After Charlie and I broke up, he dated two Russian women. When we got back together, I said something to him about how he wore those same camouflage pants all of the time, the same paint-splattered white v-neck shirts. What I meant was: don’t think I’ve forgotten that I told you I thought Russian women were beautiful and that if I was a lesbian I’d want to fall in love with one. Charlie shrugged and said he didn’t have any other shirts so I said let’s go buy you some new fucking shirts.
While we were shopping I said the Russian Women Stuff aloud to him. I didn’t think I could, but I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror and I looked braver than I felt. I looked like a warrior. I was wearing tribal earrings and I’d switched the diamond stud in my nose for a small hoop; thick black eyeliner and lots of lipgloss. My hair a beautiful mess. I turned to Charlie.
“You only dated those Russian women because I said that whole thing that one time.”
“What one thing?”
“Whole thing. One time,” I corrected. He was snapping metal hangers on the rack from one hand to the next, looking at the dress pants on clearance.
“We were drunk…I told you I wanted to kiss Regina Spektor, remember?”
“Oh, so you’re a lesbian now?” he said, and held up a pair of garish orange pants. I rolled my eyes and he put them back.
“No. I’m not a lesbian now.”
“You also said you liked English boys. Don’t forget your wannabe Banksy.” This was a reference to my affair with Lucas, the cute-but-completely-awful-for-me street artist who moved back to London with seven hundred of my dollars and two of my favorite paperbacks.
“That’s not the fucking point, Charlie.”
“And the point is?”
I checked the mirror, reminded myself.
“I’m angry. You hurt me on purpose. That’s why we always fight.”
“We don’t always fight,” he said. He gave me that look of his, the gooey-loving one, but I wasn’t in the mood and didn’t imagine myself becoming so anytime soon. Sure I loved him, deep inside and far from where any light shone, it just wasn’t a thing either of us ever verbalized.
I walked over to the plain white t-shirts and threw a pack of mediums in the basket. Charlie was behind me. I could smell him. He smelled like wet forest and cigarettes.

That night we went out and Charlie wore one of his new shirts and we saw some friends of ours at the bar. I told my friend, Stephanie, that I was going to kiss the first foreign boy I saw—that I would lick his teeth and chew his fucking face off—that I was going to make Charlie jealous. That I was going to make him pay for Russian Women Stuff.
“I thought you two were back together?” she said.
“We are.”
“You’re the worst together,” she said, and didn’t smile. The not-smiling hurt my feelings. I looked around, felt my face get hot. I’d already changed my mind. It was a dumb idea.
I saw Charlie at the bar with two of his buddies. I liked watching him when he didn’t know I was looking. He was nodding and laughing. Then some guy accidentally backed into him and Charlie’s whiskey spilled all over the front of his new shirt. Charlie smiled and patted the guy’s shoulder and I watched the guy buy him a refill.
“There’s something on your shirt,” I said after Charlie slid back into the booth.
He smiled and put his arm around me, squeezed my leg under the table. And I knew he’d get a great kick out of it if I told him I loved him right then. If I leaned in and made a huge deal about it.

Leesa Cross-Smith

About the author:

Leesa Cross-Smith is a writer and homemaker with a BA in English from the University of Louisville. She lives in Kentucky with her bearded husband and their two children. Her short story, Whiskey & Ribbons, won Editor’s Choice in the 2011 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Storychord, The Rumpus, Bluestem Magazine, Carve Magazine and Little Fiction. She puts Sriracha on everything, dances like a mom and can be found online at LeesaCrossSmith.com.

Deirdre Daly

Deirdre Daly is currently studying for her PhD in University College, Dublin in the School of English and her research interests include feminism, queer theory, the taboo and paraphilias. As a distraction, she enjoys writing poetry and short fiction.

I coasted down the dirt road on my piece of shit dirt bike. The dirt road was brown. The pebbles in the dust made my bike bounce. There was a little hill by the dirt road. It was mostly dirt and rocks. There was some scrub brush growing here and there. I looked up at the sky. I saw the remnants of a fading jet stream. I saw some movement in the scrub brush. I hit the footbrakes. I skidded in a circle. I approached the bush cautiously.
     Behind the bush was a big ass turkey vulture. It was twitching in the dirt. Its wing was snapped and bleeding. Its eyes were rolling around in its head. I stared the buzzard in the eye. I squatted down. I thought about poking it with a stick or something. I thought about bashing it over the head with a boulder or something. I didn’t know too much about killing buzzards. I liked to watch them circle in the sky. I liked it that it told me something about what was going on out in the distance. That something big was dead or dying.
     The buzzard got to its feet. Its broken wing was dragging in the dirt. The black feathers were specked with dust. It made no sound but it kept an eye on me. Its beak was hooked and white. I could see its chest rising and falling rapidly. I followed it down the hill. The buzzard tried to go faster. Its dragging wing was slowing it down. I strolled along looking at its nasty red wrinkled head and its beady eyes. I figured if it tried to rush me, I’d just kick it in the face. At the bottom of the hill, it headed out on the flood plain of the desert floor, its clawed feet leaving traces in the dust. I wondered if its friends would come and eat it. I looked overhead to see if they were circling in the sky.
     The buzzard made its way beyond our shed walking parallel to the wash. I wondered if I could herd the bird like a pig. I picked up a long piece of yucca pole. I tapped the buzzard on its unbroken left shoulder to see if I could make it turn. The buzzard just snapped at the pole, breaking it in half. I was surprised by the power of its bite and fell back a couple more steps. I started wondering if kicking the buzzard in the face would really do the job.
     I wondered how the buzzard would respond to my voice.
     “Fuck you buzzard,” I said.
     We walked on for about half a mile, out to the tree fort where I tried to kill my brother. He was kicking my ass up in the fort and I swore to God I’d kill him. He said that I wouldn‘t. I grabbed his arm and tried to throw him out. He slipped my grip and punched me in the kidney. I went down on one knee and looked up at him and said “One of these days I’ll kill you.” He laughed and called me an asshole. He climbed out of the tree. I lay there in the sun filled with rage staring up at the sun. I stared right into it until my eyes hurt and then I closed them and still saw the shape of the sun like it had burned its way into the inside of my eyelids forever.
     The buzzard came to the intersection of the little wash and the big wash and it didn’t seem to want to go out in the sand. I wondered if this was going to be the old bird’s last stand. It went back down on its side. I could hear it wheezing. It let out a hiss and shook its head. I sat down cross-legged in the dirt and watched the bird die. It took about an hour. I walked over to the buzzard and kicked it to make sure it was dead. I wondered if I should tell the old man. I figured it probably didn’t matter.
     I went back up the hill and got the long shovel and the digging spike from the garage. I put the spike through the shovel handle and carried it over my shoulder like a hobo stick. I walked back down the hill and found the buzzard again by the wash. It was still dead. I jabbed it in the leg with the heavy digging spike to make sure.
     I started loosening up the dirt with the digging spike. I raised it high above my head and let the weight of the spike bring it back down. “Let the tool do the work,” my old man had said when he showed me how to use it back when I was six. I gave the ground about thirty strikes with the pole and then dug the loosened dirt out with the shovel. When I hit rocks, I dug around their outlines and then pried them out with the spike and set them aside for the top of the buzzard’s grave. I dug about three feet down and about two feet wide and I saw the sun was going down and the colors of the sunset were everywhere across the sky. It was a blazing orange and red sunset and a little breeze was blowing through the mesquite. The buzzard didn’t smell too good and I didn’t want to touch it in case its wound was diseased. I took the spike and used the sharp end to push it into the hole. I backfilled the dirt slowly until all I could see was the red wrinkled head. I put in the last of the dirt and piled the big rocks on top as a grave marker.
     “Fucking buzzard,” I said and went up the hill because my mom was yelling about dinner being ready.

Ben Drinen

Ben writes short stories, flash fiction, novels, and a blog. His stories have appeared in journals and online in the U.S. and France. Ben and his old friend Nate Haken co-write a blog, which can be found at namesofplaces.blogspot.com. Ben also does storytelling, and was recently named Best Storyteller in Philadelphia by First Person Arts. A sample of his storytelling can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFZgUp-kvk8

Before Grandpa died he showed me his scars from fighting demons, then how he’d wrestled one—jumping up and down like the congregation over in Itta Bena when the spirit washes over them. “They almost got me good,” he said, holding his arms out. His wrists chewed up from their teeth. “I got away but they’ll be back. They’re coming back for you.” He made me fear those demons in a way that if I ever saw them, I would have the courage to fight back.
     The night before I saw the demons gliding across the water, I was with Paw and Uncle Ricky. They cleaned their rifles to shine by the slow glow of a kerosene lamp. Ma and my sister, Lottie, had gone to Rulelville for the last weekend of Cotton Days festival, armed with quilts they’d knitted to sell or trade.
     I like it when the women leave. I get to stay up with Paw and Uncle Ricky, playing cards and hearing stories that Ma said I shouldn’t. Uncle Ricky taught me how to deal off the bottom of the deck. “You gotta make’m cards pop with your thumb. That’s how to fool’m.” Paw let me drink from the bottle when the women weren’t around. That night it was brown whiskey, traded for earlier in the season. “Savor it boy,” Paw said. It tasted like pecan shell and burned like bile, but I tried to hold it, tried to let it sit on my tongue. Every time Paw drank, I tried to drink. Every time Uncle Ricky drank, I tried to drink again. I passed out with the smell of gun oil in my nose. When I woke they were gone.
     And they’re still gone, and now I can read MS5737 on the side of the approaching white boat. It is weighed down with demons. They look like men, but the devil rules their hollows. One has his hands cupped around his mouth, screaming hexes that make no sense. I stay low, my knuckles white like ghosts from the grip of the rifle. The sweet smell of gun oil engulfs me with its halo. When I pull the trigger I feel my father’s arms around me, steadying the gun. I see the flash from powder, and spirits rise from the barrel.
     They lick their lips, ready to feast on my agony. I can’t hear my father’s cry from the woods. I’ll never hear how my sister cursed God. The next time I feel my mother’s arms, I am a child again, and her breasts are warm.

