houses on Wednesdays and Sundays. Everybody stood up and spoke from a chapter in the Bible. The preachers called themselves workers. They gave up all their possessions to travel the world two and two together. The workers stayed with different brothers and sisters. I started to wear a dress with my hair in a bun. One Sunday we went to Pearl Lundy’s. I professed there. We married and I retired from The Perfect Circle. I never had to make sure that the radii were equal ever again.
     We had two kids. Your Mom had you during the Blizzard of ’78. They thought you had spinal meningitis. Whatever it was, it left you rail thin. We weren’t supposed to feed you, but that didn’t stop me. I brought every flavor of jar food known to man. You ate it all up and busted out the sides of your diaper. You were my first grandchild. Hanging on my clothesline did not get you switched. Your foolishness never meant no gallon of ice cream for you. You and your cousins stayed with me every summer. You all sat in the creek, wrote newspapers, played house, and gorged in your underwear on my gold couch. There were daily trips to Pic ‘N’ Save. As I dug through my purse, separating the wadded ones from balls of Kleenex, you played in the freezer. Frozen-over Polar Pops and boxes of broccoli chipped loose and slid down the back aisle. Dirty Diana tapped her three-inch-long Lee Press-On Nails by the flies swarming the deli display. Her cat eyes followed us out the door. We drove all over tarnation with the ceiling sagging on my bun, because you kids had unstuck the headliner.
     When I passed straight through the curly-q into oncoming traffic, your Mom gave you the keys. I continued to pay you twenty dollars to mow my lawn once a week even though I know you spent it on booze, cigarettes, and weed. I saw you less and less. You came over to bring me food now and then.
     On a midday delivery you found me on the floor behind my door. That was the last time I was home. Now I’m in a nursing home bed, ripping up my diaper, letting it snow.

     Crumb, I’m using your bathroom tonight. I pull out a National Enquirer from your bottom drawer. The scent is a mix of worn pantyhose and tissue paper. The crickets reach a fever pitch outside my window-view of nothing, where your strands of wild hair used to whip through the evening air as you ran off critters from your garden with a shotgun. I lean against the cold tile and flip through Amelia Earhart’s discovery on a small atoll. You waited fifty years for that moment. The porcelain beneath my feet takes me there. White hair overflows the pot where you kept your bun filling. I stick my finger in the hole, whirl it around, and keep the strands forever.

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Ryan B. Richey is a writer, painter, performer, half of Hannis Pannis, and a quarter of ED JR.

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xTx feels ashamed of things she does in private. To learn about these things visit her at www.notimetosayit.com.

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Matthew Thompson was born in northern Michigan and now lives in Seattle. His fiction, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in Unsaid, Everyday Genius, Used Furniture Review, elimae, The Collagist, Monkeybicycle, and Hobart, among others. He is concerned primarily with fiction writing and running long distances.

The day I started acting like I was worth a damn was the same day my car died five miles in the middle of nowhere off the highway. I walked to a gas station and I said, “Can you give me a jump?” The guy behind the counter said, “You don’t have a man in that car to help?” “No,” I said. I walked three more miles in the sun to a garage, I walked right into the shop, I stood under elevated cars, I asked the man, “Can you give me a jump? About three miles north.” He put me in his truck and I looked in the rearview, thinking about how the tow parts on these trucks remind me of the tin man. We got to my car, frozen. The man saw the look on my face, said, “This called a cable.”

All I Wanted To Do Was Dance

All I wanted to do was dance. I got a job working as a bartender in one of those clubs very corporate-employed people go to. Where they drink Red Bull and sweat out hair gel into all hours of the night. I didn’t even mind the bikini bottoms to be worn as uniform, what bothered me was the way the other women were so mean to each other in the bathrooms. I wanted to say, “It doesn’t matter the shade, it’s all the same lipstick,” but instead I was quiet while I washed my face and women scoffed each other over shoes. One of the DJs took a liking to me and now and then I’d sit on the couch behind his booth and this didn’t do much in the way of helping my popularity problem. The jealousy oozed like purple haze and I tried to say, “This isn’t my life, I’m a writer, this is an interlude in my life,” but didn’t get the chance, and saying so seemed like it would come out in another way and then I’d find myself saying, “That isn’t what I meant. I didn’t mean your life isn’t legitimate,” and so instead I poured drinks and tried not to cry while people stared at me, dancing, miserable.

Real Music

you say that you hate new york at 103 degrees I say no I love new york in the heat I can forget that I can’t forget, thick air gin in ribs slow moving no electricity for hours dirt hanging low sweat all over the place, hydrants busted up rainbows running through cab windshields wet feet a bag of oranges and two beers on the stoop roof dancing eye makeup rolling you kiss me in an alley I say this heat brings out the devil we need to run

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Nicolle Elizabeth is a five foot tall diva. She is the poetry editor in residence of Word Riot and has a bunch of fiction all over the place. Someday, she will become an astronaut.

I didn’t know who I was most days. How long, I’m not sure. I guess for years I looked at the spots and nails on my shaking hands and declared they must belong to someone else. I’d see the floral blouses and pant suits they dressed me in and insist I’d been crammed into someone else’s body.

     I wake on the porch swing. The honeysuckle is in bloom. I am me. All of me. Memories of me and Sal on the boardwalk, me in a blue and white striped bikini that would have scandalized Father. Lillian eating her first tootsie pop, the translucent brown smeared around her fat baby lips. The time I tried out for the part of Laurie, but something in my eyes and hips made the director cast me as Ado Annie, and all the secret pleasures of playing that part. I pranced and jiggled in that corset and hoop skirt and felt I was in a private cabaret.

     My hands are white and smooth. I touch my fingers to my face, run down to the river, legs pumping movements they haven’t imagined in years. I do a cartwheel in the clover and dandelions. I belt out a few lines from “I Can’t Say No.” The world is opening up green and lush around me, the smell of dew and grass is intoxicating. In every bird’s call, on every butterfly’s wing, the hum of possibility.

 
Chloe

The water is so cold. It fills my clothes. It gets into my nose and mouth. Everything is black. I try to find the out, bang on the ice.

     I become very still. I start to float. I float away from myself until I can see the puffy pink coat grandma got me for Christmas. My braids bob in the water. I can see the hole where I went in. I was so close to making it out. It doesn’t matter. I float up and up. I can see lights in the sky. There’s a blanket and dry clothes. A friendly bear gives me a bowl of Malt-o-meal. I am so happy.

 
Scarlet

I’ve had more than my fifteen minutes, but it’s been so long. A diva on her deathbed hardly resembles a diva at all. I lay drowning in sequins and chiffon. Each night, a different dress, each night, like I’m being swallowed whole—but this is the way to make sure the gods recognize me. They will know to put me in a womb where I can gather my strength, pop out and take the world anew. I don’t care if I slide out white or even a girl. I just need the lungs. I need the swagger.
     I lie perfectly still on my back, bring the silver cigarette holder to my lips. It’s going to happen—it has to happen. I whisper my mantra, praying the gods will hear me and grant me this wish. The song is over. I turn the page and begin again.

 
Tim

The dark carnival is real. The juggalos ride dirt bikes and four wheelers. Everyone’s snorting crank, smoking it, shooting it, so good. Everywhere you look, Faygo’s on tap in barrels. Everyone’s got their face makeup on. We all look so real, so like ourselves. We yip and holler and ride. The bitches don’t wear shirts. Just titties, titties, titties at the party where we’re all invited, where we all belong. No angry parents. No ex-girlfriends who are too good for you now with their uptight skirts and secretary jobs. No teachers, no punks, no gang-bangers, no sorority girls—just juggalos and juggalettes.

 
Detroit

My marble crumbles, chunks that break into rocks, that smash into shards, that flatten into grains. Other cities have removed my organs, taken my blood, sucked out my marrow that they slurp and inject into their own bones. Their spirits circle me with spread black wings. They rest on busted street lamps, beady eyes trained on the rest of my blood. They breathe my new, clean air into their lungs, hold it in. They shift restlessly, claw to claw, anxious for me to keel.
     They are too late.
     I am rising out of the ash left by the fires of industry. Injected with new blood of my own, I flower and bloom, I become legion. The asphalt cracks and crumbles like old scabs to reveal new, shiny flesh. I am more alive than I’ve been in decades. I thrive and grow, wilder, wilding. Their platelets travel to join my own, inject themselves into a breathing host.
     From the busted streetlamps, the others watch and tremble, peck at their lice. I am the new beginning. They cough and ruffle soot from their bodies. I feel for them, wish they’d join me. But they can’t see the new beginning, can’t understand. They don’t watch from trees, don’t notice the onions and garlic and watermelons in bloom. They don’t know how. They flex their talons on crumbling concrete and wait for a feast that will never be theirs.
 
––––––––––––
Harmony Neal died, then rose from the dead. There was no hullabaloo. She’s not bitter. She’s been published in recent issues of Gulf Coast, New Letters, Hobart, Cold Mountain Review, Curly Red Stories, and Prick of the Spindle.

The dog is burying an improvised explosive device in the sand. The .45 is strapped to the dog’s front paw. There is the sound of a jeep approaching. The dog frowns and unfolds a carpet over the IED, then runs to hide behind a rock.

INT. GETAWAY CAR

The cat is driving. In the back, the queen is biting the king. The king looks bored.

     QUEEN
So what, you don’t like being bitten any more?

     CAT
By the twenty-first century, the literature of cats and dogs had developed a tradition of indirection, wherein attention shifted away from the reality of cats and dogs to our cultural understanding of these animals.

