(Short) Fiction Collective

“Coalball” by Dan Hart

2012-03-05T10:02:00.002-05:00

I liked cats. Furry dragons--imagine being a sparrow. More fun to be the stalking, climbing, flying cat. Perfect hunters of unmatched caliber. Yeah, I liked cats.

Smartest cat I ever met was one I picked out myself last year. There’s objectivity here: I watched all the cats play for days. Studied each in detail until the shelter manager threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave. I wanted to train the best hunter a cat could be.

Coalball wasn’t a kitten. Both his ears were torn. He lacked the ostentatious nobility most cats possessed but embodied the hunter ideal I sought. He was courageous--never did I find his dark gray fur cowering under the bed. He embraced the unknown with careful arrogance.

Even without my encouragement he loved to kill birds. He was too good at it; he grew fat. I started to help the birds, startling them whenever he approached to put them on edge. Coalball didn’t mind. He changed tactics, trading stealth for Mach speed.

No collar lasted an hour.

I built an obstacle course for him. He seemed to understand its purpose and trained on it. I made iteratively more complex leaps and puzzles. Mazes were no match for him. He learned from his mistakes.

I trained his teeth and claws with oven mitts, playing until my arms were too exhausted to continue. Coalball never tired.

He did get lazy, though. I thought to encourage him with a water pistol. Coalball would have none of it. He didn’t hiss. His back didn’t arc. He just leapt at me, thrashing the pistol out of my hand. He landed on my leg and grinned. His front claws pierced my jeans into my thigh. When he jumped down his back talons sliced both sides of my face, jaw to ear. He turned his tail on me and strutted away.

He doesn’t put up with my antics, any more. He gets what he wants--if his stare doesn’t work his claws will. I understand his gazing eyes so perfectly. Like he knows everything about me and is smugly superior. Like monkeys should be honored cats bother with them at all.

He’s taken to rearranging the obstacle course. Whenever he looks at me, he grins. It’s evil. He slashes, hard enough to scratch but not cut. His selfishness is always satisfied.

I should have inquired into his injuries earlier instead of just thinking they were sad but adorable. Coalball was too smart to be a victim. I’d adopted the meanest cat bully in the city, and taught him to bully me.

Lately, I’ve been looking into ferrets. I’d like to train one to be the best acrobat a ferret can be.

“Women and Men (Both Little and Small)" by A.M. Taureau

2012-02-27T09:42:00.000-05:00

Underneath us Los Angeles is a peach-white blur, with the shadow of the plane growing and shrinking in shaky rhythm. In the middle of the endless low landscape is the laughable downtown, near a ridge of almost-mountains that give the Hollywood sign a place to sit. The shadow of the plane gets darker, more defined, more stable, larger, stretches out indefinitely, and then Mike kisses me and we land.

Once we are on the ground and outside the airport, the city loses its peach softness, and becomes stark and white, its shadows harsh.

“Happy?” Mike asks me, and I nod. We are happy to get away, happy to meet up with his old mentor Ray, who is going to introduce us to his newest wife, before they embark on a yearlong trip around the world. Mike and I travel well together; it should be us taking this sort of trip, but we both have mid-level jobs, able to accommodate a short three-day trip from San Francisco, but not much more than that.

I’ve only met Ray once, about six years ago, when Mike and I first started dating, and Ray came out to visit. He was in the midst of his second divorce then, and after he left Mike told me that Ray’d been uncharacteristically quiet, that he was usually dynamic, but I had liked him all the same. He’d treated us to nice restaurants, and had danced with me when we went to places where people danced, since Mike doesn’t. I learned how to rumba from him, a skill I haven’t used since.

At the hotel, they are already there, waiting in the lobby, and Edison hugs us through the introductions. She wears diamond earrings shaped like starbursts, and smells like coconut sun cream. She is even younger than me, though Ray is older than Mike by twenty years, and Mike is older than me by two.

We go out to dinner that night, to a restaurant with thick white linen tablecloths and valet parking, and then shopping the next day. Edison helps me pick out a dress almost like the one she wore the night before, which I admired. “This one,” she says, without hesitation. “This one will suit you better; it complements your coloring,” and I buy it, without even checking the label.

“You have to take it back, Grace,” Mike says, sprawled out on the bed that night, when he sees the price tag, but I convince him to let me try it on for him, and when he sees me in the dress he capitulates, admitting that Edison might be a good influence on my wardrobe, but I should look at price tags next time she takes me shopping.

I say, “She should take you shopping,” and instead of laughing he raises an eyebrow, looking thoughtful.

The hotel has a pool, though there is the beach just across the street, and Edison and I stretch ourselves out in the deck chairs. She is more tan than I am, despite the fact that we live in California, and they have come from Philadelphia. I go to the hotel store, and buy a sunscreen with a lower SPF; it amazes me that in Los Angeles one can still buy tanning oil. Edison rubs the thin lotion on my back while the men swim laps.

That evening Mike dances with Edison, while I dance with Ray.

“What’s your first stop?” I ask him, the hem of the new dress fluttering against my legs with the wind of our movement. Edison is wearing another beautiful dress, a silver one that makes me feel dowdy and too tall, though she answers my compliments with her own.

“We fly to Hawaii on Tuesday,” he tells me. “Then after about a week there we’ll hitch a ride on a friend’s sailboat, to Australia. Then Indonesia, and Vietnam, maybe.” We switch partners, and Mike and I sway back and forth, trying to remember the name of his former coworker, the one who transferred to Australia three years ago.

It is while we’re leaving, and Ray is helping me on with my coat, that he dips his head and lightly touches his lips against my shoulder absentmindedly as he is talking to Mike.

“Oh my god,” he says, when Mike coughs, and looks back and forth between us. “I thought she was Edison. She has the same dress, I think.” We all laugh about it, and then Mike makes a big show of helping Edison on with her coat. For the rest of this last night we go back and forth like this, jokingly, with Mike bringing Edison drinks as Ray gives me a shoulder massage and calls me “honey.” While we are in the ladies’ room together, Edison lets me try on her diamond engagement ring, which turns out to be too small; even her fingers are delicate, while mine are the same size as Mike’s.

We fly back early the next morning. They drive us to the airport in their rental car, and as Edison hugs me goodbye she presses a bag into my hand; inside is the dress from the night before. “I won’t have any need for it again on this trip,” she tells me, “and when we get back we’ll be trying for a baby.” I smile and thank her and congratulate her, and board the plane, watching the city dissolve back into softness below me, straining to catch a glimpse of the vivid blue ocean that stretches between Los Angeles and Hawaii. When we reach San Francisco again, I often try on the dress, but I can’t make it fit just right, and I never wear it out.

“No More Stories About The Moon” by J. Bradley

2012-02-20T09:53:00.000-05:00

“Do you think Jesus believes in giving women oral?” Nancy stares at the cancer spreading slowly across the moon.

“I think that’s still considered sodomy, even if Jesus did it.”

“That’s probably why we don’t really believe in Jesus. I mean he could work miracles but couldn’t let Mary Magdalene ride his face once in awhile?”

“He’d rather eat ham than pussy.”

Nancy and I watch the cancer spread further.

“When we have a child, I hope it’s a boy and I hope he’s old enough so I can show him a lunar eclipse and explain that’s God’s way of showing men how their mouth should act when a woman willingly opens their galaxy to him, prayerful and slowly widening.”

“What if he wants to eat ham instead?”

“His cheeks will burn like Sodom and Gomorrah by my hand or by the fact his mother is talking about giving women oral.”

“So while you give life, you can take its dignity away?” Nancy nods. Our lawn chairs creak as we settle in, her thumb rubbing ozone in my palm.

“Sunken Treasure” by Daniel Cooper

2012-02-13T14:52:00.002-05:00

We’re sitting outside on the back porch. It’s Thanksgiving day. It’s the afternoon, or maybe it’s night. It’s hard to tell. He’s sketching in a notebook.

‘Fine,’ he says. It just happened.

‘I guess.’

He has a face like mine, but better. I hardly ever look at him. We aren’t really friends; he’s just my brother.

‘Are you hungry?’ he says.

‘No,’ I must seem lost in thought, but that’s how I always am.

‘You sure?’ he says.

When I don’t answer, he draws in the notebook. That’s James. Always wanting to draw, always wanting to eat. He doesn’t try to hide it from anybody. Maybe he does, but that’s just James.

‘Let’s talk about it.’

He shuts the notebook and tosses it on the table. ‘I can’t remember what happened,’ he says. ‘Do you remember anything?’

‘Not much.’

Some grad school student is sitting right next to me in group. He’s crying his eyes out and I couldn’t care less. Actually, I’m just trying to look unimpressed so he won’t look at me anymore. He’s paying two hundred dollars a week to take his turn crying and talking about his problems. I don’t remember his name. He’s bald. He’s fucked up. Like really fucked up. His childhood was shitty. His parents abandoned him and he was lived in shitty foster care. I almost cried at some parts. He was beat up, he was raped. Now he’s confused and he wants to end it all. I sympathize with that last part.

Mary’s in my room sitting on my bed. She has my laptop and she’s listening to some of the songs I’ve recorded. I get angry for some reason and slam the laptop shut and leave the room. I go into the kitchen to get a beer. When I get back she has the laptop open again. She’s looking through my browser history.

‘You know,’ she says. ‘Usually when I open a guy’s computer the first thing I see is porn.’

‘Yeah,’ I say sitting.

‘But yours is clean. You’ve even cleared your browser history.’

‘Fuck,’ I say. I accidently sit on my guitar. A long crack opens up on the body.

Mary looks at me. Like she knows I’m about to lose it.

A year ago I accidently killed my friend Rory. That’s not totally true, he actually killed himself. He’d tried to before too. He was in a coma for a couple of weeks before he finally woke up. I always wanted to ask him about it. What it was like. What he had seen. What he had felt. Would he try it again? But when I saw him I never brought it up. Then, later, he killed himself. This time for good.

‘Did you ever sexually abuse me when I was younger?’

‘ I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ I text back.

‘’Cuz I need to figure this shit out and I want a real fucking answer. ‘Cuz I’m so fucking confused it makes no sense.’

‘I told you. I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ I text back.

‘Fuck you,’ texts James.

My Dad told me later that after he talked to me he went and tried to chug a liter of Drano. But he threw it up before it did too much damage.

I check my email. There’s just a bunch of junk mail from paranormal themed sites, except for one. It’s from Mary. For a moment I think she still loves me. That there’s a chance. ‘I miss you. I wonder where you are and how you're doing, if you still think you're crazy and your parents still don't get you and your brother's finished his meltdown yet. I wonder about how things would be different if I'd never ruined your life by sitting on that guitar.’

‘But you didn’t sit on the guitar,’ I reply. ‘I did. And now I’ll still never know what happened. I’ll never know if I’m gay or not. I’ll never know who I am or what I want. I’ll continue to get angry or cry and not know why. Fuck, where does this fucking shit come from?’

She lets that sit, and I guess thinks. I’m too tired to feel out the silence. Or else everyone and everything’s tired except me.

‘You just over think everything,’ she finally replies. ‘Both of you. I don’t care. You two are in love with each other. I have problems of my own.’

Last night I looked through James’ notebook from cover to cover. I’d been avoiding several parts. I wanted to know what Mary thought about it. She sat on that stupid guitar; she fucked everything up and made it sick. I wanted to show her the pages of James’ notebook that were filled with sketch after sketch of me. I wanted her to be the one to say it.

‘Yesterday I was helping Dad in the garage take down the Christmas boxes when and I found a box of Papa’s old journals. There were about fifty of them, bound in red leather. I couldn’t help myself. I opened one and started looking through it. It was from the seventies, it was a meticulous list of his day’s activities. Before I knew it Dad was shaking me and telling me to go away, to leave it alone. He’d finish moving the boxes by himself.’ I tell James. We’re on the porch. It’s Thanksgiving day. We’ve just gotten back from one Thanksgiving dinner and have another one to go to in a little bit.

‘I’ve seen those,’ says James. ‘I feel like if I looked through them I’d have a schizophrenic breakdown.’

‘I left the garage and just started punching the walls. I wanted to beat the shit out of the dining room table. I tried to tell Dad that we should get rid of those stupid notebooks, but I think I yelled it instead.’

They found a shotgun in Rory’s room after his first suicide attempt. He had taken a bunch of anti-depressant pills, but had a shotgun in his closet. I didn’t ask how he did it the second time. It was a closed casket. But I don’t know if that means anything.

“The Jordan Flea Market” by Jesse Prado

2012-02-05T22:51:00.001-05:00

The drive to my grandma’s house is off of E.14 Street in San Leandro and it usually only takes me five minutes to get there from my house in Hayward, off of Royal Avenue and A Street, so I had no idea why the ride going down E.14 Street ended up feeling a lot more like the roads going out towards the outlet malls in Gilroy or Petaluma.

I owed Steve money so I guess he figured this would be the best form of a repayment when he realized that this would mark the last week of the Jordan Flea Market. Everything at the Jordan Flea Market was said to be 90% off up until the last day and the way Steve told me about it made me feel like he was one of the only people that knew of its’ existence.

For that reason amongst others is why I wouldn’t believe this until I saw it. Another reason was because he told me it was at the end of E 14th street and until he told me that I didn’t even know there was an end to that street. Not to mention he couldn’t explain to me what the end of that street was like at all.

When I asked him, he said he had never been there, himself. So three days away from the last day and at supposedly the third light away from this Jordan Flea Market, Steve offered me a shot of five hour energy which I accepted right away after realizing how tired I was of him, his car and his rap music, and how obvious my overall demeanor was making this. However it may, after that shot the scenery suddenly changed from busy to desolate.

On either sides of the road we were driving all I could see as any sign of life were what appeared to be shoe displays off in the distance. What told me that they were shoe displays were the lifesize shapes of Jordan sneakers ranging numbers, I could see clearly from the twenty-first sneaker to the first where we stopped at the last light, which I now couldn’t see the point of after seeing beyond that there was no more of E.14 street left to drive.

After the light changed Steve suddenly got very excited as we passed what appeared to be a clerk at the only register there was in the middle of this desert and as we passed him up slowly the clerk turned around from whatever it was he was doing to follow us up until we parked not too far away from him. After so many attempts of trying to get out of Steve’s car as soon as it’s parked I had by now learned that his locks were automatic, which was why he got so pissed off when passengers of his vehicle tried to get out before he turned his car off. That impatience could potentially jam his automatic locks. With this knowledge I waited patiently for Steve to turn his car off when an outside force tried to open my door for me causing the same sort of jam.

Rejected, the outside force waited for us to step out of the vehicles ourselves before he introduced himself to us as Hafazz, the owner of this Jordan Flea Market, decked in a cream colored polo, tucked into a pair of khakis, cuff linked over a pair of what looked to me like Alfanis. With a strained smile worn before, during and after his greeting, I noticed his nametag before I looked around and also noticed him as the only one working. After that recognition I walked away from them and towards the first display where my hallucination had been confirmed as a reality as I reached out to touch the giant styrofoam replica of the first Jordan sneaker ever made.

Hafazz asked me right away what I think of the giant styrofoam replicas that his son had designed himself.

I told him I thought they were excellent before I asked him where his son is.

Delorious, Hafazz said he is no longer with us as that strained smile changed into a sort of frown.

Not wanting to start anything I asked him if he had given everyone the day off.

And after he said no to that he wandered off back to his desk with his head looking down at the sand.

Surrounding these styrofoam replicas were the sneakers that these replicas were made to replicate so there were only twenty-one of them and they were a fair amount away from each other up until the twenty first. By the time we got to the eighth Jordan styrofoam replica we sat on the sand because there were no benches, which was weird to me. Usually shoe sales consist of an area somewhere nearby to permit the trying on of their products but there was no place to sit down or mirrors to look into for miles, probably away from this lot at one of the gas stations before the twenty-first styrofoam Jordan replica.

Steve had that pair of Jordan’s on his feet so I knew he wouldn’t want to walk that far just to see that unless he thought there were something else over there for him. When I approached the eighth replica of the number eight Jordan sneaker Steve got up in a crouched position next to the shoeboxes surrounding it scanning sizes.

‘Don’t you have that pair?’ I said.

‘I sold them.’

‘To who?’

‘Nugyen’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How much did you sell them for?’

‘I don’t remember.’

Steve knew why I was interrogating him about this and he was desperately searching his head now for a reasonable price when he didn’t have to name one after he found a box that marked his size. All in one motion he yanked the box from the bottom of the stack throwing the top off only to find that there was nothing in there at all. Taking the top off of another all he found was the same thing.

This frustrated him, causing him to go through several boxes before he finally gave up saying that Hafazz must have them up at the front. During his tantrum I found a pair of size eights with the pair actually inside only I didn’t want to tell him this because I wanted to leave now. I knew he would want these, even though they weren’t his size and paying Steve back this way didn’t feel right to me anymore.

By the time we got back Steve had his shirt off and I had a cigarette being occasionally placed between my lips for a drag by my own willful hand and my eyebrow raised some when we found Hafazz missing from his desk. Exasperated with defeat Steve gave up his search for the shoe salesman after one look under his desk and finding the same results as he did in that box he threw hard into the sand. Twelve feet away from where we stood I could see a blue Porto potty that I missed on our way in so I dismissed myself to go use it.

Steve would be in his car when I get back, only I didn’t use the Porto potty. Someone was in there crying and with one knock the sobbing accented voice told me two things; one being that this was indeed Hafazz behind that door, and a plea to go away. Something about his sobs reminded me of the sobs you hear from a failed artist and I had no idea where Hafazz failed, but I had an idea of where I might have failed and where Steve might think he had too and by the warmth I could feel gathering in the pits of both my own eye sockets I had to get away from this Porto potty, this place in general.

Confused and irritated I walked back to the car when those feelings turned into a legitimate empathy for the hysterical, loud and elongated wails coming from Steve off in the distance outside of his car’s driver door. With both hands stretched out to the furthest length on either sides of him I could see Steve with his back to me letting out long wails into the distance.

Instinctively without questions, I ran up to him wrapping him up in an embrace that I would not withdrawal until he stopped screaming.

All I had to keep telling him is that everything would be ok.

“Avital” by Noah Cicero

2012-01-30T11:31:00.003-05:00

Avital said, “So I spent last weekend in my room. I couldn't handle going to school again. The idea was too oppressing.” While she spoke her face was animated, her arms were flapping, there was such feeling in her voice, she continued, “I couldn't take it. The whole world, maybe the universe, I kept asking God why, why God, why high school? I took some sleeping pills and went to sleep when I woke up Saturday morning, I went to sleep. The sleep felt so good, so nice and good and clean. So much cleaner than anything this world offers. I want to feel clean, you know, clean. I am not clean. I woke up around 3 and ate a bowl of cereal and some fruit. The fruit tasted good, it was, I think strawberries from the garden, so they were like, you know fresh. Then Eric called me on the phone, and I was like, I have to go over. You know. He said he had money and I need pills, I like pills, I have no money, I had to get money from somebody. So I went to Eric's. He was horrible. We went into his bedroom, his parents weren't there. We had sex, he gave me 30 dollars. I don't know why he gives me money. I don't even know why I had sex with him. Before I left he told me, 'Don't tell anyone about this.' Then he punched me in the stomach. I didn't mind, I've been punched in the stomach before. I went home and took another sleeping pill. I needed sleep. Nothing mattered. I needed to get away. I went in my house, my dad was there, and he was like sitting there reading a book, my mother told me about how the church was having a fundraiser the next day for somebody I didn't know, that I needed to go and eat pancakes. I didn't want to eat pancakes. I went in my bedroom, listened to Fleetwood Mac, I sat next to the speakers, and just listened, I kept thinking that something good would happen if I just laid there long enough, I remembered I had a Darvocet. The Darvocet made me feel better. That reminds me I need to get some pills. Then I finally went to sleep. I fell asleep right on the floor. I woke up wearing my shoes. I was so fucked up; I forgot to take them off. I didn't know where I was. My mother came bursting in the door, she yelled at me to get up, that we needed to go to church. I went, I went to fucking church. Oh man, there were people everywhere, there was pancakes and sausages everywhere. There were a lot of old people there. The old men kept gawking at me and my newly formed breasts. It was devastating. Then after the pancake dinner I went to Jim's house down the street, he sold me some Vicodin. I took the Vicodin and tried walking down the street, I felt too weird and fucked up to walk. I walked into the woods and laid on the ground. I watched the squirrels and birds for like two hours. I just sat there; it was great, nobody bitching at me to do something like go to a fucking pancake breakfast. I moved so little, that a squirrel came within five feet of me. I stared at the squirrel and said, 'Hi, little squirrel.' The squirrel didn't move. Eventually the squirrel left. I was so fucked up. Then I finally got up, it took everything I had to get up and leave that woods. I thought I might have died. But then I realized I could still move. I moved, I could still move my body, my body moved. I walked home. My mother told me that I needed to get a good nights sleep so I could be fresh for school when I got up in the morning. I went to my bedroom and cut myself for a while. My thighs looks terrible. Oh god, why am I alive?”

We all sat stood there listening to her. She talked like that constantly, she would start something and she would go through every little detail of the story. Ryan passed around a bowl and we all took turns smoking.

Print Issue In The Works

2012-01-27T15:30:00.000-05:00

We just launched out Kickstarter project! It's open until the beginning of March and if we get enough funding we'll be coming out with our first ever print issue sometime in the early summer. Very exciting stuff. Regular web submissions are still open. We'll be in touch to select writers in the near future about submissions for the print issue and we'll keep everyone up to date as we hear more. For now, go here for more details.

We're Back Open!

2012-01-11T21:46:00.000-05:00

Holiday hangover has passed. Time to get reading again. Click on the proper link on the right side of the site.

Six Questions

2011-12-19T13:04:00.000-05:00

We were just interviewed by Jim Harrington over at his blog Six Questions For... Check it out here.

Check out our pdf on Issuu.com

2011-12-02T12:27:00.000-05:00

To celebrate the six stories we nominated for the Pushcart Prize we've produced a PDF (nothing too fancy) featuring the authors' work. Check it out at http://issuu.com/patricktrotti/docs/pushcart_2011

Pushcart Prize Nominees

2011-12-02T11:29:00.001-05:00

Sorry for the delay in the announcement. It was a tough choice, and after much careful deliberation, and anxiety, I've chosen the six nominees to represent (Short) Fiction Collective in the upcoming annual Pushcart Prizes. The nominations were signed, sealed and delivered just in time. Got it postmarked on the final day of the deadline! To those that didn't get the nod, don't feel too bad, we loved them all but it was just a numbers game really.

The following are the nominees:

"when i was still young, and when you still weren't, and our father was already dead" by xTx
"Courtship: Five Micros" by Sheldon Lee Compton
"You Should Have Built Tall, You Should Have Built Wide" by Jenny Holden
"Quitting Is Easy" by Nathaniel Tower
"untitled" by Evan Swenson
"Me and Jack" by Sarah Leslie

You can read their entire stories by checking out our archives on the right hand side of the page. Once again congrats to those selected and here's hoping for inclusion in the anthology!

TTYL

2011-12-02T03:27:00.000-05:00

We'll be back in February with weekly stories of awesomeness. For now roll through our archives for some solid writing.

“It Was The Sound” by Ryan Singleton

2011-11-28T01:23:00.000-05:00

It was the sound that stuck with me.

I was terrified to see Agnieszka’s face. She died in bed, her left leg bent, poking out from underneath the blanket, her little fingers clutching the frayed ends of the fabric. I knew she was dead the second I twisted the knob on her unlocked apartment and walked in alone.

“I ain’t seen Angie in three days,” Oscar said to me, with concern in his voice. “She was finna send me to the store last night, but she didn’t answer when I knocked.” She always answered her door—for him, at least.

I was both Agnieszka and Oscar’s case manager at the low-income housing project, an SRO. By no means was Oscar my favorite resident, but he was the one I identified with most. He wasn’t quite a man; he was more of a loser who happened to have male genitals—a complete doormat, the reason I saw myself in him whenever he dragged his bum leg and dopy smile into my office to talk.

To illustrate his character, one of the bullies in the building pulled down Oscar’s pants, exposing his bare, black butt cheeks for everyone in the TV room to see. Naturally, he was humiliated—I could see his emotions bright as day, when I reviewed the security camera the morning after the incident. Sheepishly Oscar pulled up his drawers and sat down to watch the football game with the rest of the guys, ignoring the gravity of what just happened. The aggressor laughed her ass off, pointing at Oscar; then she threatened to punch him in the nose. Oscar just looked around her, trying to see the score of the game. Nobody stood up for the victim because they were afraid their sweats would be around their ankles next.

“C’mon, Oscar,” I said, after I was done reviewing the cameras. “File a complaint. That was so embarrassing what she did to you. This is one of those times where you just need to grow a pair of balls and do what’s right—fill out the complaint form.”

But he didn’t.

And part of me was glad. Since he wasn’t following our building’s formal grievance policy, there wasn’t much I could do to rectify the situation. Rather than take action, I could sit comfortably in my office and let another bully go by without confrontation.

Oscar seemed to thrive in relationships with skewed power dynamics. Agnieszka, whom Oscar called Angie, had the personality to depants her neighbor in public, then taunt him to his face and threaten to punch his lights out, but she never did because her physical health was so poor. She gave guys like Oscar—especially Oscar—a harsh tongue lashing instead.

Do this! Get that! Come here! Stop slacking, you lazy crack monkey!

And Oscar would take it. He was Agnieszka’s slave, running errands for her nonstop because the Polish woman’s ancient body was broken from excessive exposure to war and alcohol. Feeble, she could barely move from her apartment, let alone maneuver the narrow aisles of a supermarket. That’s why she needed a loser grunt to purchase her groceries and schlep them up to her tiny studio, somebody she could yell at, boss around, and pay with shots of Vodka.

From the outside, it looked like a vicious, one-sided, give-take relationship, but Oscar was the only person Agnieszka trusted to enter her apartment. She didn’t even grant me, her case manager, access to her room, not even for bed-bug inspections or roach exterminations. She’d rather live with pests than deal with a human intruder.

That didn’t stop the old lady from cutting into me with her tongue as often as she could, jabbing me with malicious comments, calling me a pussy for not joining the military, and habitually reminding me that she should be my case manager, not the other way around. Agnieszka intimidated me, and I avoided her. Once she tried to dial a number on the community telephone in my office, but she kept pushing the wrong buttons, and somehow, it was my fault. She lambasted me for it, and I let her get her feelings out of her system without a rebuttal. She bullied me, and that’s why I was happy when I didn’t seen her for three days.

She looked like a witch alive, a ghostly pauper. Emaciated, her limbs draped off her body so frail, fragile, without any muscle, highlighting the skeleton beneath her flimsy, paper-thin skin. Just under her fiery hair was a chubby face, swollen from drinking—her only time-tested friend.

When Oscar told me Agnieszka wouldn’t answer his knocks—his special knocks, which only they knew—he surmised something was wrong. Similarly, I sensed that there was a problem and needed to do what all case managers have to do from time to time: perform a wellness check.

I pounded on Agnieszka’s door, and it rattled as if it were unlocked. It was, so I entered the forbidden space, giving me the creeps. From the doorway I could see the old lady tucked beneath her blanket. She looked dead; it was too eerie for anything but insects to be alive. Still, visions clouded my mind of her sitting up in bed, spraying me with fire from and AK-47 for breaking and entering.

Who invited you in here, you boney bastard!

I knew she was dead—she had to be. Still, I needed to pull back the blanket and see her face and confirm my hunch, but I was terrified, palms sweating. I didn’t want to see her eyes. What if they’re open? Glassy and hollow, she had seen so much: her mother and father murdered at Auschwitz, three tours of duty in Vietnam, as well as divorce and cancer, each twice. If her eyes were open, her life would play through them, I thought, and I would see her corpse every time I blinked or tried to sleep or closed my eyes to masturbate. I’d have to staple my eyelids to my forehead because the dreadfulness of her past would follow me everywhere.

I was scared.

I had to pull back the blanket, even though I saw two or three bedbugs scurry over it. There’s an unwritten rule that states: If you find a covered body, you have to roll the blanket back and visually confirm death. Never mind the blistering silence, the stillness beyond comparison. Those aren’t enough to state with confidence that a person has passed. Sight is king.

I grabbed the blanket, just north of Agnieszka’s own pasty, pale fingers, and I eased the sheet back, so as not to startle the deceased.

My senses heightened. Please don’t be open, please don’t be open, I chanted. I didn’t want to make eye contact with her. And for the life of me, I can’t remember if her eyes were open or closed.

All I remember is the sound.

Agnieszka’s tong was sticking out of her mouth, swollen and white with dried drool and foam. It pierced through her closed, tight lips and crusted to the blanket. When I pulled the cover back, I had to peal the threads of spun cotton off her tongue, creating a ripping sound that was furious—a fitting beginning to the woman’s death.

It sounded like a young maple leaf being torn slowly in half, like a bullet whizzing past Agnieszka’s head in ‘Nam, slamming into her comrade’s nose. He was standing two feet away from her, and she caught blood splatter on her face. She thought in horror, Why not me? Then two seconds later, Agnieszka was hit with shrapnel in her right femur. She cried, Why me? The ripping, tearing, gnashing sound of flesh and bone separating from each other created a wound that would label her as a cripple for the rest of her existence. The smell of napalm mixed with monsoon season had nothing on the microscopic sound of human skin shredding, cell by cell.

Some small threads of blanket were left on her tongue, but the deafening noise it created played in my ear on repeat.

Her tongue was so big. It looked like something that was cut out of a cow and packaged to sell for cheap at a market. One of those bristly, pinkish, whitish chunks of meat that appears soft and tender and gross. So big you can see the coarse hairs and taste buds that line the severed organ. I wanted to poke it through the cellophane wrapper, to play with it between my fingers, rolling it back and forth. Does it feel as spongy as it looks?

She was done bleeding, done hurting, done lambasting Oscar, but there were so many questions that sprang to life when I separated the blanket from her palate. Her life was a secret that surfaced only as a derisive query or bitchy comment—a mystery that was released by a sound that I alone received.

And now whenever I sit in silence or solitude, hers are the questions I ask. It’s her life I ponder, her stories that consume me. They’re all I hear. They nag at me and criticize me and never go away.

Why are you doing this with your life, breaking into old lady’s apartments and disrupting them in bed? Be a man for once and join the Marine Corps like I did. Maybe it’ll put some fuzz on your boyish chest.

And for the life of me, I can’t remember if her eyes were open or closed.

"Dungeons and Degenerates" by Matthew Dexter

2011-11-21T00:02:00.002-05:00

I opened the door to apartment 43 of the tenant who died, let his mother inside and bowed out into the courtyard by the swimming pool where rainbows were bouncing on the abandoned raft, spectrums of what used to be. The young man lived alone and if my husband, the maintenance man, had not visited to fix the disposal--the tenant would still be in there rotting; he had his rent paid for the next three months.

“Thank you,” said the woman hidden behind sunglasses, her breath reeking of scotch, onions, and eggs. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

“Take as long as you need,” I said.

The woman let the morning sun hit her face and lifted her palm into the warm raindrops as she lit her cigarette. Perhaps the man called to report the problem so that somebody would pick up the body. Nothing was wrong with anything in the kitchen. The man had a refrigerator full of Budweiser, removed all foods that might spoil and took out the trash. He left a handwritten note and obviously cared--went to great extent to make the incident clean and not mess up any of the carpets. He slit his wrists and castrated himself in the bathtub, with the shower curtain closed and the wall covered with plastic like a painter places to protect the floor.

“I lived in a basement, and the view of the pool is special,” he said when he paid his security deposit and inspected the shiny new key as if it were a diamond.

He was quiet, kept to himself, but smiled and waved when he came and went. Once he ordered an inflatable woman and had to pick it up in my office because the mailboxes are so small. I signed for it and opened the packaging to see what one of those things felt like, taped it shut and left a note on his door with a smiley face. He also ordered a fake vagina. The boxes were unmarked, but I open all the packages, especially those meant to conceal what’s inside. Once found five ounces of psychedelic mushrooms and a mannequin; not from this tenant of course; he was only interested in the sex toys.

The woman screamed from the apartment and the rainbow disappeared. The raft was being splashed around by the fat tenant of Apartment 76, who wrestled and struggled to get onboard, only to have his weight submerge the air-filled plastic so that only the ends folded upward at ninety degree angles, as if offering a supplication to the heavens. Not giving up, the man let the plastic rub against his groin, half-supporting his genitalia like a pair of plastic underpants as it sank. The bubbles rose to the surface and the edges submerged as the woman yelled again and stormed out of apartment 43.

“Is everything alright?” I asked.

The body had been removed, but apparently the tenant had neglected to clean out his bedroom closet.

“Thank you,” she said. “This is terrible--his father will return in a few days to remove his possessions.”

She nodded and convulsed as the gardener walked past with an erection and shears, the former inspired by the college girls sitting underneath the umbrella waiting for more sun and the latter for shaping the bushes.

“Anything else--just call,” I said.

The maintenance man catapulted a small bag of marijuana from the paint-chipped seesaw. The plastic soared across the pool toward the girls. It landed in the corner near the filter and one of the ladies did a cannonball to retrieve the green treasure from one of the evicted tenants. I shook my head at my pothead husband. One day he was going to get us in serious trouble. I walked into the open door of apartment 43 and noticed the rubber lady on the floor. The resemblance was uncanny: a painted replication of the woman who had just been inside. The facial details and body image where almost identical.

“What are you doing?” asked the fat man.

I tossed the rubber woman into the pool and waved at the college girls whose parents always pay their rent on time.

“Maybe you can use it,” I said to the fat man who had given up on the raft.

The man paddled over to the inflatable woman and dragged her by the leg out of the pool, leaving a trail of chlorine as he carried it up to his apartment. The poor ladies head slammed against the steps and I knew the man would burst it somehow.

Back in the apartment I headed to the bedroom. The closet was closed but a glass bong was sitting on the table beside the futon the loner used as a bed. There was still some weed in it so I sparked it and my eyeballs hurt as I stretched them downward to watch the smoke rising through the water, filling the chambers. My job as manager of this complex is a disaster waiting to happen, horrible, like living in a labyrinth of dungeons and degenerates. Why did I inherit this from my mother? I shuttered as the smoke filled the closet and all these perverse objects came into focus: dildos, fireworks, fake vaginas, crack pipes, child pornography, and unrecognizable paraphernalia. I noticed the images of children who lived in the complex: pictures of naked tenants who laughed on the playground in front of my office for years. They had grown serious in recent months and many had moved out without saying much about why, just that their children wanted a change.

“Lord help me,” I said.

In one instant, the perfect tenant had turned into the demon that filled little boys with appendages and semen. I ran from the bedroom. Tripped over another inflatable woman, this one shaped like me. The features painted on the face were so lifelike, down to the hairs on the moles and the constellation of freckles on my shoulders. He even drew little dots around my nose that indicated blackheads. How had he seen me so close?

I grabbed the rubber woman and began wrestling with my image on the floor. At one point I got my elbow stuck inside one of the orifices while struggling to puncture the bitch. Bashed my head against the carpet, cursing my doll, this replication more majestic than the skin I was trapped amid. There were no wrinkles; just lines. The doll wrapped itself around my waist and we ended up on the bed, naked; defacement the only option, struggling for air, possessed by the smell of a fresh rubber woman.

Announcements

2011-11-20T19:11:00.000-05:00

We've changed our submissions guidelines...again! From now on we'll only be accepting stories of 1,500 words or less. We hope this will not only allow us to retain our quick submission responses but also allow us to give each and every story that much more attention. Another side note, we've got our stories already slotted for Nov. 21st and 28th. After that we'll be taking a break until the first of February. Rest easy, we're not gone for good we, by we I mean I being that this is a one man operation, just need a few months to relax and focus on some other things. So enjoy the holidays and remember to give us some good stories come February!

“Sailboats” by Rachel Bennett

2011-11-14T10:18:00.002-05:00

The waves were relentless. Pounding down on her skull, filling every orifice. What is breathing? That was something of the past. They came again and again, thrashing her now limp body into the gritty sand. With a Herculean effort, her head breaks the surface. Hungry, needy breaths. Cold. Bone-chilling cold. Another wave. Pulled under, the current dragging her farther and farther away. Cold. So cold. Black.

