SHOPLIFTING — LAURA CITINO

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Every day that summer we went down to the corner store on Oak Street. We went late afternoon, when the heat reached the edge of madness. The sun shot sharp at our eyes as if angled through a magnifying glass. Anyone with a lick of sense was inside with a fan or beer or weed trying to make the hours pass. Men in oversized t-shirts with brown papered-bottles tucked between their legs sat on collapsing porches. Sometimes they'd wave to us. 
            “Girl,” they called. 
            “What up, mister?” We twitched our hips a little as we walked by.
            “Who you think you fooling?” they called. They grabbed their crotches and hollered.
            The dusty brick building never had many customers. Our classmates spent afternoons at the gas station trying to get the older kids to buy them cigarillos – the kind that made your lips taste sweet like maple sugar. The corner store seemed from a bygone era, a relic from our parents' childhoods when the drunks were stumbling but harmless and hard candy cost sofa change. Metal grates crisscrossed the windows and a handwritten sign declared NO LIQUOR with the Arabic translation scribbled below.
            We stole more than we bought. I'd get a Milky Way or a warmed over hotdog to keep up appearances while you'd sneak out handfuls of cheap taffy in the pockets of your cutoffs. Once onto the pavement we'd high five and cram the sugar into our mouths. We weren't poor, at least not to our own knowledge. But the neighborhood was. We could feel it in the last dying elm trees, stiff chewed-up gum and cigarette butts sticking to our shoes. Bad folk loping the streets. Even at fourteen going on fifteen we were sucked dry of ambition and the neighborhood replaced it with the dangerous feeling of being disadvantaged. 
            We'd split the share at the old elementary school playground, which was abandoned in the summer except for gangs of smoothed skinned boys playing three-on-three. Curses, slurs, and the rhythmic bounce of a ball on concrete echoed through the air. We lazed in the uncut grass, the straps of our tank tops pulled down to avoid tan lines.
            We talked about boys. Endless enigmatic intent hidden in a bit lip, a coarse laugh, a hand on a knee on a leg on a shoulder. A boy named Jason, another named Marcus. Hands on bellies on your ass cuddled in recliner chairs in my parents' basement. 
            You blew your bangs out of your face and undid the top button of your shorts. The roundness of your lower belly sticking out was a little disgusting. Naked. Soft. You caught me looking.
            “I'm a growing girl,” you said. You scanned me up and down. “Bet I could wrestle you.”
            I grinned. You went to move but I was faster. Your wrist was in my grip. You leaned forward and whispered, “Go ahead then.”
            Quick as a blink I was on my back.

Laura Citino is a fiction writer and essayist from southeastern Michigan. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Midwestern Gothic, Bluestem, Passages North, and Sou'wester. She received her MFA from Eastern Washington University. She currently lives with her partner and teaches English in Terre Haute, Indiana.

KNOW IT ALL — TODD MERCER

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Nostradamus sits in darkness, rocking his chair by the front door as his errant daughter Madeleine sneaks in. She startles when he flips on the lights.
            He holds a bronze plaque that says “2:46 a.m.,” which is of course the actual time.
            “It’s getting old,” Maddy says. She smells like cigarettes.
            Her Dad quit opening mail in early middle age. Maddy holds up envelopes and Nostradamus guesses the contents.
            Junior year of high school she says, “Guess what, Dad? I’m—“
            “—pregnant,” he finishes. “A girl. Seven pounds, nine ounces, one blue eye and one brown. A linguist who also collects butterflies. Have her watch for signs of diabetes.”
            Maddy says, “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
            Nostradamus is already over it, eating a sandwich above the kitchen sink.
            Madeleine hears one day that the country’s declared war. She rushes to her father with the news. The kitchen table is covered in scribbled parchment.
            “The complete history of the war!” he tells her, “Such supreme folly, this one.”
            She couldn’t tell him anything.
            All the other Dads were early European versions of bumbling sitcom Dads, morons of obliviousness, objects of both pity and chiding ridicule.
            Sure, it’s nice to know the order that the ponies will finish at the track. Cool to know which year the Detroit Lions win the Super Bowl. But a girl could use a father, one who makes a few bad calls, one who isn’t holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments while she’s learning sin.

