RESPONSIBLE OWNERSHIP — ZACHARY DOSS

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Your boyfriend adopts a pet without asking you about it first. “You should have called me,” you say. Your boyfriend tells you that he found the pet by the side of the road. “I don’t think we’re ready for a pet,” you say.
             You and your boyfriend are not ready for a pet. One day you realize that the pet’s water dish has been empty and you don’t know for how long. The pet looks at you with its big eyes and it makes you feel bad. You’re late to work that day. Your boyfriend never remembers to feed the pet and when you confront him about it he says it was your turn to feed the pet. It wasn’t your turn, and you make a chart about whose turn it is to feed the pet so this doesn’t happen again, but the chart disappears. Your boyfriend says the pet ate it, but the pet is so skinny you don’t believe it.
             You reluctantly take responsibility for the pet. You take it outside to go to the bathroom, you teach it tricks, you give it treats, and you play with it to make sure it gets exercise. You give it baths, covering your eyes with your hand because you feel uncomfortable watching it bathe. Once, you think you catch it watching from the door while you and your boyfriend are having sex, but when you get up to check, it’s not there.
             Over time, your efforts at caring for the pet never seem more than perfunctory. You hoped this would be a rewarding experience but mostly you find the pet incredibly boring. It’s not the pet’s fault, you remind yourself, and try to keep an open mind about the pet. But you can’t help finding the pet tedious. All it does is cry and ask where its parents are, and you keep saying, I don’t know, I don’t know.

Zachary Doss is the editor of Black Warrior Review and fiction editor of Banango Street. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Fairy Tale Review, Caketrain, DIAGRAM, New South, and others. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

LOCKS AND KEYS — DAVID MATHEWS

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My Grandma Lulu never left the house without swearing, because she couldn’t find her keys. If we were going out, I knew it was coming. I’d have to wait by the door until she swore and cursed her life, like she was casting a clumsy spell to summon them.
             Sometimes they would appear as close as her coat pocket. She’d put her faux fur and plastic floral babushka on, grabbed her maroon pleather purse—everything for a while would be back to normal. She would always double-check her purse for those keys before locking her apartment door.
             During my errands with her, she’d ask, “Did you see me take my keys?” After I told her, she’d quickly turnto look into her secondhand purse, as if she were looking for something misplaced in the trash.
             Whenever I leave to go out, I question if I have everything before I lock my door. I pat down my pockets to make sure I’m all right. I find I have to catch myself from panics I’ve inherited, like high blood pressure or bad debt. When I head out into the world, I try to carry only what I need.

David Mathews earned his MA in Writing and Publishing at DePaul University. His work has appeared in Eclectica Magazine, After Hours, CHEAP POP, One Sentence Poems, OMNI Reboot, Word Riot, Silver Birch Press, and Midwestern Gothic. His poetry was nominated by Eclectica Magazine for The Best of The Net 2014. He is a life-long Chicagoan, and he currently teaches at Wright College and College of Lake County.

THE CONTORTIONIST VISITS THE ZOO — JAMES R. GAPINSKI

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The contortionist placed her foam mat on the floor in front of the spider monkey cage. She sat in the lotus position and let her mind drift. For her, contortion was about peace with one's own body. It wasn't a spectacle to be ogled. It was personal. Of course, she still made a living through public performance, but it felt wrong.
             The spider monkeys howled and screeched, but the contortionist didn't mind. It soothed her. The animal babble helped her feel more connected to nature—even if the noises were caged and therefore semi-artificial.
             She moved into her first pose: a simple backbend.
             The spider monkeys dropped to the floor and inversely arched their backs.
             "Very good," the contortionist said.
             The monkeys howled some more.
             She dipped further into a full chest bend. The monkeys mirrored her movement with ease.
             "Interesting," the contortionist said. "Let's see you try this one." She moved into a handstand, stretching her anti-gravity self into the air. The she relaxed her spine, mimicking her earlier earthbound positions. She let her sky-high buttocks glide downward, resting on her ponytail, her entire back inverted to accommodate the maneuver. She felt liquid.
             The spider monkeys complied, standing on their hands and bending their spines.
             The monkeys screeched to one another. Then each monkey outstretched a hand, leaving all body weight on a single limb.
             The contortionist outstretched her arm too. Her muscles warmed, reminding her of her physicality, skin stuffed with messy solid tissues and bones like concrete. Her liquid body hardened, elbow locking into place. She held the rigid pose for a moment, but she couldn't maintain. The contortionist toppled onto her yoga mat.
             The unscathed monkeys moved into a pose she'd never seen before. Something almost like a box act, sans box, floating in midair, supported only by a spindly little monkey tail. A half-dozen monkey cubes hovered above the ground in perfect unison, without a single twitch or sway or wobble.

