October 2023 | fiction
A cracked skull the constables told me, must have happened when I hit the flagstone walkway. And the bruises, obviously caused by my convulsions. There was no doubt in their minds that I had succumbed to a fit of hysteria, which was perfectly understandable considering the recent spate of molestations in area. The dark stains on my bodice they attributed to a bloody nose, a matter of a weak constitution to be sure. They weren’t concerned about the volume of blood and didn’t seem to notice that there wasn’t any of it around my nostrils. They also didn’t seem to notice the rumpled grass at the edge of the walkway—or that it continued to the garden.
It was an uncivil hour, and he made quite a racket banging on the front gate and yelling that the beast had been seen prowling the lane. He said he followed its curious spring-heeled footprints to our garden wall where they simply stopped, as if it had leaped straight up into the air and over the top. If I could just spare a candle, he could continue the hunt.
From what I could see of him, he wore a long, dark cloak and carried a bullseye lantern that was spent. As I opened the gate, I offered a candle fetched from the kitchen—but instead of accepting it, he threw off his cloak with a sudden jerk revealing a devilish visage and claws that glinted in the moonlight as if made of metal.
He seemed surprised that I didn’t immediately faint at the sight of him or run as he belched out a gout of blue-white flame and clawed at me. He seemed equally surprised at what else I had brought from the kitchen—and at just how much blood a dinner knife could draw.
I wonder if, after I rolled his body off me and began dragging it to the garden, the thought crossed his mind that I might have been expecting him.
Francesco Levato
Francesco Levato is a poet, professor, and writer of speculative fiction. Recent books include SCARLET; Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; and Elegy for Dead Languages. Recent speculative fiction appears in Savage Planets, Sci-Fi Shorts, and Tales to Terrify. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a Ph.D. in English Studies, and is an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.
October 2023 | fiction
La Manzanilla, Jalisco, Mexico, Thursday, July 11, 1991
10:50 am
I am writing in a thatched hut a half mile down the beach from the village. The surf crashes on the shore.
Supplies
2 jugs agua pura
2 cameras
Tortillas
1 can chicken meat which tastes like dog food
1 can Vienna sausage which IS dog food
2 granola bars
1 can Herdez salsa
We have traveled here from Lubbock to witness the greatest full eclipse in decades, using an Eclipse Monitoring Station fashioned from a Johnnie Walker box with a hole cut in it. The hole is covered with foil from a cigarette pack, with a smaller hole poked via a safety pin in the foil. It’s a Camera Obscura, a pinhole camera. Jimbo read about this design someplace. He is a friend from high school and has joined as a Mission Specialist. He wears a straw cowboy hat and a red Speedo. He has a portly frame.
11:00 am
We have not pinpointed what time El Eclipse will begin, having heard many different accounts. Mission Specialist Jimbo was supposed to be on this. One local said it would not occur here in this part of Mexico at all. We discounted his opinion immediately.
The man told us this last night as we sat at a table on the dirt street in front of a little store lit by a bare bulb. A large man with a cleaver, shirt open, was chopping pork on a board, then frying it in a pan over a propane flame.
“El carne?” I said.
“Si, es porco. Taquitos.”
“Dos, por favor,” I said.
He fried the chopped pork and scooped it onto two steamed tortillas.
“Frijoles?” I asked.
He handed me a Tupperware bowl with cold beans floating in it. The taquitos were mas fina. I considered my potential disablement from the mission after consuming the frijoles.
12:45 pm
A hen with six chicks has disappeared from around the shack behind us. El Eclipse underway.
12:55 pm
Eating Herdez salsa out of a can. Smoking a cigarette, peering into Camera Obscura. The earth-rending blackness we expected has not yet materialized.
1:18pm
Sort of like a cloudy day at the beach.
1:30pm
The sky seems to be lightening up. A rooster crows behind us. I believe El Eclipse is over. Jimbo reports that the whole universe has now changed and that his fillings hurt while the spectacle was underway.
A long moment of silence, as the surf crashes.
“Mine, too.” I replied.
Conclusions
The next night, drinking pulque at Hermana Hortensia in Mexico City, Jimbo and I found an English-language newspaper, showing the path of El Eclipse.
