ISSUE 22 August 2021
Editor: Francine Witte
Editor: Francine Witte
FLASH
Wendy BooydeGraaff Edward Lee DS Levy A'Ja Lyons Kellene O'Hara Meg Pokrass Josh Price Robert Scotellaro Maureen Sherbondy Chris Skiles Taylor Solano Paul Stapleton
Wendy BooydeGraaff
Grapes
Squirm out of your mother onto the fresh sheets. Accept the washing and the rubbing. Allow swaddling, bundling. Ride the arms of your father outside. Feel the March wind on your cheeks. Smell this: small green yellow scent of concord grapes. Every year, smell this. Smell brown earth, rich with worms and rain. Smell cut grass and pruned branches. Smell blossoms of plums, cherries, peaches, apples. The grapevines, however, speak to you. Limbs tied to taut wires, climber fingers reaching to sturdy posts. Farmers are a practical sort; hide your communion. Spend days among the rows, apologize in the fall as you are tying branches to wires. Promise this is needed, this support of twine, this bending of pliable arms. Inhale the spring bloom. Lay on the bumpy dirt when blooms give way to small green clusters. Hide among the large leaves. Bring your friends, and when you are older, your boyfriends, your girlfriends. Bury cigarette butts by the roots. Believe grapes flourish because of you instead of in spite of you. Steal the best clippers. Wait for the green to fill out, round into blue purple bunches voluptuous. Cut. Fill. Carry. Bulge your biceps. Stack bushels in the pick-up. Sell the idea of jam, wine, juice. Drive home with some cash. Late November, the ground done with promoting growth, the vines bare, drink a glass of concord cordial and begin growing your own round grape. This isn’t something to do alone, but you do it alone. Grapes your only friend, now. Grapes your only family. Grapes the only witness to you, birthing out this tumour that doesn’t inherit the land, that doesn’t love the grapes, that doesn’t do or smell or cry or taste. Tell the grapes what you really want. Allow them to steep in your pain, soak up the bitterness. Give them back their skins, and they will grow you new bunches, bunches and bunches and bunches.
Wendy BooydeGraaff's work has been included in SmokeLong Quarterly, West Trade Review, Another Chicago Magazine, NOON, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, she now lives in Michigan, United States.
Edward Lee
Waiting as I Count
Standing in a one-track train station without a timetable, I wait for a train the ghosts say never comes but once a lifetime.
Of course, I ignore them – they are ghosts after all, incorporeal beings always losing their shapes and everything contained in those shapes, while I am still alive and full of the confidence and surety of my rightness that only the living possess, packaged tightly within my solid form - keeping my eyes on the horizon I imagine the train will come from.
Time upon time a train arrives, coming from the opposite horizon, suddenly there as though it had always been there and my eyes had failed to see it, silent, vapor caressing its fading silver skin, stunted reflections showing in its carapace that do not seem to match any part of the station surrounding it. I go to board, but cannot, and am told without words being spoken – the knowledge suddenly appearing in my head, absent one moment, present the next - that only ghosts are allowed on this train, and I am not a ghost, not yet; this train and all the trains I have seen are not the train I am waiting for, but I do not know this, cannot know this, until I try to board them, and the unspoken words appear in my head, and so I try to board all of them, sure that this one – this very one! – will be the very one for me.
The ghosts cover their phantom mouths as they snigger, having found their prescribed seats. As one they whisper, 'Not yet, not yet', as the train pulls out and speeds to the horizon I have spent a lifetime searching, and I can hear them clearly though the windows of the train are thick and remain unopen; I imagine I can see the air between us vibrating as their voices travel towards me even as the train pulls away.
Not yet. No, not yet. But life is not forever, not in any singular sense, which is the only sense that matters when one only has one life, and I will wait at this station, now turning my head from horizon to horizon – though I am reasonably confident that my train will come from the horizon I have long been watching - until ‘not yet’ becomes ‘now’, and a train appears that I am able to board, the seat awaiting me, and no one else, known to me as soon as I lay eyes upon it.
Edward Lee's poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales. He is currently working on a novel.
He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.
His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com
DS Levy Fort Wayne, IN
Free Kittens
Marnie buries her nose in Zoe’s soft fur. “Oh, you,” she coos. “You’re such a pretty little fat one.”
I’m staying with my sister. Last month, after she got out of the hospital, I flew in from Chicago. She didn’t want me to come, but now that it’s just the two of us, I insisted. Two years ago, our folks were killed in a plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean. Before that, Marnie and I barely spoke. We were always so different, I’d often wondered if one of us hadn’t been adopted. Now, we’re making an effort, stretching our numbed hearts as far as they’ll reach.
Earlier this morning, I watched her thin fingers run up and down Lillie’s calico spine. I was reading, my eyes glued to the same page where I’d left off the night before.
If Marnie were a cat, she’d be feral, not lovable like a slobbering dog. Those kittens are learning to get her love any way they can.
“A penny for your thoughts,” I say, a glint in my eye because I know it reminds her of Mom, who used to say it whenever she’d catch us staring off into space.
Her hazel eyes turn on me. I half expect her to leap with claws extended.
“Make it a quarter and I’ll think about it,” she hisses.
I offer more coffee, another muffin. She shakes her head no. Shadows creep across the floor. Invisible curtains draw around her. I mark my page, close the book. It’s a fine day, warm and sunny.
I suggest a a ride in the country.
She pushes the kitten off her lap. The poor thing lands hard. I can tell Marnie doesn’t want to go anywhere, but she knows it’s easier to go along than to resist.
I drive us through town, past the Dairy Queen and The UV Emporium tanning salon where she was working before things went wrong. Farther on, we pass the hospital and, across the street, The Cove, where she goes for therapy.
Marnie looks straight ahead, as if I’m not there.
We take Angling Road out into the country, past weathered barns and silos, pastures and poultry farms. A heard of Jersey cows grazes on the hill, but Marnie won’t look. Way out in a stubbled field, some deer scavenge, and up ahead a rafter of wild turkeys strut close to the road.
My foot hovers over the brake.
Cresting over the hill, in the middle of the road, four vultures feed off a deer carcass.
“Don’t look,” I say, and she tips her head down.
We were taking a drive that day, too. I’d hoped fresh air, blue skies and tall trees would make her feel better, but it wasn’t until we saw a cardboard sign advertising free kittens that she roused from the place that swallows her whole. She held both kittens and started crying about which one to adopt. “It isn’t fair,” she’d said—the unfairness of life her curse to bear. I told her it would be a shame to separate them, and the old farm woman nodded and offered both to us in an old tattered towel. The kittens slept on Marnie’s lap and purred all the way home.
The road’s smooth. Our tires whine. A murder of crows swarm over a cornfield. I’m afraid she’ll try it again, afraid I’ll wake up and find her in the tub, or in the garage, and I’ll have failed her and my parents.
When we pass the farm, she sits up and turns toward the barn. But there’s no sign, no free kittens.
She whispers, “I really hoped―”
Her voice trails off.
I could tell her that no matter how many kittens she gets, they’ll grow up and get big. I could also tell her that mama cats nudge their babies out of the den, forcing them to wander off and live on their own. But the one thing I will never tell her is that sometimes a newborn dies and the mama will lick it furiously to see if it’s still alive. If not, she may bury the kitten and lay on the spot for hours.
DS Levy lives in the Midwest. She has had work published in New World Writing, Bending Genres, Bull Men's Fiction, Atticus Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and others. Her flash chapbook, A Binary Heart, was published by Finishing Line Press.
A’Ja Lyons. Boone, IA
Starchild
Felicia’s life as a farmer was predestined. She tilled the soil and nurtured the vines as sweat beaded down her forehead and into her long, fat, plaits. The same as her mother before her, her father before her, and back to when names and faces were as monochrome as memories of irrelevant dirt roads.
In the mornings she tended the fruit, in the afternoon she tended the vegetables, and in the evening she tended the grains. She enjoyed eating the freshly picked fruit in her cereal and porridge for breakfast. She savored sandwiches made with freshly baked bread for lunch. She delighted in steamed vegetables at snack time and dinner. Farmer Felicia was content, but soon longed for more life than the plants she grew and sold. She sought to tend to beings that would speak not in seeds, but in words, touches, kisses, and cuddles. Felicia desired a little girl child.
She woke to the sun, dreaming of a little girl with a smile as big and bright as the sun’s rays. She lied down to sleep with the moon’s rising, hoping for a child as beautiful and bold as the moonlight. Both the sun and moon heard Farmer Felicia’s heartsong from miles away, up high in the sky, during the night as well as the day.
