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I’m Aware that when I do all the dog walks at night, I should carry my car keys. That my job is laced with sloppy kisses, but just under that, the potentiality for nighttime To carve its name inside of me. I should carry metal, the kind that smells like blood,  in between my thumb and ring finger– Just in case the past comes back in the ways we do not name. I spend Thanksgivings alone but I think of ones I’ve been to in the past: laden with pie and cards and games won for a quarter, near farms and rosy cheeks. A former teacher’s kids telling me – a virtual stranger– what they’re grateful for  the year ahead, as I memorized her linens. She put the fork tines in, towards the gut, like the sharp pieces should be close, to keep them safe. If you see me alone with a carving knife, and I’m smiling It’s because I’m not fully alone, I’m thinking of the dinners past, the glimmer of the ones you loved me then, But did not linger. I grab the husky’s leash – one of three– from the apartment, which was painted black with spires. To be transparent, they said. To remind us where we stand. The way my work told me therapy was okay once in a while, the notes they didn’t say (about my brain) were quite plain. Half smiles & they still hand me coffee, out of politeness, but I notice their downturned mouths.  & the way my braid is too frizzy for corporate life, but I wish I could change, for them, or if I outta. Now, brisk pace and shallowed haunting breath; I walk the dogs one at a time because a pack Is too strong To contend with, The owner said. One at a time, and they’ll love you. In a pack, they’ll overtake you. They’ll sense you don’t belong. I recognized that song, that refrain from smudged glass and vodka shots that I didn’t ask for And the college boys pressed too neatly When they kicked you out at midnight, with swirling flakes Because you didn’t say their names Correctly. My Mom kicked me out in winter solstice once– The light from space holy The snowflakes landing in the hottub Where I stood for a minute, before I left, crumbling. Feeling the steam sink into me Slowly. Snowflakes (so pulsing, so delicate, so unique) disappear under Arguments too hot, temperatures rising too boldly. Still, I lingered: one more time. Taking her words in for another minute, if only I could hold the heat Inside, like a glove that wasn’t really mine. As she told me with fang– To go away. The dog I walk now: she had a puppy. &  the owner kept one from the litter. Couldn’t separate all the baby heartbeats From the ones that loved them diligently, hovering. When I say her daughter’s name, even though she’s banal fang, The husky looks at me with a look that is unexplainable; the dictionary couldn’t give me a word. It tried (lunar, part, kisses, dark). The look the mother gave me:  part delicacy, part despair & a little bit of haughty integrity. The way she still takes time to mark the rock in front of her before Going back to her young, as if to remind her daughter of her place & where she came from. & yet I cry, counting spires that once used to be dressed in candlelight color, Thinking that this part-wolf mix That I walk for twenty bucks Loves her puppy more than my own mother Ever Loved me. If only I could be so lucky to have a mother recognize the way another Says my name in vowel sounds, the hesitancy– If only I could get her to envelop me with paths that lead me back From midnight hours, clutched car keys, too much therapy All the way To safety. If only she would bellow out for me To come back. Leslie Cairns is from Denver, CO. She has a chapbook out with Bottlecap Press ('The Food is the Fodder'). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee (2023).

When the self-driving vehicle was in a bad accident but still in drivable condition, it selfishly bypassed the local hospital on its way to the dealership’s repair shop. The car was fixed up while the passenger inside suffered their injuries. The company that sold the vehicles received a slap on the wrist and they used the incident as a case study during their annual summit. Some employee suggested they reach out to a large hospital conglomerate. Soon thereafter, the two entities made an agreement. Now there were trauma bays staffed by board-certified surgeons attached to the dealership repair shops, where the battered self-driving vehicles and their unlucky inhabitants could be taken in the event of an accident. A one-stop shop. It could be said that the blood and oil stains on the ground complimented one another beautifully. It wasn’t long before car wash businesses began offering elective surgeries. A win-win for all, but especially for industry. The employee whose idea led to this remarkable symbiosis received a small honorary plaque for her innovative spirit. Regrettably, due to rising costs of inflation, she could not be offered a paid promotion at this time. Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two young children. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Raven Review, Maudlin House, Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, and Whiskey Tit.

