Category Archives: ShortsOnSurvival

“The Haircut” by Cezarija Abartis

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Haircut
Image by Jenn Rhubright

She had a serpent tattooed on her left bicep and below her collarbone the red emblem from  “The Queen of Pain,” which, she explained, was a song by The Alkaline Trio.

He was having his hair cut at the beauty school, where  she was studying to be a stylist. His daughter would be about her age. He’d been grinding his teeth in his sleep the past two nights. His jaw hurt.

“Your hair is very healthy,” Shawna said. She fanned it out at the sides.

“Thank you,” he said, but he did not know if that was the right response. He wondered if her parents liked those tattoos.

“We’re all the same.” She looked around at the customers and the stylists and tapped her comb in her hand. “I wanted to be different. I wanted to study art at the Chicago Art Institute.” She combed his hair and parted it into sections.

“That’s got to be expensive. Maybe an art school in Minneapolis?” He massaged his jaw. “My daughter studied art.”

“The Art Institute costs thousands of dollars.” Shawna pulled on the bottom of her shirt as if it were sticking to her, but the room was air-conditioned. “I told myself that I don’t need a piece of paper saying I’m an artist.” She put clips in his hair. “I can just make my art.”

He and his daughter argued about communication, how they couldn’t talk. Shawna had disclosed so much about herself that he felt he should tell her about himself. “A long time ago, I studied art–commercial art, not fine art. But I stopped when I saw I couldn’t be as good an artist as I wanted to be.”

She laughed. “No wonder–with an attitude like that.” She seemed unafraid to be direct. Her eyes were honest.

“I’m an English teacher now. I teach at Bishop High School.” His daughter had objected to going to the same school, being the daughter of a teacher, but in college, she was fine.

Shawna picked up the scissors. “I loved English. I had a teacher who hated me. I wasn’t disrespectful, never skipped class, but she was always giving me detention. She blamed me when someone stole my book.” Shawna snipped the hair in back lightly. “I had to pay for it.”

“You probably reminded her of someone she hated or someone she loved once.” He bowed his head down. His jaw ached. “It was not your fault.”

“One good thing came out of it: I enrolled in the skills program, where you go to school only two-and-a-half  hours a day and work on your own for the rest of the day. I loved that. So I guess I got one good thing out of her.” Her scissors worked on the right side of his face. “Is this your first time here?”

“My regular barber is out of town, and I had to get a haircut.” Mostly it was women here, but there was one college-age kid at the station at the end.

“A special occasion?”

“Yes.”

Shawna told him that her brother had a full scholarship at the technical college, but he went two weeks and stopped going. She just hoped he would get a job. Their house was in foreclosure. Her mother broke up with her boyfriend. “She always picks losers. This one was an alcoholic. She woke up in the middle of the night, and he was sitting in a chair with a gun in his lap. That scared her. But with him gone, she can’t pay the mortgage. She’s been in bankruptcy once already. It’ll ruin her credit rating.”

“That happened to my brother-in-law.” He bent his head forward, so she could shave his neck. He felt only slightly dizzy, considering how little sleep he had gotten.

She fluffed his hair out and turned his chair to the mirror. “How do you like it?”

“Fine, fine.” But no, it was not fine. His daughter was the same age as Shawna. He wanted to tell her.

She smiled into the mirror, her eyes open and leaf-colored. “What’s the occasion?”

He could not catch his breath. “A funeral.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.” She put the comb down and stepped back. She cupped one hand in the other and waited.

“My daughter. She died. A car accident.” He poured out Miranda’s whole life, her aspirations and virtues and death. “When she was little she wanted to be an astronaut. Her teachers loved her. She painted with acrylics and sang in the school chorus. We used to fight. We were almost to the end of the fighting stage.” The chair tilted. He felt stones in his throat. He remembered her voice. The cold air pierced his lungs. He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief.

She watched quietly and nodded as though she understood.

 

 

Cezarija Abartis’ Nice Girls and Other Stories was published by New Rivers Press. Her stories have appeared in Brain Harvest, Underground Voices, Liquid Imagination, Story Quarterly, and New York Tyrant (which also gave her story The Lidano Fiction Award). Recently she completed a novel, a thriller. She teaches at St. Cloud State University.

Read our interview with Cezarija here.

“Carrying the Day” by Sylvia Hoffmire

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Carrying th Day
Image by Jenn Rhubright

I know the sun was shining that day or I wouldn’t have been hanging sheets on the line to dry.