We were several hundred miles off course, far from the dark zone, figuring that the moon was really big and would black out the whole country. As the mildly hallucinogenic pulque kicked in, we closed the mission, agreeing we are clueless specks of sand on the beach.
David Fowler
David Fowler has lived in New York, San Francisco, and on a ranch near Penelope, TX. He writes from journals kept during his travels and lives in Jackson, MS. This is his first published fiction.
October 2023 | fiction, Pushcart nominee
Even before the car turned into their driveway, Wilma and Edgar could see they had visitors.
“Is that what I think it is?” Edgar said to his wife of forty years.
“I believe so,” she answered.
“Oh, well.” He peered out at two small goats. They had taken over the small porch—one nibbled at the leg of Wilma’s rocker, the other rubbed its backside against a porch post.
“That post is loose,” Edgar said.
“Aren’t you going to park?” Wilma asked.
“Reckon so.” Edgar removed his foot from the brake. He stopped shy of the carport, not wanting to lose sight of the goats.
Locked in her own stupor, Wilma was thinking of all the times she’d asked Edgar to screen in the porch. Her concern had been mosquitos that kept her from enjoying late afternoons outside.
She looked at the largest of the goats—the one with a clump of hair hanging from its chin. An image of Edgar in his fifties leapt from her memory—he’d sworn he’d never shave the goatee. She smiled, thinking of the day he had.
She wondered, aloud, “Where did they come from.”
“Probably the goat farm down the road,” Edgar said.
“They travel that far?”
“Oh, yes, farther.” Edgar wanted Wilma to stop talking. They would have to go in to bed soon; it was already past eight. He could feel her restlessness.
“We’ll have to go in,” she said.
“Yes.”
As the couple sat in silence, the goats began prancing around. The older goat came to the very edge of the porch and looked squarely into Edgar’s eyes. The animal let out a loud, “Blleeeeaaahhh.”
Wilma flinched.
“They’re testing us,” Edgar said.
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“Now, now.” Edgar patted her left knee. Her dress had ridden up her leg. He felt the warmth of her skin beneath his hand.
She said nothing. He could feel the tension running through her.
He hoped she wasn’t recalling all his foibles. That’s what she did now. He was too distant, too independent; then other times he was too nice, too cloying. He knew she was waiting for him to get out of the car and chase the goats away. Then she could go straight to her room, get out of her travel clothes, and lie down on her bed, alone.
The goats romped some more; one hopped onto Wilma’s rocker and fell back as the chair rocked suddenly.
This made Edgar laugh. “Look at them. I wish I still had that kind of energy.”
“Blah,” his wife said.
There was something about the way Wilma said, “Blah.” Edgar could feel his hand, still on his wife’s knee. A flash of old desire nudged him, touched him deep—much as if a sexy woman had bumped against him, and he was forced to pay attention.
Edgar couldn’t understand it, but he felt young again, ready. He looked into his wife’s eyes and squeezed her knee.
“You old goat,” she replied.
Juyanne James
Juyanne James is the author of The Persimmon Trail and Other Stories (Chin Music Press, 2015) and Table Scraps and Other Essays (Resource Publishers, 2019). Her stories and essays have been published in journals such as The Louisville Review, Bayou Magazine, Eleven Eleven, Thrice, Ponder Review, and Xavier Review, and included in the anthologies New Stories from the South: 2009 (Algonquin) and Something in the Water: 20 Louisiana Stories (Portals Press, 2011). Her essay “Table Scraps” was a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2014. She lives and teaches in New Orleans, Louisiana.
October 2023 | fiction
I once was the hot new thing. You too? The new kid who stirred the id. I had some cheek; the classroom and rehearsal hall were my geek. If hot was or is your lot, some snot lives who wish you were not. They snide and snark, hide in the dark seeing if our bite is as good as our bark. You and I have fans we won’t declare, who check us out, but all us chickens are so very devout. It’s a bubble with an X, a Y, and Ziminy ways it can break into trouble. Bearded and trim, they take a pass and check to see my hipless ass. Start the music playing, make it rock to kill the clock, or every head bye-bye says and cuts us dead. What a game we had with that bit of fame, excited, jotted, and besotted carved up and knotted. Boo hoo, ca choo if we put you in a stew because here comes the sun, and there’s more will to be done. It was a time so round, so fresh, so fully packed. Do it, take it, crate it, or fake it, juice the flavor, let it roast and coast, mature and savor before any boast. A quantum window flew upward in the day, and we tumbled in full to the brim. Six-winged seraphim busted out glory and joy on the In-Fi-niTE AM radio. It was the Hour Of The Word on a ’56 Chevy heard rumblin’ down a dirt road by the old quarry. That’s the story.
