October 2016 | fiction
Her hair is distracting. Her hair is blue, and it’s distracting. I know that blue. It’s that, I don’t care that you’re watching me blue. Why can’t she be normal? Sitting on her knees on the subway. Maybe I could talk to her if she’d just sit like a normal person. Maybe I’d walk up to her and tap her on the shoulder if her hair were yellow, or red, or brown. Why does it have to be blue?
She rides to her stop, gets up, and squeezes in front of me, like I’m not even there, like I’m no one, and I can’t move. I can’t breathe, because if I do, it’ll go right down onto her neck. Why does she do that?
It’s her hair. Her I don’t care that you want me hair. That salty, ocean water blue that she runs her fingers through as though to say, yeah, you could drown in me…if I let you. But I won’t. Every day, I’ve watched her blue hair fall over her white shoulders. I’ve counted the freckles hidden beneath the blue strands when her skin peeks through. I’ve watched her walk away from me, down the aisle, and through the door. I’ve watched her step out, and drift through the crowd. Her blue head bobs away among the normals. The nobodies. Every day since Monday, I’ve watched that un-natural, un-normal, fuck you hair leave me standing alone. And every day since I first saw her, I’ve wished that I were drowning.
But I’m not.
I’m breathing.
And all I can think of is tomorrow.
Amanda Goemmer
Amanda Goemmer is a Kentucky native, currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is working on her first novel, in addition to a collection of nonfiction works.
October 2016 | fiction
Blood drips onto the plates as he chatters away over supper, seemingly oblivious to the dead end that awaits them all. The kids slink silently away, as though escape is possible. Surely they know that later in the night, he will thump up the stairs in search for them as she lies in bed wondering when they auditioned for this drama.
#
A new morning, and she awakens to find shattered glass littering the kitchen floor. The kids stare eerily ahead while slowly munching cereal. Milk bubbles from the corners of their mouths. Silence hangs heavy until he slaps the bottle on the table.
“Cocktail time!”
The kids’ expressions remain impassive as their tongues flick over pale lips. They rise and she notices their backpacks leaking blood.
“STOP,” she shouts, “people will know.”
“Everyone already knows.” They turn their empty gazes on her.
“What?”
“You auditioned for the part, Ma, your name is in the obits.”
“You’re a terrible actress, I might add,” he cackles.
The kids leave and she starts vigorously mopping the floor. She is forever taking up where she left off and everything is always overwhelming.
Blood drips steadily from the ceiling, and suddenly, she is too tired to clean, too drained from yesterday, too fearful of tomorrow, too paralyzed to participate in the present tense. The chambers of her heart deplete as she struggles to recall events leading up to this point. A vision appears of her kids’ bloodless lips murmuring fateful words:
“Your whole life is a lie!”
“Only 80 proof,” she objects, knowing she is not the first to lie. Relief floods her as their accusing gazes fade into the cold, hard light of another day that she will thankfully never see as she sinks into the deep, dark, blissful deadness of oblivion.
Pavelle Wesser
Pavelle Wesser’s fiction has appeared in many webzines and anthologies. She writes in the wee hours of the night when sleep eludes her and she is usually slated to wake up early the next day, ensuring a never-ending cycle of run-on sentences and short-term memory loss. Originally a New Yorker, she currently resides in New England with her family and several dogs.
July 2016 | fiction
Old M1911, the puppy your father handed you at breakfast on your twelfth birthday, right across your Honey Smacks, before he tramped out the door toward any place but here. You stroke her barrel as she whimpers in your lap, your only puppy ever. In high school, she slept under your pillow. You whispered to her. When you had your own kids and pulled out the dirt driveway to work, she was your Annie Oakley, stowed under your seat. On weekends, after you moved out, she was an outcropping of your own hand when you toted her into your stall at the firing range. She slept quiet as you cut through the hidden part of town, where the down-and-outers live. You liked to stop at the Biscuitville there before looking for work. She slid into your feet when you rear-ended the F-150. She’d always been standup. But now, when you reach down for your little waggly-tail, she takes her sweet time coming to you, as the man busts out of his vehicle all wild-eyed and red-faced, hastens back to you, reaching behind him, wears that close-inspecting look you get when a man figures he might come under assault. The codger’s thinking just that—he eyes you up as you reach down for Brownie. You stiffen as he reacts to sun gleaming off steel, recoil as he fires two rounds into your side. Your Colt Browning falls from hand to lap, right on top of your Fried Chicken Biscuit. The shooter leans in, you can hear his breath, as you, for the last time, pet your little partner, now wet with what looks like ketchup. Something’s stirring in the man, he calls out, “Hey! Hey!” Then asks, “That you, son?” But by then it wasn’t. It wasn’t you anymore.
by Ronald Jackson
Ronald Jackson writes stories, poems, and non-fiction. His work has appeared in Blue Monday Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Firewords Quarterly, The Gateway Review, Kentucky Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and in anthologies and online venues. Recognitions include honorable mention in the Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition in 2012, third prize in Prime Number Magazine’s 2014 flash fiction competition, honorable mention in the 2014 New Millennium Writings short-short fiction competition, and runner-up in the 2016 Lamar York Prize in Non-Fiction.
