Flash

THE GHOST OF 623 LAMPLIGHTER SQUARE by Alex S. French

February 3, 2019

“Good morning,” she says, coffee buzzing in her grip.

“How’s it going,” Mike states, doesn’t ask.

“Living the dream,” Dave quips. Sarcastic? Who can tell.

“Do anything interesting over the weekend?” she tries.

Mike staggers to the bathroom. Door thud her only reply. Dave surveys the break room awkwardly: ceiling panes, Nestea packets, trashcan—anything but her eyes. She sighs and walks away.

Meeting Agenda:

First item: The jokes.

“Happy to gather for another meeting that could have been an email,” Stan chuckles.

“Ope, looks like Greg’s got the Monday face,” Andrew pokes.

“Did I have a hard weekend, or hardly any weekend at all is what I always say,” Jerry says, like always.

Peanut brittle laughter snaps between their jaws, staccato starts finish with chewy, contented murmurs. She never liked such sugar.

Second item: CEO Carl walks in late. Begins meeting with a greedy clap.

“So the numbers, the numbers are looking good. Up 12.4 percent over last March, but that’s counting NB3s like they’re NB1s…” Pinging jargon ricochets round floating clichés. She waits for one to hit. Hopes that it kills. Unreferenced numbers provide the backdrop, a gray curtain of statistical rain. The assault continues for 28 straight minutes.

“Look, our top priority is the bottom line, so trust the metrics, guys. We need to follow the actuaries’ roadmap if we want to land this plane with a boatload of goodies. Questions?”

Third item: Argument.

Jason pipes up, all folded arms and knitted brow, “I need the UWs to lower premiums if I’m going to be able to compete on top level firms.”

“We can’t go lower than our state approved rates,” Chester shrugs.

“That’s true,” she says, “but we can use the new metrics to apply to the state for a transition flex to bring down premiums on business that we really want.”

“What about the flex rate? I know Barry’s used a flex rate before!” Mark yells.

“We need to reapply for the transition rates,” she helps.

“We don’t have a flex rate.” Reggie objects.

“We can get this—we just need to apply!” No matter how she says it, no one seems to hear. She spins around in her chair, but no one seems to notice. She coughs and speaks again, but no one seems to care.

CEO Carl interjects, slaps his hands on the table. “Ah, I love this dynamism! This is what it’s all about! A back and forth, to and fro battle that’s going to paddle us forward. Good work, everyone, let’s make this work great!”

Final notes: No solution reached. Circle back on it next week.

(Remember donuts for Jerry’s birthday.)

Taylor from accounting saunters into the cubi-pod. “What-what, you turds—bonuses have arrived! Who’s ready for a li’l Shots Roulette? Bonus picked out of the hat pays the bill! Mike, Dave, Stan, Greg, Andrew, Jerry, Jason, Chester, Mark, Reggie: I know you bronanas are in!”

High fives are exchanged. Coats are grabbed. The digital clock strikes four and the room empties. She is alone. Her bonus envelope lies abandoned on the floor. But when she picks it up, she finds another underneath. Clean of footprints. Uncrumpled. Her coworker Barry’s name printed on the front. He didn’t make it in today. He doesn’t make it in on a lot of Mondays.

It isn’t right; she slices open the bonus letters.

She knows it isn’t right; she looks at her check amount, sees an extra digit in his.

She’s always known; she was right.

She doesn’t even bother resealing the envelopes. Her face falls Zen. A smile flickers at her lips. And sparks alight in the irises of her eyes.

There were lots of stories as to how 623 Lamplighter Square burned down. Electrical fire. That coffee pot was always sketch. Insurance arson. Apparently the business wasn’t doing well; they’d fallen behind the market’s current premiums and rates. Teenagers. Because.

But no one blamed the ghost. How could they blame someone whom they refused to notice?

She’s moved on to a better place now. Some think it’s Canada. Some think it’s the future. She calls it a place her own. Either way, she lives in limbo no more.

HOME by Madeline Anthes

February 1, 2019

You say you’d follow him anywhere, so when he asks you to move across the country, you do. You say you’d do anything for love, and you love him.

He wants you to love your life with him.

You try.

Your rented house has plain beige walls. It’s in a suburb and has a fenced-in yard. You don’t have dogs or children to use it.

The kitchen is tiny. You bump into each other every night as you fix your lunches for the next day. You’re watching infants at a childcare center. You change diapers and clean spills all day. You hate it, but there aren’t any teaching jobs in October.

