FICTION Archives

DOG TRACING by Mike Andrelczyk

July 5, 2020 · Fiction

I just remembered a maintenance man I used to work with who said he liked to get drunk and trace his dog on big sheets of paper and his garden was lined with pieces of broken hotel sinks. I just remembered this. Out of nowhere. When things come into your mind from out of nowhere it’s like looking at the outline of a dog on a piece of paper. The dog is gone, but its shape is there. This is a memory.

Imagine one of those shitty video dissolving effects now.

….

…. OK.

I was standing in the sun outside of the parking garage. There was a square of sunlight on the ground and I was standing in the center of it. I was avoiding doing any work for a few minutes and I was standing in the center of a square of sunlight. This was a good thing to do while avoiding loading luggage onto bellman carts and wheeling it around the hotel and unloading it.

Javier came out of the parking garage with a box of empties. The sunlight hit the bottles and it looked like Javier was carrying a box of light to the dumpster. This was good too. Throwing light into the dumpster.

“I’ll get it dude,” I said and lifted up the lid to the dumpster. “Dump ’em baby.”

Javier smiled. “I’m doing these bottles one at a time.”

He took out an empty bottle of Barcardi rum and threw it into the mouth of the dumpster. There was a great smashing sound. The great smash. The sound was like the sun smashing to pieces.

Javier selected another bottle from the box. A green bottle. He handed it to me. Like a suave gentleman extending an offer of a cigarette. Would you care for a smash, my friend?

I accepted. “Smashing,” I said in an English accent. I looped the bottle end over end and it shattered at the bottom of the empty dumpster. Terrific. Success.

Javier smiled at me. Success. Javier didn’t talk much. He was from Brazil. He had distant family that still lived in the jungle he told me once. He seemed to have a lot of girlfriends too.

“Hey, what the fuck are y’all doin!?” It was Jesse. The maintenance man. Maintaining. He was yelling at us in a pretend way like we were suddenly caught mid-smash and in big trouble. Jesse seemed to always appear out of nowhere. Especially when I was throwing stuff in the dumpster. He was like a fly. Attracted to trash and refuse.

“Jesse, what the fuck. You’re interrupting a perfectly good smashing session,” I said.

Javier the Gentleman simply extended an empty Grey Goose bottle to Jesse. A peace offering. An invitation to share in the destruction.

Jesse inspected the bottle. He really looked at it lovingly. The man simply loved trash.

“Jesse, throw the bottle in the dumpster dude,” I said. “Have a nice smash man. Take a smash break. Be a smash bro.” (I am an idiot.)

“I ain’t ‘bout to. Ima take this home,” he said.

We were obviously stupid rubes for smashing perfectly good liquor bottles. Jesse knew the secret. Never throw anything away. Don’t abandon your trash. It’s only trash if you let it be trash. Never refuse. He told me once that he would take the broken porcelain sinks and toilets home from the hotel and smash them up until he had pebble-sized pieces and he would use those for his Russian wife’s Japanese-style zen rock garden.

He was the maintenance man. He knew all the secrets of the hotel. The ins as well as the outs. He was maintaining the order of things.

I said the last thing out loud. About maintaining the order.

“Huh?” Jesse looked at me cockeyed. “See, what I like to do is buy some Jacquin’s then I fill up these bottles and there ya go. Ya got Grey Goose. Don’t nobody know the difference.”

I laughed. “What? Damn Jesse, you’re a genius.”

He smiled. Because he knew he was a genius.

“Sheet,” he said. “See what I like to do is have a few drinks then I get my dog on the floor.”

In the few seconds before Jesse continued my mind was filled with horrific visions of drunken bestiality. Then Jesse hit us with the tenderness.

“I got her trained so she just lay on these sheets of paper. And then I trace her. I make silhouettes and then I decorate my walls with all the pictures of my dogs. Been doing it for years. First was Delly. She was a good girl. Then was New Delly. Then Dolly. Now Jasmine. All labs. They’re my sweethearts and I love ’em,” Jesse paused. A moment of silence for his dogs. “Thanks for the bottle motherfucker.” He punched Javier in the ribs, but not hard. Javier only smiled.

Jesse walked off. Cradling his bottle like a baby. A baby bottle. A jewel. He moved towards the elevator shaft and disappeared into the stairwell. A silhouette is the shape of a ghost.

Some silence occurred then. Not much, but a little. Enough for it to be called a silence.

Javier looked at me.

“He draw his dogs?”

“Haha. Shit. He traces ’em. Outlines.” I mimed outlining a dog on the ground. I made the shape of a dog. I briefly imagined like that would be all you had to do to make a dog – just make the shape of a dog and it existed. In a way it was true.

