Search Results

Let me tell you about the time I was eight and made my big screen debut in Cannibal Family. I played Billy Barker, the youngest son of a grisly clan of people eaters. The short story is I stole every scene I was in, outshining seasoned actors. The longer version is we don’t live in a just world—the meek suffer, the wicked thrive, etc.—and scorching performances don’t often scale to lasting success, which is the easiest explanation for how yours truly, Mick O’Grady, recently ended up back in central Michigan doing a two-month residency at the Cannibal Family House Museum. Several years ago, entrepreneur and private investor, Dale Pressman, bought the three-story Tudor at a foreclosure auction and renovated and restored it to its original specs as the principle shooting location of the 1986 horror classic. Once Dr. Pressman had the place looking just like it did back in the day, he petitioned the township for historic landmark status (Approved!), threw open the doors to the public as a living tribute to the power of cult cinema, and told Afterburn Pictures, who still technically owned the rights to the movie, to take their copyright infringement lawsuit and swim home up a dirty river. During business hours I donned adult-sized versions of my costumes and recited my ever-quotable lines for visitors, such as, “Pleased to eat you, sir,” and, “Rump roast … Again?” I regaled them with behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the film’s production and fielded questions from fans—price of admission didn’t include photos or autographs, so I had a nice little side hustle going, provided I didn’t flaunt it. I was supposed to blog about my daily experiences on the museum website, but my postings were infrequent. Every day was pretty much the same. Once I spiced up a posting with a track from my band, SK!N FLÜT, only to have Laszlo scold me. He was tasked with overseeing day-to-day operations but mostly acted like a power-tripping security guard, his managerial style showing a fascistic streak probably nurtured in whatever Eastern European country he grew up in. “My friend, no one cares about a middle-aged man making electronica,” he said. “It’s synth pop.” “Nevertheless.” There was a time I would have told him, via my agent, that if he didn’t like doing things the Mick O’Grady way, he could get the fuck out of the Mick O’Grady business. Those times were long over. I hadn’t had an agent in years, and I really needed this gig. Dr. Pressman’s offer came at an unbelievably welcomed time. I was in arrears rent-wise at my Orlando apartment, plus I was persona non grata at the recording studio until I settled my tab. In addition to free room and board at the museum, I received a tasty stipend that would cover my debts and allow me to finally finish the long-awaited SK!N FLÜT demo tape. Cannibal Family had a legion of fans—Relatives, they called themselves—who trekked to Saginaw as if it were Lourdes. I’d be the first to admit that, though it jump started my career, the movie wasn’t anywhere near flawless, even by genre standards. As a kid I hadn’t noticed it, but the story was kind of a mess. It was never explained why the Barkers ate people in the first place. Were we heroes or villains? Who knew? Plot holes abounded. For example, there were three separate scenes where we ordered takeout from the same restaurant and then ate the delivery guy, but somehow the restaurant never put two and two together. What did they think kept happening to their drivers? If my onscreen father, Dexter Thorne (1945-2001), was any indication, this flick was creatively fueled by amphetamines and professionally motivated by unresolved tax liens. But as for the fans, I guess my point was that, for whatever reason, Cannibal Family resonated. This was what I was telling Laszlo one night in our living quarters. When the museum closed at 6:00, he and I would disappear downstairs to the basement. We spent evenings drinking beer and shooting pool, or watching movies. Other times he ignored me to defend his flat earth theory online, leaving me to drink beer and shoot pool, or watch movies, all by myself. “Platoon took home the Oscar that year, but you don’t see a museum for Platoon, do you?” I said. “There’s the National Vietnam War Museum,” he said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.” “Nostalgia is a powerful drug, my friend.” “Haven’t you ever connected emotionally to a piece of art?” I said, and tossed my empty can in the blue recycling bin near the stairs. “Give me a fucking break.” “You’re wrong, Lasz. People love the movie.” “How could they?” he said, straining to understand. “It is shit.” “Whatever, man.” I got us fresh beers and passed him one. “What do you want to watch tonight?” “You choose. I have research to do.” * Last week, after we split a case of a boozy Belgian ale, I got around to asking him to describe his working model. His concept was elaborate: Planet Earth was platter-shaped; the sun and moon were the same size and rotated around each other above us in a kind of chaste dance; gravity was an unsupported hypothesis and shit just fell for no reason; what you and I know as Antarctica was actually an ice wall that surrounded the world and acted as a barrier to hold the oceans back. “What if the wall melts?” “The ice is frozen to absolute zero, minus 273.15 degrees Celsius. It cannot melt,” Laszlo said. “You know, I wrote a song called Absolute Zero.” “Autobiography, yes?” “Fair enough. What happens if you climb over the ice wall? You fall into space?” I asked. “There is more land on the other side. Pristine and undamaged by humans and our sickening consumption.” “Let’s pack a bag and go!” He shook his head at the impossibility of it all. “NORAD guards the border. We would be vaporized inside of two kilometers. Besides, you would never survive the ascent. You can barely make it up the basement stairs.” “How do you know all this and no one else does?” “People have a hard time accepting they’ve been lied to their whole lives.” He went into an explanation about how bureaucracy by nature limits a groups’ knowledge, so that millions of people had small parts of the picture, but not the whole thing. It took someone unafraid of difficult truths to pick up all the pieces and put them together. I stopped listening when he got on a rant about Jews controlling the weather. The thing was, I knew where he was coming from. Not the part about the Chosen People’s hurricane machine, but the confusion that leads to embracing such ideas. In my twenties I’d gone deep into my very own fringe scene—direct action for an animal liberation organization. Or eco-terrorism, according to the state of Florida. I was a member of the Clearwater 5 who, while attempting to rescue a bottlenose dolphin from an aquarium, torched a food pavilion. All of this happened during a dark and nebulous period in my life. When my acting career foundered in my late-teens, I was saved by a love of music and believed my destiny held rock stardom. But then my first serious band broke up due to creative differences: My bandmates wanted a chronically hot frontman, whereas I was, if casting directors were accurate, a six. With my expulsion from T.G.I. Wednesday, I felt for the first time in my life that I had no future. And like Laszlo, I tried to make sense of the senseless. * For the a.m. crowd I usually wore my blood-spattered Little League uniform, everyone’s favorite costume. But the following morning, I spilled coffee in my lap, and had no choice but to change into my blood-spattered Transformers pajamas. I was running late but still clocked in in time to see Laszlo firing the janitor. The janitor shouted, “I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t do nothing.” “Shut up, interloper.” Laszlo dragged him by the collar of his coveralls and deposited him on the lawn. Laszlo slammed the front door and called an unscheduled staff meeting. The girl who pulled double duty at the giftshop and Barker’s Bites (snack bar), Gladys the docent, and I followed him into the living room. He pointed through the window and instructed us to gaze upon our former coworker brushing grass clippings out of his hair with a look of thickening dismay on his face. “Let that be a warning,” he said, and, drawing closed the curtains, ended the meeting. “Jesus, Lasz. What’d he even do?” I said. “I have reason to believe he’s a mole from Afterburn Pictures. I intercepted him stealing my trash.” “He’s the janitor. That’s his job.” “Was.” “That’s cold.” “You could be was too, my friend. Get to work. Whatever it is you do here.” He took out his phone and scrolled through his messages. “Bad day for this shit,” he muttered. “Bad day, bad day.” It didn’t seem bad to me. Seemed like every other day. I hurried to my movie bedroom and heaved myself up to the top of the bunk bed I’d shared with my older brother Freddy Barker—Corey Samuels (1968-1992). I pulled out a stack of Topps NFL football cards from under my pillow and started flipping through them. Soon Gladys led in the first visitors. They were a middle-aged couple. It was difficult to tell how diehard they were, but they were giving off a weird vibe indicative of Relatives, that sense they were missing something in their lives and Cannibal Family was the soil they used to backfill large excavations within themselves. “Now, this husky young man has grown up quite a bit since you last saw him,” she said, pointing up at me. “Give a hand to the one and only Billy Barker.” “My name is Mick O’Grady. Billy was the character.” “Just say the line,” she said. “The family that slays together, stays together,” I said. “The other line.” She was a four-foot ten septuagenarian and I was a little scared of her. “Pleased to eat you, folks!” The couple whooped it up. I slid off the top bunk and glad-handed. The man pushed his wraparound shades to his forehead and introduced himself and his wife. I tried not staring at the charm necklace dangling betwixt her cleavage, but her face was no better a target. Her look was one I’d seen many times before, and one I always struggled to match, brought on by the awkwardness of meeting me. They detected a shadow of youthful promise in my shattered eyes and couldn’t square my current life with the one they’d projected onto me when I was but an image on a well-worn VHS tape they passed back and forth amongst their friends. “Baby, tell him how you had the biggest crush on him back in the day,” the man said. “Still do,” she said. “Buddy, you must have been just pulling in the females.” “I was in third grade,” I said. “You’re not in third grade anymore.” “This is true.” “Goddamn it!” he shouted. “What the hell happened to you?” “Oh, leave him alone,” the woman said. She pinched a few inches of my love handle, and drew me to her. “If you’re such a cannibal, how about you eat me?” “She’s not kidding,” the man said, and threw his heavy arm around my neck. “Come on, now, gang,” Gladys said. “If you’ll follow me, we’ll head to the kitchen where there’s a delightfully gruesome surprise in the refrigerator.” “Two-to-one it’s the cop’s head,” the man said. “The mayor’s head,” the woman said. “It was the mayor’s heart.” “Was it?” “Let’s just have a looksie, shall we?” Gladys said. “Say goodbye to Billy.” “It’s Mick,” I said. “Bye, Billy,” they chanted and filed out. I took a lap around the bedroom waiting for other visitors, running my fingers over the furniture, turning up no dust. Dr. Pressman had done a phenomenal job on the house. The details were perfect. I sat on the floor and crossed my legs and stared at the large freshwater fish tank beside the hand-me-down stereo equipment, just like I did in between scenes all those years ago. Back then I’d been obsessed with the fish, to the point that my on-set tutor had made a science project out of it for me. I still remembered some of the names: Neon blue Goby, Peppered Cory Cat, Candy Cane Tetra. I’d told my movie mom, Annabelle Clifford (1950-, lives in Culver City) that I was going to be a marine biologist when I grew up. