Issue 9

FICTION

• No Costume for Me, by James Callan

• The Spanish I Still Remember, by Jacob Dimpsey

• Down in the Valley, by Paul Luikart

• Steady Eyes, by Andrew MacQuarrie

• Lost Lake, by Margo McCall

• Just One Family Tree, by Wayne McCray

• Dream of Drowning, by Catrina Prager

• 100 Tacos, by Sam Simon

• Gone With the Wind, by Theresa Walker

• Health Freak, by Eric Z. Weintraub

FLASHFICTION

• Eleven to Four, by Stephen Ground

• Assad el-Sahra, by Ayeyemi Kehinde

NON-FICTION

• Namesake, by Susan Meyer

• Enough, by Rachael Siciliano

• Gunshot Man, by Marco Etheridge

POETRY

• The Wolf You Might Have Been, by Tomas Baiza

• During the Day, by Matthew Berg

• Me Fickle, by Kyle Heger

• Tabernacle of Longing, by Ernest Ògúnyẹmí

• Concentration, by Landen Raszick

• Ode to a Teardrop, by Kate Sullivan

Editorial Team: Jose Palacios, Aimee Campos, Monica Aleman

Advisors: Juana Moriel-Payne, Thomas Cook

Lucca, Perpignan, La Chambre, Cafe de France, Montmarte, by Kate Sullivan

FICTION

____________________________________________________________________

No Costume for Me

by James Callan

When he told me that he had charmed me I made the excuse. I said to myself, of course, he’s a vampire. He’s working his voodoo magic. Projecting his aura, all seduction, heavy with oo-la-la. It had me buckling at the knees, that twinkle in his eye. Supernatural plucking of heartstrings. Music to my ears and to every other fibre of me. Intoxication with a stare. Like a warm current of please-douse-me-from-head-to-toe-and-don’t-miss-a-spot, I bathed in those waves of vampire magic.

That was my excuse. That he had charmed me. The vampire. My excuse for why I was swooning for another guy. Because all the other times I had managed to hold those feelings at bay. On all other occasions I had kept them hidden away like vampires sleeping through the daylight in coffins in deep, castle dungeons. But against the power of his unholy charm, what on earth was a fellow to do? I was powerless against his enchantment. All I could do was give in. Give in and hope the night ended with our clothes on the floor.

His fangs gleamed in the moonlight as he smiled.

Then he casually took out the plastic teeth and put them in his blue denim Levis. Some kids across the street were smashing pumpkins. The vampire had removed the mouthpiece to better articulate the curses he shouted at them. ‘Assholes,’ he muttered afterwards and didn’t bother to put the fangs back in.

He picked me up at the bar. Everyone was in costume for Halloween. I didn’t bother. I was just me. Just a guy. I was hoping a girl would come up to me because I wasn’t in the mood to get drunk but I knew it was the only way I’d have the courage to make a move. So I waited for a girl. And I didn’t have to wait long. For a boy.

God, he is cute, I thought. Then winced and looked away. I pushed away my ginger ale and called for the barman to make me a vodka tonic.

‘Nice costume,’ he said to me, so close I felt his breath on my ear.

I melted. Turned away because I was trying to seal that spark in those castle dungeon coffins. ‘Yeah, well, Halloween isn’t really my thing.’ I told him.

‘Really?’ He sipped at his Bloody Mary, playing the part, because he was dressed up like Count Dracula or some other creature of the night. ‘I bloody love it! (No pun intended.)’

I laughed through my nose, kept my mouth from smiling.

‘So what is your thing?’ He asked me.

I turned to look at him and as I did I could think of nothing other to say than ‘You…you are my thing.’ I didn’t, of course. I just stared at that beautiful, undead creature before me with his ashen skin and midnight hair and blue, blue eyes. I didn’t say anything. And I didn’t need to. He must have seen it in my eye. Maybe the half vodka tonic had loosened me up just enough to let my poker face fall to shit. In any case, I didn’t need to speak.

The vampire took my hand and I let him. I turned to jelly as he walked me across the bar and out into the night. The city streets and wet pavement blurred with reflective sheen as I blinked and breathed to stay sane. I was delirious, heady with a swarm of sensations. They bombarded me all at once. But among that whirlwind of countless emotions, among the infinite debris in a chaotic toilet swirl of jumbled stuff, greatest of all, like a white hot electric slap on the ass…thrill. Thrill in letting go. Thrill in the form of lust, unbridled. Raw and real and just like me, no costume. No mask. Thrill in its most empowering form.

We walked and we talked and we leaned into each other and we laughed and we were quiet. He chewed gum and I declined his offer for a stick of my own but still tasted the cinnamon when we kissed. We walked some more and we parted ways. Happy Halloween.

We didn’t end the night with our clothes on the floor. But we did end our night with one last kiss. In the end I didn’t even get his name. And in the end, I didn’t care. What was more important - far more important - is that the night ended with a new notion, bold and bright, a new stance, firm and fulfilling, seared into the forefront of all that is me.

The night ended by being the last night that I would wear a costume, Halloween or any other day. Never again. No costume for me. Never again will I wear a mask.

****

 James Callan grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He lives on the Kapiti Coast, New Zealand on a small farm and takes care of his little boy, Finn.

______________________________

The Spanish I Still Remember

by Jacob Dimpsey

My mother always began sentences with Men don’t like, and I thought it was funny because if Mother knew so well what men like then why did Father leave us when I was five? But I took note anyway. Men don’t like dirty feet, chewed fingernails, a smartass, heavy eyeliner, a woman with bad posture—Sit up straight for chrissakes, mija. Men don’t like frowning, loud chewing, tan lines, honesty, unnaturally-colored hair, too-revealing clothes, too-modest clothes—Okay Mother, then what the fuck am I supposed to wear? Mother whacks me in the head, I wince, and she says something in Spanish too quickly for me to make out. 

Sometimes I feel guilty for losing my Spanish. I was fluent until grade school. Silvio’s parents were so excited when he brought a proper Mexican girl home, but they were quickly disappointed when his mami said, Estamos muy felices de conocerte, and I just stood there with a polite smile and lost eyes until Silvio stepped in to translate.

I moved away from Texas and my mother as soon as I graduated high school. I told myself I wouldn’t miss any of it but sometimes I close my eyes at Coney Island and pretend it’s Galveston or I slip off my sandals in Central Park on hot summer days and let the pavement burn my feet like I would on my neighborhood street in Houston until I can’t stand it anymore and I step onto the cool grass. Mija! my mother would shout from the door of our house. Men don’t like dirty feet. Come inside and put on your sandals! 

Most of my memories of my father are just random moments that my mind crystallized into a fragmented image. I don’t know why I remember some things and not others. I remember his stained tank top, the way his chest rumbled when he spoke while holding me, his gold earring, his rough hands, his loud music in the car. When I was seventeen, I asked my mother where my father had gone and she said he went west for work so when I left I went east. I told all this to Silvio once and he got all self-righteous, comparing himself to my father. He was being selfish; I would never abandon my family like that; and on and on. I rolled my eyes and changed the subject.

My mother called me for the first time in years to tell me my abuela had died and that I needed to come home for the funeral. Is it terrible that my first thought wasn’t of my abuela? It was of Houston. I hadn’t been back since I moved to New York. I was almost nervous to see it again. Silvio and I flew to Houston two days later. I showed Silvio places from my childhood. We drove to Galveston which brought back memories of sandcastles and collecting seashells and my first kiss with my first boyfriend on the Ferris wheel and the ice cream he bought me. Everything had a dreamlike quality. I felt I needed to walk carefully, not look too closely, not disturb anything. I wanted to preserve Houston the way I remembered it.

Abuela’s funeral was at our church. Her casket rested at the altar under a statue of the Virgin Mary. I remember long mass services as a child, Mother nudging me forward to receive the sacraments. I’ve forgotten most of my Spanish, but I still remember the prayers I recited every day until at some point when I told Mother I no longer believe. Sometimes I still catch myself whispering under my breath Ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. When I think about death, I think about when my abuela would take me on walks to feed the koi fish or to pick pecans in the fall at the arboretum. I can remember running ahead through the pedestrian tunnel between her house and the arboretum, looking back at her, telling her to come on. She’s rushing to catch up. If you really see a tunnel with a light at the end when you die, I think I’ll see that pedestrian tunnel. Abuela saying Slow down, I’m coming, taking my hand; and the pecan trees and koi pond on the other side.

I’m not sure if this really happened or if I imagined it when I was young and my mind just incorporated it into the mythology of my childhood, but I’m going to tell it as if it did happen: Not long before he walked out on us, my father took me to a 7/11 and bought me a soda. Mother never let me have soda because soda makes you fat and men don’t like fat girls. So, I stood in front of the cooler for fifteen minutes trying to decide which soda I wanted because I knew Mother wouldn’t let me have another. And my father stood there watching me with a big grin on his face and a dollar in his hand. Maybe the reason I remember—or made up—this moment with my father is because I thought of it every time my mother began a sentence with Men don’t like. Maybe it’s stupid, but it made me think that what men actually like is to buy girls soda. The whole way home my father kept asking, Is it good? How do you like it? He said If it’s no good, we’ll take it back for another one. Then I said something in Spanish that made him laugh and he hoisted me onto his shoulders and carried me the rest of the way home.

 ****

 Jacob Dimpsey is a writer living in Camp Hill, PA. He studied at Susquehanna University where he earned his BA in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in Flock and Sidereal Magazine and is forthcoming in Plain China.

___________________________

Down in the Valley

b

y Paul Luikart

Adam leaned on the porch rail, out back of the little cabin that overlooked the valley with the stooped mountains beyond and he wondered again about the point of the divorce. The land sloped sharply away beneath him. The owners of the place said that sometimes there were black bears down there, and there were always squirrels and woodpeckers, and given the right spring evening, the porch would glow with luna moths. “Take your time,” they’d said, “We won’t need it again until tourist season in the fall.” He’d been there, so far, a couple of days and it was already hard to be still.

