Mount Joy by Irene Fick

We are Guests of the Day at the Best Western in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, our names displayed on the welcome sign in the lobby. The assistant manager awards us free bottled water and a choice of Frito Lay Corn Chips or Milky Way bars. This is where my husband and I sleep each weekend almost four hours from home.

Mornings, we drive the six miles on Mount Joy’s main street into the next town where my mother-in-law lies in that uneasy truce between living and dying. Evenings, we head back to the hotel. Coming and going, I gaze out the car window at church steeples, diners with Come On In! signs, freshly scrubbed community parks, and I conjure a different life, a life swathed in the ordinary, a life a few sizes smaller than my own, a gentle life with a slower pulse, and clear, finite borders.

In this life, I would devote my days to cheerful service at soup kitchens. I would crochet scarves for the indigent elderly. Cloaked in an aura of easy piety, I would become a regular at Sunday church, greeting all who crossed my path. In this life, I would accept loss as part of a greater plan, and you are in my prayers might actually provide comfort.

I would not ask so many questions or demand so many answers. A solemn walk through the churchyard labyrinth would calm my lingering unease, heal those old, stubborn wounds that bleed into the same tired poems. It would be enough. 

This is what consumes me as we come and go, come and go, tucked away in this bucolic hamlet as my mother-in-law’s life falters to a close, as her labored breath slows, as time blurs and stretches between breakfasts among strangers and troubled sleep in our third floor room that overlooks the parking lot. We are Guests of the Day and I want to be the person who accepts this small and earnest tribute with gratitude.

Irene Fick of Lewes (DE) is the author of The Wild Side of the Window (Main Street Rag) and The Stories We Tell (Broadkill Press), awarded first place from the National Federation of Press Women.  Irene’s poetry has been published in such journals as Poet Lore, The Broadkill Review and Gargoyle.

Ospitalità (Nonno Flirts with Death) by Chris Cocca

Ospitalità (Nonno Flirts with Death) 

“A clean place to work is one thing,” Carlo’s nonno said. “A clean place to die? Ha! That’s another.” Nonno looked out through the window, the view was grey and wet. “How soon, you think?” 

“How soon dinner?” 

“Dinner! Fa nable! But it would do the trick. How soon dinner, give or take? I won’t hold you to it.” 

“You’re not dying, Nonno.” 

“Heavens no.” He smiled. “I’m the picture of health.” Carlo saw the origins of his own small underbite. A shitty grin his mother said before his molars dropped. “But how soon till we eat?” 

“Maybe an hour,” Carlo said. “Maybe a little more.” 

The old man waved his hand. “What kind of service is that, goombah? How’d’these places stay in business?” 

The unit was in an old wing of the hospital given by the family of a famous poultry rancher. After dinner, Thanksgiving kind of spread, the nurses came to lift and clean him. “Don’t stick around for this part, Guapo,” Nonno said. 

“I’ll go for a walk.” 

“This one,” he said, meaning the big, pink nurse pulling down the bed sheets. “What’s the matter?” she said. 

“Your hands––like cold dead fish.” 

“Mr. Siampa, that’s not nice.”

“Ciampa,” he said, biting. “Ciampa, like with teeth.” 

“Mr. Ciampa. Sorry.” 

“Like cold fish,” he said to Carlo. “Not that it matters. Nothing works here south of Rome.” 

“South of Rome?” the nurse said. 

“The mezzogiorno,” Carlo answered. 

“My grandson’s been to college. They only call it that in books. You ever been to southern It’ly?” 

“No.” 

“Would you like to go?” 

“Someday, maybe.” 

“Make sure to lick the boot!” 

“Pop!” 

“My family’s from the tip.” He bit the air again. “Chompa, chompa, chompa!” 

“Jesus, Pop,” said Carlo, but he was also laughing. 

“Don’t take the Lord’s name lightly, boy-o.” 

“I didn’t mean to, Nonno.” 

Nonno looked back at the nurse. “I suppose you’re going to clean my asshole now.” “I’ll take a walk,” said Carlo. 

“Dead fish, almost frozen. I hope it don’t take long.”

Chris Cocca is from Allentown, PA.  His work has been published or is forthcoming at venues including Hobart, Brevity, Pindeldyboz, elimae, The Huffington Post, 8 Poems, Rejection Letters, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Perhappened, Anti-Heroin Chic, Feed, Appalachian Review, Bandit Fiction, Free Flash Fiction, The Shore, and Dodging the Rain.  He is a recipient of the Creager Prize for Creative Writing at Ursinus College, and earned his MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.

Bullets Not Included by Leigh Chadwick

On Highway 61 a billboard reads FREE BULLETS INCLUDED WITH THE PURCHASE OF ANY GUN. At Target I buy my daughter a Fischer Price electronic drum machine. The back of the box states BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. I look in every closet in Tennessee. I find bullets but no batteries. My daughter presses on her plastic drum machine and nothing happens. I drive past a pawn shop on Lincoln St., directly across from the Head Start Daycare Center. I drive to the last Toys “R” Us that still hides the haunts of laughter in shredded caves of concrete. I carry my daughter through the rubble of abandoned super soakers and Slip ‘N Slides. I sit her on a giraffe’s neck. The giraffe coughs. We feed it a cough drop. We look up. I count fourteen clouds and think of Austin. My daughter points toward a hill covered in trees curled like semicolons. She asks, What is this? I tell her it’s the amount of free bullets that are packaged in the back of semis rolling down I-75. At home I make chocolate chip pancakes for dinner. I still haven’t bought batteries for my daughter’s drum machine. In Alabama an employee working for a company that distributes water goes to work and shoots and shoots and shoots. I wonder if his bullets were free. I wonder why it’s harder to buy batteries than bullets. I wonder when bullets will get tired of running into people. I wonder if you put two bullets in a remote control, will CNN report another shooting in a warehouse. I am trying to figure out why some people get to exist and others don’t. I should buy batteries. I should be a better mother. Four mass shootings in six hours, thirty-eight wounded and six dead. Everywhere is scary when there are more bullets than batteries. When there are more guns than song.

Leigh Chadwick is the author of the chapbook, Daughters of the State (Bottlecap Press, 2021), and the poetry coloring book, This Is How We Learn How to Pray (ELJ Editions, 2021). Wound Channels, her full-length poetry collection, and Pretend I Am Real, a novel written in vignettes, will be simultaneously released by ELJ Editions in February of 2022. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Heavy Feather Review, Indianapolis Review, and Milk Candy Review, among others. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5. 

Post-Surgery by Bill King

Pittsburgh, PA

I hear geese. 

They are hooting under a starlight too thin for shadows—over and over again—except that it’s me shouting gibberish to the ones that move beneath, silent and mute, until one of them pins an arm to the gurney, and says, Sir. It’s ok. You have cancer.  Oh, and thank you, I say, and start trying to find a window with my eyes. 

