ii. 18 July

dear patricio,

lower case

wind

has the last word

you depict yourself sitting along a precipice, fishing for musical notes, balloons in the air.  you say you are the celestial scribe.  lightness, sunshine.  my land is gray, sad, in the way of lorca who once lay on his bed pretending to be dead.  call me duende only. lorca was murdered, a vile act, an assassination, but for the moment let s not go there.  gray does not mean gloomy.  lorca s world was not gloomy.  death quickened his pulse.  he wrote of it always, duende.  death does cast its sadness.  still, i do not want to live forever.  what about life … my world is gray, but not all things in it are gray.  some are luminous.  some shine with such power as to cause little earthquakes …  a strawberry or a bit of sedum growing on a rock, a touch, even a glance.  kindness is always luminous.  flowers are better off on their stems.  fruit should be eaten fresh from the vine or tree.  the stars at night, fireflies, the eyes of someone you love … these belong in a purse with the purest gold.  just now a great wind has come.  lightning flashes above the big maple.  a flock of birds dash out.  jagged and black against the sky, they disappear over the far aspens, their motion uniform. beauty.  the great wind travels in a circle.  a large branch snaps.

iv.  the living dead

23 July

dear i m a superhero,

thank you for your recent invitation to contribute to your encyclopedia of the living dead.  your almost complete lack of criteria may very well prove invigorating.

it continues to be unsettled here.  the sun is out, and the air is hot as if it had come out of a furnace.  i hear distant thunder, however, and it seems to be coming this way.  its approach is slow and ominous, much like that of a zombie in the movies of old.

i have consulted wikipedia, which i often find useful.  for the first time i encountered the term –zombie apocalypse-.  this phenomenon involves zombies taking over the planet, eating human brains.

i generally do not base compositions on my own personal judgments; however,  it is difficult to write with authority on this subject, it being so new to me.  i find myself able to offer you only my opinions.  as such, i hope they are useful.

in my opinion,  we are all waiting in quiet despair, fear, and loneliness for the other sandal to drop.  our brain is the seat of justice.  its consumption evokes fear of the worst possible chaos.

in my opinion, sometimes our mothers teach us how unique and special we are.  it may be true, but who, besides them, sees it … in this respect of not-noticing, we are all zombies of a sort.

cannibalism is taboo.  jeffrey dahmer comes to mind, but we also remember that jesus asked us to eat his flesh.  please, i mean no offense.

in my opinion, even symbolically, we are not supposed to eat our own kind.

if this is not useful, feel free to discard it.

_______________

Theresa Williams has published a novel, The Secret of Hurricanes, which was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize. Her short fiction and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals and magazines, including The Sun, Gargoyle, Chattahoochee Review, Barnwood, Segue, Paterson Literary Review,  and Seems.

Claudine and I had consumed a liter of wine and a platter of baçalau, followed by two rounds of port. The restaurant was now closing. Waiters were wiping the tables with rags, and the man who’d been carving meat from a cow’s leg—the hoof still attached—was packing up his utensils.

“Shouldn’t we ask them to call us a taxi?” I said.

“We’ll find one outside,” Claudine replied. “One more?”

I didn’t want another port—I was tired and eager to be back at the hostel, alone. But I said nothing as Claudine made the order, again in Spanish, even though this was Portugal. It was obnoxious, but then everything about Claudine was obnoxious: her sheepskin coat handmade by a Portuguese villager, her second-hand beaded child’s purse, her eyes smudged with kohl that she’d purchased at a market in Morocco. Everything Claudine owned was “authentic,” and I was supposed to be impressed. We were two women traveling alone, brought together only by convenience.

The waiter set down the glasses of port without a word. “What was I talking about?” Claudine said.

“Your father,” I said, yawning.

“That’s right. So I’m walking down the street to my apartment—this is in New York—and guess who I see?”

“Your father.”

“Did I tell you that already? The bizarre part is, I haven’t seen him in eight years, and it turns out he lives across the street from me. In New York City. What are the chances?”

“Did he know you lived there?”

“That’s what I thought. Then one day I passed him on the street, and he looked right through me. How could he not have recognized me?”

“Maybe he wasn’t really looking.”

Claudine finished her port in one swallow. “What about your father? Are you close? Tell me everything.”

“There’s nothing to tell. He and my mom are still married. They live in the suburbs. He used to be a doctor, then last year he retired.”

“That’s so boring.”

“I told you. We should go.”

Outside the village was dark and deserted—even the streetlamps had been shut off. I pictured Claudine and I walking the six miles back to the hostel in the pitch black, our high heels sinking into the mud.

“We’ll find something. We just have to go into the center of town,” Claudine said.

“This is the center of town.”

Claudine called out to a lone passerby, a man in black jeans and a leather jacket. She explained in Spanish that we needed a taxi, could he help us?

The man responded in English, “No taxis now.”

“Are you sure?”

The man paused and looked us over. Then he said, “I know where one lives. I can show you.”

We followed the man into an alley. My heart was beating fast, but I was determined not to show any fear. Claudine wasn’t afraid, not at all. She was talking to the man about the collages she was making out of indigenous leaves.

“You’re an artist.” The man sounded impressed.

It was all I could do not to laugh. I’d seen pictures of Claudine’s art. For one project, she’d painted her naked body with henna and rolled around on a giant canvas.

The man stopped abruptly and hollered up to somebody’s apartment. The shutters of an upstairs window banged open and an old woman appeared. The man said something to her in Portuguese. I cringed when I heard the word “Americans.” After he finished talking, the woman began to yell.

I was horrified. “Let’s go,” I said.

“She says her son is asleep,” the man said.

“Ask her again,” Claudine said.

Instead he led us away. The old woman was still yelling, and windows all over the neighborhood were lighting up.

