Search Results

I suppose you think it’s funny, that my friends call me Madman, or you think I’m going to be funny, or do crazy things, or belong on “Jackass” or blow something up or, I don’t know. Maybe you don’t think that.  I just know this about myself. I was a skinny kid and I didn’t have friends until eighth grade when I began to sing out loud in public besides that, I grew ten inches and began the bulking up process that guys go through, and grew my hair longer than anyone else’s in our school (which was easy to do, since they all had crew-cuts or whatever you call short hair) and then I had friends. Which is to say, people stopped making fun of me and began to like me. First for my voice and, second, the girls liked my looks, too.  And maybe some boys too, I have sort of feminine features so who knows? Someone compared me to Johnny Depp but that’s far-fetched, the only thing is that we both have fine bones and big eyes and that is not enough to make me Johnny Depp, but let me tell you that I’m a lot taller than he is, and I don’t know if he can sing, but I sure as hell can. Think I talk too much? I do when I’m nervous and I am nervous because I just got kicked out of UCLA, cause I sort of forgot to attend classes and I only made it one and a half years, and I had bet my dad that I could make it through two full years, so he won, but I don’t talk to him anyway. That’s not why I’m nervous. I am nervous because I am sitting here in this auditorium and about to go on stage to sing for a band whose lead singer died three years ago (okay, died is a euphemism. He committed suicide by combining alcohol, drugs, his car and a cliff. Might as well have thrown a gun in there, too.) and now they are looking for a replacement and every singer in L.A. is here trying out.  There must be three hundred people here. I’ve been watching and listening. Some are really good, but they have a blues edge, or a soul sound, or an r&b thing that is better suited to pop music and these guys are this outgrowth of grunge/punk, but newer in the way that has yet to be defined by Rolling Stone magazine or anybody else.  Past emo, past screamo, not even nu-metal.  I just know it fits my voice and I like their songs and I think my songs can fit into their niche but they won’t know that if I don’t get up there and sing. There’s no real order here. You sit in the audience and when you feel ready, you go up and hand this incredibly ice-cold beautiful woman your registration sheet and line up to go on stage. A lot of us sit and wait; a lot go up.  The doors opened at around 2 p.m. and now it’s nearly six and I don’t know how much longer they will go on, so I have to make my move. But I can’t. Not yet. Some girls are trying out too.  Some are really great, I would pay to hear them sing somewhere, the Key Club, the Knitting Factory, even House of Blues prices wouldn’t put me off some of them.  There have been three guys today who I think could be in this band, but I’m trying hard not to think about them and to get my mind together to stand up and make the walk down the aisle to that woman. Maybe it’s her.  Maybe she’s the one keeping me from the stage. I don’t have good luck with women, that’s for sure.  Listen.  My first girlfriend, Suzanne, wanted me to take her virginity and I wouldn’t do it, because I was still a virgin and too scared, so she convinced my close friend, Jeremy, to do it which he did (a virgin too), and then they both told me all about it in great detail.  It’s not just about sex, though. I did finally lose my virginity and things have been okay since, but I don’t seem to be very good at being a boyfriend. I almost married Tabitha, even with her totally weird name that came from really weird parents.  She loved to hear me sing, had me sing to her in the shower, in bed, while she made dinner, all kinds of times.  I started to feel she was a vampire, she was draining me of my voice and my energy; I spent it all singing for her and when I went to gigs (I had gigs in background vocals) I often lost it, went hoarse, couldn’t hold a note or stay on pitch. She sucked me nearly dry of my one and only talent, so I dumped her while she was making wedding plans and putting deposits on caterers and photographers and gazebos. No one talked to me after that, no one in her family or my family. So that’s when I moved back into the dorms and threw myself into dorm life (except for the schoolwork part of it) and met lots of girls, and made new friends among guys, and guest-sang in a myriad of garage bands that were mostly horrible, but when I sang with them, an audience came and people had a good time. This is boring. My life is boring.  Don’t get me started. Or, I guess I am started, but make me stop. This is all because I am nervous about going on stage, which is ridiculous, I can do this. It’s just that I actually want it, more than whatever else I wanted before. My girlfriend offered to come with me. Yes, I do have one, and her name is Suze and I’m not scared of her, in fact, I really like being with her and I’m comfortable with her.  And she’s pretty but doesn’t think so. She’s not super-skinny like the girls around campus, or the girls here on stage. Or the ice queen down there.  Suze is not in the least fat but by these stupid modern fashion standards, she could be described as baby-fat cute.  I could give a shit. She is beautiful.  We even went through this really bad time, we almost broke up even though the thing that happened was out of our control – neither of us could do anything about it – but we survived and this is something I find like really amazing. But Tashi, if she came with me today, I would be even more self-conscious. A guy stands up in near the front row, and I realize it’s one of the band members, the bass player.  He turns to those of us left in the audience and, in a really loud voice (shouldn’t he be the singer?) he yells out, “Don’t any of you have passion?” Fuck, maybe not. I have passion for sex and for Suze. I have passion for music. People tell me I am really involved in music when I sing, they say I embody it, but I don’t really know what they mean.  I feel it, yes, and I love it and love singing and don’t want to stop once I am started, but hell, more than half the people I just watched on stage sing with that kind of passion.  Does he want something else? Does he want more? A half a dozen people leave quietly, slipping out the back door. Not even enough passion to believe they can still have a shot. No one else moves. The ice queen looks at the band members and I recognize her signals to mean, should we end this now? No, they can’t. I leap up, a bit too ungainly, and trip my way over the feet of people whose faces look up at me with suspicion and awe. Is he really going to go on stage after that?  