I know it was hot, or I wouldn’t have put him in his playpen bare as birth to take the sun and ward off diaper rash the way my mother said I should. And I know a light breeze blew because my hair, fresh washed and lemon rinsed trailed across my face so that even now the smell of lemon calls up memories I’d rather lock away.

It’s all there, much as it is today though years have passed. The house in need of paint, still or again, the back steps sagging toward the middle. But remembering, it’s like I’m looking through smoked glass, the kind people use to watch an eclipse. And nothing moves. The lithographed tree in the center of the yard pins the sky in place so that the earth can push the horizon to its furthest limit. The laundry on the line hangs straight and smooth, as if tethered to the ground by invisible wires. No color in anything, from the baby’s toy lying in the stiff grass to the sullen sky.

And I’m there. One hand inside my apron pocket clasping a clothespin, the other tethering a pillowcase to the line as I turn to check on the baby. His hands are folded over the rail to pull up. He’s laughing. But I can’t hear his laugh. Nor see the child who’s running towards us from across the street.

I’m back to pinning clothes on the line when I hear the blow, the sound of a hard object striking something solid but softer. I’m back to pinning clothes on the line when I hear the blow and the sharp cry, then silence. A silence that flows outward from that moment to this, a silence that has lasted for all these years as I see myself slowly turning from my task that day. The picture, like the silence, never changes. The child beside the playpen, one step back from it, the baseball bat resting on his shoulder, his gaze directed downward, into the place where my baby lay. And then color appears for the first time, the only time in that picture. A crimson pool spreading out beneath my baby’s head. Those are the last sharp pictures for a while.

After that it’s all sound and motion and touch. A scream I know is my scream, a rush of movement that I know is the child with the bat leaving, the flow of air past my own face that I know is from me running and running, the warmth that is my baby held against my breast, his face pressed into the curve of my neck like so many times before but this time the dampness at my breast is not my milk.

They flew me and my baby to Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. Just me and him, my husband unable to get away. He held his business to his breast while I clasped our baby to mine. I held him as closely as I could, him strapped to a board, umbilicled by needles and tubes. When he died, minutes after we got to the hospital, I made them take him off that board and give him back to me. I wouldn’t let them put him in a box. I carried him home on another airplane, in my arms. I’m not sure why they let me, but they did.

When I got to the airport back home, I found a taxi and gave the driver my address. Things were clear to me then. Clearer than before or since. The sky was bleached again by an invisible sun. It was dinnertime, when husbands came home from work to take the noon meal with their families, when children were called in from play to wash their hands, say grace, and fill their empty plates. I didn’t knock.

I walked into their house, crossed through their living room and into the dining room without hesitation. They looked up at me, surprised I could tell. The child pushed his chair away from the table as if he knew he needed to be ready. I walked straight to him and laid my dead baby in his waiting arms. I drew the blanket back so that he could see my son’s gray, pinched face. The mother gasped, the father lurched to his feet, the crashing of his chair an explosion in that still room.

The mother said, “He didn’t know what he was doing.”

And I said, “He knows now.”

When I took my baby back, I went across the street to my own house where I waited in the rocker by the window until my husband came and called the funeral home. I let him go, knowing even then that I would be pressed backward into this memory more times than I would find the strength to resist.

The child’s family moved away soon after, an act of mercy. We stayed on, my husband’s view being that strength comes from confronting fears and loss. My husband’s view being that to turn away from anything unpleasant is to admit a lack of courage. I am not courageous. I struggle to achieve an inner blindness, an ability to turn my inner gaze away while outwardly I seem to look straight on. I fail, time and again.

Behind me now my husband sits at the table, stirs his tea with lemon freshly squeezed.

“What do you see out there?” he asks.

I turn to look at him. His eyes and hands are busy with his plate and fork, his buttered roll. His glance flickers in my direction but doesn’t quite reach. I watch him rearrange the napkin in his lap, open the newspaper that he likes to fold a certain way so that it fits the space beside his plate. There is just enough room.

“The neighbors’ dogs have gotten at the garbage cans again,” I say.

I think I hear him sigh as he adjusts the folds on his newspaper, chews each bite carefully. I push the screen door open and hear it slap shut behind me. I wonder if he notices, if it occurs to him that I might not be coming back.