You say you’ll keep looking for another job. He has his new dream job, after all.

A career. He’s managing a plant, staying late, getting tipsy at corporate dinners. He comes home rosy cheeked and full of stories about men with names like Bill and Frank. You are never invited.

The point is he’s happy. You tell him you’ll keep trying.

He’s heard you tossing at night, seen you staring at the beige walls, watched you bite the inside of your cheek until your mouth fills with the taste of rust.

He asks you over and over what he can do.

You tell him you miss the sound of the ocean, and the feel of salt air through a cracked window. How the ceiling fan would press the air down and make you feel heavy when you were falling asleep.

He buys a machine that plays the sound of crashing waves and plugs in a fan next to your bed.

You tell him you miss how sand piled in the corners of the kitchen. You miss how the wind carried bits of shell and coral, and how you’d find flecks of it stuck to your scalp when you showered. You miss how you could scratch and scratch all day and still find bits of grit under your nails.

You find a bag of potting sand in the hall closet and perfectly-formed piles near the fridge. One night you wake to him sprinkling sand in your hair; it pools on your pillow and sticks to the sheets. It makes your skin itch.

You tell him it’s the air and the smell and the way people dress. You tell him it’s the way you could close your eyes and feel present, alive, like a current connected you to the walls of the house. You miss belonging.

He brings in jars of sea air and wears flip flops around the house. He wears Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts to the grocery store. He looks like a parody of your old life together.

What more could you want, he asks you. What else can he do?

You tell him you don’t want anything else. There’s nothing else he can do.

You can’t replicate the heartbeat of a town, or the rhythm of a household, or the texture of a life. Even if you went back now, it’d all be different.

So you listen to your sound machine and step over the piles of sand. You tell him it’s time to start a new life.

At night, you run your fingers along your scalp and look under your nails for traces of sand.

DOMESTIC TERRORIST by Meeah Williams

January 29, 2019

That morning I had my usual breakfast: a bowl of pimples soaked in apple cider vinegar. However, this morning the pimples were inflamed. Each pimple had a little demon erupting from its infected head and each demon was bending over and showing me its hairy ass.

The meter lady came to the door and wanted to read my tonsils. I said “I don’t have tonsils anymore. They were removed when I was five.” She said, “Exactly” and made an angry hash mark on her little clipboard beside my name. I threw a symbolic kitten at her back as she clomped down the path to her armored dune buggy and roared away.

My life was like a lot of people’s lives except it had my name on it.

My boyfriend looked up from his laptop and asked me, “how many people do you suppose you have kill to be technically considered a serial killer? Is three the minimum or will only two do?”

When I asked him why he wanted to know he ran off into the living room and peered out coyly from the cactus farm I’d planted there.

My life was like a suitcase a stranger thrust into my hand at the train station, running off before I could object.

I’m left standing here on the platform waiting for a train with the rest of the hyenas. I didn’t see the point of going any further but the policeman said, “Well you sure as hell can’t stay here” and shoved me through the closing doors.

I took the only seat still available, beside a morbidly obese man already taking up most of the seat beside him. I asked him, “Do you happen to know where this train is headed?”

He said, “No. But wherever it’s going I hope they serve hamburgers there.”

This seemed to me a singularly significant and wise response under the circumstances. My respect for him climbed a millimeter. So I asked him, “Do you think I’m the type of girl a serial killer would mind killing?”

He said, “It just so happens that the first thing I thought when you entered the train was ‘that’s the kind of girl a serial killer wouldn’t mind killing.’”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me all day.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said.

We both seemed to intuit the conversation could only go downhill from there and so neither of us risked the exchange of a single additional word. The scenery flew past us in the windows like the contents of a blender mixing up a rat smoothie.

I must have dozed. When I woke up I was still alive. The train had stopped in the middle of nowhere. My throat had not been cut. I was not disemboweled. In other words, I had no excuse for remaining on the train. I would have to disembark. I said goodbye to the morbidly obese man on the platform. I picked up my suitcase and headed for the taxi stand.

My life was like a bomb that a stranger had foisted on me and warned me not to tell anyone about or else.

I slid into the first available taxi. The driver looked into the rearview mirror. “Where to ma’am?”

I closed my eyes. “Five-four-three-two-one,” I said.

I opened my eyes. Everything was still there.

The driver said, “Five-four-three-two-one where, ma’am?”