The sun and the moon selected a star; not too big, not too small. Far from the other stars, silent but special, and shot the star down to Earth. As the star reached Farmer Felicia, it shifted from heat and gases to head, hands, and feet.
Felicia knelt to begin evening chores when a little girl landed in her field of grains direct from the heavens, unbruised and unblemished. Her skin milky as a moon cloud; her hair dark and tightly coiled, soaked up the sun’s rays. Felicia called her ‘Starchild’.
Felicia and her new daughter rode bikes together, laughter bellowing and feeding the trees with endless joy. They ate together, the ground and grubs gobbling their crumbs and soaking in their serenity. They hiked up hills and mountains, demanding rocks and streams make way for their march of carefree and curtsies to the creatures they crossed. They swam in the lake and dove deep to greet the royalty masters of the sea. Every night as Felicia put Starchild to bed, she thanked the sun and moon for the glorious bounty that was her dearest, darling, daughter. Wishes on stars as rain droplets fell like her tears of despondence were not made in vain.
With Starchild by her side, Farmer Felicia didn’t spend as much time focusing on fertilizer and the flourishing of ferns. The Earth grew envious. Mediocre bearings and minor yields were not fitting for a gardener of Felicia’s caliber. The Earth insisted on absolute devotion. One morning as Starchild picked fresh strawberries, The Earth opened a large hole beneath and attempted to swallow her deep into its center. As she felt the ground’s first rumble, Farmer Felicia rushed towards Starchild. She leapt, reached her arms outward, and grabbed onto her daughter’s hands before the little star could slip into the abyss.
Her embrace tight, the Earth again rumbled, summoning the clouds and winds. A swirl of sky touched down to the Earth, and carried Starchild off and out of Felicia’s arms. Felicia screamed into the ether, but the violent gust of wind would not wane.
She packed a bag and left her land to search for Starchild. Felicia searched the mountains and called out to the skies. She searched the valleys and begged the Earth to bring her daughter back. Felicia searched the desert, traipsing through sand and surviving harsh sun rays. She searched the rivers, streams, bought a boat and searched the oceans.
She cried out for Starchild at night, and she called out for her during the day. Felicia knew in her heart her daughter hadn’t disappeared completely. While navigating the rolling sea, she saw a floating kinky curl in the ocean’s waters. Felicia dove down deep, her heart full of hope and body filling with fluid.
As she delved further, a sudden jet of water flew past. The sea spat Starchild out and into the air. Felicia returned to the surface and pulled Starchild into the boat. The sudden rush of air expelled oceanic content from Starchild’s little body. Felicia held Starchild close as the salty sea air stung her nose. They shivered on the boat as their hearts warmed and filled in reconciliation.
Farmer Felicia moved to the seaside and became Fisherwoman Felicia. She and Starchild spent their days on the boat catching sea creatures and selling them at coastal markets. Her princess’ crown adorned with shiny shells, Felicia marveled at the blessing to which she was entrusted. Heaven and Earth made the way, but Felicia would forge their path. Every day they thanked the sea for returning Starchild home.
A’Ja Lyons is a Black, bisexual writer from the Gulf Coast currently residing in the Upper Midwest. She is a second-year graduate student at Iowa State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing and the Environment. A’Ja is the proud mother of a highly athletically gifted and animal-loving child. You can find her on Twitter @ajalyonsroars.
Kellene O'Hara
A Brief History of Illumination
I.
At first, there was nothing. This is what they will tell you. They will say there was nothing. But an absence is a something. And, in the beginning, there was an absence of light.
II.
Then, there was the hope of the presence of light. A hum radiating from the chest of the universe, faint and hollow. An impression of illumination. It was distant and dim – like the slumber that clings to morning eyelids, a memory of the nighttime and a prophetic feeling of something yet to come.
It is that anticipation, that moment, in which light was on the cusp of being born into existence.
III.
Like a spark, light sprung into being. A molecule, a wave. Something in the air that suddenly was, and was to be seen.
Light burst. Light burned.
Gas giants grew, expanded. Extending, radiating.
IV.
Light streaked across the sky. It struck the ground and let the flames burn too. On scorched earth, it began. Illumination wasn’t confined to the heavens.
Light emanated from the land. From the core to the crust, the light was inside this planet.
It belonged to this world and to the creatures emerging from oceans deep.
Did someone mention a burning bush?
V.
Harness it. Use it. Make it ours.
The creatures wanted it. Of course they did. After all, didn’t it belong to them? This gracious gift from above? That’s what they said.
It was given to them. They owned it.
If they owned it, they could transform it. From a celestial divination, it evolved. Became a tool.
A tool for them.
Keep us warm. Keep us safe.
A simple request. Happy to oblige.
VI.
Destroy them. Burn them. Hurt them.
It was more complex, these wants. A tool to help became a tool to terminate. Or perhaps a tool to terminate was helping them. Maybe it all stemmed from the same need, the same urge. The same thing that made these creatures. They were all the same, weren’t they?
No, no. They cried. Hurt them – not us.
Them. Us.
What does that mean? The light didn’t know. The flames were hungry to comply.
They ate everything, everyone.
The flames burned it all.
VII.
The world was aflame. Wash it all. Water – the enemy of the flame. Water – which swelled and drowned desire.
Try again. Try harder. Try better.
Here’s the light, the flame. Strike it, let it burn…and burn and burn.
Again. The voices cry – Harness it. Use it. Make it ours. Make it more.
From the oil – Make it more. From the gas – Make it more.
From the crackle of electric static – Make it more.
More, more, more.
VIII.
Clusters of creatures meant clusters of light.
The clusters of creatures wanted clusters of light.
These clusters of light drown the darkness.
Drown, drown, drown.
Drown the darkness.
Darkness – vanquished at last!
The night is theirs. They own it. They own the night.
The creatures tell themselves a story about how they beat the night with light. A triumph. A victory.
Progress and the heralding of a new era of industry.
The creatures, you know, feared it, that dark and deep night.
The creatures saw the night as nothing. But an absence is something. Although, of course, the creatures disagree.
The kingdom of light is good. Shadows and all that dwells in the darkness is bad.
But what the creatures do not understand is that their light, that light that they created, stirs the skies. It obscures the source – those stars from which it all began.
The night has become polluted.
Without the stars, they cannot see. They cannot remember how it all started, this history of illumination.
Instead of looking up, they look down to the fabricated glow radiating from a false god.
IX.
Make it. Use it. Sell it.
They trade coins and cotton for the light. They trade light for night.
The economic principals driving the business of illumination are the only purpose left for light.
Buyers, sellers. All of them users.
X.
But, one night, one of the little creatures emerged from a tent in a clearing and looked up at that bright night sky…
And she admired it. Not for gain, for entertainment, for fortune or fame.
She looked up.
And she saw the stars.
Kellene O’Hara is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at The New School. Her writing has been published in The Fourth River, Sheepshead Review, The Roadrunner Review, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @KelleneOHara and online at kelleneohara.com.
Meg Pokrass Northern England
Murmurations
“Don't budge,” I say to Bob, after sampling his Sunday brew. “Hunker down just like that.”
Glorious with his calendar grin, zipper flopping open, Bob and his deep porter browns grinning right at my camera.
These days I'm gulping down murmurations of being cash strapped while he tells me what we need to make our lives more fulfilling: a life jacket for the dog, chickens to peck our skinny weeds, lop-eared rabbits because they make a childless family beautiful. Picking and choosing, choosing and picking.
“Okay, my love,” I sputter, choking on so much goodness in our living room, the abundant bounty of this lovely man in striped bathing bottoms standing next to the mirror victorious—bubbling with fidelity while boxes of lucky chickens arrive in trucks.
Not being able to communicate with the foot
Your husband no longer talks the same way to you—not since your foot stopped breathing. He passes by on the way to the kitchen, smiling uncomfortably. The foot is cold, purple and sometimes you talk to it but you don't get very far. You touch it, but your foot has the glow of a dead person’s appendage.
When you think of your neurologist, you imagine him touching your foot and your thoughts warm up. This is the only way your foot can feel heat.
Looking at your foot now you're trying to throw it some light. Most of your life remains dark, nearly as strange. Your foot seems to be living as an amphibian underneath you, looking for someplace to curl. If you were an amphibian you would take up residence in your neurologist’s garden.
You try not to think about it, and instead, you wonder why the world is walking on eggshells. Why, every time you take a step forward and ignore the pain, it feels more broken.
