October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
1. The Confession
“I know that Cheri’s been cheating on me.”
I looked at Rod. We were jogging together around the lake. “She told you?”
“Fuck no; the bitch is too afraid of me to spit it out.”
“Then how—“
“Her face told me. I been with her long enough to tell. No different than if she confessed outright.” Rod picked up speed; I managed to keep up with him even though I hadn’t been jogging much lately.
“Maybe you’re misreading her. Maybe—“
“Here’s what I’m gonna do to the fucker once I squeeze it out of her who she fucked.” He slowed down and pulled a switchblade from his shorts pocket. “I’m gonna cut off his dick. Slowly, so I can enjoy the screaming. Then I’ll shut him up by shoving it into his mouth. And then I’ll grab my .38 and—”
“Jesus, Rod, stop it. Just stop it!”
“It’ll be quite a show, Gus. I’ll give you a ringside seat. ‘Wild West Justice.’”
We finished our jog in silence. As I turned to head for home, Rod said, “If she’s still visiting with Jill tell her to get her ass back here now.”
Jill and Cheri were on the sofa, solemnly watching Cheri’s son, Rod Jr., playing with the puppy. I pecked Jill on the cheek. She didn’t respond.
Cheri stared at me; then she said, “Did you and Rod have a good run?”
“I need a drink,” I said—more to myself than to Jill or Cheri, and went into the kitchen. I poured some whiskey into a tumbler, took a gulp, sat down, and put my head in my hands.
Cheri walked in after a decent interval. She looked ill. I could see what she was thinking.
2. The Wound
Dennie said he wanted to show me something. We’d been lounging in his back yard. It got very hot so we went inside. He made a pitcher of lemonade, spiked it with his mother’s vodka, what the hell, she was out of town for the weekend. We played some chess. He must have poured a lot of vodka into the lemonade because after just a few swigs the chess pieces began moving by themselves.
“You said you wanted to show me something, Dennie?”
Wincing, he slowly removed his shirt. His fingers were long and thin. “This.” He moved to one side and lifted his arm
There was a huge purple contusion on his ribcage.
“Jeez, what happened to you?”
He dropped his arm, readjusted himself on his chair and returned his attention to the chessboard. He wiggled his finger on a pawn as if trying to decide whether to deploy it or not. “It was BB .”
“Bad Brad Jensen?”
Dennie finally moved the pawn. “Yeah.”
“When?”
“During basketball practice.” As Dennie explained it, he and BB had had gotten into an argument. BB began speed-dribbling the ball and suddenly flung it at Dennie with such force that Dennie stumbled and fell. He called BB a thug and flipped him off. Before Dennie could get back on his feet, BB kicked him in the ribs.
There was this unwritten rule: giving guys like BB the bird would earn you a bashed-in face or a couple of broken bones.
“More lemonade, Carl?
I nodded.
“Too bad BB has such a mean streak,” Dennie sighed. “There was a time when I felt sure we were really gonna hit it off.”
“Hard to imagine.”
Dennie gazed at me for a long moment and smiled. Finally, he said, “Your move.”
3. The Rumor
Did you hear the rumor?
I most certainly did. Isn’t it disgusting? How could they have been so sinful?
It doesn’t surprise me. Everywhere you look, people are turning into sinners.
I wonder if the rest of the neighborhood heard about it. Well, I am going to find out.
In just a few hours, the rumor had spread through the neighborhood. But the rumor did not stop there. It spread through the next neighborhood and the next. By the end of the following day, the rumor had spread through the entire town.
It was a wildfire of a rumor.
The rumor spread to one town after another. By the end of the week, the rumor had spread across the county, gaining strength as it spread, reshaping itself as it grew stronger with each new county it invaded.
Did you hear the rumor? Did you hear what they did? Isn’t it disgusting? How can people be so sinful?
The wildfire became a conflagration, consuming every county in the state, consuming the state, and eventually every state in the lower forty-eight. Alaska was delayed, thanks to Canada; Hawaii was spared.
Three persons dared to quash the rumor, the monstrosity that the rumor had become. Those individuals were apprehended, branded as enemies of the faith, and promptly silenced. Of course, they had become the flashpoint of yet another rumor.
— Fred D. White
Fred D. White’s work has appeared in Confrontation, Michigan Quarterly Review, Other Voices, Pleiades, Southwest Review, Writer’s Digest, etc. His most recent book is *Where Do You Get Your Ideas? A Writer’s Guide to Transforming Notions into Narratives* (Writer’s Digest Books, 2012).
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
Red coat. That’s the first thing I see when she walks into the elevator. She’s pretty. She sees me there standing between six others in a cramped elevator. We lock eyes. She smiles. I blush. A scent passes my nostrils. Spring time rain. I envision lying in a field in a soft springtime drizzle. I look up and see her. I smile. A loud conversation carries around us, but her and I stay silent.
She reaches to press her floor button, 6. I see mine, 9. Damn. Not enough time. The elevator stops at the third floor. The crowd around us leaves. We make eye contact as the door closes leaving the two of us alone. We both look back down, smiling to ourselves.
Fourth floor. I start to sweat. I check my phone out of habit. The silence is stifling. I gulp nervously.
Fifth floor. Wait what could I do? What can I even do now? Is it too late to start a conversation? No! I need something more direct. This girl must obviously be someone special. She’s even wearing rain-scented perfume, I love the smell of rain!
Sixth floor. She looks at me, smiles nervously. I smile back hesitating. The door opens and she starts to leave. I grab her by her hand and she looks back at me surprised. I smile and pull her in to kiss her. Inches closer and closer. She snaps out of my hand and slaps my face disgusted
“Oh! Sicko!” She yells.