“Never mind. Just take me to wherever you have polar bears in this town. I think seeing some polar bears is just the thing I need right now. If you don’t have polar bears, then I guess anywhere you can get a decent plate of pancakes.”

The cab pulled away from the curb.

“Five-four-three-two-one,” I muttered under my breath.

I opened my eyes.

Everything was still there.

GARGOYLE by Zac Smith

January 28, 2019

I sit on the front porch to get out of the apartment, to watch the children practice soccer in the field across the street. My neighbor comes in and out with his dogs. Every time, I pet the dogs while he tries not to make eye contact.

He is out of shape. Tall, but bloated. I see this. I remind him by looking at his body. When he looks at me, I look at his stomach. His gut, how it pokes out between the drapes of his flannel shirts. As I look at his gut, he looks at my gut. He thinks about his health, my health. Our health. He thinks about my heart surgery: quadruple bypass. He thinks about my recovery: slow and pitiful. He thinks about the future. His future, my future, our future.

I’ve seen him with junk food, bags of takeout, six-packs on the weekends. I leave the dregs of my own takeout meals on the top of the trash can out front, piles of styrofoam and foil and leaking sauces the first thing he sees when he stashes the remnants of his own sad refuse.

I pet his dogs. I can find all their sweet spots with ease, they wag their tails, they stare at me lovingly, ignoring him, ignoring the walk he is trying to take them on, and I tell him how I used to have dogs, how they slept in my bed, how we used to go on walks on days like this, and I describe their illnesses, their deaths – I describe putting them down, and I describe my loneliness thereafter, the sadness that came, and how I never got another dog, and how I came to only have cats, which I hate, because they are horrible things that stay inside and ignore me.

But I shrug, because what am I going to do? Nothing – there is nothing I can do.

I pet his dogs and I tell him about my first cat. It was my daughter’s – she moved in with me for three months, brought her cat, taught me how to care for it, then she moved out, left the cat, and I haven’t seen her since, no contact, not a word, for years, it’s been years and I don’t know why, and sometimes all I do is wonder, I wonder why she’s gone, because she’s gone, she’s a ghost, but I still have her cat, at least, I guess, and I ask him how his wife is doing, because I know she’s pregnant, it’s their first baby, it’s beautiful that it’s happening, I’m so happy for them, and I pet the dogs while he watches the kids play soccer in the field across the street, thinking, worrying, about to tug on their leashes and try to escape, so I let him go with a smile and he wanders off into the sunshine, dogs pulling in all directions because it’s so nice out, just a perfect day, I am going to keep sitting here and enjoy it.

I am a gargoyle. I am a bad omen, a shadow that haunts our front stoop, and I will wait for him to come back, for him to let me pet the dogs some more, to let me tell him more things about what comes next; I want to tell him about the cats I have now, how they yowl at night and crawl on me in the dark, how they were my ex-wife’s cats, how I never asked for them and she just left them here when she left, and tell him about my ex-wife, about her leaving, about all the things she left behind when she did, about how the unwanted cats just pile up, how everything just piles up, up and up and up and in any case I don’t think I could even climb all the stairs right now, God, there are so many stairs, I’m out of breath just thinking about them – I have to go slow, I have to halt and breathe and wheeze, I have to balance on the last stair and squeeze in through the door so the cats don’t get out, and then I have to sit in the stale air, sit with all the cat hair, with all the bills and old gauze and medicines in their little orange jars, with the old boxes of old things, the bad memories, the bad things to come and the sun just feels so nice, it’s so nice to be outside, it’s nice to walk the dogs, to watch the kids play soccer, to talk to someone, to be somewhere else, to get out, to get out while you can before you can’t, and there, there he is, I can see him now.

Here he comes.

ROTTEN TOOTH by Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross

January 27, 2019

Blinking in the darkness of the school auditorium, Rajiv spots his ex-wife Sangita. Her filmy green shawl is flung over the back of the empty seat beside her, reminding him of how their daughter, Alisha, puts a plate and cutlery out for her imaginary friend, Mr. Potato (not to be confused with the toy with the interchangeable facial features). The first time she did this, Rajiv thought Alisha was setting a place for her mother, and he’d wondered if the intention might actually conjure Sangita.

“You saving that seat for Todd?” Rajiv asks Sangita. Her boyfriend, pink-faced with thick, blond hair: Todd looks like a mayonnaise-based potato salad. Every time Alisha talks about Mr. Potato, Todd’s face is what Rajiv sees. If only she’d chosen some other produce as her friend’s namesake. Even Mr. Frisée or Mr. Dandelion Greens would leave a less bitter taste on Rajiv’s tongue.

