Current Issue

Contents

1. Sancha Panza -OR- Dads Are Just Jerks Who Divorce Your Mom — MD Joyce
2. Apparition — Howie Good
3. Letters to my Father — Eric Crawford
4. Jake is my Only Husband — Francine Witte
5. Cough Syrup — Jennifer McGowan
6. Perception — Mireille Wells
7. Dimensions of the Heart — Stephen Ferguson
8. Cerebellum, plural — Gabriella Brand
9. Less Than Super Hero — Rachel Cox
10. Once Was Lost — Vaiju Joshi
11. Bonfire of 2059 — Vivien Jones
12. My Little Runaway — Katie Moore

 

Sancha Panza -OR- Dads Are Just Jerks Who Divorce Your Mom — MD Joyce

It was all thanks to the bright red sign of China Palace 88 that I saw her. The sign was just the right shade of neon needed to silhouette her. Maybe shade isn’t the right word to describe neon. In any case, the first thing I noticed was that her legs went on forever. All eight of them. There, on my windshield.

Even though the car was stopped she wasn’t moving at all. She must have been shell-shocked; but who could hold that against her? In only a few seconds she had been taken away from everything she ever knew. Not only everything she ever knew, but everything her mother knew, her grandmother knew, her great-grandmother knew, and Holy Mary knows how many more generations of little arachnid families with their little arachnid cannibalistic values. I bet that thought would have blown the mind of a significant portion of the clientele of China Palace 88.

The sun was beginning its slow May setting and the air was cool and wet and this spider was my only companion as my car flew a calculated 5MPH over the speed limit down Route 47. I wonder what kind of effect that sort of speed has on a spider? Do they even feel it? Surely she was feeling it, otherwise she’d be moving. I mean, it’s not like spiders move that fast anyway. Right? They probably never travel even a single MPH, ya know? So this would be the equivalent of a human being strapped to a Boeing 737 or something. Maybe her eyes were popping. Brutal. But hey, they’re pretty tough. Older than teeth in fish. Saw it on Jeopardy. Real tough; relatively speaking, that is. Humans are so weak. Or maybe it’s that when you’re small and insignificant you have to be so tough, just to stand a chance.

The first few times she moved a millimeter closer to the open crack of my window my index finger would set the little window motor off and the car would fill with that sort of reverse-pop–you know, that sound that makes you feel like you’re sitting there inside a half-gone bottle of Champagne as it’s being corked up. This got real old real quick. She was barely moving and soon all I was thinking about was if her eyes were popping or not. Maybe she was blind by now. All those little bits of farm dust slapping the windshield had to be like meteorites to her. I guess she moved so little because she was afraid if she let go, she’d be swept away. Clingy. I liked that about her.

About an hour in and the sky’s more grey than orange as rainclouds gather and I’m stuck on this little conundrum. I spent lots of time trying to slow down, or lingering at the few stop signs I came across and flicking underneath the glass. She’s just not getting it. I’m going back and forth on the idea of stopping the car and letting her get off. But would she even get off? She’d probably just climb underneath the hood. I wonder if she would be able to live in there, in the engine of my car with its noxious pistons and belts and shaking and chemical fumes. So what can I do? Knock her off? Seems a lot harder than you’d think it to be. I’d probably break a few of her legs no matter how gentle I am and she’d be stuck out in an unknown farm wilderness all ready to be eaten up by some large unforgiving male wolf spider with an affinity for NBA hats and dance music and lies. She’s just a common house spider, after all.

This is my chance. I’ll stop for some gasoline and hopefully get her off my back. Or my car’s back, rather. Car’s front. Whatever. As soon as I open the door and begin to fill up I notice she’s already gone. Perfect. I’ll go buy a candy bar to give her more time to cement the deal and continue on my merry way. So I pull out of the station and drive over the Illinois River and as I’m cruising along I’m beginning to miss her a little bit. For the past two hours she’s been my sole companion as I listened to NPR and shook my head dejectedly or when I would rock out to music I never listened to growing up and then leer at old men in the lane next to me.

Ten minutes out of the gas station and I’m munching on a Whatchamacallit I bought and liking it, I mean really liking it. For the past two months I’ve been eating nothing but candy with nuts in it, ’cause just since one person in your family can’t eat nuts doesn’t mean the whole family shouldn’t. I’m liking the candy bar so much a flick of peanut-spit flies over the steering wheel and hits the windshield and bam!, I see her, right in the corner. For the next hour and a half, she’s there. She’s there with me when that semi-truck driver cuts me off, there when I had to hit 90MPH to pass the buttface, she’s there with me as the car becomes weightless soaring down a hill and I point — actually take my hand off the wheel and point — to the brood of antiseptically white windmills of the modern age and she doesn’t respond with any combat advice at all. I guess I should have expected that. She never really did before, she wasn’t really ever meant to be my Sancho Panza.

Lightning starts to illuminate the grey twilight and I can see the deep grey clouds flashing like the dodgy fluorescent bulbs in every apartment I ever lived in with mom. I’m almost there and now I’m doing an uncalculated 15MPH over the speed limit. Then the rain starts. Man, she’s dead. No way can she get out of this. The rain starts slapping the windshield so fast I can’t even see if she’s still hanging on but how could she be? She’s got to be gone. I drive for another 30 seconds with no wipers on and then I say “screw it” and hit the button. I’m startled by how little this improves my visibility. Now I’m pissed. What kind of spider can survive the rain?

The rain has almost stopped completely now. I pull over and grab a heavy beatstick style flashlight that I wish I could say was a sexy black with scratches that reveal a cool metal interior but it’s not, it’s not at all. In fact it’s a sort of bluish-purple color with sparkles in it–the kind of sparkles you see in the girly jump-ropes that come out around Easter. Hey, my mom got it for five bucks at the hypermart, what do you expect from me?

