IN A SMALL TOWN (CALLED AMERICA) by Christian Fennell

It’s getting worse, and Jake finished his beer, and together they listened to the rain on the tin roof of the drive-shed; the receptiveness of its falling; the comfort within its echoing. 

Things are lookin up, said Jake. 

Damn straight, said Jared. 

I mean, now that things are great again, things are lookin up, and Jake stood and walked to the fridge and grabbed two more beers. He passed one to Jared and sat back down on the block of cracked white oak. He took a sip and looked at Jared. I went and saw the doc.

Oh? 

Said I’m shooting blanks.

Shit, Jake, I’m sorry to hear that. Have ya told Sugar?

Last night.

How’d that go?

‘Bout as good as you’d think. Ya know how much she wants kids. Not that I don’t—I mean, you got your two and they’re doin okay, right?

Right.

Thing is, I don’t wanna adopt some stranger’s baby and say it’s mine. Sugar don’t neither. We could get her artificially knocked up, but—.

What?

Jake shrugged and took another sip. 

They got DNA.

I know they got DNA, but nothins perfect, and it might work out you’re paying for somethin a little less than what you’d hoped for, ya know what I mean?

I guess.

And then you’re just fucked. 

So, what’ya thinkin?

I want you to do it.

You what?

You heard me.

Are you askin me to fuck Sugar?

Yup. 

Really?

Yup.

Have you lost your goddamn mind?

Jake lifted his John Deere ball cap, scratched the top of his balding head, and said, nope. 

Does Sugar know?

We talked about it.

You talked about it?

Yup.

And what’ya think, Alice is gonna be okay with me walkin next door and havin a go with Sugar? ‘Cause I got news for ya, she won’t be. 

She don’t gotta know.

What’ya mean she don’t gotta know? How the hell is she not gonna know?

Cause we ain’t gonna tell her, that’s how.

For fuck sake, this is nuts, I can’t fuck Sugar.

What’ya mean you can’t fuck Sugar? She looks good still. Hell, she’s a lot better lookin than that girl you were fuckin back in high school.

She wasn’t that bad.

The hell she wasn’t.

C’mon, Jake, get serious, you don’t mean this shit?

I’m as serious as the day is long, little brother, hell, it won’t take more than a time or two—didn’t ya always tell me all you had to do to knock up Alice was to hang your pants on the bed post? 

I know, but, still—

At least this way the kid’ll be a Burleson. Jake finished his beer and threw the empty at the garbage can. Besides, ya don’t gotta worry bout thing. We’ll just get up a little early, you walk to my place, and I’ll come here. After you’re done, you come back here like nothing ever happened, and I’ll head back to my place. Jake stood. Do me a favor and just think about it. He walked to the door and looked back. Oh, and by the way, Sugar says she’ll be droppin eggs in the next day or two.

She’ll be what? 

That’s what she said.

You talked about it?

Yup, we talked about it. Later.

Yeah, said Jared. Fuck me. 

Jake opened the door and walked to the fridge and grabbed a beer. How’d it go?

Standing at the workbench cleaning an engine part Jared looked back.

Ya got it done, right?

Yeah, I got it done, but I had to turn her around.

What? Why? She looks good still. 

No, I mean, to do it, ya know. 

I guess, and Jake tipped back his beer.

Maybe cause she’s your wife, or somethin like that, what’ya think? 

How long ya been married?

Eleven years.

Do ya love her still?

What? Yeah, I suppose so. How the hell should I know? 

It’s hard to know, ain’t it?

Yeah, it’s not easy.

Ya think she still loves you?

Of course she does. Why wouldn’t she?

 I didn’t say she didn’t. What about Sugar?

What about her?

Think she still loves me?

Hell, I don’t know. Why? 

It’s just something ya wonder about, that’s all. It’s not like it’s not possible. It happens all the time. 

I guess.

Do ya think it matters?

What?

Love.

I don’t know—for fuck sake, Jake.

Jake tossed his empty at the garbage can. I think it does. He walked to the door and looked back. We’d best try again tomorrow, well things are still going good that way. 

Yeah, sure.

Later.

Yeah, said Jared, later.

Sugar walked out the door, her flip-flops smacking her heels, her white short dress tight all the way down. 

She crossed the adjoining properties and reached the gravel driveway. She looked away, somewhere, and took a drag of her cigarette. She tossed it to the gravel, toed it out, and opened the drive-shed door.

Her eyes adjusting to the dim light she walked to the fridge and grabbed a beer. She looked at the calendar hanging on the wall, some girl with less than little on draped over the hood of a shiny red car. They make good money, ya know. She opened the beer and looked back at the poster. A blonde, like her. It's not just the money, it's the connections. Ya know that, right?

She walked to the workbench and pulled herself onto a high metal stool. She crossed her legs, her one foot bouncing—a nervous energy of how she was hinged, much like this place itself. I suppose ya talked about it?

Not much we did, no.

She took a sip of beer and leaned back, her thin milky-white forearms resting on the workbench, her dress high up on her long legs, and she tilted her head, the thickness of her blonde hair falling to one side and catching the light, just right, and she knew it, and did so without having to. What’d he say? She looked at her chipped red nail polish.

He wanted to know if it went okay.

And? 

And what?

What’ya say?

Not much. 

Not much?

No. Can we not talk about this? 

Why don’t ya wanna talk about it? 

What’s the point? 

The point? She uncrossed her legs and re-crossed them the other way, her foot starting to bounce. Why’s it gotta be so hot in here? What’s wrong with that damn fan? She leaned forward. The point is, we need to figure this out, and right this minute we do. 

Jared grabbed a rag and began to wipe his hands. What’s with you? 

Did ya not hear us late night? I’d be surprised if ya didn’t.

A little, I did. What was up? He walked to the fridge and grabbed a beer.

I told him, I ain’t no puppy-mill slut, and I ain’t sleeping with you no more. 

Jarred stopped. You’re what?

What?

