Green Sands

Papakolea by Johanna

The woman stood just beyond the roving perimeter of sand and sea. She watched the waves lift bodies and place them back down. She heard the laughter of people diving under and smashing against the ocean's force. She took a step forward. The water overcame her feet, and as it pulled back, buried them. She imagined urchins, jelly fish, sharks, and Man-o' -War. She took a step back.

A young girl nearby twirled and skipped in the shallows. “Daddy,” she asked, “Why is the sand green?”

Her dad reached out to her as the water came up around her waist. When she stood firm, he let his arm hang back by his side. The woman listened. “From a volcano,” he answered. “The ocean picks up eroded olivine from this cinder cone and washes it on shore.”

“No, dad,” she said, “I mean the REAL reason.”

“Oh, you want the REAL reason.”

“Yes!”

“Okay,” the dad started slowly, “the green sand is actually mermaid glitter.”

“What's that?”

“Like fairy dust, only the mermaids use it to lure sailors under the water to their coral reef castles where they hold them prisoners forever.”

“How can they breathe down there?”

“The mermaid magic.”

“Oh, yeah.” The girl leaped out of the water and ran up the beach. She fell to her knees and began to dig a tunnel. The dad followed close behind.

The woman grabbed a handful of sand and examined the grains. She held them up to the horizon. She searched to see if anyone watched before she closed her eyes and sprinkled the mermaid glitter on her head.

***

A Walk by Forrest

Too late considering this bathing along the shore, not farthest away from her watching, older this time, so as not trying to pay attention in any faulty way, soon even wishing, patient, in the painless hope of someone else talking while walking, no one she knows, of course, who wouldn't belabor the opportunity, asking her sister her dainty name, hand extended friendly for her taking, no one noticing her not noticing, feeling much, much sunnier without her walking reminder, the little sister further away, much, much smaller, another set of prints in her sand.

***

Tides by Lyle

I had been buried in the sand for quite some time (such a subjective sentiment, time). Those monsters laughed and played in the tide while I baked. My toes began to curl in the sun. God — the sand! It was everywhere in my mouth. And worse! Given my proclivity to squirming, this immobility was — ironically, I suppose — paralyzing. Narrating my circumstances, I had hoped, if only to myself, would distance myself from this mockery of justice but it did nothing to alleviate the nausea. It was as if my whole body was being choked in a blood pressure cuff. An odd metaphor, to be sure, but even the blackness of the cuff is appropriate. I blinked as one of them ran by so that I would remember if they ever let me go. Beasts! Savages! I yelled. Thieves — again ironic (was this irony somehow a salve?) considering the crime I had been accused of. But the long, slow sigh of waves, their laughter (laughing!) and the gentle sea breeze carried my invectives off. Monsters, I sobbed. I could feel my will bending to theirs. This visceral, putative measure was working. Mortal wants carried me off.

[When you remember how you used to be, sometimes it makes you forget who you are.]

My breath became jagged and shallow. I confess I cried. I confess to everything. But it was too late. The tide had already begun to rise.

***

Samantha Who Listens to Music at the Beach by Alan

She liked to listen to Jose Gonzalez’s Veneer album at the beach and listen for how the waves, as they moved across the shore, would mingle with the nylon strings or, rather, the fingers strumming across the strings. Big haunting chords sprayed with sunlight. There is no such thing as a hiding place in this life, she would think as the music grew more intimate.

Someone would call to her, make a gesture toward the water. In these instances, she’d smile knowingly and, for the most part, simply let the energy of opportunity slide past her. Past last night’s prints in the sand, the undisturbed ones. What are the chances of that, she would think. To see the world in a grain of sand has absolutely nothing to do with eternity. Everything to do with intimacy.

And then at the point the water would reach her toes later in each afternoon and the crisp winged winds of evening’s promise would draft a few lines across her face, she would consider getting up, examine the urge as if sticking one’s hand into the body of a guitar or a summer or some other music-making thing.

