1991

by Jen Knox

Her hair was high and stiff, her body small and slight, and she wore press-on nails that made her helpless to an itch.  She could still pile lies then like neat blocks, hide behind them without regret.  The shade could dissolve her shadow but when nights grew longer, colder, she’d wake shivering.  It was twenty years ago, rubbing her hands, urging blood into numb fingertips, that I realized it was up to me to keep her warm. 

Jen Knox earned her MFA from Bennington's Writing Seminars. She works as a creative writing professor at San Antonio College. Jen is the author of Musical Chairs and To Begin Again. Some of her short stories and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Annalemma Magazine, Bananafish, Bartleby Snopes, Eclectic Flash, Flashquake, Foundling Review, The Houston Literary Journal, Metazen, Midwest Literary Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Short Story America, Slow Trains, SLAB, Superstition Review and elsewhere.  Visit her website. 

The Statue

by Nicolette Wong

We have arrived at a shaft of blindness. In the backyard where the birds split and sing, in a thousand directions, against the chalkboard of a dark sky. When the wind burns and embers fall, you reach for the nylon strings to stop my silence.

Tie me up and leave me here, you say. The stone will grow and lose its color in the sun.

No one would see the hanging statue as it fades. Only the scars around your wrists would drift, dark waves of music circling the air. Houses of love; houses of hatred; houses of icicles melting in places you have never belonged.

I tie the knots around your hands. This is how we let it die.

Nicolette Wong is a fiction writer from Hong Kong. Her writing finds its way around the world and she blogs at Meditations in an Emergency. She is in the editorial teams of Negative Suck and Dark Chaos.

A Map Is Made of Paper and Measured Lines Both
by Danny Goodman

I trace along the island coast: my father’s birthplace, teenaged vacations, lighthouse where I fell in love. At the end, my fingertip dips into the Atlantic. I pretend it floats.

Danny Goodman suffers from an overactive imagination and unhealthy yet glorious dependence on coffee. He holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans, and teaches creative writing for the Gotham Writers’ Workshop and English for SEO's High School Scholars Program in NYC.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various places, most notably Flatmancrooked, Brevity, Found Press, and Used Furniture Review. A two-time recipient of the Samuel Mockbee Award in Nonfiction, he runs the litblog fwriction, edits the online lit journal fwriction : review, and lives in Brooklyn.

Big
by Jack Swenson

My father died in the dead of winter. Went to bed one night and didn't wake up.

I booked a flight, then hitched a ride to my hometown with my father's boss, walked up the sidewalk of the house late that afternoon. At five it was already dark.

My aunt greeted me at the door. Her face was contorted. “I'm so sorry for your loss,” she said.

It was bitter cold the day of the funeral. I didn't have the proper clothes. My father's brother lent me a coat and a pair of overshoes. We sat side by side in folding chairs in a tent at the grave site. My uncle's eyes leaked tears.

That night, left alone with my mother, whom I didn't like, I listened to her laud my father with whom in life she didn't get along. I told her to stop it. My little mother, with big eyes, in her mouse-brown bathrobe, huddled in a corner of the parlor couch.

I went upstairs to my father's den and closed the door. I found the knife in a fishing box in the closet. The box was made out of varnished wood. My father's father had made it.

I took out the knife and unfolded the blade. I had given it to my father for his birthday some years before. It was the biggest jackknife I had ever seen. From butt to tip it was nine inches long. It was bigger than necessary, larger than life. It was the perfect gift.





Jack Swenson was a fan of short-short fiction since years before the terms flash & micro fiction were invented. His motto is less is more. He writes both fiction & nonfiction—often at the same time. He writes about sex a lot.

When I Was a Fish
by xTx

The lawyer hasn’t answered me and that’s okay but how long do I give him?  A day? Two? A week?  I was surprised he had email because he lives in a place where the roads are all dirt and the cars are ponies, cows and horses.  I imagine his office has a spittoon, his shoes, boots, his bow-tie a bow-tie, mustache ends turned up and waxed into curls, bad teeth a brown parade barricading his tongue.  I will pay him in bounty hunters and cotton.  Maybe he’ll send me some smoke signals.  Maybe he’ll send me a telegram.   Maybe he’ll ask to meet me down by the river.  Maybe he will give me my answers while we fish.  He will assure me that my father’s estate is being handled properly while bites from trout or bass or catfish bend the tip of his pole.  I’ll watch that tip bend with quick jerks.  I’ll watch his mouth move in front of those teeth and I’ll pretend that it’s thirst and not grief that’s making me take extra long pulls from the silver flask full of whiskey the lawyer’s been frowning at since I pulled it out of my satchel.  Unladylike, but it’s hard not to be something you’ve always been.  I lift my skirts up to my knees and let the sun warm my legs.  The lawyer’s head jerks like his pole as he tries not to look.  He tells me my brother will be in charge of everything now.  He says that’s how my dad willed it.  The lawyer’s pole continues to arc convulsively and then it holds into a quivering hook that swings right and then left with the fish it now owns.  I tell him, “You’d better handle that.” He stands and starts to reel it in.  I drink more whiskey and wait to see what’s chosen him.

xTx is a writer living in Southern California. She has been published in places like PANK, Smokelong, Monkeybicycle, Storyglossia, >Kill Author and Wigleaf.   Her new story collection, "Normally Special," is available from Tiny Hardcore Press. She says nothing at www.notimetosayit.com.

Flights of Fancy

by Robert Wexelblatt

            Looking at old pictures.  Here they are.  Traces left by reflected light and vibrating air.  Shimmering, banal, piercing, but revealing only when we convince ourselves by repeating the word.  What we have here is a memory of memories. 

            Only the visible gives warrant to the invisible, the audible to the inaudible.  Tantalized by certain negatives we insist they’re positives; thus the two most fatiguing études in concentration are trying to listen to what you can’t hear, looking for what you can’t see.  In the same way, being unwilling to make do with making do means searching out the ineffable.

            The art that is common to oyster shuckers, atom smashers, peelers of onions, interviewers, photographers.

