January 2019 | Best of Net nominee, fiction, nonfiction
Virtually Identical
FICTION
‘I shan’t introduce you to my sister,’ said Kate. ‘You’ll fall in love with her. Then I’ll have to hate you.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
(I’m used to Kate’s pronouncements.)
We were driving to Sussex. Having decided to marry me, Kate felt I should meet her parents.
‘You and your sister,’ I said. ‘Are you alike?’
‘We’re virtually identical.’
‘Twins?’
‘Stop the car,’ said Kate. ‘There by those bushes. I need to change.’
I find it captivating: Kate’s ability to transform herself. From brisk solicitor to untamed party-animal. From formal dinner guest to fun-runner in baggy shorts and shapeless t-shirt. The Kate, who now appeared in a black skirt and white blouse, was the dutiful daughter.
‘I must warn you,’ said Kate. ‘My parents are prudes.’
To me they appeared courteous, welcoming, perfectly charming.
‘Samuel will be sleeping in the guest bedroom,’ said Kate.
(Another of Kate’s pronouncement.)
Did I see Kate’s mother raise an eyebrow?
‘Don’t come looking for me in the night,’ said Kate. ‘You’ll end up in someone else’s bedroom.’
Kate’s father’s generous measures of single malt meant that I fell deeply asleep, but I woke up immediately when the bedroom door creaked open.
‘Don’t turn on the light.’
I didn’t.
In the morning, she’d gone.
‘Were you alright last night?’ said Kate.
‘Last night?’
‘By yourself in your lonely little bed.’
‘By myself? But didn’t you …?’
‘Didn’t I what?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I slept fine.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Me?’ I said. ‘I’m the bridegroom.’
‘I thought you looked familiar,’ she said. ‘I’m Aunt Astrid. I’m potty as an aspidistra. Did you know there was madness in the family?’
‘Really?’ I said, looking round the marquee. ‘Tell me. I haven’t met Kate’s sister yet. Is she here somewhere?
‘Sister? Kate has no sister. Kate’s an only child.’
by Nicolas Ridley
Unarmed Combat
NONFICTION
It’s a pleasant day in early April. Winter is no more than a memory and today we are learning how to kill people. Or maim them. Maybe both. I’m not sure yet.
Together we chant the sergeant’s mantra:
One-two-three-four,
Step-on-his-jaw,
Just-to-make-sure.
‘Next!’
Last January we slept in our boots on Dartmoor. We learnt the lesson on the first morning. If you leave your boots outside the tent, they freeze like solid blocks of ice. The answer is to keep them on all night. This means lying on your back in your sleeping-bag with your feet pointing upwards. It’s awkward at first but you get used to it. When you’re fourteen-years-old, sleeping isn’t usually terribly difficult.
One-two-three-four,
Step-on-his-jaw,
Just-to-make-sure.
‘Next!’
This spring the school’s Combined Cadet Force is camping in the Thetford battle area. We have spent much of the week crawling through damp bracken and sheep’s droppings but we’ve camped in many worse places and will do again.
This afternoon a group of us has volunteered to undergo training in unarmed combat. It sounded more fun than signals, mortars or map-reading. We are in the care of our instructor: square, unhurried, amiable, Sergeant Jones.
Methodically, almost languorously, Sergeant Jones disarms, disables and dispatches us by numbers.
‘You take the arm. You break the arm. You twist the wrist. And over he goes.’
Perhaps it’s a little chilling but it’s also oddly hypnotic.
‘You take the arm. You break the arm. You twist the wrist. And over he goes.’
One at a time, we rush at Sergeant Jones with wooden weapons. Step-by-step — cool and unflurried — he goes about his business.
‘You take the arm. You break the arm. You twist the wrist. And over he goes.’
I’m not certain what we’re learning except that Sergeant Jones is the master of his craft. If we have to watch him very much longer, we may become bored and rather restless but, for the present, it passes the time.
One-two-three-four,
Step-on-his-jaw,
Just-to-make-sure.
‘Next!’
