Spilt Milk: an online literary journal

2010-04-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

Archives.

Donna Steiner

2010-03-25T10:06:00.000-07:00

HOUSE MADE OF WINDOWS

I live among trees in a house made of windows. Outside one is a stand of maples, barren except for the frayed kerchief of a single leaf that hangs on like one of those cartoon dogs that bites a human leg and gets flung about by its jaw, flapping about the hapless leg, or a cartoon vagabond who runs for a train and gets whipped in its wake, clinging by one elongated hobo arm. When the wind picks up it rips right through the tattered leaf, and reminds me of a house I lived in once, a different house, an old house. It, too, had many windows, dozens and dozens of them. A window installer had lived there before us, and we inherited glass panes of every size and shape, including 84 squares of windows overlooking the small cemetery in the backyard, and a half-moon window in the bedroom. That house had a foundation made of large river rocks that had been plastered into coherence at one time, but the plaster had given out in places and so when it rained, the run-off would stream right through the foundation. It sounded like we had a waterfall downstairs, but because the basement was quite shallow the water didn’t accumulate. The house was on a hill, so the rain would wend its way through the basement on its way somewhere lower. That solitary leaf is like that foundation – wind rushes right through it, like a ghost quivering through paper.

At night, outside this house of windows, the black mat of the sky is spattered with droplets of nickel and silver, stars that drip to the horizon. That’s not an exaggeration; the stars trickle from the heavens to the horizon, and there are no strip malls or street lights to dilute their shine, no light pollution to speak of. There are no office buildings alit well past dusk, no neon bar signs, no churches or temples shining their lamps to beckon the lost. It’s lonely, I’m saying, and I’ve found that beauty can be an antidote to loneliness. Sometimes, in fact, beauty is more of a companion than company is. Maybe that’s why certain temperaments will seek out a book or sit quietly in a dark theater, transfixed by ink on a page or light passing through images on film. Beauty is good company.

And so, from this window, I watch the stars tumble toward Earth. And so I observe that the battered maple leaf has quieted itself, become as still and potent as a flag at half-mast. And so the cough of a neighbor across the dark yard sparks the hopeful sack of the heart.

Donna Steiner’s writing has been published in The Bellingham Review, Utne Reader, The Sun, Fourth Genre, and Isotope. She’s been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the Annie Dillard Award for nonfiction. Her work has been included in college textbooks, and can be found in the anthologies Women on the Verge, Under the Influence, and What’s Your Exit: A Literary Detour through New Jersey. She teaches creative writing at the State University of New York in Oswego.

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

2010-03-18T08:56:00.001-07:00

ARIEL'S TULIP AND THEIR FAMILIARS

Ah Cai had received Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters from Eric, who liked to regift books he’d actually unwrapped and read, even scribbled remarks in the margins, as if new readers would then scour other pages to engage with a previous reader-turned-writer rather than the book author itself. Ah Cai liked it that Eric had put his paw prints all over, even if this was the first poetry book he’d ever read, let alone owned.

---- Oh boy, Plath must have made him real mad here, went one margin comment. The comments were written in every direction as if always ambivalent and thinking it better to stay out of a domestic matter. Did Hughes really think her empty, that her dreams were empty? She made Hughes feel like a big chair, like furniture, like she was the Antarctic sea between him and her girlfriends, that’s why Hughes needed to write that stanza.

These were the sort of notes along the margins, an editor’s quiet ideas sounding through the rain. For Ah Cai, they meant a conversation, between two men able to think out loud, thoughts into words. A conversation that was remarkable, time-consuming albeit seemingly much fuss about nothing. But remarkable on this humid day nonetheless, the three buddies spending an agreed-upon day-off at Kenneth’s.

Ah Cai put on a fresh pot of coffee, yanked the Heinekens from the fridge, and opened the two boxes of mee goreng and beef horfun for everyone to dig into. There were no plates, only styrofoam cups, chopsticks and the plastic bag the food came in to throw everything out in. The air at Kenneth’s was at once dry with powder like a low fog and dank with the wet sink and buckets of slip and glaze.

The studio apartment was a mess, pointless to do any cleaning since it doubled as Kenneth’s ceramics workspace. There was an electric kiln just yards from the washing machine. The kitchen cabinets housed older clay sculptures, the larger stand-alone pieces taking up much of the living room. The books, unpacked, had no more shelves, and sat in tall piles along one long wall.

---- Hughes would have wanted one of your pieces, Ken.

---- If only, Ken replied, not looking up from his wheel. Really, you think?

---- Yep, he must have needed something for his rabbit stews, Eric said being a bit of an ass. Or something about Dante or Brontë or King’s Cross. Ken looked up and gazed at Eric for a bit, not at, but just beyond as if to say “nice idea, never thought of it”, but returned quickly to his pot with thinning walls. His technique was excellent, Ah Cai always admired, his long arms able to pull up pots almost half his size. He seemed to look down into the clay with such calm intensity, as if it were Hannah, and he had something important to say to her.

---- Could you grab that sponge for me, Cai? Yeah, the flat, round, brown one. It’s Hannah’s. I only use her powder sponges now once she’s done with them. They’re really smooth, well-made.

---- He really loved her, y’know, as much as he loved London. Eric had swiped Letters from the couch, reading one of his own scribblings. The way he describes her goading the all-laughs taxi-driver, American girl being so American, that’s what Hughes says, in her frenzied chariot-ride, that’s what he wrote, frenzied as if she was happiest being unlaced and untethered, to run free, all the way from Rugby Street to Fetter Lane.

Ah Cai walked over with the sponge and fettling knife in a small tub of clean water. He could second-guess Kenneth, what playlists to pipe in depending on what was on the wheel being thrown or altered, what dinner to get for Hannah when Kenneth didn’t have the time to cook, and what beers to bring over when the guys hung out. More than twenty years being buddies, they’d become good at it.

---- What clay is this? Seems tougher, not like the usual. Is it a mix?

---- Y’know, maybe you should try doing this some time, Cai. You seem at home with the material, seem to have the technical mind for it. Kenneth stopped the wheel and looked straight at Ah Cai. It’ll help you take your mind off Feiyan and her granny situation and work situation. And really, you need to get past wedging clay and cleaning tools.

---- Feiyan and I know it’s better this way, to keep things at arm’s length.

---- We can start you on basic stoneware. I’ll teach you coil or slab.

---- You really think I’d be good at this? Cai gathered the cups and dropped them into the boxes. Eric?

---- You won’t find out just asking questions, and it sure beats beating yourself up over a good woman you’ll never get to love. Eric looked at Kenneth, pausing just in case he’d crossed the line, and Kenneth merely shook his head in mock despair.

---- Y’know, Kenneth started, Eric’s right. Even a pinch pot can really get you going, make you love ceramics the way I do. It’s like keeping the whole world close to you, wet earth between two hands and right next to your cheek. It’s about finding something precious to hold.

---- Okay, Ah Cai seemed convinced, I’m game. What about I make something from this poem? Something from this book, from Hughes? Cai raised Letters above his head like an old trophy and waved it like a flag, as Eric registered a big grin, then a small smile.

---- Which poem, old friend?

Ah Cai flipped open the book, wanting to simply decide on the first poem the book opened to, but started browsing, then reading, moving past the various bookmarked pages, Eric’s copious notes, sometimes oblique messages, till he settled into one page, and began to slow down his read.

---- This might be the one, Ah Cai said, in a soft but firm voice. “As you flew / They jammed all your wavelengths / With their criss-cross instructions, / Crackling and dragging their blacks / Over your failing flight, / Hauling your head this way and that way / As you clung to the sun – to the last / Shred of the exploded dawn / In your fist – // That Monday.”

---- Sounds as good a pick as any, Kenneth said warmly. Title?

---- It’s “Night-Ride on Ariel”, Eric said. I can see why you picked it. Don’t get me wrong, I mean I think I get your choice, our wavelengths always in step, in sync and all.

---- It’s an excellent choice, Eric closed off his sentiment. Reminds me of another poem. By the other Hughes guy. Langston, yep, Langston Hughes. When he wrote “Troubled Woman”, a poem that began and ended with her standing in one place. Heartbreaking stuff.

Eric saw the book on the shelf behind Ah Cai, and moved forward to pull the book out from behind him. He scanned the list of poems, and turned pages to the poem, its one zig-zag stanza.

---- Here it is, that’s the way he saw her, framed her. Like a picture. “Like an / Autumn flower / In the frozen rain, / Like a wind-blown autumn flower / That never lifts its head / Again.”

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has edited more than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. A recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant and Dr Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award, he has work forthcoming in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Ganymede, Pank, Pindeldyboz and The Writing Disorder. Also working in clay, Desmond sculpts commemorative ceramic pieces for his Potter Poetics Collection, some of which can be viewed here. These works are housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

Eric Bennett

2010-03-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

Ghost Pains

Dan Wolfsen is the man Mother meets where the employees take their smoke break. She’s captivated by his slow brown eyes and the way he strikes matches on the zipper of his Dickeys. The remarkable thing about that is Dan only has one arm. He’s telling the circle of smokers how the stamping machine crushed his right hand as he strikes a match on his zipper with his left, a shower of sparks near his crotch.

Mother and Dan eventually neglect the smokers to stake out a place of their own behind the Dempsey dumpster, and so it goes that their love is conceived by the factory trash-bin. With one sleeve neatly folded and pinned at the elbow, Dan moves into our double-wide trailer. About those first days, Mother says she was never happier. What she means by happy is she doesn’t have to smoke alone.

Always, I’m the one sent to buy cigarettes – Marlboros for Dan, Menthols for Mother. And though I’m barely fifteen, my characteristic expression is furrowed and serious so the freakishly tall guy behind the counter doesn’t ask to see ID. Walking home is when I pocket my right hand to see what it’s like using my left to zipper-light a match. By my sixteenth birthday, I’m proud to say, I can generate sparks using my zipper.

What seems stable often is not, like Dan for instance. Mother sits in the kitchen, fingers following the graphite design across the gold-veined dinette, when Dan says the American dream turned against him and he’s got to go and find it. Mother’s eyes go hard as she devotes herself to having not heard Dan. The next morning I wake to discover Mother shaved her name on the back of Dan’s pit-bull. In the way that we know things before we know them, I understand Dan will eventually leave.

“Come here,” says Dan to me a few days after the dog-shaving incident. Mother sits listening at the kitchen table where she’s arranging cigarette butts in the thick glass ashtray.

“Have I ever told you about my arm?”

“You lost it in the stamping machine at the factory,” I say crooking my fingers one by one feeling the resistance in my knuckles.

“Yes, but have I told you about the ghost pains?” Dan stares at my hands while I’m playing with finger fat and then drones on in a faraway tone, “Since the accident, I get aches in my arm even though it’s missing. Sometimes I can even feel the fingers moving, but nothing is there, not really.”

From his wallet, Dan then pulls a worn and folded picture and hands it to me. The image of his pit-bull fills the frame, a hand resting on the dog’s head and another on his back, but the body to which they belong is just beyond the edge of the picture. Dan leans back saying, simply, “Those are my hands.”

My eyes roll slowly from Dan to the picture and back while he’s saying, “Sometimes I feel what isn’t really there.” He asks me if I understand. “Yes,” I say. I say yes, but I’m not certain if he means what he’s saying or if ghost pains are a metaphor for something. Without a word, Mother upends the ashtray and leaves the room.

The next day Dan and his dog are gone. And later that same evening I have my first ghost pain when I arrive home with Mother’s Menthols – and a pack of Marlboros.

Eric Bennett lives in New York with his wife and four children. He loves the silence between songs on vinyl records and beginning sentences with the word “and.” His work appears in numerous literary and art journals including Writer’s Bloc, Bartleby Snopes, Ghoti Magazine, LITnIMAGE, and PANK.

Howie Good

2010-03-10T13:10:00.000-08:00

REPAIR WORK

The moon enters in a dark overcoat.
What’s going on here? It’s possible to see

the suicide in people’s faces, the slope
of their shoulders, the way their clothing

is worn, their gait. There are days –
many, in fact – fingers drum impatiently

on the roof. I spoke to the police about it.
The stairs that lead up also lead down

to an iron bed, rumpled sheets, a photograph
of insomnia. Always the same stairs.

I’m hunched over, tightening a screw
with the edge of a dime. It does a bad job.

-

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 15 poetry chapbooks. He has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and five times for the Best of the Net anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick, was released in 2009 by Press Americana. He is co-editor of the online literary journal Left Hand Waving.

Justin DiSandro

2010-02-28T13:50:00.000-08:00

Dying Words (on deaf ears)

I fought in a war,
and died with the future in the palm of my hand.

Not your future,
or mine,
but all the collective future that can fit between the tiny trigger finger of a young boy and the scrape he got from falling off a bicycle last week.

