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.

Dollars

by Parker Tettleton

He made her dollars with words inside. He’d color and fold then write and send. Inside he said the things he’d meant to show, and some of the things he didn’t mean he tried to explain, why their last afternoon was. Why dollars, she’d have said if she’d wanted to write back. She asked everything and no one. Why he could never say.

Parker Tettleton's work has appeared in ABJECTIVE, Mud Luscious, kill author, and elimae, among others. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find more of his work at http://parker-augustlight.blogspot.com. 

Meg Pokrass:

2 Stories

Crocodilian

"A part of growing old is folding things in half," she said, folding all the kitchen dish towels.

I saw how the family luck, clingy as cat hair, never had a chance to break free. I learned that my mother's luck was a wan cup of Pepsi that has been out all night for a sick child, flat and then discarded. On our stoop, luck cleared its throat like a Mormon missionary and walked away.

Now, the fake flagstone stone stairs leading up to our house are crazy, and our door knob is black. The sky and the moon always dawdling, absentmindedly humming, doing what the newspapers say.

Her luck was crocodilian, it ate her and I was next in line. I was the child waiting in the shallow water... for soft, tickling fish.

Her luck once had the dreamy lick of salt between us - and then I was born to her...  screaming and wanting nothing to do with human milk. I imagine her whisking soy powder into water. The rise of her functional breasts.

We got rid of the dog because he bit the postman. My father left because he hated animals. We still had the three cats. He had a point. I munched carrots instead of crying, my feet and the palms of my hands became orange.

To kill our bad luck, I became the world's best. Best at things nobody bragged about:

1. chopping onions without ruining my makeup.

2. opening a curtain and seeing God in the wet air.

3. brightening my nights by moving things along the softest part of my body.

Luck sways and eats itself. Mom watches less TV and still folds towels. Soon, a boy will find me sitting alone at recess and say, "Hey."

That boy will find me attractive and say, "You are cuter than you think."

He'll try to change my luck while begging for cigarettes, and I'll offer them.

He'll trot to his car to get a lighter, and he'll bring a snack bag of nuts, pistachios... and we'll share them... sitting behind the school library, coughing and munching and kissing, echoing the others lips.

Drunk Elephant

Elephant, I said looking at his flash card with an ink splotch.

It has a trunk or a curly leg.

Oh, the doctor said. Okay. Yes. And what is the elephant saying or doing? he asked.

It's drunk, I said. This may be the kind of elephant that looks for ways to get high! I said.

This is real, this really happens - I read about it in a science magazine, I added.

You must know this elephant! he laughed.

I thought the doctor looked really striking in navy blue. His eyes were the color of a humid jungle sky.

So, what about this here? he asked, holding up another ink blotch card.

Sharpie, I said. Hm. Well, that is a sharpie or a penis. It could be either thing, but it looks very friendly - as though it could make someone really productive or smarter than they are, I added.

I looked at the clock in his office. It was broken or time was moving too quickly. I loved being asked such weird questions, slyly teasing him about Freud and penis envy theory, and I liked the doc's ageless smile and his tilted green eyes.

San Francisco, he said. Thank God we live in San Francisco.

He laughed. I laughed. I had no idea what he meant.

Why do you say so? I asked.

Well, he said, I'm not sure exactly. It just came into my head.  I mean, you have very unusual thoughts. It's a compliment, he said.

He looked at me as though he wanted to ask me a question. His eyes were purple today.

For someone with an inoperative tumor, I had a pretty good sense of humor. He had a good sense of humor too. I was proud of us for having good senses of humor.

A shaft of sunlight trickled in through the skinny, tall window and lit up the doctor's  face. For the first time, I noticed an asymmetrical mole on the right side of his cylindrical chin.

Misshapen- blue and black and gray.

He fingered his mole with his index finger. I squinted at it hard.

I want to talk about the shape of that, I said.

Go ahead, then, he said. His right eye took on a tiny twitch.

He opened his desk drawer, and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette.  He lit it, sucked strongly, and handed it to me. It felt strangely normal taking it from his hand, sucking on it, holding the smoke inside my chest. The room became quiet and cozy.

I told him that the shape of his mole looked like the shape of a continent.

Which one? he said. 

This had something to do with drunk elephants, and what I had read about pleasure seeking mammals. Smoking, passing it back and forth. After ten minutes or so, his mole became a smudge of dark chocolate.

