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FRANKENSTEIN, NOT UMA THURMAN by Travis Dahlke

December 26, 2018

You were Mia Wallace for Halloween and I was sexy Harper Lee. 'How to fake blow' was stained on your phone's search history under the spiderweb cracks that cut up my fingers where I typed in my name. In all honesty, I wasn't even going to leave the house, but stoned in bed with headphones digging into the pillow is not where new friends are made. Dancing at the church party, we saw four other Mia Wallace's, each with blood running from their nostrils to the bleached spores of their mustaches. I thought we'd reek of fog machine juice forever, but it leapt from our clothes the second we stepped outside into hurricane season South Carolina. Into pie crust cooked with yams that were already purple at the edges.

'Don't worry, I'm easy to forget about. You won't even notice I'm gone, I promise,' was what you said but it was all glitter sleeting from the band of my bowl cut. It was all wet palms.

The next year you were 'Frankenstein Mia Wallace.' Same wig, white buttoned-down and blood, but with olive skin that made you look seasick, finished by a surgical scar you drew from one corner of your forehead to the other in the visor mirror of a Taurus. An expert on pretending with baking soda. On glued-in bolts. Here it was agreed upon that we were the kinds of people who bail and eventually there would come a time when we probably wouldn't talk anymore. Realistically, most people who are friends now won't still know each other in five or so years, right? It's just how things work. Two Halloweens is a good run, let's just appreciate that. But then the make-up became real.

We found out you were allergic to cheap face paint that night and for some reason I obliged when you asked me to take an Instagram of you in the hospital bed. True devotion to the character. Method acting in a wing of Scorpio babies born under another tropical storm.

By the fourth annual Monster Smash we got more specific. This was getting a little ridiculous. I asked you not to watch over me if your dream ever came true. That recurring one about a poisonous grasshopper biting you in the field behind your parent's house. It was narcissistic to think you'd want to follow me around when you had the galaxy to explore, but we still shook on it. We would not hang out as the drafts that make curtains look like they are breathing. I wouldn't haunt you and under no circumstances would you ever, in a million years, haunt me.

There were no more costume parties. There were gaps. There was returning with a sketchy tattoo of some non-existent planet, which was really a logo the city branded to you. You drew re-imagined Disney princesses in Photoshop while I stayed at home, making fun of you to my friends in our father's armchairs. 'Miriam used to be normal. She was cool. Remember that?' Before you were seized by tall buildings and drooled back out an entirely different person. Jeggings to high-waisted jeans. Dust to dust.

I heard it happened driving home from your parent's house in the Pennsylvanian woods. You swerved to avoid hitting a deer and your Taurus ended up upside down in the empty river, blood rushing to your head to rush out of it. They tested you for chemicals to see if that was a factor, but only found shrimp scampi in your stomach because that's what you always asked your mom to make. Your dad began to feel something again from the Classics of Rock Pandora station. He will spend the rest of his days hunting for deer. Avenging your death with bottle upon bottle of Buck urine.

It had been over a few years since we had talked and the person you were to me was made from different parts. Frankenstein, not Uma Thurman. Only the traits I chose to recall, branded cattle iron style on the rosy sirloin of my brain. You said 'it's all about authenticity. I know that incision mark is there, even though it's covered by the bangs of the wig.' I thought a lot about the scorpion kids born when we met and how they were all old enough to run away from home or hide up in trees now.

I didn't go to your stupid wake. I heard they played an acoustic cover of Van Halen's 'Dance the Night Away' like it was a g.d. trailer for an erotic thriller. My eulogy would've involved the shrimps trapped in your belly, that you decided to take with you. They were going down with the ship, into the barren tributary of the Susquehanna. Miriam would do that. No one would've gotten it except us.

But these were not things that were said. These were not things that happened at all. Rather, I stayed at home to watch a movie on my laptop and during a quiet part I think I heard your sneeze. We didn't make it weird, though I knew it was you. The actual you. The kind of person who, no matter how much they spit in your hand, will break a pact.

SCUFF MARKS by Alecz Yeager

December 21, 2018

The corner of a tortilla chip rested vigilantly against the surface-smooth chest of Ivan’s “School is overrated” t-shirt. Next to it pooled a puddle of drool that was escaping from the twelve-year old’s chapped lips. The remainder of chips lay hidden beneath his hand that limpishly slept inside a plastic cereal bowl. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and after eight hours of middle school boredom, Ivan had come home, sat in his favorite chair, cracked open a root beer, and began eating chips and salsa: a perfect mirror to his father’s drunken habits.