 

 

Sylvia Hoffmire earned her undergraduate degree in theatre and creative writing. She founded Youtheatre, a children’s theatre organization and has published with Baker Plays, staging and producing many performances. She received numerous grants to support writing projects, most notably an NBC Writing Residency grant, one of only sixteen awarded nationwide. She has also received grant support from the North Carolina Humanities and Arts Councils for a variety of projects, including a collection of short stories based on oral histories she collected in the Piedmont region titled Thoughts of Another Day. She is a graduate of the Queens University of CharIotte MFA program and serves on the faculty at Pfeiffer University teaching Creative Writing and directing their Cultural Program.

Read our interview with Sylvia here.

 

“Traces in the Winter Sky” by Doug Bond

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Traces
Image by Jenn Rhubright

Tyler steadied himself alongside the enormous Cypress that bordered the open space across from his house and reached down to unleash the dog.

A chilly wind rising up from the bluffs set the branches creaking overhead as it also lit up the wind chimes his wife had arranged on the gazebo back behind the garden. Exhaling slowly and deeply, Tyler settled his back against the saddle of the tree’s broad trunk and let it all go.

The fight had been silly, he knew. Absurd, even, tangling with her about whether to change the way the Christmas lights would be hung. Couldn’t she just let some things stay the same? Her tone had been sharp edged, even taunting, the way she abruptly clipped the leash and dropped it in his hand, all but pushing him out the door. The flares had come to feel like more than just the bickering of long married people, and he resented it: a disembodied voice and that inflection of disinterest. It pulled at him, the shift and weight of dependency, and Tyler tromped his feet heavily on the wood chips for a few steps as if to shake himself back. The Lab pulled up beside him misreading the cue, and Tyler lowered to pat his head and then released him away again.

As he listened to the jingle of the dog’s tags mixing with the wind and lilting chimes, Tyler let himself drift back into memories and /images long gone. The face of a girl and a first kiss, a December night like this one almost fifty years ago. His brain clouded from the distance and compression of so much time. He remembered the way her skin had smelled sharply of astringent, and the brightness that had come into her eyes when he looped her in his arms.

They had snuck out of the Christmas concert and tucked themselves back for a smoke behind the orchestra room door. Jenny had unbolted it from the top and gave it a kick, sending smoke up past the glowing red exit sign, her hair braided and whirling. When he looked up at the sky and counted out the three stars on Orion’s Belt, Jenny pointed to the lowest one, told him it was actually two, rotating so close together they seemed like one. It was the first time Tyler had heard her talk of stars.

Hers was the kind of mind that had wrapped easily around numbers. Back then he would go into a trance when Jenny gave voice to the elegant geometry of the constellations, to the sound of words like Trapezium, the star cluster deep inside the Orion Nebula, the dim edge of the sword falling below The Hunter’s Belt. They had spent hours together staring up into dark and white speckled skies through her father’s old telescope, so dim and weak they had called it The Night Glass.

A sudden commotion of collar tags and rustling shrub leaves lifted Tyler off the Cypress trunk. He remembered that he’d promised he would not be gone long. Shaking the leash in both hands he called for the black dog who came quickly padding towards him in the wet grass. Together they tracked towards home with the leash pulling, straight and angled.

Watching as Tyler came up the walk, she stood in the parted curtains of the front window, backlit by the dining room lamps. She was outlined sharply in the window frame, but no matter the light, he could not see her. By the time Tyler stopped at the door, she had it opened, waiting. He reached out and brushed his hand across her forehead, then slowly his fingers along the bridge of her nose, onto her lips and into her hair, which lay now short about the crease of her neckline. When she opened her mouth to speak, he felt it and gently shushed her, turning to draw his eyes up again towards where he knew it should be, Betelgeuse, and the long line from the Hunter’s foot to the shoulder. She took Tyler’s hand and helped him trace it, crossing straight through the Belt’s three stars and then the further distance to Rigel, the one she said that burns brighter than all the others.

 

 

Doug Bond has endured life in Manhattan and along the Western fault lines, most recently in San Francisco. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Used Furniture Review, Necessary Fiction, Mad Hatters’ Review, Metazen, and Wilderness House Literary Review. Additional written words of his and links to social media can be found here: www.dougbond.me

Read our interview with Doug here.

 

“The Darning Needles” by Diane Hoover Bechtler

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Darning Needles
Illustration by Morgan Maurer, 2011

When a marriage fails, people eventually begin saying, “It’s time for you to move on.”

Why do they say that? A marriage is not a building to be vacated. I don’t want to move on. Why would I? Does Nessie want to leave his loch? Was Dorothy really happy when she returned to Kansas or in her sleep did she mumble, “There’s no place like Oz, there’s no place like Oz”?