William Lusk Coppage

William Lusk Coppage was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta. After serving in the United States Air Force, he completed his MFA in poetry from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA. He now teaches English in Wilmington, NC at Cape Fear Community College. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford American, The Greensboro Review, Cream City Review, Blue Earth Review, and Word Riot.

Nancy Hightower

Nancy Hightower lectures on the rhetorics of the grotesque and fantastic in art, film, & literature. She writes fiction for artists, galleries, and museums and has had work published in storySouth, The New York Quarterly, The Cresset, and Big Muddy.

I have never taken Lithium but I’ve taken Lamictal and Trileptal and Lexapro and maybe Prozac—I was dizzy and cannot say for sure. Definitely Valium and Vicodin and Percocet. My real memoir is eight pages long: six of those pages I am shaving my beard before driving to the airport. I have taken bottles worth of Tylenol PM for months while I slept on my couch for a year because my bed was haunted. I’ve taken Xanax and Lexapro and one time so much Klonopin people were worried for days, maybe years. These days I take less and breathe more. K clips my back feathers every night before bed. She is scared I won’t be there in the morning so she checks the trees outside before checking the warm spot next to her in bed. Don’t worry I say. We are pigeons perched on unplugged amps. Still, monogamy is walking with training wheels, so I never drive through Georgia without shaking. Valium is a chemical hug.

I hope I am so late to work the world is already ending. I practice not closing my eyes behind steering wheels. I practice accidental color. The world didn’t end so I stay doped through work, stand next to the water cooler but no one wants to talk about last night’s repeat of Frasier. I tell the photocopier Please buy my book so I can buy a big house and have a valid reason to vote Republican. I write in my journal So I can eat a burrito and always have salsa in the fridge. I text K So my chips can go stale before I finish the bag and I won’t even care. I won’t even care a little. I tell myself So one day my future child will tell me I was a good man. On TV Felicity says Oh, I feel so grown up. My heart, it says Oh, you beat so old fashioned. At home I tell K I have never fallen asleep under a streetlamp. That should mean something, right?

Gregory Sherl

Gregory Sherl is the author of Heavy Petting (YesYes Books, 2011) and The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail (Mud Luscious Press, 2012). These pieces are part of his collection Monogamy Songs, which will be released by Future Tense Books in the summer of 2012. He can be reached at jesuis.gregory@gmail.com and blogs/reviews/interviews at http://gregorysherlisgregorysherl.com/.

Garrett Ashley

Garrett Ashley hopes to get into a good MFA program in the near future. He writes different genres, and has a soft spot for science fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in LORE, Foundling Review, Pear Noir!, decomP and Bartleby Snopes, among others.

Someone had modified a Stratocaster to look like Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Lenny”—the guitar he named after his wife. Maple neck. Rosewood fingerboard. Mandolin inlay behind the bridge. Mahogany over sunburst finish. I had to have it.
     Though cheaper than an authentic replica, I still maxed out the Visa. But I know what I’m doing—sometimes the world just cries out for something big and uncompromising.
     I called Chrissie on the way to the bus. She was unimpressed.
     Home, I rubbed Lenny shiny with a diaper, plugged in, and strummed a big fat G. It shimmied the whole apartment. I’d never known love like that before; everything was going to be okay.

     Seems like every time I walk out the door to a gig or practice, the baby’s crying. I can tell Chrissie wishes I’d just give it up. I think what remained of her belief in my music career died with our Visa. I pretend like everything is exactly the way it should be. That I know what I’m doing. That normal people live like this. A lot of the time I’m thinking that when the band starts making money, I’m never eating chicken noodle soup again.
     Chrissie wants a bigger place, wants the baby to have her own room, which is code for she wants me to go back to giving lessons at the music store. But I can’t. Time mocks me there; on stage, time is a shallow pool of rainwater being slurped up by the sun.

     Sometimes after gigs I can’t sleep. My body hums and stomps, a bandstand in my chest. I think about the future and my mind races. To settle down, I go out to the living room and pick up Lenny. I sit there in the dark, playing lines so sweet they’d break your heart.

Benjamin Roesch

Benjamin Roesch: I am a novelist and short story writer living in Burlington, Vermont. My story “People Done Crazier Things for Love Ain’t They?” was featured in the summer, 2011 issue of Brilliant Corners and I am a recent attendee of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference where I read for thirty seconds in the prestigious Little Theater to a very small, but enthusiastic crowd. I blog at benjaminroesch.com

I like to say things worked out for me, and on some levels I guess they did.

—I work at a bowling alley now, spraying rental shoes, collecting money out of the video games. At the end of the night I have the place to myself and get to play a few frames for free. I’ve gotten pretty good. I roll the ball, watch it arc in, the pins splash and fall.

-—Years ago lightning struck an oak in the backyard. The bolt cleaved the trunk down to its base. The tree was removed and the stump ground down. Now, on dewy mornings in spring and fall, a fairy ring appears where the tree used to stand.

—I have my own railroad in the basement. Green paper-mâché hills hug a small town and miniature signalmen stand along the track, holding their lanterns high. Overhead, floorboards creak in the kitchen and dust snows onto the village.

Her picture was in the newspaper in May, one of 144 black and white portraits. Mortarboard tilted, tassel on her left, and an infectious smile. Her face was so small I almost missed it. It’s funny how your past can resurface like that, just show up in a newspaper one day. It was good to see her all grown up; I bought a card and wrote a check. It sits on the table, stamped and addressed, all ready. I’m trying to be better.

Penn Stewart

Penn Stewart lives and writes in Lincoln, Nebraska. His most recent work appears in 4’33″ and is forthcoming in Midwest Literary Magazine.

Cameron Pierce

Cameron Pierce lives in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of seven books, including The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island, Lost in Cat Brain Land, and Abortion Arcade. His work has been published in The Barcelona Review, The Nervous Breakdown, The Pedestal Magazine, Warmed and Bound, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, Nouns of Assemblage, Smalldoggies Magazine, The Dream People, Everyday Genius, kill author, and other places. He is also the editor of Lazy Fascist Press.

About the author:

Micah Dean Hicks is a creative writing PhD student at Florida State University. He writes fables, modern fairy tales, and other kinds of magical stories. His work is published or forthcoming in over thirty magazines, including Cream City Review, PANK, and SmokeLong Quarterly.

We, us women, are cooking. Well, not my cousin, she is peeling one potato for the last twenty minutes and telling us how she caught Little Bits and Henry sitting on the bridge together with their legs intertwined. The rest of us pretend not to listen. The sun bakes the rocks, cooking the soles of our sandals. We don’t say a word about it. Nobody asks for shade. We continue to prepare the meal. We shuck corn on fold-out tables. We fry bread and salmon on sheets of old metal, heated by Madrone wood fires.

I throw more potatoes in the pot and more water spills over. My auntie looks at me sideways and I know that she knows I am spilling the water on purpose. I hold my breath. It is hot! I scream in my head, but continue to peel.

“You know you could go jump in the river,” my auntie says.

My cousin, now filling us in on the tribal chairmen’s new fling, pauses to hear my answer. I shake my head once and continue to peel. I slice the potato quick and place it in the pot. No water spills over. My cousin moves to the next table with my name on her tongue. We hear a whistle in the distance and a small breeze carries the dancers’ songs to us. My auntie’s hand stills, everyone else continues to work.

“I had forgotten,” she says.

We look at her. She looks at no one.

“There use to be these long pieces of canvas. The men would make quick frames out of tall thin trees. We would throw those canvases over them and prepare all our food in the shade.” She shakes her head. “My stepfather took those tents away. After that everyone forgot there ever was shade down here. I was little, but I remember now.”

Auntie puts her knife down. She unties her apron and places it on the table. We watch, faces red from heat and souls cooking on the rocks, as she walks to the river and jumps in. Her hair tangles around her face and arms. She laughs and sweeps it behind her.

We clutch our knives like weapons. I look at my clenched fist.

My Auntie falls backwards into the water and pushes up again. She splashes us with huge hands full of water. Cold drops of water hit my face and splash against the rocks. I swear I hear them sizzle. My fist unclenches. The water feels so cool. My knife falls, then others fall around me.

About the author:

R.S. Thomas lives on an Indian reservation in Northern California. She grew-up with great oral story tellers all around her. She’s trying to figure out how to write a story as good as the one she hears everyday.

When she’s not writing she works a full time job, takes care of her three little girls, and takes a class or two at the local community college. Occasionally she remembers to breath.

About the author:

Matthew Clair is a writer, a researcher and the creative director of The Diverse Arts Project. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in fourthirtythree, Midwest Coast Review, The Intima and amphibi.us.

I’m on a mission. This is what Lillian told the man on the bus who smelled like Windex. What type of mission? he asked, but half heartedly; open in his lap, a book about snails.
     What kind of mission? He asked again, forgetting he’d already asked. Snail sex, he thought, how do they do it?
     This time she whispered her reply in his ear.
     Excuse me, he said, then coughed two beats and stood and left her, moved to a new seat. He began a chapter about The Roman Snail’s genital apparatus; eyes on the page, eyes only on the page.
     Lillian didn’t mourn his absence. There were more pressing matters at hand. She took a large chunk of thigh, the fatty bit, between her fingers and pinched. It’s not right, she said.
     She closed her eyes and heard him cough. He talked to another woman now, seated next to him. People always leave, like her friends when they’d heard of her antics.
     The new woman, beside him, knew about snails and let him know. Who knows about snails? thought Lillian, then heard him say, The apple snail species deposit their eggs above the waterline. It’s quite sophisticated really. His voice sounded happy. The woman laughed. Yes, yes it is, she said. What was there to laugh about? Lillian wondered. Nothing’s funny anymore. She closed her eyes tight and kept them so tight, so tight it hurt.

Laura Ashworth

Laura Ashworth is currently a third year MFA student at Arizona State University in fiction and the prose editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. She’s been published in Dragnet Magazine and Anamesa: An Interdiscpilinary Journal. She lives in Tempe, Arizona.

What brought you to this place, this bluff between lid and vein—blue things both, and mutable sustainers? No doubt it was the beauty—the crumbled rhyolite on the swag of the plateau, the opal and obsidian in the buff beds of dust, the ribboned columns, the reckless canyons, the susurrations of scorched, fulvous grass.