When his mother woke him up to set the table, he unstuck his lashes from one another and wiped the sleep from his face. He wasn’t even hungry at this point, but Mother had cooked dinner, and Ivan knew that Father would be no such help.

He lifted his body from the pleather, sweat-drenched chair and placed the last bit of chips on the ground for later. He knew that Pepper would probably find her way to the bowl at some point, and he’d only have to refill it later, but for now, Ivan could see the Golden Doodle wagging her tail in the yard and deemed his snack safe.

The placemats that hid in the third drawer from the left of the stove were always used for everyday dinners. Mother only let Ivan pull out the fancy cloth mats if company was over. The plastic mats were plain except for a rooster pattern that bordered the edges, and they came in a pack of four. Ivan’s family only needed three, and that was a good thing because one of the mats was melted in the middle from when Ivan accidentally put it into the dishwasher. That was the same day that Father caused the scuff mark on the dining room table when he thought that Mother had been the one that made the mistake. The other three placemats covered the table’s mark nicely, though, just like Mother covered her own.

CHILDISH THINGS by Barrett Bowlin

December 20, 2018

Hours after I first hear her voice in line at the bank, I make peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for the both of us with tall glasses of cold milk, edible memories from decades ago, and then she and I move to the daybed, together, her voice as cozy and warm as a mother's breasts.

“Point to something pink," she says, my fingers on her chest.

Her voice is bright and clear, a sparkling peal of sound, a live version of the recording made for the Little Reader for Girls I remember having in second grade, the one that took four 'C' batteries. And she's with me here, right now, warm and next to me in the nighttime.

"You found it!" she says, laughing.

You found it, the Little Reader would say, its rainbow push-button keypad worn down where I pressed my fingers.

She arches her back in my bed, cocks an eyebrow at me, says, "Point to something red." In the corner of her mouth is a breadcrumb. I leave it where I find it and move my hand away from her lips.

“Super job!" she whispers, the crow's feet at the edges of her eyes contracting. "That's great!"

She's tanned everywhere I can see, with the lines on her forehead stilled by clinic-grade botulinum, and she lives here in Santa Monica, I've learned, neighborhoods of stucco and adobe away from me, stringing a late retirement together off royalties from the recording sessions for toy companies like Hasbro and Fisher Price, from the studio work done for Mattel and Tyco and Disney. She drives a pink Mercedes she's parked in my complex's handicapped spot.

“It is great,” I say, blushing and happy after years spent away from the toy box. Somewhere over in Riverside, somewhere in my mother's attic, next to the luggage my father didn't take with him, the Little Reader for Girls' batteries corrode in their slots, acidic and dusty.

We kiss. We touch. We stretch and pull toward each other like figurines. On the nightstand next to my bed, the glasses of chocolate milk are empty, just gray rings at the bottom and lip prints on the rims. "Do you remember any other lines from the Little Reader for Girls?" I ask.

"Did you know Mattel sold millions of that unit?" she says, finding the breadcrumb on her lips and flicking it onto my floor. She's taken me up on an invitation, one stranger asking a favor of another while in line at the bank. Due for an appointment with her nephrologist first thing in the morning, she's explained, this is a one-time thing, and we'll have to be quick, so I wedge my hands under her skin.

“Can you find the letter 'C'?" she says. The words come out like music through a warm speaker.

I breathe her in close and mumble out, “Thank you so much for this,” remembering Saturday afternoons spent in an oversized papazon, pushing letters and numbers and seeing LCD cells flash on and off while the voice behind the plastic belts out, That's right! This will be over soon, this happy memory in the making, so I say, "Thank you for everything.”

She sighs after a sweet minute, rolls and turns away, and we stare at the flecks of white paint on my bedroom walls.

When she lifts up to fasten the clasp of her brassiere, she shoots a glance at her chain watch. It's late. The cloth rises up her legs like sea foam from the Pacific.

“Sorry to bother you,” I ask, “but could you say, 'It's matching time!' for me?”

The light from the neon outside glints on her fingernail polish as she clasps the front of her bra. She smirks at me before letting her lips curve down into a flat smile that says it's time to go. I smirk back, abashed, somewhere years away from here, and I watch as a stray hair from her head wheedles up into the air, dances in a blizzard of dust motes only I can see from this angle.