I thought I was fine right after my car accident. I'd slid off a rain-slick highway in Michigan onto a grassy median and knocked myself out. I woke with the top of my head feeling slightly sore, wondering why there were so many trees and shrubs in front of me. And where were all the cars? Before I could reach for my phone to call home, I saw a deep-blue Michigan State Police car pull up behind me and two blue-uniformed officers came out to check on me. I exited my SUV with no problem and was apparently too coherent to be drunk because they only asked if I felt all right and if I needed help getting home. I didn't. They cut the deployed airbags and then got in their car to lead me back onto the road. Driving home under the speed limit, I noted at some level that I'd had a very lucky break: while I'd gone into and out of a ditch, at least there was a median. Five or ten minutes further north there was no median and I would have merged with southbound traffic and ended up dead or close to it. The fact registered, but didn't take root since I was calling home to tell my husband what happened and that I'd be there soon. I was still shaken when I pulled into our driveway, but the whole thing felt a bit dreamlike. Had I really gone off the road? Three days later, my husband took me to the ER with what was quickly diagnosed as a concussion: I was nauseous, dizzy, couldn't stand or see straight. Several hours of tests didn't find any other damage and I was advised to take things easy for a few weeks, though my avuncular GP gave me permission to teach my classes at Michigan State University if I was driven there and back, and otherwise rested at home. Easy-peasy, right? And then the panic attacks started. As a mystery author, I watch a lot of crime movies and series, but suddenly I couldn't tolerate them. Watching a movie or TV show with a car chase of accident of any kind left me shivering and afraid, my heart beating so hard that my head hurt. I was reliving the moments of waking up confused, and experiencing something worse: the knowledge that I had escaped possible death or at the very least terrible injury by minutes. I stopped feeling safe in the world and gradually became afraid of even driving to the local supermarkets. I had to steel myself for the short trips, reminding myself that there was no highway driving involved, no heavy traffic, and there sure as hell weren't going to be any dangerously slick roads because I stayed in if it was raining or if there was even a forecast of rain. Worse than the way my world was starting to shrink were the vague dark nightmares that thrust me from sleep and left me almost breathless and terrified—as if the nightmare still had its claws in me and was determined to draw blood and drag me down. My GP prescribed Xanax for the panic attacks and it worked when I was awake, though the nightmares continued. But in the middle of all the mental and physical turmoil, my writer's brain was minutely noting each and every symptom, each and every shock, each and every moment of terror.  One thing was very clear: I could use this someday. Journalist and author Janet Malcolm once wrote that "Art is theft, art is armed robbery." And I wonder now, can you steal from yourself? Lev Raphael is a 1st-generation American who has authored 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery. He escaped academia many years ago to write and review full time.

Phototograph courtesy of Slobbered Lens. His skinny arms wrap around my torso, his face buried in my shirt, a makeshift handkerchief catching his tears. This wasn’t a posed picture; it was captured. Trapped. Caged in black and white pixels, then frozen in time. An eternal goodbye. We raise Guide Dog Puppies, so goodbye is a part of the parlance of our family. While others might divide time by seasons or the school year, we do it by housebreaking, socialization outings, training benchmarks, and, of course, letting go. You might think it gets easier with practice. It doesn’t. If anything, it is harder now than when I started, pre-kids. Now I carry not only my own grief, but his, and his little brother’s. A burden three times greater with every farewell. But the tears are bittersweet. We will see them again, uniformed in a leather harness, navigating a dangerous world with poise and strength, shoulders wider, head higher. Their partner – this unknown person – will become a part of our family. This closing door will lead to one thrown wide open to the future. So, I let his skinny arms squeeze, even in the unposed, unscripted moments. He is eleven, and I have no doubt that these moments are fast-receding in the rear-view mirror of growing up. The top of his head reaches my chin, his talk has turned to the future, and I saw him walking down the school hall with a girl last week. I’m not ready. Thirteen goodbyes. One for every puppy. It’s a good thing I have so much practice. It's a good thing I know that the small goodbyes lead to greater hellos. Because someday, those arms will squeeze one last time. And that will be the hardest goodbye of all. Phototograph courtesy of Rebecca Minelga. Rebecca is an author and speaker who uses the power of words to navigate the liminal spaces between who we are and who we are becoming. Rebecca raises Guide Dog Puppies and two sons - in that order - with her husband just north of Seattle. She have been previously published in The Mark Literary Review, Crêpe and Penn, and The Hooghly Review.

