Flash

PHARM BOY by Chris Milam

At the grocery, I was debating which would pair better with a chicken sandwich when I saw a ponytailed head wedged inside the refrigerated glass doors inspecting a carton of eggs.

“Hello there, do you have a preference in pickles?”

“Excuse me?”

“Pickles.” I held both jars in front of me. “Bread and butter or dill?”

“I don’t eat them. Sorry.” The smack of flip flips on linoleum trailed her into the next aisle.

I accidentally bumped into her again minutes later. I didn't need her to be anyone specific, not Rachel, not my mother, or the bored college girl who worked at the gas station I went to every night for energy drinks. She didn't have to inhabit their skin, take on their personality, mimic their cadence. I only wanted her to help me make a proper decision. Just play along. Fill a hole. “Should I go with rye or whole wheat?”

“What is wrong with you? I don’t give a fuck what you eat. Leave me alone.” Smack, smack, smack around the corner. In her basket was a loaf of pumpernickel. Was hoping she would’ve steered me in that exotic direction.

Bent and back home, Rachel clung to air and fabric. The apartment, post-evacuation, was nothing more than a gigantic Rachel fingerprint. I had met her at an NA meeting. She was on step 12; I was on step burned all bridges. Connection erupted seamlessly after that; delirium jabbed us both in the addicted heart. We found a quaint loft, painted the walls champagne, rented a leather couch, did some volunteer work. Went to church. We were all about spackling cracks.

When I relapsed, when my whole existence was lapsed, our love bottomed out. I pawned her jewelry, mocked her metamorphosis, and prowled the streets. The last thing she said to me: “Do you want to stay high and live low or stay with me and live with hope?” She bolted instead, I stayed and free-fell, landing in the arms of shadow. If not for a mother’s unconditional enabling and charitable pocketbook, I’d probably be living in the woods behind the supermarket.

A week later and I’m stuck again. "Horseradish sauce or mayonnaise, which one do you like?"

Her blonde friend in dark denim eyeballed me for a tick. “I’d need some burn, go with the horseradish.” She peeked at my cart. “And you can't go wrong with dill chips, so crunchy and sour."

We headed to the parking lot, sat in my car. “You wanna listen to rock, alternative, or hip hop?”

Lily flicked a veiny hand. “Let’s skip the nonsense. She had me text you for a reason. How many you got?”

“Hold on. Tell me something, a morsel of information. Is she still dating her sponsor? Is she happy?”

“Yes and maybe. But she’s falling, said you had the remedy.”

“She has my number, could've just called me.” I handed her six pills. “Tell her no charge. And ask her if I should move on or not. Will you do that for me?”

“You know what happened the last time you had her number. Your phone voice is a bit emotional. And yes, I’ll ask her. Gotta roll, take care.”

“Wait, does she still cut her sandwiches in half, diagonally?”

“I don’t know. I’ll find out when I drop these off.”

“Thanks.” And with that she jogged to her Mazda and blasted away from the storm surge.

Later, at a meeting, I spotted her boyfriend. Lewis was slurping coffee from a styrofoam cup. Black v-neck, grey slacks, dollar store tortoiseshell readers, silver rope bracelet, same chameleon smile; repulsive to me, an aphrodisiac to recovering, vulnerable women.

I assaulted his personal space, jaw to jaw. His coconut shampoo was intoxicating. “Do you love her or are you just using her? And a little bird told me that Rachel is popping again. Nice work, being her sponsor and all.”

“I’m not doing this tonight. You should just focus on step one and let me worry about her. Okay, Jason?”

He looked at me the way a father might when his golden boy wets the bed: a slurry of indignation, detachment, and empathy. “Yeah, better watch her close, friend. She knows I’m around.”

We admitted we were powerless…

Eat some cotton, man, climb that stairway and find enlightenment. Step 13? Walk away, sprawl on the couch, and kiss God flush on the mouth.

She’ll come back to me. Opiate love is true and eternal.

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OUT by Michael Lehman

I walked out of the desert to get on a bus, and the driver threw me off in Phoenix. He said I was too dirty and shoved me out the door with a big bucktoothed grin. I changed my ticket at the counter. Immigration cops wearing body armor with black-and-white American flags on their shoulders were standing at the exits barking for papers.

Past them, the valley floor was baking, the air full of dust. I walked by a campus of telephone company buildings, surrounded by glistening lawn and a cyclone fence topped with razor wire full of snagged plastic bags that hissed and rattled in the wind. Then the road passed through open desert, low brush, a hawk floating near the sun, a rabbit escaping. There was a whole subdivision of crumbling streets that had been named and paved but never built on, and in the distance, in the shade of a raised portion of the interstate, a neighborhood of tents and tarps.  

After a couple more miles, I passed into streets of small, decent houses, old trucks and little kids on bikes. I bought a clean T-shirt in cool, dim, low-ceilinged store where the man gave me my change.