Sangita sighs. “I thought you said talking to me was like having a cavity filled.”

“Root canal,” Rajiv says.

When Alisha first set that place for Mr. Potato, two years ago, Rajiv half believed Sangita would materialize, even though he knew perfectly well she was in Bermuda with Todd. Probably spreading aloe on Todd’s grotesque, sunburnt, mole-studded back. In movies, when children announced a presence the adults couldn’t see, those children were generally onto something. Rajiv sliced some frozen cookie dough and put it in the oven, just in case, so if Sangita miraculously walked in, the house wouldn’t smell only of takeout curry.

“You like to suffer,” Sangita says. “You like to feel sorry for yourself.”

“But after a root canal, the pain goes away,” says Rajiv.

Sangita looks at him with pity. “You need to find a seat. The concert will start any minute now.”

Rajiv finds a lone unoccupied chair two rows behind Sangita and watches as Todd settles in beside her, roping his thick arm around Sangita’s shoulders.

Then the curtain opens, and the band director thanks them for coming. He talks about the piece with which the concert will open, Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” A lullaby, he calls it. He explains the opening lines to them: “Sheep may safely graze and pasture/When a shepherd guards them well.” It was written, he tells them, for the birthday of Duke Christian, a patron of Bach, the nobleman praised for protecting his citizen flock.

Rajiv watches Todd massage Sangita’s neck with one of his giant, boiled ham hands, watches her whisper something to him. “My work is just as important as yours fucking is,” Sangita once whispered in Rajiv’s ear at a preschool play. This just after he’d kissed her cheek. Rajiv knew that things were often not what they appeared. He also knew that thinking like this was ridiculous when the thing you hoped you saw wrong was your ex-wife and her new—no, not new—partner.

The song the children play is so gentle that the music is like a hand rubbing soft circles onto Rajiv’s back, telling him to lie down and rest. “Let go of your troubles, weary travelers”: that had been Alisha’s one line in that school play.

Rajiv remembers the root canal he’d gotten ten years ago. How tender the endodontist was with him. The miracle of the Novocain sponging up his pain. And then after, when the pain was gone for good, how he had felt smitten with that endodontist for removing the thing so excruciating he’d consumed nothing but liquids for three weeks.

His analogy was all wrong. Sangita was no root canal. She was a rotten tooth. Not that she was to blame. When Rajiv first went to the dentist about his pain, he insisted the diagnosis had to be wrong. He routinely flossed. He hardly ate sweets. Then the dentist had explained that his tooth had a hairline fracture. Rajiv grinded his teeth in his sleep. That’s how the infection had gotten in: when he was unawares, convinced he’d done everything right.

GRIP by Claire Hopple

January 25, 2019

Let us tell you about Louise. At the moment we started to really pay attention, she was stuck behind a vehicle that read “Criminal Transport Unit - Dept. of Corrections” on the highway.

When traffic cleared and she finally made it to the park, she was handed a universal key to all the glass showcases by her father.

“Add more furnishings to the blue-tongue skink cage,” he said, gesturing toward an open box on a picnic table.

Louise pulled what looked to be a mini tiki hut and micro lounge chairs out of the box and headed toward the showcases. The skinks did not seem to react to the new arrangement, though Louise thought it could’ve been because they were far too large to fit into the chairs.

Here she was working with her father and living with her father and somehow her brother Bill had made it all the way to Colorado, even if he was transporting dead bodies for a living.

Naturally, he loved to tell everyone about picking up Joe Cocker’s body, who passed away on December 22, 2014 in a place called Crawford, Colorado, population 431.

“Too many cigarettes,” Bill always said, like he and Joe were buds.

Just as Louise noticed how the park pavilion smelled exactly like camp in some murky way, her father came back over.

“If things get...if they go...if things become cumbersome today, the code word’s sarsaparilla,” he garbled.

She opened her mouth to reply and he said “what” in a way that wasn’t really a question and she said “nothing,” but it was really that if something actually went down today, she would panic and not remember any real, helpful words let alone any code words, especially one like sarsaparilla.

He was off to prep the leopard geckos. She wasn’t allowed to touch them because they could lose their tails if handled too roughly.

Sure, Louise was offended that her father thought she wasn’t up for a task like that, but she was also relieved. One of the leopard geckos had this pendulous tumor that she couldn’t help staring at.