Javier smiled. “Traces dogs,” he said. “Jesse.” But the way he said it sounded like Yessy.

Javier handed me another empty bottle. I smashed it. The bottle became hundreds of tiny pebbled-sized pieces. An empty bottle is just a future zen garden.

We finished the smashing. I still had more than an hour to go. This was a shitty shift. Not much action. I’d be lucky to make three dollars in tips.

$$$

I got lucky and carried some bags for a rich asshole guy and his girlfriend. Some rich people were truly cheap. But this guy wanted to show off and he gave me $10. It may have been accidental. He pulled out the bill and we both looked at it and then he handed it to me.

$$$

I stopped at the Food Lion on my way home. I always thought “Food Dog” in my mind because once I drove Javier home and he pointed to the sign and asked if I minded stopping at the Food Dog. The lion on the sign looked like a dog I guess. I mean it was basically like the shape of a dog pretty much. I bought some fried chicken for grandma.

Then I stopped at R&R and bought a fifth of Grey Goose.

I took a small drink as I drove home. The window down. The warm evening air rushing through. I heard a dog barking in the distance. The air made the shape of the dog’s barks. The sound of the dog barking became part of the air. A dog in the sky. Yes, I thought, a dog in the sky.

I decided I would take the bottle to the beach that night and drink it in the dark. I would drink from the bottle until it was empty and I could see in the dark.

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AFTER SWITCHING ANTIDEPRESSANTS, THE NIGHT STRETCHES by Matthew Mastricova

July 2, 2020 · Fiction

After switching antidepressants, the night stretches over his body as he lies next to you in bed, thinking about dying again, even though he would never tell you that. He would never tell you that for months it has been creeping out his mouth—his death, his parents’ deaths, his students’ deaths, the death (or non-death) that comes in the after death. When he is lucky, he can find an anchor: a pair of your socks balled hidden under the table or a can of apricot La Croix chilled for days. Leftovers of a from-scratch meal you cooked that he packed for a lunch he may or may not remember to bring. A reminder that you still live here—you still live. In bed he stretches across your body like a hand over a mandolin. His body a compass seeking your warmth, your pulse, your promise that when he wakes up your body will still be singing there with predawn light.

He will watch the night, the next three nights, pass over your body. He will tell you this, his pledge to try again another pill, only after he realizes that watching you, too, is just another way to die. But tonight is still early, or late, enough for him to promise that he will get better, drinking the clotted darkness between you till there is only your body, the sun.

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THE TODDLERS ARE PLAYING AIRPORT AGAIN by Tucker Leighty-Phillips

July 1, 2020 · Fiction

They’ve partitioned everything: the slide is the runway, the jungle gym is the terminal, covered in tiny travelers; anything with mulch is part of the operations area. Nobody flies. Nobody ever wants to be pilot. The toddlers love every aspect of the airport except for flight. Tickle always wants to be the rampie, loading freight onto planes with his sandbox bucket. Dasha is the lav agent, as she’s the best at keeping the plane’s bathrooms within regulation. Everyone wants to be Bill Boyer, Jr, CEO. They fight over his stock options until they shove one another and you have to step in and separate them, saying Lacy, you were Bill Boyer Jr. last time, why don’t we let Steve this time? One child reluctantly plays pilot and discusses weather conditions and itinerary changes with a dawdling crew chief, a snotty kid with both shoe strings loose-a-goose. This is most of their game, quiet discussions, loading and unloading bags into mouths of slides. This is the fourth time I’ve been routed through Tampa this week, pilot child groans while the other begins the aircraft’s push back, preparing for takeoff. They bicker over operating the tow motor. When you say, don’t you kids want to fly, just once, don’t you want to fly, they say that’s what everyone thinks on day one, you just come in and fly, no problem, like it’s a breeze, you just fly, but we’ve got an overnighter on a non-movement area and ATC is backed up to Glasgow and I haven’t had a single fruit snack today so forgive me if I’m a little on edge, Mr. Sky Cap, and you step back, remind yourself it’s just their game, babble with the other parents, and think of some great taxi propelling you through the sky, vaulting into the blue-and-white, traversing the mighty somewhere else.

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KILLING PLANTS by Aaron Kreuter

June 30, 2020 · Fiction

It was during Fletcher's third week at the new job that he noticed Colleen's plant didn't look so hot. The plant's big green leaves were sagging, nearly touching the desk. Nobody had asked him to take care of the plant during his ten-month contract, filling in for Colleen while she was on mat leave, but the plant was obviously thirsty. Fletcher filled up his coffee mug with water and poured it into the off-white pot, the soil quickly sucking it up. Just to be safe, he tipped in a second mugful; this time, a half-inch of water remained sitting on top of the dirt. More than enough. It already seemed perkier.