Three days until I’m on my feet but the nurse’s aide has her own set of problems: Rita, that’s my daughter, dumped the grandbaby at my door before I even got to sleep. 12-hour shift. Didn’t get a wink. And can you believe? Won’t find a job. I was almost too late to make the bus, but here I am, she says, slow-shuffling me and my IV pole the fifty feet from my bed, down a mine shaft of fluorescence and bleach, to the window at the end of the hall.

It’s hard work.  When we get there, I spread my free hand and press cold glass to feel the sun.  It’s better than the images of nature on the wall studies show help patients heal faster, as if green pastures could preserve us until some brighter spring when we begin to flower again.  I study those pictures, anyway, with each revolution of the floor—past all those moaning, dinging patients’ rooms, the nurses’ station, the break room smelling of Dinty Moore stew, the laundry room with its princess and the pea tower of blankets, and the medicine closet with its rows and rows of plastic baskets, labeled, little refrigerators side by side on the floor.

But that west-facing window was always my reward. There was a warmth I could feel no painting could describe.  Once, it streamed like belief from under a cloud bank overhanging the Alleghenies; it set fire to the Monongahela and the little pool of rain water on the flat tar roof an iridescent congregation of pigeons walked around and around, taking turns, stepping in, to preen.

When I get back to my room, the young woman one door down is standing in the doorway. Maybe she’s lost, or has come to see me, I don’t know.  She asks how many times it’s come back like a riddle I must answer before I can pass. Two, I say.  Four, she replies, pointing to her chest. I’m stunned. Ten hours on the table each time, staples sternum to pelvis, chemo all over again. Good luck, she says, turning, two bags swinging overhead.

That night, I hear the geese again. They are hooting above a line of cars that disappear into a tunnel.  They hoot and hoot—over the ancient Ohio, over the folding mountains, and town after town blinking beneath the trees.  Honk, honk, they say, to the one’s walking after dinner. Honk honk, to the ones on their knees in the garden who look like they’re trying to pray.  Honk honk. Honk honk, as they keep passing over and over where I lay.

It’s ok.  It’s ok.  says the night nurse. You’ve been dreaming.   But I’m so tired, I say.

Bill King is a Pushcart Prize nominee who has published in many journals and anthologies, including 100 Word Story, Columbia Journal, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Still: The Journal, Kestrel, and Appalachian Heritage.  He grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia, holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Georgia, and teaches creative writing and literature at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, WV. His chapbook, from Finishing Line Press, is The Letting Go (2018).

The Scout by Sheldon Lee Compton

Remember how skinny he was? He had blonde hair and wore a button-up shirt that was thin as onion skin. And brown, polyester pants with a pair of cheap black Oxfords. He was covered in dust like he had been pulled from a drawer of old coats. When I learned the word sneered I immediately thought of him.

I’ve never imagined myself inside his pale skin. Never thought to be any closer to him than we were that day when he said I could play for the Cincinnati Reds. I could’ve played shortstop. I had a strong arm. But I will; I will crawl beneath his sickness-yellow, onion-skin thin, short-sleeve button-up. His words are another language inside layers of my memory. I’ll get close to his heart and see if it beats like ours, one second at a time.

***

I feel good about this one. I feel safe anyways. It’s Sunday and the gas station is closed and the cake shop is closed and the barber shop and there’s nobody, not even a little traffic coming from Pikeville through to Jonancy or back. Just nothing but this little boy throwing his rubber ball against the side of the building and catching it in his glove. 

He’s beautiful. Blonde hair long down to his shoulders, athletic. Quick! Man is he quick. Better watch for that. I'm not quick. I’ve not been quick in a long time. But it’s a guarantee I’m stronger and more willful. Definitely stronger. He’s a boy and I’m a man.

Plain truth is, I have to have this. And it has to be today. This quiet Sunday.

He hasn’t so much as noticed me sitting over here. His mind is somewhere far away, some ballpark where he’s pitching a no-hitter. It’s not like I’m hiding, really. I’ve got this big boat of a yellow car, I stand out in a crowd myself with my hair the color of creek mud greasy down my back and my old clothes, those polyester shirts with the big collars from some years back that everybody stopped wearing except people who couldn’t afford to stop wearing them. The same with the pants. I’m skinny to the point that people remember it about me. I look exactly like the kind of person who would kidnap a little boy. Kidnap and maybe worse. I’ve not decided yet.

Not one miss. He’s been throwing at that wall for over a half hour and he’s made the stop every time. He’s actually really good. I mean he would turn some heads at a practice. And then there it was. The idea. The way to make this happen.

I step out of the car and shut the door. It rattles a sound across the whole street, but the boy doesn't turn. It wouldn’t matter if he did turn, it wouldn't matter if he saw me. I have a plan now. I’m looking for top talent, which is not so far from true.

***

Now breathe. Now try to breathe.

Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry. His first nonfiction book, The Orchard Is Full of Sound, is due out from West Virginia University Press in 2022. Cowboy Jamboree Press will publish his Collected Stories in the fall of 2021. He lives in Pike County, Kentucky.

To Lose A Tooth by Kirsten Reneau

At some point in her early adolescence, Julie knocks out her own tooth. Her mother, Barbra by birth certificate and Bobbie to friends and strangers alike, lost her front tooth before any of her children were born, when she lived in her hometown in California, on a cookie. Bobbie’s tooth is golden and shines in the sunlight; it matches her six golden molar fillings, three on each side. Bobbie moved to Arkansas to get married and have children, but every summer, she would return to the ocean town she had been born into, bringing her children – including Julie- along with her. 

            Julie was named Juli, but they change it when she is three, citing misspellings and mispronunciations. The added e is the fifth letter of the alphabet and becomes the fifth letter of her name. Five, of course, is the number of freedom and she spends the rest of her life chasing what was left off her birth certificate. 

            Julie comes from an old southern family via her father’s side, the kind that built banks and schools. She hates the sticky, oppressive heat of the South that weighs down her bones and swears that one day she’ll leave Arkansas and never come back. She reads books about girls who run away from home or orphans adopted by rich men who solve mysteries. She wishes for a life like that.

            As a teenager, she runs track, fights boys, and sneaks out under the cover of the moon. She slips through the back door while the nightly train’s whistle shakes the house from its foundation. Julie is claustrophobic in her small town, the way everyone seems to think they know everything about her. 

            Eventually, Bobbie finds Julie’s footprints in the grass still wet with morning and just before her senior year, Julie is sent thousands of miles away to a boarding school in the Northeast. Or perhaps she runs away to the boarding school, a trail of fresh footprints behind her. The story changes depending on who tells it. Either way, by Fall Julie is exploring New York City by night, a few hours from Philips Exeter Academy. 