They looked at one another.

You ain’t sleeping with me no more?

Of course, I am, I just ain’t doin it for him no more.

That makes no sense.  

Are you dumb? There’s a world of difference between my wanting to sleep with you and him wanting me to. And I can tell you this much, we had better figure this out, and I mean now.  

Jared leaned against the bench and sipped his beer. How long we been together? 

I don’t know, a couple of years, I guess. Why?

In all that time we been doin it, were ya never worried about getting pregnant? Or were ya just hoping ya would and say it was Jake’s?

Ya don’t get it, do you? All this damn talk of babies, I can hardly take it. 

What’ya mean? 

She put her beer down and got and began to pace in her flip-flops. It’s the last thing I’m ever gonna do, do understand that?

What?

This world is a hard world, Jared Burleson, and it gets no easier being woman, that’s for damn sure. She picked up her beer and took a sip. And if you think I’m gonna get dropped down another rung or two by having either yours or your brother’s damn babies, ya gotta another thing comin. Besides, it plays absolute havoc with your body, destroys it completely. She looked at Jared. Is that what you want?

Hold on, are you telling me all this time you’ve been on birth control?

That is correct, smart boy, yes I have.

And all this time Jake thought you were trying to get pregnant?

Correct. 

And then it turns out, he’s sterile? What would ya have done if he hadn’t been?

I don’t know. I’d of figured somethin out.

And now he’s got me doin ya to get ya pregnant even though I already am and you’re on birth control?

She pulled herself back up onto the stool. As it turns out, yes. She took a sip of beer.

Jared pushed off the workbench and stood in front of Sugar, his hands reaching past her to the workbench. You’re something, Sugar. I don’t know what, but you’re definitely somethin. 

The small fan in the window began to rattle and it blew warm sticky air.

Sweat from his forehead dropped to her thigh.

She looked at her leg, at the drop, and she put her finger to it, and it ran like a tear.

She felt the smooth touch of her dress, moving up, and she pushed herself forward on the stool, just a little, just enough, a lazy southern cat stretching its underbelly to the warming sun.

Sugar.

I know, baby, and she put her arms around his neck. She looked out the small window. At the scrubby land. At the coming heat. A small bird came to the window. Maybe a starling? She didn't know. She did once, when she was just a little girl.

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PROBLEM CHILD by Ellen Huang

Ariel often got in trouble for trying to escape. That was how he saw it, anyway. He spent much of his time enigmatically testing the limits of his body, such as a current frustrating inability to become liquid. "If cats can do it, why can't I?" he'd grumble. He'd try to vanish into the air but trip over balls of yarn left around the house. He was losing the skill of leaving his body. He was losing memory of transcendent experience fast. 

They considered him distracted. His eyes were often elsewhere, in a different time and place, some good old days no one here would understand. Coma, lucid dreaming, and Peter Pan Syndrome were offensive nonsense words to him. He'd stew in the shadows at the staircase, grumbling at this illusion of these mere mortal adults being his senior.  

Sometimes, he'd spin around fervently, in delusional attempts to become a tornado, feet flying. Then he'd get scolded as if he had spun the entire room around him. No one cared that it was the small bed that spiraled into his way first. All that mattered was he had knocked into it, making little Fey cry again. 

He didn't know why Fey made such a racket. She wasn't a baby. In fact, she was rather a bit of a prodigy as far as creatives went. At only four, she was making pretty little cats out of fabric, quite possibly on the verge of giving them life in the future. 

Ariel also got in trouble for telling Fey what the wind said on stormy nights. He told of how he had been a force of nature in a previous life, and thus once able to become the wind. Now, he could only interpret what ghosts on the breeze were saying, and embellish as he saw fit. 

If he was feeling especially irritated about serving his sentence in this mortal shell, he would tell Fey the howling wind was saying very gruesome things. Four-year-old Fey had to hear that the wind was saying it'd rip out her hair and grind her teeth into bread for elementals in the afterlife. Or that the wind was getting angrier for missing one if its favorite gods (as Ariel often bragged he was), and the wind was going to vengefully destroy the villages while dumping Fey in a giant mixing bowl. 

One night, Fey accidentally stepped on his cloak and choked him. Ariel wasn't used to such things as he expected to poof into air if anything got him. The wind was mild that night but angry Ariel was still able to scare the girl by saying: "The wind is saying it'll wait until you sleep first. Then it's going to wrap you up and throw you far away, to get caught on a telephone pole. And then the telephone pole will unravel your innards. And then, when it's had its fun, the wind will empty out your head like a melon." 

"Noooo!" cried Fey, holding the button-eyed patchwork cat she had.

But then Ariel jolted when he actually did hear the wind speaking. 

It was howling louder outside, but nothing in the house seemed to be disturbed. Ariel's eyes felt like they were going to pop out, but now that he was a mortal they remained secure. 

"Ariel," boomed a voice in the wind. "Why are you tormenting your sister?" 

"She's not my sister!" Ariel huffed, hands over his ears. "I'm not meant to be a babysitter. When will you let me go?" 

"Ariel, you fell out of your own accord. Do not blame the child."

Ariel groaned. "I am a DRAGON. I am an ELEMENT. I am the SLEEPING GIANT BENEATH THE SEAS. And in this life, if you insist...I am a BOY. I don't settle for tea parties with lost girls!"

Then the wind got into his head, where he could not escape. "You are still made by something and will fall by something. Take the chance to become something more than a fool." 

Suddenly, Ariel began to tremble. The wind had never gotten into his head before, commanding silence in the unsettled storm in his head. A whirlwind of suppressed thoughts, perhaps hundreds of years old, suddenly ceased. There was only the voice, a whisper in a closed, empty room. "Don't bother Fey again." 

