It was well into March when Rusty found the horse of his dreams.
     An hour past the gorge and millions of corn stalks later, nestled a shit hole of a farm. Blown tires littered the ground, animals ran loose; the water buckets were fly infested, and the hay was old and mildewed. They wouldn’t have stopped were it not for a tiny sign on the side of the road: FOR SALE: HORSES. Rusty wanted to drive past, repulsed by the conditions, but Juneifer said they might as well stop and see. She was getting tired of searching. They turned up the tiny road.
     A mangy dog with bur-mottled fur barked toward a once blue farmhouse and the door opened. A man around forty walked out, dressed in a white undershirt, oil-stained blue jeans, and ratty boots. “Can I help you?”
     “Sign said you had some horses for sale?” Juneifer asked. Rusty stayed in the truck.
     “Horse. Just one. Sold the others. But he’s the best horse you’ll set your eyes on. You won’t wanna leave without him. He’s in the field. Lemme get him.” He took off toward the back of the house. Juneifer opened the truck door and the ramp lowered with Rusty’s wheelchair.
     “Don’t get your hopes up…” Juneifer murmured as the man lead the horse around the back of the house toward them. She stared at the animal, mortified.
     The man had returned with a fat pony. The pony’s fur must have been at least three inches thick over his enormous, probably wormy, belly. It was clumped with dirt. His mane hung below the underside of his neck, knotted wildly on both sides of the crest. His hooves were overgrown, curled and cracking, in desperate need of a farrier. His overgrown fetlocks were twisted, and his tail touched the ground but looked thin and raggy. “This is a special one. Old circus pony.”
     “This one?” Juneifer said. “Is he even a pony?” She put her hand on his withers to gauge his height.
     “He’s a large. 14.2 hands, sticked him myself,” the man argued. Juneifer frowned and stepped away. Desperately, the owner added, “He does tricks. Walks on two feet, bows, skips, great with children.”
     “If he’s that great, why isn’t he sold? You said the others were sold.”
     “Color. The kids always want the white and black ponies. Especially if they’re black and white. Never the bays or chestnuts.”
     “Is he sound?”
     “Never been lame a day in his life. Here, look,” the man said, trying to jog. The pony didn’t want to trot next to him, and walked lazily. The man yanked at the lead rope to get him forward, and the pony dropped his head to the ground and snatched a mouthful of grass. He yanked again, and, finally, the pony conceded. His trot was smooth and even, tail whipping to swat flies off his body. Juneifer squatted on the ground when the man turned around to trot back and see if he tracked straight or she could see any signs of him being off, even though she didn’t know horses the way she knew cattle. He indeed looked sound and healthy despite the poor care.
     “What’s his name?”
     Juneifer and the owner seemed startled by Rusty’s question, but the man rebounded quickly. “Sprinkles.”
     “…Sprinkles?”
     “I told you, he was a circus pony. Great with kids. Best pony you’ll get. You got kids?”
     “One. Teenager,” Juneifer replied as she walked around the other side of Sprinkles and tried to assess his physique. Rusty rolled his wheelchair to the pony, hand extended to touch his muzzle, whiskers long and bristling.
     “Hey Sprinkles,” he called. The pony looked him in the eye before licking his hand and then cheek like a dog. His upper lip tugged upward to smell Rusty before he mouthed his hair and smeared green froth into it.
     Rusty asked, “How much?”
     Rusty was won over without seeing a single trick and, four-hundred-and-fifty bucks later, had a bill of sale scribbled on a napkin with rainbow party balloons in hand. He was so excited about his pony that he rode in the back of the trailer next to him for the three hours home.

Mia Siegert

Mia Siegert is an MFA student at Goddard College studying long fiction. Siegert received honorable mention in fiction for the 2009 Montclair State University English Department Awards. Siegert has studied with Rebecca Brown, Douglas A. Martin, Judy Troy, and David Galef. She has been a drama editor for Goddard’s literary press, The Pitkin Review.

     One sister was the top half of the olive. She imagined herself in the mouth of the old man she was in love with. The other sister, the bottom half, was trapped under the tongue until she slipped out as the large mouth took the shape of laughter. There was something just right about the way she moved in his mouth and she knew he was probably thinking about it right then, whoever he was, and thinking about that made her think of the old man she was in love with and how much easier it would be to keep the whole thing a secret, now that she and her sister were free of one another.
     It was at the precise moment she was having these thoughts that the top half of the olive came sliding over the bridge of the large mouth’s tongue and fell into her sister. The two of them were pushed back between the set of large teeth. The teeth came down and the sisters were mashed beyond recognition, swirled back and scattered on either side of the gums before the tongue did a twirling number and grouped the bulk of them back in one place. Then they were swallowed.
     They came apart as they moved down the throat of the man who wasn’t the man they were in love with but who made them both think of that man, and they came together again in a mucous-thick canal, which steadily drew them together toward the stomach. They were sore and cursed one another and wished more than anything that they were back in the jar where they’d been less than an hour ago, back when they were together and felt they could never be apart.
     They reached the stomach, and were digested. They were spread thinner than they could have imagined, but they found each other again. Rather they were forced back together, neither one knowing quite what to do with herself or what was happening, but both feeling very tired and resigned to this new torture that was now their lives.
     They were forced together in a new moist environment and they settled there for a moment, and rested. Things weren’t perfect, but they were still. And that was a place to start.
     One turned toward the other quite suddenly, opened her mouth as if she were about to speak, but the water around them shifted. They were pressed closer together, too close for comfort, and the sisters, scattered as they were, thin as they were spread, started arguing for the first time in as long as they could remember. They argued and cursed but it did no good because the water around them only continued to be drawn away and they were only pressed closer together.
     Then they were inched along. Slowly at first, and then with some speed. They were squeezed more tightly than if they’d been made entirely of the same material and after a moment of complete darkness, they emerged into a great bright space. They were flying, and then they sank.
     Water held them, worked its way between them. They clung to one another then, but the water was relentless in its soft separation. They buoyed once, gasped for air, and were flushed.
     The whirlpool took them somewhere wonderful and strange beyond the capability of most to imagine. It was vast and dark and full of strange, sudden sounds. They looked to one another, but recognized hardly anything of the other’s face. Ad yet what they found most shocking – other than the physical abuse, the unsettling shifts of reality – was that they had each forgotten the man they’d been in love with. As they were slowly spread apart from one another, melting away to only a trace of what had been, their thoughts drifted from this to that, but rarely to him. And when it finally came out, when one casually let his name fall at a moment when there was too little left of either of them to amount to any noticeable trace of what they had been, neither seemed to pay it much mind. The name slipped out, and they dissolved until there was nothing left.

In one story, the two sisters had a dozen children between them.

     The children were from two different men, brothers actually. But it had been so long since the sisters had seen either brother, their memories of the two men had fused into one collective entity.

     That man wouldn’t raise a finger to stop the world from falling, one sister said.

     He had five children to replace each of his senses, and the final one to take the place of his governing mind, the other agreed.
     The sisters didn’t care much for these children. One sister named each of her children Lyle, even the two girls. The other sister named each of her children after one of the apostles, but immediately after began referring to each as that one.

     Tell that one to stop yelling at that one before that one wakes up and starts howling.

     The sisters weren’t hateful, just disinterested. They let the children run free most of the time, explore the woods and streams around their small country home. The twelve children learned to fend for themselves. They knew the surrounding area like a team of scouts. They figured out elaborate pulley systems and took a tree down with a few ropes, some sharp wood and some scrap metal. Out of the tree they made chairs, a table and walls for a fort. They tangled the branches and made a decent roof. Every now and then, when it was warm enough, they were made to sleep outside, and so they’d built a place entirely for themselves. The older set soon realized they would eat better if they hunted, rather than relying on the gruelish meals their mothers prepared. So the children saved what food they were given and used it for bait. They ate rabbits, squirrels, birds, whatever they could catch.
     One day the eldest Lyle discovered the uneaten carcass of an enormous blackbird. With his pinky finger, he scooped the maggots from their canals. He plucked the feathers from the body, pinched ants from its sunken chest. He cooked the thing over a spit, half a mile or so from home. He offered bite after bite to the other Lyles as they watched. That One and That One watched him too, but none would eat the mess, even roasted.
     That night, the eldest Lyle threw up in the living room. He threw up in the sink. The two sisters put him out back and he spent the night alone, sleeping on the porch right outside the door, alive with fever dreams and sweating up a thick film along his arms and legs and chest. In the morning, they found him at the very top of an old oak tree. Nothing anyone said could get him down. The two sisters yelled,

     Come down this instant, and he squawked like a bird.

     One of the Lyles threw a rock and hit the eldest Lyle in the leg. He moved farther up into the thinner branches of the tree. One sister scolded the rock thrower while the other cooed at the eldest Lyle,

     Come down this instant, Sweetie.

     He did not come down. Finally, one of the middle Lyles stepped forward.

     You best come down, he said. You best come down because Mom didn’t tell us the full story of that tree and I read the full story from one of the books on the shelf.

     None of the children had paid much attention to the single shelf of books installed above the family fireplace. The eldest children had shown no interest in reading or learning to read, and the younger children had followed in their footsteps.
     Lyle continued,

     And that tree is a haunted tree and we’ve been living our whole lives right next to it, climbing it without even sensing its being haunted. But it’s a man-eater, they say. That’s the way the book put it. It will open itself up and swallow a man or a boy whole. Zip up its mouth like a set of blue jeans and the man or boy will drown in the aging wood.

     The eldest Lyle shouted down,

     is that true?

     The other Lyle nodded slowly, with assurance.

     It is.

     The eldest Lyle climbed down from the tree and asked what they had to eat. He’d thrown up the roasted bird all night and was sick all over and feeling weak. The two sisters took turns lecturing him and scolding him and reminding him how much trouble he’d put himself and the rest of them in and by the end he wasn’t hungry anymore.
     That same storytelling Lyle is now the town’s own Lyle Garrity, soon to be mayor. And people whisper, as Lyle Garrity descends the stairs at the podium, wiping away sweat with a silk handkerchief, having laid them all bare with one of his mighty pre-elections speeches, they whisper,

     He’s got the gift, that one. He could talk a sick bird out of a tree and into being his own brother.

In one story, the two sisters shared a keyhole.

     It was undeniable, they decided, that there was something on the other side of the door. The door was locked, had been for as long as they could remember. It was made of thick wood, and neither of them had the strength to bring it down. So they kept watch. One sister got the morning hours. Her eyes were weaker and, when the light failed in the afternoons, she had trouble seeing. The better-sighted sister kept watch from noon until dark. But she often stayed up later, her eye affixed to the tiny shot of darkness there at the door. They were each confident they had seen something moving on the other side. One described it as a dark figure, hairless and shifting like a shadow. The other had seen what could have only been a man’s hand.

     No man could live in there for that long, the sorry-eyed sister said.

     But what if he leaves while we’re at the market, asked her sister. Or at night? If he found times to leave, he could live in there for as long as we can live out here.

     The skeptical, better-sighted sister said,

     We would hear him.

     She watched for him, nonetheless. She woke up as early as she could, while her better-sighted sister was still asleep, tired from staring into the dark keyhole late into the night. The sorry-sighted sister would sneak to the keyhole and stare. One eye shut, one eye stuck to the cool frame of their unknown.
     One morning she whispered into the hole.

     If you’re in there, she said, you can come out. We won’t hurt you.

     There was no response.

     If you want, I can bring you food, she whispered. Then, I think I’m in love with you.

     Nothing. She had trouble turning the keyhole over to her sister that afternoon. Some part of her was sure if she remained just a moment longer, he would say something back. But the rules were the rules, and neither wanted things to get nasty. They were eating less and less, each spending more and more time at the keyhole. The sorry-sighted sister woke at 3:30 each morning and saw the sunrise behind her in its illumination of the keyhole. First the gilded shape of the hole lit up, and then its shadowy contents. Somewhere inside there was a table…or a tall chair. There was a length of wood anyway. The floor shone too. It must have been hardwood.
     The better-sighted sister sometimes fell asleep with her face pressed to the keyhole. If the house shifted, her one eye shot open, surveying the darkness on the other side. She rarely fell back asleep.
     Nearly five days passed and neither sister left the house. They paced the kitchen, the perimeter of the living room, waiting for their turn at the door. The sorry-sighted sister still whispered. All morning, all the day through.

