April 2017 | fiction
After my father’s third wife left him, he tacked up a paper target onto the center of the cathode ray credenza and pegged a picture of my latest step-mother over it. He towed the fridge into the sitting room, packed with Pabst. Beside it was a cinder block-sized container of BB pellets for his pump action rifle.
From an inflatable arm chair he took aim and shucked beers until the picture was pulp and the vacant cans were an avant-garde sculpture. I came out of my room to use the bathroom when an errant BB whanged off the television’s curved glass, struck me in my solar-plexus and fell harmlessly to the floor.
I never told anyone, but for a while I thought I was bulletproof. My father wasn’t. He let things get to him too easily. But genetic inheritance is hard to hide. Hollow-points ricocheted off Superman’s pupils. Lois Lane’s devotion never wavered. My action figurine bulged with immutable, plastic muscles.
Decades later, when my fiancée broke up with me, I thought about my father, dead from a discharge through his ear lobe more potent than a BB. If I pinched the same trigger he had, would the bullet still bounce off?
Brandon Hartman
April 2017 | fiction
You’ve fallen a little in love with your oncologist. The wisdom in the creased skin around his eyes, the sureness of the neat part in his silver hair. The way he holds the chart with steady hands, his intense look as he scans the results. How he turns to you, and only you, with his knowing smile. “Tell me how you feel,” he says in the private language you always share in this room. You love his soft French accent, how he rolls words of hope off his tongue, murmuring as if you’ll be together for a very long time.
Karen Zey
Karen Zey is a Canadian writer from Pointe-Claire, Quebec. Her stories and essays have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, The Globe and Mail, and other places, Karen was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015.
April 2017 | fiction
Reminiscent
To-day, I thought of you. Who I’m kidding? Not a day that memories of you, of us—how we were together, slips past. How long it’s been now: a year, many years or was it in another time and place, an entirely different lifetime? I try some times purposely, pretending not to remember those times or you. But it only serves to row the senses, and brings the visions more clearly, more painfully. What was I thinking? That’s it, I remember—I wasn’t thinking at all. I was such a fool! And then you left, and the place—ah the place: our place, never felt so barren, and I was alone: then I began to think. Ha…that’s funny now. Some good it was then. . . thinking. It was too late. And now, well. . . it seems but a dream. Well, at least that’s what’ll tell myself. I was dreaming.
Impertinence
My intention was only to stop in the card-shop to say hello. But then Gia started. She inquired of things that weren’t her affairs, and being a past lover didn’t grant her an automatic reprieve into the subjects personal. As it were, I had only known her briefly one spring, and that’d been two years ago now, and it was only to take revenge at another. In the midst of her impertinent, adversarial inquiries, wherein, underneath, and perhaps understandable, lay a skosh of scorn—she made the mistake of introducing me to Helena, whose person seemed understanding and gentle; and I heard in her greeting: English spoken with the subtlety of German, and that was it. Helena’s blue eyes commanded the rest. The shop was soon to close, and Helena was the one leaving early that evening, and was all ready to go. And we left together: Helena and I.
Taylor Boughnou
Taylor Boughnou was drawn to the writers and thinkers of the ninetieth and early twentieth centuries. After years of a dedicated reading and writing regimen and journal-keeping of his thoughts and observations of his daily routines and personal travels, he began to write. He lives in the greater Boston, Massachusetts area, where he works as a wellness specialist.
January 2017 | fiction
I’m fifty years ago, at a party, drinking a martini and smoking a cigarette. I’m wearing my suit and tie and idly listening to little pieces of three different conversations. Wasn’t West Side Story a wonderful movie? How about the new president and his promise to have a man on the moon by decade’s end? Is there going to be a problem with this place suddenly appearing in the newspapers, this Vietnam wherever it is? People are dancing and the room is thick and warm. My martini is wonderfully cold and bitter. Someone puts a different record on the phonograph. They turn the music up loud.
I’m there and also here with you half a century later at the edge of a vast and darkened field. Rain has come and gone and we smell wet grass and a hint of autumn. If the clouds clear we’ll see the first of the evening stars. The wind blows itself out and the night grows still. A few minutes ago something unpleasant happened between us and we came out to the field because a little fresh air might wash the anger from our souls. I can’t tell if anything has gotten better. Maybe I’ve calmed down, but the truth is I am confused.
You’re here with me and the field stretches out ahead and those clouds aren’t getting any thinner and a drop of rain just hit my cheek and everything about us is vague and uncertain. The field is a continuation of the argument started back at the house. You hate how my mind forever wanders to somewhere far away. You want to know why I can’t change that about myself and the answer is there on my lips and at the same time is not.
Joel Best
Joel Best has published in venues such as Atticus Online, decomP, Crack the Spine and Blaze Vox. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and son.
October 2016 | fiction
My alcoholism was never once suspected. I had made it a strict habit not to get completely bombed under twenty-four hours before flight. Much of the time outside of flying and the twenty-four hours prior to flight time, is obliterated. I have a home in Los Angeles, and I have a home Pittsburgh. I have had two marriages, and remember very little of either one. The one time I felt in complete control of my life was behind the instrument panel of a jet airliner with the hundreds of souls behind me having entrusted me to their care and survival. This act, this solid performance, I was able to keep up for close to twenty-five years. I will neither declare nor confess that in the air I ever felt any particular sense of power. Rather, I felt a peculiar place of belonging, as when, as a young boy, I had watched a Scout Master surveying the white tufts of a river from the shore before taking our small fleet of six canoes through the whitewater. He was reading the line. He did so with his human eye and one paddle held up to it like a rifle, tracing the flow of the river. Even with all the computerized instrumentation that will chart a course in the air throughout a flight’s journey, when flying I felt this brief sense of being alive as I had once felt canoeing. While human participation in the flying of such airborne crafts is nearly superfluous, as flying a jet is nearly automated, I must also believe that this respite of being able to live a life outside of my time spent on the ground had saved me from one of criminal madness, an accidental suicide, or some passionate murder.
Duff Allen
Duff Allen is a writer who lives in upstate New York. He has an MFA from Bard College where he teaches writing in the Clemente Course for the Humanities. His work may be found in “Prima Materia” and other publications.
October 2016 | fiction
He lay in bed quietly, not daring to move, holding his arms and legs and breathing as still as they could be held, waiting, not sure for what. The room had darkened, but was not too dark for him to see the outlines of the furniture, the central light fixture, the door slightly ajar, the slippers on the floor next to his desk. He could hear the slow ticking of the windup clock on his dresser but could no longer see the hands that marked the hour and minute. His heart beat along with the seconds, and the emptiness between beats stretched longer and longer even though he knew time could not be stretched.
Without realizing that he was drifting into sleep, the boy felt his body move, swinging back and forth on an axis through his navel. The movement dizzied him, but he enjoyed the speed, a whipping sensation as if he sat at the rear of a roaring roller coaster. He willed himself to spin entirely around, faster with each revolution. He was conscious that he still lay in his bed, but the part of his brain pursuing the thrill of movement cared not. Then, inevitably, his body slowed and he grew sad, sorry to be brought back to stillness. He opened his eyes to find the room pitch black, but could still hear the seconds.
Bruce Berger
Bruce J. Berger is an MFA candidate at American University in Washington, DC. His work appears in Wilderness House Literary Review, Prole, Jersey Devil Press Anthology, Black Magnolias, and a variety of other literary journals.