Back at the station I sat down in a row of plastic chairs. Across from me, a young woman in a hospital smock and flip-flops was pretending to read a newspaper. Every once in a while she would run her palms over her legs, rattle the paper and laugh. When I looked at her, she looked right back, peeking out behind the paper, and held up a finger to her lips.

We got on the bus towards evening. Distant mountains shone in the orange sunlight and my head rang with the diesel engine. The girl leaned back in her seat, and deep laughter rolled out of her like it had been a long time coming. I wanted to ask, 'What's so funny?' but I almost thought she would say, "I gave the driver a dried-up leaf, and he thought it was a ticket."

A spun drunk lady wearing pink spandex got on in Quartzite and riled up the back of the bus with a long, racist rant that devolved into a chorus of Who Let the Dogs Out? with lots of barking and yipping. When the laughing girl got up to use the bathroom, the spandex lady stole her seat.

"This is mine now, ya voodooo witch!" she cried. The laughing girl moved up the row and sat down quietly next to an old woman in a black shawl.   

The sky got dark, and the stars came out like a breath slowly exhaled. The spandex lady kept singing, but her voice changed until it became as fragile as a coyote call. She sang Country Roads, Take Me Home and the bus filled with silence. She sang Long Black Veil, Danny Boy and The Wind that Shakes the Barley.  

The bus stopped at a hamburger place, and I bought three baked potatoes. The laughing girl sat in her old seat and watched me eat until I gave her one.

"Got a fork?" she asked. I looked in the hamburger bag and found two forks, handed her one, and began to eat with the other instead of my hands. Back on the road, she started laughing again.

"You shouldn't have fed her, dude," the spandex lady said.

"I'd rather hear her than you," I said.

People were drifting off to sleep. The laughing girl slept, but her laughter still rose out of her every so often. Somewhere around Bakersfield or Barstow she got off, still laughing, sprinted across the street through the lights of traffic, and disappeared.

The sun was just rising as we pulled into the L. A. station. I saw the spandex lady sitting alone over a cafeteria tray.

"Hey dude," she called to me, "do you want this? I can't eat."

I sat down next to her and leaned over the tray, gobbling the soft, salty food.

"You look like you been fightin' fires," she said.

"There was no fire . . ."

She nodded, knocked twice on the table, the way convicts do, and walked away.

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RAW MEAT by Jo Varnish

She was eighty when being eighty meant being eighty. It meant grey hair and dark colored calf length skirts, tights and rounded toed court shoes. It meant a green felted coat and patent leather black purse shaped like the queens, with a shiny silver clasp that snapped shut. It meant that purse held, at a minimum: a checkbook, a hairbrush, rouge, a lipstick, tissues (a pack, unused, and at least one folded, used), a pair of spectacles and a variety of pens.  It meant she walked slowly, tutted at ill mannered children and grew African violets in mismatched pots along her living room window ledge. It meant furniture and decor as old as she was, and a dark, cold house with wallpaper and parquet wooden floors and no central heating.  

She looked after a little girl before school for extra money. She'd seen a note towards the end of the summer asking for help, written neatly on an index card and tacked up on a noticeboard in the post office. The little girl, six years old, would be dropped off by her mother (who then went to her job of all things, as if her job werent to look after the child!) and the old lady would watch her for half an hour and then walk her to the school, which was just a few minutes away, even at the old ladys slow pace.

Watching her for half an hour sounded easy enough.  But this was not a child who was content to sit and listen to the radio or read her book.  While she certainly always had at least one book in her school bag (they werent the classics they should have been, but what could one expect from these modern schools?), when the old lady would suggest she take one out and read during their time together, the little girl was direct in her response: I dont want to read, I want to talk to you.

The autumn sun faded to the gloom of winter, and still the little girl wanted to talk.  The old lady had exhausted her knowledge of cats and flowers and and castles and insects, and exhausted herself by having to endure the same conversations over and over (honestly, were all little children so tiresome?) and thus she was relieved when the little girl rolled up her sleeve and pointed to her wrist.  

“Look, Ive got a mole, like a big freckle.

The old lady knew what to do about that. She opened her fridge and took out a tray of sirloin steak, an indulgence despite its sale price.  It was for her supper of beef and vegetable stew, for this was when being eighty meant cooking a sensible meal every single evening, even if widowed, as she was.  She cut a chunk from the middle of the steak, avoiding the marbled fat as much as possible.

“Hold out your hand and Ill get rid of that nasty mole for you.

The little girl looked unsure.  She squeezed her eyes shut and offered her hand out towards the old lady, who turned it, exposing the offending mole. She gripped the chunk of bovine muscle and rubbed it over the mole, rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. The little girl said it felt sore and she squealed when the old lady didnt stop.  She rubbed it until the fibers of the steak were stretched and split by the dry friction, until the skin was red and blotched and coated in a fine film, dappled with tiny grains of raw meat.  

