“Island Woman” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

The children betrayed her.

Giovanni tells me his mother fed the children in every country they lived in. She worked for Doctor’s Across Borders and moved him and his sisters regularly – Guatemala, Peru – hot countries with brown faces and poverty. She would make big pots of rice and beans and feed all the children in their neighborhood. He never told me what she looked like but I imagine her with Donna Summer hair, her face thick with sweat, standing over a pot in a hot kitchen dimly lit with sunlight. She is spooning heaping pills of rice and beans in bowls for the children. I imagine Giovanni close to her, 5-years-old with stiff legs and a half moon smile watching his mother like a saint. He tells me there were always children in his house and his mother filled them full with food. I imagine they forget about hunger for as long as it takes for them to swallow a hot meal.

He says his mother was always his friend and he could always feel her love. She danced with him, placed his tiny body on tabletops and shook his hips to the slow rhythms of Billie Holiday or some other woman aching with the blues. She told him to cheer for himself because it was never guaranteed anyone else would. She built him into a strong, brave boy and gave him confidence in tight, long embraces. She is unconsciously preparing him for blindness.

In his teens, Giovanni told his mother he was gay. She threw parties for his out teenaged friends, those with no place to go but the internet for companionship. She gathered them in her home for PG meet-ups so they would know they weren’t coming out alone. He tells me she would put on disco music and watch them dance. She’d laugh that this was like being back in the 70s. He called the refuge her “underground homo railroad.” I imagine her smiling among the awkward 16-year-old boys who are just learning to sit still in their sex and skin. She is handing them drinks and food and encouraging their laughter. I imagine Giovanni, a slim teenager with dark cooper hair atop a soft developing body, gently touching the forearm of another boy as he laughs, knowing his mother is not far from view.

The children beat him until he lost his sight.

He tells me the attack was like the beating from the Quentin Tarantino movie, Kill Bill. I loved the film – the violence, the gore, the endless references to Japanese culture, Uma Thurman in a tight yellow cat suit. I remember her wielding a Samurai sword—one she had just been taught to fight with—determined to kill Bill. But she was no match for a tribe of fighters with years of experience. I can’t remember the scene where they nearly beat her to death and I could not seem to imagine Giovanni taking her place. Maybe it is hard to think of a human being beat like that – his 24 year-old-body bending at the end of lightning-swift kicks, a head filled with memories of his dancing mother  hitting the pavement, the moment where sight got lost in blood and bone and hate.

He tells me he is still speculating on the motives of the boys who beat him, even after he published a memoir on the incident. They were friends, people he knew, people his mother had loved and fed and laughed with. She probably knew their parents, probably called them after they left her house to check and make sure they got home safely. These attackers were his childhood friends. Giovanni says they must have been angry that he was going off to college, making a future for himself. I’ve seen this happen to groups of brown boys; like crabs in a barrel, they’d rather have company in their sorrows than see one another succeed. He says he can tell when his book reviewers are white because they don’t understand his reasoning.

The children left him in the dark.

After Giovanni became blind, his mother came to live with him. She never gave him false hope. She told him blindness would be hard but he would be okay.

I imagine she is the light keeper guiding him through their house. He is a grown man learning to re-adjust his dead eyes to light. To remember her face, he takes in the smells of her and tastes every country they ever lived in. He learns to trace her age with his fingertips and listens to her breathe in order to calculate the distance between them.

I imagine her tucking him in at night. He is leaning his head against her as she leads him to his bedside.  When she has folded him safely under the covers, she pushes her cheek to his before she turns out the lights to join him in the dark. I imagine Giovanni feeling her face push into a gentle smile. She is reminding him of laughter.

Ashley Young is a black feminist queer dyke; poet, non-fiction writer and teaching artist. She is a non-fiction 2011 Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow and a 2010 Poetry Fellow for Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation Retreat for Writers of Color.  She is the author of a chapter in Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion edited by Virgie Tovar (Seal Press 2012)  and is currently working on her first novel “Girl With The Unicorn Earrings”.   Ashley is a freelance writer and works as an editorial assistant.  She lives in New York City with her partner and family, including a pride of four cats.

Read an interview with Ashley here.

“Vortex” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

She checked all 57 windows, the 114 locks. She twirled her way through the house, over and through things. She’d taken over this ritual of her father’s without thinking much about it, as a way to get to school on time.

As she pulled on the top half of the final window to be checked, she saw the black funnel, two, three neighborhoods away. It twisted the world, said to her it didn’t matter what windows got checked, which ones didn’t. She saw herself through that eye, a tiny thing caught in the windowpane, a bug beneath glass.