I don’t get out right away. I light a cigarette first. When I do look, to my surprise, she’s there. At least, most of her is. She’s over by the wiper. Looks like she got caught in it. She doesn’t have long-legs now. She doesn’t have eight of them either. She’s not moving much. If the wind and dust-particle-meteorites didn’t pop her eyes I’m guessing the wiper did. I stand there, ash falling on the hood of my car. I stand there forever until she uncurls and starts slowly moving again. She’s going the wrong way. It takes a long time for her to clear the wiper. Once she does, I spread out my palm and slam it on the windshield. I expected to feel her, warm and gooey underneath. Or at least gooey. But I don’t. I just feel the cool glass that’s wet without actually being wet, like it was raining rubbing alcohol or something. I go to wipe her off on my jeans, but then remember I’m a bit too OCD for that. So I pull a tuft of grass up from the side of the highway and wipe her off on that. Then I wipe my hand on my jeans.

Because I’d rather be an executioner than a tormenter.

Because what kind of spider can survive the rain, anyway?

What can I really say about you? In life, you didn’t even have a name. In death, you will. Here lies Sancha. What I liked most about her was that she was clingy; sticky feet and all that. What I liked second-most was that, even though she didn’t eat peanuts, it’s because of entirely different reasons than personal taste and I was OK with that. She always surprised me with how much of a fighter she was. I liked that, too. I liked that a lot.

I arrive at the tattoo parlor just when my friend’s getting off work. We go out, we eat. We talk to 4AM about tattoos and punk rock and non-union factories and no money. I had a pretty good time, I guess. I didn’t really think about her, I guess. In fact, I forgot about her completely, I guess.

Back in the car and driving–my mind filled with images of ink Bettie Pages on hip-bone canvasses and the smell of tarmac after a Midwestern thunderstorm and just as I start to exit town underneath the last series of streetlamps before the four hour trip home I’m able to see the invisible for a fleeting moment. This is what I see: silk lines. Lines like Indian ghost-trails turning my windshield into intricate gridline cartography of the invisible on the invisible. Lines catching in the luminescence that only black asphalt, black skies, and city lights can bring. Lines that were made by something that never really planned on going anywhere but somehow went further than all the others. Lines that were with me when I passed the windmills a second time, blinking in the night. Lines that were with me as the sun broke. Lines that would have been a real pain to get off, even if I wanted to.

 

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Apparition –- Howie Good

Mother died
on Wednesday.

I look up.

Row upon row
of windows
rise out of sight,

the same
half-eaten face
in each one.

Mine.

 

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the new poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to charity, which can be read further about here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red.

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Letters to my Father –- Eric Crawford

I’m pen pal to a homeless man in the city. I deliver the letters myself. By request, I tell him they are from his son, and I sign them accordingly:

Your son,

[signature here by hand]

Edward

P.S. Mind the hi-hat.

He runs his index finger across his son’s signature only once each letter. The words run through his eyes and build another life in him. His lips relax and tend to get pulled to his cheeks. I try to be funny because he is, so why wouldn’t his son be? By request, I bring him a clear, empty wine bottle with each letter. He rolls the letter tight like a straw, puts it in the bottle, and tells me to lay it in the ocean for when he comes back to earth as a sea captain. We live nowhere near an ocean. Needless to say, my pond is becoming a floorboard of gyrating glass.

 

Eric Crawford is a current student at Kennesaw State University. Another poem of his can be read at JMWW (jmwww.150m.com). He lives and writes in Cumming, GA.

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Jake Is My Only Husband –- Francine Witte

but still I wish there were more. When you grow up in a large family, you think like that. Hustle and bustle just gets in your ears.

When I tell Jake I wish I had had other husbands, he just looks confused, like the cat my brother, Bill, put out in the snow. Bill was the oldest of my brothers, and he taught me how horrible men could be.

There is nothing horrible in Jake. He would have given up his own bed for that cat. He’s a lot like my brother, Allen, kind and a little naive. Too bad Allen ended up gambling away our parents’ house, and we all ended up in the cold like a bunch of cats meowing into the winter night.

Then, there were the others: Groper, Slacker, Boozer, Methlab and Cheat. Yes, they were truly awful, but they did teach me how to never fall too deeply into sleep.

When I met Jake, I asked him what he was hiding. I told him I’d find out anyway, and I didn’t feel like wasting time. He said I was adorable and that he loved that part of me, the damaged little girl that he, alone, could fix.

And he keeps trying to fix me. I find self-help books and pamphlets. I am a lamp that he wants to re-wire. He is so damned devoted, that I think he can’t be real. That there must be something to him that I haven’t seen. But for now I will just have to love him. I will have to forget about the other husbands. Besides, it’s not like I really need them now. I can just wait for the other husbands in Jake to show up.

 

Francine Witte lives in NYC. She received her MA from SUNY Binghamton and her MFA from Vermont College. Her flash fiction chapbook, “The Wind Twirls Everything,” was published by MuscleHead Press. She is the winner of the Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award in fiction from Ropewalk Press, and her chapbook, Cold June was published in 2010. Her poetry chapbook, “First Rain” was published Summer 2009 by Pecan Grove Press. She is a high school English teacher.

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Cough Syrup –- Jennifer McGowan

So I went to the doctor for cough syrup,
and he gave me a prescription
so I went to the pharmacy and said
the doctor said to call him
if this tastes of aniseed,
because he didn’t know—it didn’t say
in his purple book of medicines—
and I can’t tolerate aniseed,
and the pharmacist nodded and said
he understood, and it didn’t.

So I went out for a cuppa
to kill time, reading something or other,
then went back and got the bottle
thinking I may as well have some now
and save my lungs, so I took a swig
and was promptly sick all over
the white floor. So I shouted accusingly
but the pharmacist was confused
because he said it didn’t taste of aniseed,
but of licorice.

So I took the bottle
and threw it in one long arc,
glass glistening in slow motion
as it sailed over laxatives, soaps, and umbrellas
and it hit the front window and shattered,
and I shouted, “Licorice is aniseed, arsehole,”
and strode out through the ruins
through a thousand fractured rainbows.

Okay, so I didn’t. But I could have.