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me, smiled, riffled my hair with her hands, and said, “How dare you?” I fed the fish. They bubbled up to the surface to eat. An actor is always searching for his character’s motivation, the event from the past that shapes current decisions. I wondered if my tutor’s science project had influenced me then, instilled a well of empathy for sea life so that it was inevitable that I found myself at Good Ray’s Aquatic Center fifteen or so years later at dawn with four friends, friends I’d made after I was dumped from T.G.I. Wednesday and who I believed were as willing to die for me as I was for them. Or co-conspirators as they would soon be known. While they retrieved Cinderella, a ten-year-old bottlenose dolphin, I attached a cigarette to a pack of matches, then lit the cigarette and left it inside Neptune’s Original Fish Fry, which I had painted in $10.00 worth of unleaded. * It wasn’t much later I found out what was worrying Laszlo: a party of two, a man and a woman, claiming an appointment with Dr. Pressman and his representation, an odd request considering Dr. Pressman was never here. They didn’t look like Relatives. They looked important, like diplomats or funeral directors. Whoever they were, their arrival was a disturbance, a baying of coyotes far nearer to civilization than was comfortable. Gladys had finished her tour and was next to me in the hallway. We watched Laszlo fall all over himself greeting them. “Welcome Mr. Francis and Ms. Stein, welcome to the museum. We could not have more esteemed guests, it is not possible,” he said. “See how the little dictator act goes right out the window when someone with real juice shows up?” Gladys said. “Who are they?” I said. “Lawyers. From Afterburn Pictures.” “Is that good or bad?” She shrugged and went out back for a smoke. “Please think of this house as your own. I’m at your disposal,” Laszlo said. He grabbed the handle of the lawyer’s rolling catalogue case and began swinging his other arm in a loose circle, inviting them in. He noticed me and said, “Get over here and help.” Mr. Francis raised his hand like a traffic guard. “Not so fast. Why is he dressed like a child?” “Why, that’s Billy, of course. He’s pleased to eat you,” Laszlo said. “Billy Barker, in name and likeness, is property of Afterburn Pictures,” Mr. Francis said. “You own my likeness?” I said. “In perpetuity and throughout the universe.” I looked at the woman “How can you own my likeness? Why would you even want to?” “Merchandising,” she said. We moved to the dining room, the location of the notorious Thanksgiving scene that got Cannibal Family banned in Nova Scotia. My instinct was to leave immediately. I was wearing Transformers pjs for shit’s sake. But Laszlo said, “Help me run interference till Pressman shows up.” “I don’t know, man.” “Here’s what I know, man. If this meeting doesn’t go right, we’re all going to be was.” This was what I feared. No more museum meant no more stipend, which meant no more demo tape. I’d be on a Greyhound to Orlando, to the apartment with a popcorn ceiling and black mold in the bathroom, a mailbox jammed with menacing letters from creditors. Our meeting was off to a bad start. Mr. Francis was losing his patience. “Does your boss think our time is less valuable than his?” “No one is taking your time for granted. Dr. Pressman is en route, I assure you,” Laszlo said. Mr. Francis conferred with his colleague and made a call to his client. He agreed to wait a while longer. “So, you guys work for Afterburn?” I said to Ms. Stein. “Afterburn Pictures Corporation dissolved over twenty years ago. We represent its successors and assignees.” “I don’t know what that means.” “It’s boring. Tell me about yourself. Do you still act?” “Not so much. Music is my passion nowadays.” “Seriously?” she said, and frowned. “When you think about it, music is really the soundtrack of our lives.” She reminded me of Heather Woods, my former criminal lawyer who, only eight months after being admitted to the Florida Bar, took me to trial. Her defense was humiliating but had the added bonus of being unsuccessful. She had a psychologist testify that my brain was prone to bad influence because of my untraditional upbringing. My parents had been poor guardians, the doctor said, letting their child fend for himself in an adult business. Playacting during crucial developmental years had left me unable to discern reality from fantasy. I’d been indoctrinated into cannibalism, the last great taboo. I didn’t understand a lot of the doctor’s professional jargon, but I got the gist: I was a weak man, corruptible. Heather said, “If not exculpatory, my client’s immaturity is a mitigating factor.” Verdict came back guilty. I served twenty months, followed by supervised probation, mandatory counselling, and 1,200 hours of community service, nothing involving animals. Dr. Pressman still wasn’t here. Mr. Francis was incensed. “Does your boss not understand what is personally at stake for him?” “I assure you, he’s coming,” Laszlo said. “You keep saying that.” “Because it’s true, you silly little man.” I turned to Ms. Stein, hoping to distance myself from the rising conflict. “My band has a song called She’s So Precocious. It’s about my old lawyer. This one’s got a power-pop feel, A minor, F, C, G.” I went into my falsetto. “She’s So Precocious/ Out on the streets she’s ferocious/ Best believe she know this.” When I stopped singing and opened my eyes, she was writing on a legal pad. Half the page was filled. “What are you doing?” “I’m taking contemporaneous notes.” “What for?” “In case I have to depose you.” “I wouldn’t mind seeing you again either.” She smiled weakly, jotted more. I hoped to god Dr. Pressman showed up soon. The meeting was unraveling. “If he were serious about a settlement he wouldn’t have left us here with his henchman and a washed-up child actor,” Mr. Francis said. “Who are you talking to like that, my friend?” Laszlo said. “Lasz, take it easy,” I said. “I will not be degraded.” Laszlo stood up so quickly he overturned his chair. It looked as if he were about to storm out of the dining room, but he leaped across the table at Mr. Francis and, in the most literal case of life imitating art I’d ever seen, grabbed his head by his ears and bit his face. Ms. Stein flipped to a new page and scribbled furiously. * If you didn’t know better, you’d think Dr. Dale Pressman was just an average old white guy. He crept down the basement stairs, wearing a striped golf shirt tucked into pleated chino shorts, the collar standing up and brushing his long earlobes, boat shoes with no socks. His thin white hair was unkempt on his head, his face and throat a browned from the sun, his arms and legs bluish-white. I was on my fifth beer. “Well, hello there, Billy,” he said. “Not that it really matters, but Billy was the character. I’m Mick O’Grady.” “You certainly are.” “I guess you heard?” He let out a low whistle and nodded his head. “What happened here today, I hope you don’t think it reflects badly on you in any way.” “Why would I think that?” “That’s the spirit.” He opened the fridge and stared with his hands on his knees. “Mind if I help myself?” “You paid for them.” He chuckled and cracked open a can, walked to the pool table and sent the cue ball caroming off the rails. He sat with one buttock on the corner pocket and made a sound with his mouth like he was blowing bubbles. “What’s going to happen now?” I said. “Party’s over.” It really broke my heart when he said that. I couldn’t begin thinking about going home to fearless palmetto bugs the size of cigar butts that scuttled over my face while I failed to sleep. I couldn’t imagine walking by the recording studio and not being allowed inside, when I knew I was so close to finishing my demo tape. “Don’t say that, Dr. Pressman. Nothing’s over yet. You probably need a new administrator, though. Laszlo bit off that guy’s nose.” “He sure did.” He drained the beer in one long sip, then stood up and rocked back and forth on his heels with his hands in his pockets, jingling change. “And don’t forget, you’ve got me, Mick O’Grady. I’m not going anywhere.” The situation was bad, but not hopeless. Well, it might have been hopeless for a regular guy, or someone less than a regular guy, someone like me. But I assumed Dr. Pressman knew how to maneuver out of a jam. He was filthy rich, after all. “Remember the line, what my dad told me? ‘The family that slays together, stays together.’” “I’m not sure I follow, but I like your energy. How about we take this conversation upstairs? I’m getting claustrophobic down here.” In the kitchen, a team of men prowled around us, dousing the house in gasoline. “What’s going on?” I said. Pressman mimed striking a match and tossing it over his shoulder. “Whoosh!” “Shit,” I said. “Yes, sir.” “Just because those successors and assignees were here today doesn’t mean you have to knuckle under.” “What are you going on about?” “Lasz said—” “Laszlo ate a man’s face. I wouldn’t put too much stock in anything he says.” I watched his goons dump gas over the fruit basket wallpaper, the linoleum tile squares, the brown refrigerator with alphabet magnets on the door. “But I thought you were…a fan?” I said. Dr. Pressman said that Cannibal Family was one of his all-time favorites. The museum, though, was nothing more than a money laundering scam. He’d paid 400 percent of what the house was worth at auction. The renovation and restoration were invoiced at exponentially more than it had really cost. From the start he’d been buying time until the museum got shut down. And now he would cash out with a sizable insurance claim. Why was he telling me this? Because it didn’t matter if I knew. “Here’s an interesting fact,” he said, “You’re a convicted arsonist. What you probably aren’t aware of yet is that you will be held responsible for burning down my museum, which is a protected historic landmark. Why you would do this to me, after all I’ve done to help you, is a question that only you can answer.” “I’m