"Please stay," I ask. "I need this."

"You all do," she says as she clips her earrings back on, her voice turning and leaving away from me. "Every single one of you does."

BOREDOMS by Grant Maierhofer

December 19, 2018

I’m a better tabloid than citizen. A friend of mine once wound up on the cover of their city’s something having passed out near the lawnmower he worked. He’d fixed up nearby within a building for soil and various landscaping tools and nodded off on a hillside holding his penis. I met him in treatment. He’d left one day for court and returned with pornography flat against his belly, tucked and sweated within jeans. He’d exhumed it and hatched a plot to scoop away the ceiling’s makeup and tunnel into the female rooms. I hid that night seated on the shower’s curtain while it ran, my foot wedged beneath the door so as to stop intruders. We weren’t allowed locks. This method sometimes left massive red scrapes on feet and some hid, compulsive, on the floor—their backs against the door—to compensate. I’m always compensating. I grin often and phonily. I’m not in treatment any longer.

On leaving I discovered circles of likeminded tabloids not comfortable in therapy and we’d formed groups who’d caused eruptions of boring discord. First I’d gone to the university and spraypainted NEVER WORK repeatedly down its walls. Then a friend and I we’d freed a slew of kept animals. My friend spent the night drinking and howling as was his wont, I followed the animals I kept pace with ensuring they were not hit by cars, ambling furry masses of potential yipping and sprinting at lights. I woke up sunburnt in weeds near a highway and spent the morning trying to fashion materials with which to write.

I did work, and it didn’t suit me. When I met Ivan and his cronies, then, my mind was exhausted with possibility. Ivan had worked for radio stations mostly, deejaying a bit or cleaning up, holding fundraisers or conducting yearly festivals. Through this he'd managed to start a minor label primarily made up of Japanese noise acts and solitary rural black metalish recording artists who'd likely have taken to terrorism were it not for whatever this was. I'd attended regional shows where androgynous blondes might punch guitars to spray their blood and hooded art students might conduct some throb on ancient drum machines. Ivan recorded these sets meticulously and shared them online for interested droolymouthed depressives. He sold albums, either on tape or seveninch vinyl he'd pay to have pressed when money existed. Mostly this meant nothing was released but when it was you'd hear it whispered at and slowly cults might build.

This was the nature of the thing: youths without desire for parents hunched over in rooms while longheld droning notes pushed them and they pushed back. Some were older, I was older. My friends and I we’d get in fights and get called immature by cops who’d break them up. They were right but we were searching. We’d fight each other by various rivers and fall in laughing while night slouched its dullard way to day. I don’t care for bands but experiences. I have long teeth and people look at me quick to turn and change their mind. We fed our heads on slews of chemicals and having eradicated one possibility moved on to tempered, acceptable rebellions. Bands worked. People were desperate to make these bands perform. People bought generators and stole generators and found fields far enough away where bands would play in cold. We’d circle up what cars we had to bob and hobble into one another swelling and contracting with the music. It wasn’t about longevity or rejection, it was about the sense of fabric against your skin and knowing it might rip but pushing and quieting the language in your head. It wasn’t about relating but still existed this primal scream to dress and stitch clothes together while dying down in alltoohuman smelling basements in the day.

STUNG by Sheree Shatsky

December 18, 2018

Mary found her honey bee the same way as her momma and her momma before. She paid for him.

She first saw the fine young man while watching the Billy Graham Crusades on television. He sat next to the big man himself and she liked how his suit shined in the sunshine. It was enough to make a girl pull out her credit card and tithe online and that she did, adding a note—More where this came from should you email back stating the name of the spiritual being sitting left of the world’s finest preacher.

Deacon Willis, came back in reply. A woman true to her word, Mary tithed ten percent of the amount she felt appropriate for a Christian match-up. Please have Deacon Willis email me at LordmyGodinfinity@gmail.com and I’ll finagle a few more dollars your way.

An email popped up in her mailbox, a form letter request for contributions to help the suffering children enduring life in the war zone known as Haiti.

Happy to help the effort, Deacon Willis, she replied, upon learning your first name. Best, Mary Temple.

The answer popped up quicker than quick. William. William Theodore Willis. (If I may be so bold, as the Lord has instructed us to go forth and procreate, I am happy to say, I am a single man in search of a good woman.)

