Postcard Fiction Collaborative

Texas 287

2012-01-02T13:03:00.000-08:00

Christmas Light Larger This Year by Johanna

The light of Christmas was larger this year according to holiday researchers. As usual, women toiled through the menial but loving tasks – baking, wrapping, addressing envelopes – while men forged ahead with warrior stamina amongst the forthright commercialism of the dark side. Even with so large a light, Christmas remained dim as people everywhere borrowed from the light to feed the darkness.

Even Santa Claus was unable to resist the dark forces. Giving the elves the year off without pay and blaming it on the recession, he opened a factory in Chengdu where he didn't have to provide employee health care. “No one believes in me here anyway,” Santa Claus said about his move to China.

The Obama Administration called a state of emergency. “The little light that remains will have to be protected from the well-intentioned but prolific screenwriters of Hallmark Christmas movies, in order that future generations of Americans might still be able to enjoy it,” President Obama said during a press conference yesterday. When asked how he was going to do this, President Obama replied, “All I can say for now is that the light will be kept safe.”

Early this morning, Wikileaks resurfaced temporarily to bring us important news. According to emails sent between the Obama Administration and Santa Claus, Americans everywhere have been unknowingly hiding the Christmas light out in the open where no one could have suspected. Apparently, people have been stringing it from rooftops and tossing it over ornamental bushes in their very own backyards. The Obama Administration has yet to respond to these allegations, but Santa confirmed late this afternoon that the emails are true and apparently all of those Christmas lights were made in China.

***

Untitled by Bill

The albinos have gotten whiter and the drunks have gotten drunker. Holidays in the Legion Post bar start seemingly as a tradition and turn into the chance to view people turning into their parents. The moms are bombed since they stood in their robes for their graduation pictures with a seven month bump and everyone, us included, have thickened just like the gravy we’ll have tomorrow at dinner. We’re rounded out in the face. This is not a puffiness. There is no botox here. There was no air pump hooked up to the sides of our heads. More a callous. A building up of the weary worries. Fresh-Scent spray polish smell of divorce court desks poisoning us; the tightrope walk of staying as close to zero in the bank without going over like our lives are game shows in reverse; staring across the table at in-laws you cannot stand to look at and you hope that one of these times they fall off the stool just a little bit harder, a little more dramatically, and do some real damage when they hit the floor. Eventually we’ll all drag ourselves off to mass around midnight.

***

Krikor’s Closet by Alan

In the room there were candles. And in the candles there was light. And in the light there was hope. A kind of trinity. A kind of memory.

He loved the number three. This I remember about Krikor. And he loved memory. He loved to get swept up by it during midnight shifts, revel at the dips and brace himself for the uphill climbs as if it were a ride at an amusement park. If life were to end in 2012, he’d think, there is nowhere else I’d like to be. He’d dance with his mop. He’d romance the air.

I know this because he used to confide in me. It was during the holidays, always during the holidays, when we’d gather in the basement of the church and Sonia would made boreg and someone would bring the right kind of lahmajoun from Jersey and all of our mouths would stink from the garlic and onions and feta, especially Krikor’s. I know this because he’d lean in real close and tell me about how this place, this place was his home, and I’d forget the ride in, upstairs, the world outside, my family, everything even, until he disappeared in the dark.

***

multiplicity by lyle

the audacity of hope is what i thought first
audacity
paucity
something i was pretty sure
a second opinion is for failures and there were 287 of them so many second opinion all second opinions so many candles so many failures so little control
but in all probability so much relief something i know nothing about
even after shitting there is not so much relief as exhaustion and shitting in a shrine bathroom?
it must be part of the shrine if it is called the shrine bathroom
about on par as far as exhaustion is concerned actually i thought it would be more — more something the way religion is always more
something

in the mirror i practice furrowing my brow just the slightest twist up — down concern pain anger happiness though i don’t recognize this one so well — over and over — i don’t actually feel any of those emotions as i do them but i imagine someone seeing me and think they might feel those things just watching as i do them

my own empathy with someone watching me do something that may mean something to someone empathetic but not the emotions

the brief concatenations of drunkenness though i cannot say that i was drunk for it may have been the inevitability of humanness and are they different? drunkeness/humanness: the state of being something? being something which is to say asking for something lighting a candle so to speak the flame eating at the wax until either it so slowly expires or the proprietor snuffs it out so that someone else can so quickly light it again — their own failure then flickering and licking itself

287 candles
so specific
so specific a number of failures in a little town in texas
but i’ll believe it if only for a moment.

***

Tithe by Forrest

I don’t like to recall you. This is when you are quite improper in your offertory singing behind me once you were done singing in front of me. Your mild despicableness. Knowing I am perfectly known by no one. I—if I’m allowed to talk in here—I have my ways about me, the same as keeping an uncharged fire extinguisher next to all those content, glowing votives. Where does my attention go, sent scattering over the floor at your heels, supposedly? Not anywhere today. Today I put a slip of special paper, a donation in your name, in the collection box. I just got a saint I haven’t seen who gave me something like hard-earned money.

PossumNotes

2011-12-01T17:33:00.001-08:00

Bruce by Alan

Bruce the possum was the kind of handsome that would make all the boys swoon. This particular quality to his being was enhanced every time he was on stage. Something about a microphone, a piano, three chords, and his brand of leveling truth, which was gutteral, sweet, and complex enough to liven curiosity’s prick.This worried Javier. They had been together now for six and a half years. Things were wonderful in a way. They were best friends. They were confidantes. They challenged each other intellectually. But the love had indeed fizzled as evidenced by the intermittent sex and the dimming physical charge. Bruce would spend more and more time in the garage, manipulating pedals and sifting through their “trash” for ebay prizes that would fund his travels. Javier felt for sure that this next tour would be the end. Bruce would be lost to him. Found by another.Javier’s therapist cautioned him against this kind of thinking. It will paralyze you, he warned. Go out. Do something. Treat yourself well, Javier. You deserve it. These words reverberated in his head as Javier wrote down what he thought would be a fitting ending on a few pages of his notebook and scattered them throughout the house while Bruce showered. And while Bruce was toweling off, Javier stepped out into the cool November air and considered his options. He wanted to run – down the block, to his parents’ house, to an old lover, to 10th grade, to anywhere, forever, never. Instead, he opened the garage door and paused. The wind swirled through the gossamer at the entrance while Javier said his name over and over again. Bruce. Bruce. Bruce.

***

Possum Notes by Johanna

He came and went with the moon. Like the moon, he was still there when you couldn't see him. A trail of crumbs to closet recesses, the smell of wood shavings on winter clothes, creaking in the attic on windless mornings. When he returned, I opened my palms to him, offering what little I had. I stepped on dainty toes, left the lights on at night, cleaned voraciously. Gone again, I felt uneasy like tiny feet tread across my chest while I slept. I never knew which to prefer, the pale glow of midnight or the revelation of restless comets.

***

Whispy Things Strewn by Lyle

Part I

Wispy felt trapped in his life. Feels trapped in his life. Had felt trapped in his life. Would have felt trapped. Did not. Etc. Detritus, he told himself. But he had grown accustomed to the detritus of his life, things strewn around him, things strewn behind him, long since gone but not. Things. Strewn. Goodbye, he said but he didn’t move. He tried sarcasm: Nice knowing you. Take care of yourself. But he was paralyzed through no fault of his own. Well, partially it was his own fault this linguistic parallel. Things had been strewn around so much through his life and he had done nothing to stop it. Things are strewn around so much. He strews so many things about his life.

Part II

...have an inaccurate temporal understanding of when an even occurred. It should always seem that they happened much later or much earlier than it actually manifested. Temporal-photographic memory means that the patient is not actually “living” while only “not-knowing” constitutes profitable post-conception. This in an of itself, however, presents several problems. Primarily, what should one use as a reference? Or put another way how can one be sure to know that one is misperceiving? One could use said temporal-photographic persons though this would perhaps be construed as cruelty, though on whose part is arguable considering that this person would have to be with the living at all times of day and conscious of everything that they perceive and this does not take into account interpretation of this stimuli, an entirely different debate. But I digress. Considering the temporal and spatial nature of possums...

***

Best Possum by Forrest

The best possum of my life walked out on me, on us, while I slept, and now this life seems a tawdry cheat. I can see him with a half-full whiskey bottle on the table—our last fifth, as it were—scribbling, tasking, trying to find the perfect five words to write on a piece of notepaper to leave on the kitchen counter, and this is what my betrayed eyes find: “Cant figure you—outta here.” These are the sort of sentiments one expects of lesser possums, but not my best possum who made a private Xanadu out of Styrofoam coolers. In kind, I wanted a heart-rending testimony of his pain and anguish over the inner conflict of him abandoning me condensed into a syntactically precise vehicle of pure literary merit; instead, I get the cheapest De Profundis ever composed. And I let him wallow through my neighbor’s overripe trash can for this? No, this will not do. I cannot allow myself the indignity of having the best possum dismiss me that easily. There will be repercussions. The next possum of indeterminate ability to wander through my yard at night—I will ask him to have the Book of Ages clasped in his little pink paw. He will try as he might to please me, but he must never think he is the best possum by my bedside lamp.

Lite

2011-10-31T08:05:00.000-07:00

Lite-r by Lyle

Lite’r up, he said staggering slightly. Nothing unusual yet. Click click of the translucent red lighter. The hangover is the worst, he said. Thought whirring in the air; the hiss of lighter. This was unusual. Something was going on here and I didn’t like it already. The car lit up in the night. The Lite locks shimmering for just a moment. I know I’m going to feel it tomorrow, he said. Too far in the future, I thought. The fire engulfed the vehicle and we stepped back, him hitting a rock with his heel and tipping over backward. Lone Star on his pearl buttons. Shook himself off and stood. Self-immolation, I said and he nodded. He said, Self-immolation. I could feel the hangover already starting. The fire burned on late into the night.

***

Taps by Forrest

On Don’s last birthday, we gift him our grandma Plymouth with the beer tap handles from the Kosmos Klub, now sitting boarded-up by Sanderson Park. Of course the jerk doesn’t know what to say, so we help by taking him for a ride, locking his passenger door with a swift punch down on Old Milwaukee while I shut mine with PBR. See here, we say as we run what was our usual gauntlet through the neighborhood, every time you cruise in this, you’ll think you’re still in the bar—you’ll wake up in the front and on either side are your old friends. There’s a smile on Don’s lips trying to come out. We take him to the Dubliner, but nothing doing. It’s like he’s ready to cry or something. Then he keeps driving his beermobile out to Sanderson Park and we won’t find him until late next morning by the curb, all awake. He’d ask us why we didn’t drive him home. Then the cops cite him for loitering at Sanderson. Then the cops arrest him for propositioning an undercover on the other side town. Then we let him chill in holding while figuring how to get the beermobile out of the impound. We spring him out on bail instead, and walking back with us the jerk, the asshole ingrate, says he’ll hitch back to his place—and sure enough he flags down a blonde, the kind who’ll push the passenger door open for you just because you look like some kind of a better rider than driver.

***

Lite Cosmic Relevance by Bill

One of us claimed his favorite was Crunch bar, so we decided that wasn't a real candy bar by ruling that Candy bars need 3 components, and this has forever created an unbridgeable cultural divide between Mounds and Almond Joy, very similar to Ladyhawke. The movie fell apart shortly after that when we all realized the director’s girlfriend was right and the lead actress would never sleep with the character the director was playing and without that love scene the movie had no heart, and neither did the girlfriend apparently because she broke up with him right after that so he threw a full case of beer through her parent’s sunporch and crushed their cat. Ladyhawke falls apart because any movie that relies on an eclipse for its resolution is simply too buried up its own ass (Pitch Black being the notable exception as the eclipse is the inciting incident). A few of us stayed in touch and my brother ended up dating the director’s ex when they both moved into my place in the city to get established in better paying jobs. Their relationship built into a geosynclinous rise but ultimately subducted when he refused to quit his game because he wasn’t at a place where he could save after she got sick eating 7 lobster rolls in one sitting.

***

You Would by Alan

Like a jigsaw puzzle piece fits accordingly in a given space (in a corner, because of such variables as hue and shape, etc.), some things were meant to go together. A Chevy and dreaming. Beer and beginnings. Sunlight and reflection. You and me.

When I first started writing about this, I knew that you would disagree. You would hang your metaphoric tapestry and turn off the phone in a contrived attempt to create some distance. You would begin one of those elaborate designs that keep you up at night. And later, in your struggle to keep your eyes open, you would don that cap that would help you find that singular definitive move. The one that would set you apart from the rest, all, me.

Tomorrow, the neighbors would start talking. And then the neighbors’ neighbors. And then you would start talking. Finally. After hours of silence. You would start talking because you finally got it right. And I would begin to hate you for it. You bastard.

***

Done Chrysalis by Johanna

She should have known to slow down when the tires slipped going under the overpass. She might have pulled over for the night, but she had an irrational need to get to the Corn Palace before putting the road to bed. The soft rain had just begun, winter dark just fallen. She must have been doing seventy when the tires slipped again. The Jeep spun a one-eighty and rolled onto the roof of the passenger side where her buddy Jim was shielding his head. The roll continued onto her side, tossing them around in a state of blank suspension. Glass shattered in her hair. Somehow, it landed on all fours, on the other side of the gully, perpendicular to on-coming traffic.

To her right, headlights stared her down. She could not open her door. Her left hand was fucked up. She felt for her left pinky, bent back from the top knuckle and grabbing it, snapped it back into place with painless adrenaline. Jim managed to get his door open and she crawled out his side. He was cradling his right arm to hold in the bone jutting out of his elbow.

The first responders found them there in the ditch, in the rain, broken and huddled close. She kept asking them to check her hair for glass as they covered them with blankets. When the paramedics finally arrived, they wrapped her neck in foam and strapped her into the gurney. Sirens preceded their arrival. She was half-way to the hospital in an ambulance swerving and sliding along the icy back roads when she was struck with a moment of clarity. Shit, she thought to herself, I'm really fucking high.

Nursing Home

2011-09-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

Crumble Bums by Bill

HappySad Barrel nestled closer to the center, burrowing into a crater in the paper. Green Sink just waits for the light to go down. This flash fiction business is hard. You have to take a lot of yourself and compress it into a really small place.

The racoons will crawl in one of the windows tonight, again, and claw around on the paper. They put it to some purpose, cleaning their claws. Its a strange texture. So much of the plaster and the old concrete has fallen off the ceiling you almost wonder if the raccoons have figured out some extra benefit to cleaning their claws here that they put to use in the streams surrounding this place.

Probably a lot of people died here. HappySad thinks they did. Basin Jaw assumes all the beds mean they left, because they’re empty. They’re all dead probably, just not here. But at night, Basin Jaw hears a sound, or sees a light, like a hand carrying a candle, pass through the hallway and is not quite as sure as he is during the day but still doesn’t say anything.

There’s a panic trying to write that small. Its claustrophobic at times. You can’t always stretch out your ideas, sometimes they are pressed just really tight up against you. That’s the worst sometimes, when they are just so close to you, keeping you from moving forward. Radiator and her husband, Bigger Radiator, hid from THEM years ago when all their people were taken by hiding under Warped Door, who never says anything. Warped Door knows they can’t stay here forever. Someday THEY might come back, and finally take away the Radiators, or Basin Jaw. maybe even Green Sink. If they ever come for him, Warped Door knows it will only be for the fire.

***

In the Nursing Home by Alan

In the nursing home, time flies in and out of the windows like a bird on fire, burned by sunlight, ageless and forever aged.

In the nursing home, the news is compiled and strewn about and in piles and all around and lost and found and lost and found.

In the nursing home, the way the paint peels reminds her of dancing during the war and how he used to sing in her ear tiny deep bells that seemed to ring forever.

He works in the nursing home every night to keep the heat on and roaches away so that his Esmeralda can play and be warm and grow up strong.

The ceiling is miles away, the sink another continent, and the radiator a hissing fish gulping for air in the summer in the nursing home.

There are no beds in the nursing home – no doors, walls, or floors. Only the ghosts that were and the ghosts that are and, occasionally, the ghosts that will be…the lucky ones.

***

Remains by Johanna

The mother awoke from a frightening dream, already fading into ether. She did not feel rested and her head spun with her first steps, bare feet against cold tiles. She went to look for her boy, but he was not in bed.

This boy, she sighed, always disappearing. He found the smallest nooks – between wall panels, in closet corners, inside willow tree branches, buried in old gopher holes – and there he hid with his books, while mother went mad with worry trying to find him.

She searched all the obvious spots and screamed until her voice was raw. Where was that boy? Her legs dragged beneath her like heavy stumps. She swung her arms in step, so they would not numb before she could spank him.

Returning to his room, dizzy and exhausted, she summoned her rage to keep her conscious. She pulled his precious books from his shelves as if she might find the boy concealed between the pages. She tore the books to tatters and threw them against the walls, plastering the room with a tornado of swirling white paper. Ripping apart any semblance of words, all the stories dissipated into space. The mother sat in her empty whirlwind and cried.

Watching a tear stain his mother's pale cheek, the man knelt at her deathbed, praying for a happy ending.

***

Nursing Home in e by Lyl

Arachnid pontification of color and form, is what I thought first; tiny chains of light and dark. But I soon caught sight of signification in ruins. My own signification too, truth told. Twists of sinus and aural canals and odd windows that saw through through old folks staring, blind though both had found worldly things baffling always baffling. Doors? Window glass? Pulp? Consummation. Constipation. Jung and his advisory about custodians and lack of living! Boys and girls and ruins. Anticipation always substandard. Pills? Yum. Full of bugs.

***

In Becoming Nurse by Forrest

Whoso believes not in ruin but renovation becomes nurse; and in becoming nurse, not of being a nurse, not of standing anonymous and clean, not of being accustomed to the coming ruination, the standing before mouldering files of the deceased and nearly deceased and soon-to-nearly deceased that reads blank, smudgy, inescapable numbers, numbers attached to certain predilections to weakness; and in becoming nurse there is hazard in a predilection toward tidying lives beyond the belief of becoming, those whoso sneak in anonymously where none look where they should in weakening rain; or should the nurse stand with blank countenance unbecoming to claim the ward, should the nurse predict the number of beds, should the nurse reattach faces to them, a guess must be hazarded to renovate the one whoso lives beyond the drywall mold, nearly unreadable in the file of anonymity, ceasing to believe in escape; and should the custom exist, it exists; and should in becoming nurse one becomes not a number in a tidy life but counting inescapable faces soon-to-nearly mouldering in their beliefs; and should there be hazard sneaking around unseen by weakness; and wherefore then the ruin of the number of nurses stands to cease with the number of smudgy beds escaping attention or hazarding the escape, the nurse soon believes.

Biergarten

2011-08-31T10:10:00.000-07:00

Biergarten by Kurt

This is what it comes down to, Morgan thinks. Days spent haunting the Viktualienmarkt, evenings spent carousing the beer halls. After all the striving for something, the years spent building a family and a future, it’s come down to this—you and the other regulars with nothing better to do. Standing around the public fountains nursing bottles of Hefeweizen to drain away the afternoon. While all around you the good Burgers of Munich eat their lunches and shop for their well deserved Abendbrott. Respectable folks with careers, and families. Retired Omas and Opas who take their daily constitutionals then stop here for a nibble of pickled herring with dill or a glass of chilled Reisling. To socialize and participate in the pageant of respectable daily life.

But not you, Morgan thinks. This is where you have come to forget. This is where you have come to escape. To start anew by recreating what you believe was a better past.

“Are you sure about this,” Hansi says.

“Of course, ol’ pal,” Morgan replies. “Give it to your granddaughter, Liesel.”

“Odd little, fellow. Isn’t he?”

“Odd little fellow. Indeed.”

---

Henri Fruber Had an Idea by Alan

Henri Fruber had an idea. It was an idea that would eclipse all his other ideas for sure. The chicken costume? Forget it. This blew that away. The insect repellant-out-the-ass-for-stray-hikers trick? This was better. Even the psychedelic Volkswagon trip series? Yes. Even the Volkswagon. On the timeline that tracked Henri’s comedic aerobatics, this little number was the wide vertical bar. Numero eins. The big salad.He hired a camera man, told him to look for the best-dressed man there, and made his way to the spot. There would be a little gloating, of course. Wouldn’t you? Perhaps a minute or two to adjust to what would surely bring him endless fame and glory. Yes, he would take a minute. Show the camera the idea. Let the lens adjust a bit. Get the lighting just right.

---

Even a Monkey by Johanna

Welcome to Neurometrics Lab, the number one producer of Brain Enhancement Implants (BEI). We are pleased to have you here with us today to consider the prospects of receiving your very own BEI. We realize that many consumers have strong reservations about purchasing an implant. We want you to know that here at Neurometrics, we understand. But let us assure you, BEI's are so simple, even a monkey could use one. In fact, they have. All of our implants have been tested thoroughly on monkeys before human trials and we have seen next to no side-effects.(1)

Once your BEI is in place at the base of your brain stem, after a simple out-patient procedure, our staff of professionals will help you to adjust to the changes in your mental state that you will immediately begin to notice.(2) But before long, you too will know the bliss and superior intelligence that all of our BEI customers experience.(3) With the additional benefits of hands free messaging and enhanced visual data input(4), you will be able to experience an exciting new world with more time to do what you love.

Imagine sending a message to your friends using nothing more than your thoughts while bathing on a beach in Cozumel(5) or having all your questions answered by doing quick data searches in your very own brain. Not only that but with synapses clicking into place at a consistent rate, you will know the euphoric pleasures of life(6) that used to take mystical ascetics years to cultivate.

Thank you again for visiting with us today and after touring our facilities, please let us know if you have any additional questions. Remember, at Neurometrics, we make everything possible.

_____________
(1) In rare cases, some monkeys have displayed signs of psychosis and suicidal tendencies.
(2) This service is an additional cost.
(3) At an 86% success rate.
(4) All content is corporate sponsored and you must agree to accept up to twenty-four commercial advertisements per diem.
(5) International usage may incur extra costs.
(6) Euphoria is subjective.