When he came back after the long weekend—Saturday night spent worrying about the plant, whose health Fletcher had convinced himself would determine if he was hired on full time upon Colleen's return—the plant was dead. It was unmistakable: the leaves were brown and crispy, there wasn't a speck of green, not a hint of life. Fletcher panicked. A dead plant in the office did not scream collegiality. He had to get rid of it. But he couldn't just throw it out in the office garbage—it was Colleen's plant! The janitor would for sure notice.

He stuffed the plant into his knapsack, the leaves crunching, and took the stairs to the floor below, where he deposited it in the washroom garbage under the paper towel dispenser. Washing his hands, the peaked garbage lid still swinging on its hinges, a toilet flushed. Fletcher froze, looked up at the stall he had assumed was empty in the mirror. The door creaked open, and out came Brenda. “Fletch, how ya doing?! We were all really impressed with how you handled last week’s scheduling snafu.” She was rigorously washing her hands. At least six-five, shaved head, white shirt with a short black tie, Brenda was Fletcher's boss.

Fletcher stood there, dumbfounded. Did she know what he had done? “You seem to be fitting in great. Keep it up!” Brenda smacked Fletcher on the back—hard—and vacated the bathroom.

Back at his desk, Fletcher couldn't focus. There was a lot of work to do, unending work, but for the rest of the day Fletcher barely got through what normally would take him half an hour.

The plant's absence grew in his mind like a pimple. Every night he worried that the following morning he'd be called into the board room, and Brenda and Brenda's bosses—and even, sometimes, Colleen herself, a month-old baby latched onto her breast—would be sitting there. “Fletcher, we need to talk.” “Fletcher, we know what you did.” “Fletcher... you're fired.” A week after he threw the plant out he went back to the washroom to see if it was still in the garbage. It wasn't. He told himself it didn't matter, everything was okay, it was just a plant, right?

But no matter what he did, he couldn't shake that fucking plant. He booked an appointment at his therapist, whom he hadn't seen in years. The therapist had grown his hair out, was drinking coffee from a large travel mug. The office reeked like greasy farts. Fletcher wasn't perturbed; he unloaded on his therapist about the plant, the dread, the guilt, the dreams of getting fired. “How much longer can this go on?” he said to the therapist, who took a long, loud sip before launching into techniques to deal with intrusive thoughts.

Afterwards, Fletcher felt better, but that night the dream was back: the board room, the higher-ups, their knowledge of what he did to Colleen's plant. Fletcher back in his office, packing up his scant belongings.

So went the days, the weeks, the months. Some nights, worry for the plant would fester into more generalized worries, blisters of hot searing guilt. Fletcher as a bad roommate at nineteen. Fletcher running out of his pills three weeks after society collapsed. Fletcher, a young boy, laughing when he accidentally closed the elevator door on an old man, the geezer flailing his arms and legs as the soft doors hit him repeatedly. So went the days, weeks, months, the plant by now no more than dust salting a seagull's breakfast at some suburban landfill.

Finally, Colleen's mat leave was over, and Fletcher was interviewed for a permanent position. The interview with Brenda was light, chatty. A breeze. Still, he couldn't help feeling that any moment now, the ax would fall.

The day he was offered the job, in Colleen's office with Colleen and Brenda, Fletcher told them what happened with the plant, and they all had a good laugh. “Why didn't you just buy a new plant if you were so worried?” said Brenda, slapping her knee. “That plant was here when I got my promotion,” Colleen said, “it wasn't even mine!” She was laughing so hard Fletcher watched milk stains blossom under her blouse.

Fletcher went back to his desk. An enormous weight had been lifted. He was free of the plant. He had a good government job with good government benefits and a good government pension. He started working with that rare elation that comes, what, three, four times in a life, if you're lucky. As usual, He had a backlog, but he was so buoyant he didn't care. The work would get done. The cargo would be concentrated in central, confined centers. The cargo would be packed onto trains and delivered to the processing plant. The cargo would be processed. It always was.

Fletcher looked around his office, a smile on his face.

Maybe he'd buy himself a plant.

