SHE'LL ONLY COME OUT AT NIGHT — KRISTINE LANGLEY MAHLER

Our guts churned as Kelly Tucker dared us into a game of “Who’s Got the Nerve to Hit Me” on those viscous, smothered-summer nights at the park backboning our neighborhood, our parents encased in the air-conditioned houses, watching Friday-night-family-programming beside our siblings on the couches. But we’d melted out our front doors and swiped our kickstands with our insteps and the yellow streetlight streamed off our exposed shoulder blades as we cut swathes through the swelter, merging, drawn together to the park. We didn’t underdog on the swings, pretending to be children, or climb on top of the soccer goals like the boys would; we weren’t lured by the tobacco fields on the other side of the broken wooden fence the way they’d called to us in the daylight. We met right at the front of the park, visible to anyone who had the guts to join us, anyone who might have the guts to follow our instantaneous desire to actually hit Kelly Tucker in the face when she dared us. 

We all wanted to do it, we all disliked her, disliked how mean she was, how unafraid. We disliked the natural bleach-streak in the ponytail she sleeked back to expose her sharply-featured, hawk-like face; we disliked her father whom we feared as she invoked his orders to elbow aside her absence at cotillion, invoked his pride in her for doing boyish things. We feared Kelly Tucker as she pushed us all out of the way on the basketball court, played harder, shot harder, slammed home-runs like a boy, wore gym shorts low like a boy, talked back to the teachers like a boy. She was mean but she was one of us; no one would punch her, no one would slap her, no one would say anything mean to her face. And she knew it.

So she scowled and narrowed her eyes with pleasure and we collected behind her as Kelly Tucker strode away from the park, right down the center of the darkened street, and we were pumping our fists in the air and yell-singing Kelly’s lyrical twist, SLAM, duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, LET THE GIRLS BE GIRLS because we weren’t boys, we didn’t want to be boys, we would never have sung LET THE GIRLS BE BOYS. Who wanted to be a boy, all that visible desire poking pleats into their Duck Head shorts, sweaty and slapping tennis balls against the gym wall before school, the endless dirty rhymes they made from each other’s names? Who wanted to be a boy? We were girls, unbent, belligerent, say-it-to-my-fucking-face girls, though under the fluorescence of eighth grade we were soft, secret, clenching our right fists under the demure cover of our yin-yang-ringed left hands, low in our laps beneath the lab tables, hiss-whispering about Kelly Tucker, smelly fucker. But we would meet her at the park when the cicadas shrilled into the thick night quilt, the husks of our guts burning with the things we hadn’t done. She knew that too.

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Kristine Langley Mahler lives on the suburban prairie of Nebraska, where she is completing an erasure book on Seventeen's advice to teenage girls, a grant-funded project about immigration/inhabitation on native land through the lens of her French-Canadian ancestors, and a graduate degree in creative nonfiction. Her work received the 2016 Rafael Torch Award for Literary Nonfiction from Crab Orchard Review and has appeared/is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Quarter After Eight, Sweet, Storm Cellar, Split Lip Magazine, (b)OINK, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. Find her online here or here.

FLIGHT HELMET — KATHERINE GEHAN

She thinks about it mostly on airplanes, when the pilot deploys the landing gear and the whirring machinery vibrates her seat. Her final wishes stipulate cremation and one day her charred hip replacement socket and ball will be recycled into rivets or significant metal, wings, a rudder. She could affect directional flow. Through scratched Plexiglass and misty cirrus, the cars below are toys. She traces where the highways intertwine and kiss. Her metal fillings could become road signs and announce 106 miles to Topeka, or Children Playing.

The six year old’s bicycle had hooked the undercarriage of her car and threw off steering. All she heard was the scream of another pop song chorus, baby baby baby, cheery as the last. She had looked at the radio knobs so briefly. Six was too young for cavities, and the boy had been lucky, never broken a leg, no doctor had screwed metal into bone. He left behind no pieces for wing flaps, no parts to help lift her up. 

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Katherine Gehan’s writing has appeared in McSweeny’s Internet Tendency, Literary Mama, The Stockholm Review, Sundog Lit, Split Lip Magazine, People Holding, WhiskeyPaper, (b)OINK and others. She is nonfiction editor at Pithead Chapel. Say hello @StateofKate and find her work at www.kategehan.wordpress.com. 

