October 2022 | fiction
“You’re going to get in trouble if you sleep in class, it’s that simple. You sleep at home, not in class. You know this.” The Principal leans back in his faded burgundy chair, arms crossed like the period at the end of sentence.
Marley nods, scrunches down in the hard, wooden chair in case she might actually be able to disappear.
“You should be tired of this by now. How do I get you to understand?”
Marley stares at the front of the wooden desk, the ugly words scratched there, bites both lips since her fingernails are already gone.
“Then why do you keep doing it? You know it’s not okay? Why not just go to sleep earlier?”
She wants to answer, wills the words to expose themselves, but nothing happens.
“Watch less TV… listen to classical music….”
Marley’s fingers strangle each other in her lap.
“Do you have something you want to talk about?”
It feels as if one of them might snap.
“I can’t help if you don’t let me.”
Help?
“Do you go to bed early?”
Somehow her head bobs once vertically on its axis.
“Then why are you so tired?”
She doesn’t even know where the shrug comes from.
“Do you have nightmares?” He seems hopeful. “Is something waking you up?”
A single nod, like a flower poking through snow.
“Yes?” He straightens.
Marley leans forward almost imperceptibly, lips parted.
“You can tell me.” The Principal leans in to meet her.
Marley tastes the words, not sure if they even make sense.
The Principal collapses back into his chair. “I can’t help if you don’t let me.”
Marley struggles to make the words work in her head first. Some things you have to live to understand.
The Principal sighs and drops his head, waiting patiently. Marley blinks, trying to see clearly. A plane goes by outside. The words mix, get lost, mix again, then form something she allows to squeeze through the cracks. At first just a small croak escapes her, then something just above a whisper… “My mother… she… gets sad a lot… at night… she wakes me up so I can… help her sleep.”
There’s a long pause as the Principal stares into his lap seeming to take this in. Marley stares into her lap as well, waiting for whatever comes next. Another plane goes by, just a sound, hundreds of people riding a hum in the sky. She listens, wishing she were anywhere else. Then another sound from under the desk, the unmistakable whoosh of an email flying through the ether.
The Principal looks up at her with a concerned frown. “Look, I can’t help you unless you’re willing to share. We’ll overlook it this time. Get back to class and sleep at home. Okay?”
Teja BenAmor
Teja BenAmor is a fiction and screen writer from East Village, New York City. Her screenplay Toothbrushes & Cowbellswas a finalist in the Cinema Street Screenplay Competition. Most recently her work has appeared at Every Day Fiction.
October 2022 | fiction
For thousands of years this was a peaceful place – pine trees stretching up toward the sky, hawks gliding at the line where the clouds met the infinite blue, fish scuttling down full rivers, one might even get lucky and see a brown bear, a flopping salmon in its mouth. But then the bulldozers came, ripping the ground with violence like a dagger cutting deep into flesh, shattering the idyllic mirrored surface of the lake, those still parts of the river, with the boom of seismic blasts, draining the land of its blood. Pipes were laid for oil to flow but no one who lived here wanted this. The people arrived to defend the land like birds in murmuration, huge crowds, a mass of bodies, there to put their flesh in front of the bulldozers. The people were peaceful. They were told to hold their ground and not panic. But then the riot police showed up to make an example of them. The people were shot by rubber bullets, sprayed with mace, assaulted by water cannons and blinded by tear gas.
After many days and months of camping in frigid temperatures, the people were close to giving up but then one morning as a hawk squawked across the sky, they opened their tents and discovered mirrored shields had been placed in front of every tent. They held these mirrored shields up in front of them, feeling like superheroes. They moved toward the riot police like a unified silver mass of shimmering scales. The police gasped to see themselves reflected back in these mirrors – their black helmets, bullet proof vests, combat pants, guns strapped to holsters, but underneath all that gear they were still human, still of this land, like the stardust they were born from and the dust they will return to.
For a moment there was a vibration of shared humanity -that underneath the uniforms they were just like the people they had been told to fight.
Christine Arroyo
Christine Arroyo’s work has been published in X-R-A-Y Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Dark Recesses Press, Beyond Words, and Variety Pack, to name a few. She lives with her husband in New York’s Hudson Valley with her rescue dog and cat.
October 2022 | poetry
I’m standing on my head and typing with my toes
because this is for you,
So …
Who’s going to sell those autographs-of-jesus?
Who’s going to snort Beethoven to the clouds?
Who will anoint our hearth with Velveeta?
And who will love me like Livin’ Is A Breeze?
In-furigated,
re-pooperated,
beanie-brained as we pleased,
it was easy to be in love
when livin’ was a breeze.
