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.
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.
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.
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.
April 2020 | fiction
Christian Cohen-Muhamed was the fruit of a union that celebrated diversity with some enthusiasm. He grew up in a dumpy, used-to-be kind of city, where the little kids at school called him “Chris”. Later, when a few of those kids paid a little attention to high school social studies, they called him “Rainbow”. In college, his frat brothers called him “Buddha”. They said it completed the cycle, but it was a double joke, because all those beery nights had made him newly plump and oddly peaceful.
Buddha’s dad ran a homeless shelter, and his mom worked for a nonprofit devoted to developing minority artists — preferably with an abstract bent, though that was only her personal crusade and not official policy. Worthiness having its price, the family had no money to keep their son in college past sophomore year. So, plumpness and peacefulness notwithstanding, Buddha joined Army ROTC to pay for college. Mom and dad were not thrilled, but they valued autonomy over autocracy and gave consent by silence.
During summer field training, his company fell out for a 12 mile forced march. The Drill Instructor, who wore a Ranger tab, had them chant Ranger marching songs to keep cadence. So there was Buddha, fast-timing through the Georgia woods, chanting with all the other summer warriors:
“Locked and loaded and ready to kill.
Always am and I always will.”
As the summer went on, Buddha got leaner and harder. In quiet moments, he began to feel a little strange to himself. His first major shift in self-image came the day he realized, after some training in combatives, that he had begun to look at everybody else as a target, automatically figuring angles of attack as they walked by. The second shift came when he scored “Expert” on the marksmanship test and the DI called him “Killer”.
Back at school in the fall, the whole frat heard the stories from another brother who’d been there. Buddha no longer looked like Buddha, nor did he still have that peaceful vibe. They kidded him that he needed a new name. They asked him to pick one, just so they could scrap his choice and pick something else to bug him.
He knew that “Buddha” was out and needed burying anyway. “Rainbow” was too gay to stay, even though it would be kind of backwards-cool. “Chris” reminded him too much of third grade. So, with wisdom born of Budweiser, he picked “Rambo”. One minute later, they’d scrapped “Rambo” and given him the handle that stuck for years. The day after graduation, after the commissioning ceremony, his peers toasted him by his new name: Second Lieutenant Christian (“Shiva”) Cohen-Mohamed, United States Army”.
Thomas Reed Willemain
Dr. Thomas Reed Willemain is a software entrepreneur, emeritus professor of statistics, and former intelligence officer. He holds degrees from Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His memoir, “Working on the Dark Side of the Moon: Life Inside the National Security Agency” was published in 2017. A native of western Massachusetts, he lives near the Mohawk River in upstate New York.