No.

It’s not much,

I know.

but at least it’s not shelled in lead or covered in blood,
Made of dreams, or painted black,
Mass produced, or created for an individual purpose.

No.

Trust me,
the trees cant even see this future through the fog of firestorm
Kicking in front of the clouds and thoughts of wasteful idealists.

Don’t fool yourself.
Seriously, don’t.

I hold the future.

I do,

In the palm of my little hand. It is right here.

Look.

See?

but it’s not for you or me,
for war or peace,
justice or death,
hope or despair.

Ideas?

Yes!

But your ideas can’t define what the future is.
So don’t bother.

No.

Instead, follow me to the future,
Just so you can see,
That they never made a monkey out of you or me.

Well, maybe you.

But our lips will still be sealed to the cold and curdled calls of the parting waves of that lead based, blood filled, dream-like machine that made an ocean to cover your face with a blank, black ink invented to pen peace, war, life, death, justice and despair…ugh.

Of course,

when you fall asleep during the nuclear daydream,
with bullets painting the sky and piercing the stars,
Your last look will be at the future laying in your own hand.
And maybe,
yes, just maybe,
you can do a better job of explaining it than I did.

Gracious host (for the most part)

Gracious host, who, for the most part, has become my dear friend,
I beg and beseech of thee, for several small, yet lasting things.

First, being that this is my first time from home,
I ask for a delicate explanation of purpose and action.
You see, as you can imagine, I am only a little scared.
And, yet, am myself gracious to be parted from that
lonely frown I was wearing.

It was dastardly boring, and I am thankful for my new predicament.

As for the food.
What ever can it be? A plain smear of meat
With only a hint of salt?
And where are the potatoes or the greens?
What a plain boring meal that it put me right to sleep!

Have you never cooked for more than a party of simply thee?

This sir, is a sub par attempt.
A disaster.

Did you not ever hear,
That you win more friends with honey than beer?
But, have no worry, as I was famished,
and would eat a horse.

My next query,
kind sir,
is something that I hope you can answer more clearly than before,
and it addresses the question of why
you boarded up the windows in this monastery?

I can see tiny trickles of moonlight arching through the notches
Of that splintering wood,
So, I know there life outside these walls.

And now I am confused.

I remember it being day last,
When we first meet.
Where has the sun gone?
Do you know what time it is?

I am still hanging on your promises of candy and
Fleeting freedom,
so I will keep my questions brief.

I suppose, the most pressing question would be,
What is that dreadful smell?
It’s like a slaughter house in here, and the heat is no help.

Have you no knack to prepare for company?
You should unboard those windows and
Let the wind bluster out your home!

Oh, and by the way,
Is this your home?

You told me that you were going to take me someplace special,
Someplace fun,
Something fit for a kid like me,
Something to dispel the ghastly grip of
a lonely, scorching summer day.

This surely cannot be it,
Can it?

No, actually, the more I think about it,
I recall asking you to leave me alone

No sweets, no matter how tender, could get me
To falter into being duped into some sort
Of fake splendor.

No, not me, kind sir.
Not me at all.
And at this moment, I believe I wish to part.
More quickly than I did arrive.

I would ask for a ride, my gracious host,
But I do not wish to impose a second more.
So, if you can, and if only to just
Point me to the shroud you call a door,
And I will be on my way.

In all honesty, I do appreciate your hospitality,
But I cannot stay a moment more.
No harsh words will make it so,
So why do you continue to agonize my soul.

My last question,
Kind sir,
Won’t you please untie me and let me go?

Or, at least kill me with the lights off

Barefoot, beat down, battered and blue

barefoot, beat down, battered and beautiful
wearing that dress, lit by the islands, your smile is the fruit of the sun.
no more a wicked breath to breathe the sour taste of forgotten sand.

keep your head above the riptide, watered down crash of political waves
against our otherwise, unintelligent ocean side town.
no more a face to see the sleeping feet laying in the heavens,
your hands climb the beckoning stairwell that leads star-crossed lovers to meet
the eternal Jesus that sleeps in your eyes.

keep me awake now, with the trumpeting screams that reign against a burning background.
no more a snow white drizzle across a failed TV screen,
your hair lifts a paper moon to reflect against an orbit of laughter in an
otherwise laugh-less room.

quiet, quaint, emotionlessly believable, your shoes are left dying in the grass.
no more a stone to step daintily across a lye infected river,
your toes leave pale, cold kisses next to an empty nightstand in an otherwise thriving room.

put your thoughts back now, and turn your mind to tired constraints and verse-less verbs.
no more a bluebird's song to sing us through troubled times,
your voice lifts failed leaves to dance against a pale, tinfoil sky.

numbered days can't count the ways you make the subtle breeze blow.
no more a cog in the clock that pieces its way through peaceful diligence.
your past becomes the kind future that pieces together elegant sentences from
dissident words.

barefoot, beat down, battered and beautiful.
we are all abused like kings,
no more a child to cry to our father,
our lives become the skipped blurb in a history of macabre justice.

Arson, Garcon

arsons lay bricks like daylight across the busy parkway.
bumbling passerbys trip, toes caught in gooey pavement,
eyes stuck on fast-forward as dust clouds settle on the horizon.

backwards disasters line the foreground, littering lips with murmurs
of distrust and hypocrisy.
lingering fingers point at intelligent graffiti lining the skyline,
as calm thoughts erupt into a storm of futility.

leaves, labeled with love and lust for lorn days, float past like wayward voyagers.
pausing to make companions with the dustless wind,
and speeding up to catch the breeze as it passes.

pious, pickled, and beaten to a pulp, the arsenic arsonists make their way home,
pockets filled to the brim with sunlight and stars,
and eyes to the meadows with burgeoning disgust.

A poem at gunpoint (give me your money)

I smell the wind, breathing on my neck, kind sir,
And do wonder, if and whenever, that these cold chills
Will become a warm, tender touch of that sweet
Raw and ripe red.
And, as you do know, kind sir, we are the bored and forgotten breed,
So can have no lofty expectations of knowing the answer to simple questions,
Or awkward pleas.
I would ask, but know I would care not for your answer.
But, kindly of course, I do bid your help, or a brief moment of your time
To test the waters on the forefront of knowledge.
You see, I am no more than one man living near the shore.
The beach is my burden, and the leaves my sand, and my life
Utterly a bore.
And since now, as you can imagine, the air is in the frost grasp of winter,
And with Delicate defiance has grappled the sun way too long,
My own depression is already too much to succumb.
I am left with nothing more than a bare footprint dying in the snow.
My wife is a moment’s breath from birthing more than we can know,
And we are tasked with observing the tides subsiding flow.
Time is the cousin to forgotten memories,
My friend,
And plays second fiddle to failing hope,
Fledgling and flailing in the waters at best,
But sincerely and utterly unknown.
So, as to not drag this on for a moment too long,
But before you think my breath is too short,
and all together wrong,
Will you kind sir, do me the pleasure of
Parting your hair, and biting this peach,
And telling my mom that this is not that way
In which that I die?

Justin DiSandro is a writer, filmmaker, and adventurer from Chicago. His works have been published in numerous journals including Farmhouse Magazine, Blue Moon Press and Pious.

Sara Blevins

2010-02-14T09:21:00.001-08:00

Three Glasses

The third glass she dropped on the morning of the twelfth was filled with water. It seemed to take years to drop to the floor. Clumsily she clenched her fingers together and watched as the glass shattered daintily, unnaturally silent on the smooth tile. The water pressed eagerly through the toes of her sandals pooling like the folds of a rippling hem.

Finally, she bent to inspect the damage, her body unfolding slowly--elegantly. Shards of glass glinted deceptively placid within the pools of liquid which seemed a small ocean on her kitchen floor. She knew instinctively that the water disguised smaller more menacing crystal islands. As Oliva swept her eyes over the mess she felt impossibly tired, as though this required more effort than she could muster though she was neither lazy or old.

She reasoned as she pressed a towel into the liquid and felt it dampen her palm that she had produced an unaccountable tremor in her fingers. This was the only explanation for three broken glasses tallying up at the bottom of her trash bin. Hesitantly she took the next glass from her cabinet, sitting it firmly on the counter before pouring. She moved with a kind of reverance or a private determination that she would not break another. She could not break another.

She would have liked to have called for him to come and pour for her, to sit patiently as he settled the glass securely into her hands, palms up, waiting for him. But then there was the problem of naming him, of allowing the word to leap into the air, tremble and plummet heavier than a glass to the patterned tile. He was not there to ask, to call or answer. Perhaps he was never there.

Somehow she managed to carry the glass limply to her couch, to cross her legs and stare blankly into her television set. The televison brought news of romance and on every channel a man and a woman stared back at her as though startled. They seemed to be shouting at her. Why must you spy on us? What business is it of yours to witness our private happiness? She wondered if a desperate housewife over-analyzed a man's sarcastic comments? If she had conversations with herself? If she meticulously examined every word that was said, trying to find the connection, the horrifying significance behind a smirking dig or a backhanded compliment. She dreaded the cliche of this dead romance, the resounding stamp of something overdone, something we've all seen before. It wasn't like he was dead. It was nothing so serious as that. It was only that someday he would be dead, and he would do the dying without her. The man and woman on the screen went on loving without her. Since she could not bear to look into the over-bright screen, she glanced casually at the familiar wood grain of her coffee table. A perfect ring seemed etched into the corner, though hap-hazardly. There was nothing symmetrical about it. He had forgotten to use a coaster. Wood grain meant so little to him.

She remembered exactly the day that he had laughed at her and left the little bubbling imprinted ring as a reminder of his laughter. He had teased her, dared her to comment on his impropriety. And she had smiled also, weakly, as though pained. She heard the laughter ringing in the room above the noise of the television set until it too began to plummet. She struck out at her memory as though with her fists unwilling, unprepared to witness that laugh brittle as glass shattering on the floor. The sharp tingling of the telephone set her on edge. It sounded too much like the television set, a voice without a body, disconnected and empty. It occurred to her belatedly that she should answer the phone and she swam heavily towards the sound. Quickly she rehearsed the appropriate answers. Hello. Casually, somewhat breathlessly. In case, if only, in case.

The other end of the line was dead silence. She swallowed before warbling a distant "Hello," into the receiver. Her voice was strange almost girlish. Not casual. Not breathless. It seemed to take an abnormally long time for someone to answer. It was her sister on her best behavior. Her sister using the "I'm caring about you" voice. She smiled and then remembered she couldn't see her.

"Hey, everything's fine, Suze. Calm down," she soothed.

"I'm just worried about that bastard leaving you like that. You'd feel better if you'd get out of the house," Susan said.

Even this conversation, so innocently driven sounded rehearsed in her mind. Her sister had practiced these lines. She smiled politely at the television set and said, "Did you think you were the only one?"

"What?" Susan said.

She could hear the confusion in her voice. She shook her head as if to clear it. Things were getting so muddled, so claustrophobic in the house.

"Susan, I really don't think that's such a good idea right now," she said. Absently, she ran her fingers over the rim of her glass. Her fingernail dipped into a drop of water soaking the tip of her finger. She wiped it casually on the hem of her t-shirt and waited for what seemed like an eternity.

"Well, if you're sure." Susan said.

She couldn't think of anything to say that didn't sound cliche. So she said good-bye and hung up the phone. If it rang again, she would ignore it.

The silence was condensing in the air of the room. Heavy, rain-tasting, it made her long for a downpour in the small expanse of her living room. She glanced at the pool of water not completely evaporated on the kitchen floor. She shouldn't have left it still damp.

The television set continued its litany of sililoquies and one-liners. They seemed to be spoken in a language she didn't immediately understand, although every word was achingly familiar. She understood only in tones and undulations, no longer in words or sentences.

A movement to her left alerted her that she was no longer alone and she watched in gaping disbelief as he came striding through her door. He had so much presence. It had always been his gift.

"Liv, you left the keys in the door again," he said.

She nodded mutely as her brain struggled to measure him. His massive, familiar hands swallowed the papery keys as he gazed at her, his lips twitching with his loud, outrageous laughter.

"Look, I just came to get the last little bit of my stuff, then I'll be out of your hair," he sighed and turned away from her. He dropped the keys on the end of the coffee table and she watched them take shape, gain mass and form as they left his fingers and thudded against the wood grain. She could hardly bear to look at him. The television set was relentless. Suddenly they were reversed and the actors hid shy, curious glances at the events unfolding in her smallish living room. They were gaudy spectators taking lessons from her wooden limbs and flushed lips. He walked into the kitchen and surveyed the cabinets and counter.

"I didn't leave anything in here did I?" he said.