That I am, a very good woman. You sound like a gentlemen I’d like to meet, a true man of the cloth. I imagine Billy Graham doesn’t travel to the place of my home and heritage. Yet, I would not find you presumptuous to board a plane and come calling.”

Thank you for your kind invitation, Mary. I’ve placed your contributions in my personal travel account and will catch the next flight your way. Our brief counsel will console me during my mission to Haiti when darkness falls and the streets are lined with candles and the debris of lost souls.

Sir, I’m off to buy a fancy dress to meet a faithful man. Let’s meet with the Lord’s blessing Sunday at Hopewell Church. I’ll look for you at the church supper.

Following services, she scooted past the milling parishioners and sat at the far end of the table by an impressive potted split leaf philodendron. An enthusiastic reception greeted the deacon as if Billy Graham himself stood before them. Willis maneuvered around the table, shaking hands and greeting the ladies.

Mary watched him save her for last. The philodendron tickled the back of her neck as the breeze trickled through the screened window. He stopped behind her chair and rested his hand on the back. The tickle turned red hot. She dabbed a napkin at her lady dew as he asked all to bow their heads for the blessing. “Thank you, Lord Jesus,” he breathed down her neck, “for this bountiful food and these good people. Amen.”

He sat himself down. “That is a very nice plant you’re wearing, if I may so say.”

“Oh, this old thing?” She laughed. “My name is Mary Temple, which likely you well know and I promised to support your mission in some small way.” She removed an envelope from her purse.

Willis slid open the flap, his eyes on her. He unfolded the legal document inside, the title of her home.“Why, Mary. I can’t accept this selfless contribution, but I tell you what.” He whispered in her ear. “I’d love a tour.”

“Deacon Willis, by all means. Let me show you the way.”

The deacon made his excuses to the gobbling congregation and met Mary out front of the church watching a woman parade by, pushing a baby stroller with a wild-looking dog leading the procession and a black cat taking up the rear.

“Bless you,” Mary call after the odd procession.

The woman stopped short. “Sunday words don’t pay the rent,” she said, turning round the stroller. “How ‘bout blessing me with something a bit more substantial?””

Mary took a step back. “I meant no disrespect,” she said.

“That’s quite a dog you have there,” Willis offered, stepping in front of Mary. “What’s the breed?”

The woman shrugged. “No telling, though It’s said, if a black cat follows along after a dog, it’s sensing a bit of the wolf. Or so, I’ve been told.” The black cat looked at Willis, closed its eyes slow and opened wide slower, strolling over to peruse the deacon’s ankles, rubbing the full length of his body in and out.

“Cats don’t usually take to me,” he said.

Mary fished through her best purse for a couple of dollars. “Again, I meant no harm,” she said, handing the woman the money.

She accepted the offering. “None taken, it’s just I’ve got my brood to care for,” she said, giving the stroller a sharp tap and a harsh jiggle.

Willis chuckled. “What’s inside? A wolf pup?”

The cat circled eight around the deacon’s ankles one last time.

“See for yourself,” the woman invited, zippering open the stroller enclosure. “I won’t charge you one red cent.”

Willis leaned in.

The bees swarmed the deacon and knocked him flat to the ground. His struggle proved short. After certain he was good and dead, Mary fished a cartridge from the pocket of her new fancy dress and freed a queen bee. The bees followed their mistress and were gone as quick as they had come, a dark cloud of audible darkness.

“That cat is never wrong,” the woman said to Mary. “Senses the wolf each and every time.”

Mary smoothed away the hair from what had once been the forehead of a handsome face. “I don’t know, I sort of liked this honey bee.”

The woman sniffed. “Now don’t you start getting all blubbery on me.” She zippered the sticky stroller closed. “Plenty of fancy pants out there preying on those with little or without, stealing and thieving whatever they’ve got, all in the name of the Lord.”

“I think Momma would’ve liked the deacon.”

“Good Lord Almighty, child!” She bent over laughing, clapping her hands together. “Your momma would’ve liked you tossing the queen bee into the mix, though she probably would’ve watched that no good shyster swell a few minutes longer. She was hard like that.”

She looked Mary straight in the face. “I knew your momma and though she struggled with passing on the work to you, as sure as I’m standing here, she was dead right to school you in the family tradition, just like her momma taught her. Don’t ever lose sight of your purpose on this earth. As for me, I am happy to help you rid the monkey suits from our little piece of heaven, bees willing, as long as I walk among the living.”