 

Meg Pokrass writes flash fiction, prose poetry and makes story animations.  She serves as Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review) and designs and runs the well-loved Fictionaut Five author interview series for Fictionaut. Her work has appeared in over one hundred online and print publications.

Christian Bell:

Selections from Thinly Sliced Raw Fish

  

18: Three Christians

At a jazz bar sipping cider, he overhears the guy behind him say his name is Christian, just like his. He turns around, says, that’s funny, that’s my name. The other Christian points to the guy next to him, says, he’s not Christian but his best friend was. The guy pulls up the sleeve of his shirt, reveals a heart-shaped tattoo bearing the name, his friend now dead. There’s a moment, three connected strangers, perhaps it’s spiritual, then the crowd returns, a swell of voice. The player on stage strums the bass, keeping time, holding the tune.

21: Something Borrowed

Here’s a book to borrow. I know that for you “borrow” is actually keep, since you won’t return it. This isn’t part of your chemistry. Please be kind to it. The pages are thin like a telephone book and the cover is glossy and black, displaying oily fingerprints. The plot is convoluted but the characters are like neighbors who would lend you spices, help change your oil. Please do not write in it. The margins are for your fingers to draw rectangles, your mind to have clear space.

30: The Writer There

The writer there. You mean the one inspecting tidbits of dust, trying to find paintings in the sky? Yes, that’s the one, go.

31: Grabbing the Moon

You tried grabbing the moon when I was holding you, arm outstretched, small hand clutching for night sky. I laughed, said, you can do it, and there it was in your palm, opaque ball humming like an electric heart.

34: Near the Pond Fishing

Years before we stood near the pond fishing, day fading into night. In one moment the air brushed the water surface. No voices, no sounds, except crickets, frogs, leaves. The splashing of water, the whirring of pulled line. Hey, I caught one, you said. I turned and you were gone.

40: The Dilemma of the Modern Writer,

Perhaps Solved

Where the others failed is length. He taps away, tap tap tap. The distractions of other people, the accumulation of baggage—there’s just not time so no. Here’s a brilliant observation. Look at the churning and spitting of the modern age, minute news cycles. Here’s pretense, artistic license. He gives a character, a situation, a complication. Don’t look and presto. Here’s a trite ending.

41: The Chinese Restaurant

The maitre d’ shouts, “Seinfeld, Four!” No one comes, so I approach, say, I’m Seinfeld. Sea bass special tonight—very fresh, he says. We follow him to a table, sit, ponder the menu. At drinks, a woman walks in, shouting for Seinfeld. Right this way, the maitre d’ says. I can hear her fuming—feet stomping, plastic and metal pieces clanging in her jacket, purse. Crab rangoon, sea urchin and spinach over noodles. She’s coming full force, steam pouring from angry head. We’ll be skipping on the bill so, as her wrecking ball purse goes airborne, what’s it matter. 

44: A Bad Day

You said, today was a day that didn’t smile. Asleep the sky shatters, cries confetti. A sunny day without sun. How? Ghosts wander dust-coated streets searching for lost souls, the way home from madness. You bury your face in my arm, cry. Why? Asleep then awake. Now you’re someone else.

47: Come As You Were

A shotgun is a shotgun, a rule never broken. There’s a person running across a field to tell the story to two more. It spreads. The moment dies in lit candles, mourning, those songs played on stereos. Everyone grows up. In your mind you can always revisit. In your mind there’s the moment, scratchy voices, beautiful boy gone away. 

49: Transcriber

She wrote by hand their book of revolution. A man emerges from the sea. The colonel sees her in the chair, sitting erect, staring straight ahead. Smooth skin the color of wet sand. Young, she could be his daughter. He imagined her hands of concrete bone moving across pages, leaving ink trails. The man from the sea. He is the end. Her piano player’s fingers—they’d have to be bent, broken, rendered unusable. He laughs. Through the open window a jeep backfiring, scents of sea water, pork roasting in a pit.

57: Fit of Frustration

We come to the show armed liked Mossad.  Start a mosh pit.  Your hidden bottles clank.  We know the band.  At first, they point and wave, but then they ignore us.  We get rowdy and stumble.  We get tossed.  You wander off, loose in the city.  I find you slumped over in a dark moldy doorway.  I pick you up, arm over my shoulder and a combat injury walk to the car, flop you into the backseat.  Drive home in dream.  We have no pictures.  We can’t prove we were there.  