‘Maybe there’s a difference between lonesome and lonely,’ he thought, ‘And I guess I’ll find out.’ He lit a cigarette and puffed and paced the porch and thought that ‘alone’ was different. A person could be alone and happy but never lonesome—nor lonely—and happy. Lonesome and lonely were the same thing anyway. There really is no difference. It was stupid to think about. It was stupid to think about her, now at least, and about why, about what she might be doing at this very moment, and with whom.

            When the cigarette was gone, he stepped off the flat boards of the porch onto the steep slope that slanted all the way to the valley floor. Budded hickories and white pines grew straight up, even where the slope of the land was greatest. How could anything grow so tall and straight and heavy on the side of a mountain? As he descended, his boots scraped away layers of leaves and he covered the last half of the slope like a skier, pivoting his hips and making little jumps.

There was a creek that traced the meandering valley through the mountains until, someplace far off, it collided with the Tennessee River. He stood huffing, watching the creek slide over water-smoothed stones and when his breath was back to normal, he took the cigarettes from his shirt pocket and smoked another.

He stooped and put his hands in the water. For a handful of long seconds, every untethered thought about her or their life together or their end, disappeared and the clear, cold bite of the creek was all there was. When he finally stood, he clapped the water off his hands and ran them down the front of his jeans.

He walked along creekside in time with the slosh and whisper of the water. A frog plopped into the creek ahead of him, and the jewelweed and a plant he’d always called, ‘stickum,’ with fuzzed and ropey stems, clung to his jeans at the ankles. He stumbled more than once over hidden, half-rotted logs. The smell of the creek crept down the back of his throat—the slicked little banks and empty crayfish shells, the macerated and browned-over leaves. A flat, rank bitterness.

The valley was filled with crow calls and he turned in place, staring at the sky, up through the branches that crossed his line of vision like black bolts of lightning that couldn’t disappear. When he got dizzy, he sat on a flat slice of shale and hugged his knees and sneered, “Well, come on, motherfucker. Get that peace of mind already.”

Twenty minutes later, he stood. He sighed and began to work his way further along the creek. The foliage became thicker, grasses up to his waist in some spots. He could feel his boots sinking in the mud. Then, ahead, he saw something. A spot where the grasses had been tamped down. In the middle, an elongated lump the color of sawdust. He stopped. When it didn’t move, he crept close and, closer, he could see it was a deer. A buck. An antler was missing. The jaw hung open and he could see the slanted rows of teeth. Just below the jawbone, the hair was matted with blood, smeared black in places and, closer to the gash in the animal’s neck, a reddish orange stained its hide. The gash was deep and long and irregular, and, in places, the white of the animal’s vertebrae poked through the purple muscle.

“Oh God,” Adam said, “Oh God,” and toed it with his boot.

He stooped and grabbed the remaining antler. It was cream-colored and smooth, and dark brown grooves in the keratin brought to mind the highway, endless roads to run on, a never-ending horizon. He squeezed the antler tighter and wrenched it to the side trying to snap it off, but it wouldn’t break from the skull and the slice in the deer’s neck opened wider and squeezed out blood.

But the animal wasn’t dead. In the time it takes a fly to vanish on the wind, the deer leapt. A sucker punch to Adam’s guts, a jolt of white pain. All the air went out from his lungs. The hooves scrabbled for purchase on the wet stones and water and mud flew in all directions. Adam splashed down in the middle of the creek, where it was deeper. The cold shocked him back to his feet and creek water filled his boots.

The deer bounded upstream and came to an off-balance halt as quickly as it had charged away. The forelegs buckled and, for a second, the top half of the animal was pushed along by the water and the creek flashed into the animal’s body by the rip in its neck and the rear half stayed planted by the hind legs in the mud. But then, the hind legs crumpled and the animal fell and the water replaced the blood and the animal died.

Adam stood staring. The crow calls smashed his senses first. Next, the ache in his feet from the frigid water. Then, a blunt pain spreading out from the middle of his belly. He scanned the blue for the black nicks of crows and pressed his hand to the soreness without looking down. His fingertips found the underside of the antler’s pedicle, rough and hard and still warm. He looked down then. The brow tine pinned the fabric of his jacket to his body and puckered it, but the stem of the antler was buried deep in his gut. He flicked at the burr, then pinched it between thumb and forefinger, and felt the antler move inside him. He felt, too, a slippery heat and glanced at his hand and saw it was slimed with red.

Adam staggered to the bank of the creek. All the light in his field of vision washed over its boundaries, as in a storm surge, a flood. Hot light overwhelmed everything in shadow, everything dark—mud, tree bark, every shaded thing among and through the trees. He felt weightless then. Not like floating, but a sudden loss of gravity all around. He perceived an enormous burning cloud before him, and a wind pushed him toward it. There was no sound. Nobody knew where he was. He couldn’t scream and there was nothing more to feel.

****

Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, forthcoming in 2021) and The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, forthcoming in 2021.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

_______________________________

Steady Eyes

by Andrew MacQuarrie

His eyes didn’t change when Hairston shot him.  That was the part that stuck with Hairston.  If the movies had it their way, his eyes would’ve been wide with shock, his pupils quivering and dilated as he glared at his killer.  There might have even been a tinge of innocence in that stare, one final swing at redemption as the last dregs of life trickled out of his crumpled body. 

But that’s not what happened.  His eyes didn’t change. 

He just died. 

It was strange for Hairston to be thinking of that guy, that night, in the cafeteria of North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York.  He knew it was strange.  Even so, standing in line for coffee surrounded by doctors and nurses in their scrubs and white coats—people who dealt with death every day, who were more familiar with the intricacies of mortality than he would ever be, but who’d never seen the side of death that he had—he couldn’t shake the thought. 

It wasn’t a question of regret.  Killing him had been the right thing to do.  Given the circumstances, he’d do it again in a heartbeat.  But that didn’t make it any easier to forget. 

The ward was plaintively quiet, only some chatter from the nurses’ station and the odd call bell to disturb the peace.  Visiting hours were long over, but an exception had been made for Hairston’s family. 

“Decaf, right?”

 Hairston’s brother took the coffee.  He nodded, then turned his attention back to his phone.

He seemed distracted, standing there outside the room, though it struck Hairston that he wouldn’t know what distraction looked like on his little brother anymore.  His other brothers—the dozens he’d deployed with, the ones he shared a bond stronger than blood with—he could feel even their most marginal shift in mood.  It was different with them, though.  He’d gone to war with them.  He would die for them and they would die for him.  But his actual brother?  A man who shared his DNA?  Hairston couldn’t manage a phone call once a month?  A text every now and then?  A “Happy Birthday” on his 30th? 

He ceded his brother the space he clearly needed and entered the room.  There were Hairstons from wall to wall.  Uncles.  Grandparents.  Cousins twice removed.  Most of them he hardly knew outside of old framed photos and recycled stories.  Some he hadn’t known at all until a few days before when the entire family started to convene.  Yet every single one of them knew him:  Captain John D. Hairston, United States Air Force Special Tactics Officer.  American Hero.  Pride of the Hairstons of East End. 

“Who else had decaf?”

A volley of hands, mostly older, shot up.  Hairston distributed the insulated cups.

“And the real stuff?” 

There were a couple of laughs, then a couple more hands.  Hairston distributed the remaining cups, waved off multiple offers of repayment, said something about “the least I can do.” 

He put aside his own coffee and sat down at the chair next to the bed.  It was warm.  He reached out to brush the hair from her face.  Her brow was even warmer. 

He smiled. 

She tried to smile back.

“Hey, Ma.” 

--

The mission itself hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary.  Terminal air control—managing a little airstrip in the eastern part of Afghanistan.  It had been a quiet deployment, much less kinetic than either of his previous two.  They’d taken some fire, had a few close calls outside the wire, but by that point they’d made it through six and a half months more or less unscathed.  The mood was as light as it could be. 

That it happened in the chow hall was what was most alarming.  Not that anywhere in that country, at that time, could ever truly feel safe.  But if any place was off limits from the toils of war, it should’ve been the DFAC.  It was a late dinner after a long day, he and a few of his troops musing over cups of shitty instant decaf about the first meals they were going to order back home.  Then a chilled hush washed over the entire tent. 

Fenton was the toughest of all of his troops.  A grizzled TACP from outside Detroit.  He’d been there during the surge.  He’d seen more shit than most.  Yet, frozen there by the door, an arm around his neck, a stolen M9 pressed flush against his temple, there was fear in his eyes. 

It was so quiet you could distinguish Fenton’s frantic breathing from his captor’s.  No one moved.  No one said a word.  Hairston, though, stood up.  He didn’t think.  He didn’t even consider what it was he was going to do.  He just stepped forward, his arms outstretched, his palms wide open.  “Hey, man.  I’m gonna need you to let him go.  Okay?” 

The gunman shouted something in Arabic.  He was shaking.  Hairston could see the beads of sweat on his brow. 

“Listen, man.  I need you to let him go.”  Hairston took another step forward.

The gunman flinched.  He pressed the M9 deeper into Fenton’s temple. 

“No, you’re not understanding me.”  Hairston smiled, almost laughed.  “I need you—”

Two bullets ripped through the captor’s skull.  Hairston’s sidearm was holstered before the blood started pooling on the floor. 

Fenton stabled himself against the wall.  His troops moved to secure the tent.  

But all Hairston could think about were those eyes. 

--

The doctors hadn’t painted a very positive picture.  Stage IV pancreatic cancer.  Metastasized to the liver and the lungs.  Survival rate less than 1%.  They were already talking about hospice before Hairston had found a flight home. 