Deliberately she switched off the television set. She stood and carried the glass delicately to the kitchen counter, and when he turned again she was standing underneath him as though in the shade of a tall tree. He touched her shoulders with his hands and drew her close, comforting as he had always been. It was then that she felt the glass, the fourth of the day slipping from her hand. She grabbed for it catching the rim in her reflexive grip, saving it from plummeting to the ground to join the shimmering islands already below. She held onto that glass fiercely, looking at his face--touching but not touching. Then she quietly withdrew, gaining mass and volume and form as she slid from his fingers.

Sara Blevins is a graduate of Marshall University and is currently obtaining her Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. She is both a feisty writer and a quiet librarian. Her work has appeared in the literary magazines Ect. and Message in a Bottle. She continues to work and learn from Huntington, WV.

Dennis Humphrey

2010-02-02T14:26:00.000-08:00

The Alarming Prevalence of Quicksand

Your daughter walks into the family room, iPod buds in her ears, her eyes on the text message on her cell phone. You think if she had any other sense with which to communicate, she’d have an electronic device plugged into that one too. Then you realize her pheromones are doing just that with every boy who comes into her vicinity without any technological aids at all. You find it comforting that there’s still at least that much of the biological in the machine, even if you are uneasy about the messages.

The music and the text message enter through her senses and skitter across the surface of her consciousness like long legged flies upon the stream. Yeats’ fly is a symbol of the creative mind moving on the silence of pure concentration. The fly you picture is the opposite—pop music and misspelled fragments of uninspired minutia skating on the soundless deep unknown that lies beneath her immediate attention. LOL. LMAO. IMHO. PBB. You wonder what that fly sees looking down, what swims below the surface tension. Perhaps the fly sees only its own refection. Perhaps you do too.

Her name is Savannah. You think Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. You picture spotted great cats chasing striped herbivores across sub-tropical grasslands, sleek in the relentless sun. She thinks of some young celebrity whose existence is unknown to you and whose butt is bigger than hers. She wishes her butt were as big as that celebrity Savannah’s, even though the boy she never told you she had kissed gave her an A+ for her butt. The other boys agreed. You found out about the kiss through the grapevine, but she told you about the A+ herself, thinking you would take her side. She wishes she were tanner, bigger some places, smaller in others. She wants braces on her straight teeth. She has not even lost all her baby teeth yet, but she wants to whiten them. She gets up two hours before the time to catch the school bus to straighten her straight hair and apply layers of makeup to her unblemished face. On weekends she sleeps until noon.

She updates her Facebook status with her cell phone. She does that constantly. It’s like she has no battery back-up; she must stay plugged in all the time, or she’ll cease to function. She’s uploaded hundreds of pictures of herself to her page. You wonder how many predators cruise her profile every day. You ask her if she’s thought about it from that perspective. She doesn’t know what the fuss is about.

“You always say things like that,” she says. “Everybody does it.”

She always says things like that.

She has so many digital photos of herself on the family computer hard drive, one thumb drive won’t back them up anymore. You wonder whatever became of that man with the foreign accent, the one who texted and called her no matter how much she told him to leave her alone. You remember taking the phone from her and telling him you’d call the cops. You never did.

She wants you to read Twilight.

“It’s the best,” she says.

Teenage vampire love stories. You told her six months ago you’d read it just as soon as she reads Wuthering Heights. You still have not read Twilight.

“You never listen to my opinions,” she says.

You notice she deals in absolutes. Always. Never. She thinks Heathcliff and Catherine are boring. Her English teacher, the same one who suggested she read Twilight, agrees. You wonder what your taxes are paying for. You tell her Emily Brontë shows you can write a Gothic love story without putting a single ghost or vampire anywhere but in the characters’ and readers’ imaginations using subtle suggestion, but then you think that may be the problem with these kids today. All of their imaginations are blank media, waiting for input. They need their storytellers to put the vampires in there for them. And those vampires have to be more graphic every year. You think it’s like drug users who have to use more and more and more to achieve the same high. You ask her if she’d even know a real monster if she saw one.

“What are you talking about?” she says.

That’s the problem, you think. Real monsters don’t look like monsters at all. You ask her what she thinks about the Ted Bundy murders.

“The what?” she says.

The monster who hangs the puppy from the gate of Thrushcross Grange is not scary enough anymore. Now, in the vein of real monsters, there is Saw I, II, III, IV and V. Serial murder heroes on film. Sadism. Mutilation. Now that’s entertainment.

Tonight she wants a ride to the church where she attends the youth group. She doesn’t ask; she announces it matter-of-factly, as though a ride to a church twenty minutes away is her inalienable right. You ask her what she thinks about The Sermon on the Mount.

“Sermon on the what?” she says. “Last Sunday’s was on the wickedness of worrying. Something about lilies and birds.”

You tell her you don’t want to drive her twenty minutes away past several closer churches and then drive the twenty minutes back only to have to go back and get her after church.

“You’re ruining my fucking life!” she says.

You tell her to watch her language.

“You’re cussing. Why can’t I?”

You’ve been told she acts like you. You can’t see it. You’ve been told this more than once.

She gets a text and says, “Gregor can pick me up on his way.”

You think of Kafka. You wonder if this is the same boy who gave her the A+, but you know his family. They’re good people, so you think maybe it’s okay. Besides, they’re going to church, for Christ’s sake. You tell her she can go, and you regret it immediately. You regret it even more after she leaves. You count the twenty minutes. The sixty minutes of the service. Twenty more for the return trip. You tell yourself they wouldn’t necessarily leave as soon as the service ended. Some services are longer than others. You remember your own teenage years. Backseats and back roads. Cigarettes and cheap cherry vodka. You try to remember: which of the boys in her grade did you hear was a pothead? You wonder what else that boy might be into. She doesn’t answer her cell phone or the text you just sent her. She always does this. You tell yourself she’s never going to ride with that boy again.

You go outside to look up and down the street for approaching cars. You hear tree frogs peeping and croaking in the dark to attract mates. No cicadas. You think it is too early yet for them to begin dragging themselves from the boggy spring ground, leaving the husks of their larval skins on the trunks of trees as they emerge to emit the loudest mating call in the insect world. The rising, falling drone was the background music of summer nights down through your childhood. You remember how your parents were. Your mother envisioned an alarming prevalence of quicksand in every patch of woods you wanted to explore. The world beyond the hedge was a Johnny Weissmuller movie; explorers stepped on innocent-looking patches of sand, and moments later, nothing remained but a pith helmet resting on the ground. Your father insisted that packs of wild dogs, once pets or hunting dogs, now feral, roamed the countryside. They had been known to devour children lost in the woods at night. Somehow the image of man-eating poodles and beagles never affected you the same way it did your father. It was at least slightly more plausible than his equally fervent belief that bands of Satan worshipers met in the woods at night in small clearings around blackened circles of stones. He’d seen the circles himself while out hunting. He was at a loss to account for the great number of empty beer cans strewn about the same clearings. You laugh and crush your cigarette out on the brick front steps on your way back inside, putting the butt in your pocket for later disposal so your daughter won’t see it.

“Those things are going to kill you,” Savannah always says when she catches you with one.

You try to preoccupy yourself with something else, anything else. You pick up the novel you’ve been reading, the third you’ve read recently with settings in Pakistan or Afghanistan or some-other-stan. They’re trendy. Exotic. The protagonist is hiding from someone. Terrorists? The government? A father bent on restoring his family’s honor? Man-eating poodles? You read the same page three times and you still don’t know what’s happening. You put the book down.

TV is no better. One of those crazy survival show hosts extracts himself from quicksand and then eats some bugs. A goose stepping documentary compares the Nazi and Baath parties. A man in a ski mask lurks in a made-for-TV movie about a stalker who killed some actress years ago. The local news has a story of an amber alert. You stop on that one as a grainy picture of a girl Savannah’s age comes up on screen. Not her. Some girl from the other side of the state.

“Be on the lookout,” they say. The news anchor grins and segues to a commercial break.

You turn off the TV.

Nothing works. You remember when Savannah was a little girl. She learned to ride a bike in a single day. No training wheels for her. She must have fallen fifty times. By the end of the day, she was riding down the sidewalk, no hands, arms stretched upward in triumph, long hair trailing, shouting to the sky. Always in such a rush. Go, go, go. That same week you had the first nightmare about bicycles, a twisted frame in the road, one wheel spinning slowly enough to count the spokes. One. Two. Three. You couldn’t stop thinking about the boy from your hometown, the boy who was hit by a dump truck while he was riding his bike. He lived through the accident, but his brain was damaged, the part of the brain that controls moral decision making, conscience, compassion. When you were grown, you heard that same boy was on death row. He’d been convicted of abducting, raping, and strangling his own twelve year-old niece. After he was caught he had shown no remorse. You wonder now if he thought his niece’s ass was an A+.

After the first nightmare about bicycles you made little Savannah wear a bicycle helmet. Disney princesses in pink and lavender.

“The other kids will laugh at me,” she said, stamping her little foot.

You know perfectly well as soon as she was out of sight, the helmet came off. Just like her seatbelt when she left with that boy. You’ve been told she acts like you. You can’t see it. You’ve been told this more than once.

Then, unwilled, you remember the time you were in grad school, and a murder occurred in your apartment complex, so close you could literally have thrown a rock from your front step and hit the apartment where it happened. You had to walk around the yellow police tape to get to class. In the wind it twisted like a yellow ribbon, bowed out between the points where it was tied to orange and white sawhorses. A woman had been bound and then killed with one of her own kitchen knives in the same room with her toddler. You wonder what kind of monster would do such a thing. You can’t remember if she was stabbed or if her throat was cut. Maybe it was both. The authorities are circumspect about such things. The media used the term “brutal slaying.” They always say things like that. Like it’s scripted. Canned dialog for the sake of expediency. You wonder what kind of monster would do such a thing.

You send another text message. Usually you refuse to use texting abbreviations, but your fingers are slow enough already. You think, even if she replies, even if she’s okay, this will not end. Not tonight. Not next week. Not ever. You think, even if she’s not okay, this will not end. Not tonight. Not next week. Not ever.

You hear the dogs outside. You remember Savannah always beats on her bedroom window when the dogs bark at night. She thinks it will shut them up. It never works. You swear one night you’ll hear the sound of breaking glass. You think how badly that would cut her hands. Blood and glass and barking dogs. But now, the dogs aren’t barking. They’re howling. They do that only when there are sirens in the area.

When the phone rings, you nearly drop it, as monsters of every kind crowd the corners of your mind. Crouching, never letting you rest. Always thirsty.

Dennis J. Humphrey is Chair of the English and Fine Arts Division at Arkansas State University—Beebe, and has a PhD in English with Creative Writing emphasis from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His short fiction has appeared in storySouth, Southern Hum, Clapboard House, Prick of the Spindle, and BloodLotus.

Kristi Petersen Schoonover

2010-01-25T08:15:00.000-08:00

Screams of Autumn

Emily had just slid a pan of pumpkin seeds in the oven when she heard a scream from outside.

She peered through the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked three acres of tangled woods. Now, on the second weekend of October, they were a brilliant tapestry of yellows, greens, and rusts.

“Ryan,” she called to her husband. “Did you hear that?”

He was a quiet man who liked his easy chair and his books. “Hear what?”

“A scream. I heard a scream. Out there, somewhere.”

“Probably the neighborhood kids.”

The nearest children were at the other end of the block, and they were forbidden to play in the woods.

Again, she heard the scream, the piercing shriek of someone impaled. She hugged her long sweater housecoat close. “You don’t hear it? God, it’s awful.”

“It’s probably a fox or something. Making a kill. The woods are full of pheasant this time of year.”

She heard the creak of his chair; he came up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and kissed her on the neck. He smelled like burnt chocolate and pine. “Why don’t we go for a ride? It’d be a nice day to go up to the Corn Maze.”

“The one we did last year?”

“Yes.” His hand moved beneath her sweater and caressed her breast. “Maybe we can fool around in the sunflowers again.”

At this time last year, his touch had excited her. Since then, it was all she could do to sometimes get up every day, let alone want him. “I’d like to see the maze,” she said. “But I don’t know if I want to…do anything. I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet.”

Ryan pulled away from her, then reached for her hair, brushed it away from her cheek. “I understand.” He kissed the top of her head. “I’ll get your coat.”

He left her. Out there, something screamed.

Under the periwinkle sky, the browning stalks of corn tugged at her knit hat. Ryan fingered the map. “Come on.” He held out his hand. “It looks like we should go this way to get to the center.”
In the distance, she heard those same screams she’d heard at home.

“I hear it again.”

He turned to face her and set his hands on her shoulders. A corner of the map tickled her neck. “There’s kids playing in the pumpkin patch. I saw them when we came in.”

“It’s not children. It isn’t.”

