“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.

“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 Palate, december, Southwest Review, Cold Mountain Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Oklahoma.

“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.