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.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
Be a child. Have dreams. Ensure those dreams are undefined, transitory – always out of reach. Reach out a doughy, puppy-fat hand to touch them anyway.
Continue to be a child, even when your body misbehaves by aging. Remember to attend university, even when you have no idea why.
Realize that your dreams are bigger than you thought, that the world is bigger than you thought. Most importantly, be aware of how small you are.
Ignore the lines around your eyes. You are not older, just wiser. Be wiser. Decide to leave everything behind.
Find yourself in a place you never imagined. Wish for the place that you left. Accept that you can’t go back.
Conclude that you could be anywhere in the world, and your puppy-fat hand will always reach out for something else.
— S. M. Colwill
Sarah Colwill-Brown is a British expat studying for an MA in English at Boston College. Her poetry has featured in Poetry & Audience (UK), and last year I won the Seaton Scholarship for graduate creative writing at Kansas State University.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
After hours traipsing through churches bogged down with cherubs and crosses and enough gold to filigree the planet, after hordes of us line up to clear the pathetic TSA amateur style provided by the cruise ship, in the elevator, the glass one overlooking the Mediterranean, I spot him.
“Professor Robert H. Raskin,” I shout. He’s at the back, pinned against the glass. To think I’d barely made it on before the doors closed. I’d know him anywhere. That bald head, that mole like a third eye lurking in the middle of his forehead. Next to him, his wife. I met her once, back when I was a freshman and he taught literature.
“It’s been thirty years! I called you Bobby then. We’d done it in your van that day, the day your wife showed up at school. That was a few weeks before the abortion. We were so literary. We compared my pregnancy to the girl’s in ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’ It was much easier than thinking about a real child, you being married and all.”
The elevator is silent. I imagine the others are thinking the view isn’t worth a ride up with a lunatic. But I’m not crazy, it’s just that at 48 my estrogen supply is dwindling, and testosterone, more of it now, is coursing through my body, like some kind of truth and freedom serum.
“Oh, here we are, stopping. Is this your deck, Robert? Making your way through the madding crowd are you?”
As he slouches out, an old man with his head down, his wife looks at me, her gaze direct, but disinterested, as if I’m one more relic on view, after a day filled with more of the past than she cares to absorb.
— Linda Lowe
Linda Lowe received her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of California, Irvine. A chapbook of her poems, “Karmic Negotiations” was published by Sarasota Theatre Press. Online, her stories have appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, The Linnet’s Wings, Right Hand Pointing and others.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
Ten minutes ago, I dropped you
at the airport, and you cried and I stared
blankly at the wall above your head, waiting
for the tears I knew wouldn’t fall,
not there, not then,
not when I needed them to.
Now I’m on the road, heading back
to the apartment you helped me decorate,
and there’s a hole in my stomach,
the air conditioner blasting right through it,
knowing that you’re sitting alone
in the terminal, trying your best
to bury your sadness but falling
short—way short, your eyes red like
the blouse you walked away in. But also
because I’m hungry,
because we ate brunch, not lunch,
and now it’s dinner time; and
if you were here with me right now, in the car,
we’d be discussing our dinner options,
flipping through our combined mental rolodex
of recently purchased Target grocery items,
each of us pretending to desire
what we suspect the other one does.
Ultimately, we would debate
over chicken stir fry or baked Swai,
and because neither one of us knows how
to make a decision, we would leave
that decision to chance and play rock-paper-scissors,
and you would win, like you always do,
so we would eat what you thought I wanted, which was the Swai,
and you would have been right.
I do want the Swai.
I want the Swai right now, but thinking of the Swai
makes my face contort
like a deep-sea monster,
my upper lip fat
and quivering,
my cheeks swollen, my eyebrows rolling
like the Nebraska Sandhills
we canoed through last summer. And of course
now I’m crying, now that I’m alone,
because how in the hell am I supposed to make Swai
when the only thing I know about Swai
is that I love you?
— Carson Vaughan
Carson is a native Nebraskan and freelance writer with published features work in Salon, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Orion, Truthout, the Omaha World Herald, the Lincoln Journal Star, the Wilmington Star News, and other publications. He currently serves as the nonfiction editor of Ecotone at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
1. The Confession
“I know that Cheri’s been cheating on me.”
I looked at Rod. We were jogging together around the lake. “She told you?”
“Fuck no; the bitch is too afraid of me to spit it out.”