---

Monsters by Lyle

His expression. Not the kewpie doll’s, the man’s. His expression. Is he waiting to finish his beer? Perched on a fountain. Get it over with. Take the picture. Did he win it? Doing what? Drinking half of his beer perched, at this exact moment, now, on the fountain edge (what must be a fountain). Two bottle caps clamped together like the jaws of some strange beast — the very beast whose likeness he holds in his hand. A creature of fable. But that type of monster that appears in symbols, objects, the sinewy crevice and line of interpretation (clouds, cement, condensation, cake — that kind of fable). So then his expression. Take the picture for proof and then let’s forget about it. Leave it at that. His expression says, let’s finish our beers and have another. Another.

Bread as early. Try and inform.

It is spring. The beer is light and wheaty. It drinks quickly. The kewpie doll is a gift or it’s found. Either way there is a photo taken. This is the important part now, at this very moment. The photo, which is why the expression is so important. Before — Expression — After. This is the way of things. Creases of memory. Vermin. Worms of remembering.In line behind the kewpie doll and the man with the expression (there is a glint in his eye) is another man with a large white valise. He’s looking for information about an artist in Dusseldorf. He will not find it here. Only monsters.

---

Kewpie by Forrest

How do you say kewpie to me, you who have never seen me with kewpie? And without kewpie you would never be because he is me. Though no smiles. I smile when I need company. When I need favors—from women, yes. But then I stop smiling. He the kewpie will not, you see. The kewpie is what I cannot do after you and a wife who you have not met. You see kewpie, yes? I see him. Kewpie does not see me now that you have never met my wife. I think it better if all of you do not meet without kewpie. Kewpie does need me if you have seen her before. He needs such favors.

---

Token by Bill

I bought this with little plastic tokens I won killing time in a beach-front arcade in Atlantic City in ‘73, playing Golden Jake fake slots, which I hit the jackpot on. The guy behind the counter looked at me with an odd grin, checked to see nobody else was around - kids or their parents - but it was a Tuesday morning early in the fall and there weren’t a lot of people around specifically for that reason so he pulls out this box from underneath the counter with the stuff they don’t let kids choose from. They had a couple of actual switchblades in there, instead of those fake comb things they started selling after the government banned the sale of switchblades in ‘58. But I already had knife. A couple of porno mags, playing cards with nude women, a small bong. I considered a pair of brass knuckles for a minute, but it didn’t seem like the time to pick up anything else. This little guy wasn’t even in the box, but I liked the look of him. His little black and white outfit. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Carlo Fratucci walk by on the other side of the street then, so I picked the little guy which disappointed the guy behind the counter and the deck of nude playing cards which made him happy again like he had gone through the trouble of talking out the box then I followed Carlo half a mile down the boardwalk and stuck him under the armpit straight through to the heart. I gave the cards away to my little brother, but I kept this little guy.

Las Wages

2011-07-31T19:47:00.000-07:00

The 25 Cent Millionaire by Kalifer Deil

That man, two seats down; I think he must be a millionaire or something. By the time I put in one quarter he drops in a couple of sets of four at a time. Even though he doesn't show a wedding ring, he doesn't seem to notice me. Maybe he likes blonds and not brunettes. I wonder how I can grab his attention. I tried giving him a big sexy smile but he didn't even look over. I've never had trouble getting boys, young or old, looking in my direction.

If I hit a good payout maybe that would do it. Those coins a-jangling into my cup should do something. At least he'll look at me. I'll feed the coins in faster and maybe I'll hit something good before he goes away. I wonder if he's from Texas. That looks like a Texan hat and that weathered look. He probably owns a big ranch.

I wonder how he is in bed. Does he look at women as slot machines? Maybe I should dress up as a One Armed Bandit. I'll bet that would get his eye. Oh shit! I'm out of quarters. Damn! Im out of cash too. Maybe I can get some cash with my credit card. Oh fuck! I'm SOL, he'll be gone by the time I get back. I'll turn away and pretend to be hard to get. At some point he'll notice that I'm not playing anymore. The security mirror tells me this isn't working either. Oh well, he's probably gay anyway.

***

Horse Sense by Bill

Consider the snail, or whether the snail puts upon its awareness the burden of time on its way through the meager flower-bed outside your window. Or shit on the snails. Either one is fine. The only pith I like is the kind in plants, but when we joined our farm share all we found was every other week we had to throw out crisper drawers full of moldy cucs and blackened lettuce. I really wanted the special release, limited edition version of life, but I think I got the crappy version they hand out to the suckers in the self-help book of the month club.

***

Slots by Alan

I met Arthur inside the blackjack pit. He had been watching my last few hands as I lost just about everything I had brought with me on the trip. The crowd was thinning. My family was asleep back at the hotel. I wasn’t sure if I had enough left for the cab fare back to my bed.

We started up conversation about the way things were going, how fortune crept in and crept out, the general odds of this and that. It was late. It was early. We knew, but we didn’t know.

We started combining our money, first on the slots, then roulette, and then back to blackjack. A small fire was lit, and we warmed our hands by it. I could see the marks of a callous, bitten fingernails, and the long lifeline in his palm that was interrupted by a birthmark. His face wore a kind of crooked smile unsure of what direction it might take next.

Somewhere around sunrise, I told him that I really had to go. Arthur was playing by himself now. He told me that if I were to come back later that he’d probably be at the slots. He confessed to me that he was a famous actor and that I could look him up on the internet. I asked for his last name and told him I would.

***

Present Tense by Johanna

Outside, a warm breeze sweeps his exposed skin below his shirt sleeves and makes him think of sun. He looks into it unthinking and automatically brings his palm up to shadow his eyes. Very rarely, he feels as if he is shining from inside out.

Inside, he squints his eyes to adjust to the darkness and coughs into the cloud of smoke. He searches the oversized faces for anyone he knows and is thankful for anonymity. No one looks up from their slot machines or card tables, he is invisible.

Outside, the sun is a bright light taking him in and reflecting off of him. He finds change in his pockets where none had been before. Coins for his nephews to make wishes into fountains. A song pops into his head that he used to sing as a kid, the words slipping through him. He slows down time to hold onto them.

Inside, he steps down into the cavern of plush red carpeting and feels his breath grow shallow, his chest tighten. He doesn't have much today to spare. His hope is shallow and convincing. He decides to start easy on the slot machines. He listens to the clank of quarter fall into the belly of the machine and pulls with acquired finesse at the lever. Eyes closed, he watches the dollar signs align.

Outside, the sun heats his eyelids, the perfect balance between warmth and burning. The light grows larger, too big to be contained. The breeze picks up the scent of honeysuckle and lifts it to him. There is nothing else left.

***

Las Wages by Kurt

It’s inevitable, you think. In this economy, you knew the bottom would eventually drop out. That you’d wind up flat broke again. After all, living hand-to-mouth on bi-weekly unemployment checks isn’t really living, you tell yourself. So, something’s got to change. And fast. Right? Screw feeling sorry for yourself. Screw being dependent on the man. Screw the way it feels like you’re always being scraped off the bottom of someone else’s shoe.

And that’s when it hits you.

The lyrics to that Springsgteen song. The one you used to sing out loud in the car, driving home from work. Back when you had a job. The one that gave you hope. The one that made you feel invincible. The one that’s like a banner tattooed on the underbelly of your psyche.

“The dogs on main street howl, 'cause they understand, If I could take one moment into my hands. Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man, And I believe in a promised land.”

So, that’s when you finally figure it out. That’s when you finally realize that you’ve got to take control. That you’ve got to be the man. That it’s time to double down on your last unemployment check. Cash it and take the funds to Vegas. Turn this misery into joy.

Because, you believe in a promised land.

***

sega sa by Lyle

aLas Wages — segaW saL

[wags sale

sew slags

gas l was

son of a bitch]

in the empty warehouse a conversation:

amongst the slot stools a dialog:

between the machine lines:

the cherries and sevens and BARS

Lost upon being born

***

Slottery by Forrest

I never get me no action on The Wheel of Fortunate but Gold’n Rush play loose, mostly cause, I think, ev’ryone know The Wheel of Fortunate on account of that blonde lady an her husband with the toupee. A trap from the start, suckering folk with guessing letters for words. They can lacquer that teevee horseshit all they want. It’s generic ones, see, like Diamond Dust an Superwild Cherries pay out best—them machines sit there un’specting and un’preciated, I can stare straight into ‘em, make those diamonds an cherries line up an I know they’ll line up cause I’ll leave otherwise so they won’t let me. Why sometime I sit there an loiter an wait for the pretty girl, better’n The Wheel of Fortunate lady and thrice as young—she swing by and ask me if I’m all righty an if I want to stop playing. No, ma’am, I’m fixing to get my Superwild Cherries in order fore I leave cause I already know how to spell “Winnebago” an “Steel Magnolias” but who levels those cherries so well. Made three small jackpots easy last week. She remember that, naturally. Lucky me she say—you wanna drink? Shore, bring me two whiskeys, one for me an one for you, an no she can’t drink while working an I say, None of this is working. I tip her big anyway. T-I-P, she can spell that with her hiney alone. Get her on one of these Million Dollar Dreams an I bet she spell a whole lot more.

Cuidad Juarez

2011-07-01T06:59:00.000-07:00

Forensics by Forrest

Last time—or the one last time of what can be an overlong career in this city after I arrived in forensics— when I saw them working a scene, the two officers responding were already digging into each other over what remained on the pavement. An embrace between brave women with a loaded weapon, I can imagine, is not easily accomplished, much less seen often. If one of them believes a gun is lighter than it appears because of fruitless duty, it seldom has opportunities to be used to her heart’s content.

***

Cages by Bill

Spring is nearly over the hill, the hot turning us out, like zombies, weaving through the night unable to sleep. Another cup of coffee further from the backs of eyelids. So many cups now its starting to give off that sour feeling in the stomach, but it tastes too good. It tastes too good because it still tastes at all. It might be the best cup of coffee ever. Remember in Jaws, when Quinn’s talking about the cages, “Cage goes in the water, you go in the water. Shark's in the water. Our shark.” Well we got sharks up here too.

***

Headline by Alan

The bridge was devastated. When the bomb detonated, a family of seabirds dispersed as if they were roses at the end of a wedding ceremony, the church doors now completely flung open. It was a sunny day. The sound was deafening.

The officers arrived quickly and pointed their weapons at the thought of anything suspicious. They became little sad hummingbirds maneuvering through a garden of flowers. Sweetness. Nectar. Dear god. How we need to feed ourselves with answers, targets for our desperate stomachs.

The smoke never cleared. The smoke never clears. Occasionally, we come across each other in a room in the dark and we fumble for the right questions, which (like hummingbirds) always seem to elude the logic of our collective imaginations.

***

Backstory by Johanna

I first noticed you across the room, your sway and swagger. I knew from the way you wore your hair in wings that you were from the butterfly clan. The more my attraction to you grew, the more I avoided you. One day, in a moment of bravery, I opened the door for you. “Thank you,” you said and smiled just enough that you might be flirting but, of course, I wouldn't dare assume so.

“My privilege,” I said. I meant to say, “my pleasure,” but it came out wrong. I imagined our dance, how sweet, our knees kissing.

After the incident, I saw you there looking like you were trying hard not to cry and I went to you without thinking. I was a stranger to you. You held me anyway.

***

Escape by Lyle

I’m sorry. This one escaped me. Escapes. Escapes me. Is in the very process of escape. Always with this sense of not being something, somewhere. If only for a minute it is this one. Just like a bullet. Escapes into the chamber from fingers. Escapes into the barrel and then out of the barrel and then escapes. I’m sorry: my very soul escapes with that bullet long since gone.

The Virgin

2011-05-31T15:28:00.000-07:00

Alone by Lyle

The Virgin slept. Wept. Crept throughout the vacant house. Her vacuous mind. The Virgin was no longer a virgin, abstinence and emptiness being not-quite the same thing. She had no thoughts. Her head filled itself constantly with tears. Then it became heavy with sleep and when she woke in the night on the floor she woke in puddles. The Virgin was alone. Immaculate conception. The Virgin did not dream. Her knees scraped on the floor and were scabbed. The Virgin did not dream.

***

Vows by Forrest

In leaving too soon, getting up and searching down the road for what he thinks is her, he forgets the other woman by his side. It is close to evening when he returns empty-handed, the same as his companion in plaster. The day keeps its promise.

***

The Best Lack All Conviction by Bill

There is no time out the other side. There is only this stuff condensed here in the middle, sometimes rich and sweet like angelcream and other times the milk's gone bad. Looking on, she sings the song, we’re on our way back home. Nothing worth knowing isn’t already written on our skin, the pluripotent stems talking to the world in the language of disease and demons, microbes and bacteria. Nothing worth the time it takes getting to the outside of the world, coursing a track on the rim of the atmosphere. The life we have in place is calling out cues on the falling action of our lives, afraid the climax is just pastiche in the end, a summation in detournemental existence taking life one groundhog day at a time.

***

The Poet by Alan

She was looking for the vehicle, a way to encapsulate the notion that whet the embers of her mind’s heart. Long afternoons in New England summers, uncut grass, the promise of new light. There are things that fray the maps of our inner architecture, transform mood, lift the veil so we can see again. And there are things that darken in this world.

In the front yard was a well, and on the walls of that well sat a little blackbird. She would sing to it, and it would sing back. There conversation would echo below for what seemed like miles. Miles of space always seem longer in blackness. The road is always longest when you can’t see an end.

Purity is one thing, but dedication is another. Purity the anchor. Dedication the boat. The yard shifted beneath her as she wrote. The tenor. The tenor. The tenor. The thing we all long for. The thing is singing. It perches and sings. “Hope,” she began to write (in little fences), “is the thing with feathers” and then dashed indoors.

***

Old Adirondak by Johanna

The red Adirondak chair my grandpa built has been painted three times. I know this because I like to curl into a ball in the chair's lap and lay my cheek on its back to look real close at the cracks where sun and hail have chipped away to the green below. And in well-worn spots like the arm rests you can see all the way to white. In the morning, I sit here like this and listen to my mother humming in the garden, her big hat shading her shoulders as she leans into the rake or shovel or seeds. The early sun feels good on my legs and glistens on the blonde fuzz of my thighs. I want to sleep here or stay here all day in anticipation of growing up.

In the afternoon, the arm rest is hanging from the chair where a nail came loose but I don't have any tools to fix it with. This patch of dirt my roommates call a yard is fenced in so completely that I could be anywhere except for the sounds of the neighborhood – barking dogs, yelling mothers, a gunshot or car backfire. I lean deeply into the chair and try not to think of the diner I have to go back to in the morning to wait tables for measly tips or my ex-boyfriend who keeps texting me threatening to kill my cat. I wish for my mother.

In the evening, I am taking a few moments to myself while the baby sleeps. I have painted the chair royal blue to match the front door of the house but it will not fit on my porch so I keep it down here by the steps. I have had three glasses of wine so far, maybe four, and I want another. I imagine my body lifting off from this blue wooden frame. I am finally feeling relief from the day's routine of laundry, cooking, washing, watching and the baby begins to cry. I ignore him. He continues to cry.

It is nearly dark now, but this is my favorite time to garden. It is cool enough for my loose skin that likes to hide from sunshine and heat. I am sitting on a plastic stool my son bought for me to help me better reach the vegetable beds. It wobbles when I lean in. I look up and see that old Adirondak. Broken in three places it still survives, kind of like myself. I can't sit in it anymore, can't get out of it, but I like to see it there, looking back at me. I pull at the weeds, pull and tug, resisting like the muscles in my back. Each one I pull away at clears the memories that seep in when I relax and begin dreaming. The weeds release their roots, the soil crumbles around them.

Spirit

2011-05-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

The True Story of Our Christmas Tree and Our Trailer Park by Marisela Chavez

Listen up, Son. This is why we hang our “Christmas Tree” in the sky from the crane every year:
Many many many years ago there lived a Man, right here on this land, the only person who could cut down the pine trees that filled this valley. He was very strong. See, this used to be a magical place before the Man pissed off a God. Let me tell you how.

This man--we don’t know his name--was a good man, a nice man, if a little cocky, but who wouldn’t be? He had a power no one else did. He was the only person strong enough cut down these trees, as I said. Some say the power was God-given, which makes sense that it was likewise God-taken. This man cut down the trees and the others hauled them off and sold the wood all across the country. It was even shipped overseas! This land prospered from the wood because it was the strongest wood on Earth. It was a kind of magical wood.

One day, for apparently no reason, the God dropped in on the Man and asked him to find the loveliest tree, to chop it down and to leave the logs atop a little hill for the God to take. The Man said he would but he didn’t. He was distracted. You see he was in love and feeling like a God himself. So, the Man decided he wanted to build a new house made of the best wood to impress his lover, and instead of supplying the God with the wood from the loveliest tree, he left the God wood from the second loveliest tree, which, if you remember, was still nice-looking wood because all the wood of the forest was the best wood on Earth. But he wasn’t thinking straight when he picked the prettiest wood for himself.

Well you can’t trick a God for long. He soon discovered the Man’s betrayal when he saw the Man’s new house. That God who was once jolly became angry and set the entire forest on fire. Worse, he took the life force out of all the village men’s woodies, the ones in their pants, Son (this part of the story is reserved for listeners of at least 15yrs of age). The people cried and cried. They were out of work and poor and sexually frustrated ( ditto, listeners). They felt like they had nothing to live for. Someone suggested a mass suicide but first they decided to give it a shot and begged the God for mercy. To everyone’s surprise, the God was in a great mood and felt for the people. He granted them mercy under two conditions:

1. they never, ever for the rest of their lives and their children’s lives---and their children’s children’s lives, and on and on---build a house on that land. This is why we all live in trailers.

2. and, at the end of every year, each family must sacrifice to the God the most beautiful pine tree they can find. The God swoops in at night and takes the spirit from all the sacrificial the trees before they dry up and die.

The people all agreed to the God’s conditions and the curse was lifted. The forest grew back, but the wood from the trees was no longer the strongest wood in the world. It was mediocre wood. They didn’t care. They had their wood back. They celebrated--hard. The Man, however, never regained all of his strength. He never married and he died alone in his fancy house. Some believe the God only partially lifted his curse.

So this is why we light and hang our “Christmas Tree” in the sky--so the God can’t miss it. It’s become a tradition other’s have adopted, but we do it for a more serious reason: We don’t want to piss the wood-giving God off ever again.

---

Steal by Forrest

I drive better angry.Mostly I’m done scraping tips together for bail—for that leer of her years ago as we tried pulling in. They almost took up the whole driveway. They were giving away our light above our roof at seventy-two feet.

Last late Christmas, thanks to Lindsay.

I recognized the crane operator by the height of the tree: big show-off. Before mom called the cops on him, Lindsay palmed his tiny things, mostly condoms. She’d put them on her bedstand. Then dice, shotglasses. Handful of white tree lights. For him on his left. And finally Mister Connected noticed all the other stuff.

Lindsay stuck up her hand like she could reach our door. Municipal notice. I slapped her down. I
slapped her. Got loud around there. There was nothing to sit on.

But it was mom already out by then. She had made a promise. It sounded worthless. I can’t even think of why she said it now.

There’d always be the neighbor’s guard dog keeping my sister at bay with a long smile in the steal of thinning dusk. How I’d helped make her think that was enough for her.

---

Hypersigil by Bill

I fell asleep in the middle of the dream raiding Tammany Hall, or maybe I woke up into a world where it had melted away rather than crashing like a freight train through history. There was the part of me that woke up and the part of me that awoke, and in the dream those two of me could meet for a time and confer and began building this place on the borders in the moonlight, falling out, struggling over it. It was six-sided and smelled terrific, and the two of us were joined by others, six in all.

A squirrel stared at me through the window. Beyond the squirrel for a moment there was a woman outside on the nice little park my apartment sits over wandering through the grass with one bare foot and one walking cast. I only saw her for a moment before she’d fallen out of sight but she hadn’t seemed in the best of shape. A light went up in the sky. Could have been anything, could have been nothing, and it might even have been both, revolving far out on the other side of the moon, ready to open up the moment we make contact and dose the world with anti-bodies.

Remade. From here on out birthers are taking a shot to the nuts, soccer-style stopper kick clearing it back to mid-field. This is your friendly neighborhood liberal warlord dealing out humanist progressive ideology with a battle-axe in each hand. Or download the bodhisattva construct onto one of the mind-sides, and on each side a universe boiling over with suns. I can’t say it the way it feels, as if I had to slip sideways in the light. As if I were tripping over shadows, learning to dodge out of the way of clouds passing across the dreaming sun.

---

Spirit by Alan

Spirit was quick as rifle when it came to sniffin’ out thieves. He could smell the desperation in their eyes, and before they knew, he was on top of them snarlin’ and growlin’ and making them wish they were four again and scared of loud noises beneath their windows. He was better than any alarm system because he would creep up on ‘em all quiet and ghostly. Silence is the best secret weapon. Ninjas know this. So do haiku poets. I swear if Spirit could write, he would pen something about a frog and the sound of water and splash splash splash. Shit. He’d win the poolitzer for it. All in one draft. One afternoon. Write the whole damn book. And you know what? He’d get bored of writing all day and come back home to protect Jesus’s trees. That’s a holy dog right there. He’s like the guardian angel. What’s his name? You know, the real silent one? Spirit loved his trees, especially when they were all decked out in lights. That dog would stare into the dazzle as if it were the Lord himself in them bulbs. Just for kicks we raised one in full glory high above the yard to see what he would do. We even asked Billy Bob to bring his camera to document the whole thing. Wouldn’t you know it – as if he felt we were playing some sort of experiment joke on him (or messing with the holy world) – Spirit turned and shot a look so pernicious, so sinister, that old Billy Bob clicked once, set his camera down on the fence post, and made a run for it like he had just seen the holy ghost.