I am not going to let them shut down auditions without having even tried so I am loping down the long aisle to the ice queen, barely acknowledging her presence and then I am up on stage. I feel like someone who has just won a Grammy award and now I should thank everyone who helped me get this far. But I am not that far.  I am on stage. The lights are bright and I can barely make out the band members in the front row, can’t see if their faces are intrigued or disgusted or bored.  The singing is a capella, there is no one to wait for, I can start whenever I am ready. There was this really bad time.  Suze’s friend had died in a cruel incident. It was kinda suicide and kinda murder and completely horrible and Suze and I both were witnesses.  We moved in together after that.  We held each other a lot and for a while didn’t even have sex. Suze works at Starbucks and she almost lost her job ‘cause she couldn’t bring herself to go to work.  I don’t even like to think about this but it has an odd way of slipping into my thoughts and suddenly exploding like goddamn fireworks at the wrong times. And all times are the wrong times. Suze suggested therapy. She said we have post-traumatic stress. “That’s for Vietnam vets,” I said, “Iraqi war vets.” “It’s for victims of crimes and terrible accidents and tragic losses.  It’s for us.”  She showed me a corner torn from the L.A. Weekly. An ad for a clinic in Silver Lake that listed, among its other services, group therapy for post traumatic stress disorder. “Please,” said Suze.  So I went, figuring that while it probably wouldn’t help me, it wouldn’t hurt either. We parked on Silver Lake Boulevard and walked two blocks to a small bright green storefront. The windows were sealed from window-shopping view by what looked like furniture pads, making it a sort of black hole among all the furniture and décor shops around it. I was not eager to go in.  Just as we stood there, the door opened and a tiny Asian man stepped out. He looked up at us, smiled like the sun had just come from behind a cloud and beckoned us inside. “Please come,” he said, in limited English. “Doctor is good, very good.” Then he left and we were standing in the dim interior of a waiting room, the furniture pads being the primary decoration in a room that otherwise held seven metal folding chairs and a water dispenser sans water.  We shuffled around together, whispering. (Me whispering, “let’s go” and she whispering, “No.”) A woman came through a door.  I do not believe I can describe her in any way that would do her justice. She was tall, a little over six feet.  Husky in a Midwestern sort of body. She had grey hair pulled into a ponytail that went down her back to her waist except for the multitude of stray hairs that spun out of control around her head and arms.  Her eyes were dark and the skin under them saggy like a basset hound.  She wore several layers of what I took to be Guatemalan dresses and skirts.  When she waved us into an interior room, it was all I could do to keep from running the other direction.  Only Tashi’s strong grip on my hand kept me moving toward this woman and her mysterious room. Her office was one step better than the waiting room. She sat in a padded folding chair and there were more of the metal ones scattered around the room.  Files and books and papers lined up on the floor along one wall. This doctor had great need of a desk and bookshelves and some decent seating. “Is this the whole group?” Suze asked. “I thought it was group therapy, I imagined more people.” “Not right now,” the woman said with a voice that informed us not to mess with her. “So, what do we do?” asked Suze. She is so sweet, she wanted to do whatever this woman thought would be appropriate. “Names?” the woman demanded. “Suze,” said Suze, “and Madman, er, Mattais.” “Madman?” “A nickname. Just for fun,” I added.  She stared at me, and I waited for some diatribe about the inappropriateness of the nickname, or a deep psychological interpretation or just some obtuse thing.  I really disliked her.  And she didn’t tell us her name. “What was so traumatic?” “Uh,” stammered Suze, “um, uh, my friend, um died.” “Lots of friends die.” “She died in a fire,” said Suze. I sat back and watched. Would this story come out one sentence at a time, with a judgment on each sentence, and then the next sentence trying to reconcile the judgment with the emotion? “Lots of people die in fires, too.” “We saw her die,” explained Suze. “Wait,” I said. “And lots of people have seen people die in fires, right?” “Hostility is not welcome here,” the woman said. “Only polite people can get therapy?” I answered. Suze took her hand away from mine, distancing herself.  I thought, I won’t forget that, babe.  I will remember that. “You will have to leave if you cannot be civil.” “Listen. Our friend, Moira, joined a religious cult. They built a bonfire, she stepped into it and even when she wanted to get out, they pushed her back in. We watched, we tried to get to her, to help her, but they held us back. We watched her die a long slow burning death.  Now,” I sat back in my creaking chair, “is that typical of lots of people?” I was dismissed. I waited in the stupid waiting room on a stupid folding chair and listened to unintelligible murmurs from behind the closed door.  When Suze came out she was crying but also smiling. I never saw the woman, she did not enter the waiting room. “I wish you had stayed,” Suze said. “I wish we had both left,” I said. “Fuck you.” Suze turned to me and hit my shoulder. “You and your big male ego couldn’t just listen to her, to hear what she had to say. She helped a lot, Madman. She helped me a lot.” “Yeah, well thanks a lot for pulling away from me, for letting me just hang there, for letting me leave, for not coming with me. Fuck you.  I’m taking a walk.” We parted there on the sidewalk. Suze drove home. I walked around Silver Lake for a time, had some coffee, walked through a video store and a clothing store, not looking at anything. I walked up to Sunset and stared at a bus stop sign for a long time until a smiling Hispanic woman asked if I needed information. “I need to get to Santa Monica,” I said.  And she efficiently wrote down the three buses I needed to take from that very corner to the very corner of Wilshire and 14th Street, four blocks from the apartment.  She even made change for my five-dollar bill.  I could have kissed her feet. I wanted to ask what she knew about post-traumatic stress because I was certain she could be very helpful in that matter, too. Long bus rides are useful.  This is how:  By the time I walked the four blocks to our apartment, after more than two hours on three buses, I was ready to apologize. I hoped Suze was ready to let me.  When I went in, she tackled me, crying and sobbing and soaking my shirt and telling me how she was sure she would never see me again.  I said sorry, she said sorry and we made love for the first time in months.  