So for the rest of that night, Ariel did whatever Fey asked. He baked the cookies, set up the tea parties, flattered her eleventh thrown-together-and-not-yet-live cats. He let her try his black cape and he resisted all urge to tighten it until she squeaked, for fear the wind's voice would shut off all sweet room tone, all white noise, all other dreams. He gritted his teeth and held himself together while Fey drew on his face and braided his short flame of hair. He resisted all desire to burst the tiara into flames. It was surprisingly easy.  

He caught a glint in the little girl's bright green eyes, a concentration of power the neighbors feared. People around here had fearful tales about black girls with green eyes, as if she were some possessed gris-gris doll and not a little girl at all. Yet the voice told him such tales only planted forces of hatred in this world. The voice told him within her was the tested, resilient, blinding power of good, that many would not understand. They would be responsible for not provoking each other. This practice of shaping life in the moment and being slow to anger, this gradual cultivating like waiting for yeast to rise in the blip of mortal life—that was where the wind was present. Ariel was going to have to understand that. He had never noticed Fey's irises, gleaming with other lives, too. He let goosebumps crawl on his bare white arms for the first time in ages.  

"Your Papa sure loves you, I'll give you that," he muttered as the girl finally went to sleep with a smile on her face.  

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“WHAT? NO.” by Scott Bryan

One time, at least, an elephant ate a bat. 

It wasn’t a mistake, either. Nothing is.

It wasn’t like the bat was flying around, all willy-nilly, and the elephant was yawning, as pachyderms have a tendency to do, and the bat just, like, zigged when it should have zagged, and instead of a mouthful of cud or hay or greens, delivered by way of a droopy, rough, wet schnoz, the poor elephant unintentionally brought down their ill-equipped herbivore's chompers (humiliated and hiding behind the impressive tusks of fortune which had been bestowed by whatever glue-sniffing god to whom elephants pray [Do you think elephants pray to Ganesha? No. That doesn’t seem right. I guess most people would assert that elephants don’t pray at all. Then most people would put their hands on their hips and authoritatively nod their head, proud of their superiority over such a staggering creature]. Crap, what was I saying? Oh yeah, the elephant didn’t accidentally clamp down) on the soft, light, furry flesh of the bat.

Nope. That’s not what happened at all.

“Grandpa, did you mean the elephant’s presence was staggering? Or that the elephant was staggering around?”

What? No.

What I meant was, the bat was in no danger whatsoever. This wasn’t normal, predictable, or fair. The elephant swung their mouth wide and lifted their girth away from the ground like a monkey lifting its paws off the earth for the first time, quite a feat for such a colossally distributed animal. 

“Does ‘colossally distributed’ mean there are a lot of elephants, created by a god to which they do not (or can not or choose not to) pray? Or does it mean elephants are big and have a strange center of gravity?”

What? NO.

Turns out, all of this was happening just as the hipster hangout across the way was closing down.

“For the day, or, like, going out of business?”

What? No.

They just finished the weekly open mic night, for Pete’s sake. The place was hopping! All the residents of the town had gathered to partake in some spoken-word by candlelight. 

A young person recited a piece of epic power and profundity, and the audience, dressed in slacks and pressed shirts and beatnik scarfs and glasses, who pretended to give their friends bored, disinterested eye rolls while whispering critical comments under their breath, were actually riveted, so enthralled with the young sycophant's performance they quietly snapped their fingers in time with their own heartbeats.

The background repeated like a cheaply made cartoon, the same doors passed multiple times. They elephant chomped down only a short time after the emotional monologue crescendoed to an ovation-inspiring conclusion.  

Do you get the point o’ this whole endeavor, youngin?

“I think so. You’re saying if we are inactive, we will never see the possibilities for improvement or adventure. Whether the elephant chomps down on the bat or the audience sits in silence or erupts in applause, whether or not the meaning of the action has been revealed, it’s our recognition of the importance of the moment which really counts, and we have no foresight as to where our actions will take us.”

What? No. I nearly impressed a member of the homecoming court at that open mic. 

The point is: The performer was me! 

As the two of us were trying to leave together, arm in arm, probably headed to a night of fumbling adolescent copulation, we witnessed a broken-winged bat tumbling down the throat of a full-grown elephant. That wrinkly grey mess was savage. We shrieked in horror, we covered our eyes. Our buzzing energy was flattened like the earth under the elephant’s dusty feet!

Talk about a mood-killer. 

I never saw that person again. They found their own ride home, never returned my calls. I assume they forever associated me with the ugly incident. 

“I feel bad for them.”

What? Who cares about them! They went on to marry a circus clown and I ended up entering into a partnership with the person who, upon coupling with me, brought about the birth of one of your parents! 

“You mean you got with Grandma? That’s good, right?”

Who? What? No. What makes you assume I’m the male? Grandpa is my name, not my title. Grandpa Chris Demonkovich. Would-Be Poet, Slinger of Yarn, Ivory Poacher.

“So you’re a lady?”  

Don’t make assumptions is all I’m saying. Here’s my point, young whippersnapper: 

I killed the elephant, opened his stomach, set that bat free on the same night I recited my poem. I’m a good person! But, for some reason, that night set off a chain reaction which led directly to this moment, and I’m none too happy about it! God, inasmuch as I have any concept of them, is punishing me, obviously. My life has been a steady downhill slide away from art and music and beauty and toward violence and disappointment and you! Every moment is worse than the last, this one included.

“What?”

No! You’re awful, grandchild. Just awful. I look at you and all I see is the result of my misfortune. 

Aside from the overwhelming monetary wealth I’ve amassed thanks to my unnatural ability to visit my neverending revenge on anarchistic elephants, I’m a pretty unhappy person. But I’ve never written another poem.

“Well, maybe I’ll be able to carry your legacy. You know, appreciate life more than you were able to. Perhaps I’ll become a patron of the arts when I’m spending all your money, your ill-gotten ivory gains, after you are dead!”

Lord, I hope so. 

“What? No.”