The little girl frowned and pushed her tongue in the side of her cheek, her eyes threatening tears.  The old lady pulled her across the kitchen and rinsed her wrist over the teacup and saucer in the sink, oily, beefy water swirling in the cup.  She patted the little girls wrist and hand dry with a stiff white tea towel, and they both peered at where the mole had been.  And where the mole still was, surrounded by dark pink mottled skin.

Its possible that being eighty meant shed mixed up her remedies, as the little girl began to sway and as she swayed, she started to fade until she had completely disappeared, mole and all.  

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PIERCED by Charles Duffie

Each evening, I remove the band-aid, pinch the tweezers’ silver teeth, and draw the splinter from my thumb. I faithfully clean the small wound. By morning my private stigmata will be partially healed. The body is a determined machine.

The sliver of pine is only half an inch long and thin as a needle, but against my brown palm it glows like a cosmic shard. I dip a cotton ball in peroxide, touch the splinter, disinfectant cold as river water, then place the baptized thorn in the hollow of a contact lens case and click the lid. The click always makes me flinch.

I was walking to the bus for more firewood. Maybe half mile down the trail.

That’s when you first heard the shots?

Can you turn off the lights?

What?

The cruiser lights. The flashing, it’s… I think I’m going to be sick again.

Of course. Sorry. Hold on.

Father God…

So you were half a mile away when you heard the shots?

I didn’t know what it was. It didn’t sound like gunfire.

A lot of people say that. A lot of people say it sounds like—

Shake my head, one quick jerk to return from the synaptic detour of memory.

Light an incense cone so my hotel room will smell like the forest. Fill the diffuser so the air will feel damp as that night two months ago. Turn on the sound machine so crickets and frogs will surround me again. Tap the desktop planetarium projector so the ceiling over my bed fills with stars. Then I kneel on a carpet countless feet have flattened into soft concrete and I pray.

“Father God. Set me free. See how I resurrect my pain. See how I fuel my dreams. I can’t let go. Forgive me for surviving. I hate myself for still being alive.”

When the words taste like salt, I sputter “Amen” and squeeze into bed.

Michael, would you say a few words?

Thank you, pastor. I don’t know how to do this. I wish I had died that night. That must offend you. But it’s how I feel. I wish my spirit was looking down with Nala and your sons and daughters. All of us together. Looking down on someone else standing here, someone with better words. I was going to ask Nala to marry me. I was going to attend nine high school graduations. Now I walk around with this hole in my chest, this this this hatred so constant I wear it like my own skin—

Shake my head to collapse the memory bridges. Lying on my back, tucked hotel sheets holding me down, I listen to the crickets and frogs, watch the stars, breathe the damp air, summon the dream, repeating “forest” over and over, clucking my tongue like wet gunshots. Eyes stutter. There’s the glow. I hear the voices. The trees part like curtains…

NINE HIGH SCHOOL KIDS CROUCH AROUND THE CAMPFIRE STACKING S’MORES OUT OF BROKEN GRAHAM CRACKERS CHOCOLATE CHUNKS BLACKENED MARSHMALLOWS / NALA LEADS THEM IN SONG STRUMMING “WE ARE ONE IN THE SPIRIT WE ARE ONE IN THE LORD” THE SAFEST PLACE IN THE WORLD GOD’S OWN CATHEDRAL / TWO MEN DRIFT OUT OF THE DARK LIKE FOG DRESSED IN WHITE CAMO PANTS JACKETS HOODS / THE SHOTS SOUND LIKE HANDS CLAPPING LIKE PLATES HITTING A TILE FLOOR LIKE HOLES PUNCHED THROUGH A GUITAR’S BUZZING CHEST / I CRAWL BETWEEN FACES NIGHT SHRILL FROGS CHANTING INSECTS CRYING BILE IN MY THROAT BRAIN FERAL HEART COLLAPSED LIKE A BLACK HOLE LEAVING NOTHING NOTHING BUT THE SOFT MARBLE OF THEIR WRISTS / I SEE NALA’S BODY SINKING INTO PINE NEEDLES THE DECADES OF SENSATIONS SHE WILL NEVER HAVE CONCENTRATING NOW IN THESE LAST MOMENTS / SHE FEELS ANIMALS BREATHING IN THE SHADOWS AND SEES THE SOULS OF LOVED ONES LONG PASSED TEARS PULSE OUT OF HER EYES AND STEAM IN THE COLD AIR / THE STARS DESCEND BEYOND THE NIGHT-BIRDS AND CRICKETS AND FROGS SHE DETECTS THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES BUT DOESN’T WANT TO LEAVE THIS IS HOME THIS HUMAN PLACE PLEASE SHE SAYS / I HEAR RUNNING AND TURN TO SEE MYSELF STUMBLE INTO THE CLEARING—

I wake, as I do every night, like someone brought back from drowning. The dream is so physical. It’s still shouting through me like a freight train rushing past an open window. I chew three orange Motrin tablets and lean against the wallpaper.  