He’d been in Djibouti when he got the news.  It damn near took an act of Congress to release him early, but he’d tackled that hurdle with the same relentless vigor that had defined his entire career.  It was just before midnight when he landed at Newark and just after 0100 when the cab dropped him off outside the hospital.  By the looks of it, he’d made it there just in time.  Yet, sitting in that chair, holding his mother’s clammy, trembling hand, he couldn’t help but feel like he was years too late.  

“Sweet boy,” his mother said, stroking the hand of the man she’d raised on her own. 

Hairston leaned in and kissed her brow.  He promised to take care of the house.  He promised to take care of his brother and the rest of the family.  He promised to make her proud. 

Her eyes didn’t change when she died.  They just closed.  And though it wasn’t Hairston who killed her, sitting there, holding her lifeless hand in his own and thinking about all the promises that died with her, he felt more regret than he’d ever known before.   

 ****

Andrew MacQuarrie is an Air Force veteran and a doctor. A native of Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles. MacQuarrie has previously published in The Montreal Review, The Write Launch, Pennsylvania English, and On The Premises.

___________________________

 Lost Lake

by Margo McCall

When the phone rings, Willie says, yes she’ll do it. Three days later she’s steering Hiram’s sputtering GMC down a road leading God knows where. She's towing the travel trailer she and Hiram dragged to lakes when the boys were small. Instead of watching TV with her hair in rollers, perhaps scalding milk for hot chocolate back in McFadden, she’s looking for her way back to Lost Lake.

She’s become unhinged. Like the rickety storm door that slammed open all winter, grating on her as she fed Hiram soup and prepared his injections. During one snowstorm, the pounding got so bad she went out in her robe and slippers and ripped it off the frame.

Willie threw it in a snowbank, and when spring came and the snow melted, the door sank into the mud. Willie having had more pressing matters to attend to, like Hiram’s funeral.

She didn’t tell her sons Walter or Oswald she’d signed up to be a campground host. Or as her sister Delia put it, asked their permission.

“I don’t need their blessing. I changed their diapers,” Willie told Delia, who was pestering her to sell the house, write a will and move into a retirement home.

Everybody telling her what to do, the whole town suddenly interested in her well-being, like now that Hiram was gone she was a loose end that needed to be snipped off.

Willie might have done what they wanted had she not run into her old schoolmate Albert Mason in the hospital waiting room as Hiram endured his last chemo round. Albert’s wife was undergoing hip surgery, which was going to nix their plans to be hosts at Lost Lake.

“That’s where Hiram and I honeymooned,” she said, prompting Albert to suggest she put her name on the list. With Hiram growing feebler and her thoughts racing about what to do next, she made the call without thinking.

And when they phoned her, Willie was just as surprised to hear herself say yes as she is now, looking for a place she last visited forty-odd years ago.

The winding dirt road doesn’t look familiar, but then again, some of the trees slapping the sides of the truck weren’t even seedlings the last time she passed by. She might have taken the wrong turnoff. Her poodles Cleo and Gypsy look worried.

The blue light fades to gray, and the aspens quaver with rising wind. Rogue gusts toss empty drink cups on the floorboards and tease edges of the roadmap flapping in the passenger seat beside the poodles, who whine as the rumbling thunder tracks their curving ascent.

Willie gave up on the map miles ago, tired of the crinkling as she unfolded and refolded it, confining tracts of mountain into squares that bore little relation to the landscape she remembered.

“Useless,” she finally said, not knowing whether the pronouncement was intended for herself or the map.

Willie’s been talking to the dogs, saying things like “Don’t worry Gypsy, we’ll be there soon,” or “You think we’re lost, don’t you, Cleo?”

Willie doesn’t want to admit it, but it seems she’s lost. Life has been a dreamy coagulated mix of past and present since Hiram slipped into eternity. The edges blur, soft as chocolate pudding and twice as rich and oh could she go for some now, even though the doctor says she could lose thirty pounds.

It’s hard keeping then and now apart:  worse than separating the boys to prevent a fistfight when they were little. All part of the same road, no beginning, no end, the turnoffs leading from four-lane divided highways to two-lane blacktop and gravel trails.

Memories of all the trips she and Hiram and the boys took, summer vacations in the Grand Tetons and Rockies, forays to the stock show in Denver. The cab probably still harbors a pouch of Hiram’s chew, or fishing lures that spilled from his tackle box. Willie hasn’t had the heart to clean it out.

Like everything else, the truck is a long list of things to do: fix the

broken side mirror knocked out of joint by a cottonwood branch on their driveway, flush the radiator, rotate the tires.

Time, like the memories, twists in and around itself, morning turning to twilight and then dawn with little separating one day from the next. It seems only minutes ago that she crawled out of the travel trailer in Redstone to begin a new day, and now already darkness is pressing in.

“I don’t know where the time goes,” she says to Gypsy and Cleo, who are looking out the side window in alarm at the wind whipping the trees.

And as the words slip into the twilight, she’s twenty five and with two small boys to chase after, and it was on an evening like this that she was hanging wash that should have been done that morning, scrambling to hold pegs in her mouth, keep the white sheets off the muddy ground and her sons close by. Feeling overwhelmed, a young mother then, with a husband gone for days at a time tending cattle, a circumspect man, quiet except when he was slurping his soup.

Oh, she’d loved him. But things got tangled after the boys came, and in forty years neither of them made an effort to set them right.

On that evening a black shape appeared on the horizon. Willie had her sons in the storm cellar seconds before it touched down in a neighbor’s field, and later, as she gazed at a sheet flapping in the crown of a cottonwood, she felt her own strength for the first time.

Clasping the steering wheel now, the white plastic rubbed smooth with oil from Hiram’s hands, that strength seems to have drained out of her. Worn out as the old GMC, rusty from twenty-five Wyoming winters, now struggling to drag the heavy trailer up another rise.

She didn’t have the mechanic check the truck before hooking up the trailer and guiding the GMC down from Laramie and Cheyenne. And if Hiram were around, he’d say, “Isn’t that just like you?” and “Don’t you have a brain in your head?” Making her feel small.

The trip has the feel of a dream, crossing the grassy border into Colorado, moving into the blue shadow of mountains. Eyes too weak for crocheting struggling to follow the gray expanse of road, the asphalt ribbon cut with yellow lines, getting further and further from home.

What was she thinking? Sixty-seven, hard of hearing, an old woman with thick glasses. Not like any campground host she’s heard of. Will she have the strength to clean out toilets and rake campsites? And what if she has a heart attack or her blood pressure medication runs out? Or falls and breaks her hip?

There’s a flash of lightning, growl of thunder, and spatters of rain smear the windshield. The sad truth is: there’s nowhere to go back to. The house where they raised the kids sags into the prairie, the well casings rusting, giving off weak dribbles of reddish water that leave streaks on the sheets.

There’s no turning around now. She’s sure. As the curtain of rain descends, Willie can barely make out the sign, Lost Lake, 2 miles, pointing to a narrow, rutted road lined by tall pines.

Green filtered light. Smell of wet earth. Sound of gentle rain, and water lapping the shore. Then and now, then only now. The lake even glassier than she remembers. It’s odd to no longer be moving.

She feels alone, not like she did on her honeymoon, and not as she did back in McFadden. This kind of alone is different, the alone of being Willie, Wilhomena, born in the starving year of 1934, in Medicine Bow below the Shirley Mountains, daughter of a farmer and his wife, shipped off at sixteen to marry a rancher, bear him two sons, then watch him die.

A while after she crawls into bed in the trailer, the rain stops and she falls into a deep, dreamless slumber.

Waking to the aroma of pine, she’s invigorated enough to go for a swim. The elastic around the legs of her bathing suit is shot. No surprise, the thing must be twenty years old. Her thin beach towel is covered with seashells. Though she’s never seen the ocean, if this summer works out, maybe she can coax the GMC west, follow the dotted lines until they end.

Diving into the cold lake, her heart jumps but doesn’t stop, and afterward, walking through the loop of sleeping campers, Willie shivers more from excitement than cold. After putting up her hummingbird feeder and opening cans of food for the dogs, she sits at the picnic table and makes a sign for the toilet: “Please close lid and door when leaving.” She’s always thought her handwriting loopy and uncertain, but now, examining it in the spreading light of morning, it looks just fine.

****

Margo McCall is a Pushcart-nominated Southern California writer whose short stories have appeared in Pacific Review, Howl, Pomona Valley Review, Dash, Toasted Cheese, and other journals. Margo’s nonfiction has been published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including Herizons, Lifeboat, and the Los Angeles Times, and my poetry in Amethyst Review and Umbrella Factory Magazine. A graduate of the M.A. creative writing program at California State University Northridge. Margo writes primarily about the L.A. region and live in the port town of Long Beach. Margo is a member of the Women Who Submit Long Beach chapter. For more information, visit http://www.margomccall.com or follow me on Twitter at @wordly1.

_____________________________

 Just One Family Tree

by Wayne McCray

Multiple gunshots echoed. Faces sprung up and outward from cotton fields and row houses. Hearing such blasts so close to where they lived was unordinary. Many halted what they were doing to go investigate. Those having sharp eyes saw a small crowd circling something laying on the gravel road. Upon closer look, what could've been mistaken for an animal was instead a man. He laid there pleading, then he died.

His mae culpa was unpersuasive. Those standing over him became malicious. Spats of tobacco chew landed on him. Many smiled while others cursed. Some turned out his pockets. All the rest were wide-eyed, looking at the shooter, listening to why the old lady had done it. She told her grandson to go fetch the law. Now he didn’t go directly to the police station. That was too far. Two neighbor's houses were chosen instead. Mrs. Pearl who had telephone and Mr. Freeman; he owned a rundown box van. The old lady was well aware that it should take him about an hour to go there and back. He had to run almost a mile. Most of it through considerable pine forests.  

His first stop was made and pretty soon he reached his second and began knocking on the backdoor. Ms. Pearl flung it open and an exhausted black boy stood before her. Mercury wasn't invited inside, but was told to get hold of himself. Once he caught his breath he told her who sent him and for what. And after he delivered the message she shut the door on him, prompting him to whisperly curse her before hurrying off.