 

Jennifer’s poetry has been accepted by The Connecticut Review, Gargoyle, Connecticut River Review, Envoi, Acumen, American Journal of Nursing, and other magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. She has a chapbook with Finishing Line Press and has work in a forthcoming feminist speculative poetry anthology from Aqueduct Press and an anthology of New England poetry. She is a peer reviewer for the arts page of American Journal of Nursing and a reviewer for Orbis. Several of her poems have been used as teaching texts at university level in the US.

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Perception –- Mireille Wells

“This ends our tour of the museum,” the tour guide recited. The cheap microphone in his hand buzzed with static. “You now have an hour free to explore the exhibits. Again, please meet back in the lobby.”

The guide set down his equipment on the reception desk and left for his break. Suddenly bereft of their leader, most of the tour group stood in place, murmuring and shifting uneasily. A sudden shout brought them all to attention.

“Gladys, come look! Aren’t these the just cutest things?” screeched a large woman in an electric pink sweatsuit. She was pointing to a display of plush panda bear toys in the gift shop window. Her friends hurried over to follow her inside, and soon everyone else trailed in after them. In a matter of moments, the shop was filled with the roar of American voices, cheerfully shouting over each other.

Only one member of the tour group hesitated before entering the gift shop. A white-haired man stood alone in the lobby. He stood proudly, despite the cane of expensive dark wood in his hand. The old man smoothed the lapel of his dove gray suit and glared at the sea of Hawaiian shirts heaving inside the gift shop.

He turned around to consider the glass doors that led to the museum exhibits. The tour had been a frustrating experience for him. Having been raised to think of Impressionist paintings as the ultimate form of art, he had approached this museum’s pieces as if they too were blurry watercolors. He had stepped back, and then forward, squinting carefully to discern different brushstrokes. By changing his perspective, he hoped to find the trick that revealed each piece’s significance.

Unfortunately, he found few brushstrokes to analyze, as the museum specialized in installation art. From afar, the first piece he tried to examine resembled a huge abstract painting. Looking closer, he could see it was actually a framed sheet of red plastic. The inhumanly smooth paint job had nothing to tell him. Exasperated, he turned to the small placard next to the cube. He knew he was cheating, but he hoped the placard would at least explain what he should have seen.

Qi-Xian Li. ‘Boxed Light’

Nothing. The group was moving on to the next piece, a giant horse made of yarn, so the man gave up and turned away. As he left the room, the installation’s automated lights kicked in, playing over the red surface and illuminating latent patterns beneath the plastic.
The old man had dutifully followed the group through the entire collection. He had approached each piece with optimism, hoping to find some connection with this foreign art, but each and every piece had been just as confusing. So now, he turned away from the exhibit doors. He simply couldn’t go back and pretend to look at more of that junk.

“Blobs of color, ridiculous…” he muttered as he walked into the gift shop. A rack of postcards caught his eye. He pulled one out at random and studied the image. He saw a cartoon dog.

The old man did not notice how weirdly the artist had anthropomorphized the dog. The plump animal stood on its hind legs, stuffed into a medieval peasant dress. The dog rested one paw on the head of a pet monkey at its feet. Monkey and dog sported matching fanged grins. Behind the dog, there was a table, bearing two baskets on top of black velvet. One basket held fruits painted in golden and rosy tones. The other basket contained a skull. An elaborate, stylized plant motif encircled the whole image.

The man noticed the plants and was curious. His hand shook as he brought the postcard closer to his eyes. He finally saw something he recognized; the red blobs clinging to the elaborately twisted vine had to be strawberries. His granddaughter loved strawberries, and animals.

Taking hold of his cane, he stumped over to the counter and made his purchase. He brought the card to a bench next to the museum’s paneled glass lobby walls and pulled a fine pen from his pocket, writing:

Dear Susanna,

Here is a postcard I thought you might like. I know you love your puppy, so this picture made me think of you, my dear. Funny picture, isn’t it? I am well, and enjoying my trip. The tour your mama booked for me is alright, but I don’t really care to be escorted everywhere. I would prefer to explore this city a bit on my own.

The man paused to think and he happened to gaze out of the museum’s glass windows. At first glance all he saw was an anonymous cityscape. A stream of pedestrians flowed past the window, people walking in the shadows cast by looming office buildings. As far as he could tell, he just as easily could have been looking at an American city. He’d never been to Asia before, but he had hoped it would be a little more interesting.

A shaft of sunlight illuminated a small shop with a sign written in a foreign script. Then his eyes began to pick out more and more clues indicating that he actually was in a foreign country. Over there, was that a palm tree between two park benches? He noticed a temple, painted with bands of red and orange and gold, peeking from between two of the grey skyscrapers.

He returned his gaze to the postcard and rushed to scribble the rest of his message:

Tell your mama not to worry so much.

Love, Your Grandpa

He capped his pen and returned it to his suit pocket. Then, he stood and exited through the museum’s front door.

On the other side of the lobby, a young man in a polo shirt and khakis watched the room, looking bored. The plastic-covered nametag on his shirt read:

Hi! I’m Larry!

Underneath, in smaller print, the tag identified him as an employee of:

Crestview Plaza Retirement Living,

Crestview, California.

Larry noticed the door closing, and he saw the old man, on the other side of the glass, walking away. Larry’s eyes widened with horror before he propelled his rather chubby body across the lobby and out the door. Outside, he was forced to halt abruptly as he hit the crowd of pedestrians outside.

As Larry struggled through the crowd, a small mob of nursing home residents gathered at the glass to watch Larry’s erratic flailings. The tour group pointed and laughed as he bounced like buoy in the ocean. Larry would bump into a passerby and get knocked back. While he apologized curtly to the person he had run into, Larry attempted to move again without looking. Thus he never saw the next person until he slammed into them.

The old man easily eluded Larry in the crowd. When Larry could no longer make out the shape of his back, he abruptly turned around and ran back into the museum. The tour guide was back and waiting behind the snickering residents.

“What’s happened?” the tour guide asked.

“We’ve got a runner,” Larry said with professional exasperation. “I bet this guy doesn’t even know he’s in San Francisco. I think we’d better alert the authorities and call the family.”

