End

As you may have noticed, we haven't had stories for quite some time. That's because after seven years of working on this project, we've decided to take a hiatus.

Here are some final thoughts about the project.

Thanks for reading.

We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

FIN, POSTCARDS (Alan)

I actually thought it would never end. The work had become like a practice anyway, a kind of breathing mantra we'd forget about and then an imaginary finger would point at it and it would get back on a to-do list and focus up. I did, however, imagine that we would someday actually all meet up and talk about what we made or read our favorite pieces. I suppose that could still happen, but who knows. Time is moving faster than ever these days, and the middle of multiple points seems farther and further away in this country. But we're a good bunch, and I'd like to see it happen for sure. Dim light is a necessity. And probably a beer. I'd also love for it to exist in hard copy form too. Make a book out of it. Yes. What an antiquated thought, right? Or if not antiquated, so provincial, in a way, no? Who the hell reads except the people you know who do? I do know a few who write though.


There is evidence of reading because there is evidence of rubbing off on each other. There is more to this last piece than meets the eye, but that is a conversation for another essay for another day or project, perhaps. I enjoyed the reading as much as the writing, actually. And as a poet mostly and one who works primarily in figurative and cropped reconfigurations of experience and sentiment, it was pretty cool to think in terms of narrative and then see that thinking get turned on its head by others in the group.

In terms of writing, I followed the rules for the most part. I remember Lyle and I had spoken about this idea of making it open/inventive and, especially, quick and under ten minutes or whatever. I immediately went Beat with the whole thing, and then new aesthetics starting informing the work. Pretty soon, five to ten minutes became more like fifteen to twenty or even more. But when I got conscious of it, it snapped back into place. Adjustment and stretch. Breath. It's sounding more and more like a yoga practice as I continue to remember it and write about it now.

What did we make? Love, I think. We made love. We made intentions and fulfilled them, and that is in and of itself an act of love. It can also manifest as an act of hate (some will say fear?), but thankfully we chose not to do that. In many ways, the actual products of our intentions almost don't matter. I mean, they do, obviously - and they are rad and flat and thoughtful and mischievous and crafty and everything in between - but the process seems to hold more weight while I'm writing this now. The process made me more conscious of the voices I let enter and inhabit my work and the values I express in my writing. The process made me think deeply about my present and time and the relationships around me. All this stuff sounds really private, and it is (and there are rooms within rooms within even more private rooms, still), but it's taking the intensely private and holding it up into the light that may ultimately teach us the most about ourselves. I'm thankful to have taken part in the exploration, these necessary lifts out of the routines that we think are so essential to the glue and binding of life only to be proven wrong again and again.

13 Rules of Flash Fiction (Johanna)

1. Flash fiction is a story under 500 words.
2. I used to write at a desk, but I gave up on proper posture and now I write in a chair from Ikea with upholstery dyed blue. My laptop is hot on my lap.
3. In Taos, speaking with strangers is discouraged, especially old hippies with long beards. You will inevitably find yourself stuck in an endless conversation about a variety of conspiracies regarding aliens, vaccines, the government and chem trails.
4. My daughter is not often nice to me. My mother says we are exactly alike. I work hard to make her laugh. She’s nine.
5. Flash fiction requires succinct language.
6. I like to handwrite all my stories first and then type them up. I also print photos and put them in albums. I listen to vinyl. Millennials think analog is cool. I try to explain that cassette tapes suck and always have.
7. In Taos, all the buildings are either made of clay or have facades plastered with clay to look like they are made of clay. The clay comes from the ground. It peels off the walls in the harsh mountain climate-- the freezing winter sun and the parched summer sun.
8. My daughter, born and raised in these mountains and clay buildings, gives the old hippies names—Slim Jim, Dog Face, Hobo Jo. She says, “I feel bad for people with bad parents who grow up to be hobos.” I wonder if she will be a hobo when she grows up.
9. Flash fiction must imply what is not said.
10. I wait a day to reread what I type, to check that the language conveys the story I meant for. Sometimes I discover a new narrative, a new implication, and I add words to draw it out from the paragraph. Then I wait another day.
11. Taos Pueblo is the oldest inhabited building in the United States. Some families have lived here for a thousand years. There is a lake so sacred, you must belong to the tribe to visit.
12. My tribe is in diaspora. I’ll never belong here. Belonging doesn’t exist in my DNA. I come from generations of immigrants and I have passed our displacement to my daughter.
13. Flash fiction saves the climax for the end of the story and often adds a twist.
14. When the story finally finds its infinite form, it spirals out from the center to return to the center. Only then do I know I am done.

Et al. (lyle)

2017 turned out to be a shitty year. Alienation, decrepitude, decimation. But I'm being melodramatic -- I know. One of the most difficult things was deciding to call it quits with PFC. I hope that we'll all have the heart to start it up again or try something new. We will... We will.

Idea

Idea by Alan

When Winston met Julia in the vacant dormitory, the expectation was to simply exchange the bags they had prepared several months before the election. Intending to exercise their pragmatic selves, they planned through a series of coded notes they posted at midnight on the third Monday of each month this most anticipated rendezvous. In the bags were sets of clothes that would have the proper donation tags so as to seem innocuous enough for the authorities who would surely go through them at some point. There was an influx of surveillance activity in the region recently, and everyone who mattered was a bit more vigilant.

But the weight of the meeting got the better of their even temperaments. They kissed as they went through the articles. First the creases of the skirt and then the brim of the hat. Not one but both pairs of socks next (simultaneously) and then the undershirts and cargo pants. They took time to investigate each other's pockets and redresses. An arm hung a blouse over what may have been a clock in a previous life. The hands ticked in pre-measured circles.

There would come a time when the rules that once governed the countries of our hearts would bear such inconceivable weights that breaking would be, at last, the only way to go on and, indeed, the truest evidence that life as we once knew it was officially over. But at least for this fantastic meeting, Winston and Julia were free. At least, that was the idea.

***

Building a Fire by Sherisse

And then there's a spark. Closer to the bone than you can bear. In Ulster County, you are all cupboards and stuffed love seats as the cat creeps in to boast about autonomy. In hindsight, a kettle boils. A steel spoon makes the liquids mix, clicks against the curves of paper-thin glass. The honey has gone missing, ash and wax in its place. 

From her new bed, my mother talks about mayonnaise sandwiches until she trails off into sleep. I am a six-year-old again, waiting on the gray concrete steps outside for her to wake up. How I love to be her orphan.

When Fidel dies, I feel little more than inner quiet. My grandmother appears that night wearing a regal suit jacket. She has left the cigar and sniper rifle at home, wherever that now is (or was). She isn't in the mood to fight but she will if she must. She is large, all witness and looming eyes. 

"You smell like you're pregnant," the sages say to me. This hamlet we’re in is full of wood and leaves and rain. I am gathering my tools when they hang me in my smock-dress to bloom, to plump up like a floriferous peony.

The sages sit around the dominoes table; they pray for my wild hair to finally tame, finally turn straight.

***

Here Here by Bill

Here’s the idea. Here’s the thing. Here’s Johnny. Here’s where we start. Here’s where it stops. Here’s where it inflates to an impossible size so the hearts and minds of the ogres in the hill are brought to a piece of earth suffused with light slicing up from the edge of the leaves. Here the lessons we learn bring us to the doors of a church, to the shores of a river, to the end of a rope or to a metal table in a basement. Here’s how you call the meeting to order. Here’s how you order men and women to their death.

Here’s the side of the field I need you to cover and here’s the paints you will use to make the portrait he will lock away at the utmost point of the house hidden from view. Here’s the table where she will rewrite the name of god. Here are the Star-Makers. Here are the fierce edges of sight scanning the halls of the forest as the lines between what is and what is not fade, when the walls between where we are and where we’ve been and are going pass into a thin mist, then nothing, calling all things to creep up the sides of the abyss to clarity and definition until the universe is centered at all points, the circle closed, the thought complete, here, where it ends.

***

Digression by Lyle

I thought about leaving a book inside the hollow of a tree stump. I don't know what would have happened to it, but here's what I think. It rotted. It sat there for perhaps a year until it was no more than the stump itself. And then the stump was extracted like a tooth that has turned in the gums -- green and brown and cloying and soft. Thus leaving a hollow of it's own -- a divot in the earth, filled eventually by the pools of time. The black squiggles in the book nothing themselves but ideas. Ants contained in their glass house with no one watching them. They don't get out of there, I can tell you that much. But I digress. Inevitably, I digress. May I go now?

The Game

---

Ramon and Majik by Alan

If it were less of a game, the conditions surrounding Ramon Soledad's silence would be interpreted as a grave beguiling, a heavy occupation of a vaguely familiar country's capital by dissidents who had had enough of the corrupt president's shady ties to the significantly larger juggernaut next door. If it were more of a game, the weight wouldn't sit so squarely in the chest first and then in the mind and then, like clockwork, back into the chest again as if it too were breathing long and disparate measurings of time and space. Instead, it lived somewhere in the middle, where only the most daring of our kind will venture to go.