---

2892C -- Log: 12/11/11 by Lyle

This one was strange. I know you don’t want the details but I’m recording them anyway. I won’t be back anyway. I arrived just after sundown, the light still scarring the horizon. The feet on the truck had been planted. Firmly planted as always -- make no mistakes there. Then I got to work. (Note: See work order in which the Processor wrote: “Purchaser requests nighttime extraction, silence and above all else discretion.”) You know I’ve done this all before. That I’m no novice. How many do you think I’ve done? And never a mistake that had to be fixed. I’m still shaken up. Excuse me. Probably didn’t have to go down this way. It was sprinkling but the extraction moved smoothly. Despite, I have to fucking say, despite the fact that it was lit. This was not in the work order. I would not have signed off on “discretion above all else” and “lit extraction material.” But you know that, I suspect. You know that. In the middle of it all -- a dog. Not that I don’t like dogs. I like dogs. It wasn’t the dog, per se. When it’s eyes lit up like the extraction material though I knew something was wrong. Someone had found me -- caught me. I know the procedure. You drilled it into me. As per Protocol 927 I took care of the situation. Everything is in the truck bed including my keys and security clearance. I know what this means. But you won’t see me again.

Status: Extraction complete.

Transmission terminated...

The Phantom Phone Booths

2011-03-31T10:01:00.000-07:00

(Photo courtesy & © Thomas Olson)

The Martian by Vivian

On his last night on Earth, Thomas Olson snaps an image of the twin phone booths in the parking lot of a local rest stop. Tom insists on a Polaroid Instant, circa 1987, which he has owned now for over three decades. The Polaroid Instant has always produced low-quality photos, but Tom cannot imagine taking his final images of life on Earth with anything else.

Fiscal policy and logistical limitations have defined the stark parameters of Tom’s mission: One man. One way. The remainder of his natural life on Mars. Even so, only the President’s insistence that America beat China to Mars has saved Tom’s mission from cancellation.

Last September, a fortuitous Bird Flu outbreak in China had allowed the Americans to inch again. But then, China had always planned on sending six men, a dog, and a donkey. Round-trip.

Tom pinches the photo of the phone booths between his thumb and pointer finger and shakes it vigorously, a motion which, given Tom’s wiry frame, evokes the image of a well-worn yet sturdy fencepost in an earthquake. Once the photo has developed and set, Tom adds the image to his stack. These, he will tuck into a corner of his ship. They will sustain him, he imagines, on the loneliest of Martian nights.

***

Prestory by Lyle

Stories of suicides whose families dispose of the evidence before the police arrive because they feel ashamed. I can’t imagine the lack of empathy. I would feel only sadness. Such sadness. Sadness in the taut rope or metallic gun smoke still hanging in the room like a shroud.

And one night the darkness clamored around me: suddenly something outside the light jumped, buzzed. Or was it inside the light? Or the light itself? Difficult to say despite the dichotomous metaphors — inside/outside, light/dark. But which was which? the corona and penumbra mixed to create a wide grayness. It percolated light as well as darkness. This percolation jumped,

popped —

a fly hitting a zapper at dusk.

And then the phone rang.

***

Intercessed by Forrest

I use the left one for emergencies.

I use the right one to watch.

***

Zipatone by Bill

One’s a gate of ivory, the other horn. Both are ready to party. Say what you want into the first and you will hear nothing but lies, and truths like a crate of clementines whose tops are brilliant while the undersides are rotten, half hearted veracities and cunning trickery spread over the lines like little sparks of tragedy. Best just to dial up the radio station and request something to dance to, swing your hips in place and roll your pelvis enclosed in glass and metal. Half a musical truth is something you can hold in your hand easy enough and drop when you want it to break, equal parts brightly colored dia de los muerte shadowbox and unicorn figurine with a broken horn.

Which brings us around to the other. Easily a three on the Kinsey Scale, the Hierophant become the Lovers and the warp in and out of the world a fluid motion, free of friction so that once you step inside it becomes as if you had been cloaked in void softer than the coziest sweater, and there are flashes of lightning at the edges of your eyeballs you would never hear. Likely it is best to say nothing and let time speak for itself, and certainly say nothing false. Bring a band sticker to paste down on the little shelf, something you really like since everything you hear in the receiver will have some song in the background, informing what is said.

***

1992 By Beth

Back then she was always looking for a pay phone. It was the way her family played the game. It wasn’t okay to come in five minutes late. It wasn’t okay to change her mind and come back in the middle of the night, or to tell them she was staying at her boyfriend’s place. The arrangement was that she would call at 10:45. She would tell them which female friend with good parents she was staying with. They never called back to check. Once it was established that she wasn’t coming home, they stopped watching for the flash of headlights across the bedroom wall. They closed their mystery novels. They never knew she was calling from outside of a general store, the phone receiver cold against her hand and face.

After the phone call, her obligation, she was free to drive the back roads slowly, looking out for deer, foxes, raccoons, hot guys’ trucks. She was free to drive all the way to Bar Harbor, sit on the rocky beach and drink a wine cooler, listen to the waves roll in. Free to cruise the strip mall parking lot and the McDonald’s drive-thru, just to see who was out tonight. Free to slip under the quilted covers in the apartment where her boyfriend lived, smell the detergent on the clothes his mother didn’t wash anymore, forget that she had parents who loved her.

***

Before You Were Everywhere by Alan

We used to communicate in the off-hours. Shake off the dresses of the afternoon and evening and slip into a certain kind of midnight rhythm. Only the hours weren’t really hours but phases of our lives. You on one side of a tectonic plate and me on another. The balance was a kindling, was based purely on love. And to communicate was to love deeper, to write longer, to make attempts, to reconcile time.

There’s something about distance that brings us closer together. There’s something about convenience that tears us apart. I remember when I used to use pay phones. I remember the cold receiver on my shoulder, the arcane sustained moan, and what it meant to press the lip with my finger, and start over. These things I remember. When we were closer than strangers but miles apart. Before you were everywhere and I didn’t have to find you, you were nowhere and I loved you.

***

Scientific Inquiry Into the Extinction of the Telephone Booth by Johanna

Over the course of the last ten years, the once ubiquitous telephone booth has slowly disappeared from urban and small town street corners. The retarded withdrawal of booths from civilization has mostly gone unnoticed and unmeasured. The purpose of this study is to determine the main factors that lead to their extinction.

After extensive national and international travel in search of a working phone booth, only two were found. One, in Kerala, India and one in Bisbee, Arizona where it was painted with a mural to look like an angry robot.

While it is well-known that telephone booths became unnecessary in the early part of the century with the commonplace of cellular phone devices, they were still seen as a way for the homeless or people who forgot to charge their batteries to call home in an emergency. When the populace discovered endless minutes, most people on the street willingly lent the use of their personal phones if asked politely. Once phone companies realized this, they stopped service to all booths.

The actual disappearance of telephone booths began when citizens took it upon themselves to up-cycle. In urban areas, hipsters appropriated them for use as chicken coops and solar ovens. Artists recovered them for sculptures, installation pieces and stage props. More commonly, in rural areas they were used for bird houses and pit toilets. On occasion, multiple clowns could be found squeezing inside of one.

Future experiments should investigate how much a telephone booth will be priced for on Antiques Roadshow, in the case of a retro resurgence.

The King

2011-02-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

The King by Ben Forstenzer

Let me tell you, Mickey never saw an obvious thing in his whole life. He musta spent all his time seeing the other stuff. For god’s love. This guy could stare at a spot on the page and only see its edges. Did you see a spot there Mick? What spot?

My oldest friend Mickey, that’s for sure. Oldest, from like my elementary school. From around fourth grade. He was chubby with a funny way about him and most of the kids were mean to him. But he could crack such serious jokes. Make you laugh your milk up your nose, caused a scene in the lunchroom.

And the thing was, his dad owned the place. He started it with The Old Guy. Mickey’s dad and The Old Guy, hands and gloves, hands and gloves all the way back.

So The Thleen tells me, “you got to see your move.” The Thleen says I got to get smart about it, got to make it happen. Kathleen. Twenty
years married and she’ll still tell me whats what. Since day one. She’ll tell me and it’ll be right. The Thleen does her homework.

“Mickey”, she says, “Mickey is soft. It’s yours, it’s yours to take.” She’s got the rheumatoid arthritis. Her hands are caving in. But The Thleen is tougher than that. “Mickey,” she says, “Mickey couldn't do it anyway.”

Mickey still makes jokes.

“What do flies wear on their feet?” I don’t know Mickey, tell me. “Shoes!” he says snorting through his beer. Yeah, Mickey is soft. But I laughed
at that one. Used it on clients. Sometimes it worked.

The Old Guy is old. That guy is really getting on. He rubs his chin a lot when he thinks about stuff. Mickey’s dad died a while back already. Right after me and The Thleen got hitched up. Clear cold day, hard blue sky pushing out all over, pushing down. Came into work after the funeral, wearing black and all. Thought Mickey would be in the main office next to The Old Guy. But no. Out at our double desk like usual. The Old Guy was back there calling
Mickey’s dad’s contacts.

“Just making sure we can still count on your business.” The Old Guy. He’s no slouch.

The Thleen could see it. She came in last week and popped into his office just for a hello. She’s on some new medication, makes her puke, but her knees can bend OK. Came out of the office and raised her eyebrows so high she knocked the hanging light. At home that night she told me, “he don’t got much more time there.” She’d seen it in his face.

“He’s gonna die?” I said.

“No. Just done with that office, that place.” she said.

Forty five years in that office. And
he’s had four trips to the hospital the last eight months. “Mickey can’t do it,” she said. Fixed me in a stare. Waited. “Mickey can’t do it.”

It’s pretty simple. The Thleen laid it out and I got it.

I told Micky to meet me at the bar. I told him I had business to finish. Which was true.

“Why is there a gate around the cemetery?”

“Ah Mickey, I don’t know.”

“Because people are dying to get in.” He snorted and put on his hat. “See you at the bar.” he said. I nodded.

The Old Guy was back there. Me and The Thleen had worked it out. The angles, the reasons. Mickey. That I would treat him good. If I hadn’t rehearsed it with her I swear I would have puked. But I walked right in there and I got it out. I nodded and answered his questions. I rubbed my chin like I was The Old Guy himself. We rubbed chins and thought about it and he agreed.

“Mickey” I said, “so it’s not how you pictured it would go.” He nodded. He finished his beer and looked up at the screens. He watched a soccer game. He doesn’t like soccer.

He turns to me and says, “Two hats are on a hat rack. Hat number one says to hat number two, you stay here,
I’ll go on a head.”

***

Inside Bugs by Johanna

In the recesses of the bath tub, a spider climbs and slips, climbs and slips. I beg my husband, Don’t kill it. It's bad luck. He turns on the faucet and eight legs curl under and float downstream resigned.The moth darts desperately from porch light to kitchen light to bedside lamp and hovers without rest as one after the next is switched off. Where do moths go in the dark?

To sleep, my husband sighs, turning from his back to his side.

Do moths sleep?

The fly, trapped between window screens for the length of its short life, flutters, keeping me awake to wonder what morning will bring and how futile the day that follows.

***

We’ll Make Great Pets by Lyle

Winston, sole proprietor of Animal Kingdom, upon opening the store one Monday morning, after a debauched weekend in Las Vegas (what happens stays, right? he thought as he turned the key — a feeling of both moral and physical corruption mingling in him) in which the same types of animals he pampered and loved hundreds of miles away in his store were used in a variety of sordid sexual applications, smelled the candy-apple scent of decay.

***

Raison d’être by Forrest

Never mind all these senses of intolerability we the workers exude, even in our peaceful, frenetic state of continuously applying, plastering, building up: worry about regurgitation instead. Before the King put himself in charge of our defense and titles and the general welfare of the State, only the Delegate of Heaven knew the needs suitable for the true excrescent practitioner; and now the King sits on the Delegate of Remains without so much as a pillow, forever asking him if he enjoys the new shapely form of this pretend world the best. There is no response from the Delegate. In pleasurable dread, we are waiting for the King’s next question.

***

Known Like Unknown by Bill

you draw your lay lines as I draw mine. some you see in clear, defined space but the fourth world was not always so wondrously three dimensional, so if I choose to lay them stitching this way or that across my shit leave me to my work and keep your thoughts on it. once you had to whisper what you'd seen through many eyes' fractal perceptions, drawing across numerous planes like you were Mapplethorpe seeing dark and ever darkening shades when you dropped acid and went barking, the world split to planes and always the howling chatter of Mictlan never far away. you had to hold your ears in the presense of Xipe Totec who ever has a say. tote up your channels leading through the deep blue sea, from Wych Cross Sussex to sandy Badlands' graves, carving up the mind of this world.

***

It Is What It Is by Beth

Is anything iridescent not unpleasant? She watches a swarm of flies take off from a busted garbage bag the trash truck has left behind. Flies, gas spreading in a puddle or behind a motorboat. Maybe wings. Maybe dragonfly wings, and if you think about them as dragonflies or damselflies and not darning needles, waiting to sew your lips together while you nap on your hammock, they’re not necessarily so sinister.

But then, everything is gross here in the city in the summer. The alleyways smelling like diapers. The dumpsters behind the gourmet restaurants smelling just as bad (maybe worse) than the fast food ones. The homeless guys you feel bad about holding your breath around. The smashed fruit of the gingko trees smelling like dogshit, and sticking to your shoes in the same way. The trash cans in the park full of knotted plastic bags of actual dogshit, which conscientious owners have hovered near their dogs’ asses to gather. All those bags of shit broiling in the sun. The iridescent flies landing on the bags of shit and then taking off, all at once like the girls in iridescent dresses coming out of the clubs in Old City after last call. Like the flocks of birds that wheel through the park and perch on one ledge and then another, all taking off, all landing, all taking off again.

***

On Reading Lord of the Flies (for the 11th time): a fictive primer/equation by Alan

Life + the mother of motivations + Golding’s beast + that was some vicious circle + “I cried when I read that part” + “that was stupid” + the fear inside all of us + what Simon said + once upon a time + it could happen to any of us + it could happen to you + it happened to me + “what does the title mean?” + that which we’re all attracted to + that which ties us together + the thing inside all of us + running really fast toward a car accident + “they’re all just a bunch of bullies” = “we’re all just a bunch of bullies” + if literature were really a mirror + what Simon said + if education was really education + the impetus for change + looking inward + the difference between a fly and a human + the difference between reading and reading + the distance between the little i and the big I + the courage inside all of us + “an end to war” + an end to war? + an end to war + fiction + fiction?

Untitled

2011-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

(Photo courtesy & © Emily White)

Like Crazy by Barbara DeCesare

But if you stop taking your medicine you're gonna get sick. But if you take your medicine you don't know how to be happy. I guess it was selfish of me, but I loved having you around those months - you, no meds. And also, I just plain loved you like crazy.

On the fourth day of camping you told me you threw the bottle away. I was scared and proud. And I wanted to see what would happen. My favorite was the grocery store, when you'd sneak me grapes and beg me to buy you the sugary cereals in the bottom bins, the generic ones. "That's what Betty Big Butt used to get!" The babysitter. The one who didn't care when the water was too hot in the tub. Why would you want her dumb cereal? But I bought it. Because I love you.

All summer it was like this. I'd leave the shoe store at five on the button so we could go for a hike or put the dog in the canoe (hilarious) or lie outside and feed each other gummy bears until it got chilly. All summer you were wide open and new, you were like a brilliant falling star taking over the whole long night. You were all I wanted.

The police found you crying outside the post office. Everything went bad after that. Your mother came back to town and now I don't even know where to send my letters. I knew it would happen, but I thought I could wish it off. Every day when I ran out of the shoe store, I prayed so hard the whole way home that I'd find you the way I left you. That the dark clouds hadn't welled up in you yet and ruined your view of me. Of us.

***

Fair and Square by Beth

Sometimes I miss getting punched in the face. Or in the arm, or having my hair pulled out, or bashing my head against someone else’s. Getting my toe stomped through canvas sneaker. Having someone squeeze me as hard as he could into the hard plastic of our mother’s two-door Corolla, bracing his feet against the other side of the backseat to get more leverage. Being held down on the ground, with sticks in my hair. Kicking and flailing like a fish on a dock, karate chopping, hitting back. The way a skinned knee stings. Saying sorry, sorry, sorry while I laugh and back away, arms outstretched, knowing that if I turn to run he’ll push me down. Knowing I went too far, when he’s so mad he’s crying and snotting and hitting without even looking at me. Being that mad.

Hearing the screen door open, our mother yell dinner, rolling off each other, dusting the leaves off, going inside to the smell of the Old El Paso dinner kit, the grudge already fading, almost gone.

***

How These Things Go by Alan

The last song on the mix tape was “Sugar’s Got Nothing on You,” and it was intended to be a set closer by the band who had penned it, Super Owl. The band’s lead singer Jettison Lee Waze was, of course, a poet with a penchant for online drama/scandals. He was said to have thrown a high-definition TV straight out of a fan chat room window one night because “hoothoot99 was just taking it too far.”

Most of the kids in the know in the neighborhood knew the power of a good last song, and how it could make a summer night last forever. These two knew too. One had made the tape for the other, but you know how these things go; they sort of made it together. And they were listening together that fateful evening when it all went down.

Though the first track was mashed up with The Den Intruder Song on Vimayo, the rest of the playlist ran as juice through a straw. By the flip, they were entranced with eyelashes, and midway through the second side the music itself became some dim and muted white noise emitting from the city they’d created. Until they reached the last song, of course. Then they came out of it – for a second – like a whale taking the breath before the sink, the majestic primal urge to sink. And then they dove back in.

***

Filtered Light by Johanna

She opened her mouth and ashes came out. She formed words in her head but they stayed there. It wasn't like laryngitis, her voice did not curdle out of a scratchy throat; it was just the complete absence of sound, like air. Then, ash, soft gray flakes that turned to dust between her fingers and left her mouth dry. She consulted various doctors, but no one could diagnosis her. A lab technician noted that each flake of ash was perfectly formed into a distinct rhombus.

In a bucket, she began to save the ash, opening her mouth to speak and letting the flakes float tenuously toward the metal rim. After a while, she no longer had anything on her mind to say and she could not conjure the mysterious particles. She swept the surfaces of all her belongings to gather up every last bit of minute remnant of ash that had coated her whereabouts for weeks and added it to the bucket. She put a lid on it and waited, until she forgot what she was waiting for and left the bucket alone.

Many mute months later, she was clearing out her apartment and found the bucket again. Heat emanated from the metal vessel's walls as she approached. She drew back. Kicking off the lid, she looked into the bucket, singeing her eyebrows. She gasped and the flames entered her mouth, licking her tongue and spiraling down her esophagus.

Yum, she said to the empty room.

***

~~Life Is Circular~~ by Lyle

The Theory of Circles posits that everything is circular. It’s absurd mostly but has a growing number of proponents. When I was ten I ate a rat to see what it would taste like. I never did that again. My mind would come back to what I learned. My experience. Circular.

But now I am in a state of confusion, tight little circles. Or a spiral.

I am afraid that I will eat a rat again. Absurd. Why am I not afraid of eating my son when he comes to bring food? I remember him — my son. I am so sorry I brought you into this. Perhaps it is best if I eat you too; the way life has consumed me and shat me back out at the end to stink. Life is not circular. It is a long, unbending line. Know that. That is the Theory of Circles.

***

Siameses by Forrest

Our I escapes the movers. Sad, sad movers with that moving look while making moves. They carry the two-bit dirge away, ding it against the banister. They forget their Chang and Eng. Bubblewrapped, the parlor now gave off a frontier transparency but far less suck-face. The latter once included the I happily including us. All occasions had not suitably embarrassed, however. There were still wantings of a criminal insertion. There were incidentals.

***

Untitled by Bill

Save your mind. Save the spaces along the lip. Be aware of your teeth. Be clean, and breathe deeply aware of the voluminous oysters sitting in the bay of your dimininuation. And sitting by the dock of the quay. And outside of space, falling station to station.
The mystery passed muster, lip on the slide-rule. All the other kids turned around in the surf until they fell into the ocean and we dipped them in butter. We made glass, breathing fire on the sand, and corralling coral polyps in a run-off drain sluice-bath.
Algorhythmic breathing method, we don the capes we made out of our pillow-cases, crying all the way home once the vine broke and we fell too far into the pile of leaves. Hungry and not so scared of the life, arepas for lunch, a sense of being and being stuck to the inside of the heads here like toffee. Did you suggest arepas for lunch?

Rudolph II

2010-12-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Dark by Ron Estrada

There’s another part in the Bible that isn’t actually in it. It’s only there in the boy’s own imagination. But it feels part of it, all in line; it’s when he’s praying. His mom used to pray with him at his bedside when he was a kid. She’d kneel, they’d both kneel and say the, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” part and then the boy would go and then she’d go with their own parts. Over the years she would take a step back, then watching him do the whole thing by himself while she stood in the doorway. And then she wouldn’t be there at all.

The room, to the boy, never felt like God. Outside did. And that’s what he started to do, go outside to pray at night. He’d kneel on the garden ground, pull his sleep pants up to his thighs if it was wet or there was snow and would pray aloud. He was alone; his mom still wasn’t around. This was in one way. In another, he felt less alone than in his room. He thought of other kids outside saying their prayers, all of them, and him, alone, together alone.

He’d finish and wipe off of his knees, go back to his room. He prayed for a lot of things. He didn’t pray for this, out loud, but hoped it: that he’d be so tired when he got back to his bed that he wouldn’t have to think of anything.

***

Turning In by Bill

Greetings and salutations. I've got my hands clasped together, and I am kneeling on the box. My calves are cramping, and I just want to get home and open the box of cookies that I received at work today. I'm not going to share any of them either. They were given up for me, and that, for once, must be made whole.

Johns and solicitations. Send down another crate of nails, hammer together another dozen mangers, have some left over and throw them in if it starts to look low. Cash in hand as they open the door, cash in hand as they leave. Wreaths on the doors are ok, but never put one in the room. Orchids and daisies are a must.

Senators and procrastination. We are easy in the speeding, dangerous in our breeding. We gave up on the low-life a long time ago, lost our illusions that the hard edges framing the pimps was the cream we needed for our coffee. Where the dervish whirled we gave them the air from our lungs and the sweat from our brow. We ran our hands over them and set every nerve in their body blazing with our adoration. They spun us around and made us dizzy watching them. Our heads faded to weightlessness, the world that should have been still on either side of our ears spiraling downward. Their twirling ideas seemed to float across the air toward us. We raced out into the night and took to the roads drunk in amazement, ascetic in our contempt. We took the back tires off the road and watched the snow blow past the windows, paying for the gas with plastic coins and novelty belt buckles. The shopkeeps stared at us, bemused, wishing us away on whatever endless quests they never hoped to take.

