CHILDHOOD — XENIA TAIGA

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Me:
five, six; frozen stiff in my chair. My heart is a beating, the eyes are big and then I'm blinded. The images burned, branded in my head. The fist. The angry face. Blood spraying from cracked lips. The torn skin, the ripped-eye socket. The skin shredding. The skin still shredding.

Me:
sitting in math class. My head empty, my stomach full of tatter tots and pink-slime chicken strips. The eyes drowsy. The classmates’ heads turning into little dots that I use to dot my papers and then those fists, that mouth, the angry face, the scream. I clasp my lips together. My muscles clench, my toes curl. Everything inside is pinching and strangling, till at the sound of the bell I release it all.

Me:
in the back yard looking at the dog. The white fluffy dog, the black and brown markings up and down his back. The silence of the hot afternoon. The dog whimpering. The adults laughing. The beating and beating till there is nothing left, but skin and some fur with mushy-red, pink stuff oozing like there is no tomorrow.

Me:
at the bank. Five ahead of us. The clock ticking. The time slipping. The anger growing and then the fists, the beatings, the ripped-eye socket, the bloody chains, the saws, the clanking and slashing. The hands tightening. The ideas. My mother looks at me, frowning. No, I wouldn’t do anything, mama. I’d just watch. I’d say it’s for fun and later ask her for a manicure, then I’ll ask dad to play paintball so we can go BAM! BOOM! You’re dead! Then I’ll tell YOU to wait because you’re next.

Xenia Taiga lives in southern China with a cockatiel and an Englishman. http://xeniataiga.com/

VACATIONS OF THE COUNTRY — JOE LUCIDO

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The neighbors have all gone.
             I can’t help but think they vacationed early because of what happened last week in the neighboring Historic District, when on that Sunday night the blood moon shone, and we were watching it rise and plump as if pumping with blood and readying Earth for a kiss. Wet branches yellowed everywhere, and we were out here, me alone but not isolated, in proximity of these neighbors, who leave their homes of the country every year to be more of the country themselves. We were barking at the blood moon, and the blood moon shone through the clouds, even, and the power lines and radio waves of the country were brimming with howls, our communicative arterial walls plaqued with our hoarding. We were making dinner and standing in our lawns, and on the other side of the streetlight, the Historic District was doing the same, except for one empty historic house, the one that flies the rebel flag, the house which was painted white and tinted red under the moon. Autumn had come, and we were full of something like awe, and then came the shattering of the windowpanes of the empty historic house.
             A girl not of this neighborhood was covered in blood. She said, This is my house.
             We said, Are you all right? Blood ran from her shoulders to her fingertips. She did not sound like anything, like the brokenhearted neighbor or his kenneled dogs. We met her eyes in which the blood moon shone as she walked around the corner of the house to try another window. Her eyes conveyed nothing. We said, Do you need help?
             She said, No. Her voice was not of any country. She turned back to the window and went through it like it was a gaseous, trans-dimensional gate, but it was not that. It was a sheet of glass in a historic house of the country, and then, dragging her blood soaked body to the couch, she clutched a yellow throw pillow and squeezed shut her eyes. She lay in the dark, her blood dappling the historic wood floor, and we stood stone still in the quiet of the country.
             The blood moon shone everywhere, even through the clouds. We called the police. The girl was taken away in an ambulance. The windows of the empty historic house were boarded up until the owners came back from their own vacation of the country, and then the girls who live across the street boarded one window of their own from the inside, then another, and maybe realized it wasn’t enough, couldn’t possibly be, and left, being there is only so much one can take and so much to take everywhere.
             The empty historic house was not the girl who bled there’s home. We do not know her name. We do not know where she is now, where she was before. We are not always where we think we are.

Joe Lucido is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. Some recent stories appear or are forthcoming in Passages North, Wigleaf, Booth, WhiskeyPaper, Hobart, and others. He grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis.

HAILSTONES — HANNAH HARLOW

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The hailstones, when they finally fell, looked more like the remains of an exploded ice planet, once large, decimated even more by flight and atmosphere, and now here were the comparatively tiny remains. Why did everyone always say golf balls? The hailstones came exactly when I needed to leave the house; you knew they would. You told me once you'd never seen hailstones and I reminded you of that summer when you were a baby and the hail came and destroyed our roof and the insurance company wouldn't pay for a new one because they said that's not the kind of insurance we had. We don't normally see weather like that here; how was I supposed to know what to get? I was so young and there was so little money, it’s lucky we had any insurance at all really. I moved your crib into the living room where it was too bright and you slept poorly, which meant I slept poorly, and I taught myself how to fix the roof in the nursery. It took more months than I care to say, more than nine.
             You reminded me you were just a baby, so how would you remember a thing like that? I still thought having once carried you in my womb meant we would always be able to read each other's minds.

Hannah Harlow has an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She promotes books for a living and lives near Boston.You can find her online at hannahharlow.com. 