Of course, several of Majik's acquaintances cautioned of such ambivalence. They said it would lead to hesitation and disrupt the general flow of life. Like a man uncertain crossing a busy street, the ripples would extend out and rub against neighborly convictions. There may be accidents in the crosswalk. People would get mad at him and at others. Especially in inclement weather.

But to him, there seemed no other way. To him, there was that very field (between "love wins" and "love fails" was one way of marking it) that a mentor had shown him once and now forever wedged beneath the open door. To him, Ramon was and might forever be both lost and found, an imprint upon whatever constitutes the idea of the soul in modern life. He was always and never there, burgeoning yet pressing against the walls of the invisible aquariums we set around us. He was the room without doors, both inside and out. And because of this, he was the most dangerous of all the terrorists Majik had come to know and love, the most dangerous and (in those in between spaces) the most indispensable. The most made up thing of which he could ever conceive and the most true in that gorgeous making.

***

Lesson by Sherisse

The game was always on in summer. Her kitchen. The perfume-scented heat from the clothes dryer. All the mothers asleep. No one speaking openly about God.

Outside it’s dark; through a low window the legs of people walking to and from the avenue. Grandfather is playing dominoes at the social club. Grandmother pulls out a piece of blank paper, two pens. The smell of lemon and cinnamon and condensed milk.

In a dream you are in a bed not necessarily your own. Mother is clipping your nails and hair. Her lover is hiding in the bathroom. Your legs ache, ears burn. There are doctors lining up to treat you.

You start to forget what you know; you remember things out of order; you make muses out of strangers.

The game is the background noise of nightly living, soundtrack of housework, the end of Communism. You fall in love with all the great mysteries. This kitchen as church, the magic of some faceless saint.

Carmen tells you the story of the body like this: bare feet, clothes on the table, nail polish, Solitaire. Go where you wish, she says through her mouth and laughing she leaves you alone with her roses.

***

Some Baseball Stories by Forrest

This is a story about baseball that must take its cue from other stories about baseball. A game of men and weapons and lines and empty spaces. It is something like the ancient boardgame of Go, if the fans can think of the players as blank stones upon which only allegiance is written and forget that baseball only has twenty-five men to a team. In that case, baseball is very much like Go. Perhaps it is too much like Go. Perhaps baseball is not as original as the fans believe. The first-baseman has to be crying about something, so why can't it be that. There is nothing sadder than a story about baseball where a player is sad because he realizes mid-game what an unoriginal sport baseball is, remembering a deceased Japanese grandfather with whom he played Go and always lost to because the guy was relentless, even with his grandchildren. He was a real bastard, this first-baseman thinks, which is a comparable trope to other stories about baseball he knew. Perhaps too many stories. There should be a story where the shortstop makes a routine throw to first base but the first-baseman refuses to make the catch because he decides the lack of originality in his life has become too much to bear. Yes, he likes the idea of this story: allegiance cast aside, blank stone comes to life and renounces all forms of bastardy, especially as it relates to allegorical warfare. His orbital socket will need mending, but that's all good. He won't take marching orders from some lousy unoriginal story. The fans can go screw themselves, too, he decides as the boos cascade down upon him. Those nets behind home plate aren't for anyone's protection. They're another insult.

***

I Have Learned to Live on Memories by Lyle

America's pastime. So I'm reminded. So I'm dated. It all sounds so wooden. I can't eat ballpark franks anymore. So I've taught myself to survive on memories. Little snippets of hoof and ass. It's been months since I've even parted my lips for water. I remember the run to the World Series and let the beer spill into my lap, forming a little pool -- that smell -- the memories moisten my pants and thus my lips. Remember that I am dated by pastimes, here. Watching home runs nourishes me, a bit of salt from a stone. Almost imperceptible. Almost. Almost a memory is still a little salt on a stone. I have no confidence in this, though I watch my games, though I pick the cotton candy from children's sticks when they are not watching, though I am reminded as I sleep dreaming of baseball. Of a pastime stretching out into mindless, pure blue sky.

Fortune

(photo © Alan Semerdjian && sculpture © Eileen Karakashian)

Dregs by Forrest

One of the very last things he said to me before he died was, I'm never cleaning this cup out. He took it off the table and placed it in the cupboard with all the clean dishware, and there it would sit forever in filthy repose, if I believed him. But he died soon after this so I didn't have the opportunity to find out if he would keep his word. I nearly asked his family at the funeral if they had come across any unwashed coffee cups when tending to his personal effects. Nothing good would've come from that, I figured. His sister, in particular, seemed overwhelmed by the number of inquiries made about him, his failing health, what had he been working on, why his wife had taken the kids and was nowhere to be found. These, I thought, were good questions. Much better than mine. And over the next few days, I felt incredibly foolish for my boiling down in memory all the pleasant moments spent with him into a dirty coffee cup. That cup had meant that much to him dirty, and I was there. Did this mean there was something about me that made the cup so important then. Sometimes, however, I think that was the day he decided to give up. It just wasn't worth the hassle anymore. He was letting it all go, and it really wasn't important. Neither was I. It will be an adjustment, to be sure, but I'm willing to have other people understand less about me if they stop asking his sister so many questions. She was never skilled at creating distractions for herself.

***

Fortune Telling by Alan

To overcome some great sadness, the feathered thing will rise from the ashes and circle the sky seventeen times. After, rain might fall. Or perhaps what I see are little bundles of tears. Or money. Or children. Yes, they are faces after all.

The curse that was mentioned last year when you were ten is still in play only now it has transformed into flowers. Be careful about the need to bend over and smell them. Be careful about bending over. See here, in the corner. The man that bends is surrounded by volcanoes. Above him and to his side. There’s a trail that was left from the last eruption. That’s where the flowers grow. That’s what he’s searching for.

Because it’s summer, at some point there will be fireworks. Yes, yes. This is where they will start. In the thickest part. Bring it to your lips to taste the earth. Near a river in the northwest part of an island. It’s a little dark, but I imagine when the sky clears up…wait a moment. What’s this? Oh no, no, no. Vartuhi, can you believe this? Come Sona, look at its size. Do you see the eye, Sevak? I almost missed it, but from this angle it looks larger than life. Someone is watching you. Scratch your ass to keep the bad spirits away. What’s that you say? You want the spirits? Here? Now?

***

Future Seeing by Sherisse

He wanted to show her what he knew. Always the good friend. The light was on, the air conditioner off, rain coming down hard and making everything outside blink. The plants on the table had gone to sleep for the night. “Give me your hands,” he said. “You can tell a lot just by looking at the nails, like how far you've walked and through what desert.” She imagined it was something much more banal, like whether she chewed or filed or painted them and, if so, what color. What that revealed about her femininity. This was already boring to her, tedious. She wanted to hide. He could tell something had faded in her. He tried harder to be entertaining. She let out a deep sneeze and, embarrassed, she said in a timid voice: “Oh, please excuse me.” Making something out of nothing. If this were a first draft, she would have thrown it in the garbage. She switched her hands after the sneeze. He giggled and was amused. He wanted to make the moment more real somehow, to make an imprint, to be remembered by her. “When you were a little girl, someone hurt you very badly,” he said. She looked away; she had not given him permission to touch that place. “Now what?” she asked, her eyes challenging him. She didn't know how to swim, had no intention of learning. “Now I tell you how to repair it,” he said softly. Repair what, she wanted to know. “The thing that's knotted,” he said softly. She pictured an ancient tree, a fallen limb beyond fixing. “No. Not like that,” he said. “Together we close our eyes. We locate the heart and ask it what it wants.” The word permission came to her mind. She'd been handed a permission slip. The dissolution of some old heartbreak? She felt utterly naked, kept her eyes shut for what felt like a very long time. Her skin was hot, everything was red, on fire, glowing, spinning. There was more to say to him, certainly, and to herself. If this were a first draft she would title it before throwing it in the trash. So much to say that, for now, it demanded silence, cynicism even. She freed herself from his grip, looked at her hands. Her fingernails were long, without color. She was aware of her breathing, the oranges in the basket on the kitchen table, her tongue pressing against the roof of her mouth.

***

Pyrotechny by Lyle

When I looked up from my cup of coffee, the fireworks had started. Maybe they’d been going on for quite some time. I couldn’t see them from where I was, but I could hear them thudding in the distance. Occasionally one of the few slow-drifting, dark-grey clouds would light up — it’s belly orange for a split second. But mine wasn’t a fascination of pyrotechny in action, rather it was the pre-detonated state. All of that potential so quiet, so grainy. I reached into my cup and pinched some of the fine coffee grounds lining the bottom of the cup between my index finger and thumb. Rubbing it there I considered the Hot Wells Coffee factory explosion. How unpatriotic to disturb that latent energy. How unpatriotic that we watch fireworks instead of mounds of gun powder! We should consider the mockingbird before it takes flight — sitting quietly in the tree before song bursts forth. That is the symbol that must be considered, but perhaps after another cup of coffee.