“Let’s take our feet with us wherever we go”
Ok. And keep them safe inside our shoes
(but if a puppy sucks on our toes, that’s ok, too).
Then we’ll run down rabbits on the way to our soul,
ask the wind which way to go,
then finally, we’ll know how sad we can be:
Making love,
we couldn’t help but press your dying into me;
couldn’t help but want
my life for you.
Gary Lee Barkow practices Tai Chi and walks around feeling loved. He keeps a flashlight by his futon in case he has a brilliant idea at night. He doesn’t know where poetry comes from, so he enjoys the mystery. He likes: Mathematics, aeroplanes with propellers, earthworms, the San Francisco 49ers and rock ‘n’ roll.
October 2022 | poetry
Annotated Patpong Love Song
Verse 1
Her belly’s as big
though she’s only
half his size
Pint-sized really, she’d be his daughter if she weren’t his concubine, his squeeze,
his number really, that is, he picked the number pinned on her bikini while she tumbled
in the neon marsh waters of the Mermaidium.
Verse 2
Wide-eyed calf who strayed,
her stick legs split like fragrant timber.
The old man had his way.
They had sex that he paid for not always in cash, but with a Moschino knock-off handbag, or
Day-Glo Japanese sneakers or increasingly doctor-money to her family up north in Udon Thani,
so much money for gout and nose bleeds and non-specific idiopathic pain that he started to
question how one woman – her mother – could get sick sick/so quick quick.
Verse 3
And now he glows
with foolish pride
as two bellies grow
side by side.
She offered her virtue for a transaction so now she’ll trade her freedom for security,
and keep the baby and become his wife even though he was really fat and made no effort
to contain his chronic flatulence due to the Heineken drip-feed from breakfast onwards. One
other thing: she could not pronounce her new last name. Dutch…Polish…whatever.
The Wild Blue Horses
Long before techno hit Berlin, Franz Marc miffed
the fussbudget bean counters of the Kaiser Reich
by painting blue horses stampeding from the yard,
horses romping like wedding guests on wooded trails
swigging schnapps from the bottle under the yellowest of moons.
But when the war came, Franz bled out on a cratered, treeless plain.
And, his blue horses vanished in the boneyard air.
The Kaiser, it was later learned, had given all notable artists
permission to withdraw. But the order did not arrive in time.
This was not Saving Private Ryan.
It was a very German movie.
Stefan Sullivan
Stefan Sullivan is the author of a memoir set in Siberian oil country (Die Andere Bibliothek/Frankfurt) and a work in philosophy (Marx for a Post-Communist Era: On Poverty, Corruption and Banality (Routledge/London). He has also given over 300 performances as a lounge singer/pianist. He lives in Washington DC.
October 2022 | fiction
Wherever he went, a thundercloud paraded behind him. Just a little one, about the size of a coffee grinder. Black-ish, oblong, floating along in the wake of his head. He could never, ever see it. But, if he looked back—as he always tried not to do—he could mark its tiny path of damp devastation.
You should get that looked at, said his best friend, who had come along for the ride.
You should get that looked at, said his hairdresser, who had to nudge the thundercloud out of the way so she could study the back of his neck. Stand back, peering, to make sure everything was even and as it should be.
Her sign said Hairdresser for Men, not Barber. Over a long life, she told him, she’d learned that the only thing that mattered more than how things appeared, was what they were called.
You should get that looked at, he said—he was accustomed to telling people all day what to do—when she retreated so far from the back of his head in order to see it that she bumped into a portable coffee cart and sent the grinder flying.
You should get that looked at, said his friend—he was accustomed to going along with everything, plus he knew a good appliance repairman.
The hairdresser gazed out the window and pointed at what she saw with her extreme far-sightedness (which is just a term for everything close being confusingly blurred): a dark cloud rolling in.
Afterwards, he was never sure what to call what had happened. Just that, once again, something had.
You shouldn’t look, said his hairdresser, about the back of his head after she slipped with the clippers. A small breeze—a warning unheeded—tingled his newly bald patch of scalp. We’re outta here, he screamed, furious, his friend’s insouciance once again parched ground to rain. He jerked his head towards the door with a lopsided flounce.
You shouldn’t look, said the drenched paramedic in the storm, about his best friend being cut from the car he’d just smashed.
You shouldn’t look, said a new thundercloud, purring into his ear like a full coffee grinder, as if there were all the time in the world to even things out.
Kimm Brockett Stammen
Kimm Brockett Stammen’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Litro, december magazine, CARVE, The Greensboro Review, Pembroke, Prime Number, and many others. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart and Best Short Fiction anthologies. She holds an MFA from Spalding University. kimmbrockettstammen.wordpress.com