FINGERLESS GLOVES — IAN DENNING

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We both graduated from high school that June and took jobs at the Sizzler by the mall. A year off for each of us. Your skinny arms stuck out of your Sizzler polo. When you talked, your blonde ponytail bounced and vibrated. So much energy bound up there behind the soup bar. We didn't know each other in May, but by July we were best friends.

I was seeing Chris who ran the grill. Evenings after work we turned on the box fans and banged in his little basement apartment, and afterward he fried fish in his cast-iron, naked, hot grease spitting and pinking his stomach. You and me and Torno who worked the counter all piled into Chris's tricked-out Honda, hotboxed it, and rolled up Southcenter Parkway, blasting Biggie, a glittering fireball. You rapped along, little white blonde thing. I looked at you, bouncing in the back seat, and felt all the bones in my face.

We showed up for brunch service hung over, smiling in complicity, knowing that beneath this morning—the slow families and black coffee and Gilbert sliding across the floor like oil in a skillet, glad-handing the customers—beneath this morning was a night we shared. Neon lights slick on the hood. Brown bottles in one apartment party or another. The smell of futons. Laughing your voice away.

I went to college the next fall and your year off turned into two, then three, then you were a bartender, then you were a manager at a different restaurant. When I was twenty-five, I figured out that I liked women just as much as I liked men and suddenly it made sense, like a Magic Eye emerging from colorful noise, how I would sit in Chris's Honda, my hand on his thigh, smelling of him but smiling at you. How we were high at work once, slicing open boxes in the freezer, and you said, “You know what I love about fingerless gloves?” and I said, “What?” and you said, “They keep your finger webbing warm, but they don't give a shit about your fingertips.” And I laughed and you reached out your hand, fingertips poking from the fraying yarn, and I kissed them. How they were blue and soft.

Ian Denning's work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Washington Square Review, Tin House's Open Bar, the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. He edits prose for the Lettered Streets Press and fiction for Pacifica Literary Review. Ian lives in Seattle, tweets at @iandenning85, and can be found online at ian-denning.com.

WAR MUSE — JEN KNOX

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Then the day came that his feet became shovels. It happened on his sixtieth. There was screaming near midnight. The First Lady ran to grab ice as a black car waited and the hospital room was prepared. 
             The flesh of his toes turned an angry red. The skin peeled away, and when the cold metal revealed itself, POTUS felt no more pain. His legs were heavier after the shift. 
             Other world leaders sent bundles of flowers and sympathy cards that POTUS pitched across the room, one by one.
             Doctors were puzzled. The best surgeons advised against intervention. The worst of them offered to remove the feet above the ankle where a rod had formed, then rebuild in hopes it wouldn’t happen again. Prosthetics designers were called in from around the world.
             Meanwhile, the president’s condition inspired a barrage of sketches that, ultimately, led to models for next-generation drones, underground deals that could shave away earth and find terrorism from below.
             POTUS dragged along, then learned to power ahead like a machine. His grandchildren loved that he could move sand at the beach in such an efficient way. He scooped water and tossed it their way, and a lucky photographer got the shot. The photo inspired a nation.
             The news got a lot wrong, and the more immediate the reportage, the more eager the reporters. POTUS used his shovel feet to distract as he commanded his new underground army via a smartphone application.
             Two years to the day it appeared, the metal began to retract. Slowly, POTUS’ iron levels increased and his body broke down the waste. The flesh regenerated like a lizard tail. He wiggled his smooth toes. His wife pinched his big toe, leaving a white mark that quickly faded. 
             The lightness in his legs caused POTUS to feel peace and, therefore, want peace for the world.
             World leaders did not send cards when they heard news of the miracle. The sneak attacks had gone too far, tunneling into the ground and surfacing only to aggravate areas of unrest.
             POTUS worried that the shovels had affected his judgment. He shared the worry with his wife, and she admitted he hadn’t been himself.
             Neither of them screamed when his fingers split at the creases, when the blades began to form. The pain was ephemeral, but the impact would be felt for decades.  

Jen Knox is the author of After the Gazebo (Rain Mountain Press, 2015). She directs Gemini Ink's Writers in Communities Program and works as a freelance writer and writing coach in San Antonio. Jen recently completed her first novel. Connect with Jen at www.jenknox.com