            Before all of that – before the midnight subway rides, before her first hangover, before the she starts calling home every Sunday just to hear the sound of Bobbie’s voice - she knocks out her own tooth.

            She loses an incisor on the front right side because she is doing something she is not supposed to. She’s flying. Unafraid in her youth, she and her siblings slipped on socks, sprinted down the carpeted living room and then took off across the tile floor, sliding down the hallway as fast and as far as they could. 

            It was Julie’s turn, her face tanned by summer. She would have made her body lean and aerodynamic, the way she learned to swim, and her hair would have splayed into a blonde halo around her face. For a moment, she could have been anywhere, anyone. Nothing matters when you’re flying like that.

            Then she smashed into the wall—she went one way, her tooth went the other. 

            Now Julie recites this story and others to her children like they are ancient myths, laughing in such a way that her fake tooth winks out at them. She met her husband in college and followed him back to his hometown in the mountains, exactly 99 miles from the closest real city. With her three daughters, they make a tight family of five. Her children come from an old, northern family full of teachers, the kind that taught generations of neighboring families. She makes herself content with these things.

            When she looks in the mirror, she no longer recognizes her face. It happens slowly at first, and then all at once she realizes how different she is than the girl she was. Her teeth are colored with age, but a single fake is still the color of a freshwater pearl. Julie now carries the south in her skin, in tans that became age spots. She has bad ankles, so she can’t run anymore. She still calls Bobbie every Sunday. She complains that the northern air is too bitter for her taste and talks about moving back south sometimes. Her children roll their eyes; not me, her oldest daughter, still really just a child, says. I’m never coming back home after I leave this place.

            Her daughters are restless – they dream of cities, places they believe will shock them awake. But each summer, Julie ignores their pleas for vacation, to be somewhere new and exciting. Instead, she takes them back to Arkansas, back to days that smell like sunscreen and moonflowers and nights where the grasshoppers and cicadas are whispering in the secret language of nature. 

            She claims that she wants her children to know Bobbie and her golden tooth, that they should know a piece of where she comes from. Really, she aches for something she cannot put into words, but she thinks maybe she needs to feel air with some weight, that her children should know the freedom of sliding across tile floors. 

            So when Julie’s oldest daughter – the one who shares her top-story smile and freckles - slams into a wall while running in socks down the hallway, Julie does not scold her. Instead, Julie cups her daughter’s face and kisses her cheeks and checks to make sure all the teeth are still there. That night, Julie and Bobbie, stay up talking about when they would go to California, about the hometowns that are no longer home. And when Julie’s oldest daughter is lulled to sleep by the train whistle, Julie lays awake and listens to the house’s foundation shake; it rattles her bones, reminding them of all that they’ve lost. 

Kirsten Reneau is a writer living in New Orleans. Her work has been in The Threepenny Review, Hobart, Rejection Letters, and others. She has a website and is on twitter: @Reneauglow

Fragments: St. Croix by Wilson Koewing

She first spotted Patrick straddling a log at Sugar Beach beating a coconut against a rock. Clear waves lapped and a light breeze moved palm fronds. Patrick’s beach bum affectation first attracted her. Later, a boyish charm that could roll over into deep thoughtfulness. A penchant for possession gave her pause, but mostly, Patrick seemed a fitting candidate to rescue her from the decade long cycle she could not escape. 

                                                            ***

To celebrate their six-week anniversary, they dined on cornmeal, okra and salt fish on the terrace at The Inn on Mt. Eagle. They toasted rum. Dusk spread orange and lavender streaks like icing across the sky. Sugar Beach was visible a thousand feet below. The white dots of sailboats retreated to shore as a thunderstorm, its entire area visible from above, moved in from the sea. Whitecaps slammed against black rocks, rain steamed as it hit the water, yet where they sat, the sky remained clear. 

                                                            ***     

Happy for the first time in years she invited her oldest and most enabling friend, Blake to visit. She met Blake, a philandering lawyer, in New Orleans helping to rebuild after the storm. The half-abandoned city proved a worthy canvas for their exploits. Vodka was their vice, and they drank it any way. 

Her second stint resulted. 

During Blake’s visit, Patrick created strange tension. One afternoon they visited the lagoons and Patrick pulled an air soft pistol on a tourist before returning his wallet and claiming it a joke. Patrick was convinced they shared a past they would not admit. 

                                                            ***

The night things disintegrated Blake drank a Cuba Libre on the veranda. The sun slid across the sea and sank below the treetops. Hearing screams, he tiptoed to the window. Patrick clutched a wrench and dodged flying objects. As she pleaded, he landed a crippling blow. Blake called the police and hid behind a Calabash tree on the property’s edge until cruisers arrived with sirens wailing. 

Patrick flew to Dallas and checked himself into an institution. She awoke hospitalized, tubes coursing wrist to nose. She tugged bandages and cried out for Patrick. A nurse popped in to tell her there was no Patrick there. 

                                                            ***                                               

As she healed, listening to her vitals beep, her mind soared back in time. There she was, born wealthy in Philadelphia. Bundled in pink, riding a bicycle on an icy street. Her father’s dark beard and smile of pride. His outstretched arms when she graduated Temple. Her mom’s uncharacteristic dinner toast. The handshake when she graduated Villanova law, her dad’s beard salted gray. The tears sliding down her mother’s cheeks. 

The early years at the firm. Living in Rittenhouse. Bounding toward a golden future. Until the alcohol claws. Before one became three. Three, six. Before counting became impossible. 

Seeking a new start, she found a job online at a resort. She purchased a plane ticket and disappeared to St. Croix. 

Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His work is forthcoming in Wigleaf, Hobart, Gargoyle and The Harpy Hybrid Review. 

A Reverie in Which I am Able to Miss You Again by Claire Taylor

I am trying to picture your face when we were twelve and you sat across from me in English. Or at sixteen, when I glanced up from my chemistry test and caught you looking at me. Seventeen, in the backseat of your car, eyes illuminated by streetlight. In our twenties, freshly shaved and slightly windswept, saying, I do. Or at thirty-two, your lips gently caressing our baby boy’s cheek. I am trying to picture you from two years ago. But there is only this face—yesterday’s and today’s, the same face as tomorrow’s—this current iteration of you. I have seen this face every day for the past 429 days. Have heard your voice, a constant din from behind the office door. You are on the phone again. You are on the phone always. You are never going or returning. No longer a sight for sore eyes at the end of the day when the baby is screaming and the pasta is overcooked, bloated, and soggy, dinner ruined. There is never your face coming through the door, returning home. There is only home and home and home some more. Endless hours of you.