“I have another idea,” the man said. “I’ll take you to a bar where you can call the other driver on the telephone.”

It looked like the bar we had visited earlier in the afternoon, where we’d stood sipping wine alongside old Portuguese men in their woolen caps. The men had weathered faces and hands, but they drank wine out of dainty glass cups. They’d smiled at us and sent us a platter of bread topped with grilled pork. Claudine wanted to go talk to them, but I’d said no.

Inside this bar the men were younger and unsmiling. On the television a naked woman was stroking her own breasts. The bartender charged us two Euros to use the phone.

“No one’s answering,” said our friend in the leather jacket. “We’ll try the other number.”

“Two Euros again,” demanded the bartender.

I took another coin from my purse and handed it over. Claudine ordered us two glasses of wine.

“That’s Spanish. Here we say copo,” the bartender told her.

Claudine looked at him with a stupid grin on her face.

Eventually it was arranged that someone from the bar—an aloof, mustached man with acne scars on his cheeks—would give us a ride.

“That’s so nice of you, très gentil,” Claudine told him, but he still didn’t smile.

In silence we finished our wine. The man with the mustache waited for us in the doorway as I paid the bill. His eyes were locked to the television screen.

I felt a stab of panic. “We could find a hotel,” I whispered to Claudine.

“In this tiny village? There won’t be anything.”

Just then someone else appeared. For a moment I didn’t recognize him. Then I realized it was the man from the restaurant, the one who had carved meat from the cow’s leg. He was older, shorter, and stouter than the other men in the bar, with a close-clipped gray beard and an argyle sweater.

He took charge of things, ordering the other men to make a phone call, which we didn’t have to pay for, and to bring us water and wine. I was flooded with relief when, only ten minutes later, a taxi pulled up in front of the bar.

“Obrigado.” I was frustrated that I didn’t know enough Portuguese to thank him better.

“I am Inácio.” He tapped on his chest.

“Ingrid.”

He took my hand and kissed it. He had a hangdog face with kind, droopy eyes. Without thinking, I hugged him. I smelled tobacco and felt the scratchiness of his sweater. I hadn’t hugged anyone in months, not since I’d graduated from college and started traveling, and I guess that’s why my eyes filled with tears.

“Good luck, miss.” He pronounced the words with precision, just as I’d been doing with my limited Portuguese.

The taxi driver already knew the way back to the hostel; probably it was not his first time rescuing tourists. “That was so fun,” Claudine said as we climbed out of the taxi. I said nothing. For some reason I was thinking about my father and trying to remember the last time he hugged me. Quite possibly he had never hugged me.

Claudine and I stood in the dark hallway holding our tarnished brass keys. The hostel was quiet except for the ticking of the old clock.

“You want some more port?”

All of the sudden I didn’t want to be alone. “One more,” I said.

In the tiny room Claudine lit candles and took out a bottle of port and a bowl of olives she’d bought at the farmer’s market. The olives tasted of almonds and salt and soil. They were Portuguese olives, small and green, so unlike the fat Greek olives that could be found in any American supermarket.

“I need to learn Portuguese so I can write that man a letter. To thank him,” I said.

“Who?” Claudine said.

“The man who helped us. With the silver beard.”

“Don’t you love old Portuguese men?” Claudine said. “The man I bought these olives from had no teeth. He scooped the olives out of a plastic bucket and weighed them in an old tin scale. I wonder if he would sell me one of those scales.”

“Where are all their wives?”

“I guess they died. Or maybe they’re keeping them in the cellar.”

We both giggled at this, and then we were silent.

I was thinking that Claudine had been right—we should’ve talked with the old men who’d sent us the pork. I said, “The man with the beard looked just like my father.” It wasn’t true, and I don’t know why I said it.

“Finally you say something interesting,” Claudine said, emptying the last of the port into our glasses.

_______________

Jennifer Hurley has published short fiction in Front Porch, The Mississippi Review, and The Arroyo Literary Review, among others. She is an alum of Boston University’s graduate creative writing program and currently works as an Associate Professor of English at Ohlone College in the San Francisco Bay Area. She lives in Alameda with her husband, four cats, a puppy, and innumerable books, and she can be found online at jen-hurley.com.

Joyce sat in the back of her mother’s car with her feet shoved beneath the seat in front of her. Her mother kept fluffing her hair, and Joyce wanted to sink her teeth into the back of the leather seat so her mother would turn around and drive her back to the hospital, where she could be re-Rorschached and re-sedated. It would be nice, like being pulled backwards on a bungee cord in a blue, blue sky. Joyce reclined her head and covered it with her hood. Outside the car window, a smashed rabbit’s tail twitched in the wind.

In the hospital, she had sex with one of the orderlies in a supply closet and they told her she would have to leave. It was like Girl, Interrupted, except without Winona Ryder and without chicken bones beneath a bed.

The orderly’s name was Roger, and he always wore a T-shirt with Luigi from those Mario Brothers games on the front. He wore it beneath the blue smock that constituted his uniform. Every morning, when he gave her the two little white pills in a paper cup, Joyce would wink at him with her left eye. She knew she looked stupid – she was wearing a sweater with a reindeer on it and slippers that were so worn she could feel the coldness of the linoleum beneath her feet. But Roger was lonely and his hands shook when he handed her the capsules that she always swallowed dry. When his hands slid beneath her sweater later that day, she felt his fingernails against her nipples, and it was a feeling like she used to get on New Year’s, at ten years old, watching Dick Clark count down the seconds until the new year began.

There’s a dead rabbit on the road, Joyce said to her mother.

Huh, she said, fluffing her hair. Those things happen, every day, Joyce.