 

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WOODED LOTS by Amanda Baldeneaux

Bess’s grandmother leans a sharp elbow into the worn armrest of her recliner, her chin pointed away from the kitchen chair where Bess sits, signing the contract for Ray, the homecare aid. Her grandmother has lived in the cottage at the nursing home for five years. The cottage lets retirees live independently but connected to the lodge and the cafeteria and the dorms where the older, less-resourceful people live. She doesn’t want to go there.

Outside the cottage, a small slab of patio is littered with sunflower seed shells. Petals of white azalea blossoms, knocked free by the recent rains, cover the concrete like wet sheets fallen from laundry lines. Bess tells her grandmother what time to expect Ray in the morning.

“Who is Ray?” her grandmother pulls the oak lever to recline her feet. Outside, squirrels busy themselves at the bird feeder. The feeder was there when her grandmother moved in, installed by a resident long moved into the lodge or gone. The squirrels split dry corn kernels open with sharp teeth. Birds, perched in the trees, wait their turn at what the squirrels discard into the pine straw beneath. 

Bess folds the contract back into the white envelope delivered by Ray. Over lunch, it rained so hard she thought they’d all wash away—the nursing home built in the 1960s. The bird feeder. The battered foxgloves grown in the courtyard garden outside the cafeteria, where Bess wheels her grandmother back and forth to meals twice a day from the nursing home’s hospital wing. This is her grandmother’s first time back in the cottage since the pneumonia set in. Without oxygen, her memory worsened. Bess worries about bringing her back to live here alone. If Ray will be enough. If a biblical flood could wash everything into mud tomorrow. 

Today, while the residents ate potato salad and white rolls, tornado warnings flashed on television. Her grandmother ignored them, asking Bess who is Ray over and over. 

“Ray will dispense your medicine and wash your clothes twice a week.”

“I don’t need Ray.” But could Bess stay a week longer? Could her son come? Could Bess’s mother? 

Two blue jays land on the feeder, the only birds big enough to bully the squirrels. Their feathers are dark, almost black save for the shock of blue striping their tails. Her grandmother used to get cardinals. Robins. Sparrows and blue birds. Warblers. She’d been gone a month in the hospital wing and without seed at the feeder, the birds didn’t come. They’d forgotten about the bird feeder until Bess filled it again, today. The jays are bulky and knock the seeds off the ledge where they will furrow down into the wet soil beneath the pine straw of the forested floor. 

Her grandmother chose this cottage because of the forest out back. It rises over a slope off the patio and disappears back into thickets and trees. A resident, long ago, planted iris bulbs along the perimeter, domesticating it. If one doesn’t push through the oak saplings and daffodil shoots and ivy they’d never know that a few hundred yards back runs a fence along the property line, keeping the forest divided, the residents contained. Bears can’t wander across. No deer. Since arriving, Bess has seen box turtles. King snakes. Feral cats and toads that leaped at Bess’s feet when she took a load of her grandmother’s wash from the laundry room after dark. Her grandmother doesn’t want to leave these things to go live in the lodge, away from the woods with views only of mowed courtyards and fountains and pansies and hedges. They have wasp problems, over there. Not enough predators. Bess picked a ladybug off the concrete yesterday and placed it on the stem of a pansy, hoping to save it from wasps. Hoping for aphids. Hoping the red bead of an insect wouldn’t bite her for the effort.

Her grandmother tells Bess she’s come home today. Bess reminds her, “Tomorrow.” Her grandmother nods her head, oh yes. Bess tells her again that Ray is coming to help her. She asks who Ray is, says she doesn’t need help to take her medication. She doesn’t want a man to help wash her clothes. She doesn’t want a stranger inside of her home. 

Bess wheels her grandmother outside the cottage, back to the hospital wing. The rubber wheels of the chair and the soles of Bess’s shoes crunch the small shells of garden snails out to eat begonias after the rain. She avoids the worms, stranded on the sidewalk to escape their drowning. Along the cottage’s sidewall, yellow and white honeysuckle flowers line branches like molars on a jaw line.

Bess’s grandmother grew up in a wooded town on an old train stop two hours south of here. She had a sleeping porch for hot nights and pecan trees in the backyard. When Bess was little, she picked wild strawberries in the yard. Her grandmother had a birdfeeder there, too. Cardinals. Bobwhites whistling as they stalked the grass. Spiders hiding under the screened-in, stilted porch. 

After her grandfather died, the porch began to lean away from the house and deeper into the dirt, the rusted nails lengthening into sunlight again, millimeter by millimeter. Her grandmother didn’t bother to fix the porch, just continued to let it pull free from the house and sink into the yard. 

Her grandmother is prying loose, too. She leans further from the tethers of what she once knew: the names of birds. Bess’s name, exchanged for her mother’s, long dead. She is leaning, popping nails out of the house of her life and sinking into the suctioning soil of age. Into the pine brush. Into the soft mud of a forest that is shrinking, shrinking from shortened fencing, all that was wild left locked out on the opposite side.

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UNCLE CHARLIE’S BICYCLE by Rick White