a fucking idiot.” I felt like crying. “Now, Billy, don’t start throwing dirt on yourself.” “My name is Mick O’Grady.” “It’s not your fault you’re a snapdragon.” “A what?” “An early bloomer. Some of us peak early, some late. You were what, seven, in Cannibal Family?” “Eight.” “A command performance. One for the ages. You should be proud.” I felt dizzy and lurched for the kitchen sink, splashing cold water onto my face. “If you don’t mind an observation on my part, you don’t look well,” Dr. Pressman said. Of course, I didn’t. I straightened up and wiped water out of my eyes. He laid a hand on my shoulder, fixed his eyes on mine. “I’ve got to take a shit,” he said. “So, in conclusion: It’s been real, Bill. Good luck with everything.” He squeezed my shoulder and walked away. I stood there in the kitchen, where once as a boy I’d gnawed on latex replicas of human femurs with wild delight, and came to the stunning realization that this present moment felt no more like real life than the one that took place thirty years earlier. Then I ran into the purple bruise of dusk, completely unprepared for what Dr. Pressman had thrown at me. My timing was such that it seemed as if my momentum was turning on the streetlights as I raced past them down the sidewalk. I hadn’t gotten far when I smelled smoke. I wasn’t running to anywhere but away from everything. I wanted to run until I couldn’t be found, not by police or Relatives or lawyers who owned my likeness. I ran like I could outrun my past. My breath burned in my throat and beer sloshed in my gut. I ran for my life, knowing I had no place to go. And yet knowing that I was running to nowhere didn’t stop me because a destination came to mind at last. I ran like I was within sprinting distance of the ice wall and then I was only one giant climb away from that virginal land on the other side that Laszlo revered. I would stake a claim, declare myself sovereign, and guard over the animals that flourished there, a gregarious ruler who would one day be mythologized by future citizens. I had always wanted to be gregarious. Aaron Jacobs is the author of the novel The Abundant Life. Aaron’s second novel, Time Will Break the World, will be published in 2023. Other writing has appeared in Tin House, Alaska Quarterly Review, JMWW, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Aaron mostly lives in the Catskills. Check out his website: aaronjacobswrites.com

Appetizers I remember your fingertips—your fingertips. I remember your fingertips during our first dinner, and how I was nervous, but when I saw how you reached out to taste the cranberry brie bites, and the majestic nature of time slowing down when you closed your eyes to savor a moment where you felt so much in place, and I was trying to mumble my way out of any embarrassing words I’d say. When you took your second one—this time with a fork, but then you took it off with your fingers—your thumb and index, and ever so slightly stuck your tongue out, it was then I was in love with you. You—in blemished colors—twirling around, making my rib cage vibrate. Soup & Salad I didn’t think I’d be sitting across from you again—after stumbling down the steps outside of our first dinner and dragging you down with me, I thought that was it. The grace in your laughter that night has echoed in my throat since then. So there you were again—so there you were with gentle mannerisms which taught me to take pleasure in every single movement, as if every single movement was a miracle. I was witnessing a spectacle before me as you sprinkled pepper on your beet salad. It all looked like glitter to me. Every time I stuttered my speech because of my anxiety, you were patient and guided me through our conversation like I was learning to speak a language for the first time. I didn’t stumble down the steps that night, but I certainly felt like I was falling from the sky—your arms. Entrée Once again I had ravioli in my hair, and without saying a word, you picked it out and causally put it aside on your plate. How many times did I have pasta on my head? How many times did your hand run through my thinning hair, making me feel like I belonged in a world made for everyone but me. I was just a stranger who happened to witness the beauty of the way your chin stayed still when you whispered the secrets of our existence. You were always kind, and your smile—a smile that makes your eyes carry a song out through the doors and up toward a breathless sky. Your mother's funeral was two weeks before, and it was our first time dining out since that gathering. Your eyes became watery, and I knew what you were thinking about, just as I know what you're thinking about now with those lyrical eyes. Sides That night I was going to propose to you—you asked me instead. I said yes and choked on my own saliva and you had to pat me hard on the back. While everyone was staring at us, and as I gained my breath—my vision, you put the ring on my finger and kissed me on the lips. I coughed again, and there we were, in the middle of the restaurant—only a plate of mashed potatoes to account for our love. Coffee & Dessert A million upon million years bursting a new beginning each day and how we gave our lives for each other. You always politely asked me to stop thanking you for being with me every morning—I think it made you embarrassed—perhaps the only time you didn’t know what else to do or say. I love you. So we love each other, and that was how it went. Here I am in a metallic bed during my last days, 55 years later since our first appetizer—there you are by my side. Every time I was around you I couldn’t speak because of your enchanting presence, but now I am unable to talk because the infinity of our time together knows we no longer need to chat—just a look that encompasses every second of us. I look at you now—I know, my dear—I know. I know our lives were one magnificent dinner, and I’m thinking of that tattered and torn menu you framed and hung in the hallway at home—a menu of a lifetime. Good night, my love—I’ll see you at the table in the corner of the room—it’ll be just us and most likely, I’ll have some tomato sauce in my hair and as you lift your hand, I'll say thank you for loving me. Shome Dasgupta is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, Cirrus Stratus (Spuyten Duyvil), Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West Publishing House), and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). His novel, The Muu-Antiques, is forthcoming from Malarkey Books. His prose collection, Histories Of Memories, will be published by Belle Point Press, and his short story collection, Atchafalaya Darling will also be published by Belle Point Press. His fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Jabberwock Review, New Orleans Review, New Delta Review, Necessary Fiction, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Lafayette, LA, and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.

Don’t turn around. Throw your wallet behind you,” the raspy voice says. My breath escapes into the early morning air in the form of a grey cloud. I turn to face him – he’s small, wearing a tan skullcap, and his face is unshaven. Nothing about him stands out. Nothing that would make me think he looks like a criminal. Except for the gun he is pointing at my chest. I didn’t think I’d see anyone besides the Chevron clerk at this hour. I didn’t expect any excitement when I came out for cigarettes, something I hadn’t done in over ten years. “Hey,” he says, startled, “I said don’t turn around. Don’t look at me.” “Why didn’t just you wear a mask if you didn’t want to be seen? Don’t you have any leftover surgical masks from COVID at least?” I don’t intend to sound clever or to be foolish in challenging him. It’s just the first thing I think when he tells me not to look at him. “Never mind what I’m wearing, hand me your wallet.” “I don’t have it.” I’m telling the truth when I say this. “How’d ya pay for those smokes?” “ApplePay,” I say with a tone that implies obviously. I realize that we might be seen on camera by now. “Move back there,” I suggest, pointing to the dark car wash across the parking lot. “What? I said give me your wallet. I’m holding a gun and you’re telling me what to do?” “What’s your name?” I ask. “Don’t worry about my name. Wallet,” he says waiving the gun from side to side in front of me. I’ve never seen a gun up close before. I’m nearly hypnotized by the dance it does it front of my face. “Hey,” he says trying to sound a little more intimidating. “We’re on camera right here so I know you’re not planning to shoot me.” He can’t help himself. He looks over his shoulder to find the security camera. Amateur move, he’s no thief. I haven’t forgotten how to pack cigarettes. I slap the little white box against my left hand, peel off the plastic wrapper with a single pull of the gold string and remove the foil seal. Like riding a bike. I slide out one Marlboro Light and light it with the cheap book of matches I grabbed inside. “You want a smoke?” I ask, offering him the pack. “What’s wrong with you?” “Over here,” I suggest and start walking towards the car wash, sure that he will follow me like a dog on a leash. “If you won’t tell me your name, I’ll call you Fred,” I say, stopping in front of a pair of dumpsters. We are facing each other again. “Fred?” “If you don’t want to be called Fred, tell me what to call you.” “You must be bat shit crazy,” he tells me, “do you want me to shoot you?” I take a deep drag of my cigarette and blow out a long stream of white smoke. “Yes,” I say, “I do.” “What?” “I’ll give you every last dollar I have from that ATM over there. It isn’t much. But, I’ll give you everything I have. As long as you promise to shoot me after I do.” # “Jesus, you must be crazier than me,” for the first time he sizes me up as he speaks. He takes in my designer jeans, my botox-smoothed forehead, my hair freshly auburn and cut into a severe bob. “What makes you think I think you’re crazy?” I ask Fred. “Because I’m robbing you. Nuts, right?” “That’s not for me to say.” “I’m not going to kill you lady, I just want your money.” “And I want you to kill me. So you’ll get what you want if I get what I want.” “What’s with you?” I pull on the cigarette again, nostalgic for the comfort of habitual smoking. “You picked the wrong person to rob. You should have found someone who would be scared. Unfortunately, that isn’t me.” “Is this some kind of trap?” Fred asks. He looks ashamed, but desperate. He looks like me, or at least the way I feel. I’m so close to the finish line, I feel myself breasting the ribbon. Aimee Truchan is a (mostly) fiction writer who moonlights as a healthcare marketing consultant. She is an instructor at San Diego Writers INK. Her work has been published in volumes 13, 14, and 15 of the San Diego Writers Anthology as well as in the Decameron Project. Aimee is an avid reader, woolgather, beach bum, and aspiring Parisienne. Her book reviews can be found on Goodreads and her snarky opinions on Twitter @AimeeTruchan.