This party was for some family friends of theirs. Mitchell, the father of Chase the birthday boy, used to be the older kid on the block when Louise was at her most aesthetically vulnerable.

She noted that she’d first seen him practice-making-out with a front door screen, and now she was watching him unclasp his son from a carseat.

Even these days, he would take his glasses off and Louise found that looking at his actual eyeballs would be this very personal thing. He would seem naked in a way that was more naked than nakedness, and she couldn’t look at him but also couldn’t not look at him.

The crash was more of a beginning than an ending. In the early party pandemonium, no one saw who did it. But the smashed cage was a reality nonetheless.

The Pacman frog’s cage was shattered, though it looked like he (she? it?) had escaped. Of course, the amphibian with “an easygoing nature ideal for a life of captivity” was the one set free. We had witnessed Louise do a little research of her own on these creatures, though we’re not sure exactly why she wanted to impress her own dad.

A pink Post-it lay beside the glass with the words:

For E.G.

As if the destructive behavior were lovingly devoted to this person.

Well, that was what we called the tipping point for Louise. A crowd had formed. She turned the moment into a confessional.

“I have a habit of stealing phone books off of my neighbors’ stoops,” she began.

We knew this, and the neighbors did too, but they were so thankful they didn’t have to dispose of them that they didn’t say a word.

“I stack them in the basement closet that houses the water heater,” she continued.

She was losing them.

“I - I think it’s because things have gotten out of hand. I was fired. The woman who replaced me was supposedly hired just because the CEO hit her with his Range Rover while she was crossing the street. This phone book collection is my only grip on life.”

There was a pause.

“Well, we all knew that,” said her father from somewhere in the group.

She didn’t know what to make of this.

The glass shards fell through the slits in the picnic table, landing somewhere just behind her and the memory of her pride.

As soon as we heard her outward yearning we knew no more exotic animal birthday fun would be had that day.

We found that Louise had reached that point in adulthood where she thought everyone flying planes and cutting people open should be older than her, but they were not. Not always.

Meanwhile, she spent her time doing things like compiling lists of words that were rarely unpaired. Like how nothing ever seems to “spurt” except blood.

That, and we knew for a fact she was waiting out the crinkly man four houses down. He was bound to die soon or at least move into a home, and she was preparing a way for them both. She thought he had no mortgage or family left and that this would work out for her. She helped him paint his siding three weeks ago and we think she was really helping herself.

Anyway, it was easy for us to see that her one regret in life was not just one but multiple. And that maybe she was secretly hoping that we were all axolotls, who have cannibalistic tendencies but if bitten, can regenerate their body parts over time.

BIO by Nick Perilli

January 24, 2019

Ernest Scheetz is a writer and carpenter living in Hudson, North Carolina. He smells like sawdust. Other work of his can be found in The Coyotee Review, New Langdon Quarterly, Triage Journal, New Coke Magazine, Holden Press, Instrumental Annual, Endeavors Review, Found Horizon, Form Letter Journal, Synecdoche Zoo York, String Lights Theory Magazine, Dwayne J. Quarterly, The Exorcism of Emily Prose, the garbage, Muted Xylophone Literary, The Flea Market, the Scheetz family plot, the eyes of his first son, the eyes of his dead father, Dreamboat Lit, Tourniquet Journal, Tall Tales & Ice Cream Horror Review, his friend’s copy of Teen Beat, a bathroom stall somewhere in Wyoming, Fresh Hell Annual, Khrushchev’s Lucky Fiddle Weekly, the Ragnarok Online forums, Laser Lightshow Literary, a house in Connecticut whose lumber bones are from the tree in the woods near his house that he used to carve words into with his buddy Sean, Angst & Poetry, Closed for Submissions Indefinitely, Been Where Done What Lit, Fluid on the Brain Review, Milton Bradley’s Mouse Trap, Single Slices $0.50 Annual, Twenty Sixty Quarterly, on the white cabinet drawer in the dresser down in his parents’ recently flooded basement, Horse-Drawn Fiction, Inconsequential Literary Magazine, in Stephanie Torey’s sixth grade desk with a stuffed bear, False Idols Quarterly (formerly Khruschev’s Lucky Fiddle Weekly), still in the printer at work that he isn’t allowed to use for personal documents but he doesn’t have any ink in his printer at home and the library charges $0.20 per page and he doesn’t have the cash right now, Bare Bones Construction Review, Eat at Lit, sitting completely forgotten on his old laptop’s hard drive as the best piece of art he will ever create until it’s thrown away and the hard drive is pecked to bits by seagulls , Funk House Quarterly, Oliphant Digest, in yesterday’s dream that he can’t quite remember no matter how hard he tries, The New Borker: A Canine Literary Experience, Kit Kat Lit—

