TWO THOUSAND MILES RUNNING — ANTHONY MARTIN

Bombs don’t drop here, to answer your question. Only on television. You know those white heat signatures on green computer screens they show sometimes? That way. I doubt anyone will be after you like that. Not like home.
            People die in this country, sure. In the projects and in cars and in plane crashes. It just doesn’t happen in houses set aflame by bombs that drop in from the clouds or from rockets or anything like that. And when that does happen it’s somewhere else and people don’t seem to care very long, you know? Not when it’s all so far away. They have a word for it here. Collateral, I think it is.
            It seems unsure now but you’ll adjust. This country gives you space for that, usually, as long as you don’t get mixed up. It’s one of its good colors that you’ll come to appreciate. Believe me. I know. 
            There was some guided missile that made collateral of my family and a few neighbors once. It’s why you found me here in this grimy bar. The blast sent me running for two thousand miles in the opposite direction at a dead sprint and I came straight here, I swear. And it happened when I wasn’t looking, can you believe it? What are the chances of that? I bet papa was looking though, in that final instant before the flash and the boom and the separation of particles.
            Ever wonder about that? About what they see? I always pictured clenched teeth painted cartoonish like. Or a slender white girl posing pretty, like in the old movies. It happens too quickly for any of that, I hope. It’s got to. For my sister’s sake.
            I was at the market looking at plums, squeezing them in my hand to check for ripeness. My friend from the apartment block was with me and we were talking football. God she could play. She’d put it in the back of the net easy from eighteen yards and all the kids feared it when she turned up for games. We locked eyes for a good twenty seconds after the heat of the explosion reached us, two kids frozen in that warp-speed tunnel where changes happen or they don’t happen but you’re locked up inside just the same. Never saw her again after that. She took off running like me and I’m not sure where she ended up after she stopped. It’s better that way, I think.
            Anyway I’m glad you made it out of there and over and that we met. Really. It’s still good to talk about it once in a while, just not too frequently and not with anyone who doesn’t know about it. Remember that. But first remember that it’s impolite to turn down a drink. You should already know that. It’s just like home in that way. So bottoms up, as they say here, and try to smile because the bombs only fall on television.

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Anthony Martin (@pen_tight) is a mutt whose favorite word is subtext. His work appears, or is forthcoming, in WhiskeyPaper, Mojave River Review, pacificREVIEW and Lunch Ticket.

WORKING GIRL — KYLE HEMMINGS

Yamazaki told a regular with eyes dead as checklists that she dreamed of zebras at night. He said the truth was more like Tokyo was made of glass. To put herself through art school, she tied men up until they could no longer wiggle out of their rope-burn repressed rage and shame. Her stilettos were imported from some island of exiled writers, too dangerous for the mainland. An old boyfriend once told her that her face was too askew, too lopsided, to invoke pure love from men in starched shirts. She sent money to a needy sister in Okinawa, living at the tip of a small mountain, body-gliding on the surface of hard snow. Her body was a moon too full of itself, leaking light. Yamazaki fell in love with a small-time gangster who asked her to cut him a little each day. She said blood was too precious, but the truth was that she hated scrubbing the floor with ammonia after he left. Over time, he grew as skinny as she and she began to mix bleach with ammonia. In this way, they became extinct. Or a colorless truth. Her sister, buried under the loss, took up painting abstracts in a dim light.

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Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in Elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, This Zine Will Change Your Life, Blaze Vox, Matchbook, and elsewhere. He loves 50s Sci-Fi movies,  manga comics, and pre-punk garage bands of the 60s.