Joyce half expected her to start in again about how people and little tiny baby animals die in gruesome and unexpected ways every second of every day but she didn’t. Instead, she pulled into a gas station and said through the rear view mirror, Sorry, I can’t hold it any longer.

She watched her mother walk into the station and leaned back with her eyes closed. On the black screen of her eyelids, she watched her clothes come off, one article at a time, reindeer sweater on the floor, gray sports bra crumpled on top of it, polka dot panties down around one ankle. It wasn’t the first time she did it, but it felt like the only time it had been done in a bad way. Roger was afraid, she could tell, but he couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t, and even though she wanted it (Joyce wanted it so badly) she hated him as soon as he began to fuck her. Among the mop handles and toilet paper she and Roger sweated and panted until they both collapsed onto the floor. He set a hand on her forehead. It felt like a butterfly, resting there, waiting.

Aw fuck, he had said, and Joyce thought he was going to cry.

Instead, Joyce set a hand on his stomach and watched as it rose and fell with his breath.

There was a tap on the car window. I’m gonna fill up while we’re here, Joyce’s mother said. She filled the car with gas and got back in and pulled onto the highway. It all seemed like one swift movement.

On the road, Joyce watched for more road kill but it was getting darker and all she could really see was the flash of lighted windows off to the side. Swipes of gold and silver over the black night like a million shooting stars smeared into one and rubbed with a thumb into the sky. She pressed her forehead against the glass, felt the cold of the pane and the hollow knock against her skull. Her mother’s left hand was on the steering wheel, her right searching for a radio station.

Mom, Joyce said to the air vent above her head. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?

Her mom pressed button number two on the radio and looked over her shoulder. A flash of white from eyeball.

I will not dignify that with a response, Joyce, I won’t. You know what you did and you know it was dirty and awful. You know I was trying to get you help. Her mother said those words to the windshield and Joyce thought about how everything they said to each other bounced off of the glass and back into the stale air of the car. You know I was trying to help you, Joyce! her mother screamed.

Joyce remembered that in cars such as these you could roll down the windows with the push of a button. She lowered her window and was surprised at how fresh the air smelled, how wet and how green. She stuck her hooded head out of the window and into the air rushing past. She smiled into the trees, into the homes, into the gravel beneath her mother’s car. Her teeth like bone jewels, hanging onto nothing.

Get back in here! her mother yelled, get back inside! But Joyce pressed the window button so that she felt the edge of glass against her throat, like a modern-day guillotine on wheels. She thought of Roger, fired, alone in his apartment sitting on the couch in his underwear. Maybe playing video games or drinking a beer.

She kind of wanted to laugh, but the window caught against the ridges of trachea beneath her skin and instead she just stayed there, a smashed thing rushing down the road, the hair on her head flying, like the hands of very thin people, riding a roller coaster down and up once more.

_______________

Joellyn Powers attends the University of Pittsburgh. She has work appearing in Metazen, DOGZPLOT, and Big Lucks: Quick Lucks. She blogs at especiallyfreeing.tumblr.com.

The morning after, I drive to the drugstore still sweaty and ask for the box of emergency babykiller—generic? she asks; whatever’s cheap—then swallow the first dose with a can of flat ginger ale from beside the bed. The box is pink, in case you forgot it is for a woman. At the top of my trash can, a condom shredded like a sick ’80s guitar solo.

Twelve hours until the next dose.

I go online to masturbate to pictures nobody wants me to masturbate to. The Wikipedia picture for Guy de Maupassant. An infomercial for a robotic ping-pong server. I sign onto the Miller Family Blog and search for photos of Mama Miller wading into the shallow end at baby’s first barbecue, use my palm to block out the happy-drool infant, the corner of my pinky to blot away the maternal lovelight in Mama’s eye. Then I need two hands and I just squint.

Eight hours until the second dose.

Yesterday, our third date, driving across the busted-up city for pawnshops, looking for meth-money trinkets to buy at one store and sell to another. It is a mitzvah to set objects free, even if it is not very free or for very long. Later, pink and gold clouds painted across the sky, making our way, not holding hands, to a tree he knows that’s infested with hundreds of tiny, tiny bats. Watching their mass nightly exodus: they fluttered dark and deranged against that billion-dollar sunset, divebombed our faces when it got too dark.

My old middle school’s website, looking up forgotten science teachers, searching for signs of lingering attraction. The first A-bomb tests in the South Pacific created fireballs three miles wide. It is hard to masturbate when I am distracted. I am always distracted.

Five and a half hours.

Bat-gazing, in this ghost-town city. Walking back to the car, still not touching.

Sometimes when I look at pictures of strangers I pretend everybody in the shot is already dead. It’s not always to masturbate. Sometimes I just like to feel sad.

I paid cash for the pills—pills and a pack of cigarettes and a box of condoms—with a hundred-dollar bill, and I can tell anybody else that, but he’ll offer me money and I hate when people pay for half of anything. It didn’t come up, when he was peeling off the ribbons of exploded latex, rolling that thick ring down the base and flipping it into the trash. It’s nice to know a man who isn’t Catholic.

Three hours.

All day I have felt productive, sitting here still unshowered, not making a baby, and the thing about masturbating to pictures nobody wants you to masturbate to is that there are so many of them. I am a sexual terrorist. It’s not so different from being a normal terrorist, really, except my stomach is bent on itself and my fingers are sore and nobody else is scared at all.

_______________

Kat Lewin is in the late experimental phases of trying to mate her Roomba with a typewriter. For science, mostly. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including PANK, Word Riot, and Per Contra. She is a fiction editor for Mixed Fruit and an MFA candidate in fiction at UC Irvine.

