July 2020 | fiction
It had happened before.
The first time, she was ten. It was an accident, riding her bike. She didn’t remember the hurt of it, not
even in dreams. Only the sticky cream
of blood on her chest. The limbo aftermath of being road-killed. The sound of a child, hospital bound,
crying in an endless, sputtering, roar.
God, it was
strange. The second time, at twenty, she meant to do it. It was easy enough with a handful of pills and a
locked bathroom door.
The chemicals diffused in her arteries like incense. A ceremony. At peace.
Until consequence shattered it all.
She awoke to the whispering. The stares. No one trusted her unguarded, alone. But couldn’t they see
the danger was over? She’d come back, like a cat with nine lives. Self-vaccinated, for another
decade. Brick by brick, word by word
by dinner and diaper and bridal concern,
she’d built herself back. But this self she had built–she wanted a new one. Not this wilted age, white
flower turned brown at the edge.
Her birthday was in June. This third time was due soon.
And she looked forward to it.
Samantha Pilecki
Samantha Pilecki’s work has appeared in Five 2 One, Kansas City Voices, New Lit Salon Press, Timberline Review (forthcoming), Yemassee, and other publications. She’s the winner of the Haunted Waters Press short story competition, the Writing District’s monthly contest, and was a finalist in both the New Millennium Writings Contest and the Writer’s Digest short story contest.
July 2020 | fiction
After he closes the doors and tells the driver “Okay,” the man asks Curtis, “What brings us out here this time?” He’s flipping through papers on a clipboard. “Has anything changed with your wife since…?” He’s tracing his finger down a list. Curtis’ face is already buried in the sports page. He lowers the paper and looks at the man and then back at the sports page.
I tell the man it’s the lump between my shoulder blades.
I’d show him, but I can’t even turn over in here. Not the way they have me strapped down. Not with all this equipment and Curtis and the man crammed back here, too.
I say I can’t describe the lump other than it’s a lump because I can’t see it. I could never turn the right way in the mirror in the bathroom because I can hardly turn around in there. Curtis has looked and probed but always says it’s nothing. “No thing,” he says.
I can see the silhouette of his head nodding behind the sports page.
I tell the man Curtis says it’s nothing, but I know it’s there. I have dreams about it. It has a pulse. It’s growing. Why wouldn’t it? It gets watered a few times a week. If I lie on my back at night I can feel it against the mattress. Hot. Itchy. If I go to sleep like that I dream about the lump. I hate calling it that. Lump. A generic term for something that could be festering a sac of pus that could burst subdermally and poison my system. I’ve told Curtis this. How many times? Ask him. He doesn’t deal with it. But my dreams. Almost always the lump has grown out of control overnight except I know in my mind in my dream that it hasn’t. It has been growing all along but I had hidden it under an Ace bandage or a bulky sweater or sweatshirt. “Don’t touch me, Curtis,” I’d said for days in my memory in my dreams. Which I’d never say to Curtis because I love him going on eighteen years.
Curtis rustles his paper, but he doesn’t respond.
I say in my dream I’m denying to myself and the world that the mass is a thing that has to be dealt with because it’s like I’m barely a thing if I am even a thing to be dealt with and then I’m growing something off me that requires a greater degree of dealing with, like here’s a sequel to me and everybody shows more interest in it than they do in me.
The man lights up a cigarette. He pats down his shiny pompadour and adjusts the rings on his fingers. He leans in to me. I feel his hand between my shoulder blades. He says, “Yeah. We need to cut that bad boy outta there.” His cigarette bounces up and down between his lips with each word. “You got insurance?”
I tell him no.
“It’s gonna cost you. And that bad boy is huge. Or keep it. Hell, maybe it’ll shrink.”
Curtis looks at the man over his paper and says, “Don’t. For chrissake, what’s wrong with you people?”
I tell Curtis this is what you get when you don’t have insurance. I keep telling you. This is what you get when you don’t deal with things.
Curtis asks the man for a cigarette. Now they’re both smoking. I’m going to choke to death back here. Curtis asks, “Can’t you give her the orange pills?”
The man says, “We can’t do shit until she’s admitted.”
I shoot Curtis my dirtiest look. He shrinks down behind his paper. I’m not really mad because at least we’re back to dealing with things for right now.
Jeff Burd
Jeff Burd spends a lot of time writing and thinking about writing, and worrying about not writing and thinking about writing. He graduated the Northwestern University writing program and works as a Reading Specialist at Zion-Benton Township High School in Zion, IL.
July 2020 | poetry
they are coughing in the high rises of New York
in the bayous of Louisiana
in the mountains of Colorado
they are coughing up wind
while God orders the trees to bend
with our breath
and our hope cracks
and stretches like rain
because to see death
is to scrape down a home
with nothing to build in its place
on the moody March grass
on the spine of a god
who won’t stand up for us today
they’re in a small room with white walls
fever dances in their eyes
a woman lays her face in her hands
the children are drawing houses
with trees on the lawn
lines of walls through the trunks
no erasers
there is always some line in the way
branch and wall intersecting
viruses crossing borders
world as global as the tides
as hungry as the days
counting coins for flour
while in our dreams
we walk on water
or light candles in a church
we can’t visit anymore
and in our dreams
we are always younger
they’re catching spiders
and throwing them outside
they’re wrapping themselves
in the sea-sweat
they’re watering the cactus
the cactus never bends to the wind
the cactus is fatter than God
spinier than his tongue
the cactus knows love
better than roses
because to know a desert
is to love the rivers
and I do not want to cross one today
I have a boat with no oars
and a God with no words
and children who climb trees
and a rose petal
pressed in a book
about a sea so red
it mocked our blood
a sea so parted
the fish drowned in air
so the ghosts swam west
where the sun gave up
and I’m on the shore
my river-boat
now a ship at sea
on a wave so big
I can’t see the horizon
Kika Dorsey
Kika Dorsey is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado, and lives with her two children, husband, and pets. Her books include Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010) and three full-length collections, Rust, Coming Up for Air (Word Tech Editions, 2016, 2018), and the forthcoming Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020). She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. Currently, she is an instructor of English at Front Range Community College and tutors. When not writing or teaching, she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.
