October 2018 | fiction
So this bartender starts telling me about a story he’s writing. You know how back in the old days when salt was worth its weight in gold. When you could buy anything you wanted with a little pinch of salt. This newlywed couple decides to go back to those days on their honeymoon. There’s a Time Machine that will take them—on the installment plan, of course. They can pay when they get back. But they can afford the trip because they know all about the salt and will bring along a couple of boxes of Morton Salt. The dark blue round boxes with the little girl on it with the umbrella. So they go back. They are having the time of their lives at the Coliseum watching the Christians getting mauled and eaten by the lions. They dine in the finest restaurants in Rome and rent a villa by the sea. On Capri maybe. They have the time of their lives and pay for everything in salt. Or maybe they forgot the salt. The newlywed husband left it on the kitchen table. Or maybe the newlywed bride did. Oh god, they say. They can’t pay their debts and end up getting thrown to the lions themselves. I haven’t figured that part out yet, the bartender says. The ending. The twist. What do you think. I get up from my stool to pay my tab and slide a tiny glassine packet of white crystals across the bar. Half a gram ought to cover it, don’t you think. The bartender looks around the room with panic in his eyes. I can’t take this, he says. Don’t worry, man, I tell him. It’s good. Kickass shit. And legal. Hell, you people back here in the twenty-first century haven’t even figured out how to synthesize it yet.
by Robert Perchan
Robert Perchan’s poetry chapbooks are Mythic Instinct Afternoon (2005 Poetry West Prize) and Overdressed to Kill (Backwaters Press, 2005 Weldon Kees Award). His poetry collection Fluid in Darkness, Frozen in Light won the 1999 Pearl Poetry Prize and was published by Pearl Editions in 2000. His avant-la-lettre flash novel Perchan’s Chorea: Eros and Exile (Watermark Press, Wichita, 1991) was translated into French and published by Quidam Editeurs (Meudon) in 2002. In 2007 his short short story “The Neoplastic Surgeon” won the on-line Entelechy: Mind and Culture Bio-fiction Prize. He currently resides in Pusan, South Korea. You can see some of his stuff on robertperchan.com.
October 2018 | poetry
In the headlights, fingers of fog weave
over the road, a seamstress just beginning
to patch together the loss of hours and years,
the maybe not and the not there yet.
I drive three hours to my mother’s house,
arrive an hour later than she expects,
still she’s waiting with dinner. She’s
seventy something, I’m forty-six, we’re still
mother and son. Before I’m finished with
the salad, she wants me to accompany her
to two parties this evening: a birthday
and a retirement. Between the roast beef
and mashed potatoes, it’s all guilt. I continue
to say, “No,” mentioning the chainsaw and splitting
wood for the stove, playing basketball with my son
and friends, and, of course, the drive, and in case
exhaustion isn’t enough, I accept the label
of neglectful son, and whatever else she serves up.
Plato, Socrates’ prize student, when he was eighty,
attended a pupil’s wedding party,
and during the celebration retired
to a corner of the villa to sleep in a chair.
He stayed there until the all-night revelers
returned in the morning to wake him,
but he had slept too far into the Elysian fields,
leaving us with the question: Is it marriage
or a party that leads to the death of philosophy?
by Walter Bargen
Walter Bargen has published 21 books of poetry. Recent books include: Days Like This Are Necessary: New & Selected Poems (BkMk Press, 2009), Trouble Behind Glass Doors (BkMk Press, 2013), Perishable Kingdoms (Grito del Lobo Press, 2017), and Too Quick for the Living (Moon City Press, 2017). His awards include: a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He was appointed the first poet laureate of Missouri (2008-2009).www.walterbargen.com
October 2018 | nonfiction
My father’s father died four years before I was born. Dad reacted by hoisting a massive trunk containing the man’s every worldly possession into the backyard trash barrel and setting it on fire. Mom, who had talked him out of destroying family heirlooms on other occasions, arrived at the pyre too late to protest. She could only stand near the blaze, chastising my father ineffectually, watching relics succumb to engulfing flames.
“The antique trunk alone was worth a fortune,” Mom said. She recalls its contents: Dad’s baby dress, a shift of cotton lawn. A yellowed blanket. A gold ring set with a turquoise stone the size of a grain of rice.
Photos of his parents and grandparents. There was even one of Evelyn, the sister who had died of some unnamed disease at the age of six, leaving behind a corpse the size of a doll’s.
“Why’d he do it?” I asked.
“Because if it’s gone, he doesn’t have to think about it.”
My grandfather, according to family legend, was a layabout. He’d had a stroke in front of the television at the boarding house where he stayed, bottle of bourbon in hand. For half a day the other residents assumed he’d passed out.
