“Revenge Served Hot” by Mary McCluskey

Revenge.seahorse_shark_sun
“Seahorse, Shark, Sun” by Laura Didyk, Sharpie on paper, 2015

Matt, as next of kin, receives the news from the prison warden. Then he calls me.

“Dad’s dead,” my brother says. “How’ll we divvy up the estate? You get the coffee mug and I get his sharp leather belt?”

We had been expecting this, but still my limbs soften. I sit down abruptly.

“I’ll handle the funeral,” he says. “Same church as Mom?”

I agree, surprised. Matt seems calm, suddenly capable.

~

When I arrive at the church, the bare coffin is already in place. Matt, in jeans and shirt sleeves, is waiting. The ceremony is short: no hymns, no eulogies. The vicar says a few words and then the coffin is carried to a waiting limousine.

I pause, bewildered, as the funeral car moves out of the churchyard gates.

“Where are they going?”

“The Crem.”

I turn. My brother smiles.

“Crematorium. All booked, all paid for.”

“But  – he reserved a grave next to Mom.”

“She’ll enjoy the extra space,” Matt says.

Startled, I remember my father’s rage when I suggested cremation for Mom. Matt had been there in the room, had heard that explosion, too.

Matt pushes up his shirt sleeves, turns his wrists to display the tender skin of the upper arms. The uneven circles, once a blistering, agonizing red are fading now, just gray dents in the flesh.  I have two circular scars also, on my shoulder blades. Our father’s drunken defense against the demands of two small children was a cigar with a burning end.

“You remember, don’t you,” my brother says. “How he loved fire.”

 

 

Mary McCluskey has had prizewinning short stories published in The Atlantic, The London Magazine, StoryQuarterly, London’s Litro Magazine, on Salon.com, and in literary journals in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Hong Kong.  Her novel, INTRUSION, is scheduled for publication by Little A in March 2016. She divides her time between Stratford-upon-Avon, in England, and Los Angeles.

Read and interview with Mary here.

 

“Wile E.” by Christopher Allen

Wile. E.BODY AS BIRD
“Body as Bird” by Laura Didyk, Sharpie on paper, 2015

A life of want–40 years of toxic relationships, cul-de-sac jobs, and just plain dogus ignoramus decisions—has made me pretty good at cartoon impressions. I can do Daffy and Bugs, Porky the P-P-P-Pig too. “Beep-beep!” I honk, because I know my father’s a fan.

“You like Road Runner?” he asks. “Smart bird. Agile bird. That bird’s top fit.” My father reveres Road Runner. “Beep-beep,” he says, which sounds nothing like the bird. “I’d be Road Runner—if I was, you know, a cartoon.”

~

Road Runner rips up the road, zig-zags into the cartoon desert. A feather lazes and lands on Coyote’s crestfallen soot-covered nose: a message to the dog that the naturally gifted always outrun the naturally thick.

Blown to smithereens, electrocuted, flattened by a boulder meant for his nemesis, Coyote crawls out of a Wile-E.-shaped X in the canyon floor. He unrolls himself and plumps, his cuts and contusions healed by the time he plans his next attack. He’s a miracle with limitless lives. His chagrin always curls to a grin.

And he’s never short on ingeniously ineffective plans. His reserves of can-do are inexhaustible, his understanding of aerodynamics and leverage commendably ill-informed. He’s Machiavelli with a tail or maybe just really hungry—Twain’s “living, breathing allegory of Want.”

~

“Not me,” I say. “I’d be Wile E.”

“Why?” My father’s face contorts in practiced disappointment though he’s been dead since May. “Coyote never wins. He’s his own worst enemy. All his stupid plans backfire. He’s a ridiculous clown. A farce!” He’s shouting now. “A waste of space. A laughingstock. He’s a fucking loser!”

“I know, Dad,” I say as I climb resolutely into yet another cannon and light the fuse. “But the artists always draw Wile E. another chance.”

