She Used To Be Someone Else Too by Jason Schwartzman

It’s late and the bus is still an hour away from this small town in the northern neck of upstate New York. I’m outside on a bench—inside there are pinball machines no one is playing. We start slowly. I ask if she’s sure the bus will really come. “It will,” she says. She sees I’m on my laptop and tells me the Wi-Fi password to the coffee shop next door. She takes out some cigarettes. On some days she has to choose, she says, cigarettes or food.

Voices come through on her walkie-talkie. Taxi drivers. She tells me how bad everything is in the town. How her taxi drivers used to be engineers. They used to be CEOs. How everyone is in decline, “including me.” But she also laughs. She is sad, but she is more happy than sad, I would say.

One of the voices belongs to a man named Steve. He is one of the drivers. Or he is her husband, I can’t tell.

“Bye, my love,” she says to Steve.

I keep becoming invested in these little stranger interactions. I can’t tell if I’m just searching for something to spice the vacant hours, or if it’s because of something larger, my real life turning into a wasteland where unknowability and drama and color are flowers that no longer bloom.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” she says to Steve. 

“Taxi driving is where they can hide,” she says to me, not without sympathy. Now that they’re no longer engineers, no longer CEOs.

She used to be someone else too, she tells me in between drags. Used to study anthropology. Now, she is hiding. On her days off, she says, she doesn’t come here, where we are.

“Otherwise I’m just bus lady. Taxi lady.”

On her days off, she doesn’t want to be these things. Her walkie-talkie keeps ringing, almost every minute. When we’re talking, she lets it ring longer before she presses the button to receive the call. In the parking lot, our conversation accelerates into increasingly personal territory. I tell her I think I am in decline too — she said it so I can say it. We are talking about things maybe we wouldn’t talk about if we knew each other better.

“What is your name, by the way?” she asks.

The bus will be here soon, but before it comes, Steve shows up. He comes from around a corner so I can’t see if he is coming from a taxi or he’s just there to keep her company during the graveyard shift, to share a cigarette. I like the idea of that, of Steve speeding over for a few drags with his wife, this lonely corner a little less lonely. We all talk for a while and then Steve leaves. He heads back around the corner, and when the dispatcher starts talking about him, she still never pivots to a “we.” Then she mentions an ex-girlfriend, though maybe she dates men too.

I end up appreciating the ambiguity — that all I can puzzle out of them is their fondness for each other. Then the dispatcher’s walkie-talkie starts ringing again and I throw my backpack over my shoulder. As the bus pulls up, we wish each other nice lives.

Jason Schwartzman is the senior editor of True.Ink, the revival of an old pulp & adventure magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Narratively, Hobart, River Teeth, and Human Parts, among other places. You can find him on twitter at @jdschwartzman. His website is jdschwartzman.com.

By Any Other Name by Evan James Sheldon

Jimson tied herself to the train tracks and waited to feel the vibrations. She figured there wasn’t any better way to get a sense of impending death. To feel it in your chest, starting as a thrum and moving to a buzz, would be the only way to know it fully. At least that was how she imagined it. A lot of people she knew had died; she wasn’t going in unprepared.

            A man came, wearing a long cape and a top hat and he twirled his moustache deviously. What are you doing here? This is my spot. Jimson laughed at him. He was funny, being a cartoon and all. Weren’t cartoons supposed to be funny?

Move along, Jimson said. There’s plenty of track and I was here first. She grabbed a loose bit of rope with her teeth and tightened herself down. 

            The cartoon man swore and swore, and twirled his moustache so furiously that the end became frayed like a cheap paint brush. Jimson wanted to rip it off and create some fake rock paintings of spaceships or one of those geoglyphs of a giant hyena that you can only see from the sky, something hidden unless you knew exactly how to look.

            A cartoon lady arrived, she had rope burns on her arms, but they were healing. What the fuck is this? she said, gesturing to Jimson.

My name means poison, Jimson said. No one knew what to do. 

            They all turned and watched as the train, like a pinprick, like an ever-expanding black hole, appeared on the horizon pulling them toward the inevitable.  