Storage

Beginner by Sherisse

I’d like to go back to the fractured knot of silence, the rental furniture dimly lit, un-mended kitchen light bulb. That vacation spot in winter, the faraway and steady hum of bridge traffic, uncertain and queasy inventiveness, the pause before the tug of that boat⎯obligation.

Imagine you can’t bring the car or your shoes. You can’t tell her that she’s a product of exile, tan fea y tan contenta, or a damsel in distress. You can’t dance in the disco while high on anise and elderflowers. Or talk under a table about poems on fire, hard fingers reaching for a lick.

Imagine some long list of things to recount, the absence of witnesses, my redundant use of the triad. Imagine the anonymous hand cutting the sentence in half, emptiness that later blooms into ashes transported across oceans.

And imagine the old people that brought us here, below the big bed a stash of hand tools; recycled Danish cookie tins; a collection of quarters for spending at the casino or county fair.

“This, here,” you said, arriving and splayed and already on the way to tidying up. Only once, these elaborate deaths, particular coordinates. From now on I’d like to play the part of hysterical, bereft.

***

So You Try to Build a Wall around It by Alan

I ask the gentleman about it and he politely excuses himself. In the bathroom, I imagine, he’s reminded of his last escape and makes sure the drop is not enough to break a leg this time. Meanwhile, I eat through my own jail cell while someone laments over a Chapman Stick thick with delay.

Days later, I pretend to be frozen on my parents’ lawn. Having decided that they’d have to sell the place like so many others have gone on and done, we settle on emptying out the garage to tidy things up a bit. The visitors come like dial up (end of a court, no time for signage), but the idea lights of the suburbs for miles. It’s a storage facility. I have a tag hanging from a cuff. I wish you were here on sale too.

On the loneliest of islands is a harbor where all the boys and girls would go to kiss and smoke cigarettes and get away from the calendar for a while. Here the secrets that crawled in between garments would bite later and eventually but leave no visible mark. Instead the bump and gong of boat material against wave and itself, others. Some fool decided to build a wall around it.

My history and your history and everybody’s history rides through the night sky on the backs of meteors. And if you think we’re going to crash into a ground someday, you’re probably right. But I want to add that the ground is not solid enough to contain our histories, love. The ground is no stopping place for comets like us.

***

Now pass the wine by Lyle

Is it too late, once there’s blood in your wine, to contemplate god or some semblance thereof? If you own storage, is it too late to consider life at home? What about after the lights go out? Are your prayers overdue (but not before)? Has the chance gone to say I love you? How will I know? That dividing line that is all or nothing? Can monogamy be rekindled once the flame of syphilis has burned out? How long before all the stars are counted? Surely you will balk at all of these questions. There is not even the space for you to answer them. What if I say I’m sorry? When you read this (though I know you will not), will you be filled with anger? Surprise? Disgust? Or is it even too late for any of that? And when was it too late?

Answer carefully. Your life depended on it once the question was asked.

***

Delicate Invitations by Bill

This plane seems ordinary. Painfully so in so many ways. The lines are so often straight, collecting perpendicular angles into collapsed too small spaces, bringing what is naturally rare mundanely to wide true vistas and coaxing shadows into definite shapes. They pillared the world with uniformity.

They would be tried and charged to the end of existence if this were the merest conception of their enterprise and our initial verdict was nearly such. We must have standards after all.

But worlds exist within worlds stretching between infinities running in every direction and you do not see and what I have found inside these straight lines of ubiquity are a thousand oceans from long dead worlds suspended in air in the clear light teaming with life.

Architecture

© Sherisse Alvarez

Ascent by Sherisse

The glass door had a neon yellow sign above it that lit up the sidewalk. It read: FOOT & BACK RUB. There was a framed poster hanging of a young woman wearing a bikini and an orchid in her hair. A video was playing in the second floor window: two hands pressing firmly into skin as if it were dough. This massage spot was near the subway right above Palermo Fish, between the shoe repair and the post office. All the shops were closed now but the street smelled smoky and stale from the meat and onions piled up in food carts. You could still hear the train rattling overhead. Some guys at work had told me about this place; they said for twenty bucks you could get a “happy ending.” I was sore from all those hours at the nursing home bathing men twice my size. I wanted something extra before going home to my roommate and his silence. I didn’t want beer and chips and porn. I was sick of the hangovers and shitty headaches in the morning. I was tired of the pills and the doctor’s visits and the leg cramps. I’d never gotten a massage and my palms were sweaty. What if I farted in the damn middle of it? I decided to call the number on the door. A man answered and when I asked if someone was free, he said with a heavy accent, “Okay, okay, come now, yes, we see you soon, okay, okay” and hung up. I checked my wallet to make sure I had cash. I pushed open the glass door and stepped inside. I could hear something like music coming from the massage parlor upstairs, the sound of water and bells and birds. When I got to the top of the stairs I saw a fish tank and some tiny frogs in a bowl. Two women scurried off and the man said, “Hello, friend” and pointed with his hand to a small, dark room. I went inside and he closed the curtain behind me, leaving me alone. I felt too tall and scrawny and pale. Too bald. I took off my shoes and placed my socks inside, then I set my jeans and underwear and t-shirt on the metal chair. I got on the table and put my face in the doughnut shaped pillow. My stomach growled because I hadn’t had lunch. My dick was hard. I thought about Vili, one of the nurses at the home, and how she liked to play Solitaire in the lunchroom on her break. And Chase, my roommate, eating microwaveable meals in his room in front of the TV every night. I felt a chill from the curtain opening and closing and then I heard the beeping of a timer being set. The girl covered me with a towel then coughed before she ran her hands down my back. I could feel her long hair brushing against the side of my neck. Through the doughnut hole I could see her feet, her short white socks and plastic slippers. They squeaked as she moved. I tried to close my eyes but felt like I was falling.

***

Can't be sure by Lyle

We weren't sure at first if he was dead. Or that we understood anything about it.

There must have been precedence, but not any of which we were aware. Someone brought out Robert's Rules of Order; it was, unusually, unhelpful. Debate-VII 43 was pretty close, but...

After the meeting -- unresolved -- I went home. The next day I went to my mother's husband's service (funny possessive, that). We chatted with his daughters about the weather. So much snow -- it doesn't matter.

But later, as I descended the stairs from the x street stop, the black slushy snow piled up next to the street -- it had frozen and unfrozen time and again and I un-understood.

***

A Close Accumulation by Bill

Lord Vairochana comes to escort you between the straits. He whispers in your ear the sound of wings. The words are without meaning, shapeless as thought. But the air around you is filled with feathers.

Many birds can be heard because the words did not form in the mind but in space and the intangible walls take form and draw between them a door. The light is unbroken, the shadows full because this in-between has no time for separations.

Colors cannot exist. The wind is full roaring outside and the stillness oppressive inside such that the table in the corner explodes from the pressure. It is here and now that you stare.

***

The Architect by Alan

Inside the head, the architect spins a web, takes on the shape of a fear, and a few other unnamed provinces. For what is this life if not directions from angels meant for entrances via staircases. The young get younger as we never age at the top staring down. The light is our flattened halo.

Before any bottom is the drop. Before any swallow is the mouth. Gentle, swallow...he is new to this taking. Patience, swallow...there is no true hungry mother waiting to steal away your kill to feed her cub.

The final draft may go like this: he may turn one way or the other, but he must never be afraid of the dark or the edge of a crop. For the time being, he will sit at no desk while investigating the middles. One is a path he sees (through dim light) from time to time. The other is that very room in which he both drew and lost his heart.

***

Architecture by Johanna

Before this, the mountains called her down and drew her into their belly where she found a small house made of bricks. Each year, for one hundred years, a brick came loose from the architecture and she used the clay from earth to replace its mortar. Inside the house, she built a fire. She threw in every bit of paper she could find. Photos from childhood, books of poetry and her passport were the first to incinerate. Later, she burned the toilet paper. There was nothing left to burn.

She rubbed her face in the cold embers. She ran in the yard and splashed in the mud puddles She turned cinder grey and adobe brown. She called to the coyotes to join her. The coyotes mistook her for one of their own, until the moonlight revealed that she was only human.

She returned to the house and took a brick from the wall. She ate it crumble by crumble until it filled her belly with its weight. She felt full and grounded. She ate another. She ate the whole house, which rebuilt itself inside her gut, the fire rekindled. She was still hungry. She took a bite from the mountain. She ate and ate, but the mountain did not change. She climbed to the top and reached to the sky. She pulled down the stars. One by one she ate the stars, but there were never any fewer. She walked to the ocean and drank and drank until she was finally full.