Was it the verdure at the water’s edge that inveigled you into ignoring the slithering, the panting, the plane of desert between here and somewhere? I found the fence of igneous shards, the rubble of some antediluvian eruption—ordered, erected, only to collapse into these ruddy heaps. The gate is bent, blanched slats splintered at the hinges, and there beside it, a rusted kettle, some crude iron implement, a giant bone, white as the sun. Two walls of your house stand, but the mortar bleeds out during spring rains, leaves russet threads on the stone. The curled wallpaper—evanescing azure blossoms—a womanish relic. Did she join you here, or are those frayed fragments dreamwraiths, like the rest of these remnants?

What drove you from this place? Was it the petrifying breath of the torrid earth? The brain-gnawing lonesomeness? The desiccated entrails of one of your cows—withered coils and leatherflesh, scorned by scorpions and abandoned by vultures? You left your broken plow, a jar of nails, a handsaw with a redwood handle.

Where are you now, John Cummings 1926? In some churchyard in Boise beneath a granite headstone? In the pink dust of some coulee between here and somewhere? In the sunken cellar that caved in long enough ago for wheatgrass and sagebrush to fill the furrow?

I thought you should know about the miracle. The aspens you planted are as tall as five men. Their silver trunks and trembling leaves beckoned me to this place from the river.

Lucy Green

Lucy Bryan Green is the assistant to the director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Penn State University, from which she graduated in May 2011. She also serves as managing editor of Voices of Central Pennsylvania, an independent, monthly news magazine. Her reviews of poetry, non-fiction, and fiction have appeared or will soon appear in New Letters, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Coldfront, and Green Mountains Review.

Mom must value Tay-Lin as a listener because she never shuts up in front of her. Only sometimes do I hear this leafy sound which means Tay-Lin is speaking. When mom asks her over for tea I know it’s because there’s – she’s got something on her mind and she wants to dump it onto someone else’s mind. She talks about things she probably wouldn’t talk about if she thought I was listening. Or if dad was around. One time she told Tay-Lin she didn’t ever really love my dad. She married him because it was something to do. Also, it was an uncertain time in her life as she’d just been kicked in the side of the head by a horse and was having daily seizures. But after the meds kicked her in the other side of the head, it evened her out, there were no more seizures. She wasn’t supposed to conceive because of the danger of birth defects but god is an eccentric and she is proud she was gifted with such a beautiful child. When she said that I shut the door and cried for a long time. When I opened it again I could just hear leaves.

Another time mom said how hard her life was and wondered why god was punishing her. I’m not just a wheelchair kid: I double as a kind of holy wrath. When she says things like that, well, it causes me a lot of emotional pain. My mother is an indirectly abusive person. Listening to her, overhearing her, is listening to acid rain.

Rolli

Rolli is the author/illustrator of Plum Stuff (poems), and the forthcoming God’s Autobio (stories), and Mavor’s Bones (Gothic novel-in-poems). The Seaphone, his collection of over 50 flash fictions, is presently homeless. Visit his blog, and follow his epic tweets @rolliwrites.

The time now is two to ten.
    The time now is one to ten.
    The time now is ten on the button.
    Ten on the button is the appointed hour for Helen and Stephen’s date. The clock on the wall reads two past the hour. Two past the hour is two minutes too late for punctuality. Punctuality is a quality Stephen prizes in a date.
    Stephen is alone now and he will continue to be alone as he waits for Helen and he will be alone when he gives up on waiting and he will be alone when he goes to sleep and tomorrow morning he will be alone and alone is how he will go to work and come home and scour the bathroom floor with disinfectant and book his train tickets for the weekend and catch the train for his weekend trip and return from his weekend trip and ultimately die in a flash flood as he is driving home from work, after the passage of twenty-eight years more. Stephen is, and will remain, alone.
    Stephen is not prescient. Stephen is not remarkable. Stephen is not a time-cannibal like Helen. Stephen is an actual accountant who is certified.
    The time two minutes ago was eight minutes past the hour.
    Helen has been detained on a Ferris wheel. Helen has lost track of time while window shopping. Helen has been nominated for a major award and is completing her formal application. Helen does not care about Stephen’s feelings or she is intimidated by Stephen’s feelings or she is gliding through the city on roller skates, carefree.
    Fact: Stephen deserves better treatment. Other facts: Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. Squirrels do not have a sense of smell. The double Windsor knot is the most popular knot among actual accountants. The hummingbird was invented in the early nineteenth century by Chinese immigrants. One more fact: Timeliness is next to godliness.
    If we’re talking facts, the time now is five minutes past fourteen minutes past the hour, which, if we’re talking facts, was the time five minutes ago.
    Helen is down a drain or on a skiff. Helen is a smallpox victim. Helen is using her face to launch a thousand ships.
    Stephen rises and paces and sits back down and he drums his fingers against his temples and he checks for messages and he re-checks. He feels annoyed and then desperate and then annoyed at feeling desperate. He feels imperious. He feels deeply.
    Helen is a triple-breasted trapeze freak. Helen is a suit of armor. Helen is Dorothy Parker’s armchair.
    The time now is fully twenty-five minutes past the hour.
    Stephen is thirty-three. Thirty-three years have grown a Stephen. To grow a Stephen, combine one sperm and one egg; feed; water; and let settle for thirty-three years. For thirty-three years, Stephen has been left to settle. At thirty minutes past the hour, Stephen will no longer settle.
    The time now is twenty-nine minutes past the hour.
    Helen’s blood is toxic sputum. Helen’s face is a dictionary open to the “P”s. Helen’s legs are straw. Helen’s hair is runny. Helen’s nose is mice and her eyes are a doctor’s bill.
    The time now is thirty minutes past the hour, and Stephen is gone. The time now is thirty minutes past the hour, and it is time to settle accounts. The time now is thirty minutes past the hour, and it is an unsettling time. The time is thirty minutes past the hour, and the ship is unmoored.
    The time in one minute will be thirty-one minutes past the hour. That is not now. Now, the time is thirty minutes past the hour. Now, nobody can ever know what time it is. Now, it is half past ten.

Nicolas Sansone

Nicolas Sansone is a student in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of the novel Shooting Angels. His short fiction has appeared or is upcoming in a number of venues, including PANK, Bartleby Snopes, NANO Fiction, Denver Syntax, and The Los Angeles Review. More information is available on his website, http://nicksansone.yolasite.com.

Elizabeth Ellen

Elizabeth Ellen is the author of Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense) and Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix (Rose Metal Press). Sometime this year she will be publishing an anthology of her work titled Fast Machine through SF/LD books, which she edits in Ann Arbor.

Adam Wilson

Adam Wilson’s first novel, Flatscreen, will be published by Harper Perennial in February, 2012. He is a founding editor of The Faster Times.

Each time Maria disappeared, I felt like I was under curfew. I flushed her pills, stuffed her underwear in my mouth and covered my lips with packing tape. I would search until I found her. I would walk the city from its Technicolor center to where it faded. I found her on a bridge, I found her by the water. I found her in a café, I found her shopping for clothes. It was like throwing darts in a map. My friends said it was easy to live day to day if you didn’t have goals; easy to coast on a threadbare pipe dream. Don’t be like her, don’t be a fool; this is the only life you get. I came and I went. I rode buses and took ferries. I took taxicabs, told them just to drive around. Maria made me feel like ants in the floorboards and dishes in the sink. Today she stood under an awning, waiting for rain to stop. I touched her on the shoulder, said come with me. She looked into my face and frowned.

About the author:

Ian Sanquist lives and writes in Seattle. His work can be found in various venues including Juked, decomP, kill author, and Mobius. He graduated from Garfield High School in 2009. Visit him at morepostexistentialistbullshit.blogspot.com.

Father probably enjoyed teasing Cathy. Perhaps he would snap her with a towel as he ran the narrow hallways of his mother’s house, soaking wet, just out of the bath.
    Father may have had friends. Kids in the neighborhood may have asked Father to come out and play. We might be able to find some of Father’s childhood friends on Facebook, or by looking at obituaries.com. It might be worth a try.
    Father must have been happy at least once in his life. Most children experience happiness at some point, even if they can only remember unpleasant memories by the time they reach Father’s age.
    We remember those beautiful summer days when we were stuck in the house doing the algebra problems Father had assigned us. And there are more, other memories that we fail to repress, but there are happy memories too.
    Father didn’t always wear a tailored suit. When he was young, he might have worn dungarees and sneakers. Father didn’t always complain about the way mother ironed creases into his trousers; didn’t always demand that his handkerchiefs be sprayed with starch; didn’t always wear impeccably shined cordovan lace-ups; didn’t always spend hours shining his shoes, occasionally smacking us in the head with the wooden shoe tree.
    Father may have liked getting dirty. He might have come in to his mother’s house after playing, and his mother might have exclaimed, “What a mess you are!” or “You’re an utter failure.” Father may have learned that phrase from his mother.
    Father’s mother may have badgered him about getting A’s in algebra. She might have cautioned him about petting in cars with full-breasted girls wearing perfume that smelled of rose petals. She may have told Father that she feared he was possessed by a demon. This is how Father might have come to say those things to us. This is perhaps why the smell of rose petals always drove Father into a rage.
    Father may have been a child who would have benefited from Ritalin, had it existed then. We benefited from Ritalin—it kept us focused when we wanted to take a knife and let out the blood from our veins. Father’s life might have been completely different if the pharmaceutical industry had been what it is today.
    Do not use the psychological term “narcissistic personality disorder” to describe Father. Father’s experiences in the world have shaped him, just as our experiences with Father have shaped us.
    Father must have loved Mother, at least enough to impregnate her with us and marry her. True, love isn’t necessary for the impregnating process, but we have to believe that Father stayed all these years out of something besides crushing guilt. Do not say that you’d like to crush Father with more than guilt.
    Father didn’t always come home with lipstick on his starched collar. He and mother didn’t always fight. Maybe Father was never a model husband or father, but at some point, he must have had good intentions. We do not know the truths of what went on between Mother and Father. We weren’t there, except when hiding under their bed, listening to the sounds of objects being flung and faces being slapped, Mother weeping, and then the violent lovemaking.
    Father is growing older. Mother will not always have to slip Robitussin into Father’s decaf. We will not always have to tie Father’s extremities to the bedposts at night.
    Sometimes, when we look over at Father in his wheelchair, he has a lopsided grin on his face, with a thin string of spittle running down his chin. Father in the old days would have never stood for that. He would have demanded a fresh handkerchief to wipe his face. Now, he lets the drool fall onto his sweatpants. Father would have never worn sweatpants in the past. He would never wear a pair of trousers unless they had stiff creases in them, creases that Mother spent hours ironing into place.