I am trying to picture your face when I tell you I’m leaving, or better yet when you emerge from the office at the end of the day to find me already gone. Our child sitting on the floor with a handful of markers, a pile of graham crackers. Dishes still in the sink, laundry unfolded, no plan for dinner. My voice a tinny echo asking you to “please leave a message.”  

I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Claire Taylor is a writer in Baltimore, MD. Her micro-chapbook, A History of Rats, is forthcoming from Ghost City Press. You can find Claire online at clairemtaylor.com and Twitter @ClaireM_Taylor.

If This Bar Is a Power Ballad… by Jillian Luft

..and it is, at least for tonight, then this bathroom is its bridge, the evening distilled and suspended into one crude and exultant moment, a gorgeous plateau of want, savage but unhurried, a private, whiskey-shimmered replay of all that’s come before, out there, in the tumult of dark and smoke and chicken wing grease, a way to both catch your breath and hold it, like titanium lungs on the verge of metallic combustion, like a bladder on the brink of sweet release, and what a release it is, away from the chorus, the expectant crush of karaoke revelers just outside the door, slurring the words of Skid Row, of Springsteen, of your favorite 80s songstress, pounding back brown bottles of anything, feet stomping into the syrupy stuck of days-old libations, heads thrown back like well-dressed wolves toward the mirror-balled moon, all hair and teeth and hearts, splayed and torn and worn, on acid wash sleeves, on frayed flannel, on soft, soft leather, tattooed love boys flinging themselves against the hard edges of the night, bodies building to a pathetic crescendo while you sink into the bridge, sink into the cool cavity of the shitter, press your platform boots into the piss-drenched floor and let it all spill and spurt forth, a warm and cozy river running wild between your legs while your mind bursts with possibility like a flower’s slo-mo bloom, flush with new color and light, with what the chorus of this power ballad promises once you wipe away the remnants of what you’ve set free, once you gloss up that mouth and tease up that hair and slather all that pink, slick against your skin, washing it clean and new, once you peer, curious, at your image above the rust-crudded sink and smile like you mean it, like you’re beautiful and believe it, once you inhale your animal self, sweat and bourbon and subtle perfume, once your breath mists pale against the door and you grab hold of the handle, hesitating with the hope that what’s to come never ends, that what’s out there is more of what came before but better, that what’s out there is the sustained and sublime ache of anticipation, the safe and solid weight of hours that build and build toward something, anything, before the poignant becomes tragic, before the buzz wears thin, before the inevitable outro, before the drama runs dry and the lights come up and the voice of your ceaseless yearning, once echoing electric and eternal, slowly fades and fades.

Jillian Luft is a Florida native currently residing in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Booth, Hobart, Pigeon Pages, and JMWW, among other publications. You can find more of her writing at jillianluft.com.

How to Feel by Leigh Chadwick

I buy one of Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits off eBay and go as what if for Halloween. If you wait long enough even a cloud will rot. I stand at the edge of the swimming pool at the Holiday Inn Express and watch a manatee chase a speedboat. It is easier to buy a gun than adopt a dog, so I buy a gun and rob a pet store. I steal all the puppies. My favorite emotion is Taylor Swift. For our anniversary, my husband gives me a bouquet of femurs. I put them in a casket we use as an ottoman in the living room. I ask Siri if they sell bulletproof onesies.  

Siri says, You can’t see it, but I’m shrugging right now. She tells me to wave a wand and pull a rabbit out of a heart. I do, but the rabbit is dead. I vote we get rid of gym teachers and use their salaries to give every kid a bulletproof backpack. I am scared and it’s not even night. I tell my daughter she is the wilderness in the movie where the wilderness rips the beards off lumberjacks. I smoke a pack of menthols under a palm tree in the middle of a mirage. I ask Siri if 5G gives you cancer. Siri says, Cancer gives you cancer.

This morning I woke up breathing in reverse. Having a one-night stand with Ryan Gosling’s abs is my fourth favorite fantasy. Can you photoshop love? I can’t remember the last time I ate butternut squash. I don’t even know if I like butternut squash. Whenever I drive through Oklahoma, all I see is cowboys riding glue sticks. I ask Siri how many people fall in love at gun shows. Siri says, The same amount of people who were born on a Wednesday. 

I steal a lake and get run over by a car. If my husband had a twin brother, I’d totally fuck him. My therapist gives me a silver medal for waking up. I’m so good at kissing in Pig Latin, you don’t even know. Vampire Weekend is my seventh favorite band. When I take too much Adderall, my heart gets a migraine. 

I love it.

Leigh Chadwick is the author of the chapbook, Daughters of the State (Bottlecap Press, 2021), as well as the full-length collection, Wound Channels (ELJ Edition, 2022). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Heavy Feather Review, Olney Magazine, and ONE ART, among others. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.

Tender by J.T. Price

You could see how tender he was with the cat, how he’d kneel down and extend the backs of two fingers to its nose, which the slender, pumpkin-furred thing nuzzled against, closing its eyes in concentration, rubbing its face there and purring with soft ticking pleasure. He’d look at me then, making me feel real in the room again, his two fingers motionless and the cat rubbing its face there, the smile on my own, enormous, undoubtedly. The cat was a rescue he’d adopted on a whim, and afterward, several years later, it was in the possession of Miriam, who had lived on the floor above him when they lived in the same building, and was like “a sister” to him, or that’s how he always referred to her when I was in his life, as if to preempt jealousy. Honestly Miriam ought to have been the least of my worries, if worrying is how I’d wanted to spend my waking hours. Only a few months ago, she and I met for lunch and after a certain amount of checking on each other, surveying to see who now and where and what we wanted to occupy our present desires and boredoms, she recounted with great tenderness the night when he’d finally grasped how much she’d come to depend on drink, how he went out with her, and let her have as many as she wanted, and when she’d finished another G&T at a crowded bar, he said, “Is that it?” and she’d pulled him outside into the cold again to catch a car, until they were somewhere else, another dim scene with catchy songs droning over the strangers’ conversations around them, and she’d have another, and the whole while he only ordered tonic water or coffee, not saying much, only listening to her and scanning her face with those chiseled vertical lines of concern at the bridge of his nose. Finally, she confided in an undertone, her gaze averted from mine and seeming to fixate in the late May sun on her hardly eaten salad, how she’d found herself on the tile somewhere, and he was holding her hair up, then splashing water from the sink to her face, and asking again, “Is that it?” and she let him take her back to the building on the Upper East Side, in the 60s, near the river, and he marched her upstairs to her apartment, the floor above his own, and started a warm shower, and waited for her outside the bathroom door as she washed away the night, knocking more than once to see that she was conscious, and when she came out in a towel, he put a glass of water in her hands, and she leaned against him on the way to the bed, where he pulled the blankets up to her chin. Then, Miriam said, “He just knelt above me, was just there, right above me, stroking my hair until I fell asleep,” her voice the faintest whisper, her eyes concealed by elegant sunglasses, and I, sitting across from her as the everyday parade of Greenwich Village streamed by, couldn’t help but think of him again with that cat, wondering how much effort he’d actually put into the caress and how much may have been her, pressing her still damp forehead to his stationary fingers. “It was the last time I touched a drink,” she said, then smirked, “at least for a while,” plucking her fork from the table and pronging at the bed of greens.