All afternoon the sun shines down on us benignly. Tonight the damp bracken and sheep’s droppings will remain unfrozen and we will sleep peacefully in our socks.
by Nicolas Ridley
Nicolas Ridley has lived and worked in Tokyo, Casablanca, Barcelona, Hong Kong and Paris and now lives in London & Bath (UK) where he writes fiction, non-fiction, scripts and stage plays. A prize-winner and Pushcart Prize nominee, his short stories have been read at Liars’ League (London), Rattle Tales (Brighton), The Speakeasy (Bath), The Squat Pen Rests (Swindon), Story Friday (Bath), The Story Tales (London), Storytails (London) and Talking Tales (Bristol). Others have been published in London Lies, Lovers’ Lies & Weird Lies by Arachne Press (UK), Ariadne’s Thread (UK), Barbaric Yawp (USA), The Linnet’s Wings (Ireland), Litro Magazine (UK), O:JA&L (USA), Rattle Tales 3 (UK), Sleet Magazine (USA), The Summerset Review (USA), Tales from a Small Planet (USA), Tears in the Fence (UK) and Black is the New Black & True Love by Wordland (UK). Godfrey’s Ghost, his biographical memoir, is published by Mogzilla Life.
January 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
One night, we don’t know how, he slips the bands
that bind his claws and sets to work. If fast or slow,
it doesn’t matter—whether, in a rage
of thrashing action or, methodical
(the slow precision of a diver bent
on patient reclamation from the sea),
he stalks and disassembles each bound mate
he’s harbored with, and snaps off limbs and pries
between the overlapping plates their shells
can offer only for their weak defense.
He rips them up, thrusts toothed appendages
into the soft connective flesh, and feeds.
All through the night his work transpires until,
in morning’s white fluorescent light, he lies
revealed: an armored, glutted emperor,
a sated cannibal astir within
his muddied lair, his realm acloud with limbs
adrift and picked and gnawed to fringe along
the edges of their shells, and tissue ripped
to pennant threads and litter at his feet.
Consider how we care for him: the creature we’d
have eaten without thought, though he contrived
to feast before us, had he not consumed
the meat we’d meant to satiate ourselves.
And now, the empty tank near tenantless,
do we declare the victim we’d have made
our own a criminal among the just, or call
him reprehensible in spite of us?
by Gregory Loselle
Gregory Loselle has won four Hopwood Awards at The University of Michigan, where he earned an MFA. He has won The Academy of American Poets Prize, the William van Wert Fiction Award from Hidden River Arts, and The Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for Playwriting. He was the winner of the 2009 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, The Robert Frost Award of The Robert Frost Foundation, and the Rita Dove Prize for poetry (where he won both First Prize and an Honorable Mention) at Salem College. He has won multiple awards in the Poetry Society of Michigan’s Annual Awards Competition. His first chapbook, Phantom Limb, was published in 2008, and another, Our Parents Dancing, in 2010, both from Pudding House Press. Two more, The Whole of Him Collected, and About the House, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively. His short fiction has been featured in the Wordstock and Robert Olen Butler Competition anthologies, as well as in The Saturday Evening Post, and The Metro Times of Detroit, and his poetry has appeared in The Ledge, Oberon, The Comstock Review, Rattle, The Georgetown Review, River Styx, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, Alehouse, Poetry Nook, Sow’s Ear, and online in The Ambassador Poetry Project, among others.
July 2018 | Best of Net nominee, fiction
RIP Kenneth Arrow, 23 August 1921- 21 February 2017
Bizarrely charged – not unlike Alfred inventing dynamite — often polarizing Noble Laureates taught me at Harvard and Stanford.
The repellant Brit who co-discovered DNA — their shared award had the prestige of a “once in a generation Prize” — was notorious for looking-up skirts bottom of a steep auditorium he always requested as his Harvard undergraduate lecture classroom…
A Stanford Medical student doing a cardiology rotation, I sometimes lunched in the clinic’s empty waiting room with one who’d been honored in both chemistry plus peace; his goofy smile offered strawberries or oranges or capsules of vitamin C…
Handfuls of Laureates invited us to tea; I sensed the Administration required it.
Several belonged to our family’s synagogue.
Two were father and son: the former nearly threw a microscope at me when as a freshman I said the Dean of Admissions told me (a non pre-med) during a recruitment interview I wouldn’t need to use one; the latter was a college classmate then faculty colleague.
None were women though a hematologist-aunt made the short-list, as did a neuroscience asshole uncle.
But the magnetic gentleman I recall most fondly — an “impossibility theorem” was named after him — instead of resting on his laurels remained active “to be of use” developing fundamental theorems of welfare economics that gave ballast to progressive government action.
This kind soul had a seemingly insatiable curiosity.