She stood still, the growl of it rattling the windows and locks. It felt strange to be unmoving, like a memory of a past life when she sat in the car while her father flew from window to window, lock to lock.

Somewhere he cried out, like one of those people under the white tents in the park on Sundays. She imagined the twister picking them up and taking them away. That’s what they wanted, her father had told her. That’s what they dreamed about.

But this she hadn’t dreamed of. Not at all. It wasn’t just to save time, her taking over the windows; it was really to make it hers instead of his, until one day he might forget. The twister said otherwise.

Things flew into its cone. Parts of houses and lawns. Porch swings and picnic tables. It moved as coins did, spinning on their sides.

She found herself, a tiny bit of herself, wanting it. She hadn’t thought of an ending until that storm blew outside. She hadn’t thought of day after day of checking and how he now needed the car windows checked, and she saw him looking at neighbor’s houses, eying their windows, wondering, that need to know flickering over his face.

It came and she closed her eyes. She was snatched up, pushed her against her father’s chest. She shook uncontrollably. In the windows behind him, she saw the funnel swerve toward trees, the roof of a shed bent in half, then broken into two.

He shifted her to his right arm. All the windows bounced in their frames, unnerved. How could he have let her become this—she didn’t know the missing word. Twisted. Sick. Crazy.

“Oh honey,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

The okays kept coming, one after another, each one wanting to be the answer, until they all swirled together and she watched them spin out of his mouth, dance in front of her, like a top.

She reached out for it. Stopped herself. She could do that. Stop herself.

“I’m scared,” she told him. “Super scared.” She stretched her arms as he had when he’d read that book, about the bunnies, telling each other how much they loved each other. “This much,” she said. “I’m scared this much.”

He didn’t seem to have heard. He set her down. He looked past her, to where the twister had disappeared. The windows finally settled. And he moved to check them.

She grabbed his pant leg.

“Don’t.”

He smiled at her. “Hey,” he said. “I thought we were on the same team.”

She shook her head.

He kneeled down. “It’s not that easy. You know that.”

“Don’t.” She held firm.

Later, in bed, she heard him downstairs, rattling things. She thought of how tight she held, with all her might, and how easily he kicked her loose. She thought of how nothing she wished for mattered. She thought of that twister, its endless rotations. She was finished with checking windows and locks, finished playing this silly game of pretend. She’d find a ride to school and back. She’d let her father have it, whatever it was.

She was done. She whispered it to herself. Done. Done. Done. She repeated it until everything else disappeared, until she could say it in her sleep, until she was certain.

Randall Brown teaches at Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. He is the author of the award-winning collection Mad to Live (Flume Press, 2008), his essay on (very) short fiction appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field, and he appears in the Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2010). He blogs regularly at FlashFiction.net and has been published widely, both online and in print, including American Short Fiction, Tin House, Mississippi Review, Cream City Review, Lake Effect, and Harpur Palate.

Check out Randall’s feature here.

“The Green Chair” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

This game is not new. It certainly isn’t one we can call ours, either. But it’s one my brother and I have played every time an occasion calls for it: when our mother died, our sister, my brother’s best friend, Mike, and so on. Though I have to admit, it feels less and less like a game the more we play it.

The first time—when Ma died—we were in our basement. I was sixteen and John was eighteen. We sat opposite each other on stools at an old fold-up poker table. A bottle of Crown Royal was the centerpiece. I hadn’t had very much, but John was about six shots deep. I could smell him. I sensed the stupor he’d fallen into, like a kid slipping off the end of a dock into deep, dark water. The whiff of his breath just about caused the boot in my stomach to kick up anything and everything I’d eaten that day.

“You ready?” he stammered. The sound of his shot glass coming down on hard plastic snapped my brain like a slingshot. I considered for a long, hard moment what my answer should be. After all, this was the first time we’d played.

“Yeah,” I said, steeling myself, “I am.”

I saw the quick glint of silver as John slid the gun off the table—our father’s .357 Magnum. Smith and Wesson. Hell of a gun. Dad only let us fire it a handful of times out on the shooting range in Albion.

“Cameron,” my Dad would say to me, “hold that thing tighter. It’s got a kickback. Don’t fuck around.”

I’d look back at him to affirm with a “badass” sneer. “Okay,” I’d say.

When John first proposed that we get shitfaced and play Russian roulette, to “commemorate the dead”, Dad’s voice ricocheted off the walls of my skull. “Don’t fuck around.” The words lingered like wisps of smoke, dissipated, and I told John I was ready. Ready to twist the cylinder, to rest my teeth gently on the barrel, for that rush of adrenaline as the hammer either ends you, or frees you. I was ready to fuck around.

Since there were just two of us, and the gun could hold seven rounds, our rules were this; one bullet, two turns each. The rules haven’t changed.