Debbie Graber

Debbie Graber received an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Knee-Jerk and the Whistling Fire.

Hollywood/Idaho Axis

Were we in Las Vegas or did I just imagine it? I wore high heels and dipped long hair behind one ear. John wore a black cowboy shirt with pearl buttons. Long sleeves hide tracks. I wanted to win glamour in that tacky setting, Lady Luck taming the villain, but was only going back to L.A. for a breach of contract suit with a balding publisher. Diminished and small, he stooped angrily while my spectacled psychiatrist testified to my previous hospitalization. Finally I was her—a genuine crazy girl in glory, racing down the highway to pregnancy, abortion, addiction, and heartache. Once I won that lawsuit, I couldn’t have been stopped.

Brett at the Airport

Blonde guy, easy smile, but jumpy. He grinned uneasily when I mentioned I was pregnant. Airplanes came in low and gray on the landing strip. Daylight fuzzed through windows; either they weren’t clean or the air was blurry. Don’t worry: I’m no clinging vine. I don’t want to have it, I said, assuring Brett more than John. Sensible and pragmatic. No frills. They agreed. We had beer and grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato on mine. Later John told me about Brett’s girlfriend. Had we seen the house or did I imagine it? Bright cars before their dark den of a ranch house in Idaho Falls. Rosie: brash, sloppy, and nice, made Voodoo dolls. John said they found one under the bed. Looked just like Brett. Needles up and down his spine.

Convalescence

John broke his leg again. The same leg. Hunting one morning before dawn. Later, a friend shook her head, whispered in the noisy bar at Whiskey Jacques: “He’s got a death wish. Like the movie, only for real.” I read Mailer’s book, The Executioner’s Song by his hospital bed. His grandparents visited; met me, Deb’s usurper. Holding his hand, I paid special attention to the fate of Nicole, Gary Gilmore’s lover.

Mainline Night

His soft brown Indian eyes are lit with fire, manic as he drives from his mother’s home to ours. Highway 75 is iced black. Cattle graze snow-fleeced fields, unfazed as we race by, another bullet through the night. I’m scared. If I say something about his speed, we’ll implode from the tension of hands on the wheel. He’s really flying; the cocaine in his veins fuels anger with the family.

We turn off black macadam into our loud gravel driveway and park unharmed, only I am shaken. He is fine, just fine, whirling to the door, opening it for me, smiling: he has a present. He pulls another vial from the lining in his leather jacket, hands it over, walks to the table and turns on the music. I sit by the corner window, watch him wait for me to break down.

Blues shakes the walls, makes my insides shiver. I say yes this time, because it hurts. Because I’m scared what he’ll do. I reach for the stillness, our tiny spoon of euphoria. My brain clears as he pulls out his vial and a mirror. He chops the powder, snorts a few lines, looks at me, says: I’m gonna do it. He gets out a spoon and goes to the kitchen for fire.

I stand, walk to the table, sit there so I can watch him shoot up. His long dark hair snakes down around his shoulders. He ties it back, rolls his sleeve up, walks to the sink, runs the tap water warm. Outside, the woods are black, wet. Shadowy leaves have fallen to the ground. Only this is left, this syringe filled with dissolved liquid bliss.

His mother is dying of cancer; his brothers are junkies like him, lost as his father and the boys in the band. All offer bent arms to the needle reflected in his image in the window, in my watching eyes. There’s light on the needle, the shiny point aches for a blue vein tied with tubing, throbbing hot as fire that heats the spoon, as fire still between my legs.

Please, John, I say, don’t do it again. I walk to him by the black window. You can’t keep on doing this; you’ll overdose—you’ll die. Please. He takes my hair in his hand and pulls my head back. That hurts. He pulls harder, shedding tears. I’m sorry, he says: I’m hurting myself every time I hurt you. He turns away, but I can’t stop. Then he blasts away, away from the pain, away from me. And he locks the bathroom door.

Baptism

His forehead beads with sweat—he seems a monster now. A woman waits in the bedroom, wrapped in a sheet by the window. Her left arm bleeds, but she’s breathing. He’ll wake her when he finishes. Perhaps leave a note in the medicine cabinet. He can fix himself, independently, the American way, with dignity. He sheds tears too. Scalding hot water lines the white tub. A ritual bath to purify him.

Number Four

She works in a bright fluorescent place: doughnuts and popcorn and bubblegum. Sizzles and pops and sticky cries crowd her day. Televisions blink off and on, the remote in her head’s always flashing, searching for more, more, more. Number Four works long days on her feet: liver and pot-pies and refrigeration. She has a teenage son and the younger one. Married, or sometimes says she’s married an ex-con. For now they live at his mother’s house with the kids. Motorcycles abandoned. She was pretty for a few years. Red Harleys and faces flushed with youth sped by, her voice roughened like her hands and feet. Her laugh is guttural: knowing he won’t do what he promised, but loving him just the same. For that shine in his eyes.

Judy Huddleston

Judy Huddleston received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and MFA from Eastern Washington University. Her fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, The Collagist, Wilderness Press, Mudlark, The Penwood Review and other journals. Her nonfiction book, This is the End, My Only Friend, was published in 1991; she has recently completed her second memoir and collection of prose-poetry. A native of California, she currently teaches writing at California State University at Monterey Bay.

     The only people who could answer such a question were artists living in Manhattan. The rest she was told were ignorant peons.
     You mean you, an artist, didn’t know this? It’s the first thing they teach.
     She had a drama once, driven intentions, but they crawled into a ceramic coffin shaped like a spur kicking away to Cordoba. See, some cowboy ran off with the best of her. This, she tells herself, explains her fencer’s lunge into composition.
     Stitched up, little about her adorned, she plunges phobias du jour into wads of dried-gist tattoo prints inspired by Dürer and Mom’s favorite wallpaper. She returns to that room where it all began, where Mom castrated the old man with a tuning fork, and drowned him in a vat of gelato.
     She gets back on the mail-train, and she rides.

John Flynn

Basil Rosa is the pen name of John Flynn. Visit basilrosa.com for more information.

I got the stiff, two a.m. knock on my door during that awkward stretch between Christmas and the new year. Jørgen came in, sat on my bed, and said, “Your mother is a complicated woman.”
     “Yes,” I said.
     “She says America is not like my ideas. She says America is inside her.”
     “Crazy,” I said.
     “Yes,” he said. “Crazy.”
     “Exactly,” I said, his blue eyes on mine, before my lips on his.

I didn’t notice the itch until we got home. My mother was inconsolable; she would never see Jørgen again. At night I heard her wailing through the walls and for days I only saw her in a flannel nightgown. She started crossing and re-crossing her legs.
     You had to be eighteen to buy the medication, so I asked my father to take me to the pharmacy. On our ride home, the cream in a bag at my feet, I told him everything. He sat there, absorbing the story, then asked why I hadn’t told him before.
     “I needed time,” I said.
     “Same here,” he said.
     When we got back to the house, he dropped me at the curb and kept driving. I went inside, applied the cream, then poured a bowl of cereal.
     My mother walked into the kitchen. “Don’t slurp,” she said.
     “Dad left,” I said, hoping in some small way to hurt her.
     “Did you tell him you slept with Jørgen?”
     I asked how she knew.
     “Looks like we’ve got a lot to talk about,” she said, scratching.
     I went upstairs to get the cream, then told her we could share. It was a place to start.

Doug Paul Case

Doug Paul Case recently received his BFA in writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College, where he was editor-in-chief of The Emerson Review. His short fiction has appeared in Pank, Monkeybicycle, and Annalemma. He is an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University.

The males-of-flesh in my life hold no malice—they are carefree and accepting of WHO I AM. We giggle and dance around… and my husband—when we look at Mr. McKinney’s photo at night, in bed together—says, ‘Wow, that is a handsome guy.”

People-of-flesh can relate, but only to a point. I can’t help whispering, “Mr. McKinney and I… can’t stop poking,” to pretty much everybody who meanders by. When I tell my mother she says, “Juney, Juney, I am sick to my stomach.” I’m done calling her.

My closest girlfriends-of-flesh, when not obsessing about how many winsome-looking Irishmen they have poked or are about to poke—or are being poked by—listen and nod their heads. They look like constipated librarians.

I say, “Yes, and it just keeps happening, and so far…er…really there is no down side,” and they say, “Ha! Just wait”! But they are all doing it, hypocrites.

Last weekend I planted, arranged and misted tiny plots of peat moss in pots. I linger there with them to feel the fresh sea breeze, and imagine Mr. McKinney sitting at his mac book, poking or re-poking me; or poking me from his i-phone, glowing with cricket ringtones in the dark.

About the author:

Meg Pokrass is the author of “Damn Sure Right” from Press 53, and serves as managing editor for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review) and before that, as an editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. Her stories, poems, and flash fiction animations have appeared in nearly one hundred online and print publications. Meg lives with her small family and seven animals in San Francisco, website at www.megpokrass.com.

On her arm is a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower in the middle of the desert. From his place at the counter he watches her work the grill. Cracking eggs and flipping bacon. Plating food. It’s tight back there and she barely has enough room to turn around; she’s a big woman. She reminds him of all the great beasts locked away in zoos.

A waitress sticks an order slip on a metal wheel. This happens every couple of minutes, her rushing back and forth to the same spot. She is skinny and quick. It is like watching a hummingbird. When she finally has a free moment he tries to make conversation. “Can you believe how hot it is already?”

“I know,” she says. “They just got something like eight inches back home.”

“That’s why we live here I guess.”

“Yeah,” she says. What she does not say is that the doctor thought a dryer climate would be good for her mother’s emphysema. That it might prolong her life. And it did, by almost three years. There are no more reasons to stay, but there is nothing back home but an ex-boyfriend who owes her five hundred dollars. This makes the waitress laugh. That she still thinks of him and his debt to her as something tangible, as something she will ever see again. He asks what is so funny, but she does not say.