The Bear in the Bedroom
There is always something going on with her casting and here it is again. This cute bastard in her bedroom, paw slung over her shoulder. She usually keeps things from being maudlin by making things funny. “What kind of ballet are we doing?” she says. She kisses him on the ball of his nose and inhales the rank forest inside him. “Scary,” she says. Then she shows him the bear-shaped scar on her bottom from where she'd once been attacked. At one time the notion of some young largehearted bastard next to her in bed might have cheered her up. Now she carries a lucky rabbit’s foot, to prove she’s the hunter. “The last robber who said he loved me gave me this one,” she says. “We’re all just whisking around in the past,” he snorts, and here she agrees. He shows her his needle-shaped scar, tells her that this is what happened to him the last time he cared about a woman like her, how he ended up in a clamp, how it wasn’t funny. “Don’t juggle your bastards like that, he says, unwinding his paw from her shoulder.
Meg Pokrass is the two-time recipient of the Blue Light Book Award and she is the author of eight prose collections . Her work has been anthologized in two Norton Anthologies: Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton 2015) and New Micro (W.W. Norton 2018), Best Small Fictions & Wigleaf Top 50. Recent stories have been published in Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, Wigleaf, Waxwing and American Journal of Poetry. She is the Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction. Meg lives in Northern England.
Josh Price
My Father, the Field Mouse
I wanted my parents to be happy, was always looking for things to surprise them, as death waited. I didn't know what made them happy; I was looking on the ground but maybe it was in the sky.
I think sometimes about the trailer park where we wound up, I hated it there; it wasn’t where we lived before.
I step inside those thoughts, walk down the streets of my hopes and dreams.
The wind picks up I pull the pain around me like a coat. Trees shudder as their leaves whisper of evening.
Outside the trailer where my parents stay, the sidewalks have decayed. The nearby movie theaters and candy shops are closed down, empty store fronts for sale.
My father is a field mouse by day in these streets, wages paid for the size of his anger in life. He was once a monster, now just a nuisance. My mother shoos him away with a broom from the doorway of the home she cleans, she couldn’t afford the vodka otherwise. My father runs away, my mother shaking her fist at him, for always making messes.
By dusk her work’s still not done and she’s getting worried, she’s getting the shakes. My Father comes back, a man again. He comes back every night to walk her home, to save her from the dark.
I follow my parents to their trailer. I let myself in the back door to check on them.
They sit on the couch together watching their favorite shows. They stare at a blank wall, but I don't tell them. My mother cries herself to sleep in my father's arms. He falls asleep too, his head on her head. They can always try again next time.
Even though they're gone now, they live in my head while I’m alive, where they can be safe. I keep them out of sight from others as best I can. I love them and miss them very much. I want them to be happy here, because they weren’t when I knew them.
I let myself out the way I came in and walk back, pulling my coat tighter.
I run through the streets. The wind howls, the leaves whisper. I hear my own voice out there, my voice when I was small, screaming from the dark: “Do something! You're going to die!” I run faster, to be far from memory. I slip through my thoughts, and get out of there just in time.
The day’s slide by, unseen thieves; outside the streets of my hopes and dreams crumble away. The trees shudder, somewhere my mother cries. Afraid again. She doesn't like to be alone when the leaves whisper.
But my father‘s coming back; he isn’t far. He'll be there with her soon, you’ll see, and they can stay in the place I've kept for them a while longer. It’s the only way I know how to make them happy.
Josh Price is an avid gardener and an enthusiastic watcher of cartoons. His job resume includes: builder, musician, and martial arts coach. Josh lives at the foot of a volcano, on the shores of Northern California’s largest natural lake, with his wife and two dogs.
Robert Scotellaro San Francisco, CA
Horse’s Ass
Inside
They are in the pantomime horse costume clomping comically about the lawn at their daughter’s birthday party. She, at the front guiding them, and he, with his arms around her, the horse’s disproportionally high rear. Occasionally she neighs and a few kids laugh. One girl pets its mane, then quickly grows bored and scampers off.
“Neigh,” she says into the din of squealing children.
“Giddy up,” he tells her, gently slapping her rump. They are both sweating and the scent of her shampoo and perspiration arouses him.
“Quit it!” she says.
“Not so loud,” he tells her.
“I saw the way you looked at Carmen earlier,” she whispers. You really are a horse’s ass.”
“Carmen? She’s old enough to be my grandmother.”
“She’s what, three years older than I am?”
“Huh, well you look ten years younger.”
“Ha! How does a horse’s ass produce so much bullshit?”
“Good one,” he says, “but it’s for real, you know I only have eyes for you,” and gives her another soft pat. Then he says, “Hey, let me know when you’re going to make a sharp turn like that next time. You nearly split us in half.”
Inside Out
They keep the horse costume. Occasionally they take it out of a dark corner of the closet and a good deal of creative foreplay ensues within its confines. They take turns regarding who will lead them to the bed and who will be the horse’s ass. A great deal of contortionism is required and when they emerge, it is a kind of hatching: seeing each other anew.
Divided Up
He had, an hour earlier, made a musical instrument out of his lawn chair, using the spoon from his iced tea to tap out a Latin rhythm against the aluminum armrest. He quipped that he was serenading her, as she ate from a bag of doughnut holes, ignoring him.
He sits in it now reading The Old Man and the Sea. “Why would anyone want a big fish in the first place?” he says. “What’s with Hemingway and Melville anyway?” he says. Then he flips the book over, butterflying against his thigh, gazes through a space between two hedges in their yard as Carman dives into her pool next door. He feels a burning sensation (real or imagined) at the back of his neck. He turns.
“I have a superpower,” she tells him.
“Oh?”
“Yes, I have x-ray intuition. I can see right through to the bone.”
“That sounds painful,” he says. She’s wearing a favorite blouse he bought her in Mexico, with small mirrored pieces sewn into the front of it. He sees himself divided up as he gazes into them. A jet overhead scars its way through a clear blue patch. The burning sensation intensifies. He is relieved to look up, up, up at it, his whole head in the sky. Lost in its contrails.
Brain Waves
Mass Exodus
A spider crawls out of my son’s old saxophone in the basement. Such a quiet exodus from such a noisy instrument. A quiet exodus for each of them: my wife, my son in college, this spider. It repels down on a barely visible line, so light, so light.
Healing Sounds
I visit a “Healing Sounds” therapist. What the hell? There is the use of sacred instruments and voice tones to free the boulders that have “impacted my spirit.” Brain waves are mentioned again and again. I close my eyes as gongs and voice tones “reconfigure the molecules” surrounding me. But a silly thought, born of cynicism, emerges despite my best urgings at suppression. Brain waves, I think, and picture brains coming in with the tide, their slippery convolutions catching the light just so (an ocean’s-worth, rising/falling in the froth). I smile, a faux appearance of bliss belied by the shouts in my head: erase! erase!
Light Enough
I am old enough to remember (as a kid) radio was the movie theater of the mind. How what you imagined made it so. The way books still are. I look out the window at the sky. I wonder if there are books in Heaven (mysteries, no doubt). Wonder if they play cards up there. Or have pets, for that matter, and if they strafe at fleas. Eternity after all is a fairly long time and you’d need something to do. Maybe one could learn to play an instrument (a loud one, say) start a garage band. Or does one just float around all day in outer space, remembering, or just hang out lower down on a cloud, like on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Light enough to not fall through. Like the rain.
Robert Scotellaro's work has been included in W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Best Small Fictions 2016, 2017, Best Microfiction 2020, and elsewhere. He is the author of seven chapbooks and five story collections. He was the winner of The Rainmaker Award and the Blue Light Book Award. He has, with James Thomas, co-edited NEW MICRO, published by W.W. Norton. Robert is a founding donor to The Ransom Flash Fiction Collection at the Univ. of Texas,. He lives in San Francisco. Visit him at: www.robertscotellaro.com
Maureen Sherbondy Durham, NC
The Marriage Reader
The marriage reader visits every home in the small town along the river. He determines
which home is harmonious and which one is not. His decisions are final.
He knocks on the first door of the day. A couple nervously lets him inside.
The marriage reader keeps on his overcoat and scarf, says, “This is a short test.”
He follows the couple into the living room, then he wanders to the kitchen and then the
dining room, passing the too-skinny sad looking mutt, the pile of plates in the sink, the romance
novel on one side table and the sports book beside a pipe. The house smells like melancholy and
distance.
The husband stands far apart from his plain wife. He studies his feet. She plops down on
the dusty gray couch.
“Stand up, facing each other,” directs the marriage reader. The wife pushes her tired body
up from the cushion. She crosses her arms.
“Now look each other in the eyes for two minutes. This is the test.”
The husband shuffles his feet, looks at the couch. The woman tugs at her shoulder-length
dishwater blonde hair.
His dark eyes focus on the clef in her chin Her bloodshot eyes stare at his rounded belly.
After two minutes, the reader declares, “Time to move on.”