You plan to do this full time?

I’ve taken a sabbatical from the university.

And what do you hope to accomplish?

I’m joining families from Columbine and Las Vegas, Sandy Hook and Orlando, Virginia Tech and Aurora and Parkland. There’s hundreds of us now. We’ll march on foot from California to D.C., adding marchers and gaining support as we go. We’re spending every cent we have to feed and house the caravan. We hope to inspire pilgrimages from all directions. We want to be five million strong by the time we hit Washington. But we won’t pray with politicians. We won’t debate NRA spokesmodels. We’re going to make demands. Because we deny the American alchemy that transforms victims into accomplices. We reject the lie that the only way to stop mass shootings is to amass more weapons. We claim the right of—

Shake my head. Stare into the flat dark until dawn separates the curtain from the wall.

I scrape a match, hold a needle to the flame, reopen the wound in my thumb. The pain is quick, sharp, like an animal biting my flesh from the inside.

We’re in New Mexico this morning. Speaking at two colleges, gathering signatures for an amendment to ban assault weapons on a county-by-county basis, hoping to grow like grass under the feet of Washington’s lobbyists. This is my public penance. No one notices the band-aid on my thumb.

I was too late that night. By the time I got back to the campfire, everyone was gone. But it’s not too late to stop the next tragedy. That’s why we’re here today. Because the Pine Mountain shooters were two 15-year-old boys who attended the same high school as their victims. Because other shooters are arming themselves right now. Because a mass shooting is defined as four or more dead or wounded and by that definition Pine Mountain was number 71. Because in the two months since, there have been 42 more mass shootings in America. Because last year there were over 300 and because there were over 300 the year before that and because—

Another shake of the head.

Pop open the contact lens case. Steadying the tweezers, I push the splinter back into my thumb. In that snap of pain, I see what only I saw, what only I know. I wasn’t walking back to the bus. I was sitting on the opposite edge of the campfire. I see the two men in white, the black Xs of rifle straps over their chests like their hearts have been crossed out. I see Nala lunge to pull a high school girl down. I see my own view turn and run, ducking low, fingers scrambling in the dirt, stumbling down the narrow path, down into the huge night as hands clap and plates shatter and holes punch, my vision flashing like strobe lights, choke of blood in the back of my throat, running faster, wilder, until my right hand, as if the better part of me, slams against a rough pine, another, another, dragging on me like an anchor until I stop, sobbing under that swath of stars and like a man waking from a dream turn and run back to the fire. I won’t find the splinter until two days later.

Running saved my life. I would have died too, cut down in seconds. I know that. But what I know can’t save me. I was god to those kids. And it’s not just me. Everywhere I go I see gods running, abandoning our children and grandchildren to the shooters, to poverty and sickness and dystopian tidal waves stacking on the horizon. Maybe we’re all broken. I don’t know how else to understand it. All driven by hungers we can’t sate, fears we can’t control, guilt we hide in our bodies. Maybe we’re all walking around pierced, our wounds the engine of the world.

You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead—

Shake.

My name is Michael Washington and I’m a survivor of the 71st

Shake.

Two students who survived Parkland have committed suicide. What’s your—

Shake.

Nala stares up at me, waiting. I lean back so she can see the stars—

Knock on the door. A voice calls from the other side, asking if I’m ready.

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THE CALL WAS COMING FROM INSIDE THE COCKROACH by Maggie Dove

“It’s just a Palmetto Bug. I’ll put it outside.”

This could be a more daunting task than relocating, say, a daddy long legs or a lost lizard that found its way into the house. When the humidity is just right in Florida, somewhere around the 90% mark, the Palmetto Bug doesn’t just run away from you. The Palmetto Bug defiantly takes flight, rocketing directly into your face, making even the least squeamish of native Floridians scream in horror as the fwip-fwip-fwip of their wings flutter at all five of your senses.

The Palmetto Bug is a shiny, brown, beastly creature that can grow to over two inches in length, with spindly black antennae that are just as long. Palmetto Bugs are so large that you can hear them chewing something crunchy from the other room like your Uncle Lou going at a tin of peanut brittle, as I unfortunately found out the hard and crunchy way when I interrupted one eating a crouton that had fallen onto the kitchen floor one night.

“It’s just a Palmetto Bug. I’ll put it outside.”

You could smash the Palmetto Bug with a shoe or a newspaper, but they were so large it seemed mean, like you were killing a peer, and if you didn’t angle your smashing instrument just right, it could go Pulp Fiction on you and spray its Dr. Pepper-colored guts four feet across your wall and you’d have to summon Harvey Keitel to come out for the clean-up. It was easier to just put them outside.

