1 September 2010
A Deciduous Life
When kangaroo moves into a tree, she doesn’t nestle among the branches as the robins and the squirrels do. Instead she chooses to reside in the trunk, like a bluebird or a bat. The suffocation of the bark and dark darkness is comforting, a reminder of a favorite pocket lost long ago. She papers the walls with fungus and thinks of the time she had a boy’s name and gave sexy chase across the grassland. In the tree there is not much room to move, but it is safer than the life without, with its rivers thrashing and its canopy low and lowering. She looks in the mirror and wonders, How did I get here. The bags under her eyes and the sag of her breasts. And then a tapping on her door, like fat rain thudding parched sand. Thwap thwap thwap. Thwap thwap thwap. Can they see me? Can they see me? No, they cannot see her. She’s kangaroo in a tree trunk, and she waits quietly ‘til morning.
by robyn detterline
25 August 2010
Jesus Didn't Have a Uterus
We were in the ends of summer and the fingers of the sun danced through the alley beyond my window. I sat up and flattened my hand over Alfredo’s breast, then watched it rise and fall. He woke up and grabbed my hand in his.
“You’re not going,” he said.
“Stop this. I’ll be late for my appointment,” I said, and pulled my hand away.
Alfredo was my superintendent and he had missing teeth and black teeth, and bushy eyebrows. Shortly after I moved in to the building, my kitchen faucet knob came right off so I called the number and Alfredo showed up at my door. A few days later he hung a pole in my closet for my hanging clothes, and by the time he was done, we were lovers. A week later he fixed the flush valve in my toilet, and by the time he was done with that, he was telling me was going to get a record deal and we would move into “one of those swanky brownstones.”
“What would Jesus say?” he asked. What a thing to say at such a time!
“Jesus didn’t have a uterus,” I said.
Then it happened. I thought it was the first earthquake in New York. The bed shook under us as thunder and static rumbled in the distance, then sirens, and the news. Alfredo grabbed my hand again, and the next thing I know we’re walking thirty or so blocks uptown, through wheat-colored smoke and slices of paper from the desks of those dead or alive, you just didn’t know. Along our way, Alfredo said, “You have to do the right thing. Look around you. Life is fragile.” To that, I said, “Exactly. My life is fragile. And I want it back.”
by dana c. verdino
18 August 2010
The Jipapoo
Late in the night, the Jipapoo screamed. He viciously clawed into the dirt as if trying to scratch an itch. He ran to a tree and bit into it, grinding his jaws and turning the tree into dust. TheJipapoo looked up at the moon and howled.
The brutal, wicked monster was looking to dine. His hunger burned like a flame in his stomach. The Jipapoo spread his horrible, foul wings and batted his tail powerfully into the ground. He jumped up and flew into the sky. His shriek echoed for miles.
The Jipapoo was hasty, moving rapidly through the darkness. Navigating on his primordial wits, he spotted an appetizing object leaning against a tree. Swooping down like a lightning bolt, theJipapoo grabbed a bicycle with his feet, and then flew back into the sky.
Biting into the bicycle, the Jipapoo scowled and let the bike fall. It smashed into the roof of a house. Two startled men outside of the house looked up at the sky and saw the fiend flying away. They stood in terror.
Later that night two teenagers enjoying a romantic evening saw the Jipapoo fly overhead. They screamed in fear. The Jipapooscreamed back.
The following day, the Jipapoo lay dead, rotting in the sun.
by matt rosen
11 August 2010
Lovey
When he turned four his parents plugged a digital clock in his room and trained him not to disturb until nine. At first he scratched on their door, blew his harmonica outside it, practiced his karate – KIAI! – but once they explained it like a rite of passage, a joining of the ranks of weekend boys big enough to pad downstairs in superhero pajamas; rescue chocolate milk from the fridge, the remote from the couch; spread scabbed elbows on the floor, the interruptions stopped. Solitude became his company. The coffee machine, his parents made sure, started its timed grumble and hiss after Sponge Bob so there would be nothing distracting him when it came time to pour. No one went looking for scalding. Still, into the quiet he chanted “careful, careful, not to spill” to the tune of head, shoulders, knees and toes. If only to be heard. Sugar faltered from the clotted mouth of a canister; sometimes he caught a few grains on his tongue. No matter how long he stirred it the coffee remained bitter. He tossed the spoon in the sink. They were still out of Cheerios. It took two trips to bring up the mugs, one crank of the knob, then two trips into the bedroom, tightly drawn, always sour, the hall light guiding him to his parents’ arms stretched limp as babies awaiting formula. There were no missteps. His father, on the left, spooned the pregnancy pillow; his mother, on the right, lost in a shirt, rear-ended this mistress, old gray and stuffed; rise and shine, barely a groan, forget about thank you, her son’s outgrown lovey pressed snug to her nose.
by sara lippmann
4 August 2010
Until it Rained
He was an eccentric man; the nature of his eccentricity, however, was unknown. This rumor was first started by that one person, who thought, because of some unknown reason, that he was demented. The word then circulated swiftly, and the village congrued that he was truly frenzied.
He was anathema to them. The crops had failed that year. They knew he was responsible. Rumor had it that he was a dangerous warlock.
They wanted to get rid of him so they vexed him. When nothing worked they went to the saint. The saint, emaciated and wise, clay clad and spiritually illuminated, knew it all. They told the saint about him. He closed his eyes, meditated, and then in a baritone replied to their fears in affirmative. The man was a danger, he must therefore die. It was a long consuetude that abaxials be burned to death.
He was sick and old. He knew that they would kill him, but he was too weak to fight. He waited for death.
One night they came carrying an unlit torch. He was asleep and unprepared. They lit the torch, the fire burned, a swaying flame. They threw the torch on the straw roof; the flames set the house ablaze.
The fire woke him up, it was everywhere. His screams shook the earth. The fire rolled skyward, the bamboo pillars crashed, the roof collapsed. He cried for help, but they never came. The flames devoured him.
They were relieved; they waited for the monsoon.
It never rained. The monsoon clouds bayed at them only to disappear like a mirage, the menopause continued. They went to the saint, burlap of knowledge, an angel in human form. He directed them a ray of hope, a witch who lurked, a witch who must be killed.
by barnali saha
28 July 2010
Mommy Bites!
“Mommy Bites!”
I was talking at Mommy.
“I don’t bite. I bit. Besides, Ray bites harder.”
“Daddy!”
“Ray is Daddy, Sarah. You and Ray shouldn’t be watching--”
“You were pretty, Mommy. Daddy kept saying so.”
“I was? Thank you, Honey. What about today?”
“Today we made issue paper!”
“Tissue, Honey, tissue.”
“Mrs. Clark says the T is a varawable. It means me or Mommy or Daddy or someone I don’t even know.”
“Sarah, you and Ray and Mrs. Clark are upsetting me. I can’t be upset right now. Mommyhas to make a phone call and she needs to feel, to be, pretty.”
“You are pretty, Mommy.”
“I’m--picking up now. Go make sure the popsicles are still frozen, Honey.”
