April 2021 | Best of Net nominee, nonfiction
Grace in Four Parts
I
My mother enrolled me in a tap-dance class when I was five; I hated it. The little outfits hung awkwardly on me, the sequins always falling off. The shoes hurt my feet. My steps were uncoordinated and always three beats behind everyone else’s. I couldn’t twirl without stumbling. Everyone else got that lovely tap sound as they danced across the floor. “She’s very pretty with those blonde curls,” the teacher told my mother. “But she has no grace.”
II
Grace was my only friend in sixth grade. I was hers. We sat alone at our lunch table. We laughed together. If one of us had money we bought a candy bar to share. We exchanged books. One day I invited her home after school. My mother bought cookies. Her parents didn’t want her to go, but she came anyway. We were happy walking home as I told her about my games and chemistry set, but when we got to our apartment my mother sent Grace home. I didn’t understand. My mother said, “I’m sure she is a lovely girl, but she’s colored. She belongs with her own kind.” “She is my kind: we read the same books, laugh at the same things, like the same cookies,” I insisted, but my mother walked away.. Grace’s mother told her that she couldn’t have anything to do with me. The rest of the year I sat alone at lunch; no Grace.
III
My grace period for paying my student loan was up. The credit mafia made threatening calls, sent threatening letters, even knocked at my door. “But I pay everything I can at the end of the month. I’m supporting two kids,” I told the man on the phone. “Sometimes I give you ten dollars, sometimes twenty-five but I always pay” The man scoffed; “Your money problems aren’t ours.” A friend who was a lawyer worked out a credit plan with them, but I was broke halfway through every month and lost any line of credit for seven years.
“Grace period is over,” they repeated to my lawyer. “No grace left.”
IV
“Forgiveness is an act of grace,” My husband told me when he broke my jaw after a disagreement about nothing important, something I can’t even remember. “Just let it go. I’ll never do it again,” he insisted. Then he repeated, “Forgiveness is an act of grace.”
I laughed and told him, “Everyone knows I have no grace.”
Michelle Cacho-Negrete
Michelle Cacho-Negrete is a retired social worker who lives in Portland Maine. She is the author of Stealing: Life in America. She has 80+ publications, 4 of which are among the most notable, 5 in anthologies, 1 won Best of The Net and another won the Hope Award.
January 2021 | Best of Net nominee, fiction
1974
Every time Robert pulled the starchy, white surplice over his head, he thought of watching his ma help his grandma into her nightgown, even though hers was flannel with pink flowers on it. He knew the other boys got to watch Hawaii 5-0 on the color tv in the rectory on Tuesday nights and the housekeeper made them chocolate chip cookies, and sometimes Father Ignatius gave them private catechism lessons in his study. The other boys gave each other nicknames based on the show but they called him Porkie, which he knew had nothing to do with Hawaii 5-0. His ma told him he was lucky to stay home and watch tv with her instead, but he felt sure that father Ignatius left him out because he was fat.
1978
In the locker room after the game, Victor Viccarelli flicked a towel at his butt and called him a name he would never say out loud himself. He’d known most of the team since elementary school and St. Augustus days, although he’d stopped going to church when his grandma died, but he still wasn’t one of them. Robert hated showering in the mildewed open shower room where he felt his size was not an advantage, like it was on the field, but an excuse for others to pummel and pinch, as if he were made of clay, not flesh. He laughed it off but sometimes let the shower stream longer on his reddened face to obscure the tears.
1982
He never thought he would become friends with Victor Vic, but from the day they sat next to each other in the molded plastic chairs of the Marine recruiting office, under a dog-eared poster claiming, “We Don’t Promise You a Rose Garden,” they had learned to appreciate and protect one another. One evening at chow, when Robert was picking out the stringy cubes of pineapple from the fruit cocktail and pushing them to the side of his plate, Victor made a joke about watching Hawaii 5-0 at St. Augustus, as if they’d both been there. “Those were some days,” he said. Robert shrugged and said nothing, feeling that pit-of-the-stomach weakness that still lurked beneath the armor of his camouflage uniform.
1986
It was his ma who spotted the obituary in the local paper, circled it in red magic marker for him and left it on the kitchen table, so he saw it when he got home from work. Victor had hung himself with his standard issue Marine mesh belt in a Holiday Inn in Manhattan, Kansas. That wasn’t in the obituary, of course; another old classmate who worked at the airport with Robert heard it from a friend of Vic’s sister. Robert thought about going by the Viccarellis’ house to pay respects, but he had never really known the family.
1990
No one in town besides Robert seemed surprised by the story about Father Ignatius, who was long gone now, anyway. Sandra Viccarelli wrote a rambling, angry letter to the editor about her brother, but people said she was a drug addict and a drama queen and just wanted attention for herself. Robert spent days watching reruns of Hawaii 5-0, his bulk pressing down, down into the brown plaid couch, his calloused fingers picking at the wiry upholstery. His ma asked him to come to mass with her, just this once, and he said no.