BACK WHEN YOU WERE RIVER PHOENIX — JENNIFER HARVEY

You wore crop tops and flashed a peek of soft abdomen from above denim cut-offs. Rubbed the frayed edges between your finger and thumb, and listened to what all the other girls were saying. How they dreamed of him. Then, one day, you dreamed of him too.
             You were wary of Cobain, but pretended not to be, because fitting in was all that mattered. You thought maybe one day you’d try and explain this to him, just to see the frown crease his ice blue eyes. Understanding him, took a long time.
             You drew an index finger across the map and searched for Idaho, listened to the squeak of skin on paper, as the friction pulled you westward. The sound returning, unbidden in the night, as you dreamed of black bitumen, and yellow lines fading to some point in the distance. When you woke you could still feel the longing in your thighs.
             You thought becoming a man meant being this boy. This boy who stared at flowers, and let his head fall upon the shoulder of someone stronger. Someone he knew would outlive him. You thought, when you fell in love, it would be with this boy. Always this boy.
             You thought the world would evolve towards something like him. Something softer, kinder and a little slower. And as you waited for it, you pretended not to hear the hiss and spit of vipers, and the motorcycle roar of the future as it revved down the strip towards him.

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Jennifer Harvey is a Scottish writer now living in Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies in the US and the UK. She is a Resident Reader for Carve Magazine, and when not writing can be found wandering the Amsterdam canals and dreaming up new stories. You can find her online at: www.jenharvey.net or on Twitter at @JenAnneHarvey.

SEASONS — JEFF HOARD

We pranced along fresh dirt and performed our versions of the cha-cha and foxtrot on Emma Rixington, Beloved Wife, Mother, Grandma, Aunt, August 12, 1869 - July 15, 1955, Will Be Missed By All. You smirked at the thought of her rancid and bony hand snatching my naked left foot, and I giggled about taking you with me. Our crazy dancing broke a ceramic vase settled against the gray headstone, leaving a violet to wither among the shards. I poured some lemonade on it to make it feel better. We laughed at the drenched flower as the wind picked up, cooling our sweaty bodies. Mrs. Rixington woke up, and we ran off.

*

We rustled those "flower wannabes" you always called them with every somber step surrounded by nude trees. Your grandma died a week prior, and I paid the respect you deserved. But parting came paradise in the form of inheritance, and we gabbled about your new journey after graduation while I would be stuck here fixing lemons. In a flash you pulled me to the ground, begging for a leaf angel. I obeyed, and you tossed a pile of them on my face before scurrying off. I chased after, leaving my six-second artwork that looked like a drunk had been punted out of Heaven.

*

We got hungry and fought over our new friend's nose, who you christened Snowzor the Evil Ice King. You had hoped his crooked arms and scowling expression would spook the children when it would slowly melt into the depths of Hell. Nineteen weeks was as far as we could make it, but you still kept in high spirits as I wondered what was next. A snowball smacked me back to reality as you sloshed your way around that beast. We raced back to the house, last one making hot cocoa. You grappled me, and we fell into a white poof. Snowzor would have been disgusted.

*

Raindrops dance the Viennese Waltz on Susan Burwick, December 3, 1948 - April 9, 2016, Always Loving, Always Loved. Alzheimer's grabbed tight and stripped you away piece by piece. I told you our stories every day, and tiny smirks among drool gave me hope. I scoop up some dirt, hastily plant a violet before a groundskeeper takes notice, and pour a bottle of lemonade to quench its thirst. A slight breeze ruffles my remaining white hairs, so I will stand here a little while longer, thinking maybe, just maybe you'll break through the ground, clutch my crumpled feet, and drag me with you. I promise I'll laugh all the way.

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Jeff Hoard lives north of Detroit, Michigan, with his wife and son. He graduated from Central Michigan University with a bachelor's degree in journalism and had two poems featured in The Central Review. You can find him at www.twitter.com/JeffHoard921.

HALF-LIFE — DINA L. RELLES

After the kids crush the moth on our driveway, I can see its rich red underwings more clearly. My oldest flits off to destroy an ant hole along the street’s edge. My younger son and I stay and stare at the crunched wings and legs, what’s now just a shell of a thing.

The sky’s cadaver blue and you can hear the first cracks of thunder over the hills that taunt beyond our yard. We run inside ahead of the rain.