Ryan smashed his mouth into a firm line. “Do you not want to do this anymore? Let’s go have some cider instead.”

But she knew the cider wasn’t going to make her feel better.

Dusk fell. Ryan set two pumpkins in the trunk and they headed for home.

As they bumped and jostled their way over the winding dirt road, Ryan marveled at the spectacle. “These leaves are so beautiful. The bright pinks and the oranges, and their nutty smell. It’s amazing they’re dying.”

“What?” She looked at him. Unlike Ryan, who had moved here from Florida, she had lived in New England all her life and had never thought about what the leaves were actually doing. “Is that what’s happening?”

“Sure. It makes sense. Right? They need light to live. And now they’re not getting enough. So basically, it’s like they’re starving to death.”

She didn’t answer, because what he’d said sounded like something her friend Sue, a poet who wrote a lot about nature, would say.

God, she missed Sue.

A gust of wind set loose a rain of yellow leaves, and a hail of tortured screams filled her head. She jammed her palms over her ears. “Ouch!”

Ryan was so startled the car jerked as he tapped the brakes. “What?”

“Oh my God it hurts! The screaming!”

Ryan pulled the car into the shoulder, which was just a narrow strip of grass bordering a burbling, swollen creek.

Emily writhed in her seat, and then the screams began to lessen and finally, stop. She heard only one scream now, and she was able to open her eyes and uncover her ears in time to see a single leaf plummet to the windshield.

The scream stopped abruptly as soon as it landed.

Wide-eyed, she shifted in her seat and seized Ryan’s forearm. “Oh my God it’s the leaves! The leaves are screaming! They’re screaming as they die!”

Ryan’s brow furrowed and their eyes met. She could see that he believed her, but he looked so sad.

She burst into tears. “Oh, Ryan, please make it stop!”

“Calm down. Just calm down.”

For a few minutes, all she could hear were her own sobs, the pressure of them mounting behind her eyes, in her head. Every few seconds, she heard another, distant scream.

“Ems.” Ryan set his warm hand on her back. “Ems, do you need to go back to the doctor?”

She calmed and hiccupped a few times, then looked up at him.

There was fear in his eyes.

“No.” She leaned against him. “Let’s just go home.”

He settled one arm around her, and she pressed her hands over her ears and knew that no quantity of Risperdal, Zyprexa or Seroquel was going to erase her memory of what had happened last year.

Emily had always loved haunted houses—the cheesy kind, where half the ghouls and goblins were seventeen-year-olds making eight bucks an hour to cover their faces with fake blood.
“It’ll be so totally fun!” She’d convinced her friend Sue to come with her. This particular house had been on the grounds of the Washington Irving house in Sleepy Hollow, and held the promise of Headless Horsemen and nineteenth-century style spooks.

When they arrived, a line of giant burning pumpkin-headed scarecrows on poles sent sparks into the freakishly dry night; they led to the opening of a large tent, its mouth glowing pale orange and gold. “Come on, come on!” Emily tugged on Sue’s arm.

Sue stopped, frowned, and pulled on one of her braids. “I…think I’m having second thoughts.”
“Stop!” Emily laughed, taking her handbag and settling it on an opposite shoulder so it hung across her body. “Quit it. It’s just a bunch of kids.”

They presented their tickets, entered the tent, and screamed, howled, and fell back on each other through the tight corridors of mummies and vampires, coffins and werewolves. Screams from the people behind them seemed to get louder the deeper into the labyrinth they went.

They threaded through a narrow hall which dead-ended in a room decorated to simulate an ancient forest; piles of leaves huddled around a simulated bonfire. Emily smelled something—something that didn’t seem right. Like burning rubber tires and paint thinner. She felt a rattle in her chest, and every breath brought with it a stab of pain.

A man cloaked as a Druid extended his arms and reached toward them. “Get out!” he commanded. “Get out! Get out!”

Emily heard Sue scream as the figure began to shove her out the way they’d entered.

Just then the wall to her right burst into flame, and in one fatal moment she understood that this was not part of the attraction: the place was on fire. “Get down!” She yelled to Sue. She hit the ground as flames shot over her head, and she felt her back burning. Don’t panic don’t panic don’t panic, she thought. The room was filled with thick black and gray smoke, and she didn’t know where the exit was. Ahead of her, then, she could see a sliver of bright light under the wall, as though someone were beaming a flashlight at where it met the ground; the tent fabric was moving. Crawl there, crawl there…

She did everything she could to suppress the scream that throttled her whole body. She heard
Sue, calling her. “Emily! Don’t leave me!”

No, no, she thought, I can’t, I’m sorry, I have to keep crawling toward the light…

She felt a pair of strong hands pulling her, pulling out from under the tent wall. “Put her out!” Someone was screaming. Then, more noises, a consistent thwucking as her back was flogged with a coat, or maybe a blanket.

“You’re lucky, lady,” a man’s voice said. “You’re lucky you got out. We’ll take you to the hospital, just wait here.”

The tent was completely consumed, and fiery tatters of cloth drifted to the ground. The world spun and her back hurt and she listened, listened to the screams of people burning to death, knowing that some of those screams belonged to Sue.

Ryan and Emily got home just after dark, and the skeletal trees that huddled their house were ablaze in flashing red lights: fire trucks were parked on the lawn.

“Oh, my God.” Ryan barely stopped the car before he leapt out. “Stay there, honey. Do NOT come out.”

Emily huddled beneath her sweater and closed her eyes, refusing to look, repeating the grateful’s Rosary: we weren’t home, we don’t have pets, no one got hurt, we have insurance. But soon she couldn’t resist and turned to look.

Her house was still standing—in fact, it looked like nothing had happened, at least on the outside it appeared that way—and she saw Ryan, a shadow charging up the hill to talk to one of the men in the sooty gray coat of the town fire department. Three other men were recoiling the fat white worm of the hose.

Ryan got back into the car.

She opened the passenger door, leaned over, and threw up. Ryan rubbed her back.

When she’d finished, Ryan said, “As soon as they’re gone, we’ll go inside. There wasn’t a lot of damage. The security system alerted the fire company. They only had to break the window to get in. But the house stinks like smoke.”

“What happened?” It hurt when she talked. A dry, cracked, I-can’t-say-a-word-without-hacking cough exploded from her chest in spasms of pain.

Ryan didn’t answer right away, and she looked at him, watched his Adam’s Apple move as he swallowed. When he turned to her, she thought she could see tears in his eyes, and quietly, he said, “It was the seeds you were toasting. You forgot to shut off the oven before we left.”

Saliva filled her mouth. She was going to be sick again. “I did. I did.”

“You didn’t!”

She leaned out the door again, waiting for it to come. In the past year, he’d never risen his voice to her. “Don’t yell at me. I’m…I’m still recovering, you know that.”

She heard him get out of the car.

“Ryan!”

But he was up the cement front steps and in the house.

She followed, and stopped when she got to the threshold, because the smell of burning stopped her. It was an earthy smell, like mold and unemptied ashtrays.

“Nice, right?” Ryan threw his keys on the mail table. “This is what happens when you don’t get help.”

“The drugs didn’t work.” She could feel the bile coming up her throat again.

A wind whipped high through the trees and the screaming started again.

She shoved her hands over her ears.

Ryan came to the front door and yelled loud enough that she could hear him. “What is wrong with you? Ems, I have been patient. I have been more than patient. And this is what you do?”

“The last thing I would do is try to burn this house down!” She shouted. Her own voice sounded hollow. The wind howled, the screaming got worse, and when she opened her eyes, she caught a glimpse of Ryan at the top of the stairs, headed for their bedroom.

She tromped up after him, hands still over her ears. “Ryan!” She arrived in their bedroom in time to see him yank a suitcase from the bottom of their closet. She took her hands away from her ears, tentatively. The screaming was more distant; she slammed their bedroom door to keep it out. “What are you doing?”

He tossed the suitcase on the bed. “What I have to.” He unzipped the bag, went to the closet, and tossed her sweaters and pants, hangars and all, inside. “You’re going to the treatment center at Oak Towers.”

The horror of what was happening hit her, and she seized his arm. “Don’t! Please don’t. I can’t—”
He pulled away, opened her dresser and seized a handful of her bras and panties. “You are going. And I’m driving you there right now.”

“I am not going to that place!”

For a few moments all that was between them were the distant screams from outside.

“Fine.” He flipped the suitcase he’d been packing for her over and dumped its contents onto the bed. He opened the top drawer of his dresser and fisted three rolled-up pairs of socks and briefs and tossed them into the suitcase. Then he went to his closet and began to empty it of his clothes.

“Where are you going?”

“Away.” He pressed hard on the bag and zipped it closed. “I’ll call you.” He left the room and rushed down the stairs, the suitcase not all the way zipped and one pant leg dragging behind him.

“Ryan!”

But he was gone.

He’d left the door open, and the wind blew screaming, dying leaves in with it. Emily crushed her hands over her ears, sank to the carpet, and cried.

The screaming awoke her hours later. She wasn’t sure where she was at first; then she peered down at the open front door and could tell that she was in the upstairs foyer. Her neck throbbed—she’d fallen asleep leaning against the stair railing, and when she touched her forehead, she could feel the imprint of one of the spindles in her skin, a small round depression that hurt when she applied pressure.

The leaves were invading her home through the front door. They screamed as they scuttled in. “Stop!” She shrieked. “Stop!”

But the wind outside got stronger. More leaves swept inside.

She covered her ears, but could still hear them twisting and shrieking and dying. She raced down the stairs to find the leaves had taken over the first floor. They were a couple of inches deep in her kitchen, in her dining room. More came in. The wind got stronger.

The shrieking was so piercing now it was like needles in the center of her brain. “What do you want from me?” She screamed and stamped her foot. The leaves beneath her sole seemed to groan. “What do you WANT from me?”

And then, just like that, the wind stopped, and the leaves quieted. She stood completely still for a few moments, listening. She heard something that sounded like murmuring, like people in prayer in a room down the hall.

She took a deep breath, and her lungs burned.

And then she saw them, on the counter.

The wooden matches.

She waded through the layers of leaves to get to them.

She heard laughing. “Is this what you want?” she asked.

More giggling. It reminded her childhood, of the sounds she’d heard on her Hansel and Gretel record. “This is what you want, isn’t it?”

And then the screaming started again, in full force. She pulled the outer sleeve off the matches and lit one. “Here!” She tossed it into the layer in her kitchen.

The piles singed and sent small hot particles wisping to the ceiling.

The flames crawled up the walls.

She went into the dining room, through the hallway, up the stairs, striking matches, watching them burn, feeling the heat on her face, feeling the searing in her lungs.

Then she sat on her couch and watched everything burn and waited for the screaming to stop.

Kristi Petersen Schoonover is the author of the collection Admit One: Tales from Haunted Disney World, due from Pandora Ink books in 2010. She is the recipient of a Norman Mailer Writers Colony Fellowship Residency and serves as an editor for Read Short Fiction. Her website is www.kristipetersenschoonover.com

John Grey

2010-01-19T19:39:00.000-08:00

NO RESCUE

If you were lost in the woods,

they'd send out men on horses,

even in the cold, the snow.

They'd be scrambling up hills,

fording streams of ice,

to get to you.

If it was your body gone missing,

under siege to bitter weather,

there'd be a way of dealing with it,

a rescue team with blankets, food and water,

first aid, for the moment when they find you,

a great team of them,

loud and sweaty, great beasts stamping,

flinging snow and dead branch,

nostrils shooting smoke.

If you were out there somewhere,

you'd hear them,

would signal with the last of your voice,

would push dying strength to its limit

to make itself known.

But you're sitting opposite me,

trembling, saying "I'm just not ready."

So it begins with you being found,

but still the men come

screaming out your name,

tearing up earth, smashing brush,

on horses, so huge, so unwieldy,

they threaten to crush your skull.

They want your blankets, food and drink...

cold men, hungry men, thirsty men.

John Grey has recently been published in the Georgetown Review, The Pinch, South Carolina Review and The Pedestal. He has work upcoming in Alimentum and Big Muddy.

Kenneth Radu

2010-01-11T06:33:00.000-08:00

Scent

In Catherine’s gardens of pathways, topiary, fountains, pergolas and bowers, pseudo wilderness and man-made lakes, flower beds designed by an eighteenth-century Englishman, statuary of playful Greek gods and nymphs, Delia separated herself from the troupe. She found her way to an arbour where she sat on a dirty stone bench in front of a thick wall of clipped ivy. Overhead through the slats, the Russian sky spread expansively in cloudless blue. From here she enjoyed a view of the back of the palace, less impressive than the front, and wondered about all the rooms behind rows of massive windows which they had not entered. Aside from the entrance, the amber room, one or two other salons, the ball room and gift shop, really, little of the palace had been explored. She suspected chambers of boxes and debris and reconstruction material. She had hoped to see a kitchen or kitchens. Where did the empress’s food come from? On one estate the guide informed the crowds that the kitchen existed in a separate building and servants carried meals in covered dishes, regardless of the weather, several times a day to the main house. Not convenient, but at least in case of fire, rather frequent, the manor house did not also burn to the ground. What gorgeous ceramic tiled stoves and chimneys rose from floor to ceiling in the corners of many rooms.