Although not particularly close, we were friends of the same couple so had infrequent cordial dinners. Once sitting next to him, I explained that because of G6PD deficiency, which led to my red blood cells breaking up if I took the required anti-malarial prophylaxis Primaquine, I couldn’t accompany my son on New Guinea field-work.
Listening intently, he didn’t say a word.
Two years later, he mentioned casually that he’d gotten interested in malaria. I read his article, “Making Antimalarial Agents Available in Africa.” His accomplishment demonstrated cost effectiveness of artemisinins derived from Chinese wormwoods to treat resistant malaria: that gave ammo to adding it as a benefit to a national HMO I ran.
When his equally substantial wife of seven decades passed, the professor-emeritus shrank from view.
Last night I saw this once straight-as-an-arrow attractive figure at a holiday party — now he hunched over while his caregiver wiped drool. Intimates smothered him with respect and love; those in outer circles like me whom he didn’t remember stopped by for a smile; others figured he was our host’s demented relative, simply gave wide birth.
by Gerard Sarnat
Gerard Sarnat has won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize and been nominated for Pushcarts. Gerry’s authored four collections: HOMELESS CHRONICLES from Abraham to Burning Man (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting The Ice King (2016) which included work published in magazines and anthologies including Gargoyle, American Journal of Poetry (Margie), Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, OCHO, Brooklyn Review, Lowestoft, Tishman Review, Tiferet, Fiction Southeast plus was featured in New Verse News, Edify, Poetica, Songs of Eretz, Avocet, LEVELER, tNY, StepAway, Bywords and Floor Plan. Among other publications, Deronda Review, San Francisco Magazine, Radius, Foliate Oak, Dark Run, Scarlet Leaf, Good Men Project, Veterans Writing Project, Anti-Heroin Chic, Aois, Poetry Circle, Tipton Review, Creative Truth, Harbor Village, Indian Ruminations, KYSO, Flagler Review, Poets and War, and Ordinary Madness’ debuted feature sets of new poems. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s sequence, KADDISH FOR THE COUNTRY, for distribution as a pamphlet in Seattle on Inauguration Day 2017 as well as the next morning as part of the Washington DC and nationwide Women’s Marches. In May “Amber Of Memory” was the single poem chosen for Gerry s 50th college reunion symposium on Bob Dylan; the Harvard Advocate accepted a second plus Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Johns Hopkins accepted concurrent pieces. In August Failed Haiku presented his work first among over a hundred contributors. In January 2018, among other acceptances, six Sarnat poems were featured in True Living Documented Relentlessly [TL;DR], his work was front page in International Journal Of Modern Poetry, and pieces were accepted by Australian, Israeli, Canadian and Indian publications.
July 2018 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Waking at Night
Such a short distance between genius
and shit. Take those elephant turds
Bruce Nauman (1991 Walker Art Center)
stacked in piles on the floor, soft cannon balls,
so appealing to some humans, something we can
all relate to. In my claustrophobic little corner
(compared to the Milky Way) I am happy,
moon-devotée that I am with a rag of the ancient
floating first hand outside my window. Take
these lines written in the darkness around
my bed. I hope they don’t cross
over themselves creating rows like il-
legible barbed wire some French girls
stood behind at the end of a world war,
brunette and blond collaborators
whose hair was shorn, the sign for bedding up
with a Wehrmacht man who gave them cognac
and nylons they could sell on the black market.
The girls’–women’s– heads, skulls, spat upon,
cross-and-bones thin, reviled little female
christs. It’s just dizziness. It’ll pass. It’s just this
time of night and the room so small. There
are bad dreams and then it’s over and they/
we can go back to sleep again.
But why would anybody
take this shit from the elephant kings,
their balls. Even the elephants were
astonished that their turds
were sold with their ivory.
Their leftovers.
We Missed the Boat
after Brave Irene by William Steig
Never compare yourself to another,
especially when she’s Irene Bobbin,
at the door to her mother’s little yellow
parlor with its pictures and mannequin.
“Bye! I’ll deliver the gown to the duchess.”
Mrs. Bobbin, a single mom, brimming
with exhaustion called from her bed,
“Don’t go, Irene. A storm’s in full swing.”
But Irene set off with gown in box,
into the darkening winter afternoon.
(You and I set out, too, on a mission.)
Even though the wind tore open
the box, even though the snow
was hip high, even though Irene
thought she was lost, maybe going
in circles, she struggled on.
