January 2021 | fiction
At first they were delighted when the Enochville Swallows came from behind and won the game. The team had struggled all season. It felt good to cheer. A decisive victory on the following day was even more surprising.
They finished the season with eleven straight wins. This unexpected turnaround kept everyone talking all winter, basking in the warmth of new heroes. Photos appeared in bars and diners.
The following April, Mayor Davis threw out the first pitch and the Swallows won again! After four more victories, demand for tickets soared and there weren’t enough seats to accommodate the newly-minted fans. That was when the mayor lobbied successfully for eminent domain and the destruction of the nearby Walton apartments. The wrecking ball threw up clouds of dust; the additional grandstand beyond the outfield ensured that everyone could view the action.
How did Jerry Mercer make that incredible flying catch in the ninth? What accounted for Felix Romero’s uncanny curveball in his two consecutive perfect games? Who could explain Bobby Sheets, the light-hitting second baseman, stepping up to the plate and jacking a tie-breaking home run that sailed over the astonished faces in the new grandstand before landing in Walter Schmidt’s vegetable garden and bouncing over his hedge and splashing in Rose Kindley’s birdbath? The ball was brought back to Billy for an autograph and charitably auctioned off at a price to pay the city’s operational budget for schools, police, and fire department. Mayor Davis held a press conference and announced, “We shall abolish all taxes.”
On the Fourth of July, the Swallows were still undefeated, the longest winning streak ever. Families put out blankets on the grass to watch the fireworks show, recalling with incredulous laughter the previous season when Felix Romero had blown a game by walking in a batter with the bases loaded, or when the team had squandered a six-run lead and Bobby Sheets took a called third strike for the final out, whereupon he ducked his eyes amid the boos and slouched dejectedly off the field. A few people, though, claimed that he’d ripped off his helmet in disgust and dashed it to the ground, cursing the umpire. People enjoyed disputing different versions of that debacle.
But this season offered no such controversy: it was unstinting victory, game after game. One night near the end of July, the Swallows fell behind by nine runs in the first three innings, and it appeared the streak would end. Spectators leaned in closer, their throats going dry. The air was sticky, expectant, still.
Then gale winds descended upon Enochville, a thunderstorm with sheets of rain. Lightning struck the scoreboard and the roof of the concession stand got blown off. It was a wash-out.
The next day, skies were blue, the air pure. Wise folks who’d saved their rainchecks redeemed them that afternoon at a make-up contest where, starting afresh, the Swallows won. That evening they went on to take the regularly-scheduled game, to sweep the double-header.
By August, it was easy to spot empty rows in the grandstands. Ticket prices dropped, though the team’s record was still unblemished. In local bars a new fashion emerged for blindfold billiards. Conversations turned to cooking shows and dialectical materialism. Business was generally down as many patrons traveled to watering holes in other towns.
When school resumed in September, local teachers succumbed to pressure from Mayor Davis to organize field trips to the ballpark to watch the undefeated Swallows, whose example offered pupils lessons about life and success. These outings also helped to fill the empty seats. Kids grumbled that the games lasted an eternity, and numerous parents wrote them false notes of excuse in order to relieve them of this burden. People were sick of baseball.
Charles Holdefer
Charles Holdefer is an American writer currently based in Brussels. His work has appeared previously in the Burningword Literary Journal, as well as the New England Review, North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. His most recent book is AGITPROP FOR BEDTIME (stories).
January 2021 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
The Fawn
Oakland, September 9, 2020
The dark sky surreal
burnt umber
the color of a child’s crayon
the sun uneasy red
smoky skies
fire’s residue
five million acres
and there she was
stutter-stepping down
Mason Street
a fawn
white tail flagging
beige softness
deer stillness
we stared
ghosted by silence
moisture pulled from plants
as temperatures rise
man’s folly
ready to flame
sometimes in the darkness
you can see more clearly
I’m sorry I whispered
Hunger Stones
Hunger stones as memorials
hunger stones as warnings
of famine of drought of
emaciated animals, failing crops
of too many bodies to bury
Stones embedded into river banks
in 1417, 1616, 1717, 1842, 1892
carved with words or pictures
to alert people that when the stone is
exposed, the river is perilously low
So many hunger stones now visible
our land parched and burning
revealing the truth buried beneath
A toy gun held by a twelve year old boy
I can’t breathe cried eleven times
a stolen box of cigars, a counterfeit
twenty dollar bill, a man asleep in his car
a man selling loose cigarettes
Hunger stones named Eric Garner,
Michael Brown, Tamir Rice,
Walter Scott, Alton Sterling,
Philando Castile, Stephon Clark
Breonna Taylor, George Floyd
Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine
carved on a hunger stone in the Czech Republic
If you see me, weep
Claire Scott
Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
January 2021 | poetry
I went for a walk yesterday when a flock of wild turkeys flew over my head and landed feet first on my path. Then a commotion of wild dogs chasing wild hogs gathered around my legs but moved past, now hogs chasing dogs fleeing one lone wild cat with a tail that spun like a propeller. Now all I could think of were the wild one-eyed Jacks I drew to win a poker pot last Friday night, that and a wild hair up my ass kept me steady on my path that I’d long ago chosen instead of calm, the mere contemplation of calm left me blank in search of breath. What good is breath if you cannot pant? Just then a wild goose flew over and dropped an egg in my cap. I held it up and yelled, thanks. Days later its shell cracked and a good looking little gosling sang in my arms. “Born to be wild” was all I made out. I sang back “wild thing, I think I love you,” knowing the score.