Night soon fell. A bright moon had lit up the darkness. Soon a police car parked itself in front of the roadkill. Two country cops got out and walked up to the body. One officer knelt down, while his partner stood beside him, giving his two cents, taking notice of the victim's overall look, but once the body was rolled over and its face shown itself they gasped. It was Smoke Joe. Mr. Pennybaker's right arm and personal eyes and ears. A prized man who managed multiple plantations and all the sharecroppers who worked them. Smoke Joe was excellent at his job and did it so well he rubbed people wrongly. However, his rash tactics made his family wealthy landowners and community bigshots.

This death changed both officers' moods. Neither expected to find a dead somebody; however, both began wondering what fool would be so dumb and bold to commit such a violent act. They radioed back then began canvassing, banging on doors, on assumptions that someone should've known and seen or heard what happened and when. But after lengthy questioning one thing became apparent: all of them suffered from monkey wisdom.

Sirens blared in the distance. Moments later an ambulance had arrived. Another vehicle was behind it. It was Mr. Pennybaker. He jumped out and hurried over, bending down to confirm his fears, and his face instantly reflected how he felt, becoming sullen. He gently brushed the deceased's curly hair with his hand and kissed his nordic face before watching his body get carted off. He quickly wanted to know what info they had and when they replied very little, it didn't sit well with him, and he told them so. "Knock on them again. The sonofabitch who did it is here and I want him by tomorrow, if not sooner, and alive."

News spread and before sunrise came random acts of violence and intimidation began against those living there. Drive-by shootings occurred. Molotovs followed. A porch bomb. Piked shrunken heads were posted. Finally, a flaming cross had been hoisted. Monkey rules wavered after that and another messenger bravely went out. That morning a fancy black car rode up, rejecting the dust that tried landing on it. It shone bright and clean. An opulent put-together woman got out and began looking around at what wrath had wrought then went toward a short old lady who was sitting on the front porch, adorned in her Sunday best, and singing a spiritual.

"Morning Pirine," she greeted.

The old lady replied, "Morning Salt."

"Here I am," she told her. "So whodunit? "Ms. Pearl phoned, she said that you asked for me personally."

"I did," she responded, then sat up, drew a kitchen knife and fisted it. Soon there were tiny blood droplets. Then she held it out, wanting her to do likewise.

"What for?" She stirred. "This isn't a family matter. That vow isn't for this; however, I am here seeking a life for my son's life."

"I know that," Pirine reminded. "Now if you want what you came for then swear to it and promise harm will only befall the killer and not the family," she continued, "So until we come to that understanding you drove out here for nothing." There was some hesitancy at first but finally Salt did it and they shook hands.

"Satisfied," she said. "Now tell me, whodunit?"

"I did it," Pirine admitted.

Her answer pushed Salt back, briefly off the porch, that's when she debated reneging her oath, becoming radish color and menacing, pondering if she should gut her right then.

"I said I killed him."

"For what?" She hollered, "What had he done to you?"

"He became a typical nigger," the old lady replied, leaning forward. "I caught that son of yours shaking the wrong tree."

"He wouldn't do such a thing," his mother insinuated. "He knew better."

"So you say?" Pirine denied. "I told him often to keep his fixation to himself and stop cradle courting. But no, not him. It went into one ear and out the other. So he got slick, or thought he had, by being all nice and shit, in getting Rene out of the fields and far from us and back into school. I had no problem with that. All of us knew it was the best thing for her, because she disliked physical labor anyhow. Along with its imagery of having calloused hands, burnt skin, and arthritic body. She'd rather commit random acts of sabotage than do real work. To her, fieldwork was an obscene business. Truth be told, she was horrible at it. She couldn't pick fifty pounds of cotton if given a full sack. Her brother did her work for her, stuffing her sack with what he picked, to help keep her close to the group and far from Smoke Joe. Otherwise, she'd spend most of her time scribbling numbers and letters and symbols in the dirt. Her mind dreamed only of math and such a gift should be as far from this place as possible and beyond your son's reach.

"So yesterday, it looked and smelled like rain; but none fell. As soon as sunlight broke through the cloudy sky, I felt a sudden prick, then I heard God and was told to get home and be quick about it. School was out and the earth had swallowed Smoke Joe. So I ran across that field as fast as I could and when I got there Rene wasn't on the front porch, so I went inside. Her books sat on the kitchen table. The front room was empty. Middle room too. Then I heard some low sounds in the backroom and headed there and what did I find? The damn devil at work. Smoke Joe laying atop thrashing legs, holding a feather pillow over her face. I ran up and hit him with all I had left. Hard enough to force him off of her and for her to escape into another room. He felt his head, spun around in shock, wondering who dared hit him. He rose up and knocked me down, hovering, threatening I shouldn't believe my lying eyes. That I had better keep it to myself if I knew what was best.

"I've lived a long time dealing with such foul behavior, of men having their way. As soon as he took his weight off my chest, I got up and reached under my mattress for the gun but it wasn't there. Rene had gotten hold of it and had him in her sights, telling him what he could do with himself. He tried talking to her at first, but once that hammer clicked, and her face became brave, his feet raced down that narrow hallway. She shot him twice before he reached the front door. After that, I did what I had to do. I took the gun from her and told her to go get her mother and brother and pack, they needed to leave town as soon as possible and before nightfall. Because anytime we do what's right, particularly against those who get caught doing wrong, excuses flow, scapegoats arise, and things quickly go off the rails and nothing and nobody is safe.

"To say differently would be a lie, because you're here, and being from the same family tree, we both were brought up knowing to do what's best for our children, that our branch should have branches, and spread long after we're dead and gone. And now that God has kindly blessed this family with his brilliance, I'm not letting such talent whither on the vine. She's but a child, bright and smart, and not a grown ass woman, regardless of how mature she looks. Yet, your son tried taking her innocence and future and got what he deserved.

"So there, straight from my mouth, and not someone else's. Now let's keep it simple. I don't want any pretended niggers in dunce caps having fun at my expense. Nothing worse than folks masking themselves, believing if they look and do as the others do is far favorable than the alternative. I seek to avoid that kind of hatred. Just do what I ask, do what we shook on, and let my branch thrive. And Salt, please accept my apology." Pirine sat up in the chair, bracing herself. "I'm ready. It's on the kitchen table."

Salt entered the shack, returned, then shot her, causing her to fall back, out of the chair, and off the porch. She went around and unloaded again. Then she stood there: "That's for my son and of course I wish your family well," and departed. Before she got into her car, she told all within earshot to give Pirine, her big sister, a proper funeral. Burn her so her soul could rise up. It was unfit for a tree and she began crying and drove off.

****

Wayne McCray was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1965, and grew up in Chicago until 1984. He attended Southern University A and M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He currently lives in Itta Bena, Mississippi, enjoying country life. His writings have appeared in Afro Literary Magazine, The Bookends Review, The Ocotillo Review, Ogma Magazine, and Wingless Dreamer.

_____________________________

Dream of Drowning

by Catrina Prager

Flooding in her nostrils. Chlorine in her eyes. Oddly enough, the water was the only place where she felt she could truly breathe. Took an active effort to keep her eyes off the wall clock. Not to swim out and look at her phone. Again. Abby knew her time alone was limited, and that soon enough a gnarled hand would reach deep, snaking its fingers around one bony ankle, and pull her back to reality. The claw usually invariably belonged to Grandmother Therese, who would park Abby at the pool every morning for an hour while she went to visit her friend, or get her hair done. Grandmother Therese wasn’t a woman given to worldly vices, but a stiff perm was her signature, as was the perennial, gut-turning stench of hairspray that always mysteriously wafted in after the old woman.

A kick on her side, then shuffling. A head popping above her in the blear. Apologies. Didn’t see you there. Abby wanted to tell the woman she couldn’t quite see that nobody did. So that made it alright. Abby’s own mother had only been able to see her very briefly. But then, she’d parked the stroller at Grandmother Therese’s house one day, and then forgot all about it.

Smell of her mother, who didn’t smell of anything tangible. Made Abby blink harder, rub her eyes with one well-marinated hand. She didn’t like wearing goggles ‘cause they dried out her eyes. So she’d abandon them on one side of the basin as soon as Grandmother was out of sight, and always come home with dull, bloodshot eyes.

“I hope I didn’t hurt you too badly.”

Was that a faint English accent, or was that just Abby’s imagination? For a few weeks now, she’d had a penchant for all things British, like the word penchant. But how had a posh British woman come to be swimming in a mud puddle in St. Ann Heath?

“No good things ever end up here.”

“What’s that, darling?”

It couldn’t be. Because suddenly, regardless how many times she blinked, Abby’s eyes still wouldn’t clear. And she looked at the woman, and thought she saw herself looking back. And there was that scent again, and there was that thought.

“This must be a dream.”

Uncomfortable. Of course she was. Abby had a knack for making grown-ups uncomfortable. With her weird obsessions, and her overly-long words, and her peculiarity. When Grandmother got angry, she’d sometimes yell out mean things at Abby. It was from her that the little girl had first gotten the idea that her mother had left because Abby was crazy.

“Wrong in the head. No wonder your mamma couldn’t be bothered to raise you.”

Nothing was ever said about Abby’s father. Presumably, he’d caught on early that his daughter would turn out with a few screws loose, and bolted the first chance he got.

“Did you change your mind?”

Abby was an excellent swimmer, yet now she was struggling to stay afloat.

“Excuse me?”

The woman, familiar yet strange, was looking around now, trying to spot the grown-up who must’ve accompanied Abby, so she could be rid of her. Again.

“Nobody’s here. I mean, there’s people, but Grandmother is somewhere else now. Still, she’ll be so happy to see you.”

“I’m sorry, I think you’ve got me confused, kid.”