Mommy was quiet and then she was laughing and quiet again. My favorites are orange. I asked Mommy and her friend in the dark and they both agreed, orange is the best. I wonder what Daddy thinks.
by parker tettleton
21 July 2010
Indelible
I met Tanya before the tattoos, when her face was clean. Sometimes I miss it, her face, how it used to be clean like that, but then I end up missing everything and so I’ve stopped putting weight on little aches. When she got the first line inked from eye to chin I asked her why, and she told me a story about a beautiful girl who wanted to be the kind of pure where you own nothing and eat nothing but stale bread, but this girl was so beautiful that her beauty was like a possession, as if she had a diamond that she could never give away. So one day she laid a hot iron across her face, and she gave it away. I don’t have much to give away. But where I am is, a tattoo parlor. Tanya is not the girl who burned away her face, because Tanya wasn’t ever that beautiful to begin with, not to other people, and back when we first met I think I found her more beautiful than anyone had before. Whatever you may say about the cruelties of thirteen year-old girls, above all it’s the age where you fall madly in love with your best friend and desire her like you’ve never desired anyone else. She is your first taste of desire. To have her which is really to be her which maybe isn’t so different from the kinds of desire that come later, when you’re grown, and she is gone.
by emma törzs
14 July 2010
My Most Expensive Birthday
Your nephew left a mess in the bathroom. Well, the lid has a fur cover on it, which causes it to fall down, unless you’re holding it up with one hand while directing your thing with the other. It’ll never happen again.
Ok guys, whatever you do, don’t pee on the toilet seat. Hold up the lid or sit down. Can we play my Michael Jackson CD? Only if you can dance the Thriller. I’ll be Vincent Price. I’m Frankenstein. Everybody else is a zombie. We’re supposed move in the same direction, instead we collide into each other. Since Austin is small, he undercuts Ben, whose weight cracks the coffee table in half.
by ryan richey
7 July 2010
Counterfeit Confetti
The bride declared, “I do,” and the groom slipped the ring onto her finger. She listened to the dearly-beloveds applauding as her new husband lifted her veil and showered her with air-kisses. The rotund vicar beamed with such enthusiasm that he accidentally jettisoned his false teeth.
After the newlyweds had each forged the other’s signature in the register, everyone congregated on the Astroturf outside the church. The photographer herded them back and forth, striving to keep the fibreglass gargoyles out of shot. The process took an age, mainly due to the fact that half of the guests were unable to attend and had sent either stunt doubles or cardboard cut-outs of themselves instead. The former wouldn’t stop fighting one another with balsa wood chairs and sugar-glass bottles; the latter kept blowing over in the wind. Eventually, though, the required images were captured. Everyone threw photocopied sheets of confetti as the newlyweds climbed, smiling and waving, into their carriage. A cow dressed as a pantomime horse towed them lethargically to the reception.
At the hotel the guests toyed politely with rubber chicken and Plasticine carrots. The bride sat in demure silence as the groom tapped his glass, thanked everybody for coming, and then donned a wig and false nose to deliver the best man’s speech. He toasted the happy couple and the guests cheered and sipped sparkling grape juice. As the applause died down, the bride stood at her husband’s side to cut the cake. The knife sank through thick white icing into shredded telephone directories and Styrofoam packaging chips.
In the evening, he took her in his arms and waltzed across the dance floor. They held each other close and, as they danced, their eyes glittered with the light from a hundred artificial candles.
by dan purdue
30 June 2010
Flux
She wanted a warm slapdash of baby gravy on her face like a Jackson Pollock painting. She believed in romance novels and plastic surgery. “Sex sells more than just sex,” she would always repeat to herself after carnal networking.
He took the photographs unwittingly, benumbed by the coke he sniffed off her cunt that night. She was a Hollywood star making mom and dad proud fucking the second producer’s cousin’s brother. “Anything to get a leg up,” she said. “Everyone else is fucking for fuck’s sake, so you’ll get the part. I’ll talk to my brother about it tomorrow,” he muttered as the moon traveled through the plains of gravity. “I’ll be famous soon enough,” she whispered to her somatic echo while cleaning cum off her lips in the immaculate bathroom.
He left in the morning and sold the pictures. He didn’t have a brother. She was a big hit with her old high school classmates, indeed the most likely to succeed.
She eventually married a C-lister, shot out a few kids, packed up and moved back to suburbia martyrdom with mommy and daddy to become just like them and so on and so forth…
by christof pryor
16 June 2010
Traveller
An unknown foreigner (for I am foreign wherever I go), a twenty-two year old man (if I am that yet), died (for I am that already) at ten o’clock on the night of November the twenty-second while reading Cortazar against a lamppost which a car, derailed by the fog, smashed into at one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, passing first through his body like butter before hitting the stale, rock-hard bread of his illuminated support. How well this would all fit in with Oliveira’s wonderful conception of the absurd, and mine as well, that I could sit here looking for a blank page in a near full notebook to write about my own death. For I am dead; my epitaph is written. So I wonder why I hitch all through this countryside, and others, looking for beauty, recognising it in everything from the worm returning from its concrete exile to the sewer grate I have used as a urinal, and all those green fields, hills, and trees, each resonating with a praiseworthy internal aesthetic I cannot find in myself. Is that why I keep traveling? Because I only find ugliness within, and I hope and I pray that the more I ravenously devour of this external wondrousness the better it might hold back my dismay? For I am dead, it is true, and rotting away; this shell is my mausoleum, tombstone, and grave. I will go to sleep beneath that bus shelter across the street and wake up tomorrow knowing I died today and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to start again.
by erik knutsen
9 June 2010
Where's My Stoner Chica?
This is the tag line of the indie video store manager’s craig’s list ad.
How do I know this? I am no better than him. Lonely and looking for computer comfort in my darkened room.
I will tell you where she is, mano. She grew up. She lives in Bellevue, with a blond Boeing husband, her two kids and her chocolate lab. She drives a hybrid SUV.
She doesn’t get stoned anymore-except on Thanksgiving -in the bathroom-with her lesbian attorney cousin.
I keep myself busy while I am waiting for you: focused on eating or not eating, stocking the cupboards, making school lunches, submitting my mother’s short stories to minor university presses.
You didn’t call for two weeks when you were on the road. So I slept with someone else.
I think that’s fair.
I click reply to prove I’m not a snob.
He is short with a buddha beer belly, kind eyes and a long scraggly black ponytail. Bald on top of course. Did I mention his eyes are kind? He keeps from being a Seattle aging rocker cliché by looking like he really knows how to get down and would hold you all night long after. Plus all the movies you can eat.
by jeanette testu
2 June 2010
The Wheel of the Year and Cleaning My Bathroom
I stretch my back and let it settle into a shrug, the same way that school children line themselves back into order in June, once recess is over, but not before the teacher walks all the way across the school yard to pick up her class and playtime is over.
I clean my bathroom in the manner that I rake leaves. It needs to be done, but is never finished for long, so I do it when the mood strikes or someone complains.
Soap-scum and dirt have a way of mixing and encrusting themselves in a ring in my bathtub; combining the colors of both cinnamon and green-gumdrops into an effort of art. It collects the on the horizon of the claw-foot tub, like how the ornaments on a Christmas tree serve as trophies for the adventuring boughs, who posses ambition. The star or angel, being the cream that rises to the top, is what took twenty minutes to scrub off.
Then I then proceed to go outside, into my backyard, to allow the oxygen, which lacks the odor of synthesized pine-scent, to skip and cartwheel into my organs. I indulge my aesthetics and tease the grass, which has just sprouted yesterday, touching only the tips, and I smile into the pissing sunlight.
by louisa casanave
26 May 2010
The Van
Me Da used to drive the van. It was an old Toyota Hiace, white, but it looked grey apart from where other kids had left messages like Clean me or Me other vans a Sports Car. Me Da always ignored the graffiti, so I did too. I could have thought of something better, but I never had the chance.