Besides, it wasn’t like they were those smaller but more ominous German cockroaches we had in our house, where when you saw one then it meant there were a million more hiding behind your walls. Any time we bug-bombed the house, it was like walking into a German cockroach apocalypse when we returned four hours later; thousands of their small bodies legs-up on the floor, the masses so dense that you had to sweep them out the door like you were cleaning up after an old-timey ticker tape parade.

They would recover their ranks and repopulate the house within a month.

The Palmetto Bug, unlike the armies of German cockroaches, was most often a solo traveler in your Florida home; an unwelcome, weird friend who stopped by unannounced. He wasn’t a symptom of a bigger problem, he was a self-contained local nightmare that you shuffled out the door with a piece of junk mail. Anyone’s mother would (incorrectly) tell you that they didn’t even want to be in the house to begin with; that they lived in the palmettos, hence the name “Palmetto Bug”. They weren’t roaches for Pete’s sake. They were outdoor bugs, like beetles or moths!

Tourists were always eager to tell you about these gigantic, fearsome creatures they found crawling up their Florida motel room walls, and we native Floridians would wave them off with:

“It’s just a Palmetto Bug. We put them outside.”

The only people who were unimpressed were tourists visiting from New York, who bragged that Palmetto Bugs had nothing on New York City cockroaches almost as fiercely as they argued their title of Best Slice or Best Bagel.

In my thirties, on my first trip to New York, I saw a Palmetto Bug crawling up a wall in Times Square. I pointed at it and said, “Hey! You guys have Palmetto Bugs here, too! Maybe I brought him up here on vacation!”

My New Yorker friend stared at me.

I found out that day that the real, scientific term for the Palmetto Bug is the "American Cockroach".

I found out that day that the real, scientific term for the legendary New York cockroach is the "American Cockroach".

They were the same goddamned bug.

And New Yorkers still said theirs were superior.

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BONE RATE by Kristen M. Ploetz

The marble lobby smells like old paper and spiders have taken residence in the dark corners of the tooth dentil trim. From behind a framed pane of cheap glass, ten wanted men stare at Naenie. Eight of them are smiling. She glances long enough to know some are dangerous, but all of them are broken.

Of the three windows, the middle is open for business. As Naenie waits her turn, she watches the woman in a red coat. With a gloved hand, the woman slides a small white box toward the clerk and drops three coins into his palm. Naenie cannot hear what the clerk asks before the woman nods. When she turns to leave, Naenie sees the missing eye.

The clerk waves Naenie forward. Inside her coat pocket, her left hand is in a loose fist. Her right hand signs the alphabet over and over at her side.

“Sending first-class?” he asks.

Naenie does not respond.

The wood counter is dipped in the center. A century of hands and wrists have worn it down. Over the shallow bowl, Naenie opens her fist. Six tiny bones fall from her palm. Malleus, incus, and stapes from her right ear, the other three from her left. She scratches at the stitches behind her ears, tucks the hospital bracelet back under the cuff of her silk blouse.

He leans closer to Naenie, mouths the words with precision. “Bone rate?”

She nods.

He pinches the bones one by one and puts them on the scale. Tick tick tick tick tick tick against stainless steel. For Naenie, they fall in silence.

Total weight: 1/1000th of an ounce. She pulls a wrinkled dollar from her pocket and sets it on the scale next to the bones.

With a sable paintbrush he slides them into a small metal tube the size of his finger, pushes a black rubber stopper into the top. From a desk drawer near his knee, he pulls out a padded envelope. Stamped in block letters on the front: FRAGILE-OSSICLES.

“Where to?” He says the words slowly, his black pen suspended above the envelope. He doesn’t break his stare as he waits for her answer.

Naenie slips him a folded square of paper and whispers, “This address please.” She signs no more with her right hand low behind the counter so the clerk cannot see, twists the ends of the stitches behind her left ear as he writes the name of her father.

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ROADRUNNER by Dave Housley

Roadrunner can see the arches in the distance. Behind them, the mountains. He is running, moving as always, minding the blur of the desert on either side, the potential for danger in the road ahead. Is that a rock mound or an anvil, the shimmer sun a hundred wicks of dynamite simmering.

He moves up a hill and smells the creature, a whiff and then a beak full of rot, a flash of mottled fur and the coyote is lumbering behind. The beast clutches something in his paw. A detonator or a hand crossbow or the complete Acme Mail Order Catalog.

Roadrunner slows a fraction and turns. “Why are you chasing me?” he shouts into the wind.  As always his legs move effortlessly, his body leans slightly forward. His vision blurs as the air rushes around his head.

But the coyote has never endeavored to so much as understand his language and his entreaties will sound like nothing so much as a simple “beep beep” to the animal’s incurious ears.

He runs on. The road dips and rises. The blue horizon remains fixed. The mountains loom ever closer. He feels it before he hears it and before his brain has processed anything the roadrunner finds himself leaning left. Zip! An arrow passes on his right, a few inches from his head. He dips and another arrow flies over his head. He jumps and then watches as another passes under his feet.

