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.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
A five-dollar bill. Fluttering there on the sidewalk, yet miraculously motionless in the early-morning breeze; flapping just enough to attract her attention without flying away.
Her foot clamped down upon it, hard; she squatted down fast and dug it out with greedy fingers; crushed it into a ball and stuffed it deep in her pocket.
It was barely past dawn. Nothing was open. Joan wondered who had dropped it, who had been benign or foolish enough to toss away five whole dollars as if it were nothing, as if it meant nothing. Ah, well, he or she would be thinking in self-consolation. It’s only five dollars. It’s not life or death.
She glanced at the barricaded door. The curtains hadn’t been drawn yet, but the familiar sign still stood in the window. Breakfast, two dollars. Coffee, eggs and toast. She almost smiled. She sat down on the sidewalk, waiting. It smelled of stale vomit. It wasn’t hers, she knew. She’d been down the road a ways when her last meal had come up on her.
There was a click and the door opened behind her. She jumped up and ran inside without speaking. She laid the bill conspicuously on the counter so they would know she had the money. They were very kind. They brought her extra coffee and packets of jelly that she ate plain when she ran out of toast.
It lasted longer this time, and it stayed down longer, too. But she was sorry because it came up right next to the library where liked to spend the rainy days. Still, it was something, wasn’t it? Finding five dollars. Not a matter of life or death, maybe. Not just yet.
— Lori Schafer
Lori Schafer is a part-time tax practitioner and part-time writer residing in Northern California. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Springfield Journal, The Berkeley Undergraduate Journal, Every Day Fiction, e-Romance, The Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette, Romance Flash, Leodegraunce High End Flash Fiction, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Every Day Poets, Ducts Webzine of Personal Stories, Separate Worlds, The Journal of Microliterature, Avalon Literary Review, and that’s Life! Fast Fiction Quarterly. She is currently at work on her second novel.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
He’s been dead quite some time, six maybe seven years I’d say. He passed right here in this house. That was the way he wanted it. He didn’t want doctors and nurses poking away at him until there was nothing left. I don’t think he found much honor in going that way.
Years ago he built his own coffin right there in the garage. He spent three months smoothing and notching the pine until it was just so. He put so much lacquer on it that it shed water like a duck’s back. I’ll rot long before this pine box does he told me one night.
When he finished it he carried it in and stood it upended in the corner. It was one of the strangest things I do believe I’ve ever seen. That coffin standing contoured and waiting in the corner. It wasn’t exactly an omen. Then one day he brought some boards in and tacked them across. He put a few dusty volumes on the shelves, an old hickory clock, and the birch whittled wood figures he carved. It looked like any other bookcase. Why, whenever we had company they would complement him on it. He would just smile real big like and say thank you. That was the kind of man he was.
When he passed the coroner came to the house. He went out to his van to get a bag and I told him he wouldn’t be needing it. I took down the volumes, the hickory clock, and the birch whittled figures and put them on the vestibule. I knocked out the tacks and took the boards out and told the coroner to put him in the coffin and save his bag. He just stood there trying to think of something to say. That’s quite clever he finally said. Thank you I said and smiled real big.
Then he took the coffin out and ever since I have needed some place to put these volumes, and clock, and figures. Don’t you know he built one for me too. I was hoping you’d help me carry it in and tack the board across.
— Jeremy Sexton
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
That last image of you from college was enough to undo me right there. Parked nudging the curb of the lot, you sat alone in there, staring down between your naked toes, a fat camel, the trendy ones that year, the ones you turned me onto, squeezed between your clinched fingers, which hovered above the open window as if anticipating a need for escape. Your eyes were distant, nodding against the broken rhythm of my voice, trying to make you see me. We hadn’t spoken in close to two years, which seemed then like something made up, an improbable youth conjured from death and hope.
To be back there again, I thought, to that ecstatic newness of escape from family, the shock of lips I’d longed for. The discovery of drunken autumns.
That would make things better.
A misunderstood melancholy boiled with the heat in that faded green Civic, and my inelegant words were scorched and mangled by it upon arrival.
The solipsism of me, unable to see in your shocking eyes that what you longed for was a return to a time before you knew me, when your father was still alive, and when guys like me never mattered enough for friendship, our insistence laughable and easily disposed of, like the ash-filled cups lying on your passenger floor. I was a part of those meaningless things gathering around you, things you have since thankfully swept away.
It’s taken me awhile to understand the truth of what I was then, and why your distance was just another part of your strength in coping, and why, as I walked away from you that day, I felt as though I had never seen such sadness; such beauty.
—Adam Cheshire
Adam is a writer living in Hillsborough, NC. His previous work appears in The Broken Plate, Boundoff, and Vine Leaves Literary Journal.
