AT THE HOME DEPOT — REEM ABU-BAKER

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Life imitates art, so I buy a lot of impressionist prints from the discount bin at Big Lots. I fill the apartment with them. Pastels everywhere, the green-blue dabs that I hope will make the air cool and fragrant, my home a place of peace and the safe kind of beauty. On the walls, the painted white ladies walk the parks and twirl their parasols. You must stay out of the sun! they chant, We all must stay out of the sun!, their voices like bells or wind chimes or some other cute metallic thing. I tell the parasol ladies they are being classist, that some people have to work outside because they have no choice, and did the parasol ladies ever think about that? The parasol ladies say Look in mirror, remember what the doctor said about skin cancer, how you have you have this risk inside you? I scoff at them, and throw shards of glass into their cardboard. How’s this for a mirror, I say. Later I feel guilty and I apologize. The parasol ladies say it’s fine but I sense some distance between us still.
             In the dermatologist’s office, there are also women on the walls. The doctors remove the problematic mole and express sympathy about the hideous scar they are leaving. We can fix that too, they say. And the women on the walls are like: I used to look this, but now I look this. The message is you can buy whatever kind of look you want.
             Me, I like to look like an impressionist painting. You can get some cheap-ass lipsticks and you can punch each shade against your vanity mirror and turn your reflection into a Lisa Frank kinda cloud. I’m saying you can be all pinks and purples.
             I’m saying you can even dye flowers now, even cacti. There are these gasoline rainbow succulents that catch my eye at the Home Depot. They are beautiful and I buy eight of them, hold them against my breast and stagger through the parking lot stroking their spindles with my chin, whispering: all you have to do now is stay alive. 

Reem Abu-Baker lives in Tuscaloosa, AL, where she is the fiction editor for Black Warrior Review. Her work is published or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Meridian, NANO Fiction, and other journals. 

THE BOOK — LUKE KOKOSZKA

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You're going to love this book, his wife told him every time she sat in her chair reading it. When she had finished it a month later, she gave it to him. He sat under the orange glow of a lamp and read the entire thing in one night. Closing the book after finishing the last page he realized getting married to a woman who didn't know him at all had been a terrible mistake.

Luke Kokoszka is a writer and musician living a short drive outside of Vancouver, BC. He can be found eating Bánh mì and exploring the vast roads of Canada. His writing has previously appeared in Carte Blanche, Potluck Magazine and The Louden Singletree.

LITTERED LIVERS — LEXI SENIOR

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I was drunk when I was told Palmer’s father was dying from liver failure. He was a large man, an ex-pilot, and an alcoholic with shiny eyes and a thick head of hair he combed in three strokes every half hour or so at their country club, where he would order the entire table beers and club sandwiches because, as he said, who doesn’t like a goddamn club sandwich?
             I was out with a new man, a man who treated me with something like respect, who found time to sneak behind me in the kitchen, kiss my neck, lift me to the counter, and tell me he wanted me and that all the bad things I thought about myself were untrue (and I trusted him when he said it). The night got away from us, our bartender heavy-handed, and me feeling ornery over work, and me also feeling like I should drink more as a result, only to find out in front of a white porcelain toilet that history does, in fact, repeat itself.
             I answered Palmer’s call in this new man’s bed while I bent my knees over his, just as I used to with Palmer, using smoky sheets to make a tent over our bodies, where the air stank of liquor and no one could tell us we were littering our livers. He wasn’t the type to call even when he did love me, falling asleep before I returned home and not waking up until halfway through the night, head heavy with whiskey and comforted by the whoosh of AC and a low TV, a drunk’s favorite lullaby. To call after I left him months before, when I, bottle-bodied, took all of his glass replicas of torso and hips and smashed them in the sink, beading it with what was poisoning us, seemed strange. And there it was—his father was dying, would I come say goodbye? Yes, of course I would, and this new man, a good man with clean hands and dark hair, held me as I cried for Palmer in his bed.
             At the hospital, Palmer’s father reclined in a sea of green sheets that covered once thick legs suddenly thin as a young girl’s. His face, always round and red, was emaciated. His arms were bruised, so weak that the IV caused injury. Believing him too feeble to embrace, I kissed him on the cheek, the skin familiar like leather of an old, loved purse. But he grabbed my wrist with a strength that surprised me, that I should have known he would show even then, and breathed, “Take care of each other.”
             But you don’t tell a dying man you won’t take care of his son because you can’t, because he cannot take care of you or himself, because you both share the disease that damaged his liver beyond repair. You just say, “OK,” and then you go home to the new man you know is there, awake and waiting for you to return.