DOG’s POV

The car grinds to a halt in front of the mat.

INT. CAR

     QUEEN
Why not sit on that mat for a while, kitty? You must be tired after all that driving.

Looking suspicious, as it gets out of the car and approaches the mat:

     CAT
By approaching cats and dogs with particular attention to the mechanisms by which they are represented, we lay bare story’s devices and deconstruct its received ideas.

The king and queen get out and stand behind the cat. Tense, dramatic music.

INSERT: THE CAT’S EYES.

They narrow to slits.

BACK TO SCENE

The dog runs out from behind the rock and bites the queen.

     QUEEN
Help me!

The queen dies.

     KING
We’ve been double-crossed.

The king dies of grief. The cat and the dog shake paws.

     DOG
We fooled ‘em into thinking you was the one going to get whacked. Now we can share the take from the hospital job fifty fifty.

     CAT
Oh yeah? Let me take a look at that gun.

The dog gives the cat the .45. The cat shoots the dog.

     CAT
Now everything in the getaway car is mine! Mine!

The cat sits on the mat. A sudden look of panic crosses its face as it remembers the IED.

OVERHEAD SHOT

The mat explodes. The car catches fire. We watch it burn furiously as the credits roll.

–––––––––––––
James Warner’s short fiction has appeared in KGB Bar Lit Magazine, Narrative, Night Train, and elsewhere. His novel All Her Father’s Guns was released this year by Numina Press. His website is www.jameswarner.net.

     Within a few days Michael’s house was gone. Bulldozed to the ground, the foundation exhumed and cleared, the whole plot made into a barren mound that showed sprigs of weeds. By the end of April, two-dozen homes had undergone the same. They sold without warning. Demolition crews arrived, riding canary yellow earthmovers. The noise was tremendous.
     One day, waiting to pay at a coffee-shop counter, I found myself a spectator of a debate about who was responsible. It started with a man and a woman who could’ve been married, so heartily did they disagree with each other.
     It was Ellen Regan, a middle-aged miser known for this sort of attitude. She carried herself with the inflated righteousness of a small-town school board member, which she happened to be.
     The man spoke again. He stabbed a finger at the air.
     A redhead kid laughed and nodded. He brushed the hair from his eyes, nodded at the man again, and reached once more to swat a strand of hair away (it seemed like he could repeat this loop of gestures for hours, and we would sit there helplessly watching; since the demolitions had started, we had all become voyeurs, watching everyone for signs — none inconsequential — of who was next).
     I felt no allegiance to any of the arguments, about how the world around us was disintegrating. For years a kind of exodus had been in progress. Everywhere houses were being foreclosed on, the town was collapsing upon itself, becoming a place where people lived in their cars or took loans just to move into a trailer a county away. It no longer felt like a place for anybody, much less us.
     Ellen Regan looked beside herself, and I began to wonder if she would break down right there, crying, and we’d have to take back everything and tell her a few comforting lies. Unable or unwilling to say anything, her mouth opened and closed several times, a series of prelingual gestures. Her head shook and her body slumped into a C, before moving itself to the door, where, obeisant, it passed through, reaching out a hand to brace itself.

     On my way home from the coffee shop, I saw a house with its door open. It looked abandoned — a few leaflets on the walk, grass too tall, a general sense of decay. The slight windblown movements of the door seemed like an established pattern, weeks old. A thick braid of kudzu had crawled across the lawn and onto the porch, searching for a point of purchase. I noticed that it also had begun to establish a layer of itself around the house’s base. It would be months, but eventually the kudzu, and perhaps some ivy that had tagged along, remora-like, would consume the place.
     A few cars passed, then the metallic jangle-and-whir of someone on a bike. Except for the breeze, there was silence, until I heard footsteps and felt the presence of a man near me. I didn’t look at him but I recognized his breath’s stigmata of whiskey: one of our drunks.
     I turned to him. He stood a step or two back and to my left, but he didn’t seem to be looking at me. His eyes were glassy and bloodshot; he listed to his right, ready to tip over. Before I had a chance to say anything, he walked towards the house and went around the back. I waited for a minute, but he didn’t appear again, so I followed him around, but found nothing except weeds, kudzu, a rusted, wheelless tricycle, and a few pieces of rotten loamy fabric that may have been laundry left too long out to dry.
     There was the feeling of disaster subsuming us — several of my friends had left; more patients were coming in with asthma, complaining about the plumes of dust appearing throughout town, sudden like tumbleweeds — but mostly we ignored these warnings until, by the end of May, one hundred more houses were gone, leveled into nothing.
     Kids searched for scraps of rebar and used them for swordplay. Parents approached the demolition crews and asked who hired them, how could they do this, couldn’t they see that they were destroying our community? The workers said, No, ma’am. We’re doing our jobs. There’s not much more we can say.
     A minister gathered some of his parishioners — I heard that Ellen Regan, recovering her voice, joined them — and went to the mayor. They demanded an injunction against further home sales. This place is being carved up around us, they said. Our neighbors are leaving every day. I saw some wild dogs in the lot next door. They were fighting with each other, violently; their eyes burned. Where can I take my kids now? Do something.
     The mayor shrugged and said there was no crime. They left the office promising to see him trounced in the next election, which, someone swore, only made him laugh.
     The next day, the mayor was gone. He had sold his house and arranged a new job for himself across state lines. His secretary was going with him, said his wife, who was one of my patients. I performed an exam — she was worried that he, or his secretary, had given her something. A week later, I called her saying her bloodwork was clean. She thanked me, but it was a passionless, empty sound and she cut off the call abruptly. The next day she joined the tent city where the workmen lived, in a field beyond the city limits. She wasn’t the first.
     By the end of June, the town looked like a boxer’s mouth: all gaps and broken teeth. Still our mysterious benefactor hadn’t shown himself, but his workers remained and so did whoever arranged the sales — a phantom among us. Because no one ever announced that her house was for sale. Routines remained unbroken until one day a neighbor was loading a van, saying that was it, the offer good enough, can’t you see the way things are going?
     I hadn’t seen the redhead kid again, but I imagined his face in the windows of cars going by, heading towards the highway.
     My own neighbors, Patty and Dominic Coghlan, left in tears. We hugged and made sure we wrote down cell phone numbers and pledged to meet up soon — the surest sign we’d never see each other again. Their son, Luke, was bundled in the car. He waved limply to me; I returned the gesture and thought of the man’s dog I had crippled.
     I had babysat Luke over the years. Once he said that Patty sometimes threw things at Dominic. He said it in a child’s way, as if he didn’t know the meaning of such things, as if it were as common as anything else. A vast and unequal silence began to stretch out between us. His brow squinched, confusion signaling awareness taking hold, or else it had always been there.
     The Coghlans were among the last on our block to leave. After they were gone, I went into their house (this had become a habit) and listened to the echo of its empty rooms. I kicked my foot through balls of hair and dust. In what had been the living room, I found a lamp abandoned, a thin, creased rubbery brown cord still connecting it to the wall socket. I pressed my hand lightly against the lamp until it tipped over; the bulb shattered. I nudged the leavings of glass with my toe, indulging in their rasping sound, and left.
     It felt like no one could ever live there again. The place was ready for demolition.
     The next day, a wrecking crew began laying into the house. From my kitchen I watched an excavator eat into the patio, exposing a colony of opossums, stunned by daylight. The next round crushed them. After, a dump truck carted them away with the rest of the refuse.

     It’s August now. The heat ripples up from the open flats that used to be my friends’ homes. The wind carries bitter smoke from the tent city. At night I hear dogs and the occasional cry of something meeting its end. The earth has reclaimed the land, indifferent and greening.
     The businesses are gone, the schools, the roads. It took nine days to gut the gas station, but they did it, carving deep into the ground to get out all the oiled dirt. The storage tanks left on a slow-moving flatbed truck. A few of us stood by the road and found ourselves staring, the closest we got to a funeral procession.
     I’m the last one. I’ve stayed out of some sense of duty; even without patients, a doctor is like a ship’s captain, I guess.
     A letter with an offer came today. I don’t recognize the name, but it doesn’t matter — the money’s enough.

––––––––––––––
Jacob Silverman is a freelance writer, book critic, and contributing editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review. His journalism and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The National, Tablet, and many other publications. His story “Rose Garden” recently appeared in Storychord.

     My masseuse says, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you good, so don’t change the channel.” I tell her I will not, will never do that. While being kneaded and kneaded my imagination takes me to destinations inappropriate for relaxation: a falcon lands on my face, its talons digging in; my brother kicks open my bedroom door and pisses on my homework, stuff like that. I can’t wait a whole week to tell my shrink what I was thinking while I was getting a massage; she’ll orgasm. I call her from my masseuse’s lobby. Once she collects herself, my shrink says, “This is great news.” And then, “You are making real progress and we are on the faster track to your mental wellbeing.” She suggests that from now on we meet twice weekly, telling me then that she’s had a cancellation and I should come right over. I tell her that what she just said, the stuff about my mental wellbeing is great news, truly, but I can’t come over, not right now, maybe tomorrow because right now I am way, way too happy to come down, then I do exactly that, I crash. She says, a little hysterical, “Hail a cab!”
     My shrink’s receptionist is on the sidewalk pacing. He takes my arm at the elbow and escorts me into the building. Waiting for the elevator I perk up, say, “Release me!” He refuses, twists my arm behind my back and bends my wrist. In the express elevator, with blood swelling my ankles and feeling a tad light-headed, I say to the receptionist, “Dwayne, go fuck yourself.” Fellow passengers occupy the corners, or try. Dwayne, or whatever his name is, presses my wrist harder, twists my shoulder up a micro-millimeter and I experience a version of pleasure appreciated by few and tear-up. I am totally topped off with pleasure, so much am I topped off that I weep. My shrink’s receptionist, a professional and knowing more about my body then I do, pushes and presses and on my tippy-tippy toes, and perhaps to the delight of my fellow passengers I do a little dance. “Dwayne,” I squeal, “this is the first time in I don’t know, that I have felt true buoyancy, don’t stop, please don’t stop; don’t let go.”