***

Step Lightly by Bill

Looking down at the pigeon's carcass, thinking it had nearly gotten away when it smacked into the side of the train by a strong unexpected gust of wind to land painfully and fatefully with its back to one of the stray feral cats that lived along the barrier fences of the line, its wings untouched and splayed like an angel in glory on the concrete connected to a red and devoured ribcage where it had fallen once the little carnivore was done I decided I was tired – of winter, and the city and all of the phone calls about the case and needed to feel sunlight and the sound of waves.

***

Untitled by Julianna

We went to Myrtle Beach for vacation and my wife painted her toenails. Figures. When does she paint her toenails at home? Never. At home she wears the same green sweatshirt every goddamn day and she doesn’t cook. She used to cook. She used to paint her toenails. She used to walk around the apartment in panties. Cute ones. Ones with little bows and lace and whatnot. Now? Nothing. Now I have no idea what my wife’s underwear looks like, except when I see it in a heap on the bathroom floor, bundled up with her sweat socks. Sweat socks and underwear sitting there on the bathroom floor. They sit there for days sometimes. Sweat socks and underwear mocking me while I do my business.

I spent two weeks’ goddamn salary on Myrtle Beach. I coulda been home. It was the playoffs. And what does my wife do? Reads books in a lawnchair and takes pictures of her feet.

That’s me, by the way, out there in the water. No, not that guy. That one. No, to the left of that one. The one with the arm. No, not that one. That one. That one. That’s me. I think it is. Yeah, that’s me. I’m pretty sure. That one.

***

Sea Glass by Nicole

There are bits of sea glass lined up on his dresser. They are perched in a row over his Boy Scouts of America sash. His window lights up the row of shapes two or three at a time. Sometimes, I can see him walking the shore from my bedroom window. He comes out in the mornings before the beach is crowded and hot. He examines each piece with his hands, feels for smooth edges, and fingers the acceptable pieces into his pockets. I count the pieces as he picks them up and wait for them to show up in the row with the others. I like it best when he throws the sharpest ones back into the ocean. Someday it will be the two of us together reaching our hands up over our heads to toss the pieces into the waves. The water will keep the pieces until they are ready.

Hey look a golf cart

Untitled by Julianna Spallholz

That was August. Now it’s December. Christmas in three days and finally, praise Jesus, you not here to as usual ruin it. I’m so glad the bitch is gone.

Admittedly I am not a winter person. I prefer tank tops, prefer light. But when shit sucks anyway best not to keep company with those who make it suck worse. That’s what my grandma always used to say.

Our house is just above the activity, just out of sight, just over the hill. That’s our son in the foreground, about to enjoy his win in the Zucchini Festival costume contest. As you know, our son takes things very seriously. He beat out Abe Lincoln. He beat out last year’s Miss Zucchini. I took pictures because I am his mother, because I show up smiling for these sorts of things, because I am his mother, because I take pictures, because I am his mother.

After the contest was completed our son went for a victory lap in the golf cart, which was driven by darling Rosemarie who manages the general store. Our son held his blue ribbon in his fist and absorbed his village as it went by. In the evening, there were fireworks. All in all, it was a fine summer day in a quaint small town in New England, no thanks to you, no thanks to you.

Please give my best holiday regards to your brand new surprise live-in girlfriend who is eighteen years our junior. Just in case you were concerned, his presents are wrapped and ready, arranged thoughtfully beneath the tree. The lights are hung. The nativity is set. Cookies are in the fucking oven.

***

Playful by Forrest

The deadly art of my ninja clan, forged through years of televisional exposure to underground mutagenic protoplasm, is something I feign to describe to the uninitiated outsider. Every summer, across this lawless realm, hundreds of festival barbequées disguised as former lords reveal themselves all the same as brazen usurpers of their vassals' wives—thus, at request (and advance payment) of concerned parties, I intervene so that an ancient code of honor may be preserved. Often these transactions are better disposed of at a distance, the blowdart being my preference for lethality and the sudden, low note singing from my blowgun, a sound which returns me to my adolescent training. Many a can of Old Milwaukee have I strewn upon the trampled ground in this fashion. And yet, as the one-twelfth steed of this modest cart whisks me away, I consider whether child's play has been perverted into an art with no end, or vice versa. The courtyard of my dōjō fills not with an introspective air of regret, but the beratement of ancestors instead for my sentimental weakness carried against those cold autumn winds of change. Lonely are the nameless masters, it heeds. And abide I must! For there is always another layer to peel away from my famished body.