On the shore, she fell asleep. In the moonlight, her skin glowed iridescent. The moon called to her, mistaking her for a star. The tide pulled her out into the belly of the sea. When she awoke, she was cold and wet. She turned herself inside out and sat by her hearth. She blew great puffs of stardust at the fire until it exploded, and the cosmos consumed her completely. A single speck of ash floated down to the mountains and fell through an ancient fissure. The last known particle of her breath settled.

Spirits

Playing with Spirit by Sherisse

There were spirits in the house. All around, you said. The doctor was called in. They gave you little pills in big bottles. Your hair fell out. You were still beautiful.
Or, perhaps if you had come to me as a woman...
I don't know what the deal is with the ligaments, tendons, or the lemon in the water. It hurts. It hurts very much when I use the semi-colon. There's space between the land and us and it's all right here.
Words are for spirits. Grandmothers. Hair pins. Cervical spine.
You went there and were so very pretty. In the interim. Dot, dash, delicate as a furry lick. Fox.
Come again, spirit, to the palm of a hand. Break into pieces, break, break, break into nothingness before the curl of goodbye. Pin me to that moment.
Spirit is for romance. Music in the hollow of the contractor or the silence at the other end of an e-mail. Discussion. Thursday, then.
Items: font, air, follicle. Spirit is for muse. Spirit is for banal and bendy truths. So ticklish, in your grip. Hello again, hello.
I could go on like that for strings. Long elbow-bends. Into regret and asterisks. Into such goof. Lend me the play and in springtime I will wear it.
Rheumatoid ladybug. All up my sleeve.
Where does breath go? I'm wanty for white space and un-editing.
A man is at home, turning carrots into soup.

***

Top of the Stares by Alan

To walk into a room and. The dipoff led to a drop that was about. She had no care for stairs, but that was the only way to. Look, I’m not telling you to, yet. Instead of a flashlight, he flashed some form of.

It was a haunting, this. We are told we meet all manner of people when. We are told not to deny them and then. Follow the middle way as stuff arises in. If this sounds familiar, it is because. Searching these dark rooms for traces, for. Wisdom, the voice, its echo – a family unit since. I, by.

It is in the story that we will finally begin although. We will read and reread what has been written so as. The top of the stares, another. Should the height dislocate you, find footing beside. We must not look down or up, only. If fonts could speak, what conversations throughout. What conversations against and within. Everyone is partial sometimes over.

***

Wind by Lyle

Vitex trees curved under the insistence of the wind outside the window that day that we first met. And again on our last meeting. Neither of us doubted that it would end, but the wind — so insistent, so hegemonic — both times! That was something to dwell upon. The way it picked through the leaved while forcing to inflection boney limbs. That we were in a hollowed out whiskey tank hardly crosses my mind — the dim whiskey glow of filament bulbs. That crystalline glint in your eyes as we talked to death, us. I just remember that wind, the wind up and release. It’s windy now, you know. You don’t know — insensible as you are in the wrinkles of my brain. I believe also that there are gusts there that occasionally blow you about like an empty beer can. But the wind doesn’t blow the wind — that at least is a constant. If there was nothing to blow around, what difference the wind? How you used to complain about my complaining about the wind! Remember? That IS the wind, blowing unto itself. You are no longer you. You have been blown ragged, the cracks in your face filled with sand. The tank, as we entered, said SPIRITS above the entrance. I remember that. But now I remember the wind instead of you.

***

Spark Joy by Johanna

Once the Konmari had taken over, there was little she could do to release it, but to clean. From every dark cabinet corner, she wiped, dusted, swept and whistled away the accumulation of years of solitude. She had lived in her house for so long that some corners had been forgotten. She found a shard of sea glass in the bottom of the drawer where she kept her playing cards and had no recollection of its origin. She held it loosely in her palms and focused all of her attention toward it. She let go of any reason that might seek to supersede her intuition and decided that, yes, this miscellaneous shard of sea glass did spark joy.

In the far recesses of her linen closet, she found her childhood doll, Mimsy, the one with the missing eye, the one she held onto since childhood, hauling it from apartment to apartment, wrapped in tissue paper. She held it quietly and to her surprise discovered there was no joy. She let the doll go. Someone else could love it more. She did not cry. In fact, she felt relief, amazing relief. She felt more encouraged than ever to complete her task. The Konmari spirit was strong in her.

No corner could hide from her cleansing hand. For every shelf, cabinet and niche she tidied, another would appear—darker, dustier and more crowded than the last.

And when she was done, she sat in the quiet and waited. The whole house felt light enough to drift aloft into the ether, to release her of all her earthly burdens. She waited three days before she began again. The Konmari spirit never rests.

***

Hit On by Bill

Robert Cawling thought he saw the shape of his dream inside. He took a step and as his foot touched down he felt a spark in the sole of his foot. He wanted to stop but he took another step before he could help it and his other foot landed hard and echoed along inside. Now he tried to stop again and could not, his leg moving heavy and slow it lifted itself and came down a step higher with great noise like two stones punched together. And again his leg moved though he could barely flex it it had grown so stiff and solid.

Speakers Corner

Cornered by Johanna

Hush, she whispered.

The closet was dark except for the lines of light that shone through the cracks in the door panel. I could make out the silhouette of clothes draped over hangers. The smell of mildew burned my eyes and caused tears. Or maybe it was the pressure of her hand over my mouth as we crouched on the floor. Or maybe it was fear.

Outside the closet door, the men rustled through our belongings. I was asleep when mother grabbed me and carried me in there with her to hide. I didn’t know what they were looking for. I couldn’t ask her. I hoped they weren’t looking for us. I hoped they didn’t want whatever else was in the closet with us. But then the door unhinged and I watched a pair of muddy boots step forward as mother pulled me back. I felt the corner of a box, maybe one used to store out-of-season shoes or old photo albums, stab into my back, but I didn’t dare complain.

I was sure he would hear our breath or my heartbeat. My heart was so loud in my head I thought the whole room echoed with its vibration.

He rapidly pushed aside the clothes. A shirt fell to the floor and landed at mother’s feet. I thought for sure then that he would see us. Another man called out, and the muddy boots turned briskly away. There was silence then. The quietest kind. Quieter than the dark closet, quieter than my internal organs, quieter than snow.

Mother released her grip and sighed.

***

The Steps Up the Mountain by Bill

We settled on the mountain looking down and saw the seasons turn below us. We settled on the mountain to watch the stars in the night spin away in the heavens. We settled on the mountain and watched the stones and the stones watched us back. We sat there and stopped thinking of where we had come from, where the old king had been born and marched ahead of his columns as the body and mass of it moved away further and further, climbing high into the thin air full of wind. We listened to stone and wind. We were still but moving.

We sent a message to the forest people down below. Give us your treasure.

Eventually their response arrived. They sent their old woman back up the hill without a horse because the rocks might be found too treacherous and they could not ride one anyway for that is something we had learned after we marched away. The rams who leapt among the rocks lived too high for them to catch and tame, and the rams would not let them ride in any case so she came slowly but sure, steady on her sturdy legs. She came wrapped in scarves and her fur and glasses over her one good eye and the other fixed with a patch. She came up the mountain and passed through the walls and all of the people talked about the treasure but few followed her out of their fear. She entered the castle we had raised up on top of the stone and walked up to the king. He stared up at her and she down at him with her good eye. She swiped her paw across his neck and tore out his throat. Blood ran down his chest and she ripped open his ribs and ate his heart.

She turned to look at me and I did not know if she would kill me too. She reached out her bloody paw and touched my face leaving the bloody mark. She walked back out of the throne room with the blood still wet on her muzzle, the treasure delivered, a grandmother’s duty to her family fulfilled.

***

Speaker Before and After by Sherisse

I was set to quit. The walls had started closing in on me. Sitting in my desk chair hurt every bone in my body. I'd had many dreams about my boss screaming in meetings and jerking off in boardrooms. The day I planned to tell him I was leaving, my dog died in the corner of my kitchen. I took off so I could bring his body to be cremated. When I went back to the office my boss hugged me and I knew I didn't yet have the balls to tell him I was done. He wasn't all bullshit. He had a heart sometimes too. He'd been in the army. He'd seen stuff. A few days after Darby died, my parents called to say they were getting divorced for a second time, my brother went into rehab and my niece told me she was having an abortion. I went home that Friday and considered never leaving the house again. On Monday I went in and my boss didn't know who I was. My co-workers didn't know who I was. Had I changed that much? No. I had gotten new glasses and my wife had threatened to leave if I didn't get help but I was still the same man. "It's me," I said, "Howard. I've worked in HR for eight years." Nothing. Blank stares. Security was called, then the police. I was handcuffed, stuffed into the back of a cop car, searched at the station. I wasn't a ghost. I had just run out of time.