Unboxed As if returning a forgotten memory, like an abandoned child, Back to the banks of the subconscious which violently pushed it, Womb-like, away from my fleeting paternal grasp, my eternal awareness, To live desolate, desperate, neglected, and alone in What I image to be a plain brown box In a chilly, musty, secluded basement, my mother, In an act of shedding the echoing voices of recollection Which embody the home I grew up in, the one from which she Is beginning the process of post-retirement departure, Casually hands me a palm-sized, black and white, 60-minute cassette tape With the all-too-familiar, hieroglyphic-like penmanship Of one of my fleeting friends from middle school on it, A circle of sound that hasn’t met my senses, hands Since approximately the mid-90’s Along with a paper printout of my first full-length feature script, Whispers in the Darkness, Which I wrote with one of my best friends in middle school. And as I note the immaculate condition of both items And my finger traces over words, pages, wheels which once Spun forwards and backwards in an endless cycle In the now ancient, near-extinct beast Us 90’s kids once called “a tape player”, I can’t help but think of how far I’ve come, How little I’ve grown in taste, How quickly friendships vanquish yet stay the same, And how art, In all its various forms, Is a time machine Which, especially when stumbled upon without preparation, Can connect you to a mindset, a person, A younger, less experienced, but far more optimistic version of you, As if attached with invisible wires which record your thoughts In a taut, all white cat scan-like tunnel of claustrophobic screeches And all-too-personal restrictions of movement and breath, You’re simultaneously happy to have unboxed, Delighted to have grown into someone else from, And yet, in the same instance, dearly wish To avoid. Third-Person Self-Portrait A swarm of angry bees, a honeycomb of darkness, Hovers behind the nerve-laden riverbanks of the swampy eye. Spastic reverberations, seventeen years of breathless warehouse labor, Shudders with an exploding anguish, a timebomb between the shoulder blades. Thus, your back is arched. Thus, your heart is coffin, anvil heavy From the barrage of emails, responses from publishers about your eagerly submitted writing, You sigh every time you see because you know the pleasantly worded outcome Is rejection before your stinger-strewn, hive-like brain fools you with a burst of dopamine into Clicking on the electronic retort: The orange construction cone placed in horizontal lines Along the once promising roads of your lifelong passion. And you again sigh, swim in the Upside down, marshy edges of your gaze as a sensation of drowning, a visage of your Lifelong regrets, failures, childhood taunts that, like the yellowjacket, still cause a redness, Swelling, itching beneath the flesh where your true self, naively rejuvenated with a youthful Vigor to create a still-burning dream of setting the world on fire with your art, rises Like a pimple that you can never quite get to, pop despite the lifelong scratching, indention Of fingernails to wounded, infected flesh. And it is because your mind is so laser-like In its focus on what is currently wrong that you can’t see all you’ve done right. You miss the happiness trickling down from your hard work onto the smiling faces Of your children as they grow, learn, pursue their own pleasures and hone their own skills. You miss the beauty of the fall leaves outside your home which reflect, like a mirror, Your dedication to providing for your loving family. You miss seeing the progress Made with your auteurship: The innumerable novels, short stories, plays, songs, scripts, and Award-winning films that wouldn’t exist if you didn’t have the can-do spirit that hides in the Closet of your marrow, sits on your shoulder, and whispers positive affirmations in your ear. You miss the way the sunlight bends around your frame and admirably fills your form When your back is bent, the tiny creatures are ready to attack, and doubt clouds the eye. You miss the luminosity spilling from your fingertips, illuminating your every movement: The quiet, kind-hearted essence of you being distinctly you. Andrew Buckner is a multi award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter. A noted poet, critic, author, actor, and experimental musician, he runs and writes for the review site AWordofDreams.com.