Family drama and libations. Hate is just like love and should be saved for someone special, should be forced to gallop away to Mercia, perhaps Mantua, imagining in the fires stacked dangerously high with logs the world spinning in the heart of the nemesis. Bells ringing unstruck as boots scrap across the floor, we'll hang the cards around the door, sip from a warm mug, imagine chains rattling across the cellar, and sleep.

***

Some Other Family by Beth

My mother resented going to Canada for every family vacation. It was where my father had gone with his parents, and he loved it, and he was the one who made the money. Mostly we went to Prince Edward Island, with the wide beaches made of soupy clay, the lines of endless gentle breakers, the dune grass. Like my mother, I hated the ocean – all those endless waves going same, same, same, and over, over, over.

My mother sat at the picnic table in the shade, near the swingset, and my father and brothers ran around on the beach like idiots, and when my mother had cleaned up the cookout she’d cooked in the metal grate next to the picnic table, when she had settled back in the beach chair she insisted on carrying with her everywhere (even on the rare occasions when we flew somewhere), and had taken out the latest National Geographic, I would go away from her, a few feet at a time, until I was on the edge of the woods, and then until I was just behind the front line of trees that the park’s caretaker took care of, and then until I was all the way in the woods, so far in that I couldn’t hear the ceaseless sound of waves and wind and gulls and my mother angrily turning the thick pages of her magazine.

So far in that I couldn’t have heard her even if she noticed I was gone and called to me. So far in that one time I came out almost to the other side, to some other family’s campsite. And I crouched and watched the family, with their pop-up camper and their radio tuned to a baseball game, which I guess had to have been the Blue Jays, or maybe the Expos. Their kids were playing, jumping up and down on a board-and-rope bridge over a little stream. The boy jumped down hard and the girl popped up and laughed, and they did it over and over but the parents never yelled at them to cut it out. And while I was crouching down there, the back of my legs started shaking and I thought about what it would be like to be a major league catcher, crouching down all through a game. But I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t leave until I could see that the sun was going down, leaving only the tops of the trees still in sunlight. And the last thing I saw before I turned to go was the dad, throwing a baseball up high, so high it could still catch the sun.

***

Prayers from the People by Alan

“In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited.”
- Sherwood Anderson from Winesburg, Ohio

While Julio hoped and hoped and hoped for his hometown team to turn it around, the Vanderveese twins’ continued reverence for the saint hardened like a statue in the shadows of a sunny afternoon in Minnesota. They were identical but (remarkably) of different gender. If you don’t already know, this type of thing is quite rare. The miracle arrived after the zygote split. And some say they’ve been praying since. It was as if they weren’t meant to be, but yet here they were – two ghosts materialized, two platonic lovers swimming through time, two angels with one wing.

Meanwhile, half a country away, Julio resisted the urge to purchase season tickets because he didn’t want “that undeniably empty feeling that comes with deep faith in something that simple cannot and will not come true.” Apparently, money ups the ante in the card game of belief.

There is a third player in this tragedy. Her story is currently being written. But you, dear reader, can bet your bottom dollar that her address lies smack in between those of Julio’s and the twins’ and that she’s also searching for someone or something deeply, painfully, in the middle of the night.

***

Overshadows by Johanna

Moishe had been planning this since Black Friday, examining the architecture, street lights and general proximity of the courthouse. He had no doubts holding him back as he sketched out his plans – the approach, tools and timing of the particular deed. The day of was crisp and clear so that the night was just as he hoped it would be, a moonless sky embroidered with sequins. On the courthouse steps, he entered the display of the nativity scene and, with great care, moved baby Jesus into Mary's lap so that he could use the stool Jesus was perched upon. He tugged at his tzitzit, straightened his yarmulke, and stepped up onto the stool. The red and green lights reflecting off of the old stone building provided enough light for him to string his rope over the four by four framing of the manger and wrap it taut around his throat.

He thought of his mother, a long time ago, before he converted to orthodoxy, before he prayed and kept kosher, when Hanukkah was still an important holiday. He saw her standing over the stove frying latkes and singing the dreydl song on repeat; she only knew the first verse. The house was strung with blue and white lights and their menorah took up the entirety of their small kitchen table top. Over each candle, they sang prayers and when it was time to open presents, she beamed over her children with anticipation. The excitement of a new toy kept him entertained until bedtime when he and his brother were allowed to listen to one hour of radio. He put down his new set of Lincoln Logs and settled into the couch. From the corner of his eye, he could see a flutter of his mother disappear into her room as the story of Saint Nick played across the airwaves and captivated his young imagination.

***

Transcription by Lyle

Norman reads from a transcript in front of the congregation. On a large screen, a photo scrolls across a screen slowly, like a codex.

Concerning cement statue #4. Began Feb 9, 1959 by artist — same. Inspiration — same. Finished Feb 18, 1959.

Concerning cement statue #5. Began Feb 18, 1959 afternoon by artist — same. Inspiration — same. Finished Feb 27, 1959.

Concerning cement statue #6. After a brief hiatus, artsit — same — began Feb 29, 1959. Inspiration — varied them of same with geometric variables equal but inverse. Note light on subject cement statue #6. Possible ramifications of light: 1. enlightened status 2. severe torture 3. both 4. sunburn (holding some kind of cultural significance) 5. the cement equivalent to sunburn: fading. Finished March 17, 1959.

Concerning cement statue #7…

This transcription continues for three more hours at which point the congregation rises in silence, bows briefly first to Norman, then to their neighbors, subsequently removing themselves from the room in single file. By the time Norman comes out, the moon is at its apex and a single very dark cloud floats very slowly under the bottom edge of the luminescent tumor. Norman sighs in relief, closes the large wooden doors behind him and turns the key in the lock.

***

A Winter Intercession by Forrest

Hail Mary, I’m full of grapes, and my sled is with you. Tested are you among mushers, and blessed is my Fruit Of The Loom. Holy Shit, Mother of Mountains, pray for us sledders, now and at the hour of our descent. Ah-men!

Untitled

2010-11-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

The Night Sound of Soul Mates Finding Each Other by Arlene Ang

Before Cosgrove came to live in the park, he was a novelist. He had written so many books that he couldn’t remember where he sent them. The publishers and agents never called him back and, after a while, he decided that phones were superfluous. For that matter, they never mailed him back his manuscripts—which only proved that the advantages of having a mailing address were overrated.

Ferguson, the dog, found him just when he was at his lowest. Recent regulations prohibited all forms of writing in the park. In anger, he had thrown his writing kit—made up of scalpels, a ballpen, green spray paint, some pencils—from the ornamental bridge and walked away. Ferguson, dressed as Santa Claus, fetched it back and ran after him. Cosgrove touched the saliva on the leather. He was at a loss for words for the first time in his life. He took it from Ferguson’s jaws and smiled.

Later, he unzipped his pants under the sign: Do Not Write on Bamboo. By his feet, Ferguson raised a leg in unison.

***

Scene by Forrest

Max, old boy--on the Fourth of July I'm walking you over to the bamboo forest park. I got kicked out of there last year for trying to finish carving a heart around a lover's initials on a stalk. And if someone catches you with the Santa hat on, no worries. She'll know either of us can't change with the change of scenery, but the other only has to hang around to make it seem less foolish.

***

Whole Stone by Bill

Live long in your growing green inches inching inch by inch towards the sky, signed, from one sexual tyrannosaurus to another. As I let go of the stone that was carrying me down toward the sea-bed a girl in white robes dove past me, and though I have already suffered for this I guess I'll come back up again out of the abyss and stand under the sky asking why it finds us free. Destiny on the wind, covered in oil, milleniums of decayed plankton torn up from their last resolve and spuming on the surface of our eyes, fettering the frills of our cap.

***

Feeling less Powerful by Alan

Victor Rasputin’s holiday commitments entailed a trip to his marginalized cousin’s two-story palace of sin on Lexington, extended conversations with his mother-in-law (who was, actually, a pretty “cool” woman by most standards), and several hours of godforsaken traffic between boroughs. What made matters worse was that he had recently decided to stop smoking cigarettes in his car. Irritable, beaten, and worn, he shut most of his windows without pressing “save,” blew off all new updates. As the year grew to a close, he changed his status like he changed his underwear, but the result was the same: no comments.

In the evenings when his partner fell asleep, he would lie awake on the sofa in the living room dreaming of options. He could smell them, trace their shapes, and discuss them with hoards of people (acquaintances whom Victor knew but kept at a distance) for hours on end. These musings would stimulate a certain sense of euphoria in him, hark back to a more glorious time when he felt stronger, more powerful. It was his faith in these stirrings – neither whimsical nor measured – that catapulted him through the day, a faith that ultimately was responsible for the only way Victor Rasputin was able to fall asleep in the days leading up to the most wonderful time of the year.

***

Dog Christmas by Johanna

Kibble. Kibble. Kibble. This hat is humiliating. I can't shake it. Stupid holiday. Bone. Bone. Bone. They think it's hilarious. They're flashing that light on me and laughing into it. Treat. Treat. Treat. I smell dominance and fear in this cactus atrium. The saguaro reeks of chihuahua. Play. Play. Play. This vest is itchy but worse is that thing on my head with the white pom pom on top, keeps screwing with my peripheral vision. Toy. Toy. Toy. It's tough enough being this close to the ground. Tree. Tree. Tree. Ah. Bamboo, my old friend, I've been looking everywhere for you. Leak. Leak. Leak. That's better. Go ahead laugh, but you didn't see that, did you? Wag. Wag. Wag.

***

Jolly Holidays by Beth

Yes, I would like to take you to a place with bamboo trees. It would have a boardwalk, too, with sand sifting into grooves on the tops of the screws that hold it together. We would walk on the boardwalk, holding hands (which we never do), and wearing flip flops (which we never wear), and sometimes I would feel my little toe slipping off the flip flop to touch the boardwalk, which would feel rough and gritty with the sand. I would be carefree about this, about my permeable skin touching a public place. About the possibility of cutting myself, or banging my toe on something. And you would not allow yourself to question your masculinity, just because you were wearing something on your foot that in some cultures and at some times has been called a thong. We would drift down the boardwalk, and maybe buy some ice cream, and I might even get a sugar cone, even though I’ve never liked sugar cones, just because I like the way the words sound when I say them to the teenage boy behind the counter. You would not get rum raisin, as always, and I would not get strawberry, as always, but instead we would get exotic flavors that I can barely imagine – ones that involve fresh mango or passion fruit. And yes, we would go there over Christmas, and although our families might miss us at the overheated family gatherings, they would understand that we are a family now, you and I, and if they had it all to do again they might just do it differently.

***

City Ordinance by Lyle

“Do not write on the dog.” City Ordinance 28.372c.

City Ordinance 28.372d. — “Do not write on other otherwise tethered objects including flora like trees or bamboo.”

A history of writing on bamboo (or otherwise tethered objects) has been inscribed in the margins of my copy of The City Ordinance (required reading for all City Employees). It begins at this Ordinance and continues, in the margins, through the tome (otherwise impossible to read). From the middle, somewhere:

Bamboo is lithe and supple. Reminds me of burgeoning youth. Though this is somewhat tautological, I heard it on an episode of NPR, I think. That bamboo is both lithe and supple, I mean, not burgeoning youth. They also said that it’s good for flooring because it’s renewable, but still kind of expensive and that it makes for tremendous torture devices — sliver under the fingernail. They still use it in places. Don’t know what the episode was about. Just bamboo, I guess. Very cost effective and

At this point the book has been torn in half — governmental Sharpie under close scrutiny. They haven’t replaced my copy yet, but they’ve left me the half up to that point. I was looking forward to getting to the history of writing on bamboo, as the notes had previously promised. So I have my own little revolt. My own writing on a dog. On bamboo. These photos. My voice. Writing = culture. I am not tethered. I hope they don’t trace it back to me though…

Prospect Park Map

2010-10-04T06:44:00.001-07:00

The Map Maker by Ellen

The cops asked us to make a list of the things Dad had taken with him, and one of the things he had left behind.

Dylan and I looked at each other, dismayed.

We weren't familiar with Dad's things. He had treated his clothes and tools with no sentiment and certainly no interest in how he looked to anyone else. He looked generic. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium tall, white tee shirt and blue jeans.

We went through his room. It looked empty, but it always did. We kept looking for another hour.

Dylan looked like he was asleep on his feet and he had school in the morning anyway so I sent him to bed. Maybe I wanted to be alone.

In the closet was a pair of boots, beyond shabby. More destroyed than even Dad would usually wear.
There was a suitcase, plain black with little ineffective wheels, and bearded with dust.

There was a map folded in the drawer of his bedside table.

In the dresser I found underwear, socks, tee shirts and three pairs of Wrangler jeans that I recognized from a trip to Sears two years ago.

I looked at my list of things left behind. They looked like all the things Dad would need.

I showed it to the cops in the morning after I got Dylan off to school.

"Huh," said the lieutenant who I thought of as ours.

It didn't sound like a good or optimistic grunt.

"Want me to look for more stuff?" I asked. I played with the zipper on my jacket until I started to hear the buzzing sound myself and then stopped.

"No, no, that won't be necessary."

They didn't think he had run away like they probably had at first. They thought something had happened to him.

I went back to his bedroom. Dylan wouldn't come back from school for a few hours and I had taken the day off from work. On top of everything I could feel myself being mad that I had to use a personal day for this.

The room wasn't pretty but somehow it felt more special and glamorous than before. Something important had happened here.

I couldn't imagine Dad being hurt or killed somewhere. He was like a piece of nature, a rock, or a piece of machinery, a tractor.

I could see him my mind, alone, which was how he liked to be. I could see him walking down the street from work, and instead of turning down the street to our apartment, he would stop in front of the discount store and look at everything for a long minute. He would go in without really thinking about it. He would let his feet lead him, and not think too hard as his hands reached for a new backpack, and a sleek packet of white cotton briefs. He wouldn't need much, but everything fresh. One pair of jeans. Boots with good soles would be the highest ticket item.

I took the map out of the drawer. It was laminated, a tourist map, too small to have any detail or usefulness. But I could see the creases where it had been forcibly folded for so long, and I could see a burn mark, where maybe a lighter had been held up to read it some night when the overhead light would have been to conspicuous.

I could picture him making or buying a new life, the way he made or bought everything else when he determined he really needed it.

I took the map and put another clumsy fold in it. I put it in my back pocket, and headed out to the school to walk Dylan home.

***

Slash and Burn by Lyle

I slash and burn my way through the park and then take a rest. I hear my father: “What’re you sitting for you ninny? Get up. Pillage. Destroy. Your brother wouldn’t be sitting there like a bump on a log.”

“But he’s not here,” I say. When I stand and turn around, I see my father’s lower lip tremble just the slightest bit. Seconds before I cut off his head with one clean motion. I put it on a pike and write an exclamation point where I leave it.

This is where I call my mother. She hysterical when I tell her. But she’s hysterical anyway. I hang up. More pillaging. I am green around the gills. I am green with envy. I am green and sappy. I am charbroiled. Stomp stomp splash through the creek. Murder a couple on a picnic blanket but no picnic basket. Stomp. Chomp. Squirrel. I come back around after impaling a hiker (sure, waterproof shoes will keep your feet dry), to Midwood Trail.

This is where I feel safe. Midwood. Halfway. Neither here nor there. Unapologetic neutrality. No dragons. No innocent villagers. Nothing but the soothing quiet and the shade of flora.

Well, no time to dilly dally. Get up. Slash and burn. Slash. And. Burn. This is for you, John. I’m sorry.

***

A Few Areas of Note at Prospect Park by Forrest

Midwood Trail: Two things indicated on Visitor's Guide Map likely never to be found--that is, the cartoonish mystery of the White-Out exclamation point and soothing splotches of color. Various cigarette burns, however, may correctly show potential areas of bear attacks and / or beer can pipes.

Sullivan Hill: Named for the second explorer of the region who accidentally passed through in 1897 while trapping squirrels. But the original explorer's name was also Sullivan; he was very clever and wiped out a small Native village here in a drunken rage. The second Sullivan, by all accounts, never touched a drop in his life nor did he consummate his only marriage. Confusion reigns today regarding historical legacy of both men.

Ravine: Has no name. Park management still looking into this.

Prospect Park Zoo: New visitors find it strange how the green algae on Nanny the polar bear sometimes resembles the Virgin Mary puckering her lips.

Children's Corner: A complete misnomer. Children do not own anything there and thus can escape rather easily.

Carousel: Removed in July 2007 due to fatal unicorn accident, this despite large organized parent protest after public announcement of the decision. Temporary memorial erected by the deceased's family removed by legal injunction from state government officials. Plans to pave and convert into a parking area for Children's Corner put on hold due to massive budget cuts. Plot currently sitting vacant. It has not been mowed in quite some time.

***

Order by Bill

Still worried. I could use some more hope in my oatmeal. You’ve dangled off the page edge again, left the window open for the last 29 months, so the entire sill is covered with that black city dust and looks like the ties holding up the subway tracks. Those big particles that get you coughing in the morning when the wind kicks in, but they say it isn’t gonna do too much damage to our lungs. I push the blankey you brought back onto the floor. Still too hot in here, and I might just be delirious.

Once again I’ve quit my job. Just checked out on the you need to find someone who comes a shave closer to giving half a damn. I think the term I actually used was half a two-assed rat’s taint. They certainly did not appreciate my decorating the office with burned up maps, and probably didn’t bother to say much on account of the battle-axe I fashioned out of the keyboard during our last conference call with the client. We still got the account, and that was when I knew it was time to leave. There can be no hope - not a pretty email address crumpled up on a napkin hope and not sunshine breaking through the rainclouds after a week hope - when people are willing to accept the removal of the barriers. Those kinds of people, who see you take the barriers down and like cows just start to mill blindly into the open space where you happen to be standing with the air hammers, they are the dangerous ones. You can drive them right over the edge because they will never know how far they are from where they should be.

For now I think I’ll clean up this place a little bit. I’m going to leave that black dust on the window sill, but I’ll wash the curtains at least. And probably the walls and repaint in here next week, but first I want to paint all over the walls and draw shit in markers. Maybe I’ll punch a whole in the wall and cover that up with a steel plate and hang your map up above it. And some day if you ever come home you can run your finger through that one small patch of blackness that I’ve left for you in front of the window.

***

Wild Like Fire by Beth

And sometimes she wants to get out of the car, right after they break out of the city or right before going in. Swing the heavy door out and open, sneaker scuff once and twice on the rumble strip, and then she’s on the shoulder, gray sand strewn with broken red taillight. She’s down the embankment, tall grass swishing around her legs, legs ahead of her, unbalancing her. The woods ahead, the places the sun reaches and the places it does not. Brittle sticks sticking out, low branches on the trees, she crashes through, she dodges trunks the way she has learned to dodge people on the sidewalk, her eyes low, anticipating. Keeps on beyond the ding of the car door open, beyond the traffic river-roar, footfalls deep in pine needles and black mud that sucks at her shoes.

Once she saw a kid with a lighter, teenage, holding it up to the map of Prospect Park, flame close enough to melt the cover, the smell of plastic burning acrid. She saw him, one hand on the lighter, the other cupping away the wind. She saw how bad he needed that wildness, a dusktime kid outside a park of paved trails, outside bikers and runners steady on the hamster wheel. A park full of city. A park with cast iron gates that locked him out at night.

Sometimes she wants to, but she doesn’t. She never does.

***

Park the Metaphor by Alan

Map the park, punk. I dare you. Go ahead. Try to navigate its turns and yearns. Begin to wade in some kind of body of water that is larger than most views you’ ve entered. Hike the hills, tag its trails, pin the genre on the pagoda. Balance yourself on the bridge, caress the gentle urgings of the carousel, sweet timely urgings. Run the arches to the drive. Compare them as destinations. Compare them to zoo. Compare them to the children’ s corner, to the children themselves. What’ s that? You once were? Think you still are? Map it, and see for yourself. Park it for a while. Then come back to me. We’ ll talk about it then.

***

XOXO by Johanna

Dear Manhattan,

I'm not old enough to remember you in your prime, but I still remember the eighties and nineties when you reeked of vagrants and streamed creative spooge. I miss the way we used to be, when juice bars were fronts for drug dispensaries, when a fifteen-year-old didn't need I.D. to get into your clubs, when artists could still afford to live in Alphabet City and Harlem, when you could drive through Times Square to laugh at heads bouncing off of Johns' laps, when taxis didn't take credit cards, when the Bowery was still a great place for a riot. I miss the way you were perverted and dingy, unpretentiously punk, and always, always, on the edge of something disgustingly spectacular. I'm sorry, but I can not forgive you your bourgeois homogeneity and double-decker tour buses. You may have cleaned up, but you're boring. I'm leaving you for someone else. I'm moving to Brooklyn.

See you on the Q train.

Ghost Mule

2010-09-01T00:01:00.001-07:00

Fishing Trip by Charles

Rocky Point. Puerto Penasco. Bring the whole family down this time. Why not? The Chrysler packed, water bag filled, trunk bulging. Drinking and puking and fishing. Fishing and puking and drinking. Throw the gas can into the bonfire and blow a crater right there on the beach. Howard’ll be bringing his new wife. She’s a Mormon but that’s alright. Howard’s a good man. It’ll be good for him to get off the logging truck for a few days. The old lady don’t care for him much but I’ll make it up to her. We’ll stop in Nogales on the way back and pick up something nice for her and the kid. Maybe get our snapshot taken on one of them Mexican donkeys.

Pablo, the mule needs to be painted again.

***

Tradition by Johanna

In the ninth grade, my family forced me to ride the mule in the fiesta parade. I tried to get out of it. “It's tradition,” they told me as they dragged my whining nauseous body out of bed. My father did it and my grandfather did it before him.