Lexi Senior is a Florida-based writer and MFA candidate at University of Central Florida. She can most regularly be found roaming the country for inspiration. Find her on Twitter at @discoeternal and read about her travels at www.lexisenior.com.

JIMMY AND HIDEKI TALK IT OVER — KANA PHILIP

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Jimmy Bartleman held his finger to his lips.
             “Shhh,” he said.
             The machine clunked and whirred as it came on, lighting up three bright blue LEDs.
             “I’m being serious,” Hideki said.
             “I know. So am I.”
             Hideki looked across a white meadow to the little beach town curling along the water and ran a comb through his black hair. “What I’m trying to say is, they have names for everything now. Know what I mean? Named it all, right down to the last bit.” He put the comb in his back pocket and made a chopping motion. “Extraterrestrial visits? Weather balloons, they analyzed the footage. Sea Monsters? We’ve been to the bottom of the ocean, nothing there. You got a new invention? Google it. Someone already had it,” he waved one finger in the air. “Ever tightening circles...”
             “Shhh,” said Jimmy. “You hear it now?" He adjusted the machine and the LED’s spun faster. "I think I hear it!”
             The wind pushed rows of nothing through the field.
             “I don’t know,” said Hideki. He cocked his head.
             Jimmy held his breath. His ears grew tired but he heard nothing. “I guess it’s gone.”
             Hideki was combing his hair again, “It never was.”
             In the distant town, tiny white gulls fought over McDonalds trash.
             “Everything’s been figured out, Jimmy. No room.”
             “That’s what you keep saying.” He shut the machine down and pulled his bike out of the tall meadow grass. ”I’m going home. You're depressing today.”
             “It’s not me that’s depressing, its all this” Hideki waved his hands around at nothing.

***

Jimmy stood in the shower for ten minutes. He opened the bedroom window, sat on his roof and watched the lights of the little town blinking out in the darkness. A pale finger of reflected moonlight shivered in the ocean, pointing, pointing.

Kana Philip was born in the great state of Michigan. He currently splits time between up and down state New York, where he is the creative director and co-founder of a mobile media startup.

THE END, IN THREE ACTS — EMMA WILSON

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1.
Walking to church, the birds crank circles in a flat, low sky. I’d like to shoot one with my rifle, drape it like bastard pearls around your neck. I knew I’d fall hard for someone born in May or named it, the way you hurtle towards the heart of something like the ocean deep-throating a plane. Everyone mentions the weather before bad news. Before bed I touch myself and think It’ll rain tomorrow. Everyone misses out. I moan and a black hole opens on my palm. I come to visions of birds dropping from the clouds, gagged by acid rain.

 

2.
I lost it in an abandoned trailer. It hurt; frost and ash collected on the windowpane. He held down my wrists in case they made wings. His whiskers scratched a rash on my neck, a devil’s continent. Afterward, I stole a cigarette from his soft pack. “It’s like talking to an asteroid, being with you,” he said, pulling on his boots. Crunching through the dead fields on my walk home, I shivered, I smoked, I coughed. Later, I ignored my mother when she yelled at me because of the smell. When I boiled my clothes the next day, my underwear predicted a galloping red dawn.

3.
When they sent me away, the ash fell like snow. They strapped me down and I wanted to run away to Antarctica with you, every morning skating on wild ice. After sex we could lift our shirts, scrape off more fat to burn. Maybe Antarctica is where we came from, the land where we were full. Let us rewrite our origin stories: Me, I was born packed in snow. My mother cut the umbilical cord with her teeth, said it tasted like horse hooves. And you came with crystals dotting your collarbone, a full beard covered in frost. We crawled from our mothers and chose our own names, blue though we were.