            Tapes and pictures turn gradually, or suddenly, into these memories of memories:  faces written in vanished light, voices that once disturbed distant air.  Just re-runs.

            See, Mother?  I can still can’t write a sentence.

•     •     •

-So, why did you withdraw?

-Withdraw?  What’s that mean?  A dignified advance to the rear?

-Cutting yourself off from public life then.

-I never engaged in such a thing as public life.  In fact, the phrase sounds to me like a contradiction.  Public as in mechanical, as in artificially constructed; life as in organic, also constructed, but from inside.  Or maybe I’ve always been what you call withdrawn.  An introvert for life.

-You were a celebrity.  A huge one.

-That’s a laugh.  Say I was known by people I didn’t want to know.  I was young and bookish.  When I figured it out I stopped doing public readings.

-You say life is constructed from within.  Do you mean your, well, your seclusion’s been constructed from within . . . ?  You don’t choose to display yourself to others?  Society began to disgust you?  The baseness of people, the degradation of culture?  Cults of personality?  Sexuality’s compromises?  Universal guilt?  The cheapening of politics . . ?

-No, no.  Please, don’t stop.  You’re as lyrical as Jeremiah.  Go on.  It’s always fascinating to hear how a lover makes the case against her beloved.

-You think I love the world?

-Well, I’ve only just met you, though I’ve read several examples of your work, which seems to me very good.  All the same, yes, I think you must love the world, at least to the extent of wishing to seek it out, to interview it, which is to say, in a certain measure, to preserve the world.

-I interview people, not the world.

-But there’s no world apart from the people who conceive it.  Each of us is a world, which is what makes death a serious matter.  Isn’t that what you’re after, somebody’s world, the one that would die with them?

-Doesn’t it occur to you that my purpose isn’t to love or preserve the world but to expose it?

-Then you’re out to expose me?  Not a pretty prospect.  But no, nothing to do with me personally.  The lover always wants to expose the beloved . . . . Or is that too masculine a thing to say?  You know the phrase to undress her with his eyes?  It’s vulgar but sharp.  I wonder if we’re going to flirt or talk like serious middle-aged people?  More coffee?

-No, thank you.  And you can be as masculine as you like, but I’m not flirting.  And I resent your suggesting . . . Look,  I want to come back to my question, which you’re evading all too well.

-And that was?

-About withdrawal.

-I’m asking myself whether it’s odd that a famous interviewer should be trapped by words.

-Withdrawal?  It’s not merely a word.  After all, you live way out here.  On a ranch all by yourself, like a hermit.

-It’s not a ranch actually.  It was one, but no more.  And I see people from time to time.  I have friends.  I’m seeing you.  As for my being a hermit, hermits used to talk to angels who sometimes fed them.  They prayed.  They resisted temptations heroically and strove to leave the world.

-Whereas they are the world?

-Precisely.  They were a world.  It’s a noble but doomed effort trying to climb up out of it.

-Like a hermit, I said.

-Well, and there’s another word that puts a lens over the camera.

- . . . All right.  I admit it.  You’re defeating me.  Happy?

-Our conversations needn’t be like combat, though many of the best are.  Still, my opinion isn’t worth much.  I admit that I don’t have many non-functional conversations with other people.  Still, it seems to me that this kind of bantering or sparring could be an alliance; I mean we can attack a common enemy, struggle together to the same end—

-That kind of combat usually winds up in bed.

-Only in comedies, not in, say, Plato’s dialogues.  I know, you need a serious conversation—and no flirting, remember?

-Serious, yet . . . inconsequential.

-Exactly.  So there’s no need to be polite.

-Not if you don’t want to.

-A mind that’s used to conversing with itself doesn’t bother much with manners.  Anyway, I don’t know how to be interviewed, lack the knack.  So, excuse me.  Correct me when I break the rules.

-You’re doing fine.  Just keep doing.  Now, what about withdrawal which by any name still means an unusually sparse social life, which you admit to.  You used to live differently.  Ten years ago you moved out here, bought this place.  You vanished.

-Vanished? . . . Life sometimes turns people about the way a framed photograph can be set down this way or that.

-But a photograph’s purely passive, a thing.  People aren’t things.

-People aren’t passive, that’s true.  They’re only more or less passive.

-Then life turned you . . . away?  Like a portrait?  And what do you mean by life?  What happened ten years ago?  It seems to me when people blame things on life there are events they would prefer not to discuss.

-Then it wouldn’t be polite of you to inquire further.

-Oh, now I see.  I’m to be polite but you’re not!

-The guest should always outdo the host in courtesy.  Otherwise she could feel uncomfortable.

-Why are you here and not . . . out there?

-Valéry’s Monsieur Teste is insufferable.  Do you know the book?

-No.

-Teste boasts of himself:  “I am not turned toward the world.  My face is to the wall.  There is not an atom of the wall’s surface that is not known to me.”

-And that’s how you feel?

-No.  As a matter of fact I disapprove of Teste’s boast, though I admit I can’t forget it.  Still, it’s not at all the sort of thing Teste ought to say.  Too much amour-propre, even for him—that claim to know every atom, for instance.  Worse yet, the remark’s romantic and nobody’s less romantic than Teste.  So, either he’s speaking out of character or Valéry was recording a moment of weakness.  Nobody deserves to have their character judged only by a moment of weakness, even in literature.  Or it may just be a weakness on Valéry’s part; after all, he couldn’t resist allowing Teste a putative wife and a friend to adore him.  Why not a dog as well?

-Why are you talking about Monsieur Teste?

-Why not?  He too is withdrawn, a sort of hermit.  He has no emotions and lives entirely in his perceptions, which he’s at great pains to make precise.  By most standards, he’s striving to become superhuman, which is to say inhuman . . . . Maybe I’m talking about how you seem to see me.

-Then, you’re not romantic?