J.T. Price has lived in Brooklyn since 2001. His fiction has appeared in The New England Review, Post Road, Guernica, Fence, Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, Juked, Electric Literature, and elsewhere; nonfiction, interviews, and reviews with The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, The Scofield, and The Millions.

Horizons by James Sullivan

 She asked what kind of place South Dakota was. 

We exchange students were seated among a group of English learners in a pub in Shinjuku. The high schoolers had gone home, and now it was the instructors and the college students pounding unlimited drinks at 3000 yen for two hours. Some unspoken desire tingling under the skin of each group had pushed us quickly into familiarity. We were teaching each other dirty words in our native languages. We’d played a game: pair a mode of transportation and a type of meat for ero-comedic effect. (Think: Beef train, kielbasa bicycle, pork plane.) A couple of the women there were obviously interested in at least two of the men each, and that meant one was clinging to my arm asking questions.      

I was still in love with a woman who was never really going to love me back, so it didn’t disappoint me too much when the answer I gave resulted in her shifting affections to another guy by the end of the night. 

South Dakota. What was there to say that wasn’t covered in the box of souvenirs my father had sent for such cultural introductions? The postcards of mythological jackalopes and Sturgis rallies packed with Harleys. The card featuring Mount Rushmore on the front—and the bare butts belonging to those famous faces, sketched in cartoon on the flipside. I had told the students during the language practice session about the agriculture and the Black Hills I had never seen. I showed them a photo of hunters I knew standing behind a line of downed pheasants. I did not show them the pheasant poker chip, proclaiming SOUTH DAKOTA: BIG COCK COUNTRY, but it seemed, at the present rate, that my neighbor, amorous with diluted cocktails, might just pluck it from my pocket.

 I didn’t tell her about my last memory of the place: a truck bed overloaded with deer carcasses. I didn’t tell her about the Mexican woman down the street whose Christmas decorations danced and dazzled the town’s eyes toward epileptic seizure. I didn’t bring up Pioneer Days, the local homecoming ritual, Prince and Princess sporting faux-native buckskins and cowboy hats. I didn’t explain that on my old street, you passed three distinct economic classes from trailer to mansion. None of that really occurred to me at the time because my home had never meant anything at all to me except a flat, dull place I wanted to escape. 

What I said, being too young, too earnest: “From my dad’s house, it’s a ten-minute walk to the end of town. One minute, you’re passing ordinary homes, then you hit a highway. Past the highway, it’s power lines and corn fields and blue sky forever. So, you stare a while and turn back. That’s what South Dakota is like.”

The group got quiet. A few people made boilerplate remarks. A server came around to gather glasses and take drink orders. My face was hot, and although the conversation sputtered and wheezed to life like a rusting Ford on a January morning, I could not find my way back in. 

The woman slipped her hand in mine, slid in closer. She was beautiful and older by a year and although I’d thought I wanted everything new to happen to me in Tokyo, I also wanted to get away. I couldn’t trust the way she was melting all over me, and that’s how I knew this heat between us couldn’t really be about me. She was looking at something else. 

“But when you got to that field,” she said, “couldn’t you keep going? I mean, the world does keep going.” 

The conversation had roared back into full power without us. Cornstalks rustling in the breeze. 

“You know the world exists out there, somewhere,” I said, lifting my glass for a sip, then tiring of the taste and putting it back down. “But you can’t really believe it, somehow. When you’re standing there, it looks like the fields and sky just go on forever. And maybe they do.” 

James Sullivan has split his adult life between the Midwestern US and Japan. He lives in Minnesota now and is writing a novel. Find his recent work in Fourteen Hills, Inscape, and XRAY Literary Magazine and follow @jfsullivan4th

What We Said by Terese Coe

Her ex-husband asks if there was a “defining” moment in each period of their lives. 

They both say “No” at the same moment and laugh. 

In a dream, a boy shoots a rifle. Out into the sky comes the most gorgeous intricate 

pattern of water spray, symmetrical and elongated. It floats in the air like snowflakes.

I dig my bravado, she confided. 

They say that’s precisely what brings on death, says her friend. 

In a dream, I find all the sandals I’ve ever worn, even the ocean-blue leather high-heel 

Famolare platforms. And many boots, some not seen in 30 years. 

Fear is dishonesty, his best friend said on a light dose of lsd.  

A six-year-old girl explains it all: Kids are zig-zags because whenever mom and dad 

go for a walk and get scared the kids say You’re not gonna get lost! ’Cause this is 

a one-way path. 

Her friend writes from Sing Sing, Have I achieved criminality?  

Humanoid and not as blind as war. Thoughts on the old machinery at the Met: clicks 

and snaps and whirrs, propellers, gears that calibrate, & arms & wheels and steam. 

At least we can grasp it. 

He could not move out of his grandmother’s house, so he enlisted in the Vietnam War.

If you can’t see, you can’t think, says a man going blind. 

Da comes to me in a dream saying Look, we’ve got the wood from the old floor & it’s 

still good—I could use it for something. 

Terese Coe’s prose, poems, and translations appear in Agenda, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Classical Outlook, Hopkins Review, Metamorphoses, The Moth, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Stone Canoe,The Threepenny Review, the TLS, and many others. Her collection Shot Silk was short-listed for the 2017 Poets Prize. For more details about her work, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terese_Coe.

SPIN THE RED SQUARE IN YOUR MIND by Derek Maine

I need noise louder pumped into my ear. I need to hear three, four, sometimes five noises at once. Orgasmic cacophonies, strummed vibrations, released aural energy flowing through an air coated as subversive silence. Or:       A lying silence carrying the constant flutter of each resonation or then, perhaps, the culmination of the chaos of all sounds traveling 

[landing, being formed on lips on screens on tree limbs and saxophones, landed]

the culmination of the chaos of all sounds traveling creates silence. White being all colors / black the absence of.  

I need to find a vibration. If I turn this - * this * - up louder, perhaps a wave will come through and land. Everywhere are eyeballs. I look around and I see eyeballs. Real or imagined or drawn or tape recorded live. Never do you see so much ears. The eyeball is the symbol. A stray eyeball portends. A stray ear is a prop. A stray ear is a silly thing or a gross thing. It’s eyeballs I need. Ears I have plenty. The eyeballs I have are beautiful. A pale blue shines through the frothy-white, small flickering things. These eyeballs and memory do not speak. 

