THE WIND FARM — ELENA M. APONTE

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A few weeks out of rehab and he's keeping solid food down and ready to drink a glass of milk. Phillips likes his milk, half a glass in the morning with a bowl of oatmeal, and when he's sure he's not going to throw it all back up, he takes the bus to work. 
            It's late fall, but the fields of rural Minnesota are damn cold, covered in a sheen of frost. He finds the first bird a few feet from the turbine, a mass of feathers and not much else caught in a shrub. He grabs it with a gloved hand, stuffs what's left into a garbage bag. He wipes sweat from his brow and looks up at the wind turbines spinning overhead. 
            There's something unsettling about the way they tower over him, always spinning. They are as tall as sky scrapers, full of cold concrete and steel, painted white to protect them from planes. It's only the birds they have to worry about, the dumb ones who run straight into the blades that are as long as a football field. 
            Phillips hates the biting cold of the fields. He hates the birds he finds shredded to pieces: a clawed foot, a ball of feathers, a severed head. He hates the tremor in his hands, the ache in his bones, all telling him he should've upped his Methandone intake. But he hates those damn pills. 
            "How many you got?" 
            Nico is there, standing a few feet away, wearing a hunting hat with floppy ears. His eyes are squinty and small. He's pudgy and Italian and makes Phillips look like a POW. He stoops to pick up a severed wing. Looks like it was a falcon or something, from the way the silky feathers are colored and tapered at the ends. Into the bag it goes.
            "Seven birds total I think," Phillips says. 
            Nico hums, making a tally mark with his pen. He always takes a pad of sticky notes and tallies up the birds. Today, his notes are orange. He has the hardest part of the job, Phillips is sure of it. He braces himself against another tremor, not sure if it's withdrawls or the cold. 
            "Not as bad as it has been," Nico muses. "Seems like they're getting the idea." 
            His accent makes "idea" sound like "idear." Phillips keeps picking at the landscape. Sweat rolls down his nose. The bag is heavier with bird parts. He shivers, teeth chattering, as he stuffs more inside. The wind catches a few feathers, sends them fluttering out of his reach. The sun is pink on the horizon, not quite up yet. The turbines keep thrumming and the rotors slice through the air, birds be damned, and sometimes Phillips wonders if he's just as dumb as they are, hit with death before they even realize it. Maybe they think that the rotors are birds, too. 
            It's an easy mistake, as far as he's concerned. 

Elena M. Aponte is a recent graduate of the University of Toledo. She lives in Sylvania. 

CLODS — WILLIAM VanDenBERG

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Florida is a basketcase. I got a hotel room somewhere in the interior. The hotel was a landlocked party-barge. The primeval forest anchored it. The concierge? A jaundiced, small man. His hair was mostly gone. When I demanded clean sheets he accused me of soiling my first set. “I shouldn’t have to sleep on clods of dirt,” I argued. He sarcastically offered to call the Knight’s Inn up the road. As if there was a road. As if there was another living soul for miles. 
            That night the concierge entered my room. He sang me a lullaby. He poured a fistful of grenadine onto my crotch. I demanded that he leave. He asked about my gold skin. I explained, “The gold is my royal affliction.” He had no further questions. He climbed into bed with me. He tamped down some dirt and said, “Night, night.” 
            I dreamed of the sea. The barge was buoyant and loaded with coeds. I dreamed of bygone days. The concierge smiled at me from the upper deck, raised a pink, sparkling drink in my direction. Bygone but no better. My skin was soft and free of gold. I smiled back. 
            When I woke, the barge was burning. The concierge had dragged me from my room, rolled me down the gangplank. He roused me with a weak kiss. He turned to go back inside. I gasped, “No.” He responded, “The Captain always goes down with the ship.” There were so many inaccuracies in that statement. I didn’t know where to start. I waved him off. He climbed back up the gangplank. I saw his body burn, a black smudge against a wall of flames. 

William VanDenBerg is the author of Lake of Earth (Caketrain Press, 2013). "Clods" is part of a series called MILK TEETH. Previous installments have appeared in Alice Blue Review and The Fanzine. He lives with his wife in Denver.