Todd Mercer won the first Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest, and his chapbook, Box of Echoes, won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest. His digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, is forthcoming from RHP Books. Mercer's poetry and fiction appear in Apocrypha & Abstractions, Blue Collar Review, The Camel Saloon, Camroc Press Review, Cease, Cows, Dunes Review, East Coast Literary Review, Eunoia Review, Falling Star, 50-Word Stories, The Fib Review, The Lake, The Legendary, Main Street Rag Anthologies, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, One Sentence Poems, Postcard Poems and Prose, Postcard Shorts, Right Hand Pointing, The Second Hump, and Spartan.

BEES (A HOMETOWN STORY) — CARMEN LAU

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One summer, while you were walking along the canal, a cloud of bees settled on your head.
            You kept very still and let them crawl through your hair, tickling your scalp with their tiny feet. You let their wings beat your face. It may have been hours or days, you just standing there trying to rein your thoughts in so they didn't produce screams. If they buzzed into your ears some secret that would help you later on down the road (for there is always some such creature that whispers some such secret, and it is in us to forget their words until some pivotal moment), you couldn't know, though you listened very carefully – scared, as you were, for your life.
            For your mother had warned you about bees. Their stings are incredibly painful, she said. They feel like little jolts of lightning going through your nerves. And after they sting you their stingers stay embedded in your flesh, so when they try to pull out their entrails are pulled out of their bodies in a miniscule string, and then they die, the bees. It's hell digging a stinger out of you, you need to go to a doctor for that. Also, some people are allergic to bees – they swell up and die of asphyxiation after a single sting. That's what happened to the boy in My Girl. He was so young, wasn't he? Some people are just unlucky like that and you can never tell if you're one of them.
            At last the bees grew bored or remembered something else they had to do and flew off en masse. You walked home; your legs had aged decades during that period of standing, acquiring the feel and creak of old ships.
            Yet it was all right – more than all right – when you got back. Your mother was standing over a wooden box, pulling a comb dripping with honey from its rumbling interior.
            “It's got an unbelievable flavor,” she said. “I've never tasted anything like it. I can't imagine where they've been.”

Carmen Lau's fiction has appeared in The Collagist, Gigantic, Hayden's Ferry Review, Fairy Tale Review and other journals. She is working on a collection of Hometown Stories. Find her online at  carmenslittlefictions.wordpress.com.

YOU'RE GOING TO BLACKMAIL THE PET PSYCHIC — JOHN JODZIO

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You’re going to blackmail the Pet Psychic but he doesn’t know it yet because he can only read the minds of cats and parrots and not grown ass women.  You’re sitting on your couch waiting to secretly tape him having sex with you. You’ve done this type of thing before. You’ve done this type of thing a bunch. Married doctors, lawyers with jealous mistresses, once a state senator. You aren’t pretentious enough to call yourself a psychic, but you’ve got a gift for seeing the future too. You can always tell when a man will stray; you can always tell when he’ll feel guilty, you can always tell if he’ll pay you to keep quiet.          
            You met the Pet Psychic at a bar. You recognized him from his TV show. You listened to him brag to the bartender about all the lost pets he’d tracked down over the years. When he was drunk you told him your dog Henry ran away last night.        
            “Can you find him?” you pleaded.          
            The Pet Psychic looked you up and down, his tongue darting across his lip.      
            “I need an item of Henry’s to commune with,” he slurred.
            “Back at my apartment,” you said. 

You watch the Pet Psychic press his nose into Henry’s dog pillow. If he was really psychic, he’d realize Henry’s not lost, he’s dead. Dead for six months now, nailed by a mini-van when he got off his leash. Henry’s chew toys, his dog sweaters, sit in a pile by your fridge. Your brain tells you to toss all this stuff away, but your heart hasn’t given your hands permission yet.        
            “Take down any lost dog flyers you put up,” the Pet Psychic says. “They don’t work for shit.”
            The Pet Psychic closes his eyes, sniffs Henry’s water bowl. When you close your eyes, you can see how the next hour will unfold. You’ll cry about Henry. The Pet Psychic will put his arm around your shoulder. You’ll curl your head into his chest; arch your lips toward his lips.  