I get my dad’s distaste for nostalgia.
There was that Christmas that was perfect. My cousins and I spun wooden tops on hardwood floors as the fireplace raged and cookies baked in the oven. It would forever hover there, a reminder of what Christmas would never be again. More often Mom and Dad, bound for grandma’s, would turn the car around after some knock-down, drag-out argument.
What will trigger tears is unpredictable now. I toss our wedding scrapbook into a pile in the garage but feel a pang when I throw away your moth-ridden Yoda shirt.
by Shannon Thrace
Shannon Thrace is an IT professional, a grad student pursuing a master’s in English, and a devotee of farm-to-table restaurants, summer festivals, all-night conversations and formidable philosophy texts. She is passionate about unplugging, getting outside and seeing the world.
October 2018 | fiction
He stepped off the curb into the street, turned around and stared at me. A bunch of us were waiting for the light at Broadway and 44th. Tall, wild-haired, enormous brown eyes, wide mouth slightly open — I immediately looked away.
“You are beautiful,” he said.
I pretended not to notice him, or to hear his astonishment.
“You’re really beautiful. You’re amazing.”
I looked over his head at the crush of people waiting on the other side.
“I mean it,” he said, looking directly at me and holding out his hands. “You are truly beautiful.” His voice enveloped me like warm vapor.
Heads turned in my direction, straining to see what he was seeing. I wanted to move, but the orange hand of the traffic signal nailed us all to the spot. He kept talking, his words gathering speed, his voice rising in intensity.
“Please,” he said, “look at me. I must tell you. You are a dream, where have you been, you are so very beautiful.”
I flushed. I looked down, then away. A neon white “walk” had replaced the orange hand, and the crowd surged forward. I glanced at him as I stepped into the street. His face was earnest, his eyes searching. He moved backwards, arms lifted, still facing me. His coat billowed around him like wings.
“My God, I swear. You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
I hesitated, then veered around him to the right. His hands flew up, fluttering in front of me like prayer flags.
“Wait, wait. Don’t go. Please.”
The bunch on the corner was dispersing, some looking back, a few smiling. Now he was at my side.
“Wait, I don’t want to lose you, please.” His words loomed out like a lariat, tugging on me.
“You’re a goddess, you’re my life. I mustn’t lose you!”
Turning sharply, I broke away. A bus was coming down Broadway, and I ran for it. Never mind lunch with Norma. She’d understand. Waving my arm above my head, heart pounding, panting to myself—please, bus, don’t pass me by.
Miraculously, it slowed. The doors hissed open and I lunged aboard without looking back.
The doors snaked shut behind me. He hadn’t followed.
Relief spread through my body and I collapsed into a window seat. Good God, what ever was that? I looked out the window. I had never thought myself beautiful. Maybe nice-looking, okay, but not beautiful. Now suddenly I was beautiful—to someone. Someone who saw something in me no one else had ever seen.
Someone I would never see again.
The bus lurched across the intersection. I felt a huge hole inside. I glanced back down 44th. There he was, standing in the middle of the street, arms aloft, coat flapping and mouth moving, but not in the direction of my departing bus. He was facing the curb, his eyes and his words pinned on a pudgy middle-aged woman who was standing there, waiting for the light to change.
by Sandy Robertson
Sandy Robertson’s interests in teaching literature led her to writing fiction a few years ago. She has published two short stories and is currently at work on a novel. She lives in San Diego, California.
October 2018 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
Chess
Inside one Russian doll is another,
dressed in a different nationality
and inside that one is yet another.
and so on until all of them
gang up and storm the opera house
demanding to see the mayor.
Which of them crossed the border
may depend on fingerprints
and the next referendum.
As one nation collapses,
another rises up from the same dolls,
each a pawn in a clever sacrifice.
Flatliners
So now the earth is flat
Since nothing’s truly round
Not even a plutocrat
Rolls without a sound
On wildlife habitat
Hydraulic drilling pounds
Skinning mountains flat
Unearthing sacred mounds
The Fed’s still keeping track
Of stocks that leap and bound
Payback for any kickback
Their graphs are never round.
In jazz clubs singers scat
Audiences spellbound
Because the earth is flat
Keep both feet on the ground
by Michael Karl Ritchie
Michael Karl Ritchie is a retired Professor of English from Arkansas Tech University with work published in various small press magazines, including The Mississippi Review, Margie, OR Panthology – Ocellus Reseau. He has had three small press chapbook publications and Winter Goose Press has just published his collection of poems Ampleforth’s Miscellany (2017).