Mary sighed. “How much do I owe you, Ora?”

“I’ll take the watch. I need myself a reliable time piece. You’re doing the Lord’s work, sugar.” She pushed the stroller on down the sidewalk, dog in the lead, cat in the rear, heading towards the hive back home where she would find the bees killing off their queen, like their mommas and their mommas before.

DOGS AND THE SMELL OF GIN by Scott Manley Hadley

December 17, 2018

In the years since my nan died, I’ve taken to drinking gin. She always smelt of it, it reminds me of her.

I didn’t realise what her scent was until I was a student, only a few years before cancer killed her. One morning after a party, I woke up not alone and was confused by how vividly the smell of the room made me think of my grandmother. Diving into old memories, I sought repressed images of cross-generational incest, but (thankfully) there were none. I sniffed harder at the smell of the room and realised what I recognised and, finally, I understood that my nan was an alcoholic.

Many things suddenly made sense: the clinking sound that accompanied her alone in a room; the muttered comments my mother used to make when I came home drunk during my last years at school; my mother’s repeated discouragement of me and my sister from ever getting into her mother’s car. My nan smelled of gin. All the time, all through the day, however sober she seemed. Less so, the last few years of her life as she began what was to be a fruitless fight against tumours (when she began, instead of juniper, to smell of nothing and, later, rot) but for all my childhood and teenage years, that weird smell of my grandmother’s wasn’t perfume, it was liquor.

I am an alcoholic, too. People say that it runs in families, and I suppose I’m proof that it does. My mother is pretty much tee total (often a response to parental alcoholism), and my father – though he drinks occasionally – I have never seen drunk. Neither of them seem to like it, the feeling of intoxication. I’ve tried many other intoxicants because it’s really not hard to get hold of them, but nothing’s ever felt as good as alcohol. It raises you up, straightens you out, lets you sleep and makes you happy. You can still laugh, you can still cry, and you don’t feel unfuckingstoppable. Alcohol extends the self without erasing it, subdues anxiety and tastes delicious in a myriad of ways. There is nothing like a cold beer on a hot day, nothing like champagne to celebrate, nothing like a swig of neat gin to, just for a while, quieten the furies in your head.

My drinking’s been a problem since adolescence, but over the last few years it’s gotten worse. Perhaps it’s more noticeable because I’ve got less friends now, and most who remain are also alcoholics. Perhaps it’s more noticeable because I drink mostly at home now, and the empty bottles are waiting, collected, in my weekly recycling rather than scattered across the city’s bars. I get the DTs when I don’t drink. The days after I haven’t been drinking hurt more than the mornings after I’ve blacked out. The days when I drink, I carry on until I pass out. And as I usually drink at home, now, nobody knows how bad things have got. Nobody knows I slept half the night next to a pile of vomit on the kitchen floor. Nobody knows I was so hungover on Sunday I didn’t take my dog out, and he shat next to my bed. Nobody knows I left the shit there until Tuesday.

My nan had dogs when I was a child. She had three when I was a baby, and slowly they died. The last one, a rescued Labrador, lived until I was around eight. She is the only one whose name I remember, it was Kirsty. A year after my nan’s death, I bought my own dog. For the first few months, I was better. Better behaved, drinking less, getting up early every day to walk him. But I’ve since realised that the hole I thought he was filling was a hole much bigger than a dog. My grandmother had dogs and gin to hide her unhappiness, and then only gin; then death. When she lay on the bed she died in, skin hanging like fabric from her bones, I held her hand and said, “Thank you” and “I’m so sorry”. I don’t think she’d enjoyed her life and I think she knew I wasn’t enjoying mine. She also knew, though, that I’d been happy when I was a child, back when the world was something I hadn’t learnt to worry about, when cancer and booze and depression were words I didn’t know.

And for me, that combined smell of dog and ethanol-juniper is the smell of childhood, the smell of warmth and peace and contentment, the smell of my nan being alive and the smell of the future feeling like one long adventure I could enjoy forever.

You’ve probably read about alcoholism before and you might think it’s boring and repetitive, but imagine how boring and repetitive it feels to live. Imagine being stuck in repeated habits where the only thing that gives you release traps you tighter.

Alcohol feels like it helps, even though it doesn’t. But, as I know and my nan knew, having something that feels like it helps is better than having nothing at all. Having a dog helps, but having a dog is hard and having a drink is easy. And when everything else feels hard, too, having something easy is difficult to resist. I need to walk my dog. But first I need a drink.