Laura Stamps loves to play with words in her fiction and prose poetry. She is the author of 49 novels, novellas, short story collections, and poetry books. Most recently “It’s All About the Ride: Cat Mania” (2021, Alien Buddha Press), “The Way Out: 40 Empowering Stories” (2022, Alien Buddha Press), and “Dog Dazed” (2022, Kittyfeather Press). Forthcoming novellas: “The Good Dog” (2023, Prolific Pulse Press) and “Addicted to Dog Magazines” (2023, Impspired). She is the winner of numerous awards, as well as the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize nomination and 7 Pushcart Prize nominations. *** NF: You mentioned to me that you were a professional artist prior to switching to writing. Why art? LS: I began making, writing, and illustrating little handmade books when I was five years old. I would stitch the pages together with thread from my mother’s sewing basket. In high school and college, my English professors told me I had writing talent. And I was accepted into all the honors classes in literature. But I’m also dyslexic, which meant grammar, spelling, and punctuation were difficult for me. Telling stories with paint was easier. Plus, I was winning all the art awards in school. That gave me plenty of incentive to major in Fine Arts as a career. When I was a senior in high school, I began selling my paintings at art festivals, and I continued to do that for the next 12 years. After college, my paintings were selling in galleries across the country. Prints of my paintings were published by my fine art publisher in California (Haddad’s Fine Arts, Inc.) and sold worldwide in galleries, frame shops, and chain stores like Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Target, K-Mart, etc. NF: Why did you decide to switch careers and begin painting with words? LS: Well, there was a problem. I was never completely satisfied as an artist. Not creatively. Not 100%. Something was missing. But I didn’t know what it was. One day I bought a “Writer’s Digest” magazine at my local Waldenbooks. I read it cover to cover and loved every word in it, especially Judson Jerome’s monthly poetry column. That column inspired me to write a poem. It was awful. But for the first time, I was satisfied creatively. Wow. That was the last thing I expected. And that was the day my art career ended. After that, I dug out all my college English grammar textbooks, studied like crazy, and ordered at least 50 books from the Writer’s Digest Book Club on how to write everything from poetry to fiction to nonfiction. I read, studied, wrote every day, submitted to countless magazines, and eventually overcame my dyslexia. You can imagine how much the 2005 Pulitzer Prize nomination for my poetry book “The Year of the Cat” meant to me, considering all the obstacles I’d overcome in order to achieve it. Now, 35 years later, I’ve published 49 poetry books, short story collections, novels, and novellas with various publishers. Many of my novels and novellas have spent months or years on Amazon bestseller lists. My stories and poems have appeared in almost 2,000 literary magazines and anthologies worldwide. And I’ve won numerous awards. The only painting or drawing I do now is an occasional cover for one of my chapbooks (like “Dog Dazed”). Persistent. That’s me. It’s a win/win strategy in the writing business. Write every day and submit every week. It works! NF: I’ve been following your publications, and love your stream-of-consciousness style. Please explain what it is, and what made you decide to write this way. LS: At first glance, this style of writing might seem chaotic. But it’s how the subconscious strings thoughts together, which is why it makes perfect sense in the mind of the reader. And that fascinates me! I love writing in this style and pushing it as far as I can just to see what’s possible. It’s the perfect style for creating experimental forms and breaking the rules of traditional sentence structure, which I also love. However, my college art professor gave our class some really good advice. She said the great abstract artists had to know the traditional rules for painting (perspective, etc.) before they could break them successfully. And that’s also true of good writing. You can’t break the rules successfully until you know what they are (grammar, punctuation, proper sentence structure, etc.). I like that comparison because stream-of-consciousness writing is structured in the same way an artist paints an abstract painting. Gertrude Stein is famous for her stream-of-consciousness poems and stories. Virginia Woolf wrote an entire novel in this style (“The Waves”). I’m also a HUGE fan of the experimental works of Anne Carson (“Autobiography of Red” and “Beauty of the Husband”). Every book of hers is written and structured in a different style and form. She is amazing. And, of course, there’s Donald Barthelme. Such an experimental goof! He always cracks me up. Carson and Barthelme are definitely my favorites. Always innovative. Always entertaining. NF: Please share one of your short, published poems in the stream-of-consciousness style. LS: This prose poem is a chapter from the novella-in-verse I’m currently writing. It first appeared in the wonderful magazine, Little Old Lady Comedy. Holly She sits down. At her desk. And selects a postcard. “Dear Elaine,” she writes. “I used to be married. Loneliest years of my life. They were. My husband thought if he read my posts. Online. On Instagram. That was all he needed to know. About me. My life. That he never needed to listen to me. Discuss anything with me. Plan with me. Talk to me. Not that he didn’t talk. He did. About himself. Endlessly. His worries. His problems. His complaints. His plans. Him. But here’s the thing. Instagram is not my life. A snapshot. A glimpse. That’s all it is. Too bad. He never knew that. Never realized I’m more than that. More than a post on Instagram. More. Much, much. More. Too bad. So I left him. And then, and then. Six months later. I saw a dog. A Yorkie. Her photo. On a dog rescue page. Holly. That was her name. This Yorkie. Sweet, calm, affectionate, low energy. That’s how the rescue described her. Ten years old. A senior with a skin condition. That too. But those eyes. That face. I couldn’t resist. Couldn’t. Drove four hours to meet her. Adopted her. That day. Took her to a wonderful groomer. For a super short cut. Bought special food. To heal her itchy skin. Bought her warm sweaters. Lots of them. I did. Because, because. She was mine. And now. We talk. Have wonderful discussions. Just the two of us. Holly and me. And now. She knows everything about me. All of it. All. Because she cares. Listens to me. Loves me. Hey. Forget Instagram. Forget it. Sometimes a dog is better than a husband. I mean, who knows, right? Well. I know. I do. Yeah. I do.” NF: When do you prefer fiction over prose poetry and vice versa? LS: I prefer fiction when I’m writing a novel or novella. I love the long form of novels. It suits my temperament because I’m a very patient person. Plus, it’s easy for me to see the beginning of a novel all the way to the end. I love the novel-writing process, no matter how long it might take. The ride is everything. What fun! And that’s probably due to the way I work. I write chapter by chapter. After I finish the first draft of a chapter, I go back and thoroughly edit it before I write the next chapter. And so it goes. One finished chapter after another. When I reach the end of the novel, I go back and do one final edit to catch any typos I might have missed and to make sure each chapter flows smoothly into the next. Then off it goes to a publisher, and I start the next novel. I’m a storyteller, whether I’m working on a novel or a prose poem. I write both in the same stream-of-consciousness style. To me, there is little difference between my prose poems, flash fiction stories, and novels. In fact, I’ve published several novels-in-verse. My first draft process is the same for fiction or poetry. The main character introduces herself to me. She tells me her story or poem. I write it down. Edit like crazy (at least 40 or 50 edits, sometimes more) until it’s finished. If it’s a novel, I follow her around, month after month, until her book is finished. By then the main character in my next novel has already appeared and is anxious to tell her story. This is why I write every day of the year. New characters and novels are always appearing. I never take a break between books. My characters won’t let me! NF: It seems you’ve had dogs on the brain lately. Do you have any dogs, or are they imaginary? LS: I love small dogs. The smaller the better. But I grew up with big dogs. Three German Shepherds. A Norwegian Elkhound. An overweight Beagle. Several very sweet mutts. And lots of cats. I’ve been involved in feral cat rescue for over forty years. I’ve cared for as many as twenty-one cats and kittens at one time in my feral colonies. My goal is to get them all fixed, socialized, and adopted. Because of that, no dogs for me at the moment. However, I just spent ten years caring for six senior cats. And I have to say I love seniors! Too many senior dogs are being surrendered by their owners to shelters these days. Even high-kill shelters. Unfortunately, small dogs don’t do well in shelters, so they tend to be euthanized quickly. Chihuahuas (my favorite breed) are the most frequent breed to be euthanized simply because they’re so small. Crazy, isn’t it? In the future, I plan to adopt a senior Chihuahua. But not now. Currently, I have four big, energetic cats. All socialized ferals. All teenagers. And they play way too rough for a small senior dog. But in a few years when these crazy kitties calm down, there’s definitely a senior Chihuahua on my bucket list! NF: Are “The Good Dog” and “Addicted to Dog Magazines” autobiographical at all? If so, in what way? LS: No. Both novellas are entirely fictional. They just happened to be the stories those particular characters wanted to tell. However I am a child abuse survivor and a domestic abuse survivor, so I have experience with all the nasty stuff that goes along with that, like PTSD, anxiety, and depression. I’ve also experienced my share of stalkers and bad-news men in love relationships. That’s why my books, no matter how humorous, are always empowering. I like to highlight the positive and offer hope to my readers. There’s enough darkness in the world. I have no desire to add to it. NF: What projects are you working on now? LS: “The Good Dog: A Novella” comes out in March (Prolific Pulse Press). “Addicted to Dog Magazines: A Novella” comes out in May (Impspired). We’ve been working on the covers and text design since December to prepare for the launch of these two books. Other than that, I’m currently writing my next novella-in-verse. Each chapter is a prose poem, and most have already been accepted or appeared in magazines. There are 25 chapters so far. And it looks like there will be at least 100 chapters in this novel. Possibly more. The main character is another hilarious, wacky woman, and I’m having a blast with her. She’s just too much fun to end this book any time soon. And, yes, there is a dog in this one. A senior Yorkie (my second favorite breed). This novel will probably be finished in the fall. But you know me. I’m toying with the idea of a really experimental form for this one. Possibly a series. We shall see! *** Nolcha has written all her life, starting with poop and crayons on the walls. Her poems have been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Alien Buddha Zine, Medusa’s Kitchen, and others. Her chapbooks are available on Amazon. Nominee for 2023 Best of The Net. Interviewer/book reviewer. Editor for Open Arts Forum. Faker of fake news. Website: https://nolchafox2.wixsite.com/blog “My Father’s Ghost Hates Cats” https://amzn.to/3uEKAqa “The Big Unda” https://amzn.to/3IxmJhY “How to Get Me Up in the Morning” https://amzn.to/3RLDaKc “Memory is that raccoon” https://www.amazon.com/dp/9395224622/ Twitter: @FoxNolcha Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nolcha.fox/

cry fowl yard fowl flee the sight to cower lest they perish from the hawks in flight tumbling down as they cherish prodigal ghosts it was in those first warm days and you never would have known from this old picture just how windblown yet soundlessly the silhouettes of clouds swiftly passed their shadows racing over the short grass as sunbeams cast and filtered past barren branch and woodbine to dance amongst the pale prodigal ghosts upon the clothesline J. R. Wilkerson is a longtime Washington, DC – area resident with roots in the Missouri Ozarks. He has an amazing wife, and two equally amazing kids.