Thanksgiving this year is Dad’s year—he picks me up from my mother’s house and we share a hotel room, the night before a Turkey Trot soccer tournament I will play in, in Pismo Beach, a four-hour drive north of our city. The lights are off in the room. He lies on the floor very drunk, after taking some of the team moms out for drinks, and he yawps his stories into the darkness. I liked it dirty maybe, he says. I liked the things in dirty ways. The women and their titties, their lips and fingers. They can do things to you, mijo. You will see.

I listen, not understanding completely because I am only eight, but I hate him anyway for what I do understand. Mijo, he says, slurring, howling, mijo, mijo, mijo. What were these things I have done, mijo. What were these things.

The next morning, when he doesn’t remember the things he said, I do not know if I’m grateful he’s forgotten.

I play in the soccer game, and in the next, and in the next, and we win the tournament in penalty kicks.

****

Fifteen years later I am driving my father home from a bar in Bellflower, after soccer practice (I help him coach a women’s team, and, afterwards, every week, we take them out for calamari and pizza and beer), and my father is so drunk he’s blind, crying, laughing, telling his regrets first as jokes and then as regrets—Sometimes, mijo, I no can believe it.

At a house party in the late 1970s, a few years after my mother and he had married, he noticed my mother’s sister passed out in a back bedroom, sprawled out on the bed. So he walked out the front door saying, I go for more beer, be back soon, where are my keys. And, leaving, he snuck around back to the bedroom, crawled through the window, undid her pants.

She was asleep the whole time, mijo, he says.

And, later, does he remember what he’s said? He does not.

****

In a few years, when I begin writing my novel, I ask him to come with me to Ecuador, to tell me stories about when he was young, and we fly to Guayaquil, staying two weeks. He shows me the whole city, the streets, the parks, the harbor, the seminary. He shows me the building his father worked in, the old house where he grew up, his neighborhood, the little riverbank where he kept the canoe, the whorehouse where he, on his thirteenth birthday, lost his virginity. We eat crabs and ceviche in his favorite restaurant, and we kick around a soccer ball in his old high school’s center courtyard, like when he was a boy. On the last night we drink in the hotel bar all night, and he tells me about his wedding, how he flew to Guayaquil with my mother, an American, for a ceremony his family would approve of. Before they left for the honeymoon they would stay the night in the guestroom of his father’s house. He’d had a crush on the live-in housekeeper, Teresita, for years, even before he’d moved to America, and now here he was, returned from America, returned a man, anybody could see that, even she could see that. After the wedding reception everybody was drunk and sleepy, and my father took my mother to their bedroom. Later, he got up to pee and, on his way back, he entered Teresita’s bedroom, who woke. He moved his fingers to his lips—Shhh. She did not say a word. She let him.

In my country, you do not say no to a man, my father lets me know, his eyes closed.

Come next morning, this time my father remembers, asking, Mijo, you no put that in your novel, right? No, I say. I won’t. I promise.

****

We fly home, through Panama, through Dallas, on toward Los Angeles. I look out the window, sometimes sleeping, sometimes not. Soon I’ll be at home with my wife, and in no time we will have two sons. I will finish the novel and, for six years, I won’t find an agent or a publisher, and when I do it won’t sell. But I will reread the stories in it, my father’s life, his drinking too much, his screaming, his hitting his wives, and rape, and adultery, and loss, and suffering, and regret. I will teach writing at a small university, and I will live quietly, reflectively, prayerfully—passively.

At night, while my wife sleeps, I will, once in a while, walk around to her side of the bed. She won’t ever wake up because I will, very quietly, only watch her sleep.

Her mouth is not moving, her body is still. Her little fingers are beautiful. I close my eyes and I open them, and I imagine I am my father. And I feel the power of his, now of my, drunkenness, and in my mind I act against her. I rape her sleeping sister, slowly, gently—while she is still, not to wake her. And on the night of my wedding, I put myself into another woman, and I prove it: I am a man. Then, after eight years of marriage, I leave her. She alone raises my two sons, and I have them twice a month on weekends, in between soccer games. For thirty years I play soccer and fuck women. I drink, I drink, I drink—I drink until I am blind, until I do not know the difference between English and Spanish, between a joke and a nightmare. And in the darkness, using this excuse, my drunkenness, I confess my sins to my son, this child, he is eight years old, he is in his bed in the hotel, he hears my confessions, my sobs. He cries quietly, afraid of me. And I become a cautionary tale, become his warnings, his sirens, his Do Not Enter—so that his life, my son’s life, becomes a stillness, peaceful, regretless, boring, pitiful, a thing he is ashamed of, from too much being careful, from too much being afraid.

It is dark and quiet in this house, in this bedroom, and my wife sleeps, is calm, is beautiful, is still, not knowing the evil moving around inside my body. I look down and I discover I am aroused. I am tempted, watching her, thinking these things, I am tempted to masturbate, gently—to create a celebration, to join my father—but quietly, so she does not wake to see. My body, in this moment, agrees with him, forgives him, has become him completely.

_______________

Carlos Antonio Delgado is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program. His work has appeared most recently in Akashic Books’ PITTSBURGH NOIR, as well as in The Acentos Review, and Relief Journal, among others. He has won and been nominated for numerous awards, including a K. Leroy Irvis Fellowship, an EIDOS grant, and the Turow-Kinder Prize for Fiction. Carlos and his family live in Los Angeles, in a small yellow house with a big backyard. Over the years, he has taught writing, rhetoric, theology, history, and philosophy to high schoolers and undergraduates. Please find him at CarlosAntonioDelgado.wordpress.com.

Atlantic City, January 4. Their tenth wedding anniversary. The children are with her mother in Trenton. Rain lashes the windows, turns to snow, then back to rain. It is two o’clock in the morning. Doctors from the convention stumble into elevators. One tries their door with a keycard, curses his mistake, shuffles off down the hall.