* * * * *

The wind blew her hair and dress all around her in a very dramatic fashion a she stood at the edge of the cliff, and she liked it. She liked it so much, in fact, she stalled for five more minutes, listening to the winds howling in her ear. Telling her secrets. Telling her lies. No, no, she can’t wait any longer. The time has to be now.

* * * * *

She was out of breath, finally making it to the top. She scraped her knee, twice, and it stung. Tears also stung the corners of her eyes. She saw a sailboat, far, far out in the water, near the horizon. That’s where she wished herself to be.

* * * * *

She balanced precariously on the edge, barely daring to breathe. She was about to do it, about to go over, but the wind played with her hair and dress in such a delightful manner, she had to wait. Just five minutes. Time is up, she stepped over. Eyes locked on the setting sun, the cruel wind whistling.

* * * * *

Seconds before her feet broke the surface, she changed her mind.

"Future Perfect" by Scott Carpenter

2011-11-07T00:02:00.000-05:00

By the time you read this letter I will be dead.

Or as good as. I’m only fifteen years old, but don’t beat yourself up over it. Even though it’s your own damn fault.

You are thirty. And mostly I fear you will have disappointed me.

Tell me: What do you remember? For example, do you recall the name of the turtle that escaped from its tank and ended up with its head squished in the screen door?

What about playing freeze tag with Mick and Kelsey and Emily, that time up at the cabin?

How about all those tadpoles from the pond, the ones we kept in a tub in the garage until they turned into frogs and disappeared?

No? I didn’t think so.

Do you remember anything?

What about later? Like that boy at camp who wanted to share a sleeping bag, and then pressed himself against you that way? (I bet that rings a bell.) Do you remember lying in the grass at night at the base of the water tower with Jennifer M., placing your mouth on hers while your hand slipped under her shirt? (You should.) Do you have any recollection of the violence of my desires? (You probably wish you did.)

And do you remember your promises? How you would never betray anyone? How you would travel the world? How you would learn six languages? How you would never vote? How you would always be your own boss? How you would never, ever become like your father?

I have to ask you these questions because you and I are not the same person. Every year each of our atoms is replaced. So by the time you read this, you will be a copy of a copy of a copy. There may be some resemblance, but it won’t go very far. No more than I recognize myself in the one who bore my name and lived at my address half a lifetime ago, when that person, whose existence I barely recall, was seven or eight.

We are writing these letters in Mrs. Grant’s AP English class, and the school will have mailed this to you when fifteen years have gone by. In case you don’t recall, this is not the version I turned in for a grade, where I said what she wanted me to say. This one is for you. To remind you of what you have forgotten. Even though I know it’s too late.

I am afraid of what, at the time you read this, will already have taken place. I can feel the seeds of disappointment sprouting inside me even now.

I had hoped for better.

For what it’s worth, let me give you a bit of advice. An assignment, really. Sit down and write yourself a letter, to the you that you’ll have become when you’ve doubled your age yet again. Include this one with it, to remind our future self of what you will have used to want. Make him listen to both of us. Because, you see, you’re the only chance I have.

Do it now. I don’t trust you to wait. It doesn’t have to be long.

And don’t forget the proper postage. I’d suggest you use a Forever Stamp. Although I fear that
name may be overly optimistic.

“Cake” by Aarti Soni

2011-10-31T07:32:00.000-04:00

Today wasn’t bad as far as her days went. But she was on a sliding scale of sanity. She hadn’t spoken to her mother today. She also hadn’t hated her mother today. Alisha sat at the bus stop – the one where the bus almost never stopped. The weather was almost perfect – a hesitant fall day. All the city girls were donning their latest purchases – toffee-colored boots, chunky cable-knit sweaters, in tone of pumpkin and shades of cocoa. She always thought it was funny how people rushed to wear new clothes at even the premature hint of the next season. Three months later they were fed up of these same things. People get fed up so easily.

Alisha was hungry, but not sure for what, which made her irritable. She stared at the homeless man sitting on the other side of the bench. He looked like a skinny Santa Claus, and had perched on his knees a black plastic platter with a cheap doily and a grocery store birthday cake sitting atop. It was dark chocolate on the inside – the cake looked crumbly and dry and on top of the glazed white frosting were purple and green flowers. He was grinning with delight and Alisha wondered what the original occasion had been. Did this cake ever carry any sentiment with it or was it a formality for someone. She often wondered things like this. Which decidedly got her nowhere.

A young couple waited standing as well. They looked to be in their late teens. The girl was tall and willowy in dark, skinny jeans and a coconut-colored sweater. The boy was wide-eyed and blushing. They were kissing and touching in the gentlest of ways – no matter what they did, some part of them was touching. Alisha stayed fixated on them and she wasn’t bothered. Today wasn’t a bad day.

Her mind drifted to touch and she thought about her own clothes – tailored black pants, a black v-neck sweater, and black ballet flats with a hole in the right toe. She was careless in her dress because she was cluttered in her mind, but she was protected in her clothing. She was safe. I am safe, she said as her fingers played with the white plastic button in her coat pocket. She flipped it over a dozen times – her index finger and thumb acting in concert. Why did I buy a white coat? Things get dirty so easily. They sometimes look dirty even when they aren’t.

She thought of a story her grandmother told her about a woman who was about to be molested by a gang of men and as they attempted to pull her clothes off, the fabric never ended. The fabric never ended. It went on and on until the men became frustrated. She fantasized about this tale throughout her day. Everyday. She was safe.

Today wasn’t a bad day so she dared to think maybe she would savor it. She could turn it around in her mouth and touch it with the tip of her tongue and tease her senses like she is about to swallow, and then hold it there for just a little longer. Just to taste it before it disappears. Again.

The homeless man motioned his fork in her direction as if to offer her some of his ceremony-less cake. She shook her head and smiled politely. The bus was approaching and about to stop. Today wasn’t a bad day.

“I Am Your Canvas” by Emily McGrath

2011-10-24T13:09:00.000-04:00

You truly are an amazing artist. Your skilled hands capture the image of your anger, hatred and disappointments perfectly. I study your work with an open imagination as I allow my mind to search for what drove you to create each piece.

I am your canvas. You decorate my skin, creating patterns across my back and designs up my limbs. I display to the world what cannot be hidden beneath clothing, I flaunt what you have created. The dark purple and faded blue handprints that reach around my neck and the swollen splatter that curves around my back are the most interesting. I trace my fingers over them and close my eyes, feeling your emotions—feeling your pain.

As you near I feel fear begin to crawl up my throat, it scratches at my skin trying to escape. But why do I fear the artist, especially when I love you so dearly? Your heavy footsteps move unsteadily through the house. I crouch against the wall, my hands covering the prints across my neck.

I never dare to leave my room. For how will you find me when inspiration strikes? And if ever I do leave, I move silently throughout the house as to ensure that I am never caught.

I gave up talking to you a long time ago. You simply don’t hear, which I understand, of course. An artists mind is so full of ideas that listening as well would simply cause it to flood. But you talk to me as you create your art. I listen as you yell your words of fury or sob about life’s letdowns. I have learned to be the best listener, even as my ears are ringing with pain.

The fear within me grows to be unmanageable as your footsteps approach the door. I hate the trembling that takes over my hands and I curse the tears that slowly drip down my cheeks. Why are you so afraid? my thoughts yell fiercely within the walls of my mind. Beneath his dark emotions is only love for you! I knew that’s why you did this to me; you saved your anger because you wanted to make me beautiful. You wanted to show the world that I am the only thing that makes you happy because I am what takes your pain away. I understand you like no one else.

I hear something heavy slam to the floor, followed by a shattering glass. I flinch. You let out slurred yell. Maybe today’s pieces will be enhanced by alcohol—the bitter thought crossed my mind before I had time to stop it.

I could hear you right outside my door, breathing heavily. Patiently I wait. The door swung open violently, and there you stood. Your tie hung loosely from your neck and your dress shirt was wrinkled and no longer tucked in. A small whimper escaped my lips at the site of you. Anger and a pleading desperation flickered across your eyes. You were begging me, you needed me. I slowly stood up, my frail bones, muscles and bruised skin aching.

As I stood I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Horror took over. I didn’t even recognize myself. My skin, mostly bruised blue and purple, clung to my bones. I had difficulty finding areas of myself not marked by you. Everything was decorated, everything was patterned.

I looked back to you, feeling a little more hopeless. It’s your love, I told myself weakly, it’s your love that covers me.

I took a step forward, steadily holding your pained eyes. Your pain is worse than mine, I thought calmly. I offered myself to you and once more let your art consume me. Once more I let myself become your canvas, because after all, you are truly an amazing artist.

“Laundry” by Rachel Mangini

2011-10-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

Emptying the drier you find a pair of underwear that do not belong to you. They belong to your lover and she has left them behind. You’ve dried them accidentally, fraying the lace. Had you noticed them when switching the clothes from the washer to the drier, you would have laid them flat to dry. This action intended not only as a courtesy to your lover, but also to preserve the lace for the sake of preserving the lace. Its delicate pattern, so often described as spidery, not spidery in this case but pink and scalloped where it rested, yesterday, against the skin on her belly and lower back. Your lover now asleep on a plane pointed away from you and your clumsy laundering. From the clumsy way you said goodbye, again, at the airport because she stood so rigid and kept her eyes focused on something behind you. Her eyelashes also not spidery and not moist, though you imagine them to be when you reconsider the moment now as you fold the clothes you wore when you were with her.

“Them” by Laurie Blauner

2011-10-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

Because I couldn’t help them I left. I could hear their clucking, beaks tapping on the cardboard box like someone knocking to get out. I knew their feet scraped the bottom in small, straight lines, directional lines on a highway. I knew without seeing them. I was ten years old when I turned the brass knob on the thick front door and walked away from the rented summer cottage perched on a sand dune, windows staring at the ocean where light stroked the surface of the water horizontally. I believed I could open a window at high tide and waves would pour into the house like soda into a thirsty mouth. But I left my parents’ house without knowing where I was going, on foot, without food, no stores or restaurants for several miles, only an expanse of packed sand and stubby grass, the shimmering curves of parked cars, the gray, weathered squares of other families’ houses. I left my little sister behind.

It was my mother. Her lipstick left red smears blossoming everywhere, white linen napkins, martini glasses, embroidered pillow cases, the collars of strange men’s shirts. Her tea-colored hair, the way she snaked her tongue into liquor while drinking it would interest neighborhood husbands, wealthier and more powerful than my father.

“Honey, we have to go now,” my father would say to Mother, whose glass sweated large tears down the length of her arm. Her red fingernails wrapped around the edge clicking a warning. The man she was talking to said nothing.

“Not now dear,” she would say, turning her back to him as though he was no longer there, as though she had forgotten his name already.

It was one of those parties where adults were in one room and the children in another. Where we grimaced at a clown who could barely tie balloons into the crude shapes of dogs or elephants. Smiles arranged on our faces, we waited for our parents to rescue us. Or politely excused ourselves to go to the bathroom. I spied my mother’s beautiful face hovering near men talking about Eisenhower, men nodding and touching the peplum suit encasing her elbow.

~

“Can’t you go out on the highway and play?” mother asked my six-year-old sister without smiling. My sister’s blue cat’s eye glasses lengthened across the width of her face and were studded with rhinestones. Her eyes swam underneath the thick lenses. She blinked at Mother’s moving lips trying not to hear the words.

“How about playing Parcheesi?” my sister answered without meaning to. We knew mother remembered she had children because you were supposed to have them then.

Soon afterwards Father brought them home. Three chicks with feathers that were still yellow fur, their wings were tiny letters lost in the paragraphs of their bodies, unflappable. Their feet were no larger than pennies. One walked from my hand to my shoulder without falling. Its small beak tapping Morse code against my palm. “Leave,” I thought it said without knowing why then.

~

“What do you feed them?” Mother asked Father. He ignored the question, telling her instead that she reminded him of a beautiful vase filled with lilacs, slowly dissolving in their own water. He loved: the ocean with its continuous waves; work at the clothes store where dresses wafted on mannequins like clouds in the sky; mother; cookies with marshmallows blanketed with chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

~

I could taste the salt in the air that insidiously rusted metal, leaving orange crumbs in its place. Hansel and Gretel trails. Heat enfolded my body like a suit making it heavy, sweat staining my forehead, rivulets running down my underarms. I kept on walking. The stunted trees were bent into hands plucking at something just out of reach.

Sand shifted around my shoes, finding its way into crevices, in my elbows, at my knees and wandering between my socks and sneakers. Then I almost tripped onto a bright green square of freshly mowed lawn. A red convertible was wedged at its side like a dessert. A chubby baby girl threw her navy blue ball into a corner and she didn’t know how to work her legs well enough. No one was around. I quickly ran and slipped that ball into my shorts pocket, a companion. It bulged resembling a new limb. The baby screamed and I started walking again. I pulled at my bathing suit top to keep it from losing me.

~

“Bird food,” my sister and I answered, a chorus.

Mother grew tired thinking about it. She slipped into a room without Father, held the turquoise telephone against the petal of her ear. “I only want you,” she whispered to the plastic receiver.

This had happened before. Mother’s men overflowing, at a door or window or ringing the telephone. “Can’t you do anything?” I asked Father as if we had a termite problem.

“About what?”

~

The birds grew. They flitted between my knees as I sat cross-legged on the floor, bouncing back and forth, their wings propelling small gusts of air. My little airplanes, I thought.

“God Damn chickens,” Mother said, her red fingernails in the kitchen, flashing light in the silverware drawer. Rufus, Stan, Vivian. One too big. One too small. One just right.

~

Mother asked Father to move to a motel in another town. The word “separation” was mentioned twice. I thought about the waves coming and going, reluctant witnesses along the crooked shore. My sister and I practiced kicking sand backwards into waterfalls, pecking at the beach. We watched sand granules cascade through our fingers to the ground, imagining four ugly toes, soft, red wattle swinging at our necks. Our matching hair bands curled on the dry earth. My sister’s clear glasses tilted on her nose. She forgot to comb her hair. We held each other’s hands.

~

I was thirsty. Light dripped from tiny, twisted leaves, the roofs of houses, dark, rolling driveways. It was so bright, everything seemed to shift. I focused on a tree while I was walking. But it was always nearer or farther than it appeared to be. A tricycle was wavy in the heat as though it was moving of its own accord. When I neared I knew it was stationary. It seemed as though I’d been walking forever. No sidewalks, only the packed sand and earth pushed aside by the road.

The world was built for grown-ups. Their parties, their spidery talks, their seesawing with one another. Chairs and tables were always too big, the windows and doors to keep you in or out. Their gossip about money. The best part was toys. They would buy them for us. The hothouse colors of favorite jacks and Hula Hoops. The shrunken shapes of dolls or trucks or plush animals.

The man’s car blinded me. When it pulled up next to me the man that was driving opened his door and said something to me and unzipped his pants. Something soft and almost pink flowed out and began moving. He touched it tenderly. I thought about feathers. The other man got out of the car and came toward me. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He danced a little in the sunlight. When I threw the ball, hitting him hard in the face, I could hear him spitting curses. I ran fast through the short, biting grass, rounded pebbles and broken seashells shifting under my feet. I hid behind a piece of driftwood resembling a whale stuck in sand. I waited until I couldn’t hear voices any longer. Only the monotonous waves behind me like someone breathing. A butterfly headed straight toward my face. “Like Little Red Riding Hood,” I whispered to it as it veered away at the last minute.

~

Things disappeared. Where were the wings? When our chickens didn’t use them they were hidden under feathers, invisible, tucked in like luggage for a short trip. The beaks were hard, unforgiving. The chickens were nearly full grown. Their cardboard box was too confining and there was a flurry inside all the time. A whirlwind of pecking, scratching, and shuffling. I could see the box moving, bumping along the floor.

Father visited and explained that divorce was not such a bad thing. But I knew he meant that his heart wasn’t in it anymore. I wasn’t sure about mine either. I imagined mother crawling with men like ants at a picnic. I wrote in my diary: if only I had eaten peanut butter and jelly instead of tuna fish or cleaned up a little more. If only I had been better.

My sister stayed in bed where her uncombed hair snagged the pillow, her mouth opened and closed without words. She reminded me of a fish without water.

I placed a quarter on the beach one night. The deer-colored sand, the compliant waves with their unseen undertow, stars littering the water with light broken into pieces and scattered across its surface. The moon peered down into the face of the coin with a look of recognition. In the morning nothing was there, only soft indentations in the pliant sand.

Later I came home from a neighbor’s house. “They’re gone,” Mother said from her blood-red mouth, her red fingernails rubbing her arm, straightening her hair.

Silence overwhelmed the house, eddying into corners, sitting in the too large chairs, resting on my twin bed, spreading along the frilly pink bedspread. I tried on my sister’s glasses, pulling them on and off my nose. The world swirled, blurring everything together into long streaks. I tried walking around the bedroom, bumping into the furniture. I remembered pressing Stan’s tendons that opened and closed his claws involuntarily as though he wanted something he couldn’t keep.

“Dinner,” my mother called but I wouldn’t go downstairs, even though I could smell it was one of my favorite meatloaf TV dinners again. She was rushing around, getting ready for a date. Her features enlarged in the mirror where she feverishly applied make-up, darkness outlining the rims of her eyes. Tipping her head back, she ignited her lips with flame colors that would be smeared off anyway. Powder washing her face.

“Bye, Dears,” and then she said it in French. “Take care of your sister,” but I wasn’t sure who she was talking to. My sister and I watched TV and then watched sand enter the house, arranging itself in little piles, coating the wicker furniture.

I left the next morning, early. Before I had to see her smudged and stained and wobbling in her slippers, her body leaking from her terrycloth bathrobe. I didn’t think about destinations, where I could go. One day there would be nothing left of her.

~

Clots of weeds approached and floated by me. My thirst returned. I played games as I walked. Counting the number of boats I could see bobbing in the distance. Tracing the flights of seagulls in imaginary lines that tangled into knots. I repeated baby’s nursery rhymes. “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall….” Sandy clumps fell from scabs around my knees. I had lightning bolt scratches on the backs of my legs from the grass. One shorts pocket hung empty and inside out like a useless tongue. My dark hair was matted down with sweat. When I passed houses I wondered what went on inside the walls, whether the family inside would mind another child. We didn’t have any living relatives. I would make my own way. That was how I thought.

Then I saw Jerry’s Beachcomber Hut with its stiff straw roof, windows without screens opening onto the beach.

~

“These mosquitoes are killing me,” mother used to say. “It must be my blood.” She brushed her clothes.

“Too sweet?” my sister and I said together, laughing.

Mother would look over the menu. “The food here is…cute.” And she glanced at Father, who twirled the miniature umbrella in his drink, the papery wings spreading and folding over the toothpick handle.

“Another one,” he’d say to the waitress in frayed shorts and a round straw hat, pale blue flowers climbing her shirt.

~

I creaked the door open and no one was there. It must have been mid-afternoon, before the dinner crowd. I sat at the bar with its high chairs curling around the tall table shaped like a parenthesis. I was tired. My wet skin stuck to the plastic seat and I could feel my scabs, seams in my flesh.

“Hello, there.” It was Jerry, the owner, without his beachcomber hat.

“Can I have some water? Please?”

“Sure, little lady.” He placed the glass in front of me and I drank it quickly. He looked at me. “Let me get you another.” And he left while I sipped the water more slowly. This time I finished it and carefully positioned the empty glass on the slick bar.

He came back. “Your Mama will be here soon to pick you up. She’s sure a real beauty. Like some kind of exotic bird,” He smiled, his hands carving the air. He was missing a tooth. “Put in a good word for me.” And he winked.

That was when I began to cry.

“The Invention of Restraint” by Rich Ives

2011-10-03T03:19:00.000-04:00

1.

The crook of Billy Epstein’s arm was murdered first, followed by the hollow at the base of his neck, which had enabled him to open empty jars of sky without resorting to the corrugated flesh of his sleeping posterior. If he didn’t choose to do so, it was merely because the first act was not yet in the first place. Perhaps the odor was overwhelming.

With each further anticipation, the containers released a clear salty fluid, and the witnesses became less convinced of what they had seen. The investigation proceeded with several of the previously cloud-driven held in quiet abeyance.

At the intersection of the first murder and the speech to which it was attached, a small concern was uncovered and placed in the location formerly inhabited by that portion of the body once thought to have been capable of reaching away from the rest of the body. This delicate appendage was lifted at an angle that allowed it to precede the rest of the body, which held together several digits inside one of its pockets that had become joined by the porous stained knuckles of hardened experience that can be found at carnivals, carved into the shape of dice and garishly painted in numerical sequence using the tiny bowl-like declivities prepared on each of the six equidistant surfaces. The physical capacities necessary to pick up the resulting assemblage were said to create the appearance of a grasping of the kind found only in questionable museums and occasionally in bottles of amber fluid displayed in poorly lit tents by gypsies following in the wake of circuses and medicine shows.

All of the orifices are indeed edible. It’s the idea they represent that are indigestible.

In childhood, an old wooden rocking-horse waited on a slanted linoleum floor, patterned in a shifting sequence of Teddy-bear cowboys happily lassoing the battered legs of a generously abused crib, floating on swivel-mounted casters. A young outlaw named Billy Epstein, wearing a Carmen Miranda fruit hat and sporting an outrageous mustache, was still awaiting his fate in the grainy black and white photograph lying beneath the broken glass of the chocolate-stained wooden frame discarded along the worn linoleum trail.

The emotional positioning of the hopefuls has been identified in secret texts carefully guarded by practitioners, who meet in public only in order to pretend mockery and cast misdirecting dispersions upon the activities in which they are happily engaged. This has become necessary to dissuade the many aspiring hopefuls that have been drawn to these activities by dangerous misunderstandings. Witnesses seem not to understand the deep faith with which the participants perform these contradictions and view them as merely overzealous crusaders. The clear salty fluids surreptitiously recovered by low level “sanitary engineers” are rumored to contain valuable intellectual coloration pigments.

In this way, we may have surrendered some of our less conspicuous impulses and altered the densities of archaic tact, although they are still believed to have survived unaltered on the farmsteads of extreme northern South Dakota and extreme southern North Dakota, where artesian well water used for irrigation contains an absorbable constituent of sunlight that reacts to certain combinations of vocal patterns with roots in Scottish and Scandinavian subcultures of Viking and Celtic influence. These include the expressions, “By golly, and fiddlesticks, and wouldn’t ya know it? and you’ll be wantin’ some a that.

Scarring occurs when resistance is prolonged.

On schooldays the Malt-o-meal sits silent in a fat warm bowl circled by small plastic boots filled with milk and orange juice and a pale blonde saddle covering three pieces of toast with liberal doses of marmalade applied, all awaiting the soft slap of footed flannel pajamas from the small room at the end of the innocent hall.

An illegally immigrated dog tributary originally located in the homeland and now activated by latent desires within the uncle begins a low wet moaning related to cries of ecstasy emitted by mating centipedes but without the intellectual discussion. Some witnesses have suggested that the movement contains an aural color of visceral iridescence reminding them of squeezing fireflies, but the lazy trajectory of the tributary remains much larger and does not attempt to rise from the lowest possible declivity.

Viewed from the wing of the local crop duster, the barking can be seen to exert a unifying influence on the chaotic testimonial of the contemporary family, but there is no discernable greening of the offspring, which remain sullen and moist, a condition which makes the occasionally wind-disturbed deposit of crop dust adhere in potentially dangerous quantity. From this tendency to normality we can extrapolate a cultural perspective towards survival, which might allow the density of territorial imperatives to overlap and thus exchange relatives.

Small green birds remove the chewing gum from the young boys mouths and plant it. Pecking begins when a donor resists and can result in tap dancing, stomach nesting and, eventually, death. The introduction of handcarts into the recovery efforts has proved useless.

All feminine models have been endowed with a masculine component. All masculine models have been endowed with a beast of random selection.

The voice of the mother is watery and cool. The father does not participate until the mother’s resources have been depleted. Artificial elevation of the body is adamantly resisted.

If the heart is missing, you must attach a wire to the finger to determine sensitivity. If the wire discolors, the specimen is polluted. If the body lights up, it is not to be trusted. Disconnect the wire before explaining what is required of the specimen. Some specimens will provide service only when they believe they have been lied to. These are particularly desirable as they seldom believe the truth.

This is where you will find the women weeping.

2.

The reformed transgressor gives his little sermon with heated passion edging his knowing chill. A lighted match falls towards the fireplace, already roaring with hunger.

Big and tentative, three boys, simple with yearning. The fat wet flakes of snow hold apart just long enough to fall. The boys are laughing at a joke about their shop teacher, a jovial amputee.

A Volkswagen, farting through the snow, like a dispeptic overturned motorboat, plows to a thick crunching halt and disgorges an excited nervous couple of surprisingly diminutive stature. They’re chattering like sparrows planning a vacation.

The boys who wish to become men have been drinking, dared into a pub where a woman’s life was recited in fits and starts and boos and guffaws, a beautiful tragedy where the heroine does everything wrong, and everyone cheers and begins singing. It hurts the boys to want that.

3.

What is behind the strategy of such an author?

The freedom of the mind, not the tyranny of the body.

Why does he admit this?

Because it is not possible without complicity.

Why are his tarnished dreams so transparent?

The polished window does not see itself clearly.

Are there others like him?

Yes, too many. And they all want attention, though there are many who seek it in other ways.

Why are they not satisfied to be alone?

Some are, until the mind wants to hear itself think.

And if you ask these questions, have you not added another layer of difficulty to the problem?

Yes, but the layers existed before the problem did.

How do we know this problem really exists?

In someone else’s dream the library is closed. A column of ants has been working on the steps where a sweetly flavored text has fallen.

4.

In the schoolhouse between the wheatfields, a priest is eating the onion raw. Behind the schoolhouse the boys are solving a problem with recently introduced foreigners and telling a joke about a burping monk. How much fear does it take for them to forget themselves?

Something backfired and the boys jumped. They were hoping it was a car.

Hobbed up and enlisted they were. As if they were talking to a masculine pearl.

The pale pink panic of flesh.

Fugitive, Warholed out of context, a bolted daisybuff began boxing his way to Lapland.

A truancy of one after one among many. Its ruffled pelt on the imaginary cabin door.

“Give the dodger yer bleedin’ chit,” said the foreign silence.

Wait. Someone is coming, someone who is holding his head as if it might fall off and break. Clockmouthed and doggo, a one-man zoo.

“I’m the prize, Puckerbutt. Suck it up,” said the green voice clothed in caution, ya cheeky little bleeder.

Thusly spills forth the meadow drugged in fog, somnolent.

Twigged with the recurrent her, I was, a paltry sod.

To see was there anything worth taking.

“It’s yer own doin’ then, enit?”

A dodgy scam, okay, Y’d have ta sidewalk a contender.”

“Shut yer filthy gob, ya wanker.”

Pucking the horse turd around like a cricket match.

Bulbous, ham-headed. Three dolts on their way to a discovery.

Don’t believe a word of this. Somewhere deep inside the mastodon, the father lights a green candle. The flame is red, of course, but it helps to know it’s a green candle because it’s so long ago, because the father is naked among stones sitting in a circle.

The boys form a circle outside the circle and begin dancing. It’s a dance of defiance. It’s a dance of helping each other separate.

5.

There’s a hole in the dark that leaks more darkness. The inner walls of heaven are flesh, the outer the flesh of another, separating us from air. The boy’s feeling at that moment is a small furry thing caught too far from its hole.

Them as knew ‘im’d take is face off ‘im fer a lop hole. ‘E thought ‘e loved ‘er ‘e did, the sorry sod. She weren’t no woman but a platoon. Tiny little acorn shoes on a rainmarch, eh. And that there’s Gobble the Muffin, a bloke on the lam, that one. I seen ‘im do it and the Bobbies not far behind. Heard ‘e was from the states, ‘e was, and bound ta go back. I didn’t hang aroun’ none with the dead one needin’ a killer ta point to. I was gone before I knew what I knew.

The wind testified while he lay awake that night, the truth of her in his nostrils. “How surprised you seem to find me here,” he says to himself.

6.

Rich with absence, an ambulatory garden, the evening lanterns’ tasty suggestions of bearded whaling ships slip off into the welcoming fog. His tired furry hull draws him on. His closed eyes brighten, as if daylight had been dreaming its own echo.

1) An amelioration of the cloud’s fickle justice.
2) The intimate architecture of reluctant flounders.
3) Grandpa Epstein still tuning his waldzither.
4) The intimate truss of surrender cupping defiant necessities with a beggar’s hand.
5) My throat full of rose petals grabbing at my breath.

Every word I have written is brown. Each one chased by a gray wolf that never catches it. I was glad to be in that life, though I knew it would not stay in me. Burnt oil and bone dust, the fire was talking. It was rarely a happy thing. I was a brother just like me. And another.

Maybe you died and then kept going, the bump in the road a missed signal, like so many, but what ever really ends beside the moment?

And the woman opens to let you out, not in.

Rent asunder has been thy darkling plain.

7.

Nothing holds still for long. Just when you think the shell you saved won’t sink, boytoy Neeson the Neighbor shovels the drunk’s wet spot into the rosebed, thinking tomorrow you’ll be smiling acid love, and soon there’s kisses for stolen redness, soft unprotected petals folding out, flatter and then flat, on the water, crystal-coated, circled round, but to breath its mouth fragile, it opened and was pleased with its tongue, previously conditioned to wait just like Neeson.

Something whispers I love you, and it’s not yours, but it’s there for you to leave alone and witness and to experience as if it had been. Probably it wasn’t aware of your existence and therefore maybe honest, which you took away with you, leaving the thing that carried it, where it couldn’t hold even the end of it anymore and had to move on right there, where it had happened and then lost the ability to contain itself.

8.

Billy Epstein tried to keep from placing his finger upon the end of the assemblage, which had not yet been fully identified as Neeson or any other manifestation of his unexamined childhood. He held himself not in abeyance but in Billy, in what Billy had become and not in what Billy had done.

One need only speak of blue to redden the lips, the words (first upper and then lower) open between the open pause (here and then here again) uncontained and certain only of a delinquent fleshy punctuation dampening the area of exchange.

The inspector’s raincoat began leaking. Shiny black shoes. The confident tip of a fat-brimmed mobster hat.

Sleep began bumping against the pier.

Sleep was the first thing that occurred before that.

“A Visit” by Dylan Eitharong

2011-09-26T13:04:00.000-04:00

Ray stood in the kitchen and poured another drink into an old chipped coffee mug. Jess sat on the couch, turned around and watching him while she smoked a cigarette.

“Aren’t you going to offer me something?” she asked.

Ray turned around and opened the fridge and grabbed a can of beer, tossed it to her. She caught it.

“You can have one of these,” Ray said quietly. “Careful when you open that.”

She popped the tab and took a sip.

“Thanks.”

Ray drank a little bit of his whiskey. Outside it was dark and raining heavily. Jess was hanging her head and arms over the back of the couch, looking down at the floor with her cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth and holding the beer can by the top. Ray grabbed his mug, dimmed the lights, and walked out of the kitchen and sat down on the couch next to Jess. She stayed in the same position. He leaned back and put his feet up on the coffee table, on top of some magazines and papers that were scattered about, and grabbed the remote that was resting on the arm of the couch and turned on the TV. He flipped through the channels until he came to some old black and white movie that was on, turned the volume almost all the way down, until just a quiet murmur came from the speakers. He drank some more of his whiskey as the smoke from Jess’s cigarette floated up past his head. She sipped on her beer. Neither of them said anything for a while. Neither of them was sure what to say. She had picked her gaze up from the floor and was taking in what she saw around Ray’s apartment – to her left was a bookshelf that was horribly messy and unorganized, books laying on their sides or looking ready to fall out at any moment. At the top of the bookshelf there were some vases filled with flowers – all dead – along with a few standing picture frames displaying old photographs, one of them a portrait of much younger versions of both Ray and herself. In front of her was the counter that separated the kitchen from the room that they were in – which she guessed was the living room, or den, or whatever it was called. There were several dirty dishes and utensils on the counter, and an empty whiskey bottle. She wondered if Ray had drank it all himself. That would have been normal for him. To her right there was a brick wall and a window, out of which she watched the rain for a moment. She turned around and sat up straight and crossed her legs and adjusted her skirt, seeing the movie that Ray had put on. On the screen there were two characters kissing, a man and a woman. It was boring. This could have been any old movie, she thought. They all seemed the same. Ray was raising his drink to his lips again. She watched him. She examined his face in the dim flicker of light cast by the TV. He looked so much older than the last time she’d seen him. He obviously hadn’t shaved in a few days, and there were dark circles under his eyes. His cheeks were bony, as was the rest of him.

“Why are you here?” he said quietly.

She leaned forward and set down her beer, rubbed out the rest of her cigarette in the ashtray next to his feet. She thought of something to say.

“I wanted to see you.”

He was looking intently at the TV. He drank some more.

“Why would you want to do that?”

She didn’t know.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Think about it. Give me a cigarette.”

She gave him one. He lit it, put it between his lips. He was silent again.

“I love you,” she said.

He got up, walked back to the kitchen and began pouring himself another drink. Jess turned back around and watched him. Moments later, he replied.

“Well that’s good. I would hope so. You keep doing that.”

He leaned against the refrigerator and looked up at the ceiling. Jess sighed and looked back at the TV. It was still boring.

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. “I’m no good. Finish your beer, please.”

“Do you want me to leave?” she asked, not touching her beer. She didn’t think she wanted any more.

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay.”

He finished the whiskey in one long, drawn-out raise of his mug. He grimaced as he hit the bottom.

“That’s good stuff,” he said. “Maybe you can have some.”

“No thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” He poured himself some more and sat back down on the couch. He grabbed the remote and turned up the TV. A scene in a lounge was playing. There was a woman singing an old love song and people were sitting around and watching.

“Beautiful,” he said as he blew a puff of smoke from his mouth. Jess looked at him, then at the TV, then back at him.

“What? That woman?”

He coughed.

“No. This music. They don’t make music like this anymore.”

She watched the woman on the screen.

“I think she’s beautiful.”

“Good for you. So are you. I’m drunk.”

Jess rolled her eyes.

“What else is new?”

He suddenly turned and slapped her on the knee. It was a light slap, but it surprised her, causing her to draw back and curl her legs up onto the couch, wrapping her arms around them. She looked into his eyes. He looked angry.

“Don’t talk to me like that!” he snapped.

She didn’t say anything. She just stared at him. He stared back. They stared at each other for what seemed like minutes but was only a few seconds. Then his eyes left hers, and he looked down at his lap.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Okay.”

She wasn’t sure if he meant it. He turned back to the TV, looking a bit uneasy. As he reached out to grab his drink, his hands trembled a little.

“Can you not put your feet on the couch?”

She unfolded her legs and set her feet on the floor. She thought about apologizing, but didn’t. The two were silent again. She listened to the rain outside and watched the movie on the TV, seeing what was happening but not really paying attention. She thought about Ray’s question from earlier – “Why are you here?” She didn’t know. She thought about getting up and walking out without saying a word right then, wondered how he’d react, wondered if he’d even care. But she stayed in place, sitting next to him on the couch while he drank and smoked and watched TV. It went like this for a long time. Neither of them got up. When Ray was done with his cigarette, he flicked the butt onto the ground, and when he finished his drink, he just set the mug down on the coffee table. He didn’t get up for another. After a while, the movie finished and the credits were rolling. Ray picked up the remote and turned off the TV. He turned to Jess. He opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t say anything at first. Then he did.

“I’m sorry. Thank you for coming to see me.”

She nodded.

“Yeah.”

“How…how are things for you?”

“Good.”

“I’m glad. Are you still with that boy?”

“Yeah, I am.”

She looked into his eyes as she said this. He suddenly appeared serious. He leaned forward a bit.

“Do you love him?”

She smirked, and laughed a little at his question.

“Yeah…I think I do.”

He put his hand to his chest and coughed and shook his head.

“You think? I think you need to stop thinking with your cunt.”

He laughed hysterically at his own comment. She just rolled her eyes and groaned, continued to look at him. When he was done laughing, he smiled. She looked at his teeth. They were yellow and unclean looking. He continued talking.

“You know…I think about you a lot. I wonder how you’re doing. You live so far away, now. I’m very lonely here. No one ever comes to see me.” He reached out a hand and put it on her thigh. She stared down at it, his uncomfortably familiar gesture sending a chill up her spine.

“I – I’m sorry,” she stuttered. His hand began to rub her flesh, moving back and forth. She pulled her leg away just a little, but his hand stayed. He kept talking.