A flash of fantail wing, a clack of beak on glass. Elena watches the bird zip between the windows of her study and the kitchen. She checks the outside window frames. No insects. So the bird’s frantic fling is not for food. Then what? An open door? She checks all the doors. Reminds herself she is not superstitious. No. Not in the slightest. She absolutely does not believe this little bird brings news of death. The fantail sings and zings between the windows for a whole week, its tiny notes sliding down the glass. In the second week she finds a buried truck in her garden. A toy truck, rusted and bent. Who lost it? Who loved it? She spins the wheels then reburies the truck. Digging deeper she finds the bones of a cat. Who loved this cat? What was its name? She covers it with soil. In the third week she looks out the window and sees a group of people in her garden. The fantail circles around their heads. Some of them look familiar: an old man she knew forty years ago; a woman with a baby; a child holding a kitten; a group of young men dressed in black. When they see her looking at them they nod and carry on walking. She opens her door and runs out into the garden. They’ve gone. The fantail sits high in an ash tree. It cocks its head on one side. In the fourth week she dresses carefully to meet her friends at the café in the park. She’ll explain to them she isn’t responsible for what her husband did. Despite what they’ve heard she’ll make them understand she is not to blame for his actions. If they are the true friends she believes them to be she knows they will stand by her, no matter what. She buys a coffee, carries it to an empty table, sits down, draws a breath to steady her beating heart, checks her watch and phone and studies the menu. A busload of noisy tourists burst through the door and swarm up to the counter to order food. A howling toddler runs half-naked out of the toilets into the café, his frazzled mother following. “It’s okay,” the mother keeps repeating. “You’re okay. It’s all right.” The boy throws himself on the floor, arms flailing, legs kicking, mouth wide open, face lobster red, screaming in the most monumental tantrum ever heard in the history of the world. The café customers freeze. Their heads swivel in the direction of the mother. Eyebrows shoot up into hairlines. Lips arc downwards. Muttered tsk tsks. A loud “Needs a damn good smack on that bare bum.” The child scrambles to his feet and rushes out the door into the park. His mother charges after him. A collective sigh of relief. Conversations continue. Elena waits. She checks her watch again. The café empties. Her coffee grows cold. She checks her phone again. The staff start locking doors. Sandra Arnold lives in New Zealand. She is the author of five books including The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell, Mākaro Press, NZ, Soul Etchings, Retreat West Books, UK and Sing no Sad Songs, Canterbury University Press, NZ. Her novella-in-flash The Bones of the Story will be published n the UK by Impspired Books in mid-2023. She has received nominations for The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and The Pushcart Prize. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Central Queensland University, Australia. www.sandraarnold.co.nz

Mrs. Hasty’s geese We swung into Hasty’s yard in our Datsun Bluebird, holding the car door shut with baler twine. My granny swapped soap with her during the war. When I was born, she had reached out, offered beestings from their finest cow. But my mother, from Tullamore, a young nurse, awkwardly declined. It was unpasteurised. Its properties unknown. This time I was eight, we were there for her eggs. Rapping the iron knocker on the door. Her dog going ballistic, drawing her up from the belly of the house to greet us. “Stop it”, she’d say in a quiet hoarse voice, but he didn’t listen. Her grey straight hair bobbed around the corner. She needed her glasses to see us. To take our order. To get to the hens. Past all the geese in the shed. Their white necks swaying in anticipation. She counted six, eight, a dozen and my mother paid her with thanks. Knowing those eggs were worth more. Years later, while stood amid the bustle of Rosemary Street, Belfast, the smell came to me. A mix of bleach, poultry and sweet pastry. Conjuring the flourish and movement of the woman in my hand. Her skirt swishing against the wind. White sheets billowing on the line, daffodils trumpeting on the lawn. A smell I would lean on, to bring me back. When office politics and angry emails get the better of me. I dream of being one of Mrs. Hasty’s geese. Part-time protester Up a tree, high on mushrooms picked by a guy called Tone, the anthropology student enquired after his name. “No son of mine will be called Wolf”, his mother had said, so they called him Tone. His English accent – Sherwood. She wondered if it was real. “Open your Crown Chakra”, he said. Her unawareness opened wide. “Don’t do this for anyone else.” The mushrooms were taking effect. And the student was higher than she’d ever been. Sprawled across a fishing net spanning five tall trees. Fractal grid patterns shapeshifted. Until a line snapped with the weight. Unraveled like a snake towards them. Her knuckles turned to teeth. Tone’s voice bellowed up — “Get the hell down from there. Use the rope”. With rising fear of burnt hands. She refused. And then the rant came tumbling— One broken leg and it would all be over. Ambulances called. The Gardaí. Their huts bulldozed. Get back to class. Stop playing ‘tree protester’. She was cursed. The Celtic Tiger now unleashed. The authorities would knock the ancient oak. Build the bypass. A fierce wind rattled through the leaves. She closed her eyes, summoned the might of Gráinne Mhaol, and jumped. The light of others Let’s go for a long walk through the woods, cave under the wisdom an ancient oak. Let’s not mention the power cuts, lost suitcases, the sound of breeze blocks falling. Let’s kiss under branches starting to bud. Open the curtains tomorrow, go to work and let everyone in. Derville Quigley is an Irish writer based in the Netherlands. Her short stories and poems have been published in various international magazines and journals including The Ogham Stone, Beyond Words, Garfield Lake Review, CommuterLit and Litro. She is co-founder of Strange Birds, a writing collective and a co-organiser of Writers Flock writers' festival. www.dervillequigley.net

America's greatest First Daughter, the lovely Chelsea Clinton, graced the bedroom wall of every teenage boy from my generation. She was, to us, a glowing jack-o-lantern of warmth and hope in an uncertain time. Her appeal was not the same as the other starlets of our day with whom the boys were enamored – Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ginger Spice... all my 35-year-olds, holler if you hear me! Am I right? While other women over whom we fawned bore an edgy broodiness, Chelsea's beauty was the stark opposite – her beauty lay in her smile, a collection of 32 beacons of light made of calcium. It was a smile of hope. Pure, unadulterated hope. I myself do not possess such immaculate pearly white pillars as Chelsea Clinton's. A year ago, an accident shattered what was once a fairly well-maintained grill. For a dreary time rank with self-pity, I was quite self-conscious of the fact that my tongue looked like it was in a Chilean prison cell. When COVID-19 struck our planet, I took solace in wearing a mask. But, I learned to love my smile. To be proud of it even, going so far as to think of my broken and jagged front row of teeth as one of my most charming features (the other being my avocado shape, evoking images of the Mr. Stay-Puft). What helped me to learn to cherish this busted grill? An ally who helps us more than we know, a friend we often don't know we have – sorrow. I grew up in the small town of Starkweather, Nebraska, population: 3,000. I come from a family of what's known as “oil field trash.” Some might see this as a derogatory term, but I don't shy away from it. Though I myself never had the grit to work in the oil fields, my father, uncles, aunts, and grandfather all labored their lives away to draw that crude, black gold from the ground, to put food on our table, and ironically, keep us routinely in the dentist's chair of sadism. Though Dick Cheney and the others who got rich off the precious slime never knew my family's name, I'm proud of my family's work ethic, the calluses on their hands, the bloodshot eyes they wore from copious amounts of marijuana smoked on the derricks (that is, one of those big oil towers you may have seen in There Will Be Blood), puffed to make a long day seem a little shorter. My family were as crude as the oil which they drew from the depths of the earth. They cursed in the presence of children, they smoked Camel Reds, they wore caps indoors and at church, at funerals, and those caps usually bore some crude double-entendre slogan, like Professional Crop Duster. Their red beards never quite connected with the nicotine-stained mustaches that accented their missing and broken teeth. They wore prominent soul patches beneath their bottom lips. They had boisterous laughs, mad cackles not heard since the scurvy-ridden crew of the Pequod (that is, the ship in the whaling novel Moby Dick). When I was a kid, I thought they were the coolest people ever, even surpassing my generation's other staples of cool, like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and Joe Lieberman. They regularly took the Lord's name in vain, on both mundane and heartbreaking occasions: when