Esther lived in corners. And behind the backs of armchairs. In the black and white shadows cast by the TV which Ma sat in front of all day. Saturday afternoons was wrestling—Ma’s favourite—and the other kids, the other ‘no-hoper-kids’ the ‘wargs of the state’ all gathered round to watch.‘That’s the Black Bomber,’ Ma would shout. ‘Sergeant Nitro. The Masked Intruder,’ she would shriek and holler from her sunken nicotine throne. Haloed in cigarette smoke—powder blue and sulfurous yellow.Esther was a mark, a low-carder; the perpetual victim of the rowdy, hyped up boys and their fighting ways. Clotheslines, DDT’s, backbreakers, German suplexes, powerslams and piledrivers—all meted out on thin mattresses and worn out sofas. ‘Roughhousing,’ Ma called it.To Esther, all the names of all the moves just sounded like fear, tasted metallic. Like the cat spatula, which Ma used to make scrambled egg on a Sunday and to fling pieces of shit out of the cat’s litter tray into the yard. Esther liked the cat though, his name was Arnold and, well, he’d curl up at the foot of Esther’s bed, on the rare nights when no one came. Arnold was her tag-team partner.When there was no wrestling on TV, and when Ma took to drinking—which was most days—Ma liked to pick two kids to fight in front of her. She’d make everyone gather round and chant FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! while the two chosen contestants duked it out. Ma knew which kids had a mean streak, and she knew which ones didn’t really want to fight. So she’d put them together. Said it was ‘character building’ for the weaker kids. Ma liked to be entertained, so you’d better look as though you were really trying and make it a good fight otherwise you’d be in even worse trouble. When Esther was picked, she made a big show of whirling her arms around to try to land a blow, but she rarely succeeded, and she was always pinned eventually. Esther had come to know only too well, that it’s damn near impossible to shift the weight of a teenage boy once he’s lying on top of you.‘Quit daydreaming and fetch Uncle Charlie’s Bicycle,’ said Ma one afternoon, and Esther flinched at the sound of Ma’s words—they all sounded like wrestling moves. ‘Then you get your ass to the store and get me a fifth of bourbon and a carton of smokes.’ Esther wasn’t sure what those things were.Uncle Charlie lived next door. He wasn’t Esther’s real Uncle any more than Ma was her real Ma. Uncle Charlie was a ‘Handy Man’, which sounded to Esther like a wrestling name. The Handy Man was one of the good guys, a ‘face’. The others were bad guys or ‘heels’ and she had names for them too; The Angry Principal, The Curtain Jerker, The Night-Time Visitor.Uncle Charlie was kind. He’d taken Esther to the drug store on the day Esther had seen the blood in her underwear. She’d found blood there before, but this time it was different, because it just appeared all on its own. Ma said it was Esther’s own fucking problem and if she was old enough to bleed, well then she could damn well fix it herself. Uncle Charlie knew what to ask for at the drugstore, and he told Esther to hide the box in her room for next time.The Handy Man was out back in his woodshed, and Esther walked across the yard to ask him for the bicycle.‘Sure you can borrow it any time, but first—come inside girl, I want to talk to you.’ Esther stood still, she didn’t know if she should go in to the woodshed with The Handy Man, even though she liked him.‘Well now don’t be afraid girl,’ said The Handy Man, ‘just come on in here.’ As always, Esther did as she was told. She stepped in to the woodshed, which was warm and smelt of sawdust and tobacco, just like Uncle Charlie.‘You love Jesus?’Esther nodded, like she knew she was supposed to, and this seemed to make Uncle Charlie happy. ‘Good. You like the wrestling on TV?’Esther shook her head from side to side, looked down at the wood shavings on the dusty floor.‘Me neither. It’s fake you know, all of it. It ain’t real, but you gotta admire the theatricality of it. You know that word, theatricality?’Esther thought she did, but she was just a dumb little girl, that’s what Ma said. So she stayed quiet.‘It means wrestling is all about timing. Timing, and winning the crowd. Me, I likes fishing. Fishing is about patience and perseverance. You run along now to the store or they’ll be a hiding waiting on you from Ma.’There was always a hiding waiting from someone, Esther thought. She started thinking about Jesus, and she heard The Baptist Preacher saying ‘Jesus Saves! Christ is your saviour!’ But Christ was no saviour for Esther. She thought about the wrestler on the canvas—face contorted in pain and suffering—trapped in a figure-four leg lock or a Boston Crab. All he had to do was submit. Just tap out and it’d all be over, the bell would ring and the fight would end. But Esther couldn’t even tap out. For her there was no bell and there was no saviour.Esther thought about the words Uncle Charlie had said to her as she rode the bicycle to the store, at first they didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.Patience and perseverance. Esther got the smokes and the liquor from the store, and when she got back to the house, she took the elbow-drops and the flying-knees and the stink-faces and the full-nelsons and she let Ma call her a dumb little whore when she found the box in her room.Winning the crowd. Esther smiled and told the Angry Principal that she’d just gone and blackened her own eye, that she was always so clumsy even though it was Ma who’d bounced her head repeatedly off the turnbuckle. She smiled at Ma through all of it, and she choked down Ma’s rancid cat-shit eggs on Sundays.Timing. She waited under bedsprings and kitchen tables, learned to play possum. Then one afternoon, when the boys were out in the yard and Ma was asleep in her armchair, Esther took her chance. She tiptoed out from the shadows and snuck up behind old Ma. The one wrestling move she had learned best was the sleeper hold, and she clamped it down on Ma’s neck before she even woke up, gripping on tight for all her life. Esther knew that wrestling was fake, but there was nothing fake about the way Ma’s legs kicked and spasmed as Esther held on to her neck. There was nothing more real than the way Ma gurgled and drooled as Esther crushed the breath right out of her jerking body. Ma scratched at Esther’s forearms, tearing away strips of red-raw flesh. But Esther didn’t feel the pain of it, for she’d learnt to feel nothing at all. Esther rolled back exhausted on to the canvas. She reached up from the mat and tagged her partner Arnold into the match, pulling herself up on the ropes. And to the roar of a thunderous crowd, the two victors left the arena as the bell finally rang, Esther the Shadow Girl and Arnold the Protector, riding away on Uncle Charlie’s bicycle. He did say she could borrow it any time, and she hoped he wouldn’t miss it too badly.

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I FIRST MET ZAC SMITH IN A BARN by Giacomo Pope

I was 250 miles from the nearest streetlight, and my shoes were covered in horse shit. In the centre of the barn was this dude standing on the stacked hay. He was foaming at the mouth and shouting at overfed livestock.

Zac was watching these chickens try to kill each other and they were making all this noise, but over the top of it, you could still hear the poems crashing against cracked red paint. 

The chickens were the stuntmen from Die Hard, and I was reaching into popcorn between my legs. I was sweating. The bigger chicken was digging its face into the other one (which now wasn’t moving or making a sound). The bigger chicken relentlessly pecking into fleshy feathers, and Zac was doing these little hops on the hay with a Cheshire grin.