 

 

Christopher Allen’s work appears in Indiana Review, Eclectica Magazine, Night Train, Literary Orphans and over a hundred other journals and anthologies. Read his book reviews in [PANK), The Lit Pub, Necessary Fiction and more. Originally from Tennessee, he now splits his time between Munich and Dublin. Allen is the managing editor of SmokeLong Quarterly and blogs HERE.

Read an interview with Christopher here.

“Anxiety” by Kristin Laurel

FLOWER (Anxiety)
“Flower Queen” by Laura Didyk, Sharpie on paper, 2015

I’m soaking in the tub trying to relax goddammit when I see a bee flying around and I start to get sad about the declining population of honeybees but then I notice it’s a wasp and it’s flying extremely close to the light bulb and I start to think of that story by Virginia Wolfe except that was about a moth and I don’t remember it very well because my brain isn’t as sharp as it used to be and I’ll probably end up with early onset Alzheimer’s like my grandfather but anyway how in the hell did a wasp get into the house maybe it slipped through the hole in the screen or came in through the front door and then flew upstairs into my bathroom I don’t know but I need some new screens and an honest handyman or else more wasps might get into the house and sting me and I can’t deal with any more pain; what if I develop itching and hives or an anaphylactic reaction and I’m still trying to relax go away wasp I don’t want to die but it’s getting harder to breathe and I can’t feel my lips or the tips of my toes or fingers and what if I’m having a panic attack and I pass out and drown how will anyone know it was that wasp that killed me?

 

 

Kristin Laurel is employed as an ED nurse and flight nurse. She writes to stay sane and sometimes nice. She lives in Waconia, MN and Asheville, NC and completed a two-year program in poetry at The Loft Literary Center (MPLS). Her work can be seen in CALYX, The Mainstreet Rag, Grey Sparrow, The Raleigh Review, The Mom Egg, The Doctor TJ Eckleburg Review and many others. Her first book, Giving Them All Away, won the 2011 Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press (Dublin, Ohio). To read a free copy, go to http://eveningstreetpress.com/kristin-laurel-2011.html. Most recently, her CNF piece, Terminal Burrowing, won first place in the 2015 issue of The Talking Stick.

Read an interview with Kristin here.

“Fred” by Shaula Evans

Fred
“The Other Side” by Mia Avramut, wax on paper, 8.2 x 11.6 in.

My grandmother’s boyfriend, whom she’ll never marry (she’s had enough of fetch and carry after three husbands), this man not my blood kin, drives my grandmother to family dinners at our house to sit in his gray wool hat at the end of the table with us children and other outsiders. Fred makes me gifts: my face, close-cropped, in roses, irises, a wineglass–no Photoshop, no fancy photography, just Fred snipping, scissor handles wedged past the inflamed knuckles of his retired craftsman hands. Fred glues me into beauty. I mumble thanks, abandoning his faces to ashtrays, water marks, Safeway slab cake icing smears, while Fred smiles with hungry old man eyes at crumbs I proffer as politeness. When grandfathers disappear overnight it is dangerous to love a man who hovers between chauffeur and family.

 

 

Shaula Evans is a writer, editor and translator. Born and raised in Canada, and educated in Montreal, France and Japan, she currently resides in New Mexico after spending 6 ½ years traveling around North America in a Mini Cooper. You can find her online at shaulaevans.com and on Twitter at @ShaulaEvans.

 

“Good Will” by Beverly Lucey

Good Will
“Remembrance” by Mia Avramut, acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 8 x 8 in.

Will might have to kill Candace who works across the aisle from him. She crunches on hard butterscotch sticks whenever she gets an assignment she hates. She grinds them up like a beaver with a #2 pencil.