She grabs her bag and guards her body as she strides quickly off the elevator and out of my sight.
“Well I misread that,” I say to no one but myself as the elevator door closes behind her.
— Bryan Crumpley
Bryan Crumpley is a Chicago writer, currently studying fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago. He has spent half his life in California and half in Chicago, but he’s spent the entirety as a writer both in craft and soul.
July 2013 | back-issues, fiction
Once, I had one hundred imaginary dogs and my nursery school classmates decided to have imaginary dogs too. Siddhartha decided to have imaginary elephants instead with names filled with letters strung together like the pretty glass beads my teacher wore around her neck. I liked Siddhartha because he always shared his crayons.
Once, Justin, who lived in my grandmother’s building and showed me how boys could pee standing up, told me he was eating my imaginary dogs. I watched him bring his grimy fingers up to his mouth and ran away angrily. Loneliness tainted the rest of my day, and I kept turning my head to look mournfully behind me as I walked, now void of one hundred imaginary puppies that always frolicked in my wake.
The next day, he came up to me again. “Yum, yum, yum,” he said, gnashing his pearl-white teeth together around the necks of my dogs. “Your dogs are delicious.”
“Nuh uh,” I retorted, my hands planted firmly on my hips. “I left my dogs at home today. You’re eating imaginary worms.” Justin, who wore batman underwear and always scored in kickball, stared at me with his mouth open as I walked away triumphantly knowing that his stomach was now filled with imaginary worms.
Justin asked me to marry him at recess the next day. But unfortunately for Justin, I had already asked Siddhartha, who had very politely, said yes.
by Amelia Jane Nierenberg
Amelia Jane Nierenberg is a Junior at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. She is a Fiction Reader for the Adroit Journal, the Fiction Editor and co-founder of the Fieldston Literary magazine, The Icebox, and spends much of her free time painting and writing. Her work either appears, or is forthcoming in Amazing Kids! Magazine, Tap Magazine Issue 25: Bare, Prick of the Spindle, the Blue Pencil Online, the Doctor T. J. Eckelburg Review, the Emerge Literary Journal, the Eunoia Review, the Postscript Journal, the Poydras Review, the Rusty Nail, the Black Fox Literary Magazine, Torrid Literature Polyphony HS and the Blue Lake Review. She received an Honorable Mention for creative nonfiction in the Young Authors Competition in addition to five regional Honorable Mentions, eight Regional Silver Keys and three Regional Gold Keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and a National Gold Key for Flash Fiction.
July 2013 | back-issues, fiction
It felt like I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, like I’d walked into a house that looked like mine, but belonged to someone else. She found me in the kitchen drinking a glass of water. Her eyes welled up and shone bright with what would soon form tears. I was in the right house, but at ten in the morning, I should’ve been somewhere else.
“Don’t cry,” I said.
“How much do we have?” She always cut to what mattered most, and in that minute, what mattered most was money. She didn’t care how I lost my job, she only cared that in that moment, I didn’t have one.
“We’ve got enough. Don’t worry, I’ll find something.” I didn’t know how long it would take and we both knew my words were empty, but I said them anyway.
“And then?” Her voice rose; she was angry, but not at me.
“And then I’ll find something,” I said, letting my tone match hers. “Where are the kids?”
She pointed toward the back yard.
I walked to the window, frosted with ice. Through a clear patch, I envied the innocence on the other side. “Where’s the camera?” I asked. “I want to save this.”
“We sold it. The last time.”
About a month later, I was working again and with my first check, I bought another camera. Nothing fancy, just something that saved scenes worth saving because some things are more important to save than money.
by Foster Trecost
Foster Trecost is from New Orleans, but he lives in Germany. His stories have appeared in Elimae, Corium and Metazen, among other places.
July 2013 | back-issues, fiction
Being on the run wasn’t half as glamorous as I had expected: they never tell you about Bonnie and Clyde shitting in the woods.
by Samuel Best
Samuel Best is a Glasgow-based writer and also runs Octavius, a literary magazine for students studying in Scotland. Samuel is currently writing two novels based on different blends of Scottish national identity, violence and running away. He tweets at @spbbest and has more stories available here: http://samuelbest.weebly.com/
April 2013 | back-issues, fiction
You said you felt under the weather. I suggested soup and you replied tomato. Tomato with grilled cheese. While I blanched them, you put on Van Morrison and scrolled through my songs. You considered yourself an expert.
“You need to clean your music library. Doesn’t it annoy you? How do you know what you have, what you don’t have?”
I shrugged.
“Why don’t you at least keep the genres organized?” you pressed.
“Why put songs in boxes? Why label them?” I was being ornery.
“Angel Pop? What the hell is that? Rainy Day Rock? Sci-Fi? What kind of musical genres are these?” You sounded sick.
I shrugged. It was all downloaded. Some legally, some not. The music came from pretentious blogs and Russian websites and some place called torrent. Data mountains from Korea, Morocco, mouth-breathing basements.
“You know that’s stealing,” you lectured.
***
It was Veteran’s Day when we decided to call it quits. It was raining. We called it quits, whatever ‘it’ was. We had never labeled it.
“I can’t make you happy,” you said.
“I can’t give you anymore,” I said.
You got out of bed, even though you hate the rain. I started scrolling through the songs by genre.
Afropop, Avant Folk, Crossover, Death Electro, Ethnic, Forgiveness Rock, Future Roots, Gracenotes, Merengue, Mexican Summer, Noise, Progressive, Surge, Trip-Hop, Tropical.
I x’ed out. There was no use. You took everything and left me with a head cold.
by Sonya Bilocerkowycz
