Flash Archives

MOTHER BUDGIE by David Cook

July 15, 2019 · Fiction

You push open the cracked old oak door and marvel as you step into the room. A whirlwind of budgies, of burnished gold, sunset red, ocean green and all hues in between, swoop down around your ears, chirping merrily, joy infused in each and every note. Others sing from up in the rafters while still more chirrup in colourful cages that line the walls from ceiling to floor. Being here lifts your heart.A woman approaches, clad in a shawl as bright as the birds that skitter around her. This is Mother Budgie. She is famous. Tourists come from all over the globe to visit her. She gestures you closer and says 'Welcome,’ the warmth in her voice reflected in her eyes. The budgies echo her greeting. 'Welcomewelcome,' they trill in chorus. She beams at them and several settle onto her shoulders and chirp 'Mommamommamomma.' Mother Budgie hand-rears every beautiful bird in her establishment and has patiently taught them all to sing these words. Their refrain is picked up by all the other budgies and the echoes of ‘Mommamommamomma’ are almost deafening. Amid all this, Mother Budgie simply smiles, a beacon of peace and contentment.As the clamour settles momentarily, she invites you to choose the birds that appeal to you most. You carefully select four, no, five; two the bright yellow of an undisturbed shore, two the startling blue of a clear sky and one the scarlet of freshly-picked cherries. Mother Budgie nods, then guides you through another door set in the back wall.This room is full of people laughing, chatting and eating. Merriment bounces off the stone walls. You sit at a table and wait for maybe twenty-five minutes as the noise of gaiety reverberates around you. Finally, Mother Budgie reappears, smiling as always, and places in front of you a delectable golden brown pie accompanied by soft mashed potatoes. ‘Enjoy,’ she says as she leaves. Five small beaks emerge from the pie’s inviting crust. Each is slightly open, trapped in silent song.Grabbing your knife, you stab the pastry surface. Rich, thick gravy oozes from the fissure and pools into the bed of mash. Another diner is admitted into the room. As the door opens and shuts you hear the cries of 'Mommamommamomma' from beyond and imagine more birds settling upon Mother Budgie’s shoulders.

You impale a chunk of meat with your fork and take a bite. It is soft, tender and exquisitely delicious, just as you’d heard it would be. Your taste buds croon with happiness. You dab your lips with a napkin and take another mouthful, already planning when you’ll return

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BACKSEAT OFFERING by Janice Leagra

July 12, 2019 · Fiction

He’s just had a cigarette and a TicTac after doing a line on the console. His tongue tastes of tobacco and peppermint. The car is almost too warm. The engine’s running, the heat on full-blast. Still, goosebumps dot your skin. The light from the stereo shines lava red. It’s a raw, frigid night. The threat of snow hangs like a skullcap over Maple Lake.

It’s the eve of your fifteenth birthday. He’s seventeen. He’s giving you your birthday present. Here, in the backseat of his Camaro. Fourteen isn’t so young. That’s what he’s told you for weeks. You thought sixteen would be better, but now you think he’s right.

The car is enveloped by an arched snarl of brambles cut out along the lake’s edge. The bare branches flail in the wind and screech as they stroke the car’s roof. You think of horror movies. You love horror movies. The enclosure is enough to conceal the car from cops and passersby. You wanted to come here. This is where you want it to happen.

Your parents don’t know you’re here. They don’t know you’re with him. If they knew, they would forbid you to see him, ever. He’s not the right sort. You go to Catholic school. He doesn’t go to school at all. He’s too old. He smokes. He does bad things. To you, he’s perfect. They don’t know that he shimmied up the cedar tree next to your house, climbed onto the roof, tapped on your bedroom window, wanting to be let in. You told him to wait for you across the street in his car. You snuck out and ran along the deserted road. The thump-thump of the car’s stereo beat its rhythm from within. Taillights, cherry-red beacons. Exhaust smoke reaching skyward in the wintry air.