Evan James Sheldon is Senior Editor for F(r)iction and the Editorial Director for Brink Literacy Project. You can find him online at evanjamessheldon.com. 

Behind the Eight

by Chris Cocca

The kids next door have names like Jess and Jordan. Jayden. Jalen, maybe.  Something with a J.  20, maybe 21, same age as my wife and me when we met in college, but Jess and Jordan work.  We’re not that much older.  We found this house a year ago and bought it for the nursery because Heather was still pregnant.

It’s the last house in the row, ten blocks west of center city where our folks grew up but don’t go, ten blocks from where they think things have gotten bad.  Things can get bad anywhere, I try to tell them, and they tell me not to get like that, they’re just looking out, just worried.  The neighborhood is quiet, mostly.  There are small dogs in the alley, Mr. Johnson’s, they bark at the Moldonado kids who seem to live in tank-tops and on scooters.  They’re seven, maybe eight. Mr. Johnson, his house starts the next row, has a little garden with petunias and wax peppers.  There are five more houses between his house and the street, a valley of dishes and antennas, then the bar and grade school.  The Moldonados are Italian, and Johnson is a prick about their runny noses and the sweat stains on their clothing.  He says they’re secret Puerto Ricans.  The Js don’t hide their contempt for Mr. Johnson, facsist dick, they call him, motherfucking racist.  Old bigot, I say, when we talk over the waist-high fence between our yards.  Sometimes we walk our dogs together, my Australian Shepherd has a thing for their sleek pit. We walk past the bar, the school, our dogs piss on sycamores that line the boulevard in and out of town, on high grass growing through the spaces in the pavement.

Heather and I can almost always hear them, Jess and Jordan. Radical politics, mostly, loud sex once or twice. Since last night it’s eight-ball, nine-ball, maybe snooker. Resin balls cracking, dropping in pockets, rolling in plastic tubes towards the front. 

Our doors both have windows, their curtain is black, a signal, I think, when I’m being like that, to all other pirates, you can parlay here, we can talk about shit, underground hip hop and hardcore, we belong to the Industrial Workers of the World, we occupy more than space, we live rent-free in the brains of our landlords and bosses, you belong, too, and so on. Our curtain, new since the miscarriage, is white.  There's a TV in their front room, but we have new furniture that matches our walls and trim.  The loud breaks and rolls, the laughing when Jayden scratches on eight, when Jalen or Jordan or Jess smear blue chalk on their face, those come from the other side of our dining room wall, where we have antique pecan chairs and a table and hutch with good glass and china.

We sit in the living room and hear their TV and we talk about our day and how we're depressed. Heather’s sick this week. I hate my job, talk about quitting. The cat buries herself in the fringed needlework pillows that match our new sofa.

"I think they got a pool table," I say.

We should move the pecan set downstairs and bring up the TV. That way we can eat and watch cartoons and Cheers like we used to. That way we can crash upstairs on old couches and smoke and play pool and 8-bit Nintendo with games from the 80s. We'll put action figures in the hutch and put our china and glass in the coal room. In the spring we'll watch baseball with the windows all open even when it rains.

These things won't happen. I don’t say them. We are young professionals.  The house is still an investment.  Heather starts to cough. The cat lifts her head and sinks back in the pillow.  Cars strobe light from outside through the curtain.  Heather coughs again, interrupts whatever I was saying. 

“What’s that?” she says.

“Nothing.  I think I’ll go to bed.”

Upstairs, I still hear them.  “Jesus, Jordan,” one says, “get your nutsack off the table!”

“It’s like I told you, brother. One way or another, we’re all behind the eight.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Cocca's work has been published or is forthcoming at venues including Hobart, Brevity, Pindeldyboz, elimae, The Huffington Post, O:JAL, Rejection Letters, Mineral Lit Mag, and Perhappened. He is a recipient of the Creager Prize for Creative Writing at Ursinus College and earned his MFA at The New School.

