FLAWED — LEE L. KRECKLOW

She woke in the morning and knew she still wasn't ready. She called the office, as she had the morning before, and explained that she was still ill, very ill, which wasn't entirely untrue. Then, for the next few hours, she twisted in bed, tried to block out the cold light from outside, warred against her own will and uncontrollable urges, until she was finally able to make the thick, tired movement from the bed to her couch.
                She curled into the days-old nest of blankets and ate cereal and smoked cigarettes and drank too much coffee. She watched mindless daytime television and read trashy magazines she'd taken from a neighbor's recycling pile. There were moments when she felt she should do something of more value: play her piano or read something not bound with staples, or maybe exercise, but that was only her mind taunting her, making her feel guilty about wasting away for days while refusing her the drive to overcome it. And she knew if she continued as she was, she would break again.
                Now she was surely feeling how every day was darker and colder than the last, and as the sun set on this notion of gloom and the gray light that reflected off the adjacent building dimmed, and as more snow began to fall, she felt the waning day cast a terrible judgment on the crusted dishes on her coffee table and the mess in her kitchen and the smoke that hung in the air. Somehow, the darkness outside shined a light on her filth, and she saw it on her skin and on her couch and strewn across her entire home, and she went to the bathroom to wash.
                She dropped her clothing to the floor in a heap and looked in the full length mirror behind the closed door. She looked at her hair, snarled and unwashed. She looked at her face: pale and freckled and without make-up, tiredness pulling beneath her eyes, dryness like white dust on her lips. The running shower filled the room with warm steam and she could feel the wetness on her skin. She ran her hands over her hips and over her stomach. She arched her back and pulled the skin flat and tight across her belly, flatter than it had been in years, or ever would be again. She slid her hands up further and lifted her breasts high on her chest and held them there so that they were round and full. She watched herself for a moment before letting them fall again. She turned and looked at her backside, sliding her hands across it. She pulled a leg up in the air and watched the skin tighten, the dimples disappear, but she immediately lost her balance and had to set it down again. And there she was. Uncovered. Unmasked. Flawed. Alone. She stopped looking at herself only when the mirror completely steamed over.

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Lee L. Krecklow is a fiction writer living in the Milwaukee area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Madison Review, Midwestern Gothic and Pantheon Magazine, and he recently completed work on a novel titled Fiction. You can find him socializing at www.facebook.com/leelkrecklow.

THE HEART IS THE SIZE OF A FIST — JAMES YATES

The heart is the size of a fist. It’s a lesson that everyone learns in second grade science. And everyone has made a fist, stared at it, and held it to his or her chest for the sake of context. Sometimes I clench and unclench my fist to mimic the pumping valves. Or does the aorta do that? All I remember is the size. 
            Robin Williams had that line in one of his stand-up specials: “God gives man a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to operate one at a time.” Actually, God gives us enough blood to operate many things at once. Hearts, fists, dicks, you get the picture. 
            Susan and I had some of our best sex the night before last. I was intense and focused, yet caring and receptive. I started gently, and toward the end, we locked eyes and she demanded more. When we finished, she smiled, kissed my shoulder, and asked where that came from.
            She had left her e-mail open last Thursday. I wasn’t mad, and I’m still not mad. Really. There were entire threads with her co-worker Tom. Innocent stuff, generally, but the more they communicated, the more smiley faces and winky entendres there were. He supplied most of them, but she didn’t write anything to discourage his flirtations. But it’s not like I blame her, I’m not exactly husband of the year. But I have a role to fill, even if that’s one of my lesser qualities.
            On April 5, 2:34PM Central Time, she had confided to Tom that I fly off the handle sometimes. It must have weighed on her mind, since she e-mailed it even though they were likely just down the hall from each other. In a way, that’s more intimate. She could have gotten up, filled her coffee mug in the common area, then stopped into his cubicle to share her concerns and frustrations. But she had to take the time to type and compose it—the emotions couldn’t wait for a forty second walk. 
            I sit outside their office and wait. I’m expecting them to leave together or alone, but that doesn’t matter. I hold my fist up to the rearview mirror and clench and unclench it. My heart is dictating to my fist. They’re not physically close, but they’re the same size, working in harmony, and even with that in mind, you expect me to explain myself?

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James Yates is an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing (Fiction) at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois. He also serves as a Fiction Editor for Longform.org. James' fiction has appeared in Hobart, and his nonfiction has appeared in The Fanzine and Necessary Fiction. He lives in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago.

REVERBERATE — MAGGIE VIDAL

The seeming reverb of tips of fingers folding paper. The scratching of unforgiving construction paper bowing to the force of the pinch and glide of finger tips along its length. I can’t imagine the sound of nails on a chalkboard, but I imagine it incites, excites, a similar feeling of dislike from those who hear it. But dislike leaves a strong impression. It is why I can still hear my elementary school art teacher systematically folding and stacking and tearing sheets of construction paper. 