/

/
Fatso In The Late Afternoon

     Mom had gone into the street and hired juveniles, urchins really. In boom times she might come back with three, four or five of them. Until scalded clean it was difficult to determine age or sex. An excellent instructor, given a few hours she could turn those versed in the rudiments of juggling into near-professionals, and if youngsters were physically gifted, though lacking specific knowledge, she could instruct them to perform the basics in a similar amount of time.
     While seeking flavor from the innards of a jelly filled doughnut I hear her in the kitchen working with them, instructing, cajoling and offering encouragement. Her voice, though muted by the closed kitchen door, is upbeat, which, I think, must take a lot out of her.
     If I am able, I help her roll the Porta-Stage into the living room and then, energy spent, flop back on the couch, shake open the paper and graze the classifieds. Mom, maintaining supernatural cheeriness, props my feet on a pillow so blood won’t pool, adjusts the spot-lights and tells the juveniles in the kitchen to get ready. As soon as she sets the stereo going, I set down the paper. The door flies open and they come bounding out. It’s a sight—all of them decked out in the harlequin costumes she’s sewed for them—yellow and green diamond shapes her signature design. And for the entire time they’re tossing and catching colored balls I can imagine how life—the concept of it, the big picture—to some people at least must appear urgent and pretty darn sweet.

/

/

–––––––––––

Michael K. Meyers’s work has appeared in Quick Fiction, SmokeLong, Word Riot, Alice Blue, Eclectica, NANO, Spork, Bound Off, 2River, The 2nd Hand Journal, Chicago Noir, Chelsea, Fiction, The New Yorker, and Requited Journal. Audio works can be heard in Fringe, 2River, Mad Hatter’s Review, Drunken Boat, and forthcoming in sound/text and Bound Off. Videos can be viewed on Ninth Letter, apt and at michaelkmeyers.com. He teaches in the graduate writing program at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

     It’s one of those reoccurring questions that cleave into my mind and once there, move around like a rabbit chased by a hound, changing direction in unpredictable ways. It starts with an image of a fish. Not a huge fish: a salmon for instance, about a foot long. And it’s never in the water, but on an old and bowed deck, the kind that you picture children running off years ago, cannonballing into the blue/green malleableness. It’s still alive, the fish, maybe just dropped out of a bucket or a basket. I can see the eyes and they seem dead and disconnected from the movement of its thrashing tail. The scales and mouth look cold but not as bitter as the eyes. It flops and I think about the word flounder. It makes a lot of movements; quick, frantic movements that reinforce history and expectation while bypassing desire and judgment. And though I can always see the eyes, I don’t know if the salmon really sees me, or if I’m just in front of it: the fully matured fish like a newborn baby with eyes and a neck but also a rolling head and an abstract point of view.

     Then I start wondering how they sleep. I think about how I couldn’t sleep if I couldn’t close my eyes. Imagine that. You’re lying in bed at night. You’re tired, you yearn for unconsciousness. But you can’t close your eyes. Not in any impacting way. You would just lie there, staring at the ceiling with groggy focus. Wanting sleep, wanting respite. But how could you? How could you ever? It sounds like a bad horror film made by a once famous director.

     Maybe they sleep by focusing on one thing. Just one thing and nothing else. I think that’s what I’d do. I’d stare at something until I didn’t know what I thought it was, until it could be anything—a map, a planet. And I’d never look away and I’d try not to blink.
     Why wouldn’t something have eyelids? Who could ever stand it? As I think about this my chest tightens and I start to lean forward and I want to scream, to run, but my chest is a vacuum and I can’t move and I can’t speak and I can’t close my eyes and everything seems so dangerous.

     My old man used to tell me the same stories over and over. I don’t mean that he’d tell me a story and then tell it again right away. It was more over the course of time, as if they were on a set rotation. Like a revolving Warholian record player. When he got to the end, he’d just put the needle back to the beginning and let it spin. And it’s not just him. I’ve seen a lot of people who, late in their lives, tend to repeat the same stories. I always think they must have more stories, stories people haven’t heard yet. But these are the ones they tell.

–––––––––––
Michael J. Rosenbaum is an MFA student in Fiction at Texas State University. His work has appeared in The Rio Grande Review and EveryDayPoets.com and is forthcoming on the literary website ReadShortFiction.com.

*

     The small ants bit. The larger ones were termites, which left fine brick-red dust, like in the bottoms of tea tins, on the windowsills of the upstairs additions.
     Giorgio cooked a shrimp curry that incapacitated us for days.
     Frank and Jenner were sailors, forever tying things in knots. They dodged alligators and got sunburned differently than the rest of us.
     “Do you remember Seattle in the nineties, when decaf cost ten cents extra?”
     “No, Lily,” they sighed. “We were barely born.”
     “And we are, must I mention, in the Sunshine State,” said Frank. “Who wants to think about all that rain?”
     In the meantime, we pined for the lost miracle of DDT, doused with DEET or calamine, and scratched.

*

     Our house was so big it sometimes swallowed us. Often we chatted on computers with everybody home, the soft tapping of our keyboards no match for ceiling fan and air conditioner and backup signal from the condominiums’ crane.
     We were waiting for breakthroughs of all kinds.
     Things turned to damp powder around us—toothpaste, saltines, those windowsills. Every time we stopped to look, it was four a.m.

*

     “Something smells,” said Jenner.
     “Your feet,” said Giorgio from the hundredth wicker loveseat.
Jenner manned the verandah like a prow, hanging by a pillar out over the yard, and sniffing the thunderstormy breeze. “Nope,” he said. “Something’s coming in.”

*

     The next morning, a Tuesday, Ellen looked out her bedroom window to see a flock of ibis on the front lawn—scarlet, half a continent too far north. Scudding through the sparse grass, they seemed mopey and dissatisfied.
     Ellen suggested we breakfast outside. The birds performed an exaggerated tiptoe around the lee of the house, where they took to roost on the badminton net, causing a precipitous sag.
     The wind was up, and we could all smell the smell: like ozone, but not quite. Metallic, almost tasteable.
     We drank orange juice from concentrate, and scrutinized the birds. When it was four a.m. again, we watched them, by torchlight, take flight across the face of the moon.
     Something shrieked and chattered from the magnolia tree, where seed pods hung like ovate peaches, glowing. This started up the cicadas, which sounded to us like an alarm clock, like some sort of warning.

*

     On Wednesday, we decided to have breakfast delivered by a Rube Goldberg machine, from the café up the street. Frank placed the order via orange juice cans and string. English muffins, they said, was all they could send. These arrived, still hot, on handmade plates from Japan. “You’ll have to supply your own jelly,” they said. “Tell them we have plenty,” hollered Giorgio.
     That night sounded like bowling. “Chill out, Lily,” they called. “We know it’s four a.m., but we are not bowling.” Giorgio peeked out the round window on the front stairs. “My God,” he said, “it’s armadillos.” Rolling in tight balls across the porch, bouncing off pillars, toppling plastic chairs.
     “Something is afoot,” we said. Bed seemed sensible, but we were unnerved. We huddled in an anteroom, near the remains of our breakfast contraption, which was weighted down with plates and crumbs, swaths of strawberry.

*

     On Thursday we awoke in a heap, and went outside to right the chairs.

*

     By Friday, the wind was higher. Termite dust swirled in the upstairs corners. A green heron’s quizzical eye peered through a sunroom window. Jenner stalked out on the roof with a spyglass and stared it down. “Avast,” he muttered, perhaps from the Italian basta, meaning enough, but more likely from the Dutch.

*

     On Saturday, it began to rain for real.

*

     On Sunday, Giorgio suggested Mass. We were cranky and brimming with heresy. As a compromise, Frank sang Mozart’s Requiem until we got the creeps and asked him to stop.
     “Is your air conditioner running?” asked Ellen, in response to a loud dripping sound coming from the window below Giorgio’s room.
     “Better catch it before it runs out the door!” said Giorgio. There were, depending on gender, either guffaws and chest-bumping or a rolling of eyes, the latter first toward the ceiling—an indifferent and particularly secular god—and then to the front window, which was grainy and dun. The noise had increased.
     The rain came down in such size and quantity, it was as if the sand had risen of its own accord.
     “Do you think we’ll need to bail?” asked Jenner. Frank already had a bucket.
     The condos’ ground floor was taking on water. Our house, on its stubby brick pilings, loomed. Down the slight incline of the street in front came an armadillo, floating, curled on its back. It spun and spun as it sailed off into the near distance.
     Ellen proposed a toast. “To armadillos!” she said.
     “To the lifeboats . . . ?”
     “No, Lily,” said Jenner, “it’s not like that at all.”