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TIME TRAVELING ANTIQUE DEALER by Travis Dahlke

June 29, 2020 · Fiction

The owner of Beachman's eBay store had it bad for my best friend Gedaliah. I didn't trust him because his eyeballs were made three times smaller by his glasses and it was rumored he kept a time machine in his stockroom used for poaching antiques. The eBay thing was just a front and a former ketchup plant kept the whole operation mostly hidden from public view. Gedaliah paid nine hundred dollars for her walnut pembroke table but the bureau that Beachman sold me was a reproduction with drilled-in wormholes. Gedaliah's table reeked of tea bags close up. The nails piecing it together were oily when you cupped your hand underneath. Its edges had barely softened.

“Come back with me for the set. Please. You'll learn to love him,” she told me in the car outside his shop. Gedaliah's first husband was cut down from lead paint and her second was eaten by a piano. For the in-between times there was me. For her third husband we had parked between great vats of crystallized ketchup and a yard sign that said Fast Cash 4 UR Stash.

“Five minutes. My chaperone days are through,” I told her.

Small talk burbled up easily in between Beachman and Gedaliah. No problem doing that with no customers. I couldn't handle the flirting and so I excused myself down a path carved through sewing machines and mirror glass framed by cherubs. Their wings were more like parrot wings. I followed an extension cord to where it lead under a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. SERIOUSLY, DON'T COME IN. Most likely a stunt to keep the time machine rumors moist. I considered throwing a pineapple shaped cookie jar to the ground until Gedaliah told me that we were all meeting at the Mystic Steak Loft for brandies.

We waited in the bar for hours. “Don't do this,” I told her.

“Oh stop. You don't see it?”

“See what?”

“He knows me. And he's so handsome. His face narrows in a familiar way like one of those gray movie actors,” she said finishing our third bowl of olives.

When Beachman finally showed up, draping his trench coat on a stool, I was drunk and I told him he was full of shit.

“It's not a perfect machine,” Beachman claimed. “It can only return eighty-three years.”

“So invest in stocks,” I said.

He looked right at my best friend, collected her tiny hands in his and said, “I'm drawn to what is rare.”

Familiarity is easily confused with love you shithead, but under the table Gedaliah was already exploring his shin with her foot which meant soon I'd be alone.

Throughout their engagement Gedaliah wrote me emails. At first they were joyous and typeset with magenta. She'd describe which TV programs they watched together or how skillfully Beachman could apply nail polish to her little toe without getting any on the cuticle. He often returned from his excursions with special gifts. An engagement ring stolen from a major Vegemite proprietor or a toy rocking horse with its sales tag still intact, just like the one she had when she was five.

And then her emails turned black. She wrote how Beachman had become short tempered. Money was getting tight. Young couples no longer desired real woodwork for which to decorate their homes with. Young couples aren't even buying homes. His antique poaching also came with side effects like nightmares and weight gain. He started skipping the spaghetti dinners Gedaliah cooked and spent every night on an elliptical in their basement. No more TV programs. It seemed as though, she wrote, that Beachman was tired of her.

Gedaliah became stricken by cramps that began as glass in her stomach before working their way up to her memory. In a final email she had come to realize that she knew Beachman from somewhere else. A man that cleaned her parent's house or a faceless flannel coat splitting up bread for ducks at her teenage hangout. Always watching. Mashing toxic paint chips into powder. Familiar cramps are easily confused with love.

A year after her emails turned white, Beachman's eBay store went up in flames. They found a body. They found several other bodies which might've been manikins. The cologne from ancient baseball cards, dinnerware melded into velvet paintings of Garth Brooks, brass sows, and rugs embedded with hair. Windsor-style armchairs, Pandora beads, postcards, VHS tapes, real pearl, fake pearl, young adult novels about teachers who were really aliens, bronze babies bred from tropical fowl, ottomans, wood paneled digital alarm clocks, luggage, electric guitars, bureaus with forbidden love letters still stashed within their hidden compartments, samurai swords, Christmas ornaments, Penthouses and coin collections all unified in the afterlife. Gedaliah had soaked them from inside. She entered with a jar of nail polish remover and escaped through the time machine before it too was destroyed.

Now behind the ketchup plant is only emptiness. I think they won't do anything with the space. In Gedaliah's first email she had said through Comic Sans, “it all tastes exactly like sweet lint.” I think of her now living among the heirlooms where they are all brand new.

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THE FAMILY THAT SKIS TOGETHER by Kim Magowan

June 27, 2020 · Fiction

“The family that plays together stays together,” Carol's father used to say, though even at the time Carol had felt skeptical about that assessment, given her mother's aversion to all forms of competition and her brother’s more specific aversion to losing. Oh, the way Alec's skin would mottle, the way he would say, under his breath so their parents couldn't hear, “Well, fuck you,” when Carol would knock his croquet ball into the trees. (And Carol would feel both elated and ashamed, or more precisely, ashamed because elated, and sorry for herself for having a brother who was such a dickhead.)