     I imagine you’re a kind man, she said. I imagine you’ve got a good thing going in there and don’t want to disturb us, and I appreciate that. We’re happy and don’t need any complications. But you’ve got us all tied up in knots out here. I’m not saying it’s your fault, but your mystery has a kind of gravity to it. You could be the worst or the best man in the world, I’m in love with your shape.

     She ran her thin finger around the arc and the base of the keyhole. Nothing. The next morning she began by singing softly into the keyhole, a song about pigeons and cloth and ribbons wrapping around the shape of each new thing as it passes through to some holy space where maybe they could go and forget all of this, this whole mystery of waiting and darkness and burning eyes and lonely hearts. She was exhausted. She was hungry. Her better-sighted sister was asleep, leaning against the wall across from her. The keyhole was warm with the sorry-sighted sister’s face. The wood of the door was soft against her cheek. A voice said,

     Please.

     She blinked.

     Please, it said. Go to sleep. Go to the market. You’re killing me.

     The sorry-sighted sister looked behind her to make sure her better-sighted sister was still asleep. She was snoring softly, slumped chin to chest, her knees locked and her body still.

     Open the door, she whispered. I’ll feed you. I’ll give you water. Come out and see us. I knew you were there all along. I just knew it and…it makes me very happy that you’re talking to me finally and…she was raising her voice and had to cut herself off before she woke her sister who might scare the voice off with how excited she’d be.

     Please, it said. Life is very hard in here. You’ve got to understand.

     She did understand. She really did. Life was not easy for her either. Her sister was very demanding and even cruel sometimes. They were alone most of the time. They didn’t eat well, they never had. She didn’t like hard work. She didn’t like the walk to town. It was lonely and the people in town were so complicated and cruel too. She did not like life outside the house and she did not like life inside the house. She liked the feelings that her thoughts about the keyhole gave her. Daydreaming was a perfect blanket and a set of hands. But now they were spending all day and all night in the house, afraid to leave, too excited to leave, their faces pressed to the keyhole hour after hour.

     I’ve been waiting for you, she said.

     Please, said the voice, leave.

     Open the door, she said. Open it and come out and let me see what I’ve been waiting for.

     I can’t, said the voice.

     Why, she asked.

     She rattled the knob. She leaned away from the keyhole and rattled it again with both hands.

     Please don’t do this, said the voice.

     Please don’t do this, she said back.

     She rattled the knob. She kicked the door at its base.

     Come out.

     Her sister’s eyes opened.

     Come out! The sorry-sighted sister was yelling now.

     What’s going on, asked her better-sighted sister.

     This…

     The sorry-sighted sister left the room. She came back with the rusted axe they’d used for chopping wood nearly fifteen years before. With the inhuman strength of a madman she plunged the axe into the door.

     You come out and I will feed you and give you your water.

     She dug the axe out, plunged it again into the meat of the door. Again, she plunged, using her whole body, her arms, her legs, her back. Her hair came loose from its ties and whipped alongside the axe as she plunged it once again. And once more before the bulk of the door gave way and daylight from the open room matched that of the living room to hold them in a swathe of dusty beams. She let fall the axe. Her sister came to her side. Their hands came together, and they waited.

About the author:

Colin Winnette is a writer and performer living in Chicago, IL. His first novel, REVELATION, is forthcoming with Mutable Sound Press (November 2011). He was a finalist for the 1913 First Book Award, judged by Fanny Howe, and is a current nominee for the Pushcart Prize for fiction. More information and links to more work can be found at colinwinnette.com.

As incompetent doctors rush to find a cure, The Boy’s butterfly wings continue to become larger and larger and –darker. The Boy begins to suspect that his “condition” is somehow related to his Ukrainian heritage. In fact, he was born on the same day as the Chernobyl disaster… Soon The Boy with the Butterfly Wings must choose between moving to Japan on a haiku scholarship, performing at The End of the World Carnival, joining Sphinx Inc., or running away to Portland with his emo girl-cousin to start a whole new life. The Boy is running out of time though. The more he uses his giant butterfly wings the more he puts himself at risk of crashing down into a world where perverts, drug dealers, nymphos, carneys, and Hobbits are waiting for him with the gasoline and matches….

On the last night The Black Butterfly would always pick one of the pretty ones, the bright ones, and take them back to his carnival trailer. Management kept promising him that he would get a better and bigger trailer, but there was never enough scratch in the kitty.
     “Where are we going?” asked the pretty one.
     “It’s a surprise.”
     He liked to hold their small hands as they walked together. They passed a bunch of ride jocks already tearing down The Big Butcher –a refurbished piece the carnival had picked up on the cheap in the last town. In the next tent a fat man with yellow skin was bringing a straight razor down his neck. He gave the girl’s hand a warm squeeze as they entered his trailer now. There were posters on the walls of defunct acts like Lady Sasquatch, The Famous Ying Yang Twins, and even a tiny red car with fanged clowns trying to claw their way out. A giant television set was resting on some milk crates in the corner of the room. There was a muted nature show on now about the dangers of leaving the herd. Before closing the blinds, The Black Butterfly looked out the window. Silent men smoked cigarettes in the bone yard. Everyone seemed to be staring at the ground, the way the giant moon was. It did not matter. Most of them were forty milers who after tonight would leave show business forever and tomorrow they would be back at whatever gas station or construction crew they had left a couple of weeks ago. It was almost over now. In the morning the carnival would be gone –gone –gone, a magical and poisonous darkbloom that popped up during a night and vanished when no one was looking.
     “So what do you do for fun?”
     “I seek self-esteem by expressing power over a homicide victim.”
     “Huh?”
     “I golf.”
     The pretty one was wearing sawed-off denim shorts over a fading summer tan. Her wrists were covered with cheap plastic bracelets that made noise whenever she moved them. After The Black Butterfly locked the door to his trailer, he asked the pretty one to sit down on the bed. His voice was calm and uncle-ish. He lightly reprimanded her for wearing too much makeup. He had done this before. She told him that she either wanted to be on a famous sitcom one day or become a pediatrician. He told her she should do both – handing her the doctored drink.
     “What time is it, anyways?” the pretty one asked.
     “Not too late,” he said, realizing that she had probably told her friends that she would meet them back at the front gate, or by the Ferris wheel, or somewhere like that. They usually did.
     “What’s this?”
     “Iced Tea.”
     “I thought you said it had alcohol in it,” the girl said, showing him how fast she could consume adult beverages.
     “It does. It’s from Long Island.”
     Under a string of exposed light bulbs the pretty one kept laughing nervously and playing with her hair and slipping in and out of her sandals and asking questions about what it was like growing up in a carnival.
     “Like most Carney kids, I had a great time growing up…” The Black Butterfly said, ready to finally begin his big spiel now.
     Sometimes he wondered if anyone would actually believe what he really used to be, a long time ago, when his insides were shiny, and new, and he could get scared in movie houses. He no longer got scared in movie houses. The real horror shows were outside of movie houses. The real horror shows happened every day in front of everyone else and nobody said anything because real horror was just genre work now. Loss of momentum, getting caught in nets, the pursuit of suitable suits, the dull grind, carpools, soccer practice, zombies walking around the streets with gashes and hunger and thought-shaped scars, you saw this too often in too many places to mean anything to anyone now.
     “They called us the Midway Munchkins,” The Black Butterfly said now, slipping his hand through a roll of Duck Tape, then pulling it off and holding it against his cheek to feel its coolness.
     The girl giggled and took another deep swallow. “Cute.”
     “Carneys don’t steal your children.”
     “Uh-huh, sure,” she giggled again.
     “Actually, everyone is always looking out for you, almost like you have an infinite supply of aunts and uncles. They always petted me and gave me pepsi cokes and snacks whenever I showed up at one of their joints. Sugar shacks, that’s what we call them. And of course I always rode all the rides for free.”
     “Duuuude, wish I could have grown up like that,” the pretty one said, probably thinking of aimless Friday nights and Wal-Mart parking lots and never, never having enough money in your pocket. “I would just do the Ferris wheel, probably. You were so lucky. Wudd you call it, business card?”
     “The calling card,” he corrected. He got up and faked a yawn and walked across the trailer now. “The Ferris wheel is called that because it brings a lot of attention to the carnival, it lets the town people know we are here. Would you like another drink? You look like you’re ready for another drink.”
     After he made the girl another drink, he opened a large girl-sized traveling trunk. There were a bunch of stickers all over the trunk and one of them was captioned EVERY CROWD HAS A SILVER LINING. He told the girl to come over now.
     “What’s in the trunk?” asked the girl, trying to push a genuine yawn back down her throat now.
     “Oh, you’ll see.”
     “What’s in the trunk?” she asked again, feeling a little wobbly.
     “Come here.”
     The girl looked at one of her watches and said that she really did have to go now. It was getting late and a bunch of her friends were waiting for her by the gates now. Her boyfriend was there too. He played football. They usually said that too.
     “Not until you come over here,” said The Black Butterfly, trying to smile. It was a horrible smile and as soon as it showed up on his face he knew it was a mistake because it only made the girl more scared now.
     “It’s really, late. Thank you so much for the drink,” said the girl, again, setting her glass down now and trying to steady herself against the wall.
     “Ok, one more story, a quick one, about the carnival life. It’s my favorite. It’s short. I have it memorized. I promise it won’t take more than thirty seconds and you’ll love it.”
     “I can go then?” asked the girl.
     The Black Butterfly went over and unlocked the door and pushed it open and then walked to the other side of the trailer, thus providing no barrier to her escape. “It would mean a lot to me.”
     “Well, it only takes a minute…”
     “Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a pretty one…”
     Her eyes were darker than dark blue and they were not too close-set and he briefly strained to imagine how beautiful they would look once he was finished.
     “One night she dreamed that she was – a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with herself and doing as she pleased. Suddenly she woke up and there she was, solid and unmistakably a real human girl! But she didn’t know if she was the pretty one who had dreamed she was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming she was a pretty one.”
     Her eyes were almost closed now. Soon she would be just yawning and stretching out and helplessly falling into her chemical slumber –full of watercolor dreams and unslain dragons and princesses floating face down forever. His knuckles began to whiten now and he felt full of blood and heat.
     “You look tired, little flower.”
     He continued talking in reassuring tones as he helped the girl sit down now. Her eyes… almost… almost…
     “But… it’s…”
     “You’re sleepy? That’s O.K. Don’t worry, little flower,” said The Black Butterfly, his large black glittering wings were blocking the door and he could tell that she wasn’t going anywhere, she was all his now. He let go of her hand – because he could –and told the pretty one to walk over to the traveling trunk very slowly and open it up.
     “Do you see what’s inside?”
     “The trunk?” she barely managed to say.
     The trick was to give them just enough and let their imagination do the rest of the legwork. Once he learned that his job became a lot easier. “Of course the trunk. What else, my little flower?”
     “It’s –empty.”
     “Want to climb inside?”
     She yawned again and crawled into the girl-sized traveling trunk now and waited there until The Black Butterfly shut the top over her, enclosing the girl in total darkness now with a slight pneumatic sound. He walked across the trailer very slowly again, enjoying this part, this was his very favorite part, and even though he was tired and needed sleep he felt momentarily better. That was O.K., he never slept anyway. He often wondered what kind of person could sleep in a World like this anyway. After he fastened the locks, The Black Butterfly felt very sad and empty and he kept on hearing the same thought over and over again in his head and so he spent a long time looking out the window but there was nobody and nothing in the bone yard now except for the silence and the moon and a piece of bruised fruit on a stick.

About the author:

Like most people, Brandon Wells is the author of an unpublished novel. It is called THE BOY WITH THE BUTTERFLY WINGS, and all of his family and friends really hate it, so it’s probably pretty good. His work has appeared on Atticus Review and the webpage that you are reading right now. (Why you are reading contemporary literature on the computer instead of looking at pictures of hot babes, he will never understand.) He likes to write his thoughts on other people’s pictures here: http://lifestream.aol.com/stream/fakeplasticunc. He is a member of The Young Liars Club.