-Ah, the way you fasten on a word.  First off, grown-up people are seldom romantic, though they may be misperceived by others who think they are.  Or maybe that’s what romance is, a mistake people make about each other, an optical problem.  I suppose some persist with the image even after being confronted with the reality.  After all, it’s a great age for extending adolescence, isn’t it?

-Is it?

-Forty year-olds in blue jeans?

-Ha.  As for being romantic, that’s exactly how your books strike people.  Some people at least.

-You’ve heard of incurable romantics?  Okay, I’m a cured one.

-What cured you?

-The usual thing.  Bitter medicine.

-You want to explain?

-Not really.  Talking too freely about yourself is a kind of weakness too.  It’s not like judging yourself . . . .

•     •     •

            My profession:  from dark room to darkroom.

            This is a law:  recording tends to displace remembering.  The former progresses at the side of modernity, goading it along.  Homer wrote nothing down.  History in the future will truly be bunk, comprehensively accessible and utterly forgotten.  Remember - recollect - recall - it’s on the tip of my tongue - let me look it up - whatever.

            Am I being too hard?  Distinctions are brutal, which is certainly part of their allure.  One of Mother’s secrets was to be alert to this brutality, but not always to avoid it.  She would sort of head it off before she scared the wild beast she meant to tame. “Interviewing isn’t war; it’s domestication.  That’s why women are better at it.”  To make the subject docile requires as much giving in as engineering dominance.  Giving in can even be a way of dominating (a feminine wile?).  The colt gives in because it is not giving in when it gives in.  Giving in as successful seduction.

            She once said to me about her technique (how she loved to talk technique!) that one had sometimes to challenge the subject’s point of view but must never contradict it outright.  “Let them contradict themselves,” she declared.  People are on their guard in an interview and so will be grateful for the space to disagree with themselves.  Out of gratitude they may spill everything, thinking they can take it back. 

            People want space to be complex and deep in.  Who opens up in a cell, except under torture?  “To interview is not to interrogate.  But the aims aren’t all that different.”

            Distinctions as the walls of a cell, a cell of forced consistency.  No wonder I preferred my camera.

            The camera, though, is a cell too, the narrowest.  He taught me that, the Italian phrase.  “Do you know why it’s called a camera?”  Light captured in darkness, revealed in darkness.

            “From dark room to darkroom,” he said.  “It could be a description of life.”

•     •     •

-Now, about the two years in prison.

-There’s a hawk.  See?  Red-tailed.

-In Pennsylvania wasn’t it?

-They can spot a vole from a mile up, but probably not a second vole a foot away.  Tunnel vision makes for nobility of action.  A fly sees in every direction but only for a few inches.  If you’re short-sighted and see too much you’re an insect.

-Why?  Why prison?  Was it the same as in the book?

-I wouldn’t step over a line.

-Oh?

-Some genius thought of it.  Step over that line.  A bully’s dare.  I mean the physicality of it is arresting.  No commitment’s real unless it’s physical.  This is how you accept induction into the armed forces, you step across a line.  A free act, you see.  Democratic and metaphorical.  Putting yourself on the line, moving into the line, the front line, the firing line.

-Or giving in, toeing the line.  Everybody else took the step, you stayed behind.

-I was scared, of course.

-That’s no distinction.  So were they, I imagine.  It’s what you do with being scared that counts, isn’t it?

-A philosopher!

-Don’t be flippant.  There’s a famous scene in your first book where the young man has it out with his father.  A professor, right?

-Of philosophy, like you.

-Of philosophy.  They argue about Socrates.  About Crito.

-I’m sorry.  I hardly remember it.

-Did you have a debate like that with your own father?

-Oh no.  Dad wanted me out of the country.  He thought the war was wrong long before I did.  How could we argue?

-But you didn’t go to Canada.

-Or Sweden.  Or over that line.  It was a short multiple-choice test:  army, exile, jail.

-In the book the father cites Socrates to the effect that the law of the state has to be obeyed or the state would be undermined.

-I suppose I was doing some contrived generation gap scene.

-The son says if that’s all Socrates believed he wouldn’t be in prison inventing civil disobedience.  He cites scripture, where Socrates says one must change the state’s view of justice and you can’t do that by either knuckling under or running away.

-Why bring this up?  Look, it’s a terrible thing for a son to beat his father in an argument, if he loves him.  Forcing him into a corner like that.  The father in the book had spent his life adoring Plato, so it’s even worse.  For that alone my tin-pot hero deserved a couple years.

-You think so now.  Did you think so then?

- . . . Oh, when isn’t punishment justifiable?  Tell me, does your daughter, does Emily ever win an argument with you?

•     •     •

            The clutch of breath at the magic syllables of your own name.  And the way he said it too:  “does your daughter, does Emily.”  Formal, stately, forever mine.  Emily the daughter, the teenager, Emily the photographer holding up her little dark room, Emily whose individuality he acknowledges without apposition.

            I took black and white and also color.  Of course the former are the ones that have lasted best.  Memories, like dreams, are colorless and sharp.

            All my doing, that interview; it was my production, on my head.  I read the book, made her read it, whined about getting out of the city, riding horses, seeing sagebrush and tumbleweeds, about the millions of devoted readers who’d love to know what became of him, how keen I was to meet him myself.  I preferred the two later books, the ones that hadn’t sold or been turned into movies.  He couldn’t help smiling when I told him and that’s probably why I told him, for the sake of that smile.  The wish to please others is usually a sly way of pleasing ourselves.  Cagey, flattering North American adolescent female with long hair already aware of how a giggle could shatter the wine-glass ego of even a mesomorphic quarterback.

            How beautiful his red biplane was.  It looked like a big toy.  “Used to be a crop duster,” he said.  “Picked it up pretty cheap.”

            “Take me up,” I begged.

            Flight of fancy, but then all flights are fanciful.  I still have the dream of rising and swimming with my arms and feet through an ocean of air, slowly, able to talk to those below, unnecessarily bound by gravity, because they refuse to believe it’s not some trick.  I never go higher than a ceiling, though there’s no fear of going higher.  I know I can, but prefer the satisfaction of exhorting those below, encouraging them to join me.  Wendy and the Lost Boys.