“I’m scared,” says the littlest, who sleeps on the floor, when the storm wakes him in the middle of the night.

I think, me too, but don’t say. I sit cross-legged beside him on the carpet, my fingernails, jagged stubs, stroking his soft, hairless back. I’m scared of rain we run from. Of storms that stay at our backs. Of empty nights that fall one into the next. Scared, not of the dying, but of living half a life.

A half-life, in nuclear physics, is the time it takes for something to reduce to half its original value. 

That night, I dreamt in metaphor—a man I hardly knew placed his hands on my C-section scars. I woke and wrote in the morning: We used to chase fireflies in your front yard and now you call me ‘old friend.’ 

What I want to write is how it feels to be in the night air with someone who’s not mine. The suggestive way dew smells before sunrise. The thrill I get from driving too close to the median strip on Brookside Road. 

Sometimes I’ll undress in front of the black window, lights on, and wonder if anyone’s watching.

It’s when isotopes become unstable that they begin to decay, emitting radiation in levels that could be harmful. 

I took the express train all those years ago, after the boy in Brooklyn let me loose, watched the Raritan River pass through the plexiglass. I married the man under the mistletoe at the other end of the line. We moved out to the country. Bought a van. Sometimes we take a drive just to be anywhere other than where we’ve been.

Isotopes can lose enough of their atomic particles to turn from one element into another.

When I’m alone, I play radio music too loud and cry at the sight of cornfields and spend long afternoons on the blacktop with the children circling round.  

The term half-life can also refer to any type of decay.

And now I see the kids have crushed—sneaker to asphalt—not a moth, but a spotted lanternfly. A parasite invading where we live, threatening the fruit trees and farms. One thing always gives way to another. Not everything goes on.

What I want to say is: I’m still alive.

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Dina L. Relles lives and writes in rural Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Atticus Review, Brevity’s Blog, matchbook, River Teeth, Rise Up Review, and Full Grown People, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a blog editor at Proximity Magazine and slowly penning her first nonfiction collection. You can find her at www.dinarelles.com or @DinaLRelles.

SABBATICAL — AMANDA J. BERMUDEZ

She lies in the jungle for four days, fingers interlaced across her chest, like a lunatic.
             She thinks about the telling of time, ordered by a clinical calendar of due dates/thank yous/bills adjustable for 72 hours in either direction. The obsolescence of the lunar.
             She thinks about the death of Elliott Smith. She strives to recall whether his name is spelled with one T or two.
             She does not eat; she feels hunger.
             She breathes the freshest air ever breathed, damp with earth, exhaled by the leaves of impossible plants. The way fish are to other fish, each graceful and alien, she wonders how plants breathe underwater.
             She thinks of how her mother used to say “jungle,” scoffing, eschewing the left-wing “rain forest” with its delicate, non-violent precipitation drizzling through layers of benign undergrowth.
             She thinks that creation is the only thing that ever made sense, the beautiful inert, more than orgasming, more than legacy. She thinks of God resting. How God must rest.
             She hears noises, vicious and immediate, unsettling in their disembodiment. She wriggles her toes.
             She wonders if Scotch ever made her smarter. She bets it did.
             She feels a millipede crawling across her face, a thousand gentle legs cresting the bay of her right nostril. She plucks its little body, compact and curled in her fingertips. She delivers it to a patch of soil, a new continent.
             She abandons the experiment, alive and profoundly bored.
             This is no way to live, she thinks.

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Amanda J. Bermudez is a writer and director based in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been featured at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, the National Winter Playwrights Retreat, the Yale Center for British Art, and in a number of literary publications, including Concis, Sick Lit, Spider Road Press, and Iron Horse Literary Review. She is a National Merit Scholar, recipient of the Jameson Prize, a Writer’s Digest National Award Winner, nominee for the Spotlight Culture & Heritage Award, and winner of the 2017 Cinequest Film Festival screenwriting award.