CHIN UP — SARAH LAYDEN

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My interior is made of dark red. I have seen inside my body thanks to a tiny camera. I have watched the dark spots burn away at the hands of a doctor with a tiny iron, the smoke rising from the warm dark wet space of me, a pair of cotton hands staunching the blood. I hear the word cauterize. The word lesion. The word adhere. I want to turn my head away. I want to watch, to look, to bear witness. It is difficult to conceive of inner beauty while watching the video of one’s own laparoscopic surgery. 
            The disease hid itself, impossible to detect save for symptoms in retrospect. Certain failures. Pain I grew to think of as normal, pain that grew by degree and amplitude and with magnified dread, but remembered always in that regrettable Midwestern way, Chin up, tough it out, it doesn’t hurt that bad. 
Pain-by-numbers. Doubled over by Cycle Day Four. One T-shirt of fifty percent cotton made three times heavier from sweat. I composed theories of relativity that it could be a hundred times worse. Believable because I’d been told as much. Sometimes, believing others’ lies is better than believing pain. 
            After the camera was turned off and the instruments cleaned, after I woke up, the nurse with the morphine asked me if the pain was a five or a ten. A voice came out of me saying, It’s not that bad. And then I tried to sit up. Seven, I said, and she pushed the button and I eased back. 
            I didn’t tell anyone because – how could I tell? How could I know that this thing inside me was not normal, not in the way everyone complained about, that mine was a special secret pain personalized to me? Who would listen? Chin up, chin up. We are alone until another person enters the room. Sometimes even then. 
            Listen: once I climbed a tree in a pale lavender sundress, my knees scarred with permanent scabs, and the oak bark flecked onto the smock in a way I knew my mother would not abide, but to me it was a pattern that added beauty, purpose, gave me a new way of looking at an old thing. But gazing down turns you blurry, eyes crossed painfully, until you see nothing. In those branches, all it took was me lifting my chin: I could see the roof of my house, and the way twigs caught in the gutter like little spring nests. Maybe they were nests. All that had been there before, too, without me knowing, without me seeing. First I had to look to make a thing real. 

Sarah Layden's debut novel, Trip Through Your Wires, is forthcoming from Engine Books. A graduate of Purdue University's MFA program, her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Stone Canoe, Blackbird, Artful Dodge, Reed Magazine, [PANK], Ladies' Home Journal, The Humanist, and elsewhere. She is a lecturer in the Writing Program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

RABBLE DISPERSED — SARAH BAAR

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If I had a daughter, which I most certainly will not, since I have two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five reasons not to have kids, not the least of which is that I’m just too damn selfish to have another human being depend on me—but, if I did have a daughter, she would most certainly be a girl, since girls run in our family, to the tune of three generations birthing fifteen girls and only three boys, and now that I think about it, that makes five girls giving birth to five girls giving birth to five girls, which is a lot of fives and a lot of girls, and further proof I will never have children, since it would break the rule of five and throw off the balance of the universe, which is the last thing I want, since I exist as the center of my universe, which, by the way, might factually be continually expanding into the vastness of space, while figuratively collapsing into itself in a spectacular display of self-destruction; at least from my perspective, which doesn’t seem all that selfish anymore,  since I do more than my own part to stem the planet’s slow death by helping to keep the world population down, in ways that include: never having a daughter, donating money to negative-population growth lobbyists (which isn’t even tax deductible), and educating others on the perils of overpopulation; I still admit, at night, when I’m watching TV and one of those commercials comes on with the sad music playing, and the bloated bellies of undernourished children in underdeveloped countries filling the screen, I’m not heartless enough that my eyes don’t well up with tears, though my head tells me that life simply isn’t fair, and sometimes, children are just born into the wrong country at the wrong time, like those butterflies who were born just after a mudslide destroyed their winter home and they got so confused they ended up migrating to the backyard of a man who thought the hand of God had swept up the world’s population of monarch butterflies and placed them on his land as a sign that he was meant to sell all of his belongings and wander the earth proclaiming the Good News to those who had yet to hear, or at least to the same seventy-five people who walked past the same street corner in suburban Nashville where he preaches atop a battered suitcase that only managed to get him about twenty-five miles from his former home before he ran out of gas, both literally and figuratively, and decided the people of Nashville needed to hear the gospel just as much as the people of Nairobi or Kenya or the Gambia, and whom, by the way, I pass every day as I walk to work, contemplating the myriad reasons that I will never have children, but if I did, she would most certainly have weak teeth.

Sarah Baar lives and writes in Holland, Michigan.