            Mother said if he said yes, which was unlikely given his reputation, she would aim to get him to talk most about his solitude.  She had interviewed a prisoner of war who told her that what kept him from killing himself was the other prisoners.  What kept him from killing himself?  Was loneliness his glory or despair?  Up in his plane, he said, he felt best.  Pilots always do.  Perhaps solitude is more exquisite in the air, purified, since he needn’t speak to those below, what few there were in that empty land.

            The barn had been extended to include a hangar.  Horses on one side, plane on the other.  Smells of oil and manure mingled as if it were the turn of the century.  Teenager that I was, I called the plane “cute.”  Surprisingly tiny leather seats.  He brushed back my hair before I climbed in and asked if I could perhaps try to sulk a little less.  And it was true.  I slouched the teenage slouch, pouted with pseudo-ennui.  I frowned at him and held up my camera aggressively. 

            “Cameras steal souls,” he said with a shrug, as though his soul could not be captured or as if he lacked one. 

            “Bullshit,” I replied.  “Let’s get up there before she changes her mind.”

            And Mother might have.  I had a tough time convincing her, kept looking to him for support, but he refused.  Impassive.  Nonchalant.  Didn’t matter to him.  Not his idea.

            Mother didn’t like it, my going up or not going up; or maybe she disliked having the last word, the way we both wouldn’t challenge her authority.  I took three pictures of her deciding.  Close-ups of the furrowed brow, the downturned mouth, the exasperated cheeks.  And somewhere in the eyes suspicion, maybe jealousy.

            He took me up.  I’d never been in a small plane before.  The take-off was glorious, but I became unexpectedly nauseated by the first tight turn.  We stayed up for all of five minutes.  Five minutes over the ranch, the plains stretching toward mauve mountains.  It was like laying a baby in a crib the way he set us down.  The smoothness of sleep when you’re young, the innocence of one’s first dreams.

•     •     •

-How did your marriage end?

-What a question! 

-Why?  Should I be more polite?  Should I . . . meander up to the interesting questions?

- . . . I’d like to say she died in childbirth and then I walked back to the hotel in the rain.  I’d like to say it was after a short, tragic illness, or that she was shot down in a crossfire while covering a post-colonial war.

-You’d like her dead?

-Yes, I suppose, but in the nicest way, without malice.

-And the truth is . . . ?

-The truth is . . . contradictory, as usual.

-Why contradictory as usual?

-It’s always like that.  Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.  A sentiment that was old before Gilgamesh.  Usually men say it and smile at each other and stay with the women they’ve just said it about.  I didn’t.  We didn’t.  Have you noticed that people can make too many demands of one another and, at the same time, not nearly enough?  Generally speaking, sex is too expensive, unless that’s the only thing you want.

-So you claim to be celibate?

-Celibacy.  It’s not a trait women find attractive.

-Do you miss it, sex?

-I didn’t say . . . Well, all bad habits seem natural to us.  Ask a smoker or a thumb-sucker.

-The Bible says it’s bad for a man to live alone.

-So I’ve heard.  How about you?

-My husband left me.

-Why?

-For a younger woman.

-Simple as that?  A cliché?

-Well, he’s the sophisticated kind.  He performed the cliché with irony.

-How did Emily react?

-Oh, she blamed him, then herself, then me.

•     •     •

            Was it true?  Did I?  I was eleven when it happened.  I don’t remember being surprised or blaming.  It was hardly abnormal to have divorced parents.  The irritating thing as I remember it was that neither tried to spoil me, to win me over, which is what my friends gleefully predicted would happen.  That was what I resented, wanting not the presents and treats, but to be the field of battle.  There wasn’t any battle.  Nothing the least bit stormy.  I didn’t feel tugged either way, wanted or unwanted.  Dad was the least bit guilty for the least possible time.  That was when I scored my first Nikon.  I struck while the iron was hot.  But the camera was barely enough.

            Mother was determined to be strict with me.  Life is hard, work is all-important, to indulge oneself is to decay.  “Discipline alone can save you and discipline begins with good habits.”  By which she meant the absence of bad ones, those bad habits that he wisely said are so natural to us.

            Rebellion:  taciturnity accompanied by an obsession with photography.  One picture would absolve me from having to speak a thousand words.  The world, I thought, should be kept at a precisely calibrated distance, and yet would open itself to me, only me.  I alone would pierce through it with the eye of a red-tailed hawk.  Words penetrated nothing; on the contrary, words were always more or less lies.  Barriers and baffles.  No one could have been more sentimental about snapping pictures.  Or more laconic.

            But I really did love his books.  I figured a hundred thousand of his words equaled five score first-rate photographs.

            So I talked her into asking him for that interview, into taking me along just so I could take his picture.  What I suppose I wanted was portraits of the boys in his books, with whom I was in love.  I was sure I would find those boys in him.  I was certain his face would be a palimpsest.

•     •     •

-Do you still write?

-Sometimes.  A lot more often than I swim, not quite so often as I fly, or ride my horses.  One has one’s favorite distractions.  It’s beautiful country, isn’t it?  Sundown, such a lovely word.  Did you like the teriyaki?

-What are you writing?

-The truth, I hope.  That’s to say . . . fiction.

-Only fiction can tell the truth?

-I believe people have different tastes in truth, if they have any taste at all for it, which is rare.  That’s what I learned at the university.

-What do you mean?

-Each discipline, sometimes each professor, represented for me a different truth, or rather a different path leading to it.  I quite liked physics and biology, for instance.  But they weren’t my paths.  Still, why rule them out?

-May I ask you something?

-What else have you been doing?

-You know what I mean.

-All right.  I know.

-Why did you consent to let me interview you?

-Oh . . . I suppose I was feeling like one lonesome old cowboy.

-Emily likes you.

-Really?  I’m surprised you say so.  She doesn’t appear to like much of anything.

-She’s sixteen.  It’s a pose, and it’s beginning to break down.

-It’s been nice having you here.  I’m sorry you’re leaving.