It was all red and gore, and the hay was clumping up with chicken blood. The horses eating around it, drool and yellow teeth scraping the dirt for lines of hay. 

I think about this day in the barn with Zac, and I think about how it wasn’t actually a barn, it was at a reading in Brooklyn, and how the cops were called and the bigger guy was dragged out the bar. The other dude melting into the floor with a face full of beer bottle. How fucked up it all was. How Zac and I couldn’t stop watching the grey mop pushing brown glass in puddles around the smaller guy while we waited for an Uber to take him to the hospital.

Okay I lied, we were never in a bar watching someone get murdered.

We were in this barn though, and the chicken was totally fucked. I held the chicken in my arms, my hands getting all sticky. I was feeling pretty anxious. Zac stepped down from the ladder in the middle of the barn and said he’d light up the BBQ. 

I was feeling stressed out about how to pick out all the shards of glass from the meat, and the bar was closing up. The cops were asking us a bunch of dumb questions like “Did either of you know the stuntmen?”, “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” and “My favourite type of open-door building is a barn.”, which isn’t even a fucking question. Cops man, they’re dumb as hell. 

The other writers had left the reading after the guy’s head had cracked open. They had taken all the horses, but we had both forgotten our boots anyway. Zac took a couple dozen copies of the books which were left behind the bar. We burnt them under the stars. The chicken was soft and fell apart in our mouths. I picked Zac’s teeth with hay, and we walked together to the subway. Our feet caked in the beer and blood from the floor, we dragged them through the muck to clean them up. At Zac’s stop, he turned around before the doors shut. The match caught against splintered beams. It was all so warm as the train screeched through the tunnels back home.


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REYKJAVIK by Jane Snyder

We took the kids on a tour of Iceland for winter break last year. It was Carrie’s first year of college, Tad’s third, and I wanted to do something as a family while we still could.

The sun didn’t rise the whole time we were there but everybody seemed to be having a good time. The kindergarten class leaving the National Museum as we were going in, for instance. The children had big bags of candy and were laughing so hard they couldn’t stand it. As soon as they’d start settling down one of them would say something that sounded to me like “Rootie Tootie” and they’d laugh more, harder.

“They came to see the Yule Lads,” Gurri, the tour guide said. She’d told us about the Yule Lads before. Icelandic Christmas trolls. Back in the day, they were real bastards, stole the bread from the mouths of widows and orphans. Now they put apples and little toys into children’s shoes. “The Yule Lads tell them stories and sing songs and then they all dance around the tree.”

“Roocha choocha,” a little girl in a pink snowsuit called out. “Toocha poocha.”

The children screamed with laughter, their teachers too.

The Yule Lads had left the building, Gurri told us when we said we wanted to see them, but she was sure we’d enjoy the museum and we should meet her in the gift shop in an hour. “Nobody ever needs more time.” 

She took us to a downstairs room with props and costumes. “Here you can dress as authentic Vikings.” 

The rest of our group, younger than my husband and me, but older than Tad and Carrie, fell to at once, grabbing wooden swords and their selfie sticks. “Thwack!” “Let us capture the maidens of this village, Leif, for they are a right comely lot.” 

The kids would have loved it when they were little but they’re too self-conscious now. “Vikings rarely raped and pillaged,” Tad said primly. “They married local girls and raised crops.”

Carrie reminded us she’s an Art History major, saying, “It would behoove me to see as much of the museum as possible.” But there wasn’t a lot to see, nothing like the Louvre or the Met, other museums they’ve been to, and they quick-stepped through The Making of a Nation, the upstairs gallery’s permanent display.

A Viking drinking horn carved with pictures of Judith slaying Holofernes and Jacob slaying Absolam. A statue so old and beat up no one knew if it was Christ or Thor and another figure they knew was Christ, even though the cross was missing, because of the holes in the thickest part of his feet. The figure was crude in comparison to the marble crucifixes and pietas we’d seen in Italy on another trip but his face held our interest. Kind and bewildered as if he hadn’t seen it coming.

The display on the 19th century infant mortality rate was distressing. Almost half the babies born in Iceland then died before they were six months old, starved. Icelandic mothers didn’t breastfeed. No one knew why. In the rest of Europe, I read, everybody breastfed or got a wet nurse, and the infant mortality rate was much lower.

The part about dusa, a pap of chewed up meat and butter the babies in Iceland were given as a substitute for milk, disgusted Tad and Carrie.

I speculated the aversion to nursing might have come from the old idea that breast milk was the menses stored in pregnancy. In some cultures, I told them, menstrual blood is considered unclean. 

“Would these be the same cultures that think water is wet?” the kids asked and went on, leaving me behind to be sad for the babies. 

I read about a belief, “widespread in the 19th Century” that elves would steal a baby while its mother slept and replace it with an elf baby. Perhaps, it was thought, this was a way to make the mother less fond of the baby. When it sickened and died she would think it was the replacement baby and grieve less. 

When I was having my children pediatricians told you breast was best; it’ll help you bond. But it seemed to me those mothers chewing scraps of food fine enough for their baby to swallow without choking, chewing to keep their baby alive, must have formed a bond too.

After supper that day, we got on the bus again to see the Northern Lights.

It had been a long day and Carrie put her head in my lap. “Wake me if it’s good.” 

When we passed a cemetery outside of Reykjavik I let her sleep, while I looked out at the strings of colored lights draped over the stones. In winter, Gurri said, families liked to go walking in the dark so the churches decorate the cemeteries to make it nice for them. When I looked at the lights through the falling snow they changed from sharp points to blurred stains of soft color. The babies had been dead now for longer than they would have lived. Their flesh and unformed bones had dissolved long ago. I imagined the bits of color as something left of their sweetness though I knew the Christmas lights had nothing to do with the babies.

They’d been sick, fussy, hungry all their short lives. They did not become elves. They did not become the soul of color. 