The first time we played was nine years ago. After John took the bullet out of the gun, I was pretty pleased with myself that I’d beaten the odds. I was happy for John, too, of course, but as we’ve lost people, the odds have increased. And they’ve only increased because the people we’ve lost aren’t as close to us. They aren’t family or friends. Sometimes they’re just people that John has read about in the obits. If I’m in town and John’s in the mood to get really drunk—which he usually is—somehow he’ll convince me to play.

But this evening we’re not in a basement. We’re outside at Colby’s campus, up on one of the hills behind the track field, tucked out of sight. This is a popular spot for immigrant girls with glamorized perceptions of American boys to smoke weed and take risks. A popular spot to gamble.

John is taking swigs off a small flask full of something, probably rum or whiskey.

“Cam?” He offers me the drink.

“No thanks,” I say.

I look up at the clouds rolling by before us. Little tufts, like acid pink cotton balls are sweeping out in rows. I don’t think John notices them.

~

We sit there for a few hours, not saying much, as the sky turns ink black. No one will see us up here. John is sitting a little ways away from me, fiddling with the gun and probably loading its one solemn bullet.

I hear the snap of the cylinder locking into place. A pause. Then the click of the trigger, the hammer. I hear John exhale.

“You didn’t even say we were starting,” I say, agitated.

He takes another swig off the flask and hands me the gun. “Your turn.”

I spin the cylinder and pull the trigger. Click. My exhalation of relief isn’t as smooth as John’s—it shudders a little as I hand him back the revolver. He immediately starts his turn, but I stop him.

“John, why do we still do this?” I’m not really expecting a solid answer. “We’re not stupid kids anymore. We didn’t even know this woman.”

He sips his drink. “I just like an excuse to play, I guess.”

Click.

“For fuck’s sake, John!” I look over at him, his silhouette in the thick night. He doesn’t say anything.

Click.

“John, stop, listen to me!”

Click.

My heart pounds against my ribcage as I hustle over to him on my knees, ready to wrestle the gun away from his hand. As I’m struggling to get hold of it, click, he manages to pull the trigger two more times. Click. I’m about to yell, when I realize he’s taken seven potential shots. But there are no shots. No blood. Nothing.

I hear him pop the cylinder open; he holds the gun out to me like an offering, catching his breath, and in the faint moonlight through the clouds I see its contents. It’s empty.

I roll off of him, exasperated, like I’ve just scaled a cliff. I breathe and stare up at all the darkness—all the stars, like hundreds of little pinholes that have been poked in black construction paper. They’re vast, glistening, and they’re as plentiful as all of our chances, our opportunities—our odds. I look over at John, and I think I hear him crying, softly.

I wonder if he started counting them all.

Jonathan Vanzant Stevens is a twenty-two-year-old writer and musician living in Maine, though he’d rather be in Australia. This is his first published story. Currently, he does many odd jobs and is also hard at work on a novel about disconnection.

“Mother and Child” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

I am a terrible, obvious liar. My nose squiggles and my legs start to fidget. I feel like I’m about to implode. My cheeks are still chubby and rosy with childlike naiveté and sometimes older strangers pinch them.

So it is with truth I say I had been clean and sober for 89 days. But I let it all slip away from me. Because of my vulnerability, my thin skin and heavy heart, I felt the world’s pain as my own. In a flash of a moment, in a fraction of a fraction of a second, I forgot I cared about anything.

I left rehab that night in flames. My feet felt like phantom limbs. Floating on their own down seventh avenue, that pitch-black street with no streetlights even to illuminate or keep the street company. I knew better than to go down that street but I went anyway toward the seedy dive bar. The seedy dive bar alcoholic’s haven. People like us get looks at the bars normies hang out in. Normies are people that wait till after five to drink and enjoy the taste. At our joints, you feel no shame for dumping a bag of loose change on the counter with fingers crossed. You feel no shame if you just pawned your dead great grandmother’s sapphire engagement ring for booze money. You feel no shame if you tremble outside the storefront at 9:55 a.m., eagerly anticipating its opening. Shame vanishes after the first drop.

Vanishing. Next thing I knew, I was clutching a paper bag in that dark street. I hardly remembered if I paid. I’m sure the longhaired dude with a penchant for comic books was working. He stopped carding me long ago. I imagine my hands were shaking and he wondered why I hadn’t bought my medicine lately.