Still, he’s got to “roll up the sleeves and get to work another day another dollar if a job is worth doing it is worth doing well.” That’s what they say. Except one of the rollers on his ergonomic chair disappeared somewhere between yesterday and today. Will tilts. Will thinks someone on the night shift took his wheel away. He can’t roll up his sleeves to focus on the spreadsheets splayed in front of him because he’s wearing a scratchy-feeling golf shirt from J.C. Penney his wife picked out. Also, working from a tilt makes his eyes focus funny. He should find something in his cubicle that matches the thickness of the wheel.  A deck of cards is as close as he can get.

Some acoustical flaw about the sound-muffling panels in the room amplifies and deposits grotesque noises from odd corners of the large office and funnels them to Will. Hard to tell who is using the Emory board, who has the sound turned up for email alerts, who is trying but failing to suppress farts. On top of the spreadsheets, Will thinks he sees candy-stick  wrappers, fingernail dust, multiplying Betty Boop dolls, and a cloud of flatulence. Will suspects that others in the office add his name to newsletter lists with regularity. He doesn’t want vitamins or discount thongs, or news from Guam. But at 10:00 a.m. with a plunking sound, his inbox receives #082, “Small Comfort.” It’s the poem-of-the day sent from yet another practical joker, the gods, or Billy Collins*…and it saves him. At least from killing Candace.

 

 

Beverly Lucey, a winner of the 9th Glass Woman Prize for Fiction (2011), moved back to western Massachusetts after dallying in the South for a decade. While in Georgia, she learned that “Bless your heart” is not necessarily meant to comfort, and while in Arkansas she learned that every politician must make an appearance at the January Gillett Coon Supper, where deep-fried raccoon is indeed on the menu. She has an extensive fiction presence online in e-zines (in Zoetrope, All Story Extra, Feathered Flounder, Absinthe Review and others), and her short fiction has been published in  print: Flint River Review, Moxie, Quality Women’s Fiction (UK), Wild Strawberries and, most recently in, Twisted Tales. Four of her stories are anthologized in We Teach Them All (Stenhouse).

 

“Life Saver” by Mary McCluskey

City Morning
“City Morning” by Mia Avramut, wax on paper, 5.8 x 8.2 in.

The thing about living with a guy who’s just out, who’s done his time and just hasn’t settled back in yet, he jumps and twitches and doesn’t sleep, and his eyes dart left and right and he’s always turning in the street, looking behind him. The thing about living with this guy is that even when his voice is soft, a whisper, the razor blade edge of it seeps through. When he’s saying oh, you’re so hot, you’re special you are, there’s something else.

I hear it, this thing in his voice, but I think – he’d never hurt me. He just wouldn’t.

We’re watching TV late on Friday afternoon when he kicks the wall and says – let’s go out. I jump up and we walk fast, him five yards ahead of me, and right there in town there’s a charity fair. Stalls with hand-made sweaters and jams and pickles and booths with goofy games. He laughs at the old ladies and he has a go at the shooting range, just for the hell of it, and moves the gun to the right trying to whip it around as if he wants to wave it all over the place but the guy looks at him hard, and it’s chained anyway, so he can’t budge it. He wins two goldfish. One boy, one girl. Well, that’s what the old gal said. I name them after him and me – Ted and Jackie, because Jackie has this streaky bit on top, like my hair.

I buy a proper bowl for them. He says it’s waste of money. He says they’ll be dead before you get home. Turns out he’s right. Half right. Jackie dies the next day. All her colors just vanish. She’s fine at first, then there she is, floating on top of the water, her gold bleached out. The boy fish doesn’t seem to notice. Keeps swimming round her.

In the pub when I tell Ted that his fish is still swimming but mine is dead, he gives me a look, picks up his drink and drains it, his eyes all funny and contorted through the bottom of the glass.

At home, I wait until I hear the TV go on, then I pull Jackie out of the bin, flatten her out on the kitchen counter, looking for some deliberate injury. I know he killed her. Then he’s there behind me and I scramble about hiding Jackie’s body in kitchen towel, throwing her in the trash and he wants to fuck now, and he says – you’re different, nobody gets me like you do. And when he says that, as if I’m the only one in the world who does, I give in. I can’t help it. In bed, afterwards, when he seems calm, I ask him, I say – tell me what happened with that girl. Not what you told the jury. The truth.