Jim Linnell
After attending schools on the East and West Coast, Jim Linnell taught theater and dramatic writing at a university in New Mexico long enough to be a chair and a dean and to have a play festival in his name. He published Walking on Fire: The Shaping Force of Emotion in Writing Drama, then had a catastrophic accident that, for a period, rendered him a quadriplegic. After gaining function with a walker, he published Take It Lying Down: Finding My Feet After a Spinal Cord Injury. He lives and writes in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
October 2023 | fiction
Busted Flat in Baton Rouge
I woke up to Janis Joplin’s whiskey raw voice on the radio. Shiner abruptly turned us south toward Baton Rouge, tapping his hands on the steering wheel. That’s all it took with Shiner, a whim, a change in the wind – song lyrics. We’d come down from Texarkana in a stolen pickup, and then Shiner robbed a convenience store east of Shreveport while I revved the engine, watching the rear-view mirror, waiting to be unleashed like I was in the Indy 500.
We hadn’t been together long. A month, maybe, — since one day shooting bottles and cans in the shimmering desert heat outside Bakersfield. But it was long enough to know we’d been cut from the same cloth. Brothers in arms and all that shit, Shiner liked to say. Like in the Joplin song, I figured we had nothing left to lose, and that was a kind of freedom. Maybe freedom from consequences. Even from worry. We were free to go where Shiner took us, which until the song, had been random.
South of Natchez, we pulled into a gas station in the middle of nowhere to stretch our legs. I went to the men’s room to piss and splash water on my face. I was watching myself in the mirror, making some goofy faces for the hell of it, when I heard the first shot. I recognized the sound of Shiner’s .44 Magnum, and then a loud boom I knew had to come from a shotgun. We didn’t have one and that was a bad sign. My face in the mirror didn’t look like me.
Then the shooting seemed over as I eased around a corner for a look. Shiner was face down by the station door, a pool of blood spreading from what was left of his head, and the station attendant, a middle-aged man with a bald head, sagged dead against the door, the shotgun across his lap, blood pouring from a gaping wound in his neck. Smoke still curled from the shotgun’s barrel, like it had been smoking a cigarette.
There were no other vehicles in the lot, and I went inside and looked around, careful not to touch anything, but nobody was there. I didn’t see any cameras. It was just a shitty country store with an old type of register. The modern world hadn’t caught up to that place yet.
The till was open, and I could see the cash. Not so much, from the look of it. A few small bills, some coins. Not a haul at all. Not really worth the trouble. That was likely as far as Shiner had got before the man brought the shotgun up and Shiner probably dove back out the door. I don’t know why I thought of it, but it seemed like a slow-motion scene from a movie, like from Bonnie & Clyde. I wondered which of us was Bonnie and which was Clyde.
I went over to Shiner and stared at his bloody head a moment and then looked around, but it was just me and two shattered bodies. I fished a wad of cash out of his pocket. He’d have done the same with me and I understood that. Felt it more than understood it. That was a business transaction.
I glanced at him one last time. It no longer looked much like Shiner. But I didn’t feel sorry for him. Now, I’m not unfeeling, but I hadn’t known him long enough to feel much at all. Regret? Maybe for the loss of companionship, I suppose. But no tears. He’d of felt the same about me.
I stepped in the station and grabbed a bag of potato chips and a large Mountain Dew out of a cooler. Some cheese dip, too. A lighter and cigarettes from a rack. No one would miss them. But I left the piddling money in the till alone. It was tempting, I admit. But that was Shiner’s gig and not mine. He hadn’t run that one by me. I’d got what I figured was my cut off his body. It was just the choice I made. No more than that.