the Cornhuskers lost a game, or when each of them died, one by one, year by year it seemed, consumed by bad hearts, bad lungs, bad habits, or bad reputations. The clean white shirts and bolo ties in which they were buried lent their soul patches and the gunpowder on their lips a strange dignity. When I became an adult, and my family had faded until the disarrayed teeth in their smiles were obscured behind layers of dust on picture frames, I knew the time had come to leave Starkweather, Nebraska and its population of 3,000 souls, minus those of my kin. There comes a time when everybody runs away from home, I suppose. Me, I ran to the city. I walked before I could crawl, so to speak. I went from the tiny town of Starkweather to the metropolis of Jezebel, New Mexico, population: 30,000. Needless to say, I was slack-jawed and gobsmacked, flabbergasted even, at the Gotham that loomed around me. But when I felt overwhelmed by the twenty-story buildings and neon lights of the buffets and even a movie theater, I molded that feeling into a reminder that I was hidden, a drop in a bucket, far away from the grasp of weariness and loss I'd left behind in Nebraska. There was no way all that sorrow could find me in such a crowded place as Jezebel, I told myself. I shaved my own beard, and my admittedly baby-like face gave no hint as to the men and women I'd loved and lost, who'd faded into thin air. As long as I wasn't reminded of them each day in the mirror, they couldn't hurt me. All this aesthetic effort was dashed one fateful day in Target. When I went to Target for the first time, I was rather discombobulated. I'd never been in such a swanky, upscale store. It was Dollar General times ten! I was in awe, being the rube that I was, at this place the Kardashians would surely frequent if they ever came to New Mexico. I wandered through the ominous store, amazed at the glitz and glamor. But before I knew it, I was in the women's undergarment section. The wrong part of town, so to speak. I snapped out of my trance when I noticed a woman looking at me, warily and suspiciously, as though I were Ted Bundy or some other such panty-thief. Unable to find words to explain what I was doing amid the ladies' underthings, that I'd innocently wandered into Victoria Secret City, I panicked, turned and began to run. My instinct to run away apparently not only applied to lonesome hometowns. In doing so, I tripped on my own feet and down I went. Face-first onto the faux marble floor. My nose gushed with blood, and two and a half of my front teeth were obliterated. When I wasn't toiling away at my job as an inventory clerk at a local tire supplier (fortunately in the back of the building), I was hiding in my apartment, away from the eyes of those who might see my busted grill and shudder. I looked like the love child of Stanley Kubrick and a worm farm proprietor who runs an underground polygamy cult. My COVID mask stayed on not only at work, but at my apartment as well. In my complacency, abandoning any concern for my appearance, I even stopped shaving. What was the point? Razors are expensive, and I looked like a police artist sketch. Then one day, the ear strap on the mask broke. I was forced to see my own face in the mirror when I went to brush my teeth. I didn't see myself that morning – I saw my family. I saw my father, I saw every one of my uncles. I saw a composite of ghosts with tangled red beards and broken teeth. It was a shock at first. To see men long dead looking back at me in the mirror. The dam that held back the waters of memory buckled and burst, letting loose a flood of mixed emotions that swept me away (that is, figuratively speaking). After I recovered from the initial shock, the waters of the metaphorical flood having dried, I felt an odd peace. I suddenly felt like it was okay to remember all those callous and coarse men and women I'd lost. It was more than okay, I realized – it was right. I felt rather ashamed at myself for trying so hard to forget my family for so long, to suppress their sparkling eyes surrounded by dark circles to spare myself a bit of pain. Pain is an important part of life. Without it, we'd never learn, never be shaped and refined, never rejoice when better days come. I don't want to forget my family. I've carefully kept the combing and trimming of my beard to a minimum. My soul patch is, dare I say, immaculate. My smile has a rustic charm, and I'm proud of it. If my busted grill is all I have left of my family, I'll cherish it. My smile is almost as beautiful as Chelsea Clinton's. It would be pretentious to say just as beautiful, but I'm confident I'm almost in the same league. My smile is not as enlightened, not as classy or pearly. But the smile in the mirror gives me just as much hope as the smile that radiated from the poster on my wall all those years ago. “Sorrow is better than laughter, for by a sad countenance the heart is made better.” –Ecclesiastes 7:3 Bud Sturguess lives in Amarillo, Texas. He has self-published several books, his latest being the novel Sick Things. His writing appears in such publications as Longleaf Review, Spoonie Press, and Erato. Bud is a collector of neckties and books about Abraham Lincoln.

The Dream Is Over pt. I It was all good once. Football games on Friday nights and maybe second base under the bleachers before the last call cigarettes and coffee at the Red Oak Diner. The future American heroes saved up for Monday morning war stories and the lucky ones got fist pounds and made bets on what was next. But the stars fell close. And the good ones got out. And those years that once felt endless didn’t prepare us for a future alone. A Life I used to walk around and look at alleys or hidden corners of parks and think, when I’ve finally lost everything I can be homeless here. But then I got older and left New York. I drove through Appalachia and the sad and stalled Midwest and finally made it to Montana, where the wheat was so healthy it was almost gold, and no money had ever talked to the land. It had escaped the experiment. It remained free. I saw myself as a successful writer looking out over that grass and thought, someday when I’ve had enough of this awful world I can kill myself here. And that’s why I leave instead of just signing the lease. It’s hard on the soul to stay. I hit a new city like a camera and memorize everything. And once I’ve drank in all the bars and had coffee in the morning it’s time to run. It’s the same conversation every time. With my girlfriend, with my mother, that it’s nothing they did, I just never learned to take life as it comes. There’s never been a past, it’s all new to me. Maybe you know what I mean. I’ve looked at women with the old soul eyes, who’ve stood on this dirt before, and they know for sure this is just one life and so it will be again. But not me. I clocked in with clean lungs. A boy that learned fear. That became too sad to cry. That didn’t know there would be a second chance. Always remember, if there’s nothing left to lose run for the finish line. Always remember, it’s the fight of the century every time. Always remember, death will be easier. Songs For The New War I’ve heard songs for the new war. They chant over crank radios like heartbeats from a Shaman’s drum. They come out of subways on a three-string guitar and the words of a runaway who still believes in his favorite band. They live in hog squeals you can hear from rooftops in Chicago, trapped in perdition, riding the currents of the universe like a crest without a trough. These are the songs for the new war. I heard my first from a Rat King who ended his sermon with, “ Humans have infinite past lives ... but animals get none.” I heard my second in a dream where a black moon rose over a shallow lake and tadpoles swam circles around the reflection like black stars in orbit. Is this what gets lost when we die? Does the melody cling too tight to your soul? What if you kept in no tears and never found a lie you didn’t tell? Anyone who ever lived, any martian who ever visited, any elephant who ever buried its friend, it’s all led to this. And when the messenger arrives no one will ask about his chest full of arrows. And no one will care about the conclusion of free will. The songs of the new war will fade out before their last chords. They won’t be hummed in the FEMA camps or by the future Reichs. They’ll be buried like the family dog, mourned for an hour then immediately replaced. Scott Laudati is the author of Play The Devil and Baby, Bring Back 1997. Follow him on Twitter - @ScottLaudati - for opinions on RHONJ and Vanderpump Rules.

The forest preserve rumbles with the deep-throated song of frogs, holed-up in fallen trees or testing the frigid indigo of the lake. The gulley is a bowl of fog, the lake unmoving, no tides to bring forth its secrets. Algae drapes the surface, obscuring what lies beneath. Fish, certainly. A dead tree, maybe. Perhaps even a body. Last fall, a missing man, car abandoned nearby, was found dead in these woods. There were no details provided in the press, but time and weather are not kind to flesh, and animals will do what animals will do. In this maze of trees and unmarked trails, deer and coyote disappear like magician’s tricks when startled from the path. Like the man’s body, undiscovered for weeks. How many times I must have walked right past it, unaware of him just beyond the treeline. There but not there. How many days no one knew I was there, too. Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She lives in the suburbs of Chicago and hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.

