Goddess

October 2018 | fiction

He stepped off the curb into the street, turned around and stared at me. A bunch of us were waiting for the light at Broadway and 44th. Tall, wild-haired, enormous brown eyes, wide mouth slightly open — I immediately looked away.

“You are beautiful,” he said.

I pretended not to notice him, or to hear his astonishment.

“You’re really beautiful. You’re amazing.”

I looked over his head at the crush of people waiting on the other side.

“I mean it,” he said, looking directly at me and holding out his hands. “You are truly beautiful.” His voice enveloped me like warm vapor.

Heads turned in my direction, straining to see what he was seeing. I wanted to move, but the orange hand of the traffic signal nailed us all to the spot. He kept talking, his words gathering speed, his voice rising in intensity.

“Please,” he said, “look at me. I must tell you. You are a dream, where have you been, you are so very beautiful.”

I flushed. I looked down, then away. A neon white “walk” had replaced the orange hand, and the crowd surged forward. I glanced at him as I stepped into the street. His face was earnest, his eyes searching. He moved backwards, arms lifted, still facing me. His coat billowed around him like wings.

“My God, I swear. You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

I hesitated, then veered around him to the right. His hands flew up, fluttering in front of me like prayer flags.

“Wait, wait. Don’t go. Please.”

The bunch on the corner was dispersing, some looking back, a few smiling. Now he was at my side.

“Wait, I don’t want to lose you, please.” His words loomed out like a lariat, tugging on me.

“You’re a goddess, you’re my life. I mustn’t lose you!”

Turning sharply, I broke away. A bus was coming down Broadway, and I ran for it. Never mind lunch with Norma. She’d understand. Waving my arm above my head, heart pounding, panting to myself—please, bus, don’t pass me by.

Miraculously, it slowed. The doors hissed open and I lunged aboard without looking back.

The doors snaked shut behind me. He hadn’t followed.

Relief spread through my body and I collapsed into a window seat. Good God, what ever was that? I looked out the window. I had never thought myself beautiful. Maybe nice-looking, okay, but not beautiful. Now suddenly I was beautiful—to someone. Someone who saw something in me no one else had ever seen.

Someone I would never see again.

The bus lurched across the intersection. I felt a huge hole inside. I glanced back down 44th. There he was, standing in the middle of the street, arms aloft, coat flapping and mouth moving, but not in the direction of my departing bus. He was facing the curb, his eyes and his words pinned on a pudgy middle-aged woman who was standing there, waiting for the light to change.

 

by Sandy Robertson

Sandy Robertson’s interests in teaching literature led her to writing fiction a few years ago. She has published two short stories and is currently at work on a novel. She lives in San Diego, California.

 

 

 

Michael Karl Ritchie

October 2018 | poetry, Pushcart nominee

Chess

 

Inside one Russian doll is another,

dressed in a different nationality

and inside that one is yet another.

 

and so on until all of them

gang up and storm the opera house

demanding to see the mayor.

 

Which of them crossed the border

may depend on fingerprints

and the next referendum.

 

As one nation collapses,

another rises up from the same dolls,

each a pawn in a clever sacrifice.

 

  

Flatliners

 

So now the earth is flat

Since nothing’s truly round

Not even a plutocrat

Rolls without a sound

 

On wildlife habitat

Hydraulic drilling pounds

Skinning mountains flat

Unearthing sacred mounds

 

The Fed’s still keeping track

Of stocks that leap and bound

Payback for any kickback

Their graphs are never round.

 

In jazz clubs singers scat

Audiences spellbound

Because the earth is flat

Keep both feet on the ground

 

by Michael Karl Ritchie

Michael Karl Ritchie is a retired Professor of English from Arkansas Tech University with work published in various small press magazines, including The Mississippi Review, Margie, OR Panthology – Ocellus Reseau. He has had three small press chapbook publications and Winter Goose Press has just published his collection of poems Ampleforth’s Miscellany (2017).

 

 

Solitary

October 2018 | visual art

Solitary

 

by Jing Lin

In her mysterious monochromatic photographs, Jing Lin reconstructs a familiar world that no one has been to. Her background in motion pictures informs her current work. As a graduate photography student at Academy of Art University, she worked with multiple darkroom techniques in traditional and alternative printing processes. She blurs the edge between photography and painting through the use of experimental processes. Solitary, Jing’s most recent body of work, in which she is portraying a nonexistent place to examine the theme of self-confinement. Constantly, she explores photography with these questions in mind: What did I see? What did I not see? Chinese, b. 1993, Chengdu, China, based in San Francisco, USA. https://www.jinglinphotography.com

Heath Brougher, Featured Author

October 2018 | poetry, Pushcart nominee

Eyeless

 

When your eyes suddenly fell out,

leaving you blind as a bowl of soup,

you frantically began feeling around the floor.

 

On your hands and knees, crawling carefully

to make sure you didn’t crush

one of them with your four-legged steps.

 

Feeling nothing but grunge and grime on the that old linoleum,

you became more panicked with each passing second,

realizing, now that your eyes have fallen out,

just how filthy this world has truly become.

 

 

Noisy Noose

 

The spirit has slowly evaporated,

gradually turned jaded throughout the years,

quelled, wrecked by the jarring persistence of cacophony

that pours through the veins and hallways of this world.

Inspiration melted to a feeble pulp by the noisy noose

of the boisterous trucks and verbose dogs

that populate the neighborhood, filling the air,

the never-silent wind, with an incessant clamor.

 

The poet’s soul will soon be laid to rest among the din.

 

 

The Prevalence of Nothingness

 

Churning the nothingness into a somethingness

is tried. Doesn’t work.

Maybe half-works since I see

kids gathered

in the abandoned parking lot.

It’s like they’re living my youth

which allows me to vicariously relive it myself.

Hail pours from the sky.

Gravity still works.

That is, at least, for now.

 

by Heath Brougher

Heath Brougher is the poetry editor of Into the Void Magazine, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Award for Best Magazine. He is a multiple nominee for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. His newest book is “To Burn in Torturous Algorithms” (Weasel Press, 2018). His work has appeared in journals such as Taj Mahal Review, Chiron Review, MiPOesias, and Main Street Rag.

Bunesfjorden, Moskenesøya

October 2018 | visual art

Bunesfjorden, Moskenesøya

 

by Ben Erlandson

Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is a perpetual skeptic, longitudinal thinker, brewer, gardener, photographer, learning systems designer, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. Combinations of his efforts often manifest as technology, visual media, and printable narrative. Having tried nearly every platter on the capitalist corporate industrial buffet, he’s just not found anything to his liking. He spends quite a bit of time in the mountains and rivers instead. Mostly on foot. Dr. Erlandson has published extensively in academia, including several peer-reviewed articles and co-authorship of the graduate-level textbook Design For Learning In Virtual Worlds. He has self-published the narrative nonfiction work Winter South 02014, about a road trip from California back to his home state of North Carolina. With another nonfiction project in the works, he switches gears between fiction, nonfiction, and photography to keep his mind limber. He’s been shooting for more than twenty-five years and writing creatively for more than thirty. Born and raised in Elkin, North Carolina, Ben has degrees from UNC-Asheville, Emerson College, and Arizona State University, and has lived and worked in Asheville, Boston, Tempe, Monterey Bay, Berkeley, and Washington, DC. He currently resides in Glade Valley, North Carolina, and hopes to build an ecological homestead, or just travel around the North American continent on foot, bicycle, and touring kayak, practicing photography and telling stories.