The Watch

October 2021 | nonfiction

In 1969, we had just started dating. Michael was in twelfth grade and I was in eleventh.   We were standing in the halls of Miami Norland Senior High. Lockers were clanging and feet were shuffling. Holding out his hand, Michael offered his wrist.

“It’s from my uncle,” he beamed.

The face read Bulova, the band black, the dial stainless steel.  At first glance it looked like any other watch.

Michael side-glanced like he was telling a secret. “It’s for my graduation.”

That watch followed him everywhere. He wore it at our wedding. To Michigan where we finished school. To the law office where he had his first job.  But while we grew up and moved on, the rest of the world went backward. His parents divorced. The uncle and his wife divorced. When we bought a house and a car, the so-called grown-ups downsized. And when we started a family, they started smoking pot. How crazy it all seemed!  My husband in his Brooks Brothers suit.  My in-laws and the uncle with their new hippie lifestyles. Lava lamps and waterbeds. Nehru jackets. Bongs. On good days, we were amused. On bad days, we were mortified.

The uncle was the oddest of the oddballs.  And it didn’t take long before drugs addled his brain.   Birthdays were forgotten and bills were overlooked.  Instead of furniture, his living room was filled with pillows. To have a conversation, you had to reach down to his level. Lay on the floor. Shout over the rock music. Pick at food on paper plates.

There was the time Michael’s first cousin got married in California. Little did the uncle know that pot on the West Coast packs a punch. An hour into the cousin’s wedding, someone called the rescue squad.  They thought it was a heart attack, but the father of the groom was just stoned.

How Michael laughs at this story, like it happened to another family in another life.  One glance at his watch and all is forgiven. One kindness erases a lifetime of hurt.

Years passed.  My husband’s parents died. Then the uncle slid into dementia and he died, too.  The uncle’s second wife is still around.  She’s about our age, or she says. She’s a little bit like a stranger and getting stranger all the time. Though we invite her to Thanksgiving and Seder, she seldom makes an appearance.  If she comes, she’s the last to arrive and the first to leave.

But all is forgiven.  Each year we make an invitation. And each year she either ditches us or leaves. Like the hands of a watch, time circles in a loop.  What’s the use of complaining?  Memories fade. The heart heals. And after two or three shakes, that Bulova still ticks.

Marlene Olin

Marlene Olin was born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and educated at the University of Michigan. Her short stories have been featured or are forthcoming in publications such as The Massachusetts Review, PANK, Catapult, and The Baltimore Review. She is the winner of the 2015 Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Award, the 2018 So To Speak Fiction Prize, and a nominee twice for both the Pushcart and the Best of the Net prizes.

Snyder, Texas

October 2021 | poetry

Apache Indians hunt the buffalo.

Comanche arrive on the war trail to Mexico,

the Apaches disappear.

On the staked plain, a sacred white buffalo waters at Deep Creek.

A hunter shoots the albino with ease

and skins it as tumbleweeds tumble by.

Pete from Pennsylvania opens a trading post.

Big cattle ranches arrive.

Rusty untangles a hung up goat.

Barb wire cuts into its neck.

Nearby, a mare nudges its foal.

The Santa Fe Railroad lays tracks through town

and builds a depot, and men warm themselves

by a fire of burning crossties.

The Snyder Rodeo Arena opens.

Overseas, Snyder’s son Bobby orders his men across a canal.

Bobby is fatally hit by enemy fire.

Farmers plant cotton in cow pastures.

The bank folds in the Great Depression.

Friday night football begins,

Snyder Tiger adolescents become heroes.

A prospector discovers the Canyon Oil Reef,

the town triples in size.

A Phillips 66 gas station-restaurant opens.

Powers Boothe flees Snyder, acts in movies.

Oil collapses. Money leaves.

A boy falls asleep watching a Zenith television

in a small frame house on 3765 Avondale.

A dung beetle rolls a ball of dung

on a scraggly cattle ranch at town the edge.

The citizens erect a white buffalo statue.

They argue about its testicles, remove them.

A rich man parks a gold-plated Delorean

in the Snyder National Bank lobby.

An employee at the gas plant claims a UFO hovers,

a disc with lights, soars to the southwest.

Tumbleweeds ramble across the fields into mesquite.

The wind reveals an arrowhead in a creek bed.

Down the dirt lane where huge wind turbines line the horizon,

the white buffalo skin hangs on a ranch house wall, decays.

Alan Nelson

Alan Nelson has poetry and stories published or forthcoming in numerous journals including New York Quarterly, The Stand, Acumen, Pampelmousse, Main Street Rag, Texas Observer, California Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Adirondack Review, Red Cedar Review, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, Ligeia and Whale Road Review. He also played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay?” and the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning “SXSWestworld.”

The Last Camp Social

October 2021 | fiction

“These are the facts of life,” our camp bunk counselor Peggy would say, minutes before any camp social, glancing at her watch ticking away as if we were connected to the time bomb that each boy contained behind his jeans fly.

“The average teenage male’s brain is soaked in sex,” she told us, and I thought of a towel dropped in a bathtub, too heavy with water to wring.

As for the fourteen-year-old girls who were in her charge, we were no different than the boys. Maybe even more dangerous, our eggs all revved up and ready to go, like a souped-up Mustang in a drag race.

