Streak-Free

April 2021 | fiction

The Windex was disappearing at Hunky Mike’s Sports Pub. Gallons each week. Ever since the Skin-Melting Bacteria had flown in from Peru on the beaks of white pigeons, we were obligated to perform rigorous cleaning routines. Most people held their pints with latex-gloves, but the occasional Hunky Mike insisted on riding bareback. We disinfected extra hard for those guys. Those guys thought their skin couldn’t be melted. Oh, but it could! We’d seen the flesh fall off the face of the Hunkiest of Mikes. After, we’d have to shut the whole pub down for two weeks—no tips.

Windex was not on the CDC-approved list of cleaners, but we used it anyway because Fred loved the smell. Fred was the Boss. He was an alcoholic. He’d worked in restaurants his whole life. It was an occupational hazard. Sometimes Fred forgot to put on his gloves—because he was drunk. We’d all watched in horror as he went to touch some un-sanitized surface with his bare skin. Fred! We’d shout. Hey, Fred! The Bacteria! Then he’d look at us like, what bacteria? until his memory got jogged and he started crying.

Fred’s wife divorced him a couple of years ago after he smashed his Corolla into a tree while their son was in the backseat. The son drinks his meals through a straw now. Fred’ll be paying back medical bills for eternity. Before the Bacteria, Fred’s ex-wife used to wheel the son into Hunky Mike’s. They’d sit at a table by the window and she’d spoon-feed him mashed potatoes while she drank a glass of Chardonnay. When the son saw Fred, he called him Daddy. Those nights, Fred got blitzed.

It was Marcy the Prep Cook who found Fred that morning. The night before he’d had a run-in with a glove-less Hunky Mike who’d called Fred a Loser. Fred took stuff like that to heart. Marcy said Fred was passed out in the mop closet, an open gallon of Windex in his lap, the blue stuff dribbled all over him. Marcy said when he woke up, she’d had to pry the bottle out of his hands. He kept trying to drink it, she said. He kept on saying, I just want to be streak-free.

When the white pigeons first appeared, we thought they were doves. We thought we were entering some new epoch of peace and calm. That people were going to start loving each other. That we were going to stop spewing smoke into the ozone. That we were going to stop killing each other and everything else. Now, government gunmen crouch in the corners, and the birds get sniped. Not just the pigeons—the doves too. You can see them out there, falling mid-flight, white smudges in the blue sky.

Elizabeth Mayer

Elizabeth is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her previous work has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine, CHEAP POP, Bodega, CRAFT, Fiction Writers Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her daughter Ruby.

Country Road at Night, North Carolina, 1979

April 2021 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

Like eyes in a skull,

riveted on me,

I see the windows

of a white van

in my rearview

mirror.

 

I speed up

so does he

and we keep

going like this,

the sweat of fear

stinging my eyes

till I am racing,

a rabbit, with

a fox that covets,

gaining.

 

A sign for a business district–

the car, and my heart, slow

down.  I turn off, spy a gaggle

of little boys headed home

from Cub Scouts or Bible School.

Grateful to them, I stop, roll down

the window, tell the nearest child:

“I am being followed.

Could I use your parents’ phone?”

“OK”, the kid says “I live over there,”

pointing down the road. “Get in,”

I say, “I’ll take you all home,”

and seven small boys

climb in.

 

I am driving slowly

when the sheriff

curious

at the sight,

of a white lady’s car

bursting

with black boys,

stops me.

 

I look back and see

the white van

at the turnoff

to the town,

waiting.

 

 

E. Laura Golberg

Laura Golberg’s poem Erasure has been nominated for a Pushcart 2021 Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Laurel Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Spillway, RHINO, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, among other places. She won first place in the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts Larry Neal Poetry Competition.

Eugene Shin

April 2021 | visual art

Plural Cycles

 

Eugene Shin

Eugene Shin is a teenage artist living in Seoul, Korea. He has previously been recognized by the Scholastic art competition with several photographic works. He enjoys experimenting with various materials and recently he is expanding his interest from photography to drawing, painting, and digital art. He hopes to express himself with diverse artistic ways continuously.

Psych Experiment

April 2021 | poetry

Sitting in the isolation booth,

listening for the fading bell.

The headphones, leather-bound and lush,

are pillowy around my ears,

a vacuum of sound.

When I first signed up,

I thought it would be easy money.

But within the experiment,

there is always a double game.

 

Amidst a distant humming,

my eardrums gradually disconnect,

and another timbre insinuates itself.

Exclusivity is now unblurred into its primary coloring.

Causal potency, insistent and self-confident,

reaches across the small revolutions

of electrons and protons,

and the power embedded within the orbits becomes tactile.

If you calculate the empty space between the points of energy,

the sum will strain comprehension.

Layer on the emergent potential

and it will fold upon itself, numberless.

 

They want you to tell them what they already know,

but, there’s something else answered

in the darkening absence of sound.

As the soul machine re-dons

its practiced gait, momentum and mass

disguise the slightest remnant of a limp.

Metal shavings vibrate softly,

re-orienting to magnetic poles

with their interpretations.

 

Chris Innes

Chris Innes is a writer living in Washington, D.C. and has had poetry published in a variety of literary magazines, including The Wisconsin Review, The Cape Rock, Prairie Winds, Common Ground Review, The Pikeville Review, Descant, and The Mankato Poetry Review.

Danny Rebb

April 2021 | visual art

Out of the Darkness Shines a Light – no. iii

 

Danny Rebb

Danny Rebb is a disabled self-taught photographer who first picked up a camera forty years ago and currently resides in Dearborn, Michigan. His work seeks to evoke emotion in the viewer by portraying unexpected beauty in overlooked places and circumstances or to transform what at first glance seems to be grotesque into something beautiful. Danny was previously published in the Summer 2020 edition of Flora Fiction literary magazine. Additional images from his body of work may be seen in Instagram at @dannyrebbfineartphotography