I expect him to yell at me, say shut the fuck up but no, he wants to tell me.

Saw her in the club, he says. She was hot. Really hot. And gagging for it. I was just fooling around. I push her up against the car and she yells something and then she’s got this thing in her hand, some kind of spike and I grab it, and push it towards her neck, just to shut her up but she moves and – He stops then, turns away from me. Stupid bitch, he says.

It’s when I think of her there, all her colors bleeding out, that something goes click in my head. My body cools. I don’t want him touching me. He doesn’t notice, he’s limp now, relaxed. I want to get up and run. Run away, like she should have done.

And the next night, when he’s gone to the liquor store, I pack my bag so fast and I think – that goldfish saved my life. I don’t know how, but she did.

 

 

Mary McCluskey’s prizewinning short stories have been published in The Atlantic, The London Magazine, StoryQuarterly, London’s Litro Magazine, on Salon.com, and in literary journals in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Hong Kong.  Her novel, INTRUSION, is scheduled for publication by Little A in March 2016. She divides her time between Stratford-upon-Avon, in England, and Los Angeles.

Read an interview with Mary here.

 

“A Taste of Peppermint” by K.A. Wisniewski

Taste of Peppermint
“Forest of Red Birds” by Mia Avramut, wax on paper, 5.8 x 8.2 in.

Peppermint Harris never walked too far from home; he didn’t like things he didn’t know. Still had his ’72 Gibson standing up in the corner of his daughter’s living room and only changed its strings when its rust and grunge cut through his calloused fingers. He nicked his face that morning shaving and dabbed some peroxide over the cut. He didn’t wash before he left and, as he waited for the light to change at the street corner, he smelled his hands. His black suit and cowboy hat hid a tired, aching body, the purple splotches on his legs, the red in his eyes, the beaten skin hanging onto its face.

And when he crossed the street, nobody knew who he was. None of the neighborhood kids called out Hey Peppermint, how ya doin? No one tapped him on the shoulder and asked for an autograph or sang one of his songs back to him. Not a soul even asked him for a light. After he picked up the pack of Camels, he’d stop at the bar next door for his usual: no famous imported beers, just two Buds and a double whiskey. He’d strike a match from the bar stool and he’d smile, remembering how he once enjoyed being recognized.

 

 

K. A. Wisniewski is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, the Managing Editor of Roving Eye Press, and an editor at Calypso Editions.  His creative work has most recently appeared in Toad Suck, the Tule Review, Third Wednesday, the Chiron Review, Genre, the Sierra Nevada Review, and basalt.  He lives in Baltimore.

Read an interview with K.A. here.

 

“Grip” by Kathy Fish

auburn-ca-poppies-Grip
“Auburn CA Poppies” by Allen Forrest, Oil on canvas

My brother, Mike, is getting solar panels installed in his house. All the materials are laid out on his front lawn. Workers on his roof pulling off shingles. I go inside and confront a small boy in overalls, holding a toy hammer, his cheeks tender and rosy like a picture-book child.

One of the workers couldn’t get a sitter, Mike says, coming up behind me with a cup of dry Cheerios for the kid. Mike works from home. He has three computers in his office, a stand-up desk with a treadmill. I’m afraid he’s going to ask me to stay and watch the kid, but I have things I need to do, funeral errands, like going to Walgreens to have prints made from the old pictures we’ll display, and getting Easter lilies for the chapel. Our brother Tom died a couple of days ago and his daughter requested these things, gave all of her dad’s siblings some tasks. We wanted to help any way we could. He is being cremated as we speak.

The boy sits on the kitchen floor with his Cheerios and his hammer and stares at me. I am suddenly, monstrously angry with this child just for being here.

