October 2016 | fiction
Her hair is distracting. Her hair is blue, and it’s distracting. I know that blue. It’s that, I don’t care that you’re watching me blue. Why can’t she be normal? Sitting on her knees on the subway. Maybe I could talk to her if she’d just sit like a normal person. Maybe I’d walk up to her and tap her on the shoulder if her hair were yellow, or red, or brown. Why does it have to be blue?
She rides to her stop, gets up, and squeezes in front of me, like I’m not even there, like I’m no one, and I can’t move. I can’t breathe, because if I do, it’ll go right down onto her neck. Why does she do that?
It’s her hair. Her I don’t care that you want me hair. That salty, ocean water blue that she runs her fingers through as though to say, yeah, you could drown in me…if I let you. But I won’t. Every day, I’ve watched her blue hair fall over her white shoulders. I’ve counted the freckles hidden beneath the blue strands when her skin peeks through. I’ve watched her walk away from me, down the aisle, and through the door. I’ve watched her step out, and drift through the crowd. Her blue head bobs away among the normals. The nobodies. Every day since Monday, I’ve watched that un-natural, un-normal, fuck you hair leave me standing alone. And every day since I first saw her, I’ve wished that I were drowning.
But I’m not.
I’m breathing.
And all I can think of is tomorrow.
Amanda Goemmer
Amanda Goemmer is a Kentucky native, currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is working on her first novel, in addition to a collection of nonfiction works.
October 2016 | fiction
He’d just scooched his ass down into his favorite vinyl booth for a celebratory drink at his favorite Republic bar, had just signed half his life away to his bitch of an ex-wife (and the other half to his lawyers), and now it was her asking him why he had called.
His large hands fumbled with the thin phone as he tugged it out of his back pocket, nearly dropping it twice as he turned and twisted in his seat to better hear over the din of bar sounds and bar voices.
“It was an accident,” he said.
“What was an accident?” she said.
He watched a young couple enter—the woman with a radiant smile and large expressive eyes and the young man smiling in her wake. He envied their happiness in these “salad days” of their relationship.
“Jim?”
He’d forgotten her for a split second while in reverie over the young couple, now making their way down to the other end of the bar to visit with another happy young couple, hugs and kisses all around.
“What?”
“What was an accident?” she repeated.
He turned away from the happy couples and stared blankly at the hockey game on the television behind the counter. A terrible urge came upon him—to call her a “slutty whore” and “cunt” for putting herself before their kids and family. But then a wild and sinister and better idea came to mind.
“This call!” he said. “It’s a butt dial, bitch!”
Glancing up and down the bar, he spread his fat thighs, then cupped and lowered the tiny phone into the little vinyl amphitheatre he’d created there and let out the loudest and happiest fart of his crazy busted life!
Dave Barrett
Dave Barrett lives and writes out of Missoula, Montana. His fiction has appeared most recently in Midwestern Gothic, Gravel, The MacGuffin and the Scarlett Leaf Review. He teaches writing at the University of Montana and is at work on a new novel.
October 2016 | poetry
what to do when the missiles come (at last)
1962
watch the moon through crystal skies one time,
telescope your life into the week it takes
to build a crisis into chaos,
then,
crawl beneath your desk,
press your head against your knees
and take up all the burdens of the world,
the weight,
slam the door just opened
and learn about equality
as suddenly as thunder,
then,
forget about your first steps into logic
and see the one great, simple truth:
reasons can be found for doing anything
to anyone,
in any way,
at any time;
there will be no quiz,
just a final
folded shirts, penknives
thoughts, folded, put away like clothing waiting to be worn,
tried on only when we are alone
and think that no one understands;
no one asks about the silence of our wisdom,
so it sits in dark like dated shirts
below the top drawer of the dresser and its stew of odds and ends:
a penknife that we had to have, once,
its reason long forgotten;
photos growing older every day
until the faces and the fashions fade,
like cars once new, now tired as an old idea;
watches stopped at random like friends who came and went;
a ring that once said everything,
silent now like books we thought we’d read;
all these things still moving like the steeple in the rearview mirror,
once the edge of everything, the front,
now fading back as we go ever on;
these things we’ve kept to save time in a jar
like fireflies when we were kids,
things we will not send out to the curb,
these salvaged words of life;
what do they say that we cannot resist?