July 2016 | fiction
Arlo was strolling down Pike Street one morning when he saw a woman sitting on a bench in front of a sex shop, madly trying to light a cigarette. She looked to be in her early twenties, was tall and slim with azure blue hair, and her milky white skin was adorned with tats and piercings. She looked vaguely familiar so he offered her a light and they chatted it up a bit.
Her name was Oona, and he found out that they were at the same Poetry Slam event the month before. She told him that she just moved to Seattle, used to work as a dominatrix, and that her wife, Didi, was a tranny. She also revealed that she once lived in a coven and was a witch.
Afterwards, he took her shopping at a place that carried a wide assortment of the dark, Goth clothing befitting her persona.
They met several other times that month, always followed by more shopping sprees. Arlo could see what was happening but it almost didn’t matter because he just wanted to be in her presence, at whatever cost. He liked to buy her needful, shiny things. She liked to get those needful, shiny things.
During the following months, Arlo fell into the role of servant to Oona and Didi: running errands, delivering takeout food, chauffeuring, and helping them furnish the apartment they shared with another tranny. He truly enjoyed this role.
One day, she told him that she unexpectedly inherited some property in New York and would be moving back there within the week.
Arlo felt hurt and lost without her. Eventually he figured out a way to sooth the pain and kick-start his life back up again; he would immortalize her in print.
by A.R. Bender
July 2016 | fiction
That’s my bike over there. Uncle Calvert, who I had a girl crush on in middle school, painted it white for me, and my sister Jessie twirled blue satin ribbon around the frame till it looked like a barber pole. It’s parked next to the pink and white oleander I love, with flowers that smell like bubblegum, look like pinwheels, and now poke vine-like through the rusting spokes.
I rode it when it was mousy brown, reliable transportation, nothing folks would want to steal. Rode it down the street right across from me, where it dumps onto University Drive at the signal, which had turned green, my luck was holding. I’d hit all the lights like clockwork that morning.
The old Dakota pickup came rocketing through, hell-bent on squeezing a lemon from a hundred and fifty. I’ve done it myself. I sailed through the autumn air like I was moving through water, I could paint a scene for each second I floated, until I hit hard and sudden against something, couldn’t tell you what, call it end of road.
I sit high up on the light standard across the street, looking down on the traffic island, first sun casting a warm glow on the altar of my Schwinn, which is chained to the traffic sign and festooned on either side by mother’s lovely planters.
Here she comes, clutching her translucent caddy in one hand, crammed with spray cleaners and dust cloths, and a milk jug full of water in the other. She crosses the still-deserted street from the parking lot, old hips slowing her to a waddle. She wipes and primps, stands back to inspect, kisses the bike seat and handle bars, things I’d touched, with the lingering lips of a parting lover, the same sweet ceremony every Sunday morning.
by Ronald Jackson
Ronald Jackson writes stories, poems, and non-fiction. His work has appeared in Blue Monday Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Firewords Quarterly, The Gateway Review, Kentucky Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and in anthologies and online venues. Recognitions include honorable mention in the Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition in 2012, third prize in Prime Number Magazine’s 2014 flash fiction competition, honorable mention in the 2014 New Millennium Writings short-short fiction competition, and runner-up in the 2016 Lamar York Prize in Non-Fiction.
April 2016 | fiction
It was her parents dying in a tragic accident downstate. It was being sent off to live with a grandfather she’d never known existed. It was working at his funeral parlor in an old Victorian house by a lake the color of desert glass. It was assisting the grandfather in a softly lit basement room of tiled walls and shining metal tables with round black drains. It was being ten years old and manipulating blue-tinted flesh and pliant muscle. It was peering into faces that had been rendered void, it was fitting small plastic cups under the lids of dehydrated eyes. It was inserting needles into veins and replacing syrupy blood with fine clean embalming fluid. It was applying makeup to silent women and shaving greasy five-o’clock shadow from the men who no longer cared about being nicked. It was combing little boys’ matted hair and knitting cheery bows into the tresses of little girls. It was repairing bullet holes and stab marks and burned flesh and flayed flesh and flesh that had gone missing.
It was the grandfather’s unswerving presence. It was how he sipped from a silver flask after a long day of reassembling human puzzles and stared at his protégé as though searching for something neither of them could see. It was the way he fed her powdered donuts and murmured what a good good student she was. And stroking her cheek and lightly fingering the cleft in her chin.
Joel Best
Joel Best has published in venues such as Atticus, decomP, Autumn Sky and Carcinogenic Poetry. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and son.
