FRAGMENTS OF EVOLUTION — CAVIN BRYCE

Oxudercinae

A lot of creatures look like they’re right in-between step one and step two of the evolutionary process; like apes compared to man. The neatest example is the mudskipper. It's a lard of a creature with bulbous eyes plopped right on the top of its head. Imagine a fish transforming into a lizard; right before it sprouts legs, after it’s developed lungs, that’s the form of a mudskipper. I wonder for how many thousands of years those dingus fish flew out of the water and suffocated on the shores of an unknown world before the first of them possessed functioning lungs. How many millions of them died without ever knowing why they wanted to get onto land?

Crocodylians

There are swarms of alligators in Florida—banks of rivers piled with writhing monsters. Images don’t do them justice. You have got to see them in person, in the wild, with their yellow eyes glaring at your limbs. In the space between your gaze and theirs exists only a carnivorous lust and a knowing, on their behalf, that you are nothing more than food. I wonder, when did the subconscious groupmind of their ancestors realize that they were indestructible? Camen. Crocodiles. Alligators. They’ve gone unchanged, for millions of years, without ever being choked out of the ecosystem.

Homo Sapien

Evolution is strange because we see billion-year long timelines that track the growth of legs and what not but sometimes it will occur instantaneously. One day you're a fish and the next you’re a lizard. That’s how it happened with my best friend. He was a kid. Then he was a man. It took no time at all. Like that—a synapse snapped in half and his curious playful tendencies evaporated and were replaced with the drive to sustain himself as best possible. He stopped skipping stones and started picking up shifts. One fertilized egg later and he evolved even further. It took 5 years for the entire metamorphosis to take place. Others refuse to evolve. Similar to lemmings, and their infatuation with plummeting off the side of cliffs, these beings were dedicated to extinction. While Darwin’s finches were cracking the shells of nuts and hunting for insects these pitiful bastards were failing to carve out a niche in the modern food chain. They didn’t breathe or suffocate, hunt or be hunted, they just fossilized behind gas stations and inside of cubicles.

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Cavin Bryce is an emerging writer from the University of Central Florida. He eats his steak rare and drinks exclusively from the middle shelf. When he isn’t scribbling words you can find him on his back porch, sitting on a stoop, or behind a gas station. 

IT'S SHAPED LIKE A GRIN, THEY SAY — K.C. MEAD-BREWER

There’s a crooked bridge where all the kiddies go to jump. It isn’t about death or the moon or the pines that keep crowding in and crowding in, their black night robes making them look like pointed witches’ hats. It isn’t about the parents who’ve said their prayers and drunk their drinks and hit or kissed or both their kids. It’s about that crooked bridge and the hard-eyed water beneath it. Sweet Uncle Steve said it’s where we all go down to drink. It’s where we drag back our collective inspiration, our ghosts our dreams our boogeymen, The Dark Man, The Shadow Man, The Man in the Hat Standing at the Foot of Your Bed. You look down into that big glassy face, The Water, and you see the rabbits going tharn, scarecrows shambling off their crosses, lagoon monsters waving webbed hands and fluttering slimy gills, all the monsters flashing past you, headlights on a highway. And who can say no to that? Even if it spooks you. Your hands are already sweaty on the bars, the support beam, that last inch of rope. You’re all alone when you’re on the crooked bridge, even if a party drove you to it. Your girlfriend, your boyfriend, they just got their license, their new car, and oh, it smells good, don’t it? Squeaking leather, cold windows, knuckles flexing on the wheel. Even if you all come together, holding hands, a sacred promise, your fingers cut and bleeding into each other, maybe you did it sitting around a campfire, maybe the smoke’s still pinkening your eyes. But the crooked bridge knows you, it gets you alone. It has corners, the crooked bridge, and dips. You won’t leave without looking away lost into that water, the kind that stretches down deeper and deeper as if the bottom were a slingshot pulling back and pulling back and you can’t look away because when it finally snaps forward to hit you– Oh, that big black eye. The Water. The water that opens up its arms to you, grabbing, drawing, a hug, a hand around your ankle, and says, Come on home, baby. Come on home.

