June 05, 2014

DEEP END — LARA PRESCOTT

June 05, 2014/ Robert James Russell

The bet was to touch the drain at the bottom of the deep end. The stakes were simple: if you didn’t do it, you were a pussy. The only snag was that some little girl drowned in the pool last week, her red hair tangled up in the drain.
  I didn’t know her or anything. Just some kid on vacation with her family. The newspaper ran a photo of her taken at Disneyland the day before—mouse ears and all. Anna Horowitz.
  The hotel drained and refilled the pool, but no one went in all week. We’d walk by the fence on our way to the public pool and laugh at the tourists on the sidelines staring at the water like a chlorinated car wreck.
  We went at night and scaled the fence.
  Rock beat scissors, so I was first. I lingered at the edge.
  The water was black and still.
  “Water looks different,” I said, dipping a toe.
  “Come on, asshole,” my older brother Dan said. His two friends snickered and sipped from paper-bagged beers.
  I dove in. My ears popped. I thought of Anna. Did she think this was it? That someone would come for her? Did she feel alone?
  I reached the bottom and touched the white plastic cover they put over the drain after the fact. Then I pushed off with my feet. Just as I was about to surface, something drove my head back down. I gasped and caught a mouthful of water.
  When I came up coughing, Dan was toweling himself off, his idiot friends snorting.
  I climbed out like it was nothing, but as soon as Dan’s head was turned I tackled him back into the pool. We thrashed around a bit. I got him good once on the chin. Then he ended it by ramming my face into a metal rail.
  “Motherfucker,” he said, spitting. He got out and left with his friends.
  I slumped over the pool’s lip. I took a deep breath. Then I let go.

Lara Prescott's work has appeared in the 2014 Twitter Fiction Festival, The Rumpus, and BuzzFeed Books. Hailing from Western Pennsylvania, she'll always say "pop" wherever life may take her. Follow Lara on Twitter at @laraprescott.

June 03, 2014

THE BURN — SELIN GÜLGÖZ

June 03, 2014/ Robert James Russell

See that building up there? Used to be a match factory. The whole country’s matches used to be manufactured there, you know? With this new tunnel, the land gained value. So, they’re demolishing the factory and building project homes instead.
  A lot of people living in Sariyer are retired from that factory. They still have burn marks on their hands. Some this big. It was an old factory. When filling the boxes, if a guy accidentally strikes just one match, the whole box catches on fire. Horrible burns. But the factory had a special cream. A secret formula you couldn’t find anywhere else. Ask anyone around, the miracle cream. It’s white and grainy, like labneh. You put it on immediately after the burn, heals in just a few hours. I swear to Allah. You can’t find it anymore though. Whenever there is a burnt wound, people say, "Wish we could use the factory cream."
  You see this bracelet? I used to have it in gold, then I went and had it made in silver. You know why? You know Fatih? Some weird-looking people there, wearing jubba and beards. Mullahs. One day, a mullah got into my car. He sat next to me, and I asked him where to, and we were just going. Suddenly, he held my bracelet. Just like this, he stuck his finger under the bracelet, and just like this, held it between his two fingers. I felt weird, you know? I said, "What’s going on, brother?"
"Gold?" he said.
  "It’s gold."
  "Don’t wear this, son."
  "Why, brother?"
  "Don’t wear it; gold belongs to Satan," he said. "It will burn you very badly in the other world."
"Come on, brother, no such thing," I said.
"There is son, just don’t wear it."
  Two days later, I’m washing the motor of the car. And you see how this bracelet is a bit loose? I wasn’t paying attention and the bottom touched the differential. Then, I moved my hand, and the top touched the shaft. One has negative charge, the other positive. The gold got stuck, just like a magnet. So strong. Before I knew it, the gold turned red on my wrist. Never seen anything like it. Bright red.
  I yanked my arm from the motor, yelling for an ambulance. Meanwhile, I’m careful not to move my arm, so the bracelet can only burn the same spot. Bright red—both the bracelet and my wrist. There is a doctor, Mehmet Bey, a wonderful man. I called him. So, you know what he did? I had a blister wrapping around my wrist like this. Look, you can still see. Here…and here, so he… you should let me tell it. Are you sure?
  Well, anyway, I swore never to wear gold. It happened two days after the mullah. What a coincidence! It can’t be a coincidence. I don’t know if there is a real connection, but I’m being safe. I went and had the same bracelet made in silver.