Behind me Tad was telling his dad the geyser we’d visited during the day reminded him of a pimple popping. “A really large pimple.”

Carrie’s long bright hair was splayed across my lap and I touched the end of a strand. It felt coarse and I remembered she’d complained that soaking in the Blue Lagoon had trashed her hair. “But my skin’s awesome,” she’d said, and held my hand to her cheek so I could feel how soft it was.

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DCUQ ANGRUQ by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

A discussion in one of my classes, about metafiction, memory and torment, led me to bring up Chuck Jones’s classic cartoon, Duck Amuck. None of my students had heard of it, but that’s typical: they’re students. Still, before showing it in my next class I wanted to see the actual cartoon and not just rely on what I remembered when I first saw it as a kid. I mean who didn’t love the scene where Marvin the Martian takes Daffy aboard his flying saucer so that none of Bugs Bunny’s disintegrator blasts would ever singe his black feathers again?  

But it’s in the nature of memory that details fuzz: without the cartoon in front of you, can you describe the expression upon Marvin’s golden face? Did Daffy weep one tear or two for his good fortune? I wanted to put Duck Amuck in front of my students, so that together we could see the thing itself, and untangle memory from reality.

So I tried looking for it online, first on YouTube, then Amazon, then Pirate Bay. I followed all the links my search engine grudgingly gave me, but no luck. Someone at Warner’s must have been very protective of their past, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I mean, it had Daffy traveling to Mars and finally meeting the true love of his life, Desdemona Duck, Queen of all Waterfowl. It was her love that at last broke Daffy from his endless cycle of disintegration/re-integration, of always returning not knowing anyone or anything, and to finally embrace certain death even if it was to be by erasure, the worst way to go out in a cartoon, and at last transcend annihilation to discover joy. It was like a recipe for enlightenment in ten minutes, thirteen seconds. It bothered me that one of the greatest cartoons of all time had been so thoroughly erased, and that no one seemed to notice.

I looked for and found seventeen Daffy Duck lovers subreddits. I got blocked on all of them.

Three thousand two hundred and fifty-one pages deep into my search I found a single pirated copy that cut off in the middle; it wobbled like someone had recorded it while drunk, holding their cellphone in front of a laptop on a speedboat. It was dubbed in Mongolian (I think?), and gave my computer a virus that required bitcoin to fix. There was an airplane in it. I don’t remember Duck Amuck ever having an airplane. Not unlike the original version, I felt like I too was being erased. I didn’t like how that felt.

Not long after that I got a call from my Chair. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing,” she said. “But knock it off.” 

By this point all the ads on my browser were for Mongolian butcher shops and Viagra, and my phone kept buzzing with increasingly menacing texts from Deans and Provosts and People Who Choose to Remain Terrifyingly Anonymous. Don’t get me started on the exploding garbage trucks, or the near total absence of scenery. But the more I got the sense that someone was trying to keep me from the true Duck Amuck, the more I wanted to keep digging, because Daffy would do no less. Didn’t he fight off Bugs Bunny’s million instant Evil Martians with just a wooden practice sword to rescue his beloved Desdemona from the sewers? Surely I could save one cartoon from digital oblivion.

Finally, finally, finally, five thousand, three hundred and twenty-two pages deep into my search, I found a copy of Dcuq Angruq on a dodgy server somewhere in Southern Luxembourg. Despite the name, I knew what I had at last found. With total anticipation, I dropped the file into my video player.

My computer started whistling.

I kept waiting for the flying saucer moment where Daffy finally understands his place in the world; instead it was nothing like how I remembered it. All this version of Duck Amuck contained was just a bunch of grainy scenes where increasingly horrible things kept happening to Daffy, who had no idea why such horrible things were being done to him. No wonder it was so hard to find: it was the cartoon equivalent of a snuff film.

Smoke gushed out from every outlet of my computer, but I couldn’t stop watching.

When the cartoon sputtered to its end, there was no happy duck kissing, only Daffy writhing, crying, “Stop it, just stop it, please!” 

Then the camera pulled back to reveal his tormenter to be Bugs Bunny, who was exactly the same as I remembered.

Looking up from the smoldering pile of feathers where a duck used to be, Bugs says, “Hugh, why are you watching me?”

“Have I been making you laugh?”

My name is Hugh.

The roof of my house is missing.

I see the falling shadow of an anvil approaching me. It moves wherever I move.

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THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED by Sandra Arnold

We called him the Music Man because while he cleaned the headstones he liked singing along to the opera playing on his radio. Sometimes he threw his head back and let his voice soar to the sky, scattering the crows. His singing was so beautiful it softened the fears that lay hard in my heart. It brought Nettle close to tears and closer to remembering. Even Stuck Boy stopped his monologues long enough to listen. The three of us loved watching him at work though he rarely spoke to us except to tell us to bugger off if we got too close.

I’m not sure why the bad thing happened. Maybe he got sick of us hanging around him all the time. Admittedly, it would do anyone’s head in listening to Stuck Boy going on hour after hour about solving iodic evaluations. Nettle and I were used to it, but you could see that it really got on Music Man’s nerves. To be honest, it bothered me far more having to listen to the weirdos that frequented this place, but Music Man didn’t even look up from his cleaning when they drifted past.

By lying in the newly dug grave next to the one Music Man was working on I could enjoy his singing and the songs on his radio and tune out most of the complaints from the weirdos as they completed their circuit of the cemetery. Only a few of their grievances stuck to my ears like tattered cobwebs.

“I don’t know who my hands belong to anymore.”

“Why do they say he is ‘obligated’. It makes him sound like a rectangle.”

“A slatternly slut slithering in slime.”

“Avoid drawing attention to yourself.”

“Okay so I was drinking meths, but those two women had no right to refuse my entry into the cathedral. I said ‘How dare you judge me? Only one person can judge me and that’s not you.”

“Even the sky was struggling to hold up the clouds that day.”