~

I don’t know how to mend things. A hole has appeared in my favorite cashmere sweater – the one he bought me from a boutique we discovered in Rome while we ambled through the warren of streets at the bottom of the Spanish steps. We were happily lost most of that day until we stumbled upon the familiar Trevi fountain.

We each made a wish and tossed coins into its water, thus assuring our return to Rome. I don’t know if the legend means we return together or apart. Perhaps the legend doesn’t know. I certainly don’t. After tossing the coins, we skipped away, laughing and holding our stuffed shopping bags, the sweater nestled in one.

I rummaged through a small sewing kit given to me years ago by a flight attendant–needles, some thread, and a couple of clear buttons. I didn’t remember sewing supplies in my condo. My subconscious must have packed it away. The job of mending the hole needed something more than a plain sewing needle. I thought of my vintage darning needles. I pulled them from the vitrine and tried to remember how to darn. I could not remember. I went back to my plain steel needle. I connected the ragged edges of the hole, but they didn’t fit neatly together. The result was an ugly knot.

A woman at the alteration shop clicked long blue fingernails on white speckled Formica and examined the garment.

She said, “Honey, that thing will have to be rewove. I imagine it will cost you a couple hundred bucks. Maybe more. If you don’t want it sewed like you got it, you best throw it away. Go buy a new one.”

I wanted to protest, “This is a piece of my history. It’s not from the local department store. It’s from Italy, a country I may never see again despite throwing coins in fountains.”

But I said nothing. I just left and took the sweater home, folded it sleeves-inward, wrapped it in tissue, and cradled it in the bag for Goodwill. Another woman may not care about the damage. For me the hole is so large that I fall through it into an alien and hostile world, where teapots break in poorly packed boxes, tiles drop from walls, and where I reach for a familiar cup and it isn’t there.

As we divided personal property, my last months with my husband blurred. Summer came and I signed papers giving him the New York apartment. Flowers faded. I sold my vintage Mercedes. Halloween happened. I gave him the airplane. Leaves turned red and gold. I gathered my personal things from the vacation house. Thanksgiving arrived. I shopped for condos. Christmas came. My husband ran off with the Ferrari and Tina. Isn’t there always a Tina or Dixie or Trixie? A snowstorm hit. I moved during it. I measured time by gas and frost. The act of packing my art collection has vanished from my mind. I can’t recall the first time I saw my new condo or picking out the counter tops and carpet. I talked to Mel, my therapist, because it was strange that I couldn’t remember the last weeks I spent with my husband, a man I adored.

Mel explained, “It’s called the ‘battered child syndrome.’ “A part of you knew whatever was coming was going to hurt really bad.” As he talked, his jaw clenched and he chewed his words. “For self-preservation, your mind went somewhere else. Your brain shut down.”

I shook my head, “But my brain shouldn’t have had to go away. He and I shouldn’t be apart.”

On the many trips between the house that now belonged to only my husband and the condo that belonged only to me, I passed the same woman.

She stood on a corner holding a cardboard sign that has become too common. In block letters, it said, homeless, hungry, need work, need food, have children. After a few days of passing time and time again, I stopped seeing her. She was just another landmark.

I remembered the sweater. I rolled down my window and handed her the sweater and a twenty.

The darning needles were from my grandmother and my childhood. She taught me how to darn, a skill that has fallen out of fashion. It is easier to throw things away and buy new ones.

I also have my grandmother’s pedal sewing machine. Because I could not mend the sweater I sewed a sackcloth robe to wear while I sit in ashes.

 

 

Diane Hoover Bechtler lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, Michael Gross who is a poet with a day job and with their cat, Call Me IshMeow. As well as writing short work, she is working on a novel about a likable character who strives against great odds to achieve a worthwhile goal. She has an undergraduate degree in English from Queens University where she graduated summa cum laude and subsequently earned her MFA. She has had short work published in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, Thema Literary Journal, Everyday Fiction, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Read an interview with Diane here.

“Dancing on the Rhythm Bus–One Night after Leaving The Pyramid Club, 1991” by Kyle Hemmings

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Dancing
Illustration by Morgan Maurer, 2011

He keeps shining a pen light into my eyes, this big muscle dude with a green gown. I have a vague sense that I’m in the back of an ambulance.

He asks me my name. But he’s already called me Mickey. So I say, Mickey, Mickey the SuperFag, Mickey, the kickass club dancer. I mean the best, the best, the …Muscle dude says “Mickey, Were you trying to kill yourself?”