A man comes in with a little girl. They take the seats next to him. The girl’s chin just clears the counter and she holds her menu with both hands.

“What would you like to eat?” the father says. “Pancakes,” she answers through a smile.

The girl has caught the cook’s attention. “Pancakes it is then,” she says. “She’s very pretty, how old are you?”

“She’s almost five,” the father says. The cook smiles just enough to deepen the creases around her eyes. “That’s a good age,” she says. What she does not say is that she too has a daughter. A little girl that used to be five, that used to watch her mother cook pancakes in their little house in Paris, Texas. That girl is twelve now. She loves to read. She sleeps with a light on. She lives with her grandmother. The cook pours batter on the grill and says none of this.

Things slow down. More people trickle out than in. Soon it is only the cook and the waitress and the man. They ask if he will watch the place while they take a smoke break.

“Sure,” he says. What he does not say is that as soon as they asked he thought about stealing the money from the register. That he is not ashamed of the dark places his mind goes when presented with an opportunity. That it has saved him more times than not.

When they are gone he imagines them smoking in silence. He pictures each woman staring at her respective direction and the sun high in the sky when the shadows are at their most faint. When what is visible is a mere fraction of what is really there.

Joe Dornich

Joe Dornich lives and sometimes works in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Forth Magazine, The Midwest Literary Magazine, and Nerve.com. It addition to writing Joe is taking a mail-order coarse in veterinary medicine. His mailbox is often filled with sick kittens. He lives alone.

Gerri Brightwell

Gerri Brightwell is a British writer living in Alaska with her husband and three sons. She has two published novels: Cold Country (Duckworth, 2003) and The Dark Lantern (Crown, 2008). Her writing has also appeared in such publications as The Guardian (UK), Camera Obscura and Camas. She teaches in the M.F.A. programme at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

I’ve told you how I sweat when I garden and you’ve said you’d lick the salt from my collar bones. I liked it when you said it, but I don’t think you’d really do it. I’ll have to wash the garden off my knees before I try on my new dress.

I’m coming to Tribeca for a wedding and my diamonds are made of charcoal and sand. If I don’t call you now I’ll be on my way, I’ll call you from the airport.

Or I could wait until I reach the hotel. I’ll look out my window and find the name of my temporary street. I’ll call you and say I’m in Tribeca for a wedding and you can meet me on the street under a green awning.

Maybe I’ll get a manicure. I’ve never had one. If I do meet you down on the street and keep my hands behind my back it’s because I might still have a little dirt running through my life line, hiding in my nails.

Perhaps, after all, I’ll wait and call you in the morning, the morning of the wedding in Tribeca, and tell you where I am.

If not then I’ll call you from the lobby between the toasts and the cake. I could say oh I’m in Tribeca for a wedding and you just crossed my mind. We could find some back stair, an empty room, a quiet hall.

After the cheers and kisses, after the thank you and good night, the bus boys will turn the lights up bright. They will clean the tables and vacuum the floor while I shout your name above the noise. I’ll scream I am in Tribeca for a wedding, but now we’re through and I am alone, in a blue dress under bright lights thinking about you.

About the author:

Maggie Shearon has stories in Smokelong Quarterly, Bonfire, Cezanne’s Carrot, Salt Flats Annual, Madhatters Review and other places. Years ago she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize: but didn’t win it. Her favorite of her own stories is called “Cricket”, and it appeared in Diagram.

Nathan Blake

Nathan Blake is a twenty-two year old elementary school aide with a penchant for masochism, i.e., a philosophy major. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Jersey Devil Press, Calliope Nerve, North Central Review, and Tulane Review, among others.

I was wheeling through the trees, on the wheelchair path, just in awe of the trees, when I realized their leaves were black and yellow, and were actually bees.
     Life is hard when you’re a wheeler, I mean a wheelchair person, but the hardest thing about life, I find, is wheeling away from angry bees.
     They covered me. I was head to toe bees. Like a beard of bees, only over my whole body. I flopped right out of the chair. It felt like they were eating my skin.
     After about 5 minutes, they flew off. But then one fat one came back and stung me in the eye. This made me sad, as a cat had eaten my other eye when I was a baby.
     When I told Brenda, the woman at the hospital, about how it felt like they had eaten my skin off, these bees, she laughed and said, “Oh, but they did eat your skin! You have no skin now.”
     It was all over the newspapers, the television. “Blind Wheeler Kid With NO SKIN.” I was a celebrity for about a year. I’m still pretty famous. The gifts keep coming. Parents who feel guilty about having had normal children, with skin, send me snacks and gifts. A day hardly passes without Brenda swinging by with a cardboard box, and dumping a fresh load of packages into my containment unit.
     I love the public. I really do. At the same time, I’m squatting at the bottom of my containment unit, with all this junk on top of me, trying not to get crushed to death.
     So my point is, guilt is real. It’s a real thing. It weighs about 1200 lbs, I’d say. And counting.

About the author:

Rolli writes – and draws a little – for adults (SmokeLong, Quarterly West, New York Tyrant) and children (Ladybug, Spider, Highlights). He’s the author/illustrator of the tasty poetry/art book Plum Stuff (Montreal: 8th House Publishing), and the forthcoming collections God’s Autobio (short stories), and Mavor’s Bones (poems/drawings). Visit his blog (www.rolliwrites.wordpress.com), and follow his epic tweets @rolliwrites.

Jessie Koester

Jessie Koester is a writer living in the Catskills

Sarah Gerard

Sarah Gerard is an MFA candidate at The New School and contributing editor at Caper Literary Journal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, elimae, Caper Journal, DOGZPLOT, Stumble Magazine and the St. Petersburg Times. She specializes in children’s literature at a New York independent bookstore, McNally Jackson Books, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner, the artist Timm Mettler.

Stefanie Freele

Stefanie Freele is the author of the short story collection Feeding Strays (Lost Horse Press). She recently won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open Award. Her published and forthcoming fiction can be found in Glimmer Train, American Literary Review, Night Train, The Florida Review, Whitefish Review, Necessary Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, Prime Number and Corium Magazine. Stefanie is the Fiction Editor of the Los Angeles Review.

About the author:

William T. Vandemark can be found wandering the back roads of America in a pickup. He chases storms, photographs weather vanes, and prospects for fulgurites. His fiction has appeared in an assortment of venues as detailed at www.williamtvandemark.com.

Wilma went down to the pool the other day only to find it filled with rigor. It wasn’t but a couple of days since Johnston had found a swirl of categorical imperative in the deep end. It used to be we’d just get physical stuff—bicycles, rat carcasses and the like—but the vandals are getting more sophisticated. I never would have taken this manager gig if I’d known all these headaches were in the job detail. The only reason I did take it was so we could have a watertight roof over our heads and the luxury of throwing away our teabags after each use (we used to get a week out of each one). I didn’t mind the old lifestyle so much—”We work to live,” we used to say, “not the other way around”—but Wilma got tired of it.
     Now she’s tired of all this fungool with the pool, and to tell the truth I’m about at wit’s end myself. I already had Reverend Beech come out and do an exorcism. There was a bit of faith in the shallow end, which he let stay, but as for apartheid, violence, self-loathing and such, he did away with those with a shake of his censer and a lolling tongue. That was barely a week ago and already I’m hearing these reports about the golden mean in the skimmer and pi clinging to the light.
     Chlorine doesn’t do anything. I went down to the pool store and asked if they had some sort of metaphysical chlorine, but they said the researchers are still working on that. They said I could always try to imagine it in, but I don’t have much of an imagination, so I asked Wilma to do it, but she keeps saying she has to go out shopping, which is about all she does anymore now that we have a little spare change. Seems like a lifetime since we used to actually spend some of our free time together—though the calendar keeps telling me it’s not even a year yet.
     I’ve got to take charge of things, I know that. I put on my swim trunks and head down to the pool. Sure enough, there’s some despair churning up the deep end, and when I stare, it froths up at me. What’s to be done? I sit on the edge of the diving board, bounce, meditate.
     Like any good epiphany, it comes to me all at once. I stand up and steel myself for the plunge, and while I’m stretching my arms over my head and cracking my neck, I block out any feelings of “excitement,” “nervousness,” or “apprehension.” Instead, I let myself feel only “refrigerator,” “plywood,” “swing set.” And when I spring off the balls of my feet, tuck my legs in and crash into that icy vortex, it’s not “anxiety” or “fear” I feel so much as it’s “necktie” and “rutabaga.” And when, an hour or so later, Wilma comes home and finds me doggy-paddling in this pool filled with H2O, chlorine, a few leaves, some dead skin cells, and absolutely nothing else, and she’s got a bunch of shopping bags in her arms and barely bothers to acknowledge me or what I’ve done, it’s not “love” I feel for her so much as it’s…well, the truth is I’m not sure I know what it is anymore, but it’s something else, something harder.

M. Thomas Gammarino

M. Thomas Gammarino is the author of the novel Big in Japan (Chin Music Press).

We turned off the telephone and did not answer the knock that rarely came. Out the little window, colors flashed in a haze, revealing silhouettes of moving figures. The hours passed. Our hearts went on beating, now slow, now faster. Something stuck in Alfred’s eye, a floating sperm cell or other from the cumming of the Lord. A tear evacuated my duct. I was dying to see the baby.
     Two men in overalls appeared and tinkered with the door. Despite our discomfort we proceeded with our dinner, eating something which unfortunately would not disappear from our plates unless we swallowed it.
     At dawn the next day, Alfred walked toward the window until it stuck to his eye, and he could see nothing but through it. The wings of his nostrils turned yellow. I got lost in his reflection on the window. As the daylight shifted, his reflection lifted, and I saw him pass by on the other side.
     It revolved in him now like a slow-turning whale. I began to torment myself.
     During an electrical storm, it announced its arrival at last with an odor of protoplasm that seeped into the house. Bats flew down from the attic, their wings chattering: “A baboon’s a baboon’s a baboon’s a baboon.”
     “A human being?” I asked in despair. Outside with Alfred, the baby stared at a red ball, ignoring me as if I were Dad. I turned on the telephone. No one called. No one knocked either, but I opened the door. Losing all expression, the baby straightened its back, and its eyes rolled up into its skull.

