When I Think About My Mother by C. Cimmone

When people ask what my first childhood memory is, I don’t tell them the truth. I tell them my first childhood memory is opening Christmas presents. I talk about the warmth of the fireplace and cascading limbs of a Frasier fir. It is a delightful first memory, but it’s not mine.

My first childhood memory is a spinning box fan and my mother’s smooth breasts. My first childhood memory is just a flash, a short burst of a foggy shower, a mild disturbance to an otherwise seamless day. My mother would argue that she was not a good mother and that most of our days were volatile and intentionally forgotten with overflowing buckets of guilt and shame. To hear my mother tell it, my childhood was a broken heirloom, a fractured branch of an ancestry tree that she worked tirelessly to repair.

There isn’t much left of that day, only a piece of the night, which began with a yellow glow creeping from underneath the bathroom door. The box fan cooled my face; my long hair danced in the stream of cool air. My body was limp and molded by a heap of blankets. Our dog rested against my back; my brother twisted and flopped on the other side of the bed.

The shower began, as it did each night, and draining water paced itself with the hum of the box fan. I waited for the variation of falling water, my mother’s entry to the warm shower, but there was a delay - perhaps a forgotten rag or towel. My mother’s feet eventually sank into the shower and the water ran its course, over her body and down the drain.

The gentle chirp of my mother’s voice disturbed the running water and a clap of a dropped shampoo bottle scared me into easing the bathroom door open with a careful nudge. The light was low, and in my mind, after all of these years, the light is softly falling down on my mother. The rest of the hollow room is dark, and my brother does not exist. I see my mother, her large breasts caressing her chest, her swollen thighs leaning towards the shower wall. I see her hands clenching her face; I see her long brown hair, tacky with moisture, clinging to her back. Her brown nipples are large and caring; her bare arms are tan and shaking.

My first childhood memory is of my mother weeping; it is a memory I have carried with me all over. I have sprinkled it all over my relationships and I have unpacked it each Christmas morning. I hear my mother crying when I look at pictures of my father, a man who never aged. I hear her crying in my mind when I consider falling in love. I hear shower water running when I think about my mother on her knees, begging for peace, for closure, for just a second to see my father standing tall and telling her, “I love you.”

My mother carried her grief with her to her last hour. She struggled to find a light, to see a shimmer of him somewhere along the hospital wallpaper. She reached for my hand before her last few breaths. I knew her fear was that I would only remember her pain, her unfiltered discipline, and her second-hand shirts, so I leaned in as she closed her eyes and whispered, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever known, and I know Daddy will be so happy to see you.”

This story was written for my daughter; a presumptive telling of her first childhood memory...of me.

C. Cimmone is an author, editor, and comic from Texas. She’s alive and well on Twitter at @diefunnier

Static by Kimberly Glanzman

My mom and I are watching TV, and I’m like, I don’t know, six, seven maybe? We’re in this little apartment with train tracks nearby & the trains shake us awake every three a.m. Through the grimy window I can see a row of ants or mites or something marching along the side of the building.

This is before she met my stepdad and we had anything like money.

It’s the 80s so the TV’s got a pair of rabbit ears and a line of static right through Murphy Brown’s eyes, and no remote. (Well, I’m the remote). We’re two peas in a pod, me and my mom, cross-legged with open books on our knees because there’s no such thing as fast-forwarding through the commercials yet. I’ve got a Sweet Valley book with a blonde girl on the cover named Elizabeth – like the Queen, or like Ms. Taylor who played the Queen. Elizabeth-in-the-book has a twin & a big brother & two parents & a split-level ranch in California; she’s basically a princess. Or an alien. I pretend my middle name is Elizabeth, which it almost was, if my mom hadn’t lost that argument too.

My mom’s reading a book I’m not old enough for, the cover black with a white chalk outline of a body, her feet up on the coffee table. The sitcom comes back on, and Murphy Brown stumbles around, being frazzled in her big clean house, in her jacket with the shoulder pads. My mom’s got a jacket like that; she stitched the shoulders in herself, but it’s a dark blue while Murphy’s is yellow with gold buttons.

My mom studies this show as though there’s going to be a test. I don’t know why. Sweet Valley, Murphy Brown – no one lives that way. For example, none of these fictional people read books. They’re always off doing things. I guess that’s the difference: when you have money, you can gas up the car and drive away, but the rest of us are stuck here, on this old brown couch in this old grey building with the bugs sweeping up and down next to the rain gutters, and we just have to make it all up.

