Entitled

April 2020 | nonfiction

The social club is a cross between a coffeehouse and a hotel lobby, with chic décor and trendy chairs. The woman I’m meeting is a potential client. She works in real estate development and I work in communications. I’m optimistic.

I’m dressed in a jacket and skirt, tall boots. She wears a yellow sweater that complements her dark skin. Her hair sits in an elaborate, braided crown on the top of her head. I perch on my chair, uncomfortable in its faux-schoolroom design of wobbly metal legs and a carved wooden seat.

As she details her history, I listen, but I split my attention. I face her, but I have an imaginary satellite pointed to my right, angled at the corner of the room, attempting to beam in every word. That’s where I spotted him as soon as I entered. The woman across from him is much younger.

“I really think I need to lose another ten pounds, to be perfectly honest,” he says, and I cringe, remembering him saying the same to me, fishing for compliments. He is handsome and charming as ever. Now she’s laughing at something else he’s said. I feel a pang of stale jealousy, faint, like a water ring left on a table.

I shut down the mental satellite and force my whole attention back to my meeting. I ask two questions and note her answers. She’s telling me her vision for the city, and it’s interesting. I take a sip of coffee while she accepts a fresh pot of tea from a waitress. Over her shoulder, out the window, I see snow begin to fall. It’s March, too late for snow to be welcome, but it’s pretty.

I feel lips against my cheek before I can register what’s happening.

“Hello,” he says. “I just had to say hi.” I am stunned.

“Hello,” I say. Then he walks back to his table, without greeting my companion.

I blink at her, wide-eyed. She stares back at me. She is tall and strong. She is independent. She is a business owner. A man has just kissed me in public without my permission. In front of her. I am mortified. On her face, I see understanding. It has happened to her, too.

An audio clip plays in my mind:

“Trump: I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Bush: Whatever you want.

Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”[1]

Our meeting ends and when I rise from the table, I turn to the left and do not look at the corner of the room. We walk down the stairs and out into the snow, making promises to follow up, to see each other again soon.

[1] From Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women, New York Times, October 8, 2016

 

Marijean Oldham

 

Marijean Oldham is a public relations consultant and writer. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review. In 2018, Marijean authored the book 100 Things to Do In Charlottesville Before You Die, Second Edition (2018 Reedy Press). In her spare time, Marijean bakes pies competitively.

Short Leash

April 2020 | fiction

His co-workers lounged against the building, drinking coffee and smoking before punching in for the early shift.  The elbow nudging began as he got out of the truck, walked to the driver’s side window, and kissed his wife goodbye. He sensed the men’s envy as he watched her drive away, and could just make out the familiar, mocking whispers of pussy-whipped, on a short leash, and under her thumb before he turned and the smirks quickly vanished.

They never said anything to his face, the chicken-shits. Must have been something about the way he carried himself or the old knife scar bisecting his right cheek that quelled even bigger men’s voices. But he’d seen their stares when she brought him his lunch every day, wearing those short-shorts and bare-midriff blouses, the way conversations halted and sandwiches stopped midway to mouths when she shook out her blonde curls.

He knew they wondered how somebody who looked like him had gotten someone who looked like her. Hell, he wondered himself. So, if she liked taking him to work, bringing his lunch, and picking him up at the end of his shift, he didn’t complain. A short leash anchored both ends.

 

Bob Strother

Bob Strother’s work has been published internationally and adapted for film. A three-time pushcart Prize nominee, Strother has four novels and a short story collection in print, as well as several magazine articles.

And Now

April 2020 | poetry

Quand j’étais jeune

The leaves sprang bright and

Green from every branch

Sparkling in the spring sun

 

Et maintenant

The leaves fall red, yellow

And museum blue

From each knotty limb

 

Quand j’étais jeune

Dashing like a gazelle

Across the trafficked boulevard

Catching the bus as it paused

 

Et maintenant

Waving a cane of oak

Cursing the huffing diesel

Standing behind and alone

 

Quand j’étais jeune

The femme avec les yeux

Smiled like an amused cat

Purred and waited

 

Et maintenant

Like an irritated crow

The femme squawks

And flies away

 

Quand j’étais jeune

My head was full of dreams

Et maintenant

There is only the menace of silence

 

Phillip Periman

Phillip Periman was born in 1938 in Memphis, Texas, grew up in Amarillo. He received a BA in history from Yale University and his M.D. from Washington University School of Medicine. He has had poems published by the Black Mountain Press in their anthology, “The Sixty-Four” (Best Poets of 2018) and by Unstamatic. He writes about aging, retirement, his life, and the world as he finds it—always in an attempt to acknowledge the real.

Flight

April 2020 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

When I’d walked away

from my beloved house

the new owner called: to say

she’d found a ring

and a feather

stuck into the beam

above the bedroom:

had I forgotten?

 

She’d saved the ring

but she’d lost the feather

I told her to keep it the ring

part of the house

I had its mate

broken in three pieces

in a little tin box

one broken circle enough

 

I brought her a new feather

left it in her mailbox

a long brown feather with

a blue tip and white edges

I’d let her decide

the name of the bird

 

Kelley Jean White

Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her recent books are TOXIC ENVIRONMENT (Boston Poet Press) and TWO BIRDS IN FLAME (Beech River Books.) She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

Jupp Soetebier

April 2020 | visual art

I Almost Missed You #1

I Almost Missed You #3

I Almost Missed You #5

Jupp Soetebier

Raised in the American Midwest in what was once known as The German Triangle, Mr. Soetebier’s work explores what effect his Deutsch heritage, ancestral family, and the myths and traditions of his peoples have had on memory and the way he perceives and goes about the world. Mr. Soetebier received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Florida in 1988 and taught drawing at the New World School of the Arts in Miami. He was an original member of the South Florida Art Center and later worked as a decorative painter in New York City and Los Angeles where he was also admitted into the Los Angeles Art Association. A frequent exhibitor at such events as The Other Art Fair by Saatchi, stARTup, and Conception; his work was recently included in the 79th Crocker Kingsley in Sacramento and a solo show at Acumen Gallery in Napa Valley. Jupp currently resides in Northern California with his wife and Leonberger dogs.