31, 34, 41, 44  first appeared at Escape into Life.

Christian Bell lives near Baltimore, Maryland. His fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Pindeldyboz, Skive Magazine, flashquake, Rumble Magazine, JMWW Quarterly, and Camroc Press Review, among other places. He has a blog at imnotemilioestevez.blogspot.com, and his Thinly Sliced Raw Fish works have appeared at his companion blog, thinlyslicedrawfish.blogspot.com. 

Stephen Hastings-King:

9 Stories

Antenna

She says: In the beginning the air was thick with signals about naming me Ann Tanner. But my parents never picked them up.

She takes a drag from a cigarette.

She says: When I had braces, my family wired my headgear to rabbit-ears and shortwave radios to pull in distant signals. They'd put me in a chair, point me in the desired direction and indicate how I was to hold my head and the facial expression I was to make. Football games and military actions ran through my skull. Information tangled with static and filled me up.

The movements of smoke trail her features through spaces of expressionist light.

When I squint at her from across the table I can see the waveforms created by her carrier signal.

She says: I learned to control the overflow with tiny careful movements. I learned to fine tune, to locate channels inside of channels. Sometimes during a coup d'etat or evangelical broadcast unrelated pop songs would hover around my head. I knew each was playing just for me. I am antenna and receiver. Broadcasts search me out. They like my technologies.

She takes another drag from her cigarette.

The night-marsh seems crisscrossed with streams of faint chattering from telex machines. They inch closer, looking for her.

First Cadastral Calamity

(From Calamity in Clamville)

On a perimeter of a periphery amongst a network of gullies on an embankment of mud and grass the ice house rots on a float. For years he sat in the chair at its center whittling and smoking cigarettes as he surveyed a line that extended from the lower midpoint of the doorframe through the column driven into the ground wrapped in a crown of thorns then the cube of pitted fading orange Styrofoam to a horizontal French door that opens onto mud. Because of this boundary the Imaginary Marina remained imaginary. The Imaginary Marina was to have been quite grand. But his inherited property fell 8 feet short. The neighbor who owned the 8 feet would not sell. He would say: Everyone gets one idea, one idea that can change things. The marina was mine and it was taken from me. I’m waiting here for another.

Sometimes he waited over the water. To while away the waiting on the walls he drew a story. The stick figure fisherman drops a line through the hole in the floor and waits for something to happen. An enormous shark surfaces through the hole in the floor & grabs him. In the apotheosis the enormous shark is airborne and vertical its mouth a bizarre grin drawn around two rows of terrible triangle teeth. Between them floats the stick figure fisherman his hands giant with surprise. The enormous shark swims to the ocean floor where it deposits a skeleton stick figure fisherman. The skeleton stick figure falls through a blank space toward a pipe that brings him down and down. Through the friction of the fall the figure becomes flesh. The pipe ends in a trap which is the roof of the ice house. He falls through the trap and lands back in the chair he started from. The stick figure fisherman drops a line through the hole in the floor and waits for something to happen.

Stamp Album

1. Like anyone I was imbricated with multiple flows: chocolate milk; cardigans; small airborne creatures, pathogens, contagions and other words; candy; Civil War paraphernalia; old bottles dug up from abandoned dumps; jars and nails to fill them with; sawdust; poison ivy; pieces of paper. Especially pieces of paper.

As a kid, I discovered that once you start letting cancelled postage stamps in to where you live, they come from all directions. They're like plankton that floats around getting eaten by every other creature in the ecosystem when all they want to is to find someplace safe. But once they're in your space, no matter where you put them they want to be somewhere else. They form herds. They are restless.

Baseball cards were like that too. My closet was full of flat smiling gentlemen holding baseball bats or crouching in defensive anticipation. Hundreds of them spilled out of shoeboxes, cascaded over shelves, piled on the floor. They would get into the sleeves of my shirts. The closet was infested. When I opened the door, groups of baseball cards would break for freedom. I could hear flat gentlemen shouting encouragement to each other.

2. My beginner's stamp album was a giant loose-leaf notebook with padded covers that featured a graphic jet crossing a planetary distance. I never quite understood why the covers were padded, what impact the stamps needed to be protected from.