They shrug their shoulders. The husband packs a suitcase and leaves. The wife breathes
out a long sigh held in for twenty years.
Maureen Sherbondy's YA novel, Lucky Brilliant, was published in 2020. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, Prelude, Calyx, and other journals. She lives in Durham, NC. www.maureensherbondy.com
Grapes
Squirm out of your mother onto the fresh sheets. Accept the washing and the rubbing. Allow swaddling, bundling. Ride the arms of your father outside. Feel the March wind on your cheeks. Smell this: small green yellow scent of concord grapes. Every year, smell this. Smell brown earth, rich with worms and rain. Smell cut grass and pruned branches. Smell blossoms of plums, cherries, peaches, apples. The grapevines, however, speak to you. Limbs tied to taut wires, climber fingers reaching to sturdy posts. Farmers are a practical sort; hide your communion. Spend days among the rows, apologize in the fall as you are tying branches to wires. Promise this is needed, this support of twine, this bending of pliable arms. Inhale the spring bloom. Lay on the bumpy dirt when blooms give way to small green clusters. Hide among the large leaves. Bring your friends, and when you are older, your boyfriends, your girlfriends. Bury cigarette butts by the roots. Believe grapes flourish because of you instead of in spite of you. Steal the best clippers. Wait for the green to fill out, round into blue purple bunches voluptuous. Cut. Fill. Carry. Bulge your biceps. Stack bushels in the pick-up. Sell the idea of jam, wine, juice. Drive home with some cash. Late November, the ground done with promoting growth, the vines bare, drink a glass of concord cordial and begin growing your own round grape. This isn’t something to do alone, but you do it alone. Grapes your only friend, now. Grapes your only family. Grapes the only witness to you, birthing out this tumour that doesn’t inherit the land, that doesn’t love the grapes, that doesn’t do or smell or cry or taste. Tell the grapes what you really want. Allow them to steep in your pain, soak up the bitterness. Give them back their skins, and they will grow you new bunches, bunches and bunches and bunches.
Wendy BooydeGraaff's work has been included in SmokeLong Quarterly, West Trade Review, Another Chicago Magazine, NOON, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, she now lives in Michigan, United States.
Edward Lee
Waiting as I Count
Standing in a one-track train station without a timetable, I wait for a train the ghosts say never comes but once a lifetime.
Of course, I ignore them – they are ghosts after all, incorporeal beings always losing their shapes and everything contained in those shapes, while I am still alive and full of the confidence and surety of my rightness that only the living possess, packaged tightly within my solid form - keeping my eyes on the horizon I imagine the train will come from.
Time upon time a train arrives, coming from the opposite horizon, suddenly there as though it had always been there and my eyes had failed to see it, silent, vapor caressing its fading silver skin, stunted reflections showing in its carapace that do not seem to match any part of the station surrounding it. I go to board, but cannot, and am told without words being spoken – the knowledge suddenly appearing in my head, absent one moment, present the next - that only ghosts are allowed on this train, and I am not a ghost, not yet; this train and all the trains I have seen are not the train I am waiting for, but I do not know this, cannot know this, until I try to board them, and the unspoken words appear in my head, and so I try to board all of them, sure that this one – this very one! – will be the very one for me.
The ghosts cover their phantom mouths as they snigger, having found their prescribed seats. As one they whisper, 'Not yet, not yet', as the train pulls out and speeds to the horizon I have spent a lifetime searching, and I can hear them clearly though the windows of the train are thick and remain unopen; I imagine I can see the air between us vibrating as their voices travel towards me even as the train pulls away.
Not yet. No, not yet. But life is not forever, not in any singular sense, which is the only sense that matters when one only has one life, and I will wait at this station, now turning my head from horizon to horizon – though I am reasonably confident that my train will come from the horizon I have long been watching - until ‘not yet’ becomes ‘now’, and a train appears that I am able to board, the seat awaiting me, and no one else, known to me as soon as I lay eyes upon it.
Edward Lee's poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales. He is currently working on a novel.
He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.
His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com
DS Levy Fort Wayne, IN
Free Kittens
Marnie buries her nose in Zoe’s soft fur. “Oh, you,” she coos. “You’re such a pretty little fat one.”
I’m staying with my sister. Last month, after she got out of the hospital, I flew in from Chicago. She didn’t want me to come, but now that it’s just the two of us, I insisted. Two years ago, our folks were killed in a plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean. Before that, Marnie and I barely spoke. We were always so different, I’d often wondered if one of us hadn’t been adopted. Now, we’re making an effort, stretching our numbed hearts as far as they’ll reach.
Earlier this morning, I watched her thin fingers run up and down Lillie’s calico spine. I was reading, my eyes glued to the same page where I’d left off the night before.
If Marnie were a cat, she’d be feral, not lovable like a slobbering dog. Those kittens are learning to get her love any way they can.
“A penny for your thoughts,” I say, a glint in my eye because I know it reminds her of Mom, who used to say it whenever she’d catch us staring off into space.
Her hazel eyes turn on me. I half expect her to leap with claws extended.
“Make it a quarter and I’ll think about it,” she hisses.
I offer more coffee, another muffin. She shakes her head no. Shadows creep across the floor. Invisible curtains draw around her. I mark my page, close the book. It’s a fine day, warm and sunny.
I suggest a a ride in the country.
She pushes the kitten off her lap. The poor thing lands hard. I can tell Marnie doesn’t want to go anywhere, but she knows it’s easier to go along than to resist.
I drive us through town, past the Dairy Queen and The UV Emporium tanning salon where she was working before things went wrong. Farther on, we pass the hospital and, across the street, The Cove, where she goes for therapy.
Marnie looks straight ahead, as if I’m not there.
We take Angling Road out into the country, past weathered barns and silos, pastures and poultry farms. A heard of Jersey cows grazes on the hill, but Marnie won’t look. Way out in a stubbled field, some deer scavenge, and up ahead a rafter of wild turkeys strut close to the road.
My foot hovers over the brake.
Cresting over the hill, in the middle of the road, four vultures feed off a deer carcass.
“Don’t look,” I say, and she tips her head down.
We were taking a drive that day, too. I’d hoped fresh air, blue skies and tall trees would make her feel better, but it wasn’t until we saw a cardboard sign advertising free kittens that she roused from the place that swallows her whole. She held both kittens and started crying about which one to adopt. “It isn’t fair,” she’d said—the unfairness of life her curse to bear. I told her it would be a shame to separate them, and the old farm woman nodded and offered both to us in an old tattered towel. The kittens slept on Marnie’s lap and purred all the way home.
The road’s smooth. Our tires whine. A murder of crows swarm over a cornfield. I’m afraid she’ll try it again, afraid I’ll wake up and find her in the tub, or in the garage, and I’ll have failed her and my parents.
When we pass the farm, she sits up and turns toward the barn. But there’s no sign, no free kittens.
She whispers, “I really hoped―”
Her voice trails off.
I could tell her that no matter how many kittens she gets, they’ll grow up and get big. I could also tell her that mama cats nudge their babies out of the den, forcing them to wander off and live on their own. But the one thing I will never tell her is that sometimes a newborn dies and the mama will lick it furiously to see if it’s still alive. If not, she may bury the kitten and lay on the spot for hours.
DS Levy lives in the Midwest. She has had work published in New World Writing, Bending Genres, Bull Men's Fiction, Atticus Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and others. Her flash chapbook, A Binary Heart, was published by Finishing Line Press.
A’Ja Lyons. Boone, IA
Starchild
Felicia’s life as a farmer was predestined. She tilled the soil and nurtured the vines as sweat beaded down her forehead and into her long, fat, plaits. The same as her mother before her, her father before her, and back to when names and faces were as monochrome as memories of irrelevant dirt roads.
In the mornings she tended the fruit, in the afternoon she tended the vegetables, and in the evening she tended the grains. She enjoyed eating the freshly picked fruit in her cereal and porridge for breakfast. She savored sandwiches made with freshly baked bread for lunch. She delighted in steamed vegetables at snack time and dinner. Farmer Felicia was content, but soon longed for more life than the plants she grew and sold. She sought to tend to beings that would speak not in seeds, but in words, touches, kisses, and cuddles. Felicia desired a little girl child.
She woke to the sun, dreaming of a little girl with a smile as big and bright as the sun’s rays. She lied down to sleep with the moon’s rising, hoping for a child as beautiful and bold as the moonlight. Both the sun and moon heard Farmer Felicia’s heartsong from miles away, up high in the sky, during the night as well as the day.
The sun and the moon selected a star; not too big, not too small. Far from the other stars, silent but special, and shot the star down to Earth. As the star reached Farmer Felicia, it shifted from heat and gases to head, hands, and feet.