I hear the voices. I hear the crowd. This next sentence had you in mind. And so too did the others. I hear the gallery. It’s all so very familiar to me, so like a loving embrace:

my haters cannot hate me like I can because they don’t know me like I know me

and they don’t have to be me like I have to be me so put those arrows back in the quiver.

My aural is the sense so struck.

Please tickle my ear. Pull me to you sharply by the throat + pant near imperceptible vibrations. Let their settling on me unsettle me. An unsettled man is a dangerous thing. An unsettled man is the sexiest man. These two live within, and cannot without, each other. Nature abuses and is abused. We, you and I, who’ve imagined each other this evening (is it morning where you are? what are the nights like? are the skies clear? do you see stars, or satellites? deer? coyotes?), abuse and are abused. 

I imagine you as sound. I speak of the red square often. I’ll do it again. The psychiatrist I saw when I first went in, briefly, asked me to close my eyes and make a red square. I could not. She said now make it spin. I could not and I cannot. There is no visual memory. The eyeballs and memory are in a disagreement. And so everything sings. I read your poem and it sings. I call a friend and we sing. I turn on sing and turn it on louder. When it is just you, speaking seriously, with your calm, steered baritone slight lilt just at the top register when you know you’re about to say something hilarious – fuck, this * Can Not * be the narrative – you sing and I sing for you. 

 
Derek Maine lives in North Carolina. He is on twitter @derekmainelives.

It's a strange one. Possibly in that space where it's too abstract and yet not abstract enough. I've tinkered with it a bit back and forth for a week now. Wondered if it was part of something else. If it was anything at all. I decided it was something. It has odd/off grammar, punctuation, and one part where the line breaks delve dangerously into the territory claimed by poetry. The title is awful and I hate the last line. Both are completely unchangeable. I've never primed a piece like this before. Going on rambling like this. Maybe this is my bio. Yes, I'll say this should be my bio. I live in North Carolina. I am on twitter @derekmainelives. I am aware that bio's should be shorter and in third person. Derek Maine is ashamed, but not so much that he won't hit send.

Wild Heart by Joe Eichner

            They talked about the flood, then the disease, then the children who’d become soldiers in arms, and after that, they finished what remained of the deboned branzino; someone pinched the eye, a lemon rind fell to the floor and was squished; the boy and girl — the 25-year-olds — began a sunset tour of the lake by kayak; the espresso machine, Italian, would soon begin its churn, and wasn’t it nice, isn’t it nice how you could watch Bill through the window from the waterfront, his Turretic brow in the honey yellow light spastic in drunken concentration, fiddling with the grinds, then deliberating how to compost? By the water, the rest of the party begins to get cold. The appetizers had been fattening. Bill’s sister, Laura, in her fifties, looks a bit like Stevie Nicks, and the conversation turns to the grainy video clip of the singer belting Wild Heart backstage with her makeup artist and backup singer, her fuzzy blonde hair tied up with a white bow, a bashful confidence in her glare, her face the unmoored face of someone who can’t help but sing her own song when it comes on the radio, the face of someone who hurts and will hurt and who hurts in quiet rapture because she knows she will hurt again. And all in a prom dress. Jeff assures them that his daughter isn’t dating the boy with whom she’s just driven across the country, but as their kayak fades from view no one believes it isn’t love. My first marriage, Laura says, was on a beach on an island off the coast of Virginia, the one with the wild horses, though we didn’t see any horses, just dollar stores and the planets painted onto an old wooden shed. Our honeymoon was an early morning ride on the bed of a pickup truck through the winding roads of the island, and even though we picked up another rider, we still made love right then and there. Jeff’s wife Sam says the best part about summer is that it ends. Now nothing ends. She takes a sweater out of her tote bag and hands it to Jeff who has forgotten to pack his own. Bill brings down the espresso, the little white porcelain cups quaking on the tray as he sets it down. His wife Betsy is small, works in ceramics, and lets him talk about the varieties of birds who scoop up fish from the lake in their backyard. Meanwhile, she talks with Sam about their children, and hiking trails, and sometimes gun control. There is so much more to say as the water laps up to the dock, and the music isn’t playing — even though supposedly everyone loves music — but whatever, do we always have to make an effort? A month before, on election night, Bill drank copious amounts of red wine at Jeff’s place, got drunk, and swiftly entered into an argument with Betsy over whether or not he had locked up the house before they left for the party. Later they all got to talking about high school––who died, divorced, or dissolved. And as they huddled together awaiting the results, someone said I love you, I love you, I love you I do…When the boy and girl return from their tour of the lake they find the dock deserted except for a lone plate of half-eaten red velvet cake and some sandals. How plain everything is still: The fathers and mothers and aunts all gone to bed tipsy and shivering and full, so now, the boy and girl, for a change, are the calming voices that patter while you try and sleep. They are talking about the man they’d met in Wisconsin, this toothless guy named Buck who sat outside his garage rolling cigarettes and inviting passersby into conversation. His fingers were stained with polyurethane, and his job, as they recalled, was calendars, making sure companies knew what days certain holidays fell on. He was reading a book from the library about the battle his father had fought in during the second world war. He read many books but said he’d never be able to write any himself. Then he sat upright, paused, and took it back — c’mon, he said, now wasn’t that an awfully rude thing to say about myself?

Joe Eichner is a writer from Chicago. Sometimes he discusses books, movies, and niche pop culture stuff with his twin brother here, and is currently at work on a novel. 

The Loop by Aishat Adesanya

We comb our afros. Reminding ourselves of our roots. We tie and tuck in our hijabs. Making sure to cover every inch of skin. Remembering our religion. 

We shine our melanin with cocoa butter, making it glossy and lovely. Remembering our heritage. Our backpack is secured on our back. Our side-bag clinging to our sides. 

Our cameras are on point. Lenses sharp and hungry; waiting to capture anything, everything and nothing. Our hands ache from carrying such a powerful tool. 

Our planks are sharpened. With big boards in a rainbow of colours. Carrying the words that already have our voices hoarse. The words we won't stop saying. The words that echo into the clouds and over the seas, but yet haven’t stopped us from getting killed. 'Black Lives Matter.' 

Our hearts pound like crazy. Heavily. Threatening to burst out of our chests. Fear smiles, waiting to consume us all. 

Our breaths skip at every chant. Every cry. Every speech. Every plea. All to deaf ears. 

Our black brother is on the other side. Our brown brother is there too. Watching us suffer, watching us cry for 'our' rights, and yet they are just there. Arms sweating, the veins in them bulging. Ready to shoot at us. Killer gas. Live rounds.

'Looks like you are on the wrong side brother.' 

We pull out every stunt but it all bounces back to us. Nothing ever changes. A never-ending, spiral loop. 

Will anything ever change? Not unless we kill our sight and let fear die with it. We are our ancestors' second coming, ready to face the same things they died fighting for.