    I’m not a brainless idiot, but what does any kid know about anything? No one ever told me about the birds and the bees, so back when I was thirteen, I knew less than anyone. After four months of rubbing myself two or three times a day, something terrible happened. Instead of a dry shudder and a warm tickle, I squirted white pus all over my belly and it scared the holy shit out of me. Every bone and muscle in my body was shaking and I could feel my heart banging inside my chest. When the shivering stopped, I felt like I had pulled a muscle. I could feel the burn in my belly. My vision was wobbly and unreliable. For almost a minute I thought my eyeballs were going to tremble their way right out of their sockets. My pee hole was still oozing, but barely. The pus was obviously coming from something broken inside of me, a ruptured tube, a busted vein, something no doctor could fix without giving me sleeping gas and cutting me open.
    I spent about thirty minutes just examining the goo, rubbing it between my fingers. Some of it was thick and bumpy but most of it was like milky water. I decided it was blood, some sort of white blood coming from some wound I’d torn open, probably my liver or a kidney. Maybe my appendix. All night I went in and out the bathroom, checking for more white blood, glad that the wound had at least stopped bleeding. I tried to convince myself I was still okay, because the squirt hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds, and there really wasn’t very much pus, just a couple of spoonfuls, though I knew something had changed because I felt different.
    I hoped it was a small wound that would heal like knuckle scrapes and paper cuts do. But I couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t relax for a minute, imagining the pus building up inside. How long before it filled my stomach, flooded my lungs, drowned my heart? Should I stick my finger down my throat and make myself vomit? My eyes hurt from staring, my head wouldn’t stop pounding. I didn’t want to go to bed, certain I would die in my sleep.
    The next day, I walked downtown to the library. I told the librarian I was doing a science project for school and needed a book on adolescent development. She led me to a shelf and left me there. I got the whole scoop. I wasn’t dying, no damage done. Just puberty, a word I’d heard Dave the crossing guard use a hundred times.
    I read all about semen and spermatozoa. Semen, from the Latin, meaning “seed.”
    There was stuff about nocturnal emissions (wet dreams), which explained the dirty looks and one hard slap my mother gave me after changing my sheets. I wanted to take the book home and read more, but I didn’t have a library card so when I was sure no one was looking, I slipped it under my shirt. It wouldn’t be stealing if I brought the book back in a week or two. The lady who showed me where the book was wouldn’t even know it was missing. I looked around. Another librarian was stacking books right behind me. I watched her lift a book off her cart and check its number. I wondered what she got paid for being a librarian, probably more than minimum wage.
    I stood up to leave. The weight of the book caused it to shift and drop a little lower, I got ready to run. But then I thought how some other kid who didn’t know anything might need to use the book before he had a nervous breakdown and jumped into the Blackstone River. Plus, it was still raining, coming down hard, and the book might get ruined, then it would be worse than stealing and they’d lock me up for destruction of public property. No book was worth going to reform school for. So I dug it out of my shirt, dropped it on a table, and walked out into the pouring rain. Halfway home, a police car flew by, siren screaming. I watched the flashing lights and never felt so innocent.

About the author:

Bob Thurber is an old, unschooled writer living in Massachusetts. Over the last decade his work has received dozens of awards, including The Barry Hannah Fiction Prize. Visit his website at www.BobThurber.net

An excerpt from Off-Season.

March. No calendar will claim it. A mess of a month that had never had the means to be cruel. This reign of frustrated desire. And what’s more an experiment as all stories worth telling must be. A month of feigned errands where we return to our houses finally ready to confess. But never to turn ourselves in. And while somewhere birds are donning their carnival masks, crying out from their diaphragms, here, our birds smear our windows with ash. And while their animals seem to be seeing to little but their throats, our animals sleep, waking only to score themselves more of it.
    And yet there are those of us who will hold out, slipping into synthetics and hooking up the antibiotic drip. Routinely putting up plastic on the windows once having scraped these delirious glyphs into the rime. Restricting our movements to a mummy’s repertoire. And adding layers, yes, layers. While our bodies still fill up with flu and we bleed from our noses. Our bones groaning collectively like boats.
    An anti-month or trance? This barely hissed transition? Ah, T.S., which of your many gods would even have us?
    Someone’s gutted the sky. Its insides dropping like tiny ghostly presences. Some cling and some bounce. Some will never register. Blaise’s toes went through the motions while he passed the boarded up fried food stands and arcades. Wiggled his toes as if testing the gravel, the earth’s take on gravity. In front of the inadequate malls two tourists were rubbing their parkas together as if the dull spark would invoke the opening of its white trash boutiques. Dust swirling around them and everything. But mostly around Seatown, that settlement given over to the before mentioned month. And a settlement also minus a season. Or even a spell or a summoning. The town fathers barely able to scrape up a name. The name itself more a question, a starting point. Seatown? What else you got for me?
    Seatown. Mostly transients who couldn’t make out the street signs. Drifters and riff raff. All stalled and played out. Their tires too bare to make the border and the less ambivalent mantra of Mainland (the way life would never be here in Seatown) with its blueberry preserves and lobster traps adorned with potpourri. A lighthouse gracing every cove. With a straw-hatted artist a-squat in its shade never gripping their palette knives and grappling with which body part to start with. Like they would here in Seatown. If their decades-long feud with beauty ever ended.
    Here in Seatown, our small business loans went to meth labs. Our taxes (for those clear-minded enough to file) to landfills and detox centers. And our squatters (for even if you owned, had inherited this mess, you were still hunkered down and stooped over) spent their days grimacing in sweatpants. Ever-spackled and reeking of solvents. Spilling change on the counter for a scratch card or quart. Trying to rope in, snag a cigarette. While outside, a hundred cars were unable to start all at once. Anything of use long-sealed up in plastic and slipped inside socks, into the private stash. Because in Seatown somebody was always holding out.
    Seatown. A generic name destined for an eternity of go-cart speedways and trailers stuffed with Skeeball prizes–sea shells implanted onto ashtray and tumbler, alarm clocks and lamps, pen desk sets and barometers. Mostly scallop and snail shells, mussels and clams, either mottled, drained dead of color, or reminiscent of cheap pottery dug up from the remains of a suspiciously burnt warehouse. Barbed and barnacled, razor-fine, and capable of relieving any throat’s puffing up. No fanciful swirls or sensual knobs. No cupped secrets or belly-curved elegance. No slow plunge of vermilion or Goddamn chartreuse. Place one of these babies to your ear and you’d hear not the wet lap of ocean but the grunt of some tugboat as it entered a vacated port or sand moaning in its sleep as a pearl forced its way into its dreams.
    Seatown. Sometimes it would tear Blaise up just to say it. To let it slip from his lips. Seatown. Never mind repeat it.
    And then there were those who could afford to remain through it all. That harsh broil of summer when the rents would quadruple and the population swelled to ten times its size. When Seatown would reacquaint itself with its inner idyll, its uniquely American dream life. A Hopper scene additionally tainted by barbecue fumes, RV traffic, and the stench of the marshes which the privileged would encourage into their lungs as if it exhaust from the Pope mobile. Before collapsing on their lounge chairs and watching as the sun would dissolve like a lozenge. Sucked into a translucent pall. Imagining their names entrusted in cautionary ink to the back of some barrel and sunk to the ocean floor, awaiting that apocryphal clean-up. And with that Blaise had this sense that he had taken it much too far. As he long had a habit of doing.

Mark DeCarteret

Mark DeCarteret’s prose has appeared in Quick Fiction and Brevity & Echo: Short Short Stories by Emerson College Alums (Rose Metal Press) and taken 3rd place in a Gulf Stream (Florida International University) Firsts Contest. His poetry has appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Chicago Review and Thus Spake The Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press).

I wonder about Karma and wonder if the wives of the men coming from the whores at the hotel woke up in Syphilitic sweats, paying for their husbands’ good time.

The diner, next door to the hotel, is a train car. Ash’s Great-Grandfather opened it as an extension of the hotel. It’s a stop on those tours some historians give when talking about Prohibition. Gramps had a side line in the basement, as a bootlegger, cooking up whiskey and Pimm’s No. 2 Cup. I’ve been in the basement but don’t remember much because a five pound drum of Canola oil fell on my head. When I came around they kept asking, “Gracie, how many fingers? Gracie! How many?”

“The middle’s the only one that counts,” they say I answered.

Now the hotel is where Ash’s mother lives, alone, and man is she mean. The old coot makes Ash wait on her hand and foot. Like he didn’t have enough to do in the diner. It’s ‘Ash!’ this, ‘Ash!’ that, to the point that he hates his name and has asked me to call him Declan. ‘Ash!’ She sounds like an old egret, and resembles one too, apart from the pearls and emeralds on every finger; her hands are twisted like a tree branch on Halloween. Ash moved into the storage space above the diner in the train car and turned it into a little one bedroom apartment just to get away from her. Some people have to sleep in grease to miss their mothers, I guess.

Ash reminds me of a merman. He has black hair that floats like seaweed floating down the Cape after a thunderstorm, grey eyes like tornadoes. Tornadoes sucking me up. For the record, he’s never been anywhere, done anything or seen anything; he’s never talked to anybody not like us.

We go over to the diner because Ash technically is the owner of the dump and we can eat for free. Covered in grease and rain, we hop onto the bar-stools and he puts his arm around me and I remember what safe feels like, though I’d never admit that to anyone. His mother, the old coot, is wearing the dumbest apron I’ve ever seen, the thing must be 100 years old and rotting off her hips and she throws a stack of napkins before us and says, “Gracie, don’t bring that sour face to my table.”

I’m thumbing the napkins and Ash is wringing out his red bandana when Clay walks in with a trail of booze floating behind him and doesn’t acknowledge anybody. He reaches behind the bar counter for a plastic pint glass and walks right back out while the sleigh bells attached to the door chime. He raises his hands above his head and stands in the parking lot outside the diner. In the grey air he looks like a silhouette somebody would needlepoint. He straightens his arms and holds the glass out like he’s trying to catch rain in it.

“God,” Ash says, and goes out after him, hugging him from behind, trying to pull him in. Everyone else in the diner is on their knees in the booths, hanging onto the window ledge, pointing, laughing hysterically, laughing like fools, laughing at the wrong thing.

Nicolle Elizabeth

Nicolle Elizabeth is forthcoming in Best American Women’s Travel Writing 2011 and is the author of Read This Sh*t Out Loud, which is anthology of her older and newer flash fiction pieces. She is a National Book Critics’ Circle Member and contributor to Words Without Borders, the Brooklyn Rail, the Rumpus and other fine publications. She blog here: http://glassatlassassafras.blogspot.com/ and is happy to have this bit of her in-progress novel included in the greatest of greats, which is Word Riot.

About the author:

Ellen Collett has a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Los Angeles where she works in Crime Analysis. She can be reached at www.ellencollett.com.

Dresden de Vera

Dresden de Vera is a student at Cal State Long Beach. He named his car after a samurai he read about on Wikipedia. Find his short story titled “Abstract” in the January 2011 issue of The Legendary.

Olivia Cerrone

Olivia Kate Cerrone earned an MFA from New York University, where she completed a novel titled The Strength of Glass, an excerpt of which has already appeared in 3:AM Magazine. She is currently at work on The Hunger Saint, a novel involving the brutal mistreatment of underage sulphur mine works in Sicily. Write to her at: Olivia.Cerrone@gmail.com

In America, Amanda is a graduate student in Washington D.C., where she is arrested six times as an AIDS activist with the radical group ACT UP. With her superfluous Ph.D. in English literature, Amanda works for minimum wage at a home for schizophrenics. But in England, she commits herself fully to her calling as a punk musician, recording a CD in support of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. But Nick is being hounded by the gay-bashing brother of a former lover, and Amanda has to step in again, relying on rudimentary boxing skills and sustaining several injuries. Melissa, who has always been heterosexual, falls in love with Amanda. They all must deal with Melissa’s past rape, Amanda’s mental illness and Nick’s continued harassment by her ex-lover’s homophobic brother.