Meanwhile, the old man was busy examining the wide variety of graffiti on these streets. Some of the images were recognizably artistic, and he was pleased with the painted animals and friendly community murals. Many graffiti involved words, rather than images. Some were easy to read, printed statements that looked as if they had been spray painted through a stencil.

Most of the graffiti was far more difficult to understand. He stood and tapped his cane absently on the sidewalk while he examined one of these tough graffiti. The brick wall bore multi-colored letters, stretched into strange shapes, but almost recognizable. He thought for a moment that these words must be in Spanish, but that seemed a strange language to find here. He wondered briefly if these place had ever been colonized by the Spanish.

The old man noticed the pedestrians around him for the first time. Yes, many of people around him looked as if they might have Spanish blood. An awful lot of them looked American. He realized he was probably still in a very touristy part of town, and decided to walk a bit further.

The streets all seemed terribly steep. Soon, he was leaning heavily on his cane, something he rarely needed to do. He spotted a sign post with a number on it. Hoping the post was a bus stop, he stopped walking and felt in his pocket for change.

At that moment a red cable car rounded the corner and began barrelling down the hill. The man stared open-mouthed as the cable car pulled up to the stop, one hand still in his suit pocket. He couldn’t remember where he had seen a cable car before.
Slowly, he pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket. He recognized it as a transfer ticket for the bus, and was momentarily pleased. Then, he read

San Francisco Trans-

before he stopped and abruptly shoved the ticket back in his pocket. He looked again at the cable car, stuffed with tourists snapping photos.

“Oh,” he murmured. “Oh, dear.” Remembering where he was, he also remembered where he should be, and decided to take the cable car after all.

* * *

He has to transfer, and take a bus as well, before he arrives at the skyscraper where his daughter works. He takes the elevator up, and he is relieved when he remembers the correct floor. He steps out and introduces himself politely to the receptionist. He fails to hear the receptionist’s faint reply, because he notices his daughter. She is clearly visible behind the glass windows separating her office from the front desk.

The glass buzzes from the force of her voice. She clutches a phone in her hand, yelling at the person on the other end. He did not envy that person. The old man studies her expensive black pantsuit and her aggressively permed and dyed hair. He is sorry to see how unattractive she looks with her face scrunched up in anger. He sees the small wrinkles around her eyes and mouth and realizes that she reached middle age a long time ago.

She slams the phone down. Then she looks up, and sees him waiting in the lobby. Her face immediately softens with relief, and she rushes out to him.

With his daughter this close, he can see faint freckles dusting her nose. When she was a girl, those freckles would appear every summer, dark against her childishly smooth skin. He can see that little girl, with her blond hair in pigtails, dressed in a purple unicorn shirt and overalls with dirty knees. Her eyes are still the same lovely clear blue. Her lower lip still quivers when she is holding back tears.

He leans over to hug her tightly, and smooths her hair as she sobs on his shoulder with relief.

 

Mireille Wells is an author enjoying the bohemian life in Portland, OR. Her short piece, Red Shoes, has been published in Pedestal Magazine, which you can read here: http://www.pedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=16993. She has traveled to four continents and now uses her travels as inspiration. She is currently at work on a novel set in modern Egypt and several short stories.

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Dimensions of the Heart – Stephen Ferguson

Women always want to know the dimensions of your heart,
But I never know how high or wide, so I wish they wouldn’t ask.

Do I love her more than Cupid’s ever fired off an arrow?
Or more than a solitary sunbeam casts a multitude of shadows?
Do I love her all the way to the tip of Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose?
To that sign at the end of the universe stating ‘Sorry, folks, we’re closed’?
How do I know if I love a woman to the ultimate power of Pi?
Till the last prehistoric bird gets flu and falls from out the sky?
I don’t know if I’ll love until the time when gravity loses its stick,
Or the day when a Tory government refrains from acting thick;
More than raindrops fall on Glasgow on a balmy day in May,
Or bubbles land in a parent’s hair from a baby’s bath time play;
More than the Milky Way scoops up starlight in its hands,
Till Earth’s tectonic plates recreate the shape of Gondwanaland.

There’s no point persisting in the hope that I’ll budge,
With me, the answer’s in how, not in asking how much.
For a heart to me is not made to be evaluated, judged;
The dimensions of my heart I place in every single touch.

And better than a swallow swoops and dives,
Better than a breastfed baby thrives,
Better than a flower blesses the eye,
I’ll show the way I feel, better than I can tell,
So please don’t ask how high or wide, ask instead how well.

 

Stephen is a poet based in Glasgow, Scotland. Outside of making poetry clips for YouTube and performing poetry at live events, this is Stephen’s first published poem. Stephen spent many years working as a freelance writer and journalist for various Scottish newspapers and now works for the National Health Service as a staff magazine editor and press officer. Beyond writing, Stephen spends much of his time practicing ‘creative parenting’ ie finding inventive ways to make his son do what he wants.

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Cerebellum, plural –- Gabriella Brand

Dillon started to chew the nail on his index finger while he was waiting for his lunch date to show up. Twenty minutes went by. Half an hour. He sat there, mouse-like, gnawing and waiting. Then, when the woman finally phoned to say that she’d be there shortly, he suddenly felt the need to check his outfit one more time. The last woman had suggested he iron his shirt. This time, he had even sent the shirt to the dry cleaner. He had polished his shoes. He thought he had better make sure his fly was zipped. Just as he lifted his head up, the lunch date walked by the restaurant window, heading for the front door. She was tall, with loosely curled brown hair, and she was wearing the agreed-upon green jacket. She looked even more attractive in person than she did in the photo she had posted on the We’re So Smart dating website, a matchmaking service restricted to graduates of elite universities.

She looks like a Fragonard, thought Dillon. Or maybe a Watteau. He had taken art history as an elective, but he always confused those two.

“I went to the wrong place,” said the Fragonard look-alike, breathlessly, as she approached his table. “I had it in my head that your email said, “Sergio’s” not “La Tarantella.”