For the first few years, when his father and Addie went to the Barracks, his father would stop by the welcome center and ask a volunteer for the grave location. The kiosk attendant would take a pre-printed map and outline in blue pen the roads and then unironically mark the grave with an “x,” like a treasure map. After a while, his father remembered what curves to take, what loops appeared to lead in the wrong direction, what low stone walls acted as landmarks. By the time Addie was in high school, his father had remarried. The yearly pilgrimage to the grave had ended, though the shrine with the folded flag, medals, and insignia still took an entire shelf of a bookcase. Addie hadn’t been to his mother’s grave since. Now, the locator was electronic. No need to speak to one of the old people in blue vests who used to staff the desk. After punching in the last name on a screen keyboard, a printed map fell into a waiting tray. Visiting the dead had become colder. Even with the map, Addie missed two or three turns and circled back to the front gate to begin again. Finally, he found the correct section and parked the car. You’d think it was odd to see people sitting in their cars in the middle of a cemetery, but it’s not. Addie was one of those people. With the windows up and the A/C on, he watched clouds drift across an Edenic blue summer sky. Patchwork shadows crisscrossed over the trees. Through the branches, he could see the bottomlands on the other side of the river. He felt like the car was submerged in that river and if he opened the door, even cracked the window, water would fill the car and he would drown. The asphalt of the road shimmered in the heat as if to prove the point. Finally, after three deep inhales, Addie held his breath and opened the car door. Nothing happened, except the June sun’s heat that he could feel pressing on his skin. As the heat pushed him downward, the humid air held him up. He let out that breath. The location of each grave was chiseled on the back of each stone, with name, rank, birth and death dates, medals, campaigns, on the front. Addie followed the sequence and stopped at times to read the names of loved ones he never loved. So many from such distant wars. Who comes to visit them, now, after so many years? Addie felt dizzy from the heat and knelt. From a distance, he appeared in prayer. He stood and continued and found his mother, her resting date so much nearer to this day than the others but so distant from the present. He took his finger and outlined the date, five years after he was born. He traced all the letters, all the numbers, as if he were tracing a route on a map. He could not remember her. His memories, if they were memories, were a collage of photographs his sister made for the funeral. His mother as a schoolgirl. At high school prom. The wedding. Holding her daughter. Then her son. Smiling on a trip with her husband to the Ozarks. Addie closed his eyes and tried to force himself to remember his mother, something, some word, smile, lullaby. He sat on the grass in front of the stone and began to cry. He hadn’t forgotten his mother. There were no memories to forget. He took out his wallet from his front pocket and then he took out a picture of his son from the wallet. The boy was happy, smiling, a joy in his eyes, oblivious to the absence of his grandmother in his life. “Here he is,” Addie said. He held the small image before his mother. “Your grandson.” For a moment, Addie was jealous, even bitter, at his son’s ignorance. Pain comes only from memory. Addie wondered, what if he died, now, today? His grandchildren would know him only as a myth, stories told at bedtime, or at holiday meals, with faded photographs, or images stored in a cloud. And what of great grandchildren? And after them? So many futures, each with their own past. Addie looked at the rows of graves, some of them two-hundred years old. So many dead, only known in books, or, today, electronic files, no longer in anyone’s heart. That was it, wasn’t it? Addie thought. And lightness overcame him. Maybe it was the humid heat and the oppressive sun. Or maybe, it was the knowing that his life, all our lives, are destined not to be forgotten but not even to be a memory to be forgotten. Whatever it was, he felt a calm as he put his son’s photo back in his wallet. Addie tried to stand but wobbled a bit. Reluctantly, he put his hands on the curved top of his mother’s stone. As he pushed himself up, his eyes caught movement in the section across the road. A doe and two fawns wandered among the graves and the trees. The doe nervously peered here, then jerked her head there, and froze while her nose trembled. The fawns mindlessly grazed, in full trust of their mother. The three deer headed straight towards Addie who stood ramrod straight. Thirty yards, then twenty, ten years, finally ten feet. The doe knew something was there. She could smell it. Addie’s knees ached from his sitting on the ground and he flexed them, ever so slightly, to alleviate the pain. At this small movement, the doe straightened, her fawns with her, then all three sprang into the undergrowth along the fence. Addie watched them go, and then, after a moment, he started his car and he, too, went on his way. Richard Stimac has published a full-length book of poetry Bricolage (Spartan Press), over forty poems in Michigan Quarterly Review, Faultline, and december, and others, nearly two-dozen flash fiction in Blue Mountain, Good Life, Typescript, and three scripts. He is a poetry reader for Ariel Publishing and a prose reader for The Maine Review.

The light in the studio (read: closet) was starting to wane as the sun sank behind the apartment building to the west. Kara hopped up and flipped the wall switch, knobby in its many layers of latex paint applied in between tenants. The apartment on a larger scale was a landlord special—sloppy paint job, bad overhead lighting, and minimal direct sunlight among its many delightful features—but Kara hadn’t been in a position to be picky when she was moving. Her bedroom at the shared house she’d frantically vacated in June had plenty of floor space to work on her sculptures, but the house also held a darkness in the form of a horrifically loud and rude roommate named Lila. Once Kara realized that Lila’s tendency to blast Enter Shikari in the shower every morning was probably not going away, no matter how many times she asked them politely, she realized she needed out. So Kara, strapped for choices at the height of student rental season, had moved to the first mold-free studio apartment in Mount Vernon she found. And with the state of her studio practice, she was finally starting to admit that it was not going great. She had almost nothing for her thesis review in just over two weeks’ time. Earlier that afternoon, Kara had picked up her hot glue gun in a fit of creative energy and dumped out the half-empty box of plastic forks she’d somehow acquired, gluing them together at her kitchen table with no real aim. After lighting herself a motivational joint, Kara quickly found herself entranced by the feminine curves of the forks and began to emulate them with the ways she glued them together. It hadn’t been long before she ran down to the corner store for another two boxes of forks, and she found herself at an impasse now, as the sun began to set: she was almost out of hot glue. She thought for a second about seeing if she could get it on Instacart, but she felt bad about making a shopper drive to her apartment at rush hour and closed the app as soon as she opened it. Sighing, she shoved her feet into her threadbare fleece Birkenstock slippers, shrugged on a flannel over her SLUT ERA t-shirt, and grabbed her bag and keys. She’d parked a few blocks over on Chase Street, near The Spot, since that was the only space she could find after getting off work at three in the morning last night. A couple on a first date (she’d overheard) had stayed at her bar talking until 2:30, and the barback working with her had broken a glass in the triple sinks after they’d left. She yawned and took a sip of last night’s Red Bull in her cupholder as she turned the key in the ignition. The engine whimpered before ultimately coming to a halt. Ugh. Kara slung her patchwork tapestry tote back over her shoulder and got out of the car. She scuttled down to Eager to wait for the circulator, skimming Instagram on her phone as she waited for the bus to lumber across the potholes on Saint Paul to pick her up. Paula from Visual Thinking 1 was at a residency in Napoli—lucky. Skip. Someone who worked at XS posted that they were hiring—shocker. Skip. Ugh, Mina from that summer program is ranting on main again. Skip. Kara groaned out loud as she swiped and swiped in the November chill. A shiver ran up her spine as the bus finally pulled up and she locked her phone to board. She popped her airport newsstand earbuds in and sat down, coming face to face with a very interesting proposition when she unlocked her phone again—the local gallery Oliver did his internship at was running a juried sculpture exhibition in January, and Chrysanthemum fucking Hayes was the guest juror. The chance to impress a queer sculpture icon who’d been a Sondheim finalist the previous year was too great to pass up; Kara took a screenshot of the call and pulled out her sketchbook. She frantically sketched the architecture of a large fork made of the smaller forks, noting where she might have to use a heat gun to create the curves with which she was so enamored. Her pen waggled across the page as the bus continued to barrel towards the harbor, where Kara caught the orange line as far east as it would take her, still sketching. She caught a Lime scooter the rest of the way to Canton Crossing, where she skidded to a stop in front of Michaels. Kara was a kid in a candy store—once she had the hot glue, she caught a glimpse of the silk flowers in another aisle. What if I adorned the finished fork with flowers? she thought as she held a bundle of faux gladiolus. Or even better, what if I painted it pink and did that? She wandered over to the paint aisle and thought about spray paint before remembering the tragedy of Ava Ray’s Forms and Figures final freshman year. She’d made a dress out of quart containers she’d stolen from her on-campus café job, but she tried to spray paint it purple in the last hours before class and it melted holes in the dress. Kara chuckled to herself, grabbed three tubes of hot pink acrylic paint, and headed for the checkout. Her previous work about femininity had been poorly received and subsequently scrapped, cited by her most critical classmates as vague and inarticulate. If what they wanted was obvious, Kara would just have to give them obvious, she guessed. A lot was riding on this coat of pink paint—now to pull it off. ◎◎◎ In Senior Thesis that Thursday morning, Kara could barely keep her head off the table. Oliver poked her a few times when she started to really doze off, but she was down for the count; she’d been up for almost 36 continuous hours working on the fork sculpture. It was due for finals in a week, but the deadline for the gallery