RHETORIC, GIRL! by Amie Norman Walker

December 16, 2018

Radio wire mutated with the Cicadas, every Midwest heart bled to this expectation. Knowing of no reason for time to come undone she perched herself on the couch as Carjone’s car snaked the driveway. Elevated humidity levels sweat the brows of every surface as evening rolled over, drooling for nightfall’s reprieve. Unstable minutes turned around the clocks face before he walked in with blood on his hands in a stride unfamiliar to her. She stared at him, her head cocked left and her lips pursed tight until they popped open with confusion. A need for her reflexed in his shadow. A smile straighter than his muscles acclimated, licked across his lips before he spoke.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Angel.”

Thumb on one cheek, four fingers pressing into the other, he squished her face forcing her mouth back shut, then into puckered lips.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Angel,” he hushed at her moon-eyes. Her mind spun webs of wonder around every thought of what he had done to produce this new gait and heretofore glean of violence in his eyes. He leaned in and she thought he might kiss her. Inimically opening her mouth with pressure, he slipped two fingers past her lips, pressing against her tongue. Salt and metal coiled her taste buds as he fingered her cheeks interior, sliding back wisdom tooth deep. Fingers threatened her appetite but panic yet to sway her perch, arched on the precedence of his swagger. He knew her gag reflexes lacked control, over the years he had to learn to accept the self-sacrifice of each contraction. She gagged against his fingers slender tips, her gut reacting with his gentle push to the floor, so from her knees she’d vomit at his feet. He didn’t expect her to grovel, his need was to see her bow, and if he knew her at all, she required force into such a position. Her insides heaved molten, splattering the tile and his shoe tips, the bottoms already marked with the dog shit he stomped through on his way out her lovers door.

“I’m not going to hurt you” he confirmed again, as if convincing himself, wiping her mouth against the back of his hand. Crouching down his rhetoric seared, “What was it you were hoping I’d find?” Panic thrust for a turn to choke her, eyes shut tight, she pressed forward until her face met the floor, vomit reaching for her hair. She numbed the rush of fear to reason what foment the shift in paradox. A defeating larrup to her cerebral cortex, she suddenly smelt the dewy rush of this morning. She left his address on the kitchen counter, left behind, in the steno pad under the “?” she sketched in grey pencil shades, curving out her feelings into a simple symbol. The ? mark symbolizing not only risk of dalliance, but undulating her impuissant cerebral firing. Carjone’s taught her everything she knew. Carjone’s reminded her daily of the promise she must keep for him. This maldestro error, unacceptable in its formation, was the suicide she’d not asked for.

Some people do not survive outside familial derivation of monogamy, a fact bunked against hypothesis producing population health risk adjustment factors. The Status Quo wet-nursed the belief anything they control is theirs and theirs only. Dearly devoted demand their possession, labeled love, wean from all others, to promptly be tethered solely and firmly to the other in a package christened commitment.

Carjone was a man of his commitments, Carjone wasn’t capable of living outside any boxes. She however, worried no reasonable thoughts after she removed the veil of misunderstanding each other. Her tether to Carjone’s did not demand passion but he worshipped her as if the ground she shat on moored the gateway to eternal youth. Materialized out of actions unmistakably natural, her pheromone ejections of interminable sums, pumped Carjone’s ego but would also that of any caught in the trajectory.

“I’ll tell you pretty baby, I don’t need to question you.”

She had not mistook his new stride, tuned to the Midwest’s old song, from a time when cowboys were more than junkies. She had not mistook the blood, red and caked, on his hands baked unmistakably against Carjone’s rage. Between his worked hands and her saliva it formed a glue, sticking to her chin as he cradled her up into his arms. Panic grasp at her expression, molding it submissively into position.

Her breathing held a steady pace, continuously, by her own demand, but she couldn’t control her heart. Palpitations un-steadied her, she grasped his arm in a natural pull at survival. Her thumb pressed against the scar he won when he tripped over her playing hide and seek under the warm vanilla sun chasing a hunter's moon. Childhood suddenly seemed far away, trembling she lost a reason for words.

“I’m not gonna hurt you, Angel.”, he whispered. She anticipated his actions would fall into that scars memory, warm as it bled back then, and perhaps he would not end her.

“In fact, I brought you a present. How do you like that?”