Aishat Adesanya is a 17yr old Yoruba hijabi. She started drawing at the age of 9, and stumbled on writing somewhere along the line. She’s a weird eater who cannot stand pizza. She’s an ardent reader and hopes to influence the world through her art and her unique African culture. Her work has been published in Hearth Magazine.

The fence, the zoo, and the empty stroller by Denise S. Robbins

There’s a fence around the zoo made of woven metal with barbed wire on top. They tried to hide it underneath bamboo and vines. To ‘rewild’ the area to the forest it used to be. Even though what used to be never included bamboo. 

A woman walks on the sidewalk by this fence around the zoo every day, pushing an empty stroller, and every day, during my morning walk, she walks by me without seeing me. She’s maybe forty-five, maybe fifty. A swoop of gray hair above one ear. A pair of dead eyes and a thin line for a mouth that’s stuck together like glue. Whatever secrets she has to tell are locked away behind that mouth. Except for one big secret. The empty stroller. It has a felt blanket with blue and purple stars. And an old, dirty stuffed animal: a giraffe. 

The toy’s muse, the giraffe that lives and breathes, sometimes sticks his head over the wire fence for a look. Sometimes he takes a bite of bamboo and blinks as he chews without hurry, tongue lapping up the air. I wonder if the giraffe sees the stuffed animal, considers it a lost calf, and wants to bring it home. 

The vines cling through the wire fence in spirals. The fence with its verdant muffler keeps most of the zoo noises inside. But some of them escape. A child screaming. “If you shut your mouth now you’ll get ice cream later.” The screams disappearing. An elephant trumpet. A lion’s roar, in and out like an ambulance siren as it paces in a circle. “Don’t stick your hands in there, goddamnit.” 

Outside the fence, cars drive on one-lane roads no matter how muddy or wet they are. They only have one way to go. The whoosh of each car is identical. Sometimes the tires spray water. Good thing I have a nice rain jacket, and the woman’s stroller has a transparent cover. 

Frequent guests of the path around the fence around the zoo also include a man with a shopping cart full of tarps, a power walker with a perfect body and an angry face, a pair of high school twin boys, a mall Santa. There also tend to be guest appearances from dog walkers with twelve leashes, tired runners who have overshot their distance, young girls who are too cold. 

One day I see the woman’s face jerk up towards the fence, to the barbed wire on top. It’s a subtle movement but it tells me everything. Her thoughts escape her eyes and enter mine: 

If I jump, I’d get caught on the barbed wire in the thigh and chest. If they tried to pull me

off I’d rip out an artery and die. They’d cover me with vines instead and I would rewild

myself right there on the fence.

I never got a stroller. I never got a chance. I didn’t have time. I walk this path to see the woman with the stroller, and others, people like her and unlike her, people with secrets and people with tedious lives and people that try to recall their inner wild nature but instead become trapped, pacing in a circle, people that on the outside, are blank, and on the inside, roar.

Denise S. Robbins is an author from Wisconsin who now lives on the East Coast (Beast Coast). Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Barcelona Review, The Forge, Grimscribe Press, Neutral Spaces, and more. Find her at www.denisesrobbins.com. 

Swarm by Mike Nagel

I'm thinking of this one summer, not long after my family moved to Texas, when the entire city was covered in crickets. It was something out of a Charlton Heston movie. A no-joke plague had descended upon the greater Dallas area. By July the whole city smelled like dead fish. A cottage industry emerged of kids showing up to grocery stores with push brooms and shovels and offering to clear the parking lots of all the dead crickets. People were slipping on them. Cars were spinning out. It was a liability. You would get close to a wall and then realize the whole thing was moving, every inch covered in layers of crickets. My dad's tennis league cancelled matches. The flood lights were attracting swarms. 

I'm thinking about this Monday night on my porch in Carrollton getting pummeled by grasshoppers taking pot shots at me from the grass. They line themselves up and go for the face. The latest generation of insects making a go at world domination. I was being attacked. 

On Amazon J finds a mesh fence you can install yourself for $40. It keeps the bugs out and lets the air in. It's the closest you can get to being inside while still being outside. Or maybe it's the other way around. Sometimes things are the other way around. J comes out with the tape measure. Two minutes later she comes back out with the tape measure. "I forgot everything," she said. 

As the dominant species on this planet there's a lot of pressure on us to maintain the illusion that everything is totally under control. If all the dogs in the world, or all the hippos, or all the, I don't know, giant squids, found out that we don't actually know what we're doing it could cause a panic. They might freak out. While I was living on the good ship Anastasis, docked in the freeport of Monrovia, Liberia, a favorite joke among the crew was to scream, "But who's driving the boat?!" every time we'd see the captain in the hallway. And I would like to say again now, fifteen years later, from the patio of my duplex in Carrollton, getting pummeled by grasshoppers: Who's driving the boat?! 

The mesh gate arrives on Tuesday and in a box that seems too small to contain a device that will change our lives. I've always felt that big problems require things that come in big boxes. I have a philosophy when it comes to boxes. The bigger the better. "We needed a big box for this job," I tell J. "Big." Bugs outnumber humans two hundred million to one. Last year spiders ate more than double our collective weight in prey. Yesterday I saw a really big moth. A gypsy, maybe.

It seems to me that the stakes down here on the good ship Planet Earth are either incomprehensibly high or incomprehensibly low. One or the other. Not both. I read about the President of a small coastal nation who was disappointed to learn there were no active threats against his life. He asked them to please keep looking. I once had a backpack that came with a warning label: "This bag breaks down over time, just like you."

The mesh gate isn't doing much good there, unassembled on the kitchen table, but I feel like it's starting to help. It's sending the right message. On Tuesday night I smash a grasshopper and leave its dead body to rot on the patio. That's sending the right message too. Wars are not won on the battlefield but in the mind. It was not the explosive power of the atomic bomb that was so terrifying. It was the mushroom cloud. 

Thursday night we drink Yellowtail wine on the patio and get eaten alive by mosquitos. J makes an executive decision to install the mesh gate. At any moment anyone can make an executive decision. "I'm making an executive decision," they can say. We put the gate up quickly and incorrectly. "Well, that's the gist of it," J says about the gate, which is open on both sides, and has big gaps at the top and bottom, and flaps open in the breeze. "That's the idea."

That weekend J goes on a trip to Canton and it's just me here alone with the animals trying to act like an authority figure, trying to make arbitrary decisions with confidence and resolve, trying to stick to my guns. "It's not time for that," I say when the dog sets a tennis ball in my lap. I want him to think there's a specific time for tennis balls and that I know when it is. "That's not where that goes," I say, when he puts something somewhere instead of somewhere else. I walk around all weekend pointing at things and making announcements. On Sunday I hold a press conference. The animals follow me back and forth across the living room with their eyes until I wear myself out. I wake up at 2am on the couch, 2 Advil and a SmartWater on the coffee table, the animals sound asleep in the big bed.