The pages of my beginner's stamp album were composed of photographs. The layout imposed divisions and sequences and a correct distance that should be maintained with respect to the stamps. The pages left me in my bedroom, looking at a book. That was not why I collected.

I liked to look at individual stamps, project myself into the little stamp environments and have adventures. Sometimes I grew muttonchops and attended the grand celebration of the opening of a new national aerodrome in 1912 Bosnia & Herzigovina. An orchestra played waltzes and the air was thick with confetti. Each time I walked between rows of fragile insectoid aeroplanes with the same woman I had never seen before who carried a parasol and held my arm. Other times I stood with Party officials wearing a trench coat and a giant fur hat near a power station engraved in blocky WPA style located on a prototypical hill and daydreamed about Electrification plus Soviets. Or I went jogging with a blue Marianne through the streets of 1848 Paris. We wore matching Nikes and sweat suits and ran past the barricades.

Once I told a startled-looking Sam the Rhesus Monkey that everything would be OK minutes before he was shot into space. I lost that stamp and never went back.

Mesh

Beneath wire trees in the mottled light where clouds skim along the ground and pass through geometries within which densities of absence give way to slow-motion horses he is driving and standing in front of the same car. Moist beads of impact form a mesh across his face. Everything is soft and falling.

Waveform

1. For the next-to-last journey he muled a stolen car from Gloucester to Florida. He brought with him a .38 and a bouquet of cheap flowers. He left the flowers at her door on the way out.

2. Their break-up raced through a nautilus shell. In the next-to-last chamber, he balanced a chef's knife on shelving then jumped onto the blade.

3. The furthest point of the next-to-last journey was a South Florida Motel 6.

He put the .38 on the night stand. But he couldn’t do it.

He bought several bottles of pills then wrote a letter as a narrative inside a narrative, one that outlined his trajectory and its mire and his implausible rescue and the ways it became a chimera, the other chapter divisions comprised of doses and times.

4. I watch her read the letter. Despite its melodrama of forgiveness, the story becomes her fault.

5. When the telephone rings I pick up to hear the circuitry, a vast plain of chatter that expands as I listen, opening onto infrastructure then the echoes of the undersides of voices that gives way to an abstract space of drift and vibrations and spirits. He blows across it, an atomized snarl of grasses caught in a phantom wind, and then through me and beyond become a waveform that rearranges the air and everything that is in it.

Martini

She drinks a chocolate martini. I fold myself up and slide into her pocket. There I join the others. We seven in her pocket talk animatedly about space, travel and the topologies of her breasts. She pays us no mind. We organize an expedition to the opening in her shirt. We want to slide around her skin. We climb carefully in a column. When she brushes us off her hand comes like a storm. Airborne I open myself to her length. My hand hovers just over her stomach. I disappear into details. She drinks a chocolate martini. She does not know my name.

Where I work you cannot see the sun.

Where I work you cannot see the sun.

Where I work people use words like leverage. They do not appear to denote anything.

Where I work everyone sits in a little cube in the middle of which is a little monitor on which they can look at the surveillance image of themselves sitting in a little cube in the middle of which is a little monitor on which they are looking at a surveillance image all day if they want to.

Where I work when it rains you can hear in detail water flowing through a basement amplification chamber. It is like being in the drain of a sink has become a tourist attraction.

Where I work everyone pretends they are somewhere else.

Word Balloon

Most times a vertical word balloon floats before him. The balloon looks like a distended variant of his tongue made from white sausage or maybe blank paper in the space on which he is drawn. Words crowd into it like he's an 18th century cartoon. They tumble. They jostle and somersault, a roil & boil that enacts the confinement of the space they're in.

He cannot see the words directly, only from below or at an angle. Mostly he reads their shadows.

Words flash and disappear even when he is not thinking of anything. He watches and wonders whether they obey the whims of another.

Sometimes he tries experiments. He gathers himself up and says peculiar sentences.

“There is a green rectangle. There is an interior frame of white lines.”

When he does, versions of each flash shadows around him. It is as if he moves through a box that is normally invisible because it is continuously present. The shadows of words reveal the walls of the box. He wonders about this information, whether it is better to know or not to.

When he stops saying sentences the flashing resumes its scatter.