Stuck in time as a good idea he had on the way home last week that’s lost to him and drifting away every passing day until someone grasps time travel enough to make a time machine in his lifetime, at which point Ernest will go to this person and say, “Please, I will risk the trip.” Having exhausted all volunteers (RIP), this person will say “Sure” and advise Ernest to touch nothing in the past; but when Ernest sees himself pull into his driveway, he won’t be able to refrain from jumping on him and holding his keys to his throat. “What was the idea?” he will yell at his younger self and his younger self will tell Ernest something like this but something not like that and Ernest, having damaged time, will say “That’s not very good,” Cap’n Horatio Crunch’s Crunch Review, elsewhere, and the rest.

He has a cat.

LAND SPEED by Alex Evans

January 21, 2019

On October 24th, 2011, Oscar Valentine broke the land speed record riding his Schwinn through a suburb outside of Madison, Wisconsin. People said that this was impossible, that Oscar Valentine, being neither a professional high-speed driver nor a legal adult at the time of the achievement, could not have exceeded 760 miles per hour. Others cite the vehicle as their source of skepticism. Not only does a bicycle seem an unideal method by which to compete for speed, but a close friend of Valentine has publicly stated that the tires on the Schwinn were nearly flat that morning, and he ought to know, as he was the owner of the only bicycle pump on the block. But the fact remained, it happened.

Many explanations have been posed for this inconceivable scientific phenomenon, each more implausible than the last, but almost all prior investigations have turned to the cosmos for answers, citing freak meteorological events, gusts that travelled from the Gulf to Wisconsin and buffeted the rusting bicycle from A to B in record speed. None have looked at the boy himself, Oscar Valentine, to understand what inspiration a teenager might have for that level of speed, instead assuming that the inspiration was the same for everyone who competed for the land speed record, that Oscar Valentine and the drivers of rocket fueled super cars were in fact one and the same. This is a flaw in the existing research and will be corrected here. This story aims to set the record straight, showing Oscar Valentine for what he is: not the victim of a meteorological coincidence, but a lover of chess, a dutiful son, and a boy who would stop at nothing to pursue his passions.

The reality is this: on the morning of October 24th, 2011, Oscar Valentine was running late. He had agreed to join two friends for a game of chess in the park, having already promised his mother he would go to church. The church was four blocks from his home, and the park was fourteen blocks in the opposite direction. Realizing his mistake upon waking up to his mother calling for him, Oscar was faced with two unconscionable options: to skip his planned chess match and thus risk disappointing his friends and losing his rank as Monroe County’s finest chess player under the age of 18, or to disappoint his mother and, by extension, God himself, whom Oscar felt certain was already not fond of him. Neither option was ideal, and in that warped state between sleeping and waking where impossibilities becomes possible, Oscar decided to do both.

The mass began promptly at 8:30 and lasted one hour, though Father Chandler usually cut it short early, on account of his drinking and resultant forgetfulness, which caused many parts of the service to go missing. On one recent Sunday, it had only been fifteen minutes before Father Chandler had called out, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” at which point the congregation had stood and filed out as usual, each member too polite to bring up that there had been no verses read, no communion, and no homily. It was upon Father Chandler’s unpredictable timekeeping that Oscar’s plan depended.

His chess match was due to begin at 9:30, and though his friends were fond of him, they were also hungry for power, as most teenagers are, and Oscar knew they would seize any chance to eliminate him and take his title. Thus, he wheeled his bike to the church and left it outside, ready at a moment’s notice for Oscar’s escape to the park and to victory.

At this time, all of Wisconsin’s communion wine was produced by the Glory of God Vintners, LLC. They signed an exclusive deal with the archdiocese two years earlier, and every church in the area had been well-stocked with their stigmata-emblazoned cartons ever since. However, one week before Oscar’s fateful ride, the Madison Police discovered an enormous quantity of cocaine and a stash of jewelry belonging to the deposed king of a small European nation in the factory of Glory of God Vintners, LLC. It was the largest drug bust in Wisconsin’s history, and aside from giving the Madison Municipal Police some much needed good P.R. after years of rampant corruption, it also created a major shortage in communion wine, as the entire production was seized by the state. Thus Father Chandler was sober for the first time in almost a decade, and he had many thoughts on the ways God punishes man which he intended to share with the congregation.