Our lives were built on false information, Tyrone tells Anna, but that doesn’t mean tonight can’t be different?

They have argued. They are the couple that bickers at weddings.

Outside, rain sifts through parking lot trees. Smashed perfection, Anna says. Though we started well. Our first year we didn’t ever fight.

He considers this. Maybe we should have fought, he says. His voice bleeds into the upper register. People fight when they have complete relationships. You know? Not based on fantasy.

I’m tired of fighting, she says. You’re one to talk, about fantasies.

I gave her up, Tyrone pleads.

You said that, Anna says.

But it’s true. I only held her once and it probably doesn’t count. I never kissed her. Didn’t even try. We were walking to the 14^th Street station after dinner and I grabbed her waist and pulled her to my side in a guy’s half hug, OK? And she kind of hung there at my hip, for two beats. Then we released and we were at the station and I tried to convince her but she said she couldn’t, ever. She walked down the stairs to the subway and I called her name and she turned back around and looked but I couldn’t, either.

Is this supposed to make me feel better?

Tyrone sighs and goes to the window. It has turned to snow again. Weathermen are calling for a blizzard to hit. If it does they will be snowed in. They have two more nights at the conference. He looks over his shoulder and shudders. Wind escapes the night and passes through the double-paned hotel window. They are a short distance from the white-capped ocean. He draws the curtain. It is a furious season. Already, a continent away in Malibu, red-tiled mansions slide toward the sea, carried by rivers of mud. Her body is tiny in the big bed. She looks like a small enemy.

I don’t know what it is supposed to make you feel. But it’s the truth.

The truth, she snorts. Yes. Well. She turns her back to him but continues to speak.

There are always more worlds to travel. And this is not about your silly girl. But when it becomes time to go neither of us will leave before the other. And that’s because of the first year.

Tyrone lies beside her reading Tolstoy, in trouble again with the church despite being dead a hundred years. Anna’s back curves like the half moon of winter. Tyrone watches with stupid tears as she places her clear fingernails lightly beneath his ache, as if she were touching an altar of driftwood.

Her mouth opens to him, their love a pier extending far out into the swollen surf.

_______________

Gary Percesepe is Associate Editor at BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), and a Contributor at The Nervous Breakdown. His short stories, poems, essays, reviews, and interviews  have been widely published or are forthcoming in Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Mississippi Review, Antioch Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The Millions, Atticus Review, Houston Literary Review, Westchester Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Rumpus, Pank, Bluestem, Bull, Word Riot, Moon Milk Review, Fogged Clarity, Necessary Fiction, Negative Suck, The Brooklyner, and other places. He is the author of four books in philosophy and an epistolary novel with Susan Tepper, What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G, (Cervana Barva  Press). He recently completed his second novel, Leaving Telluride, set in Telluride, Colorado.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Darth Vader and the Hunchback and even the Incredible Hulk at his most rage-filled and hideous had nothing on the Barger brothers. We hated and loved them. As boys verging on adolescence, we existed in elaborate swoons of fantasy, our violence both imagined and sometimes real. We lived in a brand new subdivision where two-story houses sprung from dirt lots. Straw and grass seed tickled our noses, competing with the tang of virgin tar, which flowed down the streets. Behind our homes was a place my friends and I called the No Man’s Land—a paradise of no supervision, a treeless expanse of red dirt with eroded gullies and hidden canyons. Interstate power lines buzzed overhead, strung along colossal metal towers dotted with yellow and black DANGER! HIGH ELECTRICITY signs.

We were covered with Band-Aids and vibrated with hyperactive energy no dosage of Ritalin could properly contain or focus. We jumped our fancy BMX bicycles over crude ramps, crashed on the landings and flew over the handlebars, then wiped away blood and red dust from scrapes on our shins. It was a contest to destroy expensive Christmas gifts as fast as possible. We crashed remote control replica fighter planes and deliberately flew helicopters into power lines hoping to provoke power outages. We looked at dirty magazines passed down from older brothers and practiced swear words. We fired CO2-powered BB guns and arrows from compound hunting bows, exploded hundreds of dollars of Black Cats and Triple Whistlers and M-80 firecrackers. We climbed high into the metal towers and swung from crossbeams like monkeys. How did we not kill ourselves? What deity protected us from self-annihilation?

Hex! The diabolical Barger boys tossed them with alarming regularity. We crouched on the red-dirt plateau, then took cover in a gully, the whammy spells zinging through the air like sniper bullets.

One peek at their creepy hovel was evidence enough of their depravity and poor character. Beyond the widest expanse of the No Man’s Land and down a winding path through woods stood the faded Barger trailer on a harsh and estranged parcel of bottom land. It rested on cement blocks. Vines crept around a window screen, where a dark figure sometimes crossed. A clothesline crossed an open area trampled to packed dirt. It was difficult to stare for long without feeling eyes from the surrounding woods. The words Barger were painted in red letters on a mailbox by a dirt road. One Halloween, Martin got up some courage and knocked on the pitted door of the Barger trailer, standing in darkness in a Dracula costume. No one answered. He did not, as predicted, turn to stone. The times we spied them kicking around the trailer or lurking in some corner of the No Man’s Land, they never spoke, other than to grunt or make a sound like an explosion. Both the Young One and the Older One had shaved heads and sandpaper scalps. We assumed this was treatment for lice infestation or hookworm, contracted after stepping into manure with open sores on their bare feet. They never wore shirts, just grimy cutoff jeans stained the color of their coppery skin. The one time I saw them up close, I noticed scabs on their elbows and outee belly buttons. Typically, we saw them running at a distance, flashing through the trees, jaws set, arms pumping. They went unseen for weeks, until one would emerge from the woods. Or they would pop their heads up from a gully and disappear when arrows and BBs were fired in their direction.