The Curse In the smoke of his words comes a sign that we can’t sleep anymore under the calm dome of the moon when auburn wildfires race to breed both needle and cone, and black water floods flatten horizons to mock hereafter, like pine martens plundering a nest of snowcocks, the hungry red anguish of boyhood hunger— “Father, your children!” My eyes fall at radiant openings among limbs of hemlock and cedar, Canadian or Himalayan, suffering in landscapes of handsome stone faces, like the chateau in a leafy French valley, or the Lake of the Little Fishes, where the First Nations gathered roots south of the Arctic Circle, all totems watching and waiting in wood or marble for a wondrous new birth to martyr, as if my sight into forest and sculpture might find a way back to a syntax of reverence for home, for his house, a wistful miracle of badlands to scrub my hair and skin, a self-portrait where the artist defies the margins by symbol, by prophecy, with a thick pith of betrayal and my apology for his absence, the golden embrace of another dread far from the one I thought I’d inherited, the feast of forgiving oneself the torment of a boy’s bloody mouth of open wings trying to fly higher, high enough to span one more wink from him, of my father in the canopies, escaping the pedestal I made him without knowing the desolation of the drowned, or the ironic reward of burning in the sky so far below. Summer Is Another Cliché The fan blades spin down sunken, my bed without his bald crown because he lies in another room, black eye down a crescent hall of dead prey, their neck and shoulder mounts on shields of spalted maple, his face a shearing force with cheek, an amuse-bouche, he startles easily, what he sees beneath the light, trains rumble by hobo fires crackling like teeth, a doll armature, his tracks are my coastline of submergence, all the sheets balling up behind closed doors, in outpatient lamplight, I pause to consider the heft of his chest, red velvet skull plate in September, of what’s denied by sleep, by taking a door off in pieces, the unexpected kiss from under his chest, the undertow of a new planetary body. Mikal Wix is a queer writer from Miami. Their poems are found or forthcoming in Uncanny Magazine, North American Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Moss Puppy, Portland Review, Roi Faineant Press, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of West Trade Review. All published work here: https://linktr.ee/mikalwix

A lot of things, you found, were a lot like murdering someone. You tried very hard for a long time to avoid murdering anyone but then you slipped and murdered someone. Having murdered your first person you discovered that it wasn’t as bad as you expected. You got over it quickly; life went on, it didn’t really affect you in any way. You worried for a while what everyone else would think but gradually you realized that no one cared all that much; as time passed you weren’t even sure that anyone noticed you murdered someone. But this morning you woke and all at once the compound walnut leaves fell in the frost and the sunshine and now you find that murdering someone is not at all like murdering someone—it’s not a thing like murdering someone, at all. Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada; he now lives in what Al Purdy called "the country north of Belleville", where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry. His photos and links to his published poems can be found at birdsandbeesandblooms.com.

Mercy The only thing I remember from last night’s dream is the word mercy, spoken by a spectral figure. Was it my soul, crying out because it had been a hellish week of floods and fury and dithering idiots spouting lies, and in the petty annoyances of my small life, that included ants swarming in my kitchen cabinets? I scattered diatomaceous earth till it looked like a bakery explosion, swabbed vinegar until it smelled like an aging salad, to no avail and so I put aside my eco-spirit and dragged out the killing traps. I allow daddy longlegs to live peacefully in corners but I can’t abide the sci fi vibe of the little black bugs who I imagine might be nesting in the walls and floors, seething, ready to take over some night I’m dreaming another mercy dream. Allergic to the stinging sort, I do not try to rescue or dispatch the sonorous wasp that flings itself at one window then another like a vaudeville routine, not noticing the open door for a good long time. When she finally does and exits, I puff out a sigh of relief until, moments later, she’s back at it – smack, frantic buzz, repeat, for several days, until I find her on the floor, no autopsy needed. None Of It Lasted We dodged the drought, the cyclone, the taxmen, even the hoarding impulse but we couldn’t stay lean and limber, go without sleep, remember everything. Now creaky and layered in dun spots, creased and folded, slooped and drooping with crinkled knees and fleeting night vision, we are old, old I say, no longer with a chuckle. It could be any day, any loose minute in a drab weekend. Let the roof cave in, the grey paint curl from the porch, let the rotted steps crumble to dust and the mold reign supreme. We’re inside the last chapter and there’s no surprise ending, no rescue. Mercedes Lawry’s most recent book is Vestiges from Kelsay Books. She’s published three chapbooks and poems in journals such as Nimrod and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her book Small Measures is forthcoming from ELJ Editions, Ltd. in 2024. She’s also published short fiction and stories and poems for children.

I’m at my first court-mandated anger management meeting when a woman with frosted pink lipstick bleeding into her smoker’s lines leans in against me at the coffee table. “Honey, I can hear your heart beating.” She smells like that raspberry body spray my mom loads up on. I ended up here because I’d been on my phone, fighting with my mom, listening to her tell me to kick Billy to the curb once and for all, while I pushed my cart with one hand down the frozen foods aisle. I’d yelled back she needed to mind her own damned business, and why was she always there for her stupid church friends and not for me? When I’d looked up, a man was standing in front of the DiGiornos and Tombstones, listening, and he looked just like Billy, all squinty-eyed and half-cocked.  So I'd lobbed one of those family sized Stouffer’s lasagnas at him, and the next thing I knew, cops had me pushed up against the pizza doors. Now, I imagine drawing a box with each breath in, hold, breath out, hold. It’s a trick my probation officer taught me, and it’s surprisingly effective in stopping me from doing stupid shit. Doesn’t seem to help me much with Billy or my mom, but I figure family takes a little longer for the feelies to kick in because they’re so much more work. The woman shrugs and walks away. I keep drawing the imaginary box. These meetings are in the Black Oak Baptist basement where Billy and I were married, with those cheap folding chairs that pinch my hips and hurt my back. The man leading tonight’s meeting keeps shoving his hands in and out of his pockets and rocking on his feet. He’s going on about how his wife simply packed up their kids and most of the kitchen utensils while he was at work one day. He starts crying when he tells us he came home to a dark house, surrounded by holes in the walls he could throw coffee cups through. The next day he broke down in his boss’s office, where his boss told him to man up and get back to work. The man then laughs like he’s embarrassed to tell us this next part, and he rams his hands back into his pockets. “That’s when I punched him,” he says. “Wife found out about it and doubled down on the divorce proceedings. I was forced to come here, just like all of you.” “Boo!” I yell from my seat. “Where’s the happy ending of how you got your family back? That’s what I’m here for.” “Now she speaks,” someone a few rows in front of me says. It’s the frosted pink lipstick lady. I grab my purse and tear off up the stairs. I force myself to go back the next week. I have no choice if I don’t want to end up in county for thirty days. Lipstick lady greets me at the door, like she already knows how this plays out. Turns out her name is Nadine. Same as my mom’s name. Nadine calls these meetings “joy recovery.” Says in the span of a week, she lost her job, her husband told her he was leaving her for her cousin, and her house burned down. Says she was rightfully mad at the world but that was no way to live. Says she’s been coming to weekly meetings for a decade, and now she makes lemonade out of lemons. I’m almost convinced she really believes it. I tell her she reminds me of my mom, all crow’s feet and chicken skin and the same habit of going down stairs sideways like a crab, one tentative foot at a time. I immediately apologize, that I’m working hard on not saying stupid shit or throwing punches anymore, but it takes time for the desire to turn to belief to turn to action and so on. She smiles like she knows exactly what I’m saying. Today, she smells like that honeysuckle cologne the Avon lady used to sell, and there are undercurrents of cucumbers pulled from the garden and yeasty dough doubling on the countertop. And that right there is my mom, all of it, and I mean it a complement. Nadine takes my hands in hers. Her skin is thin and cool, and she has a little mole between her thumb and index finger that I keep touching the edges of. She doesn’t say a word. Just patiently waits. And there’s something about her that warms me, how she doesn’t pull away as my finger dances around the mole on her hand, how she doesn’t tick off a list of everything that’s wrong in my life. So I start in the middle: Sometimes I get so mad I punch the walls, and one time there wasn’t a wall, only glass, but I’m not that stupid to punch glass, so I punched a man who looked like Billy, and my fist slamming into him stunned me, how much it hurt, how time stopped and everything was quiet and still, and there was my mom again, and it’s just the two of us again, and we’re sitting in the backyard eating ice cream sandwiches again, and she’s whispering, Ruthie, can you hear it? Listen hard, Ruthie. It’s you. And I did hear it. For a split second, I really did. L Mari Harris’s stories have been chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 and Best Microfiction. She lives in the Ozarks. Follow her @LMariHarris and read more of her work at lmariharris.wordpress.com