So you see, rather than running short, the mass had potential to run longer than ever. Oscar Valentine loved his mother and could not leave early. It would break her heart, and though Oscar was many things, he was never a heartbreaker. So, he squirmed in his pew through Father Chandler’s homily, eyes on his watch. He would have missed his chess match entirely, stuck in the church all afternoon, had it not been for Winston, the organist. It was Winston who had made meaningful eye contact with Father Chandler and gestured to his watch. Thus the service had ended with seconds to spare, and thus our hero, having taken a majority of those seconds to shake hands with members of the congregation, was forced to either admit defeat or confound the laws of physics.

The rest is history. It has been demonstrated that in times of immense stress, humans are capable of performing extraordinary feats of strength. Like a mother lifting a midsize sedan off her child, Oscar pedaled his bicycle at a speed which, by all calculations, ought to have caused both his legs to detach at the hip. Those who do not believe it can check the satellites. On October 24th, 2011, Oscar Valentine broke the land speed record on a bicycle, but he lost his chess match, and that’s the end of it.

LILY IN THE LIGHT by Megan Pillow

January 20, 2019

Lily isn’t sleeping, but I still try to get up from the bed without making a sound. The curtains are closed, and I open them a peep so that a thin shaft of light comes in, not enough so that anyone from the outside can see us. The shaft travels to the bed, to the body lying there, like someone has traced a line across her belly with a golden brush, and beneath that lick of gold, her skin, oh, Lily’s skin lights up like one of those paper lanterns that you set on fire and send into the sky. I close my eyes and open them again. She hasn’t disappeared on me yet.

Lily isn’t sleeping, but she’s still, and her hair runs across the pillow like a rivulet of water. I kneel next to her. I pool it in my hands just like Steven and Marcus and Ahmed and Dan all did before they put their lips to her throat while she lay there unmoving, just like the painter who spilled it across the pillow again and told her she was his muse and now she had to still herself.

Lily isn’t sleeping, but she’s still in my bed, looking past me to the curtain, to the courtyard, to the room she should have slept in last night, to the path and the prairie and the hundred animals that are stirring and stretching and inching their way through the whispering grass. I loose her hair from my hands. I turn her face toward me. She doesn’t meet my eyes. She’s still looking out to the sun and the stream and the roads that travel like arrows into the city where her husband is probably still asleep in their bed. I run my hand from her cheek to her shoulder, the curve of her breast, the swell of her hip, the top of her thigh, where the hair shimmers in the golden light, where the hair is downy as the fur of the rabbits creeping toward us through the brush. I know that thigh has pushed the doors ajar in a hundred old houses, pressed against her calf as she squats to take another picture of the structure of shadow and light. I know that thigh flexes when she runs through the city at night and the only thing she hears is the sound of her breath in her ears and the faint scream of sirens. I know that every man who climbs into her bed folds that thigh around himself the way he folds a bedsheet and tosses it to the back of the closet. I know the painter folds her thigh in the light the same way he folds the wings of a paper crane and then traces his eyes and his brush along every unmovable curve.

Lily isn’t sleeping, but she’s still in my bed, and she is motionless, the way she always is with men. I want to whisper to her that here in this bed, we are women, and we are the only two in the whole wide world.

This is how they like me, she says.

This is how I like you, I say, and I spread her legs, and I put my tongue inside her, and for the first time, she is alive. Lily in the light jumps like a rivulet of water against the hot of a pan, like a rabbit darting through the brush, like the pulse in her thigh that thrums against my cheek when she folds her legs around me. I put one hand underneath her and the other on the gentle swell of her stomach, on the skin that is glowing in the light of the beam, and in that light we are moving, in that light we are married, in that light we are making art better than any man’s, and I do not tell her, I would never tell her, but in that light I mourn a little, because just like the light, I know the art won’t last.

MAPLE & GOO by Anith Mukherjee

January 18, 2019

The Orb glowed, the room shook, pink slime dripped from the ceiling. The Orb shuddered. The Orb split open. Gestating ultraviolet flesh. Flesh appendages reached out and grabbed Maple by the neck, they pulled her into The Orb’s living centre. She felt blood circulating around her, absorbing her. She faded and dissolved. She did not scream. It felt like a kiss.