*

     Our handyman’s name should have been something like Enoch or Caleb, but it wasn’t; it was Bill. He came from upstream in a dented bass boat, as the sun was setting in a lurid haze. He tied up to one of the verandah pillars, and did his best to persuade us to get in. A lovely gesture, but one that we refused. The rats decided it, slinking out to dip their delicate toes in the water, then slipping back inside. In matters such as this, we assumed they could be trusted.
     Bill wished us well and sailed on in the company of bicycles, potted citrus trees, armadas of Spanish moss.
     The rain stopped. The air was dense and silent, and we breathed warily.
     We jostled ourselves inside, as though that would be helpful. Water bloomed through the floorboards, and soon we were awash in sand to our ankles. We cut a hole through the back-stair landing into the pantry below for foodstuffs, moved upstairs, and hoped for the best.

————————

Magdalen Powers’s work has appeared in various journals and been collected in two chapbooks. She lives in Salem, Oregon.

Grocery store, traffic in the produce section, not much room to maneuver, shopping carts crowded around a long bin of locally grown peaches that are on special.  I pick out a few bruise-free peaches, put them in a plastic bag, ready to roll, but a great big guy with his shopping cart turned at an angle is blocking the aisle and someone else has pulled up behind me.  The big guy has a moist look, light complexion, pink face, thin fuzzy hair on top, not unpeachlike in his appearance.  His stomach is so big it pushes his belt buckle over so that it faces the floor, and if he had a buckle under his butt it would be facing the floor too.  As he picks through the peaches he has to shift his whole body around because his arms aren’t long enough to reach over his stomach.  Already he has a plastic bag almost full of peaches, even their weight might be putting bruises on them, but who am I to tell him how many peaches he should buy and how would I know why he needs them?  I’m not aware of it till after I do it, but my mouth makes a smacking sound, a smack of impatience.  He looks at me.  I’ll be finished in a minute, he says.  I nod as if I accept his right to select peaches to his heart’s content, lean on my shopping cart, don’t look at him, don’t ask myself if he’s ever thought of losing some weight, a minute from now it’ll be over, minor inconvenience, what’s the difference if I’m here or pushing my cart ahead to greater grocery horizons?  But the guy senses I want him to be on his way and cuts his eye at me over his well-padded shoulder, resentment and self-consciousness in his look, embarrassment that I can’t get past him.  His embarrassment reminds me of someone.  I was out to dinner with my wife at a bustling steak house, lots of small tables closely spaced.  As we waited for our food I saw a fat guy and a woman being led to an empty table by a hostess, the fat guy turning sideways and hopping on tiptoes to get between the tables.  At the end of one of his hops his stomach collided with a table and knocked it over, spilling food and wine onto the floor and the people sitting at the next table.  The fat guy covered his face with his hands and apologized with all his might, and restaurant staff appeared and began cleaning up the mess.  My wife looked away from the spectacle, but I kept watching.  He and the woman he was with sat at their table for a minute or two before he told her he had to leave, he couldn’t enjoy his dinner.  He apologized again on his way out, and the people whose table he’d knocked over pulled the table back to let him pass, trying to seem considerate of his needs yet reminding him of the potentially destructive reaches of his girth.  What if he looks over here? my wife said.  He wouldn’t want you staring at him.  Same size and complexion as the peach collector, who gives me another angry look over his shoulder, and I drop my eyes to avoid a stare down.  His anger embarrasses me, but it annoys me to think that’s just what he wants.  Has it occurred to him that he could push his cart around the corner of the bin so people could get by?  Is he not in some way bringing this conflict on himself?  Couldn’t his behavior be described as passive aggressive and is his volume of food intake some form of aggression, a desire to devour who knows what?  Don’t look up, whatever is showing on my face wouldn’t look good to him, but then he takes a twist tie from the tube at the corner of the bin and I raise my head.  He holds the bag up by its top, spins it as if at the conclusion of a performance and twists the green tie around it.  He puts the bag in his cart, gives me a mocking nod, and pushes his cart forward.  The acting out bothers me, the flourish with the plastic bag, the mock nod.  I’m not accepting his finale.  I haven’t done anything to this guy.  Easy to catch up, I pull alongside him on his left, and he stops.  I ask if he’s ever been to the steak house.  One night when I was there, I say, a man who looks like you couldn’t fit through an aisle and he knocked over someone’s table.  He seems to get bigger as my words sink in.  The pain in his face hits me, in my mind his pulpy hands grip my throat, but I still stare at him.  I want to know if he was the man I saw at the steak house.  I want it to be him.

————————

Bio: Glen Pourciau’s collection of stories Invite won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press.  His stories have been published by the Antioch Review, Epoch, failbetter, Guernica, Mississippi Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and other magazines.

“You’re not going to run off and live with that old French git,” Ben said, shaving a hunk of sweet Afghani into smokable flakes with his Swiss Army knife.

“How do you spell git?” I said, recording all of his Briticisms when stoned.

“You’ll be wiping his ass in ten years.”

Ben’s face was thin, his head shaved, and when he took a drag he looked like a skull and crossbones.

“Lemme draw you,” I said.

“Remember, I’m the artist,” he said, throwing me a flat thick pencil.

I drew two circles the size of quarters, filled them in black as could be—the way you did on a Scantron—and tore them out. I leaned my head back and put the circles over my eyes. Walking on my knees, I stuck my arms out in front of me and said, “I AM SKELETOR.”

I felt my way to the coffee table, to our last bottle of wine. The black circles fell off my face when I poured.

“Make us a draw-er-ing,” I said, scooting over to Ben.

We sat knees to knees and he sketched what looked like a melted candle.

“It’s very Petit Prince. What is it?”

“It’s you and me under the covers.”

I grabbed the sketchbook and tossed it. “Give up,” I said.

“I’m nicking you,” Ben said. “Serves the dodgy Frog right.”

“You and I would end up dead in the Seine,” I said. “Dead drunk.”

It was getting late, past me dealing with the Metro.

Radio France switched from French songs to American.

“It’s Mariah fuckin’ Carey!” Ben said. “Your compatriot. Giz’ a snog!”

Sometimes, you kiss a guy because he throws a line you couldn’t ever possibly hear again.

We were drunk, we were high, our foreheads hit.

“I can’t.”

Ben stood, pulled out the futon I always crashed on, took the blanket down from the shelf and put some water on for tea.

“The usual?” he said.

“Oui.”

***

My head was spinning. Ben kept begging for me, through the wall. Him—like in the cartoons he drew—a stick figure boy with “Shag” in his thought bubble on one side of a barrier, and me on the other side, a stick figure girl thinking “Patience,” but maybe the word wasn’t completely spelled out.

My eyes landed on a glass of miraculously unfinished wine and the Swiss Army knife Ben had used earlier for scraping hash. The Paris night blew across the greenish-grey rooftops outside. The moon replenished itself in the City of Light, the city of no ice cubes.

“Come sleep with me. I’ll behave like a brother.”

All the tricks and cheap wine.

I jumped on top of Ben in his twin bed, my lower-center pressed to just above his, the place of ironwork-twisted-in-root smell of men. I was wearing his boxers and “British Fag” tee, holding the hash-sticky knife blade to the moist mound of his neck.

“How about you and me starkers?” he said.

Stoned on hash, I could see where he had nicked himself shaving. White fibers of Kleenex stuck to yellow crust, not quite a scab.

“First,” I said, “take a sip.”

I held the wine glass at an angle so as not to spill, at an angle Ben had to lift his head to—that forced him to press his Adam’s apple into the blade.

He sipped.

His hands moved from my hips to my ankles and a grin spread across his cheeky face. He had good bones. He laughed under my thighs and I felt his laughter hit just above the band of his boxers, which I still had on because as fucked up as I could be, I knew cheating with a Brit on my French married lover who might be leaving his wife when I still wasn’t legally divorced from the Russian, wouldn’t be right.

Like how surfers get to standing in one barely visible move, I hopped up and stood above Ben, marching with the knife in one hand and the wine glass in the other. My feet landed in drunken rhythm on either side of his narrow hips. “Hayayaya!” I said.

Ben had a sawhorse set up by his bedroom window to serve as an airing-out hangar for his Paris-smoky clothes. The sawhorse stood one foot from the bed. I stepped onto it and balanced, still with the knife in one hand, wine glass in the other. “I am Nadia Comanisshhi!” I said.

Out the window the cobblestones below were grey like the moon and set in a rainbow pattern. I threw my hands to the sky and stretched, arching my back, preparing to land like Comaneci, flatfooted and final, or like Kundera, between laughter and forgetting.

“Je t’donne un 7!” Ben had become an Olympic judge.

I turned from the window, tried a dip off the beam with one foot—the simplest of moves.

“Je mérite un 9!” I said—and fell.

My wine glass flew. Wine splattered everywhere—on Ben’s twin sheets, on his pile of clothes, on his face.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I said.

Ben jumped to the floor, grabbed me under my armpits, and lifted me to a stand. “Bloody hell!” he said.

Wine droplets clung to his eyelashes. He had his hands on my face again like when I’d let him kiss me because he had said Mariah fucking Carey.

“You okay?” he said.

I raised the knife up between our stained lips. I put the blade to his face and shaved a bead of wine from his cheek. It seemed to breathe …Where there is love… on the edge of the blade. Ben put his finger to it, and then to my mouth.

… I’ll be there.

____________

Christine Fadden recently found herself biting her own fist while watching Dexter, Season 4. She admits she does like this Mariah song, and also, J-Lo’s Love Don’t Cost a Thing.