There are stories about Maple Lake. This part of New Jersey has lots of stories. Old ones. About these woods. Things people have seen, heard. You’ve read books. Every book you could find. You’ve told these tales to him. You write about them in your diary.

The windows are fogging. Good. There’s no moon. It’s so dark. Still, it’s possible to see things. Movement. Shapes. Flickers.

“Why Can’t I Have You?” by The Cars is playing on the radio. It’s important to remember that for your diary. You’re shivering, but not from the cold.Are you okay? he says, not really caring, all quick breaths and awkward movements on top of you. You nod. Your bare back sticks to the vinyl seat.You focus your eyes over his shoulder to the passenger window. It’s steamed up. But there’s something there. You think of the stories. Cloven hooves, red eyes, horns, wings. They’re just stories, he’s said. There’s no such thing.His fingers. Your underwear. His belt. Your lips. His mouth. No one knows you’re here. Only him.

You look at the window again. It’s closer. Something big. Looming. Red.

Wait. Not yet, you say.

Not yet? Come. On.

There’s something there.

Where? he says.

Out there. Just outside the car. Something big. Moving.

There’s nothing there. Shh. C’mon.

His tongue. Your thighs. His hands. Your hips. The music. Candy smile, all the while, glinting.

It’s happening. This is it. It’s happening.

His body finally goes limp and heavy on yours. He breathes on your shoulder.

The radio voice says it’s 11:29. You’re still fourteen. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t caress or hug you. He just lies on top of you, sweaty.

Then at the window. Gleaming red.

Look. See it? you say.

He sits up. Rubs at the fogged window with his balled-up shirt and peers out.

There’s nothing there. What, you think it’s the Jersey Devil? Christ.It could be.

He laughs, puts on his clothes, tosses you yours. Grabs his cigarettes and lighter from the console. He gets out to smoke and take a piss. You dress and think of everything you want to remember for your diary.

A tiny orange flame flickers outside, lights up his face, then fizzles. You climb into the front seat. Then, a thunk. The car rocks. You rub your cuff on the window and it squeaks against the glass. You press your forehead against the cold surface and look. Nothing.

Except for a distant glimmer.

You roll down the window. The cigarette pack is lying on the ground. Your breath puffs out of you in tiny, faint clouds. No sound but for the gentle lapping of the lake water.

Two bright red embers stare back at you from the shore. They start moving toward you. In the feeble glow of the taillights you can make out the shape of horns and the points of wings as it gets closer. It’s just like the stories.

Perfect.

No one knows you’re here.

It stops near the back of the car. The glowing slits of its eyes consider you. You smile. It seems to nod. Its leathery wings unfurl and go taut as it leaps up into the night sky.

You leave the warmth of the car, but you don’t feel cold. You begin the long walk home and think about what you’ll write in your diary. Your plans, maybe…for next time.

He was right. Fourteen’s not so young.

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A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE by Marina Flores

July 11, 2019 · Creative Nonfiction

Firefighters in reflective neon suits stormed into the blazing Texas Thrift Store as helicopters circled the building in surveillance. The flames that escaped from the structure’s openings whipped and stirred together like vermilion lovers beneath a glassy black sky. A generator on the roof of the thrift store flickered—once, twice, like the first few seconds after lighting a sparkler on the Fourth of July—seconds before an atomic cobalt and orange explosion. Fire swallowed the structure in one gulp, almost offended by the attempt to save the remains of the building with hose water. That night, not much light was needed for the team of hundreds who, for hours, battled the inferno. The slight glimmer from the flames flushed against the white and crimson of parked ambulances and firetrucks from 83 units. Crime scene tape labeled “do not cross” enclosed the perimeter of the thrift store’s parking lot: danger, keep out.