Other times he wonders about the conventions that govern word balloons. He thinks: Maybe in the 18th century there wasn't much room so they had to be long and thin and slipped in between features. Or maybe tiny stories once told secrets and secrets had to be written on strips of paper that could be spooled up and hidden in the quill of a pen.

At times from the bottom of the balloon he sees a thread. Each one appears to run down his throat. He bites down on it. If he bites down long enough the word balloon disappears. Every time he relaxes they come back.

The Secret Lives of Horses

In a slow explosion of low fog something in a pasture flickers into and out of being. A brown wavering vertical is absorbed into a density of white. It spills out as a profile-horse which is absorbed back into density. This direction performs itself through numberless secret variations.

I fight an urge to call you, to hear your sleepy voice and say that where I am when no-one is looking time-forms are released from the objects that hold them.

On a mountain in my memory a silhouette locomotive of cylinders, rods and diamonds with open metal spinning flower wheels shudders through a plane of smoke and indeterminacy.

I point a camera at the geography of light that spreads inside a surface of asphalt. The screen remains black. The flash photographs itself scattering.

Stephen Hastings-King on process:

I write in the morning when the world is still bendy. I make coffee and arrange words: put some in, move them around, take some out; searching for seams, gliding along then through them.

I make surfaces from sentences and arrange them into structures. The movement of a reader through them generates spaces or environments. Meanings are emergent features of these interactions.

I think some very grand things but try not to let them get in the way.

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 and elsewhere.

In Preparation

by Jessica Hollander

I know you’ve grown comfortable in your hooked desk cluttered cube clean shaven pressed pant days. Yesterday I picked up piled sticks in the back presentable for your mother who came demanding we stay home in the evening. Demanded frames hung directly spaced chairs angled doors fixed properly the possibility of stripped floors. I know I’ve been complaining. Yes your cooking is good. My work goes untitled bed made dishes washed berries cut. I’ve worn out the fan in my computer. Clauses wrangled stretched ends to include something worth something. With all connotations your mother is proud to be a mother in law. She buys cleaner clears window streaks asks why I’m moody when you go to work why I don’t even want to water the weed flowered lawn. Afternoons we sit on the sun rotted porch me and her feet propped on a cushion. Thinking of you in your cubicle. She asks but I won’t call myself a writer a wife

a daughter in law. I believed I’d enjoy this summer this visit. That evening necktie loosened you cook dinner. Tell me Relax. I help her lay forks knives napkins like I’ve done this before will do it again. When she’s gone you will still go to work. Leave me our house to wander around the heat throbbed windows too wavery to look at when the sky is bright and I am bright. This is the world after learning after dreaming. You’ve proved the value of getting dressed in the morning.

Jessica Hollander is in the MFA program at the University of Alabama. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, Quarterly West, FRiGG, Gargoyle, and Alice Blue, among others. She blogs everything literary at Fringe Magazine and chronicles her failed beginnings at jessicahollanderwriter.com.

didn’t I always let you have one of my cigarettes?
by Stephanie Austin

I smoked cigarettes in between brushing my teeth because I didn't want to give in to one side or the other. I liked the taste in my mouth, mint and smoky and fresh and filthy.

The restaurant was closed, or maybe it was condemned, so he took me somewhere else. We sat in the smoking section.

The thing he said to me that night was about the journey of life and the paths different people are on and his path was going way, way over there. I looked where he was pointing, and it got the waiter's attention too.

The sandwich was messy. And isn't sandwich one of those words that's easy to hate? I want to spell it like this: sandwhich. Sand which? Which sand? That sand. I catch myself on time, most of the time. I remove the h.

In the park, later, the slides were bright and colorful and we didn't slide through them because we were too big. He told me that he takes care of his body. He enjoyed excess once per week. I lit a cigarette, and he asked if he could have one.




Stephanie Austin’s short stories have appeared in Fiction, The Fiddlehead, and American Short Fiction. She lives in Phoenix, AZ.

Poetry and Fiction by Deanna Larsen

Ode To A Girl Who Looks Better Without Makeup But Doesn't Know It


She’s a Twinkie with the center sucked out;

looks sweet but hollow inside.

She’s a hard candy apple.

She can stop on a dime- dance on a dime-

swallow your heart on a dime.

She’s a speed-up-at-a-yellow-light kind of girl.

She makes Lady Gaga look blah.

She takes in stray dogs and stray bullets.

She reckons an icicle is the best murder weapon.