I started the truck and just listened to the engine idle for a moment. It had a nice rhythm to it. Steady. No cars went by. I glanced at Shiner and the other guy. It was like an old back and white photograph in a dusty book. I finally drove south, toward New Orleans, again turning the radio dial, but all I got was Cajun caterwauling, some mournful Hank Williams. I wanted some Janis, but she was nowhere to be found. I tossed the empty Mountain Dew and chips bag out a window and saw the bottle bouncing along the road in the rearview mirror.
I ditched the truck and walked into the French Quarter with warm sun on my neck. I drank a few beers on Bourbon Street at a titty bar with frigid AC and bored, skanky dancers. It was as if Shreveport and Natchez had never happened, that Shiner had never happened. I figured time would tell on that. I tried to picture Shiner, but he wouldn’t come into focus.
Outside the titty bar, a man coaxed patrons inside by claiming the prettiest girls in the world awaited them. But I’d seen what they had, and it wasn’t nothing to bark about on a sidewalk. I smirked, lit a cigarette, and looked around. I didn’t know which way to turn, but it didn’t matter, and soon I was swallowed by a crowd, a great moving, colorful mass, and people next to me and in front were out of focus. Shapes with heads on them. The crowd swept me along and closed in on me until I felt as if we were all just one beating heart teetering on the edge of the unknown.
Michael Loyd Gray
Gray’s stories have appeared in Alligator Juniper, Arkansas Review, I-70 Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Westchester Review, Flashpoint!, Black River Syllabary, Verdad, Palooka, Hektoen International, Potomac Review, Home Planet News, SORTES, The Zodiac Review, Literary Heist, Evening Street Press & Review, Two Thirds North, JONAH Magazine, Press Pause, El Portal, Shark Reef, Cholla Needles, The Waiting Room, and Johnny America. He is the author of six published novels. The Armageddon Two-Step, winner of a Book Excellence Award, was released in December 2019. Well Deserved won the 2008 Sol Books Prose Series Prize, and Not Famous Anymore garnered a support grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation in 2009. Exile on Kalamazoo Street was released in 2013. The Canary, which reveals the final days of Amelia Earhart, was released in 2011. King Biscuit, a young adult novel, was released in 2012. Gray is winner of the 2005 Alligator Juniper Fiction Prize and 2005 The Writers Place Award for Fiction.
July 2023 | fiction
The scent of the river on his skin, late, hair and swimsuit wet from Barton Springs. Nine or ten at night, the candles dead. She’s fallen asleep or she’s pretending. It doesn’t matter, she’s nothingness, blue tulle and white dreams. He sheds the trunks, gets in her bed. With her face she seeks the warmth of the sun caught in his skin. Smooth hard chest almost bare of hair. River algae, spring coolness down below, gossamery sustenance, twirling iridescence. It’s loud inside his head . ‘You are full of noise,’ suddenly noticing her deep silence. ‘And drunk, or high, or both,’ she ponders without judging. ‘You are a strong woman’. ‘So?’ He doesn’t tremble but almost. It’s his way of telling her he’s afraid. ‘Shit, you’re not the one who’s almost fifty.’ Damn. Skin against skin, unique kisses. She stops. ‘Yes, it seems incestuous.’ He jumps back half a meter away, escaping. ‘Like mother and son???” His terror makes her laugh and love him all at once. She thinks, ‘No, like brother and sister.’ She means it. Like brother and sister is what it feels like. The skin is exactly the same, the curls, the primordial innocence. He returns to her and the story begins. It will be exactly eight times. The air lowers, breathes them, the earth rises to meet. A vast pool full of people left behind, both in the deep, dancing around each other, as if the water was a ray of sun and they water itself, everyone there, but gone.
Viviane Vives
Viviane Vives is a finalist of the Sandy Crimmins National Prize in Poetry and the Pesserof Prize in Poetry, a semifinalist of the American Short(er) Fiction Contest by American Short Fiction and a nominee for Best of the Net Anthology. Recent publications include Tupelo Quarterly, Litro Magazine (London and New York), Burningword, Reed Magazine, and The Write Launch. Website: shushchattymonkey.com