Her mistake inspired a killer. She caught it again in his eyes, causing her thighs to empty out an ache, collapsing her out of reality then back into it, drowning any possibility of truth beyond that her lover is dead. A certain hurt need be felt before a person can do the most amount of letting go they’re capable of. Carjone’s felt that hurt. She now felt it as hard. He half pulled her up with him, she floated on along.

He wrapped his arms around her, choking out a silence capable of healing, but a cry interrupted from over his shoulder, a sigh she didn’t recognize, breaking the domestics into a louder noise. She felt tension shatter when she found the girls face held recognition, this was the face of her lover’s daughter. “I’m not gonna hurt you, Angel. But that mistake was killer.” he grinned through his confession. He gasp at the reflection he caught in the mirror, as he turned around to leave her, as if it spoke his rhetoric, who was the most monogamous of all?

She walked backward into the bedroom closet, truth setting into her face, blood gloaming her jawline. Blood was on her hands, blood in her veins beat against her new pain. She hoped the wardrobe would swallow her into a place too dark to return from. She yearned to be forgotten, lost into the closet, passing through inanition with guilt the limbic grand finale fed through the amygdala. She sucked back her breathing and shut the door on herself, listening to her Daddy’s new lover cry.

THE HARVEST SEASON by Brian Morse

December 13, 2018

Henry had to abandon his car. It was clear that the winter storm had curbed all travel, as massive snow serpents slid across the vacant highway. Had he hit a deer, or was it a person? Either way, any visible evidence had disappeared, and the car wouldn’t start. He was on the highway miles from civilization, but the county’s landfill loomed close like a craggy white mountain, where a single soft green light pulsed. He fled for help.

Snow quickly filled Henry’s boots as he plowed through a deer run toward the dump. Before squeezing through a small hole in the rusty fence, he turned back to affirm the location of the road, or to find a landmark in which to anchor his direction, but everything turned blinding white, and Henry’s orientation became scrambled. A foreboding chill swept over him.

Beyond a small trash heap of a hill littered with thousands of gulls, he saw the light that pulsed from inside a small concrete structure. Weaving in and out of the tittering gulls, a deep but quiet voice called out to him. Paralyzed with fear, the voice came again. Looking down, coming from all things, a gull. He nervously adjusted his knitted winter hat, and muttered, “The fuck?”

Casually, the gull said, “Friend, you will die here.”

Henry disagreed and barreled through the snow toward the structure. That conversation never happened he thought, he must have been hallucinating from the crash. Out of nowhere, a heavy bill whacked him in the head and ripped at the back of his neck. Henry fell down, covering his head. Panic set in, it was real.

Every time he attempted to walk towards the glowing structure, thick bands of snow would develop and turn him around. He wondered if something was actively preventing him from seeing what was inside of the structure. If not snow, the crows would swoop in, litter the ground leading to the structure, and block him from continuing. He tried hiking back to the road, but that was equally unsuccessful. Henry scrapped the idea and decided to escape in the morning, so for the night, he carved out a spot within the mass of gulls, hiding from Gene, the one that attacked him.

Unfortunately, morning never came. It stayed dark for days, the snow subsided and it turned warm—so warm, he stripped himself of his winter coat, at one point attempting to use it as a pillow. He fell asleep on and off between the unworldly noises the gulls made. How long had it been night, he was unsure, but he knew he needed food. A gamey, malodorous smell now consumed the wet dump. Henry’s nose burned from the soupy garbage, he couldn’t understand how the warm spell came on so quickly.

A fog, as thick as cake batter, kept him from finding his way out of the rank hell. Further disoriented, he tripped over a bowling ball and fell on a broken bottle. He conjured everything inside of him to get to the structure. The light flickered. He dragged himself over as far as he could go. Henry finally closed in, although now, the mud thickened and swallowed him. The pulsing glow electrified the top of his head, he was so close. Out of nowhere, Gene, like a kamikaze pilot, came up from behind, and Thwap! His thick spear of a beak went right into Henry’s ear puncturing the eardrum. Already trapped by the thickening, slurry mud, his arms were stuck to his sides. He cried out like a short-circuited ambulance siren. His hat was being carried off by a lousy crow. Gene sidled up next to Henry and and said, “Get up.” Knowing full well Henry wasn’t going anywhere.

Bright fluorescent lights from all angles suddenly flooded the dump, and tens of thousands of gulls consumed the sky, whirling in a giant mass of screaming havoc.