-I guess it’s back to the salt mines tomorrow. 

-New York is a salt mine.  How about Emily?

-She gets to spend the next two weeks with her father.  He and his new family are living it up in Maine.

-Does she want to go?

-Ask her.

-I don’t think I’d dare.

-Look, while I’m asking non-interview stuff--do you ever see your ex?

-No.  You?

-Ran into him at a wedding last summer.  When he bumped into me, spilling his drink by the way, I looked over his shoulder and said, “Excuse me, dear, but I think I see someone I don’t know.”

-Ha!

-Not too bad . . . on the spur of the moment like that.

-Why don’t you turn that thing off.

•     •     •

            It’s odd how little the pictures have to say.  Like the ones in people’s wedding albums.  Good pictures prompt something, bad ones merely register.  Histories versus chronicles.  Bad pictures are heresies that seem like orthodoxy.  The smiles are forced, the faces strained.  Places are not quite times.

            It’s almost too simple and that’s what makes me unsure.  But there are such hints, like her saying “I guess” that last night, like his calling himself a “lonesome old cowboy,” like his being sorry to see us go, her at least.  What did I do while they were saying such extraordinary things to each other when I wasn’t sitting with them?  I must have had some sense of it, I’m sure, a thrill of something in the arid air.  We were there all of two days.  The bathroom smelled of pine resin and soap.  What was I doing while they talked?  Bathing?  Something with a horse?  Reading?  Was there even a television?  I do remember listening to his old records, sixties stuff.  But so much of it is wiped out, unregistered.  Shock, of course, will do that.  Like an explosion that vaporizes the things around it.  Whatever things were said when the recorder was turned off, they’re doubly lost.

•     •     •

-My life is empty.  Yours is full.

-Only from a distance.

-You’re successful in the way of the world.

-I’ve been lucky in that respect.  And you?  There’s still quite a cult, you know.  They’re still waiting for the next book.  Emily, for instance--

-Oh, my ex-fame.  It’s easier to say what makes for success than what will keep us from being defeated by life, which is how I feel.  Calling it luck is, of course, a way of saying something while saying nothing, which is the function of most of what we say to each other.  Which is all right too.  Who could actually bear to live in a Shakespeare play?  The strain would reduce us to sucking our fingers in no time.  Even poets don’t speak sensibly let alone poetically, not the best ones at least.  Most speech is hardly even an act of will.  I only think when I write.  Unfortunately, it’s easy to write without thinking.

-Unconscious inspiration?

-The id or the muses; either way’s a fancy way of saying luck.

-Emily only believes in pictures.

-The wave of the future.

-Or the wave of the very distant past.

-Emily’ll be all right.

-Yes, I really think so.

•     •     •

            I’m making things up now, but who knows?  He might have asked her to stay.  Would she have told me that night?  Could she possibly even have said yes?  Mother acted peculiarly when we went to bed, girlish.  We giggled in our room, shushed each other so he wouldn’t hear.  I told her how I dreaded Maine and that made her happy.  And then I told her that it was obvious he liked her, that he had said so when we were in the biplane.  He hadn’t but I wanted to make her still happier and I did.  She wanted details.  It was like middle school.

            We had to go but we could have come back, couldn’t we?

            I could see she was afraid of the plane but she insisted.  She wanted to go up too.  She wanted a ride.  Just five minutes before we left.  Like me.  Maybe so that he would say things to her in the plane, who knows?  Flights of fancy.

            He agreed.  He grinned boyishly.  He was delighted to agree.

            They circled once then headed west, away from the early sun.  I could see the plane going up and up.  I had my camera but I didn’t think to take a picture.  Before the take-off they both waved to me.  I was slouching by the hangar and didn’t wave back.  If I felt any dread it was only because I was already thinking of Maine.

            I used to focus my lens on adults the way you do on animals whose way of living is a mystery to you.  I was only an amateur with laughable pretensions.  My goal wasn’t to understand anything but to subdue everything.  I did want to steal souls, to rearrange the world, to find without having to look.  I was young and lazy and arrogant.

            Just the thinnest thread of smoke and I thought irrationally that, after all, it used to be a crop duster. 

            Physics and biology, two paths that can smash together in a single truth. 

            I could see that he tried to head back but the long southward bank kept prolonging itself until, unrecorded except in this memory, it turned irrevocably into something else.

 

Robert Wexelblatt is professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies.  He has published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play; his recent novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction.

Darryl Price:

Poetry and Fiction

No One Will Ever Give You This Poem

and say did you know it was written for 
you? But I will. No one will walk up to 
you on the street some day and say he loved
you so. But I'm telling you now. What good

would a pyramid be or a hanging
garden or a starry night without your
delightful creases capturing the songs
in their own wondrous folds? I want to be
where you are. Not to travel not to stand

before a charming place nor to be present
where you are not but always where you are.
What good would it do flying in a car
or on the back of a horse or sleeping
under an arousal of spread leaves if

there was not your arm to touch your hair to
sift next to me your face to press against?
I get it now. That song. Nothing Compares.
How'd I come up to this edge of notions?
A little bit more and I'll be buzzing

to pieces like a moment then I'll be
becoming from a completely different
angle and you'll be living still in
the same world as my love. Somebody please
find her and give her her poem. Do this

for me. She is the only reason I
believe in this world. Anyone can view
this story. I was once with her without
her. There was no other way. I know she
deserves real truth. Crack open this heart then

eat what's left together. But that's for later.
Right now I just want you to know that
these feelings exist in our time. May I
never utter a false dream again but
always keep your name where I am going.