Kimberly Glanzman was a finalist for the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and a 2020 Pushcart Nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, Sleet Magazine, Stonecoast Review, Jet Fuel Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, Blind Corner Literary, South Dakota Review, Harpur Palate, Iron Horse Literary Review, perhappened, and Electric Lit, among others.

Swim at Your Own Risk by Sara Dobbie

  On a Sunday morning in late November, I get in the car and drive to the edge of Lake Erie.  

     Not to the beach, where we spent sun baked summer afternoons spurning responsibility, but that parking lot where the rocky shoreline shows like a warning sign through a rusted chain link fence, where sometimes on clear days we bring takeout from the dive on the main drag.

     Howling winds tear up the water. Seagulls circle and squawk. A lady with a tiny dog on a leash struggles to tame her wild, whipping hair. All these living creatures are scurrying to safety, but I sit idling, hesitating, stuck. Struck, maybe.

     The voice on the radio says a storm is coming, but a van load of people shows up. They spring out of the Volkswagen and gather their wetsuits and surfboards. I don’t talk to them, don’t even get out the car, but I imagine them saying things like We don’t need no ocean, man, we don’t need the sun. I watch, fascinated, as they bypass the fence, and run down to a stretch of gravelly sand. They wade out to knee deep water, throw themselves belly down on bright boards, a shock of color in the granite waves, and front crawl into treacherous, frothing crests. 

     A slanting rain begins to pelt my windshield and I think about how sometimes the best thing any of us can hope for is to be in exactly the wrong place at the right time.

Sara Dobbie is a writer from Southern Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House, Menacing Hedge, Trampset, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere. Look for stories forthcoming from Emerge Literary Journal, Drunk Monkeys, and Fiction Kitchen Berlin. Follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie.

Deep in South Jersey by Jason Love

            The snack bar was out of hot dogs. I bought a soda instead. I was not really feeling a hot dog anyway.  

            “My boy is going to be the next Mike Trout,” this middle-aged mom said to anyone who would listen. During the winter months she took her 12-year-old to an indoor batting cage. This former minor league baseball player gave him personal lessons. Her son was good. But he was not Mike Trout good.  

            Our boys’ baseball team was dragging through the dog days of summer. We travelled throughout small towns in South Jersey. We won one. We lost one. The team was neither good nor bad. My son enjoyed playing, but he was one of the worst kids on the team.  

            Some of the parents were upset the team was not playing better. A few of the kids also played on an elite travel team. They hated losing. Half the kids on the team were named Chase. Some yelled at the umpires over a borderline call. A lot of the parents hung their own dreams and aspirations onto the kids.  

            My son came up to the plate. He had only two hits so far this season. The season was half over. I noticed a few parents roll their eyes. He was one of the smaller kids on the team. The other team’s pitcher was tall for his age. His fastball was probably close to 70 miles per hour. He had a moustache.  

            My son dug in and tapped home plate with his bat. Although he could not hit, he never showed fear. The first pitch was a fastball on the inside part of the plate. Strike one. My son stepped out, took a practice swing, and then stepped back into the batter’s box. The pitcher kicked and unleashed another fastball.  

            This pitch was also inside. In fact, it was too inside. My son did not bother to get out of the way. The ball drilled him in the back. The umpire told him to take first base.  

            “He didn’t bother to get out of the way” the opposing team’s coach called out. The pitcher looked upset. 

            I watched my son trot to first base.  

            “Don’t rub it,” I mumbled to myself.  

            My son did not rub his back where the ball hit him. It would leave a mark. The first base coach gave him a high five. They were both smiling.  

            If the snack bar made more hot dogs, I would buy my son one along with a soda after the game.  

Jason Love lives in New Jersey. He is working on a novel tentatively titled Hey, Jay Bob (you're an @sshole): A Love Story. Thank you for taking the time to read his story. 

A prayer for fireworks by Evan James Sheldon

It’s not that I didn’t like the way the clown looked. Creepy clowns provide a much-needed service to society. I tried to make him understand that, I tried to make him understand so many things.

He was in full regalia, and spinning a sign, like you see on a street corner advertising Taxes done cheap! or Sale. Today. Big. Except we weren’t around any stores, we were just at the park. I was avoiding my father by feeding dried rice to pigeons and hoping. We had gotten in a fight about emptying the dishwasher when it was clean, but it was really about how he wanted me to move out. He loved to do that, to pick fights about inconsequential things, but I always knew what we were really fighting about.