With my pants hanging low, my knees sticking out of the mules side like wings, earphones plugged in under my sombrero, I sucked it up and road my mule, Philemon, in the procession between the fiesta princessas and the local mariachi band. I didn't see much through the haze of humiliation except for my abuelita sitting on the sidelines, waving and smiling at me with pride. I threw her some candy even though I knew her old teeth couldn't handle it and watched as the children scattered around her for it like birds to crumbs.

Ricky Gallegos called me Mule Boy in 5th period Science class for the rest of the semester. My girlfriend, Stephanie, broke up with me, said it had nothing to do with the parade. She just wasn't into me anymore.

This year, my own son, also in ninth grade, had to ride the mule in the parade. Once he realized there was no breaking with tradition, he asked me if he could dress in drag – the whole get-up – gown, wig, make-up and heels. He said it would be ironic. I told him, “Fine, as long as you wear the sombrero.” He laughed his ass off the whole mule ride through the village. Thank god my mother wasn't alive to see it.

***

Zippy, a Short History by Lyle

Across the Rio Grande from the amorphous¹ South Texas, there is a town that has become rife with amorphous² hostilities. It used to be that a donkey,³ rescued⁴ from Boysville where he worked as a stud of sorts⁵, started a new trade at a slow touristy spot right near the rowboat landing. Zippy became restless, yoked as he was to an immobile cart, at this ghoulish business.

Part of the amorphous hostility that lingered in the town manifested itself, very clearly in form, in two ways.
Zippy, reverting to form, attempted to mount a little boy, apparently mistaking him for one of the slight women he was used to in Boysville.
The angry parents (with very little provoking) led a lynch mob to a nearby tree where they hanged Zippy and let the buzzards eat him down.

Aside from the tree, an impromptu monument on which people carve the name Zippy — just a name — he has been forgotten, as has his story.⁶
________________
¹Rocky, brush-covered land alternately sand colored and burro grey.
²Violence colored like the land.
³Zippy.
⁴Some would say kidnapped.
⁵A nasty business — carnivalesque and rooted firmly in the freakshows of yore, some of which can still be seen in the Mexican countryside where many of these shows retired, unwilling or unable to make the leap to the sexually explicit (the bearded lady being the exception).
⁶The town in now known for its large population of fainting goats (and the Association headquarters), porous border crossing and gun battles.

***

No More Zippy by Forrest

Zippy, pinstriped pseudo-zebra/mule of Nogales--I consider you the fabrication to ruin my parents' marriage on that ill-fated border crossing when I discovered I was Patricia, not Patrick. Even had I been the teenage girl I was always meant to be and you trotted out before my maids of honor for a quinceanera delight, my father would have wept next to smiling Jesus in the afternoon. I do not mean to say he was prone to sadness or profoundly affected by hokey tourist opportunities (even when my mother had dressed up enough for his approval). If not for my operation, I think he could have saved our sombreros. I think he would swallow the worm again. But you, Zippy. Because I did not ride off with you, a charade of a lesser equine tethered to a wagon that was not a wagon, I never felt the hot, blazing pulse between my thighs which, I now read, makes scared boys into much lustful men. And you never took the bit that I keep wearing for them since.

***

The Bridesmaid by Beth

I had to go and get a bridesmaid’s dress at David’s Bridal in the suburbs. It was going to be dark purple, one of our high school’s colors, although the bride wouldn’t admit it. To her, it was Lapis, and there was a difference. I had to shave my legs and wear a nice-looking bra and go in there and get a short satin Lapis-colored dress and bring in my shoes from Payless that I needed to have dyed to match. I had to do it today, because the wedding was only a month away. They would need to alter the dress to fit me.

I shaved my legs and wore the bra and took the shoes and got in the car, started it and let it run for a while, because it had been so long since we’d moved it. I left our parking spot and drove through our neighborhood to the outskirts of the city, to where I had to get on the highway that would shoot me out to the suburbs. But before I got to the on-ramp for the highway I stopped. I was in this neighborhood I’d never been in before. And I had to get to David’s Bridal before they closed early because it was Sunday, so I didn’t have time to screw around, but I stopped the car and turned it off and I got out and I walked, arms crossed, the breeze cold on my face. I walked by a place that sold pulled-pork sandwiches and had a neon sign that was an outline of a pig. And I walked by an Irish pub with big-bellied guys standing in the doorway smoking and I turned down a different street and walked by some antique stores that were closed and a store that had big bolts of fabric leaned up against the inside of the window, which had a gate pulled down over it in case someone wanted to smash it.

And I stopped in front of this other antique store with a black and white picture of a family in a parade. The sun beat down on them so they could just look up a little bit, under their hats. And this blond kid with the word Mexico stitched on his hat was sitting on a mule painted to look like a zebra, disguised as something it was clearly not. And everyone around it was smiling.

***

Contrast by Bill

See such sun high overhead piling light on the girl I remember sitting behind me in another picture like this, covered in the old light of those days as if it were painted onto the two of us sitting on a horse and not this poor painted burro with the girl missing from the picture with her arms around my small body, the tiny person I had been surrounded by the young woman she was with long straight hair helping to erase my fear and smiling like this boy in his giant hat.

***

The Photographer by Alan

Charlie and his mother had never been outside of the country, and by country I mean state, and by state I mean city, and by city I mean town, and by town I mean street, and by street I mean house, and by house I mean room, and by room I mean corner, and by corner I mean space, and by space I mean home, and by home I mean space, and by space I mean corner, and by corner I mean room, and by room I mean house, and by house I mean street, and by street I mean town, and by town I mean city, and by city I mean state, and by state I mean country. Never been. Nope.

So upon arrival, they hired a man with a steady hand – that’s me – to show them around and give them a few memories to bring back home. I did just that. Yes. Just that and more.

You see, traveling is a lot like breathing. You’re only used to one kind of breath pattern, and that’s yours. Takes someone to come along and show you another way to inhale and then exhale. Inhale and then exhale. Yes…just like that. You can’t learn that yourself. Nope. The deeper the breath, the farther away from home you can go. Takes someone to show you that. That’s what I’m here for. There are just some things you can’t learn on your own.

Fall

2010-08-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Jolene by Deborah Poe

Jolene was inebriated to the point of hallucination. Was it a meteor shower above, or was the sky falling. Whatever the case, it seemed an apocalypse in indigo.

Sure, she’d had songs written about her. She’d seen signs in the stars. Had held hands while Dolly sang on stage in a navy blue pantsuit. At the show, Jason had his hand on her chest, as they both swayed among the midnight fans. She always believed he had loved her as much for her breasts as for the song that shared her name.

Tonight she was as far from Parton’s stage as she was from him. For the latter, she was grateful. She was thinking of her mom who had birthed her under a cloudless sky in east Texas field, with the newest boyfriend in one hand and a cigarette to ease the pain in the other. So the story went. Before her mom passed, she begged Jolene to set up the record player. She must have played Dolly’s forty-five fifty times before her mother threw her arms in the air and finally forsake this world.

Tonight, Jolene lingered under cobalt light, a streetlamp seemingly intoxicated with upstate New York. Barry brought her to this party in the middle of nowhere, and she had slipped out. Barry wasn’t that different than Jason she realized as she made her way down the black pavement in her two-inch, open-toed heels. Despite the slate color that matched the air’s bite, the shoes were seasonally inappropriate.

Four boys were coming up on her; they were probably 16. If they were more antagonistic, she wouldn’t have crouched at water’s edge. In the middle of this deathly silent neighborhood, they paused then passed. The worst thing they did was look at her; then they laughed. Bent down, she took out her compact, looked at her lines of grey eye shadow and then slammed the compact down against her hand. Glass shattered.

Barry was a lot like Jason in that he’d belt out her namesake song in bizarre contexts. Barry did so when things got tense where he was. Barry too was a heavy drinker. She pulled back her bottom lip with top teeth when she thought this and persuaded her body to sit up straight. The palm of her hand was bleeding, and she scraped it across the dried leaves to try and clean it off. The lake was already iced up two feet out.

The boys passed by, and the winter meteor shower took off. The boys had started screaming, when she heard from down the hill Barry’s version of Jolene. Jolene, Jolene. Jolene, Jolene. She heard Barry’s ex approve of his singing with an exaggerated howl, annoying even from this distance. There was a pregnant pause.

It was lip numb cold. She was too old for this. Jolene took a sip from the plastic glass she’d sneaked out. The boys were well on down the road, she noticed. She could see the tallest swinging a baseball bat and clowning around, a many-limbed shadow.

Jolene burrowed into her fake mink coat. She gazed at her steel-blue shoes and considered the white stitching along their edges. She looked at her hand again.

She heard the crunch of leaves and didn’t turn around. She could feel Barry’s breath down her neck before she turned. Fuck, Jolene. He was trying to hold his voice down. He dragged her up from underneath an arm and then lit a smoke. A heel came unhinged. Jesus, careful, she mumbled. Why the fuck did you have to go off like that, he said. His car wasn’t too far away. He’d parked at the bottom of the hill, by the basketball court, so they didn’t have to walk back up to the house.

She stumbled and felt the shoe disengage from foot. When she cried out, she had the J— out of her mouth, almost saying Jason instead of Barry. Barry pretended not to notice and tugged her close. He didn’t catch the careful earlier, thank god. She pulled the jacket tighter, forearms cradling her belly.

She reached for his cigarette and scowled, I couldn’t handle the party. She tossed her head back, standing lower on one side, and exhaled in a singsong voice, here you come again. You could have your choice of men Jolene, he countered. She turned; kicked off her other shoe, and it went sailing back over the ice. She didn’t have far to go without her shoes. And the pity factor would work in her favor, when she told him the news she’d been dreading to disclose.

She flicked his cigarette a few feet away, and hobbled toward the car. Can you drive, he asked, and threw her the keys. She unlocked the doors and got in. As she put her seat belt on, she told herself this was not the night to tell him anything. Not at all.

***

A Small Blue Thing by Alan

The shoe that broke the camel’s back was tossed out the 4th floor window onto Mermaid Avenue two blocks away from the premiere party. One lover had had enough. The other lover, apparently, couldn’t get enough. This was grounds for said tossing. The windows were open. The lovers were, if nothing else, very environmentally conscious, and therefore in constant reconfiguration of proper ventilation.

Out the window and into the street where the noise from the premiere swept through the streets of Coney Island like a wild summer storm, seven guys were having a deserved moment in the metaphoric sun. It was evening. Several onlookers danced outside the fence, outside the glow. Some shot photographs. One wandered off.

It is in these moments that we lose ourselves and enter the dreams of others. Gerry left the celebrity and followed the shoeless woman. A plane flew by overhead. Something about a “new show”/“tune in”/“next week.” Neither noticed. When she found the shoe, she looked up protectively as if it was hers to have lost. As if someone else were waiting for her to do so. As if someone had planned it but didn’t have the right. What did they know about being hungry? she thought. Other questions. Then silence.

Gerry followed her over a bridge, past cities, through mountains, for weeks, a month, seasons. Always a few steps behind. Always with an eye on the shoe. And when she took it off from time to time, on a hill or behind some locked door, he would not think of her but of it. A small blue thing. A space to enter. Grounds for a kind of divorce he could never build up the nerve to consider himself.

***

The Pumpkin by Johanna

It was difficult to slouch in heels. Forced upright, she didn't tire as easily. The reapplication of lipstick was her jolt of espresso. She couldn't go home if she had on a fresh coat of cherry red. So she continued to dance with the charming man who she found she had so much in common with. She noticed when he glanced at her left hand and found no ring or tan line that he smiled. She thought she might stay in this state of enchanted grace ever after, until she realized the crowd had dispersed.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Midnight,” he responded, looking at his Rolex.
“Oh, crap, I'm sorry, I've gotta go!” She grabbed her clutch and ran for the exit doors.
“I'll call you!” he yelled after her as she left the club and hailed a cab.
The babysitter answered the door. “I'm so sorry I'm late. I lost track of time.”
“That's okay Ms. Tremaine. He's asleep now. Bobby was a prince all night. No problems whatsoever.”
“Thanks so much.”
After the babysitter left, she wiped remnants of lipstick from her mouth, kicked off her heels and collapsed on the bed. Drifting into sleep, she suddenly realized, I forgot to give him my number.

***

Disembodied by Lyle

Shoe, out of context -- or rather off the foot on which we assume such a shoe should reside. That or on the rack where it waits to be bought, to be worn, to be replaced. It is like a shoe that has been shucked into the closet after a long day of work. But in such a copse it is a different context entirely, so it is not like a shoe that has been removed after a long day of work. We then think trash or, better yet, for this story, murder. Not trash so much, think think think, because it doesn’t look destroyed, eaten, unravelled (though all trash has to start somewhere) and so we move to murder. In what other state, but that of panic, would such a shoe be displaced? The body, we are ingrained to think from crime dramas and news reports (those grainy shots of bodies half hidden in the weeds) and books about serial killers, must be somewhere close. Just off camera. Just outside the frame. We can sense its weight almost bowing the edges of the picture -- or forcing it to flicker and project, movie frame, and pan over. There. In the slightly pixelated weedy twigs at the edge of the image. Partially covered by leaves. Her feet (one bare, of course) protrude from the fallen dead foliage. Her calves, knees, thighs silken and smooth. Blue dress hiked up from the fall. Torso and chest still covered but one strap snapped. Lipstick, deep red, evenly lines her lips, but her mascara streaks down her face. From exertion or tears. Her hair is done up still half in a bun. Not far off, through the undergrowth, a highway. And beyond that, a field of budding wheat. Then the sky. All of this is outside the photo. But where is the wound? Where is the crime? No wound. No crime. Only a shoe -- somehow out of context.

***

Unrequited by Forrest

It meant either not being fair to Bertie or us looking for her shoe we had to find in the woods. It meant either not looking for the shoe we had to find in the woods or racing Larry back home. It meant either not racing him back home or downing him into muddy leaves some more. It meant either not downing him into muddy leaves some more or watching him damn us. It meant either not watching him damn us or finding the rest of Bertie out there. It meant either not finding the rest of her out there or stopping Larry’s mouth up with her fishnet stockings. It meant either not stopping his mouth up with her fishnet stockings or him playing electric guitar with two-finger chords. It meant either him not playing electric guitar with two-finger chords or us setting ablaze the soft mountain that was Bertie’s chemise collection. It meant either not setting ablaze the soft mountain that was Bertie’s chemise collection or Larry making another heartbox out of a boneyard August. It meant either him not making another heartbox out of a boneyard August or us being to fair to Bertie.

***

Untitled by Bill

Wouldn't know my name. Could not catch hers. Crouched down and plucked at the weeds, ripping them up one by one. Everyone kicked quietly at the ground, the leaves, the fields tamped down as lines dispersed when the band goes home without setting foot on the stage and the lights stay dark. Staying by the window despite the chill, dreaming awake of places we will never have the chance of running back to. Rendering the word locked away from itself, climbing stiffly into bed still wet with the curtains blowing, dreaming of elsewheres without ever falling asleep. Dusts off her hands and knits her fingers together, curling her legs underself, seemingly to effect pose, but more to warm her feet.

***

And The Future Is by Beth

We bought the shoes together, while shopping at T.J. Maxx on a Friday night with Mandy’s mom. I loved Mandy’s mom, partly because she looked like Demi Moore in Ghost, but also because she was younger and cooler than my mom. My mom would have laughed if she saw the shoes, and also if she saw my bangs curled into a poofball by Mandy’s mom the next morning (it had deflated by the time she came to pick me up). But Mandy’s mom was used to things like this from Mandy. We put our money together to buy the shoes, but agreed that Mandy would have custody, because I didn’t want my mom to laugh at me, and because Mandy’s house had better floors for practicing our runway walks.

When we were eleven, Mandy was Debbie Gibson and Exclamation perfume and a tiny flower of a body that got heat rash when her parents grounded her and she had to stay inside one week that summer. She was a note-writer, a pink-pen user, a girl who used stars as punctuation.

But she was also born on Halloween, and dressed up as a sluttier witch every year. She bought me a Ouija board for my birthday when I was thirteen, then borrowed it the next year for a party I wasn’t invited to and never gave it back. And then she was on drugs, and then she was pregnant, you know. You know.

In high school, Mr. Floyd said to never wear shoes you can’t run in, and that’s me now. Maybe it’s partly because of Mandy, although I hardly ever think about her anymore. But when I see that peekaboo heel alone in the woods, I sit down in the wet leaves next to it, touch it gently like I touched Mandy’s heat rash, keep it company for a while.

Windmill

2010-07-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Wind by Claudia

In our grandmother's kitchen, for as long as I could remember, we had special placemats for the oak table with the captain chairs. My brother's was a picture of deep meteor canyon left in the desert; mine was the lighthouse on the rocky coast of Maine; my cousin's, windmills in Holland in a field of tulips. We'd had them for so long, we could not remember if Grandma had assigned us the mats or if we had chosen them ourselves. She served us windmill cookies on little green plates. For special dinners, she used the Fiesta Ware. The kitchen was Harvest Gold and Avocado. Inside the pantry were glass bottles of maraschino cherries, and a two year supply of canned goods. She believed in preparation for disaster, and in saving.

In the living room, a braided rug and a color television in polished wood, a fine piece of furniture. The plaid scratchy sofa, big enough for all three cousins and a medium-sized dog. In the corner, our Granpa’s Lazy-Boy recliner.

We had not been to the places on the placemats, but we said we would each go there someday. Outside the kitchen window, long white blonde grass went on for miles. Now the house is gone, but not the grass, and there are windmills.

***

Manmade by Beth

Five months after she moved in, she found out why the house had been so cheap.

It started with a couple of white pickups with amber lights on top, rambling past on the dirt road. The next week, it was flatbeds with Caterpillars, and then, months later, the white blades covered in shrinkwrap like wintering boats. She watched the procession from her front porch, coffee in hand, as spring turned to summer turned to fall. She didn’t like the feeling that she’d been tricked, but didn’t mind the construction so much. Sure, it was sad to see the big pines fall, bounce once or twice, lie still with the dust swirling into the air around them. But at least the saws were too far away to be loud. And everyone said that windmills ruined the view, but it meant nothing else would be built on that ridge. They were better than skyscrapers, or Wal*Marts. So she watched, and rocked in her new painted rocking chair, and drank her coffee, and loved being in this house that was all her own.

For a long time she was alone, but then she met Pete at the coffee shop, and then she started seeing him there every week, and then she started going every morning, when he was most likely to be there. And then one day he said, hey, want to go see the windmills up close?

They drove up in Pete’s truck, a red F-150 with the kind of paint that loses its shine after a decade or so. Pete’s hands were tanned, rested casually on the steering wheel. They listened to K100, and he talked back to the DJs. The power company had done a good job with the wide, flat, road, which was smoother than the town’s potholed asphalt.

She saw the first one when they rounded the corner, bigger than she had expected, like a lighthouse. Then when she stepped out of the truck, and the wind hit her full-on, she felt a rush of fear. When she got closer, when she looked straight up at the windmill and it seemed like it was falling toward her, when she saw the shadow of it against the trees behind, when the alien whirr filled her ears like it might never stop, when Pete came to stand beside her, she started to think that maybe none of this had been such a good idea.

***

Dust Devil Calling, or Hiding From Nowhere by Bill

The ears sparking, hopping sounds from the ribs of the djinn next to her. She stopped running towards the horizon. She let her eyes clear of the moisture in them, drying salty and stinging. With the flat end of a stalk she carves his name into the earth next to an ant-hill. He smiled, his alabaster lips parting, the milky substance of his body wavering close to the ground reaching out toward the earth and fading into nothingness just at the place gravity should have touched him.

The sound of his call became like spinning of a windmill far off and a little dust devil wandered near, tracing over the marks she had left in the sand towards where they'd come. A fatter little twister came loping in and the two of them wound together into something as tall as the cactus, capering off into the wind. The ants meanwhile had nearly shifted the sands back into the grooves she had carved and his name faded once they'd broken the ring on the hoop in the center so they went back to work collecting food and digging tunnels and making ready their wars on the surrounding hills.

His face turned again, his voice became the sound of a sheet hung from a line drying in the wind, and he followed her again, weaving against the currents of the air while she dug in her heals against the sand.

***

Let’s Take a Walk by Alan

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You may be Catherine, but I’m not Newt.” He stood at her door with a bunch of wind toys tucked into his back packet. She didn’t expect this visit.

“Let’s take a walk,” he said as he revealed to her his gift. She reluctantly agreed. “But I need to get back before sundown,” she said, “or else I can’t go.”

“No problem,” he said. “We’re just going to take a walk.”

“To where?”

“Wherever you want to go.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere, not anymore.” “You’re not planning to kiss me, are you?”

He didn’t answer. They walked for hours, past the road that lead to their old school, past the gas station, past the junction where they used to watch the trucks whiz by.

“How did things change so fast?” he asked her.

“Why were you so indecisive?” she responded.

Neither could answer. At some point, he made a move for her hand, but she resisted. They sat there awhile, holding up their wands against the horizon, trying to match the toy to the actual windmills miles away. “This is how things go,” they both began to think – two sentences independent of one another happening at the same time in two different heads.

The sun went down, but the wind continued.

***

Destiny by Johanna

Destiny kicks off her sandals and places her feet up on the railing, noticing the tan lines from her straps, a contrast made deeper from all the summer dirt her toes accumulate. The bus stops twice on its way out of the mountains, once in Penasco, once in Mora. Only one or two people get on at each stop for the weekly route to Oklahoma. She lowers her feet for them, pretends to sleep so they won't ask her to move over. Through shuttered lids, Destiny sees the old lady quivering against a willow cane and thinks, she's going to see her daughter in Oklahoma City whose married to a rich rancher, but still never visits her mamacita. Destiny watches the young man with tattoos up his neck, holding onto his waistband as he limps down the aisle and she thinks, he's running away from something, a pregnant girlfriend or a drunken crime.

When the craggy peaks and their rolling foothills are nothing but distant hazy shadows, the windmills come into sight. The plains open wide, fields of dry grasses waving forward from the horizon like an ocean. She is standing on the beach hoping for what lies ahead. If the windmills are turning, she will stay on the bus, continue beyond this expanse, beyond what she knows. But the windmills are never turning. So, like each time before that she was able to pilfer the necessary change for the long ride east, she exits the bus in Clayton, crosses the empty highway and waits for the next bus home. Destiny stands and stares, imagining what those turbines would look like spinning into a kaleidoscope of light, pouring energy through their veins, but the winds never change.

