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Would testify to snowlifting like glory off the Rockies,softening the jagged horizon,Long’s Peak in a cloudy scarf,white head exposed in blue wind,and tell the jurywhat time she heard reports of Gazaand Afghanistan, of coal slag and sludgeinvading houses and wells, the Tennessee Riverinfected with arsenic.
An expert witness would swearthe crime is observable, that Earth shudders,mites burrow in, biting stabbing,smearing toxic lotions of shit.We busted the sod and multiplied;Cain is our gardener. Dig and drill,every well a syringe sucking out the juice,every mine an amputation with dull knives,no ether. An expert witness sworn to truthwould say, Get your sackcloth. Expect
» Continue reading An Expert Witness by Karen Douglass…
Munter Jack (aka THE FUG) lives in Brighton, England. He writes short stories, flash fiction, poetry and is an occasional performer of spoken word. He has produced a number of chap books through FUG PRESS – “INK”, “TEA AND PIKELETS”, “DONKEYS”, NITROUS OXIDE”, “GLITCH”, “KINETIC MEDITATION”, “OOF IT, BOOF IT, BOFF”. A collection of his flash fiction called “OFFSHORE NAVIGATION” has recently been released as an ebook on SCRIBD, courtesy of LOUFFA PRESS. MUNTER JACK has featured in ezines POETRY WARRIOR, OFF BEAT PULP, SMOKEBOX and magazines GAIJINGE and SILENT REVOLUTION. His spoken word has featured on DARBOLISTIC REX and
» Continue reading An Interview With Munter Jack by David Hoenigman…
“What do you call him?” ”I dunno, if he has a name I never heard it. It’s been like this for months, since before I moved in. Every day it’s a little worse. There used to be three in there, now just the one. I think I saw him eating his own shit the other day.” They stood around the fish tank. Someone tapped on the glass. ”Is he even in there? It’s so murky, I can’t see.” ”Ah, there he is.” A fish floated dimly past in the brown, unfiltered water. Ivan thought it looked despondant. He wondered if
» Continue reading Breathe by Josh Orkin…
I put the board on the easel. I painted the board with Gesso, and when the Gesso on the board was dry, I unscrewed the cap on the bottle of boiled linseed oil. I unscrewed the caps on the tubes of pigments, those pigs, the Sap Green. There was Ultramarine Blue and King’s Crown. There were crimson pigs, Vermillions and Alizarins, and there was ocher and black and yellow and Vandyke Brown. I mixed them around on glass, the oil and the pigs. Each pig had its own little spot. I set the easel by the mirror and painted what
» Continue reading Hurry by John Oliver Hodges…
When I was eight years old, I found my county fair-prize fish, Madonna, floating upside down in the pickling jar where she had been living for the last week. I erupted into a series of high-pitched, fast-paced cries, sounding remarkably like a smoke detector. Madonna’s body was covered in a gray film, her eyes – once manic with curiosity – stared upwards in frozen horror, and her lips were still puckered for food, food that never came. Bits of her scales had settled on the bottom of the jar next to the fake plastic castle I had stolen from my
» Continue reading Madonna by Victoria Cho…
I worked as a professional house sitter for a while. Why shell out money for my own place when I could just move from one job to the next – holiday watches, winter siestas, families abroad for the season – I hunkered down in some pretty fine quarters. But it wasn’t all china service and feather beds. Consider the Rockford sit, Margot and Harold’s place. This couple was hell-bent on spending their inheritance. Snobby and self-centered, they talked down to common folk.
“Do? We don’t do anything.”
They lived alone in a 6000 square foot ‘cottage’, preaching the
» Continue reading Suburban Cannibals by Scott Anderson…
Shelly came home from work with a cat. It was Will’s sixth birthday and she’d figured a feline would do the trick, help the boy start talking and all the rest of it. She set the crate on the kitchen table, next to the cake that Will had watched me make.
Will peered into the crate, screamed, and headbutted the wall. His oversized helmet jiggled from the abuse. I pinned his arms to his sides, whispered “It’s okay,” and avoided Shelly’s eyes, pissed as I was at her latest attempt to fix the boy.
During that first drive
» Continue reading The Birthday Project by David Erlewine…
I want you to lie to me. I want you to pull my hair and threaten to leave me again, tell me every soiled thing you loathe about me but, later, do a paint-by-numbers watercolor on my chest, inserting a subliminal message between the stripes of a rainbow. I want to cuddle with you on this bed of pine needles so scratchy we’d never be able to sleep, the frosty air cold enough to make our noses bleed, dribbling down our chins like scarlet fondue. I want the taillights glowing rat-eyed across the lake to be your eyes, fascinated by
» Continue reading Center and Fringe by Len Kuntz…
And after the epidemic of unrequited love came the epidemic of unstoppably growing hearts. Our chests swelled up so we looked like peanuts, then upside-down pears, then hot air balloons. Our skin turned red from too much blood and we believed we would explode. But our bones reconfigured, and once our hearts returned to normal size we could make our chests bigger or smaller as we pleased. Some people liked this.
There was the epidemic of ganglions, cysts on our wrists and ankles made by veins that twisted and stuck together. We heard each other popping the ganglions by
» Continue reading Our Island of Epidemics by Matthew Salesses…
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