None of My Childhood Heroes Prepared Me for This by Marissa Glover

My teenager asks me how long zits last, and I tell him about washcloths and exfoliating soap and his father’s acne scars because I grew up on G.I. Joe and knowing is half the battle. It’s not the answer he wanted. Mine never are. Like when he asks if he can go to the pool with the boys—and I remember fourteen, the dive, my ambulance ride to the ER. So I let him shoot hoops, hoping it will be enough. Hoping he remembers Billy Blazes and Wendy Waters and to think like a rescue hero, think safe.

When he asks how much longer we have to do this—wash hands, wear masks, go to school online, I smartly report CDC guidelines and the governor’s timelines and keep right on rattling about how the pantry’s stocked with soup and crackers, just in case, and thermometers and extra inhalers and his favorite sports drink, the one with all the electrolytes. Oh, and only acetaminophen because reports say it’s better for this kind of inflammation than ibuprofen. None of this brings him comfort.

He has stopped listening. Something about a rainbow and a siege and the number six. We’ve got this, I tell him again, like I’m Hannibal and this is war and my son’s part of the A-Team. I’ve always loved it when a plan comes together. But none of my childhood heroes help me be the mom my child needs. None of the taglines work. Yet here I am trying to MacGyver away his pain, MacGyver a way for us to recoup such loss, when I can’t even Go Go Gadget myself any taller to once more perfectly hug the boy who has outgrown me.

Marissa Glover currently lives and writes in Florida, where she teaches at Saint Leo University. She is coeditor of Orange Blossom Review and a senior editor at The Lascaux Review. Her poetry most recently appears in River Mouth Review, Middle House Review, The UCity Review, and HocTok Magazine. Marissa’s poetry collection, Let Go of the Hands You Hold, will be published by Mercer University Press in 2021. You can follow her on Twitter @_MarissaGlover_.

A Blue Teapot by Adam Camiolo

I could be wrong, dear sister, about your opinions regarding the blue teapot. This, perhaps, could have been a precious heirloom-in-the-wings, a hollow relic awaiting grandkids to receive its sacrament. A story left untold. 

You had placed it high above the cabinet, where it waited, and let the dust accumulate over it like a bicycle left in our old backyard after a sharpened flurry of snow. The enamel is somehow a sky-blue hovering over a sea-blue, the edges are speckled like a robin’s egg. There are unknown words etched underneath, but even I know an umlaut when I see one.  

Did you buy this, I wonder, when we both finally became orphans at the onset of our own ripe old ages?  After, when you looked out across your condo, pressing against the boundary of the hard-fought life you built for yourself within this terrarium. After, when you decided to disappear into the world. Had you picked this up when you traveled to the bazaar in Istanbul? Or maybe when you had traveled to the market of Split, where you had purchased for me the honey-rotten Rakja, even though you had long since supped your last sip of alcohol?  

The paleontological record suggests otherwise. Perhaps this teapot has resided beneath the ash of your old life. Smaller things have served as patches when marriages come unspooled. Thinking back, I’ve never seen you drink tea, but this could be part of the fabrication we wrap around ourselves sometimes. Functional people with kitchens have teapots, therefore, you must acquire a teapot. People who take their divorce in stride have teapots; I suppose. People who bounce back fast, or even at all, have teapots. Perhaps all along this thing is your own personal tektite, frozen in the ancient mud, scattered from the impact of your life moving off course. Not even a teapot can bridge the continental drift between you and a family you no longer wanted to see.  

So I held this teapot, dear sister, and thought about calling your daughter, even though you rarely did,  who had already picked through the detritus of your life and salvaged what she deemed worthy of her  sentimentality, who had already collected the old photo albums and the yellowed cookbooks and the wooden crucifixes. Clues for her to try and piece you back together. I could not conclude whether I could contain the entirety of my memories of you with this vessel, or even just my meagre guesswork. At the end of thirty years apart, even we are strangers. 

The teapot is cracked, a final signature jotted down the side like a hastily inscribed sorry-and-sympathies card. I leave the door unlocked, as there is nothing left to guard, and leave the little icon by the curb.

Adam Camiolo has written about foreign policy and has been found complaining about public transportation in the local newspaper. He lives in a small seaside town in New York with his wife and dog and is waiting for all of this to blow over. 

A lifetime of lipstick by Emily Smibert

Every Friday night as a child my brother and I would stay over at my grandparents’ house, and every Friday night, five minutes before my grandfather would come home after work and walk through the front door at 5:15 to take us out for dinner, I’d stand with my grandmother, my chin barely above the ledge of the long deep mahogany vanity, and watch her get ready. I’d study how she’d carefully apply her lipstick, blot her lips, and powder her nose. How she’d spritz one pump of Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew perfume on the nape of her neck, reach for my hand and give it a squeeze while winking at me in the mirror. To me, she was the pinnacle of elegance, grace, and everything I’d long to be.