Now that she’s forty-three, her father’s unconvincing jingle keeps bending through her brain, as Carol perches at the top of a mountain, willing herself to go down. “The family that skis together...”— what? The blinding snow is a blank she tries to fill.

“Flees together”? Far down the slope is her husband Jack, his parka a receding blue spot, his poles as small as thorns.

“Pleas together”? Her daughter Maureen, slower but more graceful than Jack, turns in neat bobby-pins. A year ago Carol wouldn't have considered sending Maureen to boarding school—she'd have missed her too much—but then a year ago, Maureen wouldn't have begged to go. Like her father, Maureen is adept at being both sweet and convincing when she wants something.

Let her go already, Carol thinks wearily. So what? Can she even blame Maureen for wanting to flee Dodge? The kid's no fool; their house crackles with tension. Carol would run off to boarding school herself if she could. Fuck Jack and his ridiculous infatuation with absurd Erica Chan (Carol won't dignify it as “love”), his dithering, his one-foot-out. Fuck trying to be a good sport, jumping like a silky-eared cocker spaniel at his mere suggestion, “Let's do some family bonding.”

Doesn’t Jack remember she’s never liked skiing? What thrills Jack and Maureen only menaces Carol. She can't shake away the picture of careening into a pine, the breadstick snap of bones. The snow has a forbidding skin of ice: shiny, reflective. Now Carol has to strain her eyes to see her husband and daughter, so far below her. She must will herself even to try to catch them.

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STILL LIFE, WAYNE COUNTY, IN AUGUST by Aliceanna Stopher

June 24, 2020 · Fiction

Buddy of mine used to have me over before his girl walked out on him. For supper, you know, or cards. Maybe beers, if one of us was going through it. We weren’t usually, back then. More like, we thought we were, but really we weren’t. I’d bring him Dad or Bert, he’d bring me working, or not. We laid it all out, sorted through it.

I ran into him on my way to work, this one night before we was supposed to get together. He cancelled, standing all crooked, thumbs stabbed through his belt loops, and I thought he was joking. I asked him what he’d said to make her run off like she did.

He told her she was ex-wife material. “She didn’t take too kindly.” Go figure.

I kept turning it over. Guess I’m still turning it over. What did it mean to feel into the future? To have a certainty the person you loved was going to break you, to see someday-pain wrapped up inside that somebody; know inch by bloody inch that pain would birth itself out. Know that cost and decide to risk it anyway.

He’d said ex-wife. Wife comes with that, too, but I guess it’d been hard for her to hear it.

Smack between coming and going, all I said was, “You’re a dumbass.” I didn’t have anything to offer. I didn’t know much about risk, or love.

Bert would call and check in, not just on me, but on dad through me. I must have been easier to talk to.

Those days I let her burrow in. I loved it when she’d tell me, “Don’t should all over yourself.” All that wisdom don’t ring true anymore.

The cracks started small. Before everything else, there was this day I was talking up this redhead in line at the post office. Real cute, had that Whitesville look about her, but a sweet smile, not a thing wrong with her teeth; trying my hand at charming, telling her I had to get my dad a sheet of one-cent stamps because they’d upped the price of postage again. He was always forgetting and melting down when his letters–all cramped chicken scratch–took their time coming back to him, undelivered.

“Kind of you,” she’d said. She fiddled with her purse strap, readjusted it on her shoulder. I was next in line.

“Ain’t kindness,” I said. “I should do it, so I do.”

She seemed disappointed then, or bored. “Well now,” she said, “don’t should all over yourself,” so I excused myself quick because it felt all the sudden like I was talking up my own sister. People make a lot of cracks about West Virginia. You know, and I shouldn't have to say. I loved Bertie–I love Bertie. The normal amount in normal ways. You know what I’m getting at.

Forgot the stamps entirely. Called Bert and asked, straight out, where she’d gotten all that phone-call wisdom from and she said, “NA. What’d you think? Does it matter?”

Like that, air out of a balloon. I wasn’t sure why it mattered—only that it did.

After Bert got divorced she moved back to Wayne County, in with Dad. Not ideal. She’d been living out on the coast a long time, maybe too long to come home. When she was married she was always saying it was easier to stay clean up where she was. I don’t know about all that. Her husband had some money. That’s always the way of it.

They were doing all right, Bertie and Dad, for a while. Making coffee, leaving enough in the pot for the other, that kind of thing. Bertie took over stamp duty.