Emma Wilson is a writer and editor living in Central Illinois. Her poetry has appeared in Magma Poetry, and she blogs about creative recovery at mentalthrillness.com. 

NAME DROPPING — CHRIS CAMPANIONI

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Story of your life                      

                           Or three minutes & forty-five seconds ago, later, until you switch tracks on the M, the part where we go above ground, rising higher through clouds, sky, factories repurposed as luxury lofts, pipelines intact, autographed with an artist’s insignia, anonymous warnings, a sign that says

   THIS IS A SAFE SPACE

   PLEASE KEEP IT FRIENDLY & NICE

There are two types of people (amid the image of the Hudson rippling through brown-gray glass; everything caked with specks as in an old film): ones who float down the river & ones who are the river (deep breath, switch track). Unable to ever really choose a hymn to play to its end even as the end nears, a fascination with strangers, places & names dropping at the speed of the brief recess between chorus & refrain—Did you hear? People talk & people talking through typing, fingers poised as on a trigger, each in our own seat keeping to ourselves. Silent except for the trembling of the train car, only its trembling to give           

   Gap, break, interlude

Only one more stop to go, a pause & prayer for permanence & permeance, to be everywhere

& all at once, to be all the time as if a liquid, what you always wished for even as a child, one lone tear traversing a cheek (rub it out, or in). You’re feeling the feeling of feeling’s return, where you find yourself when you think no one is looking. Because you could not stop you kept moving, at least through the mix you made, sixty-three seconds till eternity curated to turn from one thing to another, jubilant/wistful as the sky turns too from pale purple to soot black, equal parts imitation & pastiche of a picture you remember seeing somewhere else. Looking from the Hudson (out of view, with another high-rise-about-to-be but for now a bunch of bricks, scaffolds, skeletal rods, discarded tape, more warnings) to the people on streets, thinking about a line or lines, how we move &what moves us, if not only song, if not only a hand on one’s hip, moving slowly, the sun slowly disappearing again. All that it takes as the disc skips, finishes, repeats.

You could sit like this forever (murmur, respire), slowly disappearing out of you, name dropped to live again as someone else.

I could sit like this forever. Life imitates art, do you know

The meaning of life is to pass it on.

Chris Campanioni’s recent work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Quiddity, and Prelude. His “Billboards” poem that responded to Latino stereotypes and mutable—and often muted—identity in the fashion world was awarded the 2013 Academy of American Poets Prize. He co-edits PANK magazine and lives in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

NOW YOU KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MOON — ALISON WISDOM

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Did you pack the small one? Did you make sure it isn’t so full that it can’t close all the way?
             Yes. That’s very good. We’re going out tonight, and it will be dark. It will still be nighttime, and the sun won’t be up.
             I know what I said before. But listen—It wasn’t true. You know the moon? Of course you know the moon, I’m sorry. I know you are very clever. I know you have eyes.
             The moon. It doesn’t actually make the dead rise. The moon is up, right this second, and the dead are still in the ground. And the moon can’t call any wolves. There are no witches. But this is true, so listen. Okay. Go pull back the curtain, just a little and quick!
             Did you see the moon? And how yellow it was? And bright?
             That’s because there’s gold in the moon. Remember the old stories? Men go crazy for gold. It gets in their blood, and they can’t be rid of it. Do you remember your father’s eyes? How they were green with little specks of gold?
             Your father, the gold got so deep into his blood that it came out his eyes. If you cut him open, liquid gold would come spilling out.
             That’s why he had to leave. It made him crazy. I couldn’t let that happen to you. If you saw the moon for too long, if you went outside, the gold would get in your blood.
             That’s the real reason why you couldn’t leave. I’m sorry I lied to you, but I had to.
             Before we go outside, I need you to climb on my back and hold on, and you’re going to carry your bag on your back. We’ll look like monkeys, each of us with something on our backs. Won’t that be silly?
             There could be monkeys there, where we’re going. I’m not sure. But you must keep your eyes closed because of the moon. No matter what you hear or what I say or what anyone else says. Keep them closed. Even if you smell smoke, like there’s something burning, even if you hear me crying, even if we fall down. If we fall down, then wait. Even if you call my name and I don’t answer. Even if you hear fireworks and you want to see them. You can’t. Keep your eyes closed the whole time. The burning is just from people’s campfires. There are lots of people camping. They’re keeping warm because it’s night, and the moon isn’t hot like the sun.
             If I’m crying, it’s because I’m happy that we’re going on such a big adventure together. If we fall down, it’s only because I tripped in the dark.
             It’s okay. I’ll be fine. Anyway, now you know the truth about the moon. So get your bag, and put it on your back.  
             Yes, just like a little monkey. Now here we go.