“I spend all day here. By myself.”

His hand moved further up her thigh, closer to her crotch. She watched as it then casually made its way between her legs and under the fabric of her skirt, and felt his fingers as they tried to move aside her underwear. A sudden panicked feeling came over her as she immediately stood up, leaving his hand resting on the space on the couch where she had just been sitting. He looked up at her, a drunken confused look on his face.

“I have to go,” she said. Ray stayed on the couch, his eyes following her as she walked around the other side of the couch and towards the door of the apartment. He watched as she bent down and put on her shoes, hurrying to lace them. When she was done she turned towards him, shaking her head. She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. She watched as the look on his face went from confused to angry. He narrowed his eyes and clenched his teeth. She’d seen him look at her like that before, and she knew what it led to. He snarled, then began to open his mouth. As he did, she quickly opened the door and left, slamming it behind her and shutting out Ray’s screams of words that she’d always hoped she would never hear again.

#

When Jess’s boyfriend called her the next morning, she was waiting at the airport with another hour to kill before her flight back home.

“I’ve missed you,” He said.

“I’ve missed you too. Sometimes I wonder why I got into this business. Too much travelling…”

He laughed, then continued.

“Well at least you got to see your dad. How was he?”

There was a long pause on Jess’s end. He waited until she finally said something.

“Oh, well, that didn’t really work out. There was a terrible storm last night and I didn’t leave the hotel. But that’s all right. I don’t think he’s too upset about it. Next time, I guess.”

“untitled” by Evan Swenson

2011-09-19T20:45:00.000-04:00

...dead footprints trail off in every direction. The sensation of liberation fades just as quickly as it came. The sun is down, the tide is low, and the course of this road is fixed. I walk on, indefinitely, toward new arms, new lips, new streets and sensations, yet I can’t help but feel that the soul and substance of these things will have been recycled from all that I’ve left and am leaving.

There occurs, with every rising thought, the subsequent death of something undefinable, unrecognizable, but infinitely vital. It has something to do with the soul, as though little pieces of it were being broken off until finally it has become a veritable vacuum, consuming all--the self included--and destroying. Given this fixation upon endings, that is to say, death, I can give only uneasy speculation that my soul has been lost and drained and there remains nothing but the roots of a suicidal being, securing their places even further within, tightening their grips with every empty thought and wasted experience.

The dream burns...the rocks are tall, worn, glossed over with the lush moisture of the tide. On the lip of the ocean, among the faded ships coasting lazily atop the horizon, the presence of fire and flame makes itself felt as the bloodied sun sinks down with the tragic brilliance of a fallen soldier. The waters, though calm and composed in themselves, hand the sky a reflection of pure, unfiltered chaos as the bold colors massacre the serene surface like words of hate or war or vengeance massacre the neutral face of a sheet of paper.

Somewhere something makes a noise and the noise fades. In the distance, an old man walks slowly along the shore, his hands clasped lazily behind his waist. With nowhere to go and nothing left to say, I close my eyes and wait for patiently for something to begin.

“Porch” by Corinne Lee

2011-09-12T00:32:00.003-04:00

Wings whirring––to break into the light––hitting our porch lamps. Spitting like drops flung into flame, falling shorn. In the morning, a toad by my mother’s front door, so sated with wings that he sprawls sleeping on WEL, insect crumbs screening COME.

My mother on the porch bench after breakfast––spine a fiddlehead over Folgers––struggling to remember. “Lake Constance” is all she can say. I know the story. Other Jews, each night swimming through the lake, fleeing Germany for Switzerland. Ice water opium slowed them. Then the one-eyed searchlights, gun cracks.

For months of winter dawns, my mother and her sister, four/six, on the Swiss shore after blintz breakfasts––exploring the beached dead. Their poking sticks, rubbed bare as flesh, lifted, peeked: locked blue mouths, silk scarves now chill ropes, pale ankle throats in weedy, cashmere hose. The dead dressed, no, the living had dressed as if yachting to a romantic gourmet tryst, not to black water.

Instead, late evenings, after hunting them at the lake, the Nazis were the ones among Riesling and sauerbraten, Bierdermeier and beeswax candles––cozy fire, yet cold rain so taut they often could not open the door afterward to go home. Nor could my mother: grandparents, parents railroaded into gas, she later became American, a Philadelphian, a corset Episcopalian.

But now, only sister hours dead, she reaches toward the beached phantoms they once found together. Yes, they stole from them. The only item she kept her entire life was a child’s watch, glass back and front to show the metal works inside. She stored it for six decades––and clutched it like a lucky coin in times of trouble.

This morning, she does not clench the watch, but slips it in her mouth and holds it there, like a lozenge. She can’t remember her sister. She can’t remember the drowned. Yet like the toad, she feels oddly full and content. The timepiece is smooth against her tongue. “Metal soft-run,” she mutters after I pull it from her lips––perhaps yearning to absorb the dead and time, to make them live, her own.

“Retrospect” by Dara Cunningham

2011-09-05T12:49:00.000-04:00

I now watch the teenagers through the lens of adulthood. Today at the train station there’s five or six of them with skateboards and bikes, their heads bouncing to hip hop music that pulses from their iPods. When I was their age, we were sutured to our walkmans and listened to Nirvana; we wore flannel and dreamed of moving to Seattle. When did I start using the expression “when I was their age”?

These are the kids who worry guidance counselors and teachers; solemn and cynical with no direction. The girls wearing low-slung jeans, heavy eyeliner and piercings sit on a bench watching the boys perform risky stunts on their skateboards. They are supposed to be the bad-ass girls, the anti-cheerleaders, but they behave exactly as their sugar and spice counterparts do, passively applauding boys’ daredevil maneuvers that result in stitches and broken bones.

My observations are melancholy, but they seem happy for now. They’re happy to be away from classmates who don’t like them and from teachers and parents who insist they aren’t living up to their potential. These aren’t delinquents; just ordinary, bored kids trying to create excitement where there is none.

They are not yet afraid of what they will become. They don’t yet see themselves in the struggling families shopping at Wal-Mart or eating at Denny’s, stuck in futureless jobs and married to people they settled for simply to stop being lonely. No, these kids are completely absorbed in the present. All but one.

She is ever so slightly different. Her clothes are the same, adhering to the rigid tribal codes of adolescent fashion, but her face is kinder, eyes dreamy. She is happy to be included but is clearly on the fringes of the pack. When the train whistles as it rolls toward the platform, she is the only who looks up.

I know what she’s thinking.

Will I ever get out?

I hope she’s smart enough to know that she can’t stuff her treasured possessions in a backpack and take off one day after another fight with the parents or stepparents who don’t understand her. She can’t flee small town misery at sixteen with a wad of cash she saved from babysitting. The ones who try to don’t survive; they sink anonymously into sordid gutters until they become tragic headlines.

Getting out takes planning and preparation. She has to study the map others have left behind; study in general. If she stops hanging out here and gets good grades, she can go to college in the city, it will buy her time. If she can find a job, endure the criticism and cruel competition, she can get a place to live there, even if it is up six flights of stairs and smells like a litter box.

Those were my plans.

She’s watching me. Do I cut a glamorous figure with my highlighted hair, my new winter coat and high heels? Is it me she wants to be?

You shouldn’t envy me, I want to tell her. I’m a fake, a phony, a poseur. I don’t have an exciting career or work on a famous street; I’m not even traveling to meet a lover who does. I’m a washed up local who takes the train on her day off to walk around a gallery, buy something cheap but unique, and hope that someone spectacular will smile at me.

I’m just like you, trying to create excitement where there is none.

FYI

2011-08-30T22:19:00.000-04:00

For any of you that are interested: a while back I was named Fiction Editor of the online arts magazine, Feature Mag. Check it out here and send something in. If you've had you work published here, at (Short) Fiction Collective, or even if I somehow overlooked your abundant talent by declining a previous submission!, give it a try and submit any unpublished fiction of 2,500 words or less to patricktrotti@yahoo.com with "Feature Mag Submission" in the subject.

“Quitting Is Easy” by Nathaniel Tower

2011-08-29T08:40:00.000-04:00

I took up smoking just to show the world how easy it was to quit. It’s been five months now, and my wife is wondering why I haven’t yet.

“It takes time baby. I have to develop the addiction first,” I tell her.

“Please stop,” she begs me. “It’s so gross I don’t even want to kiss you anymore.”

I can verify this statement. I’m not sure when the last time we shared a good passionate kiss, the kind where we slap our tongues around the other’s mouth.

“Look, I’ll quit soon. I just need to make sure that I’m addicted. Otherwise it’s too easy to quit and I won’t have proven my point.”

“And exactly who are you proving this point to again?” she asks with a roll of her beautiful green eyes. It looks like sea foam bouncing around on flawless shores. For a moment I think about quitting just so I can kiss her, but my willpower is too strong. I can’t give into temptation.

“Honey, this is our ticket to millions,” I plead with her as I reach for the carton of cigarettes on top of the fridge.

“And how is that exactly?”

I have to pause here. I don’t always think through exactly where I am headed with something, but I’m always convinced that I’ll get to where I want to go. Nothing comes to me, and I don’t want to seem like I’m racking my brain too much, so I just go with my gut.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ll see it when it happens. I can’t give away all my secrets.” I am tempted to go on a little longer, but any more than that and she will know for sure I’m stalling.

“You’re stalling,” she says.

I light my cigarette and take a deep drag.

“Hey, I told you not to do that in the house. Get the hell out of here with that. Do you want the walls and furniture to turn yellow?” She waves her arms frantically in the air as if to ward off some evil.

“Relax, I’ll put it out.” I put it out just to show her how easy it’s going to be for me to quit. My hand almost immediately begins to shake.

“I want you to stop by the end of the week. Stop or I’m leaving you.” The sea foam is gone from her eyes. They’re acidic now.

“Hey, look how easy it was for me to put that out.” I put my shaking hand behind my back. “Look, I think the addiction has just about fully kicked in.” I wrap my arms around her to show what a great husband I am. “I’ve never been addicted to anything after just one time.”

Oops. She immediately pulls out of my grip and shoots me a death stare. I can feel her eyes burn though me. The look is almost as bad as the need for a cigarette. I know what she wants me to say, but saying it now will only make her appear to be happy. It’s one of her many tricks. She makes me say something because she’s angry, then she pretends to be happy, but I can sense that she is even more upset because she thinks I only said it because she wanted me to say it, which is apparently worse than not saying it at all.

“I’m going shopping,” she says to interrupt my thoughts. I don’t bother to tell her what she wants to hear. I’m just thankful that she’s getting out of the house. My veins feel like they’ll collapse if I don’t get some nicotine in my system right away.

“Alrighty, babe. Need me to do anything while you’re gone?”

“Yeah. Just one thing. Don’t smoke.”

“Fine. I won’t smoke. I’ll just throw everything I’ve started away.”

“Good. Throw that damn carton away while you’re at it.” She turns on her heel and marches for the front door without bothering to tell me where she’s going or when she’ll return. I know I’m supposed to ask, but I know she won’t tell me when I do. Either way she’ll be mad, so I might as well just save face. I don’t want to look weak in front of the cigarettes.

I hear the door slam and my shaking hand immediately reaches for the carton. I have to be honest here. The cigarettes took their full affect about two months ago. It’s been like a disease ever since. If Amy knew how many cartons I was plowing through then she would at least take away my credit cards and kick me in the balls. Amy would never divorce me, for any reason. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager, and she despises divorce more than anything, even more than smoking. Still, I’m not going to tempt her too much, so I grab a pack out of the carton and head for the backyard. She’ll know I was smoking, but at least if I do it back here then she’ll pretend she doesn’t know. She won’t even act pissy or give the impression that she thinks I’m hiding something. As long as it doesn’t seem to affect her, she really doesn’t mind.

I light the cigarette before I even get outside. I wait until the door is halfway closed before I take my first puff. It’s an instant feeling of relief. I may have become addicted to sex a lot quicker, but the rush of smoke into my lungs and veins defeats any orgasm I’ve ever had. I always used to wonder why people smoked. Now I wonder how anyone can give it up.

I sit on the deck and puff my brains out, one cigarette after another, until the whole pack is gone. I don’t think about much while I inhale, just about how I might actually quit and if I really could become a millionaire based on my experience. I’m sure I could write a book about it. Or at least a blog. People would want to hear all about how I did it. Quitting really could make me millions.

But then again, what’s millions compared to this rush?

I bury the cigarettes in the backyard like a dog before my wife comes home. I know I’ll be looking for them tonight.

"The Truth About Miriam" by Chas Warren

2011-08-22T00:10:00.001-04:00

Miriam’s sleepless nights are the fault of the dybbuk in my shampoo. He lives in my shampoo because I invited him. Why are you surprised? You are only surprised because you know nothing about Miriam.

Einstein couldn’t build an alarm clock as reliable as Miriam. Ten o’clock sharp, every night, she is washing her hair. I wash my hair at the same time. Why can’t she wait? Aviram would have understood. Sixteen years I lived in this apartment before she moved into the unit below. She had five daughters. Five daughters who all washed their hair! It drove Aviram crazy. That’s why he shot himself and is now denied entry into Sheol. All he wanted was a son. I would have given him a son. Gladly! But did he ask me to the 1972 Temple Beth Shalom Dinner Dance? No! He couldn’t ask me, because she asked him before he had the chance. He was an honorable man. Miriam is not honorable. She steals the man of my heart, and then she steals my shampoo. I see her steal it with my own eyes. We go shopping together and we share a cart. We buy many of the same things. The same shampoo? Yes! Why is that surprising? I put my bottle on the left, and she puts her bottle on the right. There is no mistake! I put mine next to the canned beets that I like and she hates. Aviram liked beets. When we leave, she puts my bottle in her bag! So on the next night that Aviram came to visit me, I asked him to haunt my shampoo. My shampoo sitting in Miriam’s apartment. You are surprised that Aviram continued to visit me? Why? Aviram was a faithful man. He visited me faithfully every Wednesday, while Miriam took their daughters bowling. I can feel him when he is in the room. I felt it when he agreed to honor my request. Why is that surprising? Aviram was an honorable man.

"Bigfoot" by Jordan Castro

2011-08-15T00:24:00.002-04:00

The night of the The Weakerthans concert, Larry King cried in the back seat of his father’s new Escalade. The crying was noiseless, but Oprah Winfrey, who sat next to Larry King, noticed and touched Larry King’s leg. “Hey,” she said. “You’ll be okay. There are other girls and you’re really young.” Larry King looked at Oprah Winfrey’s face. “Are you really that upset?” said Oprah Winfrey.

The singer of The Weakerthans walked on stage carrying a glass of wine. He spoke. He began the first song. “Oh my god,” said Larry King while grinning and looking at Oprah Winfrey’s face. “I can’t believe it.” Oprah Winfrey put her arm around Larry King. “Oh my god,” said Larry King, “I can’t believe they’re actually playing it.” Larry King and Oprah Winfrey sang while swaying to the music.

The morning of the night of the The Weakerthans concert, Larry King put on jean shorts and an Against Me! t-shirt. He rode his bike to Ellen DeGeneres’ parents’ house. “I’ll always love you,” said Ellen DeGeneres while looking at Larry King’s face. Larry King cried while making loud noises and looking at Ellen DeGeneres’ face.

During the The Weakerthans concert, Larry King, Oprah Winfrey, Jay Leno and Howard Stern sang loudly. Larry King looked at Oprah Winfrey’s face and grinned. The lead guitarist of The Weakerthans jumped off the stage and put his guitar around Howard Stern’s neck. Larry King looked at the lead guitarist of The Weakerthans and Howard Stern and yelled “Woo” while grinning uncontrollably and clapping.

The afternoon of the night of the The Weakerthans concert, Larry King and Oprah Winfrey played half of “Those Anarcho Punks Are Mysterious” by Against Me! in Larry King’s bedroom. “We’re both in bands,” said Oprah Winfrey, “but we can’t even remember how to play an entire song.” Oprah Winfrey laughed. “I know,” said Larry King while touching his hair. “What songs do you know? Do you know how to play this?” said Oprah Winfrey while playing chords. “No,” said Larry King. “Oh,” said Oprah Winfrey while grinning. “What about...” she said while playing chords. “No,” said Larry King. “Or, is that... wait, isn’t that The Lawrence Arms?” “No,” said Oprah Winfrey.

Larry King lay in the fetal position in grass on a small hill in Ellen DeGeneres’ parents’ neighborhood. “She has to come,” he thought. He moved a little then wiped his eyes. “I just... left there crying. If she loves me, she’ll come find me.” Larry King sat with his knees bent, looking at trees. A silver car passed. Larry King looked at his cell phone. It was 2:13 p.m.

Larry King, Oprah Winfrey, Jay Leno and Howard Stern got out of the car. They walked past an art gallery and an independently-owned music store, into the concert venue. “If they play ‘Bigfoot!’ tonight, I will completely forget about Ellen DeGeneres forever and I will die happy, I swear,” said Larry King. Larry King and Oprah Winfrey walked out of the concert venue and into the independently-owned music store. Oprah Winfrey ate a piece of pizza. Larry King thought “I’m vegan” while looking at Oprah Winfrey’s face.

The morning of the night of the The Weakerthans concert, Larry King looked at one thing, then another thing, then a lot of things, everything at once, before focusing on what felt like a soft ball of light inside him, gently expanding, growing until it was only himself he was aware of. He exited the bathroom. He called Ellen DeGeneres and said “Is it okay if I come over now?” “Yes,” said Ellen DeGeneres.

"If He Can't Fix It, I Don't Know Who Can" by Thomas Kearnes

2011-08-08T02:39:00.001-04:00

Ellis wasn’t supposed to do this. Brent was no longer his concern. But when the desperate man called Ellis that morning, begging to go, declaring he was ready for help, Ellis knew he had no choice. He drained his coffee to the bottom of its cup, slapped on his woolen coat and drove across town to collect the man he once loved.

Brent waited in the parking lot of his ratty, beige-colored apartment building. These dispirited accommodations were the best he could afford with his salary from Wal-Mart. Ellis kept gazing out the side windows as he eased through the lot, looking for any black men who might pose danger. He eased into a space in front of Brent on the sidewalk. His ex-lover shivered in the crisp winter breeze. The weatherman had predicted a rare snowfall for later that afternoon. While the car idled, Ellis rolled down his window and called out to Brent. “Where’s your stuff? I thought this place made you live in-house at least a week.”

“Baby, I can’t do that,” Brent said, rubbing his hands together. “I can’t take the time off work. I had to beg Miranda just to get taken off morning shift.”

“Well, I guess that will have to do.”

The two men drove through commuter traffic to the rehab facility. Brent fiddled with the radio dial, never settling on a single station long enough for Ellis to tell what song played. After a few moments, Brent gave up the search and threw himself against the seat like a sulking child. Ellis glanced at him. He hadn’t bothered to fix his hair; the dyed blonde tufts angled in every direction. Stubble covered his face. Ellis remembered how slowly Brent’s facial hair grew. He must not have shaved for several days. Tossing his head against the headrest, he ground his teeth.

“Did you drink last night?” Ellis asked.

“Of course I did.”

“Are you still drunk?”

“No, I slept. I mean, probably not. Fuck it, I don’t fucking know.”

“Have you been doing anything else?”

Brent snapped his head around and glared at Ellis. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, Brent.”

Perhaps losing his nerve, Brent shrugged and looked away. “I told you, baby, I quit all that shit. I promised you, didn’t I?”

Ellis risked taking his eyes off the rusted pickup cruising ahead in order to inspect Brent. Over the course of their two-year relationship, Ellis had learned the facial twitches, the jittery eyes that always gave away his lies. Brent curled into himself, head resting on his shoulder, as if he were snuggled under a warm quilt. Surely, he knew Ellis watched him.

“You have to be honest with these people, baby,” Ellis said. “It’s a wasted trip if you’re just going to lie.”

Brent surprised him with a quick reaction: wide eyes and slack mouth.

“What?” Ellis asked. “What is it?”

“I don’t remember the last time you called me baby.”

East Texas Rehabilitative Center sat like an angry toad among lush green shrubs and dead yellow grass. Ellis circled the driveway, came to a stop before the double glass doors. He sat motionless in the driver’s seat, the engine stuttering. Brent pressed himself against the passenger window, his breath fogging the glass. Ellis didn’t know how long he would have to wait. Frankly, he had doubted he would see this day. He simply imagined Brent downing wine coolers alone in his shitty one-bedroom apartment until…until what?

“What do I do now?” Brent asked, eyes fixed upon the rehab entrance.

“I suppose you go inside and tell them why you’re here.”

“Then what?”

Ellis dragged his hand over his face. He’d been looking forward to a sedate morning in front of morning chat shows. His shift didn’t begin until noon. He had nowhere to go. “I don’t know, Brent. This is all new to me.”

His ex-lover whipped around, eyes glassy and vacant. “Take me back home.”

“What?”

“I changed my mind. I can’t be here. I’ll figure out something else. I don’t know, I’ll—please take me home!”

Ellis had not touched Brent since they embraced at his doorway the day Brent moved out. Without thinking he grasped Brent’s hand and squeezed it, the other man’s blood pulsing beneath his grip.

“You belong here, baby. Everything will be fine. Go inside and find out when I should pick you up.”

“Promise you’ll come back for me?”

“I’ll use my lunch break.”

Brent withdrew his hand from Ellis and returned his gaze to the rehab entrance. “Does shit like this really work?” he asked, not looking at Ellis.

“You can tell me about it when I come get you.” In that moment, watching the man with whom he once hoped to spend his remaining years, Ellis knew Brent would never truly leave his life. He shut off the engine and sat quietly while Brent gasped for breath, clutching the door handle. I can wait, Ellis told himself. We have the whole morning.

Submission Guidelines Change/Update

2011-08-01T17:50:00.002-04:00

As we mentioned on Facebook, we've now made it so that only stories of 2,500 words or less will be considered for publication. Maybe we're getting lazy but this way we can give each story the full attention it deserves while also trying to provide an ever faster response, than our usual 72 hours, to you the writer. Keep them coming!

"A Room Made of Windows" by Kate LaDew

2011-08-01T01:03:00.000-04:00

HE’S STARTING TO WORRY NOW, just a little, that the people he loves the most, the ones he can’t remember not having, won’t be here forever. It isn’t a revelation, a brand new, packaged in plastic thought, but it’s the most afraid Billy’s ever been.

He calls his parents a lot, in class, at lunch, when he gets off work. In the middle of the night, he waits to hear his father’s voice on the answering machine, an old hunk of plastic from before Billy was born, a cassette recording everything he says that doesn’t matter, strips of his voice looping around themselves.

He writes things down now. He wishes he’d carried a tape recorder when he was little, strapped to his ankle, a wire under his shirt. There’s so much his parents have said. Most of what Billy’s parents told him dropped like liquid into his memory, colored the ground and were forgotten. Retracing his steps, Billy catches markings, footprints cool and vivid, but without their luster, like dried blood. His entire mind is a crime scene, clues and evidence, roped off with yellow, and he can’t find the little boy he once was to tell him what it means.

Billy asks his parents to call his voice mail and talk, just talk. He’s considered buying a machine like theirs, something that won’t beep after two minutes. He prompts, says, “Remember when” “What happened after” “Why did this.”

Billy knows there are things inside, deep, skimming along the surface of his muscles, put there by his parents. There are things he’s certain of, like the simple existence of God apart from what any book or men in expensive robes scare you into believing, the difference between driving lost and driving looking, and what arms feel like after you’ve climbed a tree. There are things he knows are true but can’t quite believe, fish dangling lanterns in the darkest dark, saints healing with their fingertips, a universe that hasn’t stopped expanding. His father picking him up, holding him like air, ‘the sky is a big mirror, reflecting oceans,’ and Billy still looks for sharks in the sky.

Billy supposes it was early on, before kindergarten and after he could write his name without tracing that he knew, without a doubt, he wanted these two people always. His mother washing dishes because his father wanted a country house. His father with his hands under Billy’s arms, spinning him like the cartoon whirlwind they’d just seen on TV. Billy is leaning his head back, his hair pressed against his father’s chest, the warm, earthy smell that would always make Billy think of him washing over his face like a blanket. Billy’s legs are almost parallel to the ground; velcroed shoes strapped soundly, such a kid that he needed a step stool to wash his hands.

His mother calls about a bird outside, bluer than Billy’s eyes, and his father looks up, stumbling. Billy’s mother’s voice, soft and pure, could always make him stumble. Billy’s feet veer towards the ground, ankles scraping the floor and his father’s hands drag across him, desperate, leaving bruises on his ribs he’d find days later. Billy is upended and righted in the same motion, his father’s knees hitting the floor, arms under his neck and thighs, cradled like the girls in fancy dresses in the black and white movies his mother watches, light and helpless. His father is shaking Billy, breathing his name and Billy rolls his head towards him, hair spiked across his eyes. His mother is beside them in an instant, a dishcloth in her hands. ‘What’s all the commotion?’ His father tells, in a voice more shaky than he wants, about their little boy and what almost was and his mother moves her hand to her head. ‘If Jesus came down from heaven,’ she laughed. ‘I’d be in the bathroom.’ Her smile is one of force, so truly meant, its very presence demanding all wrongs to be righted, all disasters avoided, a strength to save and make anything okay again. Billy watches them, the little tears in their mouths, the blinks of their lashes, telling him he was rescued, snatched from harm. He thinks without effort, ‘They loved me the moment I was alive.’

When he thinks about it now he wonders if he made it up, if he was capable of understanding any of it; a kid with carpet burns on his elbows, dinosaur sheets, spiders for pets, but his mother’s hands, still wet, firm and insistent under Billy’s chin, soap sliding down his collar, his father’s weight around him, holding him above the ground like something precious; he understood more then than now, he decides. He knew what he’s forgotten.

Billy’s still watching his parents, twenty years from when he figured them out. He comes home on weekends and plays the messages, looking for clues. “I remember this” “I never knew” “When did you tell me.” He’s found his own history project, one that started before he realized and one he won’t ever finish. His mother and father smile at him, smile like they always have. His mother is tilting her head back and laughing, soft and pure, and his father looks at Billy like he’s out of breath. He makes Billy remember jack-o-lanterns on Halloween, a light in the middle of his father, flickering in his eyes. Billy is happier now than worried but he knows what he’ll lose. What will have existed and disappeared when he can’t call and say, “Talk. Just talk.” He’ll wake up every day with a bright, empty place inside him, like a room made of windows.

Back Open For Business!

2011-07-29T04:20:00.000-04:00

Starting August 1st we'll be opening our submissions again. Enough of this lazy summer bullshit! So you know what to do. Click the "Submissions Guidelines" page on the side and follow the simple directions. Oh, and try and make them kick ass.

Check Back Soon

2011-06-21T06:33:00.002-04:00

Taking the summer off. But don't worry, we'll be back up with new stories starting August 1st. So get ready to send them in!

"You Should Have Built Tall, You Should Have Built Wide" By Jenny Holden

2011-05-31T11:01:00.000-04:00

I am leaving now. This is in spite of many things. The early sun by the food slab which warms my carapace, so that were anyone to touch me they would recoil. The tender exposure of my neck which I rest sometimes on the ground, hearing bird noise. The likely acquaintance of fools and spiders, out there. Practicalities: the grass which tickles where I have not flattened it, and the fence, my whole world. It is taller than me, but not much. If I wait a little, I will have some movement. I think up, up, and manipulate the air, tread it beneath me. You think I move like a wind-up drunkard, with risible precision, but you are wrong. It is deliberate. I show consideration in all things. Your seas are full of mavericks without shells and I wouldn't be a wheeling bird for all your world. I have toes, and they make contact with wood. We make an unnatural triangle. Pointing upwards I see the sky for the first time, though I am not young. It is close over my head, and empty of its rain. I used to shelter under the lip of the fence, but now I balance on top, tipping this way and that like scales, my stupid legs dangling either side. A piece of kit, the inner workings of machinery; no one should witness this. I am ridiculous to you, but not to myself. The technical sketches, a few bits of ply – you built me a Heath Robinson shambles to live in. Your god, meanwhile, stuck me in a nutshell, and riles me to this day. I side with you, with your can-do attitude. You feed me dandelion leaves; I eat them from your hand; this looks like camaraderie. I'd bite you if I could, instead I clamp my dinosaur jaws about your two fingers. You feel my tongue. We are at an impasse. When you are gone I still feel those fingers in my mouth, though they have transformed into half a cucumber slice, which goes down wetly. I am a layman's idea of indecision, pedalling air. There is a moment of catastrophe. Like all things, it passes. A new phase moves into position, and sticks: I am on new concrete. I leave my boxed life behind me; you can burn your planks and buy a mutt. I find it difficult to walk – a siren, the sound of brakes. I will rest a moment here, in my own darkness. If I could, I'd smash you; if only you knew.

“Mango Deck” by Matthew Dexter

2011-05-24T10:30:00.001-04:00

The old waiter arrived from Veracruz yesterday, yet already found the southernmost tip of Baja California an orgy in the sand, though normally this wouldn’t faze him, but the level of degradation of women and children was more than he had anticipated. Sure he expected fleshy coeds bearing pierced nipples, but changing bathing suits with frat boys in shallow waves was too much. The waiter was Catholic, but no prude. Taking it too far, he can’t help but watch as the parties expose their naked flesh while open-throating Dos Equis and offering lap dances to old vaqueros. You can see the erections rising exponentially with the warm water being sprayed on the women. The most nimble coeds get down on their palms and walk the backwards wheelbarrow into saggy crotches, grinding against the abdomens of tourists and local degenerates.

“Somos Mexicanos cabrón,” the horny man on stage tells his amigo, “how lucky are we?”

The waiter watches, polishes the cracked face of his Mexican skull watch--a gift from his son; at first the father would not wear the reloj because he was ashamed of the child’s involvement with the Los Zetas drug cartel. The boy rose through the ranks quickly as capos were systematically assassinated by Mexican military following orders from President Felipe Calderón. That’s when the son started sending lavish presents, stacks of money and the old man began to pray to the patron “generous bandit” narco-saint Jesús Malverde, hoping the “angel of the poor” could protect his boy.

“Do you want to show us the twins?” the MC says. “Who wants to see the twins?”

The waiter donated everything to some of his favorite churches, took a pilgrimage to Malverde's shrine, walking along the railroad in Culiacán, praying to Santa Muerte roadside altars in Sinaloa, lighting religious candles in front of skeletal figures. All in all, the old man kept nothing but the final diamond cranium timepiece, leaving the hopeful father to work at the café until he opened the bamboo door of his two-room palapa hut one morning to find a dusty Louis Vuitton suitcase containing his son’s decapitated head.

“Viva México!” says the man on the microphone.

Naked gringos are spinning in circles with their noses attached to a totem poll embedded in the sand at water’s edge. A dozen times they spin, drink a shot of tequila and pound two Tecates before running back up the beach toward the Mango Deck.

Bikini-clad tourists serpentine then collapse. They rise and fall, rise and fall. Is this all we are, the waiter wonders, waves of the moon and winks of the stars, nothing more than tits and ass and alcohol and illicit drugs?

“Can we have one of those buckets of beers--Dos Equis and Sol together?” a college boy asks.

“Two of ‘em,” his lady friend says.

“Sí, amigos,” the old man says.

The waiter trudges across the sand up the wooden steps of the Deck where he places his order. The grains in his sweaty socks were once rocks, millions of years ago they were part of an ethereal mountain; well before the Americans consumed sixty percent of the world’s illicit drugs and dozens of thousands of young Mexicans were murdered. The waiter watches the diamond skulls glow in the sun as he carries the buckets. Chopped and melted ice falls on his worn-out Nikes.

“Wow man,” the punk at his other table says as the waiter loads the buckets into their stands and cracks opens a couple Dos Equis with the rusty bottle opener attached to his apron, “where’d ya get that watch?”

The old waiter’s English is not great, but he understands, receives complements on the watch every day. He lights a smoke for the girl and watches a young woman flash her boobs. Another girl exposes her vagina, but the MC tries to block the view.

“Hey, hey,” he says, “This is a family affair.”

The old waiter can see the lips and obstinate little hairs surfacing on the mons pubis. The woman must maintain her landing strip every morning like a delicate flower. The lips are pink, not purpled, and don’t hang out like his wife’s.

“My son gave it to me,” the man says.

The tourists raise their brows and nod their heads in approval. Few notice the crack in the corner of the boy’s skull where the old man slammed it against a stone after shedding tears. The man keeps a strand of hair in his wallet, buried the head in the backyard behind the house: a small four-by-four space where the rooster shits and dogs piss; more excrement graveyard than lawn.

“Muy bueno amigo,” the punk says with the accent only drunks and morons try to use in foreign countries.

“Si amigo,” the waiter says.

The waiter watches as the naked coed dances beneath a manmade waterfall. The MC is holding the strap of her bikini bottom, struggling like a man walking a wild Rottweiler to raise it above her landing strip. Whether in a dormitory or desert, it must grow.

“Come on Minnesota, show it.”

A wave crashes and water rises to the tables, sweeps away a few plastic chairs and a beach umbrella. The old waiter can only watch the younger servers chase inanimate objects as paper napkins cartwheel across the sand into the sea. The waiter watches the red XX on the green sunshade as it’s sucked into the labyrinthine vortex that took his son.

“Viva México!” says the MC.

For some reason the waiter removes his shoes, but he does not stop there. He takes off his socks and sits in the sand and then begins to disrobe until he sits in his underpants. There’s a hole in the front, his tables watch as the pendulum shakes. The young men retrieve the seats; plant the umbrella back into the wet sand. The napkins are sucked beneath the currents to dissolve or sink into the corral for schools of small tropical fish to ingest.

“Bikini contest begins in five minutes,” the MC says.

Only the waiter’s tables can see him, lodged between their plastic orgies. An old woman with decrepit lungs looks on in horror, cracks something in her esophagus as she takes another drag of her Marlboro as an inquisitive pelican lands on the man’s head and all snort and cackle as the waiter’s testes are set free to descend themselves into the shaded golden sand.

“Que onda compa?” says Big Johnson; the three hundred pound sombrero-totting tequila man with the shoulder holster full of shot glasses.

Whistle between his lips, Big Johnson draws his water pistol and begins shooting Don Julio at the waiter’s face. The old waiter spreads his lips and chases the tequila with his tongue. It drips down his cheeks, burns his eyes, spectators stand, forming an atavistic semicircle. The shot girl approaches and the waiter takes two vials of colorful liquor from the test-tube rack hanging from her neck, swallows one and snorts the other up his left nostril. He grabs four Jell-O shots from the other girl and fills his cheeks with them. As tradition has it the girls blow their whistles and mash his face against their breasts.

“Yeah man,” says the punk.

The waiter takes two Dos Equis from the bucket and pounds them. He rises with the help of some half-naked natives in this strange new paradise. More shots, more breasts, purple and pink nipples this time, and he bites them. Close enough to count ectopic sebaceous glands on glossy edge of oral mucosa, Montgomery's tubercles around their areolas, when things take a turn for the worst.

They chase him into the waves and watch as the waiter’s wrinkled ass fades into the current. His watch is all they can see as it bounces sunbeams against their intoxicated faces and the pelican chases the man farther away from shore.

“I’ve Meant It Sincerely” by Nathan Schiller

2011-05-17T14:28:00.002-04:00

My original plan was to share something I was working on about the anxiety of giving readings, typical stuff, how your hands shake even if you’re not nervous; how weird it is when people are staring at you; how when you walk to the microphone people always glance at what you’re holding and get secretly pissed off if it’s more than a few papers because all they want is to listen to you not embarrass yourself as quickly as possible; and how readings are pretty much bullshit anyway because people are only there to see if you look like the guy they’d been picturing, which is my favorite author’s observation and certainly not one that applies to a writer no one has ever heard of.

Then I had this whole bit about how if you’re bad in a mundane way, as opposed to bad in an awe-inspiring “Holy shit that avalanche is amazing but gonna kill us” way, the people in the audience will tune you out and start thinking about all the dull things in their own lives, like if they should start going to the gym before work, until they snap back into the moment and find themselves annoyed that they’ve used their free time to attend something they weren’t forced to attend, and then sympathetic to the person who’s not quite delivering the literary experience, and then clapping because everyone else is. The other angle here is that if you’re halfway decent, the people in the audience will be so compelled by your reading that they’ll start to feel fuzzy with the ideals of art and beauty, and then they’ll zone out to the wonderful things they’re doing in their own lives, and suddenly the reading’s over and they’ve missed everything you said.