Selin Gülgöz is a full time Ph.D. student in Developmental Psychology at the University of Michigan, and a part time creative writer. Her writing has appeared in The Millions and Bant. She is also a cofounder of the blog, Fictionnon.

May 29, 2014

I'D LOVE YOU AS A WOMAN — CARLOTTA EDEN

May 29, 2014/ Robert James Russell

Grayson once painted me as a woman. Short red hair, hips like butter swirls. And ever since Grayson painted me a woman I’ve felt my chest tighten in this shirt and my waist swell like dry dirt in the earth. Grayson loved me like no man ever would. “These skies are like old photographs,” he’d say, and he’d lift his shotgun and fire.
I loved Grayson. He needed me like an artist needed white space—I were his colours, from the moment he looked at me and said, “I’d love you as a woman,” and tied a pretty scarf around my neck, kissed my nose and painted me red, gave me breasts, hips and smudged out my beard. But Grayson was a maniac. He painted hedges with blood-soaked petals, threw pony hooves from window ledges. Said he wished for war and peace. I said there was no such thing. He put a finger to my lips and cupped my chest. Told me I’d have perfect breasts.
One day I asked Grayson to paint me as a man, and I held him as he cried. I chose a field near old Dyson’s Hill, and he brought his paints, and I brought my old clothes, his clothes, my daddy’s clothes. Grayson cried when he saw me, buttoned up in a suit, bolo tie loose. He painted me in front of a sepia field; painted the sky like sweetcorn, shotgun ready. I’d never seen him look so sad, painting me a man. When he finished he took the gun outta my hand, fired six shots straight into my painted chest.

Carlotta is a writer and editor living near London. She co-founded and edits Synaesthesia Magazine. She can be found (or will be found) on WhiskeyPaper, Visual Verse, Fifty Word Stories and The Bishop Otter Gallery Anthology. She likes writing stories from photographs or paintings. "I'd Love You as a Woman" was written from a photograph taken by Grayson Perry.

May 27, 2014

BLOOD/LOVE — LEON HEDSTROM

May 27, 2014/ Robert James Russell

The news is good. The doctors have looked inside of you and inside of you is a good place to be. Good.
We sit, hunched into the miniature chairs of the office. In the gap between the corrugated plastic, we keep our hands clutched tightly together. You’re clammy. I’m clammy. I can’t quite look at you and you can’t quite look at me. And yet the news is good. The news is good and I want to look at you and you want to look at me but we don’t look at each other. We sit and we look instead at the doctor as she flips excitedly through some papers, telling us just how damn good this news is. So damn good. Impossibly good.
It makes me feel good. I hope you feel good too.
On the drive home, when I’m navigating us back through the fields of traffic on the interstate, you’re sitting there with your forehead pressed against the window, watching the other cars and the other drivers swerve out towards their exits.
You look good—your hair’s a big tangled mess that falls nicely over your forehead, your shirt clings tightly against you. But I am trying to look past you, into you, see what you’re thinking, see the cogs and gears of your insides working and turning.
I wonder if, maybe, you’re looking out at the world trying to see the insides of everyone else—what everyone around us is feeling, what every other citizen of this city has within themselves. Some of them are doubtless better than us, some of them are probably worse. But they’re all alive. They’re all alive and driving in sync with us down this interstate—right here and right now. It’s amazing, it’s awesome, it’s good. We’re completely surrounded by the sick and the well, all of them breathing. All of them are just as human as us, with just as many things growing inside of them.
When we get home, you grab my hand in the stairwell as I’m fumbling with the keys. I ask you how you feel. Do you feel relieved? Do you feel good?
“I’m fine,” you say.
You feel fine and you smile softly.