Oh, yeah, that helps a lot and things got better and better. “But let me tell you one thing the doctor said that helped,” said Suze as we lay coiled together, our sweaty bodies cooling off with the breeze coming in the window. “Okay, I can take it,” I laughed. “She had me deconstruct the incident.” “Um, like Foucault or Derrida?  French literary deconstruction theory?  You took it apart?” “Well, whatever that is.  First I told her the entire story. Then we talked about all different parts of it, focusing on the dancing, the singing, the fire itself.  I had to describe in detail the moment Moira stepped into the fire.  And in detail what it was like to run toward her, to be grabbed and held by the other people.  And last, I told her the story completely backwards, so that Moira stepped out of the fire, danced backward around it and went back to her room.” I listened and I understood.  Better than Suze, who said, “I feel better but I’m not sure why.” “You lessened its power,” I explained. “You took away the one narrative and all of its power and pain, and you examined the parts and felt each one of them fully, then like they are little gems or something, you put them down. And then you played the whole thing backward which means you control the narrative and it doesn’t control you.” She glared at me. “How do you know that?” “College, babe.  A course in postmodern theory, the deconstructionists, the way we looked at literature. It’s the same thing.  Take power away from the text and the author, and give it to the reader.” Suze curled her head up against my chest and I stroked her back. I was glad she felt so much better.  I was glad to be back in our apartment and not wandering the streets on foot or bus. And I was glad that, no matter what, I was not going to see that doctor again.  I would deconstruct Moira’s death on my own, if that was the cure. “What are you going to sing?” asks a face from the dark front row. “I was going to sing one of your songs,” I reply. “I was going to sing, ‘No Reality.’  But I changed my mind. I’m going to sing ‘The Country Where No One Knows the Language.’” “Whose song is that?” comes the voice. “Mine. I wrote it.” And without waiting, I launch into the song and I sing it with all the passion I had written it with, I sing it with my fear, and with my certainty. I wrote it for Moira and I sing it better than I ever have before. It is silent after I sing.  The ice queen is busy talking to someone in dark clothes who I cannot see; I await her official words to leave the stage.  I wait. The remaining singers wait.  Someone in the front row stands up. The guy with the booming voice. “Good on you, bloke.” The ice queen calls, “Next,” and as I pass her on the steps, she puts her hand on my arm. Her hand is warm and soft against my cool sweaty skin. “You can go. But expect a call-back.” She smiles at me, pleasantly. I don’t know what comes next. I just know that there were odd bits of Los Angeles that went into whatever success this is: wackos who immolate their true believers, a wiry-haired doctor who heals with Derrida, and a sweetheart of a woman who knows the bus system and can impart her knowledge to a suffering fool when needed. Amy Jones Sedivy grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in NELA (Highland Park) with her artist-husband and their princess-dog. She recently retired and spends her time reading, writing, and exploring the rest of Los Angeles. Amy’s most recent stories have been published in (mac)ro(mic), Made in L.A. Beyond the Precipice anthology, Big Whoopie Deal, and The Write Launch. “On Fire for Jesus", a story that tells about Moira's character and her death, will be printed in the Chiron Review in April.

So I’ve been wandering sodden streets, crossing narrow bridges. It shouldn't be any great surprise that I’m lost in Venice. It’s the easiest city to get lost in. There are landmarks, sure, like the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari and the Canal Grande. But they don’t direct you from one to the other, much less back to your hotel or country of origin. I’ve asked in Italian if there are any maps but was laughed at by the locals. When they stop laughing, they admit they can’t remember another time when it rained so long. Now I’m hoping a gondolier takes pity and ferries me back across the Atlantic. I’ll pay them in stories collected while lost in a sinking city. We’ll set course for the Statue of Liberty. It’ll be a straight shot. Matthew Isaac Sobin's first book was the novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. His poems are in or forthcoming from South Florida Poetry Journal, Midway Journal, Orange Blossom Review, Ghost City Review, and MAYDAY Magazine. You may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California.

The Resounding Silence The silence was resounding— Stifling as it crept into my every thought. The silence was all consuming— Reshaping every crevice of my imagination. The silence was foreboding— As the thoughts of my mind seemed to echo off the walls. I wanted the silence to break, But it seemed to gain on me, twisting around my heart— Wrapping its chilled fingers around my throat. I was powerless to stop it— But something sounded, a bang, a crash— Piercing through the shroud of endless silence. —My heart? Was I finally falling apart, At the thought of my own silence? No— It was the door. And with it, came a flood of noise— Tumbling into the room, overwhelming every thought I had. A bang, a crash —And smoke. Was it a fire? Was I wrong about the silence? Or had it only been hiding, waiting for this moment to consume me? No— Oh— My dad’s smoking again. Broken Mug It was a cold, clear day in the second week of April. I remember that it was a Saturday and that I was in the kitchen making coffee for the two of us. I remember taking the cup from me and holding it up to the light to see if it was clean. There was a smear of coffee on the rim, but the coffee inside was still clear. I remember how the light shone through the coffee and made the liquid glow. I remember how he stood over me then, and how my heart fluttered like a bird. I froze. He took the cup from my hand and threw it against the wall. It shattered into a thousand pieces and I remember watching as they fell to the floor like rain. I opened my mouth to tell him that it was his fault, that he should have known what he was doing, but then I remembered that it was me who did that to us. I took the broken pieces of ceramic and put them carefully in the sink in case there might be some use to them later. I cleaned the place I had thrown my heart at, cleaned the place I had thrown my soul at. I swept up the pieces of my life, as dull and meaningless as the fragments of ceramic. I carried them to the garbage and threw them in, along with the fragments of my body.