Felicia knelt to begin evening chores when a little girl landed in her field of grains direct from the heavens, unbruised and unblemished. Her skin milky as a moon cloud; her hair dark and tightly coiled, soaked up the sun’s rays. Felicia called her ‘Starchild’.
Felicia and her new daughter rode bikes together, laughter bellowing and feeding the trees with endless joy. They ate together, the ground and grubs gobbling their crumbs and soaking in their serenity. They hiked up hills and mountains, demanding rocks and streams make way for their march of carefree and curtsies to the creatures they crossed. They swam in the lake and dove deep to greet the royalty masters of the sea. Every night as Felicia put Starchild to bed, she thanked the sun and moon for the glorious bounty that was her dearest, darling, daughter. Wishes on stars as rain droplets fell like her tears of despondence were not made in vain.
With Starchild by her side, Farmer Felicia didn’t spend as much time focusing on fertilizer and the flourishing of ferns. The Earth grew envious. Mediocre bearings and minor yields were not fitting for a gardener of Felicia’s caliber. The Earth insisted on absolute devotion. One morning as Starchild picked fresh strawberries, The Earth opened a large hole beneath and attempted to swallow her deep into its center. As she felt the ground’s first rumble, Farmer Felicia rushed towards Starchild. She leapt, reached her arms outward, and grabbed onto her daughter’s hands before the little star could slip into the abyss.
Her embrace tight, the Earth again rumbled, summoning the clouds and winds. A swirl of sky touched down to the Earth, and carried Starchild off and out of Felicia’s arms. Felicia screamed into the ether, but the violent gust of wind would not wane.
She packed a bag and left her land to search for Starchild. Felicia searched the mountains and called out to the skies. She searched the valleys and begged the Earth to bring her daughter back. Felicia searched the desert, traipsing through sand and surviving harsh sun rays. She searched the rivers, streams, bought a boat and searched the oceans.
She cried out for Starchild at night, and she called out for her during the day. Felicia knew in her heart her daughter hadn’t disappeared completely. While navigating the rolling sea, she saw a floating kinky curl in the ocean’s waters. Felicia dove down deep, her heart full of hope and body filling with fluid.
As she delved further, a sudden jet of water flew past. The sea spat Starchild out and into the air. Felicia returned to the surface and pulled Starchild into the boat. The sudden rush of air expelled oceanic content from Starchild’s little body. Felicia held Starchild close as the salty sea air stung her nose. They shivered on the boat as their hearts warmed and filled in reconciliation.
Farmer Felicia moved to the seaside and became Fisherwoman Felicia. She and Starchild spent their days on the boat catching sea creatures and selling them at coastal markets. Her princess’ crown adorned with shiny shells, Felicia marveled at the blessing to which she was entrusted. Heaven and Earth made the way, but Felicia would forge their path. Every day they thanked the sea for returning Starchild home.
A’Ja Lyons is a Black, bisexual writer from the Gulf Coast currently residing in the Upper Midwest. She is a second-year graduate student at Iowa State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing and the Environment. A’Ja is the proud mother of a highly athletically gifted and animal-loving child. You can find her on Twitter @ajalyonsroars.
Kellene O'Hara
A Brief History of Illumination
I.
At first, there was nothing. This is what they will tell you. They will say there was nothing. But an absence is a something. And, in the beginning, there was an absence of light.
II.
Then, there was the hope of the presence of light. A hum radiating from the chest of the universe, faint and hollow. An impression of illumination. It was distant and dim – like the slumber that clings to morning eyelids, a memory of the nighttime and a prophetic feeling of something yet to come.
It is that anticipation, that moment, in which light was on the cusp of being born into existence.
III.
Like a spark, light sprung into being. A molecule, a wave. Something in the air that suddenly was, and was to be seen.
Light burst. Light burned.
Gas giants grew, expanded. Extending, radiating.
IV.
Light streaked across the sky. It struck the ground and let the flames burn too. On scorched earth, it began. Illumination wasn’t confined to the heavens.
Light emanated from the land. From the core to the crust, the light was inside this planet.
It belonged to this world and to the creatures emerging from oceans deep.
Did someone mention a burning bush?
V.
Harness it. Use it. Make it ours.
The creatures wanted it. Of course they did. After all, didn’t it belong to them? This gracious gift from above? That’s what they said.
It was given to them. They owned it.
If they owned it, they could transform it. From a celestial divination, it evolved. Became a tool.
A tool for them.
Keep us warm. Keep us safe.
A simple request. Happy to oblige.
VI.
Destroy them. Burn them. Hurt them.
It was more complex, these wants. A tool to help became a tool to terminate. Or perhaps a tool to terminate was helping them. Maybe it all stemmed from the same need, the same urge. The same thing that made these creatures. They were all the same, weren’t they?
No, no. They cried. Hurt them – not us.
Them. Us.
What does that mean? The light didn’t know. The flames were hungry to comply.
They ate everything, everyone.
The flames burned it all.
VII.
The world was aflame. Wash it all. Water – the enemy of the flame. Water – which swelled and drowned desire.
Try again. Try harder. Try better.
Here’s the light, the flame. Strike it, let it burn…and burn and burn.
Again. The voices cry – Harness it. Use it. Make it ours. Make it more.
From the oil – Make it more. From the gas – Make it more.
From the crackle of electric static – Make it more.
More, more, more.
VIII.
Clusters of creatures meant clusters of light.
The clusters of creatures wanted clusters of light.
These clusters of light drown the darkness.
Drown, drown, drown.
Drown the darkness.
Darkness – vanquished at last!
The night is theirs. They own it. They own the night.
The creatures tell themselves a story about how they beat the night with light. A triumph. A victory.
Progress and the heralding of a new era of industry.
The creatures, you know, feared it, that dark and deep night.
The creatures saw the night as nothing. But an absence is something. Although, of course, the creatures disagree.
The kingdom of light is good. Shadows and all that dwells in the darkness is bad.
But what the creatures do not understand is that their light, that light that they created, stirs the skies. It obscures the source – those stars from which it all began.
The night has become polluted.
Without the stars, they cannot see. They cannot remember how it all started, this history of illumination.
Instead of looking up, they look down to the fabricated glow radiating from a false god.
IX.
Make it. Use it. Sell it.
They trade coins and cotton for the light. They trade light for night.
The economic principals driving the business of illumination are the only purpose left for light.
Buyers, sellers. All of them users.
X.
But, one night, one of the little creatures emerged from a tent in a clearing and looked up at that bright night sky…
And she admired it. Not for gain, for entertainment, for fortune or fame.
She looked up.
And she saw the stars.
Kellene O’Hara is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at The New School. Her writing has been published in The Fourth River, Sheepshead Review, The Roadrunner Review, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @KelleneOHara and online at kelleneohara.com.
Meg Pokrass Northern England
Murmurations
“Don't budge,” I say to Bob, after sampling his Sunday brew. “Hunker down just like that.”
Glorious with his calendar grin, zipper flopping open, Bob and his deep porter browns grinning right at my camera.
These days I'm gulping down murmurations of being cash strapped while he tells me what we need to make our lives more fulfilling: a life jacket for the dog, chickens to peck our skinny weeds, lop-eared rabbits because they make a childless family beautiful. Picking and choosing, choosing and picking.
“Okay, my love,” I sputter, choking on so much goodness in our living room, the abundant bounty of this lovely man in striped bathing bottoms standing next to the mirror victorious—bubbling with fidelity while boxes of lucky chickens arrive in trucks.
Not being able to communicate with the foot
Your husband no longer talks the same way to you—not since your foot stopped breathing. He passes by on the way to the kitchen, smiling uncomfortably. The foot is cold, purple and sometimes you talk to it but you don't get very far. You touch it, but your foot has the glow of a dead person’s appendage.
When you think of your neurologist, you imagine him touching your foot and your thoughts warm up. This is the only way your foot can feel heat.
Looking at your foot now you're trying to throw it some light. Most of your life remains dark, nearly as strange. Your foot seems to be living as an amphibian underneath you, looking for someplace to curl. If you were an amphibian you would take up residence in your neurologist’s garden.
You try not to think about it, and instead, you wonder why the world is walking on eggshells. Why, every time you take a step forward and ignore the pain, it feels more broken.