I close my eyes and imagine myself sucked through this endless internal vacuum, the same one that probably bore me without the need for a mother with womb and scar. I was born a whore. But Muscle Dude keeps shaking me, refusing to let me fall onto the safety net of endless falling. I tell him “Yes,” just to shut him up.

“Mickey,” he says, “What were you taking? Amyl nitrate?”

No, I tell him, just some barbs, yellow bees, and he called it a “Friday Night Special.” I start to fade out again.

Muscle Dude keeps shaking me.

“He called it a Friday Night Special?” he asks.

“Yeah, he called it that.”

“He…?

I fade away.

I wake up. He’s still shaking me.

“What’s a Friday Night Special?”

“Something to take if you never want to see Saturday.”

“I mean what’s in a Friday Night Special? Mickey, talk to me.”

“Everything. It’s got everything. Every night of the week.”

The boom of his voice fades, or maybe me dropping deeper and deeper. I only want to be swallowed by this slow blackness of endless sleep.

~

The next day I can’t recall at all, a waste, like the flash of twenty years of my life, faces that pass you like comets in some erogenous unnamed zone of night, but they got me in some isolation room with my wrists in leather restraints. I’m still so tired, only wanting to escape this broken shell of a body.

Just to think: Only two nights before I was a greased banshee with some serious moves. I scored some great tips.

The shrink is cool and all, smooth-toned with the ability to elicit button-down conversation. He starts by asking what happened before the ambulance arrived. I tell him I can’t remember everything. But this guy, I mean older, picked me up at The Pyramid, said he was in love, said his name was Mr. Stiff himself, and he stuffed my g-stings with some pictures of the true father of electricity.

At his place on Loisada, we took a shower, but he was too drunk to get hard or anything. Occasionally, one of his geisha boys came out to grab a grape soda, and behind closed doors I heard some giggling, some strange talk at the volume of moon walking.

In fact, Mr. Stiff referred to them as his Moonies. I said You mean Moonies as in Rev. Moon? No, he said, my Moonies, precious as twin butterflies. These butterflies only dance in moonlight.

Later, Mr. Stiff drowned me in heavy conversation that I could not put together, the bits and jagged glass edges, and he kept prodding me to take more pills from this flower bowl in front of us, its sides flaring out like so many lips, so many strangers I have hurt.

Eventually, Mr. Stiff broke down and said I reminded him of his son, that he had one somewhere, kept sending money to the mother until his mail got bounced back with a Return to Sender. And I was starting to get groggy, and Mr. Stiff kept saying, Don’t you remember the times we . . . or how I used to walk you home from . . . and before I passed out, I remember him saying to please call him daddy, that he didn’t mean for me to drown alone, and I can crash at his place as long as I like, he never wants me to leave.

And I remember saying something about how my mother became a virgin after she had me, which was a joke I sometimes told at the club to loosen up some jaded been-there-been-everywhere fool, and then right before I hit the carpet on my knees, two of the Moonies holding hands came out and said almost in unison, “Is he alright?”

The sound of their voices echoed in my head until it reached the pitch of a siren.

So I’m telling the shrink that it was all just a fluke, that it’s just one hazard of the line of work I’m in. You meet golden bulls who’ll lick your hand and sometimes you meet raging boars who try to trap you up in a tree. That’s all that happened. But I have to dance. I have to go back to the club. Dancing is what I am when I don’t look back. When I dance, nothing can catch me, turn me to stone. It’s when I’m still that life becomes a motherfucker.

 

 

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has upcoming work in Decomp and in Lonesome Fowl.

“Hopeless in St. Henry of Uppsala” by Mindela Ruby

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Illustration by Morgan Maurer, 2011

At chicken o’clock I set off on foot, having quaffed Jolt all night so as not to oversleep right through the sex meeting. People who write me off as a hopeless, organ-grinding tramp should see me now, arriving early at St. Henry of Uppsala for 12 Step.

Not my peppiest or at all sure how to act, I stage my entrance into Community Room 2 with eyes cast low. The chair I pick is near the window. As others take their seats, I feel their attention bushwhack me. Who’s the new girl? The fatty ass punk in the thrift store hound’s tooth skirt –what’s her frailty?

Displaying a chink in the armor’s not my thing. Still, the longer I’m forced to wait for the program to start, the more violently my heart lub-dubs. As the chest contractions hit panic speed, I tell myself, Remember why you’re here: my employer (and well wisher) didn’t fire me, even after “stealing” her car. Instead, she says that if I get in the 12 Step pink, her old Nissan will be mine.