Anyway, I was going to write about all that stuff, but then I realized that I could probably summarize it in a couple of sentences and get on with the reading, which would have worked out, had I not run into a series of problems.

I’ve been writing stories since preschool, but two weeks ago, while sifting through the “Stories” folder on my laptop, I realized that most of the stories I’d written were unworthy of out-loud reading because of their inability to convey their significance when being heard as opposed to being read. For instance, let’s say that the first draft of your 450-page novel contains a number of set pieces that multiple objective readers have corroborated as, quote, “funny,” and that the material actually takes place in the neighborhood in which you’re reading, meaning that there is a better-than-not chance that your audience will be able to connect and engage with your novel in the way that corporate conference coordinators dream of their employees connecting and engaging with the spring retreat’s keynote speaker. But while on the surface your set piece would appear to be prime reading material, you know deep down that there is no way that any audience in any location would be able to digest its entertainment value if not familiar with the novel’s basic components of characters, plot, tone, and so forth.

And on top of that, let’s say that recently you’ve been studying Tolstoy and understanding his existential philosophy in a way that no one else who has ever read him has, a theory that contends that existence boils down to the moments in which we literally come face-to-face with life. If you were this person—and I’m not saying that this person is me—you would know for a fact that if you ever tried to convince yourself that audiences would respond to your novel’s set piece, the phrase “All happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” would pound away in your head, reminding you that your situation is sort of like the ones in the MC Escher calendar above your desk: you can’t be happy without being different from everybody else, but if you’re different from everybody else, you’re destined to be unhappy. In other words, if you play to the Park Slope crowd with a funny Park Slope scene from a funny Park Slope novel, everyone goes home delighted, boasting to their friends what a funny Park Slope story I heard at Park Slope reading! and that’s all you are, just a funny, dumb writer.

The realization that I had already written the perfect story but could not use it was rather depressing. What I felt I had to do, then, was give in to the writers who get off on the type of stories that render a mood and show a character’s texture and illuminate the complexities of the human condition. (And the most frustrating thing about these writers, I’d like to note as an aside, is how they consistently label the greatest short-story writer of all-time a “shower,” when in reality he was most effective at convincing you that having an affair with a lady with a little dog might be problematic simply by telling you, verbatim, that having an affair with a lady with a little dog might be problematic.) But anyway, just because it has always been impossible for you to, in a 1,200-word third-person narrative featuring a sympathetic character, uncover the strong verbs and sparse language that convey the greatest amount of heartbreak and yearning and suffering in the shortest amount of space, doesn’t mean that people want to hear your pathetic whining about how all your stories are 25 pages of telling what happened, and that one of these stories is actually called “What Happened.”

Now, I embarrass easily, and I’m weirded out by people who smile too much, that’s one reason I always wished I could wear a mask, but I have no shame in contradicting myself by disclosing that my laptop’s “Story” folder was in fact filled with dozens of drafts of these stupid little stories. I used to spent a lot of afternoons like this recent one: I sat at my desk in sweatpants typing nonsense, then I abandoned the nonsense, wrote new nonsense, deleted the new nonsense, and stared out the window at kids digging dirt in a backyard until I became inspired, at which point I began to parlay the nonsense into something presentable, which is how I ended up with a story called, “Short Stories Involving Snickers Bars That Attempted to Illuminate Something About the Human Condition and Pretty Much Failed.” A day after that afternoon, having realized that this story failed in every way, I conceived the witty idea of reading the failed story about three failed stories in the context of an ironic story about a failed writer who is afraid of pretty much everything.

To accomplish this, the first thing I was thinking I would need to do, would be to imagine that kind of a character, since in my real life I’m not afraid of anything, and the second thing would be to write the story solely for an audience. Unfortunately, even though by then I had accepted that my audience really was probably only interested in the low-grade pleasure of me not embarrassing myself, I started wondering if even that presumption wasn’t cynical enough. What would I do if my audience would tune me out simply because it thought that I had a stupid face, or thought that my posture and clothes and voice made it obvious that I was an insincere asshole? Or—and I think this is probably the worst-case scenario—what if the audience would absorb everything I had to say, really enjoy the material, and yet still call bluff on my shtick? I was, as they say, back at square one.

I know that by now you’re probably aware of the convenience with which I’ve avoided admitting that if I were capable of writing something universally good I never would have gotten into this predicament, but just hear me out. I knew I had to change; I knew I could no longer sit at my desk and think up good writing. What I needed to do was engage with the world. That week I carried a pen and pad in the back pocket of my jeans and wrote down every interesting thing I heard or saw, and it just so happened that the day before the reading, I witnessed three such moments. In a bagel shop a guy behind me was telling his friend about another friend who quit law school, moved to LA, and started dating a porn star. On the subway I saw an innocent guy get punched in the face by a crazy person, then watched as everyone (including myself) made a face that showed how relieved they were to not be the victim. And then in the afternoon, while crossing the street with a bunch of private school kids, I overheard two guys trying to convince a girl to come over Friday night to drink vodka and talk philosophy. So there: sex, violence, and alcohol. I had my material.

Well, the fact that what you have been listening to has absolutely nothing to do with any of these situations tells you how the rest of that day played out. As I wrote into the night, I couldn’t get an old Peter and the Wolf tune out of my head, which reminded me that Prokofiev had written his story, the music and the text, in just four days.

Sometime after three in the morning I realized that I had been looking through my window for a very long time. A block away, on the elevated tracks, a train passed through the station, rattling my apartment. Dozens of people got off, and in the middle of them was a man holding a briefcase and wearing a mask. Before he filed down the stairs, he paused and faced me. Without taking my eyes off him, I shoved open my window and stepped up to the sill. Behind the station were lights, those of my city, and between me and them, and between me and the ground, and me and the sky, and me and myself, I could feel an immense space. The man did not move an inch, and neither did I, and we continued to stare at each other until a quiet voice urged me down.

Suddenly, I had purpose, and for the next three hours I wrote the easiest story: my autobiography. This effort produced many pages, and from them I’ve extracted nine sentences. These are direct quotations.

• 1. “I cannot sleep more than five hours a night.”

• 2. “The simple tasks of life that are necessary to undertake have always seemed like an encroachment on my need for complete silence.”

• 3. “The multiple loving relationships I’ve had with women have never amounted to pure happiness because of my inability to accept the fact, as they have, that we love for selfish reasons.”

• 4. “I have never taken drugs or alcohol because I am under the illusion that my mind is inherently altered.”

• 5. “I can keep a secret until the very end.”

• 6. “Regardless of what you think, I, like my good friend Franz Kafka, spend much of my day laughing.”

• 7. “The best moments in life are those where we are happy for absolutely no reason whatsoever and know it.”

• 8. “The only thing I’ve never been afraid of is looking into someone else’s eyes and speaking directly to them because of how uncomfortable it makes them.”

• 9. “I’ve started my story about six or seven times, maybe even ten—so many I can no longer decipher what it is.”

I must say, in speaking these sentences, I am reminded of my favorite musician, the Russian pianist and composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff. If you listen to the only recording he made of his Third Concerto, one of the greatest and most difficult piano pieces in existence, you will notice that he cuts some of the most beautiful melodies and ignores many of his own notations—for instance, he’ll slow down where the score says to speed up. Despite being one of the greatest piano players of the 20th Century, Rachmaninoff was a terribly insecure and nervous performer. But he was also a vengeful performer, so conscious of what he perceived as his audience’s apathy that for every cough or sneeze he heard, he would skip one passage. Can you even imagine what he would have done had there’d been cell phones going off?

I bring him up to demonstrate that if you so-to-speak read between the lines, which I know is difficult when you’re not actually reading, you’ll see that even though I was unable to write a story for tonight, I managed to fit everything I wanted into these fifteen minutes. And what do I want to convey? I think it has something to do with trying to explain how difficult it is to show that what constitutes a person is 1% everything we know about them and 99% everything we’ll never know.

Thank you for listening, and just know that whatever I’ve said, I’ve meant it sincerely.

"Me and Jack" by Sarah Leslie

2011-05-10T00:02:00.000-04:00

We were the only two who could ever get into your head. Jack convinced you I manipulated you. But all he ever did was flush away reason and stir up a rage.

It was never easy to pick between the two of us. You and Jack went way back. You were long time friends who practically grew up together. I, on the other hand, only recently walked into your life.

It was rare for me to have you all to myself. You always insisted on having Jack come along. We shared you equally in the beginning, but it didn’t take long for you to pick Jack over me.

Tonight is nothing out of the norm. I’m on the sidelines, watching you and Jack roll on and on together. “Babe, what are you doing? Don’t go to bed yet,” you slur as I’m leaving the room, waving Jack’s arm in the air like he’d just won a big race.

I wave you off and leave on my own. Because by the end of the night you’ll run out of JD and I’ll still be there picking up what remains.

For What It's Worth

2011-05-10T00:01:00.000-04:00

So yeah, if anyone is even counting a few days ago we reached our one year anniversary! I know, exciting right? 52 weeks ago I never thought this thing would still be going strong but it is and I want to thank all of the talented writers whose amazing work has made this all possible. So, thanks.

"Courtship: Five Micros" by Sheldon Lee Compton

2011-05-03T00:19:00.002-04:00

The Old Roses

The old roses came from Ma Trent. The velvet rose I can't remember, but it's a rare one. Maybe he brought it the day he first came to visit with the silly hat, the day my brother said he seemed nice for a guy with big ears.

Tell Me About Her Hazel Eyes

They changed the way you know eyes that color will. Blue, green, blue, green. And it all depended on things like the sunlight or a cold room. Brown even, sometimes. Not often, though. Brown depended on my doing something stupid, and I'm a quick study.

Five

Four children are left. One is dead. He could not be any more dead. And he made it through the war only to come back and die alone in a strange room. But they remember him the day he left for Korea. "You see this hand? This hand and the rest of me will look the same the next time you see me." That's what the fifth, the second oldest, said before he left for overseas. And she still sees him the day he came back, his hair cut perfect so that every black strand curved across his head like a halo bending in the darkness.

Like a Fairy Tale

He's a nice guy for somebody with big ears and that dandy hat sitting on his head like a rooster. She tossed a soapy dish towel at him. Don't say things like that, Son. But he was nice and the hat was a bad one. Maybe their first morning together it would call them awake and then just flop away forever after.

In the Dark

Poppy called me his baby and it embarrassed me then, but now I can see how sweet it was for him to do that. So we'd go to the porch for privacy and have coffee. Out there with him, my dress pulled tight at my knees, we couldn't see too far from the porch, it being well past dusk and full dark. But neither of us tried very hard, either. And good for us, knowing now everything yet out of sight.

"Anaesthesia" by Faye Blyth

2011-04-26T03:56:00.002-04:00

Fizzing fervently, bubbles race to the bottleneck and spill into the throat of your despair. Your tongue swishes the infectious allurement around your teeth and pushes it down through your body to your wearing liver in an unrelenting gulp. Wash it all away.

Find another bottle. Smash the glass and watch your world fall to your feet. Crumble to your hands and knees and lick it up with the ferocity of your animalistic desire, howling amongst blood and shards of glass and pride lying broken on the floor.

Fire scorches your mouth and blazes through your neck and down your chest. A watery sheen forms over your eyes and you blink back the tears. Lift up your head and take a look at the world, rocking back and forth as your eyes chase the dizzying patterns of the world. Shift your weight from one foot to the other and tell the world you’re doing just fine. Twist the cap of your liquid anaesthetic and be numbed once more.

"Duty" by U.I. Ebiz

2011-04-18T22:32:00.000-04:00

Of the decimated platoon, only George’s body had returned alive. Beside his hospital bed hung a Silver Star for gallantry in action, though he had no memory of an award ceremony. Perhaps he had received it for surviving.

There had been surgeries and periods of pain, eras of confusion too futile for nightmares yet too grotesque to be dreams. He had come to accept fluorescent light and the beep of machines as natural. Plastic tubes and bits of metal and smelly plastic bags had emerged from orifices and from expanses of body he had imagined were sacrosanct, seeming designed to pin him to the bed in outrageous postures. A rare moment of lucidity had caused him to recognize for an instant that he was in fact still alive. He had experienced a stab of excruciating disappointment, as he’d imagined, or hoped, that it might all have been over. When he tried now to recall his hospital course his mind hastily shuffled images of himself crawling, clinging, pleading, but mostly laying still and flat and lifeless.

And at last, George realized that he was feeling bored: under the circumstances, a spectacular sign of recovery.

One afternoon a young officer arrived at his bedside.

“Good morning Captain.”

“Captain?” George replied, “are you in the correct room, sir?”

“You are, McFelix, George?”

“That’s me –“

The young man smiled, revealing satisfaction. “I’m in the right room – and it looks as if finally you’re here too –“

“And, could you remind me -” George asked mildly,

“I’m Captain Manuel Rodriguez,” the figure grasped George’s hand to shake it in an oddly un-officer-like gesture, “Dr. Rodriguez – you’ve been here at Letterman Army Hospital over six months. We have spoken before – perhaps you have some memory of that?“

Dr. Rodriguez, psychiatrist, was part of the hospital team routine to any solider so badly injured. George had taken wounds to his head, to his chest, to one arm and both legs. Bones had been smashed, organs ripped. All were once again functioning, more or less.

“At least the blast to your brain was not penetrating,” Dr. Rodriguez explained, “MRI scans showed some degree of injury – which we expect to heal. It appears that you lost a portion of memory from somewhere before the trauma until some months after – I don’t imagine it will return. But now you’re able to organize your thoughts again, eventually I believe you’ll do fine.”

“I feel pretty good right now,” George offered, “I’m just glad to be back, sir.”

“I imagine you must miss your colleagues, your platoon -”

“Sure. They were great guys. Of course I miss them -”

“I’m sure you do,” the doctor murmured sympathetically. And then very delicately, he continued, “It might be difficult to imagine how it is that you survived and they did not –“

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” George replied, interested but not defensive, “I was told we had no cover and that bullets were flying everywhere, that nothing anyone could have done would have raised or lowered their chances.”

“Do you have persistent thoughts about that firefight, any recurrent nightmares?”

“No, I’m just happy to be alive.”

“Some people might experience – discomfort, anxiety, some for a while might even feel guilt – over why they survived while others died –“

“I guess that would be a religious question,” George shrugged, “when it’s your time to go –“ and they reverted again to silence. Throughout his struggle towards a desperate and unlikely future, the past had been a solace of imagined childhood pleasures. Trying now he could find only the vaguest of images, and those only at the very start of that grim battle. “One thing, though,” he looked up at Dr Rodriguez sitting patiently beside him, “sometimes I have this dream, in which I hear American voices coming from the bunker –“

George could not miss the silent hesitation of Captain Rodriguez. So: not all of his dreams had been fantasy. Since beginning his recovery George had accepted his injuries as a natural consequence of war, and had not looked for explanation or blame. He’d had problems enough, and had not even thought of friendly fire. Doctor Rodriguez waited silently for George’s reaction. At last, George asked,

“Why did they give me a medal?”

“Well there’s no way you could have known! The bunker was an advance operation that was deeply classified, some considerable distance inside of Iraq – no one could have imagined that your platoon would have pushed so far behind enemy lines –“

“Weren’t we pursuing chemical weapons stashes?“

“Yes – and with such determination and courage! That’s why the medal, and the promotion, Captain – you led your platoon like a hero -“

George’s stolid concentration silenced Doctor Rodriguez in mid-sentence. The firefight itself remained invisible to him, but as he tried now he could picture himself gazing down below them some time before the assault. Yes, he realized, he had not been alone. Sergeant Garth had been there too, peering in the pale moonlight at the unexpected structure half-buried in the sand. The intervening months were a fog, but as he looked back beyond them he found that the mood, the feeling of that moment in the desert when he had made the decision to attack, was vivid. He remembered now that there had been something unspeakably seductive about the eerie dunes in the darkness, an intoxicating, magical quality to the stark other-worldly desert, which lacking a horizon at night had seemed to extend unbroken out into the stars.

Yes, and in this dream Sergeant Garth had suspected that the construction of that buried bunker seemed familiar, and George had over-ruled him.

Oh the flaw was clear to George now. Burying themselves in the sand by day and traveling exclusively at night, with no landmarks and in profound sleep deprivation, he had miscalculated their position.

George was a practical man – earnestness, a devotion to tangible reality, the well-being of his friends – all of these could be carried to extreme lengths, but not, at least not upon reflection, self-delusion. So he had killed his own men.

The notion of heroes had never sat well in George’s worldview. The idea of a man arbitrarily sticking up his head, outside the plan, was clearly an aberration – it meant something had gone wrong, an oversight, some lack of self-discipline or failure to follow regular procedures – a mistake.

George felt somehow relieved to know that the Army had not misconstrued his error. Any hint of pessimism at the start of a battle must be avoided, any suspicion of incompetence or doubt. Five dead colleagues – wasted in a pointless mistake would only damage morale for the survivors – but lost in a heroic act would galvanize those on whose behalf they had sacrificed themselves.

Very gently, Doctor Rodriguez murmured, “Your bravery was completely authentic, Captain. Your courage and determination, your willingness to place yourself front and center in the line of danger – “He shrugged very slightly, “You ran straight into the fog of war, and the Army understands that.”

George gazed thoughtfully at his Silver Star, hanging from the wall. He felt ashamed, he felt anger towards himself. This was a bitter reward for surviving. And clearly his duty now, if only to his dead colleagues, was to keep his mouth shut.

“Simply Salazar” by Stephen Ramey

2011-04-12T13:43:00.001-04:00

When his girlfriend dumped him, Salazar suppressed an urge to stalk her. That would only lead to trouble, maybe even a double-murder. She said she wasn't seeing anyone, but why else? It was probably that guy down at the hardware store. Sandy hair was a definite weakness of hers. It was why he'd worn a wig for the full week of their relationship. Had she seen him take it off? He should ask her. He picked up the cell phone and thumbed through to her number.

Rrrring! Rrring!

"Hello Salazar."

"Hi Claudia. I just wanted to ask you if the reason you broke up with me--" The line went quiet. He pressed redial.

Rrring! Rrring! Rrring! Rrring! Rrring!

Salazar closed the phone. Maybe she was driving. He should buy a hands-free set for her car. In fact, that's what he would do.

He rode his bike down to the strip mall. He'd thought about getting a driver's license many times, but had never made it through the DMV line. The bike suited him fine anyway. It was usually sunny in San Diego.

The Best Buy was at the far end of he mall, but the parking lot was laid out in such a fashion that riding a bike could be dangerous. He dismounted and walked it along the sidewalk. People bustled past, not paying him any attention.

He came to the hardware store. There was a bike rack outside and two bikes were already parked. He looked through the door and saw Sandy-hair at the register talking to a customer. As he spoke, his hands made expressive gestures, palms cupped and sweeping in small circles as if he were feeling Claudia's breasts. She hadn't let Salazar do that, but she would let him. He had that going for him.

"What the heck," Salazar said, locking his bike beside the others. It wouldn't hurt to ask.

He waited his turn, gaze casting about the store. The chromed top of a Rustoleum can caught his attention. How did they get that shiny finish to stick to a plastic lid? How hard would it be to peel it off?

Salazar walked to the display and lifted the can in one hand. It was heavier than it looked, but what wasn't? He rubbed at the chrome with his index finger. It was smooth and seemingly inseparable. He scratched with his nail. Nothing. This is one admirable can lid, he thought.

"Can I help you?" Sandy-hair was standing at his shoulder. His eyes were translucent green. Salazar saw what Claudia saw in them.

"Hold this," he said, pushing the can into Sandy-hair's hand.

Salazar reached into his khaki shorts pocket and pulled out a pen knife.

"You don't need that," Sandy-hair said. "Look." He squeezed the lid and popped it free of the can.

Ouch, Salazar thought. He opened the blade and took the lid from Sandy-hair. He scraped the blade across its surface. Chrome flaked to the floor.

"Dude," Sandy-hair said, "you can't do that. Now you gotta buy the can."

"Have you been seeing my girlfriend?" Salazar said.

"What?"

"My girlfriend," Salazar said. "Have you been seeing her, dating her? You know what I mean."

Sandy-hair frowned, gaze falling to the open blade. Salazar nodded. He closed the pen knife and dropped it into his pocket.

"What's her name?" Sandy-hair said.

"You tell me."

Sandy-hair blew out a breath. "Are you for real? You know you're buying this can, right?"

Salazar watched Sandy-hair's mouth. He imagined those plush lips on Claudia's. It wasn't hard to imagine.

"I'm dating a girl from the Community College," Sandy-hair said. "Her name's Marcy."

"No," Salazar said. "That's not her."

Sandy-hair nodded. "Come with me. I'll ring you out."

"Do you have any hands-free phone setups?"

Sandy-hair shook his head and walked to the register.

Salazar motioned with his hands. It felt clumsy. "For cars."

"I know what you mean," Sandy-hair said. "We don't carry those. You should try Best Buy."

"It's for my girlfriend," Salazar said.

"That's cool." Sandy-hair scanned the Rustoleum can. A number came up on the digital display.

Salazar opened his wallet. It was empty. "I don't have any money."

"Credit card? We take all the major ones."

Salazar shook his head.

"Maybe that's why you're having girl problems," Sandy-hair said. The words were mean, but the way he said it was nice. Compassionate. Sandy hair, green eyes, compassion.

"Tell you what," Sandy-hair said, setting the can on a shelf below the counter. "Give me your name and phone number and I'll hold this for you until you have money, okay?"

"That's a great idea," Salazar said. Intelligent too. He certainly saw why Claudia was interested. "Can I have your number too? I'll call before I come in to make sure you're working."

"Here's a store card," Sandy-hair said.

"Can I have your cell number instead?" Salazar said. "I'll feel nervous if you don't answer."

Sandy-hair looked him up and down. "I guess so," he said. They exchanged numbers.

Salazar left the store and unlocked his bike. He walked it along the sidewalk, feeling better than he had all day. The sun warmed his head. He thought of Sandy-hair's gleaming eyes. The end of the sidewalk came up. He started to lift his leg over the seat bar, but thought better. He pushed the kickstand down and leaned the bike to rest.

He pulled the cell phone from his pocket and deleted Claudia's number. Hands-free sets were expensive anyway. Then he dialed Sandy-hair. It wouldn't hurt to ask when he would get off work tonight.

Rrring. Rrring. Rrring.

"Hello?"

“Safety Patrol” by Merle Drown

2011-04-05T00:49:00.002-04:00

“You want this?” my mother held up a folded web belt. The tired rubber band
that secured it burst, and it fell to the floor in a white tangle.

We’d just buried my older brother Keith, dead at fifty. Not unexpected, no matter
how my mother had tried to protect him—a bad heart and thirty years of smoking, drinking, and looking at joy as something to be avoided.

“It was like his wine turned to vinegar before he got to sip it,” I said

“Your brother never sipped.”

“He didn’t want anything to go stale,” I said, wanting to tell her, then changed my mind. I unstuck the blue captain’s badge from the belt. “Only thing he saved from his days of responsibility. Too responsible.”

“Not too responsible,” my mother said, “since he stole it.”

“All the boys lied about losing their belts, paid their two dollars, and kept them.”

“You weren’t on Safety Patrol.”

“Keith told me I was lucky I was a girl, couldn’t get on the patrol. Real mean about it. I figured it had to do with that boy Melvin, hung himself with a patrol belt.”

My mother snorted. “Fifteen year olds don’t hang themselves.”

“He was sixteen, same as Keith. That weekend I went to Washington for my seventh grade trip. They already had Melvin in the ground when we got back.”

“Melvin got himself tangled up with that Cain girl,” my mother said. “She
belonged to that clan lived in a trailer back of the swamp.”

“Keith had a crush on June Cain, too. A dark haired girl who made the boys shift
their hands in their pockets?”

“She gave the boys what they wanted,” my mother said.

“Not Keith, she didn’t. He had to go elsewhere.”

“June made him turn on Melvin,” my mother said.

“Melvin had been his friend.” “They hung out together—”

“His best friend.” She snatched the blue badge from me. “He came home with this and said, “Mom, I advanced through the silver, the green the red, and won the blue. Now I’m responsible for all the little kids plus the boys on the patrol.’”

“He kicked one of the boys off for running against the light.”

My mother tossed the badge on the floor. “Stickler for rules, Keith.”

“Then,” I said. “Never applied them to himself,”

“Keith was a stickler for rules before June Cain got ahold of him,” my mother said. “June relied on that and poor Melvin died.”

“Mom, you’re just like Keith, blaming the girls. They moved away, June and the whole family, even took the trailer with them.”

“They better had,” my mother said. “They took your brother with them too, the better part.”

“Sometimes you talk such nonsense.”

“I told June I’d burn that trailer to the ground with all of them in it.”

My throat tightened as I tried to swallow thirty years of lying.

“Did Keith admit—”

“He sat right there— She pointed, but of course it was a different chair. “Folding that belt over and over just like he’d been taught. I knew.”

“Maybe he was just in shock.”

“June told him a bunch of lies about Melvin, like Melvin broke the rules, and it was Keith’s duty to punish him.”

“Maybe they weren’t lies,” I said.

“Lies.”

All those years I’d thought Keith had gone bad for what he did with me. I wanted to tell my mother that. Of course she didn’t know about it. Any more than I’d know Melvin hadn’t hanged himself. But I shut up, refolded the safety patrol belt and stuck the blue badge in it. I kept them and both secrets twenty more years, till my mother died, and I could throw them away.

“The Eighth Step” by Linda Peer

2011-03-29T12:22:00.000-04:00

My counselor tells me that methadone addiction is superior to heroin addiction because it fills the hole but it is not psychoactive.

I tell him that it fills the physical hole but not the emotional hole. My heart does not sing when I see that translucent plastic cup, that unnatural green liquid. When I swallow it, joy does not blossom. Where is the thrill? Methadone is like a tired marriage. Methadone is like a droning suburb on Monday morning, busy as a bee hive and with the week of work between you and whatever you love to do: fishing, or skiing, or hanging at the bar, or whatever. How can methadone, the humdrum wife, replace the fiery bloom, the natural magic, of mistress poppy?

But I've been told that I quibble about words and argue about semantics. My counselor says, “What is the emotional hole you refer to, Billy? Why is it there? Go deeper. Let the investigation be your thrill.”

So I don't often mention my opinion to my counselor.

I'm on a mission and a pilgrimage. I'm on the eighth step of the twelve-step program. I am to let a Greater Power aid me. I am to make a list of the people I have harmed and become willing to make amends to them. I'm told that, "...in making amends, not only are we to 'right all such matters to the best of our ability', but we must ALSO change and stop doing the behavior that brought about the harm to begin with."

I'm well aware that habits both support and bind us. I've... let me say I've side stepped. I've side stepped a big habit by using methadone and the thought of attacking more habits at this juncture makes me... makes me want to hide in the bar. And why shouldn't I?

Instead, I've decided to sidle into the eighth step with the easier part, the men in my family--my father, grandfather, and uncle--because there are more women and although they are easier going, they will question me harder.

I should add that the inventor of AA wrote, "Every (addict) has found that he can make LITTLE headway in this new adventure of living until he FIRST backtracks and REALLY makes an accurate and unsparing survey of the human wreckage he has left in his wake."

He liked to capitalize words, but every time I (capitalized) read this it is the uncapitalized word 'unsparing' that gives me a pain in my heart and a twinge below my lungs, in the region of my liver. My heart and liver want to run away and take me with them.

Let me begin over: I'm sitting at my computer in my studio apartment in a dilapidated hotel whose heyday was about 1920. The current owner, a hippy turned rainbow person/entrepreneur, painted the old wooden gingerbread a Mediterranean blue. I am a good recovering addict: I have a job as a cabinetmaker and I pay my rent. That is important.

To my left, a window overlooks a half-cut lawn and the edge of the forest. Out there, even the air seems green. The smells of grass, spring lilacs, and lawn mower exhaust float in to distract me, but I will not indulge myself in the seductions of the view yet. I will exercise self-restraint. I will finish this. It is an effort I will eventually show to my counselor.

Let me set the stage for my remorse: I live in Piney, a tiny sylvan paradise where my grandparents bought a summer cabin. The landscape reminded them of the old country: the craggy mountains, the evergreen forest punctuated by groves of deciduous trees. I will relent about the view and describe it: beyond the spartan dimness of my room (addicts don't waste money on household accoutrements), wooly clouds drift over the mountains and browse in a cobalt sky. A neighbor swears as he repairs his lawn mower, oily parts and tools spread across his drive. Piney looks quaint, with Victorian buildings lining the short Main Street.

On gray, dull days I see the other Piney: the decaying trailers and the abandoned renovations, their sagging roofs protected with taut blue tarps. I notice curling shingles and dead-beat pickups, and Piney looks worn out and hopeless.

My grandpa never knew I was an addict, but he saw me grow from a clever boy to a youth without apparent ambition or any pleasure except to play guitar, a youth driven by the silliest of his friends' wishes and impulses. "Who are those boys to you?” Gramps said, “They are not your friends. Your family will care for you long after you've forgotten their names."
Dad said, “Everyone plays guitar. You can't depend on that to make your future.”

But I thought I knew better. I thought I'd leave my family far behind in my great American adventure, an adventure that would begin as soon as I could escape from them.
I did not become an addict in Piney, that happened in Texas, but you can buy drugs anywhere. Finding heroin is like hunting or fishing: if you know the habitat and behavior of the species 'dealer,' and you know how and where to wait, eventually you find what you seek.

My Dad and uncle both preferred their father's weekend life to his weekday life and settled in Piney full time. For years Dad commuted an hour and a half to work in Almedia. One autumn night he hit a deer, then a tree. Dad sat trapped in his car with the door crushed and his leg broken for an hour before another car drove by on that lonely road. He was lucky his horn worked, else he might have waited there all night.

After that, Dad went native. He raised honey, four kinds of pears, apples, and vegetables. He caught fish and shot deer, ducks, and turkeys. He fixed cars in our driveway and computers on our kitchen table. Mom baked bread, canned vegetables and fruit, and smoked trout. She sold honey, jam, pumpkins, and pies. We all chopped wood for the stoves and tended the garden. It was an earthly paradise for Dad, but all I wanted was to escape.

But I have wandered. Back to the eighth step. What it says exactly is this: “8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.”

It is awkwardly put, isn't it? Is that the royal “we?” The tenses are a mess. It reads as though even the guy who invented it didn't want to do it. But as I said, I've been told I pick nits.

How have I harmed my dad and granddad? My grandfather is dead, but that does not matter for this purpose.

I did harm in the usual addict ways. OK, I'm supposed to be specific. After I returned from Texas, I needed money. Mom has a softer heart than Dad and she's a softer touch. I nabbed a ten from her here, a twenty there, long after Dad cut me off, saying I'd just spend it on drugs. And I spent it on drugs. So I caused conflict between them. I was not the only conflict they had, though, nor the first, nor the most important. I may have caused the obvious flowering of their troubles, but the root lay elsewhere. In those days, Dad would come home late, into the neat, bright kitchen where Mom was already washing dinner dishes, his meal waiting on a plate atop the wood stove, a pie tin over it to protect it from drying out. He'd give her a swift kiss and a pat that took her for granted. He'd get a beer, take the plate to the table and dig into meatloaf or chicken, home made fries or mashed potatoes, summer squash or kale. He'd stretch his long, jeans clad legs wide under the table and fill the space with his heat and his smell: the man of the house. He'd give some lame excuse for his lateness: he ran an errand for Mom or he'd stopped for a beer to celebrate a buddy’s birthday. “Don't imply it's my fault,” Mom would answer, keeping her back to him. “Don't say it was for someone else. You are late for your own reasons. It's just selfish.”

He gave her reasons to complain. She complained and gave him excuses to stay away, his home was not a haven anymore, he said.

The truth was, Dad's eye had wandered and it came to rest on a young lady who seemed to see in him what he needed to see in himself. My counselor talks about that: the terrible need to see a polished version yourself, the image of your hopes and wishes. You make excuses for all the other things you do, or you blind yourself to them.

For a while, Dad was a big man in that young woman's eyes. He was a fascinating man and a man of means. He bought her the bland Bud Lite she asked for, then taught her to appreciate the micro-brews he preferred. He got her something luscious from the Nordstrom catalog. Did my mother feel that money leaking away from her household?

The young woman flirted, listened admiringly, took what she could get, and then married a guy her own age from the next town over. She'd had a fiancé all along, a soldier away on duty. She had a harmless fling with Dad; she never slept with him. I wondered what she said about him behind his back. No matter what it was, after she dropped him, Dad stomped around at home and barely talked to Mom, as if he had no other place to unsheathe his hurt and disappointment.

But I am avoiding the eighth step. Let me try again. My father and grandfather could not understand why I acted so aimless and rambling. I wanted more fireworks, more excitement. I practiced the guitar, I started a band, then another band. I aimed to be a rock star. I prayed for groupies. I was hot to go to LA, to Austin, to Seattle, to New York City: any place where things were happening and I could test my metal. Ah, my metal.

The trouble with methadone is that sometimes you crave a high. You crave that searing bliss that vomits you out of yourself. You want that annihilating other. You want the soft loving vision of an opiate that caresses and transforms everything. The sordid world blossoms and everything is paradisiacal.

Unfortunately, that is only true at first or if you quit for a while. The illusion of transformation is the seduction of the drug, like a sexual infatuation, like my Dad. Or maybe you really are transformed, at first, and maybe infatuation transforms you, too. Addiction itself is mostly about getting sick and getting well, where the drug makes you well again. Getting well is a transformation, too, I suppose.

The things you will do for transformation! My counselor says that for most addicts, the excitement of the life is itself addictive. The abused substance and the culture of drugs fill up the foreground of the addict's world. They trump all other problems. Without them, life seems both flat and pettily problematic.

I have vowed not to tell stories of my addict adventures, of dare-doing, close encounters of the worst kind, and near escapes from the law. My counselor says life on the edge is the romance of addiction, deluded like all romance and more dangerous than most. But what is life without romance?

When I lived in Texas, Colorado, and California, I met people who scaled frozen waterfalls, trusting their lives to ice screws and the spiky points on boots and axes. My buddies raced motorcycles and mountain bikes, and rode bulls. Their eyes lit up when they talked about tires skidding, falls into crevasses. They were ignited by danger. The thrill rises like a wave, crests, recedes, wears off, and then cries to be renewed. I think the old time explorers were avid that way about the Northwest Passage, the headwaters of the Mississippi, and the Fountain of Youth. They were possessed, and we admire those who succeeded. In truth, we glorify life on the edge.

And what about other excitements, like my father's? What about life on the edge of betrayal, on the edge of being caught? There is fire burning everywhere, in everyone.

My counselor dismisses that fire. He says it is just the inability of the body to properly metabolize testosterone, as automatic as the knee jerk reflex. Unromantic. Testosterone swirls round and round until it produces a kind of internal version of a forest fire. He claims I suffer from simple testosterone poisoning and should find a productive outlet. I point out that I mountain bike, but have you ever met a serious mountain biker who did not smoke pot? So you see, my addiction is nothing special. I am just like everyone else. A productive outlet is not the final solution.

Mom says I'm a smart aleck. She says, "You won't get better until you stop talking in that cynical, smart alecky way. You think you have to act like you don't care about anything." Lines form in her brow and I see how anxious she is for me.

But I do. Care about things. But this is the only way I know how to talk.

Damn. Let me start over again. About Dad: one afternoon after that girl blew Dad off, I was with him, driving up to Piney Pass on the straight two-lane, not the curvy back road he usually takes. There are rock ledges and trees on both sides, so you see the sky as a blue V above the crest of the ridge, where the road tops out. It looks like you could launch from there and drive into the clouds.

For a change, Dad and I weren’t arguing, just listening to the Grateful Dead on the CD player and commenting on the music. I was explaining some guitar moves I call stoned riffs. He had his head back, laughing, when a dog darted into the road. Dad stomped on the brakes and swerved but the dog thudded against the bumper. When I opened my eyes, Dad was gripping the steering wheel, staring out the window, and we were stopped off the edge of the road. He exhaled and opened the door.

The pup was into the weeds. The poor thing was shattered; spine twisted all wrong, not going to live but not yet dead. It tipped its head toward us and looked as though it thought it had done something wrong, that I'm sorry dog expression. Dad said, “Shit, it's Walter’s Emmy.”

