July 2013 | back-issues, fiction
Once, I had one hundred imaginary dogs and my nursery school classmates decided to have imaginary dogs too. Siddhartha decided to have imaginary elephants instead with names filled with letters strung together like the pretty glass beads my teacher wore around her neck. I liked Siddhartha because he always shared his crayons.
Once, Justin, who lived in my grandmother’s building and showed me how boys could pee standing up, told me he was eating my imaginary dogs. I watched him bring his grimy fingers up to his mouth and ran away angrily. Loneliness tainted the rest of my day, and I kept turning my head to look mournfully behind me as I walked, now void of one hundred imaginary puppies that always frolicked in my wake.
The next day, he came up to me again. “Yum, yum, yum,” he said, gnashing his pearl-white teeth together around the necks of my dogs. “Your dogs are delicious.”
“Nuh uh,” I retorted, my hands planted firmly on my hips. “I left my dogs at home today. You’re eating imaginary worms.” Justin, who wore batman underwear and always scored in kickball, stared at me with his mouth open as I walked away triumphantly knowing that his stomach was now filled with imaginary worms.
Justin asked me to marry him at recess the next day. But unfortunately for Justin, I had already asked Siddhartha, who had very politely, said yes.
by Amelia Jane Nierenberg
Amelia Jane Nierenberg is a Junior at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. She is a Fiction Reader for the Adroit Journal, the Fiction Editor and co-founder of the Fieldston Literary magazine, The Icebox, and spends much of her free time painting and writing. Her work either appears, or is forthcoming in Amazing Kids! Magazine, Tap Magazine Issue 25: Bare, Prick of the Spindle, the Blue Pencil Online, the Doctor T. J. Eckelburg Review, the Emerge Literary Journal, the Eunoia Review, the Postscript Journal, the Poydras Review, the Rusty Nail, the Black Fox Literary Magazine, Torrid Literature Polyphony HS and the Blue Lake Review. She received an Honorable Mention for creative nonfiction in the Young Authors Competition in addition to five regional Honorable Mentions, eight Regional Silver Keys and three Regional Gold Keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and a National Gold Key for Flash Fiction.
July 2013 | back-issues, fiction
It felt like I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, like I’d walked into a house that looked like mine, but belonged to someone else. She found me in the kitchen drinking a glass of water. Her eyes welled up and shone bright with what would soon form tears. I was in the right house, but at ten in the morning, I should’ve been somewhere else.
“Don’t cry,” I said.
“How much do we have?” She always cut to what mattered most, and in that minute, what mattered most was money. She didn’t care how I lost my job, she only cared that in that moment, I didn’t have one.
“We’ve got enough. Don’t worry, I’ll find something.” I didn’t know how long it would take and we both knew my words were empty, but I said them anyway.
“And then?” Her voice rose; she was angry, but not at me.
“And then I’ll find something,” I said, letting my tone match hers. “Where are the kids?”
She pointed toward the back yard.
I walked to the window, frosted with ice. Through a clear patch, I envied the innocence on the other side. “Where’s the camera?” I asked. “I want to save this.”
“We sold it. The last time.”
About a month later, I was working again and with my first check, I bought another camera. Nothing fancy, just something that saved scenes worth saving because some things are more important to save than money.
by Foster Trecost
Foster Trecost is from New Orleans, but he lives in Germany. His stories have appeared in Elimae, Corium and Metazen, among other places.
July 2013 | back-issues, fiction
Being on the run wasn’t half as glamorous as I had expected: they never tell you about Bonnie and Clyde shitting in the woods.
by Samuel Best
Samuel Best is a Glasgow-based writer and also runs Octavius, a literary magazine for students studying in Scotland. Samuel is currently writing two novels based on different blends of Scottish national identity, violence and running away. He tweets at @spbbest and has more stories available here: http://samuelbest.weebly.com/
April 2013 | back-issues, fiction
You said you felt under the weather. I suggested soup and you replied tomato. Tomato with grilled cheese. While I blanched them, you put on Van Morrison and scrolled through my songs. You considered yourself an expert.
“You need to clean your music library. Doesn’t it annoy you? How do you know what you have, what you don’t have?”
I shrugged.
“Why don’t you at least keep the genres organized?” you pressed.
“Why put songs in boxes? Why label them?” I was being ornery.
“Angel Pop? What the hell is that? Rainy Day Rock? Sci-Fi? What kind of musical genres are these?” You sounded sick.
I shrugged. It was all downloaded. Some legally, some not. The music came from pretentious blogs and Russian websites and some place called torrent. Data mountains from Korea, Morocco, mouth-breathing basements.
“You know that’s stealing,” you lectured.