Except that couldn’t be it, either, because Ally never made confusions. She knew things different than the other kids, sure, but she was never wrong.

And then, a moment that lasted for a lifetime. A moment that should’ve never ended, Abby later reckoned. The woman should’ve stayed motionless, and Abby, she shoulda never reached out and grabbed the woman’s hand.

It wasn’t Abby’s fault. She didn’t like others touching her, either. It was just, she couldn’t seem to get her balance back just then. Couldn’t stay afloat. And the woman smelled so much like her mother.

But then, the moment did end, and Abby’s fingers touched the woman’s plump arm. And the woman’s eyes widened, transitioning from friendliness to alarm, and she pulled away, forcing Abby’s head into the water.

Not for long. One. Two. A second longer than it should have, though. Submerged, Abby greedily breathed in the tepid, chlorinated water. Felt it clogging her pipes. Silencing her mouth.

Then, she was out again, just like that, and no harm done. And the stranger woman was looking around in alarm, and saying fast words that Abby couldn’t make out. Dragging the girl out to the side. Propping Abby on one of the green plastic chairs surrounding the pool.

And then, the woman who smelled just like Abby’s mother was gone.

After that, Abby never went near the water no more, so Grandmother Therese was forced to drag her along. To stuffy apartments with too many things, and old women who smelled like absinth. To the hairdresser, with its plush chairs that always made Abby’s thighs itch. Here, Abby sat, thinking about the woman and that day at the pool. Wishing she’d see the woman one more time, ‘cause she hadn’t gotten the chance to apologize, or explain it wasn’t her fault, really, that she thoughts were all messed up. Wasn’t Abby’s fault she was wrong in the head. Or was it?

****

 Catrina Prager is a young Romanian writer, blogger and freelance content creator. So far, her work has also been featured in Bridge: The Bluffton University Literary Journal. At present, she's working on her first full-length novel. When she's not behind the keyboard, Catrina is either swimming or traveling. You can follow her on Instagram at @grimmestthings.

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 100 Tacos

by Sam Simon

Last April, I spent eight days in Mexico with my brother. I had just finished a degree in London to zero fanfare and was on my way home to California. He had just quit a job he didn’t like, even though it had paid him more money a month than I was accustomed to making in a year. Leading up to the trip, we made a pact that we’d eat one hundred tacos — fifty each. When we flew home, I had eaten fifty-one and he had only managed forty-six. I commended his effort, but I was secretly proud of the fact that I had managed to accomplish what he hadn’t. When we landed, I joked that we should go for tacos. He laughed and said he’d need a week or so. We met nine days later, and even though I’d felt half full since we’d returned, I ordered three and finished them while he told me about the two offers he’d received that week. I guess they want someone who can’t quite finish the job, I joked. He laughed and paid the bill before hugging me a bit too tight. That night, after I’d returned to our mother’s house, and he to his downtown apartment, I threw up what felt like fifty-four tacos, though it couldn’t have been more than, say, twenty-nine. It took us a month to schedule another outing, mostly because of his new job, though there ended up being another reason. I hadn’t minded the wait, my gut had maintained this sinking feeling, as if it had one final taco inside it at all times of the day, whether I’d eaten or not. When I arrived at the restaurant, not the slightest bit hungry, he was already there, sharing a menu with a woman he was seated next to. This is my girlfriend, he explained. I’ve heard so much about you, she said. Likewise, I responded. I hear you like to write, she said, your brother says you’re good. I do, I answered, though I’m not sure how good I am, he’s the one who’s good at everything. I don’t happen to agree, she said. Oh? I asked. Yeah, she continued, in fact, I hear he couldn’t even finish fifty tacos. That’s right, I said, that’s exactly right.

 ****

Sam Simon is a writer and translator from Oakland, Ca. He is a contributing editor for the Barcelona Review and teaches creative writing at the Institute for American Universities. He is a co-founder and the managing editor of Infrasonica.org.

_____________________________

Gone With the Wind

by Theresa Walker

A warm breeze blew on the sunny spring afternoon, making the loose hairs which had escaped the girl’s ponytail sway, every so often tickling her cheek. As she walked down the street a dandelion fluff appeared floating before her; she loved chasing fluffs.

The routine began as it always did. The fluff would arrive on the spring air to the girl and pass before her, sometimes even being so bold as to lightly brush her face. The girl would then strike out her hand in an attempt to snatch it from the air, but as always it evaded her. The first few attempts would be aggressively frantic, but soon the two would find a rhythm with one another.

When the wind blew stronger, causing the fluff to race down the street more quickly, she would sprint after it, smiling and giggling like a toddler. The fluff acted as if performing calculated moves, drifting forward and back, swaying side to side, and the girl just followed suit. When a hitch in the breeze caused the fluff to leap up higher, the girl leapt right along with it. Those times the wind would change direction, the fluff quickly moving behind her, the girl would twirl around and all the time the smile would never leave her face. The two moved so in sync it was as though they had silently choreographed their own dance, so full of delicate grace even the best ballet dancers would have shed a tear.

As she pranced and twirled down the street, she sometimes wondered why she loved chasing fluffs so much. She had already begun secondary school, a teenager she was, too old to be enjoying such things. As well she was too old to believe this fluff was more than just the result of a dandelion shedding. For no teen would possibly still believe catching the fluff would actually grant her heart’s desire, nor would they believe the delicate floating object to be a tiny fairy, beckoning her to follow. No, of course this could not be true, though why not? Why should she believe this fluff had no reason to come to her this day? Perhaps it was just as bored as she and thought they could find amusement in each other; this could be the case. Why should people stop believing in fairy tales and magic? Why must only the little children be the ones allowed to dream? As she wondered this, she continued to follow the fluff, for something so small it was like a beacon guiding her, to where she knew not.

Following after the tiny dancer she felt even more like a child, not only that but she felt lighter than she had in years. As she pounced after it the weight of her home life first melted away from her and she vaulted higher as she reached up for it. Then soon, the stresses of school blew away with the breeze and she leapt higher still. One by one her problems lifted off of her until she felt as if she was flying right there alongside it with each bound. A wave of happiness washed over her and she never wanted this moment to end.

The further she went and the more she ran and jumped the more it taunted her, sometimes going as low as brushing her thin, graceful fingertips arrogantly before bouncing back up out of their reach. Even as she began to tire, she did not give up. She began to pant, sometimes so much so that it was she who would cause the fragile fragment to blow beyond her span; her golden tendrils of hair burst out of their restraint and flowed around her, encircling her face in a shining mane. Soon her face dripped with sweat, her arms grew heavy and her swats required more effort, but still she remained resilient; and still her grace knew no bounds.

She still laughed and giggled, in her own little world. It was not until the horn blared that she noticed she had stepped right off of the curb and onto the road. But the warning came too late…

The car struck her with a sickening crunch, and she lay there on the ground, her body splayed out as if welcoming what came next. Her hair encircled her head like a halo, and she looked just as angelic and full of grace as before. Though she could not move, her breaths becoming shallow, she never lost the smile on her face. For as she lay there, the cold creeping in, she still felt the lightness of all the weight that had left her. As her vision was consumed by the darkness, she saw what looked like a fluff dancing across it; soon more and more appeared until the darkness was filled with them. As her life slowly faded away from her, she realized she had never felt so calm. She was the happiest she had ever been.

****

Theresa Walker’s work has previously appeared in the Juvenis Festival Time Anthology and the Wingless Dreamers’ “Writers of Tomorrow” Issue.

_______________________

Health Freak

by Eric Z. Weintraub

When I was a student at Long Beach State, my roommate became addicted to Taco Bell. Dave would come back to our dorm each night with a Grande Meal or a Toasted Cheddar Chalupa Box and wash it down at his desk with a Skittles Strawberry Freeze. On weekends, he’d bring a brown to-go box to parties we’d attend at a frat or off-campus apartment, set up shop at the drink table beside handles of Hornitos and Sauza, and devour his Crunchwarp Supremes and Quesaritos faster than a hamster stuffs seeds into its cheeks.

Some nights he’d disappear for hours, out for seconds at the nearest location on PCH and Stanley, only to return empty-handed, save for the dried fire sauce smeared across his cheek. Sometimes he got so full that he’d pass out on one of the couches at the parties, right next to the guys who’d chased too many shots of SoCo with too many cans of Keystone Light.

On Saturday morning, Crystal, who’d hosted the party the night before, blew up my phone at 6:00 a.m. “There are salsa stains on the carpet, the house stinks of artificial meat, and my dog needs to go to the vet from licking the neon cheese off the taco wrappers. Get your ass over here and pick up your friend.”

“At least Dave didn’t throw up.”

“I’m gonna be sick. I don’t know how he can put that shit in his body.” This coming from a girl who had eaten a Costco microwaved vegan patty last night while chugging room temperature margarita mix. “Your friend has a serious problem. I don’t want you or him at one of my parties again until he gets his shit together.”

She hung up the phone. Although she had no receiver to slam, the tone of her voice assured me that she’d pressed the end button with much dramatic flair.

My body was sore from both a hangover and six months straight of sleeping on a dorm room bed, but I sat up and considered what she’d said. Except for his Taco Bell addiction, Dave was a good person. We’d gone to high school together in Hesperia. We were co-captains of the debate team. Our moms were friends on Facebook. He was now twenty-one, rail skinny, and as far as I was concerned, he could eat as much Taco Bell as he wanted. Enjoy it while you have your metabolism, my father always said.

When I picked up Dave outside Crystal’s apartment, he told me to make a right on PCH. Taco Bell was no longer a suggestion, but an assumption. I thought about what Crystal had said. I could understand someone being addicted to alcohol, drugs, chocolate even. But a fast-food restaurant?

“Let’s try somewhere new. Maybe go downtown?”

“Too expensive.”

“Or something healthier. Like Subway.”

“They have healthy food at Taco Bell.”