When the Pet Psychic leaves you’ll watch some old videos of Henry. Maybe the one where he’s chasing the squirrels at the dog park. Or the one where he won’t stop barking at the ceiling fan. 
            “Don’t worry,” the Pet Psychic says as he pulls on his shirt. “I’ll find him for you.”              
            You watch the Pet Psychic glide down your front stairs. Tomorrow you’ll call him and explain how sad it would be if his wife received the video of the two of you fucking. You already know how this conversation will go. He’ll take a deep breath, won’t say anything for a long time. You’ll wait him out; listen to the tiny hisses that grind away in the background of the call, little clicks that remind you of metal crushing bone. Finally the Pet Psychic will clear his throat and like all the others, he’ll say, fine, okay, shit, how much.

John Jodzio is a winner of the Loft-McKnight Fellowship.  He’s the author of the short story collections, If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home (Replacement Press) and Get In If You Want To Live (Paper Darts Press).  He lives in Minneapolis.  Find out more at www.johnjodzio.net.

SUPERHERO — GARY BERG

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The waterway narrowed and they passed a dock with agricultural warehouses on the left side.  At the end, the river opened wide.  The father pulled the houseboat over to a dock on one of the islands, and tied it up.  The island stood out on the horizon because it was one of the few places with tall trees.  The two filled a backpack with sardines, crackers, apples, and two bottles of water.  The boy followed his father as he took a familiar route up a slight hill to the grove of pine trees.  At the base of one tree they ascended.  The father pushed the boy up first with one hand.  “That’s far enough,” the father said as the boy reached a clearing in the branches.  They put their backs against the trunk and stretched out with a view of the mouth of Delta in front of them, and their houseboat docked off to the side. 
            “I don’t understand why you can’t just stay together?” the boy said.
             “You are too young to understand.”  The father looked at the boy, and continued:  “It’s not about you.”
            “But I’m the one who has to live in two different houses.”
            They silently ate the sardines in thick olive oil dripping off the crackers, and then finished with tart green apples. 
            Back on the houseboat they set out further across the Delta with the sun going down.  The father released the anchor off of Tinsley Island, and then set up the boat for the night.  He rolled up his sleeves and started dinner while the boy positioned himself on a bunk bed and played with a Wolverine action figure.  “His bones are metal.”
            “Must be nice,” the father said flatly with his eyes fixed on the grill of the stove. 
            “He’s my favorite.”

Gary A. Berg has an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA, and is the author/editor of eight non-fiction books.

PAINT JOB — TATIANA RYCKMAN

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I saw an old Doritos truck pulling out of the Farmer’s Market parking lot last weekend. By old I mean re-purposed, I mean no longer traveling for the marketing and distribution of salty snacks. The yellow triangles that once floated down the side of the truck as if to say, “Snacks are casual and fun!” were painted over with white. The paint wasn’t opaque enough, though, and didn’t match the white of the truck. Even more conspicuous were the wide, straight strokes someone had used to paint over them. Tapering rows of stripes that made me think of whiteout that comes on a little roller were piled in the shape of chips across the side of the vehicle, and I had to wonder how many people it would have taken to hold such a large whiteout roller. And where did one purchase such a thing? There was an Office Max just a few blocks away, but I’d never seen a whiteout dispenser that big at one of those stores. Maybe they are kept in the back? Maybe you just have to know? 
            Maybe someone really just paints that way? Maybe they were sick of conforming, so instead of tracing the chips with their brush and filling them in the way patient third grade girls color, they went with stripes, like pyramids of brush strokes. Maybe they had limited shoulder mobility and could only move their arm in a straight line across the front of their body? Why didn’t they ask for help? Why didn’t they hire someone? Or was this person hired? Was someone hired to paint in this specific and obvious and not at all subtle way? Maybe it’s exactly what they wanted? Maybe the goal wasn’t to hide the fact that this truck once carried suspiciously colored snacks to pimpled teenagers all over the country, maybe it was a commentary, a riddle, a statement about the evolution of our culture and our values and our needs and the way some needs never leave us, no matter how we cover them up. How even if we stop watching Wayne’s World (both I and II) every few months, we can’t escape the fact that it shaped us. Shaped us into the equilateral triangles of something mass-produced but iconic, a tiny piece of our cultural geometry. 
            I went back to the vegetable stand where I work. I thought: forget about it. But there it is, white-washed across my memory. Maybe forever.

Tatiana Ryckman was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of the chapbook story collection, Twenty-Something, and assistant editor at sunnyoutside press. Tatiana leads Creative Writing workshops through The University of Texas at Austin and her local library.