Theo Greenblatt
Theo Greenblatt’s prose, both fiction and nonfiction, appears in Cleaver, The Columbia Journal, Jellyfish Review, The Normal School Online, Tikkun, Harvard Review, and numerous other venues. She is a previous winner of The London Magazine Short Story Competition. Theo holds a PhD from the University of Rhode Island and teaches writing to aspiring officer candidates at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, RI.
January 2021 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
It wasn’t his bridge, of course.
It wasn’t even his city, and it certainly wasn’t
his world. It’s your world, jazz music says,
I’m just living in it. And the world’s a workshop.
Sonny was different, though. Even for one
we’d call young gifted & black without being
bromidic. Sonny heard so much but mostly
only listened to himself, waiting and creating
his own kind of way, expressing everything.
How do we describe the kind of man already
in rarified air deciding he wasn’t high enough
(having already eschewed the artificial ecstasy
that ruins veins and soils brains, Body and Soul)?
This colossus, keeping his own council, split
his apartment to set up shop in the crow’s nest
of the Williamsburg Bridge, perhaps the one
place aside from the Arctic Circle where no one
could see or hear history being picked apart
like a carcass, and then reassembled in real time.
Three years of this. Almost a thousand days
while the world spun, the cash registers rung,
and so many pretenders to the throne ascended
for lack of better options. Sun turned to snow
and dawn turned to dark and there were still
all those sounds: a style being tweaked, a gift
being refined, an experiment being improvised.
The quest for vision, it’s said, will make
otherwise steady men see outlandish sights:
as they deprive themselves of human fuel
they become something at once less & more
than a vessel; the spirits speak to and through
them and once that barrier is broken, one sees
oneself changed, then begins changing the world.
(*In 1959, feeling pressured by his unexpected rise to fame, Rollins took a three-year hiatus to focus on perfecting his craft. A resident of the Lower East Side of Manhattan with no private space to play, he took his saxophone up to the Williamsburg Bridge to practice alone.)
Sean Murphy
Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. His work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, The New York Post, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. His chapbook, The Blackened Blues, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard. He’s Founding Director of 1455 (www.1455litarts.org). To learn more, please visit seanmurphy.net/ and @bullmurph.
January 2021 | Best of Net nominee, fiction
On the day of the final exam, students walked into the classroom to find a long table lined with body parts inside jars. Confused, and not seeing their professor anywhere, they walked along the table and read the labels on the jars:
– #1: Albert Einstein’s Frontal Lobe
– #2: Frida Kahlo’s Hands
– #3: Chris Hemsworth’s Biceps
– #4: Joan Sutherland’s Lungs
– #5: Usain Bolt’s Feet
– #6: Jane Austen’s Temporal Lobe
– #7: Freddie Mercury’s Vocal Cords
– #8: Oprah Winfrey’s Mouth
– #9: Anthony Bourdain’s Tongue
– #10: Beyoncé’s Legs
– #11: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Heart
– #12: Mother Teresa’s Heart
One of the students noticed an envelope at the end of the table marked, “Please read aloud.” He picked it up and said:
“Hi, class. This is your final exam. You get to choose one jar to eat from. A few minutes after you’ve eaten, you will receive skills and talents related to the person’s body part you’ve selected. As there are only 12 of you, you must choose quickly. You will receive your grade after the test is complete. Once these instructions have been read aloud, you have precisely one minute to select and eat. I am watching. Go.”
The students were the best and brightest at the university, maybe the country. They scurried around the table, some diving for their desired jar, snatching off the lids, shoving the various body parts into their mouths.
After the minute passed, the students stood around the table alternating between looking at each other and looking down at themselves, blood smeared across their hands and faces, meat wedged between their teeth. Only one person stood apart from her classmates.
She clung to the wall, face ashen, body shaking, but as each of her classmates began to clutch at their throats, lines of red crossing across their eyes, gasping, reaching out for help, toppling to the floor, convulsing and then settling into grotesque stillness, she noticed the lone jar left on the table, the one that would have been hers, shining like a beacon, and she understood.
The door opened, and the professor walked in, beaming.
“Congratulations,” he said, shaking her hand. “You passed.”
Elison Alcovendaz
Elison’s work has appeared or will be appearing in The Rumpus, The Santa Monica Review, The Portland Review, Lost Balloon, and other places. Elison has an MA in Creative Writing from Sacramento State and was selected as a Best Small Fictions 2020 winner. To learn more, please visit www.elisonalcovendaz.com.
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 | Best of Net nominee, visual art
Before the Storm
Just Take Me Home
Harry Longstreet
Harry Longstreet is retired after twenty-five years as a writer, producer and director of filmed entertainment, primarily for television. He’s always looking for images that speak to the human condition and the world around him. He favors ambient light and unposed, unaware subjects. In the last fifteen years, he’s had a number of one-man shows, and his work has appeared in more than two hundred national and international juried exhibitions. Longstreet is twice a Single Image Merit Award recipient from Black & White Magazine and twice a Single Image Merit Award winner from Color Magazine. In 2013, he was awarded the Gold Medal (monochrome) in the International Varna Salon, and in 2014, he took Best in Show in the annual CVG Washington State competition and in 2017 First Place-Photography.
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