BUNKER — ANTHONY COTE

Daniel and Peter held on to the skinny saplings on their way down the hill, their sneakers covered in mud and leaves. A silence had surrounded them since they agreed to skip school and explore the bunkers. Neither had been there without a group. Neither had been there without older kids around. The bunkers were theirs. 
            “Here’s a good one.” Peter said nodding towards a concrete opening in the ground. 
            The steps down were covered in wet leaves and a rancid odor crept up out of the dark. Peter pulled a flashlight out of his pocket and went down the steps. The beam of light swung around then disappeared. Daniel crouched with his hands on his knees, squinting into the mouth of the bunker. The beam hit the staircase after a few minutes and Peter walked back up.
            "Look.” Peter said and held out a wet hand grenade. “It’s rusted shut. The pin don’t move.” 
            Daniel felt his insides shrink into his stomach, his throat closed but his hand extended when Peter held out the grenade. Daniel felt the weight of the steel and how cold it was, he saw the rust smear his fingers. Daniel felt the ridges of the grenade and couldn’t let it go. “We’ll chuck it in the ocean” Daniel said.  
            “Fuck the ocean” Peter said. “We get the pin out and drop it down one of these bunker vents.” Peters iron brown hands grabbed the grenade back from Daniel. They started back into the saplings behind the bunker opening.
            “What if it don’t go off? It’s probably dead.” Daniel said to Peter. They were about thirty feet apart behind the bunker and scanning the undergrowth for one of the steel vent shafts.
            “Well, if it don’t go off we’ll ha—“ Peter was cut off.
            Daniel felt a low thud and turned to see a brown cloud of leaves and atomized mud where Peter had been forming his answer. His right arm and the half of torso it was attached to was gone, as was his head. Two legs attached to the blackened right side of Peter’s body moved as if they were descending a staircase then dropped. Daniel walked over and into a cloud of pink and brown condensation that stuck to his skin. The parts looked like a mannequin painted black and still wet.  
            “—ve to go down the bunker and find it,” Peter said. The words were hissed from inside of Daniel’s head, right behind each ear.   
            The woods were silent. Things were sliding through the wet leaves, Daniel could see them. Little brown and black shapes converging in one spot and clicking together, scratching as they each found their place. Some were burrowing up from the mud; others came quickly out of the surrounding trees. Other pieces were breaking through Peters legs a few feet away, all converging and reassembling. Powder swirled into the top of the steel ball and the bent collar of the grenade wrapped around the top again.

After an eleven year hiatus, Anthony Cote (@A_Cote1)  made his triumphant return to the classroom in 2011 and is now studying anthropology and writing at Rhode Island College. His resume is filled with several factory jobs, each of which he has excelled at. Anthony also collects music and enjoys economical whiskies.

'54 — A. L. ERWIN

Cold.  Cold like when God ain’t round.  People go confusing it, thinking it should be hot.  Absence don’t generate no heat.  It’s cold for my Momma and me.  
            “Wanted rid of his ass soon as I laid up on him.”
            First time I heard ‘em words slip out her lips were in that winter of ’53.  Ground done took to freezing in the mere mentioning of a wind’s swell.  No room for hold in that sheet of ice.  Meant ‘em crops died, went by the wayside along with ‘em cows, taken sick by a rogue that’d got loose in the field.  Left us hungry and thin.  Daddy went that year too.  Weather didn’t have nothing to do with that’n. 
            Second time were after she’d spotted him.  Spewed it out over a pot of boiling taters.  ‘Bout the only thing ever touched our lips anymore, ever since that winter of ’53.  ‘Em bruises, one’s used to call on her arms, one’s Daddy used to give her, they’s long forgot.  Like purple and black weren’t never seen.  Met this new fella near Trudy’s.  Right where the bend gives way to that old hickory.  Right where that sign reads in seared black, “GOD WATCHES ALL.”  Daddy’d hung that after a man in a tent sprayed visions of fire.  Slightest things labeled aversions to God afterwards.    
            Called hisself Lynn, this new one.  Momma muttered it with plops of wet on her cheek while that water popped and bubbled below.  Called me “SUGA,” first time I met him.  Said, “C’mon over here SUGA, let me lay my eyes on ya.”  
            Smelled of stink he did, but Momma hollered out, “Connie, honey, ya be nice now.” Shared in that same cut he did.  Same tan on his skin from working in the sun.  Same glow of yellow combed on his head.  Same look as Daddy.
            Mud smeared over my Momma’s clean walls from his flinging dirty boots in the corner.  Didn’t say a word that woman did.   Not even a full year since Daddy’s accident ‘fore that “SUGA” man’s living with us.  Not three months after ‘til  ‘em purples and blues came back on ‘em skinny arms of hers.  Weeds jumping out from long sleeves as she wiped stains off her table and emptied smokes from our only nice bowl.  
            When it assured, it’d have to be done again. 
            I done knowed how to kill, skin, cook, and cure since ’50.  Weren’t no other way for it to go on a farm.   In ’53, as my feet grazed over that crunch of white, whispers of, “flesh is flesh,” cut back against my tongue.  Held it there between my teeth as I opened that shed out back, that place where metal’s kept.  My Momma’d showed me how to gut a pig not two weeks ‘fore Daddy’s accident.  My hand still shook, though.  But it needed to be done.  Couldn’t take the listening of ‘em beatings anymore.  In ’54, my hands were still. 