fisherman he is only seen in flashes, gold thrashes on the line, reeling it was not he who was found, so cold to the touch, that sallow thing iscariot online it can deceive the eye, a lie upon the lips that betrays it’s through a judas hole i spy where no one returns my gaze it’s through a judas hole i spy so you can’t return the view might it deceive the eye, a lie upon my lips that finds you indian summer in warm reprieves we’d enter soft infernos of foliage, leaves so vainly hanging on for winter how it froze us, in short sleeves J. R. Wilkerson is a resident of Northern Virginia by way of Lawrenceburg, Missouri.

Whimsy The day I saw the life-like parrot swaying on a string in front of your kitchen window I knew you had made a pivot in the cage that trapped your hardness now headed for fresh air, lighter, you offered me a gingerbread-man cookie letting me believe you were feeling powerful telling me you could get a head on a plate if you wanted to as you sat smiling next to your prayer plant Offshoots I am most comfortable staying behind the lens looking to take just a second of time for one picture, one frame taken in an open meadow that keeps teaching me I will be surprised by what appears after one click when it is time for me to look at the finished piece when I find rays of light I didn't see with my eyes go full spectrum, out of nowhere, illuminating crevices when a blur of cloud formations come to reveal a window in the blue where a lit-up man sits with his arms spread out over this kingdom reminding me that even when I am out of sight trying to hide in stillness, trying to avoid hard doors that may slam in my face, nature will open will speak out loud through closed spaces bountiful eyes share with the poor from fields of view in the making Turn Up I send you a picture of a rutabaga while you are hiking with a message that says the rutabaga and I love you you call me instantly because it is just what we needed I thank the farmer who planted the rutabaga, who helped us harvest our urgency First Cousin Only six years older than me you seemed to be so much wiser you were trusted to take me to the playground, so we could go on the seesaw up and down I wanted to be as pretty as you I wanted to put my sneakers aside, be shiny in patent leather like you, until you jumped off while I was smiling high in the sky making me fall hard sideways onto the cracked pavement catching only the look in your eye that frightened me more than the pain on my face I told no one when we went home as though I seemed to know it was safer to calm myself than to speak of this new found lowdown Susan Shea is a retired school psychologist who was raised in New York City, and now lives in a forest in Pennsylvania.  Since she has returned to writing poetry this year, her poems have been accepted by a few dozen publications, including Across the Margin, Vita Poetica, Ekstasis, Persimmon Tree Literary Magazine,  and The Avalon Literary Review, as well as three anthologies. Susan is so happy to wake up every morning knowing she now has the time to write poetry.

Disney’s recycled animations It’s been said that Woolie Reitherman had the cels of those scenes drawn over each other because it had already worked once, so why not again? Well, because that afternoon Christopher Robin walked a resurrected Indian jungle and began to feel the transfusion flowing through the landscape’s veins. Déjà vu at first, and then the full embrace of a parallel abandonment. The stock-phrase-pastime of slinging rocks over the bluff was really young Christopher questioning the colonialism of Mowgli’s god. How did I miss that? And if I missed that, it seems certain that I, too, am an organic sketch drawn over many past lives. Tell me great animator, how did the last me fair when our leg was fractured, running through cinders in the schoolyard? Or when we approached the burning car in the early hours before our breakfast shift at Jennifer’s on Pearl? The night of the fire, the night our neighbors nearly spit-roasted themselves, how often do they live? And does the flame continue to follow me through time? It does, doesn’t it? It’s rare but sometimes out on the rocks, if I stand still enough, I can feel your ventriloquism in some kind of celestial acrylic. I must admit it’s easy to lose track of your life. Sometimes, I swear I can hear your clear sheets flipping, layering themselves over us the weight holding us down, moving us along. SPOF Such poor machines we really are. What engineer worth their weight in gearing would craft so many Single Points of Failure. So many non-redundant environments with no backups, junctions where one failure, one loss, ends the system’s hum within the world. But that is exactly how some of the best lives are built. We hold our husbands, daughters, brothers, mothers, sons, and wives with all the strength of a stripped bolt. Tightened, with almost no hold at all.

Plumb or Plum? There, just outside my living room window, are six standard issue, old school mailboxes fixed on top of six wooden posts and a street sign at an intersection that says HWY 23 and N. Plumb, each one leaning at just a slightly different angle, each one pointing to a wildly diver- gent set of coordinates up there, in the night sky, looking down on us, all the time, that are, in turn, separated themselves, by millions of lightyears, and each one of them with a planet that’s almost like ours, maybe… But, for some reason, the one thing I keep coming back to is why would these folks name their street Plumb instead of Plum? Kansas Clouds They look like Kansas clouds, she said, raising a postcard up for my inspection as she emerged, suddenly (smiling somewhat triumphantly), from a forest of t-shirts, cap-guns, trinkets and toy tomahawks: a strip of Arizona highway, 1953, under a towering cathedral sky crowded with cumulus clouds like arctic caps that someone (mischievous) had set adrift to wander with the weather, their shadows slowly flowing over the arid landscape below, most likely unnoticed by the hitchhiker and gas attendant. Staring at the Ceiling Woke up to what I thought was the sizzle and tang of bacon cooking and a wandering piano solo, coming from somewhere, that seemed vaguely familiar to me though I just couldn’t identify it, no matter how long I laid there, staring at the ceiling, but instead it was just a soft summer rain falling on the steaming grease trap down in the alley that the Thai place next door kept right below my open bedroom window, and I guess the piano must have been just a dream. Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.