***

Cornered by Forrest

One of the worst things about Speaker's Corner, other than that the street lights have never worked there, keeping it preternaturally dark throughout all hours, including daytime, strangely enough, because of it being situated next to tall buildings that also keep their lights off most of the time, which often gives me the impression the financial district is always abandoned as I pass through it on my way back home on foot, raising the distinct possibility I will be mugged or worse though, thanks to the security cameras installed, the perpetrator of this hypothetical crime will be indentified, to be sure, so I may be avenged by Law or public outrage, assuming, however, those security cameras actually work, which is uncertain to me, as those dark, beady eyes which I never see moving in any direction or showing a pulse of life, and are not there for mere subterfuge to make said perpetrator think twice about what he or she is about to do, assuming criminals do think twice about their crimes, and I've assumed they do sometimes because, avenging aside, why bother putting up a security camera to when something more beneficial and practical like, for instance, working street lights can be put up instead, and for the reason that I'm a statistical anomaly, someone who has never been the victim of a violent crime despite passing through Speaker's Corner at the worst time of night all by myself, alongside those shallow glass buildings, in the absence of those working street lights, is that I seldom meet anyone interesting there.

***

The Idea by Alan

1. Somewhere in the modern city, a man gives himself to an idea. That all people should have a voice in the conversation may not sound like the most radical notion, but to those who are comforted by the exact location of their desks, floor, amount of sunlight, etc., it’s that one tiger in the show that refuses the hoop and waits a little longer to step up to the stool.  

2. “This is the new architecture,” he imagines her saying, her fingers wetting the tips of the pages with each turn.  The manual, an irrepressible thing yearning for actualization, prods the sensitive executives in her office who are hiding a little more than encrypted messages on the refrigerator wall.

3. The Speakers’ Corner would be a democratic space, open to all who needed it, very much like the Garden of Lovers flashing outside city hall or the Riverside Arches moaning somewhere north of the predetermined spot.  The invitation would always be there, a short step up from the concrete on a five by six wooden palette, just large enough for two but mostly/inevitably occupied by one.  And it would transform.

4. Amidst the planning, the thought comes to her.  It is a noble insertion.  There is no great poetry without great audiences, no matter the integrity of the corner or the room.  We cannot all be waiting our turn at the mic if we want this thing to work.  

5.  “But what about audience?” she asked one night.  And then “Surely we can’t stop needing each other?”

***

@SpeakerzCorner by Lyle

*SpeakersCorner __ Silence is key. Pauses, crescendos, glottal stops, caesura, that red, blinking hand at crosswalks. Baffled silence wasn’t particularly frowned upon by the mute crowd, gagged as they were by legislation. And so they called it Speakers’ Corner. The grass was never watered.

*OfficeOverlook __ I would watch them down there from my office window. Babbling! I, of course, didn’t know what they were saying until I bugged it. Right behind the “R.” And then there was no stopping them. My magnetic tape would be full when I came in in the morning. And this wasn’t a cheap “hobby” — I realized too late.

Of course the first thing I did was hire a linguist — after I felt like I had enough evidence.

The first guy thought I was crazy. So did the next few — I lost count for a while. So I finally decided to linger amongst them.

Someone did, ultimately, speak my language and so I hired him. And thus we have the following manuscript:

[…]

It is some micro speakers’ corner gibberish. It has to be, but my translator swears that it is inconsequential. He said inconsequential. I don't know that that was a translation.

  Really —

The Water Fountain

Thirst by Forrest

One is thirsty. There is only one place because it should be only one: a fountain installed, and this is all thirst needs. On a hot day, everyone who is thirsty will line up to observe the thirst of others, how it makes them social, complacent or petulant, how it makes them eager for converstation or willing to ignore it altogether, only to have a drink when it is their turn. One will move on quickly from drink, the line is grateful; one lingers, there becomes impatience, soon uproar. One should not be thirsty forever. Cannot be. One in line says this. The thought sends a commotion down the line, especially for those confused at the very end. One can be thirsty forever, it seems. There is only one line. There is only one place. One cries and wails, waits for waiting itself, though no one ahead listens. One is almost there, thinking, I'm happy that I won't be the one thirsty for much longer. Even a glimpse of a fountain during that thought can be beautiful. All cries and wails are forgotten, the line itself. One thinks thirst is understood then. Far and distant down the line, thirst seems to beckon, return, because there is a line still which will make the absence of thirst a pleasure later. Even during a glimpse. Even during a drink. One may stay thirsty forever. A commotion begins at the front of the line. One has waited for nothing. The waiting at the front is the same as the waiting at the end. One has the next turn but waits, looking at the only fountain, seeing it. One has the place. One does not want to know what remains after thirst. One will remain thirsty. The rest will remain thirsty forever.

***

Fountain by Alan

The school was built with the intention that the learning would revolve around the gathering and redistribution of gifts given during a particularly joyful season that would otherwise never be used. The first to go was his son’s cordial sweater adorned with proper insignia that was not really going to be his style and then several boxes of chocolates from coworkers and a crate of compact discs from the past three decades of bands that never quite made it to wider circles. The moving was done on days off, and “the company,” which is what they decided to call themselves, would post pictures of the work in the hallways in between classrooms while school was in session and on their periods off. It’s no coincidence that they fell in love. Love is what happens when people decide to, finally, commit themselves to something far greater than their individual selves can commit to. In other words, love is born in the classroom if the classroom has no walls. Knows no other vows.

There was no end specifically listed in the initial proposal. The business at hand was everything. They would stop occasionally and drink from the fountain installed in between Biology and Man’s Inhumanity to Man. It was the cleanest fountain they knew of in the building or anywhere else for that matter. And they would approach it with a thirst for the ages, lingering longer to rinse out whatever tiny flavor was left from the last meal (or maybe to feel it, know what it was differently), hoping to not offend others. These were moments of reflection on what’s on the inside of these bodies, what highways, what channels, and what bones that emerge from the deepest slumbers. Because of the nature of their schedules, they were alone mostly while drinking. And it could only have been that way, for God’s singularity is what, ultimately, is the impetus for its creative impulses (one student had said in seminar) and, perhaps, ours. And what is it that the prophet had said, that to love is to make the other feel free? All this while the world outside made preparations for the turning of the calendar year, stacking presents they received and presents they had yet to give, some of which would ultimately be targeted by the company for new addresses. But first the fountain.

***

Decadence by Sherisse

At the water fountain, I waited and let you drink first. I’d forgotten how to write you. I’d wanted to speak of the white of your shirt, tell you how it may have been all along about beauty (and fathering).

Eyeglasses on a table.
Cups. Plates.
Thank you.
A way in.

As the water pours, my right becomes my left. I sip five, seven, five. I am reading Nin and the lunchroom ladies call her crazy.

I am planning to give you my men. To be old in you. I am hoarding the cotton of your clothes and watching all your quiet carnivals. I am lending you my women, their taut and nervous muscles.

Inventions.
Obstructions.
And. Or.

***

Longing by Lyle

Why is it so hard to look to the future with longing, while seeing the past that way is so easy?

I am reminded of a culture that believes that past and future are like a stream (not unlike our own culture, of course) but that they stand looking downstream, the past having washed over them -- in front, not behind. While the unknowable (and that's all right) future rushes - no - drifts toward them, backs turned. Royalty would have servants stand upstream and put drinks in little boats, which would float past occasionally, and irregularly. Surprises from the future. I love this thought.

How unlike a water fountain that we face, head-on with such obduracy - and disappointment when it is dry.

Expectations are such nasty creatures. But then so are longings for something that has floated past you. Ineffable even at that moment of passing.

This water fountain must be dry. I will not even twist the handle. You can not long for something that has not and will not happen.

***

 STOP/GO by William

She’s gotta think about the life ahead of her, about the shapes of tomorrows and the beginnings of wilder planes of existence full of inconceivable geometries and more easily understood trigonometries, where the vocal cords of highways sing long, sweet songs.

We are out of time at the edge of the map and the edges are singed, crisp and flaking off leaving little doubt there was one more instruction we needed. We are past the point when a pint will settle our stomach, calm our nerves, and solve the most pressing of problems. We see only the light shining in and miss the shadow it casts, see the moon but miss the dog chasing it.

She stops for a drink. The rest of us miss it, don’t notice she is gone until we are too lost to do anything about it. Thing is she knew where she was going. She will find it no matter what, step up to the edge and walk over out of whatever that simple way of being we take for granted is. We thought we lead the way but she was steering from the back. We will be lucky to get out of the basement, to make it back to a window in time to see her in the sky, shoeing the wolf away from the sun.

Round Trip

Away From by Sherisse

In other words, the car never worked right. Pipo just let it sit in the driveway so the neighbors would think we had money. The car was a metaphor for things that never ended because they never even began. Or the other way around.

Once the car did take us someplace but only because the wind was heavy that night and the moon new. That night the ancestors were pushing us along, Pipo said. That night he said, close your eyes, or I closed them without his permission because I wanted to forget what we were leaving behind, and I knew they had been shut for a long while because when I opened them again I was in the countryside, not Pinar but something like it. Maybe only as far as Hadley, Massachusetts. It smelled like manure and tobacco leaves. It was only slightly foreign.