The Bear in the Bedroom
There is always something going on with her casting and here it is again. This cute bastard in her bedroom, paw slung over her shoulder. She usually keeps things from being maudlin by making things funny. “What kind of ballet are we doing?” she says. She kisses him on the ball of his nose and inhales the rank forest inside him. “Scary,” she says. Then she shows him the bear-shaped scar on her bottom from where she'd once been attacked. At one time the notion of some young largehearted bastard next to her in bed might have cheered her up. Now she carries a lucky rabbit’s foot, to prove she’s the hunter. “The last robber who said he loved me gave me this one,” she says. “We’re all just whisking around in the past,” he snorts, and here she agrees. He shows her his needle-shaped scar, tells her that this is what happened to him the last time he cared about a woman like her, how he ended up in a clamp, how it wasn’t funny. “Don’t juggle your bastards like that, he says, unwinding his paw from her shoulder.
Meg Pokrass is the two-time recipient of the Blue Light Book Award and she is the author of eight prose collections . Her work has been anthologized in two Norton Anthologies: Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton 2015) and New Micro (W.W. Norton 2018), Best Small Fictions & Wigleaf Top 50. Recent stories have been published in Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, Wigleaf, Waxwing and American Journal of Poetry. She is the Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction. Meg lives in Northern England.
Josh Price
My Father, the Field Mouse
I wanted my parents to be happy, was always looking for things to surprise them, as death waited. I didn't know what made them happy; I was looking on the ground but maybe it was in the sky.
I think sometimes about the trailer park where we wound up, I hated it there; it wasn’t where we lived before.
I step inside those thoughts, walk down the streets of my hopes and dreams.
The wind picks up I pull the pain around me like a coat. Trees shudder as their leaves whisper of evening.
Outside the trailer where my parents stay, the sidewalks have decayed. The nearby movie theaters and candy shops are closed down, empty store fronts for sale.
My father is a field mouse by day in these streets, wages paid for the size of his anger in life. He was once a monster, now just a nuisance. My mother shoos him away with a broom from the doorway of the home she cleans, she couldn’t afford the vodka otherwise. My father runs away, my mother shaking her fist at him, for always making messes.
By dusk her work’s still not done and she’s getting worried, she’s getting the shakes. My Father comes back, a man again. He comes back every night to walk her home, to save her from the dark.
I follow my parents to their trailer. I let myself in the back door to check on them.
They sit on the couch together watching their favorite shows. They stare at a blank wall, but I don't tell them. My mother cries herself to sleep in my father's arms. He falls asleep too, his head on her head. They can always try again next time.
Even though they're gone now, they live in my head while I’m alive, where they can be safe. I keep them out of sight from others as best I can. I love them and miss them very much. I want them to be happy here, because they weren’t when I knew them.
I let myself out the way I came in and walk back, pulling my coat tighter.
I run through the streets. The wind howls, the leaves whisper. I hear my own voice out there, my voice when I was small, screaming from the dark: “Do something! You're going to die!” I run faster, to be far from memory. I slip through my thoughts, and get out of there just in time.
The day’s slide by, unseen thieves; outside the streets of my hopes and dreams crumble away. The trees shudder, somewhere my mother cries. Afraid again. She doesn't like to be alone when the leaves whisper.
But my father‘s coming back; he isn’t far. He'll be there with her soon, you’ll see, and they can stay in the place I've kept for them a while longer. It’s the only way I know how to make them happy.
Josh Price is an avid gardener and an enthusiastic watcher of cartoons. His job resume includes: builder, musician, and martial arts coach. Josh lives at the foot of a volcano, on the shores of Northern California’s largest natural lake, with his wife and two dogs.
Robert Scotellaro San Francisco, CA
Horse’s Ass
Inside
They are in the pantomime horse costume clomping comically about the lawn at their daughter’s birthday party. She, at the front guiding them, and he, with his arms around her, the horse’s disproportionally high rear. Occasionally she neighs and a few kids laugh. One girl pets its mane, then quickly grows bored and scampers off.
“Neigh,” she says into the din of squealing children.
“Giddy up,” he tells her, gently slapping her rump. They are both sweating and the scent of her shampoo and perspiration arouses him.
“Quit it!” she says.
“Not so loud,” he tells her.
“I saw the way you looked at Carmen earlier,” she whispers. You really are a horse’s ass.”
“Carmen? She’s old enough to be my grandmother.”
“She’s what, three years older than I am?”
“Huh, well you look ten years younger.”
“Ha! How does a horse’s ass produce so much bullshit?”
“Good one,” he says, “but it’s for real, you know I only have eyes for you,” and gives her another soft pat. Then he says, “Hey, let me know when you’re going to make a sharp turn like that next time. You nearly split us in half.”
Inside Out
They keep the horse costume. Occasionally they take it out of a dark corner of the closet and a good deal of creative foreplay ensues within its confines. They take turns regarding who will lead them to the bed and who will be the horse’s ass. A great deal of contortionism is required and when they emerge, it is a kind of hatching: seeing each other anew.
Divided Up
He had, an hour earlier, made a musical instrument out of his lawn chair, using the spoon from his iced tea to tap out a Latin rhythm against the aluminum armrest. He quipped that he was serenading her, as she ate from a bag of doughnut holes, ignoring him.
He sits in it now reading The Old Man and the Sea. “Why would anyone want a big fish in the first place?” he says. “What’s with Hemingway and Melville anyway?” he says. Then he flips the book over, butterflying against his thigh, gazes through a space between two hedges in their yard as Carman dives into her pool next door. He feels a burning sensation (real or imagined) at the back of his neck. He turns.
“I have a superpower,” she tells him.
“Oh?”
“Yes, I have x-ray intuition. I can see right through to the bone.”
“That sounds painful,” he says. She’s wearing a favorite blouse he bought her in Mexico, with small mirrored pieces sewn into the front of it. He sees himself divided up as he gazes into them. A jet overhead scars its way through a clear blue patch. The burning sensation intensifies. He is relieved to look up, up, up at it, his whole head in the sky. Lost in its contrails.
Brain Waves
Mass Exodus
A spider crawls out of my son’s old saxophone in the basement. Such a quiet exodus from such a noisy instrument. A quiet exodus for each of them: my wife, my son in college, this spider. It repels down on a barely visible line, so light, so light.
Healing Sounds
I visit a “Healing Sounds” therapist. What the hell? There is the use of sacred instruments and voice tones to free the boulders that have “impacted my spirit.” Brain waves are mentioned again and again. I close my eyes as gongs and voice tones “reconfigure the molecules” surrounding me. But a silly thought, born of cynicism, emerges despite my best urgings at suppression. Brain waves, I think, and picture brains coming in with the tide, their slippery convolutions catching the light just so (an ocean’s-worth, rising/falling in the froth). I smile, a faux appearance of bliss belied by the shouts in my head: erase! erase!
Light Enough
I am old enough to remember (as a kid) radio was the movie theater of the mind. How what you imagined made it so. The way books still are. I look out the window at the sky. I wonder if there are books in Heaven (mysteries, no doubt). Wonder if they play cards up there. Or have pets, for that matter, and if they strafe at fleas. Eternity after all is a fairly long time and you’d need something to do. Maybe one could learn to play an instrument (a loud one, say) start a garage band. Or does one just float around all day in outer space, remembering, or just hang out lower down on a cloud, like on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Light enough to not fall through. Like the rain.
Robert Scotellaro's work has been included in W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Best Small Fictions 2016, 2017, Best Microfiction 2020, and elsewhere. He is the author of seven chapbooks and five story collections. He was the winner of The Rainmaker Award and the Blue Light Book Award. He has, with James Thomas, co-edited NEW MICRO, published by W.W. Norton. Robert is a founding donor to The Ransom Flash Fiction Collection at the Univ. of Texas,. He lives in San Francisco. Visit him at: www.robertscotellaro.com
Maureen Sherbondy Durham, NC
The Marriage Reader
The marriage reader visits every home in the small town along the river. He determines
which home is harmonious and which one is not. His decisions are final.
He knocks on the first door of the day. A couple nervously lets him inside.
The marriage reader keeps on his overcoat and scarf, says, “This is a short test.”
He follows the couple into the living room, then he wanders to the kitchen and then the
dining room, passing the too-skinny sad looking mutt, the pile of plates in the sink, the romance
novel on one side table and the sports book beside a pipe. The house smells like melancholy and
distance.
The husband stands far apart from his plain wife. He studies his feet. She plops down on
the dusty gray couch.
“Stand up, facing each other,” directs the marriage reader. The wife pushes her tired body
up from the cushion. She crosses her arms.
“Now look each other in the eyes for two minutes. This is the test.”
The husband shuffles his feet, looks at the couch. The woman tugs at her shoulder-length
dishwater blonde hair.
His dark eyes focus on the clef in her chin Her bloodshot eyes stare at his rounded belly.
After two minutes, the reader declares, “Time to move on.”
They shrug their shoulders. The husband packs a suitcase and leaves. The wife breathes
out a long sigh held in for twenty years.