My father took a picture of me with Santa Claus so he could remind me over and over again who was to blame when I didn’t get what I wanted for Christmas. The beer budget didn't allow for film developing for months, but the next year his contribution to holiday decorations was that picture in a dust-dulled frame that once had his wedding picture in it. He put it on the mantle since it was heavy enough to hold up a perennially unused stocking, and after a few empty Christmas mornings of dad answering my disappointment by shrugging towards the mantle, I was cursing whenever someone mentioned the Holiday Spirit, scowling at carolers, rolling my eyes at K-Mart Christmas displays. And blaming a lot on that smiling, bearded asshole with me in that picture. Then—6th grade—Jimmy and the kids at lunch laughed at me for not knowing it was my parents. Santa Claus was supposed to be my parents, which was now just my dad, a person who existed like a door ajar since mom—in his words—wanted to have things handed to her. I immediately started buying as many toys and candies as I could with whatever allowance he remembered to give me, secretly stowing presents wrapped in pages of the Pennysaver. Christmas Eve I snuck it all into a festive pile under the tree, and in the morning smelled dad's 90-proof robe before he staggered into the living room. I waited for my apology. For him to recognize my disappointment was his responsibility. Instead he pieced together the whole scheme, slowly bubbled into laughter, and said, I did it. I did it. You ever see your mother again you tell her I did it. He walked to that picture on the mantle and pressed his finger to my younger face, causing the stocking to fall to the floor. See? See? I taught you a lesson, he said, and then wobbled back to bed, leaving me to unwrap what I had done for myself. Timothy C Goodwin-Actor, writer, photographer (@)timothycgoodwin(.com)

I sat in the hospital waiting room in my full regalia — blue sequins chafing my thighs while the cut tee I was wearing made me a bit too cold. I tapped the rubber boots to keep time with the commercial jingling overhead. It was something to keep my attention while I waited for the doctors to make sure the kid was feeling ok. “Welcome back to Channel 5 News!” said the television. “Now, let’s turn over to Sam Nelson with the weather!” I tapped my foot faster to block out the sound of my voice on the screen. Looked at my boots on the linoleum so I wouldn’t have to see my face. A friend of mine from my college basketball days had taken his kid to a wrestling match of mine one weekend. It was a side gig — something to make me feel young. The studio didn’t like the bruises that would show up on my neck in the morning show, but all I got were a few slaps on the wrist. And the flips I could do, the performance of it all. Just made me feel better than being able to read a teleprompter and knowing what the readouts were from a weather observatory a couple miles away even if I was a heel in the wrestling ring. Few months later and come to find out the kid has cancer. The friend of mine calls me and wants a favor. I humbly oblige. And here I am. This friend of mine, Kent, steps out of some revolving doors. “He’s ready now, Weather Man.” My name is Greg. The kid is hooked up to a series of tubes and pumps all flashing and draining and coming in and out of his body. He’s breathing heavy in his gown, the skin like paper and barely making a dent in the bed. A window lets in some light through the blinds. Even the light is sterile as it's filtered through. The boy’s name is Victor Dun. I step into the room behind Kent. The kid’s eyes light up without Kent even having to introduce me. I flash some muscles, snarling in between some basic bodybuilder poses. “Want me to make it rain the pain?” I ask. “Yeah!” Victor says. He hocks up a lung afterwards. A frown forming with each breath leaving his body. My smile drops but Kent glares at me to keep egging the kid on. “Ahhh, what the hell do you know,” I say with the limp of a wrist. “You probably can’t even beat me in an arm-wrestling match.” “Oh yeah! Set up the table, dad!” Kent obliges, pushing a bouquet of flowers off the table. I grab a chair to sit down opposite the kid. Heart monitor beeping. My foot tapping to keep pace with the kid’s life. It takes Victor a few minutes to lean over the bed. “Come on!” I say. “You’re just giving me time to warm up!” Kent positions himself over the table, acting as an official for the match. I grip Victor’s hand. Holding it like a feather. The veins turning blue up to his naked, bald head. “Ready?” asks Kent. His kid nods. Even spits in my face. I wipe off the spit. Kent slams on the table with a fist. The match begins. I try to put on a show. Straining my neck and letting myself lower my arm ever so. And the kid is trying too. He’s really giving it his all. The heart monitor beeping faster. His dad smiling ear to ear. After five minutes of the charade, Victor Dun is victorious. I let him be — lower my fist to the laminated wood. Heave out and even sweating from the attempt to restrain myself. “Goddamn…you beat me.” Victor looks at his hand in my hand. Slinks ever so back into the bed. A frown forms on his face. “I guess I did,” he said. “What’s wrong?” asks Kent. And Victor Dun, in a moment of existential doubt, responds with, “I don’t know. I just thought he’d be stronger. But you’re weak.” I slink back into the chair. Now no better than a machine. J.B. Kalf is currently slipping on ice. Has been published within Beaver Magazine (poetry), #Ranger (art), BULL (flash fiction), and elsewhere. Palm frond fanatic and prefers limes to lemons. Can be found at Twitter or Tumblr @enchilada89.