WE HAPPY FEW — TIMSTON JOHNSTON

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Tucker. Rusty. Calvin, Connor, Cooper. We have names that once belonged to Golden Retrievers. 

Everything about us comes together like chalk and weeds and clay. We’re separated only by fence posts. We share our mother’s crushed geraniums, their yellow garden trowels in half-dug holes, red checker-print tablecloths, flies and oniony potato salad, hammers and drills on pegboards, the smell of paint and grass clippings and stilled hose water dripping without sieves, birthing the puddles that draw millipedes and catch cottonwood seed.

We bored. We Cat’s Cradle gazes. We silent five. We breathless nothing. We pebble-kicking misfits of our own alley.

Ants rain from the oak that hangs over home plate. They crawl behind ears, underneath collars, line the brims of our hats. They bite, but we do not take our eye off the ball’s stitching. We swing. We miss. We curse and search the weeds behind us. We’re at fault. We’re our own catchers. We hate the curve, the knuckle. We love the slider but always call for heat.

We joke that Calvin jerks it to Rusty’s sister. He pictures her Keds—virginal white soles, pink laces, red tongue. We say we don’t masturbate at all. Until one of us admits it. Then we all admit it. It’s every day. It’s our morning coffee. Our afternoon tea. Our bitter nightcap.

Connor’s heart palpitations eat him, gnaw his ribs. He says it feels like the frog’s croak, the slide into second base, the catch, grip, and grind on gravel. He beats his sternum, the one-and-two-and-one-and-two, reminding the heart of its rhythm. We stomp our feet with him, accent the two, grunt the and. We remove our gloves and slap mosquitoes to our chests. The one. The one. The one. We taste dust. We count red dots and mashed wings.

We chase strays as they bark and nip, run in circles, round bases from third to first to right field to left. We never conceived the rules. We never established a way to win. We are speed and torque and centroids. We are nature, unleashed. We wield the club, our ancestral tool, and we strip ourselves of civilization. We territorial. We one. We aim. We swing. We maim. We kill. We pant. We breathe. We won. We scatter. We howl.

Timston Johnston received his MFA from Northern Michigan University and is the fiction editor of Passages North. His work appears in Midwestern Gothic, Ghost Town, and Cartagena. He likes Reese's Pieces. 

THE SHREW — JANE LIDDLE

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The shrew told her husband for the millionth time to shut off the light in the bathroom. The shrew had been telling her husband to shut off lights for forty-eight years. She had also been telling him to close drawers all the way, and to quit doing that thing with his mouth. But for the past few months the husband’s forgetfulness and self-control had gotten worse. The husband was sick. He experienced a great deal of pain every second of the day. The shrew would feel bad about nagging him but couldn’t help it. Even if the husband had all the sudden started to shut off the lights, close the drawers all the way, and stop doing that thing with his mouth, the shrew would still probably yell at him about these things. One day the husband asked the shrew to help him kill himself. The shrew dismissed this idea and even admonished the husband for thinking such a thing. The husband requested her help in dying with the same persistence the shrew had asked the husband to shut off the lights and close the drawers all the way and to stop doing that thing with his mouth. The shrew went for a very long time ignoring the husband’s requests until one day she stood outside the kitchen and watched him struggle to open a can of soda until he broke down and cried. When he was done crying he put the can of soda back in the fridge. The shrew set to work to procure the proper drugs. She did this through her sons, who normally avoided interactions with the shrew, but complied because they were delighted to fulfill such a strange request from their strict, tight-laced mom. Maybe the shrew was finally lightening up. The shrew did not tell them the real reason. The shrew waited for the husband to bring up helping him die again and she didn’t have to wait long. When he did she said that all was settled and that he could die anytime he wanted. He wanted to die that very day. The shrew set up the bedroom to be lovely with flowers and candles. It looked romantic. The husband took the pills at sunset. The shrew and the husband waited for the effects to take hold. The shrew watched with irritation as the husband did that thing with his mouth, but she didn’t say anything.

Jane Liddle grew up in Newburgh, New York, and now lives in Brooklyn. She has recently completed a short story collection and a flash series about murder. Other murder stories have appeared in NANO Fiction, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Everyday Genius. You can find her on Twitter @janeriddle or at liddlejane.tumblr.com.