ROGERS PARK BOTANICA — DAVID MATHEWS

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It was off of Clark Street. I am not sure if it is still there. It was not far from a sighting of a Christ image on a tree near a bus stop on Touhy Avenue. I was with someone who I wasn’t sure was my girlfriend or not, on what would have been our third date, if someone was keeping track. She came in often and wanted to stop in while we were passing by. We waited among the shelves stacked with sentries of Santeria orishas disguised as my familiar saints, for Estella, who would tell us our fortunes. Her nietos spoke Spanglish and flipped between afternoon talk shows in the old storefront’s backroom-turned-living room. Estella eventually sauntered in with six Sears shopping bags, three in each hand. To my companion she greeted, Hola, bienvenida de nuevo, to me, Mucho gusto, to us both, I be right back. 

Once she settled in, she read for my friend first, then for me. Estella would not let my friend come in to translate—they spoke seriously about it. After putting her hand up and giving her a stare down, Estella simply told her, Esta bien. We prayed together in a combination of broken Spanglish mixed with Latin, before she went about her card-work, with her abuela poker face on. I could sense she could sense that gypsy blood brought over with my ancestors. I was not a mark anymore—she liked whatever magic was in me, in us to share. She did not speak English well, but I could understand what she was trying to say. Estella started to tell me things she shouldn’t know, like the fire I felt coming that I stopped before it burnt my work, and I wondered, perhaps she has the sight? Just then she gave me a freebie, Your friend is not worth your time. The spirits are uneven in her house. She warned me, You have all the papers all about the house, cherish them as if they were your namesake’s psalms. Then she hugged me, the way my Babicka would on Christmas or after long absences or before long goodbyes. 

She tried to up-sell me on some candles and incense sticks explaining they would help quicken her predictions, as I started to smell  grilled cheese sandwiches while hearing reggaeton music videos from the show Estella’s nietos decided finally to watch.

David Mathews recently earned his MA in Writing and Publishing at DePaul University where he studied under Richard Jones.  His work has appeared in Eclectica Magazine, After Hours, and Midwestern Gothic. A life-long Chicagoan, he currently teaches at Wright College.

http://www.davidmathewspoetry.com

@dmathewspoet

TO CRAWL THROUGH STARS — JASON MARC HARRIS

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When she walked the lobster with its purple leash into the laundromat, Liz heard the boys.
            “That a toy?”
            “Crazy lady, bringing a lobster in here.”
            “Maybe that’s her only friend.”
            “Man, look at the claws on that thing!”
            As she loaded her clothes, the boys drew closer, peering and poking at the crustacean with their shoes.
            “Hey lady, what you got a lobster in here for?” This boy was not the tallest. He wore a red cap with bells, like some jester of old. 
            Liz thought of Loki, the god of mischief. 
            Liz paused, clung to her “Starry Night” nightgown, worrying whether the stars’ blurry rage would fade in one too many trips to this revolving engine of warm and soapy froth. 
            Nerval explained he walked his lobster on the grounds of the Royal Palace in France because “it does not bark and knows the secrets of the sea,” and though she felt somewhat the same, Liz did not give that answer.
            “Because it comforts me.”
            “Yeah? Cool pet, huh? Bet it could snip the tails off dogs and cats.”
            Liz smiled at the boys. 
            “They’ve been known to crack the legs of scuba divers.”  
            Let them know some fear. 
            “Damn.”
            Let them keep their distance, for she wanted to contemplate the spin of water and soap, the riffles of lint like coral spirals, the laundromat walls with their infinite cracks, opening to worlds and worlds beyond.
            The boys retreated.
            “Aint that big.”
            “That’s the small kind, supposed to get eaten at Red Lobster,” the jester sneered.
            “I dare you to pick it up,” the tallest boy said and folded his arms.
            The boys’ jabbering sank into the background buzz of the machines while Liz completed her loading. She set for “warm,” added soap and coins. The door still hung open.
            The lobster wobbled along the edge of the washer, testing the metal with antennae.
            Then, the boy with the fool’s cap grabbed the lobster by the tail, flung it into the washing machine with Liz’s clothes.
            Another slammed the door and pressed start.
            The purple ribbon curled up into the air and twisted, spiraling.
            Liz screamed, tried the handle. 
            Locked.  
            No pounding would loosen that grip of metal and glass until twenty minutes had passed.
            “He’s on vacation!” The tallest boy laughed.
            “You’re killing him!” Liz shrieked.
            “Nah, he’s surfing! C’mon, he’s a lobster, he’s good with water.”
            “It’s too hot!” Liz screamed.
            “Shit,” jester-boy said, “yeah, might be a spa in there.”
            “He’s just taking a bath. He aint boiling.”
            As the lobster whirled in foaming sparks of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” Liz grew dizzy, but she remembered that lobsters survived while breakers pounded the rocks. The hum of motors clanked through her mind, and she wondered when the pulses of the universe would send the great crustacean across cosmic gulfs of darkness to slice with its massive chilipeds through the rocky whirl of worlds and send out sparks of stars.