It was in that place that Pipo’s wife planted roses of all colors. The rose is the flower of the homesick. It grows well in to winter. And because the garden is its own universe, Pipo liked to visit it often. Between his jobs as gas attendant and shoe salesman, Pipo liked to read with one leg hanging off the side of the patio chair.

When Pipo died the women in the house were all vertigo and tears. I don’t recall the year. Endings always want to belong to another lifetime. All men who remind me of him appear as if through a rearview mirror. In that car, I am the only granddaughter. Not yet an admirer of anyone except him. I am only the story of moving away from and not yet made for speaking.

***

Other Flying Things by Alan

Berry and The Olive were not quite ghosts but disappearing nevertheless. They had made a pact several years ago that if one of them were to hum the melody of that instrumental song that was on the radio that day, the other would have to come up with the lyrics on the spot. It wasn’t quite a test but more like mutual respect. They searched the county roads for traces of themselves to pick up and place ever so gently in the trunk of someone else’s car. They believed in the emulsive power of sunny days.

One was the parent and the other the child. And then, just like that, both grew up. It’s not so much that time goes faster when you’re older or staring at photographs…it’s more the act of giving, the monolithic transfer of it, unit by unit, from one hand to the next. There is so much to name in this exchange: the exceptionality of the oval face, the look into dimension, growing hair and the like. But mostly, it’s the emptying that repeats itself, love the bat’s echo to see where it must go, eat what it must eat, draw what it will always draw – these imagined rooms to fly through from time to time chasing memory, birds, and other flying things.

***

I. Am. Not. No. Longer. Lyle

No longer my memories. Or, could I remember, perhaps they never were. This accumulation of time and… space? Of matter, both vaporous and material. Such that it leaks, or seeps out of my ears like metallic silver, these photos, these memories(?). It does have it’s prophecy (drag your finger along its edges). Still(!), memory-less, memory-conveyance, in stillness, life-quality — necessity as some people call it. I am, in my psychosis, a non-sequitur. If nothing else. But, then again, memory is not. Sequential. And, therefore, I. Am. Not. No. Longer. My. Memories. Maybe you are

Future Tense

In the Future Tense by Alan

You step into the future tense with no map or directions in hand. You recall a set of luggage - florid patterns, Russian-dolled sizes - that your mother brought from that other country you have yet to visit. You appropriated the space for something you were working on once, a long time ago. Songs maybe. Probably more like sounds. These are in the past tense in the future tense.

The path to the future tense is decorated with choices. You are like a Danish prince in the future tense in the sense that you will "lose thy name of action in resolution." You cannot kill the urge so you sit in front of it in the future tense. You watch it pray to other gods in your head.

You are a collection of hesitations and hiccups in the future tense, one that someone might consider studying but most likely will discuss over lunch. In the future tense, the lunch might be fast food or it might involve alcohol. In the future tense, your trajectory will be looked upon as more fluid than it may appear to you now in the present tense. It may seem like "he should have done this" or "he should have done that" in the future tense. In the future tense, hindsight is sitting pretty. It's your favorite dress. In the future tense, you will walk into the place where you met dressed as her and wait for yourself to walk in through the door.

In the past tense, you grappled with the appendages in a mechanic's bathroom in order to get out what needed to be gotten out. In the future tense, that will be considered "evidence" or "the way in." In the present tense, you are slightly embarrassed about the indentations or, rather, intonations of that number. But here's the thing in the future tense: there is no embarrassment. Only truth.

In the future tense, you will raise a hand in a classroom and volunteer for the experiment. It will involve a machine and the heart and wireless technology. It will remind you of this moment, half-buried between the present and the past, but alive yet still, tense, aching for new music to come.

***

Semantics in Florence by Sherisse

That was the year the men had all the words. The women were without mouths, tongues. They slept fully dressed beside the bathtub. They said their creator had made them do it.

That was year the fruit sat under the recessed bulbs of spackled ceilings. You could have been in a place like Florence, Kentucky, where the Duro paper bags are made and stamped, “100% recycled, please reuse.” Hot coffee on the stoves of the fortune tellers, untouched, and the matted trees laughing in your ears.

And salivating, you. Prior to lovering or fathering or friending. You are anyway as dear as they come. A word I can never entirely pronounce. To get at the violet in the body, discreet organ flower. These hands go looking for you who came and went, who I let split the stalk in two.

And the things you never let the other taste: ambient and parched the salt between it all, the white tip of your nail, the underarm. The very precious rupture into dis-order.

I heard you once sort of say: only the men who give the women back their magic are worth saving. Chalk it up to semantics, the open envelope let loose from plans. After hours, an emptied out shoe, double-chinned laughter in the factories.

How lucky, the places never even seen. That was the year of atoning for crimes not committed.

***

Moon Garden Tarot by Johanna

The Nine of Cups kicked back in her mushroom meadow, a recently emptied bottle of wine by her side. Looking up at the super moon in Taurus, she knew that everything would go her way. She was a brilliant social butterfly about to have her dream come true.

She gazed at the King of Swords in his glass throne in the sky. Dragons laid like old dogs, docile, at his feet. His sword was made of ambition. He was a competitive man, but sometimes his affections waned and she had to pressure him to stay focused. She dug his mustache. She made up stories about what she wanted to do with that mustache.

The King of Pentacles also had a good mustache and a very big castle. He was quite grounded and practical and his throne was made of stone. She eyed him longingly as he spun the world on his fingertip like a basketball. She imagined the stimulating conversations they would have solving problems of world peace.

For guidance, she visited the Fifth Hierophant. He always gave her comfort when she went to his gate. She waited for nightfall and used both the gold and silver key. She asked him for inspiration, “Tell me the truth, which one will it be?”

“Test them,” he said, “to determine the perfect one.” He shuffled the deck and three cups fell out. Each chalice filled with singing fairies. Their song entranced her as it amplified. She grinned, “That sounds like big ass love.” Rejuvenated, she decided to throw a party, the largest party anyone in the land had ever seen and she would be the High Priestess of the party. She invited the Hierophant, both kings, the fairies and everyone in Moon Garden. She wore a mermaid tale made of emerald scales and a crown bejeweled with the moon and sun. Dolphins served sushi and chocolate cake while whales sang in chorus. She rested blissfully in her throne of conch shells and listened to the melodic din of gathering friends.

Perhaps the kings would not arrive. Perhaps only one would come. She was sure it no longer mattered. She didn’t need to decide. She realized she could have them both.

The Hierophant leaned in to whisper in her ear.

***

Simply Put by Lyle

Simply put, she will say rather loudly (at least for someone who stares into crystal balls in dark, cloth-laden rooms), It doesn't look so good. But she will be alone. Again. Perpetually? Who could say? She might have had something to say about that at one point, but not now (then?), to anyone who would or would not listen -- dead, alive or somewhere in between. That's crass of me to say, though. I'm demeaning her trade -- in the future tense, no less. Simply put, we don't know, as she will say as I've said. And we don't. Unless there is something built into our culture, into our cards, into our future. Something perhaps baked into the very nature of our jobs that will statistically suggest, no! predetermine outcomes, such as love affairs, morning routines, Alzheimer's and death (always death -- that's an easy one, she will say). Some trajectory that starts with a blue-bottomed bellow at birth. That's the easy part, she will say. Something simply put.

***

Brief Paths by Bill

Get yourself right with your maker. Maybe you have to buy a goat, or gather a bundle of holly tied together with a ribbon a child lost. Really that should not matter as long as the proper procedures are observed. You’ll know if you do it right because it will be as if you sat in the sat in the sand and felt the drumming of waves against the beach. Look in the windows as you head inside.

Sketch out her sign in front of you, draw the circle around it with the sweat from your brow and press the pad of your thumb to it as you close your eyes and set the empty glass ass-up on the table with your other hand. Remember her as a painting you saw walking in a waking dream, imagine the wind outside the building the day she gave birth to you and know down to the bone how it felt as she slipped away like a breeze.

Sit close to the fireplace listening to the stones warm. Be inside when you are outside, and outside when you’re inside, and flipped the other-ways too since the candle will stay lit all the way down until the very last sputtering spark draws in its final taste of oxygen in a soft sharp gasp before the thin rising curl.

Toad

Anacoluthon by Alan

When Aram Zohrab woke one day from deep in the reverie of the much-longed-for-and-recently-realized kiss, he found himself changed into a knobby and irreconcilably amphibious toad. The path that led to this discovery was, it seems, the only point. And a man becomes a toad as if a toad becomes a man. And a frog becomes a ravine in the way that I think I love impossible you and will always love the idea of.

The first thing he did that day was consider the circumstances. Like other sudden discontinues, there is no other way to say it. No familial dream, no going backwards in a fairy tale. The water flows one way and inside the most sensitive cavity an aching transformation.

