January 2014 | back-issues, fiction
You brought our freedom as a mirage in their parallax vision. In that one brick wall shirt that you wore every day. That spring noontime, in gym class, that we stood at the far end of the parking lot ballfield—you with your middle finger masking-taped to two popsicle sticks, splinted—and you urged me, with each change of batter, to retreat ten feet more from the game.
We did it for the full 48 minutes, gliding backwards in our ballgame-facing position—behind the chain that marked the schoolyard boundary, onto and beyond the sidewalk, across the street, down the block—slack witnesses reverse-looming further and further away.
To have watched receding the whole civilization, that credence! Only the bell of the period startled us from it—and you laughed at the top of your lungs, yowled, as I scrambled—we’d never get back in time. You turned rightway around, that sly loping walk of yours, made of your hands a listing scale of comically foregone decision. To have watched it all receding, in those Lion’s Club glasses, without blinking. You were right: we were well out of that now.
by Nicole Matos
Nicole Matos is a Chicago-based writer, professor, and roller derby girl. Her credits include Salon, The Classical, The Rumpus, THE2NDHAND, Vine Leaves, Chicago Literati, berfrois, Oblong, neutrons protons, and others. You can catch her blogging for Medium, publishing tappable stories on Tapestry, and competing as Nicomatose #D0A with the Chicago Outfit Roller Derby, too.
January 2014 | back-issues, fiction
“Have another?”
“Can’t, I have to go.”
“You always say that.”
“Only when I need to leave.”
I can still hear the corny music on the jukebox, the clinking of the glasses. The barkeep heard our chiming, collected his money, a too generous tip. We left, bade each other platonic adieus, walked separately to our separate families. How I miss my travelling days!
At home, always the same or nearly the same scene: I open the door, panting after my three story climb, my wife at the range frying or boiling something. “About time you got back.”
“I was delayed.”
“I bet,” smelling my breath, it’s cheap vodka, not kissing me. “Did you pick up the bread?”
“I forgot. I can go get some.”
“Don’t bother, it’s late, you may get delayed again, besides bread makes me fat. Do I look fat in this?” She twirls away from the steaming stove.
I say nothing or say something mollifying. My expression does or does not give me away, I can never tell with her, besides she isn’t fat. We eat in silence, our son long gone, the damn TV still on, a carafe of mineral water our only splurge. I pick at my meal, not wanting to mix drink and food, that’s why I’m too thin.
“If you drank less, we’d both eat better.”
I rise, clean off my plate, return, put my arms on her shoulders, nuzzle her ineptly, we don’t kiss. “But we wouldn’t be so happy.”
by Clyde Liffey
Clyde Liffey lives near the water.
January 2014 | back-issues, fiction
The fish is staring at me from the plate, its blackened skin and brittle tail spread between rice pilaf and sautéed mushrooms. A foot of omega-3 fatty acids, which my mother, who set the plate before me, said helps with depression.
I wasn’t depressed last winter when I hugged the possibility I might be pregnant, wrapping my heart around the secret, envisioning my baby tadpole-size clinging to the side of my uterus, our blood intermingling. Brian’s baby. There was a bridal shop down the street from my apartment; I already knew the dress I wanted. But then I wasn’t pregnant after all and Brian told me he’d met someone else.
At night I drank and wept, working up a Camille-like tragic image. During the day, I sniffled at my desk until co-workers rolled their eyes when I reached for another tissue. Then, in early April, a bunch of us got let go.
When I couldn’t find a job, my mother said she’d moved her sewing stuff out of my old room and I was welcome to it. So, I’m back home with this damn fish, my mother eyeing me across the table, and my father hunched over his food like a wolf with a fresh kill. Who wouldn’t be depressed?
The fish doesn’t want to be here. Once it shimmered in fast moving water. It might have been pregnant with hundreds of luminous eggs. How can I eat it when, like me, all it wanted was to have babies? I try to explain this to my mother, but she can’t get past the sex part.
by Anna Peerbolt
Anna Peerbolt’s flash and short stories have appeared in Drunken Boat, Prick of the Spindle, Apollo’s Lyre, The Legendary, Long Story Short, DOGZPLOT, and elsewhere online.
January 2014 | back-issues, fiction
Lucy strolled into my life twenty years ago. Short and heavyset, trailing a couple of unruly dogs, she welcomed me to the neighbourhood. Most mornings Lucy wound her way through the community with her dogs in tow, and their leisurely pace always invited the opportunity to chat.
On warm evenings Lucy walked with her husband Leo, a tall thin navy veteran. It made people smile to see the elderly couple hand in hand. When Lucy stopped to admire gardens and dispense dubious dog training advice, Leo waited patiently, content to let his wife weave her hospitality through the neighbourhood.
An ambulance came for Leo one bright afternoon and for a few months Lucy’s walks took a different path. Neighbours respected the urgency in her step as she hurried back and forth on her way to the hospital. No time for chats and even the dogs curtailed their usual exuberance.
One morning, a thinner and frailer Lucy stopped to admire my fall asters. Leo was gone, but Lucy was back. I joined her as she retraced a familiar path through the community and gathered condolences like a grand bouquet of sunflowers. Lucy’s daily walks continued until the day she got confused – inexplicably lost on her own street – and well-meaning family intervened. Recently, a young couple bought Lucy’s old house.
I often stroll by at a leisurely pace that invites the opportunity to chat.
by Hermine Robinson
Hermine loves writing short fiction in many genres and her publication credits include Readers’ Digest, Postcard Shorts and Vine Leaves Literary Journal. She lives with her husband and children in Calgary, Alberta where the winters are long and the inspiration is plentiful. Her nickname Minkee was chosen at the age of five and it is still the name she answers to when it is shouted across a crowded room.
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