***

Something Meanwhile by Lyle

And before you know it, you're in the middle of something. The X, she tells you, says just here somewhere.

There is a wedding—Abe Lincoln, a chef—she checks off the rest of the list. Yup, all there.

Meanwhile: after studying the map, you're not so sure about anything.

And here's the mossy retaining wall, she points to the map and the wall—taptap.

Something, you say ponderously.

There is a small crevice in the retaining wall, you realize suddenly (and at the exact same time that you realize they are everywhere in the retaining wall—in fact, that is how retaining walls are built: at that exact moment you also think maybe that is part of the definition of a retaining wall; at least, you believe, suddenly, it is a solid connotation).

Well then, she says. Yes, you concede.

And then, from the wedding party: Hey look a golf cart.

Click.

***

This Holiday by Alan

This holiday. Like all holidays, I will consider the festive and rub up against the festivity. What I mean, of course, is that I will take no prisoners – roll out the golf cart, so to speak. We will paint the course, appropriately, green, and if the course is already green we will discuss another color, something 19th-century, perhaps. And the entire family will be there. I will make them…

Stop…quiet on the set. In all seriousness, this is not quite the way I envisioned it. We’re all over the place here. And you’re not making any sense. The little one is flexing too much and the smiles are too believable. Dress it up with artifice. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to be doing this? Don’t you know the date? The sun is out. The birds are chirping. There are thousands of parking lots of people making plans dishonestly in America and you have to pick the one that doesn’t have the wherewithal to get it together? And another thing…who put that golf cart in there?

What golf cart?

***

In the Light Thrown Down by Bill

Over time, building from one year as a notion then become a thought, growing the next year into a sense and after into a shared feeling about the party, a communal disconcertion and finally into a fear – a dread – whenever anyone showed up in an exceptionally outlandish fancy dress, such as the sheer dervish costumes Betty and Matilda wore last year.

The concern was felt as a flutter of unease as guests arrived in on and under outlandish transports. Korigar's entrance on a bull a few years back and then again the following year, reasoning that a repeat would be the most austentatious choice, had matched for a slight prickling of hairs on the back of necks Joseph's arrival in a convoy of four-wheeled ATVs.

The exotic – foods like the white cobra fritters, or drinks, like the rum specially distilled from a sugar-cane which only cultivates symbiotically with an especially aggressive species of fire-ant entomologists claimed were the most war-prone organism on the planet – haunted the guests throughout their revels.

The bizarre, the strange, the rare, the exuberant and humorously mundane, like the golf carts this year taking the guests from one part of the party to the next, all worked to build toward this apprehension which in some ways was the signature of the party, rising in nervous glances and anxiously held breaths as the festivities approached their crescendo – that the party would never come to an end and that they all, dressed in their funny attire, would be trapped there, forever celebrating.

***

I’ll tell you again how it happened … by Nicole

There was a white golf cart the day Bobby joined the army.

Mom’s face cracked like a soft eggshell against the counter.

Bobby’s top and bottom buttons were always mismatched.

Dad walked in circles, pulled his hair, and shut his eyes.

It would happen sooner or later.

Fear inside my chest like pounding on the concrete belly of a pool.

And next door a family celebrates.

Storm

Storm by Johanna

Returning from the funeral. Quiet but for the wind. There is no rain, no thunder, only the distant flash of lightening in the eastern plains. Was it a night like this one? Driving north on the front range we watch the bolts strike out and reach the far corners of the dark sky with branching fingers. The darkness alight with hidden objects – billboard, farm house, factory, a car abandoned on the side of the road. Is this how it happened? I roll down the window and the air is warm and thick. The taste is metallic. My arm hair bristles. Did she see the car coming? A flash just bright enough to show us the world.