Dillon smiled and told her not to worry, but then he could think of nothing else to add. Nothing. Even though he had practiced that very morning, while shaving, many of the conversational “ice-breakers” proposed by We’re So Smart. He rose slightly and fumbled to shake Miss Fragonard’s hand, then realized she had already tossed off her green jacket and seated herself so that his outstretched hand practically brushed her left breast. He felt his face grow warm. She was wearing a scooped neck blouse, with the straps of a camisole exposed at the top. From her earlobes dangled small jade earrings. He quickly sat back down and gulped.

He told himself to make eye contact, to resist the urge to stare at the tablecloth. The last person he had met through We’re So Smart had observed that his eye contact was a little sketchy. She had actually used the word sketchy, which Dillon had first taken as a compliment. Sketchy like a Durer print, he had thought, until she explained what she meant in one final caustic email.

Dillon clamped his eyes onto Miss Fragonard, or was it Miss Watteau? Blue. Her eyes were blue, he told himself. Not quite periwinkle, but definitely towards that end of the spectrum. Pervanche. No, they were Cornflower. Kornblume, as the Germans say. Or azul. What exactly was azul? Dillon’s mind flittered here and there among languages. Then he began to wonder how his own eyes appeared. Were his glasses clean? Perhaps they were smudged. Hadn’t he wiped them this morning?

He still could think of nothing to say aloud.

The woman looked directly at Dillon with her bright blue eyes. She smiled. Then she gave a toss of her head, and glanced around the restaurant.

“This looks like a nice place,” she said, cheerfully, as the waiter dropped off two menus.

He agreed.

She mentioned her fondness for Italian food, which led her to describe a trip to Milan last spring, where she had given an academic paper. Dillon managed to nod and acknowledge that he, too, enjoyed Italy. He had gone once to Florence during university and then again three years ago, right before his thirty-sixth birthday. The trip was a gift from his parents. Miss Fragonard/Watteau raised one perfectly arched eyebrow, and asked if Dillon still lived with his parents. He assured her that he did not.

The waiter reappeared at the table wondering if they were ready to order. The woman asked the waiter to describe the house salad, in detail. Dillon couldn’t take his eyes off the perfect row of white teeth which were visible when she said the word “insalata”. The waiter, his pen poised, turned to Dillon. In all this time, Dillon had not even looked at the menu. He quickly zeroed in on the first item he saw printed at the top of the page. Scungilli Rusticana. Only much later did he remember he was a bit frightened of squid.

“Oh, you’re adventurous,” she said. “I’m just going with what I know.”

Dillon grinned, thrilled to be called adventurous. He stammered out a protest, but she continued.

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you like adventure. You must go on a lot of digs, in exotic places. That’s pretty wild.”

He had never really thought of his work as adventurous. Most of it took place in dusty libraries or in the caverns of museums. But she maintained otherwise.

“It’s a quest, right?”

He had to agree.

“And what exactly did you say your specialty was?” she continued. “Neo-Sumerian history?”

Dillon was delighted that she recalled this bit of information from his written profile. A good sign, he told himself. It means she was interested. In him. In his work. He asked, hesitatingly, if she had ever heard of Tappeh Sialk. She shook her head. He wanted to tell her all about his research. But, suddenly, all he could think about was his thinning hair. He wondered if he should have parted it on the other side. Was his male pattern baldness that obvious? Would she take it as a sign of his virility? His mind whirred. He had been an archeological historian for fifteen years, but he couldn’t even come up with the names of the two Frenchmen who had excavated Tappeh Sialk. For some reason, he found himself talking about archeological brushes. When he realized he wasn’t making a lot of sense, he grew silent.

“May I have a breadstick?” she suddenly asked, breaking his reverie. She leaned over to take one of the breadsticks propped up in a pottery mug. He caught a whiff of her perfume, or maybe it was her deodorant. She smelled like a field in Provence, or maybe just like the lavender sachets his mother used to stick in her bureau drawer.

“You had mentioned something about the ziggurat at Tappeh Sialk,” she continued, delicately snapping the breadstick with her perfectly white teeth.

The ziggurat. Of course. Considered, by some, the world’s oldest ziggurat. In Iran. A special site. But when he thought of the word site, his mind went back to the dating site where he had found her. We’re So Smart. He started to think about the logo, two cerebellums entwined around two hearts.

Then he suddenly remembered one of the We’re So Smart guidelines: Conversation should be like ping-pong, going back and forth.

He realized that he needed to ask her about her own field.

Polymers.

She was happy to describe her work. “Although I’m not married to it, ” she said with a laugh. She described her doctoral thesis and then her research. He nodded vigorously, but he had to admit that he had forgotten a lot of advanced chemistry. He had only a vague idea of what she was talking about. When she mentioned that her particular interest was recyclable carbohydrate polymers, his mind again went elsewhere. To carbohydrates, plain and simple. The kind he ate. In great quantity, too much of the time. Chips. Biscuits. Chocolate Box Cake. He couldn’t stop thinking about his paunch, flopping its way over the top of his chinos. Had she noticed when he stood to greet her? He tried to suck in his stomach, but gave up when he realized that his belly was now quite hidden by the table itself.

When the main course came, she dug into her insalata and Chicken Diablo. Dillon watched her lips grow redder with blotches of tomato sauce. He took his fork and moved the rubbery scungilli around on his plate.

“You’re kind of quiet, aren’t you, Dillon?” she asked, sponging up the last of the sauce with a slice of ciabatta.

He wanted to assure her that he would talk more once he felt comfortable. But he couldn’t think of a way to say it. He made a brief comment about still waters running deep. Did that sound haughty? Was it too much of a cliché? He hoped it didn’t come from the Bible. No, surely it didn’t. He lowered his head and studied the dessert menu in silence.

Neither one ordered coffee. The waiter left them to split the check, as We’re So Smart suggested. He watched her reach for her purse. The jade earrings swayed like little pendulums. Penduli. Latin I, prep school. Neuter noun. Dillon suddenly could see the declensions in an old textbook, right next to a drawing of a naked Roman goddess, over which some previous student had declined the word “boobs” in indelible ink. Plural. Feminine. Boobae, boobarum,boobis,boobas, and so on.