I spent more time on the job, or alone in my apartment, or walking the road ditches up the mountain, failing to take risks.

Everything was fine, but it wasn’t just the bedbugs that spoiled it. Yes, I should’ve told her, but there were a lot of things I should’ve done. I knew that, even then. I knew my sister and our father didn’t see eye to eye on many things. I knew how hard it was to try to know a man who doesn’t, most days, without the right pills, really know himself. God, I knew that. Likewise it had to have been tough on him being around her, feeling like maybe the way things had all shook out in her life were a little bit his fault. Maybe more than a little bit.

It was a bright afternoon.

That I remember.

I walked in, could smell coffee on and thought, good sign. Up the stairs and there was Dad, squat in front of the TV watching Judge Mablean.

“Shouldn’t you be working?” he asked, “It’s the middle of the day.”

“Shouldn’t you be–”

That’s when I heard Bertie stomping somewhere nearby, tap-steps, rapid-like. Then, hollering. God-awful. Like she was being stabbed all over.

Dad hopped up and I followed behind, waited like a bloodhound as he eased open one of the bedroom doors. There she was, slapping at herself, her hair big, thin arms flailing, screaming, “They’re crawling all over me, get ’em off,” over and over.

Big moon eyes, body—a knot of baby snakes.

Up close, my fists clamped around her wrists, and I still didn’t see any bugs. If I were a better brother I would’ve known that didn’t matter, known she could feel them, known that was enough. I just held her there, her hollering tongue a limp fish, fixating on the raw patches on her arms, her neck, her cheeks.

She moved in with an old friend from high school not long after that.

Then, there was all what came next.

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PEN by Neil Clark

June 24, 2020 · Fiction

They put a bomb in my pen. It’s like that film Speed. In Speed, your man Dennis Hopper puts a bomb in a bus. Tells everyone as soon as the speedometer in the bus goes below 50 miles per hour, the bus goes boom. That’s what they did to my pen. If I stop writing, if ink stops leaving my pen, the pen goes boom. Bombs in buses, they do a lot of damage. Bombs in pens? Maybe not so much. But these days, who knows? I’m fucked if I’m going to stop writing to find out. My wrist is already hurting. Some of the other coffee shop punters are coming up to me and asking if I’m alright. They’re saying I look stressed. Wired. A bit on the deranged side. “Maybe go easy on the coffee,” they’re saying. “I couldn’t drink another one anyway,” I’m saying. “My hands are sort of tied.” “What do you mean?” they’re saying. I’m explaining. Explaining while writing. Explaining about the pen. And the bomb. And the inkometer. Sweat’s now coming off my forehead and my hand is smudging what’s on the page. They seem concerned, these coffee shop punters. Understandable, I suppose. I suppose they’re just like me - they don’t want blown up too. “Who’s ‘they’?” they’re asking. “What?” I’m saying. “Well, you said ‘they’ put a bomb in your pen,” they’re saying. “Who’s ‘they’? And how?” “You think I’m in a place to find that out?” I’m saying. “I’m just here to deal with the problem at hand, like Keanu and like Sandra.” They could do a runner at this point. They could leave me in here alone. Me and my pen and the bomb. That’s what they tell you to do these days. Run. Hide. Tell. I’m saying I’ve got a bomb in my hand. That could arguably be classed as terrorism. “I’m not the Dennis Hopper here.” I’m saying. I’m now finding myself a bit on the self-conscious side. Guantanamo Bay never featured on my list of dream holidays. Re-emphasis of my earlier Keanu and Sandra point is needed. “I’m Sandra fucking Bullock! I’m Keanu fucking Reeves!” This seems to be resonating. Amazing what a ‘fucking’ here and a ‘fucking’ there does. Luckily, they seem to have seen the film and know what I’m on about. “How can we help?” they’re saying. “Words,” I’m saying. “I need words, like Sandra and Keanu needed road.” Now they’re shouting words at me. But the words they’re shouting are some amount of shite and I can’t work like this. It’s all just free association, no sentences. “Pen!” “Bomb!” “Ink!” “Bleeding!” “Bleeding Ink!” “Pen!” “Somebody already said pen!” It’s like a gaggle of hens. I can’t write a gaggle of hens. Buck buck cluck cluck. See? Doesn’t work. “Stop!” I’m saying. My whole arm is seizing up now, but I don’t dare take the nib off the paper to give it a shake and a stretch. Everyone in the coffee shop has left their laptops to gather round my table. Twenty-five, maybe thirty punters. All of them trying to be the hero. “A different approach, please!” I’m saying. “Do the words need to make any sense?” they’re asking. I have no clue. “Better if they make sense,” I’m saying. “Just to be on the safe side.” There’s books. It’s one of those coffee shops where there’s book cases. “We could just read a book to you,” someone is saying.” Good idea. The consensus is that this is a good idea. They grab books. Piles of books are now everywhere around me. They start giving me options, shouting hundreds of titles at me. Fifty Shades of Grey is a popular choice, but I manage to overrule. “Read out one word of that and I’m blowing us all up,” I’m saying. There’s more debate. Debate about what type of book – poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction. High-brow, low-brow. Some clown is still insisting on Fifty Shades, but common sense prevails, and the clown gets banished from the group and barred from the shop for life. We settle on… The Grapes of Wrath. Some punter is starting to read. “To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows…” “Wait!” I find myself saying. “I’m not sure about this. I think I feel my pen heating up. This is plagiarism. Maybe we can’t do plagiarism. Maybe the pen blows up if we do plagiarism!” “Fuck sake,” someone is saying. “I don’t remember the bomb on the Speed bus having this many rules,” somebody else is saying. “Yeah,” somebody else is chiming in. “That was the beauty of that film - the simplicity of the premise.” They’re all starting to chat among themselves now. They’re discussing Speed 2: Cruise Control and how it wasn’t as good as the first. How it especially suffered from not having Keanu Reeves in it. Now they’re weighing up the merits of Keanu Reeves as an actor. How bad Bram Stoker’s Dracula was. How good John Wick was. How he’s pretty much just doing Ted from the Bill & Ted films in every single role ever. “Can we please focus!” I’m saying. But the crowd is starting to dissipate and pair off and get their phones out to look up Dennis Hopper’s IMDB page. Somebody has brought me a chamomile tea. They’re putting it on my table and patting me on the back. I’m sipping it and admiring the amount of road I’ve just covered. That was a good wee writing session. And in the end, nobody got blown up. Same as in that film Speed.