Jason Marc Harris graduated from the MFA program at Bowling Green State University and is outgoing Fiction Editor of Mid-American Review. He received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Washington. Publications include Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (2008) and (with Birke Duncan) Laugh Without Guilt: A Clean Jokebook (2007).  Stories in CC&D: The Unreligious, Non-Family-Oriented Literary and Art Magazine, Everyday Fiction, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and Midwestern Gothic. Come by and say hello at http://www.jasonmarcharris.com/.

THE GINGERBREAD METHOD — PATRICK WILLIAMS

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Comrades, the school should have a special baker if children are to eat the alphabet. Picture a long list of gingerbread words arranged according to length. The child gnaws letters from left to right, learning to read. The first old-time reading primers included this method. But even early on, boys and girls were driving away teachers by spelling out troublesome little dough rhymes about American history like “John Adams did die and so must I” and “While patriots do paraphrase, torture is largely commonplace.” In modern teaching practice, reformers have discarded these methods as trash; most of the gingerbread books were scathingly denounced. Nowadays, for example, Ruth texts Timothy harmonious moral lessons of childhood street genius. Then he marks the texts read and may return them later, perhaps with pictures of things. And thus the pupils are taught to read in glimpses of narrative, in a variety of forms, all while handling different styles of mechanical objects. One cannot protest: the child soul revels in crude play. For millions of present-day users, however, the combination of multiple devices and thinking in scraps of thoughts results in extreme confusion.

Patrick Williams is a poet and academic librarian living in Central New York. His work has appeared in publications including The Metric, Word Riot, 3:AM Magazine, M58, The Collapsar, Hot Metal Bridge, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Really System, a journal of poetry and extensible poetics.

ÇA VA — WHITNEY TEAL

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Gilly was too much like Ryan for him to ever love her. Ghanian by way of London, she had a way of being that an American would describe as “scrappy”—a euphemism that only seemed to be applied to people made ruthless by terrible circumstances. Ryan and his friends back home would call her a hustler. The type of chick who knew how to take care of herself.
            Tonight she breezed in, brown sugar-colored skin, long, straight weave and bright pink lips. Neither of them French, they kissed each other on both cheeks anyway, before she gave him a peck on his lips.
            “Ça va?” She asked him. “You look happy to see me.” Gilly looked down at the hard-on Ryan had been nursing for the past hour, thinking about when he’d see her.
            “Bah ouais, tu es en retard,” he replied, in the slow and deliberate French that made native speakers lose patience.
            They were both foreigners in a city where they could be whatever they wanted to be, yet, still, they’d managed to be exactly who they always were.
            As such, Gilly didn’t need preamble. Sweet talk seemed to upset her and foreplay didn’t hold her interest. It was only sex, but that was enough because sex with Gilly was like nothing Ryan had ever experienced. Sometimes he thought it was her height, at almost six-feet, her frame overwhelmed him, enveloped him and some part of her body seemed to be always around him when they fucked. He could smell only her when he breathed, his tongue would recognize only the taste of her, he could only see her.
            On a more practical level, she was a shameless freak. Her body was all-access. She gave every move her all.
            After, one of his faded Georgetown sweatshirts covering just to her crotch, she made the English-style tea she always craved, using the whole milk he bought only because she liked it.
            Balancing a small mug on his mattress before lying in his creaky, low-slung bed, she puffed on a small wooden pipe filled with weed. Occasionally he took a drag.
            “Milk kills,” He told her, stretching his arm around her shoulders and dropping the pipe in her upturned palm.
            She refilled the little groove on top with plants and then lit the tip again.
            “So does sex,” Gilly said. “Doesn’t mean we have to abstain.”
            “You going to church tomorrow?”
            “Every Sunday. You finally ready to come?”
            “I don’t speak French,” he said.
            “You haven’t got to. God speaks to you in your language, eh?” Smoke billowed from the round bed of her o-shaped lips. “The spirit will be high tomorrow. I can just feel it.”

Whitney Teal is a journalist, essayist and creative writer from Fort Worth, Texas. Her nonfiction has been published in lots of magazines and on lots of websites devoted to women. Read some of it at whitneyteal.com. She swears a lot on Twitter @whitney1016.