He wondered if he should ask her about going to the movies. Or to a concert. For their next date.

She got up, pulled on her jacket and buttoned it across her chest. He looked down at his own hands, noticed the bitten off fingernails, and stuck his hands in his pockets. Then they walked to the door together. It had started to rain, so they lingered a minute under La Tarantella’s pink canopy while she took a fold-up umbrella from her bag. She shook his hand, and ran off, her long legs deftly avoiding the puddles.

Later she emailed him, “I don’t think there’s any chemistry here (I’m a chemist, I should know LOL) but it was really nice to meet you. I wish you the best of luck with your research and your search.”

Dillon thought back to her last comment about his being quiet. He knew that he should have given a better answer. He should have said that he was actually quite talkative, a regular moulin à paroles, as the French say. A windmill of words. He should have told her that he was restraining himself so as not to overwhelm her. Then he might have aced the date.

 

Gabriella Brand divides her time between the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where she writes, and Connecticut, where she teaches. In between, she seeks out more exotic locales. Think jungles, cities, deserts and high mountains. Her work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Perigee, Room Magazine, PIF, The Citron Review, Calliope, and Echoes. One of her short stories has been selected for the anthology He Said, She Wrote to be published this Spring by Big Wonderful Press.

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Less Than Super Hero –- Rachel Cox

When I was little, I was the master of disguise. I could be anything: a pirate, a mommy, Helen Keller, a superhero. But in all of my incarnations, there were always disabilities: the pirate had a patch, the mommy was alone, Helen Keller the obvious, and the superhero had cape malfunctions. No one’s perfect. But I was the best at hiding, either behind a mask or under a bed or in the confines of my mind. I became used to not being seen, longed for the silence of my closet behind the toy chest. Until the voices in my head began to scream louder than the voices outside my closet, I knew a short time of peace. These were the good years constructed of an overactive imagination, a life written complete with two perfect parents, fun-loving siblings, pattern, order, happiness. Abstract words of no stronger material than clouds or cotton candy or poisoned air. I should be used to my powers of invisibility, but it’s harder for me to turn off those powers these days. The times when I want to be seen, I scrub at my chapped skin to rub off the invisibility and hope that someone will at least see the drops of blood on the floor from the invisible girl. They didn’t see me again today. I didn’t scrub long enough or hard enough and the film of invisibility remains, the superhero is still having cape malfunctions, and the pirate now has two patches over her blind eyes.

 

Rachel Cox has been featured in Metaphor, and she was the founding editor of Weber State University’s Epiphany Literary Journal at Weber State University. She won WSU’s Fiction Prize in 2009 for her short story One Leaf and is currently pursuing her graduate studies in English. In her “spare” time, Rachel is writing a historical novel. She currently resides in Ogden, Utah, USA.

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Once Was Lost –- Vaiju Joshi

Some days it is the piano books. Yesterday it was the hockey sticks. Today it is the entire sports bag. Ann and Jessie navigate the grey school corridors on autopilot, lured by the siren song of the missing sports luggage. The classrooms and corridors stand fatigued and sullen, a grubby toddler awaiting a bath.

The locker rooms are at the end of the corridor, on the left. The doors are closed but a tell-tale sliver of light spills out from underneath. Behind the closed doors are whispers of mops and vacuum cleaners and dusters going flap-a-flap.

“Oh dear, is it locked?” Ann has managed to catch up with Jessie. “Jessie, this is why you should be organised. Wouldn’t a list have helped you today?”

Jessie says nothing. Of course the door is not locked. Her mother makes a big deal of everything.

“We can still go in,” Jessie says.

Ann looks uncertain. Clearly someone is working in the locker rooms.

“It will be the janitors, Mum — Judy and Bill.” Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Groucho and Zeppo.

Ann knocks anyway. No one answers her over the din.

“You really don’t know anything, do you?” Jessie says.

Ann sighs. Jessie was once three feet tall. She had a pink backpack and a stuffed elephant called Ellie. She ate cheese sandwiches every single day for an entire term. The day her pet turtle died, she missed Kindy because she was so sick with grief that she threw up. For several weekends after that, Jessie walked over to the spot in the garden where they had buried the turtle. She was four but she had a defiant sort of hope that the turtle would leave her a message or make an appearance, perhaps even resurrect itself from the dead and waddle homewards behind her again. Then one day Jessie forgot to mourn for the dead pet and he sunk lower into the ground, freefalling out of her memories, gone for good.

“Can you grab my stuff for me, Mum?” Jessie is saying now, tracing broken arcs on the floor with her shoe. She has one hand on the door knob, but she doesn’t want to go inside the locker rooms. She is older now, almost thirteen. Still turtle-less. Still trying to gather things that were left behind.

Her voice is a child’s again and Ann wishes she could kidnap this child in front of her, never let her go again. The people in the locker room can keep the sulky teenager. She will take this baby girl home and make her a cheese sandwich.

“You need to be responsible for you actions, Jessie,” Ann finds herself saying instead.

“You are so full of it,” Jessie says.

She pushes the door open and for a moment stands framed in the doorway. Then she disappears into the light and the sound beyond, an Alice down a rabbit-hole.

Inside the locker room, Bill is emptying the bins while Judy is vacuuming the tattooed floor.

“We could go to one of those sea-side towns for a holiday Judes, they are going to us offer us permanent jobs here, my bones feel it,” Bill is saying above the roar of the machine. “One of those Getaway places where they have bars with happy-hours and chicken skewers with satay sauce.”

Judy half nods.

“Those seaside bars always have pretty girls running the tab. Young and tight bodied,” Bill cackles. Something inside Judy’s heart twirls and writhes into a dirty snake.

There have been other schools before this one. Never a permanent job even though they rarely miss a day and are neat enough with their work. For 10 years she has been with him, even though there are parts of him she does not want to know about. Many years ago, before they got together, he was once suspended for something to do with the bathrooms. Nothing was ever proven. A misunderstanding, he said.

