October 2020 | fiction
The first time she was touched was in the dark. At a school assembly, the lights in the auditorium off so that they could see the video about drunk driving play on the projector screen above the stage. A hand was on her thigh and then between her legs. She tensed but didn’t dare look at the boy the hand belonged to. She concentrated on the girl crying in the video, mascara running down her face, saying she wished she could take it back. Make it better again.
She’d only spoken to the boy in class. They had English and Bio together. Now, his hand crept up her thigh so slowly it was barely moving. She didn’t flinch. His fingers followed the inside seam of her jeans. His knuckles pressed hard.
There, in squeaky seats, she chewed her lip until it stung, the hurt of it. She wanted him to press harder, harder. They didn’t look at each other. A mother cried on screen, asked why, why, why. Mascara ran down her puffy face. His thumb dug in and she sucked in air. She could hear the whole school breathing, in and out. Something unfamiliar stirred in her. Someone whispered and a teacher shushed them.
Erika Nichols-Frazer
Erika Nichols-Frazer has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She won Noir Nation’s 2020 Golden Fedora Fiction Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Red Tree Review, HuffPost, Lunate, Literary Orphans, Noir Nation, OC87 Recovery Diaries, and elsewhere. You can find her work and blog at nicholsfrazer.com.
October 2020 | fiction
Circa 1980, back from college on break, I took my 53 year old mother to the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show in my hometown. In the car she flashed me her lacy bra peeking from her unbuttoned plus size floral tunic, shimmying her bosom and smirking at the look on my face before buttoning up again.
The Channel 7 news team was at the theater, and Mom intoned, mock-voice-over, “Fans of all ages flocked to the contemporary cult classic…” But no one else there looked over 25; the generations didn’t mix it up as much back then. Gray perm and shelf hips notwithstanding—even back in grade school kids always thought she was my grandmother– she was the perfect audience, probably the only one who understood all the allusions. After all, Lily St. Cyr was born way back in 1918.
Neither of us jumped into the aisle to do the Time Warp, but I could tell she wanted to. She had a way of laughing that was like how some people cry—with her whole body. Everyone always smiled when my mother laughed, which was a lot of the time.
As we walked to the car she took umbrage with the critics who dismissed one young Susan Sarandon’s performance. “Her eyes are very expressive. She’s gonna go places.”
She went on to compare the male characters with guys I liked in high school. The many Brads, the one Frank and two Rockies were obvious. We clashed over Eddie—I said there were no Eddies in my history; she said there were at least three. “I heard Ninja Star Nun-chuks is in jail right now,” she said. “And Skateboard Steve definitely shoplifted you that mood ring. And Pig-Pen…”– who had once left indelible dusty handprints all over my white French cut T-shirt–“…wasn’t he busted for …”
“Why must you remind me?” I was newly engaged, and smug. I thought only, and constantly, about my perfect fiancé, how much in love I was, how perfectly he smoothed over my ruffled past.
“Just trying to keep you humble,” she said.
I scratched my nose—she always made it itch when she annoyed me.
She caught me. “Aha—I see I still have the power.”
I deflected. “Well, what about the criminologist-narrator? I never dated him.” Ha-ha: he was old and irrelevant. As I said it I realized that he, the foil, a disembodied, judgmental scientific explainer, reminded me of someone…my father-in-law-to-be. Then I realized he also reminded me, just the tiniest bit, of my father-in law’s son, my own fiancé.
I held my breath, discreetly dragging my hand across my nose.
She paused. “He was quite the know-it-all,” she finally said.
I suddenly remembered her saying of one of the Eddies, (Skateboard Steve?) that one day I needed to match up with someone (even) smarter than I was. I’d said she’d sounded sexist and she’d said no, her advice was specific to me.
As I exhaled, she added, “How ‘bout them guns on that Rocky?”
And then she laughed and I smiled.
Julie Benesh
Julie Benesh has been published in Tin House Magazine, Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Gulf Stream, Berkeley Fiction Review, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Bridge, Green Briar Review, and other places. Her work has earned an Illinois Arts Council Grant and a Pushcart nomination. Julie has an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College, lives in Chicago with two cats and a lot of books, and works a day job as a professor and at a school of psychology.
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 | fiction
He doesn’t want to go to the dinner party. She tells him he promised but he tries to get out of it anyway. He had his mind set on laying around the house and doing nothing in particular. On the drive over he thinks about the planet Mercury. He’s reading a book about space.
Despite being closest to the Sun, Mercury is not the hottest planet. Venus is the hottest planet. This is because Mercury doesn’t have an atmosphere. Ice has been discovered buried in the bottoms of craters located at its poles. Mercury orbits the Sun every eighty-eight days. A year on Mercury is three months on Earth.