“The Black Bean Crunchwarp Supreme?”

“Precisely.”

I sat across from him at a plastic table in the Taco Bell on PCH and Stanley, the scent of ground beef hanging omnipresent in the air. We were bathed in the purple neon of the light installation by the entrance, part of Taco Bell’s attempt to catapult itself into the 21st century. My side of the table was empty, but Dave’s tray was lined with tacos that leaned against each other like fallen dominos.

“I think you have a problem,” I said. Through a mouth of ground beef and tortilla, he grunted a question mark. “I think you’re addicted to Taco Bell. After this meal, you should stop. Go back to eating at the dining hall.”

“Dude, people can’t get addicted to Taco Bell. It’s not In-N-Out.”

I reminded myself that this was a tactic from the debate team. It was his job to make me question my argument. “If you can’t get addicted, then stopping shouldn’t be a problem.”

“You’re tripping.” He slid a Cheesy Gordita Crunch across the table and told me to eat it.

The cold pit in my stomach from too many shots of Seagram’s the night before made the food more tempting than I’d expected. Dave was in too deep to see what Taco Bell was doing to his body, so I decided I’d let him see what it did to mine. I inhaled the Cheesy Gordita Crunch, ordered a Grande Meal from the counter, and sat across from him with a meal that matched his own.

“Fuck off. Don’t put on a show like one taco got you addicted.”

“I am going to match you taco for taco, quesarito for quesarito, until you lay off the Bell.”

“Your body.”

I ate the meal over the next ten minutes. At first, I savored the salty meat juices, the butteriness of the tortillas, and the slight crunch of the otherwise flavorless lettuce. Aspirins have done less to cure hangovers. By taco number eight, the meat sat in my stomach like a brick. I could eat no more and allowed Dave to complete the task for me.

I spent the day working off the Grande Meal: going to the campus gym, napping, and jogging to the nearest 7-Eleven to buy overpriced pomegranate juice to lower my blood pressure. That night, my roommate returned to the dorm with a Variety Taco Party Pack and offered me a Shredded Chicken Mini Quesadilla. I scrunched together my cheeks like I might puke.

“Told you it’s not addicting.”

I ate the quesadilla in two bites. Although my gastric juices wailed, the food tasted delicious. “This is what you’re doing to me.”

“Don’t be such a health freak.” He arranged his fiery sauces across his desk like a YouTube chef preparing to shoot a cooking video.

I spent the next week matching him meal for meal. I puked in the shared dorm bathroom, took cold showers, and woke up in the mornings with my bed soaked in grease-scented sweat. At night, I had dreams of Steak Quesaritos growing cinnamon twist shaped legs and chasing me down Bellflower Boulevard, of wrappers crawling out of our trashcan to give me paper cuts, and the chihuahua from the old commercials biting at my leg where it dangled over the side of the bed. Each night, Dave cheered me on as I finished the meal we’d ordered. “Eat one more. Eat one more.” I swallowed the last taco and wondered if my stomach would explode.

After a month, I’d gained twenty pounds, but because my metabolism was still in its prime, it all went to the baby fat in my chin. That weekend, we attended a party at the Beverly apartments. The girl who sat in front of me in astronomy was there. Though I wanted to talk to her, I stood beside Dave, where our fill-up boxes commandeered the edge of the drink table. The girl spoke to me when she came to refill her red cup with Cazadores, but backed away at the smell of my bean and cheese scented breath. I reached for my Altoids, only to remember I now used the case to store Tums. By the time I looked up, she had left with a group heading to the pool. I ate till the pain went away, but once my box was empty, I realized I was still hungry.

“You want to get more?” I asked Dave.

We left the party and walked to the nearest Taco Bell. When we arrived, the doors to the inside were locked. I rattled the handles and peered through the clear plastic windows.

“Open up. We’re hungry.”

“Quit tripping,” Dave said.

A worker appeared inside from behind the kitchen and pointed for us to use the drive thru. Since we had no car, we walked to the speaker box where I asked if the employee was ready to take our order and called for him to answer several times.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t serve you if you’re not in a car,” the speaker box said.

“We walked here.”

“Company policy. You’ll have to get your car. Or hire an Uber to drive you through.”

I couldn’t wait that long, nor afford Uber and Taco Bell in one night. “Help us out. Just this one time?”

The box ignored us. I kept calling for an answer, but it remained silent. I soon screamed that not servicing someone who doesn’t have a car was discrimination, then charged the box and tried to pull the speaker off its stand like I was breaking its neck. Dave shouted for me to calm down as I decapitated the speaker and the box hung by its wires.

He ran off without waiting for me. But I stayed, transfixed by the brightly lit drive-thru menu, a collage of every meal option photographed in beautiful high-key light. I sat on the driveway concrete and fantasized about the next time it would be mine.

****

Eric Weintraub is a recent graduate of the Mount St. Mary’s University's MFA in Creative Writing program in Los Angeles, CA. His short fiction has appeared in Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Cost of Paper, and other publications.

FLASHFICTION

_____________________________________________________________________

Eleven to Four

by Stephen Ground

The horn from [what sounds to be] a mid-sized, mid-priced sedan blares intermittently. Maybe a couple blocks over. Could it be a frail alarm wailing for saviours to indifferent raccoons or Schrödinger’s stars? The three-quarters shy moon? Or a tremoring skeleton, furious because their Supply fell deeply unconscious [in a chemical sense] while Bones weaved over, mid-speed, to hide within the tangerine glow of empty streets? Maybe Bones had nearly landed at the Supply when a Meat [with cracked heart or liquified thoughts] leapt in the path of the mid-sized, mid-priced sedan weaving mid-speed through syrupy tangerine. Caught together in an intermittent loop – weave, leap, horn, return. Forever and ever [at least until dawn].

****

Stephen Ground is a prose writer, poet, filmmaker, and picture-taker based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His fiction has appeared in Lost Balloon, Soft Cartel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. He also has work forthcoming in Best Small Fictions, and nominated for Best of the Net. Find more at stephenground.com.

_______________________________

Assad el-Sahra

by Ayeyemi Kehinde

I launch the YouTube App and type the phrase “Lion of the Desert” in the search box. The image of the old man catapults me into nostalgia, dips my head into a well of memory– about two and a half decades deep, and I behold the scenery of a man who strutted and fretted his life dragging men from the jaws of beasts till everything black on him became white; call it grey; call it eld; call it a powerful weakness that makes God becomes shy. I fetch the tears of a small me watching a boy in the screen – who is also shedding tears at the sight of a noose around the old man's neck. I exhume the small Qur'an he read as he stood firm on the gallows, it is still small as it was and carries the scents of his revered sweat. I exhume his eyeglasses that saw nothing at that point in time but the world beyond, that crashed on the floor as the noose stiffened his throat. I can still hear the echo of my voice asking God why He watched the infidels dismantled and disfigured what He created in His image, why He didn't stir them into ashes and let the wind blow them into evanescence like the black-and-white television I watched the movie through. I saw myself asking God then my father why the good ones die.

felling

the straightest trees . . .

summerhouse

[for Omar al-Mukhtar (1858–1931), the Libyan liberationist and freedom fighter also known as “Assad el-Sahra” meaning “Lion of the Desert”]

****

Taofeek Ayeyemi (fondly called Aswagaawy) is a Nigerian lawyer, writer and author of a Chapbook Tongueless Secrets (Ethel Press, 2021) and a full-length book "aubade at night or serenade in the morning" (Flowersong Press, TBD 2021). His works have appeared in Lucent Dreaming, Ethel-zine, artmosterrific, tinywords, The Pangolin Review, hedgerow, the QuillS, Modern Haiku, Frogpond and elsewhere. He won the 2021 Loft Books Flash Fiction Competition, Honorable Mention Prize in 2020 Stephen DiBiase Poetry Contest, among others. He is @Aswagaawy on Twitter.

NON-FICTION

_____________________________________________________________________

 Namesake

by Susan Meyers

“What will you call him?”

It’s a reasonable enough thing to ask someone who is expecting a child. Though I’m not pregnant—not yet.

“Well,” Dana assures me, “you’ll figure it out.”

Still, there’s so much else that needs to happen first. Like now, weaving among those familiar signs—Keep your Rosaries off my Ovaries and Pussies Grab Back—along Seattle’s hilltop. Each January, my friend and I join thousands of others in thick-knit pink hats, our sheer numbers reassuring. Even Dana’s own son: “He’s making friends at school,” she explains, “with kids from other cultural backgrounds.” In a sea of liberal protestors, this is supposed to make sense: Things are getting better. “You know?”

But I do not know—not yet. Protestors wedge along the start line, peering down the city’s steep slopes toward Elliot Bay, all skyline and shimmering sea; and, four blocks south of where we’re standing, ten stories in the air, a cryotank holds all my hopes: the frozen embryo that I am waiting to implant. Male, the doctors tell me: a son of my own.

“Good for you,” she nods as we filter through those crowds waiting patiently among the rainbowed streets of Capitol Hill near Cal Anderson, the park that, eighteen months later, in the summer of 2020, will briefly become an autonomous zone, as the nation roils with protests larger still. But we don’t know that yet. For now, sudden violence and police indiscretions seem always to take place elsewhere; nothing here is yet burning.

“I just never thought,” I admit, “that I’d be doing this alone.”

The clinic appointments, and fertility drugs. The extra jobs to pay for it all.

But that’s not what Dana means. “Your son,” she reminds me, because there is little we can predict, though we do know this: “He won’t be white.”

The crowd leans forward, compressing along the start line; and we follow. “Not everyone gets it yet, though,” her head shakes again. Other women with her on the PTA, for instance. “They just don’t understand.” The need for broader curriculum, representation, change. “It’s a shame,” she looks up knowingly—both of us white, middleclass—though raising a child alone, I likely won’t ever be on a PTA, won’t have time.