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CHALK by R. J. Patteson

June 20, 2020 · Fiction

Look at a man’s shoes, would you look? You can tell a lot, they say. People look at your feet and see the left toe of your boot scuffed black and they don’t know that you do it for the wind, man. That you kick the shift up, up, up, man, you kick it. And for what?

You say, “The wind, man, I do it for the wind.”

And you scare your mother and other people’s mothers when you ride by, and maybe you get too close or you get too loud. They look at their sons through the mirrors of their station wagons as you ride too close and tell them to never get a tattoo and to never date a girl with a tattoo and to never get a motorbike or else they’ll die all gruesome.

So why, man, why? It’s the mothers, man.

And people don’t understand when the work gets slow and the money gets less and you can pick only one, man. You live in a place where the leaves change colors and the snow falls and you sell the one with heated seats and keep the one with half as many wheels. For what? That’s what they say and you just smile back and tell them you plan to take the bus.

They look at you like you’ve got a mental disability, man.

The snow turns to slush and the slush turns to rain and the rain turns to sun and people waiting in line at the bus stop go from boots to running shoes to socks-in-sandals to just sandals. You give your cousin a call and he says he’s at work but the garage isn’t locked, man, and you open your cousin’s garage and take the greased bedsheet and throw it to the floor and sit on the tattered seat and grip the bars and lift the steel with your legs, man. You lift it.

Then you grow your hair a little too long and you ride through the country and you scare the cows and you race the horses and the whole time you’re thinking about how you don’t get what people don’t get. They look at you all confused, man, and they always say to ride safe and wear your helmet and ask if you’ve signed up as an organ donor yet.

“I knew a guy whose brother died in a motorcycle accident,” they tell you. “Why are you single? You should have a wife of your own. You should have kids.”

So you swipe right one day and she swipes right and her profile says that she teaches kindergarten classes and you ask her if she’d like to meet up for coffee and she looks through your profile and says yes. She says yes, man. And you’re drinking orange pekoe, man, when you tell her you were only half-truthful that you owned a car and she smiles a fake smile and looks at her hands for a while.

But she doesn’t leave, man.

She asks if you can take her out and the next day you squeeze her head into your spare helmet and the two of you scare the cows and race the horses and she digs her nails into your chest so she doesn’t fly off the back, man. And when you get to your apartment, she pushes you on your back, man, and she undoes your belt and pulls off your shirt and digs her nails into your chest, man.

But you’re just the notch because she doesn’t call you back and she even blocks your number, man. She blocks it. Now she can make her father angry and she can wear a Harley Davidson T-shirt around her friends and wait for them to mention it so she can tell them about the time she dug her nails into a man with long hair—that’s you, man.