His last flickering visage was of a large 4-wheeler charging towards him with two glass-masked men who appeared to be dressed as surgeons, blades out. They shoveled Henry’s limp body into the back of the open air vehicle and roared back to their bunker. The green light turned off until the next one arrived.

Gene hardly registered the commotion, instead, he preened his pale white knives, alone, lording over his kingdom of beautiful, rancid wreckage.

THE WEEPING NUDE by Jennifer Lewis

December 12, 2018

“Get up.”

“No. It’s not even light out. I want to sleep.”

“You heard me.” He lights a candle, then another. Then claps his hands. “Move!”

She smells the turpentine. Hears the clinking of glass bottles. The room is freezing. Tiny sounds of the night drift through the walls. A horse kicks a stone, then neighs.

“I’m not posing,” she says.

“I’ve told you before. You never have to pose. You must be yourself.”

The Weeping Nude, Edvard Munch 1913

This makes her smile. She likes being different than the others. Not another archetype, or myth or stupid symbol. How 18th century? She’s the youngest of his models. Only seventeen. A strong peasant girl with a wide face and wide-eyes, who earns room-and-board for cleaning the house of a lonely painter, who had just spent eight months in a sanatorium suffering from hallucinations and anxiety.

“Fine,” she says, gathering herself under the blankets. She rises to all fours, articulating her spin, the blanket still on her back. She looks like tent. Her head thrashes and her hips shake until the blanket falls off. She stands on her knees and takes of her white nightgown. Her now-famously dark hair covers her breasts. It keeps her warm. She’s thankful to her mother for giving her this thick mess.

She hears the bristles of the brush dancing on the canvas, the palette knife scraping the surface. She smiles to herself under all that hair. She loves the power of her beauty. Its ability to wake up this old man in the middle of the night.

“Don’t move,” he says, commanded by inspiration. Grinning at her like she is some kind of God. She wonders what his friend, Dr. Fraud, would think about this?

“Stay still, Moss Girl.”

Her thighs burn with fatigue. Her fingertips and toes are frozen. She fidgets. She doesn’t want to stay still anymore. A draft moves over her nipples and belly. She wants to crawl back under the blankets, but the chance that her portrait may hang in a museum keeps her still.

“You’re stronger than you think you are,” he says, “You’re a healthy girl.” She narrows her eyes. She feels badly for him. He had told her that he was a sickly kid, that he watched his mother die of tuberculosis when he was five, then his older sister at fourteen. One night when he allowed himself to drink, he said, “Illness and madness and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle.”

She stays motionless until her thighs can no longer take it. She falls back on her heels. Her left leg cramps and she lunges it straight. She hates him for waking her up. She hates her mother for encouraging her to work for him. She hates that her only skill is to please this insane man. She places her head in her hands and feels her belly convulse with rage.

“Fantastic,” he says. “Bravo!”

CONTACT LESS by Adam Lock

December 11, 2018

Reaching with a blind hand, Rebecca pulls a loaf from the back row and reads its scarf. David buys the wrong sort; he buys bleached, ghost-bread, even though he knows she doesn’t like it. The price of bread is an economic barometer. There’s a trick to selling a house: bread in the oven. She sniffs the loaf. Bread is as old as farming, as old as the domesticated dog. She wants a dog. David doesn’t. In the UK, we throw six million loaves into our waterways each year. This disrupts the whole ecosystem and is bad news for amphibians, fish, and ducks. Bread is wrapped in plastic. She watched a TV programme about the Pacific Trash Vortex. There was a time the baker would take a loaf from the shelf and hand it over, dusting the counter in flour. No plastic. Her nan had a breadboard, breadknife, and a square yellow gingham towel to cover the bread. Only self-checkouts these days. Less contact. Next to the self-checkout machine are three loaves, white, the ones David buys, each with a sticker: ‘Still Fresh.’ She hovers the barcode over the glass. Beep. Contactless. She hovers the card above the machine. Plastic hovering above plastic, a sliver of space between, like reiki, hovering hands, ch’i. Contactless. She moves the card closer, narrowing the space, and she can’t remember the last time David kissed her, or a time he went down on her, or a time they did that thing with their hands, interlacing fingers so it looks like a zip on a coat. Beep. She swaps the loaf for one that is ‘Still Fresh,’ and walks out of the shop, the loaf, expiring with every second, held close to her chest.