****

We spotted the Barger brothers in the Snack Lounge of the K-Mart. Seeing two baboons or werewolves would have been no less shocking. They sat in a booth in ripped tank tops, legs swinging, the blackened bottoms of their feet flashing. The Older One gnawed at the gristle remains on a corn dog stick. The Younger One tipped an onion ring box to his mouth, fried bits showering his face and tongue. They took off into the store, their dusty feet smacking the floor in an odd rhythm. We followed. They were elusive. We saw one pushing the other in a shopping cart down an Automotive department aisle. We found them in Toys ripping baseball cards out of their wrappers, stuffing their mouths with gum. They scampered away as we approached; a plastic watch holder bounced on the floor. Something about that empty holder enraged me. I found a Security man and breathlessly explained to him: Theft is taking place in this store. The Bargers are stealing baseball cards and a Timex watch. They have shaved heads and live in a trailer. He thanked me for this “valuable information,” and resumed talking to an attractive cashier. The Bargers streaked across the parking lot with devious, elated faces, giggling hysterically. Their front pants pockets bulged.

****

Beyond being the spawn of the devil and raw savages, they were thieves. They were likely stealing things out of our back yards. Defensive measures were taken. We began day patrols, drinking from canteens, our salty sweat mixing with cool water. Holes were dug on a perimeter near our backyard fences, then covered with plywood and handfuls of dirt, forming a booby trap Maginot Line. We swore to capture and interrogate the Bargers.

We spotted them swinging from a knotted rope. We plunged into the woods on bikes to flush them out. They ran out into sunshine, heading for an electrical tower. Fleeing seemed to confirm their guilt, their evil nature, and a viciousness crept into our bodies. That can be quite a high. We fired bottle rockets that snapped over their heads. They jumped into a ditch, the Older One’s head bobbing even with the ground as they ran. We headed them off at the far end and threw rapid-fire dirt clods. On open ground, we had them in a crossfire. I sailed arrows past their heads. One arrow sliced a calf and the Older One cried out in pain. We couldn’t pump our guns fast enough; BBs smacked against their legs and backs. We grabbed the Younger One and pinned him long enough for several hard punches, bloodied his nose and kicked him in the balls before he got away limping. He sobbed twice, in a pitiful kid way. It snapped me out, but not long.

Then they were forever gone. Gone from the No Man’s Land, gone from their trailer. We celebrated, but, to be truthful, we were sad.

****

Older kids kicked out the trailer’s windows and littered beer cans inside, a desecration we somewhat resented, having not been done by us. I’m not sure who lit the match. Probably Martin, the pyro. In any event, the trailer caught fire easily and roared to life with tall orange flames and pumping black smoke; we cheered as the sides caved in. The power and terror of it ripped at our chests. We were gods. The Bargers could never return. We had achieved final victory.

_______________

Robb Skidmore is a writer who lives in Atlanta. He has published short stories in New Orleans Review, New Millennium Writings, South Carolina Review, and Oasis. His ebook novella, The Surfer, can be found on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. His debut novel, The Pursuit of Cool (TMiK Press), is coming out in January 2012. His website and blog is at robbskidmore.com.

When I was six, and every year until I was ten, my parents sent me the first week in August to stay with my great-aunt Agnes while they vacationed at a gambling resort.

Every day of the sweltering weeks before my departure, I threw hysterical tantrums. My mother told Mrs. Hempel from next door that I was just trying to get attention. Mrs. Hempel nodded and said my parents deserved a week on their own in a cool place with no whiny kid to think about.

My mother told Mrs. Hempel, refilling two small glasses with cooking sherry, “I’ll bet she’s got a pile stashed away. We expect her to leave it all to David.”

“There are mosquitoes at Lake Drumhead and the frogs make noises all night long,” said my father, slapping shaving cream on his thick neck. “You’re such a scaredy cat, you wouldn’t like it there.”

“You are a naughty boy,” my mother said, pulling the Donald Duck suitcase off the closet shelf. I threw myself on the floor again, kicking and screaming. She went into the kitchen and turned up the radio.

August came, despite my tantrums. My parents warned me, singly and together, not to be naughty, and put me on the bus for the four-hour trip to Great-aunt Agnes. Pinned inside my shirt I had a manila envelope containing a card with my name and destination address. The envelope’s sharp corners pricked my skin like bee stings until my sweat softened it up. Then I hardly noticed it.

She met me at the bus terminal, her hair wispy under a hat of worn black velvet. We walked the five blocks to her small rented house with its unkempt yard, taking turns carrying my little suitcase. When she removed the long hatpin and took her hat off, she had a bald spot, just like my father.

We ate supper and then I threw up in the enameled wash basin. When I had my pajamas on, before climbing into bed in the scary room where the walls moved and shadowy branches fingered the window, Great-aunt Agnes flexed her arthritic hands and opened a concealed drawer in her writing desk. “I have something to show you, David.”

She took out a little box with a spring lid. It flew up to expose a glass eye staring at me from a purple velvet lining.

“This, David,” she whispered, “is the eye of God. No matter where you are in this house, it knows what you are doing. It can see through walls, it can see in the darkness. It sees what you do in bed. Do not ever, ever be naughty in bed while you are staying with me.”

“No, ma’m,” I said.

“No, Great-aunt Agnes,” she whispered.

“No, Great-aunt Agnes,” I whispered back.