James R. Gapinski is managing editor of The Conium Review, and he teaches writing at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. His fiction has recently appeared in Juked, NANO Fiction, Word Riot, and elsewhere. Find him online at http://jamesrgapinski.com.

MEDICAL IDENTIFICATION BRACELET — WREN JAMES

/

a.
when i am twelve years old, i take the bus to the middle school. i take the bus to the middle school because i am twelve years old and it is too far to walk.

when i am twelve years old and on the bus, i receive terrible news. i hear that my school friend, earl humerus, was hit by a car while crossing the street to get to his bus stop. he isn’t actually my friend. he is actually someone who sucks just less enough at sports and lives just close enough to fill in on backyard football games.

oh, poor earl humerus. another car accident for poor earl humerus! there is a myth about earl humerus that his penis was run over by a car and replaced by a plastic tube. i never think about how that could have happened, but every time i think of poor earl humerus, i think of pee dribbling out of his pee tube like an upside-down lemonade.

when i hear that earl humerus has been hit by another car, i ask around to find out how serious it is. i ask around, but nobody knows. nobody knows how serious it is. i wonder if poor earl humerus is in an ambulance with his face smushed into an oxygen mask. i wonder if there is blood. i wonder if his bones are breaking through his skin. i wonder if the ambulance driver sees his plastic pee tube.

as i am wondering, i feel like crying. i feel the air in my stomach being sucked out through the tear holes in my face. i feel like crying because i can’t help picturing my face on earl humerus’ body, my face paper-dolled on his broken body crumpled up like a re-used shopping bag in the back of an ambulance.

when i get to school that morning, i don’t think too much more about earl humerus. i don’t think too much more about earl humerus because i am thinking about my homework, i am thinking about whether the whitehead i squeezed out that morning will re-accumulate, i am thinking about what i will say if anyone asks me what i am thinking.

b.
my daddy comes home from work at 4:30 pm, like he does every day. he looks at my mother in a way that i have never seen him look at her when he comes home from work.

“you'll never guess what happened to me this morning,” he says.

she looks worried in a way that i have never seen her look worried before.

“this idiot kid,” he says, “this idiot kid ran right in front of my car this morning. he didn’t even look. he ran out from behind a parked car on the street. i didn’t see him until i hit him.”

Wren James lives quietly by the ocean with his wife and children. Recent work has appeared in the EEEL, Atticus Review, and is forthcoming in Lockjaw Magazine and the Doctor T.J Eckleburg Review. Find him: @wrenajames and wren-james.tumblr.com.
 

BURROWS — SARAH GLADY

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All hamsters are from Syria, because they all came out of this one litter of Golden Hamsters that archaeologist Aaron Abrahams dug up out of the ground in 1930, (they write that he discovered them, where they already lived were hunted and hid in Syria underground), and when I say all hamsters I mean golden hamsters in captivity, (my hamster was named Sparky and was a miniature, I got him after my sister’s, Hammy, died from tumors, like all mammals), but Abrahams’ weren’t the first hamsters in captivity, they’re just the current survivors. The first captives were hunted because their tunnels ran under crops and people carefully pierced them by the thousands for their exotic fur and for their pleasing taste to the Syrian farm dogs. And, I swear to God I’m not making this up, they were almost extinct and then Abrahams brought them to the University of Jerusalem where zoologist Israel Aharoni helped to breed the litter of twelve, (I know what I hope they were named), and then they made it out to the world to in 1939. Abrahams returned to Aleppo and ignored the farmers but it was before barrel bombs and the old city tunnels and the damage to M4, to M5.