He wonders at the coyote, almost respects the animal’s pure drive. After all these years, after each time he crashed into a mountainside or blew himself up or ran smack into a cleverly planted anvil, the coyote continues his pursuit. If Roadrunner weren’t the object of the animal’s murderous objective, he might find the sense of duty admirable.

Roadrunner can hear the coyote’s ragged breath, the lopsided carriage of his claws scrabbling away. He rounds a turn and pauses. A pass, a narrow suspension bridge, a rocky canyon below.

Coyote stops as well. He sucks the air in great, desperate gulps. His rotten breath is like an oppressive heat. Roadrunner wonders if he is going to have a heart attack right here on this road.

“Let us stop this madness,” he says.

Coyote bares his fangs. He swipes his back paws on the road. Roadrunner wonders where he will go to lick his wounds, if there are cubs there to greet him, a partner, a pack. Even as he pities the poor creature, his brain is gauging distances, his muscles coiled and ready. “You do know the definition of madness?” he says.

Coyote wipes drool from his face. He walks a few steps and then he is running, his paws clenched, fangs bent to either side of his face, eyes closed in concentration.

Roadrunner retakes his path with the animal close behind. He allows the coyote to gain until just before the bridge. He stops, darts right, and cuts the ropes. He waits to hear the scream, the crash of the coyote’s body on the canyon floor, but there is nothing but the wind.

He turns his back to the canyon. He runs.

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TRASH DAY by Savannah Slone

Driving home from work, Evelyn wonders what would happen if her airbag released, should she be in an accident. Would it vacuum itself back into place like a video playing in reverse? Would she have to put it back in herself? What if she didn’t put it back in right? Wouldn’t putting it back sound the horn? Should she drive into the country, with the steering wheel’s guts resting on her girth, as not to disturb the neighbors with her honking as she put the airbag back where it belongs? Or would she take it into a mechanic? But what if she got in another accident on the way to the mechanic? There would be no airbag to protect her in said accident. What if she were to die in the first accident? Maybe she wouldn’t have to mess with the airbag at all. Maybe the airbag, itself, would do her in. She did sit far too close to the steering wheel, even though she wasn’t really that short and her legs were rather constricted while she drove. But she felt too far away when she was a comfortable distance from her steering wheel.

Evelyn’s car has a dented passenger door from a sideswipe that she never took care of. A sideswipe she didn’t confess to. As she is about to pull into her driveway, her eye is caught by the weekly garbage truck that heaves her neighbors’ trash can into its bulky body. She parks in the street, tosses open her grey can, starts chucking the nonsense she meant to empty before today out of her forest green Ford Taurus and into the can. McDonald’s sacks. An empty Kleenex box. Ginger-tipped Q-Tips.

As the truck approaches, she finishes, pulls into her driveway, and leans her seat back so the collectors can’t see her for the car hoarder she is. Like a child who covers their eyes and thinks no one else can see them. The mechanical arm raises the open can, dumps it, sets it back in place, and moves on. Evelyn’s pale pink cotton shirt sticks to her mole-trodden, sun-spotted body. She wipes the perspiration from her lined forehead, into her short, graying hair, and onto her too blue blue jeans with the fake out pockets and the amplified elastic waistband.

Evelyn didn’t have the patience for zippers anymore. Half the time, the zipper would be just out of reach, tucked, hiding from her. When she forgot to do laundry and was left pantyless, the zipper once got jammed on her salt and pepper pubic hair. Evelyn had to scissor herself free. She pushed the jeans into the overflowing trash can under the sink and growled, “Fuck it.” She wore pajama pants to her nearby superstore, bought new zipperless jeans, and donated her old ones to the Salvation Army, even though they hated gay people like her. Goodwill was too far of a drive.

Evelyn exits her car. She goes inside to retrieve the overflowing trash bag she forgot to take out. She had put another wax melt cube into her Scentsy burner because the one that was in there had lost its mojo. There it dripped onto her rental house’s oatmeal-tinted carpet, left on overnight.

“Shit.” She runs, tripping over her own feet, looking like she’s trying to get into a lunge position for the first time. She shuts off the wax burner and goes for a grocery sack and some oven mitts. Evelyn’s have owls on them because she wants to be quirky. The owls have been charred a few times too many and have rust and ebony marks all over.