Paper is my ears’ first memory. Paper left a stronger impression on them than the leaping, sorrowful cries of Céline Dion in my mother’s car, or the ca-ching of the register in my father’s restaurant, or the Ya wanna go ta Bostin, ya wanna go ta Lynn, look out ‘ittle Maggie or ya gonna fall iiiiiiiiiin game my grandmother liked to play. The first time I was unsettled by the noise I don’t remember. But the first time I remember being unsettled by the noise, I had maybe four or five years’ experience hearing. 

Before bed my mother was reading to me. It was a kid’s book, something short and easy, but with a good number of pages. And while she was reading to me I was listening not to her voice, but instead to the sounds of her licking her fingertip and sticking it to the top of the page, pulling it forward and turning with a flick of the wrist. It was irritating, somehow disturbing. When she stopped reading for the night she reached for the top corner of the page and gently folded it, dog-eared. Small imperfections in the paper that we can’t see made smaller waves of intensity in the sound of it folding.

Ffffsssssffsssffsst.

Dreadful.

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Maggie is a graduate student in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at San Diego State. She grew up on Pokémon, Poptarts, and My Little Pony, and hopes that both her food and entertainment palates have been refined since. Loves wine, whiskey, wum waisin ice cweam, and thinking she's funny. 

SIT PRETTY — KATRINA PROW

After the examination—the heels in stirrups, knees toward opposing walls, the scoot your bottom down, closer to the edge, that’s it—the doctor smiled.  Everything looks great, she said.  The gloves pulled back from her skin with a snap.  Just great, she added.  She pulled a closed file from its plastic compartment on the door, those bare fingers traced the lines.  She hummed. Then, Stay.  The room was lined in cartoon teddies, and according to a chart on the wall, I had slept with 8,712 people—stick-figured men and women, signs for the bathroom.  Just one more thing, the doctor said as she took a pin-prick of blood from my index, cold hands on mine as the cotton pressed and a heartbeat began its slow, internal throb.  The door closed, and I sat: my waffle-print skirt fluttered as I stood and stretched for a coil of pants and underthings on the floor.  Imagine my surprise when I saw it.  A single chocolate kiss sparkled at the head of the paper-lined table, a small treat for this good girl, for a job well done.

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Originally from California's Central Coast, Katrina Prow is a Ph.D student in Creative Writing, Fiction at Texas Tech University.  Her writing has been published online and in print with Literary Orphans, Passages North, and Pearl.  She is currently writing a collection of short fiction about the restaurant industry, a product of many years in the 'biz.  

THE MUFFIN MAN — JON SINDELL

The Muffin Man had sliced the circumference of his beaten top hat all the way around save for three inches in back that served as a hinge, and he’d flip the lid and pull out a muffin. I wouldn’t share because of my weight, but it moved me to think that a poor man would share. I met him with Mom on my first visit to Occupy, one–hundred or so pup tents down by the bay. We brought blankets and food, and Mom was my guide. Gregory flipped his “sun roof,” and Mom laughed so hard her hair whipped her face. Later she said, “He reminds me of a hippie charmer I knew.”
            I returned without Mom, with canned beans and soup. Gregory sat at the opening of his tent with his arms wrapped around his hiked–up legs. It made him look small, but he was tall and solid. His smile was so white, and the whites of his eyes were so bright, I guessed he was twenty–seven or so despite his leathery face. “It’s a lived–in face,” he said with an apologetic sort of grin. He pulled an article about income inequality from the band of his top hat. “Lincoln kept legal notes in his hat band,” he said. He smiled like this was the coolest fact ever. “Did your Mr. Marvel tell you that?”
            Mr. Martin, my revered AP Gov teacher, had not.
            “It’s tragic,” I told Mom at home as we cooked. “Gregory’s house was foreclosed by the bank.”
            “One of those adjustable rate loans, I bet. The banks pushed those like drugs.”
            “Hell of a way to treat a veteran.”
            Mom arched her brow in that annoying skeptical way.
            On my next visit, Gregory shared canned tomato soup in his tent. He hung pen flashlights and glow sticks, and it looked like a bistro.
            I told Mom, “He has PTSD from the war. His nerves are a mess.”
            She snapped her knife onto the cutting board. “And what makes you think this drug bum is a vet?”
            “He told me! God, you’re suspicious!”
            Gregory wrote poetry about the war and read it to me. I told him his words were like bleeding flesh. He asked me to write a poem called “Bleeding Flesh,” and I did, and he loved it.
            “Jennifer—that’s enough! Don’t you see what he’s trying to do?”
            I thrust my lower lip. Mom knows she can’t order me around when I’m wearing my fish face, so she gripped my shoulders. “Jenny,” she said. “This person doesn’t care about you.” She scanned me from my big stupid glasses down to my big belly. “He just thinks you’re available, hon.”
            In Gregory’s tent, I lay on his shoulder. He smelled like liquid soap and earth. He laid his hand on my belly so gently, I could almost feel a baby in there.