I floated on phantom limbs back to that alley. I ripped the fifth of Karkov because of the way it burned, because it ignited my throat like poison. I was trembling, barely able to hold my hands still. My fingers knew what to do but my body rejected it. I vomited bile. Goddammit, I wanted that blanket of intoxication to cover me. I chugged it. Then I was so consumed by crushing guilt, I swallowed a fistful of Ativans and Effexors. I took a razorblade to my wrists. My wrists became the canvas. My memory is in flashbulbs like the fluorescent lights with the whir of the ambulance whisking me off in the night. The ambulance is the stagecoach for alcoholics. We don’t lose a glass slipper. We lose our sanity.

The screeching sirens still burn in my nightmares and I wake up in a cold sweat, the blinding bright red and blue twisting and distorting into a fucked-up watercolor palate. My head spinning, brimming with chaos, I am in a stretcher again. A bright red wristband to warn others I was on a 72-hour hold for suicide watch.

~

In 403 B, I awake to the orchestral hums of the fluorescent lights and floor waxer. I expect a welcoming committee with clowns and fire-breathing dragons and balloons, but I roll over and realize by the cold sterility and lumps in the mattress that I’m lying in a hospital bed. They must have already given me Ativan because I feel like I’m tripping out of my mind. I think I see David Lee Roth over my bed shredding.

Instead I hear a soft, confident voice and feel the tightening of a blood pressure cuff like a noose to my arm.

“Hey, it’s Sandy I’ll be your C.N.A. tonight. Okay, I’m just gonna check your vitals and pump some more fluids into you.” Sandy looked to be a few years older than my mom. She had a weathered face with gentle blue eyes. I became aware of the acute stinging of the new IV in my hand.

“Your pulse is still 150, but the Ativan should help with your anxiety.”

I nodded. And tried to smile but then I remembered where I was (again) and couldn’t make my muscles move.

“It’ll be ok, just rest up. Anything I can get you?” Sandy asked.

I wanted to ask for my sanity back but my mouth was frozen. I really wanted home. I wanted home and it was impossible because I belonged nowhere. I asked her if my friends brought anything and she nodded. Before I could ask her to get it she was gone; she knew how much I needed home. She was gone like she knew where she was going. She held out my bright blue duffel bag. I found my blankie, greenie. In its shambles it was barely recognizable as a blanket. But it was my familiar. I reached for it.

“Sorry, but I can’t let you have that. It could be used in a way…” she trailed off. “Well in a way it shouldn’t be used here and it’s our policy.”

Tears rolled down my cheeks. I brushed them away with my sheet and offered a faint, “I understand.”

“I can cut you off a corner if you want,” she said. “Let me go do that for you.”

“Please? That’d be so…” I tried to let the words of gratitude come out but Sandy had already bustled down the hall. I clung to my greenie, my piece of home.

Tessa Torgeson lives in Fargo, North Dakota. She recently graduated with an English degree from NDSU and hopes to pursue her MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her poetry has appeared in the Red Weather literary journal. Her blog can be found here.

Read an interview with Tessa here.

“Let’s Dance” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

We stand on the sidewalk outside his house, watching his daughter, and my brother says every time I see her walking down the street it breaks my heart.

I can see why. It’s not a walk, really. It’s a lurch, a stagger, a shuffle.

His daughter is twenty-two. She broke his heart with joy when she was born and with fear when she was five days old and stopped breathing and again with terror when she had the surgery to fix that mis-made heart.

Since then, his own heart has been a construction zone: continuously broken and re-broken, patched together so many times it’s a bit misshapen. Yellow tape marked do not cross surrounds it: traffic cones warn of dangerous ground. Of holes. Of weakened areas.

She throws her long thin arms around me, cries when I arrive. She will cry when I leave. In her embrace, I watch my brother over her shoulder.  His light blue eyes are reflective, transparent, fractured in the sunlight.

My brother takes her to Pirates games. She loves baseball. He takes her to church. She stares into the high vaulted space with long-lashed brown eyes too far apart. Her mouth hangs open, her lips parted and loose, her teeth crowded.

He says close your mouth, sweetie and she does, pushing it shut with her long, lovely fingers.

There’s something I’d like to tell her about what she has done to her family. But she may already know. Or not. Who knows if it would matter.  Who knows what she knows of broken hearts, of disappointment. She doesn’t talk. It’s enough to break your heart.

Sue Staats recently received her MFA in Fiction from Pacific University. She’s currently revising her novella, The Mitchell Boys, and working on a collection of linked short stories. Her short story “No Hero, No Sharks” was runner-up for the 2011 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, a finalist for the 2011 Reynolds Price Fiction Award, and was published this past spring in The Farallon Review. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have also been published in Susurrus, the literary journal of Sacramento City College. Her poetry was featured in the 2012  Sacramento Poetry Anthology and her short story “Marshmallow Empire” was a finalist for the 2013 Nisqually Prize for Fiction.

Read an interview with Sue here.