They’re colorblind. All of them. Very solitary except for the Russian ones, which have rapid onset depression if you take away their mate. After the Syrian goldens came out, a British scientist, Leonard Goodwin, claimed he was actually responsible for bringing the world hamsters. The scientific community didn’t really give a shit, seeing as they had just looked up the etymology of hamster, and it turns out it’s from old high German and means oppressor and everyone couldn’t get over how terrible it was that they had named the Syrian goldens from the University of Jerusalem in 1930 the German oppressors but then they realized it wasn’t German, it was Avestan and so the British scientists pouted and tried to breed more and weren’t very successful but it’s colder there and there are fewer archaeologists trying to dig up families from the ground trying to dig in new borders into the sand and transcribe other mammals’ religions and other mammals’ bones and (we’re really obsessed as scientists with mammals and dinosaurs and tree rings and tar pits and oil and new labs in old cities and why are there only horror movies about new diseases—the, the hamsters rarely get diseases except for tumors and fratricide).

Sarah Glady writes, teaches, hikes, and lives in Phoenix, Arizona. She holds an MA in literature from Arizona State University. Her recent work can be found in McSweeney's, PANK, and Stirrings.

JK — ROB H. DAWSON

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Logan's mom smoked with all the car windows up. I had always thought you were supposed to roll a window down, if you smoked in a car, but when I asked, Mrs. Morales said that the noise from the highway was too loud. She kept the windows up and tapped her ashes into an empty McDonald's cup for the entire ride up to the Dells, singing along to every song that played on the country station.
             The smoke was inescapable, but Logan had gotten a headphone splitter for his fourteenth birthday along with an iPod. It sat in the middle seat, and we took turns picking songs, a long thin bridge of cord connecting us as we leaned on opposite windows, staring at cornfields and inexplicably still-extant porn stores.
             An hour and a half in, without warning, Mrs. Morales took a sharp right turn off an exit to get gas. My whole body jerked to the side, and Logan's head bumped hard against the glass. I thought, if there had been no splitter, then maybe, we would have had to sit right next to each other, to share one pair of headphones. And if we were to be sitting right next to each other when the car took a turn like this, I still would have been thrown by the force of it, but thrown, this time, potentially, into Logan, and the skin on our arms could possibly, just for a moment, make contact, maybe, and my leg would press into his leg, his bones and fat and muscle, tightly wound and mine at last. And there would be tension, just a little tension, and I would have to make a joke, to break it, and I would lean over and put my head onto his shoulder, only for a second, before pulling away and laughing it off.
             And maybe Logan would laugh, too. It could be our inside joke: "Mark Leans On Logan Like They Are In Love, Ha Ha Ha." I had been thinking about the jokes Logan told around his new friends, and there were, I decided, three categories: mean things about girls, quotes from movies or TV shows that I didn't like, and pretending to be gay.
             So this would be the third kind, then, for sure, if it could happen. Which it couldn't, because Logan had gotten the splitter and because I was sitting on the far side of the car, an empty seat preventing our thighs from touching for the entire ride, and probably the entire trip, and then also the rest of my life, actually, which was at that moment almost calming to imagine, a whole life without any jokes to make that I did not think were funny.
             I took a long, deep breath, letting Mrs. Morales's smoke inflate my lungs. At the gas station, I bought a bag of corn nuts, which I didn't even like, just to have something to do with my hands.

Rob H. Dawson lives and works and sings songs to his cat in New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in WhiskeyPaper and The Rumpus. You can find him at @robhdawson.

INTRODUCING CURTIS — RAVI MANGLA

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I’d like you to meet Curtis. He works with me in accounting.

~

Say hello to Curtis. He has a fantastic weather app on his phone. It’s accurate almost half the time.