Susan wakes up in a sweat. A suffocating feeling of doom pins her to the bed. For a moment she panics and thinks she is back to those months of sticky sleeplessness when she thought she was losing her mind. She’d been terrified to find out what might be wrong with her but had no option but to go to the doctor when she forgot the PIN for her bank card, her password at work, and came within inches of crashing into a car she hadn’t even seen, all in the same week. It was a relief to discover that it was the menopause and not a brain tumour or dementia or something awful like that. She was too relieved about her diagnosis to spend any time mourning what it meant the end of. She’d never been one of those women who spent their lives dreaming about having children. She wasn’t really sure if she wanted them. Being on her own, it wasn’t a question she’d had to realistically face. You’d need to be with a man for a few years to get the measure of him, to know if he’d be the sort you could trust if he’d be someone you could build a future and family with and that’s not something she’d ever managed. There’d been a few boyfriends when she was younger but they’d never lasted more than a few months before she grew sick of the sight and sound of them, or they of her.  There weren’t exactly suitors queuing up at the door these days and she’d given up on internet dating ages ago after a long string of encounters with desperate divorcees, married men and headcases. She didn’t have to work hard to spot the red flags with any of them. They were practically waving them at her from the moment she met them. Now that the HRT had kicked in she’d been flying the past few months but maybe she’d gotten used to it and needed a higher dose patch. The doctor said it might need some adjusting over time. She never wants to go back to that useless brain fog stage again. It was terrifying, and mortifying. Susan turns over, pulls the duvet up tight to her chin and tries to go back to sleep. An image of a boy sitting alone in a dark room pops into her mind and she realises that’s what had woken her up in such a state. She’d had a horrible dream about that poor, sad hungry boy in the dirty nappy from the Barnados ad, the one she has to change the channel every time it comes on. They shouldn’t be allowed to manipulate people’s heartstrings like that for money, it’s not right. Seeing it always makes Susan think of that book of her mother’s from years ago about a woman who’d been neglected as a child. She’d read bits of it when she was in second or third class. It made her feel sick but there was something fascinatingly compelling to learn of the horror people were capable of inflicting on a child, their own child. She’d been too young to read such awful things and it had never left her. Some people don’t deserve to have children. The boy in her dream had been crying. He wanted Susan to help him, to rescue him, and though he was right in front of her, for some reason that only makes sense in the world of dreams, she couldn’t get to him. The feeling of helpless panic is still palpable and she doesn’t want to drift back into the dream so she drags herself out of bed to go pee and splash some cold water on her face. She should write to the advertising standards people, or whoever it is that governs those sorts of things. As she climbs back into bed she is grateful that at least it means it’s not the menopause that is haunting her tonight. Susan sleeps poorly for the rest of the night and is a wreck at work the next day. She does her best not to show it and to plaster a smile on her face. They all, well most of them, gave her a lot of lee-way when she went a bit loopy. She thinks they were as relieved as her that there was a reasonable explanation for her brain and personality malfunctions. They’re not a bad gang. They make an effort to go out for dinner and drinks every few months and though she invariably gets stuck with Ciara, whose sole topic of conversation is her never-ending divorce, or Keith who can only talk football, it’s the only chance she has to go out these days so she tries to make the best of it. All of her friends have teenage children now and are too busy driving them from soccer to music lessons to friend’s houses and back again so they don’t have time to go out anymore. Her sisters are much younger than them and they have their hands full with a bunch of pre-schoolers. She meets them now and then for coffee on Saturdays but she never gets the chance to finish a sentence without the young ones needing attention, food, entertainment, or refereeing. Going out and meeting people without having an actual conversation leaves Susan feeling lonelier than ever afterward. The girls have provided the grandchildren for their parents to obsess over so that leapfrogged them both past her into favourite daughters positions. Any time Susan calls her mother, the conversation always ends up on the children and which of them drew an amazing picture, scored a goal in their soccer match, or said something so cutesy and funny it has to be repeated for weeks. Still, things are good with Susan. Work’s going well, another year or two and she should be promoted to Team Lead. She has her Spanish classes on Tuesdays, her books, and goes to the theatre every week or two, the cinema the rare time there’s anything decent on, and her trips to The Shelbourne in Dublin or The G in Galway on her own for a treat every couple of months. She can’t complain. A couple of weeks later Susan calls into the supermarket on her way home on Friday evening to pick up a few bits. As she walks along the fridge section towards the milk, she passes a toddler sitting at the front of a trolley. His father is berating the little boy for reaching around to grab a packet of mini Babybel cheeses he’s just put in. As she opens the door of the fridge, Susan hears a child start to cry. “I want it,” she hears the wailing voice say. She instinctively turns to look back at the little boy in the trolley but it’s not him who is crying, though it sounds like it’s coming from that direction. There’s a high wall of special-offer toilet paper stacked next to them and she reckons there must be a child crying someone behind it and that the tower of toilet paper is throwing the sound around in some weird way. She carries on towards the freezer section to get some ice cream, glad to be escaping the grating noise. There is a work night out planned for the following night. There are just five of them meeting up to go to the new Thai place on O’Connell Street. Between weddings, no babysitters, secondary school graduations and other plans, most people couldn’t come this time. Susan thought about making up an excuse to cancel. That small