DOCTOR DIAPERS — CRAIG FISHBANE

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I was born with a stethoscope around my neck. I grabbed the scalpel from the scrub nurse in order to cut my own umbilical cord. They slapped me with malpractice insurance to make me cry. Then I was swathed in prescription pads and rubber gloves. My mother gave me an otoscope to suck on. My father made a teddy bear out of tongue depressors. I kept an x-ray of myself as an imaginary friend and juggled specimen cups when I got lonely at night. During the three days I spent at the hospital, I attended seminars on brain surgery, forensic psychology and the advantages of taking payments on an installment plan. I spoke my first words on the morning that I came home. As my parents lowered both me and my pager into a crib, I gurgled how I didn’t think I was cut out for medical school and that I was better suited to be a nurse practitioner instead. I watched my parents pick up one sterile instrument after the next from my bassinette and throw each one onto the floor. Once my mother and father had succeeded in smashing every piece of equipment, from the articulator to the tubing clamps, they both wet themselves, bawling without respite until, finally, they cried themselves to sleep.

Craig Fishbane is the author of On the Proper Role of Desire (Big Table Publishing). His work has also appeared in the New York Quarterly, Bartleby Snopes, Gravel, Drunken Boat and The Nervous Breakdown. He can be contacted at his website:  https://craigfishbane.wordpress.com/

WELCOME LETISIA CRUZ — ASSISTANT EDITOR

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It was an exhaustive search—seriously, thank you all for your interest in the position!—but we're excited to introduce our new Assistant Editor, Letisia Cruz!

Letisia brings with her a wealth of experience in publishing, she's a talented writer, and we couldn't be more pleased to welcome her to the CHEAP POP family.

Get to know about her below! Yay!

Letisia Cruz is a Cuban-American writer and artist. Her writing and artwork have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Acentos Review, Gulf Stream, Moko Caribbean Arts and Letters, Ink Brick and the Writing Disorder, and her chapbook Chonga Nation was selected as a finalist in the 2016 Gazing Grain Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University and currently lives in Miami, Florida. She serves as Resident Artist and Co-editor at Petite Hound Press and Online Poetry Re-Features Editor at The Literary Review. Find her online at www.lesinfin.com.

VOID — ADAM GIANFORCARO

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I can still feel its heat, the smell of burnt hair after you placed your arm in its opening. How I called your name into its mouth, as if you were still able to hear me. As if the wormhole had a belly. As if it was a great sperm whale and you an old man, a cat, a goldfish, a puppet. 

The sour smell of ozone forever lingers on my mustache, even when I shave it off and it grows back anew. 

Its mouth—the dark darker than dark. How you stretched thin, and were gone. 

We were barely twenty then. Back when we watched Darren Aronofsky’s Pi in your dorm room. Back when we cuddled together on your twin bed while your roommate was home on weekends. 

You said you were going to tell your parents about us. Soon, you said. Soon, and then you left. 

If I could condense space-time. If I could pull it like a string. If I could just get it to bend. 

It’s strange how hope still clings to truth like some parasitic wish. Like I could just stumble upon another opening, another access, somewhere in the park by the water tower, or in the changing room at some store. I still look everywhere. 

And what if I was to find one? What if I tripped over myself and stretched like taffy into the void? Would you recognize me right away? Would you believe how long it’s been? Would you understand how the years have passed? How they’ve passed with the heaviness of a wet blanket? 

But what if I really was to find one? What if it was just there again? After I’ve sketched equations on forests of notebooks, consulted hundreds of scientists, maniacs, broken fingernails scratching at graph paper, killing myself just to find patterns in the ripples of skipped stones—what if it was just suddenly there again? 

All these years. All these years. 

And for you, my dear boy, you’re probably still in a state of shock, just mere seconds after it happened. How time is different where you are. How if I saw you today, your face would still be smooth from your morning shave. 

I ask myself: Would you be distorted from the weight inside? I ask myself: Would you still be you? 

If only I could get back to the beginning. If only I could rediscover you on some miscreant thread of string theory. You in your green t-shirt and the smell of Barbasol on your skin. Just like you were, and simultaneously, precisely, just like you are.

Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the poetry collection Morning Time in the Household, Looking Out and children’s picture book Uma the Umbrella. His work can be found in Hippocampus Magazine, Kentucky Review, The Los Angeles Review, Sundog Lit, Potluck and others. 