Leon Hedstrom has poems and short fiction published in or forthcoming from numerous magazines, including 3Elements Review, Bodega, WhiskeyPaper, and Four Chambers Press. He currently makes his home in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

May 22, 2014

HOT — JACQUELYN BENGFORT

May 22, 2014/ Robert James Russell

She makes coffee for horny men. The sign above the service window is a noble gas twisted in glass and electrified, reading

Hot Stuff Here

in curlicues. She wears tassels and a thong. Her hair looks good, like she eats really well or takes special vitamins, though neither is true.
  There is a scald mark on her thigh from steaming milk. There is a draft under the door. There is no toilet.
  She licks whipped cream from between a coworker’s breasts to encourage generosity. The pay is abysmal. The tip money is good. She doesn't think she’s damaged enough to work here and says so to all her friends. She has no plans to leave.
  The woman on the next block has a sign with movable plastic letters, reading

TASTY
WITHOUT
PASTIES,

and wears heavy sweaters even in summer. “Let’s put her out of business,” says our heroine each morning, as though the territorial battles of roadside coffee stands serving too-sweet mochas outside Seattle were her personal civil war, and she a general in hotpants and lipstick.
She pees at the gas station around the corner. She buys gum for the privilege. She slips sticks of it to her favorite customers, the ones who don’t request change on tens and twenties. “Let’s stick together,” she says in a Mae West voice she borrows from old movies. The men peel out of the parking lot in their sensible cars, spilling coffee, trying to impress her. She pretends it works.

Jacquelyn Bengfort used to drive warships for a living and was actually pretty good at it. Now she’s a writer in Washington, DC, and doing just ok. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Tirage Monthly, Storm Cellar, District Lines, Postcard Shorts, and Labyrinth. There’s more at www.JaciB.com.

May 20, 2014

PING AND PONG — DANNY RENDLEMAN

May 20, 2014/ Robert James Russell

Not having played it for some time, the old friends were rusty and a little drunk, but always on the look-out for some competition, so they said, What the hell, and headed for the basement where the landlord had left a battered table, a couple beat-up paddles, and one good ball out of four, and the first friend said, Boy, I don’t know if I even remember how to serve this thing, but the second friend said, Look, you go like this, and he did, and so they played for six hours, each of them remembering in turn how to add a little English, or how to deftly get the long shots—or at least the ones that didn’t go in the cat litter or the sump pump hole or way back behind some left-over 2 x 4s, when they’d put the cat back there, too, and hope she’s knock it back to them, and sure enough, it happened enough times they would smile every time, and they both got sweaty and forgot about their beers or else knocked them over going for a wide shot near the chimney where they’d put them to be safe, and soon the games got so close they stopped keeping score, since each game went to deuce anyway, and it wasn't long before they were in top form once again, or so they thought, and each was full of admiration for nearly every shot the other made, and the first friend got really good at back-spin so that the ball would die on the edge of the table and fall off, and the second friend got really good at pulling impossible shots out of his ass, as it were, so that the first friend was laughing so hard in disbelief he sometimes couldn't return the ball, and this went on for, as I said, six hours, until their wives came downstairs and wanted to know what was so funny and what were they supposed to be doing while the men played around down here like a couple goddamn kids—but, no, that’s not the way it happened, I made that up as an easy resolution—what really happened was, after a few hours of this, they began to realize that it’s difficult to be friends if you never do anything together, if you only sort of talk about things, share views, as they say, and maybe have an occasional lunch once in a while, no you gotta do something together, like jog, or play tennis, or Jesus, even play ping pong once in a while like they were doing that very minute, and each felt closer to the other, and they knew each of them felt that way, but they didn’t talk about it, just kept playing and having fun, and then when they decided to call it a night, the beer was gone, the first friend said, You know, I really enjoyed that, and the other friend agreed, and said, You know, let’s start doing this more often, sort of have a ping pong night once in a while, get together, have some beers, relax, get away, and, you know, have some fun.
But, of course, they never did again.

Danny Rendleman's last book of poetry was Stepping Into the River Once. He has a new book due this fall from Kelsay Books, Continuo. His poetry and fiction have been published in a gob of mags, from Clown War to American Poetry Review, from Happiness Holding Tank to Field.