***

Occasional by Forrest

Out of the way, the storm chasers had fled towards the danger, only returning at dusk, but still hungry. We had a few eggs left which hadn't flown away, a loaf of bread not broken. We'll eat it all, they boasted, and we believed them until they did eat it all. Then they noticed we had nothing left, and asked if they could have that as well. We gave them the last of it for their equipment to record. They laughed, patted each other on the back. The best yet! they cheered, watching the dials move, the needles tremble. Our admiration was a helpless thing, little more than what the weather can be on occasion here, waving to the gathering crowd.

***

Malice by Lyle

Out the car window the signs & marquees gave way to storm clouds in that woozy way alcohol has of double exposing images in your head over time as you stare out the window of a car. Strung together by time and distance. An equation, perhaps. And you driving said something to me or not to me now and again. Sometimes with a light laugh afterwards and I smile and am warm in the heater-filled compartment watching the clouds roll in quickly and with malice.

***

When the Aliens Finally Arrive by Alan

I saw this coming in one of my earlier journals. It was several years ago. Don’t quite remember when. I was driving to Tennessee with Tim in the front seat mad with joy and love and cigarettes and nothing to fear. All of a sudden, the idea for a horror story.

When the aliens finally arrived, I shared with Tim, they made their way onto the systems that connected us. They bore into the wires that ran across the country and crept inside the billboards and interstate signs. They marked our tepid crossings with deep and profound vigor. They studied us as a race. They came from the clouds like a gentle rain.

How did you know they were there? Tim was curious. I was writing while driving, looking up between mile markers. I was sketching furiously in the fading light. The characters on the page began to lie on top of each other as it got darker. The more I wrote, the less I understood.

Maybe only we could see them. Tim was wild-eyed now. I stopped and looked up, away from the road. His head was half-out the window, his smile a kite in the wind.

Who?

The crazy ones.

The crazy ones, I repeated. Years later. In the onset of winter. At the sign of a storm.

***

American Wedding by Nicole

It happened in a court house. In a room with a conference table. In a little town I had not heard of the year before. Just the two of us, your brother, a judge on his lunch break, and a gray copy machine with it’s back turned to the room.

The judge pronounced my name wrong and again pronounced my new hyphenated name wrong. When it came time I dropped the ring. Watched it roll under the mahogany table before squatting down in-between the vows and my turn to say I do. I had been married once before. So long ago that it seemed like a dream. The memory folded in on itself like a worn blanket in the bottom of a closet.

I felt the carpet against my knees the hem of my black and white dress pushed up against my thighs as I stretched my fingers under the swivel chair. I must have made a terrible bride. I refused a new dress. I refused a new ring. I refused to let anyone where it seemed there was only us and more us.

I left my family for this tiny room. 1500 miles of distance and my first snow. The wind waiting outside to burn my cheeks. For my hand franticly searching. For the ring I would return to your finger before exiting the room and making the long drive home.

***

Unpredictable Variations on the Face by Bill

A quick line of them walked in at dusk, five shadows dug against the storm clouds and encroaching night wearing long gray coats and fine, brilliant red scarves. Their necks and cheeks gleamed with freshly shaved skin. The smell of vetiver came ahead of them. Their shoes clicked on the boards and their arms swung easily at their sides. The knives we all knew were tucked away in their vests against the side of their ribs on the far side of their heart. Among them I recognized my friend, so different and strange with the dark hair.

It was stupid to come in tonight with only a pen, when they had been reported so close to the border of the county. A pen is of such limited use, sharply tipped but easily bent or broken if the blow strikes a bone. A hard knife with a strong tang will break through half the bones in the body on a good thrust. Best bet with a pen is an ice-pick strike — the brain stem or the eye.

They approached the bar as I rose and came toward them from the back of the room. I kept my head lowered, staring shoulder level, letting my gaze rise only as I passed my friend, asked and answered our questions in quick succession of eye movements. They moved around me and waited. Finally I reached out a hard and pull the scarf from one of them. The softness of the fabric was exceptional as I placed the center of the scarf over my eyes and tied it off behind my head. They placed their hands on my shoulders and led me toward the door and out into the night with the pen still in my pocket.