About the author:

Daniel Grandbois is the award-winning author of the story collection “Unlucky Lucky Days” (BOA Editions, 2008); the art novel “The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir” (Green Integer, 2010), illustrated Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya; and “Unlucky Lucky Tales,” (forthcoming, Texas Tech University Press, 2012), illustrated by Fidel Sclavo. His work appears in many journals and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Boulevard, Mississippi Review, and Fiction. As well, he plays in three of the pioneering bands of The Denver Sound: Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Tarantella, and Munly.

Daniel Grandbois

She wanted to live in a house by the sea. A warm sea, she said laughing, no more of this: cold wind off the lake, thin sugary snow hissing past. Warm is good, he said, rubbing his hands together. Not a big house, she said: A cottage on a cliff, with whitewashed walls and a red tile roof. A slate roof, he said. He’d worked with slate, liked the care you had to take, freeing the broken ones, fitting the new. Sure, she said, slate’s pretty. It was that easy, their dream house. Over coffee they agreed on a division of labor: he’d repoint the chimney, the walls; she’d choose the colors, do the painting. By the time the waitress brought the check, they’d made themselves at home.

She showed me a photograph I’d seen before. He was a good man, she said. You’d have liked him.

She’d asked if I’d help her sort through some things. She didn’t want to leave a mess, she said. I told her she wasn’t going anywhere, but she only smiled, we wouldn’t argue. She’d always been thin. But now she seemed smaller.

On a shelf she couldn’t reach I found an album she’d forgotten. Most of the photos were of her, but in the last, he sat on a stone bench, squinting at the sun, a cane beside him. He’d carve those from ironwood, she said. Rub in linseed oil with waxed paper. She showed me how she’d teased him about it, made a circle of her thumb and forefingers, demonstrated rapid cane-polishing motions. But her laugh rattled, and her cough was worse.

I looked for tissues, offered a yellowed napkin fallen from the album—No, she said hoarsely, that was our dream house. I turned it over, saw the faded sketch. When she’d got her breath, she told me the story: that long-ago Sunday morning at the diner, the pen he’d borrowed to draw with while they talked. She put the napkin back in the album. We were young, she said, it was all in front of us. We should never have settled for this.

When I got home I needed to work some, and I thought I’d flesh out his sketch, make her a drawing called House by the Sea. It was an unrealistic notion. My best drawings show themselves to me slowly; those that don’t I get bored with, seldom finish. House By The Sea went its own way, became another of that summer’s Abandonments—walls cracked and flaking, windowslots with rusty shutters, archaic antennae bristling from a listing cupola. Nothing like their cottage, no place she would have liked. That night I didn’t like it much either, but I’d torn up too many that summer, so I put it away and went to bed.

This spring, looking for something else, I found the drawing in an unlabeled folder. There were notes from those weeks, pages torn from a notebook: I find her at the kitchen window, a hummingbird hovering at the glass. They’re going, she says, he’s come to say good-bye. The Times obituary misspelled her name. I thought of trying to finish the drawing, but to alter or add seemed dishonest, a betrayal I couldn’t articulate. I found an old pencil, the kind I’d used that year, and signed my name.

Mark Reep

Once upon a time, there was a middle-aged woman who woke to a wrinkled house.
     She rose while it was still dark and pulled out the ironing board and iron from within the closet under the stairs, behind the camping equipment and Christmas decorations. She laid the board out in the middle of the living room and plugged in the iron, only hesitating when adding the distilled water. But then she figured steam could only help. She ironed the furniture, windows, and walls. By dawn, she was exhausted. Worse, she didn’t feel any better, and soon her husband and children would be up.
     She sat at the kitchen table, dipping a carrot into hummus, though never taking a bite, and staring out the sliding glass door at her tiny, unkempt yard until she fell asleep.
     No sooner had her boys’ lips touched her cheek then she opened her eyes. She tried to smile but found her face creased from lying on the oak table. She worked the skin with her fingers, but there was nothing to be done about it. The boys tossed their bowls and spoons on the counter with a clang and were about to grab the milk and cereal when she asked if they’d like mommy to iron them. Sure, they replied, game for anything. She laid each on the board, pressed them carefully, then folded them up and put them together in a sealed plastic box in her closet. Returning to the living room, she placed the iron on top of the board and sat cross-legged before it, hands resting on her knees, thumb and forefinger making a circle. For a few minutes, she thought she might be getting somewhere. The line in her face started to fade. But then her legs fell asleep, bent crooked beneath her.
     She knocked her husband on the head with the iron as he emerged from the bathroom after his shower and shave, ironing him right there on the floor. She found it much simpler to smooth him out once he was dead. After, she folded and placed him in a box on the high shelf next to her children.
     She returned to her ironing board, placed the iron on top once again and spent the rest of the morning sitting before it. Within minutes, the couch and loveseat became tangled, and soon the entire living room bunched up like a ball of socks she’d just pulled from the dryer.
     That afternoon, she moved the ironing board from the living room to her bedroom, thinking perhaps that had been the problem. She changed positions from sitting to kneeling, and there she passed the rest of the day, chanting and genuflecting. The harder she tried, the more wrinkled she became. The walls folded in on her. The ceiling dipped and curved with unseemly lines. She tried to stand but in the process kicked the ironing board over. The iron fell on her head, and she sank into blissful sleep.

This morning she smiles over toast and coffee. The house seems in order. The walls and windows appear relatively straight, the furniture passable. The little pig cooking timer ticks away on the counter beside her. Every hour it rings. That’s when she yanks the cord, releasing the iron from the pulley mechanism she’s rigged to the beam above her. The iron lands squarely on her head each time. After she wakes, she resets the timer and hoists the iron back to its resting place. Every once in awhile she runs her hand absently over the tablecloth, remarking at how smooth it seems.

Peter Grandbois

     I’m a wanton thief, a friend tells me; I’m stealing time from myself. “You’ll never have kids of your own if you keep this up,” she says, referring to the childish capers I indulge in while respectable people reproduce. She has earned the right to chide me, to study me over cups of coffee and scold me, because she has done everything carefully. She has chosen her husband as painstakingly as she selects and applies nail polish. She has birthed children in two and a half year intervals. In her life there are no wasted gestures; even with the thrum of conversation around us, the cars puttering past the café windows, her mind admits no distractions. “Here are some guys I think you’d like,” she says and hands me a list of names accompanied by email addresses and phone numbers. “Don’t be nervous,” she instructs me. “Just be yourself, within reason.”

     I’m a single-minded hitman, picking off parts of myself. At the latest in a series of dates (#15), my jokes stir up nothing but uneasy smiles; I stop telling jokes. I also don’t mention my collection of bookmarks (totaling one hundred and three), my pet newts (Fig and Sir Isaac), and the color-coordinated stacks of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt cups in my fridge. I start talking about how brilliant Alec Guinness was playing eight different characters in one movie but snip that conversational thread when Date #15’s eyes glaze over like the carrots in his side dish. I pretend I’m at a job interview; I pare away all of my unsuitable qualities until I’m down to breezy smiles, steady eye contact, and carefully mirrored body movements.

     I’m a billboard charlatan, wearing a headscarf and heavy jewelry. I promise shining fortunes in the stars. Love, power, success, whatever you wish for – I’ll be the balm on your mosquito bites, the guidepost on your blizzardy roads. I can do everything. In the kitchen? I’m brilliant, having recently acquired cookbooks from Provence. In bed? A pretzel and hot tamale hybrid. Riches? My career will power us both to a three-car garage and a summer home in the Hamptons. Just don’t think too much about what I’m saying. Breathe the incense and believe in me, let me lull you with my Jamaican accent.

     I’m a tired crone, the fate of any lady who fails to acquire a prince. At a family wedding my 12-year-old niece asks me where my date is – she’s getting sophisticated, picking up on the nuances of adult relationships or lack thereof. She used to think I was the coolest aunt ever, the best jokester and storyteller who always got the characters’ voices just right. Now I’m like her younger brother’s old jack-in-the-box, the one that tends to pop past its dented lid even when no one’s winding it up. She wears glitter in her hair and at the corners of her eyes. She smoothes her pink-sheened bridesmaid dress with a manicured hand. As she twirls a straw in her non-alcoholic daiquiri, she boasts that she has a boyfriend; he plays lacrosse.

     I’m an unhinged kidnapper, plotting to secure a captive. My victim is a harmless male with thinning hair and a tendency to fondle his Blackberry when nervous. We meet for lunch, carry out a stilted conversation over wilted salad. Afterwards I suggest a walk. He hesitates but is not clever enough to contrive an excuse. We stroll past storefronts with stripped mannequins, past a dock where disgruntled boats rock on their moorings. Pigeons peck at curbside offal. I hook my arm through his elbow in genial desperation. In a seedier part of town, his hand twitches around his Blackberry. He probably thinks I’ll club him, drag him to a deserted warehouse and demand ransom from his sister (she lives in a condo in North Carolina). Teeth glinting, I chatter and laugh the way a normal person might. My skirt swirls around my knees, and my heels dance over each crack in the pavement. At some point I confront our reflection in an empty display window. Only then do I realize that I’ve snatched hours away from his life, and mine, and that we’re both miserable for it. I hustle him back to a busy street and relinquish him to the nearest taxi. He smiles at the driver.

     I’m a swamp beast, and my campaign of mucky mayhem is coming to a close. The warrior pursuing me is larger than he was back in my glory days as an evil overlord. He lets me lurch around the room a few times for his amusement before he closes in for the kill. He shows no mercy. He cuts me down, then leaves me in a corner and wanders off.

About the author:

Hila Katz is a student and writer living in the US. She blogs at The Sill of the World (http://thesilloftheworld.blogspot.com/).