“City of the Dead”¹

After chaining myself to the White House fence, I just hung there for hours, watching tourists with their hot dogs, sodas and ice-cream bars, their maps open to historic, downtown Washington, D.C. I tried welcoming them to the crack-and-murder capital of the United States, but they had come for the Jacqueline Kennedy furniture, not an ACT UP demonstration.
    I didn’t want to ruin the moment. After all, they’d walked past a lot of homeless people to get here. The poor slept on grates near the U.S. Treasury and across the street in the People’s Protest Park. They were everywhere, but if you planned it well and tilted your head acrobatically, you could manage to act like you didn’t see them.
    Even though it took all day for the police to cut us down, no one seemed to think AIDS activists hanging in front of the White House was a scenic photo opportunity.
    We weren’t on the post cards.
    We were shouting, “Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS! The government has blood on its hands!” It was a nice day for a demonstration. The air was crisp, the sky was blue, and there was nowhere else I had to be. I was in graduate school, writing my dissertation, and had a flexible schedule.
    The police cut me down and carried me to the van. Swinging between two cops with my head just above the pavement, I could see other protestors waving brilliant, green-and-pink ACT UP posters. They were pictures of Ronald Reagan’s face with the word “AIDSgate” stamped on his big, green forehead. He looked like Herman from the TV show “The Munsters.” His eyes were neon pink, and the smaller text read: “10 years, 1 billion dollars, 1 AIDS drug.” I had one of those posters hanging in my apartment, and it glowed in the dark. I used it as a nightlight.
    Some of my lesbian-separatist friends thought it was politically-incorrect of me to have joined ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. They mistakenly thought AIDS was a gay-male issue. But since I couldn’t be a lesbian separatist and a punk at the same time anyway, fuck that. My academic-feminist friends thought it was cute that I was in ACT UP. But I had stopped waiting for the feminist revolution because I was afraid all the punks would be lined up and shot.
    I ripped up my Politically-Correct Lesbian Politeness Police membership card. I had given up explaining that it was possible to be a punk, a feminist and a lesbian all at the same time. I was tired of being treated like I was ideologically deranged.
    After being arrested, I sat alone in my holding cell until the cops pushed in a woman who was high on something, probably crack. She was wearing an unzipped, torn, white leather skirt and a fake fur coat over just a bra. She sat next to me on the metal bed.
    “What did you do?” she asked.
    “I chained myself to the White House fence to protest the government’s policies on AIDS.”
    She smiled at me, nodding out.
    I wasn’t completely clear on holding-cell etiquette and didn’t know if I should ask her what she’d done when I was pretty sure I knew. But I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t interested. I remembered the politically-correct term for “prostitute” was “sex industry worker.”
    “What are you in here for?” I asked.
    She looked at me like I was totally crazy. “Baby, I’m a hooker.”
    I imagined my lesbian-separatist friends yelling at her for using that word.
    I imagined my academic-feminist friends yelling at me for not correcting it.
    I couldn’t imagine having a normal conversation with anyone.
    I wanted to be just where I was, sitting in a holding cell, thinking about democracy.
    I used to think democracy meant one person, one vote, and every vote had equal value. But the men paying for sex were outside in the voting booths, and the hookers were in jail.
    I didn’t know if lesbian separatists voted at all.

“White Riot”²

The police stood everyone who was going to be transferred to Central Cellblock for processing against the wall. The other ACT UP protesters had already been processed, and I was the only one left.
    A tall cop in a huge metallic-blue cop coat turned me around to cuff me. She said, “Girl, what the hell are you doing here? You don’t belong here.”
    I looked around the room. I’d never felt so white in my life.
    In racist D.C., the prison population is mostly black.
    I said defensively, “I belong here as much as anyone. I broke the law.”
    I wished I could switch myself off like a light bulb.
    When the Central Cellblock cops arrived, a large male officer checked one man’s handcuffs and bellowed, “This isn’t how we cuff people in Central Cellblock.” He motioned to an equally large female officer. “Let’s show them how we do it the Central Cellblock way.”
    They took off everyone’s handcuffs and put them back on again tight. I said to the extra-tall woman who cuffed me, “Aren’t you gonna ask me my safe word?”
    All around me, people were screaming for their cuffs to be loosened. The result was a feeling of total chaos. That lady cop put my cuffs on so tight, I wanted to scream, too. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want anyone to see me squirm. Power to the people, I thought.
    We were herded out to a police van divided into two sections by a metal wall. The officers put the men in one side, the women in the other. We pounded our shoes against the metal. We were so cramped, we couldn’t move anything but our feet.
    They drove us into an underground parking garage and left us there.
    It was hot in the van.
    The men screamed even though no one was there to hear them.
    The women didn’t yell until the cops returned.
    I slammed my monkey boots into the small, plastic window that divided me from the backs of the officers’ heads in the front seat. I was smashed up against it like a bug. I realized they could leave us stuck here for hours if they wanted to.
    I imagined myself dead or mutilated somewhere along the Potomac. I already hadn’t been able to feel my hands for some time, and I worried about the blood not getting to them. I imagined myself locked up and lost in the system. I thought of an old Clash song: “I got nicked fighting in the road, the judge didn’t even know what’s my name!”
    The plastic flexi-cuffs cut into my skin, and I concentrated on my punk responsibility to resist authority. That’s right, I thought. See if you can break the white girl. Make the white girl cry.
    I thought about Patty Hearst locked in a closet and raped repeatedly by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Next to that, I had nothing to complain about. I told myself that this was no time to get claustrophobic.
    After I was sure we’d used up our entire air supply, the cops finally opened the back of the van and let us out.
    I was the only white person in Central Cellblock, and I hoped I wasn’t bugging anyone. My handcuffs were removed, and I was put into a small cell. Left to myself, I evaluated the marks on my wrists and a welcoming committee of cockroaches.
    Central Cellblock was the one place in D.C. that everyone–cops, criminals, lawyers, hookers, activists–told you not to end up. It was the dirtiest, most disgusting lock-up in the city. And I’d been in enough of them to know that this was true. The paint on the bars of my cell was filthy, peeling-off, puke green.
    The times I’ve spent in Central Cellblock were the only times in my life that the sight of cockroaches didn’t make me scream. I felt a sort of inner calm because there was nowhere to go and nothing I could do.
    I was also calm because as long as I was in custody, I didn’t have to deal with my dissertation committee. The members each had completely different opinions about how I should write my dissertation, and their arguing–with me in the middle–made me feel like a child of divorce all over again. I didn’t even want to be an English lit professor anymore. All I wanted to do was finish my degree and go back to California to start a punk band.
    I sat on the upper metal bunk, the one without the thin, roach-stained mattress. I wondered, if I stayed in there long enough, would I learn to tell time by watching the cockroaches crawl up and down the bars of my cell? I wondered if that was the kind of wisdom that just happened to a person or if I’d actually have to figure it out.
    But I felt at peace. I felt like a fucking buddha.
    My mental problems peaked during graduate school. Instead of merely being paranoid and thinking that people were judging me all the time, people were judging me all the time. I was in a constant state of anxiety; even when I stood still, I felt like I was running. And I only felt like I’d caught up with my real self when I was sitting in a cell.

“Nobody’s Hero”³

I was tired of living in the crack-and-murder capital.
    I burned American flags to relieve some of the pressure. I burned flags at Union Station, at the Capitol, at home and at barbecues. I lit a cigarette on a burning American flag in front of a television news camera at an ACT UP demonstration downtown.
    Soon it wasn’t enough, and I worried I’d get a flag-a-day habit.
    I burned a flag in the park across the street from the White House in 1991 during a parade to show off weapons from the Persian Gulf War.
    It was the same year Nirvana’s Nevermind record came out.
    The parade route had to be repaved because the tanks were so heavy, they wrecked the road. I think it cost about a million dollars, and they only fixed the street because it went past government buildings.
    The thing about Washington, D.C. is that you can live in the worst housing project slum–gunshots, crack houses, liquor stores and lottery tickets–and still have an amazing view of the Capitol.
    At night, it gleamed like clean, white bones.
    I used to drive over a hill through a drug-and-gang-infested section of New York Avenue and look at the Capitol past the pink neon sign of a very dangerously-located motel. It was my favorite spot because it epitomized the breach between life in the real world and the federal government. I doubted that even Moses could cross that sea.
    Of course the people of D.C. don’t have anyone in congress or the senate with an actual vote representing them. They truly have taxation without representation. I don’t understand how that can be constitutional. D.C. is supposed to remain neutral. It doesn’t turn democratic blue or republican red on an election map. As Patti Smith described the nation’s capital at a 2004 concert at D.C.’s 9:30 Club, “It’s the color of fucked.”
    Sometimes I drove through Capitol Hill on my way to the Phase, a lesbian dive, just to blow my mind. It could be a beautiful spring in Capitol Hill, the ritzy, rich-people area behind the Capitol, but in just one block, the carefully-manicured rowhouse gardens of daffodils, tulips, crocuses, rhododendrons and cherry blossoms ended. The brightly-lit corner markets and people in expensive coats walking their small dogs were suddenly gone.
    The next block was a war-zone of gutted crack houses and homes with cardboard for windows. People hung out on their front steps. There was an abundance of liquor stores, lottery tickets, drugs, guns and AIDS. It reminded me of a Dead Kennedys song, “Kill the Poor.” I’ll always remember the sight of scraggly black-eyed Susans, brilliant yellow flowers with black centers, growing around the crack houses. When crack and AIDS spread into the white, heterosexual, upper and middle-class communities, a war with Iraq was as convenient as the local 7-Eleven.
    The day I burned the American flag at the glorification-of-the-Persian-Gulf-War-and-buried-alive-Iraqi-children parade, there were about ten of us protesting, surrounded by a million white Republicans. I dumped nail polish remover on the flag and dropped a lit match on it. The sight of it smoldering gave me a sense of peace, and I forgot to run away.
    I looked up in time to see a mob of angry white men running toward me. I thought they were going to kill me over a four-dollar piece of material. I held out the receipt I’d kept in my pocket for exactly this purpose and shouted, “It’s my property! I can do what I like! I paid for it. That’s capitalism in action, fools. Love it or leave it.”
    They chased me all the way to the Metro station.
    “Your priorities are really fucked up!” I screamed, as they turned back to throw themselves on the flag. And I thought, that’s just great, my life is worth less than a piece of cloth. You’d think Betsy Ross had sewn it personally.
    I’d heard of “suicide by cop” before, someone who gets herself killed on purpose by forcing the police to shoot her in the commission of a crime.
    I wondered if I’d almost committed “suicide by Republican.”

¹The Clash, Super Black Market Clash.
²The Clash, The Clash.
³ Stiff Little Fingers, The Complete John Peel Sessions.

Lorrie Sprecher

Lorrie Sprecher is the author of the punk lesbian novel Sister Safety Pin (Firebrand, 1994).

Her collection of short fiction, Anxiety Attack, was published as a literary pamphlet by Violet Ink in 1992.

Her work has appeared in anthologies including: Dykes With Baggage (Alyson Books, 2000); Lavender Mansions: 40 Contemporary Lesbian and Gay Short Stories (Westview Press, 1994); Glibquips: Funny Words by Funny Women (The Crossing Press, 1994).

Her work has appeared in journals including: The North American Review and Feminist Studies.

She has a Ph.D. in English and American literature from the University of Maryland, College Park and resides in Syracuse with her dog, Kurt.

The first two chapters of her novel Pissing In A River appeared in Sub-Lit in August, 2009. Another was recently published in Monkeybicycle.