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A human, Jon Sindell earns his bread as a humanities tutor and a professional–writing coach. His short fiction has appeared in dozens of publications; these include Hobart, Pithead Chapel, Word Riot, Connotation Press, MadHat Lit, New South, The Good Men Project, and Weave. He curates the Rolling Writers reading series in San Francisco and practiced law once’t.

FRIDGE POETRY — JENNIFER CHARDON

Pat said I should quit the coffee and aspirin thing. I asked him which one he thought was worse. He left the room. He’s been doing that a lot lately. I know he thinks they’re both as bad as each other. That’s what he wrote on the fridge with the poetry magnets while I was in the shower. Both bad.      
            I push start on the coffee machine and set up my canvas so the sun won’t blind me in the afternoon. Pat likes it when I paint at his place. He likes to come home from his bullshit day job and see that art still rules the world.      
            Pat is an artist too. A few years ago he wrote a screenplay, raised some funds online and made the film. It screened at a few good festivals. Mostly he’s happy because he has something to talk about when he sees his family at Christmas.      
            I don’t see my family at Christmas. Last year I pretended to be going home but stayed at Pat’s while he was gone. I spent the four-day holiday wired and making black-and-white stories on his fridge.  
            I’m afraid Pat’s going to dump me because I’m always tired and always a little bit sad, even when I’m not. I wouldn’t mind so much except that I don’t want to lose his apartment. I got rid of my secret spare key after Christmas, terrified that he’d catch me with it. Sneaking in while he’s at work wouldn’t be an option.      
            His apartment is a converted warehouse. There are no real walls, only windows. The lighting is always good for art. And other things. I take my aspirin bottle from the top of the fridge and start rearranging the magnets.

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Jennifer Chardon is a writer with secret dreams of also becoming a comedian and/or hairdresser. She is currently at work on a novel, Chasing Summer. The title will probably change. Jennifer has spent much of the last six years backpacking, journal writing and staying up late. She recently bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii because she refuses to live another winter in New York. 

FINGER SPELL — CHASE BURKE

I went out for a run in the late night, after midnight, maybe after two a.m., when my neighborhood was darkest, the streetlights brightest. This is what I did sometimes.
            At work, hours earlier, I saw a friend shred her fingers in the swiftly spinning blades of a garbage disposal. Her hand went in the disposal and an oblivious coworker turned the machine on. She yanked bleeding slivers from the drain.
            My neighborhood was in a good part of the city but I still wondered whether it was safe to go for runs at night. Then I would wonder if my assumptions about the safe-or-not qualities of my neighborhood were sound, or based on some misunderstood aspect of demographics. I might have had all of the angles wrong.
            My friend, when she pulled her fingers from the garbage disposal in the large sink in the kitchen of the restaurant where we worked, she was screaming, and every thought I had then while holding an order of chicken-fried ribs related to horror films, to the implied, and maybe you thought of that too. Instead of retching in the nearest trashcan I walked out of the kitchen and served table 6, and even there in the restaurant I could hear my friend’s voice. She was a tough kid. We shared a cigarette later that night, after she taped up her fingers, after the bleeding stopped and you could see that the cuts were minor, were only small slices.
            I don’t know what this has to do with my running in the middle of the night, but sometimes I can’t keep still, and sometimes I can’t settle down, and sometimes I think about where I might be—as a person, I mean, as an event participant—if my hand were in the proverbial garbage disposal. Nothing’s wrong with me. I like the feeling of lukewarm semi-humid night air on my skin.
            Outside by the dumpster while stubbing out her cigarette, my friend, always the trooper, said that the next time this, the disposal, were to happen, after I had moved on with my life to the real world of dreams realized, she would send me a postcard and sign it with stub blood, because you can only escape the implied once. After the first time you’re fair game.
            I went running with my eyes closed.

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Chase Burke has lived in Florida for most of his life. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and has taught English abroad. His short fiction has appeared in Gigantic Sequins, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Literateur, East Jasmine Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and others.

DRESS UP — MATT BELL

Because of the father's overwhelming love for his younger daughter, he carried her away from her mother and her older sibling, and in a distant land he held her in a series of towers and caves, castles and keeps. As the younger's childhood waned he began to suspect that her most beautiful day was soon to arrive, and by his unlimited resources he commissioned great dresses, one for each day, but without the fashionable girdles that might confuse her shape or give it to him falsely—he wanted, he said, only to see her exactly as she was. In each consecutive dress she was more lovely than in the dress before, a terror he soon could not stand, because while each day's showing had brought him more joy, he knew there would come a day when the next would bring him less. And because he could not live with this knowledge he sent her away from him, or else not away but up, but down, into taller towers and deeper keeps, where the showings would continue without him, held before flawless mirrors bought at the younger's demand, for she too had come to love the lace and the stockings, the heels and the necklaces, was almost stupid with vanity, her father thought—but where he also thought he would not have to watch her as she learned, one day, to lessen.

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Matt Bell is the author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods.