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
July 2023 | fiction
Scaly edges pierce eggshell: my oval microcosm of speckled beige – limited, yet a thinly protective sphere.
Siblings dispersed, hatching to dilating day-lit skies and mother’s sheltering feathers. Feather-winged, like her. Fitted into a puzzle. Her pieces.
Not so, this fate, for me.
My edges are sharp, toughened as steel cornices. I choke on flames – knowing I’m different.
I patter discontentedly, innately perceiving a world – one elongated ahead as taut elastic. One where scales are not accepted nor hot-flame breath. An existence where a man can crumble to ashy dust from a plume of distaste, cannot be tolerated. Mankind will view me as a villain: disdain pouring from clenched lips.
As fragments of shell cascade amidst held wings, unopened fans of propellent force, I admire belted rays of sunlight. Bands warm troughs and peaks of my verdant skin like a reduced in size mountain range. As my wingtips expand, more shell dispels, flaking before my beating heart.
Man will fear me.
They will come – summoning blood spill.
I sense hellish flair, even now, within teething, infantile hours, coursing vivaciously.
None will survive belly-deep roars, nor cast sight away to a more tender species, petting absentmindedly whilst entangling fingers into furred oblivion.
I am the future.
Here, and now, my clawed feet stomp the earth, grounding eggshell roots to powdery forgetfulness.
Upwards, I soar to shaky plains where God stands by an easel, casting futures with daubs of metallic paint.
Emma Wells
She is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry published with various literary journals and magazines. She enjoys writing flash fiction and short stories also. Emma won Wingless Dreamer’s Bird Poetry Contest of 2022 and her short story entitled ‘Virginia Creeper’ was selected as a winning title by WriteFluence Singles Contest in 2021. Her first novel is entitled Shelley’s Sisterhood which is due to be published in 2023.
July 2023 | fiction
‘Never apologise, never explain’: a mantra my mother shared with me frequently, and herself embraced as fiercely as any of her lovers whenever another of her liaisons came to light. Describing herself as ‘a strong woman’, she was, she said, unfettered by petty censure and the expectations of others.
My father’s forbearance appeared limitless, but ‘a strong man’ he was not. The term itself invites ridicule. I picture a fairground performer, attired in leopard-skin tights, sightless eyes, rictus grin, swinging rubber dumbbells above his head.
Why, you might ask, did my mother marry him? Were there boundaries that still needed to be stretched? Freedoms that still needed to be tested? Was my father’s love a provocation? Was his patience a challenge?
He never asked for apologies or explanations. There would, he knew, be none. She was the woman he adored. This was the price he paid.
His solace was poetry. Whatever the season, whatever the weather, he would take his pale, age-stained edition of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury into the garden. Sitting under the protecting arms of the wych-elm, wearing a light cotton jacket in summer, a heavy gaberdine in winter, he would read Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, losing and finding himself in the mists, clouds and clearings of their alchemical words.
Summer and winter, summer and winter. Did his poets start to tire him? Did their high sentiments fail to uplift him? Turning the pages, did the familiar verses begin to weary him? Did they weigh him down?
My father was found hanging from a low branch of the wych-elm. Palgrave, released from his grasp, lay open beneath his feet. Taking it up, I searched its pages for a note or letter, a slip of paper perhaps, something to mark his place. I discovered nothing. No explanation. No apology.
Nicolas Ridley
Nicolas Ridley lives in Bath (UK) where he writes fiction, non-fiction, flash fiction, scripts and stage plays under different names. A prize-winner and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his short stories have been widely published in anthologies, literary magazines and journals in the UK, Ireland, Canada and the USA.
July 2023 | fiction
We didn’t want to go to the homeless non-profit fundraiser, mostly because we were tired, because we already donated money and needed items, and had volunteered to work the shelter, but we were invited and had free tickets. It had been a while since we’d been out in the community even though we were vaccinated, boosted, and still wore masks. Before we committed, however, we pulled a suit and dress that hadn’t been worn in two years and decided they both still fit well enough and likely no one had seen us in them before, or if they had, they wouldn’t remember.
The same caterer who supplied all chicken dinner fundraisers served fried chicken, and by the time we got to the steaming pan, the breasts were gone, and we had to choose between thighs, drumsticks, or wings, not enough protein to keep anyone alive. We spooned some instant mashed potatoes, some green beans from a can, and a store-bought role and shuffled like cattle back to our table to hear a speaker who thought a lot of himself and droned on about motivation from his stint in professional sports. If anyone had checked, he would have discovered plagiarism from a psychology textbook.
The venue was at the city owned Civic Center, a place each non-profit rented because instead of twelve hundred dollars, they got a discounted rate to one thousand dollars. What none of them knew was that the mayor used to charge eight hundred dollars and raised the price to twelve hundred dollars with the idea he could give discounts to a thousand and still make two hundred dollars for each chicken dinner fundraiser. His capitalistic move had worked, and the Civic Center went from a fifty percent occupancy to ninety percent and could have been one hundred, except for the religious college who simply wouldn’t move their events even after twenty percent of their alumni and donors got COVID, since the college hadn’t social distanced them and because they refused to wear masks.
After dinner, a handful of couples danced around their tables to the live music coming from the corner by a three-string band who made a decent living from their fee plus tips even though they didn’t have health care or any other benefit and were one gig away from homelessness. I heard the nonprofit cleared five hundred dollars profit after the rent, the band, and the caterer were paid, and they set a goal for one-thousand-dollar profit for the next chicken dinner fundraiser. We decided we’d give even more, but we weren’t interested in any more chicken dinners.
Niles Reddick
Niles Reddick is author of a novel, two collections, and a novella. His work has been featured in over 500 publications including The Saturday Evening Post, PIF, New Reader, Forth, Citron Review, Right Hand Pointing, Nunum, and Vestal Review. He is a three-time Pushcart, a two time Best Micro nominee, and a two time Best of the Net nominee. His newest flash collection “If Not for You” has recently been released by Big Table Publishing.
July 2023 | fiction
She was flying in her dream, flying through the sacred sky, when she tumbled through the clouds and landed in a heap of rubble upon the earth. Then she knew she was no longer dreaming because someone trampled on top of her trying to get somewhere else. She tried to move, but her legs were pinned down, her foot twisted in a hideous manner on the other side of a slab. Thunder clapped inside her head. She tried to call out, but her mouth was gasping on the stones next to her and beside that lay her tiny, battered heart shining in the moon’s light. Suddenly it struck her: she was dead. She could see pieces of herself all about.
Yet instead of being horrified by this, she felt a surprising warmth inside. She was flowing. Not down the dusty road and towards the sea, but up towards the heavens where her dream had been. In that very moment she was turning into light, her spirit expanding. She had risen and others had risen too, all of them ascending, weightless. They had begun again.
The village lay scattered far below, the people who had survived were shouting and throwing their hands wildly about, everyone looking for all the things they’d ever loved that had been taken away. She could not see this or even hear it, but she sensed it. All things came back to what they were.
It was market day, but she would never be going again with her mother and sister to buy the apricots and figs or the fresh anchovies from the smiling fishmonger. She would never sip sweet boza sprinkled with bits of shaved cinnamon bark or chase her sister through the silvern almond grove. La-le! La-le! – she could hear someone calling, the syllables of her name hanging crystalline in the icy air.
And it had all happened because of that evening years ago when the contractors had made their hidden agreement: more sand than cement. Who would even know? They exchanged incredulous looks as they imagined a new car, gold watches, trips to the resort by the sea. What was so wrong with wanting such things? What would ever happen? Nothing, not for a thousand years.
For the children of Turkey.
Donna Obeid
Donna Obeid’s work appears most recently in The Baltimore Review, Carve, Flash Fiction Magazine, Hawai`i Pacific Review, South 85 Journal, and Waterwheel Review; she was a finalist for the Julia Peterkin Literary Award and Raymond Carver Short Story Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Palo Alto, California. Read more at: www.donnaobeid.com.