Kostya approached as if he had been looking for her, striding under the leafy arbour, fixing his gaze on hers so fiercely that Delia dropped her eyes and withdrew a mint from her purse to busy her hands and look down so as not to reveal her obvious surprise and possibly pleasure in seeing the lad. Rummaging about her capacious purse suggested preoccupation, indifference to his appearance, but it also disguised the effort to compose herself. Odd, it seemed that she had always been sitting in Kostya’s presence: on the boat in the dining salon, on the cruise ship deck, on the tour bus, and now in the gardens of the once sumptuous Catherine palace outside of St. Petersburg. Sitting to be served, always in the position of looking up to the lad, and he looking down, waiting for instructions or to give her what she wanted. Allowed on the tour bus he was enjoying time off today. He had sat directly across from her seat, spreading his legs in such a manner that she could reach over and touch a thigh or allow her eyes to wander to the centre of his body. Kostya eyes had caught her glance.

On shore he appeared taller out of uniform than he did on board. By all accounts she should be surprised to see him in this spot, for surely he would have preferred the company of the other crew who had joined the sightseeing tours rather than search for an old woman. Not that Delia entirely admitted to her age, and if she did, why Catherine the Great had enjoyed the services of a lover thirty years or more her junior, taking up with a twenty-two year old boy when she was already past fifty. What difference then did a few years on either side make? Delia straightened her back, glad that she did not sag, had successfully withstood the gravitational force which led senior citizens to droop. No one could accuse Delia of drooping, yet.

Kostya wore the latest Russian fad in shoes, golden-beige leather, elongated toes slightly tilted up at the tip like middle-eastern slippers. She thought of Ali Baba and the cave, the forty thieves, the great jars of oil and spices and jewels, semi-lunatic genies, and oh those severe Arabian men crossing scimitars over their burly chests and leaping in their baggy trousers, if that was the word for their pants. These shoes had the effect of lengthening the foot. Really, Delia, blushing, for slithering across her mind was the serpent of innuendo: the old story about the size of a man’s foot, nose, or hands, and the invisible appendage of more compelling interest. Nonsense, of course, but why would men choose to wear shoes that appeared to increase the size of their feet? Yes, well, Delia, why did some women wear impossible stilettos?

If she lingered here, she would have to speak to Kostya, exactly how remain problematic since neither spoke the language of the other. He walked with purpose towards her, Delia could see that. The legs of a gymnast, one of those gloriously built Russian athletes swinging elegant and powerful legs over the pummel horse or springing off a floor mat at every Olympics. She always watched the floor and gymnastic exercises. She sucked furiously at the mint. That little bronze statue of a centaur she had seen in the Winter palace, reared on its sturdy hind legs, hoisting a protesting nymph with whom he had every intention of galloping away and ravishing in a Grecian glade.

Those Greeks knew a thing or two about wild abandon. Oh, those Greek boys, indeed, Delia found herself remembering the guide in khaki shorts leading her through the ruins of the Parthenon, his curly hair the colour of black olives. She had read her Plato and knew all about the many stages of love, from the physical to the philosophical, the ascent towards wisdom. Well, she had been content not to reach for the spiritual sun that day since the earth had revealed its manifold treasures to her eager eyes and receptive heart.

Certainly she was old enough to be wise. No one could accuse her of giving in to her admiration for the virile lads in her Montreal night school classes. Travelling alone afforded anonymity and protection, it encouraged indulgence. She wasn’t, after all, in pursuit of underage pretty boys in Thailand. Old enough to resort to the consolations of philosophy, but she prefer to avoid that resort entirely. How easily a young man’s fingers or lips or legs, their expressions, the sweat on their necks, their fragrances, or their athletic tumbling after a volley ball in the sunlight, as she had seen naked young men do on a Mediterranean beach, how easily they turned her head and desires: how easy it was to come down from the heights of philosophy. Such beauty, all the more beautiful because so many lads possessed the earth unconsciously, utterly oblivious to their privileged status and exquisite forms. And here was Kostya, appearing as if some genie had divined her secret desires and made them manifest on the grounds where once a Russian empress walked her dogs with her adoring, magically young lover. What was his name? There had been several, but who was it in Catherine’s senior years? Would Kostya know? Oh, look, he comes to me. Delia didn’t think anyone he heard her rather loud sigh.

Above her when he stopped, Kostya’s physique created a shadow and she could look up from her seat without squinting. Between the slats and vines of the arbour overhead, pieces of blue sky and sunlight glinted like a ceiling panelled with sapphire and amber. She had reached the age when the sun cruelly exposed the true nature of a mature woman’s complexion. Although she had protected herself with sun block and subtle cosmetics that guaranteed a natural look while masking imperfections and finer wrinkles, the sun exposed signs of age the way it revealed dust in a room and the accumulation of dead skin on a Sheridan table. Quickly adjusting her vision and, retracting her hand before she allowed herself to touch his, extended towards her, Delia smiled. Kostya spoke the now familiar Russian greeting.

His lips, those blood-suffused lips. Lips that required a gentle tracing of her own fingers in order to appreciate their texture, lips parting to allow her fingers … the tongue. In the arbour’s shade Kostya’s blue eyes darkened. She assumed he was eighteen, but he possessed the loveliness of a younger male who had just recently emerged from the indistinctness of childhood into a man’s body. She couldn’t really inquire. What would have destroyed the inclination or mood or fantasy more than asking the boy his age? Before we go any further, my young man, exactly how old are you? She’d immediately place him beyond the pale of her own desires. So big, how effectively he protected her from the light as if he was slightly bending over her as she sat on the bench, his back curving like an umbrella.

Presumably a minimum age requirement existed for employment on the boat, but ah, the lips, the fullness thereof, the deep pinkish hue suggesting warm blood, somehow bespoke lack of experience, an innocence ripe to fall that made Delia instinctively offer him the mint she had been unwrapping. Or was that, too, a pose, inauthentic? What was the minimum age requirement here, she quickly asked herself, but did not pause long enough over the question to find a suitable answer. Kostya was more than a mere boy, chronology beyond that did not signify except in the narrowest of legal terms, and who, anyway, was really paying attention?

Kostya accepted, allowing the tip of his fingers to brush her palm, then circled the rectangular green mint resting on her hand like a gem. Long and pale, the knuckles prominent, the nails bitten rather than manicured, but clean. Such strong fingers like the fingers of a pianist, she imagined, how securely they could hold on to what they grasped. Quickly, quickly her mind fled from the image of one of those elongated fingers following the outline of her own lips as they parted. His fingers probing. How delicately they played pianissimo on the nerve-endings of her skin. The tips of his fingers ever so subtly danced a measured and slow pavanne, the forefinger leading the way, followed by the second, his thumb circling like a private dancer. Then he clasped the mint, raising it to his mouth and stood like a soldier at attention, except for separating his legs, standing too close, too wonderfully close.

Kostya held the candy before his lips, watching Delia watching him, his dark-eyed gaze lowered, half covered with smooth eyelids fringed with lashes women envied, and opened his mouth into a wide Russian smile, stuck out his tongue and gently placed the mint on the moist surface then withdrew, retracting the spongy pink flesh like a lazy lizard taking its time to consume its prey, and slowly sucked. She tried not to look up, knowing her eyes would search his under those lowered lids and follow each muscular movement of the cheek, as if mastication possessed hypnotically magical properties. Kostya quickly and suddenly sat down on the eighteenth century bench although it, too, could well have been restored or simply added last year for all she knew, his thigh too close to hers for she, well, recoiled was not the word, but perhaps retreated ever so slightly so as not to draw attention to the action or to give offense.

Perhaps Catherine the Great had lingered on this very bench with her lover, Lanskoy, the lad’s name unexpectedly crackled in Delia’s mind. A dream of a young lover he had been for the aging empress. Delia was conscious of concentrated heat on the palm of her hand. Kostya kept staring ahead, not turning his head to her at all, his arms crossed, and stretching his long legs out, crossing them at the ankle. Through the thinness of his white cotton shirt she could see the hardness of a bicep. Her eyes embraced his profile, able to distinguish where blush reddened the high cheek bones and the full curvature of his lips, thicker than most she had seen. A splash of red colour spread over his cheeks as if he were either overheated or blushing, but she suspected it was simply the effect of capillaries beneath the skin, although no less appealing for that. Naturally wavy, the colour of a Russian wheat field in August, broken with the occasional curl, his hair needed a trim, and invited a hand to tousle it as she would have loved to do. And if her fingers caught themselves among the wildness of his hair, what then? What fragrance? He wore a cologne which enhanced his body and infiltrated hers, reminding her of several youths in her classes who wore eau de cologne, the odour of youth. He must have known how susceptible she was to masculine scents, but she couldn’t imagine how he would have discovered her predilection.

What was Kostya doing here? Why had he followed or looked for her among the crowd? Because as he sat there, amazingly comfortable and relaxed in her presence, his legs stretched out and oh so casually crossed at the ankles in her presence, his jaws moving as he sucked on the mint, Delia began construing his motives. There was another empty bench in the arbour. He could not have come alone on this particular excursion. His silence and too-relaxed pose either suggested familiarity or, and here Delia heard her own breathing, of familiarity to come. She wished she had studied Russian. The lad knew no English aside from hello and yes.

He swallowed the mint and she riveted her eyes on the throat muscles. She could have watched his every movement all day, the protuberance of his Adam’s apple. Allowing her glance free range, she studied the outline of his thighs, noticed that his manhood rested along the left, snuggled tightly under cloth, even in its relaxed state, rather too noticeable to be entirely accidental. Staring at it, she believed, caused it to stir beneath the imprisoning cloth, elongate and awaken. How tempting to touch him there, the ideal embodied in the real, and he would not have recoiled in horror. Delia blushed, whether from the lad’s obvious ploy or from her own interest, she wouldn’t be able to say, if asked.

He uncrossed his legs, shifted position, and Delia felt his thigh pressing against hers, a deliberately considered move even to the point of determining how much pressure. As she did not retreat this time, Delia understood that Kostya clearly took her lack of protest as a sign of encouragement. He separated those vigorous legs wider to allow for an alignment of the two thighs, cloth against cloth, flesh against flesh, and he placed both hands interlocked across his flat stomach, leaned back and relaxed into her admiration. Really, if she had her wits fully about her, she would have stood and left without a word. Well, given the language barriers, no word would have sufficed, and she did not wish to leave him with an impression of disgust or dismay. No, that would not do because, as the leg pressed more assertively against hers, she remembered that little statue of the satyr embracing a bacchante, promising delirious abandon.

True, she was hardly a nymph, but oh that boy unsettling her calm and sucking on her mint could happily act the satyr. She had studied his legs long enough to know they did not crook like a goat’s and undoubtedly did not end in split hooves. Closing her eyes, she breathed in his fragrance deeply as if she were smelling the roses on the vine, past their prime, fading, losing their petals and most of their scent, but still his scent was sufficient for the moment. Ah, the heat of his flesh against her thigh, almost dissolving the fabric between them, so skin abraded skin and moistness mingled with moistness. She could almost hear her own blood rushing into the chambers of her heart. She leaned into him, aware of the compulsion of beauty.

Kostya then got up and stretched, raising his arms above his head, locking his hands behind it. His biceps flexed under the pressure, and his buttocks clenched beneath the tightened seat of the pants. There was a heavy gold ring on the third finger of the right hand, although she didn’t believe it could be an engagement ring. From her perspective on the bench it appeared to feature the craggy head of an animal, a lion perhaps. He remained in that pose long enough for her to enjoy it. That was clearly his purpose, to entertain, and long enough for her to become uncomfortable because, after all, the boy’s ass was virtually next to her face and she was now finding it difficult to breath. It would be more discrete if they were not seen together, more so if, in fact, he did not stand and stretch his body well within touching distance.

How confident the boy must be that she wouldn’t protest .That Delia wanted to touch him, run her hands up and down his legs, clench, lead his body closer to hers, so moistness may meet moistness. Then Kostya walked away. Not so much as a good bye or a smile, Kostya walked away, slowly, stopped at an opening in the side of the arbour where she expected him to glance back, which he did, and the tilt of the head seemed to suggest that she follow him. He must know the gardens and its secret places so well. He stretched one more time, quickly, and in that instant Delia remembered her Greek guide on the beach, rising from the splash of the sea and stretched his wet and glistening brown body.