I can recall sneaking into the bedroom before her to go through the top right drawer, unwrap a stick of pink Trident bubblegum from the pack always ‘hiding’ in there and examine each tube one-by-one, mentally cataloging them while blowing bubbles. Magentas, pinks, beiges, burgundies, and dusty rose after dusty rose, I’d line them up on the seam of the cream crocheted vanity runner, the scents of roses, honeydew, musty Kleenex, and bubblemint swirling from the drawer into what would become the definitive scent of my childhood. I loved that room.

Every holiday and birthday, or sometimes ‘just because,’ I’d be gifted her “free with purchase” mini makeup pouch, filled with whatever goodies the woman at the beauty counter had given her. I still have them all, and if I looked hard enough, I bet there are a few tubes of dusty rose hiding in my old bathroom drawer at my parents’ house.

In a way, my lipstick has always echoed my life: from days when friendships were formed over obscure flavours of Lipsmackers, to first kisses shared while wearing a marshmallow-scented sticky gloss. I can remember saving my babysitting money for my first “real” lipstick—the signature matte M.A.C. black box tossed in the bin, beaming as I tried it on for a classmate’s bat mitzvah. How many memories are bound, eternally tied by these tints? Frou, Marilyn, Velvet Teddy, Ruby Woo, Night Moth, Dare You. And how do I mark the days in between when I wore nothing at all, days where I spoke few words, felt everything, saw no one?  Did balm cover the cracks in my lips the way I prayed it would varnish the façade I forced myself to placate?

Even now, 20 years later, my grandmother’s bedroom still smells of roses and honeydew. And though the tubes may be fewer, the colours less vibrant--and seemingly less used--I still rummage through her top right drawer for a touch-up or quick glide of colour whenever I stop in for a visit. Because one day there won’t be gum hiding for me and the dust will settle in that drawer, with untouched tubes never to be unsealed. But until then, I will still blot my lips with whatever wrinkled and pilling tissue she’s been using and left there and give myself a wink.

Emily Smibert is a Canadian writer and editor based in New York City.

Two from David Centorbi

We Sat In The Dining Room

I had the box of candy cigarettes grandmother gave me. She lit her long white Virginia Slim 100. I pretended to light mine. She dropped two ice cubes into my Fred Flintstone cup and poured my apple juice halfway,

“That’s called, Two Fingers.”

She dropped two ice cubes into her Waterford medicine glass and poured it almost full with Jameson Black,

“That’s called, No Air.”

She took a long drag of her cigarette, exhaled a bit, letting the smoke cloud around her lips, then made it disappear into her nostrils,

“That’s called, The French Inhale.”

From the kitchen mother yelled,

“Delores, stop teaching him your nasty habits.”

I leaned toward my grandmother and whispered,

“Show me that trick again.”

+++++ 

When Father Would Drink His Johnnie Walker On The Rocks

I would drink my Vernors pop on the rocks. When mother would take her pills, I would spread my Good & Plenty out on the table, white and pink with my Vernors on the rocks. Mother would say,

 “Oh honey, take the white ones before daddy starts drinking and the pink ones after he's had a few.”

I always listened to her and watched him: once he made his second trip to the bar in the corner next to the empty bookshelves, I would start getting the pink ones ready to take after he sat back down in my grandfather’s brown, cracked leather chair.

David Calogero Centorbi is a writer living in Detroit, MI. Recently published work in The Daily Drunk, Dreams Walking, Versification, Brown Bag Online, Horror Sleaze Trash, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Crepe & Pen. He can be found here on Twitter: @DavidCaCentorbi.

Every Night, We Make Ourselves Over Again by Stephanie King

Botanicals Nighttime Undereye Cream, .2 ounce, $65 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

After he left, everyone kept telling me that I looked tired. I was tired, but the truth was, I’d already been a single mother for years even with him there. So it was nothing new to stay up late, silence creeping over the house and exhaustion settling into my bones as I wandered around the house picking up this discarded sock here, packing lunches for tomorrow there.

When my year-end office bonus was a gift card to a beauty store instead of crisp cash, I smothered my disappointment in lotions and ointments to bring back the youthful beauty they told me had faded. This cream smelled like blackberries as I swiped it on under my eyes each exhausted evening, reminding me of my childhood carrying a pail into the woods to go berry-picking in elated excitement. 

It worked, y’all. What keen sorcery is this? Away went the dark circles of despair. Co-workers started asking me if things had “settled down.” Men who were too young to be appropriate but old enough to know better started to dish out smiles and nods, and after six weeks of continual use, phone numbers. Bartenders mixed my drinks heavy and poured the leftover shaker into an extra glass on the evenings my ex had the girls. Soon I needed this eye cream to cover up for all the sleep I was lacking due to other activities. 

I cannot recommend this product enough. The eyes are the window to the soul; that includes looking out as much as looking in. Cast off the dark shadows lurking under your eyes as thoroughly and efficiently as the ones looming over your life.

Stephanie King’s stories have won the Quarterly West Novella Prize and the Lilith Short Fiction Prize, and have also appeared in Entropy, Every Day Fiction, Loch Raven Review, and Lumen. Her education writing has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Penn Capital-Star, and The Typescript. She received her MFA from Bennington and serves on the board of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference.