“Then how—“
“Her face told me. I been with her long enough to tell. No different than if she confessed outright.” Rod picked up speed; I managed to keep up with him even though I hadn’t been jogging much lately.
“Maybe you’re misreading her. Maybe—“
“Here’s what I’m gonna do to the fucker once I squeeze it out of her who she fucked.” He slowed down and pulled a switchblade from his shorts pocket. “I’m gonna cut off his dick. Slowly, so I can enjoy the screaming. Then I’ll shut him up by shoving it into his mouth. And then I’ll grab my .38 and—”
“Jesus, Rod, stop it. Just stop it!”
“It’ll be quite a show, Gus. I’ll give you a ringside seat. ‘Wild West Justice.’”
We finished our jog in silence. As I turned to head for home, Rod said, “If she’s still visiting with Jill tell her to get her ass back here now.”
Jill and Cheri were on the sofa, solemnly watching Cheri’s son, Rod Jr., playing with the puppy. I pecked Jill on the cheek. She didn’t respond.
Cheri stared at me; then she said, “Did you and Rod have a good run?”
“I need a drink,” I said—more to myself than to Jill or Cheri, and went into the kitchen. I poured some whiskey into a tumbler, took a gulp, sat down, and put my head in my hands.
Cheri walked in after a decent interval. She looked ill. I could see what she was thinking.
2. The Wound
Dennie said he wanted to show me something. We’d been lounging in his back yard. It got very hot so we went inside. He made a pitcher of lemonade, spiked it with his mother’s vodka, what the hell, she was out of town for the weekend. We played some chess. He must have poured a lot of vodka into the lemonade because after just a few swigs the chess pieces began moving by themselves.
“You said you wanted to show me something, Dennie?”
Wincing, he slowly removed his shirt. His fingers were long and thin. “This.” He moved to one side and lifted his arm
There was a huge purple contusion on his ribcage.
“Jeez, what happened to you?”
He dropped his arm, readjusted himself on his chair and returned his attention to the chessboard. He wiggled his finger on a pawn as if trying to decide whether to deploy it or not. “It was BB .”
“Bad Brad Jensen?”
Dennie finally moved the pawn. “Yeah.”
“When?”
“During basketball practice.” As Dennie explained it, he and BB had had gotten into an argument. BB began speed-dribbling the ball and suddenly flung it at Dennie with such force that Dennie stumbled and fell. He called BB a thug and flipped him off. Before Dennie could get back on his feet, BB kicked him in the ribs.
There was this unwritten rule: giving guys like BB the bird would earn you a bashed-in face or a couple of broken bones.
“More lemonade, Carl?
I nodded.
“Too bad BB has such a mean streak,” Dennie sighed. “There was a time when I felt sure we were really gonna hit it off.”
“Hard to imagine.”
Dennie gazed at me for a long moment and smiled. Finally, he said, “Your move.”
3. The Rumor
Did you hear the rumor?
I most certainly did. Isn’t it disgusting? How could they have been so sinful?
It doesn’t surprise me. Everywhere you look, people are turning into sinners.
I wonder if the rest of the neighborhood heard about it. Well, I am going to find out.
In just a few hours, the rumor had spread through the neighborhood. But the rumor did not stop there. It spread through the next neighborhood and the next. By the end of the following day, the rumor had spread through the entire town.
It was a wildfire of a rumor.
The rumor spread to one town after another. By the end of the week, the rumor had spread across the county, gaining strength as it spread, reshaping itself as it grew stronger with each new county it invaded.
Did you hear the rumor? Did you hear what they did? Isn’t it disgusting? How can people be so sinful?
The wildfire became a conflagration, consuming every county in the state, consuming the state, and eventually every state in the lower forty-eight. Alaska was delayed, thanks to Canada; Hawaii was spared.
Three persons dared to quash the rumor, the monstrosity that the rumor had become. Those individuals were apprehended, branded as enemies of the faith, and promptly silenced. Of course, they had become the flashpoint of yet another rumor.
— Fred D. White
Fred D. White’s work has appeared in Confrontation, Michigan Quarterly Review, Other Voices, Pleiades, Southwest Review, Writer’s Digest, etc. His most recent book is *Where Do You Get Your Ideas? A Writer’s Guide to Transforming Notions into Narratives* (Writer’s Digest Books, 2012).