Me Da lived with the Other Woman at the far end of town, so I only saw him once a week. Me Ma would drive me over whenever she was ready, and we’d make ham sandwiches and get taytos and cokes from the press and head out. The Other Woman was never there. We’d drive out to the river if it was fishing season, or else to the playground, or we’d just take the dog for a walk.
After me Da and the Other Woman moved to a better place I saw his van in a car park. I wanted to meet the new owner, but me Ma said I must be soft in the head, so I just hawed on the window and wrote This used to be my van and that was the last I saw of either of them.
by fiona mc cashin
19 May 2010
Vaudeville
That is what we call it. The bears gather in the woods at night, spinning-plates on tree branches. The furry acrobats and ventriloquists parading around with their petite cubs.
“Shhhhhhhh,” we say, peeking our heads out of our dens, our yawns echoing against the trunks. “We are trying to sleep here!”
We hear them hollering. It’s our bedtime and the sun goes down and then they all start up.
At camp, we are testing our survival skills. We bunk inside fallen trees and are taught to live like the animals live. We build fires out of bark. Bake pies in their flames. We lick our fingers like fur, between every crease, until every inch of our bodies are clean.
I send letters:
My Dear Mother,
You were right. The bears are very inconsiderate. Although, they are nothing like what you described. They do not tip over garbage cans or eat small children, but instead, keep us up at odd hours with their laughter and songs. (Although, I must admit, they are very skilled on the accordion).
I miss having windows. How they let all that sun in but keep the rest of the world out.
Love,
Liv
I bunk with a girl who draws maps in the earth. Sarah connects lines to places that are nowhere in particular. She draws continents and connects them with bridges. She draws a map of our woods.
“Where do they go when they get tired?” Sarah asks. “When the bears are sick of juggling and dance?”
The mornings, they leave traces of their hootenanny. Playing cards, sequined bushes and yellow-feathered grass.
We study their paws stamped into the dirt. Then consult our maps. The scribbles of cattails. The swirling lines that lead us to answers.
“That way,” I point into the trees. Towards where the light hits.
We follow our instinct and our instinct takes us everywhere but home.
by hannah pass
12 May 2010
Unraveling
I was through three shirts already, the heat in now for weeks, the sweat pulling and beading everywhere, and Daddy through the door blinds. Momma’s dirty white linen drapes billowed out the window. The tiny blue cornflowers she embroidered along the bottom, flashed in the slanting sun. I watched as the wind played wild with the unraveling weft threads, and then I heard the engine start up. Fifteen minutes. He’d be gone, heading for town.
I heard the footsteps, tried to keep count in my head and set to smoothing and punching up the pillows on the coverlet. Out the window over the pine stretches I could see the clouds coming in over the hill. They held stern close by, like rough camp dogs ready to roll down hungry upon the ground and tear back the soft flaps on the old horse stall.
I know I stopped seeing straight when the engine rang up louder. Imagined the long bends through the pines to the road. Didn't just imagine it. Knew it with my eyes closed, holding my angel. I'd driven this way many times before. The door cracking open. The floor creaking. Stillness. I settled to it, my toes lifting up through the sandal bands and up against the soft cotton bunching at the foot of the bed. I told myself there was nobody there, no one at all.
by doug bond
5 May 2010
Cinder & Smoke
My father killed himself the morning after I turned twenty-five. He figured I was old enough to take it then. He smelled like the South's red clay ground and I used to wind the clocks at home for him. Tonight my partner cooks and I drink. He slivers onions like a body moving through silver water.
I want to learn German so I can speak the way his grandmother did. I want to know the way that language curls out in the space between us. I fell for him the way his last lover did, full of food that sweat its fervors out of my neck and swallowing vague reservations. I went to the bookstore today and a girl with almond eyes picked out an English-to-German dictionary.
When I was a little girl my father built bonfires. I sat as close as I could, taking in the cinder and smoke while he coaxed clear moans out of his father's oboe. I watched his chest rise and fall like history's empires and he told me music is something to say when you've given up on language. I want my lover to find me like grass in his hair. "Tell me what your grandmother was like; how strong were her hands?" After dinner, I build a fire in our backyard tonight. I tumble my father's ashes on it and watch them swirl, insouciant, to the crocheted stars.
My lover hands me a beer and our time together is a burning building.
by dawn west
28 April 2010
Cute
He told her to wait with the lights out, naked under the covers—that he had a surprise for her. A moment later she saw the disembodied Glow-in the Dark condom; a nearly vertical neon-green phosphorescence coming toward her, and when she strained to look—his vague form following it to the bed.
She laughed, even snorting once, and when she stopped to catch her breath, she said, "That's really cute—it's hilarious."
He stumbled over one of her shoes and cursed, and she watched the pert luminescence telescoping in. "What do you mean, 'cute'?" You're always talking about trying new stuff. Hell, you use the word cute to describe a newborn. Damn, I think I twisted my ankle."
Outside it was raining and a car hissed past, its headlights racing down the wall and vanishing behind the TV.
"I didn't mean anything by it," she said.
"I hate it when you plop your shoes any goddamn place you please."
She sat up with the covers over her knees, her legs drawn in against her, and sighed. "Come on," she said, "Let's start over… ok?"
But all she heard was a rubbery snap, and watched the thing sail across the room.
"Christ," she said finally. And then there was only the shhh of a truck rattling by, and its lights sliding down the wall.
by robert scotellaro
21 April 2010
Dialogue for 13 Points
Scrabble meshed my mind, and now I can’t think straight at the therapist’s. She sits in quiet, giving me the space to place my words, and all I say is “duodena.”
“And how does that make you feel?” she asks.
“Addendum,” say I for a double-word score.
“This reminds me of something you brought up last week.”
“Deftly?” I am hoping for more vowels.
“You mentioned a sense of inertia, a fear of disorder, and a sensation of flying.”
“Yagis.”
“I don’t think that’s a word,” she says.
“Aorta.”
“And what does that mean to you?”
I say, “Obtuse,” but only because I can no longer understand her.
by larissa amir
14 April 2010
Girth
Take up the slack, said my friend Jimmy, and I did, and as I pulled on that rope up from the ground came a man with horns and hooves for feet. His skin was all red and blistered and he didn’t seem happy to be in the cold light of day. Jimmy dropped the rope and asked him where he signed up. Signed up, asked the red man. Jimmy was crazy and was all prepared to hand over his soul because all he’s ever wanted was a big dick. Come on, said Jimmy, I’ll give you my soul right now, but in exchange I want twelve inches added to my cock. The red man laughed and said he’d been misinformed. He didn’t buy souls anymore. Since more people were turning away from the church, and discovering they could spend an eternity having sex and doing drugs in Hell, he had no need to go poaching. But what about my small dick, asked Jimmy. The red man suggested he marry a midget, or save up for an operation. He then jumped back into the hole from where he came. Jimmy couldn’t afford an operation, but he took the advice of the red man and married a dwarf. They live quite happily in a small lodge way out of town. Some days I see him walking with his wife and they both seem very happy.
by craig wallwork
7 April 2010
Underground
“What did you do in the war?” she asked, as she blew white smoke rings which faded into the warm summer night.
“Oh, I worked for the underground,” he replied.
“How terribly exciting!” She patted the empty place beside her.. “You must tell me absolutely all about it.. Where were you? Berlin? Moscow?”
He shook his head. “The Piccadilly Line.”
by charlie britten
31 March 2009
The Circus of the Body
As a young boy, Odilon Viellot believed that the inside of his body looked very much like a circus. It was this old memory of a supposition that Odilon shared in bed with his wife, Veronica.