Evelyn had only meant to go out to fetch a Redbox movie from the parking lot of her local Safeway, but when she pulled up, this older man was walking up at the same time and insisted, “No, I insist. You go first.” She had wanted to borrow Carol again. What if this guy looked over her shoulder? What if he was attracted to her and that’s why he let her go first? What if he was a Republican? What if he got angry? She didn’t know him. Evelyn tried on a tight, teeth-baring smile and inhaled her nerves through her diastema and other tiny oral spaces. Transaction uncompleted, Evelyn scurried to her car. She didn’t look back to see if his facial expression read confused or amused or however else she might have affected him. If she had affected him. She locked her door and bit her lip as she reversed, then sped forward. She pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street, almost getting T-boned by a car, whose headlights weren’t turned on, despite it being nearly 9 PM. She hit the brakes, stopping perpendicular to the lane she should be in. The car honked, driving up onto the sidewalk to pass her. Her jaw clenched and her body vibrated with anxiety. She didn’t want to go home. She drove to the school where she worked as a business manager and parked in her usual parking spot. No one else was in the lot and that comforted her. She was always overwhelmed by the swarming congestion of it all.

She twisted her keys out of the ignition and wanted a break. A break from her repetitive evening monotony. A break from her debilitating loneliness. A break from her apprehensions that consumed her. A city bus pulled around the corner, entering stage left in her plane of vision. Her body moved for her, telling her what to do, before she knew. A handful of people got off, as she walked up. She ascended the steps and entered coins. No one else was left on the bus. She couldn’t fathom the complexity of humans coexisting unless it was passing her by. Slides on a projector. Boys grabbing butts. Teen girls cracking up, as they walked down the street. A homeless couple and their small child. An old man pushing a stroller with a Pomeranian inside. A woman in a motorized wheelchair close behind him. Someone entering a convenience store. A car pulling into their driveway. A wayward youth scrolling on an iPhone. A curbside-sitter listening to music. An oceanic pulse of leaves and tango and blue and red flashing lights. A choreographed existence, being constantly toyed with—rewritten. Hazy mirrored doubled back reflections. A second bus, headed the opposite direction, too close. Brief eye contact with a woman who looked like the woman she loved. What she might have looked like, if she could have still known her.“Last stop,” the bus driver bellowed, as they slowed to a halt for the final time. She got off and walked for two hours back to her car. She slept, with the seat reclined, setting the alarm on her cell phone for five minutes before other employees would begin arriving. She always liked to be the first to arrive. Evelyn goes into work. She has a normal day. Afterward, she drives home. She takes out the trash.

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BEE GIRLS by Gregg Williard

One chilly autumn evening a flying saucer hovered over orchards of the estate of Septimus Giles, who had just stumbled into a mound of composting dung, his ramble through a dusk redolent of pear, flower and Queen’s Stew apples, and astir with the hum of bees (and now anti-gravity oscillations) rudely deterred by a slipper suddenly bilged to cold offal. Chilled too by his unsuitable velvet smoking jacket, lingerie lace cravat and linen pantaloons (with no stockings or hat!), donned for an after-dinner brandy by the fire rather than an October stroll about the grounds. It was a serious breach of form. Why had he ventured forth so unsuitably attired? Vexed with his dilemma he did not see the hatch open above him, and three bee girls emerge to caper among the trees.

Floating out of the trees on thrumming green wings they descended to consider a startled Septimus with wide apart, somewhat equine eyes. The bee girls wore identical yellow and black-striped camisoles and had the same blond hair, styled in onion dome bouffant. Their high, porcelain brows sprouted trembling antennae, tuned, his gathering wits surmised, to etheric excitements of the beyond. Neither sprites nor fairies they were human size, and charming in their heft.Septimus swooned. Bees were all the rage among his set that season. Only a week before he had draped a night gazebo with poor cotton, candle-lit from within and filled with his new bee colony denizens. Queued ladies with honey dipped handkerchiefs entered and in moments gave issue to the most extraordinary cries. A honey dab to their exposed vaginal lips had drawn bee stings to their most tender nether regions. Septimus counted Scientific Investigations among his enthusiasms; his latest intention was to test a daring conjecture that bee venom and female musk would result in exquisite aphrodisia. Thus far his subjects had proven unsuitable, but he was not deterred. Now this bee trio could prove to be the answer. And shorn of antennae and wings, coached in modest comportment and armed with proper introductions the creatures might even be welcomed into society, his sponsorship drawing fair repute his way. He stepped forward, bowed and extended his hand. They shrank from his overture.Of course it had to be his unsuitable attire. Sartorial recklessness had somehow curtained off all futurity. His assurance of place seemed somehow at risk.“But...I am a gentleman!” he cried, incredulous, setting the bee girls to bob the air like agitated paper angels hung for the new year. He slipped and fell face first into fertilized earth, and came away seasoned with more offal and dung.He sobbed, bereft, his spirit’s nectar now humbled sweet. The bee girls dipped their thirsty antennae in his aura, sorrowed deep azure, and drank deep. Once sated they quickly departed.Septimus staggered through the orchard’s dark aisles back to his manor. He would bathe and don fine dress again but discover society no longer hospitable. The precise nature of his wrongs eluded definition; always indefinable missteps and indiscretions of comportment, dress, speech or scent made his presence strangely intolerable to all others of his rank. Its agency remained mysterious, but the outcome beyond dispute: expulsion—now and forever from the hive.

