MIRROR BALL — RON GIBSON, JR.

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An old man leans forward, hugging a hand-hewn fence rail against his chest, sun bombing down the hillside behind him, and says to his shadow, "Remember that girl I was madly in love with?"
             His shadow remains silent, a film negative on yellowing grass amid flickering leaves from trees.
             "Remember that girl I made love to, and felt my body lifting out of itself to float in an ocean of night, wreathed in her beautiful light, stars like teeth devouring me whole, until I was nothing?"
             His shadow mirrors the old man's shoulders in a sigh, and finally says, "I do."
             The old man sofly smiles, and says, "Let's moon over her for a while."
             His shadow says nothing, wind scattering rags of shade across the land like wild Appaloosas in full stride.

**

An old woman leans forward against the kitchen sink, peering out the window, sun wreathing her in light, when her shadow asks from the linoleum tile, "Remember that boy you were madly in love with?"
             The old woman is silent, lost in the flickering light of a film projector in her mind.
             "Remember that boy you made love to, and showed your magic and the stars to, holding onto one another, naked, shivering on the moon of Europa, until you became whole?"
             The old woman's shoulders mirrors her shadow's sigh, and finally says, "I do."
             Before the shadow proceeds to speak, a soft smile materializes on the old woman's face, "He's mooning over me again, isn't he?"
             Her shadow says, "He is."
             "Let him moon for a while. He does so like to moon."
             The old woman adjusts her glasses, watching time scatter around the old man and his shadow like wild Appaloosas in full stride, before adding, "Then tell him supper's ready and he'll stop."

Ron Gibson, Jr. has previously appeared in Pidgeonholes, Maudlin House, The Vignette Review, Ghost City Review, Word Riot, Cease Cows, Spelk Fiction, Firefly Magazine, Ink in Thirds, Gravel Magazine, Unbroken Journal, etc…, forthcoming at Foliate Oak Magazine, been included in various anthologies, and been nominated for two Pushcarts. @sirabsurd

SOFT HISTORY — TAYLOR BOSTICK

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I step over Maggie and sit down at your desk. You have two e-mails from someone named Steve. The first one says: “If you can come, come.” The second is blank. I wonder if it was eventually meant to say something, whether you have an artifact of an infinite brainstorm, a sliver of reality frozen before revealing its brilliance—a photograph of a child’s face just before the punchline of a joke (or at any point in her life)—or a simple mistake. I get the same feeling at museums sometimes, looking at ancient things. That carving on a satin pillow behind bullet-proof glass: proof of the prominence of religion in society? Or: had bone, had chisel, liked looking at animals and imagining them with wings? I get it lying next to you sometimes, too. Your words, your promises, the key to your apartment: proof of my prominence in you? Or: had extra pillow, had extra key, needed a pair of shoulders to stand on to make you feel like you can fly?
             I hit REPLY ALL to the second e-mail and type: “If I can, I will. If I can’t, I might. If I’m dead, you’ll know by the smoke.” I press SEND. Almost. I’m not the kind of person who’s brave enough to say things. I mark the e-mails as unread and close your computer and walk over to your window, tapping Maggie on the head as I go, and she stirs, though I can’t say for sure she feels anything. I wonder sometimes if I’m more than a dream to her. I open your window and lean out until my feet are off your floor and I’m balancing on your sill. I wonder if I should have responded. I wonder if you know who Steve is. I wonder if I should have more answers at this point in my life. I decide you don’t know Steve but that I should have responded, that he meant to e-mail you, you and me and everyone, wanted us all together to tell us in person he’s figured it out, solved religion and hunger and peace and learned everything about history and not just the hard things but the soft things too, the skin and paper and dance and love things. The things that don’t survive a thousand years in the dirt. The things I’m not sure will survive in you. Maybe Steve is our savior. If not some guy named Steve on the internet, then who?
             Outside your apartment, a cardinal is singing. There’s always a cardinal singing. They have three or four different songs, and just when I think I’ve heard something new, they appear from the trees in a burst of red as if to say, it’s me, it’s always been me.

Taylor Bostick is from Alexandria, Virginia. His degree from Virginia Tech is in civil engineering, though his parents can’t help but notice he likes to write more than the other engineers. His fiction has previously appeared in the Rappahannock Review, and he’s currently working on a biography of someone you’ve never heard of. 