Local Legends by Kathryn Fitzpatrick

The cast of Finding Bigfoot stops at Crabby Al’s to hold a meeting. They eat shrimp with townies and talk sightings.

Each episode features them at some remote location—typically Wyoming or South Dakota—chatting up locals and exploring the forest. They make loud, whooping noises and hit sticks against trees, but they never find a Bigfoot—at least, they never show one. 

Today they’re visiting inland Connecticut. Thomaston.

“A real New England seafood restaurant,” they say. “Right on the coast.”

The camera angles are careful, strategic. They capture oysters with too much chopped parsley, chowder in bowls like cupped palms. There are sailboat models tacked to the walls and pencil drawings of sand dollars.

People are laughing. They lean over the paper tablecloth, describing Bigfoot in full detail. Maybe a bear. A coyote. Kids playing a prank. 

They describe smells and stature, the glistening oil coating the Bigfoot’s fur. The red eyes.

This is what the TV audience won’t see: bald men on Harleys who cling to the sidewalk like mosquitos on skin. That waitress who loogies on burgers in the kitchen. 

The drizzle of water that runs beneath Reynold’s Bridge, choked by empty tuna cans and plastic bags, Diet Coke bottles. The swollen dumpsters next door.

Bigfoot, crawling out from the alleyway, sucking discarded shrimp tails the way Creepy Joe sucks cigarette butts.

Kathryn Fitzpatrick is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Alabama. Her work has been featured in Cleaver Magazine, Out Magazine, Bodega, and elsewhere, and was called “biting, brutally honest, and not school appropriate” by her high school principal. She tweets at @avgbuttcrumb. 

Passenger of the Sacred by M.S.

The moon’s unwavering gaze follows me. It says, do not pick at what is laid to rest. Yet I labour along another journey. Waiting, with fists clenched. Grabhandles swing ceremoniously as he enters. Unaccustomed to the land of hot and humid, this mountaintop idol with velvet skin and a hole in his cheek. Another orifice to cater to, embroidered circumference gaping. But I lack a tongue of precision: When I say concern, I mean sensation. When I ask for truth, I want an escape. I place my offering into his punctured face. Broken flowers, loose change. A picture, a memory. Then lean in for a revelation. I receive a tale of caution. Love shrouded by noise. This compartment of whining metal. I do not want to be what I seek. I do not want to be what I seek.

M. S. writes flash and poetry. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ellipsis Zine, The Night Heron Barks, Rejection Letters and other such online literary journals and magazines. 

Sympathy Dive by R.J. Patteson

The stands are loud and smell of watermelon bubblegum and chlorine. And it wasn’t always this way. It was a dead sport. And everyone is screaming. Like, the girls I mean. They’re screaming encouragement because the kid who lost his sister is climbing the thirty-three-foot platform.

I mean—

If you didn’t know, his sister plunged from seven-hundred-forty-six. It’s our dark secret they don’t show in the post cards. She was two grades higher than me. Her Facebook is still there but was changed to, Christine Smith Memoriam. The last post was from a boy in her grade saying, shouldn’t we take this down, it’s creepy. She would be in first year college now.

And her brother’s name is Thomas, I think.

And, I don’t know—

He’s climbing up, up, and he’s all skin and bones and muscle which is why half the girls in here came to watch. To see the grade twelve boys in small bathing suits from the underside view.

And the other half?

I’m in the other half. Wondering if this is the sequel. Like, in health class when we learned about self-image and eating disorders. Sympathy eating is when you have a friend or sibling who’s overweight so you also become overweight. Not because you’re hungry or depressed even. You do it as a sick form of guilt.

Thomas is at the top, deep breathing damp air. He’s visualizing his spins. And maybe he’s planning on getting stuck in mid rotation. I wouldn’t believe it was anything other than accidentally on purpose. He looks, I don’t know, like, guilty up there or whatever.

Brothers aren’t always nice to their sisters.

Like—

And his dad is the loudest one in here. He’s already forgotten only a summer ago. He’s in a bloodlust of living, like, vicariously or whatever. Remembering the days when he was skinny and could do three spins before hitting the water.

It was seven-hundred-forty-six feet before his daughter hit the water.

Oh my God—

Thomas jumps and he’s spinning, spinning, and he’s a human corkscrew in midair and he’s dropping quick and, like, is this what it was like for his sister? And he’s outstretched like a needle and I could count every rib the way the cold has tightened his skin and he hits the water like a pebble and not a man and he climbs out of the water shivering and maybe crying and he doesn’t look at his dad at all.

Even with, you know, all that “Way to go, Tommy Gun!”

He just stands there for a long while looking for someone in the stands. He snaps his bathing suit. He pushes the water from his hair with his hands. He blows the droplets from his lips in a raspberry.

The judges, there’s three of them, and they hold up their cards.