 


That Kind of Body

I was thin young. There's a kind of freedom to be found when walking around inside that kind of body that allows you to have in this world what's known as a presence. People see you eating but they can't make out what for. You're not going to gain an ounce.It's not that they feel sorry for you. You just seem to come with a certain kind of strange unknown magic about you. It can be felt but not really traced. It's like you have a little secret but everybody knows you do. Some of them wanted it for themselves,you could see it in their eyes. Yes.They want it badly. But I would say most of them simply don't trust it. So what you get is looks all day long.So it's radiating vibes all day long, either of the don't come near me type or the come here boy I want to buy some of that type.  I also had fairly long hair then I suppose but only because I couldn't be bothered with going somewhere to get it cut. It seemed like an awful waste of what little money I ever had on me. Money was for fun, as much fun as it could be stretched out to buy, so I went to the state fair with my dinky camera and my money to see what I could see.

The first thing I saw was a woman in a polka-dotted dress sitting on a park bench eating an ice-cream. She was making little slurping sounds around and around the cone in her hand because the icecream was dripping like a fountain like a volcano that had just erupted like a candle in fast motion,and believe me she was having trouble keeping up with it all, but that wasn't what was the interesting part for me. She literally took up the whole bench by herself from one end to the other. I asked her if I could take her picture and she said,'Why sure, honey.” She gave me a very practiced pretty smile and held her icecream cone out to the camera as if to say,”Would you like to share some of this with me?” I thanked her and quickly moved on in the direction of barker's row.

In those days if you wanted to get from one side of the state fair to the other rather quickly you went behind and in back of the stadium and walked through the rows upon rows of barkers calling out,”See the only still living mermaid around,” or”meet the girl of your wildest nightmares—half human and half-gorilla.” Stuff like that. I was walking as fast as I could go without making eye contact with anyone,young or old,fairgoer or fair employee.And I'd almost made it—I could see where the real fair stuff started again—the wafting food smells, the rising and falling noises coming from the rides the throngs of endless walking people--when a voice called out to me,”I  can see you there boy,don't run away from me, this is something you've just got to see for yourself if only to tell your grandchildren about it one day, only fifty cents, the head of a beautiful woman and the body of a hideous snake,don't pass up this opportunity of a lifetime,take a chance, only fifty cents!”What could I do?

I gave the man in the striped shirt and the funny looking bowler type hat my fifty cents and I went inside a small tented room.What I saw there was a large beat-up looking army colored low mesh cage sitting in the center  of the floor and inside it was the most beautiful face of the most beautiful looking woman I had ever seen before sitting atop the stacked and coiled body of what looked like a giant snake. We looked at each other in utter silence. I couldn't take my eyes off of her. I wanted to kiss her.

Finally I mustered just enough breath to hoarsely mutter ,"Hello.” She smiled at me through those perfectly beautiful teeth and her really red red lipstick and said,”Hi. What's your name then?” I told her my name and she told me hers, although I immediately forgot it because I couldn't really pronounce it anyway, but it sounded sort of Asian. “What do you do,”she asked. I told her I worked in a bookstore, and she said,”Oh I love books!” After that we had a full on conversation about books and movies and she told me she was getting a degree through the mail and, and she was just the nicest sweetest person I had ever met in my entire life up to that point. She dazzled me in every way. It turns out she was in an automobile accident that had left her paralyzed from the neck down and she and her husband, the barker outside the tent, were just doing this to make a little money, and to have a little fun. To say I liked her would be an understatement. I adored her. Nothing about her made you feel the least bit sorry for her. She just simply wouldn't allow that feeling to come out of you. She required no sympathy. I felt like I had met an angel. I still wanted to kiss her.

Just then the tent flap flew open and in walked a boy of about ten years old and his two doting parents. All three of them were wearing blue duck-billed caps that looked like they'd also served as maybe rain bonnets somewhere in the last few years or so. The dad was round, the mom was round, the kid was round. They looked like a family of balloons or lost together balls. The kid runs right up to the cage then and puts his chubby fingers through the mesh and shakes the whole thing and starts screaming, “Oh, God!” I turned and walked out of there and gave the barker husband a kind of backward wave goodbye. Later on at home I realized I hadn't taken a single photograph of her.

Darryl Price was born in Kentucky and educated at Thomas More College. A founding member of Jack Roth's Yellow Pages Poets, he has published dozens of chapbooks, including a dual chapbook with Jennifer Bosveld, founder of Pudding House (the largest literary small press in America), and had poems in journals including The Bitter Oleander, Cornfield Review, Allegheny Poetry, Wind, Out of Sight, Paper Radio, The West Conscious Review,Pudding,Metazen, Cap City Poets, Doing It,Prick of the Spindle,Olentangy Review,Fourpaperletters,LITSNACK, Like Birds Lit, Voices, Istanbul Literary Review and The Green Fuse. He is a member of the Fictionaut. Read an interview with Darryl about his approach to poetry at Voices: http://fuddyduddyfan.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/darryl-price-a-poet.

Helter Skelter Books

by Claire Massey

The helter skelter itself was rescued from a derelict pier by an anonymous bookdealer and relocated to a quiet corner in a nearby park. Its blistered deckchair stripes rise unexpectedly from between the conifers. A small sign beside the often shut door advises visitors that there are no formal opening times and to please do try again. When the door stands ajar you can venture into the dim, salty smelling interior. As you climb the tight curl of the staircase a single, packed bookshelf winds alongside you, but it is difficult to read the spines in the splintered light.

The round room at the top is tiny and thick with books. There is no room for a bookseller, only an honesty box and a pile of paper bags and sellotape dispenser. So you must pack your own purchase before you take up a hessian mat from beside the exit and set off down the slide.

Helter Skelter Books first appeared in Imaginary Bookshops. This site is the result of a reader coming across two wonderful books in quick succession in a fairly ordinary bookshop. The first- Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino- made her long for imaginary places. The second- an ode to bookselling by Lewis Buzbee called The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop- mooted the idea of ‘bookstores that don’t exist, yet should’. Imaginary Bookshops is her attempt to bring some into existence.

Claire Massey’s fiction, poetry and articles have appeared online and in print in an assortment of places including Cabinet des Fées, Enchanted Conversation, Flax, Rainy City Stories, Magpie Magazine and Brittle Star. She is the founding editor of New Fairy Tales and Assistant Translations Editor at The Adirondack Review. Claire lives in Lancashire, England, with her husband and two young sons. She spends a lot of time in imaginary bookshops, links to more of which can be found on her blog. 