Boxes

by Wilson Koewing

I took a job delivering pizzas in Longmont after moving to Colorado. I hated it but refused to do anything else. The shop sat in a strip mall of dying businesses. The owner lady operated on shoestring margins and ruled with an iron fist. The other employees were teens. When deliveries were dead, we made stacks and stacks of boxes.

On deliveries, I witnessed strange things.

A blind man at a senior facility who would invite me in.

“Now where’d I put that money?” he’d say, shuffling across the carpet to retrieve bills from a cigar box.

An aquarium ran but housed no fish. Screensaver photos shuffled on the TV. Car pictures covered

the walls: stock cars, classics.

“What do you drive?” he’d ask, shuffling back. 

I named cars I thought he’d like to imagine driving around that sleepy town.

There were many others. Drunks. Stoners. Two middle-aged white guys who lived at the end of a cul-de-sac and always burnt cardboard in their yard. Check out my new gun folks. Elated children. Snarling dogs. Housewives in towels. Creepy loners with strange hobbies. Small-scale model building. A high-powered telescope purchased.

Then there was funeral home guy.

He ordered large pepperoni and mushroom. The first time he opened the heavy funeral home door, a chilly air released.

“Sorry,” he said, like trying to talk over a lawnmower. “Sometimes down there so long I forget the time of day!”

He had droopy brown/black eyes. His irises reflected TV fuzz back. Had a strange way of examining you, like it fascinated him that behind your eyes a spark remained.

I watched the seasons change delivering him pizza. 

Winter. I could smell the fresh snow, but the clouds were gone, and the sky was clear. An actual funeral. I delivered to the side door.

“Amazing turnout,” he said, admiring the mourners outside.

Spring. He wore headphones and watched a show on a tablet.  

“Small town, nobody dies in the Spring,” he smiled.

Summer. He donned a Hawaiian shirt, shades pushed up on his forehead.

“Can’t do another summer down there,” he said. “Getting out of town.”

“Where to?”

“Not sure,” he said. “Possibly the islands.”

Fall. I’d given the owner lady notice. I was moving away. He grabbed the box without a word, seeming to sense the ending. I watched the soles of his bare feet walk away as the door closed.

I didn’t feel like returning to the shop, so I drove along the outskirts. Outside town, beautiful mountain views materialized. Insulated in neighborhoods, you forget what exists beyond the limits. I kept driving and gained elevation until the town took on the shape of a box in the rearview. Compacted. Suburban sprawl seeping from its edges.

I pulled over to the shoulder and turned off the car. Had I really never noticed before, that funeral home guy never wore shoes?

About The Author

Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His work can be found in Pembroke Magazine, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Five on the Fifth, Ghose Parachute and Ellipsis Zine. 

Photo Credit:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/garethrobertsmorticianreferences/4004809565/

The Porn Version

by Evan Fleischer

I don't know where you are when you read this, but you know the implicit cultural cliché that marches through our lives that ‘there's a porno for everything?’ How — minutes after someone has delivered the State of the Union — phones ping across the country to let you know that a porn version of the selfsame address has just been released? How the speed of this particular aspect of creation moves even faster than the creation of certain episodes of Law and Order? That speed has now claimed this story. There's a porn version of this story. Please don't google it.

Or do! Or, rather, don't. And, no, I don't know how they did it, let alone whether or not a 'why' might reveal itself — how they were able to move faster than the speed of a clause cooked up amongst the gentle evening air-brush of trees in a part of Virginia so quiet that people 'round here tend to summon up horses that may or may not exist to patrol the streets wearing tiny glittering cowboy hats while they sleep — but, hey, they did it. It’s on the screen. Mission accomplished. Medals bestowed. Shirts removed and tossed out the window faster than a bomb in wartime.

About The Author

Born in Long Beach, California and raised in Massachusetts, Evan Fleischer has written about William Faulkner's maps for LitHub, Alasdair Gray's sense of Glasgow for The New Yorker, explored a French translation of Groucho Marx's memoir in The Paris Review, and is currently working as a fiction editor over at Hobart Pulp.

Cover Photo info:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/eioua/2788129890/in/photolist-5fnTT1-5Pkmdf