Her skin smells like pomegranate.

Her cleavage is quicksand.

Nobody knows her natural hair color.

Nobody knows her like I do.



Two Vignettes For Two Ex-Lovers


I. Tasha

Every mole and mismatched sock on your person a clue.

Most people are so secretive. You’re an open book, you write books, you’re desperate like a Book of the Month Club sending unsolicited titles.

Your anatomy                  drowns

in adornments.

Intentional like the dragon tattoo. Anyone who chances a glance at the small of your back will say oh she’s so worldly. Unless they read Chinese characters; they’ll see your Hepatitis sense of adventure and your linguistics are rusty.

Infected lip ring; I still kissed you.

Spider eyeliner, scars on your wrists running I-meant-it vertical, cracked tooth enamel. Your body a Shenandoah in Flames civil war battle. I think you fired the first shot.


II. David

Who knew signing a lease would be our Last Will and Testament.

Our living room was IKEA which is living for beginners; all our furniture named like Swedish porn stars: TROLLSTA, LÖVÅS. Couch converts to a bed. One night I folded up with the springs, hoped you wouldn’t find me but the cat ratted me out so we had to go at it again.

When you wore your favorite cap you looked like Castro. When Cuba’s on the news I always think of you. My little revolutionary.

Spitting teeth in the kitchen sink you swore you’d never touch the stuff again.

Your love charred through skin and bone and rewrote genetic code. You sent me spiraling back to Precambrian.

Thank god my ink revived me. Startled like an un-muzzled pit-bull. What a bitch. You should be grateful for pseudonyms.




Deanna Larsen holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Spanish, Latin American Studies and Creative Writing. She studied the tango in Argentina, but still can't dance. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota where even her friends make fun of her Minnesota accent. Her work is forthcoming in wtf pwm.

Naked Ladies
by Jack Swenson


Love Birds

I tell Max I don't remember what my wife and I argued about. We sit in the library and drink bourbon and listen to music. Later, Max tells one of his guests to show me her legs. She is a tall, dark-eyed beauty. I tell the girl that her laugh is full of sunshine. Max fancies that he can look into a woman's eyes and see her soul. Later the three of us lie on a bed in the moonlight, and I touch the nipples of her tiny breasts with the thumb and pinkie of one hand. The morning I leave Fargo to go back to sunny California it is twelve degrees below zero. That night when I get home, the bedroom is dark, and my wife is already asleep.


Post Time

"Who do you like in the sixth at Pimlico?" the fat man asked. I looked up at a black sky filled with stars and tried to spot my lucky one. After dinner we sat on the balcony until it got too cool, and then we moved inside. I mingled with the other guests, chatted with my wife's friend Peggy. I placed a glass of champagne in her hand. Missed opportunities: they follow you around, I said. She put her arms around my neck and whispered something in my ear. She said she wanted to find a man who could appreciate a woman who gave great head. I told her about my nightmares.


A Grave Matter

You nibbled a potato chip, peeled a grape. You said you were going to have a D & C, and you would need a ride home. At the table next to ours, a slender man in a suit and tie was commiserating with a balding man with a walrus moustache. Later you sat on my bed wearing nothing but your hat and rummaged through your purse. You told me that the score never interested you, only the game. At the gravesite the next day we stood far back and watched while they planted your lover. I scanned the mourners and wondered which one was his wife. That afternoon the fog rolled in early. In the morning my resentments were back. They were lined up on my window sill like fat little birds.




Jack Swenson writes only micro & flash fiction. Less is more is his motto. He is old, wise, and nobody’s fool. He is kind to animals. He loves to tell stories. He was born in Minnesota, but he moved to California many moons ago.