Downtime

by Justis Mills

Her favorite movies play at twenty-four frames per second, which is to say eight frames every third of a second, meaning eight for every blink, every snap, every cracked knuckle or lit cigarette or lips pursed over a straw.

Her favorite books are a few hundred pages, perhaps a hundred thousand words, and so, each thousand being a picture, they are about a hundred frames: four seconds. Four seconds of mountain air, vacuumed into a deep breath, elements of which escape to drift above the tree line.

Her favorite songs are four minutes, almost sixty thousand frames, more than she can hold. She plays them on old-fashioned headphones with legs crossed, humming to the drums, to the synthesizers, to bass beats like worn out bullfrogs: never to the lyrics.





Justis Mills edits First Stop Fiction. His work has recently appeared in Leaf Garden and been featured on FictionDaily, and is forthcoming in The Bicycle Review. He drinks ice water with eight cubes, always.

Bodensee

by Barry Basden

They come for us just as we are leaving our lakeside villa, sold this morning for cash, a pittance in foreign currency. We escape by boat, all that we cherish in valises and sewn into our coats. We stand in the stern, watching tiny men scurry down the expanse of green to the beach below the house. We see flashes. You touch my hand and say something, but it breaks apart in the wind. You lift your arm and wave a fleeting goodbye. I think of your gardens, the swans, our world turning over. But things could be far worse, and we move across the waves toward distant mountains, blue with snow in their afternoon shade. We will take the night train. We will find a place.





Barry Basden lives in the Texas hill country with his wife and two yellow Labs. His writing has appeared in many fine places. He is coauthor of CRACK! AND THUMP: WITH A COMBAT INFANTRY OFFICER IN WORLD WAR II and edits Camroc Press Review.

Outside Eddie's Room In the World
by Sheldon Lee Compton

Eddie combed the doll's hair. Then another and another. Many dolls, all told. More than he could count. He looked at the room of family photographs hanging on walls and leaning in corners while he combed.

Some he knew, recognized from the slant of eye or the dip of shoulder, others he did not. A man cocked against a company truck. Hair slick, morning fog climbing down from the mountains behind him to swallow him. Another done professional of Eve and her family, the boy and the girl who died three years back.

Drove into town at midday and didn't come back. Deputy Calhoun found both of them behind the old Hobbs store with blue powder hanging from their noses like early morning icicles.

It was Eddie who tried to explain to Granny Barb what happened. He used words like "pills" and "snort" and "plague." Granny Barb said she took medicine but it never left her dead like her sweet grandbabies. Eddie stopped trying and Eve and her husband R.B. just never tried. They left Granny Barb to soak in her own confusion and pain while they plagued themselves long enough to forget why it mattered to start with.

Eddie stacked one patch of dolls into another corner. He tucked the comb in his back pocket and eased into his recliner. Nearly dozed off, his hand-held scanner blared out in the quiet. Static in heartbeats and then the cops talking in numbers. He listened for names in between the numbers. He knew most of the codes. He knew the codes for fatal wrecks and overdoses, gunshots fired and so on. It was a rock slide on Creed Hill blocking traffic. Nothing much happening this morning. Maybe later today.

Every doll had a name. Eddie named one for every family member gone. More dolls than he could count. Counting slaughtered sheep. But he tried, and finally went back to sleep in his chair, one ear cocked for static and numbers and the plague, always there somewhere outside his room in the world.






Sheldon Lee Compton has published widely in a number journals including most recently Dark Sky Magazine, Emprise Review and BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review Online), as well as the short story collection DEGREES OF ELEVATION: SHORT STORIES OF CONTEMPORARY APPALACHIA (Bottom Dog Press).  He survives in Kentucky.

Ghost Dance
by Stephen Hastings-King

Outside the lattice of snow suspended in the air comes with traces of the glitter that was in her hair.

As the sound curls up and pulls away, the image widens onto other people slow line dancing amongst cans of beer and food in tinfoil bins hardening over Sterno.



From the side a voice says:  When I looked into the sun a voice said: ‘Tell them to do the old line dances.'

The voice breaks up the transform that had by then connected memory traces of glitter to drawing imaginary symbols between her legs.



He wears a bowler hat.  He turns and says:

These people think they and their world are things.  So for them to pass away is to disappear.  But they are their worlds are not just things.  Every continuation is a passing away.

While he speaks his eyes are bicycle wheels then kaleidoscopes of yellow green and black.

When he pauses, one eye is a moving spiral and the other a mirror in which you see yourself peek around the far end of a movie camera.



As he turns away he says: The secret is that there is no secret. 

When he turns away his face disappears beneath the bowler. 

And you turn along with him to watch a silent ghost dance performed by people wearing cowboy boots and tight jeans.  They form into a circle, their movements synchronized and low to the ground. 






Stephen Hastings-King lives by a salt marsh in Essex, Massachusetts where he makes constraints, works with prepared piano and writes entertainments of various kinds. Some of his sound work is available at www.clairaudient.org. His short fictions have appeared in Sleepingfish, Black Warrior Review, elimae, Metazen, Fwriction: Review and elsewhere.

After He Stays

by Melanie Yarbrough

When the sex that is new and promising in its awkward moments is over, you turn to him. You expect that he's figuring out a way to leave; the parts of you that know wait for him to stand up and put his clothes back on, quicker and with more eagerness than when he took them off. You expect to stand at the door, your head against it like you've seen in movies, watching him go and wondering if he'll be back again. But he doesn't, he stays and asks if he can look around your room, even though it's small enough to see from where you lay. He asks about your parents, your past relationships, why one of your walls is painted gray when the rest are painted yellow. You tell him there isn't much to tell, but you tell him anyway, things you haven't thought of in a while, things you have never tried to articulate. He tells you things about himself, about his older sister's bout with depression, about taking a year off from college to move home with her. You notice the patterns of his facial hair as he talks, and you are comforted by his comfort in sharing this with you. He says he feels he had fun in his twenties, that he wants children someday and marriage. And it isn't weird the way it's weird sometimes when people say they want to get married and you've just met them and you think, Oh, I don't want to marry you. It's normal and comfortable and you think, Maybe I could marry you. Maybe years from now you could be lying in this same bed, in this same position, and you could say, “Remember that first night you were here and you said you wanted to get married?” And you could both laugh and move closer together.