REPLACING MYSELF WITH THE COLOR BLUE — LEAH LEINBACH

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It is 1996. The city is at an insomniac flavored standstill with itself. Imagine the moon exploding and no one witnessing it.

It is 2005.  The cacti are thirsty and you have never been in love. You thought you maybe felt it once. But she was fleeting, just like the seasons. You wake up and can’t remember the color of her eyes.  You think of the equator a lot.  And order in Thai food.

It is 2013 and sexting is happening. You don’t own a television and forget that you have a shadow sometimes.

(when it concerns you, I put a pillow that you slept on, over my face)

We were in the same bed once, but you barely noticed. You said you wanted to get married one day and then you fell asleep and went to work and never mentioned it again. 

It is 2016.

I felt you on the street today. And I knew you didn’t want to feel my shape.

So I hid behind a car and a little girl asked me why I was hiding and I told her that there are some things in life I cannot face. Tornadoes, the death of hummingbirds and you. She told me I was sad and I told her to find her mother.

It is still 2016 and this is what I have become. 

Leah Leinbach is currently residing in Portland, Oregon where she spends her days trying to talk to trees, babies and dogs, wishing she could speak their language. She prefers the ocean to most things and wishes she slept more.

CECILIA'S FLOOD — MICHAEL PATRICK BRADY

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When my great aunt Josephine died, her executor informed me that I was now the proud owner of a dugout canoe made by the Chinook peoples of the Pacific Northwest, circa 1897. “Maybe you can donate it to a museum,” he said, aware that Cecilia and I occupied a third-floor walk-up in a building with no elevator. But Cecilia wouldn’t hear of it. “You don’t understand,” she said, cryptically. “There’s going to be a flood.”
             A few weeks later, I came home from work to find her sitting in the canoe, holding a small, red neoprene lifejacket. “Where did that come from?” I asked. “The postman brought it instead of the margarita maker we ordered,” she said. “It’s for a dog.” We argued for hours, but nothing could change her mind. “There are no accidents,” she said. “You know that.”
             We scoured the kennels, finally settling on a cinnamon Chow Chow who fit the vest perfectly. “Bellissima,” cooed the kennel master, “Little Cenerentola.” Cecilia walked her for hours, looking for the next clue. Books on the breed littered the canoe, their pages drenched in neon yellow highlights. “I’m getting closer,” Cecilia said. “I can feel it.”
             In bed, I pondered how long this obsession had really been going on. “Cici, darling,” I said. “When we met at Nantasket and you bought me that Coke. Was it because I was the lifeguard?” She smiled, and kissed me. “Why is anybody attracted to anybody?” she asked, then turned out the light.
             I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of crying. Cecilia was sobbing in the canoe, clutching Little Cenerentola.
             “Who died?” I asked.
             Cecilia shook her head. “It came to me in a dream,” she said. “When the flood comes—I think we’re supposed to eat her.”

Michael Patrick Brady is a writer from Boston. His work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Phoenix. Find him at www.michaelpatrickbrady.com.

THE INHERITANCE — MATTHEW K. THIBEAULT

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Maybe you’ve heard about these people who have a lot of cats and how sometimes their cats eat them after they die. That really happened to my mother, twenty cats, something like that. And they didn’t just take a few bites out of her.
             She had been dying in and out of the hospital for months and one day she just stopped going. This is what they told me, that she stopped showing up and there was nothing they could do. The hospital has to respect a person’s decision not to deal with their health.
             So, all right, she wanted to forget about dying so she could relax in her apartment and die. I should have been checking on her more often. The fact that her cats ate her is terrible, but it’s not like they killed her. She was dead. She loved the cats. In a weird way she may have wanted it, or at least preferred it to letting them starve.
             But the point is that all of the cats survived. People don’t just swing by and clean everything up. Sure, they take away the body, but it’s the family that does everything else.
             I don’t know what I was expecting when I got there, like whether I’d somehow forgotten about the cats or what, but I open the door and there are twenty-something starving cats looking at me.
             What happened was that she had one cat that was never fixed and wound up adopting a stray and that stray knocked up her original cat and so on. Twenty or so inbred cats, all because my mother couldn’t be bothered to spend fifty bucks at the vet.
             The place smelled awful, like something sweet mixed with bleach and paint thinner. I didn’t know what to do. They surrounded me. Their collective meowing was like an air-raid siren from hell.
             I found my mother’s stockpile of tinned cat food, opened a few tins, and whipped them around the apartment before I ran out the door. I had to get rid of those clothes. It took three showers to get the smell out of my pores.          
             I’ve done this a few times now. A friend who paints cars lent me a mask. I’m not sure who to call or what to do about these cats. I don’t even know how to start packing up my mother’s junk. The stockpile of tins is running low and I’ve already paid an extra month on her rent. The neighbours are starting to complain about the smell and the meowing, and my mother’s landlord has been leaving messages on my phone. I’m worried I’ll be charged with animal cruelty or neglect or something. At the very least they’re going to try to make me pay for some cleaners to come in. The carpet is finished. They’ll never get the smell out of there.