Peggy was from Arkansas – a state none of us had ever heard and could have been as distant as Mars. Every morning she brushed her long bone-colored hair eighty strokes a minute

and then massaged Vaseline into her scalp. She had lost her left eye to a stray golf ball and in the empty pocket she could see miracles of light, bursts of purple, green and gold, a constellation of the Lord’s color. A large gold crucifix flapped against her concave chest as Peggy shouted out directions for lifesaving as we swam in the cold Maine lake. She could teach us not to sink if our sailboats capsized but when it came to boys, we were all hell bent on drowning.

She prayed quietly in the middle of our cabin, her words competing with the

buzzing mosquitoes and The Archie’s Sugar, Sugar. We traded lipsticks, practiced kissing our Bobby Sherman posters, tongues licking the crinkled paper that tasted like Cutter repellant. We, the girls of Cabin Nine, were all lost causes.

“Please stop,” Peggy begged as we stuffed our bras with Kleenex.

Peggy also had the gift for predicting the future. One night, during a thunderstorm, she made us sit in a circle and announced our names: Cindy, Diana, Helen, Jill, Karen, Sylvia and Rachel.   I wondered why I, Rachel, was the last on her list. Cindy, who wore thick rimmed-glasses and had braces, would be a film star. Diana, who was already a tennis star at the camp, would one day play at stadiums around the world. Helen would be a nurse, although we had seen Helen once faint at the sight of blood when she scraped her knee. Jill, the only girl who had divorced parents, would never be married but find happiness in a place filled with deserts and camels. Karen would have six children with three different men.  As she spoke, her face would be lit up by the streaks of lightening outside. She never predicted anyone else’s future because the lightning went out and we all screamed. “Now that’s enough,” she told us, leaving the cabin to inspect if there was damage outside our cabin because of the storm. Later that week I begged her to tell me what would happen to me, but she only took a deep breath and exhaled so deeply that I could feel her breath across my face.

That Sunday, the bus that took Peggy to church overturned and bounced down the mountain like a “yellow rubber ball,” according to one witness. We did not know how to grieve and just read our Tiger Beat magazines.

Our new counselor was named Summer, a beautiful California hippie who had been to Altamont and told us how she had seen the Hells Angels beat up people. Summer was the opposite of Peggy, and several of the girls sprayed lemon juice on their scalps so they could have her same butter blonde hair color.

Yet Peggy still hovered us, her warnings hot against our skin like a sunburn that wouldn’t heal. We couldn’t explain to Summer why none of wanted to attend that last camp social.

Instead, we sat in a circle outside our cabin, staring at the stars in the night sky, each girl holding each other’s hands.  This was our own memorial service.  It was as if Peggy sacrificed herself for our collective virginity, our eggs safely nestled inside us mute and idle like dead car batteries.

Penny Jackson

Penny Jackson is an award-winning writer who lives in New York City. Her books include BECOMING THE BUTLERS (Bantam Books) and a short story collection L.A. CHILD and other stories (Untried Reads.) She has won a Pushcart Prize for her short fiction and was a McDowell Colony Fellow. Penny is also a playwright with plays produced in New York, Los Angeles, Edinburgh, and Dublin. www.pennybrandtjackson.com.

Stanley Horowitz

October 2021 | visual art

Into the Mystic

Stanley Horowitz

Stanley Horowtiz is a retired Adjunct Professor at Farmingdale College. His work had been included in the 2018 Heckscher Museum Biennial. Recent covers have included Rattle, Stand, Cimarron Review and Kestrel.

The Time Traveler’s Plaque

October 2021 | fiction

Striving to inject some wonder and whimsy into people’s humdrum days, an older man with a sense of humor installed a plaque in front of his stately home reading: “Queenston Heritage, Frederick John Wimple, 1812-1896, Inventor of Time Travel, Lived here in 2065.”  The installation was done discreetly, such that no one really knows when it occurred.

Recently, a local doctoral student decided to covertly document the amount of time that tourists and passersby spent looking at the numerous heritage and historic plaques dotting the quaint village which 19th century Mr. Wimple had called home in the late 21st century.  The researcher’s results were made public in the form of an article published in a local paper.

Having great pride in the relatively large role their home has played in the forming of a now great nation, townspeople were dismayed to learn that on average most people spent twice as long reading the plaque pertaining to Frederick John Wimple.  Given that the dozen or so other plaques detailed in the study typically contained ten times the amount of information as the Wimple marker, this was seen as evidence of an apathetic populace and confirmation that we’re living in a post-truth era.

Looking to draw evermore visitor traffic to benefit the local business community, it recently leaked that the village council was furtively formulating plans to install several other fictional “contemplative plaques.”  Additionally, the grand Victorian home at the purported site of Mr. Wimple’s past residence of the future was recently sold off-market for an exorbitant amount of money to a mysterious theoretical physics think tank based overseas.

Scott G. Harvey

SCOTT G. HARVEY teaches psychology at SUNY Buffalo State and resides in the Niagara Region of Ontario with an ever-changing mixture of humans, cats, dogs, and chickens. He is the author of Savagely Noble: A Young Man’s Journey from Ignorance, Through Illusion, To Identity. His short fiction has appeared in Short Story Avenue.