You don't plan on it, but he sleeps over. You grow nervous that his smell will seep into your sheets, that you will grow used to smelling him and you won't know until he's gone that it was ever there. You leave him sleeping in your room. You drink chocolate milk in the kitchen, smoke a cigarette and smell that instead.

Melanie Yarbrough writes, but mostly she reads. She loves all the different ways you can say something, and all the different ways you can (mis)understand something. Her family, Emerson College, angry bar patrons and several indifferent men have all contributed to her writing. When she's not writing fiction, she's writing about fiction at The Things They Read.

Six Months 

by Dallas Woodburn

I inherited my grandmother’s humungous big toe, love of the color blue, and lack of common sense. I did not, however, inherit her cooking skills. My painstakingly prepared eggplant parmesan is a burnt, rubbery mess. 

Bobby’s ex Heather is a good cook. Bobby’s mother told me so, in that carefully contrived way boyfriends’ mothers have, the way that makes them seem discreet when they’re being anything but. 

I wanted to cry, but I laughed instead.

The kitchen still smells of burnt cheese when Bobby arrives, but I’ve safely destroyed the evidence,plopped Golden Dragon’s take-out Kung Pow Shrimp onto two china plates in a semblance of formality. Bobby hands me a single pink rose. I like sunflowers better, but I say “Oh!” and smile and thank him.  I put the rose in a vase of water. Tomorrow, the petals will begin unfolding.

Bobby pulls out my chair for me – “A true gentleman!” my mother would say with an approving smile – and sits down. I unfold my napkin and smooth it on my lap. Bobby raises his wine glass in a toast, I raise mine in return, and we touch them lightly to each other, oh so lightly, as if we are afraid the glass will shatter. I spear a shrimp with my fork. When I look up Bobby’s staring at his food, trying to smile.  My heart sinks.  “What’s wrong?”

His eyes are apologetic.  

“I’m allergic to shrimp,” he says.

I lower my fork and stare at the plate in front of me, the china plate with the gold edges, the plate that now looks so foolish covered in peanuts mixed with rice mixed with shrimp in a bath of brown sauce. We’ve been together for six months.  How could I not have known he’s allergic to shrimp?

I hear Bobby’s mother in my head: Heather knows he’s allergic to shrimp. Heather is a great cook. Heather knows everything. 

I want to laugh, but I cry instead. 

We drive to In ’N’ Out. Bobby orders two cheeseburgers, two small fries, and a chocolate milkshake to share: his attempt to salvage a shred of romance. 

“Extra whipped cream, please?” I ask.  At least I know how Bobby likes his milkshakes.  It’s a small thing, but it’s something I can do for him, something I won’t mess up. 

We sit on the same side of a hard plastic booth. Bobby puts his arm around me and studies the receipt. “Number 53,” he announces. He gets up, brings back ketchup packets, napkins, straws. 

“Here you go.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“You’re welcome.” He studies the receipt some more.

Before I met Bobby, I used to plan imaginary conversations in my head, topics I would discuss with my boyfriend, once I actually managed to get one. I used to picture us, me and the hazy outline of my future Romeo, excitedly sharing the details of our lives – because he would love me, and I would love him, and every detail would be exciting.

“Tell me a secret,” I say.  

Bobby looks up from the receipt. “What?”

“Tell me something about you. Something I don’t know. Something nobody else knows.”

Bobby fiddles with his straw wrapper, rolling it up into a ball, then unwinding it, then rolling it up again.  I know he’s searching for the right response.

“Becca, if this is about the shrimp thing – “

“It’s not!”

“Seriously, you’re blowing this way out of proportion. Don’t worry about it, okay? It’s my fault I never told you.  I guess it just never came up.”

“I know. This doesn’t have anything to do with that,” I insist.

He remains unconvinced.  

“What I’m trying to say- Have you ever thought about how sometimes you know people, but you don’t really know them? The real them?”

“You know me,” Bobby says.

“I know.” I sigh. “I know I do.  But you get what I mean, right? Everyone has secrets.”

He flicks the straw wrapper ball across the greasy tabletop. “I don’t know… I don’t really have any secrets. I guess I’m just not a secretive guy.”

“C’mon! There must be something! Some other shrimp allergy.”

“What can I say, Bec? I’m an open book.”

“I know, baby, I don’t mean a secret necessarily, just . . . ” I feel myself deflating. What do I want him to say, anyway?  Bobby doesn’t keep any secrets from me- At least, not on purpose.  I should be happy. 

“Never mind,” I say.

“Number 53!” someone calls.  Bobby goes to get our food. 

We make the most of our shared milkshake.  Bobby slurps noisily, and I laugh for him.    Across the aisle two teenage girls watch us surreptitiously like we’re the main characters from the latest Nicholas Sparks book.  I know what they’re thinking; I can see it in their faces: How romantic. All they see is two people leaning close, faces almost touching over the tall glass. 

I want to tell them it’s never that simple, never that easy. But they wouldn’t understand.  Not yet.     

I pull away, close my eyes. “Brain freeze,” I say.  Bobby smiles, leans forward, and kisses my forehead.

                   “Happy anniversary,” he says. 

Dallas Woodburn is the author of two collections of short stories and editor of Dancing With The Pen: A Collection of Today's Best Youth Writing. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Dzanc Books Best of the Web anthology, and has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Arcadia Journal, and The Newport Review.  She is currently an MFA student at Purdue University and serves as an editorial assistant of Sycamore Review. Visit http://www.writeonbooks.org/ to learn more about her nonprofit organization Write On! For Literacy that works to empower youth through reading and writing.