***
It was Veteran’s Day when we decided to call it quits. It was raining. We called it quits, whatever ‘it’ was. We had never labeled it.
“I can’t make you happy,” you said.
“I can’t give you anymore,” I said.
You got out of bed, even though you hate the rain. I started scrolling through the songs by genre.
Afropop, Avant Folk, Crossover, Death Electro, Ethnic, Forgiveness Rock, Future Roots, Gracenotes, Merengue, Mexican Summer, Noise, Progressive, Surge, Trip-Hop, Tropical.
I x’ed out. There was no use. You took everything and left me with a head cold.
by Sonya Bilocerkowycz
April 2013 | back-issues, fiction
The worst thing you can say about her is that she was once your friend.
Perceiving that you stood side-by-side, you courted battle fighting the giants, while she secretly cheered for them to win.
On the last night you invited her into your home, you welcomed her to sit at your table, to eat, to talk of life. Recounting your adventures together would make for a feast, but she would only taste bitterness.
On that last night as the conversation dwindled in the air until there was only the sound of forks and knives clinking on empty plates, she began to tell you the story of the frog and the scorpion. The Great Adventure of the Scorpion and the Frog, she called it. You felt something there, in between the words.
Her voice carried on as you cleared the empty plates. Stopping short of the ending, right as the two are about to reach the riverbank together, she paused with an air of great satisfaction. Placing the dishes in the sink, your back turned, “Well, what happened next?” you asked. But you knew what happened.
It was for only a moment that it stung; the knife piercing flesh, scraping bone, a finite point in the unraveling.
The worst of it would come as you lay on the floor. Consuming you, the inevitability of reality, the world for what it was swirling in emotions of shock and disbelief and giants that were nothing more than windmills, adventures that were charades, friendship and loyalty, and belief in things that could be and should have been breaking before actuality and frogs and scorpions. You always knew that scorpions existed.
by Michelle Hanlon
April 2013 | back-issues, fiction
Giant Rat
There was a giant rat that lived in our basement floor apartment in Boston that year. I lived with two guys that I didn’t know very well—and we were all very different personality types. One guy, Tom, worshipped David Bowie. He was a skinny, angular blond guy—with David Bowie hair and clothes. He called himself “Major Tom.” The other guy was Irish Mike. Irish Mike liked the Pogues and the Dropkick Murphies, and all things Irish.
The three of us didn’t have a lot of common interests to talk about. Therefore, we got stoned a lot, and we’d sit around in the living room—which was also where Irish Mike slept—and zone out, watching TV. And the giant rat would lumber across the living room floor, waddling like an armadillo. And we’d be dazed and numbed out, but we appreciated having the rat to focus on. “Holy crap,” someone would say, “that rat is huge!” “It’s more like a dog.”
The rat would squeeze into a hole behind the radiator in Irish Mike’s room and disappear. But then one day the giant rat got stuck. We could hear it—wedged in between the wall and a stud or a pipe in the corner of the living room. It would emit a low squeak and wiggle and push.
We told our landlord about it, but he just sent over an exterminator who left a lot of trays full of poison lying around the apartment. That was the end of the giant rat.
It was sad, like losing a pet. And we didn’t talk to each other about it. We just went about our lives, sharing the painful, tragic glances of parents who silently mourn their lost children.
Johnny Fist
A muscle-bound young blond man strode up to the bar and slapped both of his palms down hard on the wooden counter to get Sherry’s attention. She looked at him, expressionless. He held up six fingers.
“Six beers for Johnny Fist.” He was wearing a tight t-shirt that read: Johnny Fist will Kick some Ass tonight.
“The limit is two,” Sherry answered flatly, putting down two bottles.
Johnny Fist threw some bills onto the bar and smiled, picking up the beers.
“I’ll be back,” he announced.
I’d only been working at the bar for a couple weeks. I’d never seen this guy before. “What’s the deal with the inflatable man?” I asked Sherry.
“Johnny Fist? He’s here quite a bit. He’s a small time professional wrestler—you know, like in that movie with Mickey Rourke. He wrestles down at the armory—I guess he almost always loses. Somebody told me his tights have a black circle on the crotch, with a bright red fist in the center.”
“Figures,” I said, watching Johnny as he worked his way over to a table of girl-women near the bar.
“Who’s got a cigarette for Johnny Fist?” he barked out.
A girl in leather jacket, with a Nascar t-shirt gave him one. Johnny Fist nodded.
“Johnny Fist likes action,” he said with a smile.
“Oh Jesus,” I said, shaking my head.
“He’s all talk,” Sherry said. We watched him pose for the girl-women, flexing his muscle. “I carded him the first time he came in.” Sherry smiled. “His real name is Wendell.”
by Paul Rogalus