And why must this be done today, I ask my brother. He sips his coffee. If I cancel it will be weeks before they can come back, he says.

I wonder how it’s possible that a living breathing person can be gripping your hand one day and be reduced to a pile of ashes the next. We all stood around his bed at the hospice, my other brothers and I, and Tom grabbed hold of my hand and gripped it hard enough to hurt. He was smiling, had a gleam in his eye.

Mike said, you’ve still got it, bro. Tom had been a quarterback, a state wrestling champion. My dad used to have the boys squeeze tennis balls while they watched tv. Grip was important. The difference between winning and losing.

Tom had stopped talking the day before. Was given no more fluids per the protocol. Massive amounts of morphine and anti-seizure meds were being pumped into his body, but he gripped my hand like he did those tennis balls of his youth.

Take it easy, you’ll break her hand, my brother Steve said. We all laughed. This was one of those good moments from the last few days. There’d been others. When Tom’s ex-wife leaned in close to him, smiling, and he wrapped his arms around her. When the college buddy showed up, had driven all the way from Texas and sat next to Tom telling all the old, wild stories. The fight they got into in a small town bar and the night they spent in jail there, being fed pork barbecue and corn on the cob and not wanting to leave. The stories made Tom laugh, albeit soundlessly. It was so good to see.

He finally let go of my hand and lay back and Steve dipped the tiny sponge on a stick into the bottle of Crown Royal and dabbed it on Tom’s lips and tongue. There, brother, he said, have some of the good stuff.

 

 

Kathy Fish‘s stories have appeared in The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers(Black Lawrence Press, 2015), Guernica, Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Quick Fiction, and elsewhere. She is the author of three collections of short fiction: a chapbook of flash fiction in the chapbook collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press, 2008), Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011) and Together We Can Bury It, a second printing of which is available now from The Lit Pub. She has recently joined the faculty of the forthcoming Mile-High MFA at Regis University in Denver.

Read an interview with Kathy here.

“Lost” by John Gifford

Lost_south-african-hills
“South African Hills” by Allen Forrest, oil on canvas

Fifteen years, his unruly, upstairs neighbor likes to remind him in those empty, uncertain hours of night, is twenty percent of the average American male’s lifespan! That’ll throw a wheel out of balance!

Of course, he knows this, can in fact still hear his lawyer arguing on his behalf, that time served is time he cannot replace. Taken from him. Gone.

Fifteen years! his neighbor points out, as if he’s forgotten, as if he hasn’t thought about it nearly every minute of every one of the ninety-nine days he’s been on the outside. Which is why he keeps the radio on, morning, noon, and night. Silence is a rabble-rouser.

Although he was exonerated, his name cleared, he didn’t get everything back. How could he? When he thinks about it like this, late at night, lying there in that fragmented apartment, trying to remember faces, names, numbers, and what the world looked like before, before, even the quarter-million-dollar settlement his lawyer negotiated for him seems inadequate, inconsequential. Unless…he can’t be sure.

He heard disbelief’s voice for so long that eventually it moved in with him and became his cellmate. Then one night his memory slipped through the bars and escaped, and suddenly he couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t doubted, when he hadn’t seen himself through the eyes of others. After all, if he’d needed any evidence, there he was, wearing orange shame, eating for sustenance rather than pleasure, with no use for a calendar. And yet he was innocent. That’s what he always maintained. Innocent. That’s what his lawyer had argued. Innocent.

Technicality: that’s what everyone else said. Even after DNA evidence helped overturn his conviction. Even after the newspaper dedicated three column inches to setting the record straight. Everyone said it was just a technicality. Just a glitch in the system. A minor detail had set him free.

His lawyer said to ignore them, said to look forward, not back, said to get on with his life, that he’s only thirty-five, that—if one could believe statistics, research—he’d probably live another thirty-five.

It’s going on four months now and though disbelief packed up and went away he can still hear self-doubt stumbling around upstairs in the cruel, wicked hours of night, rattling him with its shackled footfalls, hurling antagonistic slurs—fifteen years!—as if it has nothing better to do than stay behind and torment him.