R.J. Patteson is an author/screenwriter from Toronto. His other stories can be found in X-R-A-Y, Ghost Parachute, and MoonPark Review among others. He tweets @rjpatteson

Nineteen Reasons (Not) to Stay by Colin Lubner

Reason no. 1 to stay: we have previously asserted to each other to have been in mutual love. Reason no. 2: I am still in love with her. No. 3: in the morning the pigeons beat their wings upon the kitchen’s windows’ sashes and make the most awful laughter. No. 4: the kitchen’s windows face east. No. 5: when the snow falls it spoons itself to their exterior sills, inexact ripples, softening shapes. No. 6: autumn. No. 7: the names we have given Day Street’s Saturday-morning joggers. 7a: Mothman. 7b: No Face. 7c: Socrates. No. 8: the elms in autumn. No. 9: the Delaware in autumn. No. 10: proximity. No. 11: gentrification. No. 12: the accompanying complications of separation. No. 13: a moment at the beginning in which she drew upon a fogged train window a tiny turtle and I added upon its head a tinier hat. No. 14: my inability to describe to her in full my desire to connect, to bring into stereoscopic focus our future loss. No. 15: the dogs of Penn Treaty Park. 15a: Alex. 15b: Chris. 15c: Shawn. No. 16: her arms around my stomach, her chin on my shoulder, night, Day Street’s street lamps shaping water droplets into ghosts, the comforting nothing of passing cars. No. 17: the asynchronicity of our sounds and our silences. No. 18: the last of the banana-bread muffins we baked together for our future breakfasts thawing upon an enamel sunflower. No. 19: she was gone in the morning, but the things that were hers remained.

Colin Lubner writes (in English) and teaches (math) in southern New Jersey. His work has either appeared or will appear, temporally speaking. Recent pieces can be found through his Twitter: @no1canimagine0. He is keeping on keeping on.

Immersion by Maria S. Picone

In the Dead Sea, anyone can float.

I hadn’t planned to go swimming, and modesty was on my mind as I entered the sea and experienced my body propelling itself like a hot-air balloon. It was 2010 and I, a broke graduate student, wore an orange bebe logo shirt I got in a free promotion and a casual gray skirt with a fraying elastic. My great-aunt, then 85, sat in a chair and waited along with our kind taxi driver, Osama, whom she called “Oh-sam” with the pedal on the O. The desert beach had cabanas and those little shop-huts you see everywhere, outdoor showers and foot-height water pumps. I threaded my way from our chairs to the shoreline, doubtful that I could float as my body always sinks in water.

Coming here to Palestine, we had defied the masses of tourists experiencing the Holy Land with every possible comfort from their sacred buses. We hopped over the contentious and malleable border from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. I snapped a photo on an early morning walk of a bebe retail store ad proclaiming that New York, Paris, and Bethlehem should be held in the same esteem. Odd gears, cracked cinderblocks, and fragments of rags littered the sidewalks. It was dawn and already hot, the sun rising on the settlement that overlooked Bethlehem like a hungry spider supervising a colony of ants.

My aunt and I wandered through this landscape alone. Never did we see a bus full of passengers. The tourist attractions had a shabbiness the luminous, ultra-famous sites in Israel lacked. She took everything in with the fearlessness of a female nun and educator who grew up during the Depression. She insisted on walking up the steps to the Mount of Temptation, a mile-plus climb in disorienting sun. Osama stayed beside her the whole time, guiding her with his arm and matching her pace. Everything was hot and hard: desert, mountain, weather, steps. At the end of this herculean effort lay an oasis of blue stone, white marble, ancient gilding—a sight so magnificent, it necessitated this contrast as if in tribute.

By the Dead Sea, my aunt dozed in the arid sun. A taxi driver in a blue long-sleeved striped shirt watched our purses. I floated in the sea like a dying fish, content to let my body be raised like a flag—grounded in this healing moment: hot salt, gilt sand.

Maria S. Picone (she/her/hers) often writes about social justice and identity. Her writing has been published in Kissing Dynamite, The Sunlight Press, and Q/A Poetry. She received an MFA in fiction from Goddard College and holds degrees in philosophy and political science. Her website is mariaspicone.com, her Twitter @mspicone. 

The Taste of Dust by Scott Neuffer

            “The worst kind of news,” he says to me, as he walks from the house to his sports car.     

            He’s a starved-looking man, bony, white hair, but wealthy. California money well spent on forty-foot masonry towers, one at each corner of his unfinished mansion, dominating the Nevada hillside.

            This summer, I’ve been a twenty-year-old construction worker without a chance in the world—told every sweaty day how best to furnish his rising stature. But today, even I can see that he’s been tapped by something profound, as vast and unyielding as the desert ground itself: sand, pebbles, flares of grass, all teetering as he walks in the summer heat to his car.

            “I can’t make sense of it,” he says, turning back around.

            He tells me that his son, my age, was killed by a drunk driver the night before. Apparently he was riding around with some friends when the maniac’s car smashed into the passenger-side door.

            “It should’ve never happened,” he says, sweeping his hand over the torn-up hillside. “It’s not what I had in mind when I moved up here.”