July 2020 | nonfiction
He says the only way to learn is to watch him make it first.
He gathers peaches in a large bowl and rinses them with cold water then pats them dry with a paper towel. Next, he peels away the fuzzy skin to expose the fleshy fruit. He does this slowly, meticulously, to remove all the baby fine hair. The peaches must be completely bald, he says. They’re sweeter that way, more enticing in their bare state, soft with the natural juice that coats his fingers, and if he sneaks a taste, just one bite—so inviting, so fresh, so young with summer—they’ll leave behind a sheen on his chin, his upper lip.
To remove the pit, he slices the peaches down the center and splits them wide. It takes concentration and force, but not so much force that the peaches bruise and congeal in his grip. “If you bruise them, they’re no good,” he says, and licks his fingers. He can’t help but to remove the juice that way.
He slices the peaches into cubes and stacks them in a colander to allow the extra juice to drain away.
Next, it’s the mangoes. He palms them, adjusting his grip around one, then the other, squeezing gently and playfully, checking for spoils.
The mangoes are quickly sliced and chopped and tossed into the bowl without concern. They don’t require the gentle handling afforded to the peaches.
The fresh mint is next. He yanks them from their stalks, tears the leaves, and mixes them in with a splash of lime, and some crushed—nearly massacred—pitted cherries. Everything is tossed together and poured into a bowl.
The recipe calls for red onions, but he leaves them out. Chopping onions makes him cry and he won’t risk crying in front of me.
He doesn’t ask me to chop them, either. I’m not old enough to use a knife.
He scoops the mixture onto a spoon and suspends it in the air in front of my mouth. I’m in his world now, unsteady on my feet, uncertain as to what happens next or how we got here.
“Try it. You’ll like it. I promise,” he says.
I reach for the spoon, but he pulls away and shakes his head.
“Open wide.”
And so I do.
Melissa Grunow
Melissa Grunow is the author of I DON’T BELONG HERE: ESSAYS (New Meridian Arts Press, 2018), finalist in the 2019 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Award and 2019 Best Indie Book from Shelf Unbound, and REALIZING RIVER CITY: A MEMOIR (Tumbleweed Books, 2016) which won the 2018 Book Excellence Award in Memoir, the 2017 Silver Medal in Nonfiction-Memoir from Readers’ Favorite International Book Contest, and Second PlaceNonfiction in the 2016 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards. Her work has appeared in Brevity, River Teeth, The Nervous Breakdown, Two Hawks Quarterly, New Plains Review, and Blue Lyra Review, among many others. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, as well as listed in the Best American Essays notables 2016, 2018, and 2019. She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois Central College. Visit her website at www.melissagrunow.com for more information.
July 2020 | nonfiction
The fallopian tubes. I remember them. I don’t remember the teacher’s name, the one who was showing us the filmstrip in the girls-only, 7th grade health class. Her mouth was always a little off on one side so her lipstick was kind of smeared, and she wore heavy pancake makeup, though she was younger than our mothers, and it was Florida where no one usually wore that. The room was darkened for the projection, and she stood just outside the light’s beam, clicking through the frames.
The shape of the whole setup of the insides, our insides, floating adrift on the white screen always reminded me of a cattle skull with the horns still attached. The fallopian tubes, I remember, had little fringed edges like stunted fingers reaching down into nothingness where one egg – one special egg each month—was chosen by something or chose itself to make the filmstrip staccato journey through multiple frames up the fallopian tubes and down the uterus into nothingness.
The teacher disappeared suddenly during the first semester. No one told us why. “Substitute” days stretched into weeks, and we gossiped “pregnant,” but somehow we thought we overheard “electroshock.” We speculated whether it would make her mouth even more crooked. She never came back. But it didn’t matter for us; we already knew everything we needed to know about being a woman.
Linda Buckmaster
Linda Buckmaster has lived within a block of the Atlantic most of her life, growing up in “Space Coast” Florida during the Fifties and Sixties and being part of the back-to-the-land movement in midcoast Maine in the Seventies. Former Poet Laureate of her small town of Belfast, Maine, her poetry, essay, and fiction have appeared in over forty journals and four anthologies. Two of her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and one of her pieces was listed as a Notable Essay in “Best American Essays 2013.” She has held residencies at Vermont Studios Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Obras Foundation, among others. Linda taught in the University of Maine System for 25 years and has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast program of the University of Southern Maine. Her hybrid memoir, Space Heart. A Memoir in Stages, was published in 2018 by Burrow Press. She is currently working on a literary journey across the North Atlantic following the cod. www.lindabuckmaster.com