of a group could end up being awkward. There’d be no escaping someone if they got too intense or boring but it’d been ages since she’d been out with anyone other than herself so she decided to take her chances. She could always leave early and get the last bus home if she wasn’t enjoying it. It’s quiet at the bus stop when Susan arrives a few minutes before six. There’s just a baby in a buggy there with what must be his Granny. She thinks it’s a boy. It’s hard to tell when they’re only a few months old, though its so chubby that it must be a boy. She’s checking the messages on her phone to see what pub they’re meeting in when she hears a whimper. It slowly builds and builds until it turns into the distressed cry of an upset baby that desperately needs something – food, a nappy change, burping, something. Susan looks up. The boy in the buggy is not smiling or talking but he’s not crying either. He’s just sitting there looking back at Susan. The noise doesn’t seem to be registering with his Granny at all. She’s watching for the bus while keeping an eye on the electronic notice board. “I want to go home,” Susan hears a child scream through tears yet the boy’s face is motionless. She looks around but there is no one else here, no other babies. She doesn’t know what to think but something very strange is happening and it’s starting to freak her out. She turns and begins walking back towards home. As she does, the crying fades. She looks back over her shoulder. The little boy is watching her, his face motionless, yet she can still hear a baby crying. Susan thinks about the crying in the supermarket the evening before. But that was different, she reasons to herself, there probably was a baby crying there that she just couldn’t see. She half runs, half walks back home so quickly that she gives herself a stitch in her side. When she gets there, she pours herself a double vodka with a splash of coke and texts Paul from work to say she missed the bus but that she’ll get a taxi in and will meet them at the restaurant. There must be a logical explanation for what happened but none come to mind no matter how she turns it over in her head. The drink has taken the edge off her uneasiness by the time the taxi arrives and the small talk she is forced to engage in with the driver is a distraction. The night out is okay but not great. The food is right up her street but the conversation gets stuck in a loop about their boss and whether he’s over-stating the hours on his own time sheets, if he’s going to stay with their team or more to a rival company who’re setting up outside the city next year, whether he’s qualified enough to even be the manager, and on and on it goes. Saturday night TV would have been better than this, Susan thinks, not impressed that talk of work has invaded her weekend. She downs a few more vodkas than usual to take the edge off her irritation. Her hangover the next day means she can think of nothing but lazing on the sofa, watching rubbish TV. The next week at work is busy and Susan has to stay in late a couple of evenings to finish a report that’s due so all thoughts of strange crying babies go out of her head. It isn’t until the following Saturday, when she is out for a walk and turns into the park that it comes back to her. There are children everywhere, like there always are on weekends. A little girl of about two is coming towards her on a toy car, pushed along by her father. They pass by Susan with only the sound of their chatting hanging in the air. As she continues, she meets a mother and baby in a pram. Susan’s shoulders drop in relief when they walk by her without a sound. She tells herself off for being anxious over nothing and quickens her stride to get on with her walk, taking the path that follows the boundary of the park all the way around. She’ll get a couple of laps in before she heads back home again. As she rounds the next corner, Susan nearly runs into a woman who is walking with her head down, furiously typing on her phone with both thumbs. A little girl is waddling precariously behind her, trying to catch up with the woman. The toddler looks Susan straight in the eye and as she does, Susan hears it start to cry. The child looks upset but, like the boy at the bus stop, she doesn’t seem to be crying. There are no tears falling from her eyes, her mouth isn’t even open. But it has to be coming from her. There’s no one else near them and no big stack of toilet paper to form a semi-plausible explanation this time. “Mammy! Wait! I’m tired,” Susan hears the little girl call out but the sound isn’t coming from her mouth, it’s shut tight. Susan breaks into a jog and heads for the path that will bring her back to park gate. She has to get out of here. She passes more children on the way out, a bunch of young lads playing soccer, a baby in its mother’s arms being fed a bottle, a little boy on a practice bike with no peddles. None of them are crying, obviously or otherwise. But then she walks by a little girl of about two and a half or three whose father is trying to make her kick a ball to him and as soon as Susan lays eyes on her, she hears the girl start to cry. Like the other times, the girl’s face remains impassive while the sound of crying fills the air. “I hate football,” Susan hears her scream. “Why do you always make me play football?” Susan picks up the pace and doesn’t stop running until she’s through the gates and on the path home. She crosses the road to avoid a buggy coming towards her. What is going on? As she walks home, she thinks back over all the crying children, trying to make sense of it. Other people didn’t seem to hear them, or if they did, they pretended not to. But were the children even crying at all? To look at them you wouldn’t think so, their faces didn’t match the sounds she’d heard coming from them. It was like the sound was emanating from them but not from their mouths, as you’d expect, though that doesn’t make sense. As she thinks about it, she realises that the crying doesn’t usually start until she looks right at them, until their eyes meet. Are they trying to communicate with her? Are they looking for her attention or help?  