They arrive at the party. They say hello to the people they know and meet the people they don’t. He knows everyone can tell they have just been fighting. Sipping drinks in the living room, he ends up on the couch with Greg and Allison who predictably shift the conversation to improbable, unprovable conspiracy theories. She talks with a couple over by the record player. He met them ten minutes ago but has already forgotten their names.
Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system. It is larger than Mercury. Ganymede orbits Jupiter every seven days and Jupiter orbits the Sun every twelve years. A year on Jupiter is twelve years on Earth. Ganymede has a deep saltwater ocean fixed between layers of ice buried below its surface.
Dinner is risotto with sauteed morel mushrooms, homemade bread, and a fresh picked green salad. He is impressed and compliments the chef multiple times. He volunteers to do the dishes with no intention of actually doing the dishes. Later, everyone plays a board game in the living room while he drinks whiskey and smokes cigarettes on the back porch.
Neptune is the coldest and most distant planet in the solar system. Pluto is not a planet anymore. A year on Neptune is one hundred and sixty five years on Earth. Neptune has winds that blow close to supersonic speed and rain made up of compressed carbon. It rains diamonds on Neptune.
On the drive home she gets serious. She tells him he is absent. She feels he is no longer trying in their relationship and doesn’t know how long she can keep doing this. Also, he drinks too much.
Triton is the largest moon of Neptune. Triton was once an independent planetary body, drifting in space, that got captured by Neptune’s gravity. Triton’s orbit is in decay and it will eventually be torn apart by tidal forces and the pieces of its shattered carcass will spread out to form rings around Neptune.
Back at the house he apologizes. She is right. He has been absent. He tells her he will try harder and he loves her and wouldn’t know what to do without her. They talk for a while and end up making wild, frenzied love on the floor.
Triton will be destroyed in three and a half billion years.
Barry Biechner
Barry Biechner writes poetry and short fiction. His work has appeared in CIRQUE and Apeiron Review.
July 2020 | fiction
The woman had no set schedule. She came and went of her own accord and when we saw her it was like a glimpse of some elusive animal. She had soft flips of hair and wore furs and costume jewelry, dark sunglasses, always wheeling a carry-on. Sometimes we didn’t see her for weeks and then there she was, strolling past the ostentatious clock stuck at a quarter to three, the old men in faux leather chairs reading The Wall Street Journal, the fake ivy planted in plastic urns.
The manager wanted us to clean the room the woman had occupied secretly since who knows when. It was a hidden room behind a wall, and to get to it, you had to remove a patch of carpeting big enough only for a cat. When we peeled back the carpeting, we saw a small square entrance. We chiseled away at the entrance and saw the lair for what it was, a room the size of a large closet with clothes, boxes piled to the ceiling, a cot with a simple pillow.
The manager in her Talbots suit and Tiffany bracelet was anything but sympathetic as she rummaged through the belongings with an attitude of disgust. She uncovered old blankets, sheets, a stewardess’s uniform with a pair of gold wings attached to the lapel. In another box, there were extension cords and blow dryers and large hot rollers with protrusions like sea creatures.
We did not realize there could still be secrets behind the walls. We thought that these had all been eradicated with the razing of the asylum, back when they used to bring in the crazies confined to chicken crates. But we cannot deny—some of us found things: a small trunk under the pigeon-infested rafters filled with photographs and pressed flowers. A collection of glass bottles with poems curled like messages. The remnants of a leather strap. These were different from the hair ties, half-filled plastic water bottles, and gum wrappers we found in the common areas when shampooing the rugs or mopping the floors.
We hauled away some of the boxes. Some were full of Christmas presents, neatly wrapped and with bows. Others had dolls pressed up against cellophane windows; dolls in velvet dresses with names embroidered on the lapels—old vintage dolls with glass eyes peering out at us apprehensively, as if we were doing something wrong and they were concerned.
Later, in the parking lot, we divided up the gifts and unwrapped each one: miniature china tea sets and tiny spoons, glass figurines, the makings of a toddler’s chair. We thought, perhaps, she was dead. Or was she a ditz, forgetting to give presents and have children? We laughed uneasily, thinking of our own children, and remembering the rows of granite markers with chiseled numbers back by the recycling center where the land slopes gingerly toward the cornfields.
Laurette Folk
Laurette Folk ‘s fiction, essays, and poems have been published in Waxwing, Gravel, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Mom Egg, pacificREVIEW, Boston Globe Magazine, and Best Small Fictions 2019. Her first novel, A Portal to Vibrancy won the Independent Press Award for New Adult Fiction. Her second novel, The End of Aphrodite, is published by Bordighera Press. Laurette is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and a graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing program. Her website is www.laurettefolk.com