She was a little boarder collie mix. I was stunned, shattered in my mind, and just stood there.
Dad said, "Sometimes I wish I carried a gun."

He went to the truck and got a hunting knife he kept under the seat. He knelt by the dog, stroked her forehead between her eyes where dogs like to be rubbed, and said, “Good girl, Emmy, good girl. I’m sorry, girl.” Then he held her muzzle closed and slit her throat, like he'd kill a Sunday chicken, and that good dog's life bled out in a red stream into the weeds. Dad pulled her body deep into the grass, out of sight of the road, and arranged her and so she looked normal and comfortable. Crows had already gathered in the trees, waiting for us to leave. Dad kicked at the dirt and said, “We could try to cover her, but they'll just uncover her. We have to tell Walter.”

I hadn't said a word. I just watched what he did. I admired how clear Dad was, how he handled it. Then, once it was over, he sat down in the grass, covered his face with his hands, and began to sob, brutal and constrained. I didn't know what to do so I sat down by him. When he stopped he said, his face turned away, “Nothing I have ever done has come out the way I intended.”

It didn’t seem right to try to reassure him. I didn’t understand what he was accusing himself of. I could guess some of his regrets, but I had never thought about his intentions. I only thought about him in relation to myself, as if I was still a little child.

We drove to Walter's, but he was away. Dad wrote a note in carpenter's pencil on a paper bag and masking-taped it to the door. He wrote that Emmy’s body was half way up Piney Hill and he was sorry.

When we got to my place, I offered Dad a beer. We drank two each sitting in the yard and then he went home.

Two days later I signed myself back into the methadone program I'd dropped out of. They gave me the counselor I have now and he's a decent guy, really. I've given up the fire in my heart and the world that blooms into flame or flowers to search for something more quotidian and steady.
My counselor describes it as the thing that sustains ordinary people and that, at its best, runs like a deep, cold river rich with trout.

But I've wandered again. From the eighth step, I mean. I seem to have difficulty sticking to the point. I am supposed to be recalling the harm I've done, become willing to make amends, and stop doing the things that caused the harm in the first place. I guess I'd better start over.

"when i was still young, and when you still weren't, and our father was already dead" by xTx

2011-03-22T11:52:00.003-04:00

I got the fallout, like how a movie theater floor receives lost popcorn. Every chance you had; a kick to the thigh, slap to the head; kid shit. Brother shit. At the corner store I’d want a pack of Bubble Yum and you’d want a Marathon Bar. Dad would never give you more money than what was needed and even though you had the newspaper job and a real wallet for the money you made, somehow wanting some fucking Bubble Yum turned into an ordeal made easier for you by our unfair sizes. You’d twist the rectangle out of my hand; your hand a mutton chop choking my wrist.

At night I’d pray for God to make me catch up to you quick. The stories I’d swim in my head as I suffered through your snoring were of me bigger than you, twisting your wrists and making you put back your Marathon Bars.

At six, I didn’t really know who the real enemy was. But if I did, the stories would’ve been different - the prayers too. The adult me chokes on the I’m sorry’s I still haven’t said. But what do six year old boys know when all they can’t see past is the torment of an older brother; a shield.

The day we buried dad we were wearing black. The shoes hurt my feet but I didn’t say anything. Nobody was saying anything. You made me keep my hair fixed nice while yours hung long over your eyes. Dad would’ve been mad and called you a ‘little faggot’ again but you still wouldn’t have cut it, even if it might’ve made a difference, which it wouldn’t have. Even if you might’ve cared, but you didn’t.

After all the praying and talking were finished, people lined up to put a flower on the casket. We were last because I guess sons’ flowers should be on top, like it meant something. You lobbed your flower lazy and then tossed a handful of pocket change like you were feeding a beggar’s palm. The flowers scattered like scared ducks with the weight of the metal. A few fell to the ground and I wanted to cry right then, but I didn’t because I knew if dad were watching he’d call me a faggot too. Instead, I bent down to pick them up, adding to the one clenched tight in my fist. I saw your shoe kick the grass and then walk away.

"A Normal Birthday Party" by Nicholas Claro

2011-03-15T20:50:00.003-04:00

Rick stood next to his wife in the living room looking out the open window. Their son William waited at the end of the block for the bus, adjusting and readjusting the straps of his backpack. After a time a few other children soon joined him. It was at the point in the morning where it could be mistaken for dusk. There were no clouds and the sky held a dark and drowsy shade of gray and for a time now sat resisting the dark blue that slowly crawled and was turning light blue in the east, which was tinted blood red at the very edge from light of the morning sun not yet quite raised. Some stars clung and blinked insipidly on the opposing slope of the firmament.

“All I’m saying is that I’m concerned,” Joanna said. “Look what happened to Reeve, Louis the fourth, Oleg the Prophet.”

“You can’t count Oleg; it was the snake in the skull that did him in.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Don’t you think he’s a little young?”

“I was his age when I first rode,” Rick said.

“You also grew up in the middle-of-nowhere Arkansas. All you had were horses,” said Joanna. “I don’t see why we can’t throw him a normal birthday party at an arcade or something.”

The bus rounded the corner of the block. It rumbled and stridently came to a halt. The doors split open with a hiss and the schoolchildren began filing in. William turned and waved and Rick and Joanna waved back and the boy boarded the bus.

“Thought we could do something a little different,” Rick said. “Something he and his friends could brag about at school.”

Joanna pulled her robe tight and shook her head and looked down at her feet. “Where would this even take place?”

“Up at Plug’s place in New River. He has a few mares and acres and acres of land.”

“He’s okay with this?”

“Yes. I talked to him about it last week. We owe him a visit anyhow.”

“I just really don’t know.”

“About Plug or the horses?”

They stood looking at one another.

“You know as much as I do I enjoy Plug’s company.”

“It’s not like they’re not broken. He keeps them fresh. He can still ride.”

“I just think it’s dangerous is all.”

“I rode for years and nothing bad ever happened to me,” said Rick. “And you should’ve seen William’s face when I brought up the prospect of horseback riding.”

“You should’ve discussed it with me first. I’ll be the bad guy.”

“It’s not for another week and a half.”

“What’s your point?”

“I’m just saying give it some thought. You don’t have to make your mind up this instant.”

Rick turned the car onto the 202 and merged on the 101 and when he exited onto the 17 he put the cruise control on. Joanna read one of those celebrity magazines in the passenger seat with her bare feet propped on the dash. Two boys aside from their own were in the backseat talking and telling jokes and laughing. Rick put his hand to the vent and let the cool air blow over his palm.

“Is that better,” Rick said.

The boys nodded.

It was early afternoon when they arrived to New River. Gravel rattled beneath the tires when the concrete quit and the car kicked up clouds of rich yellow dust. The surrounding hillsides were pale brown and scattered with rocks streaked with red. Saguaros and Mexican broom and other thistly flora were spread across the desert floor. They passed several small adobe houses all bearing the same shade of beige with slightly different tones of brown accents beneath windows or on doorways. Their ceramic tile roofing looking like thick red scales pulled from some massive sea-beast. A low adobe wall of deep red encased one house. Fire barrel and acacia planted and spaced evenly all alongside of it. Some decorative painted clay pots sat upon stacked rocks.

“I forget how beautiful it is out here,” Joanna said.

“Why’d we never take a look at a place in this area?”

Joanna put the magazine in her lap. She turned to Rick and tilted her head and pulled her sunglasses down to the middle of her nose where they balanced delicately on the bridge. “Would you really want to commute all the way to work?”

“No. I suppose not.”

Plug was sitting in a lawn-chair just outside of the front door when Rick pulled into the drive. Plug smoked a rolled cigarette and wore a brown shirt with pearl snaps and blue jeans tucked into beige boots made of ostrich. He nodded and raised the hand with the cigarette fixed between two fingers. A small ribbon of smoke drifted off the blackened end and curled as it took the wind.

“Good to see you, Plug,” said Rick.

Plug rose slowly from the chair and took Rick’s hand and smiled. His entire face seemed to wrinkle all at once. He turned to Joanna and nodded: “Mrs. Sibley.”

They hugged.

“Boys. Say hello. William, you remember Plug, right?”

The boys all said hi. William said that he sure did.

“Thanks again for doing this,” Rick said.

“Shoot. Could use the company,” Plug said. “Don’t often get too many visitors. When a man reaches my age there sure ain’t many folk who’re still around to drop on by.”

Plug flicked the cigarette on the ground. Rick watch as it bounced and the ember broke off and looked like any other rock in the sunlight once the smoke petered out. Plug opened the door and motioned for the visitors to come in. A faint pop in the distance echoed and faded like weak thunder.

“What was that?” Joanna said.

“Sounded like a gunshot ways off,” Plug said. “Kids shootin cans and such.”

The backyard consisted of three and a half acres of land encased by a large wooden fence that Plug and Rick had erected some years ago. In the foreground was the horse barn. A four-stall structure made of pine and oak and gates painted green and made of steel. Plug had taken an old foldout table and set it up on the back porch and covered it with a white tablecloth held down by a wire sculpture centerpiece of a rider with a lasso in hand. There was a large bowl filled with tortilla chips and several glass bowls not yet filled with different color salsas that Plug had made. The salsas were in mason jars next to each bowl waiting to be opened. Little metal chairs with strapped-down cushions stood tucked into the table. A cooler sat pushed against the wall filled with ice and Coke cans and beer. They ate chicken and brown rice with potato salad off red faience plates. Both Plug and Rick sipped beer from cans between bites while Joanna and the boys drank Coke over ice in glasses. The presents sat opposite the table in front of a sliding-glass door that led to the living room. The temperature had steadily risen since morning and plateaued just shy of ninety degrees in the shade. Joanna remarked how quiet it was out here. No car horns or sirens or the perpetual the din of city streets. There was little else than the slight percussion of silverware on the plates between quips of dialogue.

“Never was one for big cities,” Plug said. “Like to be able to look up at the sky at night and see stars, if you take my meaning.”

When everyone finished eating Rick collected the plates and silverware and brought them into the kitchen and set them on the counter and filled the sink up. He forked the remaining tidbits of food into the trashcan and put the plates and cutlery into the soapy water. When he came back outside the presents were on the table and Plug was standing off a ways smoking and squinting in the sunlight.

“Want to go ahead and open these up kiddo?” said Joanna.

Rick watched as his son looked over the cluster of gifts and then turned and looked out over the yard. The horses stood idly in their stalls and one whinnied loudly and swung its head and William looked back at Rick.

“Presents will still be here,” Rick said. “If you’d rather ride now.”

Several minutes later Plug came back walking and guiding a horse by the reigns. The horse was tawny in color with a mane as black as spent coals. A red saddle was strapped upon the animal. A thick white stripe ran from between its eyes down to the nostrils. White ran from just below the joint and down to the hooves on the hind legs. William stood looking at the animal as though looking at something he’d only heard or read about but never truly knew whether it existed or not until this very moment.

Plug hoisted William onto the saddle and told him to hold the horn. William’s feet didn’t quite reach the stirrups. Plug handed the reigns to Rick.

“I thought this would be more difficult,” said Joanna.

“It’s like taking a dog out. I lead, it follows.”

Rick walked along the edge of the yard in the heat near the fence with a firm grip on the reigns and everyone surrounded the animal as if exalting a war hero returning home. When they reached the end of the yard they turned around and started walking back. Some thirty yards off across the fence walking along the plain were two boys. By their clothing Plug recognized them to be the Hollis brothers of the next house over about a mile and a half. They walked and smoked a cigarette that they passed between one another. One of the brothers carried a rifle by its strap on a shoulder. Rick and the rest continued walking on and one of the birthday goers asked William when it was going to be his turn and William said in a minute, that he wanted to ride just a little bit longer. Rick handed the reigns over to Joanna for a moment to roll up the sleeves of his shirt to the elbow. When she handed them back she looked well of it out of her hands. Rick ran the backside of his forearm across his head. Plug walked a little behind and pulled out the pouch of tobacco from his shirt pocket. A slight breeze started up and rustled the bushes and failed to bring any relief from the heat. Rick brought the horse to a halt.

“Everything okay?” Joanna said.

“Yeah, just give them a second.”

“Who, the boys?”

Rick pointed. “No.” A little ways in front of them stood two young javelina nibbling on prickly pear.

“That’s odd. Don’t see them much during the day,” Plug said. “Especially when it’s this hot out.”

“They won’t come at us will it?” said Joanna.

“No, they don’t see too good,” Plug said. “Just listen to Rick and hunker down a bit.”

The two javelina leisurely walked in circles and sniffed and nipped at other plants as if they didn’t notice the group and the horse and they probably didn’t. They kept this up for another minute before scuttling off beneath the fence. Rick resumed walking, but at a slower pace at Joanna’s request after Plug cracked a joke about rattlesnakes and scorpions.

“How are you doing up there bud?” Rick said.

“Good. This is fun.”

“Good.”

“Does this make me a cowboy, daddy?”

“You feel like one?”

“A little bit. Yeah.”

“Then I suppose it does.”

Rick spat on the ground and turned to Plug and said a cold beer sounded good right about now. Plug lit the cigarette and said he agreed. The hooves of the horse hit the ground rhythmically and clattered against the rocks as it walked. Joanna walked next to the horse with a hand on the cuff of her son’s jeans. Looking back Rick saw the two boys fixed on the legs of the animal as they watched each footfall attentively and scurried closely behind it, half-bent and sideways like crabs.

Rick heard a faint holler and looked over the fence and saw one of the Hollis brothers jumping about and shouting loudly while the other brother slung the rifle around and jammed the butt into the pit of his shoulder and took aim. A shot rang out and cracked and echoed and died off. The horse nickered loudly and beat its hooves against the earth.

“Whoa. Easy, easy,” said Rick. “Hold on tight, buddy. Okay?”

“Okay,” said William.

“Please,” Joanna looked at Rick wide in the eyes. “Just get him down.”

“It’s fine. The horse just got a little spooked.”

Meanwhile, Plug had walked over and up to the fence and placed both hands on it. “Goddammit. You boys knock that racket off. You’re old enough to know better not to be shootin so close.”

The Hollis brothers kept looking down. Kept running. Then Rick saw the tan and black and grey peppered hide of the javelina come out from behind bushes. Plug yelled once more and waved his arms above his head and the brothers continued running and the one had lifted the rifle and chambered another round. The boy slowed his steps for an instance while taking aim and again fired. Then two more shots quickly followed. Blam blam. The sound cracked loudly like dried wood giving under some tremendous weight. Rick felt the reigns tightened and he turned and saw the bottom-side of the two front hooves held high in the air. The animal’s eyes were wide and black and searching. He yanked down on the reigns and the horse came down heavily on its front legs. The force threw William a little forward on the saddle, but still he held onto the horn tightly. He was crying loudly and looked wildly in all directions. Rick tugged on the reigns and brought the animals face close to his and ran a hand down between its eyes and talked quietly to it. Rick pulled William down from the saddle and the boy wrapped himself tightly around his father and continued to cry onto his shoulder. Over William’s shoulder Rick saw Joanna crying and leaning over the body of one of the birthday goers, repeating I don’t know what to do I don’t know what to do. He put William down and told him to stay put and rushed over. The child lay on his back on the hot earth with his eyes closed and his arms splayed out above him. He looked relatively unharmed except for a little cut just above his left eye. It had started to bruise some around it. The other friend stood a little ways off, looking as though not knowing what to do or how to act and did nothing but stand still and silent. Rick knelt down and put an ear to the child’s lips and then pulled away and put two fingers on the throat and after he removed them stood up.

“Plug, mind getting back to the house and calling an ambulance.” Rick said.

Plug had walked up from the fence and stood close to Rick. Rick heard the old man exhale loudly and in the corner of his vision saw Plug shaking his head slowly. Joanna had walked over to and collected the other child and brought him over to William where she now crouched and spoke calmly and collectively to each child.

“It ain’t gonna do much, is it,” Plug whispered into Rick’s ear.

“No. It won’t do a bit of good. But it’s the only thing any of us can do now.”

"Sweet Heart" by Christina Murphy

2011-03-07T22:46:00.001-05:00

It wasn’t that he was angry—just, as he liked to say, unfulfilled. Anger did not give him the permission he needed to be unkind to her, but unfulfilled vaulted him into a new category. Unfulfilled, he was misunderstood, and someone must be to blame for that. Not that she was, by any means. But no one could convince him of that. Whenever he was unhappy, it was always because his life had taken the wrong turn in marrying her. None of it was his fault even though he had left a marriage and a child behind, and obviously the decision was his. No, that did not matter. What mattered was she was not living up to his expectations and, after all he had sacrificed in leaving his wife to come to her, didn’t she owe him?

We all had known her for a long time. She was a very sweet and very honest woman who largely thought in practical terms—except, of course, when it came to love. Then she was like the rest of us, trying to cope and do the best you can while your heart speaks a language you don’t understand. She was taken with him. None of us saw in him what she did. We all thought he was self-centered and that nothing was more important to him than getting his way. His way was wrapped up with that she should be making him happy. Never mind that he was seldom happy for long. And never mind that he was hugely critical of her and unkind, embarrassing her in front of friends with his criticisms and complaints and his sense that if she would just obey, everything would be all right. None of us could imagine how long-suffering she could be until we saw her in action. She took it upon herself to protect him from revealing his true pettiness and worked hard to have others see him as the public self he had created for himself—kind, understanding, supportive. It was all an act, on both their parts, but hardly anyone ever saw through the pretenses.

So, was it a surprise that he left her for another woman who thought he was a saint and later learned how angry he could be at life and at her? Yes, it was a surprise. It caught her off guard and destroyed what was left of her faith in herself and in relationships. Not that she ever let us know. She had control of her emotions, and none of us would have known what she was going through. Except the one night she went by the house of her former husband and his new wife and stood across the street, watching. An hour or so later, she crossed the street and stood by the large elm tree in their front yard. She had a note that she thumb-tacked into the tree: Hearts do break, it said. Someday you both will know.

On the walk back, she cried. It was perhaps the first time ever that she cried in front of others. And there was an ice cream parlor across the street that she had passed many times. Behind the counter was Miss Doris, content to scoop out the various vanilla, chocolate, peppermint, and butter pecan flavors that people longed for. Miss Doris was smiling as each child’s face lit up with joy and small pink tongues lapped up the sweetness.

She was tempted to go inside and be a child again with a large cone of sugary ice cream, and she would have done it had she been able to stop her tears. But something about watching Miss Doris made her sadder. There was not enough ice cream in the world to satisfy the hunger of the children and adults lined up for scoops of marshmallow heaven or strawberry morning. Even if Miss Doris added sprinkles and candy chips, peanuts or gummy bears, there just wasn’t enough. More and more would be needed, and soon Miss Doris would have scooped out all the huge ice cream tubs she had, and, one by one, the people would all abandon her—moving down the street to the next ice cream parlor and the next server who would attempt to make all their longings fulfilled.

"Denial In The Backroom" by Campbell Kennedy

2011-03-01T00:24:00.002-05:00

I never stopped having the images appear, even after drinking myself into unconsciousness.

It happened again, earlier today. I was walking towards Flatbush through the Fulton Mall, bobbing and weaving thru the crowd, G Unit blasting out of Max's discount Shoe Store. Max's was where Jerome and I got a pair of Pumas ten years ago.

I was looking in the window almost in a daze. How could I not be? The sun was beating down on my neck, my tongue was like sandpaper. I could feel the coolness of the hosed down sidewalk thru the gap in my sneaker under my big toe.

I needed new sneakers.

I looked in the window and I saw him staring at me.

Jaw hanging down.

Bloody.
Hands like brown purple tree trunks raising up to me.

His blood coated white gold teeth sparkling at me. The exclamation point of the gash that ran down his caved in eye. Just like the last time I saw him in good lighting. Ever taste your own heart? That’s what happened to me in that moment.

I turn around and run smack in to an old Rasta. He carries the scent of myrrh with him. Our eyes lock and I barely register the words "Peace Ras" flow from his tongue before he enters Max's. Then it’s just me, G-Unit, Max’s display window, the wet sidewalk, glaring sun and a few hundred black and brown living souls.

No blood.

No stumps

No peace.

I didn't buy the shoes.

* * *

I'm not paranoid.

I don’t believe in ghosts.

What I saw was just the result of a lot of the shit that happened last week. The party, the fight. I now know where they got the "bullet time" effect in the Matrix from. I saw it when the hand holding the shovel came down and smashed in to Jerome’s face. Everything slowed down. I understood exactly what was happening, from every angle. And there was nothing else that I could do.

He was a big motherfucker.

Always was. And I guess that’s one of the reasons we became friends a dozen or so years ago. Him the bulky former elementary school bully and me the quiet unassuming mixtape enthusiast. I was playing a 60 minute TDK dub of a bunch of Tribe Called Quest remixes with some James Brown and Parlament Funkadelic thrown in. He stopped in front of my stoop and I thought he was going to kick my ass. Instead he said, "That’s the dope shit right there yo." and smiled.

In high school he got sent upstate for possession. I didn't see him again until maybe six months ago. He was still a big motherfucker. Although I had gotten my growth spurt and filled out a bit. Working out and boxing. I was never good in the ring and after being pummeled on the mat for a year I quit.
It was my Ife, my sister’s fault, I did it for her.

She was best friends with the coach’s daughter and talked me in to getting smacked around for a few months. But I loved the training, the focus. My coach said my form and technique was good, but "You can never think of the other guy as a piece of meat that needs to be taken down. You have too much heart."

He might as well have cut off my balls and dangled them in front of my face.

So then one day Jerome shows up again in Clinton Hill, three blocks from my home. He stepped out of a Chinese take out shop on Myrtle and hollered at me from across the street. I thought I could ignore him, but he crossed over to me and gave me a pound on the shoulder. He smiled, that white gold tooth sparkling at me. He didn’t say much as to where he had been, just that his parole had ended. He hinted that if I had any friends looking to score to give him a call. Apparently he had made some friends in his time upstate.

He put his hand on my shoulder as we walked side by side and I felt a chill running down my spine. He mentioned something about wanting to hang out, like old times.

I tried to avoid him for the next few weeks, but it was useless. Even more so once my Ife told him about her birthday party. Her man was in Iraq for the third time. So rather than waiting it out alone she decided to pack up her SUV and move in to the middle room of my railroad until Damon rotated back stateside.

She mentioned Jerome while I was down in the garden. In exchange for a cut on the rent I worked a few hours a week in my landlady’s backyard. It wasn’t much, a ten by ten square tacked on to the corner brownstone but with a few flowers and herbs it was coming along nicely. I had started getting ambitions and was digging a trench for a line of bamboo to add some privacy. Of course the half blind landlady took credit when showing it off to her church hat friends. But I didn’t care.

I did the work.

It was mine.

But I digress. My sister stuck her head out of the back window, my bedroom window.and yelled down at me as I dug out the trough for the bamboo. I hated it when she was in my room, but I smiled up at her anyway. She said she was talking to Jerome the night before and invited him over to her birthday party, no sorry her birthday soiree as she called it, and asked if he was seeing anyone.

I cursed under my breath.

Knocking the dirt off of my hands I stood up and smiled my best plastic smile and felt the dirt seeping in to the hole in my shoe. I yelled back up at her that I didn’t know but he has a soft spot for Old English. He hated Old E, said it tasted like day old warm piss, but I wasn’t about to let her off easy.

That was six days ago and I’ve lost count of how much Old E I’ve had since. Ife was a drinker. She kept the once dry kitchen well stocked. I wasn’t a fan of alcohol but she got me into it again. I think I drank more in the 2 months since she moved in than in my year at college.

***

And look at me now. I’m drinking chai liquor out of the bottle. The last leftover from the soiree. The cups and glasses and ice trays from the party still littering the living room and kitchen. I’m tired. And there is a smell coming from the back room that I can’t place. But I don’t want to look for the source now. My shoes are by the door, dirty and broken with holes in the soles. I should have brought new ones.

***

By the time I got home on Ife’s birthday there were already people in my apartment for the party. I could hear them from the other side of the door. There was music playing, a few girly laughs and manly boasts echoing in the hall. My key was in the lock when I felt the door creak slightly, some one leaning against the other side. And I heard a new voice, pretty but slightly slurred saying, “I didn’t know he was your brother. He’s kind of become the neighborhood weirdo.” Then another voice “I thought he was a crackhead for a while.”

Whatever, they didn’t know me. I began to turn the key but then another voice cut thru the scarred brown door. “Nawh crackheads have more personality.”

I froze.

I know that last voice.

That last voice knows me.

It was Ife’s.

I pulled my key from the lock and went downstairs. The weight of my feet causing the rickety steps to groan under me, becoming louder and louder with each step. I didn’t see Jerome walking up the stairs until I was pressed between his bulk and the stairwell wall. Trapped. I could smell him just like before. Drakar Noir mixed with sweat and something fried and that cheap laundry detergent on his oversized blue button down that makes my skin itch. I must have mumbled something about leaving Ife’s present at work as I squeezed by his hulking frame. I do remember him smiling this big toothy grin showing off his white gold tooth. Getting down those last few steps nearly killed me. But I managed to make it to the door with out breaking any of the land ladies antique vases that lined the foyer.

I hated him.

I didn’t know it at the time, but yes I hated him.

I breathed in the night air and went out in to the garden.

Working at night in the garden is great. The air is cool. Much fresher than my apartment now. You don’t get sweat in your eyes as easily in the dark. People used to look at me strangely when they passed me at midnight and see me with a spade or a pickaxe. They just didn’t see the logic of it. Well there isn’t much to see in to the garden now. Not since I put the bamboo in. Between the darkness and the fast growing green stalks you would have to be standing right on the edge of the property to see me at work.

It’s a good thing Ife is respecting my room while she has her party, no, soiree. I couldn’t hear much of the noise going on upstairs as I struck my shovel in to the dirt making room for the acidic topsoil and fertilizer. I don’t know how long I was working back there. Must have been a few hours. I had heard the front door slam open and shut maybe a dozen times as I dug out a trench, much larger than I should have. I guess I was just in to the work. Every shovel full of dirt muffled the words that came thru the door. I was covered in grime and sweat. I wasn’t thinking about the pain any more, or the scent or of that night where he called me a bitch. I was thinking about how I was going to have to fill in half of this hole in order to plant the rest of the bamboo.

That’s when I heard the first scream.

I looked up and saw my back room light on. For a second I was angry. Then I heard another, and another piercing scream. Something about that sound that finger print of pain made me know it was Ife’s voice.

Something was wrong.

I ran in to the house tripping up the brown sandstone stairs. I entered the foyer and gripped the shovel like a rifle before rushing up the creaking steps. I must have collided with one of the antique tables because I remember the sound of something crashing behind me and a dull pain radiating up my thigh. I fumbled with my keys and managed to throw back the deadbolt.
The front room was empty, bottles and plastic cups were everywhere. I could smell the mix of alcohol and weed seeping in to my skin, mixing with my sweat.

I moved in to the empty kitchen. More of the same, except for a shirt on the floor. Buttons ripped off, one of them found its way thru the hole in my shoe.

My hands were shaking. My eyes were burning. My lungs felt like a hot hand was trying to claw it’s way out of my chest.

I crept, shovel at the ready, in to my sisters bedroom and almost tripped over a pair of her pants. I caught myself on the tiny Ikea twin bed she picked up from Craigslist. There was light seeping under the door that connects her bedroom to mine. I leaned up against it and listened.

I heard the bed squeaking.

Her moans

His grunts

My heartbeat.

A dozen thoughts flashed through my head in those quick seconds, but it came down to just seven words.

He is raping Ife in my room.

Without another thought I rammed shovel’s handle under the doorknob. I can still hear the sound of the impact of metal slamming into wood. There was my sister under Jerome. Naked, on my bed. His back was arched and her eyes were closed.

That’s when I had the bullet time moment. Everything slowed down. Like I was moving in water. As if God put his finger on the pause button with just enough force to slur the tape.

Between the door bouncing off of the wall and my first steps in to the room Jerome turned in to a pile of meat with gold teeth.

I could see everything.

My sister opening her eyes, the corners of her mouth turned up showing off her dimples.

The condom wrapper laying next to the gun on my oak nightstand.

A fly buzzing against the ceiling

A hand swinging a shovel into Jerome’s head.

My hand.

I swung.

I treated his body like meat.

I must have pounded his face and back two or three times before I heard my sister screaming. She must have been choked up, full of fear, unable to call out while he was violating her until I busted in to the room.

It’s going to be ok, she’s going to join in, she is going to take her revenge.

Jerome was spread out on his back now. One hand covering his half smashed in face while the other gropes blindly for the gun. I ran to the other side of the bed and sent the shovel down edge first on his outstretched wrist, smashing it on to the oak. I hit it again and again.

Then I felt a weight on my back. My sisters tiny fists beating on me. God he must have done something awful to her to turn her against me like this. She’s screaming at me to stop. I push her back and look at her long enough to see her head crack against the footboard. She passed out from the trauma that he put her through.

The bastard.

Jerome moaned one more time. I had to punish him even more now. I dragged his other hand on to the nightstand, raised the shovel high over my head and swung. I heard the crunch, felt the table give way under the blow and felt the warm spray of blood graze my face, shirt, pants and shoes.

And then it was over.

The bullet time ended.

And I had blood on my shoes.

It couldn’t have lasted for more than a minute. The pile of meat that was Jerome McGill was soiling my bed.

***

I still have bloodstains from the meat on my shoes, along with the holes. I take another swig of the liquor. I must look quite the sight. Clothes still dirty from digging. Meat blood on my shoes. Bottle of chai liquor in one hand. Jerome’s gun in the other. Staring at the dark creamy liquid in the bottle. I haven’t cleaned the house since the party. I’ve had to keep myself busy or else... or else....God I see him again. In the glass. His face bending in to form, then my sisters face. Ife’s face looking at me in those blank shell shocked eyes. They swell up, growing larger and larger morphing in to one another until they are all I can see. I drop the bottle. Ife/Jerome images shrink then shatter. The dozen fragments of glass and pools of dark fluid all have there fused together faces on them.

That’s why I have to keep myself busy.

***

The window overlooking the garden was open. I guess that’s how I heard her screams. I dragged the big motherfucker to it then pushed him out. It was surprisingly difficult to do. He fell down the half story with a dull thud in to the soon to be fertilized soil.

It was just a matter of rolling his fat ass in to the trench I had built the night before. In the back of my head I wondered if he would be good for the bamboo or not. I’m guessing he would be pretty acidic if he was drinking a lot tonight. So I covered him up. I was done before dawn.

When I came back in to the room my Ife was still passed out on my bed. Her head was at a crooked angle. She needed to sleep. I made her comfortable. I can’t begin to think what she has been through. When she wakes up we’ll talk and figure out what to do.

***

That was four days ago. She is still asleep. And there is this smell comming from somewhere in the back of the apartment, like something died.

She hit the floor four days ago and hasn’t woken up. Damn him for pushing her, for knocking her down for raping her. I should have done more to him, to make him pay. Yes, make him pay for throwing her off my back.

Off

My

Back.

My back.

Her fists were pounding on my back.

I killed her.

I need another drink.

"Snickered Rain" by Tiffany Anderson

2011-02-22T00:02:00.002-05:00

What would you do if you saw a little girl all alone, crying, in the rain? I saw loads of people pass her by. Mostly high schoolers too busy thinking about love or other things. I’m glad I’m years from that. Even though I can’t really talk, she was so tiny. She had on a basic khaki uniform with a blue jacket. No backpack. I stopped and just stared at her for a minute. She didn’t even look up. Then I went over and held my umbrella over me and her. She didn’t notice that for a couple minutes. Guess she was so wet it didn’t matter. She had these big brown eyes that had a staring contest with mine. Then she noticed the Snickers in my hand. She reached out for it but I pulled my hand back. I just bought this. But after a minute her eyes started watering so I put my umbrella down to give her some. After a few seconds she picked up the umbrella up and stood on her tiptoes trying to keep me dry. I took it from her and gave her the piece of candy. She got this big smile on her face and hugged me. I smiled too. For a moment I felt protective of her. For a moment in time she was my little sister. Like the one I lost years ago. We sat there for like an hour. I know I should have been getting home but being here seemed more important. I know I’m going to pay for it later on but I don’t care right now.

A lady came around walking slow, looking like she lost something. The little girl started fidgeting. Then the woman locked eyes with me and I knew, from seeing so many run through my house, that she was a crack head who was probably looking for a high. She came closer to me and I automatically hug my little sister tighter. She grabbed my little sister, talking about some guy named Tony waiting for her. The girl started screaming and reached out for me. The mom just kept pulling and yelling, but the little girl wanted me. Only me. Then her mom just raised her hand and brought it down hard on my sister. She was still. I filled up with hate. Why would you do that to a beautiful little girl? But then again why does my dad do that to me? Painfully and angrily I watched as the mom picked my little sister up and carried her off to pay a debt she didn’t owe. I just sat there and cried. I cried for the beating I’m going to get when I get home, but more for the little girl. I cried for my real little dead sister. I cried because I didn’t know what else to do. I let the umbrella down and let the rain cover me and my tears. I sat there until somebody, too, knocked me asleep.

We're now on Submishmash!

2011-02-17T00:31:00.003-05:00

We've decided to switch over in order to make it easier for you, the author, as well as us. Check out "Submissions Guidelines" page on the right side for more info.

http://shortfictioncollective.submishmash.com/submit

“Craig: List Me” by Allison Fine

2011-02-15T00:11:00.002-05:00

Music Up: Peter Gabriel Shaking the Tree “Don’t Give Up”

Colors: Saffron and Magenta

Car: VW Jetta, new, whatever the current year is

Movie: “Inception”

TV Show: “Mad Men” (for me: nostalgic)

Road Sign: Yield

Writer: Faulkner and/or Thomas Pynchon

Quote: “One is either living a little more or dying a little bit.”

Religion: Buddhist with a touch of Jew, Christian & Platonist

Line Spacing: Triple

Craig. I must tell you. I am advertising in the “Platonic Friends” Section because I have no choice. Life is difficult and then you find yurself (sorry yourself) bulleted, aligned, spaced and disregarded. I may be older than the average, obviously older than you, and you are the average are you not? Or, well—what is the average in this global market? Is this a global market, or a comically Golden Market? The fatted calf is swollen, waiting for the tide to strip off the meat, and maybe an Abraham to come down and see “Knock it off! I gotta couple’ a rules here.” Oh, that’s wishful thinking. No interventions, right? Just more of the same the same the same, the same. ……..(Repeat loop endlessly)

Craig, I may be over sixty but I’m still dreaming. When the flood comes I have a band-aid. I call it the wisdom of suffering. Kind of like your grandmother—bubbe? Remember her? And have I got a bubbe maise to tell you! A tale of the ghetto I live in—you know, the ghetto of the old? That invisible invented space where you all pushed us when we got too old to carry children and too young to die? Oh, sorry, you didn’t know you put us here—you thought we went here voluntarily! I mean, don’t we like to retire and hang out with the hanging flesh and dropping eyes crowd—just like our own? We all want to flock together with those birds, right?

I really get nostalgic over Plato’s philosophy of the ideal archetype. And here I am! The idealized archetype in the flesh! Divine, not human, only appearing to be so, a trusted teacher and a friend, a lover, a sexual dynamo, but ok. Teacher. Mentor. Educator. Coach. Spiritual Adviser. This is a place for the non-carnal intentions—sorry to transgress. Forgive me Craig, I still want and crave upon occasion. In my mind’s eye, I am beautiful. Do you want to see me? Craig! Answer! Please! I am almost lost!

Archetypal Woman

From Craig to Archetypal Woman:

I can almost see you; a kind of 60+ cougar right? You: loaded right, and maybe bored? Me too. I am bored. I hate my job. I am a Printing Press Machine Operator. There are a still a few of us left. I offset lithographic presses, letter or letterset presses, flexographic or gravure presses, I produce print on paper or other materials such as plastic, cloth, or rubber. That’s my day job. My real vocation is acting. I’ve been in over a hundred plays, maybe more, a couple of films and TV commercials, I’ve got a presence here, know what I mean? I have a lot of friends too. Friends. Platonic. But boy, could I use a Cougar! Whaddaya think?

Boy Biotic

To: Boy Biotic

I am not sure what your name means. What is Biotic? And what is a Cougar? Is that an archetype? I am lost here. I am not, as one person put it, a “natural sexy ‘oral giver’ whatever that means, and is that Platonic anyway? Friend, O Friend, Where Art Thou Friend? Where is the friend to pull flat twists into my hair, listen to Beethoven with, someone to enjoy life in the “in between land?”