Maybe she has a gift that allows only her to be aware or or to tune into their pain. She has a vague memory of a cousin on her mother’s side being the seventh-son of a seventh-son but he only ever had the cure for shingles and warts, and he wasn’t even that good at it, as far as she remembers. Susan thinks over it all afternoon as she tried to catch up on housework. Maybe she should stop running from whatever this is, stop getting so freaked out by these children. They’re only babies, she tries to convince herself. They aren’t trying to scare me. Could she be more open to them, to let in whatever they are trying to say to her? The prospect scares her but she has a niggling feeling that she’s been somehow called to do it, that they’ve chosen her for a reason. It would be cruel to ignore that. Susan can’t help but notice children and babies all the time now. Everywhere she goes she sees children being ignored, not listened to and not having their basic needs met. They are in McDonald’s and cafes at lunchtime, in the library, in the queue for the cinema, in shops, on the street, everywhere. Their lips don’t need to move. She can hear their endless cries in her head.  “I’m hungry.” “I have a pain in my tummy.” “I want Mommy.” “Let me down.” “Get me out.” “I don’t want to.” “Give me milk.” She tries to connect with those that signal they are in distress, to meet their gaze with concern, willing them to see in her eyes that she cares, that she understands, that she’s sorry they are hurting. Sometimes it works and the crying subsides. Sometimes it’s not enough. Susan stops being afraid of whatever this is that is happening to her, and takes comfort in the fact that she can soothe the pain of some of them. The cacophony of the troubled souls and the emotional energy she has to expend to reach them becomes exhausting. She doesn’t have the mental capacity for watching TV or reading when she gets home and usually falls asleep listening to Classic FM, contented by the work she has done. She stops caring about her actual job so much. She does what she has to and makes a point of leaving on time every day. If Paul wants to lick up to the boss by doing overtime and volunteering to take on new projects, he can have the Team Lead position when it comes up. Susan realises that she doesn’t care about it as much as she thought she did. She skips a work night out at the bowling alley, then a musical they all go to. She hasn’t seen any of them outside the office or her sisters in a while. It doesn’t bother her. She’s afraid they’d notice something is up with her and there’s no way she could explain any of this to anyone. Beside, it feels like it should be just their thing, hers and the children’s. There is a boy in a buggy in the riverside park Susan always passes through on her way from the cheap pay-per-week car park to the office.  It’s ridiculous to even call it a park since it’s mostly concrete and the few narrow strips of grass there are are covered in dog shit. At first, he is only there the odd time. Now he’s there every morning on her way to work and every evening on the way back. He must be a year, or a year and a half at most. His mother looks like she’s been pushed to her limits. The sagging black bags under her eyes make her face seem even paler than it probably is. Her hair is stuck to her head and looks like it hasn’t been washed in weeks, and her grey tracksuit is pock-marked with stains. The way the boy looks at Susan haunts her. His eyes tell of his pain, of long hours spent on the streets, of the bottles of milk that no longer fill his growing belly, of the shouting and fighting and drinking when they do go home. He never cries though, not like the others. He seems too defeated to, too tired to. She knows she should do something to help him. Who would she ring and what would she say? Without a name or address to visit nobody would do anything anyway. Social workers are all overworked. It’s always on the news. They can’t keep track of their enormous case loads as it is and hundreds of children stuck in horrendous situations are falling through the cracks every day. That night, she dreams about the boy. He is in her house, crying. The sound haunts her she runs from room to room trying to find him. His cries grows louder and louder, the intensity of it panicking her. When she reaches the kitchen she sees he is outside, sitting in the back yard in the cold with just a nappy on, a dirty nappy, like the boy from the Barnardos ad. She runs to the back door but it won’t open. He is hysterical now, crying for her but no matter how hard she tugs at the back door, it won’t budge. Tears are streaming down her face now too. She is letting him down. Susan wakes in a panic with the most awful feeling of guilt she can’t shake for the rest of the night and into the morning. She listens to podcasts until dawn sends a pale light through her curtains, then gets up and goes to work an hour earlier than usual. She avoids the park by the river on the way there, taking the longer route through the shopping streets, but the boy is on her mind all day. Autopilot brings her on her usual, well-worn route on the way home, though she hadn’t meant to come by the park. When she gets there, he is sitting on his own in his buggy his eyes pleading with her to help him. His mother is off over on the other side of the park, getting a light from some men drinking cans on a bench. The woman’s back is to the boy, oblivious to any danger he could be in. Without thinking, Susan grabs his buggy and runs as fast as she can back in the direction she’d come from. She doesn’t dare look back until they’re out the gate and hidden from view by the dense hedge that borders the park. She finds a gap she can peek through and is disgusted to see that his mother hasn’t even turned around yet and is oblivious to the fact that her son is missing. Susan bends down to look at the boy and make sure he is okay. “Take me out of here, leave the buggy,” he silently says to her. “I can’t stand another minute trapped in this thing.” She does as she is told. She has no car seat so she leaves her car where it is and runs to the bus stop two streets over instead, looking over her shoulder the whole way to make sure they aren’t being followed. There is a bus just about to pull off when they get there. “Thank you,” he says to her as the doors close behind them. Susan has no idea what she is going to do, how she will explain the fact that she suddenly has a child, where he will sleep, who will mind him while she goes to work but all worry about these practicalities disappear from her head when he says, “Let’s go home, Susan.” A quiet peacefulness floods through her. She will look after him. This is what all those other children were leading her towards. This is her purpose. It’s what she is supposed to do with her life. She has never felt so sure of anything before. Margaret Cahill is a short story writer from Limerick, Ireland. Her fiction has been featured in The Milk House, époque press é-zine, Ogham Stone, Honest Ulsterman, HeadStuff, Silver Apples, Autonomy anthology, Incubator, Crannog, Galway Review, Limerick Magazine, Boyne Berries and The Linnet’s Wings. She also dabbles in writing about music and art, with publications on HeadStuff.org and in Circa Arts Magazine.