Alison Wisdom holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her fiction is forthcoming in Indiana Review and appears in Ploughshares, Columbia Journal online, Quiddity, and elsewhere. She lives in Houston, Texas with her husband Josh and daughter Margaux. Find her online at www.alisonwisdom.com.

JUST LIKE MUMMY — SANTINO PRINZI

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When I grow up I’m gonna be just like Mummy. Mummy told me I was gonna have a little brother soon and then her belly got bigger and bigger. Daddy had to help her lots; she was too tired to play with me sometimes. I would walk around with a football or a pillow underneath my t-shirt and pretend to have a large belly just like Mummy. She’d smile and laugh and rub her belly and sometimes she’d make me put my hand on it too and I could feel my baby brother inside. He would kick – he wanted to come out and play, Mummy told me.
             After baby Ben was born Mummy and Daddy bought me a baby doll and a pram so I can push my dolly around like Mummy does. I love Ben and I love my doll which is called Ben too. I fasten him in his pram so he is safe and doesn’t fall out. When Mummy is feeding Ben a bottle of milk I feed my baby doll too. The baby doll makes noises and its eyes open and close when I tilt it. I copy Mummy and rest the baby over my chest and gently rub its back. Baby Ben has fallen asleep and Mummy puts him in his cot, pulls a blankie over him, and watches him sleep; she sometimes smiles and her eyes are always shiny. I’ve looked in the mirror lots of times to see if I can make my eyes go shiny too.
             Tonight Ben is crying so Mummy picks him up from his cot and rocks him in her arms. I do the same. I make the same hush-hush sound Mummy makes and I bounce lightly on the balls of my feet. His crying is getting louder; I make crying sounds too because my baby isn’t real and can’t cry any louder. Ben won’t stop crying and Mummy’s face is red and she starts crying too. I want to be just like Mummy so I pretend to cry. I mimic Mummy’s panting. Mummy yells get to bed. I go away with dolly and I hide behind the door because I need to see what Mummy does to make Ben cry if I’m gonna grow up to be like Mummy. I imagine another me which I mime shouting at so I can be just like Mummy.
             Through the crack in the door I watch Mummy lay Ben on the sofa, so I rest my baby on the floor. His little arms and legs are thrashing up and down. Mummy is still crying as she grabs Ben’s blue blankie, folds it into a rectangle, and holds it over his face. She presses it down hard as if she is trying to touch the floor through the sofa. She’s sobbing lots. Ben is getting quieter and quieter.
             I run and find my blankie so I can be just like Mummy and make my baby sleep too.

Santino Prinzi is currently an English Literature with Creative Writing student at Bath Spa University, and was awarded the 2014/15 Bath Spa University Flash Fiction Prize. His flash fiction and prose poetry has been published, or is forthcoming, in various places including Litro Online, Flash Frontier, the 2014 and 2015 National Flash Fiction Day (UK) anthologies, Unbroken Literary Journal, and has been selected for The Best of Vine Leaves Journal 2015.  His website is https://tinoprinzi.wordpress.com and his Twitter is @tinoprinzi.