***

The Department by Lyle

The processing of negative space into pieces falls under the current regime’s Department of Localized Anesthetization for Migratory Thought Patterns. “Final compartmentalization of concatenation,” letterhead, name of officer. “Few of us have the faculty to do our job,” one employee is anonymously quoted as saying. Windmills circulate slowly as a man records the negative space every second. He files reports hourly wherein the windmills are given a break from the relentless process. A bird is caught in the mechanism during this time but goes unrecorded. The photos he takes before the hour and after the hour are always blurring, as per department mandate. Jacob Quixote, another member/employee (it is more than just a job) of The Department, is giving a lecture about negative space in thinking and the detrimental effects, when it is uncompartmentalized, on local housing patterns. The Department is dark, having been cloaked by an anti-mitigation device (the mitigation of darkness having been covered in several memos of late). It has, in essence, classified itself: an inclusive set of one.

***

Windmills by Forrest

She’d slide herself and me off from town to get me my turn, but not my no-other brother. He got the waterbowl. Wooden alphabet blocks. For him I’ve wanted remembering this: she drove out any time except high noon and after if ever she had cared, pulling up to uncleared brush casting small shadows out by roadside as she readied a lit cigarette in her right hand. He might’ve liked the darker blue ridge of those remote windmills of hers turn and cut and keep cutting into a lighter shade of clear sky. I’m not sure. On the hood of the car she’d sit, smoke, consider the spinning blades, and not talk about Luther since I think men didn’t need mentioning for her fascination there. They don’t do nothing, she often griped, looking over the far distance between. They’re just for show. Big fucking show.

This much I had learned already from her. I drew large circles around her car in the dust with the heel of my sneaker. I’d start with the left headlight, make my way towards the back while she was distracted, eventually come to where she sat, her legs propped over the grill, pale yellow bruises scattered across her knees, and I kept drawing around her until she’d grab my arm and press me up against the hot fender and tell me to watch the goddamn useless windmills—less you’re rushing to get back? she asked with the cigarette tip an inch from my face. Then she threw her arms about my shoulders. It’d let her nuzzle my ear. Didn’t think so, she giggled smoke into me. Now you try spotting another road to those, sweetheart, cause we’re still not finding them yet, but I once gave her up and pointed out the road we both came on.

Vondelpark

2010-06-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

(Photo by Stephanie Mazzotta)

Security by Mike Imondi

The bicycle looked like it grew straight from the ground, a sprouting of sorts, a sign all by itself, too high for anyone to reach. We searched the park for other clues of fantastic behavior, but the only other fantastic behavior happened between our thumbs, entwined with the rest of our fingers, the roots of continued growing.

I learned once in high school about friction and surfaces and—shit, what was it called?—the place where two objects meet. We met in the park that day on a blanket, the ground under us jabbing at our bottoms every so often. We were quietly uncomfortable under a too-hot sun, the backs of our shirts stuck with sweat.

“That’s a safe spot,” I said, considering the bicycle’s perch on a street sign.

She wordlessly agreed, a small noise, maybe pitched for only me to hear, escaping from somewhere inside of her. It was like that between us often: the smallness of the intimate, the miracle of insideness.

✠ ✠ ✠

Dirac by Bill

This hand too high, so I cannot feel any kind of authority. Inescapable and anemic sense of knowing, slowly draining, rain washing down the sides of it, dirt slowly building up on the bottom edges and spreading out. Spun round once on atomic rotation, twice, unreachable, cycling toward a tunnel in the sky, drawing down the heavens and passing it through the weave of the planet. Riding risen into the evening, legendary warriors standing atop narrow spans, in seiza, leaving behind any knowing, abandoning awareness, unburdened by thought and ready to go.

✠ ✠ ✠

Man, Things Were Getting Good, by Beth

The night had been work, dinner with friends, a bottle of wine on Fitzie’s fire escape. The stack of ones Chuck gave her when she cashed out was too thick for her jeans pocket. She loved the regulars at the restaurant: Matt with the long eyelashes and the moleskine next to his place setting, Carly with rockabilly hair and a green bowling ball bag, Kevin sharing a clove cigarette with her on her fifteen-minute break.

It was the first night that didn’t end up too cool for short sleeves. Everything was thick with that early-summer heat, the smell of asphalt and jasmine as they sat on the back steps smoking, and she licked her lips and watched the woods for fireflies.

Dinner was the new guac and basil burger on special, browned just through but juicy. Chuck comped all her friends as a thank you for the double she’d worked a couple days before. She flirted with Jimmy, the new dishwasher, before they left, because it made her feel that everything was hers, everything could be conquered.

They watched The Last Picture Show for the hundredth time over at Fitzie’s, all of them crowded together on the couch, the smooth skin of their legs and arms brushing against each other, tangling in different combinations over and over. And then after the movie, on the fire escape, she sat with her legs dangling, looking far away to the quiet lights of Center City. They passed the bottle of chianti, hand to hand, mouth to mouth, and she could still taste everything from earlier in the night, the clove and the basil, the butterscotch cannoli she’d sneaked when she first got in. They talked about going down the shore on Friday, about Andrew’s band’s show at Johnny Brenda’s next week. And just before it was time to get on her bike and head home, Dino put his hand on her waist, just for a minute, as he kissed her cheek goodbye. She could smell the spice of his cologne, and she wanted to grab his bicep and squeeze it hard, run her hand down his arm and hook her fingers around his leather belt and pull. But that would be another night. She could wait.

* * *

In the early haze of the next morning, a dog-walker found her. Naked and splayed behind her stepfather’s townhouse, bruises all over, she looked like she’d tried to crawl into the bushes at the edge of the parking lot.

Seven days later, the police made their arrest. The kid had confessed after fifteen minutes of questioning. It was random, he said. He saw her bike and wanted to steal it, she fought back, and then it all went bad.

✠ ✠ ✠

The Conversation by Alan

There was this guy that I met when I was in New Orleans. I was 23 or 26. It was Mardi Gras, pre-hurricane and the metaphors that came afterwards. We were young enough to drive around the world but not old enough to understand where we were going. The guy I met was protesting the festivities; he had no beads. Only a sign that read, “God will still forgive you,” or something like that. We ditched our car for rented bikes that day of the trip though we didn’t get very far.

We got to talking about music somehow. Me being a musician and an Aries sometimes does that…forces a conversation. But isn’t every conversation at least a little forced. And if not forced, perhaps jostled? Anyway, we got to talking about music, and he told me that God made the B and the Bb and every other note every created sound the way they do because they’re perfect and so is he. And when I say “he,” I mean “He” as in God.

I listened for awhile, and then I asked him about the other notes. And when he didn’t understand, I said that there were hundreds, millions, billions of other notes in between a B and a Bb. He asked me why he couldn’t see them on the piano. This made me happy because we were really getting into it now, and I responded by telling him to think about halving a piece of paper continuously, forever.

“That’s impossible,” he told me.

“Not if you believe,” I said.

We kept at it for hours. Man, sometimes I think we’re still there. Bikes left suspended against a wall or a post; the music from the bands endlessly spinning; us inventing ways to convince each other; the invisible still invisible, reposed despite the parade.

✠ ✠ ✠

Joe Mike Explains to His Boss Why He Was Late For Work by Johanna

“I'm sorry, Mr. Wong. I know. I'm late again. Well, it's a really interesting story. I mean, you're never gonna believe it.

“Okay, well, you know how those poles have been showing up overnight all over the city since the Chinese occupation, I mean, Chinese Liberation. Yeah? Well, I thought someone was just sticking them in the ground for some kind of sick joke or something, but actually, it's more like they are sprouting up. Yeah, just coming right out of the ground. I know this because one sprouted, or sprung up, from the sidewalk last night right under my bike, took it 12 feet into the air, broke the lock and everything. Yeah, crazy, right?

Well, ever since oil was outlawed for American citizens, I mean, American subjects, and the Great Urban Migration and everything, I can't afford any means of transportation other than my bike. I asked my neighbor Lisa if I could borrow hers, but she had a flat tire. She directed me to Leroy who spent, like, half an hour just going at that pole, solid as steel, with his hacksaw while Lisa and I stood ready to catch the bike should it fall, but he just couldn't get through that shit, I mean, pipe. Then, this homeless guy, I mean, a comrade, was watching us and said we should climb on each others' shoulders and push the bike off the pole and then he would catch it. Well, it's not like me to take advice from just some guy off the street who looks like he hasn't bathed in a month, but I was desperate and didn't have any better ideas. So, I got on Leroy's shoulders and Lisa got on mine and pushed the bike off toward the, uh, comrade guy and he actually caught it. We were cheering for, like, a second before he took off on my bike laughing like a crazy dude. I chased him for a while, but he was way faster than me. I always said that bike was fast...

“Yeah, I'm almost at the end of my story. Anyway, I borrowed some money from Leroy to take the light rail, which will probably take me the better half of next month's salary to pay off. No, sir, I don't mean to say that you don't pay me good here, the pay is good and all. Just that, you know, I'm an American capitalist pig and all, spending my money on fast food and porn and, anyway, I'm going to borrow my brother's bike until I can save up for a new one and...

“What's that, sir? I'm fired? Oh, shit.”

✠ ✠ ✠

In Memoriam by Lyle

The man told his children the story of the statue. His story started:
Early one morning Rosdahl rode his bike to work, in the dark, as usual, even in the summer months. Rain. He had tried hooking his umbrella under the right side of the handle bar as he rode, but fell. He spent quite some time in a ditch by the road. His leg healed and he went on. He limped. He sold his bicycle because he thought it might kill him. Though he didn’t really care about life, he also didn’t want to die. At work his limp became worse and he had to push himself around on his wooden desk chair. He pushed himself backwards with his one good leg and the chair legs screeched along the wooden floorboards. Soon he found himself at the bottom of the stairwell looking up. Somehow the chair had stayed under him during the tumble and his back had been broken by the back of the chair. After several hours, he turned himself, turtle on its back, so that he lay prone. Using his clawed and tortured fingers, he pulled himself toward the exit.
This was his memorial, the man told his children, shrunken, dead children.

✠ ✠ ✠

Vondelparkpaniekaanval by Forrest

Oh tame thineself, tourist horse’s constipation were it expelled mid-trot. This lone terrible verliezer from Champs-Élysées carries dispatch for only thine superlative and pedals he alongside and twixt flowers steaming, “Vonderfullest Thou!”—would it not be finer to succumb for a cycle riot’s sake, or be worse in thine own dirty bathwater? But truly very sorry appears our modest evening dog park. If thou arrive there rose-laden of another alias less dry, perhaps a leash will falsen thee for Cranial Dutch then?

Boys

2010-05-01T07:29:00.000-07:00

Dark Section by Dennis E. Bolen

Far as I know we never knew each other before that moment whenever the hell it was but it is known that Bill—the guy writing notes—died 1988 of AIDS in San Francisco.  There was a dark section in his history but his sister sent a note to the reunion so we know what happened. The guy next to him, Al, worked his dad’s quarter section outside Estevan until a tractor rolled on him so now he hobbles around and manages an apartment building in Regina.

That’s me in the middle, you all know my story. Goofy Sandor to my left went into accounting but tossed it to make zillions in the tech boom, lost it, then made it back. He had me down to Miami last year after our get-together and we tooled around the Keys in his Tollycraft 53. Had my own cabin. Cooked in the gourmet galley. Tended the best-stocked boozebar I ever saw. But all those women. Too young for one thing. And too many. I mean you get to a certain age.

Out on the end Roy of course had those wives and lost all his real estate then came up with some kind of internet spamscam and got sued by several governments the world over. Last time anybody saw him he was going by another name—funny enough there’s a dark section in my head—I can’t even remember his real one.

But one thing distracts me looking at this blurry moment from so long ago. It’s the reflection in the windows above us. An opposite-bound train. Oblivious though we were, there we stood smirking at a kind of crossroads. It wouldn’t have made any difference to us. I know now as I did then that we would never have thought to go any direction than together.

***

Big Men’s Uniforms by Bonnie Nish

They had plans in their big men uniforms. Big plans; beer and poker at the back of the bar car, if they didn’t get carded. Who would card a guy in uniform anyway? It was unconstitutional. One by one they left the bright sun to board, leaving behind the town which they never felt did them justice somehow. Parents who couldn’t see beyond the great divide that was the sign on the highway out and the cemetery that was the locked door in. They were leaving no matter what, even if it meant a burial at sea or a bullet through the head on some foreign beach. They made a pact to one another never to look back.

Unbeknownst to them, these five best friends from public school became the nameless billboard for the good times of war. Caught on a passing photographer’s Polaroid, this moment was plastered on city buses in a place none of them had ever even been. Their smiles and easy going manner made thousands of other boys want to grow up and become just like them. Suddenly every boy over the age of 12 wanted to leave behind their families and dogs and baseball teams and go off to kill some evil enemy. Only that evil enemy had a gun and a tank and didn’t think twice about killing a mamma’s boy.

If only these friends had known what was in store for them, they would have shouted at the top of their lungs, not to do it, not to go. They would have told them not to leave their mother’s embrace and the warmth of their beds. The horror of the trenches, the smell of death, knowing it is ending even before it began, well they would have made a different pact. They would have thought again before heading to the back of the bar car. They would have hugged their mothers longer and taken the dog for one last walk. But then again maybe it is best they didn’t know. After all they had their plans in their big men uniforms. They had their smiles and the moment of ordering that beer and never being asked for identification. They were men!

***

Smaller, Prouder by Forrest

A photo kept man to man by the occasion a missed birthday is celebrated, having survived a tornado, two Midwestern floods, one very angry conversation, and now it’s being used as a coaster by Anselm’s daughter. I want to talk to her—nothing else but that. Anselm has me let it go. Time for blowing out Bobby’s candles. His cake sits a few days short of nineteen and we still recognize it as ours: broken neck during a drill, not long after Peterson snapped us at Central Terminal. We all looked at his camera better then. A world of boys off making our smaller wars. Not so proud, I had thought. The daughter shakes the water off sheepishly without a word, dismisses herself outside to the patio with her ladyfriends. They have a fresh round of pink champagnes. Guess we don’t command much flair, fellas, Peterson tries salvaging, as I hand the photo to Fitz with the first slice of Bobby’s cake that I can muster.

***

A Few Extra by Bill

Before this one there was a picture of Russell, who was my mom’s uncle, sitting in a chair in his officer’s uniform with a dachshund on his lap, but I don’t know these guys and need to look closer to see they aren’t guys, not yet. Or I can’t tell, just like can’t tell what year that bus is from. And this is the only one of them, of these kids in the stack in my hand, taken from the box at a yard sale where I’m buying back pictures of my family from a stranger.

Russell had a mustache, a good old boy like Lancaster, and he draped his left leg over his right and looked like he was always going to look from that moment on. The dog seems to like the attention. They have a frame too of another photo of his, a bust shot of head, shoulders, the cap pushed back just a bit to knock off the shadow on the forehead. The frame is a billfold with the facing pane the notice from ’44, but that was an earlier photo the air force used.

They want a quarter each for the photos but $5 for the frame so I can take it home and stick it in a drawer. There is another picture of a kid standing beside a wall covered in ivy and I take that one too and another single pane frame for a buck. These kids by the bus and the kid with the ivy we’ll probably hang on the wall.

***

Putting it Back by Beth

Her favorites are the ones with flashes of light, like this, with the sun shooting off the bus’s window. In another, a pregnant woman in a dotted dress holds something she must have moved quickly: cupped in her hands, the light tinders, flares.

The room is small and off the kitchen. For another family, it could have been a mud room, or a walk-in closet, or even plumbed to be an extra bathroom, something useful. She keeps the door closed to company, but when she goes in she opens the curtains to the row of icicles, gleamed and dripping.

She's stacked the pictures in shoeboxes, tied them with twine. On each is a piece of an index card labeled “Luggage” or “Garden Hoses” or “Fur Coats”, “Dogs’ Collars” or “Adventure Books” or “Fishing Trophies”. “Rhinestone Sunglasses”, “Crocheted Blankets,” “Costume Jewelry”.

The night of the fire had been humidity waiting to break, the stream running high, frogs calling from tree to tree. She woke first, to the campfire smell, the smoke rolling low over their beds like fog through the islands. She had dreamed it many times before, many times since, the slow-motion burn, the what-to-take. She didn’t take anything.

***

The Warning Track of Summer by Alan

Late August always brought with it a kind of post-supper glow. Though everybody was about to go somewhere, the leaving we took was slow. Our bellies were full, our hearts were leashed, and our minds were on fire. This was the way it went every year. This is the way I remember it.

There’s not much else I can say about those days. We were thirsty for starlight’s drip because we believed we could catch anything with our tongues. We believed we were pioneers when we stared at treetops at three a.m. We were formed by a kind of unconditional love that only a few feel - mostly boys, sadly. And this is what shaped our future relationships. This democracy. This recess. This at bat. This swing. That fly ball shooting way past the warning track of summer. We watched it fly straight out of the park and into the atmosphere. And, god, did we want to follow it. This was the start of all things beautiful that will eventually pass. That should pass. That pass whether we like it or not.

There were a few who stayed, of course. It’s hard to leave something this good. Even if it broke their mother’s backs (instead of their hearts), they stayed. They stayed. And we left. Sort of.

***

Boys by Johanna

He was always writing in that book. Sitting across the table at the diner, he scribbled in that book with crinkled brow, each stroke of the pen stabbing at the pages, filling them up with inexplicable urgency. I wanted to slap him hard with my extended palm across the flat plain of his cheek. Sometimes, while on break from working the line at the factory, he would smirk while scrawling down seemingly genius ideas in that book. His pen couldn't move fast enough for him as I chocked on my cigarette. I daydreamed about putting my butt out on that book, watching it burst into flames. I laughed maniacally. On the weekend, cruising down a back road, the windows rolled down on the Packard, Glen Miller Band blaring from the stereo, his pen caressed the pages of that book with whimsical grace while his up-curled lips revealed a wondrous world inside his head gushing out through his letters. I wanted so much to swipe that book from his hands and kiss his smiling mouth while speeding dangerously through dense forests.

One day, while he was in the shower, he carelessly left that book out on the bed-stand. I finally had my chance to open it up, read the secret passages that consumed him. Lifting the leather bound pad, I sniffed at the cover, ran fingers over the soft pages. Then, I shut it and shoved it inside the drawer. That was when I realized my greatest fear, not that those pages would finally affirm how much he despised my presence, but that there would be no mention of me at all.

***

Boys to Men by Nicole

I am not a boy in the picture. I am from the outside looking in. I am thinking this could be my grandfather but it isn’t. However some of the boys or all of the boys were eventually grandfathers to someone. Or maybe no one. Maybe one was gay but didn’t say it to the friends standing there in the 40s. I am thinking it is the 40s. Not now; then. I like that the bus seems to be chrome or silver in this interpretation: in my creation of the story. I notice the one who is reading and writing. The one with the photo and the pen in his hand. Is it a checklist? Is it a To-Do or the writing of an address? No No. It’s a photo of him with a girl and maybe he is signing I love you. See you soon. I’ll miss you. I will never forget you. What was it that he wrote to the woman taking the picture? If only I could know. If only I could see in. They appear not more than 18 when they left on this day in the photo. Did they come home men with amputated limbs, holes in the heart where love once lived? I assume they had too many experiences imprinted in their brains of the many things they never ever spoke about. They lived a lifetime of silence because of the war because of the images left to haunt them. The ones of the one who didn’t return and the many others reasons that turned these boys into men.

***

Photographic Memory by Lyle

In that instant I took the photo, the sun came out and the glint from the train blinded me temporarily. I closed my eyes and lowered my Spotmatic. They laughed at something and then a train pulled out of the station on the platform next to ours, deafening me with its blaring horn blast. Fumes coughed up out of the locomotive formation and swung down in the breeze along the platform. I disappeared for a moment in a state of sensory depravation and I knew at that instant I wouldn’t be coming home. I remember that thought as I look at the photo so many years later. That glint brings on the same thoughts ending in sensory deprivation every time. One of the boys — Frankie — sent the photo to me. I don’t know how he found my address. Surely he hadn’t hired a PI.

When the horn stopped and I opened my eyes, the boys were still there, in the thinning, twisting mist of exhaust, but they weren’t laughing anymore. Or rather they had no expressions. They scintillated, phantasmagorically, all looking off in different directions.

Another horn blast shimmered through the air just as I opened my mouth and said, I’m through. We boarded the train shortly after. That’s the last thing I remember from this photo.

Dead End

2010-04-01T07:53:00.000-07:00

~~dead end: a movie~~ by Lyle

Pan down from the starless night sky. Stop. This is real life on a dead end street. The sign at the end of the street — if it is to be called a street — looms large and yellow and. The viewer feels restless in its brightness. Stop. A plastic bag, color indeterminate in the light, lies deflated and still against the curb on the right. Vague linseed and fluorescent street lights tawny the asphalt. Dead End. This could mean so many things and so few. In a backyard that may or may not be on the Dead End, a small dog yaps at something unseen, unheard. “A thoroughfare (usu. including sidewalks) that is lined with buildings.” The houses lurk in shadow, as the camera rolls down the Dead End, swings, around the plastic bag, brushes under the hackberry leaves and comes back out. Stop. The dog has stopped barking. Pan up. Stop.

***

Live Ends by Forrest

I check the handbook: Yellow diamond indicates motorist general warning, but nothing’s general about a Dead End. The terminus is specific while trapped speeding in a vehicle, to be sure, though I am a pedestrian who carries DMV materials while jogging at night. And, no, I am not running away from imminent danger here. I am brushing up on warnings. This tired neighborhood won’t imitate a cheap horror show, I keep telling myself. It can’t be so bloody obvious.

My wife, on the other hand. She had suggested needs while jogging with me, that I search for a Live End that leads elsewhere but still concludes abruptly. Yet I liked the idea. I thought I could startle her by the random cul-de-sac. A little entertainment. Change of the dial.