As I watched the media’s minute-by-minute sky coverage of the Texas Thrift Store’s four-alarm fire, I held my breath. I wrapped my arms around my knees and pulled them close to my pajama-ed chest. I imagined the sorrow on the faces of onlookers, on the faces of medical crews on standby when two firefighters were not accounted for after an emergency evacuation. Inside the structure, the heat of flames sizzled around brave suited bodies, the smoke heavy like weights in their throats and chests. One firefighter was found and rushed into the back of an awaited ambulance, his body covered in a sheet of black residue. Where was the other unaccounted fireman? Why hadn’t they found him yet?

Parts of the thrift store’s roof caved in and collapsed, like a house of blocks that tumbled down and down and down, as the blistering fire singed through the walls of other businesses in the shopping center. A tingling sensation tugged at the backs of my eyes, but I continued to watch the news updates, mostly nauseated over what might be unearthed after the last flame was extinguished. As the footage continued to play across my television screen, I wondered if my estranged father watched the yellow firestorm engulf the place we once visited so often.

On one of the two weekends a month I spent with my father, John took me to the Texas Thrift Store. He held my hand as we walked in through the glass doors and underneath giant red letters. The inside smelled like one big garage sale. We browsed the little girls’ aisles for clothes and shoes until I snuck away to the more interesting area of the store: the toy section. These rejected or donated toys—some brand new, others slightly used with a film of grey tinge—were piled in low, rectangular wooden bins for children like me to rummage through. Layer upon layer of toys were thrown on top of one another, sometimes in a pile of rubble already plowed through by other curious children. There, I glanced over dolls with ragged hair, play cash registers without batteries, puzzles, and boxes of Legos with missing pieces.

John found me in one of the aisles and held up shirts and bottoms that clung to plastic hangers: a faded floral blouse; a pair of scuffed, knock-off Sneakers; and a few pairs of wrinkled jeans and cargo shorts. Round tags that hung from the garments read five dollars, some two dollars. At the sight, I envisioned the little girls who had worn those items before me, how their daddies had purchased these clothes for them, brand new, as a birthday gift or just because. John pushed the items into the crevice of his arm and led me by the hand to the register. A tired shadow clung to the lower-half of my father’s round jaw and his unshaven skin, but his face still looked so much like mine.

When my father removed his withered and worn wallet from a jean pocket at the register, I recalled how his face looked when I asked for a McDonald’s Happy Meal two weekends before our trip to the thrift store. John had just come home from work on a Saturday afternoon. His skin always smelled of a greasy mechanic’s shop, sometimes with the stale twang of cheap beer and a female stranger’s cigarette smoke. I tugged at the bottom of his shirt that was still stained in white patches near the chest and armpits.

“Please, please, please daddy, can we go to McDonald’s?” I extended the vowels in the question, too eager for the plastic figurine in the Happy Meal.

My father slapped his jean pockets with ashy hands. “We don’t have money for McDonald’s,” he shot back. John used that tone with my mother on the phone. I once overheard my mother say we didn’t need a dime from him, that he could keep his unpaid child support.

His mother, Ruth, whom I once called Momo, chimed in before I could ask another question. She pulled out a few dollar bills and quarters from her coin purse. The skin on Ruth’s face and arms sagged like the withered branches of the front yard’s pecan tree during summer months. The tree was heavy with rotting pecans and empty bird feeders. I blocked out the fact that John’s mother bathed me, head-to-toe, at age eight, age ten. In the court custody battle, Ruth stood on the stand and testified, under oath, that she always waited outside the bathroom door while I showered. My mother cut my hair like Velma’s from Scooby-Doo because, for most of my elementary school years, I refused to bathe or brush out the knots from the bird nest on the back of my head. Ruth handed her son the money, kissed my cheek with thin, wrinkled lips, and sent us on our way.