THE STRONGEST MAN ON EARTH — MICHAEL MUNGIELLO

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A dancing bear for East Orange was what I was. Fridays I’d score goals on the fucked-up soccer field. Saturdays I’d recite cantos from The Divine Comedy in my great-aunt’s garden to an audience of drunks. I masturbated crouched under the bathroom sink, wads like chewed-up bubble gum on its curved marble underside. I shared the bed with two newborn brothers and recited my name to lull them to sleep. Once I found a worm in our laundry. I tried to stick it up my older sister’s nose and my mother caught me and threw the worm into the toilet. This happened twice.
             The first time I met a prostitute I was sixteen. She shook my hand, then wiped her fingers on her mini-skirt. I imagined reading the first time I had sex. Then I actually read from a book the second time I had sex, the first time I was able to come. William Carlos Williams’ Paterson.
             Harvard was the only college my parents had ever heard of, so it was the only college I ever wanted to go to. I applied to Harvard and then a few weeks later I opened the letter, having known since I got out of bed that morning it’d be a rejection. I began smoking more, doing steroids, spent whole days down the shore. My dad got sick. There were problems with his liver. His whole face turned yellow. Some days it looked green. I stopped smoking but did more steroids and had more sex.
             I got engaged to a girl I met at a roller-rink. She worked at a hair salon, until her doctor put her on bedrest. Pregnant. My mom and sister helped a little bit but not enough. Anyway, what they really had to offer I didn’t want. I started sending stories out for publication and sold popcorn at the movie theater underneath our apartment. Every Sunday night they would show a Fellini. I could hear them all from my concession stand, but my Italian was slipping away from me and I couldn’t understand what most of it meant. I’d forgotten Dante. Most of the people I’d performed for were dead.
             I didn’t want to go anywhere else if Harvard wouldn’t have me. By the time I would’ve been driving to I don’t know Rutgers in my dead dad’s tiny Chevy, my fiancé was in labor.
             Bike horns and beach balls. My son slid out like a seal.

Michael Mungiello is from New Jersey. His work is published or forthcoming in Nanoism, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Short Fiction Break, and Construction Literary Magazine.

FOOLS GIVE YOU REASONS — SARAH SCHIFF

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The aquamarine paper mask obscured the bottom half of the nurse’s face, but her eyes sparkled brown beneath ink-coated lashes.  The doctor regretted not weeding his salt-and-pepper monobrow.  The top of your face assumes so much responsibility for expression when you work in a hospital.
             The man on the table was mumbling—something about needing to stop.  Not many people enjoy a rubber tube up the ass, and even fewer must like it when it’s a welcome-to-middle-age medical procedure.
             The doctor wondered what the nurse liked.  He wondered if she loved her new husband—the man wasn’t much to look at, the doctor thought, but packed a lot in the wallet.
             So many marriages are forged out of something other than love.
             He wondered if he still loved his own wife, if there was a point to their communal existence now that the kids were grown and gone. 
             “Leave it alone!”  The man on the table was yelling now, not unheard of, but the doctor was intrigued by the unexpected.  The nurse increased the dosage of the twilight drugs then quieted the man with a pat on the back and a shushing sound.  The doctor imagined her lips in the shape of a kiss as he maneuvered the tube deeper.
             “Looking good,” the doctor said, tilting his head toward the screen televising the man’s lower intestine.  The nurse met the doctor’s eyes, then looked away.
             His heart lurched, and he imagined them together, smuggled in a mothy, anonymous freeway motel.  The thrill under covers.
             An aeolian moan escaped from the patient’s mouth.  He was bald except a ring of white hair around the base of his skull.  With the glow of the florescent lights, it looked like a halo.
             The nurse cleared her throat, her eyes angled toward the screen.  A polyp pulsed red and menacing.  The doctor welcomed the opportunity to brandish his electric wire.  “It’s pretty beastly.  Can you bring me the snare and cautery?”  He hadn’t meant to rhyme and winced at the echo.
             “What euphony,” she said, bringing him the mirrored tray.  He tried to convey a smirk through his eyes, a return of her witty flirtation.  But also to play it safe.  Coded flirtation may not be flirtation at all, but the doctor knew from experience that it usually was.
             The man on the table was mumbling again, fidgeting too.  Reluctant to begin the polypectomy with such a mutinous patient, the doctor opened his mouth to call for nitrous.
             “Stop that right now.”  The patient’s words were sober and clear, punctuated like the bullet points of a lecture.  
             The doctor heard the words, and the patient exhaled and lay still.
             When the doctor handed the nurse the seared polyp, she sealed it in the orange bag and asked him where he was eating.  The doctor pretended not to hear, said goodbye to the sleeping patient with his eyes, and left the room.  He was going home to his wife for lunch.

Sarah Schiff earned her PhD in American literature from Emory University but is now a fugitive from higher education.  She writes short fiction and teaches high school English in Atlanta.  Her essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, and Arizona Quarterly.

ONE OF OUR MORE SERIOUS POETS — TARA ROEDER

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She’s one of our more serious poets.  Seventeen affairs and counting.  (Several with Russians.)  Since 2003 and on a daily basis she has produced from 5:17 a.m. to 7:03 a.m. on a slice of gravlax and a cracked mug of black coffee.

Her tiny daughter Sophia Maria goes to a Montessori school.

No flippant ball of energy, no kittenish ingénue, she excavates deeply.  Her work washes over you like a brilliant benediction (claimed one reviewer), and leaves you panting and jealous.  Not a word is wasted.  Her vocabulary stalks you.

But she looks so good too.  The dirty sweater dresses.  The smudged, seven hundred dollar glasses.  That little V shaved on the back of her head.

Fuck.

Tara Roeder is an Associate Professor of Writing Studies in New York City.  Her work has appeared in multiple venues including Monkeybicycle, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Bombay Gin, and Haggard and Halloo.  Her chapbook is forthcoming from dancing girl press.