“That’s brave,” my friend confirms as, behind us, a bullhorn picks up: brief speeches about domestic violence, indigenous rights, disappeared women. So many injustices that we are not a part of. “You could have done it another way.”

Another way, meaning, not using sperm from my gay friend: a man as excited as I am to see our son come into the world. A man who happens not to be white.

“That must have been a hard choice to make.”

Choice? There are many things I don’t control—being single or not, at forty, and running out of time. Still, technically she’s right. From a database, I could have chosen the baby’s eye color, hair, physical dexterity. All those descriptions at the sperm bank read, ironically, like dating profiles: athleticism, musical interests, the perfect dimple, or a talent for science. So much presumed perfection.

But it’s true; that’s not what I’d chosen. “I just wanted my child to know where he comes from. I wanted him to be loved.”

Around us, signs bob: Not My President. Nasty Women Make Herstory. Fight Like a Girl.

“Still, it must be scary,” Dana insists. “Those boys who aren’t white—they get hurt so much more.”

It is 2019. George Floyd is still alive. Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend has not yet answered their apartment door. Ahmaud Arbery has not yet gone out for his afternoon run. The park where we are standing now has not yet become a free state—CHAZ, then CHOP—and the man whose presidency we are protesting has not yet threatened to send military forces to dismantle it. But we don’t know this yet.

Around us, the January air is crisp. No memorials yet, no masks. The wind lifts, and people shuffle impatient along the line; it is nearly time.

“You must be proud.”

Proud of what?

As the crowd presses forward, my stomach sinks—They get hurt so much more often—and I’m not sure which part chills me more: the truth of what she says, or the ease with which she says it. “It must be so hard,” she says, and I cannot disagree—though there’s the instant shame of it. There are many things I’d wondered about raising a child alone, one whose skin tone won’t match my own: the assumptions that people will make about us, their quick confusion, and the countless stories I’ll need to tell. Or the countless ways that my son, too, will have to learn to tell his own story. So many things I’d wondered—though this, until now, had not been one of them. Violence, danger, all those things I truly don’t control.

“It’s a brave choice,” she assures me again, and it’s her quiet confidence that shakes me: all that we don’t see, by believing that what we do see is enough.

By now, though, feet are lifting; the bull horn quiets; and we are all pressing forward, leaving Cal Anderson Park to flood across Broadway: slogans and pink hats and urgency. But it’s not enough, I want to tell her, still wavering from the nausea of fertility drugs as the crowd presses us now toward the heart of downtown. All along the way, apartment dwellers—here, in the most expensive city lofts—cheer from open windows, waving orange spray-painted babies and anti-Trump signs; and in the distance, the cryobank towers quietly over the city: all precision and sheen. The pace slows as our numbers swell, pressing forward with chants and testimonials—all those overlapping messages—while my son, frozen, sits waiting behind us. And still, we are marching through these streets, voices high and signs waving in a rage that has become so familiar, you’d think by now it would have a name.

 ****

Susan Meyers has lived and taught in Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico and currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Seattle University. Susan’s fiction and nonfiction have been supported by grants from the Fulbright foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, as well as several artists residencies. Susan’s novel Failing the Trapeze won the Nilsen Award for a First Novel, and it was a finalist for the New American Fiction Award. Other work has recently appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, Per Contra, Calyx, Dogwood, and The Minnesota Review, and it has thrice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

______________________________

Enough

by Rachael Siciliano

I bought a betta fish in August 2020 to help me through COVID. He died in December before the world had a vaccine.

I did not know you could love a fish that much. But it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t heal his torn dorsal. I couldn’t keep his iridescent scales blue. He didn’t swim long enough in his palatial planted tank to overcome the trauma of fryhood in a tiny barren cup. None of us does. I guess.

By April, I had had enough of COVID. Enough of mainlanders, younger than me, post-boasting their second vaccines while I was still waiting for my first. Enough of tourists swarming back into these Hawaiian islands like it were their disposable playground. Enough of worrying my mom would have to spend another birthday in isolation.

As soon as I had scheduled my second vaccine, I booked a flight that would land me home on her eighty-first birthday. Over the phone we joked that my presence would be present enough.

Then she told me our seventy-seven year old neighbor, a woman who had taken me on day-long canoe trips, was dying from pancreatic cancer. We had been invited to send letters. As if words would be enough.

After seventeen months, I was going to see my family. Would two weeks be enough? At the airport, my mom greeted me with a long, tight embrace. For the first time, so did my dad.

“We haven’t had enough rain lately,” he said as he drove us home, “we’re in a drought.” The greenest pantone-color palette drought you will ever see.

Over the two weeks, I noticed things that had not been there when I was a girl. White pelicans now circle the local lakes. White lupins now decorate the marsh prairies. Cottonwoods now fluff the air with their May snow.

My dad now listens when my mom speaks, then validates what she says, because a few years ago she had let him know she had had enough.

My mom now tells me she’d like it if I moved back, because, I think, she knows. And I wonder if moving back would give me enough time to make up for the things I wish I hadn’t said, and to say all the things I wish I had.

My mom seems well enough, for now. But things that don’t normally happen to young bodies are happening to her old one: inexplicable spikes in blood pressure: undiagnosable bouts of gas: hairless arms and legs. Will her years of healthy living be enough to keep these little things from becoming big ones? Will she live long enough to glimpse what her life might have been had my Dad found his composure sooner? Will I? Had he once been who he is now, might I now feel as though I had done enough with my life?

One night during my visit, my mom placed the palm of her dominant left hand against the palm of my dominant right.

“They’re the same size,” she said, “I knew it.”

Her once long fingers, which sewed my clothes, stitched my stuffed toys, knit me intricate sweaters, and embroidered cat faces onto my favorite brown corduroy quilt, now matched my stubby ones. The middle knuckles on my second and third fingers now sometimes bulge as hers always do. Will looking at the back of my hand be enough to remember the details of hers when hers is no longer here?

During my visit, our ailing neighbor passed. Her obituary taught me that she had minored in French, met her husband when she was seven, taught a course at the university, restored native prairies, trained course and comfort dogs, and visited Hawaii, likely while I had been living here.

During all the years I had flown home to my parents, I had only visited her once, because there had never been enough time to see both my family and hers.

But her obituary taught me more. A quiet life lived kindly in a bucolic Midwestern town is more than enough.

****

Rachael Siciliano holds a Ph.D. in French Literature from UCSB and worked for twenty years as a User Experience Researcher and Designer uncovering and telling other people’s stories. These days she volunteers, growing industrial hemp, restoring native ecosystems, and meditating with women who live in the prison up the road. She lives on Oahu with her blue fish, Max.

_________________________

Gunshot Man

by Marco Etheridge

The little boy had never seen a gunshot man before, had never seen anyone or anything shot with a gun except on television. Now there was a bleeding man with a bullet hole where his heart should be, stretched out on the couch of his mom and dad’s VW camper van.

It wasn’t a real camper van, not like the ones in the magazine that his dad showed him. His dad had built their camper van out of a regular VW van. I can do that better and for half the money. That’s what his dad always said.

And now there was a stranger laid out on the camper van couch that his dad had made, a couch that folded out into a bed. His mom and dad slept on that bed, and the boy was worried that the stranger’s blood might drip onto it.

There were three strange men in the VW van. One of them rode up in the front seat beside the boy’s father, in the special place the boy was allowed to sit in only if he behaved himself. His dad drove down the road while the stranger in the front seat talked and waved his hands.

The second stranger knelt on the floor of the van beside the sleeper couch, speaking to the gunshot man in a voice so low the little boy could not hear his words. The man with the bullet hole in his chest did not speak or answer. His eyes moved around like he was looking at something no one else could see, but his mouth did not move.

The boy and his little brother sat on the bench seat at the back of the Volkswagen. His mom sat between the two of them, holding their hands. His mom’s hand was trembling, and her grip was tight, so tight it hurt. His brother leaned forward past their mom’s body and looked at him with wide eyes. He answered his little brother with an eyebrow shrug, the way you do when you don’t want the adults to notice.  

The sunroof was open a bit and a warm wind blew into the van as his dad steered them down the road. The boy’s mom spoke to the gunshot man. Her voice sounded strange, like she was someone else.

Is that too much air for you?

It was the kneeling stranger who answered. The gunshot man didn’t say anything.

No, Ma’am, that’s fine. We’re fine.

The little boy stared at the man laid out on his parent’s sleeping bench. The gunshot man’s shirt was unbuttoned all the way and he was not wearing an undershirt. The boy could see the man’s belly. It was pale like a fish except where the blood was.

The bullet hole was down from the man’s nipple, but higher than his belly button. There was a big bubble of blood over the bullet hole and the blood was bright red, like a cartoon. The boy watched the blood, waiting for it to spill down onto the sleeping couch, but the blood did not spill.

When the gunshot man breathed in, the bubble got smaller, and when he breathed out, it got bigger. Bigger and smaller, bigger and smaller, like it was the blood bubble breathing in and out instead of the man.

The boy did not like the strange adult sitting in what was supposed to be his seat, up front beside his dad where you could see far up the road. This was not how family vacations were supposed to happen.

Their trip had started out like a normal vacation, with lots of driving and then camping at night. His dad drove them into Canada, which was a different country from the United States. Earlier in the day, before the gunshot man changed everything, they had visited Storybook Gardens in London, Ontario. Ontario was a province, which was another name for a state. The boy memorized these important details, just like he always did.

At Storybook Gardens, the little boy heard the story of Slippery the Seal. Slippery was a sea lion who lived at Storybook Gardens. Slippery escaped into a river, which is how he got his name. He swam all the way down to Lake Erie, which is really far and not in Canada anymore. Slippery played in the water and had a really nice time before some men finally captured him.

When they drove away from Storybook Gardens, the little boy was sitting in the good seat beside his dad. They were riding down a highway with farms and forests on both sides of the road. Then the boy saw a man in the middle of the road waving his arms.