Rainstorm

Rainstormer by Alan

In the world of ghosts, a silhouette is used to incite a riot. It’s Platonic. Mimesis. An affront. Certain parties are likely to get agitated, which can lead to unpleasant marauding of said premises or general haunting.

There was a cat once. In love with a dreamcatcher set against a window overlooking the forest. Outside it was rainy. Perfect weather for goblins and dance. Before the trees, a screen. Before the apparition, a suggestion in the corners. Lines flashing across the eye the way an old television set establishes itself and gets its footing. Blurry derivations and intimations. The whole scene, they said, happened in a heartbeat, which was about right for the spook and the dash for the door.

A ghost perturbed is enough to lead a cat out into the rain.

***

There Are Many Paths Home But Only One Way to Leave by Forrest

White cat waits. Waits its turn brought wobbly by shopping carts on rubber wheels she leaves out front, a second-hand name tag hung on her old sweater with soiled yarn flowers preferring, “How May I Assist You Today?” She passes three, four doorsteps, self-debates theology at her own occasionally speaking aloud. Instance fails rationalization: any white cat then having agreement welcoming her back. Again. On floorboards near the stairway stalking frowned upon but having ignored her well this long this one white cat rushes in turns body upwards its whiskers making febrile signals.

A lambskin boot for sleep. She mutters. Christ. Again.

Why, it had been saved, hadn’t it.

But a recent neighbor, no less than someone newer—that is who restores the white cat to its comfort until it sees her picking up mail. Letters with no original salutation. Wickedness from the city claiming front porch and the façade. Her pacing. Yes, she’ll tape over that mail slot. Rotary phones accumulated in the kitchen where she calls him an impatient father. That’s a ring that’s a ring that’s a ring that—

Is what she wants to ask him about him for several months more, and more of a remarkable likeness sent was his pencil sketch of her thirty-fourth birthday than this white cat accustomed to her plodding. She discovers it curled in a ruined corner, it watching her watching. Conversational, she means, is attendant sincerity would it search every room, every other bend sunlight doesn’t dance upon, while the white cat takes scrambling breaths for rest from such help.

She’ll lock it out tomorrow. Thinking she’s better as she shouts—yet will she come grumble her Christs. Will a white cat jump from her arms.

Unless singing on the other end of the line speaks it away.

***

Cat Hell by Johanna

She winked her green eye as she twisted her whiskers and purred. Her throne of bones encased in flames.

“What am I doing here?” I asked.

“Don't you remember?” the cat said with a devious smile and I was suddenly consumed by gray memories: a window covered in frost, a bird (what kind of bird?), a raven mocking me, a convulsion of sneezes, a wide-eyed kitten wrapped in a blanket, a grove of tall trees, day shifting into night, walking away, arms swinging, a wretched yowl.

My skin singed as fires spurted in gusts all around me and I stuttered, “But, but... I couldn't keep it... I'm allergic...” I sneezed. “I had no where...” I sneezed again. My eyes teared and itched. I felt my swollen face. My throat closed tight. “I'm sorry,” I wheezed, “I didn't know.”

***

Screen by Lyle

Screen—a protective device, as from heat. Something that conceals. To conceal from view or knowledge, therefore, to see is to know (even biblically perhaps—a complicated metaphorical system. A window screen does quite the opposite in one sense. It lets air through. Osmosis as knowledge. But it also keeps bugs out—you will not know mosquito bites or the blue buzz of a fly. And it keeps things in, to an extent. A cat, perhaps learned in the language of boundaries, surfaces, containers. But the storm rolling in will pass through unless it is projected onto the screen and it is in fact not something one can see through, an ontological foreshadowing of the act of seeing or lack of that ability. All of these airy meanings are but perforations leaving the raggedy language an invisible border around the inevitable, awe-inspiring and treacherous nothingness behind it. But then language—I tell you, STOP!, becomes a cuirass and the void is screened off, reflected back on itself if only for a few moments and it is just a cat slapping her claws into the holes as she ferries in the northern. The first of the year.