Town Nouvelle Vague is a paranoid city. Steeped in irony and sarcasm. Sincerity was outlawed. No one knew what anyone was really thinking. There was a constant underlying analysis of meaning. The paranoia fed into the general theme of contempt. Everyone disregarded everyone. There were no real friendships. Relationships revolved around sex and sarcasm. Non smokers were exiled. Emphysema was the town’s leading cause of death. Jazz blared from giant speakers scattered throughout the city. Your life must be soundtracked to Mingus, Coltrane, Ellington, this was not a choice. Everyone had nervous ticks, stress induced neurosis, underlying anxiety. None if it ever showed. Everyone adhered to the strict code of style. Style was essential, mandatory by law. Maple watched all this, wandering the streets, calm and invisible.

She had decided to burn her past. Fizzle it out of existence. She was starting fresh, unburdened by old mistakes. She did this by sitting on her bed, systematically flowing through her memories. They came to her, one by one, from early childhood to yesterday’s conversations. She quietly removed the ones that were painful, awkward, pointless. She categorised each negative memory and burned the synaptic flash that held them in her brain. She was tired of being this person. She was going to create a curated and stylised narrative for her identity. Nouveau Maple.

Goo was a mixture of a lunar eclipse and a radioactive sunrise. Her tattoos writhed and mutated across her skin. She had ultraviolet fingers, melting neon eyes, liquid hair. She would pull out her eyeballs with the tip of her switchblade, the black holes in her head absorbing nutrients from the sun. She carried a snub nose revolver with her always, strapped to her ankle. She seduced businessmen, and as they took off their clothes she would gently place the revolver by the side of their skull, stripping them of their cash. She enjoyed the work, and felt no moral remorse.

Maple had been watching Goo for days. Something about her made her the perfect subject. Some electric quality, a tangible mystery. Maple knew she was hiding something, some underground section of her life. She followed her into cafes, walking the streets, she watched Goo carefully watch others. Maple wondered if she had found someone else like her, someone with a similar gift. She watched Goo flirt with strange men, before following them back to a house or apartment. She never saw what happened inside.

It was late at night, there was no moon, the streets were empty. Maple had followed Goo down some back street and lost her. She walked around, searching for Goo’s figure in the dark. Electricity ran down her spine. She heard the click of a revolver’s hammer.

She heard someone whisper,

“So what do you want?”

Maple and Goo sat in a midnight cafe. Around them were insomniac loners and jittery winos. Maple told Goo that she just liked to watch. Everyone. She liked to watch and see what happened. That she wasn’t interested in them personally, just in how they behaved.

Goo said,

“That’s very strange.”

Maple shrugged. She lit a cigarette, she coughed, she put the cigarette out.

Maple and Goo would work together at night. Maple would watch, observe closely, finding men who seemed rich and foolish. She would find their routine, their patterns. She would tell Goo where and when was best to find them. Goo would either seduce them, or, on lazy nights, simply lead them down some blind alley and point a gun at their head. They split the money. Iridescent in cash and crime. Afterwards they smoked and drank black coffee.

His name was Johnny. He knocked on Maple’s door in the early morning. The sun hadn’t risen, the stars seemed jittery and frightened. She did not open the door. He knocked again, louder. Maple silently walked to her kitchen and pulled out a knife. He knocked again.

He shouted,

“Police.”

She put the knife down. She nudged open the door. He stood tall and shimmering, an ultraviolet shadow.

He flashed his badge and card.

Johnny.

There was something about him.

He walked inside.

He said,

“We have an offer for you.”

Goo had found a new man. He was affluent and ungraceful. He was new to Town Nouvelle Vague. He did not suit the style of the place. His hair was too clean, his suit too fresh. She wanted to get him before he was exiled. She wanted to get inside his apartment, to rob it clean. He was easy to seduce. He lost himself to her gaze instantly. He unlocked the door. He walked inside. Goo followed. Maple stood, gun drawn, pointed at Goo’s chest. Goo, with a reflex she didn’t know she had, immediately reached for her revolver. Maple fired. There was no scream. Goo fell. Crimson ripples staining the floor. The town shivered.

Johnny sat in Maple’s apartment. A dead and silent night. He gave her a new set of clothes. He said to trash everything she owned, to become unrecognisable.

He said,

“We’ve transferred the money to this account.”

He handed her a card.

And she dreamt of a night she once spent with an ultraviolet girl. They sat high in a treehouse overlooking the city. The girl lit a joint, held it up to the sky, and said,

“We’re double high."