Delia could still see the rippling of Kostya’s slacks over his thighs, the way the pants covered his buttocks, and how his white shirt clung to his back from perspiration. He turned left and disappeared, his scent wafted back on a breeze channelling into the arbour . Oh yes, cologne seeped into the very soul of desire. The mingling of scents, the smell of fragrance, the heady smells of the body … Sweet agonizing torment, to desire and refrain, to part the lips and receive no taste. Wisdom should have come to her aid, but lay chaste and virtuous on the ground, a young man’s elongated shoe pressed against it’s desiccated face. Age should have protected her, and it did during her classes when conducted her classes of philosophy like a Mother Superior overlooking novitiates.

Her body ached as if she had spent an evening making love with a vigorous satyr who had taken little thought for her comfort as he riotously took his own pleasures. Oh those long Ali Baba shoes! Here she was lingering within the scent of her Russian boy who looked as if he could be strong enough to hoist her in the air and carry off to a grove, if she allowed him, a satyr with a decidedly mature, but well-preserved nymph. And if she did not allow, would he let desire determine actions? She had led him on, had so blatantly accepted his intimations he could not be mistaken of the power he held, of how she had sacrificed authority and respect for the sensation of moist lips and subtle but insistence fingers.

Delia rose from her seat, feeling a stiffness in her legs from sitting so long, the mint entirely dissolved. She wondered if she had been meant to follow Kostya, if she had waited too long. How much time was left before the tour bus departed for the cruise ship. How could an assignation be arranged? He had been deliberate, he had wordlessly promised love, sensing her wishes, and wordlessly promised more if she followed. Delia took out a tissue and her compact mirror from her bag to check upon the condition of her eyes. Then, parting the ivy thick on the arbour, she saw Kostya in the distance, standing on a knoll, waiting, looking towards her although she could not be seen, the sun brilliant on his white legs.

Kenneth Radu has published several books including a memoir, The Devil is Clever (HarperCollins Canada), and three collections of stories, among them A Private Performance (Montreal: Vehicule Press) which won the Quebec Federation of Writers' Award for best English-language fiction. His writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming online in Clearfield Review, vis a tergo, fourpaper letters, Leaf Garden, Black Lantern, Four Cornered Universe, Eclectic Flash, LWOT and elsewhere. He lives in Quebec. A new collection of his short stories will be published in 2010 by DC Books of Montreal.

Happy Holidays

2009-12-13T17:50:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season. The year is coming to an end, and with the season comes gifts, carved meats, awkward family exchanges, and (unfortunately) travel. All this to say, we're going to be out of town for a while, and because of this, Spilt Milk will be taking a brief hiatus. We will resume posting in the new year, and we have exciting new works to expose to this realm of anonymity and irresponsible choices.

We will be reading submissions during this break, and we hope you will use our time off to send us something truly impressive. Or, if you'd rather read, feel free to peruse our catalog of talented writers. Can we make a suggestion? Try "Museum of Fucked" by David Peak. Preorders shipped this week, and we have a couple leftover copies we'd be glad to pull out of the fridge and send to you. It's here.

Thanks for reading, and Merry Christmas. We'll see you in the new year.

--the Editors

Donal Mahoney

2009-12-04T16:41:00.000-08:00

Diamond of Jello

From my stool in the diner I watch
the old woman with elm tree arms
command the big booth in back

and roar for a menu,
take a half hour to read it
before placing her order.

Watching her eat, I realize
life for her is a dollop of whip cream,
a twirling ballerina, on a diamond of Jello.

I raise my water glass
in a silent toast. Bravo, I whisper.
I wish her good cheer.

Leaving the Station

Each morning
I step from the train
and march with the others

leaving the station.
The weatherman's warned of rain
so we're armed

with umbrellas,
our briefcases swinging.
Across from the station

there's an old hotel
high in the sky. King Kong,
everyone calls it.

In tall windows
old men appear,
disappear, reappear.

It is August in Chicago
and the old men wear
overcoats and homburgs

so no one can steal them.
They light cigarettes,
mumble and curse

at the daily parade
leaving the station.
Traffic is thick

but even in winter
no one looks up
since no one can hear them.

Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, MO. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Public Republic (Bulgaria), Gloom Cupboard (U.K.), Revival (Ireland), The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), Poetry Friends, Poetry Super Highway, Pirene's Fountain (Australia) and other publications.

Greg Santos

2009-11-28T16:48:00.000-08:00

Honey, the Appliances Are Singing Again

1.
The boom box doesn’t like it when the others talk behind its back. It often sits alone, mumbling and stuttering to itself. We’ll have to keep an eye on it; I think it’s plotting something.

The VCR in the basement coughs up dust and reminisces about the old days. Occasionally it repeats itself, especially when it brings up the Robot Revolution of ’59 but we’re all too polite to change the subject when it comes up.

Fanatical robots have been zealously attempting to convert the printer, bombarding it with pamphlets, junk mail, even phone calls. The printer has been handling the stress pretty well but I don’t know if its defenses have been worn down too much. When we came home from shopping the other day, I could see it peeking out from behind our blinds and staring at the Robot Sentience Temple across the street for a good 5 minutes. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried.

My answering machine has been acting up lately when taking phone calls while I’m away. We’re going to have a serious talk about what is and isn’t appropriate to say when clients call the house.

Movie night Tuesdays are always a big hit with the appliances. They adore the Back to the Future trilogy and, of course, Blade Runner. But surprisingly their favorite movie of all times is The Little Mermaid. They all get eerily quiet when Ariel sings “Part of Your World.”

Greg Santos is the author of the e-book Thinking Things Through (Pangur Ban Party, 2009). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as McSweeney's, The Best American Poetry Blog, Six Sentences, Nthposition, The Brandi Wells Review, Word Riot, This Zine Will Change Your Life, and The Feathertale Review. He is the poetry editor of pax americana. He blogs at http://moondoggy.blogspot.com.

Howie Good

2009-11-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

JUST LIKE EDGAR ALLAN POE'S BLUES

I found my heart wandering
the streets of Baltimore,

penniless,
raving unintelligibly,

dressed in someone else’s clothes.
It was coming from a funeral,

or going to one,
and when I omitted to ask whose,

it was gone.

But, all these years later,
mere acquaintances

continue to receive letters
begging for $10 for the fare home.

SONGS WITHOUT WORDS

1
The clock
stretches out
both hands
toward us.

Fingerless hands.

2
She missed
class a lot

that semester.
I tried to talk

to her once
about it.

She listened
quietly,

like a dark
window.

3
Her name was
Staci Love.

Love – to feel
tender affection

for somebody
or for something.

I looked it up.

4
She had begun
to smell by the time
they found her,
and later I heard
it was self-starvation,
machinery on fire,
an irregular heartbeat
under beaten gold.

5
The clock deserted her,
and ever since,

it isn’t late,
but it feels it.

WHERE I’M FROM

I came straight from work
to meet them on the corner,

but, of course,
they had already become

fine particles of smoke.
While I waited, I listened to music

for barbed wire and accordion.
The short days of winter

had sneaked up on us,
the sky like a fogged mirror,

the frozen puddles like pale bruises.
I stood there for what seemed a lifetime,

naked by then and shivering
and with my hands raised

in the air, an unqualified witness
to an unspecified event.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 11 poetry chapbooks, including Still Life with Firearms (2009) from Right Hand Pointing, Visiting the Dead (2009) from Flutter Press, and My Heart Draws a Rough Map (2009) from The Blue Hour Press. He has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and five times for the Best of the Net anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick, was released in 2009 by Press Americana. He is co-editor of the online literary journal Left Hand Waving.

Kenneth Radu

2009-11-14T08:28:00.000-08:00

The Rottweilers

My neighbour caged two Rottweilers in his backyard or chained them to a spike driven into the ground. When I stood among the hollyhocks next to the fence, they ran towards me, leaped up, and almost clenched their jaws on my face before the chain choked and tugged them back. My neighbour displayed tattoos on his arms: a medusa and a cockatrice on his right forearm, and a spectacularly breasted woman straddling a flying lizard on his left bicep. Bald, he wore two silver hoops in his right ear, drove a black Corvette, and also a glinting black motorcycle with high handlebars and chrome tubing. The gas tank bulged like a goitre between the driver's legs.

Mine was a pleasant suburban neighbourhood consisting of oversized homes on extensive lots with roofs sloping like ski jumps. The grass was kept rigorously cut. Begonias, geraniums, and impatiens were the most popular flowers. Built on a former pasture, the suburb boasted few mature trees. For the most part the houses were occupied by second- or third-home buyers who had escaped the ravages of the recession and who wanted a quiet suburban life.

I know it is fashionable to mock the kind of suburb I lived in. Many people with artistic, intellectual, or counter cultural inclinations hold it in contempt. When they are not satirized, the residents there are despised. As the stereotype goes, they're materialists or philistines or pathetically straight, television addicts smothered in middle-class banalities. People who choose to live in the city's rougher neighbourhoods, in walk-up flats or in townhouses on busy thoroughfares within easy access to foreign film, art galleries and the only bakery that produces an edible bagel must, by virtue of location, be superior in every respect.

I played the cello as a hobby; well, more than a hobby, for I was a member of a classical chamber group. Three friends and myself - a clarinettist, a pianist, and a violinist - met once a week to practice Bartok or Stravinsky or whatever took our fancy. Now and then we performed at private functions or in churches, but we really played for ourselves or families and friends. The neighbour on the other side of my house used to be a professor of Commonwealth literature, now retired. A well-travelled scholar and sinophile, she had visited China five times and understood Cantonese well enough to carry on a conversation and to read Chinese newspapers. She was also an accomplished poet, having published several volumes of hallucinatory verse which I still enjoy reading, some of which gathered impressive reviews in literary magazines. Adele hated the city and moved to the suburbs fifteen years ago with her Confucian texts to avoid as she put it, "the trends," speaking as if "the trends" were a kind of insidious viral infection.

When the Rottweilers and their owner moved in, I was taken by surprise. Of all neighbourhoods this suburb would not have attracted a man with tattoos, a Harley, and a predilection for black boots and belts spangled with silver studs. I couldn't say if he lived alone for more often than not I saw an assortment of women enter his house, sometimes accompanied by other men wearing pony tails and leather jackets. Three or four vehicles usually parked in his cobblestone driveway, of different makes depending on the day of the week, almost all of them black. For instance a Citroen arrived every Tuesday morning and left by noon; on Wednesday, a Mercedes and a Buick pulled up in the afternoon; on Thursday, curiously, a blue Lada driven by the skinniest woman I had ever seen, perhaps anorexic, with red hair cropped close to the scalp and ropes of stone jewellery strung around her neck.

And so quiet.

After a year my worst fears had not been realized. A lover of solitude and reflection, I dreaded the onslaught of partying next door: people hooting, rock music rattling the windows, beer cans flying over the fence into my garden. Despite the regular gatherings in his house large enough to host a wedding reception, he managed to keep the noise down to an acceptable level.

One Saturday afternoon half a dozen cars and an equal number of motorcycles parked in his driveway and on the street in front of his house. Although I counted sixteen, I'm sure more men and women than that wearing leather gear of one sort or another spent the afternoon barbecuing in his backyard, drinking, splashing about in his small in-ground swimming pool, many smoking, some dancing. A few guests, as I could see from my bedroom window, engaged in sexual activity under the forsythia and honeysuckle bushes. Relieved that the party was not clamorous, I was able to practice Bach's cello Suite No. 6 in D, a particular favourite, without having my concentration shattered by raucous voices or booming rock 'n roll or nasally country and western songs. My neighbour preferred music of the fifties and early sixties. Not entirely ignorant of popular taste, when I allowed my attention to stray in that direction, I could hear Bill Haley and the Comets rocking around the clock, Buddy Holly, and the lamentations of Patsy Cline.

Our meetings over the fence were brief. Despite his athletic body, my neighbour's broad face and well-trimmed, grizzled beard betrayed his age. Although he wrapped his arms around young women including, as I saw at the Saturday barbecue, the anorexic Lada driver, he was well past forty, perhaps approaching fifty. We exchanged polite comments about the weather and little else. His voice was raw and throaty from smoking too much, I assume, his eyes dishwater grey and unrevealing. He wasn't the kind of man one liked instantly.

I did mention how close his dogs came to jumping the fence, that their chains gave them too much free play. Unsmiling, he said they never attacked anyone who minded his own business, they were well-trained guard dogs. I could see that, I said. They were great with children, his own daughter wrestled with them when she was a child. Not this pair, he added, but their parents, now dead. He had always kept Rottweilers. And that constituted our longest conversation.