***

Untitled by Nicole

To say it was obscure would be an understatement. It was more like this. The flash. The glimpse of something between what you think it is and what it really is. Her eyes on mornings like this. Not really gold or blue or amber or green. No, it’s just dark. The stare. The look that says “wait.” Just like that. “Wait.” And between us? A pause that will never be recovered.

South Street Seaport

(courtesy & © Haik Kocharian)

Unpopular by Lyle

Once again I have failed. Not, I believe, in the way your would think primarily.

I waited the storm out up on the bluff. In fact, I watched it roll in, my legs dangling down the. I could dip the tip of my sneakered foot into the odd calm of the milky substance, which had risen and then stopped. Already the bones began to surface, grim bubbles. The bluff, by then, underwater but for the slightly sloped steeple of grass under my exposed buttocks. The sun, on a string, hissed and stopped as it dipped slowly into the water then rose up out again to steam the air with the broth-y brine of bones.

So you see how I have failed and there is no one to see the drop of water fall from the rubber toe of my shoe — I have failed to populate the world — or hear it splash.

***

Mangled by Alan

Franklin’s leaving was quite the scene. The entire department was there when it happened, of course, busy at work on the new designs and intermingling gossip transcribed by the surreptitious glance and notion towards. We believed in bandanas for the week. Someone hashtagged that stripes were in. There was another storm coming, Felix squeaked from the mail room.

If the last four weeks were any indication of his dissatisfaction, I never knew. If his gentle retractions should have given him away, I didn’t look up from the page. The shape of his mouth, his jeans, the way he handled my jaunts into indifference. My stoic repose. My statuesque ingratitude. These are images I’m left with in his wake.

We come into this world shaken by love and we will leave it the same way someday.

***

Untitled by Bill

I swear it was a man in leather kit - full pants, and sleeveless coat with no shirt. But cheap, poorly made, and coated in plastics to preserve it like the couch in the living room of his father's apartment years back. He walked in on dad and dad's girlfriend naked and sweating crumpled together on that couch once. Now its the end of summer and grasping at the fall his hunter's garb lined foolishly with felt he sweats, a strip mall Safarian stalking a decent gelato in an urban jungle where fifty thousand tourists a day traipse un-eaten through well tended paths. His never sharpened machete only used on the hedges around his mother's house.

This is the middle, where it has to grind out. He simply looks as foolish as we all feel. The middle where nothing happens, where there has to be only the pounding pounding pounding of movement. The same movement, over and over again, again and again and again, like his father's hips moving up and down between that woman's legs with the skirt around her ankle.

Mom had asked him if he's seen the skirt, the black and white striped one, a couple days earlier. This was a few years before she shacked up with Byron just to cut through some of the loneliness of an abandoned cuckqueen, and then it was there dangling over the floor. There it was on the mannikin before he threw it or close enough, the same colors, dad's key that he still had turning in the lock until the act itself is meaningless and the heart, the love, is just pouring out of all of them.

The faces that you meet become featureless patients awaiting triage, their faces wrapped in wet linen clinging to their features and destroying any individuality, the human removed from the being except for the relentless communal eventuality. Sawdust soaking up the blood where he fell out of the window and cut himself.

***

Business by Forrest

When the monsoon rains come, the market street proprietors must bring in their mannequins quickly, or risk losing them forever in the flood. I have lost a few this way myself and, other than they are not cheap to come by, I have learned to rue the disappearance of each one more than those in this coastal province who mind their own business: a grandmother here, a six-year old there, what does it matter. They tell us during the funeral that it does. By that time, I've already spent most of the week, once the clouds have passed, searching for my lost mannequin and finding instead distant relations who I had thought been swept away during the previous flood, or another hapless bystander who went out photographing the downpour. It is sad and inevitable, yet very few things can be dressed up as mannequins suitable for a drowned town. I've tried broomsticks potted in pails of hard cement. Once even a distant relation, until someone reported me. It is sad and inevitable. There are some perfectly good mannequins around, waiting to help out. If only it didn't rain so much; then everyone in this forsaken tourist trap would mind their own business.