Judy doesn’t know much else. But she hears the whispers.

“It is in his eyes,” they say in smoggy tones behind her back when their contracts end yet again without extensions.

“Something not quite right,” “Creepy bastard,” “Yes, we will give you a reference”. More misunderstandings, really.

Bill stops talking about bar employees when Jessie enters. She is wearing culottes and a blue rugby jumper, on her bare legs is the faint gleam of soft, blond hair.

“I forgot my bag,” Jessie says to no one in particular. Bill stops working and an elastic grin spreads across his face. Weirdo, Jessie thinks.

“Is that the one?” Bill points to an orphaned sports sack. He picks up the bag before Jessie has a chance to retrieve it.

At the far end of the room, the vacuum cleaner makes a thirsty sound as it chomps on a plastic spoon. Thump-crunch-thump it goes.

“Here you go, let me help you put the bag on,” Bill’s voice is dunked in eagerness.

“I got it, I am fine,” Jessie starts but Bill’s hands are already brushing against her fingers and then her arm. Then his hand moves up to her shoulder before coming to an abrupt halt on her chest. His hands are large and hairy and he smells of Lysol and Pine-O-Clean. For a long moment his rough palm sits on her Size S jumper.

“Get off, jerk,” Jessie yells as she breaks into a run.

“Hey, I was only trying to help,” Bill calls out to Jessie’s receding form. The vacuum cleaner stops its growling midway as Judy walks over to Bill.

“Girls these-a-days, dammit. You cannot help anyone anymore,”

Bill spreads his hands about him helplessly.

Outside, Jessie stands close to Ann, her head down, her sports bag at her feet. The Lysol is permeating through her top and into her chest, a stinging flame washing away her cells and her tissue, corroding her skin this way and that.

“Should we check the locker rooms one more time, Jessie? I don’t want to come back yet again because you left something else behind,” Ann is saying.

She smiles when Judy opens the door and looks at them.

“I have a very forgetful child. She keeps losing things all the time.” Her words are tinged with an apology.

“They grow up just like that,” Jude says. In her throat, a murky river hisses and spits. “Then there is not much to lose.”

Jessie follows Ann back to the car, her heart heavy and cold, her eyes suddenly full of thick tears. She sinks into the back seat and wraps her arms around her sports bag. Then Jessie cries for her dead turtle. And for everything else that was once lost.

 

Vaiju Joshi’s fiction has previously been published/is forthcoming in Adelaide Review, Bartelby Snopes, Global Short Story competition, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Six Sentences, CoolDog magazine and Five Stop Story amongst others. Her fiction also was short-listed for the Best Australian Short Stories 2010 and 2011 anthology. She is an engineer by profession and is currently working on her first novel (one of these days she is going to write the next chapter).

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Bonfire of 2059 –- Vivien Jones

“When’s the deadline for these?”

Andrew held up a fistful of tartan and ginger and waved it. Robert looked across, checked his clipboard, and shouted across.

“Three days. It’s tight. When the carrier coming?”

“Tomorrow.”

Andrew tossed the Jimmy hats into one of a dozen cartons all round him, then he bent and lifted armfuls of them until the carton was full. Andrew crossed the floor, avoiding various piles of tinned shortbread and rolls of paper kilts, and taped the box shut. He took a sticky label from a pad and pressed it across the gap – FOR EXCHANGE – it said with an official Scottish Office stamp in the corner.

“What do we get for those then?” Andrew was laughing.

Robert checked his clipboard.

“Ten paperback biographies — four pieces of Cairngorm rock — and a high end Mary Stewart signet ring. For three hundred Jimmy hats. That’s the official rate.”

“Who worked that out? What a job!”

“Yea — well we’ve four cartons of shortbread and five of miniature malts to get packed before we leave tonight.” He kicked a large sack in passing.

“Not to forget the hairy haggises.”

Both men stared around the cluttered loading bay, at a sprawl of Edinburgh Castle tea towels, bright rolls of flags, piles of geographically labelled rock, and all the other tourist goods taken from the shelves.

“I was thinking we might burn the paper kilts ourselves.”

* * *

The notice on the meeting room door said ‘POETS’ NIGHT, 2059′ but someone had scrawled ‘BURNS 300′ across it in vigorous italic letters so it looked like ‘BUMS 300′ from a distance. The people inside were animated, quarrelsome, partisan. So far they had only three names agreed — Henryson, Burns and Violet Jacob and this last only because she was a woman and lost a son at The Somme and was from Montrose. The hard part would be selecting the living poets – not many had reputations well enough entrenched with the academics, amongst whom one man’s lark was another man’s crow. There were a lot of swearwords and worse, politics, in recent verse, something to be avoided unless sanitised by the passage of time. Then there were the eco-poets, the trash-poets, the Slam poets….It was an endless list. There was one persistent young man who kept asking for a people’s poet. The only woman — a librarian — was vehemently opposed to any living woman poet being chosen on the grounds of her gender, and bitterly angry that, in those circumstances, none had been suggested. The man enduring her low grumbling turned to her and said.

“But the good ones, Carol Ann and Jackie Kay, are dead — and I don’t know about these Facebook poets, Marie. I don’t think the number of Friends you have is a guide to quality or endurance.”

“Babydoll McKay has more readers than Burns ever had, and she’s old. She’s got one of the first 50 years on Facebook blue e-plaques,” she muttered back.

“Just the same, we’re supposed to be defining new standards — emphasis on the second word!’ he hissed.

“Well, I think a change is long overdue!” she replied.

* * *

There were a fleet of eight HGVs snaking south through the mountain passes of the M74, all hired from different companies in case there was a protest like the one in Inverness. It had started as a joke — students probably — with banners saying ‘Save Our Hairy Haggis’ or ‘Jimmy Hats are Braw’, shouting and hanging round the roadway into the Highland Mall. The drivers had phoned in and asked what they should do. Protestor numbers had increased, a visiting football crowd and a folk festival audience had swelled them to road blocking proportions. The papers had made a meal of it next day.