forest in the early morning 
by Susan Tepper 

So call me prick.  My ex— she could tear into me with the expletives.  Even when the kids were small.  Those round innocent faces staring up at Mommy and Daddy.  At first it raised the hair on my neck.  After a while nothing.  You get used to it.  I can't help myself.  I love women.  I love them to bursting.  They're like seeds you get in those little Burpee seed packets from the hardware store.  That you put in a soil container and remember to water.  Then you get a flower.  Lots if you're lucky.  I had weekends where I'd use the going out to buy socks routine all weekend.  Socks after more socks.  She never asked to see them.  Not once.  I used the same crumpled food bag with the same blue socks.  Took it straight out of that Meryl Streep movie.   The one where Meryl finally catches on.  Smashes him in the face with a key lime pie.  Clarice smashed things.  No pies.  One time she smashed my tropical fish tank.  The glass was too thick to shatter but the fish were a mess.  It was carnage.  I sank to my knees in our bedroom.   She'd laughed.  I know you've always hated my fish I said.  Water had slopped onto the Berber carpet.  The dog came running in and scooped up most of the fish.  Everything seemed to happen in a micro-second.  Clarice packed her LV duffle bag.  I called in a carpet cleaning service.  Even after the clean-up a smell like low tide hovered.  I moved my laptop into the living room.  The girls online were cute in their old pictures.  I thought of calling Clarice's sister but they were tight.  I thought about going out and restocking the tank.  I stayed in drinking bourbon and smoking.  The smoke gave the fish smell a forest-in-the-early-morning scent.  I thought about taking a painting class.  I could learn to paint large landscapes like George Innes.  Canvases.  Easel.  Paint.  Paint brushes. All that stuff.  I abandoned the idea.  I went back online.  I wrote a girl name Arielle.  She looked nineteen in her photo.  She was dark.  Clarice a blonde.  It seemed like a good switch.  I sent her my photo and she didn't write back.  The weather turned warmer.  I phoned my son who said you fucked it up with Mom.  C'mon I told him.  Give your old man a break.  I phoned my daughter who was icicles.  I have my own problems was what she said.  The neighbors started calling the cops.  The cops came a couple of times.  You have to walk him they said.  They wanted to know was there a reason.  They wanted to know did I have a bum leg.  He likes the yard I said.  They said the Board of Health would have to be notified.   Too much shit piling up back there.  One cop sniffed.  He looked around the living room.  I don't sell drugs I told them.  There's this smell the cop said.  Oh that I said.  From the dead fish.  The cops looked at each other.  One raised his eyebrows.  Do I need to call a lawyer I said.   The smaller cop narrowed his eyes.  Only if you done something bad.  I shook my head and said I didn't know.

Susan Tepper is the author of Deer & Other Stories (Wilderness House Press, 2009) and the epistolary novel What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G (Cervena Barva Press, September 2010) which she co-authored with Gary Percesepe. Over 100 of Susan's stories and poems have been published in journals worldwide.  She has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, hosts FIZZ, a reading series at KGB Bar in NYC, and is Assistant Editor of Istanbul Literary Review.

Loom
by R.S. Bohn


Castor's wife's loom had broken. She showed him where.  He examined shattered bits of wood, turned them over in his paws, considering.  He shook his head. 

It was my mother's loom, she said.

I will build you a new one, he said.

It won't be the same, she said.

When she was alone in their lodge, she sat and cried for her loom.  When she had cried enough, or all she could, she took a piece between her paws, began to gnaw. 

●

Castor searched the woods surrounding their pond for a week before he found the right tree.  It smelled soft and wise, and he asked the birds in its branches if they'd mind moving, and told them why.  The birds respected Castor and his wife, for both were fair and kind and kept their young from gnawing trees unneedfully.  So the birds agreed, and when they’d moved, Castor began to work.

Before the moon had fully risen, the tree fell.  When the north star had swirled the world around like a cape, Castor had carved the tree into many pieces.  One by one, he brought them to the lodge, swimming quietly back and forth across the pond.  If his wife’s dreams were troubled for his absence, she never left their nest, nor came looking. 

●

By dawn a new loom stood in the lodge’s great room.  When Castor’s wife rose yawning she found Castor waiting, his tail thumping lightly on the floor.  She saw the loom. 

Castor waited while she circled it, sniffed, testing carefully.

Do you like it?

Yes, she said. I like it.   She opened a saved basket of shed moose hair, and began weaving it into the loom. 

●

Castor left her, and went out to his day’s work.  When he returned, exhausted, still anxious, his wife showed him the new blanket she had woven. 

So it works, he said.

It works perfectly, she said. Perfectly.  She patted her belly, brown and sleek.  One day, she said, our sons will have a sister, and this loom will be hers, and her daughter’s too.  

They kissed as they always did, mindful of big teeth, and then she showed him what she’d made of the old loom, the broken parts reborn as little beavers and birds and all manner of forest creatures, each given life by those same clever teeth. 