My dealer promises this is magical shit. Trust me, he says, you’ll see things you can’t comprehend. Sit back and enjoy the bliss.
     I don’t care about bliss. I want my dead lover back. I want him across from me, feet propped on the coffee table, knocking back his sixth beer, hooting at the big tits and cartoon muscles on Jersey Shore.
     My dealer slips out the door. I shovel that shit up my nose quick like oxygen. In under a minute, there’s nothing left on the black ceramic plate but a scattering of granules.
     The high proceeds like all the ones before. Rapid thoughts and ideas rocket past, taunting me. Old boyfriends and lost friends awaken, sore at being neglected. A dozen different notions for new stories percolate at once. I live in a land of supple white noise, and perhaps this is indeed bliss.
     I was beginning to think you didn’t miss me, he says.
     Jerking my head, I find him opposite me in the ratty old recliner. When he was alive, he claimed that chair as King Jeremy’s Domain.
     I was waiting for you, I say.
     You’ve got quite a long high to ride out.
     The tweak hustles through my veins, my chaotic mind. So much is possible, perhaps it’s safest to do nothing.
     I nod my head, letting it sink lower with each dip until my chin rests on my chest. Still gazing at the carpet I haven’t vacuumed in months, I tell him how much I miss him.
     Then talk to me, he says. He’s smiling, one side of his mouth hitching higher than the other.
     I don’t know what to say.
     How long do you want me to stay, he asks.
     I tell him forever. Stay forever.
     If you believe I can, I will.
     This makes perfect sense to me. I assure him that I believe.
     Remember watching Peter Pan as a kid? he says. How that flying faggot said you could save Tinkerbell if you clapped hard enough? Well, start clapping. Who knows what might happen?
     I pound my palms together. The harsh staccato of flesh against flesh scampers through my apartment. It’s the only noise in the room. I remember the last time he said he loved me, over the phone when he was drunk. One day I will forget his voice. I keep clapping and Jeremy keeps grinning.

Thomas Kearnes

Thomas Kearnes is a 34-year-old author from East Texas. He is an atheist and an Eagle Scout. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Night Train, PANK, 3 AM Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, wigleaf, Eclectica, Bound Off, JMWW Journal, Pindeldyboz and other publications. He is at work on his first novel. He is a 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee. In the accompanying photograph, he is the man being molested.

Megan Cook

Megan Cook studied creative writing at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. A good chunk of her childhood was spent in the Central Valley of California, where she learned how to crimp her hair and was once lost at the Stanislaus County Fair. She currently lives, works, and writes in Nebraska.

Kenton K. Yee

Ken has stories and poetry forthcoming in Bartleby Snopes, Apollo’s Lyre, and Short, Fast, and Deadly. He is interested in the poetry of time.

I used to live a porous life governed by a pantheon of doubt, and this, I believe, is the reason I made no close friends. At a gathering of acquaintances and the acquaintances of acquaintances—and perhaps this serves as an example—I was introduced to a man who had witnessed the death of his wife by drowning. The story was that he and his wife, accompanied by their son, four at the time, neither of them a good swimmer, had gone to the seashore on holiday. When caught up in an sudden undertow he could save either his wife or his son and had, well, the boy was with him at the party. The boy, maybe six, sat in the corner of the living room embedded in the pocket of an over-stuffed chair, a box of wooden matches balanced on his knees. He struck a match, studied the flame, then put it out in his mouth. As long as I watched he did that, one after the other, tiny flares in the dimly lit room.
     On the screened-in porch, where I’d gone to smoke, I met a bearded fellow who claimed to be a genie. After lighting my cigarette—some time passes here and we are now seated in his car—he said he was capable of making my life better. Well, I said, go ahead, give it a try—want some money? I was fishing around in my purse for the change that settles to the bottom, when he waved me off, made a tut-tut and told me to ask him a question. As I was in the process of shaping my request, he turned scowly and warned that I should make sure that I state my question precisely because if not—he leaned closer and I noticed that he didn’t trim his nose hairs—there was a risk of him dishing out bum advice.
     I forget both my question and his answer. We married.
     After the divorce I craved a more balanced life.
     If in some future—and this is emblematic of my current thinking—for instance, if on a day devoted to bestowing fundamental readjustments, on that day I will request to be made able to whistle. Or if that request is grandiose, an example of overreaching and cannot be arranged—if indeed, as has been threatened, someone is keeping score of our thoughts and our deeds—I know myself well enough to tell you (and I suppose this represents what is called progress) I would settle for less.

Michael K. Meyers

Michael K. Meyers fiction appears in Quick Fiction, Work Riot, Eclectica, NANO, Spork, Bound Off, 2River, The 2nd Hand Journal, Chicago Noir, Chelsea, Fiction, The New Yorker, SmokeLong, Requited Journal, Alice Blue and (forthcoming) in NANO & Work Riot’s 10th Anniversary Anthology. His audio works can he heard in Fringe, 2River, Mad Hatters Review and in Drunken Boat. His videos can be viewed on Ninth Letter as well as on his website; michaelkmeyers.com He teaches in the graduate writing program at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

One day Papa’s legs did not function, the next his speech. Sophie and I visited; she was five at the time. She sat on his hospital bed with her book reciting memorized passages that I had read to her. She was patient, letting him stare at each page before she’d turn to the next. Only his eyes moved.

Sophie spent nights at our neighbor’s house, and I slept on a recliner in Papa’s hospital room. I picked up smoking again to keep awake through the night. I read articles about grief. They recommended being honest with children. Do not tell her that Papa is on a journey or asleep forever. If she asks if she is going to die, tell her not for a very long time. If I can’t answer a question, it’s okay to say, “I do not know.”

In the basement that stored our washer and dryer, we kept everything we wanted to remind ourselves of again, boxes of Sophie’s baby clothes and my wife’s dresses. None of them smelled as they once had. Some had been forgotten. After my wife left, I’d lay a dress on our bed and sleep beside it. I’d wake in the middle of the night and press my face into it and breathe. Soon it began to smell like me.

I lied to Sophie about her mother. Sophie had only been two years old. I reminded her everyday that her mother would come home. After a while, I’d only say it in my head.

A sun shower passed as I hauled Papa’s boxes from the truck down to the basement. Sophie watched. She waited on the landing. On my way up, I sat beside her. I cradled a sneaker box of Papa’s remains. Rain beads still held on the lid.
     Sophie kissed my shoulder. “Is Papa moving in?” she asked.
     The box weighed nearly five pounds, heavy in my arms. I’d store it upstairs, on top of the refrigerator until she understood. I smiled at her. I rocked the box on my knee, beads of water sliding this way and that way.

Craig Buchner

Craig Buchner’s fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, the Pisgah Review, Spork Press, and others. In 2006, he won the AWP Intro Journals Award for fiction. Craig currently lives in Portland, OR. Links to his work can be found at www.craigbuchner.com.

It was just before dawn when the man finished the book and slipped it back in its jacket and placed it gently on his nightstand. He looked at it lovingly then walked to his window and peered out onto the street. It made him think. Books always made him think. Occasionally, films and music made him think, but never as much as books and never with the same intensity. He wondered why it was always just before sleep, when his energy had almost expired, that his mind became most alive. He wanted to go to his typewriter and talk. Talk about his thoughts. Record them. Maybe this time he would capture something with meaning.
    Instead, he lingered at the window and stared at the cold blue circle of light from the street lamp. Then, walking past his desk and typewriter, he lay down and closed his eyes. This is not right he thought, but he did not fight it. His mind swirled with big ideas and grand feelings. I should make something of this. I should do it now. But he did not stir and soon the feeling had left him and his mind began to think of forgotten things. They were simple and plain and sad—blurred memories of loss, error, and accident.
    He whispered involuntarily. The sound startled him, and he opened his eyes but was unable to recall exactly what he had said and was too tired to care. Then, he rolled onto his side and lost another day.

D.N.A. Morris

D.N.A. Morris is a writer from Houston, Texas. He has a B.A. in English from Rice University and a M.L.A with a concentration in writing from the University of St. Thomas. His work has appeared in the Laurels Literary Journal. Write to D.N.A. at: dnamorris@gmail.com

     We sat in your apartment watching game shows. We stayed awake until three in the morning, millions of dollars up in the air. We wanted some of that money, but we didn’t know any of the answers. All we had were big ideas about ways to turn each other on.
     Your mom didn’t remember who you were. We visited her in the home. They told us she mostly just sat around. They tried to get her interested in puzzles, the newspapers. They tried to get her interested in bingo. She mostly just sat around, like a ghost. It made you sad. You didn’t understand why she couldn’t recognize you. It’s a disease, I said, you look like a fading photograph to her. Your sister disappeared into Canada when she was nineteen. Your father died of cancer. Your mother didn’t remember any of this. She thought I was a doctor. She thought you were a nurse.
     We went to the shore and watched the boats. I took my clothes off and walked into the ocean. It was cold and there were rocks on the bottom. You said I was crazy. I came back to shore and put my arms around you. I was dripping wet, and you twisted to get away, but I wouldn’t let go.

A Sleeve Full of Birds

     I’d fallen through the sky like a shot bird, into their span of attention, and they’d put the handcuffs on my wrists. There was another man in the cell where they stuck me. He told me he wasn’t guilty and asked if I trusted him. He reached for my hand, but I pulled away. He and I, in that cell, we formed a kingdom of tall tales. He looked like a man with a sleeve full of cards and a head full of poisoned dreams; a man waiting for the world to pin its judgment on his chest; a man who slept in his clothes.
     He asked me to tell his daughter where he was. He said his daughter was a lawyer. He said she’d studied hard and done well for herself. I asked what they had him in for. He said he wasn’t guilty. He looked like a man ready to throw the first stone, then run as fast as he could. He said his daughter was a lawyer, he said she’d get him out. He told me to contact her. He said they’d take him away any moment, that someone needed to contact her. He made me memorize her phone number. He pressed his hand into mine, and then they took him away.

Ian Sanquist

Ian Sanquist (b. 1990) is a student at South Seattle Community College. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Ink-Filled Page, Mobius, The Birmingham Arts Journal, The Scrambler, and The Catalonian Review. Currently, he is at work on The Lynching was Announced in Advance, a novella about lovers and detectives. He blogs at morepostexistentialistbullshit.blogspot.com.

     Herman and the whale passed within view of a Norwegian whaleship, where sailors drank pea coffee and ate pancakes. The sailors hadn’t seen a whale in weeks. They ignored the baby and prepared for battle, lighting fires under the try-pots to make tar, fastening the trebuchet to the deck.
     Tarballs across the sky. Dark suns against the blue. The tar crashed into the sea and spread out in a viscid puddle.