The newscast on the thrift store fire continued well on into the early hours of the morning. That night I tried to remember when John and I left the thrift store for the last time. I couldn’t. The television screen lit up my living room like an open furnace until the final firefighter’s body was located. The man, a six-year veteran of the department, was a father of two, his wife still pregnant with their third child. I imagined the Texas Thrift Store’s charred entrance doors that John and I entered and exited through before and after our brief shopping trips. These same doors are the doors that many expected one firefighter to run back through, unharmed, able to return to his off-duty life as a dad after a grueling day of work battling other people’s blazes. For those few hours I exhumed memories shriveled and dried like raisins, discolored by the hue of scarlet fury. For those few hours I, too, battled my own fire.

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SHOWERLESS by Chris Wilkensen

July 10, 2019 · Fiction

This train is a church in both its movements and its congregation. No one dares interrupt the silence. Metal rolling over rusted metal. Outside the scenery passes by like life to a teenager: fleeting but feeling never-ending. Most passengers wish they could be anywhere else to feel anything else, to feel something other than strictly operational. At each stop people straggle off, mostly alone, onto their next journey.

New passengers come aboard. She hovers over me. She breathes harder and heavier. No other free seats. Her pink hair raises my own arm-hair. I move my bag to the ground for her to sit. She only eyes my phone. A blank screen that reflects her face. No makeup, freckles. Thin, rough skin covers her well-proportioned face.

When she gets closer, the stench smacks me. I take a deep breath, look at her and cough.

“Sorry, I haven’t taken a shower in a few days now,” she whispers. The suits and skirts around focused even harder on their cell phones.

“Oh, I see,” I say.

“I’m homeless. Makes it hard,” she says.

Twisting my head to the right, I look at the side of her face. She looks down, maybe ashamed, but I gaze toward her lap, afraid of eye contact. Her jeans are gross, not in any type of style in vogue to teenagers, with black spots and purple spots of dried blood, maybe. Her yellow boots remind me of construction attire.

“I’m sorry.” I look down at my Calvin Klein dress shoes and North Face backpack.

“Yeah, me too.” She crosses her arms.

I’m a suburban transplant who moved to the city to be closer to downtown for school, still new to city life and city people. My parents budget callowness into my college expenses. She can use my parents’ overhead more than we can.

I can’t let the other people on the crowded train, who I’ll never see again, witness me cry in sympathy. Hunching up in the seat, I take out my wallet from my back pocket.

“Here. Maybe this can help.” I extend the money toward her.

She hesitates, looks around.

“Is this for real?” This is when my eyes meet hers. Wide, blue, elusive.

I nod.

She looks at my hand, taking the $40 like a busy cashier, before her hand grazes my arm. Doors open at the next stop. She jumps off without waving or looking back.

I abhor the thought of another conversation, especially with someone who saw what just happened. The passengers just glance at me. I still smell the rough circumstances that embarrassed her.

The train trails until the end of the line when we all get off. Long after the stop for my studio. Standing outside alone in the train station I wonder which could come first: someone talking to me or me talking to someone. People pass. I fiddle on my cell phone, nothing productive or fun, just killing battery. No WiFi to entertain me. Only me and my thoughts.

The temperature drops, so I walk faster to warm my blood. Shops are closing, five minutes before 9. I beg a bakery to please stay open because I haven't eaten or drunken anything in hours. They don't care. They just repeat their opening hours. I check my phone to verify the time.

So I walk. I’ll try this for a night. Just one night. In the distance, I see a park without people. The inside top of the slide can be my room for the evening. I’m experiencing and learning new things, what college is for. Hopefully I can run into her again. It’s Friday night, so I can go until Monday morning without showering.

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PHARM BOY by Chris Milam

June 30, 2019 · Fiction

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

June 28, 2019 · Creative Nonfiction

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

June 27, 2019 · Fiction

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 queen’s, 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 weren’t 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 lady’s 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 weren’t 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 don’t 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, I’ve 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 I’ll 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 didn’t 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 girl’s 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.

It’s possible that being eighty meant she’d 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

June 26, 2019 · Fiction

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

June 21, 2019 · Fiction

“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

June 20, 2019 · Fiction

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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