Given everything we had to contend with, listening to Music Man singing along to his radio was an interlude of happiness for Stuck Boy, Nettle and me. Unfortunately, on this particular day, Nettle was going on even more than usual about the names on the headstone that Music Man was cleaning. She was always interested in watching him prise the grime out of the names he was working on even though he always ignored her questions. Eventually she would give up and move away to read other inscriptions. This time, however, she didn’t. Music Man heaved an exasperated sigh. He turned off his radio. I felt the molecules in the air shiver as I peered over the edge of the grave and saw Music Man toss his cleaning rag on the ground. He turned to stare directly at Nettle. He looked back at the headstone and jabbed a finger at the three names etched into the stone and then turned back to stare at each of us in turn. Stuck Boy immediately stopped spouting iodic evaluations. Nettle covered her face with her hands and began to cry. Music Man’s attitude felt like a punch to my gut. He of all people should have understood that there are some things you simply don’t rub in people’s faces. To get this point across I reached up, grabbed his ankle and dragged him into the grave. He lay there yelling blue murder while I climbed out and the three of us stood at the grave’s edge staring down at him. We told him we’d leave him there for a bit so he’d know how we felt and then we’d pull him out and forgive him.

After a couple of minutes four other workers in different parts of the cemetery heard Music Man’s shouts. They came charging over as if the devil himself was after them. Between sobs, Nettle tried to explain that it was an accident, that we didn’t mean to hurt him, that we just wanted to teach him a lesson. They ignored us and called an ambulance. The ambos ignored us too as they loaded Music Man onto a stretcher. We watched them carry him out the cemetery gate and into the ambulance. We watched the ambulance speed away down the road, siren blaring. 

As the noise of the siren died away in the distance the crows settled back on the trees. Nettle cried louder and said she would really miss him. Stuck Boy gave her a hug then swiveled her around and pointed at the headstone. Music Man was kneeling there carrying on with his cleaning as if nothing had happened. Without looking at us he reached down to turn his radio on. Old habits die hard in some people, I suppose.

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COVER by Benjamin Kessler

The father is accompanying the daughter to the mall. The daughter wants very much to get her ears pierced, and while the father thinks she is too young, he has consented. Though only after making the daughter pull weeds from between the spaces in the driveway concrete. The father doesn’t simply give the daughter everything she wants. He makes her earn it, and this makes him feel like a good parent. He enjoys very much feeling like a good parent, especially in front of the mother.  

The daughter wants candy from one of the turnstile vending machines and the father gives her a quarter on the condition that she promises not to eat the candy all at once. The daughter says she won’t and runs off to the island where all of the machines sit, their scratched domes filled with stale sweets in muted primary colors. 

The father sits on a concrete bench and watches as the daughter inspects each machine, stooping over and choosing carefully the candy she wants. The daughter insisted on wearing her favorite green jacket, even though it is permanently stained by grape juice and the mother has labeled it “home only.” But the father isn’t concerned. When he saw the daughter bound down the stairs and reach for it off the hook he gave her a sly wink, as if to say our little secret

People mill in and out of stores. Teenagers laugh inside a photo booth. There’s so much to see. Another little girl in a green jacket runs laps around the candy machines. The father hasn’t had his driver's license back for very long and he’s excited to be out of the house. He wouldn’t tell the daughter this, but the father would have taken her to the mall regardless of whether or not she picked out the weeds to his specification. They may even go get fried chicken after, or see a movie. The father doesn’t have a job anymore. The father and the daughter could stay out all day long.

Being at home is just so difficult. It has become tremendously boring. The father feels as though he has read every book he owns, twice. Then there are of course the reminders: the now empty cabinet above the sink, the lowball glasses sealed away in the Goodwill box in the basement, the car with the busted front end sitting for months untouched in the garage. To get to the mall the father borrowed the mother’s car, though not without subject to that admonishing look she gave while handing him the keys. But everything is better now. Just look, the father says, holding his hand before him and spreading his fingers. No shakes. 

The daughter has made her decision: chalky sour candy shaped like tropical fruit. She slides the quarter into the slot and turns the metal dial, the father watching, anticipating the sound of gear teeth in conversation. But there is instead another noise. A familiar sound, though not one the father has ever heard personally. He knows it only by reputation. The other mall shoppers must know it as well, because in an instant everyone is frenzied, running and screaming toward the array of double doors, overlarge glossy shopping bags swinging wildly from their hands. 

But the father is smarter than them. Though he’s never been in this situation before he knows from evening news that the danger may well be waiting at the exits. So he launches himself toward the candy machines with speed he wasn’t aware he had, scoops the daughter up by the waist, and sprints into the nearest store. Once inside, soft music piping in over the speakers, he ferrets out a hiding space within a circular rack of blue jeans. He then pulls the denim closed like a curtain and holds the daughter close. They are safe, and the father again feels like a good parent. In the main hallway many are still in a panic, calling out. A fire alarm has been pulled and it wails.   

The father tells the daughter that everything is going to be okay, then turns her around. But as he does so he discovers it is not the daughter. No, it is the other little girl with the other green jacket. She has fair skin and braided blonde pigtails. She looks nothing like the daughter, really, and to the father’s surprise his first thought isn’t for the daughter’s safety, but rather how the mother will react when she learns what has happened. She will assume the father had been drinking. How else could he make such a mistake? How else could he be so foolish and irresponsible?  

And what has happened? Nothing so sinister. What the father, and everyone else, don’t know is that the sound, like a director’s clapboard inciting a hectic scene, was simply a sandwich board falling onto its face.

The father stares at the little girl who is not the daughter. The little girl is about to speak but the father puts a single finger to his lips. The father thinks about the daughter. He wonders if, in another store, in some makeshift shelter-in place much like his own, another father is staring at the daughter. The father takes out his cell phone, thinks about calling the mother, telling her that he is okay. And the daughter, she will ask? Fine, the father will respond, because he doesn’t know she isn’t.

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