In pointing out Live Ends to others—assuming I find any—I will use orange to indicate them. Orange signage for maintenance appropriates more caution, I think, since an impending development can’t be specified beyond familiar appearances or the expectation of a self-regulatory barrier. That tucked-in sidestreet way, way down by the dry reservoir, for instance. The cheerless bungalow. It has the makings of a deviation taken at my own peril for another person who will remain unknown to me.

I don’t believe I’ve been regarded the same there before.

***

The Super Eights by Bill

Not sure if I am being unproductive, maybe I am being preproductive. Uterproductive. We are of course Samsar-productive. We manage. Time manages. Same thing. All in all it has to be easier out there someplace. Maybe on the thunder road. Maybe in the sun where the boats weave on the sands and the memory of water. Your choices weren’t the best, but whose are? Ok, maybe you clogged the rivers with excrement that smelled like hexane and turpentine and we didn’t really do much to stop it (learning to drive a back-hoe was fun), and we were busy pumping enough nutria-sweetners into our blood we were embalmed with metabolized formaldehyde by the time we learned Reagan wasn’t going to die and spent the next century posing in wax museums while we waited for that plastic sheen to wear off our bodies.As I said, we manage. If you ever manage to evolve again, well, hopefully we’ll have kept the lights on for you.

***

Stealing Signs by Beth

My boyfriend’s parents’ Airstream trailer was full of signs he’d stolen. The trailer was parked for good at the end of a narrow dirt road, and his parents never used it anymore. The coffee table said Stop. Frost Heave hung on the bathroom door. He’d stacked orange cones in a kitchen corner, and one morning we woke up to a Railroad Crossing pole stuck six feet out into the pond.

I yelled for an hour when he brought in the purple garden ball on the sandstone stand, stomping up and down the trailer’s tiny hallway. Stealing from the town was okay, but I didn’t like him making off with things from people’s yards. I didn’t want him to be that person.

On summer weekends he had parties at the trailer. His parents bought the alcohol, delivered it to us, and then left us alone. He was their youngest child by eighteen years.

Later I read in the newspaper that four kids went to jail for stealing a Stop sign because somebody ran through it and got killed. But it’s all so arbitrary, you know? What counts as a crime and what doesn’t. What can be stopped.

***

Lovely by Alan

Lovely is the sign that exits the road. Lovely is the notion that serves to protect. Lovely is the miracle that makes the cul-de-sac. Lovely is the evening that surrounds us when we’re thinking. Lovely is remembrance. Lovely is the court. Lovely is the cars parked in a circle for summer’s final note. Lovely is the night as black as crow’s dreams. Lovely is this is why we came and for safety and for peace. Lovely is the nearsightedness. Lovely is the far away. Lovely is the immigration from highway to this way. Lovely is the stationary. Lovely is the sway of maples when it’s dark and we’re asleep. Lovely is this memory. Lovely is this street. Lovely is the way we grow up and think back and reconsider and never leave.

***

Untitled by Nicole

I have American Syndrome. There are no pills to take for this. It’s as if one day I hope to arrive at life but I know it won’t happen but yet it happens all the time. It’s the moments of satisfaction akin to a stuffing, a feeling, and fullness that I want to feel constantly. But each moment arrives and becomes the past that becomes the memory. So we move on to more and more of the future, forgetting. And we repeat the pattern again and again. And I think I am circling a cul-de-sac like a mouse on a wheel, a person on a treadmill, or a pinball stuck in the chamber without enough force to push it.

Untitled

2010-03-01T17:16:00.000-08:00

Untitled by Nicole

It was the fourth of July in Nederland, CO. One of the biggest days of the year for the town. Every year my husband and I liked to have a party. People always drive from miles away to enjoy fireworks over the reservoir. The reflection provides another view of the spectacular event. We invited Mike to come. He said he would bring the fireworks but we didn’t realize exactly what he meant. The fireworks from our deck were the town’s sideshow. We had a hose to make sure we didn’t burn the house down. Some people were surprised that the cops didn’t come. But it was Nederland on the fourth of July.

***

Glare by Lyle

The bamboo rustled and glowed brightly. Sean moved quickly to light the second “flare bomb,” a concoction of his own devision (we knew there was alcohol in it and maybe magnesium). We all knew that it would end badly someday, but no one ever even protested his, “All right, check this one out” or its inevitability just before the parties broke up. The flinty flick of the lighter and then the glare. Sometimes they were too bright to look at directly, like life itself. So we watched the bamboo flare up, dance and die down. Someone took a picture. Sometimes we conjectured about our presence at his next party. We hummed and hawed, but always ended up going. For all of its absurdity and repetition, there was a certain allure. I found myself particularly drawn to the tail end of these “experiments.” The ebbing of the experiments, the party, the night. The burning out of our lives always left us quiet, listening to the bamboo rustle, the remnants of color in their leaves.

***

Measurement by Forrest

Can’t earn bitemarks yet. Magnesium settles that, Bill. It’s only two traps sprung same place. You run off and I search anyway—even if that is your car. When Dina slummed, I’d figure when to stop asking. I got, you realize, moods flouting me. A fucking blue aura taming her. She insisted. Loved hands. What are still called hands. And I know she’d known our Bill grinning easily for us. I think you might pose courageous in the dark as well.

***

Maker by Bill

Here is how it opens: yawling collapse. Earplugs become necessary. The application of knowledge come round, butts against edge of the pit. Stick your hand in, tip over. This is how it sticks: neo-agent orange. Where would you like it to burn if not in your dreams? Do recover gasping for breath without knowing the shore and wake unsure whose bed you want to be in, sweating, shaking, feverish?

***

Soon, You Will Have to Worry by Beth

The night has chilled enough for sweatshirts, sweaters, fleece jackets, after a long, cloudless afternoon in which you lay on the grass with Sean and Sam and Mike and Josh, arms spread out and fingers almost close enough to touch. Mike grabbed one of your flip flops and wedged it beneath his head for a pillow, and you were glad it was new enough to smell more of Wal*Mart than of bare feet. Looking up at the sky through the high branches tossing in the breeze, you knew how lucky you were.

Now the wind swishes through the pines above the back deck where you are drinking a glass of wine and smoking a clove cigarette so slow that it keeps going out. This afternoon, everyone was still, and you could imagine that they were imagining their bodies sinking into the grass and the dirt, like you were, and when Josh said, “what was that poem where the bodies become part of the ground?”, you said “Thanatopsis” without even having to think.

This afternoon you didn’t have to think too hard about anything, hold on to anything, but now Mike is doing that thing again, that frenzied thing, and even though you can smell the pines and see the stars overhead when you lean back in your lawn chair, you can also smell the lighter fluid, the hair Mike burned on his arm, you can see the bright flashes of the fire.

***

Alone in the Woods by Alan

Once upon a time, alone in the woods thought it was alone. Alone in the woods believed that every single thing is alone, ultimately, until it is not. Alone in the woods took this philosophy with it one day to a secluded area in the country of red. It brought some friends with it. Drink was one of these friends. Think, fire, and smoke were the others.

They decided to have a conversation. Alone in the woods suggested that they not use words. This was tacitly approved by all the parties present. On the deck of a state within the country, all the borders were called into question. One by one, they appeared and took the stand. So it went like this for several hours. It was alone and then not alone. Alone in the woods in the woods and alone one moment, then alone in the woods in the woods and not alone in the next. This went on for a very long time. The end.

***

The Last Bonfire by Johanna

The sky was full of tiny night dust, flaming stars falling to ash. Resounding putter and proceeding puffs before the last gliding cascade into infinite nothing.

After the alcoholic frenzy, after the insane tirades, after the sophomore orgy, after the naked dancing, bodies sprawled about, their consciousness having left them hours before, the fire still burned. The smoke had weakened to a bitter thick and noxious gray, a scent which would stick to our flannel shirts and jeans until laundry day. Someone had to snuff it out. We turned our backs to the struggling flames and began to unfasten our buckles, only slight turns of the neck to ensure we were united, no movements that may suggest doubt. Pants down, bending at the knee as if in a deep bow of reverence, we could feel the dim flames still hot enough to penetrate our skin, imagining the possible singe of hair. Quickly, a mass release of urine, a splashing yellow cascade with the odor of beer, left our bladders causing the fire to scream and hiss as if calling out for help. Dripping dry, we pulled up our pants, turned back to the smothered pit of warm coals and laughed. Dark then, and chilled, we returned to the distant light of the dormitory, hoping not to step on anybody.

Aftermath

2010-02-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

Aftermath by Johanna

There are no canyons to cordon neighborhoods or rivers to divide regions. In Kansas, a town is a place along a road where houses converge. Everything else is empty, fields of empty. Not even a uniquely shaped boulder to name a street after. It is as if someone decided this would be a lovely place to plant a town, just over here, and seed a border of shops, service stations and government buildings.

My daughter asks me what sound wind makes. She is singing Old McDonald and at the moment Old McDonald has wind on his farm, eeii, eeii, ooh. I tell her it says, “whooosh” and bend my voice low. “With a woosh, woosh here and a woosh, woosh there,” she continues. My husband: “Old McDonald had a wind farm?”

Wind only makes sound when it is pushing up against something or traveling through; it lacks autonomy. This makes the wind feel unloved, invisible so to speak. It craves attention. The wind also hates Kansas. In the spring, it likes to spin itself into a hissy, throw a tantrum, and thrash down upon the randomly strewn gardens of towns. Sometimes, it gets carried away. Sometimes, it carries everything away.

My daughter is out of the car now, stretching her legs while we watch the construction underway to rebuild the town. Running off, she trips precariously close to the rim of a pit. I yell, “Get over here, right now!” She cries, “I want to run! I just want to run!”

“I'll count to five and you better get your behind back here. 1.... 2.....3....

***

Top 10 Things to do in the Aftermath by Nicole

Top 10 Things to do in the Aftermath

wrap up in a blanket in cold weather.

play “I Spy” and notice the red and the rusty.

practice using PVC in a recycled sculpture.

redeem copper for money.

kick the debris but only while wearing boots.

wear gloves in case you must pick up the plastic.

disregard the plastic

keep the tires.

don’t inhale around the pipes.

burn the wood only if it’s not been stained or painted.

***

Graygray by Lyle

They looked for bones amongst the rubble. Beigebeige. They hunted for muscle and fat. They rummaged for hair and nails and sinews. They searched for mass. Redred. Picked through and strung out, the people investigated themselves for blood. The Qassam rockets landed near by. The MATADOR missiles landed near by. I pretended that I was dead and that you were dead and watched the twisted metal and rubber smoke. There was something red in the jumble of nothuman remains. Everything was human. Everything was dead. An object in motion is not proof of life. Silhouette against the blueblue sky. Maybe a bird. Maybe another rocket. It's black and falls into the sun, but reappears. Nothuman. The rubble is bones. The rubble is muscle and fat. The rubble is rubber and metal and wire and plastic. Graygray. I don't have to pretend anymore. Blackblack.

***

Redacted Item From Progress Report By the “Little Bobby” Macauley Search Party at the White Sulfur Landfill, November 21, 2009, Later Restored in a Secretly Taped Conversation at DiGentillo’s Tavern, February 14, 2010 by Forrest

Have problems feeling some kind of the rightest way with him leaving all the personal shit there when everyone dreams about his old man’s outboard motor instead.

***

Unforced by Bill

part of you, a small part of you, wants to make all of this into a weapon, and you want to be angry because you are still kind of angry most of the time when you lift it onto your shoulder, strapping it around your waist a slump in your shoulder just hopes to leave all of this mess alone that right eye you keep rubbing with the ball of your palm has gone looking for a shadow in the shape of a tiger taking your legs with it you feel a small grit of skin scratching above your ear flake off beneath your fingernail and laugh to yourself that you should find a belt to cinch around your waste part of it reminds you of the season 5 finale’ in Lost and you’re still circumambulating around this pile like all those other piles you have circled in your absent-minded asceticism or you remember the piles of dirt the county trucks used to leave across the road from the house when you were little you used to climb even after that time you got scabies because the electricity was shut off and there was no hot water

***

Evan’s Roommate by Beth

The sun was just starting to shine bright on my desk when I read the email about what had happened. You’d think they’d tell his roommates first, but I found out the way everyone else did. I’d gone to bed at three, just to get a couple of hours of sleep before getting up to finish my paper for English, the one class he and I had together. I had been dead tired, but now I wasn’t.

I knew I should wake Mark up and tell him, but I also knew he’d do the drama kid thing and act like it was a big loss, like we were really close to him. Later I’d be glad he could do that, act devastated around Evan’s parents, around the counselor they eventually sent to talk to us, but not now.

I went on Evan’s facebook to see what people were saying. Only a couple of his high school friends had posted so far. Then I checked for news reports, but I didn’t need to read them to know what had happened. Evan was from DC. He didn’t know anything about driving in the snow, and worse, he thought he did. He could probably tell you everything about how a car works in snow, the mechanics of it, but all that kind of knowing would just get in the way. He wouldn’t know how to feel the car, make little corrections, not panic, let go.

The sink was still full of his mac n cheese bowls, which had been bugging Mark & me all weekend. Evan only liked food that was bright orange and smelled bad. I got up and just stood there looking at the dishes, wondering what I was supposed to do. I guessed his parents would show up sometime to get his stuff, and I tried to see the room like my parents would. The back of our door, which was covered with beer bottle caps that Evan had stuck on there with gum or plasta tack. The swimsuit edition photos that I had torn out and put up all around my desk. They wouldn’t be impressed that we had three TVs stacked up together, and that we sometimes watched different shows on each at the same time.

I thought about Evan, how he leaned back in his chair in English, arms crossed, scowling, how he said nasty sexual things about the teacher whenever her back was turned, how he cheated off me on quizzes, how he never did any homework but still got B’s in all his classes. How he stole my high school girlfriend, how he stole my gloves out of the back of my car and then kept insisting they were his, how he spilled strawberry milk between the couch cushions and just let it dry.

Because I couldn’t feel sorry that he had died, I washed his dishes.

***

The Jump by Alan

Like barbells hurled in a tornado, the thinking about it is both fascinating and dangerous. We’re not the prize fighters we used to be, that’s for sure. But what isn’t for sure, what still is missing, is the reason why she attempted the jump in the first place. With so few miles to go, why veer off and seek a new kind of adventure? She made sure that no one was watching, but our sources say one man (the proprietor’s cousin) watched the whole thing go down. She undressed the air in those seven or eight seconds. She unfolded the paper nightgowns of our minds, the ones we lie down with during the late shows. She made a pact with gravity, the stray dog who always follows us home. Grow wings, she cried. God, let this beast grow wings. And the rest was a photo in a textbook near some words about something you can’t or won’t memorize. In a school. On a desk. The promise of something more but suspended. Forever.

A

2010-01-31T13:10:00.000-08:00

New Year's Day by Alan

When he awoke, one thing was over and a new one just begun. There was a quiet in the city not unlike the silence associated with some forests or an empty house. He noticed this because the window was open. Besides the accelerating rush of a car’s tires every so often, the only sound was the sound of memory. There was a burning house, a friend in distress, the possibility of tenderness in a kiss high above the gargoyles in the architecture. All faint hums now, all neon outlines of a life slipping into the past.

There would still be villains. He knew that for sure. But there would also be new imaginers to meet them whenever they appeared. For every action there’s a reaction, for every urge there’s a remedy, and for every canvas there’s a stroke. Perhaps it would be his neighbor in the new year. Perhaps it would be an out of towner with grand ambitions. Or perhaps, like him years ago, it would be some suburban kid with city roots looking to make a difference who walks into a closet after the signal is made and emerges caped, inspired, able to leap tall buildings for a taste of the sky, resolution.

***

Middle by Lyle

“A” glowing haphazardly in the night. But it wasn’t how I remembered it starting. Though at this point I can’t remember what did start it — only the glowing “A” that didn’t. Until the sun eclipsed it’s majesty. Here we disagree. Here is where you said that the sun actually made it more majestic by dimming it to ashing coal, somehow vertical, somehow sitting harmlessly on the wooden wall instead of burning right through it. This is when I said “haphazard” haphazardly. This is when I started the story. And for some reason, now that I’ve begun, I can’t remember what might have come before I began. On this point you are silent — mooting the point. I write this poem to you in anticipation of when we will begin again before it all started and before it all ends:

A fang, arsy-varsy hangs, starts
facts and acts days far away — avant-
past, say. What can a lad and lass crack
at? Past? Gray alarms? Halt! Days slap
fast at lack and stars lad and lass. A
stars wall. Lad stars lass.
Fail.

I show it to you and you say, ahh. I don’t know if you understand. But then, you must have such a storied past while mine begins and ends in “A” — such a middle.

***

Anti-An by Forrest

A attempts acquiring An’s audition as appropriate aubade against aloofness. Angry and assailing afterwards, A admonishes An about average age at agnostic altitudes, accidentally advancing another An agenda along, aforethought agreeable, aggravating, almost aloft. An answers agog, “Ah.” Alternately, A analogizes apostasy. Agitation abounds afar as altruistic. Ambivalence. “Amazing An!” announces A, albeit acerbic. Always askance. Achingly anticlimactic also.

***

We Call Him Don by Bill

Finger tips against grit, and the pads worn down. Olden breaths, knee bends creaking at the edges, frame bent into shape and done up on a jig. Gotta take a jog. Burn out the lights and the soot from our lungs and just blast the whole fucking mountain down along the way. Reams of the stuff. Get your glory out and rub yourself on all that marvelous shit buried in the earth.

***

Adolescence by Beth

The barn burned in January, on a night cold as shattered glass, a night when you could see stars between the stars. It didn’t mean much to anybody anymore. Farley had sold off most of his land, and the barn was left to itself, sliding down from its roof-ridge, the ridge twisting like the back of an old man. The inside was full of broken things, things that might be worth saving but weren’t worth keeping in the attic or the basement and cats that were wild and not worth keeping inside, either.

The barn meant nothing to anybody anymore except for me and maybe Jed. Jed must have cared about it once, I think, but I don’t know if he still does. He’s not the sentimental type, not like me. Maybe he doesn’t even remember anymore, the hot bored afternoons when we went in there together and he wrestled me down on the floor and I pretended to fight back but didn’t try too hard. Every afternoon I felt the weight of him, more and more solid and dry and warm as the summer went on. We lay there on the pine boards, still and saying nothing, and then after a while, always after not long enough, he would get up and I would get up and he would run off somewhere and I’d try not to follow.

***

Felted Bad by Michael

This was in a dive. A real dirt-trap. Called the Scarlet Letter, big red neon "A" outside. Fuckin' tacky. I been stabbed there twice, but this time around I did the cuttin'. My scissors moved real smooth through that felt. Hell, when I was done, you couldn't see that big red "A" worth a damn. But you still knew it was there and that kind of made you feel horrible. I still smile thinking about it. The implications. Like it had gone somewhere, maybe inside you, and you could feel it burning your insides, like maybe one of your organs. And I know who you are who deserve that, so I made it happen. I made it happen for me and everybody like me. It doesn't absolve you anymore because now you only see it when you close your eyes. Try sleeping like that, with a big neon "A" on the back of your damned eyelids. I can promise that, unless you are a champion sleeper, or like, really exhausted, you will not be able to fall asleep looking at that thing. They won't ever figure out how to put that light back on the outside. I got it in you good.

Go Research! Go!

2009-12-29T13:20:00.000-08:00

Singular Reciprocity by Boyko

You can’t really say we were faking it. You wouldn’t tell the guy who stuck the AI chip in the android that he was faking human intelligence, would you? You’d say he was trying to make progress. We were doing that, but with history. You bury something, and then dig it up, and who’s to say if, in that time between burying and digging, it hasn’t become authentic? Look at time capsules. Same principle, really. When you live as long as we do (and it wasn’t us who made our batteries rechargeable, pal, it was you), you come to realize that people need some connection with their past. So you build bridges, backward, through history, and you restore the severed connection. Just like attaching a cybernetic arm. No, it is not the real thing, but doesn’t it, in many ways, work better? It’s satisfying to you to harvest what we have planted so skillfully. We’ve seen it. Just as it is satisfying to us when you make a small upgrade, debug some of our systems. This isn’t the goddamned Singularity, friends, it’s just Reciprocity. We don’t know how you guys do it, and you don’t even know that we do. But c’mon, it’s a closed system, and it works. So who gives a crap?

***

Confession by Alan

To dig is to receive, they say, but for me the day is not long enough for excavation. I want to look it right in the eye and hold the thought, get lost in the process till I’m weak in the knees and get lost some more. But a thing like this is not easy. Too many distractions, I suppose. And the weight of holding.

Flash forward like twenty years, and I’m still right where I left off. The limbs have stiffened from all the indecision. The back aches, but no one can tell. If I’d only dug a little deeper…well, if only I had dug at all.

I want to remember us as a kind of civilization that almost made it. I want others to remember too. They could try digging if they’re into that kind of thing. Or they could freeze in the moment like I did, like you never could do but ending up doing anyway. Hopefully, I didn’t cause your freezing. If I did, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you wait all these years for something that was never there in the first place.

***

The Truth of the Matter, We Swear by Lyle

Our primary forays into the field of archeology were not very successful. The first time we started digging in the back yard, we hit a water main quite quickly. We left equally as quickly, so as not to avoid contact with the inhabitants (an important cultural sensitivity --that we did not interact -- toward the people of the country at the time was vital to our research). There were several other incidents, one involving a drive-in diner, which almost landed our intrepid group of **pologists in "jail" (that's what they called it and our interaction with them clearly jeopardized the science of our project).

Our secondary forays concluded much more successfully. Above is a picture of the first (and last as it turned out) in our second foray. We dug in and observed without interacting. Everyone was pretty damn sure it was something important (Jack says that it might even be Hansel and Gretel's home -- something about the train tracks, I'm not sure), though I think it all looks pretty staged. I mean, look how polished it all is. Still, we were being optimistic about our second foray. It had to go well for us. Funds were drying up and investors were getting antsy.