~

Have you met Curtis? His insoles are custom-molded to his feet.

~

Please welcome Curtis. He collects foreign currency. Mostly Canadian.

~

My friend, Curtis. His pants once tore performing the chicken dance at a wedding and he spent the rest of the night in his car.

~

It’s my pleasure to introduce Curtis. He keeps a photograph of his ex-wife in his wallet.

~

Give a big warm greeting to Curtis. His mother accompanied him to junior prom and left with his guidance counselor.

~

Meet my dear colleague, Curtis. Please don’t serve him any peppery foods, as they irritate his bowels.

~

Do you know Curtis? Last week he invited his neighbor over to watch television, but she declined, indicating she had a set at home.

~

Curtis, everyone. Everyone, Curtis. His online backgammon exploits are legend.

~

May I present Curtis. Sometimes, when ordering takeout, he’ll use a name other than his own. It’s a lie he’s grown accustomed to telling.

~

Hi, this is Curtis. Can you believe he didn’t want to come here tonight?

Ravi Mangla is the author of the novel Understudies (Outpost19). His stories have appeared in Mid-American Review, The Collagist, American Short Fiction, Barrelhouse, and Corium Magazine. He lives in Rochester, New York.

CELEBRITY — BROOKS REXROAT

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She was brunette back then, doing the same thing I was: escaping family to walk down the beach. At some point we fell into step together and I did the sort of uncharacteristically adventurous thing 15-year olds do only on vacation: I spoke. Some dumb thing about the nice weather. She followed my dumb thing with an unexpected thing: she smiled. Every time I saw her smile after that, I judged it against that first one, that one which seemed so genuine. I never saw her smile like that again.
             “It’s always beautiful here,” she said. “Peaceful. We come every year.” She acted like she didn’t notice adult men snapping their necks for a double-take, or their wives glaring and elbowing. Even then, people couldn’t help but gawk at her. 
             There were lots of things I could’ve told her, but she seemed the sort who’d heard enough of football or honor rolls or youth groups, so I told her I played music. What I meant by this was that I owned a guitar and had a spiral-bound notebook full of melodramatic scribbles about heartbreak I thought I’d known.
             “Really?” she asked. “Me too. Who’s your agent?”
             I went red, told her I was still working on that.
            She turned at the pier, too. On the way back, we walked so close our shoulders touched once—a shock of soft warmth. She laughed a lot, though her laughter wasn’t predicated on anything being funny. It was more a vocal smile.
             “How long are you here?” she asked. “Tonight,” I told her, and she looked sad, didn’t say anything else.

•

“What are you doing?” Dad asked when I dutifully sat down between my folks.
             “I said I’d come back.”
           “But—” Dad was flushed and speechless. “You were walking with her and you stopped? Go!”
             But of course, she was gone, a trail of craned necks left in her wake.

*

MTV’s name was not yet a lie, so I was sofa-watching videos the next time I saw her. It was October, and I went pale as her face filled the screen. The camera zoomed out to her whole figure, to that pleated skirt, then she danced. I was excited—and then crushed because the song was terrible. I hated it, but couldn’t help wanting to see her again and again. The song went into overdrive rotation; I think my cat memorized the melody.
             At Sonic Boom, I ignored the clerk’s incredulous brow when I bought that CD. I flipped it over so the cover faced downward but the clerk pointedly flipped it before she scanned. “That’s 15.98.”
             Every time I went back into the shop, the same girl was at the checkout. She knew what I’d bought, and she deemed me unworthy to browse the row of bins labeled alternative. She crinkled her pierced nose and half-snorted every time I brought the Vaselines or Sonic Youth to the register, and I just smiled back, because what did she know, anyway? 

Brooks Rexroat lives and teaches in Huntington, West Virginia. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing-fiction from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and his work has appeared in such publications as Day One, Weave Magazine, The Montreal Review, Matchbook Literary Magazine, and Midwestern Gothic. Visit him online at http://brooksrexroat.com.