Gain back Sada’s trust and snag her ride? Blowing this sweet a deal would be a stupiculous move.

Besides, my sex life’s hit rock bottom. Of that I am damn sure. All I’m good at lately, other than getting stone cold rejected by heartless dudes, is going cruising for a bruising. The thrill of that’s long gone.

Will sexaholic meetings help? No guarantees. What is a safe bet is that these folks are gonna make me talk about myself. Blather seems to be what self-help is about. Like Sada’s grief workshop at this church, where they unload sagas of sorrow and cheer each other on. I lift my chin and suck hard at air, to not turn blue with fright.

Eight others are present so far. We all wear jackets in the unheated room and look like a pack of bears. I’m shivering and sweating.

For gratifactual distraction, I think of my music promoter kingpin pal (and secret object of desire). When I called Stoney yesterday, he told me our bass player’s dad is sick. She’s visiting her parents, this flounderous fish tale goes, and no one knows when she’ll get back, and Up the Wazoo’s not rehearsing. Or so Stoney and the girls in the band would have me think, if I’m gonna get paranoid about them, and maybe I’d better. Johnny Rotten once said it best: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

On a cue I’ve managed to miss, a man’s lisping voice across the room gets the proceedings underway. “God give uth grayth to akthept with therenity the thingz that can’t be changed.”

One chair over sits the runt who squeezed a rubber squeak-toy in the toilet stall when I accompanied Sada to this church. The toy squeezer isn’t acting like a hyped-up toddler today. She’s quietly pursing her lips during the prayer, but she’s definitely the chick from the can, ‘cause she’s wearing the exact same size-four gray shoes with matching laces. I stare at them as the prayer ends.

Amens erupt, a chorus of confidence, though, if you wanna know the truth, this room’s a far cry from inspiring. The floor is worn to ribbons. The paneling droops. The chairs have seen better days. The one grace note of the excursion struck on my way in, when the church biddies at the refreshment table offered me free coffee. While I tanked a couple of cups, they explained that they’re a Black ministry of Evangelical Lutherans, and St. Henry of Uppsala was a bishop in Finland who got canonized.

Overdosed on caffeine, I’m Too Far Uppsala to capiche whatever point they were making. At any rate, “introductions” have begun, and my glands sweat in hyperdrive as the participants state their names and the gist of why they’re here: “Tarik, Fred, Roxanne…internet sex, physical abuse, romantic escapism,” details that fly faster than bullets in a shoot-out.

“I’m Dales,” a guy in front of me says, “a sex addict who can’t get through a day without ten to twelve ejaculations.”

I grin and digest his sentiment effortlessly. A hush descends like a thought of death. Everyone stares at me. My turn? I’ve got zippo! No handle that neatly justifies my presence. The blood in my lower extremities defies gravity and whooshes up to my face. It’s all I can do to sputter, “Pass” to get everyone’s attention off me.

Someone laughs. I can’t see who. My engorged head hangs between my legs. Introductions end.  The topic “internet addiction” generates cross talk, but I hear only smatterings between heartbeats that in my head sound like, “Get out, get out, get out.” When I rise and follow these dictates to the exit, no one laughs or speaks or tries to stop me . Even the coffee peddlers in the hall ignore me shambling past.  I’m hopeless. Everyone at St. Henry’s knows it.

 

 

Mindela Ruby is a former punk radio deejay and current community college professor. Her fiction has appeared in The Binnacle, Emprise Review, Literary Mama, The Medulla Review and Boundoff audio journal. This piece is an excerpt from a completed novel.

Read our interview with Mindela here.

“Winter” by Donna Hunt

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winter
Illustration by Morgan Maurer, 2011

I will not wake up today. I will not get out of bed. I will stay cocooned in sheets.

I will not eat, answer the phone, check email. I will spend the day watching soaps on channel 5 and imagining every piece of lint on my carpet is actually an insect. I will get up 27 times to check. It will never be an insect. I will be startled by the shadows my glasses make and decide that being able to see is not that important. I will nap. I will read Anne Carson. I will worry that I am turning into Emily Brontë. I will spend an hour prying underneath my fingernails. I will reconsider using the phone but will not want to talk to any of the 108 people in my phonebook. I will listen to Johnny Cash but for only 20 minutes because he will make me cry. I will spend another hour imagining how glamorous my life could be if I lived in Québec, or Nebraska. I will take a shower because I need an excuse to change my clothes. Then I will make tea because there will be nothing left to do. I’ll stare at the table. I’m not sure how long.