To Cougar: What is an archetype? I am lost here. Clue me in. Also, where is “in between” land? Is it near Indiana? I have an ex-girlfriend from said State.

Boy Biotic

To Boy Biotic: I am not a Cougar. Stop calling me that. An Archetype does not a Cougar make. “In-Between Land” is that space between life and death. I thought that was self-evident. How old are you?

Woman Archetype

To Cougar Woman Archetype: I am 32.

Boy Biotic

To: Boy Biotic: I am angry. Can you take that?

To CWA: Of course. I love an angry woman. It often translates to Flaming Lips etc. and all that.

Boy Biotic

To BB: Are you playing me?

CWA

To CWA: NO.

BB

To BB: BB used to stand for Bridget Bardot? Ring a bell?

CWA

To CWA: No. Before my time. I am playing you somewhat. You need to lighten up. How ‘bout it? Face time eh?

BB

To BB: No “face time” as you put. I am somewhere between sixty and God. I’ve never had plastic surgery.

CAW=Cougar Archetypal Woman, or Crow as in “Caw Caw Caw!”

To CAW CAW: Face time or I cut you off.

BB

CAW: Cut me off. I am unafraid. What have I got to lose? I am already alone or we wouldn’t be having this “conversation.”

BB: Why did you put conversation in quotes? Look, what’s the problem here? Is it fear of Sex? Are you afraid to undress in front of a stranger? Do you have body-image issues? Are you afraid of orgasm? Or fearful you can’t have one or you might die having one?

CAW: I am throwing your emails into the spam bin. Never email me again or I will call the authorities.

BB: What authorities? The Spam Police? You can’t run away from yourself.

To Craigslist List Editor/Help Desk: I saw an ad for a Housecleaner under the writing/editing section of Jobs. This is upsetting! Are you trying to suggest that writers must be housecleaners because none of them can make money as writers? This may be TRUE but are YOU suggesting it, because, because—well, it isn’t you, is it? It’s the person who placed the ad so I should really address my vitriolic anger at them.

IF YOU NEED PERSON CLEAN YOUR HOUSE...PLEASE EMAIL ME......THANK YOU
Location: Stamford.

Is this Stamford, Connecticut? For God’s sake not even New York? And what grammar! If you need—person—it should be “if you need A person…” Oh well.

BB: I miss you. I just found out I have Cancer. My mother wants me to come upstate to stay with her but perish the thought. She was an OK mother but I don’t want to die in my mother’s arms. This is not how I imagined things would be. I had everything to look forward to and now I have nothing to look forward to.

CAW: This is terrible. What kind of cancer?

BB: I won’t do this in public.

CAW: All right. Face time is in order. I live in Brooklyn. Where do you live?

BB: Brooklyn.

CAW: Brooklyn’s a big place. Shall I come to you? Will you come to me? Give me your phone number.

BB: Numbers are not exchanged on Craigslist. Give me your address. I will snail mail you my information, all right? We can arrange something.

************************************************************************************Some Days Later:

Kevin Levinski, a young looking, rather handsome man of 32 arrives fifteen minutes late for his lunch date with Mary Shea, a sixty year old hottie wearing a blue jean mini skirt, magenta tights and three inch Payless designer heels. They meet at the Heights Café on Montague Street, near her place in Brooklyn Heights, although he has to travel from his place in Williamsburg. Kevin looks disheveled, as if he hadn’t slept in a week, and his skin is the color of egg and ash. Mary takes one look at him and all her sexual thoughts go right out the window. She wants to mother him. Is it possible?

She is sitting in the far back corner reading a two-week old New Yorker, an article about short men. Kevin is 5’10” tall—he’s in the middle somewhere, so short is not his problem. What is his problem? She looks up to see a scared young man holding a book in one arm and his satchel loosely thrown over his left shoulder, looking down at her.

“Kevin? Sit, sit!”

He sits.

“Do you really have cancer?”

“Yeah.” Kevin says. “I want some coffee.”

Mary stirs her latte with the wooden stick thing she got from the counter. Kevin goes to get his coffee and Mary forgets to breathe until he gets back. Some minutes later this shaking, scared young man is sitting in front of her, nursing a coffee, his satchel slumped forlornly on the floor next to her left foot. The satchel is dark red, “burnished red” the ads call it, with a snap front and a long shoulder strap.

“Nice Satchel, Kevin.”

“My mom got it for me. On line.”

“She loves you.”

“Yeah.” He takes a long, slow drink of coffee and looks around the café; eyes of deep dark green framed with blond lashes, curly, medium brown hair. The boy is a lovely young man and he has a terrible thing going on.

“This isn’t fair. It should be me, not you.”

“My dad died two years ago.”

“Of cancer?”

“No, he had congestive heart failure. He was waiting for a transplant but he died first.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was 58. I thought he’d live forever. So did my mom. He owned the Light and Lively Dry Cleaner in Williamsburg. We’re famous—for our light and lively service or whatever.”

“Are you going to take over the business?”

“My mom sold it. We owed money on the house. She needed cash.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a retired nurse but now she has to work. She’s working for a private company and hires out to do home care for the elderly. She moved upstate to be close to my sister and my Aunt. “

“How old is she?”

“Fifty-four.”

“Wow. Lord, I wonder what I’d do if I had to work.”

“Are you rich?”

“No, but I have an income. My ex-husband takes care of things. He left me for a twenty-eight year old actuary and feels guilty. I milk it for all its worth, you know. Probably mercenary, but I stayed home for twenty five years taking care of him, and I think he owes me!”

“No kids?”

“No kids. He was the kid.”

“Would you take care of me if you had to?”

“I’d take care of you no matter what. “

“I have to leave my job and my apartment. I can’t keep working and my roommate can’t support me. I’m going to the hospital on Thursday. Wanna come with me?”

“All right.”

With a sudden and swift decision Mary leaps into the unknown, something like a dream but with the ragged awful edge of reality to it. There is fear and all kinds of mixed up feelings and emotions that really scare her silly, but somehow she knows that there’s really no choice to the matter at all. It has already been concluded sometime before, perhaps in a boardroom of fantastic characters that do discussions and things about human beings while they float three inches above the ground. All she knows is the sad and soft sweetness of Kevin’s face; the simple manner in which he asks her to jump onto the running board; his life and possibly his death and something else she feels excited to touch. Ecstasy? Could there be sexual innuendo? Is she crazy or worse, depraved? This fierce but sacred moment slaps around her face like a taut wind on urban winter days. She has the understanding of that. Plus she knows anomie well, having entertained the boredom of her age quite long enough, thank you! The terrier of ennui has set in for a long stay in her life, barking incessantly as small terriers do, and there are no more opportunities for escape.

Looking at Kevin’s profile as he looks at her black plastic shoes with the yellow rubber heels and soles, there is a sudden gust of wind inside her stomach. I could love this man, she thinks, and I could take care of him at the same time. Perhaps it will be his last fling and mine too! We will dive off the Grand Canyon into the sky like Thelma and Louise! A romantic thought, but needless. His cough brings her back down to the scruffy floor, his brown sensible shoes and the polite murmur of the Heights Café.

“I’m gay,” Kevin announces softly.

“Oh.”

“Not that it matters. I just think you should know.“

“All right. But I think I love you. Does that matter?”

“I was bi-sexual in High School, but since I was twenty-one it’s been exclusively men.”

“So this isn’t going to be your last fling.”

He laughs. “Oh yeah, right! I already had that. I just responded to the Craigslist ad because I liked your tone,” he answers her unasked question.

“I’ve never taken care of anything except Cooper and my jade plants,” she adds, taking a long sip of the latte.

“Cooper?”

“My ex. He’s a lawyer by day and a science fiction writer by weekends. He got one of his stories published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. They’ve been going for thirty years. It was a great honor. He thought it might lead to a book contract but it never did and then he met the Actuary, Monique. His full-length novel is a mess anyway. I read it. It falls apart in the middle and keeps changing tenses. His main character is a flop.”

“You mean his main character is a loser?”

“No, he’s supposed to be some great scientist or something, but Cooper just couldn’t pull it together. The character sounds more like him, a lawyer, than a scientist and he’s not convincing anyway. No emotional clarity.”

“Are you a writer?”

She is silent.

“All right. You are. Maybe famous. Right?”

“I taught music to deaf children for fifteen years.”

“How do you teach music to the deaf?”

“Sound vibration. Up from the floor. They feel it. And dance to it. Hebrew Institute for the Deaf, Avenue 1.“

“Are you Jewish?”

She laughs a raucous laugh. “Mary Shea? That sound Jewish to you?”

“No.”

“Irish Catholic all the way. Up from Boston. Met Cooper at Brooklyn College—we were both students there—him, pre law, me, Music Composition.”

“What instrument?”

“Flute, piano, a little viola. Aaron Blayer was my teacher. He was great.”

“How did you end up teaching—“

“Let’s table this discussion, can we Kevin? It’s about 2 blocks to my place. Wanna come over? I have some leftover meatloaf and we can sit down at the great big dining table and hash over every little detail of our silly little lives!”

“Ok,” Kevin, reluctant, but sad, a little wise, wary, still, he likes the crinkles around her eyes.

“I warn you—I am looking for a Fitzgerald kind of epiphany,” he tells her as they leave the café and head out to her brownstone on Myrtle Street off Flushing.

“What does a Fitzgerald epiphany look like?”

“Civilized people going to pieces, laughter “rising toward the summer sky…” the appearance of true and total joy unhampered by guilt or expectation or pragmatic thoughtful repose. You know, drunken people who are rich and dress well.”

“Civilized people are constantly going to pieces—I thought that was what civilization was all about. Put quotation marks around civilization, ok?”

“Drunken white people I should add.”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Most definitely.”

“Drunk is drunk, in my book. I grew up with alcoholics. Everyone in my family was a drunk. Except me.”

“Oh. An unfortunate childhood.”

“Not so bad. We laughed a lot! Cried a lot! My dad finally died at forty-nine of being drunk too long—liver and kidneys just gave out. My mother grieved, then she got herself a younger guy who stole all the insurance money dad left her and she died.”

They walk on and on. She almost regrets leaving her car at home.

“It could be a novel if we have time. But more likely, a short story.”

“I have no intentions of writing my memoirs,” she tells him.

“That’s OK, I’ll write them for you.”

“Can you do that?”

They round the corner and her home is in view.

“Here we are,” she says, a trifle tired suddenly, drawing her breath in small gasps. Up the stairs, to the door, in the keys caressing the double lock, punch the number code into the alarm system in the hallway and—

“This is it,” said with a sweeping arm.

“It’s enormous.”

“We got a good deal in 1984. It’s paid for now. Just property taxes. He pays them, of course.”

“He must love you somewhere.”

“He has faith in the original work—you know, what we had when we were nineteen and—“

“Like the Gatsby people. The Fitzgerald People.”

“Perhaps.”

He follows her with a touch of melancholy and a slight drag to his feet from the foyer to the lovely warm, golden-lit dining area with the etageres theatrically displaying collector plates from all over the world. Then to the kitchen—warm smells, a hint of garlic and basil, glass and tile and wood and appliances that gleam and shine, much as he hopes they will in heaven where he plans to go, no matter what, if he believed in it, but his cynicism does not allow it.

“I want to adapt to this, but I am not sure I can,” he tells her.

“Sit down at the table, I’ll serve you the best meal you’ve had in years. I’m a great cook and I’ve taken cooking classes on and off for twenty years. I could be the head chef of a restaurant if I wanted to.”

“Why don’t you want to?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can be the writer of my story. How’s that?”

“I told you, I don’t write. Dance, music, cooking—that’s it! Enough, don’t you think?” she says this to a strange guy sitting at her kitchen table, a large, thick plank of wood Harry Stein made for them when they first got married, a plank with knot holes and knife nicks and a couple of dark stains. A warm, hard, thick kind of table that spells permanent. She reaches into the enormous double-sided silver Sears refrigerator with the ice and water taps and the pull out freezer on the bottom pulling out onions, two carrots and a handful of kale and begins chopping it all with an enormous Ginsu knife on the chopping board next to the sink.

“So, you can write my story?” he asks again, strangely not listening to her answers.

“Oh hell—forget that! I can’t write a shopping list! I go blank with words and a piece of paper! Give me food and spice and a thousand mouths to feed!” She says this as she bends over, her ass reaching to the ceiling, the spandex tights underneath the short jean skirt pulling tight against the ample cushions of her buttocks. He notices but says nothing.
Up she comes with a large crock-pot and a long chafing dish, wrapped, and several plates heaped with things that look good to eat if they are warm and happy. Like, you are sitting in her kitchen, he muses.

“Get ready for gastronomic orgasm!”

“It’s not Cancer, Mary, it’s AIDS.”

Music Up: “Someone to Watch Over Me”

Colors: Black and Gray

Car: Buick Regal

Movie: Angels in America

T.V. Show: Nurse Jackie

Road Sign: Handicap Loading and Unloading Only

Writer: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quote: “In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

Religion: Catholic

Line Spacing: Single

The hospital room was not an exciting place to be. Mary was in over her head and she knew it. This “dying thing” as she called it was not really her bag, although her life would surely be characterized as a mixed bag. Getting left, harried moments running around doing too much for other people, (living people), wishing she had a quiet moment and then when quiet moments came fidgeting like crazy unable to handle the thoughts racing in her head—the fear of nothingness, the fear that it would all be over—she’d rather be in the fray, she told her friends. And in the fray she was. But here, in this room where Kevin was struggling to keep breathing, machines and I.V.’s everywhere, Mary was truly out of her element. Every time his eyes opened she saw the terror in the green irises, the sadness and the fright and the question—where am I going and what will I be doing? The question hung in the air between Mary on the chair and Kevin in the bed.

“Why can’t they open windows in hospitals?” she asked and Kevin smiled a little smile. She went over to the window to somehow force it but a nurse walked in as she was trying with all her energy to pull the window open.

“You can’t do that,” said the nurse, a forty-something African American woman with large dangly earrings, a beautiful smooth face; deep burgundy lip stain and a bottle of moisturizer in her right hand. “Try putting this on his legs, and feet and hands and arms—his skin is very dry. It feels good, doesn’t it?” addressing Kevin. He nodded.

The touch of skin to skin--the contact--Mary feared she could not maintain the distance she needed to move on with her life if this happened, and hadn’t she had enough loss anyway?

Reluctantly grabbing the bottle from—what’s her name?—Shenequa said the name tag—Mary spurted some replenishing, hydrating cream onto her hands, gingerly lifting the sheet from over Kevin’s legs, and began rubbing the cream into the translucent white skin, blond hair freckled over the legs, the sad mournful ankles barely able to support his little body, emaciated now, even after all the weeks and weeks of cooking she did for him. His skin was like a robin’s egg, the feet and toes lay dormant, barely moving as she rubbed cream all over them. Shenequa, satisfied with the result of her commission, left the room after passing a hand lightly across Kevin’s face, as if to smooth out the fear, and spoke with a low voice Mary could barely hear, “It’s gonna be all right now, son.”

Finally Kevin’s mother arrived, later in the day. He had been in the hospital four days and Mary did not want to call her. Kevin finally took it upon himself to use Mary’s cell phone while she was down in the cafeteria eating a crab salad and coffee and dialed his mother, leaving a message on the voice mail: “Hi this is Carol—I’m not available, you know what to do.” Did he know what to do?

“Mom, it’s Kevin. I’m in Brooklyn Hospital. Room 814. Can you come and see me?” He hung up after this, after thinking for some moments, there was really nothing more to say. He’d tell her everything when she got there. Or nothing.

Music Up: Plants & Animals “Early in the Morning”

Colors: Opalescent White

Car: Tesla

Movie: Ferris Buehler’s Day Off

T.V. Show: Hero

Road Sign: Dead End

Writer: David Foster Wallace

Quote: “The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.”

Religion: Buddhism

Line Spacing: Double, Single, Triple, And Quadruple

For several days Mary had an obsessive need to cook recipes for two: Poulet a la Saucisse, Curried Chipotle Potato, an incredible Pineapple Upside Down cake, Seafood Tangine, Spicy Thai Lobster Soup, Miso-glazed Black Cod in Coconut Broth. The creativity was pouring out of her like never before, getting rid of the pain and the pleasure until she was completely numb. Across the street on the avenue leading to the trashed monument celebrating a forgotten WWII hero who she had forgotten to even notice, she saw a young man with a red satchel out of the corner of her eye. She was sure it was Kevin—it was! Opening the window, despite the cold, she shouted out: “Kevin! Kevin!” The young man kept walking, obviously not hearing her. Running with the kind of speed she would have dubbed “desperation” down the steps, out the door, she was somehow able to catch up with the red satchel carrier and tap him lightly on the shoulder from behind. He turned, his face ruddy with the cold, a cigarette tucked over his left ear.

“Hello?” he said, not paranoid, but not exactly happy either.

“I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

The mad dash down to the street had winded her terribly, and it was with an incredible amount of weariness that she entered the kitchen once again, the smell of burning grilled snapper in mango sauce filling up the kitchen, the entire house, her life.

“Deepest Regrets” by Ronald C. Flores

2011-02-08T00:17:00.000-05:00

It was a lovely funeral, although nobody said so. There were many mourners. Many of them came up to me, at one moment or another, and offered me, his tearless widow, their pésames.

“Fifty years,” I heard someone say, “How will she do without him?”

How will I do without him?

They were right to ask, of course, those darkly dressed well-wishers. Such an old woman—and now alone.

“Don Manuel Hipólito Matías, farmer, born in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, June 26, 1898, husband of Doña Serafina Fernández, born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, March 31, 1912, has passed on to a better life. Burial will be Friday, Feb. 14, 1997 at 3:00 p.m. at Buxeda Cemetery in San Juan,” the brief obituary read.

He would not have found it brief. He would not have liked the rambling construction. Surely he would have taken out my name as being irrelevant. He would have condensed it to ten or twelve significant, un-wasted words.

Sufficient words for an insignificant man. Until his death, no one really noticed him. I didn’t notice him fifty years ago, until my father told me that he had given him my hand. I met him three days later, was married six months after that, and tended his house and his peones until there was nothing left to tend.

He died in his sleep, but not in a bed. For the past 20 years, he slept in a hammock in the wooden shack behind the new house. He never slept with me.

I laugh when I say “new” house. The first house on the hacienda was torn apart by San Felipe, and then by San Ciprián. Don Manuel—I always called him Don Manuel—would not be humbled by a hurricane. He and the peones gathered every scattered scrap of wood, every palm plank, every splinter, until he had enough to build the house again, smaller each time. The new house, a concrete box, was built by the government as shelter for the rural poor.

We were never poor and we were always poor. We were child poor and house poor, but we were never pride poor, nor money poor. The other old Spaniards in the barrio considered Don Manuel a wise and prudent man. The few times they had dealings with him they deferred to him, even the older ones. He was isleño, and gentle. He was a millonario, they said, meaning he had thousands of dollars in bars of gold hidden away, in case the Americans seized his land, or the crops were blown out to sea, or the cattle were infected with some God-sent disease.

What he never did was spend a single penny he could save. At first I would shut myself in my room when he would wait on the porch for Don Emilio’s man to bring the neighbor’s old newspapers.

“It is the same news today as yesterday,” Don Manuel would say. “I can wait,” he’d say.

You get used to most anything. That’s what my mother said and that is what she did. And that is what I tried to do. I made my dresses and our nightclothes out of the blanquín from the bags of chicken feed and washed them and wore them until the fabric was so thin it was like the softest, sheerest silk.

I longed for children but knew without asking that it was something Don Manuel decided he could not afford. He sometimes borrowed children, like day-old newspapers, from his isleño friends, but they–“ingrates,”– drifted off sooner or later to paying jobs on other farms.

Until the government forced him to give land to his peones, he paid them with a tiny share of the crops or animals they tended. When they got the land, most turned their backs on him, and worked only for themselves. The God-sent disease arrived, but it was not what he expected; it was time.

He lived too long, longer than his friends, with no one left but his Doña Serafina in the concrete room, with the bed my father gave him along with my hand, a bed that heard the costly cries of unborn babies.

I told the curious that it was he who asked to be buried in red; but if they had known him they would have known that it was a lie. They peered over the gilt edge of the massive mahogany coffin and were faced with a tiny, empty carcass of a man dressed in a red silk suit, surrounded by a sea of red satin.

If they had known him they would have known that it wasn’t politics: he was a life-long Republicano, and that party’s color—in its latest manifestation—is blue.

If they had known him, they would have known that it was only a grand coincidence that his funeral was held on Valentine’s Day. If Don Manuel had known, he would have chosen a day when the rates were lower.

But they didn’t know him.

I knew him. Don Manuel Hipócrita Matías Manco. I knew that he died in his hammock, his nightshirt mended beyond recognition, one of his cold gold bars clutched in his hand.

If he knew that I had used it, to buy him this, he would have died all over again.

Mi más sentido pésame, Don Manuel.

My longest, deepest regrets.

“Tin in Pictures” by Kirsten Peterson

2011-02-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

Dad bought two hundred acres of old farmland. It had been grown over since before farmers stopped using horses. Mum and I would go for walks in the bush and mostly trip over barb wire grown into roots, but sometimes we would trip on other things that weren’t sticks under moss or overturned stones. We cooked steaks on a hand grill from the farm foundations in tinfoil so the meat wouldn’t taste rusty. Dad wrecked the weed whacker when he hit the spikes on a hay rake. It was an odd hay rake because it didn’t look like a rake at all. It was supposed to be pulled by horses to get the chaff. The rake looked like a square grid that had got stretched by the pulling into diamond shapes instead. At the corner of each pulled out square there was a spike. This was where we hung our wet mittens and socks, and coats on the bottom rung if the sleeves didn’t touch the ground.

There were only a few things to find that weren’t rusty. I liked the glass tops from jam jars where the seals had rusted away and the main jar had been crushed. The glass tops were flat and didn’t break so easily, but I still only found three. The glass tops had bumps outlining the jam jar company’s crest. I found last the one that had part of the picture – there was the edge of a crown and horsetail that might have been white. It was red now and made me think of the people buried in bogs and their blonde hair turned red.

Mum and I used the jam jar tops like coasters. No one else did – the bumps made cups tilt and they knocked over easy. Mum said that was the interest – tea was so relaxing it was almost boring and it was less boring if it might spill. At cards we took turns nudging the table so that the cups slowly tilted the other way. The first day I found the horsetail top I took my old coaster and put it in the cabinet. At cards I took my cup off the picture coaster and said I was going to go put more milk in because the tea was too hot. When I came back Mum had Gran’s ashtray in front of her and she was picking the picture off into the ashtray. “There’s a lot of dirt under this,” she said.

Interview at Duotrope's Digest

2010-11-26T10:10:00.002-05:00

Our interview over at Duotrope's Digest is available. Check it out here: http://www.duotrope.com/interview.aspx?id=4680

TAKING A VACATION

2010-11-14T17:20:00.002-05:00

Starting immediately, and continuing through January of next year, we will be taking a break from reading submissions. If you happen to send us something we'll remind you of our vacation and get back to you once we begin again in February. The holidays are finally upon us and a trip to Europe is in the works for January; plus we could use a little breather. But have no fear, we'll be back and better than ever starting February 2011. In fact, we've already got a few awesome stories lined up for when we return. Continue to check our page on Facebook for updates. We've got big things planned for the new year including a switch to weekly publication schedule instead of a daily one, working on putting together our own website free from the constraints of Blogger, we're also trying to figure out a plan to fund our first ever print issue (probably a best of the first year type thing) as well as figuring out just how much money we should give away for our next writing contest (to celebrate our one year anniversary in May 2011.) So stay tuned and have a happy holiday season!

ANNOUNCING THE 100TH STORY CONTEST WINNER!

2010-11-12T22:10:00.005-05:00

"Never Worn (New Without Tags)" by Madeline "Maddie" Ward

I need this stuff out of the house. I lay it all out on the carpet. My hands shake as I take the pictures of each item with the digital camera. That’s going on eBay too. I’ve unwrapped all the presents. Makes it look less suspicious.

With each click of the camera, I feel this overwhelming guilt. These should be gifts under the Christmas tree. I can’t sell it as a lot. Buyers would get suspicious. They want to know why you don’t want it. What is wrong with it? Was it stolen? No one needs a guilty conscience this time of year.

There are eleven Christmas presents in total. I should be writing a syllabus for next semester but instead I’m opening up an account on EBay. My class was canceled. Someone with tenure will teach them. We all do desperate things in desperate times.

One of my colleagues used to say that the academic mind retreats into work when tragedy strikes. When his wife died, he buried himself in work. Wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning thesis on the War of 1812.

For some reason, I keep coming back to Hemingway. For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn. I used to say that was my favorite story at parties because it’s one I could remember. It was by Hemingway, so it was literary. It was short and witty. It could have such a deep meaning or no meaning at all.

I can’t take them back to the stores. I won’t put myself through that. FAO Schwarz, Nintendo World, The Disney Store, Macy’s on West 34th, I went all over town for them.

I didn’t keep any of the receipts. I was so convinced with my purchases that I wouldn’t need them. I got everything on the lists. I did it all right. I stare at the blank text box on my laptop screen. I don’t know what to put. So on eBay I just say, like new. No one really wants to read about other people’s tragedies this time of year. What they have to do to survive.

No one needs to hear why we aren’t having Christmas this year.

I watch as the pictures load. There’s the remote control fire truck he would have been playing with on Christmas morning. Jamie was going to be a fireman, like he told me so often. I remember the smile when I took him to the Firefighters Museum in New York on my day off.

There’s the light up, talking Panda Bear he wanted. There’s the gameboys I would have had to buy a hundred more games and useless accessories for. I got one in red for him and one in pink for Alyssa.

I took pictures of the four separate Broadway show tickets, just for proof. They are the hot shows so they will sell fast. Alyssa was going to be the next Twyla Tharp. I always thought that was funny. She doesn’t want to be a ballerina. She wants to teach dancers and choreograph every move they made. There’s also the Hannah Montana iPod she begged me to get her with Hello Kitty headphones.

It will be real when it’s all sold.

On Tuesday I had three children. Today is Sunday and I have one son. I let Marcus my brother take them home from the reunion. We were all going to come back to my place. They wanted to be in the car with Uncle Marc. It was a head on collision.
It wasn’t Marc’s fault.

It was the other driver. He was drunk. The words that are the beginning of many ends.

I wanted to kill him myself. How can anyone be so irresponsible? Given time I will forgive him. I will be the better person in this.

Last is her gloves, took three department stores to find the right ones. Macy’s had them. We were going to go back for the Santa pictures. I’m crying again. I can barely do this. I don’t know how I am going to clean out their rooms. I think I am going to hire some charity to haul it all away.

My wife wanted to take it all to the Salvation Army, even the Christmas gifts. I said I would take the new bikes there tomorrow. The rest needs batteries to work. She still is at my mother-in-law’s with the baby. She doesn’t need to see this.

Girl’s leopard print gloves, I type. New without tags, never worn.

IN NEED OF A SLOGAN!

2010-11-08T15:43:00.001-05:00

Brainstorming ideas for a catchy slogan. Suggestions? If yours is chosen you'll receive a gift (maybe a book with a thank you note or $20.) Post them here, on our Facebook page, or email to editorfic@aim.com.

Check out our pdf on Issuu.com

2010-11-05T23:30:00.002-04:00

To celebrate the six stories we nominated for the Pushcart Prize we've produced a PDF (nothing too fancy) featuring the authors' work. Check it out at http://issuu.com/patricktrotti/docs/pushcart_pdf

Puschart Prize Nominees

2010-10-27T14:56:00.003-04:00

After much careful deliberation, and anxiety, I've chosen the six nominees to represent (Short) Fiction Collective in the upcoming annual Puschart Prizes. The nominations are signed, sealed and delivered!

The following are the nominees:

"Guess Who's Coming Out to Dinner" by Jack Logan
"Vince's Woman" by Kent Cooper
"Train Wreck" by Allison Fine
"Planet Rain" by CC Long
"Clash" by Drew Wilcox
"You" by Nathan Fuller

You can read their entire stories by checking out our archives on the right hand side of the page. Once again congrats to those selected and here's hoping for inclusion in the anthology!

100th story Contest!

2010-09-22T00:47:00.001-04:00

(Short) Fiction Collective is proud to celebrate our 100th story! In order to do so we've set up a writing contest. Don't worry, no entry fees! So here's the deal, send up to 3 short stories (no romance or sci-fi please) of no more than 5,000 words each (email above.) Contest ends on November 1st. Winner will be announced in mid November. If you're selected you'll have your story published on the site, a hundred dollar check mailed to you, a few randomly selected books from the Editor's private library, and eternal bragging rights. If you don't win, don't despair because when we re-open the site for regular submissions in January of 2011 (we need a break for the holidays after all!) all of the stories that weren't selected will be up for publication (no promises though.) No lose situation so don't miss out! We look forward to reading your submissions.

“How Norm Larsen Saved My Face” by Aaron G. Lenza

2010-09-21T01:44:00.000-04:00

When I was eight-years-old my Italian mother coerced my four siblings and I to go to church every weekend, a chore I scorned because I would rather be making mud forts in my suburban New York neighborhood. I only remember one day of being eight-years-old.

It was a breezy Sunday afternoon in June. My father was entertaining business clients at our home with my mother. I had missed Saturday’s mass with the rest of my family because I was exploring the remains of a burnt down hospital with a girl I loved, but without a watch. My oldest brother, Anthony, who just got his license and a white Jeep Cherokee, was innocently sentenced to cruel and unusual punishment: to bring me to church.

My mother phoned Josie, a seventy-eight-year-old Albanian woman who read at church.

“Make sure they don’t walk out after communion, I’m counting on you Josie, you’re the only other parishioner I can trust,” said my mother while I was listening in on another telephone in my house.

Then I heard Josie say in broken English, “If run, the Holy Spirit will enter my legs, and I will make great chase after the donkeys.”

Ralphs Ices was out of the picture. We actually had to attend the service. As soon as the last notes of the piano rang out, we made a run for it. We pushed through hordes of parishioners to get to the large wooden doors. I forgot about the holy water, but remembered to snatch a free bumper sticker on the way out, as Father Terry advised in his weekly announcement.

When my brother and I embarked in his Jeep he saw the sticker I took and said stoically to me, “If you put a bumper sticker that says I heart St. Sylvester’s Parish on my new jeep, I’m going to give your body an Indian sunburn.”

My plan was foiled, so I needed a backup. I had been idolizing Jim Carrey and the weird things Jim would do to himself in his movies. So, I thought to myself WWJD? I took the backs off the bumper sticker and slapped it over my face. I turned to my brother and screamed, “Kabooooooo, is there something on my face?” We laughed wildly for a minute. One minute and nine seconds later, I realized that the adhesive was setting into my baby face. I panicked. I started screaming again, but in anguish this time. Since my brother couldn’t see my expressions, he thought I was still trying to be a comedian.

Anthony laughed more and told me to knock it off. I tore at my face, but the giant Roman Catholic sticker wouldn’t budge. It was almost as if the power of Pope John Paul II and 70 years of abstinence was raging inside the adhesive. With my eyes, nose, and half my mouth covered, breathing was difficult and my hysteria wasn’t helping. My brother realized what was happening and adopted a lead foot. He never drove so fast into our driveway.

Anthony ran me right into my father’s scotch and peanuts schmoozing party with me over his shoulder. My mother started crying. My dad dropped his glass of 12-year-old scotch. The guests were confused. My sisters started laughing. My brother couldn’t explain.

My parents ran hot water over my face in a large utility sink for an hour. The bumper sticker’s edges frayed, but the entire thing wouldn’t budge. Then I was maneuvered into the shower like a fish after an oil spill. I lost my hysteria and turned into a limp piece of hopeless shit. I thought I would be “sticker boy”, a weird Catholic mutant for the rest of my existence.

My father charged into the garage, over to the darkest, grimiest corner to find the greasy can of WD-40 that was always sitting there.

Papa shouted, “AARON, CLOSE YOUR EYES!”

I heard an aerosol can spray and then I could see again. My father walked back into the living room and said to his clients, “WD-40 claims to have 200 and more uses. I just found out what #201 is.”

The WD-40 experience proved to my father’s clients that he was the cool, calm, and resourceful family man built for the job.

My mother eventually stopped crying the next week, after she accepted the fact that I didn’t have eyebrows anymore. I got made fun of everywhere I went that summer. I never did watch another Jim Carrey movie again.

The story gets told at weddings, baptisms, bars, bar miztvas, and funerals. Every time it’s mentioned I thank that son of a gun, Norm Larsen, for inventing WD-40.

Today, twelve years later, my eyebrows couldn’t be bushier.

“The Hammer” by Michael Henson

2010-09-20T11:26:00.000-04:00

Under the walls, the bluedark lights, and the clouded half-moon of Main Street, a boy stood with an uplifted hammer in his hand. He was face to face with a parking meter, with his face very stern. A moment before, as the boy stood at the corner, he had swung the hammer at his side like a lantern. A moment before that, he had pulled it from his belt. Now, the hammer hovered near the head of the meter like a wasp.

It was a cold, windless, mid October night. In spite of the cold, others, still caught in their summer habits, sat out talking on the hoods of cars or on benches in front of stores shut down for the night or on lawn chairs brought down from apartments above.

A pair of men, gone limp from long hours and cheap wine, hunkered on a stone stoop worn smooth and low by the shoes of many decades. Their elbows rested on their knees and their hands dangled stony and useless between them. They were the only ones who watched the boy.

It was a tiring, mid-week hour. In minutes, most of those now sitting would leave the streets for the rooms above, some of whose windows were already dark, some of whose windows flickered with television.

The boy and the meter stood the same height and, but for the hand that held the wavering hammer, the boy was as still and erect as the meter. He barely even blinked. But the muscles of his brow tightened as he stared into the passive steel face and glass eye of the meter.

The men on the stoop silently noted the creased brow of the boy and the threat of the hammer. Their own brows tightened as they pondered this thing.

*

In Cincinnati, the parking meters of Main Street run to the south in two lines, dozens to the block, hundreds all told, past the shops and the tenements, past the courthouse with its great stone face, past the blind and massive downtown buildings, down toward the Ohio River. To the north, there are only a few dozen more meters before Main Street runs up into the hill and stops. To the west and east, more meters run along the parallel streets and the cross streets, each with the same dial face and the same coin slots, each with the same glass eye.

*

The two men on the stoop had been sharing a bottle of wine for some three hours, starting from the time they had gotten off work. New in town, they were working temporary labor. As the people poured through the streets from the downtown offices on their way out to the suburbs, the men had settled onto the stoop with a loaf of bread, a package of baloney, and the pint of wine. The swinging sign above them read, MOUNT MORIAH MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH, and on certain nights, the storefront rocked with song, testimony, and preaching. But this was not the night, and the men were left to themselves on the stoop.

The wine and the baloney were gone, but half the loaf of bread was still tied in its plastic bag.

One man counted out the last of their change. “Clarence,” he said, “We got us a problem.”

Clarence said nothing. He had rolled up a slice of the bread and was eating it slowly and grimly.

“If we don’t get paid tomorrow, we’re done in.”

Clarence nodded.

“We don’t have nothing left now for breakfast. Nothin but this loaf of bread you’re eatin out of.”

Clarence nodded again, but the man with the change could sense that he was nodding out of no real interest.

“Look at that boy, Paul, “ Clarence said. He nodded again, this time to point out the boy at the meter. Paul followed Clarence’s eye to the spot across the street where the boy slowly swung the upright hammer.

“That boy’s about to do some damage, I reckon,” Paul said.

Clarence said nothing. He was not entirely fuddled with wine and he wanted to watch this thing closely. Paul, further gone, stopped counting and stared also. The loose change was spread out on the sidewalk in front of him, a small galaxy of silver and copper coins.

The boy had by then begun to tap, almost gently, on the glass of the meter.

*

The hammer was his father’s, taken from his father’s tool box, taken in spite of his little sister’s warning. “He’ll tear you up if he knows you got that hammer.” The toolbox was in the kitchen, in its place near the door to the fire escape stairs.

She had seen him go to the toolbox with a swagger. He kicked the box, then hunkered down to pop it open.