I wondered how long the clown had been there, but I guessed it had been quite a while since his eye paint was beginning to run. I didn’t hold it against him. He was working really hard. The sign practically blurred.

No one else seemed to care about the sweaty clown spinning a sign we couldn’t read. Children weren’t amused. They flicked bits of sand in the air to watch how small things fall. Mothers avoided eye contact like he was asking for money. After a while it became kind of sad, and I told him that. A sad clown is better than a creepy clown. You’re really moving up in the world.

He kept on and his red nose fell off, and then he stepped out of his floppy red shoes. One gaudy suspender broke, then the other. Soon he was just a guy twirling a sign. If you had known he was a creepy clown before, there’s no way you would now.

He was getting tired; I could see him straining. So I went, and in one smooth motion traded the spinning sign for my bag of dried rice. He looked thankful, if a bit surprised, but that could have just been the remnants of his original getup. I spun and spun, grateful for my natural dexterity.

My father, who had been pretending not to watch, came up, chuckling a bit to himself. What are you doing? he asked. I didn’t have the breath to speak really, but I managed to squeak out, trying to get the pigeons to explode. He didn’t chuckle after that. It’s almost as if he wasn’t paying attention, like he couldn’t see the trajectory of an initial action, like he didn’t know that something begun continues even if its form shifts. 

My arms grew tired and the creepy clown left with my bag of dried rice. I looked around frantically for someone to take over the job, but nobody came. I stayed at it until after dark, until the park had emptied except for two lovers necking on the bench where I had first fed the pigeons. My forearms began to cramp. I set the sign down and it was too dark to read what he’d been selling.

Evan James Sheldon's work has appeared recently in the American Literary Review, the Cincinnati Review, and the Maine Review, among other journals. He is a senior editor for F(r)iction and the Editorial Director for Brink Literacy Project. You can find him online at www.evanjamessheldon.com. 

The Position of the Jungle Gym by Linda McMullen

The woodchips molder at my base, tingeing my cheery scarlet plastic the color of blood.  Insects and grubs slither among the organic waste – reclaiming, they believe, their kingdom.  The wind chases itself through my hollow passages, for want of other options.  The sun frowns overhead, pulsing with an unspoken rage.  If I had a touch of poetry, I’d borrow from Verlaine, a man capable of conjuring autumn austerity out of high summer. 

I heard about that particular lyricist from one of the mothers – not one of the PTA warriors or the hesitant foreign brides or the minivan marauders – a sloppy-ponytail-and-hoodie model doing an expensive and, she said, “pointless” MA.  She read aloud en français while her little Quinn dared the sodden monkey bars and promptly broke her ulna.  But the verse stayed with me.  And it sings in me now, reverberating through my plastic shell.

Quinn isn’t here.

Neither is Hank, or Sara, or Elizabeth with those great grey-green eyes.  Nor is Gio, or Morgan, or any of the other screeching, thumping, half-feral...

…glorious…

…children. 

They left on a drizzling Friday in March, huddled against their parents’ waists, clutching hastily assembled packets of worksheets that drooped in the damp.  How could I know, then, that their scuffing sneakers and shrill delighted voices would vanish? 

And who knows when they will come back again?

It’s raining, now; teardrop shapes evanesce on each of my abandoned faces.

Je me souviens de jours anciens et je pleure.

Linda McMullen is a wife, mother, diplomat, and homesick Wisconsinite. Her short stories and the occasional poem have appeared in over seventy literary magazines.

Uncle is Gonna Get You by Jerica Taylor

Kids should remember birthdays more vividly than they remember the crumble of instant coffee granules finger-sifted into the sugar.

More clearly than they remember the timber of their uncle’s voice, the twitch of his moustache and his furious red cheeks as he yelled at them for not making decaf coffee for their grandparents. Kids should be proud of being given responsibility, finally old enough to boil water in the whistling kettle on the electric stove. They should not be screamed at about avoiding caffeine for heart health because they don’t understand and they are eight.

They should remember the bitter lick of the spoon, the drip of half and half, more sharply than the voices that reverberated through the house long after everyone had gone home. They should put on the Gloria Estefan cassette and spin circles in the living room as Missile Defense loads on the Sega. They should have their gun ready.

Jerica Taylor is a non-binary neurodivergent queer cook, birder, and chicken herder. Their work has appeared in Postscript, Dream Journal, and perhappened. She lives with her wife and young daughter in Western Massachusetts. Twitter @jericatruly   

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.