Matthew K. Thibeault's stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in F(r)iction, The Globe and Mail, and The Malahat Review. He received the 2015 Ernest Hemingway Prize from Fiction Southeast. He attends the University of Victoria and spends his summers in Dawson City, Yukon.

AN EXPERIMENTAL APOLOGY LETTER — ALLY WHARTON

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I’m sorry that your first love made you feel higher than the vodka you tried at thirteen when I thought I knew you better.  I’m sorry that I learned to hate him more than the girl who hit me so hard that my ears rang louder than your laughter.  I’m sorry it didn’t work out, and that he deserved so much better than you.  I’m sorry my friend of eight years told you I was mad when I wasn’t.  I’m sorry I believed her shifting eyes that wouldn’t meet my own and took her fragility as an apology.  I’m sorry I became close to people that care about me.  I’m sorry I left homecoming crying because I couldn’t handle the noise and went home and threw up.  I’m sorry I gave up because I thought you were happier without me.  I’m sorry your father is a stranger and your mother married a man that you don’t even know.  I’m sorry you don’t know Hemingway.  I’m sorry I knew you’d fail out of biology.  I’m sorry that you don’t know how to spell “writer” and that I am one.  I’m sorry I’ve taken all the blame and let you walk free of the chains that drug me down for a year while I did nothing but wonder what I had done wrong.  I’m sorry you never got to see me cry, but I’m so proud you get to see I’m unbroken.

Ally Wharton is sixteen years old and currently resides in Charles Town, West Virginia. She spends much of her time reading, writing, or furthering her obsession with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. You can find her on Twitter @ally_wharton.

MY TEACHERS TOLD ME TO BE CAREFUL WITH THE FIRST PERSON — KAJ TANAKA

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My teachers told me to be careful with the first person. They spoke of it like an addiction that, once begun, is difficult to control. Once a character begins observing the world directly, where is the filter? What’s to stop every inane thought from creeping in? And beyond that, the first person is a selfish point of view. It is only good for the confession booth.

My teachers told me to be careful with the first person. Personal tragedy is a luxury. The depth of one’s tragedy is proportionate to one’s prosperity. Those who truly suffer do not have the time or volition to frame their narrative as tragic, comic or anything else. They do not have the energy to carry their story up a hill and plant it in the ground. Beware the memoir and other first person accounts of tragedy—in those accounts, be always on the lookout for concealed wealth and privilege.

My teachers told me to be careful with the first person. No one wants to hear your complaints, they told me after reading one of my more raunchy tell-alls. No one cares about your life. Just tell us a story. Use the third person. It’s a much more robust point of view. The third person is the eye of the gods. It was good enough for Dickens. Even Jesus Christ tried to avoid the first person; that’s why people liked him so much.

My teachers told me to be careful with the first person. Look at Augustine, look at Apuleius, look at Lucian, look at Whitman—all rich misfits, all pathetic, all the butt of someone else’s joke. To write in the first person is to be the set up for someone else’s punch line. You’re Rocky, my teacher said after reading one of my stories, you just keep getting hit. See what happens, she warned me. Just keep writing about your wife—see where that gets you.

My teachers told me to be careful with the first person. You are a writer, they told me; your life will never be as interesting as you want it to be. Just die in a memorable way. It’ll be the best thing for all of us. You’ll get your story, only it’ll be someone else writing it, and that way it will be in the third person, the way it always should have been. And anyway, death is a great adventure. Don't be frightened. Death is no tragedy. It isn't personal.

Kaj Tanaka’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Volume 1 Brooklyn, PANK and Joyland, and he has been featured on Wigleaf's (very) short fictions list. Kaj is the nonfiction editor at BULL. He tweets @othrrealppl.