 

 

Donna Hunt is a Pushcart nominee, and her chapbook The Coastline of Antarctica is forthcoming this summer from Finishing Line Press.Her poems are under consideration for the Yale Younger Poets Anthology, and she was recently awarded a four-week full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center.Her poems have appeared in Diagram, Prime Number Magazine, The Cleveland Review among others.She received her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte, and is currently teaching at CUNY.She has a poetry podcast available from itunes.

Read an interview with Donna here.

“The Lemon Method” by Anne Elliott

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The Lemon Method
Illustration by Morgan Maurer, 2011

He stands four floors below, outside the window, playing God Bless America all goddamn day.

Across the street, a chapel is covered in ash, festooned with flags, crayon drawings, chains of origami birds. Gravestones in the churchyard, two centuries old, gray dirt, dead grass. Even the grass, dead. Looming behind, stubs of famous office tower, gravestones too, lit yellow into the night, still smoking.

Our old office is damaged, off limits, behind checkpoints we can see from our window.  Our new office is a conference room, four of us crowded around one table.  Laptops, papers, Doritos, dry-erase board.  And a lemon.  Tasha brought it to deal with our troubadour.

“If you show him the lemon,” Tasha says, “He won’t be able to play. It works to stop a whistler.” An old Russian trick, like medical suction cups bruising your back, like dog saliva to ward off infection.

“You just show it to him?” I’m laughing. I’m skeptical. This lemon is the best thing I have seen for awhile.

The lemon sits on the table for weeks, while the fife plays on. He doesn’t know we are in here, that we hear him all day, that his song penetrates our jumpy bodies like ash: particles of asphalt, computers, bones.

Phone calls from Boston, clients growing impatient. Now I notice how loud this colleague chews, that one laughs. Eyes to my screen, but nothing gets done. I look at the same word fifty times, and forget it fifty times. Every number looks wrong to me. A war of feet under the table, and apologies grow less sincere. That person’s lunch smells disgusting. I look straight ahead, out the window, at the newly empty sky.

I can’t take this song any more. I grab the lemon and go outside, ready to face the enemy.

On the street, tourists push against police barriers to get a glimpse of what isn’t there. Eyes turn skyward, mouths gape, taking in the dirty air.The fife guy breathes this all day. This is the gritty wind going through his instrument. The hat beside him holds quarters, no bills. He’s just an entrepreneur. He’s a symptom.

I hold the lemon up, show it to the disease. The stars and stripes, the new sirens, the horrid blue sky, the junk of grief.  I give it a good squeeze. It pushes back, solid and cool in my hand. When I go back inside, the fife plays on. The gritty wind is still there. The lookers still gape. Nothing has changed except my palm. It has turned waxy white, and smells like an innocent summer.

 


Anne Elliott is a securities analyst / writer living in Brooklyn. She has performed spoken word, with and without ukulele, at PS122, The Whitney Museum, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and Woodstock ’94. Her stories have appeared in Hobart, Pindeldyboz, Opium, and others. Her hobbies include knitting and feral cat management.

Read our interview with Anne here.

“1984” by Craig Boyer

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spider and drain
Image by Kristin Beeler

Steam rises. My clothes begin to freeze. Those damned coin-operated dryers at the dormitory never do the job.

I save quarters for cigarettes and dollars for beer and never have enough for more than one dryer cycle. Soon I’m frozen solid as the Tin Man. Other students, well bundled for the downhill walk to class, don’t notice.

Dormitories of brick stand silent and brown. The river is choked with ice and the ice is piled with snow. Trees stand naked and the sun sleeps, buried by clouds. Boots whisper over the snow and words turn to smoke. The white wall of the campus chapel is defaced by the black, spray-painted words of Nietzsche: God is Dead.

Am I dead, too?

In developmental psychology class, I begin to thaw. Twenty minutes into the lecture, I might have just climbed out of a swimming pool. But nobody looks. Not even when a small puddle forms beneath the hems of my jeans. My sleeves drip onto my blank notebook. Even the little, gray-haired professor, who has no choice but to look, doesn’t.

A woman in a denim jacket palms me a menthol. I hate menthols, but beggars can’t be choosers. As pathetic as this looks, bumming isn’t as bad as digging through ashtrays in the dormitory. And I’ve wandered the student union so long that my clothes are nearly dry. Ten more cigarettes and my empty pack will be full again.