Now the road is lonely and the air bites and the leaves fall down, down man, they fall and your cousin calls to ask if you need to use his garage again.

You’re not paying attention, man. You’re not.

Your phone is buzzing and you’re thinking it’s your cousin when you should be thinking about some important information that was told to you by your motorcycle instructor when you were seventeen. When your instructor stood in front of a chalkboard and said, “Hey gang, how’s everyone doing today? We’ll break in an hour, for about an hour, and there’s a sandwich place across the street just so you know. But first, let’s talk about something that’s so important, gang. Let me see a show of hands on who can tell me how many beers you can have before riding? How many beers, gang? The real answer is zero, gang. Zero beers, because a motorbike isn’t like a car or a truck, gang, there’s no seatbelts or airbags and requires your full attention.”

It requires your full attention, man.

And small rocks pull your tires and you go down, down man, you go sideways. “Eighty-feet,” said your instructor all those years ago as he ate his ham sandwich for about an hour. A man can slide on the road for eighty-feet when he goes down, man. That’s you, man. Your body slides and the road eats through your denim before it eats through your skin before it eats through your fatty layer of flesh before it eats through your muscle before it eats through your bone.

Somewhere there’s an instructor who’s telling his class how your body painted a line on the road like red chalk. You wish he was telling them how you did it for the wind, man, but he’s not. He’s showing your helmet, how it’s worn flat on one side like lipstick, how if you hadn’t been wearing it your head would have looked like the perfect cross-section of the human brain that you see in textbooks. He’s blaming you for the increase in his motorcycle insurance.

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FAILURE TO BREATHE by Emily Withnall

June 17, 2020 · Fiction

The diaphragm wheezed and gasped. It was a broken accordion and with each push, the squeaking and squawking that emerged were evidence that it should surrender. There was no hope and what’s more, the attempts were painful—and embarrassing.

The diaphragm felt defeated. This was an old, familiar feeling. It had never lived up to its full capacity, but over the years, awkward swimming lessons and less awkward singing lessons had strengthened it. The diaphragm knew what it was like to be useful and strong and to provide the satisfying, deep inhale and long sustained exhale. It was capable and even when it didn’t live up to its full potential, its self-esteem was always growing.

The diaphragm had never liked roller coasters but it had to admit that the roller coaster was the best metaphor for its trajectory. Roller coasters were clichés though, so the diaphragm felt it had to reconsider this framing. Maybe it was like hiking a mountain. It had done well with hikes, but not with hikes over 10,000 feet. Pumping air through asthmatic lungs was a tall order. Still, the diaphragm had done the best it could. What had all appeared like an uphill path, leading past the stars and to the very edges of the ever-expanding universe, was just like everyone else’s path. A lovely, if arduous, ascent… but with nowhere left to go but down.

The diaphragm felt guilt in admitting defeat. What would happen to the body if it just laid down and took a forever nap? Would it be accused of murder? It had never heard of a diaphragm being accused of murder, but there was a first for everything. An accusation would surely lead to conviction. A life behind bars. That wouldn’t do the body any good, but the criminal justice system further breaks what is already broken, so such an outcome would be in keeping with history.

The diaphragm was glum at this point and wanted to rewind time, but time was like a cassette tape with all the ribbon hanging out and knotted. Even if the diaphragm could untangle the ribbon and find a pencil to slowly wind it back in, would reliving the pain be worth it for the joy? Especially if it turned out that the tape was Alanis Morissette. It would even be worth caterwauling to “You Oughta Know” if the diaphragm could just fix some things. If it could go back and choose not to self-sabotage. If it could go back and do deeper therapy.

The diaphragm had been rendered a sad, flat balloon because the body was wracked with grief. Love, the kind that seeps in and stays, had alchemized between the body it belonged to and the body containing another diaphragm. The other diaphragm was even weaker and rarely provided its body with a full breath. There were sad reasons for this but also hope for breathing at full capacity. The two bodies felt promise and possibility and a love with family in it—a new feeling for both of the bodies. Together, both diaphragms experienced breathing that was deeper than ever before. The future was full of the richest oxygen.

Then, the other body walked away. The love stayed behind because it was too late to get it out. Love had spread everywhere and filled spaces not occupied by organs. Love blocked the middle of the chest like a bandage applied so tight the wound festers and skin dies at the edges.

The diaphragm supposed that it should blame love, or the chest, or the lungs. Or maybe it should blame the air, so filled with coal dust and exhaust and micro-plastics. Maybe, in not trying, it was actually saving itself.

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