A woman was singing and strumming her guitar on the subway platform. She is new. Before she arrived, the only sounds were the endless off-beat beeps of the turnstile and people chatting and trains grumbling and indecipherable announcements over a mysterious speaker. (When I see a fiver in her case I wonder if the person took change back or if she planted it.) She only sings three songs and if the trains are on time you will not hear the whole loop. The trains are rarely on time.

At lunch I went to the bathroom and my piss was very dark, like an IPA. I have been ill. A cold I cannot beat. I never understood why old men shake their dicks so long at urinals. Now I do. And it is not because I have a cold.

This man was sleeping on the train during the ride home after work and at his stop his eyes snapped open, no conductor’s announcement or anything, and he grabbed his bag and walked off like the ceiling of his skull was being stomped on by a Clydesdale.

It is hard not to love subway performers unless they make it easy. Boom box with blown speakers, loud clapping when people (me) were tired after long days with boring tasks. People (me) were trying to read. But we (I) had to stop everything so they could do a couple back flips. Seen this same act too many times. “Show your love, show your support. We’re not robbing or killing.” Oh, right. Those are the only options.

I walked home during a downpour. No umbrella. I hate umbrellas. I bought one the other day at a bodega because I was caught in a drizzle. The umbrella did not cost much. Less than a good IPA. I opened the umbrella and a few seconds later a slight breeze destroyed it. It did the reverse-umbrella thing and all the metal parts snapped at the joints and the handle broke and it fell to the ground in pieces, a dying robot-spider-kite, and I got wet. Then I caught a cold. But that is not why I hate umbrellas.

Streetlights look better streaked across ripple-wet sidewalks. Remember the time we rode bikes in the park and a storm chased us? The time we walked across the bridge and there were flowers for someone who jumped? The time we saw a deer run down a busy city street? The other time?

There were crumbs of Pringles on my chest, many, as I wrote this even though I had been eating grapes and there is not such a thing as a grape crumb, is there? Thanks for listening with your eyes. And, hey, enough about me. Let’s talk about you and all the wonderful things you think about me.

———-

Robb Todd is reformed journalist. He lives in New York City. His first collection of short stories will be available soon from Tiny Hardcore Press. www.robbtodd.com.

A male attendant was already cleaning our motel room. In one hand he was holding a bottle of Windex. In his other hand he was holding a toothbrush. I touched my face. It was still filled with a normal amount of teeth. I looked at Leon’s mouth. He had more than one tooth. I tried to remember if my mother had used Windex on my mouth when I was a child. I thought of her squirting Windex on the face of a baby that wasn’t me. The baby turned into a glass snow globe. My mother picked up the snow globe and shook it until the globe wizard got a snowflake in his left eyeball.

Mickey left his motel room and handed me a key to the dump truck. He was wearing the same black shorts and blue short-sleeve buttoned shirt that he had worn the day before. Leon and I climbed into something that was a dump truck. A boy the size of a grossly enlarged thimble stood next to a white van and watched us. He was wearing a black, faded t-shirt that said, “Timmy” on the front. There seemed to be stains in all the creases of his clothing. When Mickey walked up to the white van Timmy asked his father if he could eat some skittles for breakfast. Mickey nodded. I sat in the driver’s seat of the dump truck and fingered the ignition. Mickey and Timmy made space for themselves in a white van. Something called Billy sat alone in a white pickup.

Our little parade of automobiles left the motel parking lot in search of a highway. The white van inched to the front of our transportation party. I prodded the dump truck up behind the white van. I looked in the rearview mirror. Jimmy and the white pickup moped behind us.

It did not take very long to find the highway. Highways are large structures that were built with the intention of being seen. There are very few places left in America for a large interstate highway to hide comfortably where no one can see it.

The first hour in the dump truck was similar to every other hour I had ever spent in a moving vehicle. I held onto a steering wheel and only turned it when it needed to be turned. For long stretches there was nothing to do except look ahead, out the windshield. I did not need to turn the steering wheel very often. When I turned the steering wheel I only turned it slightly. Other cars surrounded the dump truck and did similar things to the road, but these cars were smaller so they felt less significant. Very few objects can do what a dump truck does. The dump truck did things to the road and the road did things to the dump truck. Their love for each other was not something I was not jealous about, but it reminded me of a tall couple I once saw outside of a grocery store on matching bicycles. One of the bicycles had a basket. It was filled with fourteen clementines.

Leon asked me if I missed my motel bed. I told him I had slept like a dead leaf. Leon said, “I don’t enjoy the way you talk about yourself.” A piece of skin peeled off my leg and fell on the floor of the dump truck. I looked at the flake of myself for twelve seconds. When I looked over at Leon he was asleep. Sometimes when I looked at Leon I didn’t like him. As he slept, part of his mouth hung open. I had an urge to spit on my fingers and rub them on the floor of the dump truck and then smear my dirty fingers in the parts of Leon’s mouth that were open. I was not proud of these thoughts. We had reached a point in the trip where neither of us liked each other as much as we had once liked each other. I thought about pulling the dump truck to the side of the road and leaving Leon in a ditch, but I knew Mickey wouldn’t have been happy with me if I had stopped so I did not stop. The dump truck continued to move at sixty miles an hour. When I tried to drive faster the dump truck would not move any faster.

Our path had become a stream flowing into a void. When Leon woke up he asked where we were. I didn’t know where we were. I took out my cell phone. The shape of the cell phone did not know where we were either. It only said 10:30 a.m. I looked out the windshield ahead of us and could not decide if we were still in Ohio or not. We continued driving until we were no longer in the original place where we didn’t know where we were. We were in a new location that was similar to the old location. The shapeless mumble of the highway discouraged all modes of thought and imagination.

It started to get warm in the dump truck. Leon took off his shirt. Some of his chest hair smiled. A family-sized blue truck full of inflatable pool toys passed us. One of the plastic inflatable objects looked like the veiled eyelid of an octopus. The right blinker on Mickey’s truck began to beep. Leon touched one of his chest hairs and asked me what he should name it. I told to name all his chest hairs, “Baby Noels.”

We stopped for lunch at a store that sold fried chicken, pizza, and tacos. Mickey, Billy, and Timmy ordered fried chicken combo meals with french fries. Leon ordered four tacos. I got a small bucket of pizza and a fountain soda. Everyone sat at the same table and ate in silence. After Mickey, Timmy, and Billy ate their fried chicken they watched me eat from my bucket. Mickey, Timmy, and Billy did not eat their french fries. Mickey asked if I wanted to eat his french fries. I looked in my bucket. It was still half full. I was the last one to finish eating.

Before we left Leon used the bathroom. I waited outside for him in the hallway. Someone had written a poem on one of the tiles next to the bathroom door. It said, “eat the peace you are given to do whatever you please.” I heard a muffle of toilet paper. When Leon came out he said there was an old taco stain on the ceiling of the bathroom.

We followed the white van to a refueling structure. It was near an old pine tree. I parked the dump truck and let it suck on a fuel tank for twenty minutes. While I squeezed the gas nozzle I watched a family finish their lunch at a picnic table next to the gas station. Two boys argued over who would eat the last olive. An older woman cut the olive in half. Each boy put a piece of the olive in their mouth. When the family left the picnic table each member seemed to be dragging a full stomach. The youngest object in the family held his ass until the older woman noticed and took him to the gas station bathroom. On the ground, in the grass, near one of the legs of the picnic table, I saw the peelings of a clementine. I was tempted to put something in my mouth and wait for my body to swallow it, but I didn’t do anything.

Billy held the hood of the white pickup open. I watched him pull out the dipstick and look at it. His lips barely moved as he held up the dipstick and then used a rag from the floor of his truck to wipe the dipstick clean. When he put the dipstick back in the truck he looked around until he noticed me watching him. I waved. He closed the hood of the truck very quickly and walked into the gas station. Timmy followed his brother into the gas station. The nozzle I was squeezing stopped working. I removed it from the truck. Mickey went into the gas station to pay. A few minutes later I saw Timmy leave the gas station holding three candy bars and a Mountain Dew.

We returned to the highway. The inside of the dump truck grew warmer the longer we used it. The parts that were broken still knew how to make us sweat. Leon took off his shirt and drew a stick figure on his chest. He said, “I drew a picture of myself on my own chest.” He asked if I wanted a picture of him drawn on my chest. I looked at Leon and his chest and said, “Nah, I don’t want a picture of you on my chest.” Leon put away his pen and crawled out of his seat and sat on the floor of the dump truck. He climbed off the floor and leaned half his body out the window. I heard him slapping the side of the dump truck, encouraging it to move faster. I looked at the speedometer. We were going about as fast as we had been going the whole time.

Ohio held us in its palm for a few more minutes and then handed us over to Indiana. Leon asked where we were. I said, “I was once born in this state.” Leon did not believe me. I told him he should call my mother and ask her where I was born. I handed him my phone. I watched him press some buttons and hold the phone to the side of his head. After a few seconds I heard a small version of my mother’s voice speak in Leon’s ear. He asked my mother where I was born. She told him I was once born in Indiana. Leon handed me the phone. I told my mother I loved her and hung up.

When we got near Indianapolis I noticed the white van seemed confused. It turned off the interstate. Leon asked me where the white van was going. I shrugged and followed the white van. We were no longer on a major interstate heading west. I looked at a road sign. It said we were heading north. The white van slowed and did a u-turn. I worried the dump truck wouldn’t be able to do a u-turn, but I followed the white van’s lead and did a u-turn. Leon said, “The white van seems confused.” We returned to a major interstate highway headed west. I wasn’t sure what was happening. The white van merged back onto highway. We followed. I looked at the white van. It continued on through Indiana.