A FIVE-POINTED FAILED PAPER LOVE WEAPON — BETH GILSTRAP

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You wear your hair down and your brother’s jeans the day the only boy you date freshman year staples himself in the chest. You are still sticky from gym because you can never bring yourself to shower in front of people, but you hope the perfume you stole masks it enough. You blot your cheeks, nose, and chin before you see him on the path to yearbook.
             When you try to speak to the boy, to tell him you want to take his boots home to your room to eat, to put your forefinger on his eyelids and absorb the image you know can’t be unseen, the one of his friend hanging by a chain from a dogwood, how the gravel sound of his voice makes something in your hipbones crack, how the pain in your chest at night after he finally hangs up must make you the youngest person in the world who suffers heart attacks. But all you can do is touch his skull earring, ask where he got it.
             As he leans you up against the locker, you notice the dust mop smell of the hallway, doors clicking closed, and a few straggling runners trying to make it to class. You are late. You squirm away and dig a knuckle into your sternum. He pulls his own hair.
             Fine. Whatever. I thought you loved me.
             You try to give him the love letter you folded into a star, but he flicks your arm away, sending it sailing to the floor—a failed paper love weapon you lift off the linoleum by two of its five points. In yearbook, you cut pictures and wax them onto mock-up pages. Candid shots of Emily and Allison and Farrah all branded up like race car drivers and lording over each other. No one’s permission ever given or granted to separate. An image of the math nerds lined up eating bag lunches on the floor at the back of the cafeteria. The full page memorium for his friend’s suicide his parents said was an accident. You snip your open palm and watch as your own blood beads. When you see him again after school, he is halfway to his car. You run, your backpack thumping so hard it hurts your shoulders.
             Wait for me, the girl who knows how it feels to bruise herself.
             He turns after he unlocks his car door. On the white lettering of his Black Flag t-shirt, red spots soak through, spaced the width of staples. Seventeen staples equal thirty-four holes. You ask what’s wrong. He tells you you don’t love him. You touch his knee and take a cigarette from the dash. Before he drops you home, he pulls off into an adjacent field. Amid swaying weeds and broken bottles, you kiss all thirty-four of his wounds, wishing he were the first or the last violent man in your life. 

Beth Gilstrap's fiction and essays have appeared in the minnesota review, Literary Orphans, WhiskeyPaper, Synaesthesia Magazine, and Bull, among others. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, storySouth's Million Writers Award, and The Pushcart Prize. She is the author of I AM BARBARELLA (Twelve Winters Press, 2015) and NO MAN'S WILD LAURA (forthcoming in 2016 from Hyacinth Girl Press. She thinks she's crazy lucky to be Fiction Editor of Little Fiction | Big Truths. When she's not writing or editing, you might find her on her porch swing, with a book in one hand and a drink in the other. She lives in Charlotte with her husband and enough rescue pets to make life interesting. 

I HATE EVERYONE IN THIS FAMILY — DYLAN BRIE DUCEY

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Miranda slams the bathroom door so hard that the full length mirror falls onto the floor. Shatters. A million shards of glass. Rage, pain, hate. The problem was that you told her to eat. You wanted her to eat and she didn’t want to eat and you made that outrageous request. That demand.
             “I hate everyone in this family!” she screams, and you want to slap her but you can’t because she has locked the bathroom door. Now the hallway is a mess and the dog is sniffing around with interest. You throw a shoe at the dog. You watch the dog yelp in pain and skulk away, tail tucked between her legs. Miranda will never come out of the bathroom, and if she does the soles of her narrow feet will be sliced to ribbons.
             Miranda’s younger sister cowers in the bedroom. You cannot see her, but through the walls you can feel her fear. She is probably hunched under her desk, blond hair falling over her eyes, and if spoken to she will not respond, she’ll stay mute for hours, days even. Some of us lash out in fear, others fold in upon themselves. Miranda is one who lashes out.
             While you sit helpless in the kitchen, Miranda rages on inside the bathroom. “No one in this family understands me, no one even cares! I hate you, Mommy!” You should get up, get the broom, get the dustpan, but you cannot move. Your ass is cemented to that chair. Maybe if you are quiet this whole fucked-up situation will evaporate, maybe you could take the keys and slip out the back door and maybe you yourself could evaporate. But while you are thinking this shameful thought, the younger one slips noiselessly from her room and appears before you. She points at the broken glass. “Mommy,” she whispers, and her voice is weighted with anxiety. “Mommy.”

Dylan Brie Ducey's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Pinch, whiskeypaper, Pear Noir!, decomP, The 3288 Review, Foliate Oak, and elsewhere. She lives in California.

A MURDER OF CROWS — JACQUELINE DOYLE

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She lumbered down the hillside, clutching her enormous belly, then veered off the path and into the woods, stepping over tangled tree roots, half sliding in the mud as she descended to the river. Her water had broken. It was time. The river was swollen with spring rain, so loud she could barely hear the birds twittering in the trees, the raucous cries of a flock of crows that swooped through the sky. When she reached the riverbank, she tugged off her shoes and socks and sodden underwear. She was covered with goose bumps. Shivering from the cold, she lay on her back and spread her legs wide, feet planted in the soft silt of the riverbed. Two crows were fighting on the opposite bank. They pecked aggressively at something on the ground between them. The pain was unbearable. She imagined crows in her womb tearing at her, preparing to fill the skies, a dark cloud. The crows were an omen, she was sure of it. She was about to give birth to a lie.