             Today, the heat is unbearable, the old man teetering towards his car. Today, I learn that I have a chance, that death makes no exceptions. It grants everyone the same desperate franchise. It’s everywhere, especially in the heat, sneaking in the hot, hard air, empowering him as it empowers me, charging us with the cruel ownership of our choices.

            Earlier in the day, during a doctor appointment, I met a young woman in an air-conditioned elevator. She was clean and beautiful. I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to taste that privilege. I had dreams of a moonlit rendezvous.

            “Hot, huh?” she murmured in a voice like water.

            “Come with me,” I answered the burgeoning scheme in my head. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

            But that was then. Now, I’m a refugee in the shade.

            “The worst kind of news,” he says to me.

            His car makes a dismal smoke in the sharp heat. He leaves me in the hot air of his unfinished garage, sitting alone in the dust.

Scott Neuffer is a writer and musician who lives in Nevada with his family. He’s also the founder and editor of the literary journal trampset. Follow him on Twitter @scottneuffer @sneuffermusic @trampset

To Learn By Watching by Eliot White

Science says that amongst friends the topic of conversation shifts every seven minutes. Think about this for a moment. Your dialogic life twisting in a series of hairpins, undertows of unfocus, altering the latent language and feeling pent up in your brain.

And, of course, the conversations with yourself are even more a labyrinth.

You consider watching the new Ken Burns documentary on country music. You consider why you are thinking about watching this documentary. Because you are driving country roads on a bright and cold autumn morning, sunlight filtering through the trees in flickering patterns? Because you are driving this old truck, which is still new to you, this being a person who drives an old truck? Because you caught a few minutes of the Fresh Air interview with Burns last week while you were on the way to pick up sesame oil and beansprouts from the Asian market on Liberty Street?

You consider asking your suddenly elderly grandfather to teach you how to call hoedowns as he did in the late 1950s when he met your grandmother. You trouble out how to ask him, this stoic, plodding dairy farmer turned relentless doer-of-things-that-must-be-done. No time for frivolity as long as you’ve known him. At eighty-four, he still goes to work six days a week.

Yet when you try, it is possible to see him as a young man, playing his records over and over,  thin disks spinning and marrying the needle to the grooves of human longing. His willful self-study permits him to learn synchronous steps from diagrams in a book containing constellations of small shapes that represent girls twirling in Sunday dresses and slack-shouldered boys in polished work boots.

You worry there isn’t enough time to learn from him what you need to. For example: how to grease a ball bearing, transplant strawberries, build a smokehouse, speak a few choice phrases in Pennsylvania Dutch, save every spare nut, screw, and bolt.

More mysteriously, you are sure there is no way to ask him about the other things that you’ve tried to learn by watching him these three brief decades: how to steady yourself against restlessness, how to believe in the future, how to reach across the distance from one person to another. But who is to say that any of us know?

Eliot Paul White is a writer and teacher from Lancaster, PA. He organizes and hosts a monthly reading series called The Turning Wheel at DogStar Books, which he has been doing since 2015. His writing has appeared in SundogLit, Fledgling Rag, The Skinny Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. 

Red Velvet Mayhem by Jay Whitecotton

Last night on my way to the park I was stopped at a red light. It’s a notoriously long light so I checked a text thread I’m in where two comic buds were arguing about Adam Corolla tweets. 

One was angry that Adam Corolla was sexist while the other thought he wasn’t sexist enough. 

I heard a violent crash, looked up and saw a minivan spinning towards me, pieces flying everywhere as it was ripping apart in mid-twirl.

It was as if in slow motion. I could hear my own thoughts:

‘It’s coming towards me. Don’t hit my truck. The driver is really fat. Put it in reverse and hit the pedal. Adam Corolla. Is there a car behind me? If you don’t like him, why are you following his tweets? Fuck, there’s a car behind me. I’m gonna get hit. You don’t HAVE to pay attention to Adam Corolla. Fuck! He hit me.’

I pulled over in the vacant lot and got out to assess the damage when I saw a Jeep SUV on its side. No one was getting out. Smoke was faintly billowing out. 

I started running towards it, but my shorts were slipping down. I made it to the vehicle bare assed and saw a couple of figures trapped. I tried to climb up, but was worried it might tip over on me. No one else was coming. I didn’t know what to do. 

Finally some college kids ran from across the street. I had one lift me up on top. I started knocking trying to get the people inside to unlock it. I managed to get the door open. A teenage girl was on the phone with 911. Her mother kept screaming “My husband! My husband! He’s not moving!”

I lifted the mom out first, then the daughter, looked inside and saw the father’s body crumpled in the back. A girl said she was a nurse so I helped her up and into the Jeep.

I went to the back to open the hatch. The daughter had the key. She got it open and as the door lifted - half of her father’s body flopped out. Blood and what looked like brain matter started spilling. I threw my hand over the wound to keep it all in, yelling at the daughter to block her mother from seeing. 

As I was kneeling with my hand trying to keep his brains in I saw a pistol in the dirt. Somehow it landed in the gravel with the butt of the gun straight up and perfectly balanced. It was so odd. It’s like when you flip a coin and it lands on the side, what are the odds?!