Charles Springer
Charles Springer has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning painter. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he is published in over eighty journals including The Cincinnati Review, Faultline, Windsor Review, Packingtown Review and Tar River Poetry, among others. His first collection of poems entitled JUICE has been published by Regal House Publishing. Read about him on his website at https://www.charlesspringer.com. He writes from Pennsylvania.
January 2021 | poetry
Love Sonnet Written on Learning That the President Has Been Hospitalized
What a fine day for schadenfreude, my dear!
I’ve no intent to offer thoughts or prayers:
for we, the heathens, lovers of Earth, fear
no god—aspire not to sainthood. May
we live long in love, and the nation heal—
and if the wicked suffer, what’s it to me?
Why must we their empty conscience appeal
for kindness, or give an ounce of ours? We
have a future to fight for! They won’t steal
another thought from us. I think of you,
of post-pandemic strolls, how it will feel
to be relieved of this hate. O, we knew
these would be awful years; at least we laugh,
say I love you, watch for flags at half-staff.
Confessions of Private Grief
In the yard of my childhood home
there was a mature Jasmine shrub
beneath my window. On many mornings
I would arise from my private grief
with a deep yawn and breathe in
a sweet gulp of air that would rush
like rum down my throat and into
the center of me. This is love,
atoms discovering atoms.
I recall my first experience of infirmity.
It was like a dream, all vague shapes
and things that make no sense in retrospect.
An old man hobbled toward a casket.
There was silence but for the click of his cane.
He paid his respects, then turned. A solitary diamond
dripped from his eye and shattered in the grass,
so hard and so fragile. This is death,
atoms splitting into atoms.
I have lived as free as a fragrance on the wind,
as shackled to the earth as the vine that produced it.
May I confess in a poem what is forbidden us in prose?
I want the atoms you exhale, the cells of your skin,
the platelets in your blood. To open a door and find you
as alone as we are in dying. To touch my grief to yours.
To be a single gust of sweetness howling in the dark.
Andy Posner
Andy Posner grew up in Los Angeles and earned an MA in Environmental Studies at Brown. While there, he founded Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit that provides financial services to low-income families. When not working, he enjoys reading, writing, watching documentaries, and ranting about the state of the world. He has had his poetry published in several journals, including Burningword Literary Journal (which nominated his poem ‘The Machinery of the State’ for the Pushcart Poetry Prize), Noble/Gas Quarterly, and The Esthetic Apostle.
January 2021 | nonfiction
My ruminations don’t come preformed in neat complete sentences with subjects, verbs and objects, beginning with capital letters and ending with periods (what the British call full stops, hexagonal red symbols of written language); rather my contemplations appear in my mind as fragments that start and pause and pick up again, that change direction and double back on themselves, that sometimes s-l-o-w w-a-y d-o-w-n and come to a near halt—as you may be tempted to do at a stop sign when no cars are in sight—and then plunge ahead; but they’re always connected in an erratic and inexplicably continuous narrative that switches on with my pre-dawn awakening and runs all day (like our ceiling fans in August), punctuated by comma and semicolon pauses, by parentheses for explication and dashes for enhancement, by asterisks that act as mental notes in the margin, by question marks and exclamation points, not to close off the dialogue but rather to ask or assert … and even when my thoughts start to evaporate, before they dissolve completely around ten p.m., there’s an ebb, a gradual subsiding, and I can almost hear the dot-dot-dot, the slow, even syncopation of ellipses, those three-dot placeholders, the last ticks of consciousness that lull my brain to temporary cessation, and while the last of these may finish with a fourth dot—the finale, the inevitable full stop—I don’t see the sign, hear its clang, or feel that definitive plop: I’m switched off for the night….
Alice Lowe
Alice Lowe’s flash fiction and nonfiction have been or will be published this year in Hobart, JMWW, Door Is a Jar, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Burningword Literary Journal. Her essays have been cited in the Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She writes about life and literature, food and family in San Diego, California, and posts her work at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.