Other than groceries—just the basics; a learned behavior which has become habit; but then again his idea of eating well has always been getting enough to eat, hasn’t it?—and batteries for the radio, which he buys in bulk, the only thing he’s sprung for so far is a pair of reading glasses, faux tortoiseshell cheaters that multiply like rumors and which make him feel like an historian as he scans the residential listings at his local library, reveling in the room’s wide-open space and the vague camaraderie of the other visitors as he scrolls through screens, scanning, the hairs on back of his neck bristling occasionally, his head jerking and twisting whenever someone approaches from behind, then the breathing techniques, deep breaths, and the counting and holding and waiting as he centers himself in the winter of his fuzzy, if familiar, discontent. And all the while he never stops searching for names that might help him fill that fifteen-year void.

He tells himself that perhaps he can connect with someone he used to know, a friend or former co-worker from the car lot, which is now just a tire shop. Or maybe he has some family left, someone out there somewhere who can remind him who or what he used to be, who can substantiate that what he believes—what he wants to believe—is true, that his freedom is the product of something innate, something more than the minor technicality his upstairs neighbor insists. He has money now and he tells himself that he’d spend all of it to prove he is who he always said he was. And if he can’t do this, he thinks, what’s the point of going on? What use is money, even a quarter million, to a man who can’t look at himself in the mirror, tell himself he’s innocent, and really believe it?

 

 

John Gifford (@johnagifford) is the author of the story collections, Wish You Were Here (Big Table Publishing, 2016) and Freeze Warning, which was named a finalist for the 2015 Press 53 Short Fiction Award. His writing has appeared in Harpur PalatedecemberSouthwest ReviewCold Mountain Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Oklahoma.

 

“At Risk” by Joan Wilking

waverly-beach-docks-At Risk
“Waverly Beach Docks” by Allen Forrest, oil on canvas

I think a lot about ghosts these days. They feel closer than ever: my mother trailing the scent of her favorite summer perfume, my father’s puckish smile, the friends who died young and the ones who died, almost, but not quite old, some by misadventure, some by disease. That end feels too close, the claustrophobia of old age. The off ramp to God only knows where, makes me wish I believed.

The black and yellow signs on the road say, Uneven Pavement – Pass at Your Own Risk. There is only the one road in and out of the Neck. The old road has been ground down, waiting to be resurfaced after a winter that was so severe it turned the asphalt into rubble.

My childless friends are obsessed with their dogs. They post pleas for help for one animal shelter after another. One posted pictures of her dog on its birthday and then thanked friends, on the dog’s behalf, for their best wishes. So many of us, turn seventy this year. My daughters wanted to throw a party. I said no. So they will come to surprise me with something we will do together, alone.

I’m on my way to the farmer’s market. There was the smell of lilac and viburnum in the air when I left the house. A fog bank lay so low and thick on the Bay that I couldn’t see the water. The tops of trees on the other side were still visible, grayed out, like a ghostly mountain range.

At the market, an herbalist is set up under a white tent. She has pink streaks in her hair. She sizes me up and says, You might like to try the burdock root. The placard propped up against the jar says it good for easing the pain of arthritis and rheumatism. You brew it. It makes quite a nice tea, she says.

 

 

Joan Wilking has had short fiction published in The Atlantic, Bellevue Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, Other Voices, The Mississippi Review, Ascent, The MacGuffin, Hobart, The Huffington Post, The Santa Fe Writer’s Project Journal and many other literary magazines and anthologies online and in print. Her story, Deer Season, was a finalist for the 2010 Nelson Algren Short Story Competition of the Chicago Tribune. Her essay, Too Soon, is in the May 2014 issue of Brevity. Her essay Sunday Times is online at The Manifest Station and her short story, Clutter, in the Elm Leaves Journal is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

Read an interview with Joan here.