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K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her writing appears in Carve Magazine, Hobart, Fiction Southeast, and elsewhere. As a reader, she loves everything weird—surrealism, sci-fi, horror, all the good stuff that shows change is not only possible, but inevitable. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com or follow her @meadwriter

HOW TO EXPLOIT YOUR ANCESTORS — ARAM MRJOIAN

Begin by orienting yourself to the genocide that most closely aligns with your cultural identity. In this case, let’s say Armenia. Learn your family history. Ask relatives for their passed down stories and recollections, the artifacts buried in basement storage closets and notes scrawled across the margins of moldy bibles. Soak up every obscure detail of your family tree. Create a geography of displacement. Fill in the blanks with facts derived from academic texts. Research is key. Upon introduction, do not correct people when they add an ethnic cadence to your first name, and smile politely when they don’t bother to attempt your last. In school, when teachers take roll call, shout here before they even make a go at it. This will happen several times a day. Identify telemarketers by their mispronunciation. Tell them Mr. Joian no longer lives here. Whether at the grocery store or another shopping outlet, make a point of reading the tag on every item you buy to confirm it is not a product of Turkey. This is especially important when purchasing apricots, bathroom linens, and Haribo gummy bears. At cafes, never order Turkish coffee, regardless of the roast’s country of origin. Learn to cook garlic-heavy ethnic food. Fill your kitchen with fresh lavash and fragrant rice pilaf. Season your lamb with abandon. Make baklava from scratch, even though you lack the delicate touch to work with phyllo dough. Add lahmajoon and torshi to your short stories. When the girl you date briefly after college refers to you as caramel-colored, do not remind her you’re both Polish. Never give her the opportunity to compare your pasty thighs to your much tanner face. Let imaginations run wild at your ethnic ambiguity. Make strangers guess a few times. Once, they’ve pinned you down, remind them often that your ancestors suffered and survived. Write the stories of your distant relatives as if you have ownership of them. Use the word disembowel to describe the death of your pregnant great aunt. Fill your writing with bloodstained bayonets and torrid deserts and death marches. Include words like atrocity and annihilation as much as possible. Steal Peter Balakian’s ideas about the transmission of trauma. Provide personal context to your transgenerational grief. Show them you’re still pissed off. Tell them too. Write about it again and again until it becomes your niche, the ethnic signature of your artistic vision. At readings, tell your audience the notorious Hitler quote, the one that goes, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Inform your listeners Turkey still jails journalists to this day. When all is said and done, you’ll feel no closer to figuring out who you are. You will still feel separated from the past. You will think yourself a coward, a pretender, a boy using his funny name as a crutch. But remember, you are a product of survival. You are the living proof. How you live is up to you. Isn’t it?

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Aram Mrjoian is a contributor at Book Riot and the Chicago Review of Books. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Millions, Kenyon Review online, Joyland, Colorado Review, Gigantic Sequins, Tahoma Literary Review, The Masters Review, and many other publications. He is currently working toward his MFA in creative writing at Northwestern University, where he is the Assistant Managing Editor at TriQuarterly. Find his work at arammrjoian.com 

NEW SUBMISSION PERIODS / PUBLICATION SCHEDULE

Hello, friends!

We're excited to announce a streamlined submissions and publication schedule! (But, as always, for more information on what we're looking for, or how to submit—when we're open!—please check out our submissions page.)

Starting in 2018, CHEAP POP will have (2) consistent publication seasons. This also means we'll have (2) consistent submission periods. We hope this consistent schedule helps you as your write, edit, and finalize your pieces for submission.

Please note: We will not respond (accept/reject) pieces until after a submissions period is closed. You are free to query us, but our method is to read every piece we get, even ones submitted at 11:59 PM on the last day. It's important to us that every piece gets the same care and attention. This also means we generally need a small buffer of time after submissions close to read and gauge pieces.

Submission Periods

• Open the month of June Only (to be published August and September that same year)
• Open October and November (to run starting in January of the next year)

Publication Schedule

• Season 1: Pieces run mid-January to end of March/into April
• Season 2: Pieces run August and September 

That means submissions will be opening in a few short months, for the month of June, so start getting your pieces ready! For all other info, click here!

ENAMEL — CAROLYN OLIVER

Eugene Dunderforth, DDS, did not expect his wife to titter when he told her about the affair with his accountant one Sunday morning over eggs, fruit salad, bacon, and coffee.

 “Oh Gene! What a joke, today of all days. And Gwen is such a nice person—maybe we should have her over for dinner. Do you think she’s a vegetarian? So many young people are, these days.”

He laughed halfheartedly, stunned by his own daring. “No, I don’t think she is,” he muttered, unfurling the newspaper that he’d crushed in his hand. It had escaped his notice that this particular Sunday in June was their wedding anniversary—thirty-two years. After he registered the date, smudged with sweat, his face relaxed into its usual expression of mild boredom. He idly wondered where he might buy his wife some flowers. Would she care if he had a bouquet wrapped up at the supermarket? He speared a piece of melon, which dripped pale green juice onto the lace tablecloth.