In the hollow of his skull, he said, a small clown car orbited his consciousness; in his arms, tiny painted elephants marched back and forth over the hill of his elbow; in his chest, acrobats performed dangerous leaps over the net of his intestines. Skin was merely a circus tent, and his heart, a sort of ringmaster.
Years of adult sense, education, and contrary scientific research notwithstanding, Odilon wondered aloud if he was but a thirty-three year old boy for whom jugglers caused headaches and snake handlers erections.
He told this to his wife but spoke to the dark light bulb at the center of the ceiling.
Veronica, who knew her husband delighted in remembering his boyhood, nodded at appropriate times, raised an eyebrow at others. She listened with the half ear given by those half asleep. When he was finished, she turned over, put her hands in between the knobs of her knees.
They slept ass to ass for comfort’s sake.
The next morning, Veronica Viellot, sitting on the crowded subway below the city, thought again of her husband’s childish dreams and tried picturing the inside of her own head. Passengers stepped on. Nothing came. Londoners rushed past like blood cells. Empty, empty, empty. She concentrated and focused and strained, until, at last, she felt defeated by the imposibility of completing her own autopsy. The sinking in her stomach was nothing like a falling tightrope walker. It was nothing like that at all.
by john zackel
17 March 2010
Trees Are Huge A-Holes
This one tree in front of my house is trying to piss me off.
Immediately after the thaw, it donned its dress of birds, done up in early buds like the whorish frail trees that line Lawrence Avenue. It waves at the man I love, my neighbor, and offers him a single blushing bloom from the end of its branch. My neighbor tucks it into his lapel and wears it for the rest of the day.
When my boyfriend and I walk underneath it, it trips us, especially if my neighbor is somewhere near. If I am alone, he comes over to see if I’m okay. I like to tell him I’m okay even if I’m worried about the terrible angle my ankle is in. I smile too long sometimes, I admit that.
I tried once, on a little picnic we had, to write my boyfriend‘s name on the trunk of that tree. When I pulled away, he frowned and pointed out a drastic misspelling-- I had spelled it as my neighbor‘s name. I crossed it out and tried again, embarrassed, and again, I removed my pen knife to find the name of the neighbor. My boyfriend stared at me, mouth slack around a wad of egg salad, and asked if I was trying to tell him something.
As I was crossing out the other name for the second time, I leaned in and whispered into the bark, why are you trying to destroy me? And the tree whispered back, hey, I’m doing my best here. Why are you trying so hard to screw everything up?
by jasmine neosh
10 March 2010
Wallet
In my cell phone the woman’s voice is gritty and shifting, a gold miner’s pan, uncertain now about this, her offer to meet me, perhaps dredging up horror movie scares or past ill-fated meetings, but she names a 7/11 in Darien, not far from where I filled the tank and bought a six pack and made a promise to myself that this would be it, no more, even if I was alone with no one to confer.
I get out of the car sensing an ambush, I’m that disoriented already, from the beer or glare or panic at being late, a flat tire hissing in my head, a trapped bee there. The sun is scalding, sun is angry, sun is a roiling, boiling mirror. I get chills and go dizzy as sweat spider-crawls to dank places, my pits and groin, the crack of my ass.
Sign of something in her eyes, something I’ve seen others wearing—fear.
She drops my wallet and back-peddles away.
I hold it in my hands. I realize how light it is. I hear cars on the freeway, trees taking on the wind, gargled music, laughter, a child’s scream. I close my eyes and let the sun brand me.
by len kuntz
3 March 2010
R
The letter R comes between Q and S. In English, he sounds like re or ru or even er. In Spanish, he gets a little flourish. The story of R is fairly sad but he doesn’t want pity. He was born in autumn in the year 1970 to good parents in Grand Junction, Colorado. He went to school and all that, did his best though it wasn’t always good enough. Still, by 1998, he had a wife and a young son with deep brown eyes named Keith. They lived in Denver where R sold auto insurance policies for State Farm. When Keith was hit and killed by a blue Chevy pickup while tossing the ball up and down to himself in the cul-de-sac, it took a toll on the relationship. A couple months after, they went to Baja, and, as both had always dreamt, swam with gray whales in the turquoise depths, but the knowledge in the animals’ eyes was too great. Now R is divorced but hopeful there is another woman out there for him somewhere, maybe another child, both of whom he will cradle in his arms every day. He does internet dating out of shyness. R doesn’t judge anyone in this life, but worries everyone is defined by a fetish these days. His only fetish is not to die alone. When you eventually use R, please remember this story
by shane castle
24 February 2010
Thy Neighbour's Ass
It says in the Bible, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s ass.”
Our Mr Nextdoor is a nudist. From our bedroom window, we see all his vain attempts at coaxing a tan out of the pale English sun. There he is again, spread-eagled over his flowery sun-lounger, his wobbly white bottom spilling over the sides.
No temptation to sin there.
by charlie britten
17 February 2010
Conference
LAX
Doc is at the bar sitting next to a couple when we arrive. Ben and I shake his hand. Ben buys a round, then I do. Doc keeps his hands in his pockets. Doc's cheap. He's a cheap drunk, too. He's already loaded. An hour later the couple is still there. They are laughing and talking. Doc leans around behind the man and asks the girl if she wants to go outside and fuck in a Volkswagen van. Nobody else says a word.
Flying Home
At the hotel we help a covey of stews with their luggage. We ask them to join us in the room, and they accept. Later Ben and Doc leave with two of the girls. I am on the bed with a third giving her a back rub. She has taken off her blouse and unhooked her bra. I whisper that I would like to fly the friendly skies with her. She says okay if I can remember her name. I can. It's Vicki. I remember it on the flight home the next day.
by jack swenson
10 February 2010
Reverse Engineering
He begins with clinical depression, raunchy sex with sad sexy women, and wounds that won’t heal. He adds a daughter with razorblade slits on her thighs, a suicidal son, and a family dog brutalized. He stirs in bankruptcy, unending quarrels over who gets the kids for the holidays, and severed family ties. He throws in endless nights sleeping on an awkward couch, insomnia, whole days drunk, and sticky rendezvous in adult bookstores.
Seven months later, he has the ring. Sparkling. Lustrous.
All he needs now is to ask her to marry him.
by eric bennett
3 February 2010
Emma's Verruca
It's only when Emma starts talking about verrucas that I begin to sense something's wrong. Sprawled out on my bed, I kick the door closed on my eavesdropping room-mates and switch the receiver to the other ear while I sit up.
"So, you know how it is." she says. "You get a verruca and you know it's there, you can see it, you can feel it, but it doesn't really get in the way too much, doesn't really affect your day-to-day living and it doesn't seem such a big deal, right? It doesn't hurt. Not yet. It will eventually -- probably soon -- but for now it's just there, you know? It's just ... there."
"I dunno," I say. "I guess so."
"But then you realize it's not doing anything for you and you don't actually need the verruca and -- hey, wait a minute -- you can get cream for the verruca. You realise that your foot can be healthy again if you just, you know, get your ass down to the pharmacy, buy some of that cream and kill the verruca. So, that's pretty much where I am right now. That's what I did. I got myself some verruca cream. Is this making any sense?"
"Emma, am I the verruca?"
"No, no, no. No." She pauses for a beat or two, then says, "Our relationship, though. It's our relationship that's the verruca."
"Oh."
She doesn't say sorry. She just applies her cream and hangs up.
by gavin broom
27 January 2010
Pole and Pyramid
He got an erection lasting longer than four hours.