MY FATHER IS IN THE HOTEL ROOM extorting someone on the phone. We – my wife Mariane, our daughter Tessa and I – listen as he works the client, using his powers of conviction to extract money from the man on the other end of his cell phone. “I tell you,” my father says, his voice brimming with confidence, his tone bright with belief, “You won’t make the change in your life, until you’re fully committed to the change. Whether it’s money or it’s happiness or it’s the best relationship you can possibly have, none of it will become true until you prepare your mind fully for what you want.” My father paces back and forth.
    My wife and I are sitting in a hotel room in Florian, Pennsylvania and I’m feeling a peace I haven’t felt in twenty years. Everything is in place. Even dad, in a way. The carpet is dark silver and sufficiently plush to get across a sense of luxury. Like you’re just on the nearer side of success.
    The hotel was probably converted into a Sheraton from a police barracks, or warehouse, or armory. Its smooth, heavy textures rise up from my deepest childhood memories, and although I’ve never been in this hotel before, I recognize its stainless steel fittings and hardwood details from the buildings of my youth. Here, the world is constructed of bluestone slate and lacquered maple. This is Pennsylvania and even in decline it’s built to last.
    My wife and I sit on the sofa, playing with Tessa. We talk about our dinner plans in the hotel restaurant and listen to my dad’s enthusiastic conversation. Yes, doubt is a big part of the mental game. It’s part of the no-win game. My dad’s racket is a joyous one. That game is called, I’m-going-to-talk-myself-out-of-what-I really want-in-life-and-then-blame-it-on-something-else, he says. The trick is…Allowing yourself to have these thoughts…No, don’t try to fight it!
    ”He uses so much jargon,” my wife says. “Where does he come up with it?” she asks.
    She’s French, Mariane. And she really only knows the America of big cities. On -the drive here, she got a five-minute case of the giggles when we passed a pizzeria boasting ‘Real Itailian Pizza.’
    ”So what?” I shrugged.
    ”They misspelled Italian.”
    ”I told you this area had fallen on hard times.”
    ”So that affects their spelling?”
    ”The English teachers were the first to go when the schools closed.”
    Now Mariane whispers as she watches my dad pace, nearly shouting at the walls in his excitement. There’s no need for her to be quiet; he can’t hear us. He hears only the great thoughts in his own mind.
    ”Jargon is how it works,” I tell her. “He invents all the terms.”
    ”We better feed Tessa,” Mariane says, reaching for the baby food jars. We offer Tessa spoonfuls of pureed peas and squash, and she gulps it down, her pert, dime-sized mouth opening for the spoonfuls.
    We watch dad walk back and forth near the room’s hallway entrance that leads off to a counter and a bathroom beyond that. He jabs an index finger into the air. “You’ve got to be fully committed to the outcome you envisage because if you don’t, you won’t be prepared to take advantage of it. What? No! It’s not just a matter of positive thinking. No, I call it a redirection of your thinking. You can’t just hope for something good to happen. You have to reorient your mind to thinking the right way,” my father says.
    To be fair, even if my dad is extorting the stranger, the man is deluding my dad. Mostly by giving him an audience. Making him feel impossibly wise if not, judging from the sweeping gestures of his hand, omnipotent.
    A crime is being committed. It definitely is. I just can’t really say by whom.
    Having grown up under my dad’s rhetoric, I tend to blame him. Then again, the older I get the less I really can.
    You see, my dad would get some idea in his head “an unconditional loving relationship” “an authentic relationship” “an empowering relationship” and he’d yammer on about it for weeks. In my teen years, when he was off discovering himself after his divorce from mum, he’d appear suddenly at the house, his eyes burning with excitement for the Great New Father-Son Relationship that we were going to have. He’d speak breathlessly for hours about his great discovery. He’d buy me cherry limeades and jalapeño cheeseburgers from Sonic. He’d gush about this new chapter in our lives. In the end he’d declare that he wanted to have the best relationship a father and son ever had.
    We’d agree. He’d drive off into the night, bliss-filled. I’d turn back to my teenage thoughts.
    Then I wouldn’t hear from him for three weeks.
    So it was an on-again, off-again thing, our Great Father-Son relationship.
    He marches in an anxious circuit on the floor, finger upraised in instruction, hands-free phone plugged in his ear.
    From where I sit, it looks like bullshit. Yet dad just charges on. And his victims…His clients…They line up for more. What kind of country is this where people pay for such glurge? You could claim that he was the perpetrator but for it to be a true scam, he’d have to know he was taking advantage of his clients. He doesn’t. His skill is genuine, he’s sure.
    Still, there had to be some kind of bottom to this.
    Even this quasi-conjob can’t bother me today, not like it usually does. Now it’s just a peace and warmth and belonging I haven’t felt since I was a ten and my dad was just my dad and what he said I believed, and my parents were married, Carla, my sister was alive and well, and my brother and I carried on never ending bedtime conversations about the Roman empire and space exploration. Back when my younger sister Veronica struggled to keep up with us, and learned earlier than any of us that you could count on no one. And it was best just to get over the fact and move on from there.

    My father flips his cell phone shut, glances up at us. “That was a Brody,” he says, investing the name with a promising tone. “He’s a very successful real estate agent in Arizona. He made something like $40 million dollars last year.”
    ”What does he want with you?”
    ”He’s got people working for him. He’s really good at what he does in the real estate industry. But the relationships he has with the people who work for him need to be improved. And he’s really no good at relationships. So he’s one of my clients.”
    ”Does that mean he can call you whenever he needs?”
    ”Yes, because he pays me a retainer.”
    For such claptrap? “A retainer?”
    ”Yep.”
    We pad down the carpeted hallways to the dining room, pushing Tessa in the stroller.
    ”This is a pretty nice hotel, huh?” dad says looking around.
    ”Yeah, it is.”
    ”Do you remember the Keystone?”
    ”The…?”
    ”…hotel. When I was a kid,” my dad says, “the Keystone was the finest hotel probably in the county. This was back when people still traveled by trains.”
    ”Isn’t that the old hotel that used to be downtown? With the big façade?”
    ”Down on Jefferson Street. Now if that was still open, that was a hotel.”
    ”What did they turn the building into?”
    ”They demolished it.”
    ”It almost looked like a bank, didn’t it? I remember.”
    ”Yeah, it got condemned as a health hazard. It had too much caked on pigeon poop to recover the building. The place started breeding disease.”

    We’re the first ones in the hotel lounge which is set with a grid of tables over a burgundy, institutional-style carpet. The menu board says the evening’s special will be prime rib and pork roast.
    A curvaceous waitress, who wears so much make up you can write your name in her face seats us and we flip open the leather bound menus. Her powdery scent lingers once she leaves.
    There are burgers and steaks and fried fish fillets with fat ramekins of tartar sauce. The sides are potatoes au gratin, tortelloni, or French fries. All your Southwestern Pennsylvania staples. We just need pirogies and wedding soup.
    Dad holds the menu at arms length to get a look at it through his bifocals. “Prime rib. That sounds all right to me,” he says and places the menu on the table.
    I’m never in PA more than one day without craving a salad or hummus but the steelworker’s diet remains here even if the steelworks are gone. And the locals, who once would have labored in factories, stand behind the counters of Sheetz’s and Giant Eagles and BPs. They bag groceries. They sell gas. They call for clean ups on the dairy aisle, their mouths part slightly in dismay for what’s become of their world.
    With industry long gone, they, like the rest of America, have come under the sway of management pep talks. Management theory. It is the elixir of this economy. The credentialed cousin to my dad’s make-believe specialty.
    ”But how did you find Brody, dad?”
    ”Brody found me. Like they all find me. On the internet. I have a three tiered subscriber levels, you know?”
    ”You have subscribers?”
    ”Starting at only $10 a month. But I tell you, you get 20 of them and you get $200 a month coming in. And that’s just the basic level. I have an intermediate and a gold level, too.”
    ”And they get to call you at any time?” Mariane asks.
    ”The ones on retainer do. Like Brody.”
    His victims seek him out. That’s the worst part of my fathers scam: his victims seek him out. And like a serial con-artist living in the land of make believe, he just doesn’t stop. In fact, he makes sure the world can find him. Now on the internet. Before on the phone. Soon on podcasts. Dad was always an early adopter. Before the internet it was pamphlets and the ubiquitous seminars. And consulting. There always seems to be someone who needs to hear what he will tell them. What, in a nice coincidence, he just needs to say.
    So they pay. $50 for the first session and $35 for each additional. Not bad for a course he personally designed and created. Out of thin air.
    He’s effusively explaining the manual “Breakdown or Breakthrough: You have the power to decide” when the waiter arrives to take our order.
    ”How are yinz doing taday?”
    ”Good. Good.”
    ”What can I get for ya? Would you like any starters? Any potato skins? Fried mushroom caps? Calamari?”
    ”What is your Caesar salad like?” Mariane asks.
    The waiter hesitates for a moment, as if allowing clearance space for her accent. “It’s a full platter. Comes with bacon bits and a creamy Caesar salad dressing. Topped with Parmesan.”
    ”It will be full of mayo,” I said.
    ”Does it have mayonnaise?” she asks.
    ”It doesn’t come with mayonnaise,” he says.
    ”It’s got mayo in the dressing,” I say. “Everything here has mayonnaise. This is Pennsylvania.”
    The waiter is in his 20s. His face is a hodgepodge of Hungarian, Italian or whoever happened to be passing through Ellis Island 80 years ago. His course black hair stands out among the heads of thinning gray visible everywhere in this town, in this hotel, in the dining room even. Dad’s hair has gone white since coming back here, too.
    ”When I was a kid,” my dad says, “They used to call mayo ‘dressing’.”
    ”Dere ya go,” the kid says. “But I’ll ask for you about that one anyway,” he says to Mariane and walks back to the kitchen.
    ”I told you everything has mayonnaise.”
    ”I just wanted to know.”
    ”This is PA. I know what the Caesar salad is like.”
    The waiter returns. “Yeah, you got it right. There is mayo. The chef says he can make you a dressing without mayo, but it will take longer.”
    Mariane looks around.
    ”We’re in no rush,” dad says.
    ”Yes, I’ll have that,” Mariane says. “Please.”
    ”Dere ya go,” he says, rounding and jamming his words together like everyone in Southwest Pennsylvania does. “D-wn” for “down” “Bott-ul” of water.
    His parents must have figured it was worth staying. Not like dad and mum. They moved us to Colorado when things got bad here. And dad ended up back in PA after a couple of lunges – and misses – at big time success.
    When you’re out of options and out of money, you can’t beat small town Pennsylvania. The cost of rent on an apartment is a fifth of what is in the rest of the country. Better still, almost everyone is treading water. No one expects you to be successful.

    Florian, Pennsylvania wasn’t always this way. Dad and I talk about how it used to be. Back when I was a young boy, when we lived here. “Men actually went into factories and made things,” we tell Mariane. I struggle to recall the memories he outlines in words, like the Keystone Hotel, the Steelers Super Bowl wins in the 70s. We explain to Mariane how this town would have looked years ago.
    ”Oh, it was vital,” dad says with a shrug. “Vital.”
     My dad and I agree about this Past Pennsylvania and just agreeing with him is proof our differences have become remote. He’s past sixty and I’m past thirty and maybe some things should just pass. Maybe they can. And so it baffles even me – bizarre creature that I am — why I go ahead and ask, “Remember our trip to the Denver Zoo back when we moved to Colorado?”
    He stops talking for a second, looking forward to recall the memory. “Yeah.”
    ”Do you remember what you told me in front of the turtle display?”
    He can’t recall. He can never recall, even though I bring this up every couple of years.
    ”You told me you could speak to the turtles, dad.”
    The waiter arrives with an armada of plates covering a massive tray. With the mark of craftsman, he kicks open the stand and begins serving us. Serving us, while working us, bringing our attention to the food, to his care in getting us what we want.
    For Mariane: “One Caesar salad made without mayonnaise. I went ahead and put the dressing on the side so you could decide how much you want.”
    ”Thank you,” Mariane says.
    ”Are you French?” he asks.
    ”Yes, I am,” she says.
    ”Thought so. I hope the salad is to your liking. You have a beautiful baby there. Prime rib for you, sir,” he says. “The au jus, here. Let me know if that’s not enough. Here’s some bread rolls. A mix of whole meal and sourdough. Tell me if you’d like a Kaiser roll. We have those too.”
    By the time the food is laid out before us, everyone has forgotten I was asking him about the turtles. Dad’s attention is on prime rib, on productive relationships, on success, on his granddaughter. So what if for months as an 11 year-old I told people my dad could speak to turtles? So what it got me an unwanted chat with the school counselor?