Let’s set them afloat on the pond, she said.  And they sat on the roof of their lodge, and by and by the moon rose and watched too.

R. S. Bohn is desperately in love with words, even the ones with bad reputations and duct tape on their shoes. She writes, she craves, she sees dead dogs in her dreams, she can drive a stick. Prefers Southern boys. Her work has appeared in The Molotov Cocktail, A-Minor, Six Sentences, Cast Macabre (upcoming), and Short, Fast, and Deadly.  Her first chapbook is forthcoming in October from Deadly Chaps: www.deadlychaps.com. She writes flash fiction that usually isn't very flashy (and sometimes isn't fiction).  Find her at http://rsbohn.blogspot.com. 

Counting Backwards
by Thomas O'Connell

Afterwards, alone in my room, I would try to recall the sensation. Lying motionless on my bed, wearing my swimming mask with its tart rubber smell, I would stare up into the light bulb and keep my eyes open until they dried, until the white bulb flattened, until I could see the astronauts falling.



Thomas O’Connell is a librarian living in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. His short fiction has appeared in Caketrain, Sleepingfish, and The Broken Plate as well as other print and online journals.

Elephant
by Michelle Elvy


They say we can’t jump, and they're probably right, but truth be told I’ve never tried.

They say they’re in charge, too. They say.

They say they believe in conservation, they believe in protection, they want to save the environment. They say.

They make Animal fucking Planet but I never watch it. I’m busy here with too much sun and sky and not enough water for my baby.

They say they love animals, and they focus on the details. They make lists: Bulls are colorblind. Butterflies were flutterbies. Polar bears are lefties, snails like to sleep.

Do the details matter? Do the details make them feel better, feel more? Do they recall the massacres, the bodies, the wretched reek of death? Do they know my grief? It's not in their fact list, but it is real. I dwarf them, yet to most I barely exist.

Here’s what matters. I have been here for millennia, my mind stretches across space and time. I know the softest part of skin, the smell of life, the touch of memory, the taste of my mother, the sound of my brother.

Urine is essence. I piss gallons on their words.

And I never forget.

Michelle Elvy lives and writes on a sailboat. Her professional lives have included teacher, historian, translator, editor, and chief wrangler at a software consulting company. She has published stories about children, food, faraway places, motorcycling, dreaming big, and the kindness of strangers. Her recent short fiction has appeared in a number of online literary journals, and you can find her writing at Glow Worm, flashing at 52/250, listening at VOICES,

or sailing on Momo. Michelle is presently in New Zealand, but her latitude and longitude are subject to change. Her love for elephants, however, will never change.

Duty
by Michelle Reale

Afterward, we slept in one room, my mother on an army cot and my brother and I in our sleeping bags.  The air conditioner groaned.  I was still thirsty.  The television flickered.  She hadn’t turned the sound down and I couldn’t sleep.  I hadn’t thought she liked scary movies.  A girl screamed and my brother stirred.  I patted his back and he settled again.  My mother’s shoulders were shaking.  She was crying.  I closed my eyes, pretended I was asleep too.  The commercials were louder than the movie.  After awhile I heard her snoring.  I wanted to shut the TV off, but I was afraid she would wake. The movie ended. The Star Spangled Banner played.  My brother said something in his sleep and I patted him again.  I wanted to cry too.  Why was I the only one who couldn’t?  I unzipped my sleeping bag and got up.  She’d fallen asleep holding the remote and I couldn’t find the TV’s off button.  What are you doing, she said.  I turned.  She was looking at me like she did sometimes, like it was my fault, all of it, whatever.  I never asked for this, she’d said once, and I knew she meant me and my brother.  I said, I was just.  I couldn’t think what.  She patted the cot for her cigarettes.  They were on the floor underneath and I got them for her.  The pack was almost empty.  She shook one out, lit it.  Can we drink the water here? I said.  She shook her head.  Hush, she said, your brother’s sleeping.

  


Michelle Reale is an academic librarian on faculty at a university in the suburbs of Philadelphia.  Her work has been published or is upcoming in a variety of venues including Smokelong Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, Gargoyle, Word Riot, elimae, Monkeybicycle, Eyeshot and others.  Her fiction chapbook Natural Habitat was published by Burning River in 2010, and her second collection Like Lungfish Getting Through the Dry Season is forthcoming from Thunderclap Press.