He went to the ER, where unfortunately he waited with cheerleaders -- victims of a pyramid gone bad.
It was obvious. His choice of pants was all wrong.
His wife, thrown suddenly back to her own cheerleader days, pretended not to know him.
“Tentpole!” she shouted. And, “Get that away.”
Luckily the cheerleaders, scraped and sprained and possibly broken, just kept texting, oblivious to the world.
by gary moshimer
20 January 2010
My Moment as a Pickle
I dried the dishes and she put them in the cupboard. She went on and on about cats & dogs & corduroy. After a while I told her I wasn’t going to pretend I knew what she was talking about.
“Instead,” I said, handing her the last dish, “I’m going to pretend I’m a pickle in a jar.”
She made a face and I hopped up on the table, swinging my feet just above the dog’s head as he slept beneath it. She turned away, then poured dry cat food into a dish on the counter.
“I’m a pickle,” I said. “A vinegar pickle. In a jar.”
Binky skittered across my lap as the dry cat food tinked in the dish. His claws pulled threads from my corduroy. As I fingered one of the threads I didn’t see her pack her hands with cookie dough. The wad whapped wet against my cheek and I fell from the table. She laughed. I wanted to laugh too but I knew my jar had shattered, and now I was just a stupidpickle drying out on the tile. So I just lay there, waiting for her to put me away.
by mel bosworth
13 January 2010
The Winter I Was Going to Meetings
Greg honks twice. It was raining all day, but it stopped for a little while. Now everything is silent.
Meetings are at the old strip mall. I never noticed the building before I started. Still don’t know what’s on the first floor. Meetings on the second. The cement stairwell on the side of the building is enclosed by a cinder block wall, but they didn’t put a ceiling on it.
On the second step Greg stops, asks, You hear that?
The gap between each step opens to empty space under the stairwell. He gets on his knees and looks through. Just a baby, he says. Mama didn’t come home.
After the meeting, we get milk from my place. We leave a bowl by the step and wait. The thing is tiny and dull-colored, like dust. Walks lopsided, its leg mangled.
Greg tries to grab it, quick. The thing hisses and almost gets him in the hand. He looks at me and we look at each other. Then we let it be.
It’ll die in there and the stairwell’ll stink for weeks, Greg says in the car. We’re quiet, considering that.
All that week, rain. They start up with Christmas songs on the radio. On the way to work the fog hangs low on the hills, like smoke when it’s in the trees. The stairwell stinks for weeks, exactly like Greg said. It stinks so bad, it gets in your clothes, in your coffee, in your mouth.
One night I have a dream where I crawl through and get my hands around the baby raccoon, even though it’s thrashing and clawing me and everything. I clutch it in my hands and with my eyes I make it be still. With my eyes, I tell it, Be still.
by brendan garbee
6 January 2010
Crazy
One night just before my father moved out, my sister was driven away in an ambulance. Sometime after midnight I awoke to voices, male voices, urgent and loud like they had no concern that others might be sleeping. I was eighteen, not frightened of a thing, but these voices were completely wrong and I ran out of my room to see what was happening. My sister was being rushed out the front door on a gurney. My mother was following behind and yelled back to my father, who was standing at the door alone, "Call Fr. Olson, get Fr. Olson on the phone right now, tell him what's happening."
Since Fr. Olson was our parish priest, I immediately concluded that my sister was dying. But when I ran to my father, he put his arm around my shoulders and said, "Relax, relax. She'll be fine."
"But what happened?"
"She thought she saw something," my father said. "She thought the devil was with her in her bed. She just hyperventilated." He gave my shoulders a squeeze. "Naturally, your mother wants her checked out by professionals. But she'll be fine. Like she always is."
I noticed he wasn't in a hurry to get Fr. Olson on the phone. "Are you sure?"
"Positive," my father said. "It's your mother who worries me."
Three months later, he left us for good, moving all his things into an apartment where, he assured us over and over, things would be far less crazy.
by evan schaeffer
16 December 2009
Toad
Her son had his shoes on the carpet again. Mud-caked clots layered thick with slime and wet soil. Worn, but soft and spongy as the ribs of larva curling slowly inside bean-shaped eggs. She wanted to stop his barbaric habits because, That’s what you do with an animal, she told herself.
One day the son began to grow, slowly at first – then exploded. He sprouted whiskers overnight and had a beard to the navel by morning. His arms and legs doubled in size – then tripled – and when his hands began to web, he took to the yard and slept in a grove of pines where he knew the neighborhood children would not play.
That? said the mother days later to the members of her bible study at the sight of her son – now two stories tall. Never mind him, she muttered scrambling eggs at the stove, It’s only a phase.
Ribbut, croaked the son who had become hungry. He sat alone in the yard watching the house, blinking between breaths. When his stomach growled, it sounded like thunder.
by adam moorad
9 December 2009
Solitude Distantly Near
He was once a sentry watching the seas for the mystery of what might lie in other dimensions, the light that signals land is near, but not the land a heart can travel.
by christina murphy
2 December 2009
Diffuse
I opened my window to let the atmosphere diffuse. He wound it back up with the button on his side.
"We have air con for a reason" he said, ending the silence.
I stared out the windscreen and watched the painted lines disappear beneath the car. After a while I started to imagine myself as one of them. Waiting, hoping to be run over and left behind.
by alex thornber
25 November 2009
Thanksgiving
There was a vale that long shied its dismal face from the world, until discovered by a band of dour pilgrims. In thanksgiving they slaughtered turkey upon turkey, until their gobbles became a dark wind that sighed up over gables, and hissed past the church steeple. Thenceforth, each year at the appointed hour the townspeople sealed themselves inside the church. ‘They draw nigh!’ shrieked a small boy, his tender countenance disfigured by a spasm of terror. ‘Speak not!’ shushed the mother, and pressed the trembling child to her bosom. Outside gathered a legion of little shadows, silent as death. Waiting.
by billy cryer
18 November 2009
Kook
They dine by wine and candlelight, his first date in ages. He wants to seal the deal, but always fails in the clutch. Things are different this time.
“You look so pretty,” he says, and she smiles, “from a distance.”
She frowns.
Dammit.
by tom mahony
11 November 2009
Bison Lying Down Afternoon
When I cross the valley north, the west wind through my front wheel makes spoke-song. Fewer than six vehicles the whole ride, and that includes two hay wagons. Pretty easy to see how cow-tipping might seem appealing and revolutionary to the local teens. Widows cutting grass in the heat. Pavement shimmering, the valley rippling a big distance, farm ponds glistening. Little kids on trikes and Big Wheels right in the road, their big brothers buzzing dirt bikes in the turn-rows.
Oh my god this is a sweet road, even with those surprising turns banked and scattered with chat, and the long, steep descents I’d rather take going up than going down.
When I see the bulls, one lying down, I call it a good day’s ride and stop to take a picture, even though it means climbing a little mother of a hill without a rolling start.
by bim angst
4 November 2009
Last Dollar
The week gas hit five dollars a gallon Toby set his car on fire.
He’d been drinking over at the Tip Top in Elmore, Saturday night, was driving home 2 am or so using country roads all the way to avoid the local cops. He ran out of gas about three miles from town. He'd left his last dollar on the bar as a tip because the girl tending bar was hot, so even if he could hitch a ride home he'd have no money to fill the damn thing up. None til payday. Thursday.