Jacqueline Doyle's flash has appeared in Quarter After Eight, Sweet: A Literary Confection, [PANK], Monkeybicycle, Vestal Review, The Rumpus, Café Irreal, Literary Orphans, and Corium. She has a flash sequence in the anthology Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (White Pine, 2016). Her work has earned two Pushcart nominations, a Best of the Net nomination, and Notable Essay citations in Best American Essays 2013 and Best American Essays 2015. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

JUST ASKING — CLAIRE GUYTON

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It was the way he’d said, “Of course, Sweetie”—heavy on “course,” long on “ie”—that made her wonder. The way, too, that he pressed her hand between both of his as he said it, the way he locked eyes with her and smiled.
             A faint scar, the length of an eyelash, curled up from the right corner of his upper lip, a capital C for… Cute? Clever? Charismatic? 
             She smiled back, then pulled her hand free, wiped the sweat on her jeans, and left for work.
             When had he ever taken her hand like that, like somebody’s mother, like an old aunt? And that intense look into her eyes—it was like he’d studied a how-to on appearing to speak with sincerity.
             Calculated? Confident?
             She would have been fine if he’d said no, I don’t love you. Maybe she would have preferred it.
             All day she wondered. She heard, Of COURSE, Sweeeeteeee, over and over, even as she logged receipts, managed to sell a few fish tanks. You should see that in three to five business days. Enjoy.
             Canny? Cunning? Cavalier?
             Sweeeeteeee. Crafted? Coded?
             No surprise when she got back and he wasn’t there. And it wasn’t just him, missing, but the him-infrastructure. His toothbrush, his slippers, his tea mug. Beer.
             That’s what you get for asking. Well, no. That’s what you get for living with somebody you have to ask.
             Or. Wait.
             Maybe she had imagined the whole thing, and all this time... Conjured??
             Crazy Confused Confounded. ColdClammyCrushedCrateredCapsized.
             Yeah, of course the “C” was meant for her all along.
             Closed Castle. Crypt.
             CORRECT. 

Claire Guyton is a Maine writer, editor, and writing coach, whose work has appeared in bosque (the magazine), Crazyhorse, Hunger Mountain, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Mid-American Review, River Styx, Sliver of Stone Magazine, Summer Stories (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2013), and elsewhere. She is a former Maine Arts Commission Literary Fellow, and earned her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

ON FLAWS — MACIE MITCHELL

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I burn incense to ash and watch rosemary ember drop into a bowl the color of the house I grew up in. I move my fingers over the bowl’s cornflower glass, thumbing the small bumps in its surface where air has been trapped. I inhale the thick pockets of smoke and feel my body become empty and whole at the same time.

**

The middle branch of the Escanaba River was the back yard of my blue home. The deck that reached the edge of the river was littered with crooked nails and rocks split down the middle. I remember its wood always wet with rain or rot. The river’s water ran low enough to see every rock and twig over which it passed. I would dangle my feet off the end no matter the season. My toes ebbed through its warmth in June and skimmed the frozen water in December, but there have been summers when my feet couldn’t reach the surface.

The water was high and cold in April during the first spring that I could walk. The day I learned, my mother took eight pictures of me moving toward her in our backyard on her 35mm Pentax, each one blurry. After taking the photographs, she shifted to shield her eyes from the sun, her bare arms reaching above her brow, casting a shadow on her face. With her back to the river, she moved her knuckles down to the camera and twisted its lens closed. She opened its back and removed the used cylinder, not noticing that I was still walking.

I fell in head first while her back was turned. She heard the splash and continued to replace the film with a new roll, moving the leader into the slit on the right spindle, winding the lever toward and then away from her until the film was wrapped firmly in place. She pressed the back of the camera shut and pushed down the metal disc on its top left side to lock the film in place. She took a test shot of her shoes and then came to save me.

**

I notice a crack in the side of the bowl and I run my finger against it, wondering where it came from. Maybe it split when I dropped it on the bathroom floor. Maybe it was there to begin with. I think about flaws: cracks in casserole dishes, cracks in windshields, cracks in fingers.

Sometimes I imagine rivers, ones that flow through towns I’ve never been to, ones with red sand and grass carp and water higher than the Escanaba in spring. I walk along many other banks, but my fingers always slip back to blue houses and mothers with their backs turned. Maybe half of my words are synonyms for suffering.

Macie Mitchell lives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where she studies literature and writing at Northern Michigan University.

AWARD NOMINATIONS — 2016

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We are so pleased to announce our nominations for two awards: Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. We owe everything to all of our wonderful contributors, and it was a challenge to select just a handful, but we felt these pieces really highlighted our focus and drive here at CHEAP POP.  (Seriously: we are lucky to publish consistently excellent, moving stuff.)

And here they are:

Best of the Net

Pushcart Prize

Help us in wishing these nominations good luck, and if you haven't already, now's the time to check these magnificent works out. 

(For a full list of of our award nominations, check our our Awards Page.)