Lying in the deep featherbed was like drowning. All around me, the old house creaked and squeaked and popped. I was so afraid of the noises that I couldn’t fall asleep. I thought about my parents at Lake Drumhead, and about the frogs which I was not afraid of at all, whole families of frogs, with friendly frog fathers that croaked in deep voices, and frog mothers that croaked happily when they won a lot of money gambling, and pale green baby frogs that were just learning to croak with small squeaky voices. I imagined a joyous choir of frogs all around Lake Drumhead until the ceiling light went click and I was startled to see Great-aunt Agnes at the foot of the bed smoothing her deformed hands, tangled as tree roots.

She whispered, “David, stop making those silly noises. Go to sleep.” Then the light clicked off and she padded down the hall. I stayed very quiet. All I could think of then was the glass eye glowering in the concealed drawer.

The week passed with me in a state of numbness, tiptoeing through musty rooms or sitting as still as possible in the porch swing, never sure if I was doing something the glass eye disapproved of. I pulled weeds in the flower bed. I dusted the lopsided venetian blinds. I threw up every evening after supper. The eye watched me day and night until Great-aunt Agnes whispered good-bye and I climbed on the bus again.

She died the winter of my tenth birthday. Before she went into the hospital, my parents received a parcel marked Not to be opened until my death.

The parcel contained her last will and testament, written in spidery longhand and not witnessed.  She left everything to the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, for winning the war against the Huns. We never had to contact him though, since it turned out that she had no money at all and was in fact behind on her rent. The parcel also contained a small box marked For David. When it was opened, to the surprise of everyone but me, a glass eye stared up from the velvet lining.

“What a strange thing to give a child,” said my mother.

“Throw it out,” said my father.

“We can’t throw away an eye,” my mother said. “It looks real. David can have it as a keepsake.”

“Strange keepsake,” said my father.

“Strange runs in your family,” said my mother.

“And what runs in your family?” asked my father who was already edging toward the door and divorce.

“Breast cancer and bad luck,” she replied prophetically. Before I finished high school, she had her full share of both.

I would like to go to Lake Drumhead just to listen to the frogs. The resort is gone though, destroyed in a tornado nearly twenty years ago. A lot of people said that was God’s judgment on an evil place, and I agree with them. I’ll bet the frogs are still there though, bellowing all night long, saying croak, croak. Some nights, when I am tempted, I open the box and look at the eye.

_______________

Janice D. Soderling’s fiction and flash appears in Willows Wept Review, New Walk, Horizon Review, Montreal Review, Turtle Quarterly, Fiction at Work, Gloom Cupboard, JMWW, Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue, The Chimaera, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Boston Literary Magazine, Our Stories, 42opus, Glimmer Train Stories and other venues. She was nominated in 2009 to Sundress Best of the Net, Dzanc Best of the Web and Pushcart and received The Harold Witt Memorial Award from Blue Unicorn for best poem of volume 2010. She is Assistant Fiction Editor at Able Muse.

Here’s Walter, naked, in a rocking chair.

Here he is again, not a shred of clothing, posed like The Thinker, thinking.

Walter on his back, or tucked in a fetal ball, or curled like a hairless cat in the middle of a room without furniture. Charcoal-on-Canvas Walter, so detailed, you can see the basilic vein of his right arm. Graphite-on-Paper-Walter, so blurry, you can’t tell which part is Walter and which part is a passing cloud.

You never met Walter. Until recently, you didn’t even know he existed. You also don’t know most of the mourners gathered in the gallery. And because of this, you feel like a weird tourist as you shuffle down the long hallway, this celebration of Walter’s life and career.

A month ago, a phone rang. After that, your roommate, Catherine, was on the couch sobbing for the rest of the night. Walter is dead.

Here’s Walter with the beginning of a beard.

Here’s Walter with a hairline receding into the darkness behind him.

The community of professional artists’ models in this city is small. Sure, there are hundreds of people who tried it once or twice, people who posed, fidgeting, in front of a college class for an hour or two. But the models who do it year after year—the ones who know the sitting rates for every art program within a fifty-mile radius and can tell you which instructors will want them to hold the same position for three consecutive hours and which will ask for several varied poses—these models all know each other. They’ve been staring at drawings of one another, sometimes for decades, and when you can identify a friend’s body from a penciled silhouette—just from the slope of her abdomen or the texture of his thigh—that’s an intimacy, a bond that few will ever understand.

A phone rings in the middle of the night. Catherine answers it and later says, “I won’t let my colleague be forgotten.” Schools are contacted. In less than a week, every professor who ever hired Walter is asked to contribute to the memorial. Artists and their former students rifle through studios. Crates are pried open; closets are excavated. Phones keep ringing.

Here’s Walter, laughing.

Here’s Walter, far away, possibly asleep.

Impressionist Walter. Surrealist Walter. Walter as a bunch of jagged lines. Walter as a perfectly-engineered machine of muscle and light.

Catherine is standing by the guestbook, talking with someone who you think must be a famous artist.  In her black dress, she glows in a ring of tea candles, and everything about her seems so—what’s the word you’re looking for? Refined? Cultured? Experienced? Her five earrings. Her soft tattoos of dragons and orchids and pagan things. Symbols and stuff that radiate some kind of restlessness and mystical beauty. Though accompanying her to this event seemed like a good idea this morning, you’re feeling increasingly out of your league in this room of sophisticates.

What are you supposed to say to the people you meet? When you see a lady, crying quietly in the corner, do you try to comfort her, or just leave her to her own private grief?

Here’s Walter, head bowed as if in prayer.

Here’s Walter, pointing into the distance at something just beyond the canvas.

You move from one portrait to the next and pass through most of Walter’s adult life in less than ten minutes. Walter after Walter after Walter after Walter. And then, something makes you stop. The drawings at the end of the hallway. They’re on small scraps of paper and each image seems incomplete. There are fifteen or so, and these are the figures that will haunt you later, images that will enter your memory the way a draft slips under a doorway.