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WAKE, ZIPLINE by Angelo Maneage

The waters are synchronized. There is a decanter of coffee fuming. Grandma is sad.

Eating pizza, strangely. Songs are playing, strangely, and I catch one directly above the table we are at in this separate room (but all the doors were open, so it was more like a section of a bigger room, like a house is a room with sections of itself). My grandma, aunt, grandpa, my Uncle Bobby are all sitting here, with a few other people and pastries that are covered that I’m told to eat but confused to because they are not eaten.

Pizza boxes were stacked sort of like one row was pepperoni and one wasn’t. They were both cheese. There are eight ounce waters next to them, in a square, being taken in a diagonal. This feels like it means something. Uncle Bobby asks if he could have a pop, but we told him no.

She tells me this exactly that way: “Grandma is sad.” She shows me houses on her phone, ones that she looked at because my grandpa wants to move, Aunt Chrissy shows me a house too. 20 pizza boxes are behind us; Uncle Bobby looks as if he might take the empty ones. The pastor’s wife, I forget her name (I’m not sure if that is rude or not because she remembers mine), talks with my grandma while I’m looking at her phone.

This house is a ranch, it’s red and long. There is a lake by it; grandma loves the lake, she always gets a pass to the one at the city every year. I went with her once and there was a dead bird in the water.

The house is sold.

A voice plays over all of our thoughts. The pastor’s wife is behind me so I give grandma her phone back; I don’t want the wife to touch my head, but she might.

Her voice is sloshy. Sincere about markets, or catering, death, something about money in a donation. Something in or on her eyes that I’m not sure I like; exhaustion in her voice and she always has a limp, but her lids seem to character act. I really might be angry because my mom’s fiancé is tall so his legs have nowhere to go but down while he’s driving; I spilled coffee on my pants I’d just picked up from the tailor.

There is a setting up of a camera. Two voices but mostly one. It’s a bit sloshy. That one starts to talk. It’s definitely Gary. I want to see this. I want to hear it. Everybody is talking; nobody is even eating pizza. Aunt Chrissy tells me this is Gary, but I already knew that. I listen, staring; I get up and push the way to the section where its watched.

A large room; the Gospel House. You can see the pipes or vents, whatever they are, from the ceiling from the floor. Carpeted. Very beige. This is a church that is for ex-mafia men in the local area, and their wives and families; it is very warming.

Pictures of Gary are in stations every 14 steps, I counted. In a collage, not making a larger Gary, but something of that. Like if he were a square, which he wasn’t; he’d smoked in a funeral several times before, jumped in the pool, drank in the car immediately after without putting a towel down.

He always looked old, I’d noticed. Youthful wrinkles, strangely. In a way he never looked healthy, but there was something confusing that with his beam. He would pick you up and put you on his shoulders if you were a certain height and weight, and carry you around, and you would be in the pool, somehow, he would be on your shoulders then, fighting a stranger you’d never seen, laughing, the stranger too, with another stranger you’d might have seen before holding the other up. Splashing in every picture, there’s something hinting at a Hawaiian shirt.

It isn’t really a traditional church or clergy, so I thought maybe that they would have left his body out of our site. And it didn’t feel too good to see him immediately; it felt like I was invading or like I wasn’t prepared, as prepared as he was. I’d never been that close to death, I don’t think. Or influence.

His daughters, crying, congratulated me for graduating college; I’d met them before in younger cases. Congratulations, you.

Wearing my cap, I hugged them, individually. I met a cousin I’d met before, also waiting in line. She’s older, crying. She uses Facebook to look at me, she mentions; she congratulates me.

My mom’s fiancé says he heard about 30 properties the family is keeping and how expensive that is, money, money, people, pool boy, and admiring that reality.  

Gary is surrounded by flowers.

The video projected above a piano on four screens. A still silence, near movement, near the end. One man clapped once, but after that first contact understood that nobody will and began to warm his hands up.

Picture dark, grainy curtains. This is heaven, he says.

I realized my pants were unzipped in the hallway with all the people I’d just met with; at the last funeral I was at, my pants ripped as my grandpa and I lowered his mother’s urn into the ground. I zip them up.

My mom wants to go home. She had been crying for a few years, today especially; I had been weird all day too. She talked about how she’d gotten him an autographed football and how it was displayed on the shrine, I saw, and how good it made her feel. This made me feel good; this made me feel like we’d all missed a point.

I hadn’t been told that they were going to do this, but everybody brought bags of sand and began to fill the room with them. Each section, water is shot in from Pat and firemen outside with hoses. The whole fire department is here. Everybody is here. Even people my aunt works with, and her customers. Dons, city workers; everybody is cheering, dancing in the middle while the filler is poured. An inflated ball is in the crowd. Another. A volley ball net.

We are at the beach. Gary is dead.

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