I mostly held the steering wheel of the dump truck with both hands, but sometimes I would stop holding the steering wheel with my right hand so I could use my right hand to hold a cup of iced-tea. Leon asked me if the iced-tea was still icy. I took a sip and told him that the iced-tea was warm and no longer an icy beverage. He asked if my icy beverage had turned into “hot juice.” I took another sip and said, “The icy beverage is now a hot juice.”

A truck passed us. I looked at the man driving the truck. He looked like a beard that was wearing a dirty shirt. I waved to him. He raised his arm to wave at me. I noticed his armpit was greasy. Leon said, “The human body contains more grease than a jar of whale oil.” I asked Leon if he was going to put whale oil in his hair when he got older. He said he would probably put some form of grease in his hair, but was not sure if he felt morally comfortable putting whale sauce on his human fibers.

Some men in orange vests were cutting the grass on the side of the road. A brown station wagon passed us on their way to the Grand Canyon. Two boys sat in the back of the station wagon. One of them was blowing on a trumpet. The other was sipping on a juice box. The dump truck continued to pass through Indiana. Three hours disappeared.

The white van turned on its blinker again. I looked at the gas gauge even though it was broken. I followed the white van to a gas station and parked next to a diesel pump. Leon and I climbed out of the truck. I put some fuel in the dump truck. Leon wandered off and asked some of the other truck drivers if he could rub their trucks.

A few minutes later Mickey walked over to us. He looked concerned. He rubbed his forehead. He asked if I had a driver’s license. I told him I did. I followed Mickey into the gas station. The woman behind the counter took my driver’s license and looked at it. She was wearing a perm. My driver’s license was a regular driver’s license. There was nothing special about it. I did not have a special license that said I could drive large machinery. Mickey stood next to me waiting. I wondered if he had a license. I was going to ask him why he didn’t show the woman his license, but the woman handed me back my license and said, “All set.” Mickey asked if I wanted something to eat or drink. I grabbed some candy and some more iced-tea. I asked Mickey where we were. He said we were in Illinois.

The dump truck followed the white van back to the highway. Everything seemed okay. The dump truck didn’t seem any more broken than it had been the whole trip. Leon was eating gummy worms. He bit off half of one of the gummy worms and stuck the other half to the side-view mirror. I asked if I could have a gummy worm. He gave me one. I ate it. Leon was laughing. I laughed too. We were only seventy miles from St. Louis. Leon said, “We will probably be in St. Louis in a few hours.” I nodded and said, “St. Louis smells close.”

A few minutes later black smoke began pouring from the engine of the dump truck. Everything that had been going beautifully was now a massive broken object breathing out large amounts of smoke. We would be stranded. Someone would rub their face. The business opportunities in St. Louis mailed us a postcard. I thought of where I wanted to end up and I could not remember what I thought. Everything smelled like black smoke. A grown man rubbed his face until he turned into an old man.

———-

Mark Baumer was once younger. He likes to eat. He knows how to read because he once learned to read a book. He has some websites. One website is thebaumer.com. The other website is everydayyeah.com

When one of the Nicks had fucked Sheri it came about as most these things do on a blurry beer and whisky filled night, with the neons raining down like cigarette ash from the smoke that filled the bar’s atmosphere.
     The Fat Kid was working the Bar’s bar that night, and he’d noticed Sheri, but not with any kind of attraction, for the Fat Kid didn’t realize yet that Sheri was attracted to him.
     She sat at the bar against the wall near the Pabst clock, with the wood grain seeming almost to grow into her arm and shoulder and into her curly brown hair that sometimes also rested against the wall, as she leaned, a few beers and at least one shot in. Nick had gotten off early, had worked the delivery driver’s shift, one that lasted a mere couple hours, for the deliveries Steve shut off after ten, thank god, because some drunk assholes would call in till two in the morning—assholes that kept up the apartment walls in buildings not two blocks away—jabbing away to Cooter or the Fat Kid about a delivery pizza, and they had to say shut the fuck up already we stopped delivering at ten PM and what do you want a delivery pizza for anyway when you could walk over and order one you lazy piece of shit.
     This Nick, it should be established since there were two, was the smaller, blond-haired, wiry like a weasel. In fact Steve sometimes said, where is that fuckin little weasel Nick, when Nick had been on a delivery for forty minutes and everyone knew he’d stopped somewhere along the Lake with the Bar Car, parked upon a dock looking at the mountains and the water while he sucked down a bowl of green weed.
     Now that Nick had finished he ordered a shifter and a pitcher and the Fat Kid poured out both and went ahead and dribbled the gold of the whisky into the shot glass and set all three before Nick, because the Fat Kid knew that even though Nick didn’t order the shot he was going to sooner rather than later and he might as well get that over with. Nick sat drinking and Johnny Cash sang.
     That saxophonist—sax player, whatever they are called—the drunk, his name was Chris, but his name doesn’t really matter, he came in and ordered a beer, setting the sax in its case against the bar rail near his feet. Nick sighed, his lips downturned. Here we go. This drunk would get drunk and start talking and eventually talk to Nick and Nick sure as fuck didn’t want to talk to the sax player. Last time he did so the sax player turned into an out of tune sax and sat there blowing for an hour and Nick wobbled off after grabbing him by the collar of his jacket and tossing him, a limp sax, so that he crumpled against the Pole Position set against the wall behind the bar.
     Nick slammed his shot. It went down so smooth he yelled, Hey Lunchbox! And he shook the empty rocks glass at him and slid it across the bar. Nick picked up his beer glass and pitcher and moved down the bar, away from the sax, and toward Sheri. She—at least so far as Nick knew at that time—wouldn’t annoy the fuck out of him.
     Even before Nick had settled his ears were assaulted as that goddamn saxophone started up with the Fat Kid. Poor Fat Kid, stuck there behind the bar, no choice but to listen to the stupid fuck sitting there gleaming gold in the beer lights and pealing like a dying mountain goat. The Fat Kid manhandled the remote to turn up the skipping CD, for even that was better.
     Couldn’t handle any of that, eh? The voice was hers, Sheri’s, at Nick’s other ear, and it was so soft and rational that he welcomed it, a blanket he could wrap himself in, in the softness of her voice.
     The Fat Kid lumbered over with Nick’s second whisky.
     For Sheri’s part, Nick never said anything that interesting or funny, but she laughed. His teeth floated in his open maw and the scraggle of blonde up above gleamed like something new. Sheri said things like, I’ll bet you’ve turned out a young lady or three.
     Nick kept the shots coming, ordered for them both. The Fat Kid got rid of the skipping Johnny Cash and settled for Foghat. The sax began reeling on its barstool, out of tune. Nick kept the jabber going. What was he saying anyway? He was from Colorado. He’d seen mountains, mountains like these here, where the Lake was. Maybe he’d never seen a lake like the Lake, but he’d seen mountains all right. He put in some time while trying to get out west for speeding. Speeding? He had a warrant out already. He’d missed a meeting with his probation officer. But once he got that done, he was back on the road, hitching his way in cornfields. He shacked up one night in a guy’s shed, and then that guy’s daughter came out around midnight. She had silk-like hair, was all Nick remembered.
     That was when Sheri laughed, said, Sounds like a joke, the farmer’s daughter. She said he must’ve done it to lots of girls he was so dirty. She said it and play-slapped him on the shoulder, and when her hand dropped it dropped against Nick’s thigh and she went ahead and let it rest there. Why not? It had been a little while. He was cute, in that shady, skinny thug way. He was a cornstalk himself, withering. Nick kept the shots coming out. The Fat Kid stared at a NASCAR race.
     In the Bar, the men’s and women’s bathrooms sit side to side, near the hall that leads to the backyard beer garden. When Nick came out of one, so too came Sheri. They joked: Fancy meeting you here!
     Sheri said, Let’s see what it’s like outside, because it wasn’t winter then, and the nights were steam off the lake and sweat without the bar’s swamp cooler to cool things down. She led Nick out the back door.
     The stars were coming down, streaking blond like Nick’s own hair, one after the other. The mountain tops still dusted with the snow that never melted reflected the light and the mountains rose up and kept rising as Sheri led Nick to the horseshoe pit. There was a picnic table where fat guys, and sometimes even the Fat Kid, set their pitchers and glasses while tossing shoes.
     She had her hands on Nick’s belt buckle and stripped it open deftly the way one flicks out a knife blade. She felt him grow hard in her mouth, his smell coming off him, like salt, like the sea, like sea salt. Nick grunted. The animal came up out of him. The stars kept falling.
     The hairs bristled on his back, on his shoulders and arms. He ripped off the wife-beater stained with dribbles of pizza sauce. The air thickened. His cock pulsed. He lifted Sheri up onto the picnic table, shoving her skirt over her hips. His nails had grown. He scratched a thigh. She let out a short yelp. The animal in her. He pushed into her and they both grunted and panted, heaving against one another beasts they were.
     It lasted seven minutes and thirteen seconds. Neither Nick nor Sheri knew. They became human again. Nick’s pants pooled around his ankles, he pulled and buckled tight again. Sheri straightened her skirt. They finished their beers and had one more shot, and by then the bar was closing and the Fat Kid said to them and the saxophone, It’s time for everyone to get the fuck out.