is this our sad rebuttal to the reasoning of time,
or just our failed argument, the ‘you can’t have this’
markers from the road we can’t take back?
or are they like the folded shirts below,
baggage from the miles spent,
or provisions for some journey yet to go?
monologue
he was talking,
but he didn’t care who saw,
sitting by the flat gray stone
as if beside an altar,
white shirt brilliant,
red face torn,
careworn once again, anew,
six years since it changed forever;
legs stretched out
parallel with hers
as they always were,
side by side,
stride by stride
so many years,
there to share where words refused to go
though he was sure she heard;
“everything we say is talking to ourselves,”
he learned when he was young,
and so it was along that hill,
muted marble markers
warming in the sun
that cut into the letters, dates
carved upon the rocks
beneath the endless sky
that smirks at him,
at all of us
as it passes in its hubris overhead
Standing in Line
Moving forward toward the front, the edge,
wherever this is heading to,
this herd, a rosary
as fingers count the beads
leading to the draggle
of the crucifix;
impatient at the back
standing on our toes to see,
we peek beyond the queue,
jealous though we do not know
the space beyond horizon, shadow.
We do not know
what waits for us in front,
though we all will get to see it
soon enough.
John Kristofco
John P. (Jack) Kristofco’s poetry and short stories have appeared in about two hundred publications, including: Slant, Folio, Rattle, Fourth River, Santa Fe Review, and Cimarron Review. He has published three collections of poetry and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times.
October 2016 | fiction
Blood drips onto the plates as he chatters away over supper, seemingly oblivious to the dead end that awaits them all. The kids slink silently away, as though escape is possible. Surely they know that later in the night, he will thump up the stairs in search for them as she lies in bed wondering when they auditioned for this drama.
#
A new morning, and she awakens to find shattered glass littering the kitchen floor. The kids stare eerily ahead while slowly munching cereal. Milk bubbles from the corners of their mouths. Silence hangs heavy until he slaps the bottle on the table.
“Cocktail time!”
The kids’ expressions remain impassive as their tongues flick over pale lips. They rise and she notices their backpacks leaking blood.
“STOP,” she shouts, “people will know.”
“Everyone already knows.” They turn their empty gazes on her.
“What?”
“You auditioned for the part, Ma, your name is in the obits.”
“You’re a terrible actress, I might add,” he cackles.
The kids leave and she starts vigorously mopping the floor. She is forever taking up where she left off and everything is always overwhelming.
Blood drips steadily from the ceiling, and suddenly, she is too tired to clean, too drained from yesterday, too fearful of tomorrow, too paralyzed to participate in the present tense. The chambers of her heart deplete as she struggles to recall events leading up to this point. A vision appears of her kids’ bloodless lips murmuring fateful words:
“Your whole life is a lie!”
“Only 80 proof,” she objects, knowing she is not the first to lie. Relief floods her as their accusing gazes fade into the cold, hard light of another day that she will thankfully never see as she sinks into the deep, dark, blissful deadness of oblivion.
Pavelle Wesser
Pavelle Wesser’s fiction has appeared in many webzines and anthologies. She writes in the wee hours of the night when sleep eludes her and she is usually slated to wake up early the next day, ensuring a never-ending cycle of run-on sentences and short-term memory loss. Originally a New Yorker, she currently resides in New England with her family and several dogs.
October 2016 | poetry
There is something elegant
about the way the sun
kicks out over the horizon
with such agony, each morning,
and today I’ve seen
both its death and birth,
an entire lifetime
burnt away over
harsh landscapes;
everything is forgiven
when dawn pours out
over the hills—
when the first
dregs of light
skim over the treetops,
and they seem like
they are breathing.
Allison Taylor
A current poetry MFA student at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Allison’s poetry has appeared in Birch Gang Review, and she has studied writing under the mentorship of Renee Ashley, H. L. Hix, and David Daniel. She earned her undergraduate degree in computer science from Gettysburg College, and when she’s not writing and reading, she spends her time working in the publishing industry, tutoring math and English, and watching science fiction movies.