Mabel Whitcombe—she had, thank God, kept her name, despite the talk it had caused—caught her breath and pushed a starched napkin underneath the blossoming stain. Nothing escaped her notice, including thirty-two years’ worth of emergency root canals on Saturday nights and crown fittings after office hours. For the best patients, the ones who paid promptly, he’d assured her, waving at the quiet, inviting rooms of their four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath colonial, which Mabel tastefully updated every few years.

She considered marriage as rather like a visit to the dentist: salutary to both parties, likely painful to one, and temporary. For some years she had cultivated a faith in statistics, believing that once Eugene blundered off around seventy-six, she’d have fifteen years or so to enjoy alone the fruits of his denture placements and pain-free fillings. But as the years without orange juice and ice cream and raisins (notorious enablers of decay) had passed, it became clear that her faith—and her husband—might very well outlast her patience.

She sipped her black coffee, avoiding Eugene’s infrequent glances and watching orange-yellow egg ooze toward the edge of her plate. It was a good plate, part of a set she’d bought without consulting him. Porcelain with a thin gold band around the rim. All these years she’d been so careful not to nick them, scooping each piece out of soapy dishpans and drying them by hand. If she looked closely she might find a nest of tiny cracks, but from this distance the surface was smooth as cream. Except for the encroaching yolk.

After the day’s stock report had transfixed Eugene, she scraped up the egg with her knife’s edge and licked the blade clean, immediately chastising herself for risking damage to the plate. At least she had avoided one of his gratingly cheerful lectures on endangering her enamel.

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Carolyn Oliver’s fiction has appeared in Day One, Tin House’s Open Bar, Slush Pile Magazine, matchbook, and elsewhere. A graduate of The Ohio State University and Boston University, she lives in Massachusetts with her family. Links to more of her writing can be found at carolynoliver.net.

BETWEEN THE SKY AND THE SURFACE OF THE WATER — ROCCO RIVETTI

On my back, in the smooth depth of the green hull, I was rocked gently back and forth as the rowboat turned slowly counter-clockwise.

Circling there, experiencing the unique tension of buoyancy occurring beneath me, it felt as if the boat was performing a miracle, some kind of impossible balancing act between the sky and the surface of the water.

Evening sunlight pressed against the branches of a willow tree overhead. My stomach felt warm to the touch, though my shorts were still damp from an hour’s swim at four. As I spun away from shore, patches of light defined by shadow splashed upon the bare skin of my torso before spilling from the boat into the water below.

The scent of wild sagebrush hung above me like a cloud while the boat pushed further outwards. Then night fell.

I could hardly make out the shore on the other side. As I floated towards the center of the lake the boat continued to spiral, turning backwards to face the willow tree on the receding shoreline.

I saw you standing there in your green dress, your left hand gripping the cloth below your waist, raising the hemline slightly upwards of your ankles already submerged in water.

You looked perfect, as if you’d just emerged from the lake.

I raised my hand to wave. You started to smile, growing smaller by the minute. Water lapped against the sides of the rowboat as a sparrow crossed between us. It may have landed in the willow tree but I couldn’t be sure before the boat’s rotation swept you out of my sight.

I’d brought with me half a bottle of red wine.

It seemed useless to me now.

You called to me, and as your voice carried across the lake it passed through the last rays of twilight, willow bows and foxtails, over ripples, tadpoles, and scurrying crayfish, beneath the slowly turning stars over head. Only as your voice reached me through the night did I realize I was cold.

I turned my head to find you, and caught you spinning.

Spinning along with the fish and the plants and the crumbling lake house and trees that covered the shoreline. Spinning with the hills in the distance and the quickly darkening sky with no moon. Everything was spinning now, except for me.

I had never spun like you. You made it seem so easy, turning along with the rest of the world. Before long the spinning picked up, you and your surroundings churning together, boundaries absorbing each other until everything was combined into one dizzying, terrifying whir.

I held my breath, then sank slowly into the night.

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Rocco Rivetti has lived in various towns up and down the coast of California his whole life. As a graduate of UC Berkeley, Rocco studied under authors Joyce Carol Oates, and Namwali Serpell. When not writing, Rocco makes music videos for bands, and his video work has appeared in publications like Pitchfork, Spin, The Fader, Dazed Magazine, and Stereogum. 