Maureen Sherbondy's YA novel, Lucky Brilliant, was published in 2020. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, Prelude, Calyx, and other journals. She lives in Durham, NC. www.maureensherbondy.com
Chris Skiles
The King and the Jester
ONCE THERE was a king, who had lavish, gourmet meals laid out in front of him every day. But he would not eat. So, the Jester says,” Why, not hungry, king? Anyone in the entire kingdom would eat that.” But the king just nods, goes to sleep, then attends to his duties for the day.
The second day, the food is laid out, and still the king will not eat, so, the Jester, growing very jealous, goes up behind the king while he is sleeping, and rapes him, and kills him. The Jester then puts on the king’s clothes, in disguise of him. Then the king’s attendees tell him it is time to go do his duties, so the Jester as King willingly complies to go. The King’s attendees lead him to the corridor, to the room which he must do his duties, and there the King is left alone. He walks down the corridor, opens the door on the far end, and, to his shock and amazement, it is all anarchy, hell, kids beating each other up,, and killing each other. The King is terrified. He goes up to one of these club-wielding children, and asks him, “Where is your master?”
And the child says, “You killed him.”
And so the King returns to the throne room, and the gourmet food is laid out in from of him, but he has no stomach to eat it.
Chris is a reader for The Common and Mud Season Review. His work has appeared in over three journals, most recently New Plains Review. In his free time he enjoys fishing and reading Hemingway.
ONCE THERE was a king, who had lavish, gourmet meals laid out in front of him every day. But he would not eat. So, the Jester says,” Why, not hungry, king? Anyone in the entire kingdom would eat that.” But the king just nods, goes to sleep, then attends to his duties for the day.
The second day, the food is laid out, and still the king will not eat, so, the Jester, growing very jealous, goes up behind the king while he is sleeping, and rapes him, and kills him. The Jester then puts on the king’s clothes, in disguise of him. Then the king’s attendees tell him it is time to go do his duties, so the Jester as King willingly complies to go. The King’s attendees lead him to the corridor, to the room which he must do his duties, and there the King is left alone. He walks down the corridor, opens the door on the far end, and, to his shock and amazement, it is all anarchy, hell, kids beating each other up,, and killing each other. The King is terrified. He goes up to one of these club-wielding children, and asks him, “Where is your master?”
And the child says, “You killed him.”
And so the King returns to the throne room, and the gourmet food is laid out in from of him, but he has no stomach to eat it.
Chris is a reader for The Common and Mud Season Review. His work has appeared in over three journals, most recently New Plains Review. In his free time he enjoys fishing and reading Hemingway.
Taylor Solano Ann Abor, MI
Isabel
Looks from her child, stiff and sweaty, to her father, leaning on his cane and smirking, steps from death but deviously defying it. To her own feet – long, lean, pale.
Three separate worlds. One smugly prolonging reentry to the ground; one in perpetual confusion over how quickly the world and those in it spin. And hers, caught in the never-present between an arranged past and an impossible future.
Her feet spread and stretch. She follows the milky trajectory of her toes as they catch the spilled sunlight, out the doorway, past the jasmine bush. Into a cold clearing just beyond the edge of her childhood home.
Isabel is nineteen again, steadily and silently ascending the hilltop that just obscures the view of her father’s window. She feels the cold beads of dew on the bottoms of her feet as she stands her nightly guard. Awaiting the return of a husband whose scent and eyes she never knew. Gathering blades of grass between her toes, she closes her eyes and breathes until morning’s air pushes her back home, fulfilled in her unfulfillment. Each night she returns to the hill, each morning she embraces disappointment and glides home in an empty gaze.
Her son tugs her hem, and Isabel looks down upon him. She lifts the hair clung desperately to his brow and presses her lips to his forehead. Then she pulls away and gazes, wondering if her son’s almond eyes would have matched his.
“Mija, you are in the clouds again,” says her father, smiling down upon her. Isabel turns to him slowly as if breaking a crosscurrent. Smiles. Gathers her son on her hip and stands. “Sit down, father. We will bring you some fresh juice from the market.”
Her father simply turns his head to the sky and smiles, for he and she both know he will not take the chair in her presence. His pride forbids it.
When Isabel and her son return to the house, however, her father has not only taken the chair but has fused with it, a stone statue on a throne of generational defeat.
She whisks jasmine into the room with her quick stride, and her father smells her entrance and relaxes his neck back toward his daughter. Although his body and senses have deteriorated, he has never lost the essence of the jasmine bush, evoked by the smallest shift of the wind.
Isabel and her son, indulgently placed in her lap, gather at her father’s feet. She hands him the cool bottle of juice then proceeds to rub first his left foot, then his right. Her father croaks in delight as he rests his hand on her shoulder. Her son drifts to sleep against her breast.
She allows herself to close her eyes just for a moment, and she is back in the clearing, walking hypnotically towards the hill. A moonbeam beckons her, lifts and carries her to the crest. The night wind catches her hair and pulls it across her lip. Isabel looks out and waits.
Taylor Solano is a writer, educator, and journalist from upstate New York. Her writing has appeared in FLOATED Alternative Culture Magazine, The Lamron, For Women Who Roar, and Other Worldly Women Press. Her poetry has showcased in several art shows, including “Tre Prospettive (Three Perspectives)” at Hart Gallery 27 and “The Body Is a Vessel for the Spirit” at Art Center of Rochester. In June 2020, Taylor was a featured author of the Literary Partners Series at Writers & Books. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Paul Stapleton
Hand Wraps
Goodman sits on the apron of the ring, waiting his turn for the shower upstairs, coiling his hand wraps, pressing the strips of cloth with his thumbs as he winds them tightly to keep the wraps smooth and ready for the next day of training. He unzips his gym bag and tucks the wraps inside his gloves where he always tucks them.
But inside the bag, his gold necklace is gone.
“Maybe it fell out,” Santiago says, peering around, the old security guard in his lounge chair, mumbling about the days when men didn’t wear jewelry, before he rises to help Goodman search the floor for a blink of gold.
Goodman already knows.
“That stranger took them,” he says. “The one who showed up today calling himself Sugarcane.”
He runs upstairs, his anger expanding.
In the locker room, Sugarcane is dressed for the street: hoodie pulled over his head, jeans hung low, black Timberlands. Morales is standing next to him with a photograph in his hands.
“Check it out,” Morales says to Goodman.
It’s a picture of Sugarcane in a boxing ring, much younger, fists raised above his head, the year scribbled across the top, ten years gone past.
Morales returns the picture to Sugarcane.
Goodman is surprised, but the picture calms him.
“You still fighting?”
“Hoping to,” Sugarcane says. “There’s a card next month. I hear they’re looking for fighters.”
“When’d you fight last?”
“Not in a while, bro.” Sugarcane smiles.
Goodman studies the man.
Sugarcane throws on his coat, begins to button up.
Morales heads towards the staircase.
Outside, an elevated train rumbles past.
“You took my gold chain, didn’t you?”
Morales halts and turns around.
Sugarcane grabs his gym bag and swings it over his shoulder. “You accusing me of something?”
“My necklace is missing.”
“Ain’t my problem.” Sugarcane steps to leave, but Goodman steps into his path.
Morales joins him.
They stand chest-to-chest with Sugarcane.
“Don’t crowd me.”
“Look, bro, there’s two of us.”
“And?”
“Let’s see what’s in your bag.”
“You playing me?”
They hold their ground.
Sugarcane eyes them each in turn then throws his bag to the floor like a gauntlet. “Go ahead.”
Goodman picks up the bag and sets it on a bench. His arms are shaking, but he removes things carefully one by one and places them on the bench—a jump rope and bag glove, a towel and another bag glove. He pulls out boxing shoes then turns the bag upside down and shakes it.
Sweatshirt, sweatpants, jockstrap, mouthpiece all spill out.
Goodman shakes the bag again, but there’s nothing else. He nudges the items on the floor with his foot, but nothing gold appears.
The three of them stand awkwardly, ready to be done with each other.
Goodman persists.
“How about your coat?”
Sugarcane glares defiantly and lifts his arms. Goodman slips his hands inside his pockets.
Nothing.
“Esta bien, pendejos?” Sugarcane sneers. “Want to check my pants, too?” He pulls his front pockets inside-out and dangles his keychain before them, then he turns around and slaps his back pockets. “How about my asshole?” His voice is loud. “A man wants to put his past behind him and what does he get? Two punks calling him thief.”
Goodman assesses the situation.
“Sorry.”
“Too late.”
Sugarcane kneels to gather his belongings, and Morales bends to assist him.
“Get your hands off my shit.”