(Did we quit too early?)
Somewhere past Farmer Bennett’s
pasture the wind was so strong it
blew away two tissue paper ghosts
that sheltered the beautiful pink,
sparkly dress. And the dress, too.
(What went wrong for us?)
Irene had a mission for sure.
She was focused on succeeding,
a matter of food for the cupboards,
wood for her mother’s cold stove,
and something for the pot on it.
(We could’ve tried harder, I guess.)
Irene‘s tasks doubled: now
she must find the lost gown.
Through gangly, primordial woods
where there’s no sense of direction,
she stumbled on, snow blind, from tree
to tree until her little legs protested
they could lift themselves no more.
But there! At wit’s end, there was
the dress, plastered to a tree,
decking the trunk out for a party.
(Maybe the Fates were against us.)
A sight indeed for sore eyes.
And not much farther on, an amber
window light spilled out over the snow.
The palace! Irene huddled before the door.
Like a snow sculpture, but she’d made it!
(And if she hadn’t? That happens, too.)
All good things followed: the Duchess’s
pleasure at the gown, the warm ballroom,
the delicious feast an absolute joy
for porridge-fed Irene. And best of all,
a purse full of money for her mom. The end.
(It almost hurts, others’ triumphs, they feel so good.)
by Sharon Chmielarz
Sharon Chmielarz has had eleven books of poetry published, the latest, “little eternities,” in Sept. 2017. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize seven times and five of her books runners-up for literary awards. Kirkus Reviews named her “The Widow’s House” one of the 100 best books in 2016. She was born in South Dakota but has spent her adult life in Minneapolis, MN.
July 2018 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
We are all lined down;
deep and thick in a pit;
so black there is no other color
where pleas and prayers cannot escape
but seep down this jail of flesh.
There is no room to bleed.
Our ghosts scoff, “Show us your chains.
Give us your screams and your wails.
Tell us your stories and tales
of the ocean, of sales,
of fields, of bales,
or we don’t know you.”
Children barter unearned coin
with unmarked hands
and forsake God for gimme and gold
to buy peace from the secret sin.
They covet another color;
any other color.
What I hate about my color is my hate.
What I hate about my color is my sorrow.
What I hate about my color is that color
is so precious to the Beast.
God made us black.
The Beast made it matter.
Still, our ghosts scoff, “Show us your chains.
Give us your screams and your wails.
Tell us your stories and tales
of the ocean, of sales,
of fields, of bales,
or we don’t know you.”
What I love about my color are my mothers.
What I love about my color are my brothers;
sanctuary, survival, solace, and succor.
I may scale the strong walls,
and stronger walls that we build
with guilt, blame and shame.
and exorcise ghosts
that scoff and boast.
by Stuart James Forrest
Stuart James Forrest developed a passion for creative writing while attending the Stanford University Continuing Studies Program. He enjoys writing poetry and short stories and hopes to develop enough skill to be a strong, creative representative of his generation of Black Americans who lived through a very tumultuous period in American history.
July 2018 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Google News tells me academics in India are robbing literature of any personal touch. Poor literature breeds poor syllabus breeds poor literature, a vicious cycle while banner ads of Clarks walking shoes keep stomping across my laptop. Page down leads to Baltimore cops reading Plato and James Baldwin. Then: No bombs, no guns, just 90 minutes of football. As Google knocks, I learn that cinnamon may help attack fat and obesity. Scrolling up to schizophrenia, the subhed says angry avatars help people stop hearing voices by shouting at them. Meanwhile, Ohio State rallies past Michigan, Pakistani authorities order a media blackout and Easter eggs lay hidden in the new Senate tax bill. Are millennials narcissistic? The evidence is not so simple, says Google News. Silicon Valley, Black Friday, Donald Trump and the FCC. Badgers football, tobacco companies and the Pope in South Asia. I can still hear Google knocking. What to click? I choose the one that says Buddhism includes everything, even comic books.
by Gary Singh
Gary Singh was recently a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. As a scribe, he’s published over 1000 works including newspaper columns, travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry and short fiction. His poems have been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Maudlin House and more. For 650 straight weeks, his newspaper columns have appeared in Metro, the alternative weekly paper of San Jose and Silicon Valley. He is the author of The San Jose Earthquakes: A Seismic Soccer Legacy (2015, The History Press). http://www.garysingh.info