The hammer rested among the ratchets and wrenches and sockets -- the gray treasures of the box. It was a ball peen hammer, its shaft and head gone dark with much handling, the corners of it nicked and blunted by beating against the stubborn underparts and innerparts of cars.

The girl cupped her hand against her mouth as she watched her brother pull the hammer out and hold it aloft as if it were something from a legend. He tested its smack against the palm of his hand. Three times.

“Awww,” she said. “He’ll find out. He’ll kill you.”

The boy held it upright by the end of the handle and swung it back and forth for the feel of it, to test it against the tendons of his wrist and the grip in his fingers. It made him feel stronger to swing it.

He had already considered tossing it back into the box and closing the lid, but she said, “Awww, he’s gonna find out.” That stiffened him. He stood just a little taller.

“Fuck him,” he said. He inserted the hammer sword-like into his belt and went to the door.

“Awww, you cussed,” she said.

She followed him out onto the fire escape. “He’s gonna find out,” she shouted down the stairs. “He’s gonna find out.”

*

The night air on the back stairs was cool, crisp as new paper. Halfway down, it stopped him for a moment. The stairs led down to an alley. Similar black iron fire escapes led from a whole row of buildings on either side down to the same dark alley with its boundary fences and its surface of rounded rainworn bricks and the blank wall bounding the opposite side. The half moon, half-hidden in cloud, gave little light. The lamp at the head of the alley was dark. He could just make out the dark plum of the lamp shade where boys had stoned out the bulb four nights ago. But he knew, even in the dark, the path he was to take, down among the garbage cans and engine parts of the back yard, through the gate, and down the alley to the corner.

He was stopped, for just a moment, by the snap of cold air across his face, by the bands of cold air on his arms, by the cold air, crisp as a bite of apple, that he felt in his lungs.

There was a forest-feel to that air. For just a moment, it threw him so that he did not know for sure where he was. It stopped him just long enough that he sensed his sister stepping to the door. Her shadow dimmed the light from the window. He heard her shout, “He’s gonna find out.” Then he started down the stairs again.

*

His father was a quick and angular man dressed daily all in gray and with hands gone gray at the knuckles and in the creases of his fingers. He had a blind left eye, crushed in the factory where he used to work. That meant he drew a check now and made a little money on the side doing valve jobs and replacing transmissions on the cars of the neighborhood. The cars were mostly older cars and had no need of computers and electronic monitors to set them right.

He said he liked it better this way, working the odd jobs, setting his own hours, now that their mother was gone. “I can keep a little better watch on these kids,” he would say. In the months since she had passed, he had set them a strict schedule. And he generally met them at school to walk them home and made sure they were fed and had their homework done before he went back out to work on whatever he had started.

Because of the eye, the boy felt his father had two faces. The good-eye face was the face of someone stirring beans or working on a motor or crossing the street. The brow and the creases around it moved and gestured. They backed up his words. He pointed with the eye; he directed people where he wanted them to go. The eye was one of his tools. When he was angry, the good-eye side was the one to watch out for.

His face on the shut-eye side was a little crumpled from the accident. The muscles had slackened a little so that the face seemed to sleep. The eyelid drooped halfway down across the blind eye so that all that was left was a dark slit and a dim glassy surface within it. The eye itself seemed to be not so much blind as sleeping. His mouth seemed to droop as well and, when his father smiled or cursed or told a story, the shut-eye side came with it to smile or curse or speak. But it came a little slowly. It seemed to drowse behind. It seemed to want to go backwards.

The shut-eye face was that of a man gone half asleep. Or drunk. Or listening closely to a song. Or dreaming some solemn, distant dream.

*

At the corner on Main Street, the boy looked toward downtown, then up toward the hill. For a moment, he thought of walking over toward Vine street or toward downtown, but decided better. It could be dangerous to go too far from Main Street alone, at night. Besides, if he went too far, he would never get back in time. He had no idea how long he really had, how long before his father got back home. In spite of his brave words to his sister, he did not want to get home late. He did not want to test his father.

There were lights at Topper’s Lounge, the only place on Main Street open at this hour. Every few minutes the door would open to let the music of the juke box spill out onto the sidewalk: country music, with a familiar, rock-steady beat and a familiar, neighborly voice. There were nights, he knew, when his father would go to the bar to sit in front of a cold beer gone warm and stare at the mirror while that music played. Both sides of his face would then seem to sleep. He would come in then and talk his father out of quarters for video games and for juke box songs of his own.

*

He liked to go with his father to work on cars. He liked the smell of grease and the problematic nodding and talking of the men around an open hood. He liked being asked by his father to hand him a tool and was proud of his knowledge of tools. But his father never let him come along on a school night.

“Hey, Daddy,” he had said. “Let me come with you.”

“You got to stay here and . . . “

“I aint got no homework. I done it all in school.”

“You got to stay here and watch your sister.”

“But she can go to Marcie’s.” Marcie was his aunt. “Let me . . . “

“This aint no little tune-up job. And I aint got time to run her out to Marcie’s this hour of a night. I got a chance here to make a little money . . . ”

“I can help. You know I can.”

His father made a sudden cut with his good eye and silenced the boy.

*

The boy was working his nerves tonight. All through supper, it had been pick, pick, pick. “These beans ain’t no good.” And: “Why don’t we get us cable?” It had been like that for days. Pick at this. Pick at that. Pick at this again. And now, he’d had it.

“You stay here, I said. And watch your sister.” He waited a moment to let that sink in. “And you’ll do whatever damn else I tell you to do.” He emphasized this last by pointing his finger and bearing down on the boy with his open eye.

“You hear me?” He looked at the boy so relentlessly that the boy fell back half a step.

The boy said nothing. He looked up at his father with all the hate he could crowd behind a mask of stone.

*

He’s gonna hit him, she thought. For sure this time, he’s gonna do it. She even thought she could see her father lunge forward. She even saw him fist up and unfist his hand.

*

That boy, he thought. He’s got to learn to mind. He looked down at the stony, hardset face of the boy and knew he would get nothing out of him. Not a yes sir nor even a sour I hear you. But at least he got no more lip. At least he had gained the boy’s silence.

He decided to let his point stand. “Now I’m gonna be workin over at Scanlon’s over off Sycamore. If you got trouble, come and get me. Otherwise, you stay right here.”

“But daddy . . . ” This time it was the girl.

He cut her off with a wave of his hand. “Now you mind,” he said. “You do what he tells you to do and if I aint back in time for bed, you go on to bed just like he tells you.”

“But daddy I wanted to get ... ”

“You want a lot of things, honey, but Daddy’s got to go out and earn us some money. So you mind your brother.”

He looked over to the boy as if to underscore his original command and met the boy’s stolidly defiant, silent face. Then he pulled his coat off the back of a chair and said, “You can watch TV til nine thirty. After that, you be in bed.”

Then, for no good reason, except to know he still had some power over the boy, he set two words as he would set a nail, then tapped them down with a nod and a sharp look from his good eye.

“You hear?”

The boy stared silent at the wall.

“You hear me, boy?”

The boy felt as if his father had shaken him by the shoulder, the words were so muscular and definite. He nodded quickly, to avoid being shaken again, and hoped that by nodding he had not broken down his stonewall stance. His father was taking his measure. His good-eye side was all scrutiny and puzzle.

*

Her father hitched his coat up onto his shoulders and reached for the door.

“Daddy, your tools.” She pointed to the tool box by the door.

“It’s okay, honey. Scanlon’s got all the tools we’re gonna need.”

“You ought to let me come along to help.”

When is he gonna let up? he thought. Fury rose up, then subsided. He struggled to remember that the boy was having a hard time, that he needed patience. The boy looked suddenly very small and fragile and yet hard as diamond. Fiercely pouting, arms folded, the boy seemed even smaller than his age, as if a younger child had suddenly broken out of the shell of the boy.

A memory, quick and painful as the blade of a knife: the boy and his mother, together in a park, or maybe down home. Years ago, a snapshot kind of memory, full of grass and smiles: She held the boy close. Cheek by cheek, they smiled toward him. Even in the black of white of his memory, light danced around their faces.

In a moment, that memory would have flooded and sunk him. He turned, to keep the boy from seeing the welling in his good eye. He coughed, to clear his voice.

*

She had been hit by a car as she came home from work. It was awful, awful to remember it, so he rarely did. For two nights, she had lain in a hospital bed wrapped up in feeding tubes and electrical scanners. At first, they had given him some hope. The nurses smiled when they came into the room. The scanners zigged-zagged back and forth in strong green lines across the screen. For two sleepless nights he had traded on that hope. He stayed up, hour on nervous hour, watching those green lines and listening for a word and watching for a flutter in her hands. She spoke not a word nor made a sound, but the strong green lines skittered up and down. He slept in a chair where he could watch her and the screen. If he woke in the middle of the night, the lines still skittered sharply, up and down, up and down. He listened. No sound. Then he drifted back into a stiff sleep.

Two days. Two nights. Then she quit on him. The darkening of the room called him up out of his sleep. The green line had flattened across the screen. He struggled up out of the stiff chair and felt a flutter near his face like the wing of a bird or a moth. Quickly, he found and pressed the call button and, while he waited for the nurse, felt the moth-like thing hover near. He took her hand; it was light as a leaf. The nurse rushed in and he backed away. The room felt heavy as stone.

*

When he told the children, the girl balled up her fists in her eyes. She leaned against him and sobbed as he stroked her hair. The boy drew himself up ramrod straight. He stood stock still like a soldier and stayed like that all through the days of visits and funeral. Some days, he could still catch the boy standing at attention, soldier-straight, rigid as a pole.

It had been two months. But only two months. He leaned down and put his hands on his knees to talk to the boy.

“Son,” he said. “Just do what you’re told. One way or another we’ll make it through this.” He always figured you had to talk to him like this, man to man. It had always worked before. To lean down and talk straight to him had always softened him.

But the boy turned to stare at the wall. He touched him on the shoulder but the boy would not turn. He kept the hand on the shoulder, just to hold for a moment that brittle memory, but the boy tried to shrug him off. With that shrug, the anger rose up in him again. That boy’s still tryin to show his ass, he thought. He was tired of fooling with him now.

“You just do what you’re told, “ he said. “I can’t worry about that transmission and you too.”

The boy rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.

The father stood up. “You make sure you're here when I get back.”

The boy said nothing. He crossed his arms on his chest. He made a small toss with his head.

He scoffed. But he said nothing.

*

She was glad her father was gone. It meant no more standoff and no more shouting. She thought that, with her father gone, her brother might watch TV or play checkers with her. The thought of it made her feel warm and safe. When Daddy and her brother argued, she wanted to hide; she wanted to crawl into a closet or a back room. Sometimes, when they argued, she clenched shut her eyes and clapped her hands to her ears and found a dark and a silence that were just like those of a closet.

Tonight, with her brother here, she would be treated special. I’ll make him play cars with me, she thought. He always argued and complained, but he always played with her. Then later, if her father still was not yet home, they could snuggle under a blanket and watch TV.

Her hope died when she saw her brother’s hard face. He had swelled his chest and stuck out his jaw. He watched the door long enough that he could hear his father’s footsteps clatter to the bottom of the back stairs. Then he walked up and threw a karate kick to the door. It banged in the frame and rattled the glass. She was sure her father heard it (and was sure he meant his father to hear it) and knew her father had stopped mid-stride in the middle of the yard to listen, curse, and go on. When her brother came round for a second kick, his fury changed. He seemed to smile, a sneaky sort of smile that made her worry.

“What’re you lookin at?” he snapped at her.

The taunt raised her hackles. “You,” she snapped back. “Who you think?”

But he had already turned past her to the spot by the door where his father kept his tools.

*

“Paul,” Clarence nodded toward the boy across the street. “What do you reckon that boy’s tryin to do with that hammer?”

Paul watched more closely for a moment. He had to squint sharply to see through the vapors of the wine.

“That boy’s fixin to break open that parkin meter,” Paul said. “That’s what he’s doin.”

“Nah.” Clarence shook his head. “Look at how he’s tappin on it. Just peckin on it like somebody peckin at the door.”

Paul peered again. “It don’t look like he’s doin anything,” he said, “that’s any concern of mine.”

The boy tapped slowly and silently, so slow and regular and clock-like that Clarence thought for a moment to check the rhythm against his watch, which he pawned two towns ago but still missed for its loud regular tick and for the feel of it like a pet on his wrist.

“Just look at him,” he said. “Now when have you ever seen a kid just tap like that? Look at the look on that boy’s face.”

“What he looks like to me is a boy that needs his tail whipped.”

Clarence paused for a moment before he spoke. He took another bite of the bread and chewed it slowly. “Well he might,” he said finally. “But he aint doin that meter no harm.”

“Yeah, well we’ll be pretty well harmed ourselfs if we don’t get us a bed for the night and somethin to eat in the mornin.”

“So what’s wrong with the mission?”

“Aint nothin wrong with it if you like sleepin on a concrete floor or an old metal chair, which at this time of a night is all you’re gonna get.”

“It beats this damn doorstep.”

They were silent for a moment as they considered their limited options. In that silence, Clarence’s thoughts went back across the street to the boy, still tapping so slowly, like clockstroke or heartbeat.

*

Each meter is full of levers, wheels, cogs, and springs. Each meter has a wind-down timer that clocks down the minutes with a near-silent grind. Each meter, to catch the coins, holds a locked-down cylinder the size of a can of vegetables. Each meter holds up a red flag that says EXPIRED. Each meter hides a yellow flag printed with the word VIOLATION.

*

The girl called his name down the stairs but her brother did not hear. He’ll be back, she thought. He knows he better be back. She saw his shadow when he opened the gate to the alley and thought to call him again, but her voice had suddenly become too heavy to move. She could not budge a sound from it.

She felt cold standing out on the steps, but hesitated to shut the door until she could guess by his footstep that he was out to the alley and had turned up Fourteenth to Main. As long as she was out on the fire escape, she could still feel tied to her brother. She knew what she might feel once she shut the door.

When finally she did shut the door, it seemed that the room had suddenly darkened, as if, somehow, the lights of the kitchen were darker than the darkness that was out on the porch, as if she had been swallowed. She was scared; she felt lonely.

I’ll tell, she thought. He’s supposed to stay here with me. She imagined her father returning and her brother sitting with his head down. She would point to him with a sneer and tell: He left and took your hammer with him. And then she could watch him get a whipping.

The brave thought kept her from tears for a moment, but the tears did come, and she cried all through the dishes and the wiping of the kitchen table and she cried as she set out her school books on the table for in the morning. And he don’t even have his homework done, she thought.

Her tears were finished by the time she decided she could watch TV. So she left the light on over the sink, went into the living room, turned on the set, and settled onto the hide-a-bed.

The living room was dark. She liked it when the only light was the light from the TV screen.

The hide-a-bed was where she slept at night, so she had her pillows and stuffed animals. In minutes, she had taken her pillow to the floor. She flopped forward into her pillow and leaned on her elbows. After the first commercial, she sat up on her knees, moved another foot closer, and hugged her pillow like a bear.

As the minutes ran down, she kept that position and inched herself closer and closer until she was nearly face to face with the bright screen.

Light from the television flowed across her face and shoulders.

*

Paul looked at the span of money and shook his head. “We wouldn’t be in this spot if you’d knowed how to keep your mouth shut, you know.”

Clarence took another bite of bread and chewed it like a duty.

“Will you tell me, why in the world, with us out here about to starve to death . . .”

“We aint about to starve.”

“Right. We got a half a loaf of bread and a belly full of baloney and wine. Anyway, can you tell me why, knowin we aint got but a shadow between us and the gutter, and knowin you got us run out of the last four jobs we had in the last four weeks, you had to tell that foreman to go fuck himself?”

“He deserved it.”

“Maybe he did. But I don’t deserve not knowin how I’m gonna find work tomorrow.”

Clarence spat.

“I mean, it’s like you get to workin real steady and things get going good and it gets to lookin like we might be able to get a little ahead, you got to go mouth off to a boss.”

Clarence was watching the boy across the street.

“Ever damn time.”

Paul noted that Clarence had his mind and eye on something else than his lecture, but went on. “It’s like some damn kid that’s . . . ”

“I been doin it since I was a kid. Teachers. Probation officers. Cops. Bosses. I can’t stand to have em dog me out.”

“You don’t have to let em dog you out. I’ll take the doggin out and you go on. Just so we can eat regular.”

“Ever since I wasn’t no older than that boy over there, if I thought I was gonna get pushed into a corner, I’d come out fightin.”

“Your daddy needed to kick your butt a few times.”

Clarence was silent a moment. “He did kick it. A lot.”

“So did it do you any good?”

Clarence spat again, expertly, through a gap in his teeth. He leaned back against the church door and folded his arms so that Paul could know that he intended to talk no more about it.

Paul started to count out the money again. Clarence watched him for a moment, and almost said, You think you’re gonna come up with any more this time? but he scanned the street instead. The boy still silently tapped at the meter. Upstreet, at the corner, a man in gray work clothes and a ball cap stood with his fists on his hips, staring at the boy.

Somethin’s gonna happen now, he thought. Somethin’s gonna come to a head.

The man in gray shook his head. He watched the boy as if he wanted to take it in, as if he wanted to understand what he was seeing, as if he wanted to be sure what he was seeing.

When the man in gray seemed to fill up with an energy that was threatening and familiar, Clarence got up on his feet.

*

A meter is rigid as a sentinel. Motionless and metallic, its glass eye never shifts. But when the handle is turned and the money drops, its inward parts begin to click and hum. (You have to get close to hear it. You have to get your ear down to it.)

*

Clarence dusted the seat of his pants and walked (unsteadily, from the wine and from three hours of sitting in the cold) to the curb. He leaned against the nearest parking meter for a moment -- that moment that the boy stood hammering and the man stood watching.

Then he leaned back and looked at his own meter. He wanted to know what the boy wanted to see. He wanted to see what the boy was hammering at. He saw nothing in the face of that meter but lines and numbers, nothing in that face but an arrow, buried now inside its slot. He looked through the glass, past the numbered dial, straight through to the other side. The boy and his hammer were a blur, viewed through the scratches of years, the scale of minutes, and the distortion in the glass. He flipped the lever back and forth, so that it brought up the red flag and the yellow flag, and again, red flag and yellow flag, red flag, yellow flag, in the same heartbeat, clockstroke rhythm as the boy.

And maybe it was the wine or maybe it was the sitting in the cold or maybe it was some strangely other thing, but he suddenly began to understand (though he could not have put it into words) why the boy stood tapping at the glass. He even began to beat at the brow of the meter with the heel of his hand.

*

“You know the tool you need for that don’t you?” Scanlon nodded up toward the starter.

“What’s that?”

He and Scanlon had the car up on ramps. They lay under it with a trouble light. Already, they were cold. There was no way they could not be, lying on their backs on the cold alley floor where any scrap of wind would catch them.

Scanlon coughed and bent his hand into a C-shape. “That starter wrench of yours,” he said.

He stuck his nine-sixteenths up into the space between the starter and the bell housing again. He could get the box end of the wrench on the bolt, but lacked room to turn it. Silently, he cursed.

“I reckon you’re right, “ he said. “And that starter’s got to come off. Aint nothin else’ll do it.” He pulled himself out from under the car and tossed the straight wrench into Scanlon’s tool box. He had only half a heart for the job anyway, after his scrap with the boy.

“Well we can’t get nothin done under here but to catch a cold,” Scanlon said, sliding out from under the car.

“I’ll go get it,” he said.

He wanted to go anyway. He wanted to check on the kids.

*

“Who’s been in this tool box?” she heard her father call. She felt a pang of guilt; if she had closed the box he might never have known. She pulled the blanket closer around her. Her father muttered as he rattled through the wrenches, sockets, and screwdrivers in the box. From where she sat in the light of the television, she could see only one stretch of kitchen wall, but the small light from the lamp over the sink threw his shadow large against it. It grew even larger when he found his tool, closed and snapped shut the box, then stood.

The wall exploded with shadow as he came toward the door to her room. For just a moment, the shadow hardened into his black form in the doorframe. He switched on the light. He looked at her with his good eye, then scanned the room.

“Where is he?” He turned his good eye to the wall when he said it, so that she could only see the crushed up side of his face.

When she did not answer, he brought his good eye around. She did not want to say the words, so she nodded briefly toward the back door. He followed her nod, as if he expected to see the boy, then looked back at her.

“That little son of a bitch,” he whispered. He slapped the c-shaped wrench against his thigh. “I’m gonna wring . . . ” he whispered again. He looked to the girl. “You mean he left you here by yourself after . . . ” He did not wait for her to answer. She was glad of that; she had no idea what to say.

“By God,” he said. “I’m gonna . . . ” He put one hand to the door frame and let his head tap against it lightly for a moment. Then he lifted himself off and stepped back toward the door. “You stay right here til I get back,” he said back over his shoulder. “I’m gonna pull that boy in here by the ears.”

He had turned his good eye side around to say it. Then he was out the door and onto the clanging fire escape. She heard him stalk down the stairs. She heard him slam the wooden backyard gate.

She shivered a little and pulled her head down into the blanket so that only her face was showing. On the television it was a commercial. A line of cars crossed a western desert while someone sang a song.

*

The boy stood out on the corner of Main Street with the hammer in his belt. He looked to the left and to the right, down Main Street to the south and up Main Street to the north.

None of his friends were out. He had hoped he would see someone so he could show off the hammer and say, I took it out of my old man’s tool box and he could say He tried to make me baby-sit but I told him where to stick it. But none of his friends were out.

He made himself glad of it. If his friends were out, he would have to stay out, for pride, until after his father came home. There would be hell to pay if he made it back too late.

He looked again, left and right, just to be sure. There were only a few old men and some of the women who stay out to talk on the street at night. He felt lonely for a moment, with no one out to listen to his story, with no one out to hear him say, My dad’s a dick, man. No one to hear him complain, Man, he just expects too much.

He could see only the people on lawn chairs and on the fenders of cars and the two winos on the front steps of the church.

He looked around again. He knew he had to get back; he knew he would be in trouble if he did not. But he wanted to do something before he went back. He wanted to feel the weight of iron and wood in his hand.

So he drew the hammer from his belt. He admired the nicked, pitted and blunted head of the hammer, its flat head side and its round head side, and the wooden shaft, its grain darkened with handling. Its weight surprised him when he tested its smack against his other hand, so he gripped it higher.

Then he held it up in front of him, a lantern, a sword.

*

The belly of a meter is money.

Twist the knob and the meter swallows coins. It drops them over the triggers that set the timer and into the steel cylindrical gut at its core.

The heart of meter is time.

The swallowed coins trigger the wind-down clock in the breast of the meter. The springs, pulled tense by the twist of the knob, slowly give up their force. The seconds tick off reluctantly. They hold on like fingers on a cliff.

The soul of a meter is memory. The meter remembers the coins and remembers the twist of the knob.

The meter is the crossing of time and money and memory.

*

He carried the hammer upright, in striking position. He wanted to break something. Anything, it did not matter. Just so long as he could get back before his father came home.

He looked at the plate glass window in the front of Grubb’s Furniture. The window was tall. Each panel was slender. Each was painted with the name of the store. He pondered cracking out the center panel at the bottom so he could watch it cascade like a brittle waterfall. The hammer waved itself in anticipation.

But Mister Grubb was a nice man. He had sold them a bunk bed on credit back when his cousin came to stay.

The hammer, still waving, moved him away from Grubb’s window and over to the curb. A car window? Here was a wide Buick, with a half acre of windshield, ready like a crop of corn. He had seen a windshield shatter before into little square beads. There were rows of cars here, parked for the night just like the Buick. But there were too many watchers for something so large.

He was ready to give up on Main Street, ready to find something on the alley or side street. But the hammer pulled him from the fender of the Buick over to the meter beside it. The meter! It was as if he had never seen a meter before. The meters were there every day, silent and stolid as a row of trees, never changing but for the arrows and flags under the glass lid. Now, suddenly, the meters took new form, as if each were a human face with a metallic jaw and a single eye and a wide glass brow. He stepped up to the meter in front of him and let the hammer wave in front of it like a dowser’s wand.

He felt power and satisfaction to wave the hammer just inches from the glass. Just to feel that power, he let the hammer wave several long moments before he tested the meter with just a tap. The meter shook inside. The money, the arrow, the flags, the inner springs and gears, all shook in a metallic jiggle and complaint. He hit again. Same sounds. And again. And over. The impulse to smash was gone. Suddenly, the shaking was what he wanted to hear. He hit until he found a pace at which the jiggling sounds from one blow would continue into the next. The meter began to hum and rattle. The hum and rattle vibrated down the shaft of the hammer and into his arm and into his whole body so that he felt his own gears and springs vibrate. He and the meter hummed and rattled and vibrated together. He could have gone on for an hour:

But then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He knew it was the hand of his father and knew that the curses that rained down on him (little sonofabitch . . . give you a job to do and you . . . deserve to . . . little smartass son of) were his father’s curses and knew that the fist that cuffed him about the ears (so that he could barely make out the words of the curses) was the fist of his father.

He felt the hammer go snatch from his hand so he ducked his head between his arms and felt the wood shaft drumming on his shoulders.

“Daddy. Daddy. No, Daddy. I’m sorry. Daddydaddydaddy.” He tried to pull away, but his father’s grip was true as a leg-hold trap so all he could do was run around in a circle pulling his father’s thumps and curses behind him like a cart. He tried to see out, but could not. It was like looking through a rainstorm from the flap of a tent.

Then suddenly that rain lifted. The blows and curses stopped. He waited before he looked up, not yet trusting this reprieve. When he did look up, he saw his father face to face with the stranger from the stoop of the church.

“Go easy, buddy,” the man said. The man may have said other things as well, but that was the thing the boy could hear: Go easy. Still bent under his father’s fist, the boy craned up to look from man to man. It was as if there were two faces in a mirror --the same creased gray ball cap, the same silver at the jaw. But the man had just one set face, and his father two: the good-eye side with its hard lines and its drawn-down anger, the shut-eye side with its heaviness and sag. The angry side grew even tighter. For a moment, he thought his father would draw back and crack the man with the hammer. He felt the impulse in the muscles of the hand on his neck.

Instead, his father stepped back, and even seemed to nod. He seemed to darken across his shut-eye side. The grip on his neck was still tight, but his father let him unbend himself and stand at his full height.

His father looked at the meter, then at the man in the ball cap, then pulled his son away.

*

Clarence watched the man drag the boy down the street and to the corner where they turned and disappeared.

He felt tired all of a sudden, more tired than he had been all night, and more sore in the muscles. And more drunk. He wanted to sleep it off. He wanted to be out of the cold.

Paul watched him cross the street. “You done your good deed for the night,” he said.

Clarence spat. “Let’s find us a place,” he said.

*

The father kicked the door shut behind him and loudly pitched the hammer into the open tool box.

“You get your smart ass into bed and don’t let me hear another word out of you.” He released the boy’s collar, gave him a shove, and watched the boy, still hunkered over, toddle toward his room.

The TV was shut off; the girl had pulled out the hide-a-bed and pulled the covers up over her. Was she asleep? She made no sound. He could imagine her tensed like a rabbit under the covers and felt shamed at the thought of the curses she had heard and the angry clatter of his tools.

He slumped into a kitchen chair and leaned against the table. He heard the boy pull open his dresser, then heard him pull off his clothes and plunge into his pajamas. He was tired now; he had avoided feeling tired because he knew he had Scanlon’s job to do. But now he was tired; he had decided to forget Scanlon and his job. He had no more heart tonight for late-night work in the cold. His life, which until now he had handled like work coming down the factory line -- jobs to be worked off one by one -- now seemed hopelessly hard. And he was tired now, all of a sudden, of split knuckles, heating bills, baloney sandwiches, rounded bolts, cars with ragged floorboards and grumbling mufflers. He was tired of notes from teachers and tired of moving his car at seven in the morning to beat the meter man.

The half moon shed its half-light across the floor. He felt himself begin to doze. He began to to sway with exhaustion.

He put his forehead against the palm of his hand and let it prop him up against the table. In doing so, he drew his hand down over his eyes so that he covered both good eye and shut eye and he was in darkness. It was a gesture he made night after night. On many of those nights, he fell stone asleep in his chair, his eyes both blinded and covered and his head propped up by his hands.

Some nights, he woke in the deep hours, looked around him (lights on, mice rattling under the sink, windows black with the darkness of three in the morning), then limped, stiff and lonely, to his bed.

But this night, before he could drop into that sleep, he was worried out of it. Something fluttered at the margins of his attention. Something brushed against his hands. He opened his eyes and the fluttering was gone. A moth? Perhaps. He looked around the dim-lit kitchen with its neat stacks of plates and orderly boxes of breakfast cereal and remembered that he needed to check on the children. For all he knew, the boy had opened a window and snuck down the fire escape. So he stood and moved unsteadily toward their rooms.

The girl was asleep now for sure. Her face, in the dim illumination of the nightlight, was silvery and innocent. Her mouth hung open and slack; her hair curled over her eyes. He adjusted the blankets across her shoulders and she brought her hand up as if to protect herself. It was a quick, reflex, cricket-claw movement. He watched, and she relaxed again.

The boy’s room was in shadow. He heard nothing, so he checked. The boy lay tightly doubled in his bed. His clothes were piled at the foot of the bed and his jacket thrown across the seat of a chair.

He thought at first that the boy too was asleep; he was about to turn back to the kitchen. But, suspicious, he listened a moment. The boy’s breathing was not the deep and loose sound of someone sleeping. It was a sneaking, bare-breath sound, the breathing of someone who does not want to be heard. He could see by the tautness in the arch of the boy’s back and the grip of his fist on his blankets that the boy was awake; he was only pretending to sleep.

Good, he thought. At least he aint out runnin the streets no more tonight. He looked up and down across the child’s tense form as if he could nail him down to the bed with his eye, then stepped to the window. Main Street was empty now. The sitters and watchers had all gone in or gone on. Main Street seemed silent and settled. The stranger who had confronted him had disappeared.

He was glad of that. It made him tired just to think of it. I reckon I was out of hand.

The thought brought a flash of heat to his ears and a lumpish feeling to his bowels. It was such a heavy, foot-in-the-gut feeling that he was dragged down with it onto the edge of the boy’s bed.

He felt his good eye grow heavy again. In a reflex, he rubbed his face and eye to clear his sight and look again at the unsleeping boy.

Maybe I’m too hard on him, he thought. The boy was still tensed and sprung, his eyes clamped shut.

Maybe we can talk, he thought. But no words came. No words could come. They were choked up in him like a pile of old coins.

He knew that without the words, there was no point in sitting here. He should move; he should make himself ready to sleep. Instead, he sat, heavy in the gut, foolish and mute, listening to the steady, slow, rabbit-tense breathing of his son.

The night was by now so silent that he could hear the distant sounds of trucks on a highway, dogs barking, a wavering siren.

He wavered in his seat on the boy’s bed, his good eye drooping, his thoughts gone flat. He was dropping into sleep like a big-wing bird.

Again, he felt the pestering presence, hovering and persistent. It fluttered near his brow. He raised his hands against it, as if to protect his damaged face, to shelter his orphaned eye. He rose, half-blind, with his hands before his face, staggered from the children’s room to his own, and fell into his bed fully clothed. He lay long enough with his hands before his face that, finally, he slept. When he woke, at five in the morning, he woke from a sleep haunted by grief and apprehension. And for the first few moments, in the half-light from the window, memory and fear so beset him that he was nearly pressed down. But he pushed back, roused himself, and began to think: what to make for breakfast? which school clothes for the children?

“Coffee Shop Revelation” by Melanie Montano

2010-09-17T13:20:00.001-04:00

Every Monday afternoon at half past four, I wait for her at the Starbucks on Greenwich Ave; four D-train stops from the university where she studies political science. As I’m partial to the ‘dollar and change’ newsstand coffee, I can’t understand her addiction to overly-priced chai tea lattes. Yet she favors this franchise’s crinkled velvet couches, colored burgundy, like the lip stain she wears when we duck into unnamed pubs during our Friday evening rendezvous.

I pulled out my mobile to check the time, realizing she was running late. We had spoken earlier to confirm our plans, and considering the arrangement maintained throughout two consecutive seasons, I blamed the unremitting downpour for her delay. Goddamn rain. I’m always amazed how time is placed on pause whenever bad weather surfaces. Upon showers or snowfall, traffic assists to slow down the wheels of regularity. Routine is halted and excuses for tardiness are made to those who are still prompt, despite life’s inconveniences. Categorically, I’m just one of those punctual saps.

I gazed out the rain-smeared windows to observe the daily grind in motion. People-watching has always been a pleasurable pastime of mine, although Camilla finds such behavior bizarre, and often times, unsettling. Even so, there’s something novel about an anonymous face and the urgency, or indifference, of one’s stride. Each passerby co-exists without relations to one another, all while sharing the same pavement. I chalk up my appreciation for nameless folk as part of the innate writer in me, but Camilla just rolls her eyes and calls me an ‘absurd scholar.’ She does not engage in conversations which stray from her own opinions.

I was hoping to catch a glimpse of her vermillion galoshes as I examined life through the pane, but all I saw were strange faced people. Most were shielding themselves from abrasive winds and cursing Mother Nature for their puddle-sopped footwear. There were a scattering of businessmen competing for popcorn hued taxicabs, waving manic arms to hail a dry haven. Some people hid under dampened newspapers and briefcases, while uncooperative umbrellas forced others to dash under a shrouded fruit stand for temporary refuge.

I grew bored of waiting, and drifted away from the dampened scenes outside. I tried visualizing the pout upon Camilla’s lips as she would enter Starbucks, shaking out a taupe umbrella speckled with rain water. String bag slung over her right shoulder, she’d theatrically stomp her boots onto the muddied welcome mat, and pull out a silver thermos to fill up with her five-dollar fix. Upon paying, she’ll search for me among a sea of yuppie lawyers, sipping their Arabica blend while exchanging stock rises, even though I’ll be rooted in the same spot as the last six months. I already knew her champagne curls, routinely straightened every morning, had long coiled up after a brief encounter with the day’s moisture. I anticipated her irritability as she would plop onto the couch and grumble, “Look at this fucking hair.” My patience would require a few adjustment notches to accommodate her salty temper, as I’ve learned how the weather impacts her disposition. I have often prayed for sunny days.

Oddly enough, I find something disarming in Camilla’s frequent mood swings. Call it a love-illness of sorts, but I spark inside whenever her tepid eyes transmute into embers during a frenzied dispute. One the evenings when her youth beckons a night of boozing, I suppress the urge to drive past the local bars in hopes of spotting her slight figure outside. It would kill my sleep if I caught her bumming a smoke from some frat boy as she teetered in those high, black boots.

The sound of holiday chimes jingled against a closing door and rattled me from my daze. She entered breathlessly, pushing through a swarm of chattering women donned in aqua scrubs. Autopilot set in and I swiveled off the gold band, chubbed around my left finger. We both pretended the significance of vows didn’t encompass life’s deviations.

Camilla bypassed the line and darted toward the couches, quite uncharacteristic from her usual, grandiose routine. The rain had swallowed her from scalp to feet, and as she trailed water with each sloshing step, I noticed crimson veins streaking across the whites of her eyes. It was all different this time; her hastiness, the panic cemented to an ashen face. Before I opened my mouth to speak, she blurted out words that crucified my rationality:

“They know, professor. Everyone knows.”

“Old Dogs” by Diana Bloom

2010-09-16T23:07:00.000-04:00

“Call me back when you’ve got a moment, honey. I need your advice.”

Replacing the phone in my pocket and boarding the crosstown bus, which the driver has lowered for a man with a walker, I slip my card into the machine. I’m still not used to the yellow Metrocard with my photo on one side. The sound it makes is different, too. Settling into a single seat, I look again at the pearlized business card.

I’m on my way uptown from a Soho townhouse where I was called by a “Sylvia” the day before, asking me to come for an interview at nine today for a position teaching English to an employee. She calls back several times after talking with the boss to work out a good time for him. I’m told nothing more till I’m ushered in by a fellow in his twenties, then escorted upstairs by another young guy, who speaks without an accent. On my way, I pass a glassed-in office with three young women talking together. All of these kids are Asian. I hear what sounds like Japanese, but I’m not sure.

At the top of the stairs, I’m presented to a thirtyish Asian guy, kind of cute, who makes a slight but distinct bow and offers his hand but no name. I sit down opposite him, unasked, and learn that the posters all over the walls feature my potential students, a number of slender, very young, leggy girls in acrobatic poses, their mouths open in front of a huge crowd.