His dad stopped the van so they wouldn’t run over the man. The man stood beside the window of the van, talking loud and fast. The boy heard the words wounded, and hospital, and flat tire.

Then his dad was out of the van. There was a car parked on the side of the road, and his dad walked to the car with the other man. The boy saw his dad bend down to look into the car, then hurry back to the van. The big sliding door flew open.

Get in the back, kiddo. It was the voice that meant do it now and no questions. So he jumped in the back.

Then two strangers came towards the van carrying another man between them. The man they carried was slumped forward and his feet dragged on the ground. He tried to walk, but mostly they carried him. He was the gunshot man. 

They loaded the gunshot man into the van and laid him down. That was when a regular vacation day changed into something else.

His father started the engine and then they were driving down the road again. That was how he ended up sitting in the back of the van with his little brother while his mom squished his hand.

They drove past more farms and patches of forest. His dad was driving faster than normal. After a while, the stranger sitting in the front pointed out the window and said something. The boy heard the funny noise the van made when his dad worked the gear lever and the van slowed down.

His dad turned off of the big road and drove up a long driveway to a big hospital building. When the van pulled to a stop, lots of things started happening all at once.

His dad and the man in front climbed out. The big sliding door slid open and the boy saw men in white coats and a tall woman with grey hair. She was telling the men what to do. She had a loud voice like a schoolteacher.

The men had a little bed on wheels. They jumped into the van and bent over the gunshot man. The white-coated men all moved together, and the gunshot man floated out of the van and onto the little bed. Then they were running, pushing the wheeled bed through some big doors. That was the last time the boy saw the man with the bullet hole in his chest.

When gunshot man was gone, his mom let go of the boy’s hand and he shook it to make the blood go back in. One of the strangers was standing outside the van with his dad. The man shook his dad’s hand and walked away.

His dad pulled the sliding door shut with a slam. The boy’s mom slipped into the good seat as his dad climbed back into the van. The engine started and they drove away.

The little boy sat where he was. He stared at the wrinkled cover on the sleeping couch. He could still see the outline of the gunshot man.

Later, he asked what would happen to the gunshot man. He asked again and again, but the adults did not have an answer. They said it was one of those things they might never know. They said it was a mystery, which is what adults said when they didn’t have a good answer. When he asked once more, they told him to hush.

That night, after they had eaten dinner in the campground, the little boy thought about the man with the bullet in his chest. He imagined the man escaping from the hospital, slipping away from the men in the white coats. Like Slippery the Seal, he would find a river and swim away.

Maybe he would swim all the way down to Lake Erie, clear out of Canada. He’d swim and swim and swim, just like Slippery the Seal. The clean water would swirl over his body and wash away the bubble of blood. The gunshot man would not be gunshot anymore. That would make him happy. Then he could live in the big lake and swim around and have a really nice time and try not to get caught.

****

Marco Etheridge is a writer of fiction and CNF, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His scribbles have been featured in many lovely reviews and journals in Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. Notable recent credits include: Coffin Bell, In Parentheses, The Thieving Magpie, Ligeia Magazine, The First Line, Prime Number Magazine, Dream Noir, The Opiate Magazine, Cobalt Press, Literally Stories, and The Metaworker, amongst many others. Marco’s novel “Breaking the Bundles” is available at fine online booksellers. His author website is: https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/

POETRY

_____________________________________________________________________

The Wolf You Might Have Been

by Tomas Baiza

You were raised by wolves to live with dogs.

Taught to look down, bow your head,

to never bare your teeth, lest you be labeled 

off-putting, combative, intimidating.

To pass—because isn’t that always the point?—

you must accept the collar, submit to the ritual grooming, 

meekly absorb those things called ‘constructive criticisms,’

and never, ever tell The Truth, lest you be labeled

uppity, contrary, menacing.

To survive in a kennel where instincts are dulled,

howls are muted, and tails must always be wagged

in performative appreciation for the slop heaped on your tray

instead of the sweeter meat you would have fought for. 

If you were still a wolf.

You dare to ask the stupidest question of all: May I not still be one of you?

Don’t be silly, they say. We were wolves so that you wouldn’t have to be. We gave you a leg up,

moved to the suburbs, let them teach you English, sent you to Catholic school to memorize the

declensions. 

We have given you what the dogs said was too good for us. You will make us proud in your

transformation. 

Proud and not a little sad,

for the wolf you might have been.

 ****

Tomas Baiza is originally from San José, California, and now lives in Boise, Idaho. He is a Pushcart-nominated author whose short fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Parhelion, Writers In The Attic, Obelus, In Parentheses, Meniscus, [PANK] Magazine, 101 Proof Horror, The Meadow, Peatsmoke, The Good Life Review, Kelp, Black Lawrence Press, Bacopa Literary Review, and elsewhere. Tomas's first novel, Deliver Me: A Pocho's Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery, and his short-fiction collection, A Purpose To Our Savagery: Stories and Poems will appear on Running Wild Press in 2022.

________________________

During the Day

by Matthew Berg

During the day I'll rise,

greet light's return enthusiastically,

embrace the hope of something new.

During the night I'll not forget,

remember grace that isn't gone,

good that still remains,

even when it's invisible,

for hidden isn't gone,

just unseen.

****

Matthew Berg is a renaissance man with varying interests and hobbies. He is a man of faith in Jesus and a writer of many styles, though he specializes in poetry and lyrical writing. As a native to Minnesota, who now lives in the South, he has a unique background for his work.

___________________________________

Call Me Fickle

by Kyle Heger

I once thought that flirting

with death was fun. But

now that She has begun

flirting back, I’ve moved

on to playing hard-to-get.

Wrestling with my demons

used to be a risk I gladly

took. It wasn’t until they

started fighting back that

my enthusiasm began

to wane.

 ****

Kyle Heger, former managing editor of “Communication World” magazine, lives in Albany, CA. His writing has won a number of awards and has been accepted by 67 publications, including “London Journal of Fiction,” “Nerve Cowboy” and “U.S. 1 Worksheets.”

________________________________

 Tabernacle of Longing

by Ernest Ògúnyẹmí

the music bears me to you country of cowry shells.

house of saxophones, room of dancing shekere. small

ghosts making mimosa in the sax’s lungs, the boy’s

translucent tooth clinking in the agogo, purple dick

in the konga’s chest. an empty snail shell too. I hear the beat

in my chest. long lost lover, yesterday’s dandelion in my hair

do you hear it? wither the willow makes her tent, wither

the golden butterfly. I still love those legs. I want to go on

dreaming— girl with the wolf-rose tattoo dancing

in shaded light, I want to dance with you. again.

I feast on the blood of the wolf. the wolf becomes me

****

Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí is a writer and editor from Nigeria. His works have recently appeared/ are forthcoming in AGNI, Joyland, No Tokens, Agbowó, Southern Humanities Review, the Minnesota Review, the McNeese Review, West Trade Review, among other places. He is a staff writer at Open Country Mag.

_____________________________

Concentration

by Landen Raszick

there in your inner benthic zone

where the oxygen swings murky light—

non-light, imagined, visible—

thoughts open and close like mouths

breathing thick draughts of fear,

its casual repetitions, ink.

a portal of light wreathed by human hair

passes through the thick air

and the steady nothing held

like a faded projection of a lake.

the eyes open,

leaves streaming in as before, but not,

the same green keener,

attuned to human breath, breathing

as the grass breathes, or opposite.

mayflies are here

like black seahorses, musical notes on wings:

they swing symbols of infinity,

swimming black spots into my eyes.

they seem to be seeking entrance,

hovering near my ears,

the orifice promise of body and blood.

I feel loved

that the substance I’m made of

is made to be invaded.

this, I can give, at least,

for a moment of what I’ll vainly call clarity

and for the swarm that will die within a day

and come back swarming.

****

Landen Raszick is a Florida-born writer who'd (pre-covid) been teaching English and traveling in Japan, Vietnam, India, and Nepal. He is currently an MFA student at Johns Hopkins University.

________________________

Ode to a Teardrop

by Kate Sullivan 

I am not a poet, but gimme a choice between an acrobatic clarinet line and a piece of dry toast, I’ll take the clarinet every time. Maybe that counts for something and I’d rather sing than talk.  Remember the time I had to wipe my tears on the wide white sleeves of my surplus when we sang that Irish tune during the service?  Or when we would jump over each other to be chosen by Mrs. Keenan (requiescat in pace) to go to the blackboard to scan the dactyls and spondees of the iambic pentameter of Virgil?  Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Perhaps some day it will be pleasing to remember these things. I bought the sheet music for Rhapsody in Blue in Newton Center when I was a junior in high school and have been working on it ever since - and to think he made it all up!  I believe I’ve slipped through life without ever having read a sonnet. What a shame, but alas, choices must be made. Now seventy winters have besieged my brow, but 70 is the new 50 and I’m hoping to take a cross-country trip like my whizz-bang 72-year old poetry teacher, Barbara. I want one of those little silver teardrop trailers big enough for one bed and a toilet and a place to heat water for tea. I could read my sestinas in little country taverns, then park my teardrop at the water’s edge for a skinny dip before cocktails. “You’re only young once!” my father used to say, and at 70, he died suddenly and peacefully in his sleep, taking us all by surprise. “A gift from the angels!” said one old lady at the party back at the house.  I was 34 and wanted to clock her one.  Now I know she was right.

 ****

Kate Sullivan likes to play around with words, music and pictures. She is the author/illustrator of two children’s books, On Linden Square (Sleeping Bear) and What Do You Hear?(Schiffer) and illustrator of Brief Accident of Light (Kelsay). A linguist by training, she is also an award-winning composer and performer. Her one-woman theatre piece LENYA! won the Independent Reviewers of New England prize and her Fugitum Est was premiered by The Kremlin Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Her paintings range from travel sketches to her series of ostriches set in JSSargent paintings. She plays the musical saw to impress people.