There has been much written about the new MLB rules this season. I read daily reports on how fast games are (2:38), how stolen bases have increased (1.32/game), and how scoring is up (4.3/game). Because game speed is the reason that fans are not coming to the ball parks. We are conditioned to speed. If the car in front of us doesn’t move at the exact time the light turns green, we grumble. We don’t have the time to wait in line any more so we order online, just drive up, and our groceries are placed in our trunks for us. Walmart knows that if their website load times are too slow, they lose millions. A one second load time increase costs Amazon $1.6 billion a year. So, yeah. Speed is the name of the new game. For 162 (or hopefully more) games each year, baseball is a constant in my life. I watch games on television and listen while I’m in the car or in the garage. TSN is bookmarked on my laptop and phone. I read Baseball Digest and memorize game facts. From the day I first discovered baseball in 1977 when the game came to Toronto and I walked to school with pockets full of baseball cards, I have not been concerned with the length of games. Well, perhaps on those April days at the old Exhibition Stadium when the wind and the rain blew in horizontally off Lake Ontario I may have muttered something about it to some of my fellow sufferers. While watching at home, I read books, putter around, fold laundry, and discuss the game events with whoever is with me. It’s the background for over half my life each year. In 1990 when I was still not sure what life had planned for me, I was working in a warehouse, picking, packing, and shipping books, a job I had done since intermediate school, both as a summer job and as full-time employment. I showed up every day, but many others had attendance problems. So, the foreman hatched a plan to encourage people to come to work every day. Each day you did, you got to fill in whether you thought the Toronto Blue Jays would win or lose that day on a large chart in the office back in the receiving area. First one to get a certain number correct would win tickets to an upcoming game. Before the Easter weekend, I put in my picks and when I returned on Monday, I had reached the magic number. (Don’t ever mention THE Magic Number to my kids.) I was given two tickets to the June 29 game against the Oakland A’s with Dave Stewart on the mound for the visitors. My best friend, Jim, was my plus one. It was the least I could do seeing as he was the source of all my Maple Leaf tickets.  We took our seats in the 500 section, first row third base line, just past the base. I don’t remember much about the first part of the game. We ate, chatted, got caught up, and laughed, while the game unfolded below. In the 7th inning, I distinctly remember noting to Jim that the Jays hadn’t had a hit yet, a fact that we should have noticed earlier if we had been paying more attention. But that’s the way it goes with baseball sometimes. Bottom of the 8th, still no hits. You could feel the buzz beginning around the SkyDome. Were we really going to see this happen? Top of nine comes and goes. I don’t even remember who was coming up to bat for the Jays. Doesn’t really matter. What I do remember was the almost 50 000 Toronto fans standing and cheering the opposing pitcher as he recorded each of the last three outs. Pretty much everyone except Jim, who sat there with arms crossed, scowl on his face. “I can’t believe you’re cheering for the opposing team,” he said. When the last out was recorded and Stewart was mobbed by his teammates, the Toronto fans continued to cheer and applaud. Dave Stewart and baseball fans were the winners that night. Each game since, I have hoped that I would witness another one. Alas, I have not. The game took 2:27 to play. Deryck N. Robertson lives and creates in Peterborough/Nogojiwanong, Ontario, where he is an elementary educator. Work has appeared with The Minison Project, Orchard Lea Press, Loft Books, and forthcoming  with Vital Minutiae Quarterly. His first chapbook, All We Remember, was realeased by Alien Buddha Press in 2021. He is the EIC of Paddler Press and has a couple of songs on Spotify. When not writing, he can usually be found drinking maple roast coffee around a campfire or in the stern of his canoe in Algonquin Park. You can find him online @Canoe_Ideas, @PaddlerPress, and deryck.ca.