The medics arrived and quickly took over. Getting the jaws of life and doing an incredible job of saving his life. I went to the mother and held her hand. She looked so scared and lost. This was her entire world. Everything. 

I told her he was going to be ok. The medics were there and looked extremely calm. I said head wounds are very messy, it’s normal. I hated saying it. I had no idea what I was talking about, but felt she needed to hear it. She said he was drinking tequila earlier. I said let’s not tell that to the cops. She said it’s ok her daughter was driving. I said I loved margaritas. 

At this point we were surrounded by spectators all congratulating each other and taking the lead. No one would look at me. That’s when I remembered to pull up my shorts. I backed away to let it be and went to check on my truck. 

No dent. Just some scuff marks. It was nothing. Thank god. Since Quarantine I haven’t had a license, insurance or inspection sticker. 

I got in discreetly as a cop was arguing with the driver of the other vehicle. He wanted to leave and the cop was telling him if he did he’d be arrested. I slowly drove off through the lot. Nobody noticed. 

I ran home to wash off the blood, threw away my stained clothes then took my truck to a gas station to clean out the inside in case there was more blood.

An hour later I finally made it to the park to get my run in.

Anyhoo - here’s that recipe for a Red Velvet Cake because this is actually a blog about cooking. 

Ingredients

*  1/2 cup butter, softened

*  1-1/2 cups sugar

*  2 large eggs, room temp

*  2 bottles red food coloring

*  1 tablespoon white vinegar

*  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

*  2-1/4 cups cake flour

*  2 tablespoons baking cocoa

*  1 teaspoon baking soda

*  1 teaspoon salt

*  1 cup buttermilk

 FROSTING:

*  1 tablespoon cornstarch

*  1/2 cup cold water

*  2 cups butter, softened

*  2 teaspoons vanilla extract

*  3-1/2 cups sugar

* Preheat oven to 350°. Cream butter and granulated sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in food coloring, vinegar and vanilla. In another bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt; add to creamed mixture alternately with buttermilk, beating well after each addition.

* Pour into two greased and floured 9-in. round baking pans. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 20-25 minutes. Cool layers 10 minutes before removing from pans to wire racks to cool completely. 

* For frosting, combine water and cornstarch in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir until thickened and opaque, 2-3 minutes. Cool to room temperature. Beat butter and vanilla until light and fluffy. Beat in cornstarch mixture. Gradually add confectioners' sugar; beat until light and fluffy. Spread between layers and over top and sides of cake.

Jay Whitecotton is the product of a clinically diagnosed schizophrenic family of drug addicted Star Trek nerds, who would rage tweak all night while playing Dungeons & Dragons. His comedy special Jazz Funeral is available on YouTube for free because he couldn’t justify charging people during a global pandemic. 

Acrological by Jack Bedell

My uncle believed you only named a dog so it would come when you said its name. And he never named a dog anything that started with the same letter as any of the other commands he used, because he wanted his dogs to snap to it as soon as they heard that first sound. Never used the command “come” since it wasn’t sharp enough to carry, so we always had a line of bird dogs named King or Coop or Crown or Copper. Nothing starting with an S, for sure. God forbid the dog sat down before running in. Nothing with an H, because “high on” actually meant to run off. Couldn’t have that either. No Ls. Lying down was not an option until the job was done. Bs were out, too. “Be still” was a big one in the blind. No Ds—“Drop it.” No Ls—“Leave it.” No Gs—“Go.” It was always good to know, though, that he only expected one thing to happen whenever he said a name. 

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Cotton Xenomorph, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, and other journals. His latest collection is No Brother, This Storm (Mercer University Press, 2018). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019. 

Even The Bad Ones by Jim Trainer

When I was working at that bougie place on the row, they offered health insurance but I got fired before I could get it. Maybe it was too many Saturday nights in the summer calling in sick while I was selling ounces of mushrooms and burning my feet on the beach down the Jersey shore. I think it was because besides the manager I was the only one in that place lucky enough to fuck this singer who worked there. He got his feelings hurt and took it out on me.  It was hard luck in Philly then. Bitter cold, February. We shared a cab. When she got out I followed her in. Her hair glowed red in the cab’s brake lights. We could see our breath when we laughed.

It wasn’t until summer that he got his revenge. He fired me. On the payphone at 83rd&3rd, in Stone Harbor. I leaned right, taking the weight off my foot. It was bandaged and burned. The sun was setting on the strip. It lit up the water-glass of Wild Turkey tilting in my hand like a jewel. The beach was deserted no families no one. I hung up and dug for your number in a pocketful of cigarettes and sand.  Your boyfriend answered so I hung up, limped across the street and back to my sad throne. I drank in dusk with gulls crying in the salty air. I had no apprehension of anything. My dead car, my sudden unemployment, the black September cleaving in.  Nothing. I sunk low in my chair and drank. It was the end of the summer and I blew it again.  I felt old and foolish like only the young can.

Curator at Going For the Throat, columnist for Into The Void and progenitor of stand-up tragedy,™ Jim Trainer's Keep Bleeding In The Anno Finem:  10 Years At Going For The Throat will be released this year through Yellow Lark Press. To sign up for Jim Trainer’s Poem Of The Week, visit jimtrainer.net.