    After a few minutes of robust cutting and clinking of knives and forks and chewing, dad eyes the waiter, and in a moment of culinary delight, calls him over.
    ”Yessir. Anything wrong?”
    ”This is an excellent piece of meat.” He points.
    ”Glad to hear it.”
    ”What’s your name?”
    ”My name’s Dean.”
    ”Dean, this is an excellent piece of prime rib. Really superb.”
    ”Oooh,” Mariane says. Everyone turns to Mariane, whose got a delicate clutch of fingers holding a napkin under Tessa’s chin. Tessa has thrown up. She’s grimacing in pain while the mess rolls down her front, onto the high chair’s wooden tray. Pureed peas mixed with Goldfish crackers.
    Once finished vomiting, her grimacing stops and she begins to cry. Mariane and I scramble out of our chairs to clean up the mess. The waiter returns to the table with a huge wet rag. Dad pauses for a moment to watch the spectacle, laughs and says to me. “Ah, it seems like just yesterday you were the baby.”
    ”We’ve got to get her cleaned up,” Mariane says.
    ”Dad, we’re going to have to run back to the room and get her cleaned up.”
    ”Take your time,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

    Just one of those things. It’s just one of those things, I tell Mariane. And we hurry and clean and coddle and soothe Tessa and fret whether this trip of eight hours in the car has upset her stomach.
    Twenty minutes later, we return to the table to find dad talking with great head nods and sweeps of his hand to our waiter. Dean. Of course. How could dad not? Dad has finished his prime rib. Our food sits on the table.
    It’s okay dad has invited a stranger into our midst and dad can’t stop talking long enough to acknowledge our return, or ask how Tessa is doing. Of all the strangeness dad’s invited into our world, Dean the waiter can’t be that much more of a bother. Not here. Not now.
    At a pause in their conversation dad announces grandiosely to us that Dean has a great future ahead of him in restaurants. “He really has a passion for it.”
    Dean is beaming, being told by dad that his success isn’t just possible, that if he really listens to his heart, it’s assured.
    Dad says Dean is the kind of guy who will succeed in the hospitality business. Dean actually plans to open a four-star restaurant one day. Sounds like what Florian, PA needs, dad says. “Something to add some pizzazz to the place.”
    ”That’s what I’d like to do. Introduce some fine food and excellent service to the town.”
    Part of the excellence means getting the most out of people, dad says. It means bringing out their best.
    Mariane and I cut into our food, listening. The moment is pure dad. If nothing else the enthusiasm he whips up is genuine. He really means it. And Dean will go away, if for no other reason than to serve the elderly couple that has just tottered into the dining room.
    In a moment of optimism, I want to join in the excitement, too. I want to share in the enthusiasm. “Are there any four-star restaurants in Florian already?”
    ”Not yet. The closest are in Pittsburgh,” Dean says, his lips part at the possibility.
    ”Well, I guess you’d have to woo customers from Pittsburgh over here.”
    ”Why?”
    ”Because you probably wouldn’t have enough business for a four-star restaurant in a town this size, would you?”
    ”There are other towns nearby.”
    ”Yeah, but…How many people in Hermine or Mentone Heights would eat at a four-star restaurant?”
    ”Some would.”
    ”Some would, son.”
    ”Dad, they’re mill towns. And mining towns. They’re…”
    ”I’ll make it happen,” Dean says.
    ”I’m sure you will,” dad says.
    They nod in agreement. I watch in dismay.
    My eyes turn from dad to Dean, and Dean to dad. Dean says to dad, “Thanks, mister. It’s nice to have the faith of someone.” And I have to swallow this exchange whole. In order for the moment to pass, I play along with dad and the waiter, and pretend that yes, Dean’s going to open a four-star restaurant when the last elegant thing in Florian, PA sagged under so much infected pigeon shit, it had to be demolished.
    ”I’m not saying I don’t believe your determination,” I say. “It’s just that…”
    Dean cuts me off. “I don’t know about you but this is America: anything is possible.”
    A yelp of a giggle escapes Mariane.
    ”This is America, son.”
    Swallow it. I just have to swallow it like the warm glob of mayo on my side salad plate. I’m speechless. And the waiter just watches me. Waiting to get me to concede his point. His and dad’s cornball reality. And I really was just trying to be encouraging.
    A smile rises on Mariane’s lips.
    ”I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
    ”Nothing’s wrong with you,” Dean says, his voice warming with pity for me. “You just don’t believe in what’s possible.”
    I just don’t believe in what’s impossible: that’s what I want to bark at him.
    Dean’s gaze is unwavering and bright as he stands over me. Serene. After a moment of appraisal, he asks, “What have you done today to make your dreams a reality?”
    Over at their table, the elderly couple await in defeated silence, frowning at their menu. Just swallow it. Allow it. Just say, okay.
    Dad looks to me. “Really, son. When it comes to mind over matter, matter isn’t anything. If you believe in yourself.” My posture is locked in place, eyes averted from Dean. I’ve got “the look” on my face. I know I do. But I can’t help it. I can’t even bear to move, I’m so furious.
    Mariane says Tessa needs her teething gel.
    ”It’s in the room. I’ll get it,” I say, almost pushing past Dean and his credulous smile. My footsteps are fast and heavy, and I march past our room and keep walking down the hall, down, down to the emergency exit at the end of the stairway, push it open with both hands, sending it buckling into the outside wall, to charge out into the parking lot, to stand, and breathe air.
    This place! This dying town! I can grow up in Colorado and flee to France, I can have a separate life in New York but this town is waiting for me, wherever I go. This place where I come from…Where Dad comes from…Where the fucking waiter Dean comes from.
    I half expect to see it, as I look over the city, I half expect to see his and dad’s four-star restaurant and am relieved when, instead, I find only the last embers of setting sun prickling through the horizon of roofs and trees.

About the author:

“Not for All the Mayo in Western Pennsylvania” is an off-shoot from a novel which has evolved considerably from what is contained here. However, the themes and preoccupations continue further down the same path. My fiction has appeared in Kos Magazine and Literary New York. One of my short stories was chosen as a finalist in a Glimmer Train competition. I work as a reporter for a media organization in Australia but hail pretty much from Austin, Texas. In addition to fiction, I have had essays and opinion pieces published online at the Griffith Review and the National Times website.

    The Greyhound bus pulled into the lot. As I quickly maneuvered into the narrow aisle with the other passengers, a rather overweight woman, squeezed into a much-too-tight sundress, wide-hip-bumped me from behind. The woman was so huge, so magnanimous in her culinary habits, that she overflowed into the aisle, her bulk blocking the aisle’s width, her flesh threatening to overcome the frightened tourists in the adjacent seats who retreated, clutching torn seat backs and flattening themselves against the dirty windows, to avoid the surging tsunami of flesh.
    The doors wheezed open, and the line began to move. When we neared the driver’s seat and the three steps to descend into The City, the handle of the woman’s carrying case entwined around one of my arms, forcing me, on the second step, to jerk back; however, the woman, her momentum still projecting her forward, smacked her stomach against my back, causing me to stumble and, as I was unintentionally connected by a thin strap to this woman, we both tumbled through the door of the bus, cartwheeling past the surprised faces of the other passengers as we fell heavily to the ground.
    I landed first, rear down, the woman falling violently on top of me, her bulk bouncing off my thin body, rolling sideways over, her great stomach, itself a wide brush of art rivaling Rubens, rippling, an effluence of flesh, her thick white legs awkwardly opening, the flesh on the inner thighs vibrating furiously as she landed on her back, thumping loudly to the concrete over me, her legs skewing across my head.
    I found myself looking at the underside of her white cotton panties.
    I caught my breath and quickly sat up.
    No one moved for a few seconds.
    A voice over a loudspeaker called, somewhat incomprehensibly, drivers and passengers to their departures. The woman began to moan loudly. She seemed to be bleeding from a small gash on the inside of her leg. I still sat there, my head a bit muddled. The bus driver, a burly man with rough-cut hair, thick stubble, and an intricate tattoo of a giant green parrot on one forearm, knelt near the woman and spoke soothingly into her ear, his voice unheard to the rest of us. Her eyes widened, and gradually she relaxed into his strong, heavily-veined arms.
    A white-haired man in a faded red uniform brought over a first-aid kit.
    ”Is she okay?” I asked the bus driver. He nodded, cradling the head of the woman in his arms and stroking her head in a tender way.
    ”You can go,” the bus driver said. “I’ll take care of her.”
    Stolen pulled me from the ground.
    As we walked toward the terminal, we watched the bus driver comfort the woman, his hand still stroking her head, his mouth hunkered down close to her ear, words whispering between the oily strands of her hair as she laid her hand gently on the rippling green bird.
    This is where Stolen and I met.
    My name is Nel Lowry.
    I received the hand-delivered letter from Bliss Inc., a Fortune 500 company that I had interviewed with recently, informing me that I was the winner of their nationwide job lottery. There were so many qualified individuals, over five thousand, who applied for the one open position that, due to such an overwhelming response, they had to use their job lottery to select the appropriate candidate, in line, of course, with their hiring motto: “Only the best. Leave the rest.” The motto was accompanied by the graphic of a flying eagle with an unidentifiable victim hanging from its sharp beak.
    The letter instructed me to report to their main office in The City on Monday at 9:00 a.m. exactly, and they would establish corporate housing once I appeared. I had never been in The City, having lived in my hometown of Ohio in the state of Ohio all my life.
    The letter also stated that after a trial work period and “The Test,” whatever that was, the decision regarding Lifetime Employment would be made. If it was granted, I was guaranteed a position at Bliss Inc. for the rest of my life, and if not, I would be let go or, as the letter stated, “free to explore the wonderful opportunities of the exciting free-trade job market.”
    I had spent the last five years of my post-collegiate life toiling away in obscurity at an office in Ohio, Ohio, being the local administrator for a paper goods supplier, aging what felt to be quite rapidly, thinking that this was my lot in life, that this was how it would always be, that it would never get better. I had actually applied for the Bliss Inc. job a few months earlier but having heard nothing from them and assuming that I had been quickly taken from the running, I had forgotten about it, grudgingly content to labor away in the paper-filled office for little salary. That is, until I received the notice.
    It was time to pack.
    I boarded the Greyhound bus downtown. The bus was the cheapest way to get to The City. I had little money and could not afford to fly; unfortunately, the bus made numerous stops, 32 of them (except on Tuesdays and Thursdays when they added three more stops), at small towns along the way east before reaching the final destination of The City.
    It was a two-day trip.
    At one stop near Pigeon Ford, I got out to stretch my legs, which had gone numb from the narrow space allotted to me by the design of the seats, the space being so narrow that I had to keep my legs wedged up against the back of the seat, my knees against my chest.
    At another stop right outside of Mount Vernon, the ticket counter was boarded up, and no one waited for the bus. I met an old man who was sitting in a wicker chair. He would sleep until the sound of the bus woke him, and when it pulled away, he would sleep again. He said he liked my face because it reminded him of something. He didn’t know what but gave me a round gold watch, still on its chain, saying that he didn’t need it anymore. He warned me that the watch ran fast or ran slow but never on time and was only a few minutes off, never more than ten and never less than three. The driver asked us to board and as the bus, whining, pulled out of the station, the old man slowly nodded back to sleep.
    On the bus, I got to know Stolen as he repeatedly passed my aisle seat, learning his history while he walked by. His full name was Thomas Patrick Daly, an old Southern name, but he preferred to be called Stolen, his nickname. I shared my brown bag lunch with him, giving him an apple and half of a peanut butter sandwich. He was deeply appreciative.
    He had been visiting relatives elsewhere and was thinking of leaving The City, day-to-day life being a struggle in itself there but, as he said, there was always something drawing him back to it.
    Stolen did not like being on the bus. He would pace back and forth in the aisle, climbing over the other passengers as he made his way from one end to the next. The bus driver, over the intercom, repeatedly asked Stolen to sit down, but Stolen merely quickened his pace, furiously making his way over those who sat in the aisle, over extended legs and arms twisted sideways, and the slightly exposed stomachs of those who slept. The other passengers grew accustomed to Stolen’s pacing and eventually would sleep through having him crawl upon and across them.
    I told him that I had no place yet to stay in The City. Returning on his next round of pacing, he offered to let me accompany him.
    Soon we approached The City.
    The passengers on the bus began talking excitedly, pointing at the skyline which was growing larger as we approached the mile-long tunnel that went under the river to get us into The City. We were all ready to leave the bus: the smell of unwashed bodies increasing in odor, black stubble on the men’s chins, the loose hair of the women starting to shine in the light and lose its shape, our faces and bodies beginning to pale from the lack of sun and grow stiff from the cramped seating, all of us beginning to annoyingly stare at each other.
    Emerging from the tunnel, we found ourselves in The City. It towered over us. Skyscrapers and unending buildings of brick and concrete pushed together, crowded, in a city so full. The streets were packed with cars, horns blaring, each jockeying for a better position, and more pedestrians occupied the sidewalks than I’d ever seen in Ohio, Ohio.
    The bus grew quiet, all of us in awe.
    As we were passing City Park, I overheard that there existed no native landscaping in this city. City Park, being many acres wide, had been brought by men, arranged and planted there according to multiple sets of landscaping designs. The trees, the large lake in the center, even the grasses themselves, were transported in on trucks smelling of gas and diesel.
    ”It’s not real,” Stolen said. “It’s made by men.”
    The bus slowly moved on.
    This was a large city.
    The City itself was divided into district territories, almost like city-states, sometimes separated by mountains or rivers, some man-made, and others separated by street and avenue boundaries; these territories were distinct in their ways, mostly culturally dominated by one group — Arabic, Armenian, Asian and so on. Somewhere a territorial accounting had been organized but, given the infinite-seeming largeness of The City, it was believed to be an urban myth. For although The City was constrained by a certain land formation, re: island, it became infinite with its constant minute boundary changes, underground buildings, and rooftop cities.
    While slowly passing through one section of The City on our way to the bus terminal, I noticed that the street gave way to an adjoining small island, possibly less than 200 yards round. In the middle of the island was a statue carved from stone, about seven stories tall, large enough that people could enter through the toes of the statue, it being a full size replica of a woman, and wander around inside her. This statue occupied the majority of the island and was surrounded by a chain-link fence with only one access point; a dozen armed men in matching blue uniforms with thin, hungry German Shepherd guard dogs patrolled the perimeter. The access point was secured by more armed guards, in flak jackets, bulletproof vests, and steel-toed boots, who stood impassively and impressively near a small mustachioed man, the money-taker, who gave out orange numberless tickets in exchange for the exact change dropped into a gunmetal box. The money-taker produced forth as if by magic from underneath the table the orange ticket to the gushing tourist who was x-rayed, metal-detected, and slowly hand-frisked by unsmiling guards. The tourist then gained admission to the statue.
    The statue was a woman who looked out toward the sea. She held her left hand over her face as if to shield herself from the sun, so she could see something clearly in the distance. Her right hand was balled into a fist pulled back, elbow cocked as if it were a brute gesture of power conceived, or it could have been the wave of a hand that hadn’t yet unfurled and relaxed after a celebration. Her attire looked to be a business suit, surprising since she was hand-carved from stone.
    Stolen informed me that recently there had been efforts by The City, their commissions and historical societies, to date the statute because no one knew exactly when the statue had been erected, or, if you trusted the oral stories, chipped away with the base being a natural rock formation. It was not until the last 100 years people began paying attention to the statue and, correspondingly, when mention of it started appearing in local newspapers and gazettes but, unfortunately, no mention was made as to when the statue came into existence despite the large amount of historical criticism. Some historians stated that the original inhabitants of the area, now an extinct race, erected it. Some stated that the statue was brought over, as a totem, by an early conquering race who either died out, moved elsewhere, or got bored and went home. Others didn’t know and honestly said so.