     In a nearby rowboat, two boys wearing gaudy dresses navigated the tar patches. Waves generated by the whale’s wake lapped against the sides of the boat. When the boys signed up for the Merchant Marines at the South Dakota State Fair, they envisioned the ocean as a new version of land, a different kind of prairie. Upon seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time, one asked the other: why does it keep moving?
     The boys had been at sea for seven weeks, aboard a four-mast schooner called the Toby Greene. The previous night had been called The First Drunkening, and The First Drunkening involved something called whiskey, and the whiskey turned their heads into distant rumors. In the morning, meaty hands pulled the boys from their hammocks. Buckets of water tossed on them in the pink dawn. The sailors dressed the boys in women’s clothes, then held them down and pierced their ears. Gold hoop earrings, sloppy makeup, sweet perfume. Coconuts stuffed up their ragged dresses.
     The boys were exiled in the rowboat so the men could prepare for Line Ceremony, a celebration of their ship’s crossing of the Equator. The boys understood the Equator to be a line on the Earth drawn by the hand of God.
     The whale swam west at a rapid clip. Herman clapped and giggled.
     When the baby passed by, one of the boys yanked Herman out of the water. The other knifed Herman free from the whale.
     Herman blinked at his two ugly mothers. One clutched him to her bosom. Breasts hairy and coarse, her breath a sour cloud.
     As the boys began to row back toward the Toby Greene, the Norwegian whaler passed them. The sailors were singing a traditional whale hunt song, and their voices rang in the air. The ship became a blur on the horizon, and then the sea became an empty room.
     When the Toby Greene loomed into view, it cast a shadow across the rowboat, and the boys looked up, anxious to share what they had found in the sea.

About the author:

Mark Walters lives in Columbia, Missouri. Recent work has appeared in the Sonora Review.

Skip O’Conner.
Trip Carlisle.
Christian Jewitt.
Lorenzo Pucci.
Anthony Lucci.
Lincoln Herzog.
B.J. Zenchelsky.
Balthazar Bennett
Marshall Bigg.
Alexander Graham Hunt.
Aldo Valeri.
Sandy Koeller.
Travers Most.
Vinnie Velasco.
Christophe de Botton.
Robert Itkin.
Warren Ackland-Snow.
Denis Smeal.
Tommy Louloudes.
Gabe Zelzah.
Renzo Barbetti
Mercer Biddle.
Theodore Sestanovich.
Rick Waller.
George Stormer.
Edwin Kadue.
Blake Dossick.
Raymond Oderman.
Alex Henahan.
Kyo Sato.
Father Joseph Parsons.
Matt Flack.
Matt Hornby.
Cesare Montagnani.
Joel Stein.
Cal Scrogum.
Hamish Eisenberg.
Bobby Peet.
Terry Pappas.
Lawton von Behren.
Dirk Fox.
Elliot Lenkov.
Damon Sayles.
Harry Wissmann
Thaddeus Brayton.
Senator Randall Rush.
Bennett Brodsky.
Rabbi David Geldzaller.
Deon Higgins.
A.J. Jiranek.
Lou Quick.
Andre Washington.
Bennett Pulverman.
Mike Hinkle.
Jeremy Urquhart.
Barry Grossman.
Link Hennessy.
Javier Longo.
Gunga “Buzz” Narayana.
Ben Fritzley D.D.S.
Jonny Lee Landers.
Casper Tomkins.
Benny Rust.
Owen Lawrence.
Lawrence Owen.
Isaac Savadge.
Pat Cachapero.
Roger McNulty.
Pascal DuBarry
Ari Elias.
Lew Laufer.
Miguel Romero.
Alain Despaux.
Jack Becker.
“George of the Jungle” McKenna.
Lars Skoonabeek.
Dave Reese.
Brogan Hamm.
Professor Emeritus Jonathan Barraclough.
Clark Davis.
Dallas Jenkins.
Two boys from the Phillips Exeter Academy.
Arch Brown.
Rocco Tuttle.
Steve Brustein
Mauricio Ponti
Mike Alltop.
Chad Oestrich.
Jean-Paul Villand
Denny Schisgal
Marc Scott Mueller.
Nick Skouras.
Martin Barton
Adrian Cahill.
Tony Lopez
Richard Mathys.
Ben Davidoff.
Argyle Smollen.

     Tracy gingerly folded the paper and handed it back to me. “You had sex with all these guys?” she asked.
     “Not at the same time,” I told her.
     “How does that make you feel?”
     “It doesn’t make me feel one way or another.” It dawned on me that Tracy may have felt envious. I never had trouble hooking up, but she may’ve encountered a bit of a hard time until she turned twenty and lost those pesky forty pounds. “Can we grab a bite?” I asked. “I could go for a salad and a glass of Chardonnay.”
     “I’m too unnerved to eat, Kate. Do you regret sleeping with any of them?” she inquired.
     “I didn’t become pregnant, none gave me a disease, and I’m ready for the next one. What’s to regret?”
     “Well, I look at sex differently than you,” she said. “To me it’s a bit more sacred.”
     “Sacred,” I repeated. “I never felt sacred about giving a guy a blow job. You certainly can’t accuse me of discrimination.”
     “No, your list would pass mustard at the United Nations.”
     “I think you mean pass muster.”
     “I like seeing the same guy over and over again.”
     “Then why aren’t you with one of your chosen three?”
     “Because they dumped me like last week’s TV Guide.” All of a sudden, tears began to stream down Tracy’s cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
     “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll find a guy who won’t dump you.”
     “That’s not it,” she explained. “I’m crying because I don’t think we can be friends
any more. I had no idea you were so loose.”
     “Loose?” I asked in disbelief. “What decade are you living in? The 50s? Call me easy or promiscuous or even wanton, but loose sounds like my skin is about to fall off.”
     “And wanton doesn’t sound like a Chinese soup?” she snapped back with anger.
     This sudden mood swing took me by surprise. I certainly didn’t want to argue semantics. “OK, no wanton. Sorry. Call me loose, if you like. Pass the mustard, if you want.”
     Tracy took a few moments to collect herself. “Don’t you want to live in a lovely house on a quiet street with a man who watches your baby sleep?”
     “I like noisy streets,” I told her. “Always have.”
     She nodded with a profound sense of understanding. (She obviously understood more than I did.) Then, with fury, she crossed the room in four long strides, turned the doorknob, and turned to face me. “For all intensive purposes, our friendship is over.”
     “Well, you can’t have a one-sided friendship, so I guess it’s over for me, too. For all intents, purposes and whatever else.”
     “I won’t mention the list to another living soul. But when we see each other in the hallways, let’s pretend we don’t know each other.”
     With that, she abruptly turned, and left. “I won’t have to pretend,” I quietly said.

Garrett Socol

Garrett Socol’s short stories have been published in more than 30 literary journals including The Barcelona Review, 3:AM Magazine, Lit n Image, Underground Voices, Bartleby Snopes, > kill author, Drunken Boat, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His first collection, Ear of Lettuce, Head of Corn, will be published by Ampersand Books in late 2011.

I’d come across the troupe after I lost all my money investing in a Beijing-based company that sold weather. They promised thunder storms and sunshine. Climatology, they were called, like some rock-star inspired cult with pagan deities. People were queuing to be proselytized, and I was one of the first to be chosen, then sacrificed—my hundred-thousand dollars became a granule inside a frigate of waste and, after they went bankrupt, I wandered China in a daze. I met a circus act of expats who’d also lost their way. They were performing in an underground subway. It was Sarah with her self-immolation, her ‘Christmas tree of conflagration’ stunt, that made me beg them to recruit me. “Larry here can freeze his whole body. Tammy has pubic hair longer than her legs. What the fuck can you do?”

“I can die,” I replied.

They laughed and were about to dismiss me. But Sarah stared and asked, “How long?”

*

Long enough to live. I wondered those seconds before death—does she feel my desire? Does she know I stare at the way fire meanders across her wrist, the way the oily crevasses reflect in her mastoids and the sharp accents of her clavicles? She reminds me of a charcoal painting with her chaff knuckles and her veins resembling broken pipeworks mired in corpuscles—a symbiotic car crash of mitochondria and guts.

She talks like an airport intercom messenger. “Paging Ethan. Go drown yourself.”

*

Sarah locks the glass cage. A makeshift audience has gathered. I’m vying for their attention, competing against their cell phones. Water mixed with green tea leaves explodes out like a fusillade. I drown and die; the cage releases the water.

*

Resurrected by CPR, I drink 60% proof er gou tou and stumble around camp. I enter Sarah’s tent and ask, “When was the last time you made love?”

She replies, “I need fire to get aroused.”

“Burn us,” I tell her.

Her eyes gleam. “A lot of people think they can handle the heat.”

“Burn us,” I say.

She sets her arms on fire, her lips curling. Sweat beads on her forehead and it crinkles in delight. She puts a match to my pants. I smell embers like they’re dead hope and I can see the blurry ineptitudes of my past.

“You want me to stop?” she asks.

I shake my head and the fire consumes us, greedy rivets stumbling over one another to get higher. I press my fingers against her bony back, her spine feels like bolts. She shivers and she’s crying from pain. Her tears whet the fire. “You’re insane,” she says.

The pain is becoming unbearable, the heat, a scorching machete ripping my calves open. “Best way to quench passion is to kill it.”

“Who killed yours?” she asks.

“My bosses, friends, my ex- … You?”

She sucks in the smoke. “Me.”

“Let’s kill you then.”

“How?”

I grab her hand and run towards the water tank.

“I’m not like you, I might not come back,” she says.

“It’s easy. Just swim towards the light.”

“What light?”

“The one you see when you blink and your breath stops. Ignore all the voices calling out to you pretending they’re the people you loved.”

“Who are they?”

“Death herself,” I answer. We jump in and lock the cage. Water bursts out, quelling the fire. I kiss her and swallow her burnt breast. There’s desperation in our fingers; every sense is acute in our race against the end. She closes her eyes, exhales, bubbles run up her face; I draw the last air from deep in my stomach. The water is cold, but it’s a fiery death.

Peter Tieryas Liu

Peter Tieryas Liu has his work published or forthcoming in places like anderbo.com, Camera Obscura Journal, Gargoyle, and ZYZZYVA. He once nearly drowned to death. Fortunately, a twelve-year old boy saved him, for which he is eternally grateful.