500 Words on the Bare Minimum by F. Scott Arkansas

The bare minimum has fallen on hard times. Our new century has seen its once elegant hull wrecked upon the craggy cliffs of this post-post-post modern age. Dragged undertow by the likes of bio hacking, micro-dosing, and marginal gains—coupon clipping for the soul; a society of godless people hell bent on a short-cut to consciousness; set adrift in an iso-tank escape pod—halfway to nowhere and getting closer everyday.

We are maxed out. Worn down by the endless onslaught of empty noise—without haven, without course, doomed to “fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.” We fill our bellies with ancient grains and goji berries, and yet the emptiness increases. We steer this vessel with a broken compass and yet we demand a speedy arrival. How are we to cure this longing that ails us?

Look no further wayward sojourner and fall with me into the buttery nooks of the Bare Minimum; the whole minimum and nothing but the minimum. A method unconcerned with outsmarting the tall hedge maze of fate but rather allowing the crushing abyss to wash over your blemished self “in an awesome wave.” Stop searching and you will find yourself. Want what you have and you will have it all. Content yourself with yourself and get reacquainted with the Bare Minimum (BM™).

Throw off the yoke of shame imposed on you by your masters and embrace the idioms of the unwashed masses; “Don’t work harder, work smarter!” “Cs get degrees,” and my favorite “Good enough for government work.” Because let’s face it, if it's good enough for the bondservants of American serfdom, then it's good enough for you!

Why spend what precious few hours you have left striving for the summit of a molehill when you could side step it all and embrace BM™. Contemplate eternity? I’d rather contemplate breakfast, “More BM™ please!” Because I am a simple man. In fact my only remaining hope is to one day live in a modestly furnished one-bedroom apartment above a quaint family-owned pizza shop on the outskirts of a big city. Close enough to be there and yet far enough to evade the epicenter of the blast. I believe in BM™, do you?

Before one more moment is lost you must realign yourself with BM™ and remember that history makes fools of us all: those of us who are mostly right are more than likely a fair bit wrong and those that are wrong are most certainly more frighteningly right than any of us would like to admit. So give up, embrace BM™ and accept that your communications degree is stupid. Why minor in Ethical Taxidermy when you could major in BM™ today.

So start outperforming, in an underachieving manner of speaking, and join BM™ now!

But before I go, if you’re wondering to yourself how you could thank me for my invitation, think nothing of it, after all, it was the very least I could do.

A Note on The Author…

F. Scott Arkansas was born in Omaha Nebraska in the midst of an electrical storm that claimed the lives of 38 people. He started BM™ fourteen years ago in an effort to combat the spread of unmediated individualism, which he has publicly decried as “cowardly.” He is both the founding member and junior executive fellow of the Institute for National Concentration, a public health trust committed to the abolition and subsequent destruction of unsightly leisure wear. He is married to 3 sets of fraternal twins and has an assortment of children he refers to as Canadians. Mr. Arkansas can be found among the Andean foothills searching for “our missing socks.”

Ryan Miller, Me, and the 1989 Oakland A’s by Patrick Nevins

            It started with Jose Canseco. The year before, he’d become the first Major Leaguer to hit forty homers and steal forty bases in a season. I’d missed it. So, when Ryan Miller introduced me to baseball the following spring (my father had taught me to fish, not to play games with balls), he claimed Canseco as his favorite slugger on the 1989 Oakland A’s. That left me with the other Bash Brother, Mark McGwire, which was more than okay with me. We collected their baseball cards, wore their t-shirts, pretended to be them when we smacked Wiffle balls over his fence.

            We divided other players, too. Ryan, having played the game longer, was the better infielder, and believing that short was the superior position, he took Walt Weiss. I’d be Mike Gallego, flipping him the ball to turn two, then pretending to be McGwire again at first when he threw it back. Ryan had the better arm, too, so he claimed starter Dave Stewart. I was happy to have closer Dennis Eckersley; his long hair and mustache made him look like a 70’s rocker, and he had a wicked sidearm delivery (my own throws were sloppy sidearm tosses that Ryan’s father, our Babe Ruth team’s assistant coach, tried to correct). Then there was Rickey Henderson. The Man of Steal was so cool, we each had to have him.

            Rickey Henderson notwithstanding, the ‘89 Oakland A’s gave us easy choices (and a World Series victory). Outside of the pure joy of watching Major League Baseball on TV, and two glorious afternoons at Wrigley Field (I’ll never forget walking up the tunnel to the Technicolor delight of grass, ivy, and sky), most things were out of our control.