About the author:

Ron Burch’s fiction has been published in numerous literary journals including Mississippi Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Eleven Eleven, Pank, and been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Bliss Inc., his debut novel, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.

I’m sitting with Chang in his bathroom. Chang is in the bathtub washing himself. He is scrubbing like he is trying to remove his skin.
    We are not gay.
    Chang washes himself constantly.
    If you go to Chang’s house you will most likely have to talk to him while he is the bathtub. Out of politeness he takes a bubble bath so you don’t have to stare directly at his naked Chang penis. Even his parents have to endure this.
    Chang looks at me says, “You know why I’m washing myself, right?”
    Chang does this routine about once a week.
    ”Yes, I know.”
    ”You know, when I was little. When I was coming over on the boat from China; they stuck my family and me down in a dark black hole to live in. We weren’t allowed out and there was no bathroom. So everyone shit in the corner of the room. It was horrible. The stink of shit was horrible. All you could smell was shit for weeks.”
    ”That sounds horrible Chang.”
    ”Yes, it was terrible. But it became worse. My fucking brother Dong, that stupid asshole decides to, out of a joke, to throw me in the fucking shit!” Chang pauses for a second. A look of total anger comes over his face then he goes, “My fucking brother Dong throws me in the shit, then stood there laughing. Of course I was crying and screaming because I was five, and all he did was stand there laughing. Then my mother ran over in the darkness and beat the shit out of Dong; which kind of made me feel better about being covered in shit, but didn’t, and never has.
“My mother picked me up out of the shit and carried me back over to our little corner of the hole we were traveling in. We could not spare any water so my mother took off my clothes and threw them in the shit, then began spitting on me so she could wipe the shit off. I was not only covered in shit, but then covered in spit. It was horrible, fucking horrible,” Chang paused dramatically again and finished with, “I still smell the shit, I still do, that’s why I take these baths, you know, because I still smell the shit.”
    ”Chang, when my dad threw me over the Berlin Wall I got shot by a fucking Cossack. Getting shot is worse than getting shit on you.”
    ”I would take the bullet any day, what do you know of being covered in shit?”
    ”I know my fucking leg hurt like a bitch,” I said.
    ”It probably did hurt.”
    ”No shit, it fucking did.”
    We sit there for a long time in silence.
    We don’t do anything.
    Times passes.
    We don’t know what to say to each other. But we don’t expect anything to be said.
    We know our lives our boring.

About the author:

Noah Cicero blogs at http://noah-cicero.blogspot.com/

    You don’t play pinball with just your fingers like a person who doesn’t play much pinball. You use your body. You have played a lot of pinball. When you play, you stand on your right foot, which you plant against the machine’s front right leg. You rarely set your left foot down, and you spin at your hips. The raised leg adds a little extra torque to your body when you give the machine your hip. You are very careful not to slam tilt the machine with a hard check to the front panel. You hit with force and finesse. You modulate the pressure. You balance between violence and consolation.
    You dated a girl who liked to stand behind you when you played pinball. She held on to your hips and pressed herself against your back. You didn’t ever dance with her, but you played pinball and she held you and it was kind of like dancing. If you hip-checked the machine and she got bumped, you apologized and she told you you didn’t need to apologize. She told you to pretend she was not even there.

    You play pinball with the housemate, and you remain stone sober because you are the one who is driving everybody home when they want to leave the house party.
    You and the housemate talk about roadside attractions. You mention something you’ve read about, a place called Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska, where a man has taken old cars and built his own version of Stonehenge with them. Yeah, built the housemate says. You don’t understand the way he inflected the word built, so you ask him what he meant. In Toadstool Geologic Park, says the housemate, they have a naturally occurring Carhenge. That guy stole the idea, the housemate says, from a real thing. You ask him what in the hell he is talking about, naturally occurring. A tornado, the housemate says, one of those big, big ones hit a junkyard in Omaha, and carried a bunch of fucking cars across the state, threw them up into the jet stream and they booked across the state, and landed in Toadstool in the shape of Stonehenge.
    I shit you not, the housemate says.
    It is absolutely fucking true, the housemate says.

    Then the housemate says, did you know that trailer parks are hit so often by tornadoes because of the shape? The way they are set up? I went to a math camp in high school, and this engineering teacher told me that tornadoes hit trailer parks because of the way they are set up. It attracts them. Scientists know how to prevent that from happening, the housemate says. That’s why tornadoes don’t ever hit airports, because scientists have told the people who design airports how to build them so they don’t attract tornadoes.

    You half listen, but mostly you hit corner shots, and trap the silver balls on your flippers during multi-balls, hit the Martians when your told, and fire shots right up the center at the plastic UFO to blow the Martian’s out of the sky when they attack.

Helen asked for a moment to wander.

“It’s your trip,” Blain said, after looking at his watch.  “But we’ve gotta get going soon if we’re going to meet up with Busy at your friend Asseem’s place.”

“Right,” Helen said.  “Of course.”

“Assuming you picked the right one.”

“Always the optimist,” Helen replied, and looked down at Rocket for support.

Rocket, however, was already off sniffing around.  He’d apparently found his happy place, no longer finding it necessary to stick to Helen’s shins.  And though she’d found it annoying moments before, she now felt vaguely naked.

She must not have covered this anxiety very well, because Blain immediately sidled up beside her and, without speaking, made it known that he wasn’t going anywhere.  This put us both at ease.  It was very possibly even more reassuring to me than Helen herself, since she couldn’t have known yet how serious her situation was turning out to be.

The CS complex is located just south of downtown Seattle, and I was traveling  primarily west, it seemed, though the gauge I’d been given was taking me down a series of dead ends.  This made sense—how could it know that certain paths were blocked?—but it was nonetheless extremely frustrating, and I was required, on a number of occasions, to retrace my steps and discover new ways to reach the far side of whatever wall the device had directed me to walk through.

That, and I was headed down.

Being an early, and hence by then relatively senior, member of the Surveillant staff, my office and viewing room were located on a good floor, its lounge looking north across Elliot Bay from a perch above the industrial cranes that stalked the docks of the city’s vast seaport.  And though I’d been in the building since the beginning, I’d never had any interest in exploring it.  I went to meetings in the meeting room, entered and exited through the nearest elevator—which brought me directly to a bus tunnel—and of course primarily, almost exclusively, my time was devoted to the viewing room.  I was therefore wandering through all manner of unfamiliar floors, rooms, and hallways, always heading down and still, for the most part, north, though once I’d descended below the ground floor I’d lost the advantage of windows to help orient me.  I could have been headed anywhere.

I was at very least five levels down when I came to an exit I’d never seen before.  It was at the end of a long, bare hallway and, though clearly marked Exit, the door was obviously not often used.  People brushed past me from both directions, carrying files, pushing carts, speaking into the air in front of their face, their words being picked up by the building’s voice-recognition system, and stored, the central computer most likely carrying out requests that would be done by the time they got to their desk.  I’d never used that system, and it still amazed me to see people walking alongside of one another, each one speaking, but not to each other.  I looked back down the hall.  The Professor’s meter was clearly insisting that I head in that direction.  I don’t know why I stalled, exactly – the act of leaving the building seemed at that moment significant, irreversible even, as though I’d only pretended to make my decision about all this before and there I was, facing it all over again.  What was I doing, after all?  I was leaving my post, my sworn effort to watch and protect.  Until that moment I could have been doing anything.  Until leaving the building I could have been looking for an empty bathroom stall.  By walking through that door I’d be breaking down the most important distinction that existed within the realm of my profession.  If the Professor had not been the one to ask this of me, would there have been any way to persuade him that such a transgression was defensible?  Right then, staring down that lonely, blank corridor, I had my doubts.  I bit down slightly on my top lip, and tipped my head in the direction my body reluctantly followed.  As I approached the door I could hear noise from outside.  The sound of voices, whistles, a honk, and things less recognizable trickled into my ear and as I touched the smooth metal bar that ran across the center of the door I realized that what lay outside was exactly what I’d been instructed, ordered, to avoid at all costs: Helen.  Nauseous from nerves, I pushed open the door.

“Have you ever tried REMO?” Blain asked.