Walter with immaculate knees, but the rest of his body—just shadow and fog.

Walter’s jaw line and cheekbones, but his neck and shoulders are only an outline.

The hint of two eyes looking back at you.

The impression of a mouth.

These fragments remind you of when, years ago, fresh out of college, you aimed yourself at Europe, and blazed a trail through the museums and cathedrals of the Renaissance. It was there you were first awed by God and art. In Florence, you found Michelangelo’s Awakening Slave—a block of marble with the shape of a man emerging from it. And while everyone claimed it was unfinished, to you, it seemed utterly complete.

Since childhood, you’d heard God created man in a single day. That’s a short time, but for that first man—carved painfully from the Earth—it seemed much longer. Imagine how it felt for Adam to be born one piece at a time.

Here’s Walter’s torso, no legs.

Here are Walter’s arms and nothing else.

In Michelangelo’s sculpture, the face has no distinct features, no clear mouth; the slave is forever unable to scream. He pulls himself from the block of marble, then the marble seems to wrench him back. Even now, they fight like this.

The marble: offering a breath of air to his lungs, and taking it away.

And the man: half unable to enter the world, and half unable to remain.

_______________

Matthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize and will be published by Alice James Books in 2013. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, Failbetter and elsewhere. He is currently the poetry editor of The Collagist.

Would you like to hear a pretty story, a nice story? Aren’t you sick to death of all the things you read and hear that are so tawdry and cheap? So violent? So depressing? What would be wrong with a story about a nice family? A story in which the family members treat each other with kindness and respect. A family that occasionally hops in the car and goes out for ice cream. A story in which good things, not bad ones, happen. Sis studies hard and wins that scholarship. Dad gets his promotion. Mom’s pie wins first prize at the State Fair. Buddy hits a homer in the big game and takes Linda Sue to the prom.

How about a story that takes shape under clear blue skies? Or, if there are clouds, they’re those big, fluffy ones, rolling on above homes where folks lead happy lives. And, if there is a tragedy – a tornado, say – and the sky is black and dangerous, and homes get blown away, then neighbors pitch in to rebuild each other’s houses and farms and businesses and, in the process, learn important lessons about life. Nobody gets killed, or maimed, or permanently disfigured. And a character can say, “Madge, it was only bricks and mortar. What we’ve got, you and me, can’t be blown apart.”

How about a story in which a puppy doesn’t get hit by a truck? Instead, what if the puppy, who is adorable and belongs to a hard-working young sculptor, seems to have wandered off in a snowstorm and frozen to death, but what really has happened is that the plucky little fellow has traveled miles and miles in the blowing snow to reach a run-down shack at the edge of town that has snow piled up above its ill-fitting windows, and inside there is a poor woman and her two babies and the woman has done the best she can, but ever since her young husband, a policeman, died while subduing a serial killer, this woman, who has tuberculosis, hasn’t had enough money to properly feed her babies, and can’t afford heating oil, and so the wonderful little dog tunnels through the snow to the back door, and when no one responds to his barking or to the sound of his paws scraping at the door, he chews his way into the mean shack and finds the mother lying on the floor, unconscious, and the two babies, in rags, huddled against her, crying, and the dog, seeing all this, goes over to the telephone and dials 911 and is able to tell the dispatcher the exact location of the shack and, while he waits for the ambulance to come, the pup finds a single can of Campbell’s soup in a cupboard, opens it, warms it on the stove and spoons some of the soup, Beef ’n Barley, into the eager mouths of the two children and when the emergency medical technicians appear they find the little pooch lying atop the young mother, with both babies, color returning to their tiny faces, clinging to the puppy, and then the emergency personnel carry the mom and the children out of the house on stretchers, one big stretcher and two small ones, and put them into the ambulance and start intravenous glucose drips going into all three of them, and the dog rides in the ambulance with them as it races to the hospital in town, where the doctors announce that the mother and her kids were rescued just in time and they’re going to be fine, and while they are still hospitalized, but getting stronger every day, word comes that a long-forgotten great uncle of this woman, a ne’er-do-well who’d left town fifty years ago and was never heard from again, has died in Tulsa, where he made a fortune digging oil wells, and he’s left his entire estate to this poor young woman and her babies who are, of course, poor no more and, in fact, are stinking rich, and when they’re released from the hospital, the woman buys a big new house and they have everything they could possibly need and more and there will be plenty of money to pay for the finest automobiles, the best colleges, extravagant vacations, and televisions with enormous screens, and in the midst of all this the mother, cured of tuberculosis, falls deeply in love with her doctor and he with her and, although he knows that he can never replace the heroic young father who has died, he becomes a wonderful and loving parent to the two babies, and then the City Council votes to erect a statue to the slain hero and the commission is given to the young artist who owns the puppy that everyone thought had disappeared in the storm but, of course, hadn’t, and was instead off on a mission of mercy and compassion, and everyone in town is falling all over themselves praising the little pup and marveling at what a splendid, heart-warming story the whole thing is, and the dog has become a genuine hero, not just in the town itself, but throughout the county, the state, and the entire nation, and stories about the amazing dog and the miraculous rescue and the subsequent events appear in newspapers and on television all over the world and everyone who hears the story gets a happy glow just from hearing it and, because they feel so much better about humanity, even though, of course, the main character in the story isn’t a human being at all, they themselves seek out opportunities to do good works, works of simple kindness that, although they may not be as dramatic as what the brave little dog has done, shine like beacons in a stormy world and make it a better, brighter place?

What would be wrong with a story like that? You’d like to hear a story like that, wouldn’t you?

_______________

Todd McKie is an artist and writer. His stories have appeared in PANK, Dark Sky, BULL, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Emprise Review, and elsewhere. Todd lives in Boston.