***

Untitled by Nicole

Today they are dragging the lake. You know, out behind that old house with the orange shutters that are falling off at the sides? The ones with the sun and moon painted on them? The police are out there now. I can see them from my window.

I am watching but I won’t look for too long. I don’t want to see when they pull it out. It’s more than old condoms and beer cans and lawn mowers thrown over the sides.

Today they are dragging the lake. Someone that looks like James’ brother is wearing diving gear. They have maps spread out on the hood of one of the cars. I can’t see the map, but I see where they are pointing.

I am watching from my window. Don’t worry. I don’t move the curtains and am only looking through the place where the fabric folds apart. Don’t worry. I won’t look for too long.

Today they are dragging the lake. There is a yellow crane and they are dropping something into the water that makes ripples. Like the bathroom wallpaper - big circles that move in and out when you stare and don’t close your eyes.

I’m watching and they pull it up. The water falls out of the sides and drains back into the lake. Your box looks different. The paint has peeled up. But I can still see the flowers I painted. The dark circle in the middle and each loop of petal as big as your hands.

Today they are dragging the lake. I can’t keep you anymore. I’m sorry, you know. I am. I’m watching but I’ll stop looking soon.

Lunch

Mouse by Forrest

In the unlit basement I once entered only once, I had heard and seen nothing and was expected to hear and see nothing, the whole venture planned carefully, the way they were working starting at the end, the way people are forever fixated on outcomes in general or my own, specifically, not where we would like to begin, I hear, perhaps behind me, likely off to the side I search in the dark, but we have all the time, moving backwards, just out of what my sight makes out, when someone turns on the light fixture dangling languidly so that the only surprise is to hear or see anything that instant, and not to expect to hear or see it moving, a few gigglings starting in my presence, these letting me think I wouldn't have lasted this far even if I reminded them we were working towards the beginning where all the characters are introduced, where we know the action and setting take place, where we learn about what happens when disturbing a snake's hunger: timidity.

***

Lunchish by Lyle

It was not supposed to go this way. But it never was. Or is. Either. Both. But then that's neither here nor there. This is the infinity. This was the infinity. Not that not wanting to do it this way means anything one way or another. Just that the desire itself existed outside of this infinity, which was obviously trouble. But there was nothing to do about that. Because trouble, too, was outside of that infinity, like a speck of dirt on a lens or an errant pen mark on a math test. Did that mean something? Or was it a self-inclusive bracket? Meaning it meant everything and then nothing also. And included itself in its own digestive tract. The answer is always so close like the swelling of a brain. And then. Gone.

***

The Serpent Is Not Eating Its Tail by Alan

All that is wrong with history is alive and well in Las Vegas was what a wise man said to me once a long time ago. There is a lot of talk about a kind of meta-implosion in modern society…like we’ve gone so far in, we’re out, man. Way out. But the truth is it’s still like the Romans and before the Romans. “A place of darkness,” Conrad called it. The rules that govern our behavior are worse than the pilgrims and their little squirts into the continent and its pulsing heart. The serpent that eats its tail is not aware that the meal it is having is its, most likely, final one. There is a certain naiveté that is passable, affectionate, sweet almost. We forgive the oversight to a certain extent, enough to peer into the later realization as revelatory manifesto or starry doctrine of almost zen. But this serpent is not eating its tail. This serpent goes for the head, which is to say the core of our sanity. This serpent has purpose, a cause. Direction! Hisses “horror, horror” while it swallows us whole face first.

***

Snake Dreams by Johanna

In my dream, I told myself, “Remember this,” the rattlesnake that took a bite from my left shoulder, how I barely noticed, how it didn't hurt a bit. And I remembered even as the sound of yelling children awoke me, even though I had no time to write it down.

Later, I looked up meanings in my Dream Dictionary:

1. A warning about a situation that is poisonous in your life. 
2. Your inability to make choices. 
3. Sign of being on the verge of personal transformation. 

Nothing seemed to apply to me.

All day I saw snakes - sticks in the garden, cords lining the wall, vines twisting through holes in the fence.

