January 2014 | back-issues, fiction
Marlene glared down the alley at the two pins in their corners, her eyes narrowed over the ball like a snake’s before it strikes. She stood tall and still and substantial, in her black pants and the white shirt with pinstripes and Marlene stitched in red over the left breast.
Then she moved, power under grace, just the barest hitch to her step, and this being only the sixth day out of the hospital. Today there would be no fat-ass comment to upset her four-step sequence. Today was about the clarity of the pins.
Between steps two and three she began to lean and lower, torso approaching horizontal, right arm back with the ball, left forward for balance, and if she felt the bruised ribs you couldn’t tell to look at her.
On step four her right arm swung forward and she didn’t so much roll the ball as release it—opening her hand as you’d free a bird. Marlene slid to a stop just short of the line and hung there, balanced on her left leg, her right raised behind her and folded in a delicate ‘L.’ The ball rolled straight until the english she’d applied took hold and curved it left, a pin-seeking missile. She liked to call it that: english. Most just said spin.
The ball kissed the inside of the seven pin and sent it caroming into the left wall and bouncing back and across in an arc, where it took out the ten and both pins dropped from sight into the back-alley abyss.
The sound it made was sharp and satisfying: de-ba-cle.
“Nice shot, hon,” Candace said.
Marlene blew cool air on her fingertips, then turned back toward where Harold used to score her and said, “Take that, motherfucker.”
by Richard Bader
Richard Bader’s work has been published by National Public Radio and by the rkvry Quarterly literary journal.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
They started seeping in slowly. None of us noticed. One or two, here or there. Easily explained.
The doorbell buzzed and opened to a dreadlocked orange vest at the bottom of the stairs.
“I need to read your meter”
He starts forward. He wants to cut through the house.
“I got a big dog in here.”
He doesn’t argue, just gives me a blank stare.
“Drive around through the alley.” I say, as he climbs in his truck.
He comes in the back gate. It took only a minute for the reading, nothing unusual. Except it was then that I saw them. The buzzing swarm. He shoos them away as he slips back out the gate. I follow them. Droning and crawling inside the porch beams. Squeezing in between the slats. Dark vibrations shuddering under the eaves. Hundreds or more. At dusk I creep and hit them hard with creamy white oil from a lethal black spray bottle. I sleep content till dawn. Then through the window over the coffeemaker they come. Bigger. Mad. Sickly. I spend more hours with the spray. Up on a ladder and down on crooked knees. I seal the holes with insulating tape and foam. But the carpenters are boring holes like cheese. I hear the tapping of their bodies against the tape. Louder. Harder. Inside desperate to get out, outside hell bent to get in. I hear them zipping, darting, honing. Sharpening. Meter man locked the back gate. Everything is moving. The house is alive and coated. A massive hive. The first sting starts the flood. I am puffy, soft and porous by the time I go down.
— Elizabeth McGuire
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
I’m writing this from Jeff’s Lazy-boy sofa. The cracks in the brown leather makes it look like an artifact from Constantinople, untouched by human hands for thousands of years. It’s almost as if he sculpted a casing of his bum’s shape in an impulsive moment of creation, like dentists do when molding impressions for night guards. The absence his real bum feels, exquisite, in a way — kind of makes me want to jump up and down on it. But I’m not going to vacuum the petrified mango chips in the pull-out bed unit. I’m not.
There are days where all I do is wait for you. Your silence. Is that the answer? When I read your preface to “How to Share the Skies,” I imagined you floating between Triangulum Australe (my favorite constellation), calling from the space station with your lyrics in progress: ‘But I’m already here. Like a translucent leaf. Half lit by sun.’
Remember that poem I wrote in Ohio during the private coaching hour? ‘Flowers in Winter’? It’s like that. Not Jeff’s elliptical in the dining room. No. It’s what he calls the swear word. The word that is not okay to talk about in our house. S-Oo-U-L. This makes me feel like a kindergartener again, always trying to hide my incompetence. Like what Oprah said in the summer issue of her magazine about how carnations are bogus. “This I know for sure,” she wrote. “Living a lie is a dangerous thing, like the dentist who loves veterinary science and resents himself for it, while sealing the tooth of fifteen year old kid in khaki shorts and flip flops.” When I’m at my dentist, I think about eggshells in the garbage disposal. Slipping my hand inside. Running from the sink. Facet left on hot. Blood on the white IKEA rug.