Goodman considers Sugarcane picking his things off the floor like a beggar—his mouthpiece, his rope, his gym clothes, his shoes, his gloves. One by one, Sugarcane returns the items to his bag on the wooden bench. Goodman is disgusted with himself, his anger deflated.
Then he notices there are no hand wraps.
No hand wraps have come out of the bag.
He thinks.
“You keep your hand wraps inside your gloves?”
Sugarcane hesitates, briefly, a second, not even that, but long enough for Goodman to know the question has penetrated.
“Why you ask, bro?”
Goodman and Morales exchange glances.
“Where are your hand wraps?” Goodman steps towards Sugarcane, only the wooden bench between them, and slips his hand inside the bag and removes a glove. He teases out a loose sloppy balled-up hand wrap, and with that, the gold necklace tumbles out and plink, almost sibilant, slinks free upon the floor.
“Holy!” Morales laughs in derision. “You caught him.”
Goodman plucks up the necklace, feeling powerful, the same feeling of pride after victory in the ring.
Neither one of them expects the box cutter.
Paul Stapleton teaches humanities in Chicago. His stories have appeared in Aethlon, Flash Fiction Magazine, Ruminate, and elsewhere. His story in J Journal was awarded a Pushcart Prize in Fiction (Pushcart XXXVII). In the late 1980s, he was a member of the Jerome Boxing Club in the Bronx, NY, where he lived for many years.
Isabel
Looks from her child, stiff and sweaty, to her father, leaning on his cane and smirking, steps from death but deviously defying it. To her own feet – long, lean, pale.
Three separate worlds. One smugly prolonging reentry to the ground; one in perpetual confusion over how quickly the world and those in it spin. And hers, caught in the never-present between an arranged past and an impossible future.
Her feet spread and stretch. She follows the milky trajectory of her toes as they catch the spilled sunlight, out the doorway, past the jasmine bush. Into a cold clearing just beyond the edge of her childhood home.
Isabel is nineteen again, steadily and silently ascending the hilltop that just obscures the view of her father’s window. She feels the cold beads of dew on the bottoms of her feet as she stands her nightly guard. Awaiting the return of a husband whose scent and eyes she never knew. Gathering blades of grass between her toes, she closes her eyes and breathes until morning’s air pushes her back home, fulfilled in her unfulfillment. Each night she returns to the hill, each morning she embraces disappointment and glides home in an empty gaze.
Her son tugs her hem, and Isabel looks down upon him. She lifts the hair clung desperately to his brow and presses her lips to his forehead. Then she pulls away and gazes, wondering if her son’s almond eyes would have matched his.
“Mija, you are in the clouds again,” says her father, smiling down upon her. Isabel turns to him slowly as if breaking a crosscurrent. Smiles. Gathers her son on her hip and stands. “Sit down, father. We will bring you some fresh juice from the market.”
Her father simply turns his head to the sky and smiles, for he and she both know he will not take the chair in her presence. His pride forbids it.
When Isabel and her son return to the house, however, her father has not only taken the chair but has fused with it, a stone statue on a throne of generational defeat.
She whisks jasmine into the room with her quick stride, and her father smells her entrance and relaxes his neck back toward his daughter. Although his body and senses have deteriorated, he has never lost the essence of the jasmine bush, evoked by the smallest shift of the wind.
Isabel and her son, indulgently placed in her lap, gather at her father’s feet. She hands him the cool bottle of juice then proceeds to rub first his left foot, then his right. Her father croaks in delight as he rests his hand on her shoulder. Her son drifts to sleep against her breast.
She allows herself to close her eyes just for a moment, and she is back in the clearing, walking hypnotically towards the hill. A moonbeam beckons her, lifts and carries her to the crest. The night wind catches her hair and pulls it across her lip. Isabel looks out and waits.
Taylor Solano is a writer, educator, and journalist from upstate New York. Her writing has appeared in FLOATED Alternative Culture Magazine, The Lamron, For Women Who Roar, and Other Worldly Women Press. Her poetry has showcased in several art shows, including “Tre Prospettive (Three Perspectives)” at Hart Gallery 27 and “The Body Is a Vessel for the Spirit” at Art Center of Rochester. In June 2020, Taylor was a featured author of the Literary Partners Series at Writers & Books. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Paul Stapleton
Hand Wraps
Goodman sits on the apron of the ring, waiting his turn for the shower upstairs, coiling his hand wraps, pressing the strips of cloth with his thumbs as he winds them tightly to keep the wraps smooth and ready for the next day of training. He unzips his gym bag and tucks the wraps inside his gloves where he always tucks them.
But inside the bag, his gold necklace is gone.
“Maybe it fell out,” Santiago says, peering around, the old security guard in his lounge chair, mumbling about the days when men didn’t wear jewelry, before he rises to help Goodman search the floor for a blink of gold.
Goodman already knows.
“That stranger took them,” he says. “The one who showed up today calling himself Sugarcane.”
He runs upstairs, his anger expanding.
In the locker room, Sugarcane is dressed for the street: hoodie pulled over his head, jeans hung low, black Timberlands. Morales is standing next to him with a photograph in his hands.
“Check it out,” Morales says to Goodman.
It’s a picture of Sugarcane in a boxing ring, much younger, fists raised above his head, the year scribbled across the top, ten years gone past.
Morales returns the picture to Sugarcane.
Goodman is surprised, but the picture calms him.
“You still fighting?”
“Hoping to,” Sugarcane says. “There’s a card next month. I hear they’re looking for fighters.”
“When’d you fight last?”
“Not in a while, bro.” Sugarcane smiles.
Goodman studies the man.
Sugarcane throws on his coat, begins to button up.
Morales heads towards the staircase.
Outside, an elevated train rumbles past.
“You took my gold chain, didn’t you?”
Morales halts and turns around.
Sugarcane grabs his gym bag and swings it over his shoulder. “You accusing me of something?”
“My necklace is missing.”
“Ain’t my problem.” Sugarcane steps to leave, but Goodman steps into his path.
Morales joins him.
They stand chest-to-chest with Sugarcane.
“Don’t crowd me.”
“Look, bro, there’s two of us.”
“And?”
“Let’s see what’s in your bag.”
“You playing me?”
They hold their ground.
Sugarcane eyes them each in turn then throws his bag to the floor like a gauntlet. “Go ahead.”
Goodman picks up the bag and sets it on a bench. His arms are shaking, but he removes things carefully one by one and places them on the bench—a jump rope and bag glove, a towel and another bag glove. He pulls out boxing shoes then turns the bag upside down and shakes it.
Sweatshirt, sweatpants, jockstrap, mouthpiece all spill out.
Goodman shakes the bag again, but there’s nothing else. He nudges the items on the floor with his foot, but nothing gold appears.
The three of them stand awkwardly, ready to be done with each other.
Goodman persists.
“How about your coat?”
Sugarcane glares defiantly and lifts his arms. Goodman slips his hands inside his pockets.
Nothing.
“Esta bien, pendejos?” Sugarcane sneers. “Want to check my pants, too?” He pulls his front pockets inside-out and dangles his keychain before them, then he turns around and slaps his back pockets. “How about my asshole?” His voice is loud. “A man wants to put his past behind him and what does he get? Two punks calling him thief.”
Goodman assesses the situation.
“Sorry.”
“Too late.”
Sugarcane kneels to gather his belongings, and Morales bends to assist him.
“Get your hands off my shit.”
Goodman considers Sugarcane picking his things off the floor like a beggar—his mouthpiece, his rope, his gym clothes, his shoes, his gloves. One by one, Sugarcane returns the items to his bag on the wooden bench. Goodman is disgusted with himself, his anger deflated.
Then he notices there are no hand wraps.
No hand wraps have come out of the bag.
He thinks.
“You keep your hand wraps inside your gloves?”
Sugarcane hesitates, briefly, a second, not even that, but long enough for Goodman to know the question has penetrated.
“Why you ask, bro?”
Goodman and Morales exchange glances.
“Where are your hand wraps?” Goodman steps towards Sugarcane, only the wooden bench between them, and slips his hand inside the bag and removes a glove. He teases out a loose sloppy balled-up hand wrap, and with that, the gold necklace tumbles out and plink, almost sibilant, slinks free upon the floor.
“Holy!” Morales laughs in derision. “You caught him.”
Goodman plucks up the necklace, feeling powerful, the same feeling of pride after victory in the ring.
Neither one of them expects the box cutter.
Paul Stapleton teaches humanities in Chicago. His stories have appeared in Aethlon, Flash Fiction Magazine, Ruminate, and elsewhere. His story in J Journal was awarded a Pushcart Prize in Fiction (Pushcart XXXVII). In the late 1980s, he was a member of the Jerome Boxing Club in the Bronx, NY, where he lived for many years.