            The following year, our favorite A’s were back, but the Reds swept them in the Series, a crushing upset and a major disappointment to us. Thirty years later, I see parallels in watching the A’s capture the pennant then and watching them leading the AL West now, as they play to empty stadiums. Not since my adolescence have I been so uncertain about what the future holds. College, adulthood—in 1990 those thoughts lived on a vague horizon, not unlike the gauzy territory in which I can one day take my children to Wrigley. But I can be almost certain that tomorrow will look just like today, as I could back then. As sure as I am that tomorrow I’ll stay in and report to my basement office, I could predict that Rickey Henderson would steal with a face-first slide that had him overtaking the bag, a Bash Brother would pummel the ball to bring him home, Eck would pick up the save, and Ryan and I would replay the infield magic in an endless game of catch.

            What I couldn’t predict was whether one of our fathers were stricken by a disease that left them unable to play catch, whether one of our brothers came home with Gulf War syndrome.

Patrick Nevins is Associate Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College.

Crumbs by Brandi Spering

I’m sitting in the kitchen of my apartment, contemplating how I will transport this wooden, thirty year-old table my mother lent me. It’s one of the finer things we’ve owned—she’s owned, and for longer than she’s had me. I am determined to not ruin its stride or the condition my mother has kept it in, despite the paint chips from school projects and the wear on the legs from being carried to each new home. It has spent the last fifteen years on a cement floor, in my mother’s basement. Now, it is here and in use.

The table isn’t as long as I remember, not as oval. There are sesame seeds spread across it, two here, three there.

On the ceiling above me are three holes that appear as black dots if you look quickly. For the past two weeks, my roommates and I have feared ceiling collapse as walls are being demolished above. The exposed pipes running through this kitchen are clanging as if to say, why can’t you do something as workers hit them in the process. It has been raining drywall and wood screws and nails attached. Some in trash bags, some loose, hitting the fire escape before the yard.

Because the floor is on a slant, the fridge doors pop themselves open. Our milk spoils fast. We had and might still have, some unwelcome pets. But it seems to be improving. I spend some nights here and most days when I don’t have class. Empty pizza boxes keep finding their way to the floor.

I want stability.

Brandi Spering resides in South Philadelphia where she writes and paints. Her book, This I Can Tell You, will be released by Perennial Press, Winter 2020. Her work can also be found in Perennial Press’ Super/Natural: Art and Fiction for the Future, as well as Stardust Magazine’s Issue 5: Stills. More at Brandispering.com

The Silence When I Know by Marilyn Duarte

Giggling, caressing, shedding, we glide onto the king-sized bed, pushing its decorative runner to meet the wine-stained carpet. Our bodies form a tangled necklace; our limbs its dangling charms. Arms wrapped around my shoulders, you grin sloppily, then kiss my forehead gently. I tell myself that I am lucky: I have wanted this. You. Whisper a question disguised in innocence, but dripping in ridicule, and I know.

My body shrinks like an ocean ebb tide receding from the coast; diminished as we’re released from our orbits’ gravitational pulls. My throat turns dry and I stutter an incomplete answer. Desperate to reconstruct reality, I let you slide my hand to float over your heart and force the thump-thump beneath my palm to mean more than it does. As you fall asleep, your breathing grows slow and staticky. Images from earlier that evening swirl in my mind: when we wandered the cobblestone roads, sat snugly on an empty park bench next to the rose garden, where you told me how much you wanted me, but failed to mention you were lying.

I bury a whimper into my pillow, pause for breath, turn over. I cannot drown the truth. Why did I take pictures of us when we weaved through the trio of arches that faced the rippling midnight water? You asked, then snickered and said you didn’t want them. That they were meant for me to remember. The air conditioner buzzes. On the ground below, someone kicks a patio chair and it scrapes the deck surrounding the figure-eight shaped pool. A painful screech. The clock radio’s white numbers tremble just before the four rapidly flips to a five, silently reaching a new destination.

Marilyn Duarte holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa’s low-residency program and is currently a Staff Writer at Longleaf Review, a Creative Nonfiction, Contributing Editor at Barren Magazine, and an Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor at Pithead Chapel. Her work has appeared in The Tishman Review, (mac)ro(mic), Ellipsis Zine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and elsewhere. Originally from Toronto, she now divides her time between Canada and Portugal. You can find her at www.marilynduartewriter.com and on Twitter @MareDuarte28.

A Refresher by Evan James Sheldon

            Dad is watching cartoons, reruns of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and drinking. I’m supposed to be asleep, but I sneak out of my room and watch from around the corner. He doesn’t laugh or smile while he watches, though his face is lit up from the glow of the television, making him look like a ghost in the dark. I notice that every time they say cow-a-bunga he takes a sip of whiskey, like he’s playing a game all by himself.

            Eventually, I return to my room and pull out my action figures, Raphael and Michelangelo and Leonardo, I can’t find Donatello but he was never my favorite anyway. I don’t turn on the light so my dad won’t notice. I fight monsters turned into outrageous things by ooze, things Bebop and Rocksteady would be afraid of. I always defeat them, except tonight it doesn’t work. I can’t think of what my turtles should do to take down the evil creatures. I can’t picture them winning.

            And I think I understand why my dad plays his own game, maybe he’s forgotten how to take down the evil creatures too. Maybe he needs to watch how it’s done.

            I sneak back out but he’s fallen asleep. I leave Leonardo on Dad’s lap.

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.