Sometimes, I give this wheelchair bound homeless woman a quarter, hoping she will reveal herself as an angel, instantly leaping out of her chair in humble service. My life has left me, I will say. And she’ll tell me exactly how to call it home — what train to catch, the best luggage shop in town, which socks to buy. The blue. It’s more likely she’ll just ask for more money while ranting on about the Vietnam War or past lives. She believes pain is inherited from generation to generation and that she was born at the beginning of time as a single celled animal. I can’t distinguish if this woman’s story is worthy of an e-mail to Oprah or not. Or if this will move beyond your agent’s spam filter. There is nothing I know for sure.
— Gregory Josselyn
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
On the first day of winter, I watched the Anne Hathaway movie “One Day” with our kids. It’s about Emma and Dexter who, the night they graduate from college, go to her room and try to make out. He is drunk, but Emma, although she is fascinated by him, agrees that it is best for them to just be friends and they fall asleep. It is July 15th and for most of the rest of the movie they meet again on that date for twenty years in various places and for various reasons. Though clearly in love, they are often angry with each other because they live such different lives. Emma, a teacher, has an alcoholic boyfriend. Dexter becomes an annoying T.V. personality who marries a woman who cheats on him. After his divorce, they finally admit that they are in love and they marry. They are happy and hope to have children, but one evening when Emma is riding home on her bicycle, she is hit and killed by a garbage truck.
She is shown dying in the street, then there’s a flashback to the morning after they first met. They wake up in bed together and are embarrassed and apologetic. They decide to take a walk on the mountain which overlooks Edinburgh and realize that they want each other. They race down a hillside covered in wildflowers to his hotel, but find his parents waiting for him there. Once again they are embarrassed and they say goodbye, then more goodbyes, then, I’ll be seeing you.
I remembered warmer days, happier times and your favorite song, Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” and the line, “I want to see you dance again,” and I started to cry for you and for me and for Scott and for Haley and I hid my tears from them. It was 4:00 o’clock and already dark. Outside a cold winter moon was just rising above our bare deck, cleared of summer furniture. I put on the Bears game, gathered up the chips and the salsa I had made with the small remaining tomatoes from our garden, and took everything I was able to carry into the kitchen where we made the lasagna you had taught us all to make.
— Charles Kerlin
Charles Kerlin is a teacher of creative writing and American literature at Saint Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana with a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado. He was a graduate student for two summers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has published a half dozen stories, won the Hopewell prize for a short story judged by Alan Cheusse, book editor for NPR. “On This Harvest Moon” came from the experience of watching One Day with my children on the first night of winter.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
An indistinct sound of struggle was what made Lydia look into the barrel of nicotine colored rain water out back. A glistening head, pointy at the tip, was poking through the gelatin surface, paws frantically treading water. It was about the size of a large rat and she realized it must be a squirrel. In fact, it must be The Squirrel – the one who was always skittering around the house, looking in her windows.
The last time, she’d been in bed with a married man. He’d reached over to stroke her thigh and a slight movement had caught her eye in the window. Maybe it was the apprehension about getting caught, but the squirrel had taken her by surprise then too. Perched on the sill, its unabashed gaze cutting past the peeling paint, the underwear turned inside out. It was holding a slice of pizza in its little fingers and munching with no particular interest. “Enjoy the show,” Bill said, but then had chucked a work boot at the window.
Now, she leveraged her own work boot against the hefty barrel and tipped it over. The water spread soundlessly, the squirrel catching its breath against the side of the house.
— Valerie Borey
Valerie Borey lives in Minneapolis where she writes, teaches, and otherwise probes rabbit holes and random tangents. Her creative work has appeared onstage at various venues and in publications such as Diddle Dog, Heavy Glow, American Nerd, The Festival of Awkward Moments Anthology, and Better or Worse: The Anthology.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
Statewide alert: White female, 14-19 years, brown hair and eyes, last seen walking alone in Forest Park. The Rangers’ Hut is considered the likely destination. May be wearing red raingear. Wanted in connection with possible wolf sighting.
— Lynn Bey
Lynn Bey has had short stories and flash fiction published in The Literarian (nominated for a Pushcart award), The Brooklyner, Birmingham Arts Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, Marco Polo Arts, Prime Number Magazine, and several other magazines.