show was on Sunday. She knew Oliver was just trying to protect her from being called out by their snarky graduate teaching assistant, but god, she was tired. “Let’s break for ten to get coffee,” professor (and renowned fiber artist) Jenna Donovan suggested. “You all seem a little fried this morning.” Kara raised her head and shuffled out of the room with everyone else, jaywalking across the avenue that bisected campus to get to the bookstore café in the nearby Fitzgerald Building. She ordered an iced latte and dumped a few Splenda in before heading back to the classroom, already slightly more awake having taken a stroll through the morning air. “By the way, before we get back into the lecture,” Jenna started. “I wanted to let you all know that we’ve confirmed our guest critic for the individual thesis reviews next week. We’re pleased to be joined by local artist and curator Chrysanthemum Hayes.” Oliver nudged Kara hard. It seemed she was getting a double dose of her absolute idol this semester. It could be said that Chrysanthemum inspired everything Kara was making right now—their emphasis on flawlessly executed craft work had been one of many contributing factors to their local celebrity. And when she’d seen Chrysanthemum’s work at the BMA for the Sondheim show last year, Kara never would have thought she’d get to meet her at all. Here’s hoping my sculpture holds up, she thought as her stomach dropped a little. ◎◎◎ The fork was a fucking failure. Kara was absolutely certain of it. She had hot glue strings everywhere, her heat gun work was sloppy, and the leftmost tine of the fork was a little too thin compared to the other three. She’d also given herself second-degree burns on a few fingers from the glue gun. But it was getting close to ten at night on Sunday, and she needed to get painting if she wanted the paint to be dry in her documentation photos. Kara had hauled the piece to her campus studio, which was mostly full of her studio mate’s work, but she’d carved out a corner to paint the thing hot pink. While the paint dried, she glued the silk flowers across the handle and scattered them up the tines. She started to cry a little as her phone dinged. Central???? Oliver had texted the group chat. Down, James is too, their friend Evonne replied. Grand Central was the bar down the block from where Kara lived. She’d been going with Oliver since before either of them could legally drink, originally making it a tradition after their Tuesday night Intro to Metal class sophomore year. Crying, actually, Kara responded after a second. Wtf??? Oliver sent back only seconds before FaceTiming her. “Oliver, it’s so bad,” Kara said. “Like, terrible. My studio mate gave me this look like she pitied me.” “So?” he replied. “She doesn’t fucking like anything good. She thought Rivera Ann Langley’s mud wrestling paintings were gauche. Doesn’t that tell you you’ve done something right?” Kara sniffled. “Show me,” Oliver said. She shook her head. “Turn the camera around and show me.” She sighed and flipped the camera to show Oliver the fork. “PLEASE!” he said. “That is a gorgeous object. It’s such a powerful commentary on the expectations of femininity. You’ve got nothing to worry about.” Kara smiled a little. Oliver always gave it to her straight if her work was bad. They’d become friends after their first Intro to Painting critique freshman spring, when Kara was fresh out of a breakup and realizing she wasn’t as into men as she thought she was. She’d gravitated towards Oliver, who seemed so comfortable in his identity and was also welcoming, but honest. He’d told her as kindly as possible during that critique that the banana in her still life looked like a penis, and later apologized for his honesty on their lunch break. Luckily, Kara had been in art school for long enough to realize it was worth having someone honest around, and the rest was history. “You really mean that?” Kara said. “You don’t think it’s a poor attempt at craft?” “One thousand percent. Now come on, I’m gonna hang up so you can get those photos into the gallery. We’ll meet you at your studio.” Oliver hung up. Kara hustled the giant fork down to the documentation room and started to set up the lights. She peeked at her watch—10:56. At this point, it was far too late to make any other changes to the sculpture. Kara would end up like Ava Ray if she did. She picked up the camera and began to photograph. At Grand Central, Kara ordered a whiskey ginger and grabbed a seat on the velvet banquette against the wall. On her first sip, she grimaced as she realized that a hefty sip of pure Jack Daniels was sitting on top of the drink. She started to stir it in with a cocktail straw as Oliver walked over and sat down next to her. “I think we should cheers to Kara’s sculpture,” he suggested to the group. Everyone laughed and Kara protested in jest, but she ultimately raised her glass to the fork sitting in her studio—the one she’d gotten uploaded to the gallery’s submission manager by the skin of her teeth. She drank the whiskey ginger and tried to forget about it. Maybe her level of craft wouldn’t match up to Chrysanthemum Hayes, but the piece worked as proof of concept, and maybe no one would really notice its shortcomings. Kara chuckled nervously as she took another sip and vowed to put it out of her mind now, for real this time. ◎◎◎ The following Thursday showed up quicker than Kara expected. She dragged herself out of bed with her last alarm bleat of the morning, brushing her teeth with a shaking hand. It had been easy to forget about the giant fork sitting in her studio when she was at Central with Oliver and her friends, but now that she was about to bring it into thesis, she was panicking all over again. In the room where she was expected to present her work, a pedestal had already been set up on the far wall, per her request. As if it were a baby in her arms, she gently released the fork she was cradling onto the heavily scuffed pedestal and gulped hard. Her classmate across the room was finishing an install of papercut manta rays across the other wall and offered Kara a half-smile from up on the ladder when she saw the fork. Kara dragged a metal stool over to the pedestal and sat next to it, bouncing her foot until she heard the familiar voices of Jenna and her other faculty bounce down the marble hallway. She froze as her classmate scuttled out of the room to give her privacy for the critique. “Hi Kara,” Jenna called from the doorway once she’d arrived. She was joined by Josiah Williams, the metalsmith and previous Guggenheim fellow, and Vidalia Metz, ceramicist and noted hardass. Kara had Vidalia for Forms and Figures and she’d picked up and dropped someone’s polymer clay sculpture on the ground during a critique once, making a point about deconstruction as its little plasticky pieces scattered across the linoleum. She gulped while her critics filed into the room. “And of course, Chrysanthemum Hayes.” Kara felt her soul leave her body when her art crush walked into the room, wearing an appropriately yellow floral jumpsuit and surrounded by an aura of calm power. The fork felt like a big risk, but Oliver had talked her up. Kara put her shoulders back and introduced herself to start the critique. “So, first, I’m going to have everyone respond to what they see initially without you speaking,” Jenna began. “And then I’ll open the floor for you to respond after that.” Kara nodded. The critics fixed their eyes on the hot pink fork before them. “Right off the bat, I’m really struck by the sculptural work you’ve attempted with the heat gun, but I do wish the craft matched up with the conceptual aspects of the piece,” Vidalia said after a moment. “I think it could be such an interesting exploration of the ways craft work is regarded as women’s work.” “It’s also not bad enough to be intentional, you know?” Josiah piggybacked. “The proportion is off in a few places, but not enough that it’s deliberately exaggerated. There could be such an interesting dichotomy between the craft of the piece and the fact that it’s craft work, and I just feel like that’s missing. I don’t know, I kind of want to see it in metal forks and not plastic ones.” “I almost wish you had explored the idea of multiples,” Jenna added. “Instead of working with the silk flowers. I mean, I don’t think those really add to the piece. But can you imagine if there were three or four of these in different sizes, maybe different cutlery?” “I absolutely agree, Jenna,” Chrysanthemum chimed in. Kara winced on the inside. “I can see where you were going with the silk flowers, but I think they make the piece look like it’s trying a little too hard, you know? Same with the hot pink—I just think it’s all a little too obvious.” “Definitely,” Josiah said. “I think there’s still a direction for this, you know, maybe painted blue or purple and pushed more with the heat gun. And I don’t disagree about multiples—what if you made an entire place setting of these?” “Or an entire kitchen, really,” Chrysanthemum suggested. “What about a frying pan or a blender?” Kara continued to sit in the din of four highly respected artists tearing her piece apart as she thought about the gallery show. If by some miracle she got in, her piece would probably be hung by the emergency exit if this was how Chrysanthemum was responding to it. But honestly, her hopes weren’t very high anymore. Why had she listened to Oliver? Jenna’s voice snapped Kara out of the trance she’d found herself in: “Kara, did you have anything you wanted to add?” Kara’s face was blank. ◎◎◎ Kara rolled over in her bed on the following Tuesday morning, still hesitant to open her eyes just yet after another late shift the night before. She checked her watch to find that it was almost noon. Begrudgingly, she opened her phone and scrolled through her notifications, wrapped in a blanket like a burrito. The group chat wants to get brunch on Saturday. Grubhub coupon. Rain alert from the Weather Channel. Kara paused as she caught the subject line of the first email in her inbox: Groff Contemporary juried exhibition results. Her stomach plummeted and she tapped the notification. Thank you for your submission to “Queer Forms” guest juried by Chrysanthemum Hayes. We received a substantial number of excellent submissions and regretfully, yours was not chosen by our juror for the exhibition. Kara hauled herself out of bed and walked across the room to the giant pink fork she’d leaned against her kitchen table. Well buddy, she thought. You’ve served me well, I guess. Kara threw open her kitchen window and, after only a moment’s hesitation, dropped the fork four stories down into the alley. The handle held together surprisingly well, but the tines shattered off in various directions. Kara then reached for the gin on her kitchen table and poured a shot out for her fallen friend. nat raum (b. 1996) is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster from Baltimore, MD. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press, as well as the author of you stupid slut, the abyss is staring back, random access memory, and several chapbooks. Find them online: natraum.com/links.