That he had a daughter interested me. Not only were we the same age, but like me he was also a parent. My son Frédéric, however, had not spoken to me for six years, not since he left home at eighteen to form a rock band and to smoke whatever dope he pleased. We had quarrelled over his friends, his activities, his grungy clothes, his obsession with heavy metal, a form of music which I believed, and still do, execrable. Rebellion and disobedience raised their tiresome heads after his twelfth birthday, encouraged by testosterone rushing through his body. When his mother died, I could do little to console my fourteen-year-old son except take him to symphony concerts where he sat with his head bowed and hands clasped, buy him dinner at my favourite restaurants, and increase his allowance. I don't know if he understood how much I needed him, how much I needed to focus on his life to prevent mine from collapsing. He retreated to his room and plucked at the strings of his guitar, first acoustic, then electric, which he bought without my permission.

Did your daughter desert you, as well? I was almost tempted to ask. Did you feel the sting of filial ingratitude? Did you sit on your child's bed crying, knowing that you had managed it all so very badly and that, like my son, she probably would never return? Did you phone all her friends you knew for information they did not have or would not give? Did you phone the police who said she was of age and a free agent? Did you endure the agony of a parent who had lost his only child?

Of course, I did not ask impertinent questions. Perhaps the woman who drove the Lada was his daughter. She looked to be in her early twenties. With the use of binoculars, I could see through my living room window that she sported tattoos on her upper arms.

On the occasions when our paths crossed, I wanted to ask my neighbour whose name, I was not surprised to learn, was Chuck, why he wanted to live in this suburb. Even I could be discreet, recognizing the limits beyond which it was better for curiosity not to go. In time I suspected illicit activities next door, possibly involvement in drugs. I had no evidence whatsoever to support my suspicions other than boots, tattoos, Harleys, black cars, and the intimidating company. Their heavy smoking in the backyard left a sickly sweet smell in the air for hours after the last visitor had gone. Police officers knocked on Chuck's door once or twice.

Among dogs Rottweilers are not my favourite, not that I had given the matter much thought.. I was never one who felt the need of a pet, even though my son wanted a dog before his mother died. Some dogs, however, are more charming, more sociable, more well-tempered than others. Based upon what I saw of my neighbour's, I judged Rottweilers deficient in all three categories. With heads that appeared too heavy for their bodies and with jaws that would not have released their grip, Chuck's surly dogs always seemed to be watching me whenever I looked over the fence. If they broke free from their chains, would they have jumped over to rip off my face? My assured me they did not attack off their property.

In his absence during the day and, given my view of things, I knew when he left, I took to staring at the dogs. Somewhere I read or heard that one could stare a dog down, force him to avert his gaze. The Rottweilers sensed my watching even before they saw me for they would get up quickly from prone positions and whirl around growling. Sometimes I rattled a stick along the cedar rails or pointed as if casting a spell. These actions at first interested, then irritated, then enraged the dogs. Within minutes they would hurl themselves against the cage, shaking the entire frame. If Chuck left the dogs chained outside the cage, my grimacing and stick-shaking infuriated them. Forgetful of how much slack they had, the Rottweilers rushed, leaped and choked, gurgled, growled, and fell back, straining at the leash, barking until I stopped the teasing.

Perhaps I enjoyed too much leisure. When my son Frédéric left home, I did not think I could complete another day of my life and my business - I once owned and operated a music store - suffered. After a period of reflection in a stone-and-pine lodge on the shores of a placid lake in the Laurentians where attendants offered counsel and pills, I decided to sell and retire. I spent many hours playing my cello, often positioning myself outside Frédéric's room. Were it not for my age, I fancied that I could have begun a professional career as a concert artist. Compared to the cellists I admired, however, I remained an amateur in the truest sense of the word. Gendron, Fournier, Ma, Harrell, Rostropovich and Schiff all reminded me of how far I had to go even as they provided moments of beauty and respite in the shadows of my house.

Frédéric could not sit still through one of my performances. On the first anniversary of his mother's death, we visited her grave, laid flowers, and returned home where I wanted to play in her memory, if only for a few minutes, one of her favourite pieces. My wife Isabel used to do crewel work as she listened to me after dinner. Frédéric didn't want to hear the cello. We argued and he slammed the front door behind him just as I sat down, the instrument nestled between my knees, the bow ready and my heart twisted with rage and sorrow.

I loved walking the streets of my suburb. It suited me to saunter a few blocks without manoeuvring my way among pedestrians or being approached by beggars. Chuck seldom went for a walk as far as I could determine. I would have thought the Rottweilers needed the exercise, but day and night they remained in the backyard chained or caged unless he let them into the house.

From my terrace if I stood on a chair, I could see into one of the side windows. As he had hung vertical louvered blinds, I caught a glimpse of the interior between the slats. Posters covered the wall though I could not determine what the images represented. Installed when the house was built, the original wagon wheel chandelier with the globular glass shades remained. As the louver blinds in the front windows were drawn tight, I had no idea how those rooms were furnished. I did see, however, Chuck and his friends carry in a brown leather sofa one day. I was sorry not to have been at home when he first arrived with the moving van filled with his furniture.

Isabel and I never did cruise the Pacific nor, closer to home, did we hike through the hills of Cape Breton Island . The music store demanded so much time and when we finally saw a few weeks of freedom ahead she fell ill, took to bed, first in hospital then at home, listened to my rendering of Bach's cello suites, so difficult to do well when her coughing spasms broke my concentration, and died. I imagined Chuck arranged his life to suit his desires, was neither a slave to wages nor strait-jacketed by regular hours. Nor did I imagine him a hiker of misty trails.

He gave the impression of barging his way through life, of separating obstacles like the parting of the Red Sea because his will, his authority, the raucous power of his Harley, did not recognize prohibitions of any kind. I always advised my son to be careful, to show respect for people, to study hard, to be home before midnight. After Frédéric left, I reached the conclusion as I held one of his sweaters close to me that parenting consisted almost exclusively of issuing decrees like papal bulls. Of course, the young are foolish and understand little. Frédéric did not see the anxiety behind the strictures and proclamations, the terror I felt of losing him as I had lost Isabel. If I could have framed the proper combination of words, devised a magic spell, I would have protected him from the misfortunes and sorrows of the world. Unlike my neighbour, I did not keep guard dogs.

For five years I walked the streets, subscribed to rock magazines, visited record stores, made a thousand telephone calls, hired a detective for a time, even bought a television set to watch the music video stations in French and English, hoping to see that my son had indeed found happiness in a band. I discovered that he had left the city and might have hitchhiked his way to Vancouver where he would have met few hindrances in floating away. When I strolled through the neighbourhood, I sometimes fancied seeing a young man with hair shaved off in the style of today's youth, an earring like my neighbour's, ill-assorted clothes on his back, and he would be Frédéric. Without a word of criticism, I imagined that I would embrace him there in the street and say welcome home. I imagined my sorrow would evaporate like fog burned off by the morning sun.

Returning home from one such walk, I heard the Rottweilers in their yard. It must have been early October, the day clear and cool like chilled white wine. The week before I had begun turning over flower beds, inserting new bulbs, cutting down the hollyhocks. Uncaged, the dogs each gnawed on a rubber bone. What a carefree life they led even as guard dogs. I picked up my rake and scraped the rails. Once again they took offence and barked. This time I continued scraping the wood, leaned over the fence, and shouted, "you stupid, stupid dogs." I raised the rake and made jabbing motions in their direction.

The dogs took the bait. They lowered their heads, snarled, showed their teeth, edged forward. They did not rush and jump immediately, only to be tugged down and choked by the chain. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, knee-high dogs with heads that reminded me of the Elephant man. Their barking became deep-throated growls, their teeth and tongue visible. "Stupid dogs," I again shouted, jabbing at them over the fence with the rake.

Of course I saw the leap. I did not register the fact that, although uncaged, they had somehow come unchained. I did not have time to do very much except yell and try to shake them off. One dog sank his teeth into my hand, the other caught me on the chin. Shock cushioned the pain although the first breaking of the skin felt like intense, concentrated burning. And I fell howling among the drying stalks of hollyhocks.

I remember screaming as we wrestled in my flowerbed. Instantly obedient to their master, they released their savage hold upon his command. He rushed me to emergency where I was sedated and anaesthetized as the doctor stitched my face. Several fine bones in the hand that plucked the strings of my cello had been crushed. I wore a cast for weeks. I never saw Chuck again even though he called when I returned home, knocked on my door and left a basket of fruit and nuts on the welcome mat. Too embarrassed and accepting the blame, I did not take legal action. As the Rottweilers were not rabid, they continued to gnaw rubber bones in their cage. Adele commiserated, brought over casseroles, and tried to dissuade me from moving. I could no longer bear to enter my son's room. I decided to sell the house and move into the city.

Now living in a bay-windowed apartment on a busy street, I enjoy a balcony that looks over the backyards of my neighbours who have wonderfully transformed their plots of land: cedar decks, hanging pots of fuchsia, bridal veil, trellises woven through with grape or clematis vines. No one has objected to my playing the cello in the evening when the neighbours are either preparing or eating dinner. My face is scarred, the bottom right cheek looks as if it has collapsed. To play gracefully and accurately with crooked fingers which stiffen on damp days is sometimes painful. I have given up my place in the chamber group.

I don't know what my poet neighbour was worried about as I have not fallen victim to the "trends" since I've been living here. Every week I walk to a nearby store boasting three floors of rock videos and discs. The sound is tumultuous. One day I hope to see the face of my beloved Frédéric printed on a cassette or the casing of a disc. I will know at last that his dreams have come true.

Kenneth Radu has published several books including a memoir, The Devil is Clever (HarperCollins Canada), three collections of stories, among them A Private Performance (Montreal: Vehicule Press) which won the Quebec Federation of Writers' Award for best English-language fiction, and he is now working on a fourth collection of short stories. His writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming online in Foundling Review, Clearfield Review, vis a tergo, fourpaper letters, Leaf Garden, Black Lantern, LWOT and elsewhere. He lives in Quebec.

J.A. Tyler

2009-11-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

of nails

And when it had been long enough of the dark nights and the cold days, all of this past the orange leaves and the red leaves and the yellow leaves, he took to making of himself a man of nails, the image in his head of a pincushion, the reality of bristling.

On his arms he set long rows of nails, the points indicating every direction that was away from his body, the sharpness of him angled and defined. He made rows too of his legs, across his abdomen, over his shoulders and down his back. His spine like a triceratops, the heaviness of blades.

Her ribs were hurting again. Her head was hurting again. Her mouth was dry and her nose was running and her eyes they rocked too far back, bouncing off of the walls, the insides, making a ricochet behind the retinas. She pulled tissues from boxes and he pulled the heads of nails through and then out his chest, until they wavered from his body when he breathed, folding and unfolding with his steady rhythms, fighting to look all mean and man.

Remember when we cuddled on a beach and there was a wedge of lime I squeezed into your beer and you looked at me and smiled but he doesn't end it like a question because he knows that she would remember if her head wasn't full of flu trembles.

Under his fingernails he faces out pin nails, the smallest he can find, so when he drags his hands down the small of her building, the brick and the windows, there is a screeching that makes the cats wail, and they sit on the walls and wail until she turns on her light and screams down to them shut the fuck up and it is the first words he has heard from her in he doesn't know how long.

He smiles knowing she is broken, is breaking. He smiles.

The equivalent of seeing one snow flake float in a spin of rain, if you are the one waiting for winter.

And birds collect on his body, flying into him at speeds he is afraid of, gluing to his nailed body, until he is feathered and looks more chicken than metal.

This is what you have done to me he says and feels like that is something he has said before, maybe each day or every day until it was that days stopped being days or happening at all.

A dove careens into him. A blackbird. A pigeon. A finch.

He is a spotted egg. He is dappled beaks. He is a line of dead bodies.

Dead man walking he says and she sneezes and he says Bless You and feels a pain in his rib, like where she was supposed to have been taken from. But now he has this extra rib and there is nothing to do about it but try to avoid breathing deeply or laughing hard or saying long words that require any extra breath.

Her room it spins, the ceiling spiral art, and him below on the street wearing coats of fresh birds and the white of their last shitting and all the blood. She is listening for cats and doesn't know why. She is thinking of a beach where there were limes and he squeezed a lime into her beer and she smiled at him. She sneezes and hears something that sounds like pans rattling. She sneezes and a bird's wings stop fluttering somewhere below her. She sneezes and fills the room with a germ mist.

These nails are to protect me he screams to her, hearing the waver of the bed as she rolls from one side to the next, the medicine not yet kicking in and the night going long, stretching. Because I remember how easily I let you under my skin he says and hopes that even as the alcohol and antihistamines hit her system she still feels how prickly his body has become.

I am protecting myself he tells her again, just to be sure it is something he has said.