———-
Jamie Iredell lives in Atlanta and is the author of Prose. Poems. a Novel., and The Book of Freaks. His writing has also appeared in literary magazines such as 3:AM, The Pedestal Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Action, Yes. This piece is excerpted from a novel called “The Fat Kid.”

He had a face that looked like two faces. What you’d expect a man to look like if he never sat down, or only paid in change. It wasn’t the lighting, or the angle at which you stood. You could look him dead in the eye and not know it—not know that, for days, he had been saying that it had been raining and that it had been raining hard and that nothing will ever be the same again.

BUNKUM

When you wake from a deep slumber and find that you have misplaced your hand, it is a good indicator that it will not be a good day. The day before yesterday I sent my children to Kosovo. For what, I do not know. It must have slipped into one of their pockets, or been mistaken for a shoe. Or, perhaps, I am merely having difficulty recalling some catastrophic incident. There are days when I forget that I am a woman. I have great urges, so violent and deep. Some days I can’t help positioning myself between the fridge and the wall. It gets better as the seasons change. I want to ply another woman so bad. A crowbar, a hatchet. My own teeth can be wriggly, I’ve noticed. The centre of a woman completely hewn in half. I can’t stand it, moving from room to room. I can’t brew tea. I kick my dog. I stone my neighbour’s maples. I send my barber’s hair to the lumberyard. I don’t know what to do with my fists. My husband, he doesn’t know. What gets him wily is a clean manse. A neatly stacked deck of cards. White tennis shoes.

THREE

Family portraits will often fill my head with romantic notions concerning the disappearance of my first ex-husband, now made brother-in-law. I’m laden with too many stories. He died trying to save a child from a burning house in which there was no child, merely a widower and his dog. Or: upon returning an overdue library book he found himself aghast, outlined with so many paper cuts they seemed penciled in. An adult size holed in the shape of a man was found in the library ceiling. Or: while traversing the interiors of a local museum he found himself penetrated with a fossilized shark tooth. How it managed to pierce his heart remains uncertain. Or: descending the slopes of a high ridge he found himself legless, then bootless, in that order. Regardless, in of all these stories, I am nowhere to be found.

TAXIDERMY

Being duck shaped it was only natural that I fell apart when you began to describe the interiors of a flintlock. What I mean when I say duck shaped is that I am too easily welcomed into ovens. Or too soon made proper into stomachs. I know a man who sits down to have an aneurysm. He doesn’t live here anymore. He lives on Main. Sometimes he comes in to turn the sink on and off. It loses its charm quickly, being remarkable on a menu.

RAM

I built my house upon my chest. I lived in it for years. I brought my husband over. I brewed him tea. I split his legs between the concrete. I knew his heart was too soft for baseball. He liked kite flying and murdering. Salvaging and rusting. We made several children. We called them all Ermine. We called them all home.

———-
Prathna Lor is the author of Ventriloquism (Future Tense Books).

The end was nigh, and I was getting bored. My brother had left, my wife had left, and Fred, the only neighbor left on the block, was packing. Even those who remained were tired of waiting. Soon, the few stores would close. The pharmacy. The grocery. Everything under a buck. What then?
     My mother clipped a bright orange flower from the new bloom in the back yard, and her long white hair fell loose around her shoulders, coating them with snow. It was hot. I held the clippers while she rearranged her bouquet and nodded, turning it slowly in her hands. A crow passed slowly overhead, a hole in the sky.
     “Zinnias are from Mexico,” said my mother, and then, “Keep an eye out for Zane, would you? He’s delivering some marijuana today.”
     I took the bouquet inside, threw out yesterday’s, and placed it in the center of the table. The emergency radio crackled like a dog eating bones, then fell silent. The whole house was silent. I stood in silence above the bouquet and stared out the window.
     Across the street, Fred was lifting a large metal sculpture into the back of his van. It looked like he had it, but at the last moment his grip failed and the complicated, fragile thing fell crashing to the street. He cursed loudly, and as though drawn to the noise, I joined him outside. Fred had never been a very good neighbor, but with everyone else gone our bond had deepened. Since the evacuation, his once intimidating body had grown bent with worry and, suddenly, with age. He leaned it against his van, and rubbed its lower back with a frown.
     “Damn thing,” he said.
     “What’s the story?”
     “It was given to me by a Korean Czar for a job I did in Alaska.”
     Now in pieces, the sculpture had been of a chicken with fire shooting out of its mouth. I turned over one of the small flames with my foot. It made the muffled clink of pocket change.
     “Why a chicken?”
     Fred quickly gathered the pieces and hoisted them into the van, his back audibly popping, his face tight.
     “Dragon,” he said.
     He closed the van door, then held out a massive, lumpy hand. “Well, I guess this is it. Give your mother my best.”
     We were both sweating, and in the three seconds our hands were clasped a slimy glaze slicked my palm.
     “I’ll tell her,” I said.
     Fred looked back at his house. He’d kept his property groomed, a polite rebuttal to the slow collapse around it. And as silly as it seemed to me in the abstract, his house had always been a comfort, something I looked forward to seeing each day.
     He walked up the short, trimmed path to his steps, up his steps to the porch, and locked his front door. He tried the handle and, satisfied, put the key back in his pocket and returned to the van, which he started, stopped, leaned out the window.
     “And please,” he said, “tell your mother to keep that gas tank secret. No telling who’d do what for it.”
     I watched him drive down the block, giving the abandoned cars and fallen branches a wide berth. He paused at the end of the street with his blinker on, then, with a small wave of his hand, he was gone.
     Out of respect, I decided to give it twenty-four hours before breaking in to see what I could find.
     Since my brother had taken his family east, my mother’s house had fallen into semi-disrepair. I did what I could to keep the trees back and maintain the drainage around the foundation like he’d shown me, but I wasn’t quite up to the task, and my mother made it easy to neglect the place.
     “It’ll outlive me,” she’d say with a shrug.
     A siren sounded from somewhere toward the water, releasing three long true wails before twisting into something more like a wounded cat.
     During the evacuation, Fred had stood watch over his home tirelessly, and by virtue of occupying his own porch had served as a kind of sentinel for the block. We were frequently woken up in the night by the sound of his warning shots, but after the first week or two these had become soothing rather than frightening, a sign of safety, of order.
     The looting had finally ceased to be much of an issue, but I couldn’t help feeling vaguely exposed.
     I went back inside.
     “Zane? Zane is that you?”
     “No, mom, it’s me,” I called through the house. “Mom?”
     I found my mother sitting on the back porch, in the sun, her eyes closed.
     “It’s me,” I said again. “Fred’s gone. He says goodbye.”
     “Goodbye Fred.”
     “He says to keep that gasoline safe.”
     She squinted up at me.
     “Tell him that if he has any other opinions about the gasoline he can tell me personally.”
     “I’m going to get his television. What do you think?”
     We’d gotten rid of our TV over a year ago to distance ourselves from the goings on of people whose actions, to quote my mother, “no longer concerned us.” I didn’t care. I’d never been a news watcher. So I was surprised that this had been my first response to Fred’s announcement, a week before, that he’d be leaving. It had been my first thought.
     “I think it’s a beautiful day,” my mother said, and closed her eyes.
     Cheated out of her retirement home in Arizona, it simply couldn’t get too hot for my mother. I watched a fat, dizzy bee meander musically across the deck and rise, willfully upward, making for an apple blossom.
     “I’m going to try and get some writing done,” I said.
     I had not been writing.
     The book I was working on when Seattle evacuated had been pure fantasia, a baroque love affair with sound and rhythm and scene. But compared to the surrealism around me, it had begun to seem indulgent and beside the point. I climbed the stairs to my writing room and looked out over lower Ballard, Freemont and the north side of Queen Anne hill. What followed had been a period of simply writing down things I saw, with no real coherent structure, let alone plot. I’d recorded the big events: the massive exodus, the rise of homesteaders.
     I’d then begun to record the weather.
     The Space Needle, long since decommissioned, hovered pointlessly in the distance. Closer, gulls circled over the Freemont canal. I liked this view in part because in it the city remained largely unchanged, pre-apocalyptic. If anything, more serene.
     I opened my notebook and wrote, Hot again. I scanned the last few pages: all Hot. I found a Hot with showers three weeks back. The journal was a triumph. Still, the ritual was something I found comfort in, the being alone, pen in hand. The designated space of it. The view. There was some construction going on a few blocks away—an incongruous level of activity amid the largely pacific streets—and I again made a commitment to visit the site, as I had made a commitment to visit it days ago when it had begun.
     I heard a knock at the front door, then Zane called through the house, having let himself in.
     “Ma’am?” he said, always polite. “Mrs. Rose?”
     “Hey Zane,” I called down the stairs, “just leave it on the couch, okay? The tomatoes are by the door.”
     I held my breath to better hear him pad around. He went as far as the dining room looking for my mother, but turned back and paused at the couch, then again at the door, where he grunted softly while lifting the box. My mother had been trading vegetables for pot since the winter, when a crop of rutabagas had surprised us in early January. Before my brother had moved, she’d kept her drug use more or less hidden for the sake of Olivia, her granddaughter, but she’d since grown bolder.
     Zane’s head appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
     “How’s your mom?”
     Covered with tattoos, his face was nonetheless an honest one, with big blue eyes he put to work mostly, from what I’d seen, in the service of kindness and concern.
     “She’s fine,” I said. “She’s a trooper.”
     “Good,” he said, and smiled. “How’s the book coming?”
     I shrugged. “I need a plot.”
     “My boss says plots are for gravestones.”
     “He does, does he? I’ll keep that in mind.”
     “He says art is born of the individual’s unique response to his own existence.”
     “This is some boss you have.”
     Zane nodded, kind and concerned.
     When he left I returned to my desk and watched the construction for a while. Scaffolding had been erected around the house, and men were all over it doing something I couldn’t quite make out. Presently a whistle blew, and they descended below the green canopy. I stared at my mostly blank page.
     Long before leaving, Penelope had been worried this might happen. To her, my blank pages signified something more than the absence of writing; they signified my mood, my moping and irritability, my level of contribution, finally, to the relationship. I’d come upstairs on several occasions to find her standing at my desk, flipping sadly through my journal, gathering evidence. I hadn’t given her children—the least I could do was give her another book.
     Of course, she was coming back within the month—at least, she’d said so a year ago. She was coming back to check in, to take me with her. She was coming back to sign divorce papers. Coming to see what comes next. And when she did, I wanted to have something to show her.
     But nothing came.
     My mother was shuffling through the house, and I could hear her clear the coffee table. By the time I got down there she had the bag of weed at her feet, and the cigarette machine before her. She was struggling to get a paper in position—something increasingly difficult for her arthritic, gardener’s hands. I sat beside her, marked her stubborn concentration.
     “How are you feeling today, mom?”
     “I’ve been thinking about blood.”
     “Not because you saw any, I hope.”
     “Your father used to cut himself on the job. He’d come home at least once a month with some nasty gash, and I’d offer to dress it but he’d shrug me off and say, ‘Don’t worry about it, Rosie, I clot fast.’ He had a high platelet count. He was so damn proud of his clotting. He smoked too much, he drank too much, but he always said he’d die of natural causes.”
     I put my hand into a pocket of airborne dust frozen by sunlight.
     “Anyway, dear, how are you?”
     “Mom.”
     She got the paper right, turned to me. “What?”
     She always did this.
     “Nothing. I think I’m going to go take a look at that construction down on… it must be 59th or 58th street.”
     “I think that’s a great idea. There are always plenty of ways to get involved in your community.”
     “Well, right. I just want to know what they’re doing. It’s hard see what’s happening from my room.”
     She laughed. “I’ll let that statement go without comment.”
     She turned back to her machine, rolled the paper up to the gum line, and brought it to her face. She scrunched her mouth around to summon saliva, then licked.
     When she reached down for more pot I noticed a folded piece of paper, a letter, it looked to me. I picked it up and opened it. The text was strangely askew. It looked like a fax, or even the result of an ancient, hand cranked copy machine. Dry splotches of smeared ink interrupted and obscured some of the words, but it was largely legible. It was addressed to something called “The Guild of St. Cooper” and bore the title “On Marbles.”
     “What’s this?” I asked.
     My mother glanced at it quickly, but didn’t seem interested. “Zane must have dropped it.”
     A brief scan revealed that it was written in an odd, slightly archaic register, and that it described some children playing marbles, or rather, playing with marbles, just sending them careening into one another.
     Taking a break to rub her crooked hands, my mother glanced at me and, seeing my vaguely transported expression, asked whom the letter was from.
     I looked at the bottom of the page. “It just says The Editor.”
     The radio crackled again, and we looked at it expectantly.
     One day—no one could say exactly when—that radio would roar to life and announce the collapse of the Ross Ice Shelf, an event that would cause irreparable damage to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, trigger a tsunami across the Pacific Ocean, and raise sea levels as much as fifteen feet. The radio would then fall silent forever, having served its purpose, and Seattle would cease to exist.
     My mother brought another joint to her lips, stuck out her tongue. Everyone wanted to die of natural causes, of course. Some were just more impatient than others.