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A. L. Erwin writes Southern Pulp.  Sometimes, she does it well.  Mostly, she bides her time slinging drinks until the day comes that she doesn't.  Her debut novel, A Ballad Concerning Black Betty or the Retelling of a Man Killer and Her Machete, is out soon.   

LITTLE SAIGON — NANCY LYNÉE WOO

We were walking down the street, fresh kumquats in hand, one day in her neighborhood of Little Saigon. Biggest Vietnamese ghetto outside of Vietnam, quietly situated across boba shops and Pho 99s, smack dab in the middle of 1999. My best friend and me, walking past dirt yards and Buddha bellies, swinging our little arms and sucking the juice out of the tiny, tart things that weren't quite oranges. We had grabbed them from the red envelope cement of her front yard, where strange smells from the kitchen and karaoke with English subtitles belted out from the peeling paint windows. Circling and circling around the block, bored as an Orange County summer, I opened my 9-year old trap to say, “You’re weird.” And I giggled. We joked like that, all of us, the half Mexican and the fat Japanese one especially. All us Orange County different-colored girls, poking fun at each other before the boys did, before the ads did, criticizing ourselves like our moms did, every flaw pointed out. I said to her this time, “You’re funny weird. You joke weird.” This was a compliment. “Yeah!” she said. So I kept going, “In fact, everything about you is weird. You look weird. You talk weird. You dance weird. You smell weird!” She was laughing with me until. Quiet. I stopped. We walked. Throwing away the skins now. Passing the house where the dog cried all day long, and then, one day, didn’t. “You think I look weird?” Stammer. “No,” I said. She cringed at me with long Viet face, big lidless eyes, framed by muddy cream skin and flat tracks of black hair, fallen. “I always thought I looked weird,” she said. I stared back, chubby China cheeks and big teeth, fat stupid fists wanting to ball up and kill the guy who killed his dog. We drifted back to her house, then drifted apart after 5th grade. What she didn’t realize was, what I didn’t say was, what I couldn’t say was, I didn’t mean it. A mirror can’t be offended. We’re in this together. Your face is mine.

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Nancy Lynée Woo is fortunate to have found a lovely poetry home in Long Beach, CA with the fine folks of the Poetry Lab. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Subterranean Quarterly, Melancholy Hyperbole, Cadence Collective and Cease, Cows. This particular piece is taken from a larger work of prose poems that hopes to be published in the near future.

4-F — AMORAK HUEY

You volunteer but there’s a murmur in your heart, a stammer that might have saved your life. For a while, at least. You break another boy’s arm in the state wrestling meet. You dream of the jungle. Classmates go, and their names appear on the gym wall. You practice magic tricks, slipping cards into other people’s pockets and pretending to be surprised when they appear at critical moments. Everyone is losing faith; it’s nice to keep some mystery in things. You start telling people that you faked the murmur, that you can control the ebb and pulse of your own body. It’s remarkable how many doors remain unlocked, how easy it is to walk in and take what you want. This will not last, the flesh can hold only so many secrets. For years, the sounds will be all you remember—all that music like no one had ever heard before, and then the snapping of bone.

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Amorak Huey, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His writing has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, The Southern Review, Menacing Hedge, Hobble Creek Review, and many other print and online journals. Follow him on Twitter: @amorak.