For Halloween the time he wrapped up in tin foil and called himself a baked potato. She said You look like an idiot. And the holiday that instead of a gift he made her apricot jam and it fell apart in the baking and it was too late for anything else so he changed it into pancake syrup and she said Jesus Christ and then sat on of their high-back chairs and read a magazine with pictures of beautiful women and shirtless men and jeans with perfect tears in each knee.

You are beautiful he says and means it genuinely and then puts his arms up and reminds her window of all his nails and how strong he has become. But she is asleep now in her bed, a brain full of bugs and coughing, a sore throat that never wants to talk to him again.

You are not all bad he says and means it, taking his leg and making metal music on her street.

And then he thinks of the time that she said I love you more than all of these worlds put together and You are full of the most wonderful things and This is how it is going to be. Those were all moments when he didn't need nails or pricking tools of any kind. Those were times when the sun seemed to come up right and there was a microphone for every voice he had.

And snow comes down on him, small flakes melting on all his armor. Nails no protection against the fall mix of rain and snow. The birds weighing him down, heavier now with wetness.

She sleeps and he carries birds attached to his face and hands and arms and legs. She sleeps and he thinks about how she is a compilation of all things good and bad. She sleeps and he knows that nails won't stop her from creeping back in, his thoughts already turning, the birds and the nails sloughing to the ground.

Snowflakes, rain, all the wadded up tissues on the floor by her bed, a soft snoring and residual grey cloud light. Nails with useless sharp points.

I am sorry he says and feels better, finally having said something true.

J. A. Tyler is the author of the novel(la)s INCONCEIVABLE WILSON (scrambler books, 2009), SOMEONE, Somewhere (ghost road press, 2009) & IN LOVE WITH A GHOST (willows wept press, 2010) & has had recent work with Sleepingfish, Caketrain, Hotel St. George, elimae, & Action, Yes. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. For more details, visit: www.aboutjatyler.com.

Eric Beeny

2009-09-26T17:53:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from Lepers and Mannequins, a novel

ACCESSORY

On a soft patch of leaves Jaundice and Quall were kissing.

Jaundice was kissing Quall.

Quall was kissing Jaundice.

They kissed with mutual feelings of intimacy, though with some apprehension.

Jaundice and Quall were kissing.

Quall stopped kissing Jaundice.

“I’m glad you live farther away,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Jaundice said.

“It gives me more time to want you, when I’m coming to meet you. I love wanting you.”

“You want me?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you needed me. You told me you needed me.”

“I do need you.”

“Then why would you want to be farther away from me?”

“Because it makes me long for you, is all.”

“Don’t you anyway, long for me?”

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“I’m confused.”

Jaundice was afraid.

She wished she hadn’t told Quall about the mannequin migration.

She wished she didn’t feel like she could trust him.

She was afraid she couldn’t.

Jaundice hoped Quall hadn’t told the other lepers.

She hoped her trust was enough.

Quall hadn’t told anyone.

Really, he was glad Jaundice moved farther away because it gave her and the other mannequins more time to prepare for an attack, if they even knew one was coming.

Quall wanted to tell her they were coming.

Did the mannequins want to be attacked?

Did they want to be needed?

Who was asking these questions?

Jaundice wanted to be needed.

Jaundice wasn’t sure she could trust herself.

She had told Quall about the migration.

Quall hoped Jaundice trusted him.

He was going to tell Jaundice the other lepers from his colony knew about the migration, but he thought she would think it was Quall who told them about it.

She would think that.

But she would forgive him.

Maybe she wouldn’t.

Quall wasn’t sure how Jaundice would react.

If Jaundice accused Quall of telling, she wasn’t sure how he’d react.

It might’ve been a lot easier for Quall to forgive an accusation of dishonesty than for Jaundice to forgive the dishonesty she accused him of.

This was all just so silly.

Jaundice and Quall.

They both thought these same thoughts.

And it was all just so silly.

But neither of them knew.

It would be up to one of them to say or do something to keep all this silliness from getting any sillier.

Jaundice said she was confused.

Quall touched her face with his hand, his one hand.

He leaned in across the soft patch of leaves they sat on and he kissed her all faintly on the lips.

Jaundice kissed Quall back.

“I need you, too,” she said.

“You do?”

“I do.”

Jaundice lay down on the soft patch of leaves.

They rustled beneath her.

She smiled at Quall.

Quall smiled back at her.

He pulled a pocket knife from his pants.

He pulled the blade out with his teeth.

Jaundice closed her eyes.

She spread her legs.

Quall pushed the knife’s blade in where Jaundice’s genitals would be, if she were anatomically correct.

He began carving out a hole.

Jaundice bit her lower lip.

Quall pulled the knife out, and pulled out the plastic cylinder he cut from her privates, from between her legs.

“You’re sure about this?” Quall said.

Jaundice opened her eyes and she nodded her head.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”

Quall set the knife down in the leaves.

He put the plastic cylinder he cut from her privates down beside it.

Quall unbuckled his pants with his hand, with his one hand.

Jaundice didn’t help.

She just lay there.

Quall got his pants down.

Jaundice looked at Quall’s penis in the moonlight.

She thought it was kind of ugly, and she wasn’t sure exactly what it was supposed to do, what it was supposed to represent.

She touched Quall’s penis.

She took it in her hand.

She pulled on it gently.

Quall’s penis got stiff, like Jaundice’s arm.

He watched Jaundice pulling gently on his penis.

Quall’s penis got stiff and kind of big.

“Will it fit?” Jaundice said.

“I think,” Quall said.

“Did you make the hole big enough? I don’t want it to hurt you.”

“I think it’ll be Okay.”

Quall climbed on top of Jaundice.

He kissed her breasts.

She hated her breasts, but right now Quall seemed to like them, and Jaundice loved Quall, so she stopped thinking about her stupid, immobile, no-nippled breasts.

Quall came up and he kissed Jaundice’s mouth.

Jaundice kissed him back.

Quall took his penis in his hand, his one hand.

He pushed his penis into Jaundice, into the hole he carved out of where her genitals would be, if Jaundice was human.

Jaundice moaned a little.

Quall grunted a bit.

“Do you feel that?” Quall said.

“Not really,” Jaundice said.

“Feels good.”

“Really?”

Quall moved his penis in and out of Jaundice’s hole.

It was a little tight.

Quall’s penis wasn’t very big, but he had misjudged how big a hole in Jaundice he needed to carve.

“Yeah,” Quall said. “Kind of tight, though.”

“I think I’m starting to feel something,” Jaundice said.

“Are you going to cum?”

“I don’t know.”

“I want you to cum. I want my penis to do that for you.”

“I’ll try.”

“I think I’m cumming.”

“You are?”

“I think so.”

Quall began moving his penis in and out of Jaundice’s hole faster and faster, and he was about to cum.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

He grunted.

Just before Quall came, he stopped feeling anything.

All he felt were his hips pounding the backs of Jaundice’s thighs.

“What the…” he said.

He stopped and looked down.

“Shit,” Quall said.

“What?” Jaundice said.

“My penis, it, popped off.”

“What?”

“My penis, it, it popped off.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s still inside you.”

Jaundice looked at Quall’s crotch.

He had his testicles hanging there, and just a leaking red patch of torn flesh where his ugly penis used to be.

Quall’s penis got stuck in Jaundice like a bee sting.

Jaundice stood up.

She had blood dripping from where her genitals would be if she was human, and on down her thighs.

“I’m sorry,” Quall said.

Jaundice smiled.

“No, it’s Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, it’s my first period.”

“It looks good on you.”

“I think I like it.”

DISPLAY

Clarice was standing naked in the window.

Jaundice’s mom sat back down.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into that girl,” she said.

There was Quall’s penis to consider.

“She wants to be like them,” Clarice said.

Clarice looked at Jaundice’s mom.

“I wish I could be her wishing I was someone else.”

Jaundice’s mom held her hands still on her lap.

Clarice looked back out the window.

She saw two lepers hobbling past her cabin.

One of them was vaulting on crutches.

The other had only one arm.

They looked like they were arguing.

Clarice watched them as they got closer to her cabin, and then she heard a familiar voice call out, “Quall.”

“Jaundice,” Clarice said.

“What?” Jaundice’s mom said.

“I think I heard Jaundice.”

Clarice looked out the window.

The two lepers stopped.

One of them said, “Jaundice.”

He had only one arm left.

The other one only had one leg left and he was on crutches, and he was reaching into a burlap sack slung across his shoulder.

Jaundice’s mom got up and stood next to Clarice, and she looked out the window at whatever the hell.

Farmer pulled out a hand grenade.

“No, wait,” Quall said.

He tried wrestling the hand grenade from Farmer’s grip.

Jaundice started backing up slowly.

She tripped over a tree root that came up out of the mud and looped back into the ground, and she fell backwards.

Farmer whacked Quall hard in the ribs with one of his crutches.

Quall bent over and fell to the ground, slipping and sloshing in the mud.

“Jaundice,” Jaundice’s mom called.

Farmer looked up at the cabin and saw two mannequins standing in the window.

He bit the pin off the hand grenade and tossed it into the window and it went off, hurling Jaundice’s mom’s and Clarice’s limbs out the window and all over.

“Mom,” Jaundice called.

Farmer got another hand grenade from his burlap sack and bit the pin out.

He held the lever, clutching it in his fist.

He vaulted over to Jaundice lying there in the mud.

“No,” Quall called, on his knees and with his one hand left holding his side where Farmer’s whack hurt.

“Open your mouth,” Farmer said.

Jaundice closed her eyes, bit her lips.

“I said open your mouth.”

Quall got to his feet and came up behind Farmer.

“No,” Quall said.

Farmer turned sort of, vaulting sideways toward Jaundice.

“You stop right there, Quall.”

Quall stopped right there.

“Leave her alone.”

“I will, as soon as she opens her mouth.”

“Don’t do it, Jaundice.”

“So, this is Jaundice. Oh, she’s pretty. She’s where you stuck your dick, huh? This is what you broke it off in?”

Jaundice started to cry a little.

“There, there little booby,” Farmer said, stroking Jaundice’s wig with the hand grenade. “You look like you could use a hand, Quall. A whole arm, maybe.”

Farmer stood up straight and held his head high.

Quall looked at Jaundice.

Jaundice, that’s me.

Jaundice looked at Quall.

I looked at Quall.

“Tell you what,” Farmer said. “I won’t blow up your little life-sized doll here, if you just take what you need from her.”

“Take what?” Quall said. “What do you mean?”

“Her arm. Take her arm.”

“I can’t…”

“You will, or I’ll have her in pieces all over the place, and the rest of us’ll take what we need. It might as well be you.”

Quall and Jaundice looked at each other.

“It would be more romantic this way,” Farmer said.

“I, I can’t…”

“Do it.”

Quall hobbled toward Jaundice lying there in the mud.

“Quall, no,” Jaundice said.

Farmer smiled real big.

Quall got down on his knees.

He didn’t look at Jaundice.

He grabbed her arm and ripped it out of its socket.

Jaundice cried a little.

“There you go,” Farmer said.

Jaundice got up and ran off.

Quall felt really just awful.

“Try it on,” Farmer said.

Quall stuck Jaundice’s arm into his shoulder socket and all the rotting flesh there hugged and welcomed the new appendage.

Quall started to cry a little.

“Looks good on you,” Farmer said.

Quall watched Jaundice run off toward the stone tower.

He got off his knees.

“I’m proud of you, Quall.”

Quall looked at Farmer.

He kicked Farmer’s knee, the one knee on his one leg left, and he kicked it so it went backwards the wrong way, like an ostrich leg.

“Fuck,” Farmer said.

He dropped his crutches and toppled over.

The hand grenade rolled out of his fist.

Quall used Jaundice’s arm, the hand on Jaundice’s arm, and he grabbed the hand grenade.

“Open your mouth,” Quall said.

“Fuck you, Quall.”

Quall kicked Farmer in the ribs.

“Ahhhhhhh,” Farmer went.

Quall released the lever and shoved the hand grenade into Farmer’s mouth, and the hand grenade chipped some of Farmer’s teeth.

He shoved it in so deep Farmer’s jaw opened too far and cracked.

Farmer couldn’t spit the hand grenade out, and his eyes opened big, started watering.

Quall hobbled away as quick as he could.

He went off to find Jaundice.

He thought about having children.

Eric Beeny is the author of The Dying Bloom (Pangur Ban Party). His work has recently or will appear in 3:AM, Abjective, Dogzplot, >Kill Author, The Legendary, Matchbook, The Northville Review, Pear Noir!, Shoots and Vines, and others. He’s a contributing editor for Gold Wake Press. His blog is Dead End on Progressive Ave. (ericbeeny.blogspot.com).