The rest is, as one likes to say, historians, not so much history. He thought about the kiss much, the lips, interruption. We’re always interrupting or interrupted, aren’t we? We shift through points of view only to arrive at a single moment whose beak is both lovely and sharp, whose feathers for fancy and flight. When Aram Zohrab woke that day, he found himself. Still, but no lay trap. Just a refocusing, a conflagration of the soul in order to understand this desire, which is always reason enough.

***

She Tells the Houseguest by Sherisse

That still she derives some pleasure from knowing this man even though she can no longer sit in the same room with him or listen to the sound of his voice. She has had to make his aches and pleasures irrelevant. But she keeps him near her neck and ear and she imagines that he whispers something about Césaire or Tranströmer in the middle of the night because he suspects that she is particularly interested in the aesthetics of loneliness and in her mind, or someplace, they go on together about what is real and where the real resides. The conversation was charged, made her spine light up like a thing on the brink of death.

He was the kind of would-be lover who could, without knowing it, make her feel acute grief and if not grief then pure and pungent longing. She would tell him this; she knew that he was amused by it. And once they walked together along that stretch of highway where all things appear trapped beneath the earth and asphalt and on and on that summer just after the baby, several babies not belonging to each other, were born.

And all the items that once must have belonged to nature, or the absence of it, the possibility of it, now organized themselves into shapes not that orient but that absorb noise and imagination and all the rest of it. She had asked this before: what would be there now if they returned to it, what odd creatures and non-native trees and what stars and what atmosphere of innocence and would it be enough to get them lost in that whisper just under the things not said.

The actual lines were strewn throughout the house, the fragments and notes and bits of his beard. The awkwardness of sudden closeness, like looking into a mirror and seeing your own ghost. The shock, finally, of his presence. How visible she had made herself.

But now she was repeating things. The houseguest with the toad around his neck had said nothing this whole time, not even when desperate she asked like a sick child for a cure. He inquired instead about her dreams. He was interested in the dialogue and laundry of sleep. She was suddenly possessive, unable or unwilling to give anything away. She didn’t have the courage to apologize. In this country there could be no proof of his ever having been there. The houseguest would have to leave and return empty-handed.

***

Conviction by Forrest

Toads are not the best of animal friends one can stumble upon in the forest primeval, but sometimes it's best to make a go of things with them when you're lost because ugliness, too, is entertaining: it makes you feel less stupid for getting lost in the first place. The rough part comes when you unlose yourself by finding a cabin inhabited by a pair of convicted criminals on the lam. Taken by surprise, they'll see you with the toad in hand and ask, Whatchoo doin with that toad in your hand, mister? Now since you may not know that these two are escaped cons (though the matching jumpsuits are trying to tell you otherwise), you would be inclined to say, Bad luck repellant; however, following a newfound instinct being slowly sharpened by your current predicament of walking lost in the woods, you say instead, That's between me and my toad. The entreaty of privacy, though resembling zoophilia somewhat, could, in fact, earn you a certain respect with these two—and sure enough, it does. They start laughing wildly. A stupid question to begin with. We're all friends now! Bring the toad inside—we got plenty a dead bugs for it. You politely turn down the offer. It's getting dark, you explain, and you've been wandering lost long enough. It's time to get home. They stop laughing. The short one looks at the tall one, and it's the tall one says, This is your home. It occurs to you then that these are the handsomest strangers you've ever been suspicious about. Maybe the tall one is right. One place is good as another, and you seem to forget at that moment any of the former comforts you enjoyed at wherever you were living before you got lost. You're just as handsome as these two men—perhaps more so since, unlike them, you have a full head of wavy hair. Three handsome men living in a cabin in the woods. There's a poetry to this scenario you can't recall from something you've read before, but it doesn't matter. Feeling a tinge of jealousy, you place the toad on the ground; immediately it bounds away from you. The short one slaps you on the back. Tells you it'd be happier outside instead. You would very much like to believe him as you walk up the wooden steps to the entrance with the tall one right behind you, watching the toad knife into the bushes from the clearing, but the cabin feels so much warmer. There's a fire waiting inside. Yes, there must be.

***

As Earth Had Shaped Them by Bill

Simple and shaped by calm as the rolling of stones through the ages of the earth, collecting rainwater in time’s basement, listening as it flows down the face of the rock, seeps through the stone to drip a far falling echo when it lands, the humming murmuration of it in the pipes once the walls have closed in on mornings framed by progress. Understanding taking the shape of people, mimicking their behavior while struggling to act in accordance with the rough chaos of their logic. A quiet response to a call it took a long time to make. There is a bit of the stretch left and the frustration of hope.

***

Qualia by Lyle

The old toad froze, contemplating, one might imagine, life. Not in that fight-or-flight way of most amphibians but in another way all together. Considering the afterlife, such that it is (it is!), of a toad. Surely swampy. Filled with those fast moving challenges to satiation -- making them all the more tantalizing and rewarding (one might say, more heavenly, even). Or perhaps we image this old toad contemplating the wind-skimmed, fractured reflection of the pond. What would it be like to hop on a ray of light? What is this qualia qua qualia that is perhaps something other than just fight or flight. What is this leaping sensation?

Sugar, Chef's Quality

Maybe, Sugar by Alan

Sweetness, why do we sway in the trees so? Where is it that those sudden wings fold in genuflections over hidden earths? What is it that the thirsty man said to the breeze before it lifted his desire and turned it into a dove?

This month we want nothing but questions, for the child has not yet begun to read. One might be a photograph, a play of light. Another the trace of a breast. There are things sought after in this world, and there are things that never leave one’s side. This is a kind of maxim he will most assuredly learn, another punctuation mark with which he will fall in love.

Can we meet again? At the end of this month. At the counter where we first met. I’ll be done with a set of words and walking home. It will be spring, finally. I will stare through the glass and look for you amongst the faces. There we will find a space in the dark to exchange dresses. I always thought there was a chance that you were the voice I spoke to long ago, the one in the perhaps dream. What is it about memory that leaves certain probable holes - space for the tasting, taste for lasting – that are inevitably filled with sugar, more sugar? I will meet you there.

***

Some Other Ghost by Sherisse

Over crepes, Ellie said that she believed her husband was falling in love with me and asked whether I, too, was falling in love with him. There were pink peonies on the table that looked as though they had just bloomed. Outside it was hot and we’d agreed we would sit indoors where it was air conditioned. We were both wearing dresses that covered our knees. I laughed when I heard the question, or just a moment after. Ellie’s face grinned but only slightly. I looked over at the bar and the band performing Chris Isaak’s, Wicked Game. I noticed how few people were dining at this early hour on a weeknight. I was chewing and pointed at my mouth to indicate that I would answer her question but needed more time. Her gaze was fixed on me but friendly. It was as though she’d just asked for something that belonged to her and was simply waiting, patiently, for me to retrieve it.

We'd been seeing each other, the three of us, for several weeks. I wasn’t yet sure if this was a relationship, if I would even call it that, nor what was expected of me. And it was that thing – expectation – which I had been trying to deflect since the first conversation. I had wanted to be a passerby, or a participant from a distance. But now we were here, she and I, on a date that started with a stroll through Chelsea and would end with a kiss on the Highline. We hadn't gotten to that part yet. Soon we would order coffee. The coffee would arrive in bowls. She would add sugar to hers and I would have mine unsweetened. This detail seemed to signify some greater difference: the fact that Ellie had a husband and I did not or, perhaps more accurately, that she had made a choice to become someone’s wife whereas I had not ever believed I could fully inhabit such a thing.

Eventually some words strung themselves together. “I may be falling in love with him,” I said, “but we can’t yet know what is reality and what is fantasy.” I paused there. Ellie seemed satisfied as she exhaled. I thought her satisfaction might have more to do with the fact that she had asked the question in the first place, found a confidence she didn’t know she possessed.

After the Highline I found my way back to my Queens apartment. In the soothing dark I wept for some past not yet washed away or disposed of or gone. It was as if Ellie had asked what other secrets I'd been keeping. I hadn't realized I'd been keeping any at all. I may have been falling in love with her husband – with her, even – but there was some other ghost. I took the peonies home with me that night, not the flowers themselves but a photograph. I would go on looking after them in solitude as if they were an extension of our own – Ellie’s and mine – forgotten, or lost, beauty.

***

Sweet Tea by Lyle

Sweet tea with Susie under the pecan trees in the afternoon when it was still not so hot to sit out under the trees and drink sweet tea with Susie. But that was some time ago before the rain. Before the rain was sweet tea with Susie. And then the rain left us separated; a rain is a sliver that separates. A woodpecker in the savaged trees. The foreignness of bridges. Homes stolen for bridges. Sweet Susie under a pecan tree, still under, where I drive a nail into the trunk and think about sweet sweet tea with Susie. No more with sweet Susie.

***

Sweetness by Johanna

For the first eighteen years, I lived in a marsh. We ate rice, mushrooms, watercress, fish, frogs and ducks. My skin flaked with green scales. I made friends with flies and lizards. My eyes yellowed and twitched.