May 15, 2014

JR — SCHULER BENSON

May 15, 2014/ Robert James Russell

On the fifth day, his counselor gave Lajon an egg for accountability.
“Draw a face on it. Name it,” his counselor cooed.
Lajon drew a frowny face on the egg, then wrote “jr” on the other side.
“This egg is your baby, Lajon.”
“Yeah,” Lajon said, eyeing his counselor’s absent scribbling as he palmed the permanent marker to use later that night in his bunk.
“Accountability.”
That evening Lajon left jr alone and unsupervised when he went to shower before the prayer meeting. He wrapped jr’s base in a dirty sock and left him frowning on the particle board dresser he shared with his roommate.
Lajon returned to a note:
“ALRite bitCH I GOT Yo Egg
If u WANNA SeE it AGAin
U gotTA dO MY CHORES for 3 MOTHER FUCKeN DAYS
If YOU say fuck that oR GET A COUNSELLER I WILL smash
This Mother fuckEr I will TELL you whO I Am tommorrow”
Lajon laid the note on his dresser and ground his teeth. He weighed his options like cellophane baggies as he stared at the framed crochet above his bunk.
Let go and let God.
“Fuck this egg,” Lajon said.
After dressing, he shuffled down the men’s hall and out of the facility to the van that waited to tote inpatients to First Assembly’s prayer meeting. Lajon drank seven cups of the church’s free coffee. As per the group’s laminated guideline sheet, he made his way to the kitchen’s refrigerator to replace the creamer he’d used.
Amid a debris field of crusted condiment packets on the fridge’s middle rack sat an egg carton. Lajon slid his thumb between cardboard lips, yawning open the carton’s hinge. One egg. Just one. He retracted his hand to run a finger along the permanent marker bulging beneath his denim.
Lajon forgot what he was clutching in his other hand, but whatever it was, he let go of it.

Schuler Benson lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he recently completed his bachelor's degree. His fiction and poetry have been featured in Kudzu Review, Hobart, Thunder Clap Press, The Fat City Review, and others. His first book, a collection of short stories titled The Poor Man's Guide to an Affordable, Painless Suicide, is forthcoming from Alternating Current in June 2014.

May 13, 2014

RITUAL IN MIAMI, MAY 1980 — NICK MAINIERI

May 13, 2014/ Robert James Russell

We are a junior college baseball team gathered on the crushed brick of the warning track in the right-field corner, waiting for our first baseman, who seeks something in the dark beyond the fence. We chant his name.
He combs the Bermuda grass with his fingers. We knew him in high school. We all knew each other. Our first baseman played for Carol City, and he liked to pummel you with the tag on the pickoff, no matter how close the play. Call it bush league because it is, but he is ours now, here, where sometimes you need a little grit. The rest, we came from Columbus High, South Miami, Coral Gables. Only one, our shortstop, grew up in Liberty City. And while we chant, wondering what our first baseman will find, our shortstop’s mind goes elsewhere—downtown, his family and his neighbors march in protest.
We chant. The air draws taut. A siren blips. Through the column of floodlight insects rise and tumble. Lumbering palmettos, juking moths, some of our first baseman’s favorites. The starting lineups tone from the loudspeaker, ping against the empty bleachers. He appears in the corner gate. Tall, slightly walleyed. Hands cupped together.
We chant and encircle him.
Eighteen games ago, he found an earthworm while we stretched. Some of us recoiled, so he slurped it and chewed. Eighteen straight wins, and we have seen mashed grasshoppers on his tongue and moth wings pasted to his upper lip.
We cease to chant on the same beat. He pops his hands to his mouth, and the lower half of a lizard hangs from his lips, tail flailing. This is something new.
A sharp crack, now another, from downtown.
He lifts his fists, growls, and chomps. A meager jet, oblong and dark, beads and vanishes into the warning track. We howl. We sound savage. We know it, we like it. In a spot of blood the severed tail clings to his chin and spasms, snapping like a green nerve.
Our shortstop drops in a heap. We roll him onto his back. His skin has paled to gray. Flecks of crushed brick stick to his cheek. His eyelids tremble and he mumbles.
Our first baseman kneels, wishing to help. The tail jerks and threshes. Our shortstop drums a finger on his own chin, wishing to communicate.
The sirens bleat. We hear them now, and huddle around our shortstop from Liberty City.

In the coming days the riots explode. Our shortstop sees his brother’s scalp split by a hurled bottle. He sees a car, overturned and burning. Others see much worse. We never understood how bad things could get. All the possible and violent reflexes. Rituals often require blood. We finish our season with the city around us raw and wounded. We await the Major League draft or we transfer, and some of us leave, but most never do.