He got out of the car and lit a cigarette, regarded the situation, and when he was done just flipped the butt through the window: a whim. Once he saw the upholstery catch some flame he leaned in and gave the flame some help, tossed some candy wrappers at it, blew on it til he figured it had the strength to make it on its own. He swooped the pint of Wild Turkey from the glovebox, backed away to watch the fireworks. One of those big loud explosions would improve his mood. Like on TV.
It never happened, of course.
The car was out of gas.
It took Toby about twenty minutes to realize this. Once he did, he stood up, thinking about how different TV was from real life. He finished off the bottle of Turkey with one pull, lit up his next tolast cigarette, began to walk home.
by jeff wood
28 October 2009
A Whack at Happiness
Carl sits in his locked office, blinds drawn, staring at little naked women on his iPhone.
Finished, he puffs cologne over each hand, sniffs. He thinks about going to the bathroom sink, forgets, remembers, puffs again. He deeply inhales and exhales, halfway expecting to find courage in this, perhaps insight. He grants himself three minutes before marching into his boss's office and declaring he's okay. He's not sure why, but he knows if he doesn't do it now, it won't get done.
Carl tries to hold onto the quietness of his office. He listens to his nose exhale, to the hum of the little fan. He still isn't precisely sure why, three Tuesdays ago, walking from the train to work, he felt himself fall to the ground and then wait for the police, the whole time feeling like he'd been planning this for years.
It was easy, the acting disoriented part. He rubbed the back of his head a few times, asked if the cops thought someone had hit him in the head, asked if he was bleeding. He mumbled, failed to react to their questions, blinked a lot. He did the same at the hospital. Since returning to work, he has received no new assignments and been the recipient of sympathy and avoidance from fellow government drones.
Carl stands, stretches. He needs to open his door, just a crack at least, to make sure he's going to find his boss. Perhaps tomorrow will be better to tell his boss. Yes, first thing in the morning. He locks his door, leans back in his chair.
In 17 years he can retire with full benefits. He will be 59. Maybe his wife will die of ovarian cancer like her mother. He can see himself stepping up, handling the sale of their mansion while executing the distribution of her trust assets. He will live near the Chesapeake, in a bungalow, able to see little waves smacking into each other.
by david erlewine
21 October 2009
The Bloodline of Sissies
As they struggled to salve his bruises with petals, the elders explained to the loser of the brawl that he was as much female as he was male. The restless Androgyne wiped his tears like they were bison piss. The elders assured him his sensitivity was from Highest Spirit, and he possessed a divine intuition that gave him the ability to heal—both himself and those young men who so often provoked him with jeers and pranks.
While the rickety geezers enclosed Androgyne in a circle of whispers, the rest of the young men trotted past in a line of fists and bellows. They pursued the deranged mammoth that regularly menaced the community by turning abodes into cracked stones and families into flat carcasses. Throughout youth, Androgyne had known the reason for the mammoth’s rampage. The animal simply desired to rejoin its herd, which grazed on the flowering side of the mountains. Humans created this rift when they clogged the pass with hulking clan halls and insatiable bonfires. Of course, Androgyne never confessed that he could understand the wants of a mammoth. Weird beasts didn’t need empathy; they required slaughter.
By returning pushes for embraces, Androgyne untangled himself from the elders. He sprinted after the rest of the men, intent on being the first to stab his spear into the monster’s belly. He was also the first to receive a tusk through the chest.
Because there was little room left in the men’s cemetery, the elders buried Androgyne with the women.
by david massengill
15 October 2009
Eureka
Lindsay, bored and lonely as usual on her hour-long commute from her home in Red Wing, MN to her job as a Database Administrator at Best Buy World Headquarters, decided this day to do something rather peculiar. Despite the fear she normally had of walking into her office even a minute past nine AM, she feared the continuance of her daily routine even more this morning. There was no obvious explanation as to why this day of all days became her breaking point, but that mattered little as Lindsay pulled her vehicle over onto the shoulder of Highway 10, opened her door and walked off into the wilderness. Sure, there were electric power transmission lines high above the trees and cookie-cutter houses in a circumferential horizon line, but Lindsay’s shoes were touching dirt and weeds and it felt like a romantic and spiritual thing. As this warm and naturalistic feeling gurgled about her limbic system, Lindsay was struck upside the noggin by the great log of life, which is to say, she was shat on by a bird.
by christopher matthew jensen
7 October 2009
Santa Meets the Tooth Fairy
They meet at a party and the attraction is instant, surprising them as much as anyone – what, with his wide-belted girth and crinkled eyes and her spun-sugar hair and silver wings. Within moments of being introduced, he takes her hand and leads her to a moonlit room, empty except for a bed and a snowy blanket. Softly, he shuts the door, and the floor tilts under her dainty feet.
They share a sense of humor about their situation – with a grin and a gruff whisper, he promises not to take her on his lap and ask her what she wants. She laughs, with music, and touches his cheek, sending small licks of flame through his frost-bitten skin. Then they’re quiet again as her fingertips travel under miles of plush red velvet to feel his heart beating.
Afterwards, he says he'll drive her home, but she straightens an iridescent strap on her slim shoulder and reminds him she still has work to do. One last kiss, and she’s gone so quickly he feels like a boy who’s been dreaming of packages.
Later, as she’s lifting the pillow of a sleeping child, she catches the scent of soot and pine, and she, who always works in silence, hears a sigh escape from her ribs. At the same moment, he’s riding across the sky with a pair of soft leather reins in his hands and is suddenly engulfed by the fragrance of a pure white lily that blooms just one night a year.
by linda ferguson
30 September 2009
Approaching Girls in Dixons
I think she is the kind of girl who likes the smell of electrical fires. Interested in the backs of televisions; excited by too many plugs in a socket. An overheated adapter for a hot water bottle.
Today she's in Dixons, where the warm air holds a possibility.
She's waited for a quiet moment to place her hands over a laptop fan, something like hope on her face.
I should probably go over.
by teresa stenson
16 September 2009
Showtime
“Thanks, asswipe,” he grumbled, clutching the steering wheel and scowling at the driver puttering and weaving ahead of him. “Take two lanes instead of one. Christ.”
“Shh,” his wife said, glancing toward the back seat. “The twins will hear you.”
“They’ve got to learn sometime.”
“Learn what? Impatience? Road rage?”
“Proper driving technique.”
“They’re three.”
“The world’s getting more complicated,” he said. “Technology and the new math are changing everything. Never too young to learn.”
“Or too old?”
He passed the car. The driver yelled obscenities and flipped him the bird.
Showtime.
As he raised his hand to reciprocate, he saw his wife and kids staring at him. His finger had started its inexorable and well-practiced movement into position. The kids munched pretzels and watched him like a cartoon.
He grudgingly retracted his finger, clenched his teeth, and completed the pass. His wife turned on the DVD player. The Wiggles sang about some big red car.
“Showtime,” he muttered.
by tom mahony
9 September 2009
Moving Day
We’re in mom’s Cherokee with a full-sized mattress strapped to the roof with kite string because that’s all my dad could find, and dad can’t be bothered to go to the store for proper rope or bungee straps, nor does he want to drive an extra 20 miles to borrow Uncle Flip’s pickup truck for the job. Nope, that’s what he’s got three boys for. Dad drives, and my brother and I are on either side of the backseat with an arm out the window, holding onto the mattress. My other brother? He’s lying spread-eagle on top of the thing to weigh it down as dad drives 15 mph in a 45 zone, backing up traffic for miles. Next, we move the La-Z-Boy.
by kelly stapleton
2 September 2009
A Noble Profession
I didn't recognize the e-mail address at first, having been retired for nearly five years. But once I saw the name "lfoote," and the "edu" address, I opened the message, looking forward to hearing from Lois, my old teaching colleague.