———-
Shya Scanlon’s first published book was a handbound edition of his novel Forecast, created by Drew Burk. shyascanlon.com

You told me about seeing an old friend at the store and how she asked you if we were still a couple. You said she gave you a disappointed look when you told her that we were still together. You did tell her though, that we had broken up a few times and we were now seeing a therapist. She smiled warmly, maybe condescendingly, when you told her that part. She put her hand on your arm, even stroked your wrist a little. This was a friend you used to take stock in, someone who has been married to her high school sweetheart for almost twenty years, even though she got more miserable every year.
     “What has he done to prove himself to you?” she asked you.
     You remembered how I bought you flowers, how I said I was sorry, how I undressed you like a starving man, but that was about it. You told your friend that it had to do with having time apart and how that put things in perspective. But in the back of your mind, several sad defeated thoughts scrolled by: This is as good as I will ever get now… I can’t remember what I was unhappy about… I have always overreacted about simple things… Why should someone prove themselves to me when I can’t even prove myself to anyone?… It would be nice to have someone help with the bills… I don’t want to die alone.
     Your friend gave you a hug and whispered something that sounded like a daily affirmation into your ear before she said goodbye. You continued shopping, even though you were quietly filling with an uneasy mix of shame and anger. When you got to the checkout stand, you saw your friend, thumbing slowly through some garish gossip magazine with headlines about affairs, cellulite, and movie stars in rehab. Her eyes sparkled and her mouth twitched lightly with drool. She looked like she wanted to dive into the magazine and fix everyone’s shitty world.

———-
Kevin Sampsell lives in Portland, Oregon, where he runs Future Tense Books, an influential micropress that he started in 1990. His work has recently appeared in The Rumpus, Unshod Quills, and Smalldoggies. He recently performed a new collaboration with musician Laura Gibson at sold out Entertainment For People shows in Portland and Seattle. His most recent book is A Common Pornography: A Memoir.

Guy: Hey, I’m Carl.

Lucy: I’m feeling a little low right now.

Guy: I can get you a phone book or a baby booster —

Lucy: You’ve got it wrong. I am emotionally low. Like down and out.

Guy: This is the speed-dating thing, right?

Lucy: My name is Lucy and I have a cactus, a job, and basic plus cable. Not necessarily in that order.

Guy: Is the cactus single?

ROUND TWO

Guy: Cheers, I’m Basil.

Lucy: So you’re German.

Guy: Pfft. Er, I’m from London.

Lucy: Nothing.

Guy: England.

Lucy: Hey, whacka, whacka let’s put the ‘gland’ back in England.

Guy: Come again?

Lucy: I’m always above people’s heads.

Guy: Yes, well then. Aufweidersehen.

 
ROUND 3

Guy: Oh, wow, this is fun! You having a good time?

Lucy: Compared to the funeral yesterday, yes!

Guy: Jesus, I’m sorry. Did I say something? Who. Died?

Lucy: Coral Wilson, she was 87.

Guy: Grandma?

Lucy: Lover.

Guy: You have a sick sense of humor lady.

Lucy: Whatever do you mean?

Guy: Well, that can’t really be true.

Lucy: So much is true that no one wants to be true.

 
ROUND FOUR

Guy: Word on the street is that this is the black hole seat. I got a text from my man Jimbo that said you’re some kind of necro—lesbo.

Lucy: I love your shirt. What do you call that? Criss-crossy lines? Intersections of color? Boxes of interconnectedness? Catholic shame branding?

Guy: Plaid.

Lucy: There is a sadness to that.

Guy: What? No there isn’t. Plaid is cool, it’s everywhere and it’s perfectly happy.

Lucy: No, that I love your shirt so much. I’m really into it. If you’ll let me be forward with you, its stolen my heart.

Guy: So I suppose you want to have a round with just my shirt then?

Lucy: You really get me. If you’d worn a different shirt tonight then it’d be you, I swear, it’d be you I could spend the rest of my life with.

Guy: What if I told you the shirt is me and me is inhabited by a temporary setback?

Lucy: So the shirt is an externalized version of yourself that you really like a lot and you want to keep it safe.

Guy: Here, take it.

Lucy: I’m going to buy it a whiskey. It needs one.

———-

There is a strip of photos that we’ve hidden somewhere. It’s four pictures of us from a photo booth when we still had other people’s rings on our fingers. You can see them in one of the poses. We never thought to take them off.
     We thought that people would just think that we were married to each other when we were out somewhere—that I gave you that ring and you gave me this ring.
     We were good at pretending to be one strong couple, not a combination of two weak ones. But I do remember that time at the dessert shop when you pointed at something excitedly and accidentally called me by your husband’s name. You didn’t notice your mistake and I just rolled with it, like nothing happened.
     There is no sign of rings in any other photo of us. I guess that means we’re free.

———-
Kevin Sampsell lives in Portland, Oregon, where he runs Future Tense Books, an influential micropress that he started in 1990. His work has recently appeared in The Rumpus, Unshod Quills, and Smalldoggies. He recently performed a new collaboration with musician Laura Gibson at sold out Entertainment For People shows in Portland and Seattle. His most recent book is A Common Pornography: A Memoir.

———-
Jensen Beach is a graduate of the MFA program at UMass Amherst. His stories have appeared or will soon in American Short Fiction, The Collagist, Fifty-Two Stories, Ninth Letter, Sou’wester, Witness and the Best of the Web 2010. HIs first book, a collection of stories called For out of the Heart Proceed, is forthcoming in 2012 from Dark Sky Books. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.

———-
Jensen Beach is a graduate of the MFA program at UMass Amherst. His stories have appeared or will soon in American Short Fiction, The Collagist, Fifty-Two Stories, Ninth Letter, Sou’wester, Witness and the Best of the Web 2010. HIs first book, a collection of stories called For out of the Heart Proceed, is forthcoming in 2012 from Dark Sky Books. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.