The third person to walk by outside yells, “It’s the bird’s garden!” before turning away. While it may be the bird’s garden, the baby is in my belly, pressing up on my liver, which is sliding into my ribs. On a video call with my mother-in-law, I pronounce the word “Chiropraktiker” correctly in German – I just don’t say it loud enough. My chiropractor says everything far too loudly. I guess it’s because she rattles backs with a tiny “jackhammer.” I slide downward on the table, so my belly properly fits into the pillow’s belly cutout. I swear I feel him wiggle, but he’s as soft as good poetry. All good poetry starts with a time and a place, so I set a timer at my desk for 25 minutes. I am told to refrain from reading the book now as it will evoke too much nostalgia and I agree. I continue to read about cults. How many 25-minute timers must one start in a day? Please don’t answer that or I’ll have a nervous breakdown. I look at the picture of me and my sister in LA, a cactus behind our heads. I think, “Wow, I used to be so fit” before remembering I’m pregnant – this isn’t a matter of weight, goddammit. It’s a matter of one body growing a baby while the other was not. I will call you when it makes sense, somewhere deep in Prenzlauer Berg where it starts to look like Friedrichshain and there are no longer any cobblestones. Some days, I cry about things that never actually existed. Like, hypothetical nostalgia – like, this could have existed, but it did not and never will. And this person could have been this way, but they never were. We may be in the bird’s garden, but the baby is in my belly, pressing up on my liver, which is sliding into my ribs. Taylor Miles-Behrens is a writer and adjunct English and creative writing instructor living in Boulder, Colorado. Her work has recently appeared in Fjords Review, MORIA, and [sub]liminal. She studied North American literature and culture at Freie University (Berlin) and creative writing at Kingston University (London).

Novel in the Making The story is short, and not very novel. A man and a woman, both brisk as cloud breaks: The woman is not bad, but sometimes sloppy. The man is not bad, but sometimes sloppy. The man constantly reminds the woman of what she lacks, which is the same thing that he lacks, and they are constant in constantly doing this. Till one day the woman just tires out, the way a clock stops ticking after a spring has rusted. And the woman stops listening, and the man stops talking. The space they share is silence. No tick, no tock, And they learn how to feel lonely, Together. Triste There’s something sad about a daffodil on a windowsill in February. The miracle of the blossom against grey panes, the brazen orange mouth that speaks in wide O’s, when I am still living in backdrop of winter sounds, uncertain what each patter and rasp might be. The roll of wind against shutters. Glasses shifting in a rack. The dog scratching at its chain. Not yet ready for this bulbous shout of color on a sill, or the comfort of my own loneliness yawning wide and loud. One Night a Bear pawed through our garbage tins, jostled our refuse, it stuck a dank tongue into an empty pint of cherry vanilla, knowing what brought it to that moment of sweetness— a watermelon rind, cobs of corn, the crusts of bread obsessively carved from squared edges. All that could have sustained us, was but a flicker in the unburdened appetite of a bear. The bear could see our faces pressed in awe against the pane, eyeing a still life of trash strewn over the lawn revealed in crescent moonlight. The next morning we packed, traced veins on maps, budgeted our solitary destinations for places other than the unchartered terrain of heart. Memories of that night, summers and summers ago, are fettered to a moment in a rented cabin. The only thing not muted to our past is a bear--come one night when we were hungry, but could only watch it feed on all we had tossed away. Smiling Fish My son at the age of three asked: Do fish smile? Where does the blue go when the sky turns grey? Why do I have to sleep alone if you don’t? He never turned from my exasperations, muted answers, or the continuous folding of whatever it was in my hands, keeping them from being empty. Now, grown and the product of unanswerable queries, he says that I am the one with too many questions, demanding details, the fine tuning of sound bytes, wanting, in every minutia, the story without any revision, becoming the constant north in memory’s daily compass. All of our rejoins are just remakes of questions he stopped asking, now that I have all the answers. Laurie Kuntz’s books are: That Infinite Roar, Gyroscope Press, Talking Me Off The Roof, Kelsay Books, The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press, Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press, Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press, and Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press. Simple Gestures won Texas Review’s Chapbook Contest, and Women at the Onsen won Blue Light Press’s Chapbook Contest. She’s been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net Prizes. Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila Na Gig, and other journals.  More at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Blasted by winds of silent rage, this would be nothing less than a tsunami. No trees left standing. The Northeastern constricted surrounding villages. Long as I could remember, this violent turbulence touched down and tore up the same fragmented single-wide body I cowered within. Never thought to move. Kept rebuilding the same ravaged landscape into something salvageable until the next cyclone hit. Flies never gave notice before skies darkened and vagrant clouds compressed into thin lips of the horizon. Stood ground as the torsion of organs wrenched themselves into opposing forces of cell migration between malignant or benign, dwelling or scrap metal. *** “Got no gust, girl. You’re nothing but a sprinkler of Moms, squalling and nipping. Got no misgivings about a downpour when I can cover myself with the windbreaker of you. Rambling your skinny ass around my boys with some kind of buoyancy. What the hell is that shitstorm called? Dad’s wheezing under Mom’s endless torrent of shackles. You trying to swallow me up? Don’t get all drizzly on me now. I got lightning beating thunder under this skin.” *** My mouth wrenched open the same shoddy door that stuck. Air was thick and sinister quiet. Why don’t assholes get out of hurricane alley? We got no time for that shit. Each damn year everything bleeds over this skeletal territory, only to become obliterated, as if we don’t know what’s downwind. We stay, we go. More threatening to settle over a stretch of open terrain with no history, no decay. Smack of waves on boulders one listens to day after day without registering, and yet without it there would be an absence of potency. The man traced the lines of my face with a gun. My neck wedded itself to the contours of his guillotine archway of compressed fingers. He bulged from his recliner while groundswells sprayed from his pores. My fists were two restraining orders as I sunk to my knees. Fingers slid along the sides of my twitching cheeks. I dropped my head in his lap. The neighborhood was roiling. “How could I ever live without you?” I asked.

Both a cartoonist and writer, Berin Aptoula holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Adelphi University, where she also teaches. If you’re ever looking for her or find yourself in need of miscellaneous new wave facts, check your local discotheque for an androgyne grooving under the alias BALKAN VILLAIN.