OPEN DOORS CAN LEAD TO CLOSED SPACES — CHRISTIE WILSON

Is it possible that my eighth grade algebra teacher conveyed the importance of math, and I just missed it, choosing instead to watch the sunlight move and caress the back of that one boy’s neck, disperse its packets of energy on and under the thick gold chain he wore, that he allowed me to wear, once before a basketball game. 
             Probably not. Probably she didn’t tell us anything of the sort. Didn’t tell me that later, while searching for meaning and clambering for doors, I would obsesses over physics, and then I would need the ideas, need the tools to exercise the square roots from the denominator. She didn’t tell me, didn’t walk down the aisle, didn’t push her palm against the side of my face, and didn’t say, “this boy will not be important, but this fraction will.”
             I spend some time watching online explanations of how to simplify a fraction, and I take notes. I want to understand relativity, and later I drive my daughter to play practice at a church we have just begun attending in a town where we just moved, and I recognize that watching the videos about the fractions and standing in a sanctuary, nervous and itchy from the new wool hat are indistinguishable, or at least derivatives of the same instinct.
             The boy wasn’t important, or maybe he was.  I saw him a few months ago, right before the summer took leave. Naked in his tendency to repeat prepositions, plain in the way he never spoke directly to me, and clear in his desperate, shaking limbs was the leveling path of all those substances that had scoured their way through his veins. I wish I had pulled him to me and said, “It’s ok. It’s ok. We’ve already made it this far.”
             But I didn’t, and I’m certain he could see the disgust I was struggling to swallow, see it leaking right out of the corners of the smiles I worked so hard to construct as I pulled my child back from his hand. I can’t always be my best. 
             And just as his life opened for me that day, the books splay wide on my desk, their private interests on display, asking me to see them and not wither. The search for knowledge is always obscene. I like thinking of them, alone now in my office, the pages whispering dirty jokes to one another as they huddle and speculate about my progress, my inability to go forward without taking oh so many steps back.

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Christie Wilson lives in Illinois. Her work appears in Atticus Review, Driftwood Press, apt, and New World Writing among other publications. She is currently writing a collection of prose and a novel. Visit her at www.christiewilson.net or follow her @5cdwilson. 

BUDDHA AT THE WALDORF — RISHIKA BATRA

Day One: He gives away his complimentary salad—the chef’s best case for the value of material pleasures—to some huddled mass of blankets on the street. Who eats it too quickly to savor the evenly chopped walnuts, the twist of lemon peel. Then Buddha sits on the pavement, crossing his legs in lotus and closing his eyes until the sky blackens. When he emerges from meditation, passers by have left him: two dollar bills, a handful of coins, a boxed salad from Duane Reade.

Day Two: Buddha is unimpressed by opulence. Golden suite, atop New York City, a bed built for a king. “Look how big your suite is!” say the hotel managers. Buddha smiles, gestures out the window, replies, “Tiny compared to this jungle.” The managers throw up their hands, but they have achieved, unwittingly, a minor victory. Buddha has tasted Fiji water, and he finds it remarkably crisp.

Day Three: Suite 4416, at the Waldorf Astoria, now harbors the highest concentration of homeless people in Manhattan. Shocked managers knock at the door, and Buddha asks, “Am I not allowed to throw a party?” “This is not a party!” “But it is—these are my friends.” Room service, perfectly professional, comes by to drop off a hundred and two Waldorf salads. “A hundred and two?” a manager asks. Buddha smiles, lifts two plates off the cart, and hands one to each manager. They want to throw up their hands, but they’re holding expensive salads. Plus, they’re kind of touched. 

Day Four: The head of hotel operations, manager of managers, opens the door to the uncapping of a hundred bottles of Fiji water. His moustache bristles in bemusement. “Mr. Buddha, we have to ask you to leave the hotel. Your credit card has been declined.” In addition to his stern glare, he has brought a posse of gun-toting officers. “Well,” replies Buddha, “I know that’s not true. But if you send us to the street, you will see us in the street.”

Day Five: Buddha, alarmingly, makes his body go limp. Mind over matter. Have you ever tried controlling a body that does not twitch? A body with no reflexes, that accepts its contortions like water. The cop’s knee drives into Buddha’s back, the back bends, does not return force, is he still breathing? A picket sign lies next to him: Excess Is Injustice. A line has formed: guests at the Waldorf, snug in their down coats. They are patient, unworried. This is a small ripple in a vast lake—easy to look away. The cop cars drive off. Buddha’s friends return to their corners, set out empty cups.

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Rishika Batra is a multigenre artist and writer, currently living in Chicago with a roommate and three cats. In addition to Cheap Pop, you can find her work in Vestal Review, 100 Word Story, River Furnace (under "Neptune"), and The Nashville Review.