THE UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN — MIKE SALISBURY

In the picture, an unidentified woman is led from the scene of the Hindenburg disaster at the U.S. Naval Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937.
            The woman is walking away unscathed. Her English is serviceable, but she barely understands what the man is saying when he takes her by the arm. She goes with him, craning her neck around to see the ground swallowing the mighty zeppelin. 
            Another man, this time a German survivor, takes her other arm, and the two men rush her away from the burning wreckage. Her face is pale, numbed by the horror of the night. The German tells her not to look back, first in English, and then in their language. 
            When they reach the hanger and the flames of the Hindenburg are in the safe distance, its devilish glow lighting up the night, she laughs. The eyes of the men are on her. She covers her mouth to hide the embarrassment. She has just survived this, but she has also survived so much more. 
           On the other side of the Atlantic, the man she left hasn’t learned about her escape and won’t until Tuesday when he returns from a business trip to Köln. The closet empty, her belongings gone.   
            The unidentified woman watches from inside the hanger as the last of the Hindenburg’s frame crumples, the sounds of men shouting are all around her, their voices trying to call back the dead and return the zeppelin to the sky. Beside her she notices the zeppelin service man crying. He weeps into his hands while sitting on the edge of a metal folding chair; his cap crumpled beside him on the ground. Behind him the hanger is becoming a way station for the dead. They’ve begun to line up the sheet-covered bodies in rows. 

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A Michigan native, Mike Salisbury's fiction has appeared in Avery Anthology, Black Warrior Review, Crab Orchard Review, Bombay Gin, and The Emerson Review. Mike is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Pacific University. He lives and works along the Front Range of the Rockies. 

STRANGERS — AMANDA MISKA

We meet at a sticky-floored bar where the jukebox plays Conway Twitty's "Hello Darlin'", and you’re sitting alone, mouthing the words between sips of beer.  I just finished slow dancing with an old high school boyfriend who I wanted to make jealous—he’s engaged now. This town is too damn small. I sit down beside you like we aren't strangers. I am drunk. You are not. I ask you to dance. You say you don’t dance. 
            “Ah, but you sing.”
            You blush.  “I can’t help it. Old country songs remind me of my dad.”
            And just like that, you’re telling me your life when all I wanted was to sway against you for a few minutes and leave with someone else.
 
But I leave with you. And you’re so nice, like, the personification of the word nice.  For weeks, every time you ask me out, I wrack my brain for an excuse, but can’t think of a good one.  When we fuck (what I call it; you insist on saying making love), you tell me I’m the most beautiful girl you've ever been with, the most beautiful girl you've ever seen. You whisper it in my ear, like throwing bread to a starving mouth. In hindsight, the right word is overeager. For both of us.
 
And then the test shows two blue lines.  I am afraid of how calm I am as I dial your number. I invite you over to talk in person, even though you've never been to my place—we’d always stayed at your trailer because I have room mates, even though you have cats, and I hate cats. Especially your cats, two black females who liked to snake between my calves every time I walked in.

You are strangely elated when I tell you I want to keep it.  When your phone rings mid-conversation, you leave the room to take it. Through the thin door, I can hear you excitedly tell whoever is on the line that I’m pregnant; That Girl I Was Telling You About is what you call me.  I wonder what else you've said about me, how you've painted me to strangers.
 
You had gone through two pregnancy terminations with previous girlfriends. I don’t know why, but you told me that on our first date, bringing me into your confidence too soon, always saying too much, like:
            “You could move in. We could get married. I’d get rid of the cats for you.”
             “I don’t want any of that.”
            Sitting on my bed, you take my face in your hands and try to kiss me, and I pull away and slap you clean on the cheek.
            “Don’t. Don’t do that.”
            So you disappear. And I’m alone again except I’m not.  
 
I try to love the boy, but he looks so much like you. It was easier before his eyes turned gray, before his milk-pudge melted, before his downy blond hair all rubbed away and grew back copper.

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Amanda Miska lives and writes in Northern Virginia. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from NIB Magazine, WhiskeyPaper, Black Heart Magazine and Buffalo Almanack.