Mike Nagel's essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and The Paris Review Daily. Find selected nonsense at michaelscottnagel.com. 

The Same Two Songs by D.T. Robbins

I’m jerking off in the shower the first time I see my dad’s ghost. He doesn’t see me trip over the tub onto the carpet, cupping my junk. But there he is – heavy black bags under his eyes, a galaxy of freckles stretched out and connected, giving the illusion of a tan, bald head, red and white beard. He stares blankly into the clouded mirror above my sink, turns and walks through the bathroom door. I wait on the front porch for mom to get home before going back inside. 

“I saw dad in the bathroom,” I say. 

“You’re grieving,” she says. 

She used to fuss him for any and everything. From buying the riding lawn mower instead of the push kind to grilling her steak rarer than she liked. She’d go, “Ah, shit, Jerry, what the hell is wrong with you? You trying to kill me?” He’d laugh, “Everyone knows you’re gonna kill me first, Debra.” Now when someone asks how she’s doing she just says, “He was a great man, and he was my husband.”  

I’m taking a leak in the middle of the night the next time I see him. I pass out, wake up soaked in piss. He’s still there, silently staring at himself in the mirror. I try to get his attention, throw my arms around and shit. Then, just like last time, he turns and walks through the closed door. I wait for him to come back for a while, wondering how to get him to see me. If I stand where he stood, what would happen? But the idea of accidentally being possessed by the spirit of my dad scares the shit out of me and makes me nauseous. I try taking the mirror off the wall. It doesn’t budge. I give up, go back to bed.

I wonder where he goes when he isn't haunting me. Like, is there a ghost dad rock band where they only play covers of Live and Supertramp. I feel like that’d be something he’d be into. When I was a kid, he used to pull out this old guitar his dad gave him, tune it up, and strum. Always the same two songs. His calloused thumb scratched against the worn dull steel strings while his other hand fumbled to form the only three chords he knew. I’d stand in the doorway and listen. After finishing the songs, he tucked the guitar in the closet behind his coats, found me standing there. He said when I got older and could hold the guitar, he’d teach me what he knew. 

If mom is having any similar paranormal experiences, she doesn’t mention them. I also haven’t asked. She spends most of her time now decorating the living room with houseplants. They hang from the ceilings and stand in every corner. 

I’m helping her hang shelves for the succulents when I slip. A few plants crash and spill onto the floor. She goes, “Ah, shit, Jerry!” I wait for her to acknowledge that she called me by his name. She doesn’t. I lose it. I pick up one of the small pots and chuck it across the room, covering the walls in black dirt and cacti. She freezes. My voice booms throughout the house. A parade of insults and obscenities cascade out of my mouth. Halfway through my rant, she slaps me across my face. 

“Your father never would have let you talk to me like that,” she says. It takes a second, but it comes hard and fast. 

I’m blubbering. 

She grabs me by the back of my neck and puts my head on her shoulders. I wail my throat raw. She holds me for a long time, runs her fingers through my hair, “You’re just like him,” she whispers and lets me go on. 

We sob as we clean, our faces wet and stinging, hands caked in dirt. I vacuum the last bit of soil off the carpet, go into my bathroom and start a shower. Steam rises and drifts across the ceiling, fogging the edges of the mirror. I study my reflection, see my father looking back at me.

D.T. Robbins has stories in Hobart, HAD, Maudlin House, X-R-A-Y, and others. He's founding editor of Rejection Letters. Find more at dtrobbins.com. 

Eddie's Pockets by Steve Comstock

Eddie’s got a thermos of coffee in the truck. Thick, black stuff that will curl your nose hairs back. He’ll sit in the parking lot for a half-hour before his shift and suck it down, straight from the bottle, no mug or nothing. Then he’ll clock in and change into his work clothes. He puts a flashlight in his pocket, a little green thing with scratches on the lens. Hardly even makes a decent beam anymore. One little screwdriver in his shirt pocket, for picking and prodding; a fingernail that don’t get dirty. 

He keeps a picture of his babies in his wallet, even though they ain’t babies no more, or his. Ain’t seen them since they were teenagers. Their mama took them to New York State in a little, blue, hatchback loaded down with luggage bags and no goodbyes.

In the picture, Eddie’s all cleaned up. His hair was still black and slicked back. He’s got a little, chubby girl on each knee. Their red little fingers with eggshell nails are caught onto his neck like they’d never let go. They had a little old house by the river with plaster walls that kept the cold out, and a yard with tulips by the driveway and forsythia in a big thick row around the back. Sometimes he’d set out a little blanket in the back of the house and lay down with his babies in the springtime, teach them the names of trees; stuff folks can’t remember anymore. He’d bring them a treat in his lunchbox, Little Debbie’s from the machine at work. They’d fight each other trying to get it open and eat them face first.

He worked on the mining equipment then. Good money but you had to watch your head. Saw a crane slip right over the lip one time; fifteen story fall. But you ought to have seen those big things move. Diesel power just singing off the rock walls, big turbos whistling all day long. The mining job went away when all the other good jobs did, when the steel mills closed down and everybody forgot who their neighbor was. Eddie started driving long haul tractor-trailers on the road, and it was state-line after state-line, "baby, baby I love you" from a payphone in a truck stop diner. "Daddy, daddy when you comin’ home?" And the sun would set right down across his big windshield lighting up the cab in orange and blue and purple til he hurt from the beauty of it. So he’d call home at the next stop to tell her and she’d sit there on the other end and not say anything at all.  “Baby, baby, please don’t go.”

It’s been fifteen years. Eddie stopped driving tractor trailers. Got this job fixing rental trucks, but it was too late to come home. He got rid of the house with the forsythia because there’s something cold about the way a place can keep a memory. Like one morning you’re gonna wake up and she’s gonna be smiling on her pillow next to you, like maybe she’s just on vacation or taking the babies to dip their toes in the river.  

Eddie’s got a thermos of coffee in his truck. He’s got a flashlight and a screwdriver and a picture of two beautiful brown eyed girls in his pocket. He’s got a six pack of beer in the fridge at home and a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. He’s got tuna fish in his lunch box and a big Snap-On tools calendar inside his locker with girls showing their legs. He’s got wrinkles under his eyes dug in real deep and five of the same pair of jeans. He’s got a woman he’ll call on every now and then when he just needs a little bit of company but he ain’t got a dog or garden or a baby or a woman to tell good things to.

Steve Comstock was born and raised in Baldwin County, Alabama. He served with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and now works as a mechanic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work can be found in Hobart, Hobart After Dark, and The Ghost City Review, among others.