“You’ve heard of the Trixies?”

“Of course,” I fake, “but I don’t know much about them.” I assume that, like other singing groups today, they’re matching kids who don’t smile and whose music sounds more or less the same.

“You probably have a grandchild who knows the Trixies. They’re very famous all over the Asia, and we’re starting a campaign in U.S. They’ll be touring North America with Gian Bobi this fall, and we’re gonna publicize them all over U.S.”

I look at the gigantic speakers on either side of the huge keyboard behind his desk. The stuff is all cutting edge, and almost fills the small office, which is white like the rest of the townhouse, inside and out. On the right wall is a diploma from the Berklee College of Music, along with a photo of the man facing me standing with a ghoulish Michael Jackson. I learn that this man has trained the Trixies since they were 8, and that singers make more money from touring than from CD sales.

He really likes my credentials, which Sylvia found on the Web. He wants me to work daily one on one with each of the seven Trixies, whose English levels are different.

“Wanna cookie?” Standing up, he offers across the desk a large box of Pepperidge Farm.
On the card he now hands me, which I receive with both hands and peruse care-fully, I see that Mr. Kung is Korean —my bad (Azad taught me that one)-- and is some kind of VP at this PR firm. On learning I live in Manhattan, he asks if I can return today after two o’clock to meet the girls. They’re in English class now.

When I say I can’t make it later on, he asks if I can make it tomorrow, Saturday. He sees my doubtful look: “Then how about Sunday? You see, I’m lining up possibilities. I wanna start with you.”

I don’t want to seem reluctant once I’ve implied by my presence that I want the job.
Though my doubts are growing as he speaks.

Saturdays are my yoga and French classes, but I feel forced to say I’ll be out of town for the weekend, finally agreeing to come in Monday. Fact is, even that’s inconvenient. I have two regular Monday students.

He repeats that he does have other candidates, but wants the girls to see if they like me first. So Monday’s the latest he can do. He’ll be seeing the others after me.

They need enough English at their fingertips for interviews, so they don’t have to pause and translate every time they’re asked a question. “For example, when interviewer ask, ‘Who’s your favorite singer?’ right now they have to think before they can answer just one word, ‘Beyonce’.”

What he wants is a kind of workplace English. Done that before. Enable them to talk about pop culture. That’ll require some prep on my part. “Favorite boy band?” (cue): “Backstreet Boys.” “Favorite ice cream flavor?” (cue): “Raspberry swirl.” The Rs’ll be hard.

The handsome--and not badly built, either--Mr. Kung smiles, adding that they’re “real girls, they ride subway to their English class, even they have limo, and they all live upstairs, here,” he points upward, “in apartment with maid service, but they insist at doing own laundry themselves. You’ll like them.”

I know I would. And they’d like me. I’d be fine with the girls.

I decide to email him later. Now I just smile and nod, figuring we won’t speak again.

We never get to money talk. I’m not sure how he does that, since I seem to have been sort-of-hired, and he hasn’t asked if I have any questions. Normally, students ask what I charge, and companies make an offer.

I figure, since he manages to get it in that he’s bought the building, that he’ll make it worth my while to revise my life as I now know it. Or, despite the high-tech gear and hotshot stars, he’ll say his hands are tied, or he can get someone who’ll take less for the privilege of working with the Trixies.

But all this, I never learn.

On the bus home, I get a call. Since I’ve been using the cell on vibrate, I can’t always tell if it’s the phone or my innards rumbling. I hate it when people take calls on buses, but I pick up. It’s Donald, the second assistant, the one with the American accent, who ran after me as I was leaving to give me the CD. He’s wondering, in case I’m hired on Monday, can I start this week and work from 2 to 5 Tuesdays through Fridays?

“For how long?” I ask.

“As long as they need you.”

Pulling out my calendar—Estefan, Mei Ling, Sharon, Azad—I agree to come in from 2 to 5 each day, next Tuesday through Friday. I do this only knowing that when I get home I’ll email a polite rejection. (I can’t refuse on the bus.) Should I say I’m not the person they want for this job (which has saved face before for both parties), or the truth, that I have commitments, too, and can’t just desert my other students to dance to his tune?

That’s why I called Sol this morning, to see how to word things.

When I hang up (funny expression), I take out the booklet that comes with the CD and has lots of photos. The seven Trixies really are adorable, the oldest, he said, just 21, wearing the same pixie cuts, and thick eyelashes that make them look all alike. Petite, shapely, cleavage-free innocents.

I read, about the oldest, just turned 21: Onstage, Hyun is the hottest and funkiest member, but offstage she’s the big sister that all the members love and come to with their problems. … her maturity helps keep everyone in check.

I get home, and Sol has left a message. Though he has three faculty observations to write and a tenure decision to work on, he’s agreed to check my email before I send it.

“Your response sounds fine,” says Jung Ja, my friend and one of my earliest private students. I called her to avoid any cultural faux pas. “But if his English is that good, why don’t you just call him and speak directly? By the way,” she adds, clearly smiling on the phone, “get me their autograph!”

We laugh.

But I don’t feel comfortable calling. Before email, I was still mailed notes to people,

Then I take Marxy for her walk. She’s our baby. She’s getting old, fifteen human years. We’ve had her since the year after we moved in together.

…

At dinner, Sol serves a Pad Thai. “Why don’t you just tell him it’s not for you?”

“I feel as if I’d already accepted, though he did say he was seeing other candidates. ‘Lining up the possibilities. Time is money,’ he actually said.”

We laugh.

“Those four appointments next week sound like he’s made up his mind. I felt backed into saying we were going away for the weekend—we who never even stay out late because Marxy can’t be left alone. I couldn’t say no then. It was awkward, so I accepted, with the plan of contacting him later.

I was supposed to drop everything when he called. He had no idea I might have other work. I know it’s my fault that I didn’t say no then, but I just couldn’t. I barely got in a word, in fact.”

Sol laughs and puts his hand on mine, along with a bit of egg yolk. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to work with these Pixie Girls if you don’t want to. Let’s see what you wrote.”

…

“Looks good to me,” says Sol, pouring the espresso.

That night, I dream about the Trixies dancing to a slow waltz tune with Donald, Mr. Kung, and Sol. Why this job so concerns me, I don’t know. It feels wrong to refuse it once I’ve made a show of wanting it, even though Kung couldn’t care less. In my position, he’d have no scruples about “quitting” before he was hired.

Then I mentally review my email and I’m pleased. I’ve said it politely yet firmly, been appreciative yet assertive.

Dear Mr. Kung,
…good meeting you this morning...
…honored that you have considered me …. looking at my schedule, however, I see I was hasty in accepting the commitment next week when I spoke with Donald after seeing you, since this commitment would require that I make major changes in my previous obligations to other people.
I’m sorry, but for this reason I will have to regretfully cancel next week’s appointments and decline your offer.
Again, I very much appreciate….

…

The next morning, after Marxy’s walk, I log on, eagerly looking for his reply. And there it is, on top of my original message:

It's okay. Please reschedule with Donald. Thank you.

I have a good laugh. I never do learn who is Sylvia.

“Daily Walk” an excerpt from the novel "Saul’s Last Book" by Allison Fine

2010-09-15T08:52:00.000-04:00

Saul Lerner took his daily walk down Connecticut Avenue NW with his dog Barney in tow. Barney’s just a mutt, just a mutt, just a mutt (like me), he thought in rhythm with his feet. Someone he saw regularly at the dry cleaner’s (his name escaped him) stopped and petted Barney. The guy looked like he never cleaned an article of clothing in his life. He wore wrinkled jeans and a sweater the color of egg, with stains on it. Maybe his cousin owned the Dry Cleaner.

What kind of dog is that?

Oh—he’s an Arubian Cunuco, Saul told him.

A what? He looks like a mutt to me.

Well--that breed has a mutt appearance but believe me, he’s not. I’ve got the papers. He’s all Arubian Cunuco.

That’s great, the guy said and wandered on, wrinkled jeans and egg sweater with him.

Barney looked to be a cross between Spaniel and Lab, (more Spaniel than lab), with maybe a little sadness thrown in, but he tried to act like a poodle because two gorgeous Czechoslovakian poodles lived next door (the neighbors were Czech—the poodles came from France) and Barney wanted them badly. Barney couldn’t do anything about it—they took care of that years ago, but he tried anyway. The poodles disdained him—the snobs.

Saul and Barney stared in at the familiar shops they frequented for the last twenty-five years of Saul’s life and the ten years of Barney’s life. Things looked brilliant when Saul left the house until a crow crossed his path, sat on the sidewalk and shrieked at him. A good omen or a bad omen? Saul decided to find a book on Native American animism in the bookstore and find out. He wished he could figure out what crows were saying said when they screeched. A warning, or just a crow?

Storefronts changed over the years as chains bought out the independents, while others remained the same. Special haunts he visited regularly—the bookstore, grocery, the library, Levine School of Music (where he studied Jazz piano to no avail), the flower shop, the gift shop, the Melody Record Shop (he wrangled with the owner for perfect copies of vinyl records). All along the street he knew so well.

At Luna Books he found a book in the Tarot section. It explained Animal Medicine and the connection to the “great mystery” (Saul certainly thought of everyday life, while possibly frivolous, as a great mystery).

When you call upon the power of an animal, he read, you ask to be drawn into complete harmony with the strength of that creature’s essence. We all communicate through the common denominator of the creative force of Great Spirit, which lives inside the Great Mystery. The book had a long list of animals and he turned to Crow. Crow keeps sacred law, Crow bends the laws of the physical universe and “shape shifts,” a rare and unique ability. Few Adepts exist in today’s world, and fewer still have mastered Crow’s art of shape shifting. This art includes doubling, or being in two places at one time consciously, taking on another physical form, and becoming the “fly on the wall” to observe what happens far away.

Saul closed the book at this point because he felt actively alive in two places at one time: in the bookstore reading about it and back as a child in his mother Bessie’s kitchen begging for a scrap of kindness and getting marsh mellow cookies instead. These troubled childhood memories propelled him to buy the book, get a coffee and leave the store.

There must be more to life than how we live it, he thought as he passed The Pleasure Palace, an exotic woman’s clothing store he paused to stare at many times before. He never walked in. His Neurologist wife wouldn’t be caught dead wearing this kind of clothing and he did not envision himself as a cross dresser. Maybe one of his daughters? Not Natalie, the gay one who drove a truck for UPS. Pragmatic Marissa? Never. He stood in front of the window display mesmerized by the clothes splashed with color and texture draped on the mannequins. Mannequins. How weird, he thought, inhuman, cyborgs, tall, elongated—in no way like real women—although-- (he thought of Andrea and her lovely long torso), ideas like this drifted: women, bodies, power; men, sex. It always led to the same thing.

He remembered Andrea’s tango-y scent as he kissed her goodbye at the door and walked to the car. She stood at the screen and he almost wished they were newly weds so he could go running back to tell he they had to make love at once and work could wait. Hah. Work never waited. Still, he dreamed of pouring lotion pour le bebes all over her skin.

The Great Mystery of Sex! He exclaimed to himself as he stood in front of the window. No one bothered about him on the sidewalk. The neighborhood accepted Saul and Barney as part of the usual fixtures of the landscape--most of them rushed by with no discernibly functional purpose.

A down-to-earth man like me, he told himself, wouldn’t--but he immediately recognized how his mind excused itself. For so long he faked as a totally coherent man he began to believe it. In truth, his life careened along more as an experimental novel than a realistic one and for God’s sake, his consciousness roamed all over the place. His personal narrative ran toward the non-linear and life exploded daily, remarkably accidental. Maybe if he had a normal job that would change things but he doubted it. The Writer, The Professor; archetypes he felt comfortable with and knew, served as backdrops to the other stuff. The Other Stuff: more like pandemonium, he concluded. He liked the random quality of his days, anyway. He even accepted the Uncertainty Principle. The more precisely the position is determined the less precisely the momentum is known. How did this hook up with shape shifting? Saul wondered.

Looking into the dustbin of his imagination he found nothing there except excrement—the rubbish of thoughts he hoped to discard but really only stored somewhere safe for a moment such as this. The moment often required more than he had at his disposal. Sitting at the dining table every day, this morning, last night-- typing away at his latest book-- he’d been working on book after book for the last ten years-- different books but it always seemed like the same book in different shapes, sizes and colors—he pondered whether the imagination could possibly create tangible change in a writer’s reality. Can my characters leap off the page and come into my living room? The idea intrigued him. He had no desire to write science fiction, he just loved thrilling himself with his own thoughts. The horror of everyday life was that it was so uninspiring—he wanted to spice it up a bit, but he had no explanation for this kind of mental traveling, and secretly he found it impossible to consider it would find material realization. It was just a mind fuck--masturbation really, and who doesn’t need that once in a while? He had only minor medical problems, some requiring procedures, and with retirement looming in the short distance, time became vulgar, insignificant and sad, something almost fatal. He was going to live longer than he had anticipated as a young man with promise and far from filling him with joy, the stretch of life ahead of him brought a vacant feeling. Western rules of chronology did not apply to the myriad moments of Saul Lerner.

This morning, before Barney forced him to leave the house, he wrote the death scene of a woman in Rocella Jonica, Italy—a woman who has affairs secretly. This entertained him awfully, but then he feared that creating something new meant leaving the novel for a moment and doing a short story. Could he handle working on a short story while finishing a novel at the same time? Oh hell. He opened a new window in Word and sat in front of a snappish blank page.

A woman whose husband follows her, and thinks to do her in because of the shame she brings him and the family. A woman with two daughters. A woman who—
Nun sacciu, nun vidi, nun ceru e si ceru durmiv, he wrote, I know nothing, I didn’t see anything, I wasn’t there and if I was there I was asleep.

It begins with the moment of realization—no one is accountable! But from who’s
viewpoint--from the husband’s? From—her name is Florianna asserted itself in bold letters, much to his dismay. It’s on the page I can’t do anything about it now. The helplessness of the writing process, the wily nature of his imagination dismayed him. Could he control it or not? Who was God of the book, anyway?

His wife Andrea came into the room undressing as she moved through the fire of a red sunlit morning, her blouse undone revealing the tips of breasts creating a sexual gust and distracting him completely.

Why do you do that? Don’t you know men and women are different?

Re-conceive sexual arousal response, she replied.

That’s a doctor’s comeback.

I’m a doctor.

I’m a man.

Anxiety has a negative effect on sexual response.

Who said anything about anxious?

You’re so anxious you’re about to explode.

Fuck off.

Sometimes anxiety actually has the effect of enhancing sexual response to stimuli! Isn’t that intriguing? That’s why men and women fight and fuck. Cognitive processes may mediate the negative effects of anxiety.

Could you say that in Latin?

La ansiedad realza respuesta sexual.

That’s not Latin.

Spanish dear. We’re going to Ecuador in the fall.

What did you say to me?

Cojame ahora que le necesito.

He kept writing. Andrea climbed into his lap, pushing her breasts into his neck and kissing the top of his head.

I’ll never get anything done this way. He reached over Andrea’s long torso to continue typing.

Peach peaks crested every wave that came toward the shore. Clouds appeared and changed every color to its complement: pink, orange, purple, white. The cold wind threaded inside her clothes, making her wish to return inside before it turned into a cold injection—as her family often said becoming ‘gelatoso’, ice cream—when someone feels cold to the touch. The coolness she felt was more than just the wind and the water—

Ah. Saul came at the touch of her hand on his penis.

Jesus, Saul, it hasn’t been that long.

I know. I’m--

Your story is turning you on, not me.

God, you’re jealous of my work.

Andrea laughed, the sound sliding from his ear to his hands around her butt, hands caressing her with passion and care--not typical for ten years of marriage.

You didn’t get any pleasure out of this, he said into her armpit.

Tonight I will.

Why wait?

I’m on duty at the hospital.

She slid off his lap. Saul’s pants were wet. I’ll have to go upstairs, shower and change. Shit.

He continued typing anyway.

The Shinto religion has a Penis Day, Saul.

Great.

The Ionian Sea brought a memory of the ancient sailors who once traversed this tip of Italy, but Florianna could no more think of history as she could think of why she was there. Friday night was her husband’s night to be with the boys and their girlfriends. Wives were to stay home with family and children and not ask questions. Luca never entertained his girlfriends in Rocella because of his mother. Instead, he went to nearby Giossa. His girl, barely out of school, filled herself with dreams. She was necessarily an outsider. Her family did not have relations with Luca’s family. She knew that once she became a girlfriend she would never become a wife.

It’s a tribute to Bacchus.

A poor substitute for Dionysus.

Whatever.

They carve a penis out of a tree trunk and dance around it.

I bet you’d love that.

No. I’d hate it. We already live with the Great Big Penis guarding the Washington Mall for God’s sake.

What’s that?

The Washington Monument.

Oh hell. Shut up.

To make a long story short he felt deserted. The writing went on and on but yada yada yada— churning it out daily-- saying nothing exceedingly well, (or maybe not so well). Ten years, ten books, all the same book, none published, none ever would be. He had a book out when he was thirty-five but—failure is not something most men like admitting to, yet as he read the statistics, most men are failures. At least he had a beautiful wife younger than him, a decent home (she paid for) a good job teaching literature to graduates, (he wouldn’t go into that), a few first-rate friends, (they annoyed him), a great stash of wine—

You’re not reading my stuff are you? Saul asked Andrea as she came back into the dining room with her shirt on and her pants off.

You’re creating cognitive dissonance, she laughed.

I hope so. I thought you were going—

I am.

I work on the dining table while you have an office of your own.

I make more money than you do.

Ouch.

Who cares as long as everything gets paid for?

She left the room trailing her white blouse behind her like a kid trailing a teddy bear.

Back to Sex.

I’m losing Time.

Everything’s disintegrating.

What is Time anyway? I’m either velocity or location. Right now I am located--

As he stared at the clothes inside The Pleasure Palace window he felt himself to be both outside on the sidewalk staring at them and inside the clothes themselves. The texture of that idea struck him as the essence of insanity. Marvelous. He could shape shift into a woman.

Women.

Which brought him to the party. There were always parties and this one was no different.

Last Friday’s party consisted of his friends from the university, her friends from the hospital—a peculiar mixture of people who gathered together and stared at one another across the table as if they were gaping at a wacky dish in a foreign restaurant. After a few bottles of wine awkwardness eased and tongues loosened up. The doctors wanted to talk literature and books and storytelling and the writers wanted to talk science and medicine and biology.

There was Phil with Margo, who seemed distinctly unhappy and looking great in a pair of skintight jeans and a burgundy halter-top, Saul invited Kayla, an associate professor from the English department working on her second book and she brought her husband David, Andrea invited one of her medical students, Thomas-something from Idaho or Iowa, (Saul always got them mixed up), who brought his nineteen-year-old girlfriend looking as if she were in grade school. The girl had a nose ring and a conspicuous tattoo on her left arm and Saul wondered whether the conversation would be beyond her but he found her face during the evening frozen with a supercilious smile on it, her eyes moving from person to person, object to object around the room, taking in the Lerner’s twelve bookcases filled and spilling out with books. Saul caught her rifling through the album of photos Andrea kept on a table near the kitchen door. Maybe she had something going for her. If I were a thirty-year old med student I’d bang her too, Saul thought.

Thank God Andrea did not ask them to play charades as she threatened to do before they arrived. Saul cooked dinner—something simple. Corned beef, cabbage, tossed salad; string beans and Andrea bought a Key Lime pie from Wegman’s. They brought wine and various other drinks into the living room and sat around telling tales of medical procedures and literature, unsuccessfully playing with metaphors of ascent and descent.

David Burchfield, a fellow Neurologist of Andrea’s, with a large head and close cropped white hair, started off with a joke meant to break the ice between his side and Saul’s friends from the graduate English Department.

Let me tell you this story! Let me tell you this story! he shouted.

Calm down for Christ’s sake, his wife Victoria said, a pediatrician with her own practice in Fairfax. Her elbow brushed against Saul’s thigh as they sat on the couch and he felt an electric tingle of something but it could have been the wine.

It’s amazing how doctor’s want to fall all over themselves proving they can be storytellers too, Mitch Bloom said as he fingered the galley of Jasper Thorn’s new book Kicking It. Jasper Thorn graduated from the MFA program five years ago and was already up for the Penn/Faulkner award. Mitch had been a constant friend of Saul’s for twenty years. Their offices, next to each other, made it easy to kibbutz in the hall. Mostly they said hello and complained about the burgeoning numbers of “emerging writers” suddenly attacking writing programs, armed with fifty years of empowerment and accumulative anger, storming the halls and classrooms and upsetting the carefully maintained balance between power, allure and mystery and young kids worshipping faculty writers. “Emerging writers” are short on admiration for what they see as patriarchal dipshits ruining their lives, they concluded. On the other hand, the faculty really did want to ruin their lives and it was so easy to do.

So tell the joke already! Mitch’s wife Bonnie shouted. Bonnie Bloom—Saul always loved her name, but Molly couldn’t even begin to live up to his fantasy.

Mitch cleared his throat.

Ok: A Woman Who Reads. One morning a husband returns after several hours of fishing and decides to take a nap. Although not familiar with the lake, his wife decides to take the boat out. She motors out a short distance; drops anchor, and begins to read her book. Along comes a game warden in his boat. He pulls up alongside the woman and says, "Good morning, ma'am. What are you doing?" Reading a book," she replies. "You're in a restricted fishing area," he informs her. "I'm sorry, Officer, but I'm not fishing, I'm reading." "Yes, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any moment. I'll have to take you in and write you up." "If you do that, I 'll have to charge you with sexual assault," says the woman. “But I have not even touched you," says the game warden. “That's true, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any moment." "Have a nice day, ma'am," he said, and left. Moral of this story: Never argue with a woman who reads.

Mitch laughed heartily at his own joke. Thomas and the little girl smiled politely.

Phil looked at Saul who looked at Andrea who looked at Bonnie.

Any more Key Lime pie? Andrea asked.

What’s wrong with that joke? Mitch boomed.

Nothing. Nothing. Saul had tried to salvage the moment but the moment was dead on its feet.

Nothing right with it either, Kayla said. You better stick to medicine.

So how about some cards? Or watching a movie?

This was how parties went until they all got drunk enough so it didn’t matter. Saul went to the kitchen to grab two more bottles of wine. He could see that it would take a lot of lubricant to bring this dead whale to life. Personal identity disappears after enough alcohol is imbibed and he wanted to eradicate the personal identity of just about everyone in the room, including his own.

Ah, more wine, Mitch said. I really liked that joke—I don’t see—

Stop beating a dead horse, Bonnie told him. Andrea—I’ll have another piece of the pie. Bonnie, weighing in at about 230 pounds, was the last person who needed more Key Lime, but Saul was six glasses of wine past caring and too busy checking out Victoria and wondering if he could corner her in the kitchen and ask her how her pediatrics was going. Instead he took his wine glass out on the porch and watched the longest twilight fade out on the loveliest spring day in recent memory. Everything was violet with a tinge of gold, the cherry blossoms were falling from the trees and spread out all over the sidewalk like a pink and sweet pathway—the drive glistened with last night’s rain. There was a misty glow to it all--he just wanted that blush of hope to last but he knew it wouldn’t. Barney came out on the porch to join him. Too bad dogs can’t drink wine, he thought. He never understood that saying ‘it’s a dog’s life.’ Does it mean a dog’s life is good or bad? If it’s a dog’s life there is no relief. But there are smells. He supposed that was some compensation. Forget parties.

Saul snapped back into the moment and stared at the exploding colors in the window. The fashion world waits to be surprised by something new and the boredom of the rich knows no bounds, Saul realized. He thought about the meaning of colors. Some colors brought psychological depression and some brought--joy. But so what? The fashion business was all about the visual manifestation of moods placed on objects, he reasoned. The rich love moods. Oh, the rich are a moody lot. The rich (he put the phrase the rich in italics) very rarely create anything—but they willingly support mediocrity with their colossal power of preference.

Power of Preference.

Stay here, Barney. Saul bent down to pat the top of Barney’s head. Barney had been well trained to sit neatly on the sidewalk outside the door of whatever shop Saul entered. He sacrificed for the pleasure of their daily jaunts out together because he knew, he trusted, that sometime after all the waiting Saul rewarded him with a romp in the park, and the park meant the delicious smells of other dogs and the pleasures of pissing on a wide variety of trees. That was, in essence, the dog’s life.

Saul walked into the store.

May I help you? The young woman, draped in something peacock colored, flowing and just barely showing the outlines of her breasts, surprised him.

No. I’m just looking around.

He walked over to a rack of dresses and thought about clothing as he fingered the garments and felt their soft, silky fabrics on his skin. The colors tantalized him--the mystery of texture and fabric turned him on. Blue, scarlet, green, lavender, yellow, lime, orange--wasn’t that the idea--to make men feel the singular sensual Great Mystery of the Woman? High-arousal hues coupled with low-arousal hues—a form of entrapment.

Oh hell, Saul’s practical voice countered, fashion has wielded a weapon of war and aggression ever since the reversal of nature and the Fall of Adam. Those two poor souls put clothes on as a primary social factor—(particles can appear in places where they have no right to be—Heisenberg interrupted his reverie)—the first primary social factor: the moment when humankind lost its innocence by realizing the shame of its nakedness, with all the implied sexuality of power and lust and loss of control. Clothing became a ploy to control the sexual urges. Clothing begat fashion, but before fashion (if there ever was a “before”) clothing stood as the first prehistoric attempt to provide a sensory response to the world, a kind of cheap imitation of nature in all of its glorious plumage, color and richness. Clothing was essentially a ritual behavior mechanism with roots in tribal society where clothes were the way in which one identified one’s place in the tribe. Ah hah! Clothing is Shape Shifting at its most rudimentary level! This revelation gave Saul a moment of joy and he let out a little laugh, which startled the sales girl industriously straightening brilliant-colored T-shirts on a long wooden table.

I’m sorry.

That’s all right. Can I show you something specific?

No—I’m just getting off on clothes.

Oh. She smiled. Her earrings told him she understood. Ah—clothing gives out subtle signals.

Nothing has changed, he realized, as he moved from the rack of dresses to another rack of balloon-like pants with matching colored, printed shirts. We still live in tribes except the old tribes have distorted into smaller and disparate sub-tribes and sub-sub-tribes to keep the energy at a manageable level. In spite of this, the more humankind advances in civilization the more violent and warlike the tribal group dynamic becomes! This violence, subjugated, projects outwards through many artifices—fashion is one of the most trivial of these artifices--asserting itself as a pseudo-artistic portal through which humiliation of one’s fellow species finds its manifestation. Saul congratulated himself on these thoughts and held up a large pair of balloon pants. What will Barney say? Barney sat outside panting on the sidewalk waiting uncomplainingly for his master to take him to the park where he could revel in the odors of vegetation, shrubbery and other dogs. The salesgirl peered out the front window of the store to look at Barney.

Is that your dog?

Yes. He’s good. He won’t bother anyone. He’s too old, anyway.

Oh, he can come in the store. I don’t mind.

He’s probably better out there. He’s used to wandering around with me.

Ok.

She went back to folding shirts.

Fashion is violence, Saul thought as he looked in the full-length mirror on the door of the dressing room with the pants held up against his body.

Could I wear these?

Fashion seeks to use the human body as a disembodied mannequin displaying the cloth and color born out of the imagination of the designer having virtually nothing to do with the person modeling the clothing, nor with the humans who may wish to adopt or modify the vision for themselves. Saul reflected that these ideas might make a good article. He took the pants into the cubicle and shut the door.

Fashion has de-feminized the woman by extolling masculine characteristics in a feminine body, (the skein of thoughts unwound in his head) by performing a lobotomy on the personality of the models who show the clothes, by demanding that models have no hips, no breasts; no flesh! Saul took off his jeans and slid the multi-colored balloon pants on. The celebration of a primary male homosexual fantasy, (which also expresses itself in the Ballet and other art forms), turning young girls into little boys-- disembodied corpses! The result? A wave of revulsion toward the natural body of a woman that, quite logically carries over into a social revulsion against women and their bodies in general. All men are homosexuals! Saul discarded that thought. Ach, Mien Gott! He heard the voice of his childhood Rabbi; Frankel the Frank, they used to call him.

With the pants on, Saul turned to the side to see how they looked. He wished for a mirror so he could see himself from behind, but he didn’t dare ask the girl for one. The pants fit but he wondered if the ballooning effect made him look a little hippy. Would Barney recognize him? And what happens when I walk out into the street?

Since women’s bodies go through so many changes in the course of a lifetime from girlhood to puberty to motherhood (for some) to menopause to death—death! At this Saul looked away from the mirror and shape shifted himself into a dead corpse lying inside a coffin. Imagine death! Forget it. He felt a sudden heart palpitation but it could have been the coffee.

Group loathing towards women’s bodily fluctuations produces in young girls and pre-pubescent girls a sense of failure, self-hatred and disorientation. Saul contemplated whether he ought to buy the pants or not. He could always give them to Andrea (who would never wear them) or give them to the Salvation Army or something. But he wanted to wear them! What taboo was keeping him from doing this? The successful woman who learns early will display a gross imitation of male behavior, body movement and dress, thus further alienating herself from her Woman power. This violence against women--a form of social aggression--does not originate in fashion but finds its most obvious expression there. The media prevails upon the consciousness of all and sundry through television, radio, film, advertising, magazines and computer ads—the violence spreads everywhere like a plague, an insidious form of bio-germ warfare that cannot be seen, felt or smelled but permeating every pore of the organism—the bio-warfare of fashion! Saul thought of the title of the article: The Vast Right-wing Conspiracy of Fashion—no--The Vast Left-wing Conspiracy of--

I am going to take the pants.

He walked out of the dressing room wearing the pants.

What do you think? He asked the girl.

Well, they look—interesting.

I like them. How much are they?

$250. They’re on sale.

What? So this is sticker shock. Could he pay $250 pants that would advertise him as crazy, eccentric, gay or was he just plain out of his mind?

With Globalization, even girls in Mongolia want to look like Tyra Banks, he thought. Until the human animal comes to peace with the Archetypal Feminine we’ll engage in social, political and emotional war in the increasingly tighter and spatially smaller Global Village we call the world. That would be the concluding sentence.

I’ll put them on my Visa, Saul said, jeans draped over one arm and wallet in hand.

Do you want to wear them out? she asked.

Why not? Barney’ll understand. He pulled his visa out of his wallet.

I need to remove the tags. She came around from the counter with a pair of scissors and delicately cut the tags off the pants.

Will there be anything else?

Not right now.

Can I put your jeans in a bag?

Sure.

Saul walked out of the store with a Pleasure Palace bag and the Luna Book bag and realized that there was no place to put his wallet. The pants had no pockets. Barney looked up at him expectantly. Park now? his eyes said. Saul dropped his wallet into the bag with his jeans and they proceeded to the park.

At the park Barney ran around sniffing life while Saul sat on a bench and pulled the book out.

Crow medicine people master illusion, the book said, human law creates a mandate of acceptable behavior within the context of worldly affairs. I hope nobody I know comes walking by, he thought. Human law is not the same as Sacred Law. Crow sees the physical world and the spiritual world as humanity interprets them as an illusion.

It makes no damn difference what I wear, Saul concluded. Saul listened to bird sounds and watched Barney snuffling and hunting around pissing on trees. He felt the cold, hardness of the bench underneath the flimsy fabric of the pants. Women feel the world with their asses, he reflected. An expansion of time passed as Saul watched Barney and sat on the bench, thinking of zilch, screening the whole thing, in motion and at rest simultaneously. From somewhere far he heard a train and experienced concurrently: the train window with life whizzing by at dizzying speed—trees, houses, buildings sliding past; the earmarks of civilization minus the potential causal relationships, without reference to events—an eventless moment of pure release because it was the moment with no other moments to consider--and sitting his ass on a park bench in NW D.C watching Barney explode with joy. He sucked air in two places at the same time and both places made about as much sense as the voices of children heard in the distance or the memory of joys and desires that hung together in the intelligent dominion of his mind.

Once home, Barney raced next door to tell the poodles all about his latest excursion and sniff their hybrid excitability while Saul deleted everything he had written that morning. The moment of realization in the park became obliterated with the gestalt of his daily existence—a sink full of dirty dishes, one of Andrea’s ubiquitous household lists tacked up on the refrigerator, a pile of short-story submissions to read, an article that he had to write--it became obvious to him that in spite of the fact that he considered writing his vocation, his real vocation was reading the rotten work of other people who considered writing their vocation. Years of reading rotten work had eroded his self- confidence: he worried about the deleterious effect on his own work. He wondered if the years of reading stories of awkward desperation filled with clumsy sentences of bad writing had invaded him at some subliminal level and made him into an even worse writer than he was. But that was probably just an excuse he used to justify the fact that he hadn’t created anything worth publishing in so many years that most people referred to him as a great teacher, a great reader, a great writer of articles, a great reviewer—everything but a great writer. And, he asked himself at terrifyingly honest moments, would he ever be a great writer? At what age does promise sink into self-delusion? Could a man be promising in his sixties? How long was he going to live? He began to worry he wouldn’t live long enough to find out. He realized the absurdity of this and didn’t care. At moments such as this, Saul roamed his memory for the women who had humiliated him or loved him or both—recent memories of women (in their twenties) who often flirted with him until they discovered he really was that old, older than their fathers, (even though he could disguise all this with a certain, shrewd liveliness in his eyes) older, (especially in the paunch) than any man they had ever flirted with, and yet they found themselves flirting with him anyway. He hadn’t lost his touch. The packaging was a little frayed around the edge, but that was not the problem. The trouble was that he had not really addressed his essential weakness: he was a pagan, a vain diva filled with coldness and a wicked sense of humor, having no money, (or not enough) and a wife much more empowered than he was. In short, he was an old man weary of it all. By now, the balloon pants had begun to really irritate him. Barney was happy, why shouldn’t he be happy too? If he could get happy by sniffing around young girls life would be perfect.

The richness of the freedom conferred by the mask of fiction forced him to try, against the repeated feeling of failure, against the words of his editor written at the top of his novel: a flickering, barren, depressive perfectionism, against the memory of the stern moral code of his father; against the demanding, whining, devouring presence of his mother, to write sentences, phrases, moments, scenes, characters, dialogue into something—he wanted to be remembered. Hiding behind those wonderful invented masks gave him the option to play at reality, change it, mold it, shape it, move it, scare it into doing exactly what he wanted—the imagination was so much more pleasurable than life! But--(he opened the book he had just bought hoping for some clarity), let’s face it, he’d had a good day, he looked ridiculous in these pants, and fairly soon Andrea would be home to make him experience the momentary pleasure of pretending to be happy. Was that it? Are we are just pretending to be happy?

You have forgotten to ask for help when you needed it, the book said, thus you will not be able to receive abundance when you want it most. This is characteristic of those who are ungrateful for the blessings, abilities, talents, health, family and friends in their lives. Ungrateful humans often walk with inner pain rather than with peace in their hearts.

Saul closed the book feeling cheated and angry. Perhaps he was pushing himself too fast in the physical world—I need a Reunion with something deeper and the pants didn’t do it. He wished he really had the ability to shape shift, move time somewhere else or move himself into another time, experience another body not his own, but isn’t that what marriage is about? Experiencing Andrea’s body as if it were his own? The imagination of her body brought her energy into the room just as if she were actually there and for a brief second Saul actually thought she might be—but it was just Barney scratching at the door wanting to be let in. He went to the door and there stood Barney, with the two Czech poodles beside him, happiness complete. Saul would have let the poodles in but they didn’t really belong in his house. Barney came in alone and went right for the new bone Saul had set near his bowl of water. Saul discovered if he made the boundaries of his life smaller and smaller, dissected the days into minute divisions--moments, he could stop feeling like a doormat. He realized that Barney was his only teacher and all the rest of it was just routines he wanted to get through in a hurry. Next year is next year, Saul thought, believing in his lost youth.

"Second Guess" by ANONYMOUS

2010-09-14T00:13:00.002-04:00

She died a lonely and painful death.

I was too busy maintaining my grades because I was convinced that she would’ve wanted me to do that. But what if I was wrong and she really did want me by her side in those last few precious moments?

For the next few months every night when I closed my eyes I would see her suffering in an empty room.

A lone tear would form in the corner of my eye when I pictured her sitting there hooked up to a bunch of machines.

I’m not a scholar, I’m a horrible son.