So this time it was midnight and moonlit when the first lorry pulled into the Border Crossing Retail Park to start a queue of vehicles at the back of the stores. A man in a business suit stepped forward and spoke into his mobile. Quietly, the double doors of several shops opened and figures began towing trolleys laden with boxes towards the ramps at the back of the lorries. The boxes were labelled FOR EXCHANGE. A lone figure stood at each ramp with a clipboard, counting. No-one spoke. It took an hour to load all eight lorries and they pulled away as quietly as they had arrived, heading north. An hour later, another eight HGVs pulled into the Park and seemingly reversed the procedure, unloading carefully counted boxes into the stores. The boxes were labelled SP APPROVED. This time there was chatter amongst those present and some laughter. As the last box was unloaded the man in the business suit pointed to the ground. Those present gathered round. The box was placed where he pointed and he walked round it, then slit the tape with a clean movement of a paper knife. The box sprang open, spewing layers of tissue paper upwards. The man leaned forward and plucked something out of the tissue folds. It was a Caithness Glass ewer and it glinted in the moonlight.

He held it aloft and cried ‘Made in Scotland’. There was a murmur of approval from the crowd before they turned and dispersed into the stores. A figure moved out of the shadows and approached the man in the business suit.

“You rang the Arbitration Department?”

* * *

“Toast for the lassies?” The librarian leant across the table and parked the toast-rack beside the butter. The other woman, also a librarian, pushed the piles of books aside and reached for her tea plate.

“I thought we’d got beyond this gender nonsense. My mother told me what it was like in 2030. They’d only just allowed the statues of Duffy and Kay and Galloway in the Parliament Garden. They still weren’t having Hadfield. Can you believe that?’”

“Well it was either us choosing the women poets or leaving it to the men again.”

“Do you still want Babydoll Mackay? Not one of the younger ones?”

“There’s still no-one to touch her. Especially in the Slam.”

“True.”

“So who’s being Burns in it this year?”

“Rab Wilson’s great grandson.”

“It’s a great tradition, isn’t it, the Burns Slam?”

“It was long overdue.”

* * *

The Arbiter shook his head. He was turning a ceramic dog round in his hand.

“It’s always the last few things that take the time.”

The man in the business suit frowned.

“But you’ve all those guide lines.”

“Hmm. But it’s the aesthetics.”

“The aesthetics?”

“Hmmm. This here — it’s a black Scots terrier, it’s made of well fired, well glazed pottery and it was made in Elgin. That’s three ticks. But it’s wearing a tartan scarf and a bonnet.”

“Is that the aesthetics?”

“That’s certainly the problem.”

“That’s what Edinburgh wants rid of?”

“Goods that compromise or deride the image of Scotland to the outside world.” The Arbiter read from the sheet on his lap. Suddenly it was important to the man in the business suit that the black dog stayed put.

“Folk put coats and shoes on little dogs,” he suggested.

“Folk do lots of things. What is this saying about Scotland?” The Arbiter held the black dog at arm’s length.

“That Scottish folk look after their dogs.”

“Is it amusing?”

“Only in a feeling way.”

“Like Disney?” The Arbiter looked horrified, as if he’d sworn.

“Not at all — like, like Greyfriars Bobby.”

“He didn’t wear a scarf or a bonnet. I’ve seen the statue. He’s just a dog.”

“A Scottish dog — like that one.”

The Arbiter paused, pondering whether the tilt of the dog’s head wasn’t a mite too cute.

“Tell you what — you can keep the dogs and I’ll take the Flora MacDonald Cook Books — ‘oat cuisine’ — what kind of a joke is that? I might have to reconsider if there’re complaints — there’s to be an army of secret shoppers wandering about. But you’re all right for now.”

The Arbiter took out his FOR EXCHANGE stamp and used it on the boxes of books, then the SP APPROVED stamp and pressed it all four boxes of ceramic dogs. He shook hands with the man in the business suit leaving him in the small hours to arrange a display of Caithness glass ewers and black Scots Terriers ready for the store opening on January 25th.

* * *

“Gonna to the bonfire, Hugh? It’s free. Gonna to be huge.”

“Are there fireworks?”

“Naw – just burning the stuff.”

“Bit of waste, if ye ask me.”

“They’ve paid for it. Well, swapped it for guid stuff.”

“Waste of time, then.”

“But they didna want folk looking like eejets.”

“How no? It’s just a laugh.”

“They said it’s just for tourists. Gave them the wrang idea.”

“So, who wants to see us in the raw?’

“How?”

“Just look at us! A Jimmy hat would just finish it off. And a box of shortbread with a wee dug on it.”

“But are we going?”

“Aye. Might as well — efter all, it’s Burns Night.”

 

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My Little Runaway –- Katie Moore

In the afternoon
she is five
and mad, packing a bag,
donning a raincoat,
carrying two extra
pairs of shoes,
and a doll.
She doesn’t want
to live here anymore,
with rooms to be cleaned,
and rules. She will
get a job as a princess
and hire me to make
her breakfast.
I breathe a ten count,
think back, back to
just this morning
when all she wanted
was cuddles and cartoons,
as she whispers to her sister
the elaborate plan to
steal my keys while I sleep,
so she, my miniature runaway,
can still sneak in for food
and bedtime.
By evening she is old,
wise, owlish in my lap,
a sleepy sage, she whispers,
Oh, it never would have worked
I forgot how much I’d miss you,
now please rub my feet.

 

Katie Moore is the mother of ferocious daughters, the wife of a handsome cop, and a willing slave to the written word. She is a proud founding editor for The Legendary at http://www.downdirtyword.com. Her work can be found in such mags as Underground Voices, Metazen, and The Splinter Generation, and forthcoming from PANK, Kerouac’s Dog, and Zygote in my Coffee. Katie is chaotically awkward, ill adjusted to the world, and completely unashamed. For more info, samples, news, and publication credits, visit http://www.thegirlcircus.com.

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