The message was chatty and catty, a Lois Foote trademark. She talked of exams to be read, her hatred of me for abandoning the ship before her, and offered her deadpan descriptions of colleagues: "Gilda still waxes prosaic." "Richard continues loathing everything published since 1900, except his novel."
Then came the real reason for writing. "Angus is quitting at the end of spring semester."
"Angus is quitting?" I typed. "I thought they have to remove him with a crane. I smell gossip."
"No crane. A cutie," was all her follow up email said.
"Full disclosure at one," I wrote back, "Or I'll tell everyone about your tattoo."
She waited more than twenty minutes before posting another e-mail. She hadn't been teaching drama since Ibsin wore diapers without appreciating the value of the dramatic pause.
Lois proceeded to tell a sordid story of Angus, our white-haired, Harley-riding poet from Scotland, caught by Dr. M in the photography lab practicing his dark room techniques with a freshman.
There are times I miss my former profession.
by wayne scheer
28 August 2009
Just the Cup
Mornings I get coffee in the building cafeteria. I get a Medium Fair Trade with room for dairy, non-fat. Before applying the lid, I breathe in the aroma, a pleasure. I pay with the change I've prepared, and my day as a junior accounts manager begins.
This morning, a woman ahead of me grabbed an Extra Large cup, took it, empty, to the line. She was wide of hip, dressed well, jacket and skirt of muted maroon, an elegant necklace-bracelet ensemble, expensive-looking heels. I'd seen her before, around the lobby, in the local paper. She was CEO at McDonald-Loewy, a big financial firm in the building.
When it was time, she strode forward and, without pausing, said to Marla, the cashier, "Just the cup." Marla waved her through. I handed Marla my change - five quarters, four dimes, two nickels - and slipped the receipt into my wallet.
At the condiment stand, the CEO reached past a small man, picked up the Cream canister and poured, poured until her cup was full, then topped it off with a splash of Non-Fat. I looked once at Marla, then back at her.
She raised her head, beamed. I saw in her eyes the same satisfaction I feel each morning. I returned her smile, then got my own dairy. My cup cost a dollar seventy five, hers nothing. We'd soon both be at our desks doing our jobs. Mine? To account for all payables and receivables, make sure they are exactly right.
by alan girling
26 August 2009
Parking Lot
The gentle humming of the power windows being lowered was not a comforting feeling. Even the cavernous backseat of a Monte Carlo couldn’t provide enough shelter from the approaching storm. “Fat ass!” he would bark. The heat of the words adding to the already hot Missouri day. Stifling, but he would rarely sweat. He would sometimes mumble after that, keeping his voice low and his words fast. It was a sad addiction. He was on a mission to ruin everyone’s day. I sat there, a quiet soldier of his “hotheaded regime.”
Parking a few spots away from the store was usually no big deal. But when it’s hot, people run low on kindness. “You need the exercise,” he shouted as he circled around like a shark. The second punch stung the worst. He wasn’t playing. His eyes stopped dancing and remained suspended as if they were in boiling liquid. His jowls became tight, like a Doberman on the hunt. No one ever returned the jabs.
There’s power in saying what you want and getting away with it. Like a “ring and run” for adults. “Hussy,” he would let the “u” and “s” linger on his lips. Sexy and foul at the same time. We would eventually park and get out of the car. The whole scene unfolded in slow motion: the sun was blazing, we took confident strides towards the store, his eyes settled on whoever dared to stare, the cool rush of air conditioning and sound of the electric powered doors welcomed us in. Victory.
He was a dangerous man. I like danger, I like it a lot.
by heather calomese
21 August 2009
Cherry Bye Blues
As the train alpined its way through Switzerland he delighted in hovering about the caboose platform, waving back to young Swiss girls riding their bicycles on the outskirts of another picturesque village, steeples and shops with hiding places galore. Oh, it was great to be alive and young, young, healthy and in demand. Nineteen years old and really living now, a tempest rushing to Barcelona to lose his cherry. Several guys on Herzo Base had been to Barcelona and they told him all about the friendly whores to be found and enjoyed along the Ramblas, the greatest street in the world.
Why not? Now was the right time. During the summer of 1958, a week in the great city of Barcelona, where winsome whores awaited him, and he was really going to let them have it, his first fucks something they would never forget. Getting laid!
Unfortunately, he had always been extremely shy around girls and totally unprepared to confront a naked woman. He reveled with American sailors at the Montparnasse Bar where he picked up the very willing Conchita who took him to a beautiful room of sensual lighting and soft music. Getting laid!
Unfortunately, he drank too much, or maybe not enough, and cowering from the bed he watched the naked woman finger fuck herself over the bidet his last two nights in Barcelona. A train carried him and his cherry safely back to Germany.
by kalman gayler
19 August 2009
Despair
In the weeks after Gregory's wife left him, sadness would suddenly drench him, like a sneaker wave. The times he¹d expected to feel heartbroken, alone at the end of the day before their favorite television show, for instance, he felt only the dull pain of vacancy. It was unanticipated sweetness that allowed despair to rush in, as when the child next door poked her head over the fence, pointed to her mouth, and announced that she'd lost a tooth and he could only nod before he fled inside, certain that he might burst into tears.
When the cat, a furry odalisque, rolled on her back on a soft April morning as he stood in the sandy garden bed where he'd planted carrots, an enormous wave reared up and toppled him to the ground, smashing his face into the feathery green tops, the sorrow receding only when the dog next door began barking frantically and he lifted his head and saw the child with her head over the fence, observing him.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
“Tending the carrots,” he said. Dirt fell from him in clumps and he flushed, after which the sadness began to diminish and finally evaporate, embarrassment being a hot, calming emotion.
by rosaleen bertolino
14 August 2009
Kill
When the child saw what his shot did, he forced himself not to look away, aware of Bobby, Tommy, and Little Davy grinning and yucking. With three fingers, his father gripped the squirrel by the scruff. The animal thrashed blood across the snow in fine, bright sprays. His father offered the squirrel and the knife for the boy to slit it vent-to-throat, as he’d seen his father do with other game. But instead, the boy wrapped one hand around the squirrel’s soft, heaving belly, the other under the neck. The uncles opened metal thermoses, poured steaming chocolate for the boys. The child twisted his hands, heard something like pretzels crunch, felt something like glass shards grind. He raised one hand over his eyes as if to shield them from the sun, leaned against the tree, and swallowed. Then, he feigned a cough and spit bitter.