When the children came inside from their play, hissing in whispers, they encircled my feet until I buckled to the floor. The oldest peered down at me with yellow eyes. “Mom?” he said.

I locked myself in the bathroom, though I knew it was useless; they always found me. I turned on the hot water, filling the room with steam, and waited.

Gathering

Gathering for the End of the World by Johanna

At first, it was difficult to believe that the apocalypse would come anywhere near their little town, situated in the middle of nowhere, cradled by mountains and bordered by desert. But it was true. The news had been on the radio for days. They heard it in their cars between yard sales or while driving their kids to school. They heard it inside banks and grocery stores. They read articles about it in the local paper. The apocalypse was coming to town.

Local businesses, accustomed to the tourism industry, began selling tickets to the apocalypse. Thousands of tickets sold in the first hour. People from all over the world were expected. The first concern of local police was the traffic it would cause. In order to navigate all the people who would certainly arrive by the busload, they decided to close down the streets, detour tourists to parking lots and shuttle them in.

The townies knew better, of course, then to buy tickets. They would be able to see the whole thing from anywhere in town. Instead, they gathered in small groups preparing themselves for the end with various libations. The sun was setting, turning the sky pink and gray and orange. The apocalypse was scheduled for just after dark. While tourists lined the sidewalks to get into the show, the locals took to the abandoned streets. Children in tow, jumping in rainbow puddles, they shuffled along the yellow lines, laughing and shouting like there was no tomorrow.

***

For Company by Forrest Roth

When I drive you to the gathering, it is not for company, nor for comfort. I can see your friends anytime I want. I can see you with your friends anytime I want. But I want them to see you with me. I want them to see me driving you in a car with one working headlight in the sun. I want them to gather around the one which doesn’t work and show them that it is, in fact, missing. And your friends will ask you about driving with one headlight in the sun, if only because they did not see the face of who was next to me.

***

Happenstance by Lyle

The second coming was largely uneventful. In fact, it went without notice. We were all standing around outside a vegan place when, apparently, a flash of light... happened? I’m still not sure about it all. In fact I don’t remember it at all. Someone sent me the photo afterwards. I do remember riding home and feeling a little odd. But who doesn’t?

The feeling was like something I had felt as a kid standing on a street corner. Like god (I must have believed in him then — bearded and wrathful) was pulling my spine, from the base, up. As if he wasn’t sure that I should be on earth. Not that he thought I would be better off up there or that I didn’t belong down here just that maybe he changed his mind (14 years after the fact). He is rather fickle, after all (14 years is nothing to god). So I would stand on the corner waiting to cross this street or another and feel like I was being tugged up by the spine; my mind had wandered all the way down the vertebrae a little at a time and was then being coaxed back but not straight back. Parallel to myself leading back up to my head (where I genuinely believed my “mind” existed) maybe six inches behind me. And it felt good. A kind of spiritual experience that I didn’t want to admit to because it was mine and only mine. I didn’t want to share it with anyone else. I wasn’t a christian. And it certainly didn’t feel christian. It felt like a rubber band pulled me up (but of course the rubber band reached all the way to heaven -- these terms are not my own; I have to use them so that you can quickly understand; I have so little time) and so had so much slack that it couldn’t possibly really lift me up. There was little doubt that it could NOT. Heaven. Haha. It’s just a feeling you don’t quite understand.

***

They're Talking about It by Alan

Beneath such a sky, a few of them would congregate and share stories. Lake Taghunock in the coldest months, the semester from hell, the place where cigarettes were cheap. Two of them had a thing for each other but were too indecisive to tell the others for fear of sudden philosophic collision. The others had things for others that they would occasionally talk about as well, but only when the sun went down.

They were in love with words and talking and also, to a lesser extent, silence. Theirs was the ellipse and the understated. They kept their hands in their pockets to feel the shape of some thing, but mostly what they really left the time with was a shape of thinking.

A new friend and potential life partner would make a remark years down the line from those days and immediately one of the few would be taken back. Such knowing from a stranger. Such shared experience. This must be right. This must be when things turn.

The words would be the impetus but the silence, like in certain photographs or memories, the result.