The question wasn’t as strange as it may seem – REMO is a major topic of discussion among civilians.  Its use, abuse, and theories about its meaning have amounted to a cultural capital on the scale of a common television show or popular movie star; it is something people bring up to find a point of connection, or fill the space.  Besides, he’d already told her about the addicts in the park.  Helen was in front of the Cyclone Chamber, squatting at a placard that charted the increase in frequency of cyclone activity from before the End of Electricity, through the Brightening, to the present day.  It was fascinating.  She’d never seen this information displayed in such a straightforward way.  Though of course she’d lived through it all, it was somehow more alarming to see the data presented there, under ground, than it was to see cyclones in the distance, or even above her own home.

She looked up behind her shoulder at Blain and grimaced.  “Unfortunately, yeah, a couple times.”

Blain kicked a smallish rock that turned out to be Styrofoam, and it went soaring off behind a strange plastic tree.  “No likey, eh?”

“No likey one bit,” Helen confirmed.  “Hey, did you know that there’ve been over 100 new cyclone classifications discovered in the last 10 years?”

“Enough to make your head spin.”

“Well there’s a new twist on an old saying.”

“Babe, we could go around and around like this all day.”

“So long as we each wait our turn.”

Blain frowned.

“You mean this whole issue revolves around me?”

“You’re good,” he admitted.

“Thanks.  Really, though, this is actually informative.  I’m kinda surprised that this park was ever created in the first place.”

“You mean because…”

“Because people don’t exactly seem that interested in the facts, when it comes to weather.”  Helen shrugged out an obvious duh.  “In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Right.  Well, I guess you’d know more than I would.”

“Bet your ass,” Helen said, standing back up.  “Why?”

“Why what,” Blain said, scanning the inauthentic underbrush for Rocket.

“REMO.  Have you done it?”

Blain flicked his head to suggest that they move on, and Helen was ready.  She called Rocket over, who trotted back to her side, happy as a dog, and they all started walking down the pathway between the Cyclone Chamber and the Thunder Shack.

“No… Well, yes,” Blain said.  “But I guess why I brought it up is I think it’s interesting.”

The decrepit amusement park resembled a cross between a run down mall and an industrial storage area.  The buildings were dressed up in innocuous, subdued olives and beiges but the paint covered plain, corrugated steel.  Rivets ran up and down the walls like an orderly procession of beetles.

“I think it’s gross,” Helen said, making a face.

“Well think about it.  You’ve got on the one hand this stuff that comes out of you, you know, that you make.  On the other hand you’re putting that stuff that comes out of you back in your body.”

Rocket ran off down the path ahead, chasing a rat.

“You think he’s okay?” Helen asked.  She was amazed he’d shed his apprehensions so completely, but was herself unable to entirely forget them.

“Sure, he’s a dog, ain’t he?”

“Uh, right.”

“So but what I’m getting at is, you take this stuff and you, you know, consume it, and then it’s a part of you, right?  It’s a part of you that then comes back out as REMO.”

“Right.  I think that’s a fair explanation for it.”  Helen wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but it provided a fine sound track to the surreal, unnatural landscape.

“So it’s both consumption, and production.”

“It does seem to blur that dichotomy,” Helen said absent-mindedly, looking around at the derelict carcasses of a city’s false hope.

“Though, of course, it’s unsustainable.”

I tried not to think about how close I was to the park.  I was pretty sure it was to my right, but when I looked down streets that led off in that direction they’d veer after a few blocks—the Seattle Underground doesn’t adhere to a grid plan—and I’d be left with little more than a hunch.

Before that day, I hadn’t been to the Underground in years.  What I remembered most was the positive spin on dark implications it had initially represented.  Everything had been just a little too cheery and polished, from what I remember.  All the quaint little cafés with their “outside” seating, napkins that didn’t have to be held down with magnets to tables that didn’t have to be chained.  It was all a little too much, and I couldn’t help but think about the world over my head, and how unpredictable it had become.  Neither could anyone, I guess, which is why it is the way it is, now, and was that day: a creepy mixture of seedy big business sharing its playless playpen with entry-level criminals who couldn’t stand the heat topside.  Or the cold.  Or whatever the world decided to throw at you at any given moment.  I passed slick limousines—one of only a few types of automobiles that were allowed below ground—parked along side of shopping carts filled with “used” electronics for sale.  I passed street vendors operating carts that broke every health code selling food to suits on their way from subbasement to subbasement, ushered around by shifty body guards with one hand permanently hidden in their jackets.

But what I noticed most were the masks.  Everyone wore them.  I’d seen people who wore AS-Masks while watching Helen, of course, and I’d seen people on TV who wore them, but it was a different thing altogether to be there among them.  To be one of them.  It was mildly disturbing.  I looked into a couple of the faces I passed by, trying to determine their mood, what they were thinking, but it was impossible.  Everyone seemed emotionless, going about their errands and tasks like automatons.  No doubt appearing like an automaton myself, I made my way through this anonymous public space clutching my two gadgets close to my chest, the cobbled gauge tracking the emotion that my mask reflected from what was coaxed out of my body by the public conduction conduits all along the streets, and my monitor locked onto Helen, my Helen, who was merely blocks away.

“So where is everybody?” Helen asked.

Blain, walking a couple steps ahead, stopped and turned around.  “Everybody who?” he asked.  He seemed suddenly tense.  He looked at her through narrowed eyes, and cocked his head to the side, his massive jaw jutting out in the opposite direction.

“Hey, whoa there, cowboy,” said Helen, stopping too.  “Rocket!” she called.  “Rocket c’mere boy!”

I stopped too, of course, the hairs standing in attention on the back of my neck.  Leave it to Zara to get in trouble just when I was out of reach.

She looked up at this massive man before her, and forced a smile.

“You know, the criminals you said were down here.”

Blain visibly relaxed, rolled his eyes, and turned back around.

I pushed forward.

Helen watched his back as it rocked slowly back and forth, each muscled upward shoulder rising over a raised foot long and wide.

“They’re around,” he said.  “They stay out of sight, mostly, in case of cops.”

Helen started after him, looking around for the dog.

“Rocket!” she called again.  “That damn animal.”

“Got minds of their own,” Blain said, shaking his head.  “Little guy probably found something to pee on.”

They continued up the path for a few paces in silence, Helen growing silently worried, until she heard a rustle from a nearby plastic shrubbery pitched in grass green foam.  She turned, looked a bit closer, and sure enough Rocket’s yellow nose was poking out from beneath it.

“There you are,” she said, and crouched down to get a better look.

Rocket did not look very good.  He was wide-eyed, and shaking slightly.  The bush he was under rattled as he spoke.

“Helen, I met someone who knows you.”

“What?” Helen exclaimed.

“Shhh!”

“Oh give me a break.  Come on, Rocket, we gotta keep moving.”  She began to stand back up, but Rocket redoubled his efforts.

“Helen, I’m serious!  Do you know a guy named Skip Handpepper?”

Helen froze.

So did I.

“Handpepper?” she said in disbelief.  “Uh, well I did know a guy named Handpepper a while back.  Does he have crazy—”

“Curly red hair,” finished the dog.  “That’s him!  He needs to see you!  He says you’re in danger!”

Helen finished standing up.  “Well, this is certainly unexpected.”  She decided to ignore the warning for the moment, and let Handpepper explain it to her himself.  “Do you really have to remain under that bush?”

Rocket looked both ways slowly, and crawled slowly out.  “I thought it would make it more cloak and dagger,” he said.

“Right.  So where is he?”

“He’s just on the other side of Lightning Strikes.”

“Is everything okay?” Blain called.

Helen looked up and saw that Blain was a hundred feet or so ahead.

“Ah ha!” he said.  “I see you’ve reunited with your lost dog.  Well, tell him to get a move on.  We don’t have a whole lot of time.”

Helen stood her ground.  “I think there’s someone I used to know over here!” she called.  “An old teacher of mine!”

I couldn’t believe this was happening.  If Handpepper was down there with the riff-raff, it couldn’t be a good sign.  He’d begun to dabble in deeper and increasingly obscure sexual avantism after Zara had left his class—I doubt any causal connection—but I always figured he’d manage to keep things in order.  Why would he be there, and how could he know anything about what was happening?  I watched, unable to move, as Blain’s face returned to the scowl it had only just left and he stomped back to Helen, who had begun to follow Rocket down a smaller path in between a concession stand and something called a “Drying Booth.”

I moved off to the edge of the sidewalk and tried to focus.  Was the Professor getting all this?  I needed to know.  I activated the walkie-talkie feature on the monitor, opening a communication channel between me and the main viewing room.

“Professor!” I called.  “Do you see what’s happening?”

There was no response.  What if the Professor had been called from his post?  The sounds and smells of the street seemed to intensify.

“Professor!” I tried again.  “Professor, answer me if you’re in the viewing room!”

Someone walked by and jostled my shoulder, knocking my monitor to the ground.  I scrambled to pick it back up and thankfully the screen hadn’t been damaged.

“Watch where you’re going!” I shouted to the figure who’d bumped into me.

It stopped, turned around.

“What was that?”

“I said…” I realized that I should let this go.  Getting into a fight was the last thing Zara needed from me right now.  “I said, I’m sorry.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

The figure turned back around and shuffled off.

I looked back down at the monitor and realized that the light indicating connection with the viewing room was out.  I tried to activate it again and nothing happened.

“Fuck!” I yelled.  “FUCK!”

I heard a honk, and looked up to see a delivery truck backing in to the place where I stood.  I turned around and saw that I was right in front of a loading dock.  I glanced at the ET gauge, and it happened to be pointing in the general direction of an unmarked door just to the right of the cargo bay.  It was wavering a bit, and I probably could have followed it further up the street, but I was frantic, and I needed to avoid any other unintentional interactions.  I ran up to the door and tried the handle.  It was unlocked.

Helen followed Rocket down the little path, and Blain followed them both.

“We really gotta get going,” Blain called out.  “I thought you were looking for Asseem, not some teacher!”

Helen ignored him and kept walking.  She thought about the time she’d run into her old teacher on the overpass to downtown Seattle, and how he’d told her that he’d just seen Asseem.  Asseem had denied it and she’d had no reason to doubt him at the time, but now she began to wonder.

“He’s right over here,” Rocket said, nose to the ground.

When Helen finally saw him she recoiled despite herself.  Handpepper was crumpled on the ground, gaunt, his clothes almost rotting off him.  He smelled incontinent.  Her memory of him was as a generally tidy man, so this was a complete transformation.  In fact, she wouldn’t have recognized him were it not for his hair.

He looked up at her, his eyes red and out of focus.

Then he screamed.

“Get away!  Help!  I can’t take any more!  Someone help!”

“Handpepper!” Helen said, remembering her mask.  “It’s me, Zara!”

“Zara, my dear!  My sweet sweet Zara!” He reached a thin, filthy arm up to her.

Helen dodged the arm, and it fell to the ground as though unable to lift its own weight.

“Handpepper, what’s happened to you?”

“Never mind me.  Zara, thank God!” he said.  “I’ve been waiting for you!  You didn’t dance the night you said you’d dance and I’ve been waiting, Zara.  I knew you’d come back.”

September 2009
My Bike Shorts Are Not Yours, Or My Bulge by Joe Stracci

February 2009
Another Ohio by Luke Bartolomeo

January 2009
Sarah’s Memoir by Rebecca Berg
Evangeline and Little Moses by Rudy Young

July 2007
The Space Between Brooklyn and Manhattan by Jackson Bliss

June 2007
Blood Simply Wants to Be Rusty by Nick Bredie

May 2007
Plastic Bottles by James Lewelling

April 2007
Excerpt from That Strange Flower the Sun by Tim Keane

February 2003
Blood Tender Excerpt by Paula Anderson

January 2003
Telephones by Judy Moffett

July 2002
Loss Loop Excerpt by Aidan Baker
Dishpig Excerpt by Tony Nesca

June 2002
The Art of Falling Apart Excerpt: The Concert by Mark Dawson
The Brick Excerpt: Freaks of the Industry by James Stegall

April 2002
Success Excerpt by Paula Anderson

March 2002
Success Excerpt by Paula Anderson