For months, he chewed and chewed, unable to swallow meat, tonguing it into his palm surreptitiously, pretending to wipe his dry mouth, then slipping the flesh under the table to the dogs.
by bim angst
12 August 2009
The Monster
I first met the monster when he had the bloody needle sticking out of his arm hunched over on the mattress in an awkward position, eyes wide open. That maniac chased me out of the trailer for no reason at all, and he would have killed me happily too. He actually chased me around that depressing kitchen a few times before I decided on pressing my luck, jumping out that front door, and running for my life. I ran across that trailer park like it was the Olympics, nineteen years old and sprinting between hurdles, and all because this insipid heroine addict thought I was interested in the beautiful fourteen year old daughter of his cocaine injecting ex-convict girlfriend. I had brought her cocaine many times for free because she was my friend and she was an addict, her mother that is, never the girl. My relationship with the girl, Brandy, was mostly innocuous--having denied her multiple precocious attempts at seduction as Lolita-esque and gotten drunk in front of her face instead of even kissing her on the cheek--and a monster was two steps away from killing me over nothing.
by matthew dexter
7 August 2009
What Girl
It being Saturday and all, and Saturday being when teenagers are supposed to go to the mall, my friend Sam and I took the bus to the Mazza Gallerie downtown, even though we probably would have fit in better somewhere plainer and closer to Sam’s house in Bethesda (where I used to live years ago), but we went, maybe for no reason other than that, like most fifteen-year-olds, even ones who hadn’t seen each other in years, we couldn’t think of anything to do, but maybe it was fate, because between Sam Goody and Chess King with us wondering if maybe we had run out of things to say, I suddenly saw the girl that three years earlier I very nearly maybe almost could have kissed when my family was in Aspen at some smarty-pants retreat that both my father and hers were attending, but point being, here she was and not entirely surprisingly because I knew her family lived in Silver Springs and she was walking right past me and all I could do was watch her go, her face more grown-up, leaner, her body still long, still lean, her long, soft brown hair falling straight down her back, and her flip-flops softly flip-flopping past me and I turn to Sam and say, “That girl that just walked by: that was that girl that I told you about—the girl from Colorado,” and Sam says, like an idiot, “What girl?”
Sometimes I wonder if anyone knows me.
by steve mcpherson
5 August 2009
Unlike a Horror Movie
On our honeymoon we became lost in the mountains. Far from any town, we pulled off at a tiny gas station to ask directions.
“It looks,” my wife said, “like the kind of gas station where people in a horror movie stop for directions. You know, just before they’re picked off by a psycho killer.”
We laughed and walked inside.
The place was old but well-lit, and it smelled of fresh coffee. Steel guitar from an old country song swelled in the air, comforting even if I couldn’t place the tune.
The man behind the register was clean, pleasant and helpful. He didn’t wear filthy coveralls, spit and curse like the station attendants in horror movies.
“Well, that wasn’t like a horror movie after all,” I said as we walked back to the car.
We drove off, following the directions the attendant gave us. They led not to a sudden death at the hands of a killer but to a long road of petty cruelty and tiny atrocities.
by sanford allen
31 July 2009
Hook, Line & Sinker
Summer after the accident my parents began insisting they could get to heaven without waiting in line. Six months before Christmas, in the guts of June, they invited an incorrigible band of nerds into our living room. Neighborhood parents shook their hands and hightailed SUVs straight out of town. Mom made homemade eggnog, dad chiseled away at a giant block of ice. I sat smoking in garage rafters, seeing how far I could dangle spit before sucking it back into my mouth. Inside they played games and sang songs about life everlasting. In an effort to appease the few popular girls that couldn’t tantrum their way out of attending, I told Leroy Hinklefuss that if he spread peanut butter on his genitals and let our black Labrador Leviticus (nee Duke) lick it off, that I would recreate the favor in my upstairs bedroom. Some people believe anything. We laughed hysterically behind cupped hands. My parents walked in on Leroy frosting his scrotum like a cupcake. After the celebration, after everyone had gone, my parents said we needed to getaway. They said there would be roller coasters and water rides. They said it would be heaven on earth. Excited, I got in the car.
by brendan o'brien
29 July 2009
Dematerialized
The engine in the cab of Stuart’s 1965 Dodge truck started spitting steam in a traffic jam on Highway 1 towards Santa Cruz. Stuart never wanted to pull over for anything so he put an old t-shirt over his hand and removed the radiator cap between us. A geyser of antifreeze and boiling water exploded and drenched us in a Hell’s rain.
He pulled over. We tumbled out, our backs steaming.
“I’m so sorry about this. I should’ve known,” Stuart said.
We sat on the rail separating the road from the cliff. I looked down at a group of hippie nude sunbathers on the beach. I’d heard that in tropical hurricanes, a person on the beach could be dematerialized by sand. I wondered what kind of asshole would hang out on a beach in a hurricane.
My back stung where my bikini cut into my boiled skin. This was as good a time as any to break up and I thought about how I was going to say it so he wouldn’t think the radiator was the main reason when I noticed that on the beach a man and woman lay on their backs holding hands. They were so happy and perfect like Adam and Eve and my resistance slid away like loose gravel on a steep sandstone bluff.
I pressed the side of my face against Stuart’s chest. I heard his heartbeat and it was racing.
by maureen o'leary wanket
24 July 2009
Bread Route
The nursing home called. My father and one of his cronies had stolen the idling bread truck from outside the delivery door. “This is tragic,” she apologized. “I don’t know how it could have happened!” But I did. They’d probably been scheming for weeks. They were senile, but not stupid. “I don’t know if he can drive it,” the head nurse continued. “We’ve alerted the police.” “He can drive it with his eyes closed,” I said. “That used to be his route.” I got on my little scooter and puttered across town, weaving around pedestrians, light posts. I spotted the bright yellow truck in the Turkey Hill parking lot, tilted back, front tires resting on a concrete divider. Country music blasted from the open door. My father in his pajamas was loading plastic trays of bread on a dolly. He nodded to me. “Do you believe the prices on this shit? When did that happen?” Buddy was teetering near the open back door. He was naked and his blue plastic diaper was ripped open from one side. He was fitting a baby bagel over his penis. “When does anything happen?” he said.
by gary moshimer
21 July 2009
Mornings
Around here there are times when early summer mornings are right still, when all us farmers can hear each other’s tractors starting, just after sun-up, especially if you’re late getting out to yours. Tractor motors popping and snorting, from there, then there, then over that away, the whole county warming up its motors.
Always reminds me of a time outside of some little French town. We’d been crawling on our bellies for two whole days, finally got some armored support in the late afternoon, stopped for the night. Next day at sun-up, all those tanks begun to run their motors. I said then to this New York boy I used to pal around with some–I still remember his name, Guido di Barco–I said to Guido that those tank motors reminded of tractors starting up on all the farms around home.
That day we moved into that little town. Guido got killed–only we never said “killed.” We used some other words.In our outfit it was “bought the farm.” So now of a quiet summer morning if I hang around talking with the old woman over coffee and get out late to start my motor, I hear all the others starting theirs, and it reminds of that time outside that little French town just before Guido di Barco bought the farm.
by brad field
16 July 2009
Claw
I’m raking leaves when three little boys run by, kicking up one of my piles. Piggies, that’s what my wife calls the kids. Inside the house, my son sits on the entry room floor, looking at alphabet flash cards. The boys run to the end of the cul-de-sac and disappear down the hill, no doubt looking for soggy tennis balls or quarters in the little creek.
I hold open the trash bag with my left hand and stuff leaves into it. Once I get enough in the bottom, the bag will be easier to control. Even the year my wife helped, starting each bag was the worst part. She stood there, yelling back at me that she was holding it open.
Next year my son will help, whether his stomach hurts or not. He won’t be like her, always claiming headaches and stomach viruses and exhaustion.
One of the little boys’ moms calls out “Jamie!”. She walks past me, not waving or saying hello. My wife hated her from the day we moved in. I think the woman’s name is Janet. She travels a lot. She’s some hot shit attorney whose husband is more like the wife.
Janet runs to the edge of my yard and looks up past my house, at the wooded area beyond my backyard. “Jamie, come here!”
Serves her right, not knowing where her child hangs out. You can drown in less than 2.5 centimeters of water.
She circles back, walks right up to me. “Where did he go? Where is Jamie?”
My son watches us through the window. I shake my head and claw leaves into the bag to make it still.
by david erlewine