I picked my mom a bouquet of asters, marigolds and rose mallow. They dried to dust under the window. The only music I knew came from my dad's fiddle and he never played it very well. I found a magazine once at the side of the old county road. The pages torn and wrinkled from rain. I brought it home and hid it under my pillow. At night I searched the pages in the moonlight. It was all about cars. Red cars. Fast cars. Electric cars. Trucks and wagons. I was shocked to learn that people cared so much for cars. So much that a whole magazine could be devoted to them. We never had a car. Only a row boat.

My dad found the magazine and burned it in the yard with the trash.“It's just trash,” he said. “You don't need to be reading that junk.” I couldn't read anyway.

Then there was the fisherman. He called me pretty. News to me. He saw that I was feral and he pulled prizes from his pocket. A wooden token, paper clip, pen cap, rubber band, glass bead-- his pocket seemed infinite-- brass key, earring, button, broken chain, and the best prize of them all, a dirty, torn packet of sugar.“Try it,” the fisherman said.

He took me away that night and I never returned. I had never known such sweetness.

***

After a Dying Ray by Bill

It’s a sweet chance and we had to take our shot. The train was getting ready to leave, ahead of schedule, a bit of secret advance we’d managed to scrap up. Normally we were all thumbs on the pulse of things, and our hearts were never that strong to begin with – often we got knocked out before we even knew we didn’t know anything. But the train was a change and the train was the whole bowl of wax where it wouldn’t matter why we couldn’t hack it. If we got this one thing right, had a choice between the convalescent and the moribund then it was worth it to take a roll of the bones and see if it came up white.

Pet Shop

The Pet Shop by Alan

To make amends with his imaginary friend, the illustrious and forgiving (to most) Van Hulsitor, Jeremiah decided to visit the local pet store, which all the boys in his grade had dubbed “a weird vibe” based on their respective mothers’ lay evaluations in between car rides to and fro matches. The first thought was something in the reptilian family, but the stock was slim pickins. “Be careful for Solomon,” the disenchanted man behind the counter warned. “He’s a bit temperamental these days.” Solomon was busy negotiating a deal with a small albino mouse it seemed. Something serious. Jeremiah chose not to disturb him.

Then there were the crabs. Buckets full of them. They seemed to converse with one another in a series of gestures and genuflections. It was like church, thought Jeremiah. The congregation, the pews, one on top of the other. Van Hulsitor might like that. It was, after all, in church when the offense took place. Somewhere between the sermon and the trip to the bathroom. It was quiet. So quiet in the hallway. No one but the two of them. Until Jeremiah, once again, made the mistake of turning on the light.

There are some creatures that are nocturnal. The man behind the counter had loose and flexible handwriting. The characters seemed restless. The room in the back had no lights. Jeremiah entered cautiously, dared not let his friend know what he felt he had to do.

***

Clever the Dog by Johanna

Clever sat in front of the barber shop on the third block from the painted boulder two blocks from the smashed guardrail one block from his home. Home was a new word for Clever. He had spent most of his life roaming the streets of Grainville, the next town over. It was in Grainville that he got into his first fight and tore the ear off of a pit-mix trying to steal his garbage pile. It was also where he conceived his first litter after a late night howling. In those years, he had managed to escape Animal Control six times without a scratch. But the winters got colder, the scraps sparser and he slowed down. They found him jaywalking at dusk. He swore they gloated as they threw him into his cell at the pound. Steady meals and warm shelter aside, he hated being behind bars. He was a vagabond meant for the streets with freedom to roam. When they put him on a leash for a walk, he struggled futilely to tear his head from his infuriating collar.

When the little girl came in on that fated spring Sunday and begged her begrudging father to take him home, he finally saw his escape. He wasn’t fazed when they took him to a new town or when the little girl named him Clever and expected him to sit for regular grooming sessions. He knew his time would come and it did. One day, she opened the door for a package delivery and Clever cleared right past both sets of legs and kept on running. Of course, before long he was lost. He had never been to Red Crest before. He had no idea where to go.

It was early evening when the car lights rolled into the alley where he hid, trapping him. The father grabbed him by that blasted collar and threw him in the car. As tough as he was, the large hands of the father on his nape discouraged any fight he might have had left after his great escape. The father did not take him straight home. Instead he took him here, to this spot in front of the barber shop. They sat in the car in silence for a while with the heat running until the father finally spoke.

“See those two storefronts there, across the street? One’s a pet shop. You’re too straggly a mutt to go there. That’s where the fine breeds are sold. That’s where I wanted to buy a dog. Lucky for you, my daughter insisted we get a stray from the shelter. She’s got a big heart that girl.”

Clever listened intently. For the first time, someone spoke to him without yelling or condescending. The father lowered the fan on the heater and continued, “See that other storefront. That’s where they butcher the meat and that’s where you’re going to end up if you ever run away again.” The father turned to look him straight in the eyes and what he saw there must have convinced him that his message got through because he started the car and drove home. Clever did not take the threat lightly. He had no doubt that the father meant it.

At the house, the little girl squealed with delight to see her dog again. Father glared sternly from above. Clever hung his head low and obeyed. After a few months, he got used to the comforts of home—the petting, the treats, the yard where he could bark at pedestrians. But every once in a while, when he got an itching to run, he’d walk here, sit and stare at the two storefronts, remembering his inescapable fate.

***

The Late February Sunlight by Bill

Trumbling into the parking lot the big pick-up with the quorum of us in the back kicked up a fart of dust after I knocked on the window indicating we should stop when I saw the sign for the pet shop figuring this strip mail ought to be a low-key spot to wind down and regroup. Of course he tossed us a bit against the side of the bed with a sharp left turn to come up short of a sudden right in front of the coffee shop. The truck’s owner sure had a black hand sense of destiny about him.

Who knew what town this was, hours from the capital. We’d beat a hasty retreat from the conference on the advice and seeming concern of someone I had to try hard not to think about. Despite the suddenness of our arrival to this nowhere place, Rob yawned ambitiously against the sunlight and the rest of us moved a little slow and chilled, clutching a bag here and there began to shift upwards, Gail and Cliff jumping off the side edge of the truck under the propultion of caffeine promise and the rest climbing down off the rear bumper. The driver stood by his open door, stretching big and yawning in his jeans and tucked in western shirt and not to be outdone by his truck he let a loud fart rip in the wind. A few more days like this and I'd hire him full time but for the moment it was all I could do except wonder if another UN delegation had ever arrived in such a fashion anywhere. Probably.

***

The Red Crest Pet Shop Review by Lyle

The Red Crest Pet Shop, is difficult to describe. The front sign, of which I have provided a photo, contains two perfect circles, as if wormholes from (to?) another time and place. But the shop itself is orally inimitable, and thus, indescribable, especially as the shop owner forbade me from using metaphor (they are not animals to be understood as anything other than themselves, he told me) or from objective description (these are exotic animals, the likes of which you have never seen, he pressed — they must be experienced first hand), which precluded photography inside the shop. So I am left with the shop sign itself. The images on it are not accurate in the least — such common animals as snakes or cats or goldfish do not exist in Red Crest. They are otherworldly animals of which you have not heard. The best indirect referential statement I can make is that only the sizes of these images come close to how different these “pets” are from your pets. Look at the sizes! In relation to each other. In relation to their representation. I have inspected this image for far too long as I have nothing but memory and radio silence to report otherwise. I have been constricted, so to speak. Go see the place for yourself; though be forewarned, you may return with nothing — that most absurd of all animals.

***

Who Doesn't Love Sausage by Forrest

Because stories are the worst possible vehicle for sincere confession: I haven't been the only proprietor of the Red Crest Pet Shop to pass off expired merchandise to Farmer Jed's Meat Market next door. In fact, I've been told by my wife's grandmother, a clandestine arrangement has existed between the Pet Shop and Farmer Jed himself since Red Crest's incorporation in the 1940's, mostly in the form of Jed sending business back to us—senior citizens stocking up on ground chuck who miss the presence of a cocker spaniel, foodie hipsters buying python meat who are overly curious, that sort of thing. There's an odd correlation between the two that people who never run a pet shop are aware of: the devoted carnivore needing animal company. You'll see what I mean, Jed told me once as he picked up some rabbits laid low by a malfunctioning A/C one night out back. I still didn't feel very good about it. Only because the whole arrangement had a certain sense. Maybe Jed's customers knew what they were buying. Or none of it made any difference—we're better off that it came from next door instead of Argentina, I can hear the good folk of Red Crest say. I'm not really speaking any revelations here. That's what bothers me. What good's a confession, I tell my wife, when no one in town cares one way or the other? Feeding our lone goldfish, she shrugs her shoulders. She thinks it'll grow large enough someday to set it free somewhere. I doubt it has any conception of the outside, a world where there are always honest people lurking.