A few more empty beer cans from the wastebaskets in the dormitory and I’ll skip my afternoon philosophy class and carry them to the recycling machine on Water Street. This benevolent, cast-iron monster spits quarters. I hope it spits enough for me to buy a twelve-pack of cheap, local beer—but even twelve beers don’t get me drunk enough. Not anymore.

I’ll have to use my knife.

It’s a bread knife, serrated, bent and blunt, but not too blunt to cut a hole in a can of beer. Warm beer works best. It’s easier to swallow. So I split my stash in half: six cans for the refrigerator and six for the ledge. Then I set the first can at an angle on my writing desk, prop the bottom of it with a psychology book, drive the crooked knife through the aluminum, fold back the sharp edges, seal the hole with my mouth as I lift the can and pop the top.

Five seconds and the beer is gone.

I shove the can under my desk like I shoved empty vodka bottles under my bed before I went away to college, where I planned to quit drinking— right after my 20th birthday.

When I’m drinking, my roommate stays away.

Popping another beer open, I feel a good buzz start. After “shooting” three more I can relax and drink the cold ones that I crammed into my roommate’s little refrigerator in place of his sodas.

Finally, I’m a little drunk. Only two cans remain from the twelve-pack. The news starts. Outside, far beyond the women’s residence hall, red lights flash from a radio tower. Red…. Black…. Red…. Black…. Red…. Black….

The beer is gone. I feel dull all over. This knife is dull, too. I press harder, running the serrated blade across my palm. The stinging sensation isn’t mine—I’m simply aware it is there. I press harder…. The blood is mine. I use it to write on the blue wall of the dormitory room using the words of the Beatles: “HELTER SKELTER.”

I wonder if anyone will notice.

 

 

Craig Boyer started writing in the mid-1980s by recording his nightmares and sharing them with Dr. J. Allan Hobson of Harvard, one of the world’s foremost dream researchers.  Since that time he has published essays in Blueline, Breakaway Books, Nostalgia Press, and The Bellevue Literary Review, where in 2005 he published The Devil and a Pocketful of Glass about his lifelong struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder.  In 2003 he was admitted to the MFA program at the University of Iowa, but chose instead to keep his full-time job and start a family.  He now works as a behavioral specialist with Emotionally/Behaviorally Disturbed high-school students and has a beautiful wife (Liz) and two beautiful children: (Ellie-6 and Alex-2).  1984 is an excerpt from his memoir-in-progress, Deja Vu: snapshots from the journey of an obsessive-compulsive. Visit his website at: Deja Vu

Read our interview with Craig here.

“Enough” by Jason Schneiderman

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red rose
Image by Kristin Beeler

She grips the lectern. Her eyes are steady. She has Rasputin eyes. Steve McQueen eyes.

My father is transfixed, leaning forward in his chair to meet her stare. She starts with “The world is what you make of it,” and the next forty minutes is about the law of survival, how you have to be ruthless, how nothing can stop you from getting what you want if you never back down.

“Why do one percent of Americans possess ninety percent of America’s wealth?” she calls out, and the crowd shouts back “Because they deserve it,” which surprises me. These people aren’t rich. We’re in a hotel ballroom, not Madison Square Garden. The chair I am sitting on is badly cushioned and poorly upholstered.

How did they know to yell that? My father yells it too, which makes me look at him, but he shrugs. When she finishes, there are testimonials from people who lost everything and how great it was to be left with nothing. How the end of welfare made this woman start her business, and how not having health care made this man take responsibility for his diet.

We’re getting to the question and answer section, which seems stupid to me, since this day seems all about not helping other people. I want to ask a question, but I don’t know how to say what I want to know.

Everyone is talking about money, and I want to ask about gratitude or grace. I want to ask about care and about need. I want to ask about how I have better dental care than the Feudal lords of medieval Europe and how that makes me appreciate this long line of dentists and anesthesiologists going all the way back to Ancient Egypt. I want to ask about how the rose bush in my backyard was developed by botanists, and how much I need them when I go outside. Or how magical it is to me that my trash gets picked up every Monday and Thursday, or how even in their ruthlessness, everyone in this room seems to want to help each other out.

I want to ask about value and I want to ask about family. My dad looks kind of hopeful when I get in line to ask a question, but when my question comes out, not.

It doesn’t come out like I had thought it would. It comes out, “Do you have to love someone to want them to be OK?”

She looks puzzled, then angry. She takes a breath, says, “Get a job.”

 

 

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books, and Striking Surface, winner of the 2009 Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press.  His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.  He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004.  He currently directs the Writing Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Read our interview with Jason here.