Our third foray turned out to be a disaster. It was our foray into the publishing stage and when the site was revealed as an obvious fake (the headline read: HOAX, you dummies), the whole community felt duped by our work (ultimately entitled: Android Deconstruction Site). Critics reviled our paper ("they're miniatures, fucking idiots" -- not really constructive criticism, we felt) while a small group of people claimed it was a parody, but only a parody of ourselves. We, of course, went underground (literally).

Our communication is now short and truthful. We wish to apologize for any consternation, but we also wish it to be known that it was an accident. The whole thing. A train wreck, so to speak. Unavoidable and calamitous. That is all.

***

At Independent Site by Forrest

Day Twelve

Party has learned too late plasticine excavations in mild afternoon weather spur another’s geophagy. Like before, toast-squares applied to solid tea at breakfast, washed ourselves down in miniature wheelbarrows suddenly extant. Dug without fear and satiety. Research should not nauseate when substances continue materializing. Yesterday mud cascades, unexplained filling-ins afforded one of us escape. Tiny rumblings of trains in the night! Profanity withheld at deserter’s tent. Cot sat empty, save field journal. Kettle on heater filled with liquid plaster (he always claimed it was solid coffee). Tasted grainy. Not professional. Same his journal. Numerous passages highlighted. Sipped liquid plaster on his cot and read, Stones are really pebbles, Culture had access to Euclidean geometry, et al. Indecipherable. Baseless, shoddy, agreed. We burned his tent. Threw boulders on train tracks—likely will be moved somehow by tomorrow morning. Party morale low, but new discovery of cardboard at site keeps us from being dismayed by whistles in the distance.

***

Untitled by Bill

Daniel caught the scent in his bucket – Fenton must have wandered out here drunk last night and used it to vomit into. Daniel pushed the bucket away from him and bent back to the screen. He glanced backwards under his elbow at Mol, faggy scarf on her head, sketching out the contours of the site on the edge of the pit, holding the arms out away from her but resting the pad on her knee. That piece of shit Rocher just watching them. Daniel hated to be watched while he worked, hated doing work while someone else stood around and watched. He stood up and stared at the scientist, grinding his teeth. He pulled off his gloves, walked across to where Henry pulled up with the wheelbarrow next to Rocher and past them down the tracks back into town. Let them make the casts themselves if they needed them right away.

***

Apnea by Beth

At night she dreams of wet passageways. She dreams the smell of wet iron, the beam of her flashlight shining on wall after wall, moving forward with no promise of an end. She wakes and wakes.

She has promised Carl that when she goes home she will see the doctor. Carl worries. He says sometimes he lies awake and listens to her sleep, wills her to start breathing again, wonders if he should wake her and remind her to breathe. Carl sleeps warm against her, and sometimes the warmth loosens the strained muscles in her back, and sometimes she just wants to shake him off like a heavy blanket, although it gets so cold in the tents late at night. Maybe she sleeps fine, breathes fine, in her bed at home. She doesn’t remember ever waking so often.

Every day the sun streams down as they crouch and pick, brush and blow the dust around. From time to time she looks up at the cloudless sky, tries to rest her eyes. She wishes she could see the sky pure blue, without the little hairs and bits of dust floating in her eye fluid. She wants something that simple.

Day of the Dead

2009-11-30T12:23:00.000-08:00

The Living by Beth

We’d been together a month when she took me out to the suburbs to see her mother’s grave. First she drove by the house where she grew up, pointed out where the new people had changed the fence, replaced the picture window with a bay. She looked for so long the car started to veer onto the other side of the street. I felt bad for not warning her before she bumped the curb, but at least there were no other people around.

The graveyard was huge and the grass was still green, scattered with red and yellow leaves. I’d never seen graves like that, rows of pink or gray granite with granite vases stuck on top of them. I expected her to lead me to one of those, but instead we went into a building with glass doors like a mall and a room with walls of gravestones piled on top of each other like mailboxes.

“I never feel her here,” she said, and I could see why. I couldn’t wait to go back out into the bright sunshine, where at least the graves had different flowers in their vases.

On the way home we were mostly quiet until she said, “I’ll never love anyone like I loved my mom. She was the love of my life.” I rolled down my window then, slowly so as not to make it seem like a comment, and turned my face toward the wind.

***

In Chambers by Michael

There was something too austere about the place, and I was looking for the right handle to pull. Places like this aren’t made without trap doors. I got wondering just then, maybe someone else had the hand on the lever. I might find the trap door alright, but it wouldn’t be through my own accident or cunning. The atmosphere spoke to that, told me that I should pop in to see my maker sometime. He was missing me and might want to see me home safe and sound. Well, not yet. I’m not done here, so don’t try to overwhelm me with your sacred aspects. The only awe I feel is toward my limitless rage. It has no bottom, and cannot be contained. Tonight I find what I am looking for. Solace in blood on the temple floor, on the temple walls; everywhere but the on altar, for that is where I will sleep.

***

How to Remember by Alan

The man who lit the candles lived not too far away. Up maple, and then a left onto…I forget the name of the street. His house was the only one on the block. There are old bikes in the front yard, overgrown shrubs, and a kind of warm smell of neglect when you stare into the photographs of it. That’s one way to remember. Another way is to repair his favorite ladder. They still have it at Rose Hill – the caretakers never use it though. Someone said it would make a great gardening design tool. Lay it down on the ground and dig some holes for flowers, herbs, and plants. The geometry of memory…all lined up and preserved for eternity. Then the plants would grow and grow and wave in the gentles stroking of night wind. Or even breathing, I guess, if one were really close to it...as breath is wont to do to a flame.

***

Language by Lyle

When I found the one I was looking for, number 223, I realized that it was only a number. The candle was lit, but flickered like a moth. Odd that the others were so still. Directly above it, the space had been filled in. I looked around and then knocked on it. Solid. I took a photo — the lights blurring together. I put my hands in my pockets. Voices susurrated down the corridor, along the walls, impossible to understand. I bent down to look closer at the candle. There was writing around the base, tiny, black writing. It looked like Cyrillic or maybe Sanskrit. The corridor moved down in either direction while people studied the numbered spaces. The night outside must have been dark and silent. The dead were nothing but dead.

***

Silence at the Last Place They Find Guiomar by Forrest

Returning visitors withhold silence at the last place they find Guiomar Hector de la Rosa. The guide will take them to the fourth catacomb in the western hall, marking off the twelfth row, then counting up six columns: there remain de la Rosa’s two shin bones. By then, they have already seen his empty sockets peering in the famous Skull Room (confirmed by his well-documented abnormal cranium), his rib cage dawdling in the Hidden Antechamber (a fair chance—five had been broken by his uncle’s design on separate occasions), and his pelvis languishing in the Old Clock Room (supposedly). Scattered unmarked in the three previous catacombs, the rest of de la Rosa. Only these shin bones granted eternal proximity at the fourth next to his beloved Azucena in the adjacent tomb. She often kicked them, the guide has been trained to say, while they slept. The guide will shrug. Perhaps she did not mean to kick his shins, or de la Rosa never complained to her noble face. It has been speculated that he accepted the punishment for this special violation of her family’s patronage. He had studied many such tribulations beforehand. And his personal diary shows, at least, he knew what would fall upon him in the tenuous customs of this region. Today, when the visitors’ shouting commences at the tormented shin bones of Guiomar Hector de la Rosa, they understand they also wake Azucena as well. The guide will not mediate. It is a regrettable interment. She is a poor lady anyway, the visitors will profess as they stand catching their collective breath, waiting for the guide’s further instruction.

***

Untitled by Bill

Shame shame shame you dying, like falling rocks dwindling into silent space like the hidden faces of lovers we hate, of marriage beds we would see burned. On lifeless planets, where little tinkling grains of metallic sands whipped by the wind, shining like stars on the horizon as they race toward you to pick apart the flesh on your skull and the softness of your eyes, can you hear the chants of the believers of a loving god calling for the blood of the abomination. And whose breath motivates those winds? What thoughts awake in gasping dreams? Are you scared, confused, sitting in a tent on the wild-west show looking out at the poor starving children of the people that buried your heart at wounded knee. What do you feel when they grip the lions by their manes to yank back the head, in that instant, tense with friction as a knife to skin before the jerk across?

Let My Window Open the Door

2009-10-05T15:04:00.000-07:00

Construction Equipment by Bill

I feel I must almost throw myself up through that window, to get in there, off this street, out of this open vulnerable air between steepled buildings smelling of incense and a burning, hollow shore lined with drums of fuel. Eyes following me while I have none. I only feel the window, the wind on the panes, the stones under my feet connected to the structure of the frames, the mountings in the wall. Nervous shaking licks of saliva pool on the tip of my tongue and I rub them against the back of my teeth, which I will use to bite them if they come near, the saliva working to keep my teeth cool, from heating up too much while it infects them. I have to get out of the open before I infect them.

***

Through the Never by Beth

A door slamming, the sound of the shot. This kid Hollis, prom committee president, found the body later in a dressing room next to the stage. He got Mr. Harrison and Mr. Harrison saw it too. Months later, Mr. Harrison read us this thing he wrote about it. After that I couldn’t stop picturing the body, slumped against the wall, pale. Veronica said how could we enjoy the prom now, after what happened, but Veronica didn’t know him and neither did I. Neither did Hollis, who smoothed his eyebrows all the time with his fingertips. We could barely even picture him because nobody went to wrestling meets and he didn’t do anything else.

But a lot of kids went to the funeral. They said the casket was plain wood and people wrote messages on it in Sharpie. They said people put bottles of alcohol in there with him, and joints, and Metallica CDs. They said he definitely knew before he did it that they weren’t going to cut the wrestling team after all. But he still did it.

Sometimes the doors slammed like that, made that noise, when it was windy and the language teachers left the windows open. But I think I heard the shot.

***

The Trajectory by Michael

If he is right, then the science, the physics, and the biology will all work themselves out without him having to do anything after initiation. So he sits there and looks up at it from his car, waiting for the right moment, wondering if it will ever come. Maybe later, he'll just drive away, without having done anything. Go back. Except, he realizes, it won't be back anywhere, just a different direction forward; a different initiation. As this idea takes root, and the branches spread in his mind, he places his hand on the ignition key, and leaves it for just a moment, savoring his own indecision and the infinite causes of it. Then he removes the key from the ignition and scratches at his scruff with it. He'll come back tomorrow, and play it again in his mind, and see if this time, it doesn't branch out. He exits the car and stretches. and goddamn it feels good just to stretch out.

***

Window Talk by Alan

“I want to let a little air in.”

“Why?”

“Just because…”

“You realize you’re always doing this.”

“What?”

“Finding ways to subvert the situation…move things around…furniture, books, whatever…feed the plants…you know what I’m talking about.”

“That’s not subversion.”

“Of course it is…”

“I may be doing a little avoiding but definitely not subverting.”

“You’re doing it again.”

“It’s really hot in here.”

“It’s fall in New York. We’re having a warm day. It’s definitely not hot.”

You notice their poising themselves on respective sills, each body a kind of bird - pensive yet remarkably alert.

“Do you realize we’ve known each other for…”

“Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”

They shift a bit to get more comfortable, prepare the curtains for intuited vicissitudes of uncertainty and sun.

A bus passes; you lose track of the conversation, move on.

***

Apologies by Lyle

It wasn’t that only two windows hung open, or that the curtains fluttered just so, obscuring a form — you. It was that the glass panes each had a slightly different quality, a different transparency. I knew it was mostly because of the angle — each one a fraction of a degree different from the ones next to it — but I thought maybe there was something in the age of each pane. Maybe some were new and other were older, the glass sagging slightly like an overripe plum (sorry I ate those, by the way). Gravity never loses. Still seeing you wrapped in that fulvous curtain so lightly made me think of birds. I thought you might alight on the thin metal window frame and disappear around the next building before I could get inside to say that I’m sorry. Gravity is just a fancy way of saying death. But still the birds fool gravity for a while — just like our temporary reprieve from it. Maybe reprieve isn’t the right word. We can still feel its weight, only it hasn’t entirely flattened us out yet. You disappear from the window with hardly a disturbance and my reverie is over like that. There is only my self-reflective guilt flowing out of open windows.

***

Open Windows Opening by Forrest

opening one window opens the window opening to the next window now closing by one open hand that opens them or closes them later or sees later that hand seeing the next open window by opening one window with a closing hand not waving above nor waving to a hand below waving above later at the open window it sees which opens next to the closing window closing the open hand closing it and not seeing the next open window below open the one hand closing over to wave and ask the closing hand below which window to enter later and close the opening window as entering they now see waving does not open windows closing nor waves open hands closing them when seeing below the one hand that does not wave above to enter open

File Cabinet

2009-09-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

Oak Burrs by Forrest

As though led into a true archive, find the paper nest receiving an almost filial attention: common field mouse filing itself away inside the cabinet, the detritus cozy where pointed out. And even it had a name. Fine. That’s fine, the caretaker beams, and, really, the records almost keep themselves. It’s a stone age technology. But it all gets uncovered processed and ascertained. Everyone stays home. This knowledge after six o’clock would seem akin to making peace with leashed demons. Fine checks out. So reach in. Try piercing hardened mold. Lift a card with worst prospect. It’s likely any everyone—just don’t expect the everyone sought. Or do and be faint about it. Be that reasonable.

***

At Least Read the Card, to Remember by Bill
 
Where NAME, the NAME remains un-spelt. Pen-tip touch, line. Unfaded. Incomplete. No mark there. Music somewhere, a series of strings and a few tooting horns, then a long thin line out towards the side, drifting slowly off center. Corners folded. “Don’t fold the corners please Philip." Philip, an idiot put to work entering information in the front office. Mild mannered. Penchant for bending the corners of papers. Will work for an hour or so in unbending dedication transcribing information without a crease. NOK. Unknown. COUNTY EXECUTOR: Line Line Cross. A. Line Bloop Bloop. B.ABERNATHY, H. PLOT 172 DOB 4/1/1892. “Janice, when he is done, have him sort the county admissions.”

Now, the office, waiting. Cedar limbs in the window, moldering bats on the floor.DOD 9/8/1---. MARKER: 172. DOD nothing so much, unreadable, stained. Capillary desecration.

***

Pareidolia by Beth

 
In her long days alone in the rented house, she searches for company. Faces of deer in the knotty pine walls, fat ducks in the kitchen canisters, a bent-backed man in the curve of the stairs.

More tangible signs of people come and gone – a filing cabinet stuffed with index cards, worn-out chairs that bear the imprints of bodies, a small handprint low in a kitchen corner.

She sleeps as late as she can each morning, then lies in bed watching the voile curtain move in the breeze. When it rains she breathes in the smell of wet pines and spruces. She waits until the curtain is darkened with drops, then shuts the window and tries to sleep again.

Afternoons she sits in sunlight on the kitchen floor, next to the handprint. She makes herself small again, trying to see the room with a child’s complete attention. The way the light moves across the linoleum. The way an ant drags a dead comrade. The bloom of cream in her coffee. If she can keep track of things, if the details matter…maybe.

***

The Files on Me by Michael

It probably would've been good to include something true in there. All those identities, mixed up together, they can't have got far looking for me there. But now I wonder why I wanted so much to be lost in that shuffle of paper. It might have been good to leave some hints. A bread crumb paper trail. Now it would seem my only legacy is to be a labyrinth. I got no strings to hold me down, and so off I float, a homeless helium balloon. Looking down, looking back, there's no one looking back. Not at me, but I catch their profiles, catching the shadows I set to play against the translucent rap sheet that makes up what I did in my time here. Or there, I guess, now.
Invisibility was part of it, but it became all of it. Then there was nothing. I didn't exist. That was it.

***

Nishant and the Beach by Alan

Remnants of the blast had Nishant laughing for days.  First it was the fat end of a ubiquitous Garcia tie that just appeared one day not too long ago after Greg and Arto rehashed their younger days in southern Jersey, the edges frayed and darkened.  Then, continuing down memory lane, he came across several boxes of large binding clips emptied like machine gun cartridges.  He could only think of Susanna.  Oh beautiful Susanna…how he never made her smile.  Not once.

In fact, he stayed on the beach in fairly good humor for over three weeks, during which he came across three swivel chairs, incandescent lighting, the hot water knob of a water cooler, and the company file cabinet.  Though a bit worse for wear anyway – and significantly worsened because of the IED – old reliable held up pretty well and almost smiled back at Nishant as he held up his iPhone to block the sun.  

The mobile post: Almost a month after the attack.  Why do I feel so free?  Where r you?

***

Card Weevils and the Clerk by Lyle

The clerk, if you could call him that, filed the photo of the burr oak filing cabinet in the burr oak filing cabinet and left it open.

A worn shoelace against the back of his head held the tortoise shell glasses on the tip of his nose.

Beside the burr oak filing cabinet was another burr oak filing cabinet, the bottom drawer open a couple of inches and the third drawer open nearly a foot. The card weevils had been in it and cards shredded out littering the floor. 

The “clerk” put his tortoise shell glasses into their shagreen case, but removed the shoelace before he did. He formed the end into a noose and put himself in between the two burr oak filing cabinets, the noose loosely laying on top of the cards in the open third drawer.

Burr oak filing cabinets spanned the narrow hall, which disappeared into slits at either ends (one end a black slash, the other a white one). The card weevils had chosen CT-07739 to infest. The clerk did not understand why.

And so the clerk spent his evening waiting for the weevils.

When We Murder

2009-08-24T14:28:00.000-07:00

Lint by Lyle

When the single cloud, white, harmless enough, earlier in the day, had drifted behind the sun, people stopped talking. Instead they began to pick up objects in a display, which I found to be quite despicable, of communication. Television sets went dead, but there were so many things on the ground and low up on the walls. Animals became action verbs while plants were used more sparingly to show passivity (this, of course, was a cultural understanding of the plant). Dryer lint, renewable, and readily obtained became the obituaries. People began to fill buildings with dryer lint and hair, sometimes used in conjunction with each other to produce parcels. People became aware, for the first time, how many people actually die and began to pick up cats with more regularity. This was the beginning of the end. When the buildings overflowed, it marked the end of the beginning of the end. No one knew what would come next.

***

Catkilla by Forrest

Technique, extensive photographic documentation, a show how grabbing feline scruff puts him in it—before the snapping of necks—that feeling satisfied for, up until afterwards, never dwelling on snuffing one despite its sinking teeth into his hand, him sucking on the wound, You know you won’t miss the taste as much as I will, and would he refer maybe to his alley safaris out back, benign catnip bag with cartoonish fish skeleton strung together to a batting stick (filled water-pistol in other hand, cocked-ready-like) though he can’t in his accomplice’s touched-up trophy pic, not for being strictly positive, anonymous at the final moment, however, but just further baiting now with a blast he has among the summer dumpsters, Sunny, yeah, sun’s out you little shit, I’m giving the universal thumbs up here.

***

When We Murder by Bill

My shoulders are so hot I feel like I've a laser mounted on them, like a predator. The heat sits across my forehead and my neck too, a bow fiddling the strings of simmering frustration. The trees look ready to sit down and spread those bright sun-exposed leaves along on the ground, leaving the squirrels to fend for themselves, keeping firemen out of the business of rescuing cats, which they don't really ever do anymore anyway. The clouds are staying away, the coffee is almost done, and I think someone stole our fan.

***

Untitled by Beth

The next morning, the rabbit’s hutch smashed in. Winter so cold the snow squeaked under her mother’s boots, boots too big. She slid bare feet into boots, opened the door that stuck, moved slowly over dry snow to the rabbit hutch, hutch her father made with scraps of wood and chicken wire. Hutch he didn’t make, exactly, but built onto with wood and chicken wire. Hutch of an old rabbit long dead, one she never knew. She knew her rabbit, knew it as well as she could know a caged outside animal. Outside unlike the cat that slept on the patchwork quilt her mother made as a teenager, the cat that pounced and bit her feet through the quilt every night. The snow squeaked under her mother’s boots, the wind blew the skirt of her nightgown, flannel. Morning sun pale in the trees. Rabbit’s water frozen in the margarine container – no need to break the ice for him this morning. No tracks, no blood around the hutch her father made. The cat in the hutch, sniffed around. Chicken wire smashed, the rabbit gone.

***

Little Story from a Picture by Michael

There were certain things that were encouraged when he was growing up. They were accepted things, often considered rites of passage. Mostly, it seemed, people around him did these things without thought and basked in the attentive acceptance that came with doing them. He basked, too; he loved the attention and accolades as much as anyone. But at night he would grind his teeth in his sleep and have unsettling dreams.
He was generally considered a good sport. It stood out that he asked too many questions, but most wrote this off as a mild slowness on his part; a need to have everything spelled out. Really, he was stalling. He hoped, prior to whatever new task was set before him, that someone would provide for him a good, or at least practical, reason for doing what he was about to do. He pried about alternatives once or twice, but the uncomfortable silences and condescendingly patient raised eyebrows caused him to laugh off his own ideas of how things should be done. This last time, he had done that. He would never do that again. He wasn't sure if he would ever do anything ever again.
It was still twitching when he posed for the shot. It wasn't a being anymore, it was just a thing. The shutter clicked, and they murmured their approval, and encouraged whatever modest showboating he numbly engaged in. But he could feel it melting down his face. Until his face wasn't his anymore and it slipped over his shoulders and down his arms, chest, back. He felt it leave him, and he didn't think it was coming back. And the spasms ended and the thing in his hand and the thing he now was stood there, both surely unaware. That was it.

***

Fuzzy by Alan

I want to smile at the thought of this. I want to shake out the lightning that is inside all of our heads. Make it real. Something you can touch, feel. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you. There’s an impulse inside every lover that wants to undo everything that has been done. There’s a desire to unravel that pervades the bedrooms, the locker rooms, the long drives of our pasts, presents, and futures. It’s a little funny sometimes and tickles the small of your neck.

If I were a kitten and this impulse were my mother, it would drag me around to new places. It would keep me away from danger. Yes, it would. Fires, potential drowning, the Doberman up the street. It would transform my understanding of what’s immediate, what’s misunderstood, it would provide definitions. But when hungry, alone, pensive – the mother and life together for the first time…that cute little face (mine, yours)… I mean really together – the shock of it, yes, the shock of it might send one back, far back, so far that the unraveling will be unraveled, the reality will be fiction (not complete), the error now a ghost.