I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU — YAEL van der WOUDEN

Two months after my mother passed away my daughter woke me up to tell me she was sorry. I was half in a dream and said, "Honey it’s late go back to sleep," but she didn’t. She put her cold little hands on my face and said, “No” and tapped my cheeks until the dream dissolved and I was up. 

"What," I said. "What is it, yes, what," and my daughter said: 

“I died in the night. I’m sorry.” 

"Honey," I said, like there was more to that sentence but there wasn’t. I put my hands on her and she was solid, why wouldn’t she be. Standing in a hedgehog shirt, smelling like milk, the way kids do. I gathered her up and arranged her under the sheets and said, "Honey, why do you think you died?" and she shrugged and asked if she could have a soda, and would she have to go to school tomorrow, now that she’s dead. 

"You’re not dead," I said, quiet, and my eyes began to weep like they’d decided their own sadness had nothing to do with me. 

“I don’t know what to tell you,” my daughter said, knocking her foot against my leg. I used to say this to her. Then, “Can we turn on the tv?” 

The next day we stayed at home but the day after I said, "Now life doesn’t stop, okay?" and sent her back to school. Then school called and asked where my daughter was. I thought no and no but it turned out she’d hid in a bathroom stall because she was dead and didn’t want to go to class. "Her grandmother just passed away," I told her teacher, later, an explanation. I was tired and unwell, half an eyeliner on. One bottom lip lipsticked. 

"So what’s happening?" I asked her in the car on the way back. "What’s this? You’re a ghost? What?"

“Yes,” she said. “I’m a ghost.” Then made a long ooooh-sound that made her laugh and so I laughed too, which made her laugh more. "What do I do?" I panic-whispered on the phone that evening, talking to my sister. My daughter walked into the room with a white towel on her head.

“It’s my ghost hair,” she said, then danced to the tune of a candy commercial.  

"What can you do," my sister said, and told me she loved me, and yes you too and good night, shabat shalom, I’ll call again tomorrow. "Yes. B—What? Yes. Okay. Bye."

That night I wrapped us up in blankets and asked my daughter what her favourite colours were. She named every single one she could come up with, picking her nose. "Do you think you’ll be dead for much longer?" I asked. 

“No,” she said. “Maybe a day. Or maybe two.” 

"Okay," I said, and rested for a moment in the mess of her hair. My own breath smelled like milk, and she, wet from the shower, like every memory I’ve ever had.  

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Yael van der Wouden is a writer, editor, and a mixed-bag-diaspora child situated in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She co-founded Chaos Press, a Dutch feminist publishing house. In her off time she waters plants, walks into rooms to immediately forget why, and reviews books for Platypus Press' literary guide 'The Wilds.' Her work will soon appear in The Sun Magazine. Find more at yaelvanderwouden.com 

THE BIRD — MAX ANDREW DUBINSKY

A bird took my eye. I was just sixteen and in love and content to simply stroll down the sidewalk with a soda pop in one hand and my girl’s in the other when the bird, spooked by a certain hawk or the exhaust of a passing bus or deranged in its own way, descended from the heavens and collided with my face, its beak bursting my retina, tearing through my iris, and devouring my cornea. The bird flew away, spectators said, unharmed. Satisfied, I imagined it was, full of me while I lay there on the ground, writhing, shouting for vengeance, for my girl to still go to the Homecoming dance with me despite my hideous appearance. 

I think of that bird still today when I eat breakfast, drink my coffee, drive to work. I think of that bird when I make love, go for a jog, take a swim. I think of that bird every time I see my old flame at the Grab-N-Go Gas Mart on the corner, and make her give me change for things I don’t need: a Hershey bar, a bar of soap, a bag of skittles. I only ever carry a twenty. I think of a bird that is surely dead all these years later and its little bird children, dead now too, I suppose, if someone asks what I was like in high school. I spent my time in trees, on rooftops, and climbing telephone polls. I sat atop ladders, awnings, and rafters. Were you an acrobat, they ask, a thrill seeker? A bird watcher, I say. 

And it’s a bird I’m watching this morning as I slink closer to the edge of the roof, the soft gravel taking the shape of my foot with every creeping step. A bird. The bird. Impossibly still alive. And there, in its hideous black beak, my eye! Somehow after a wife, two children, an affair, testicular cancer and surgery, two houses, a college degree, a bad traffic accident, and a bet on black that paid off in roulette, the bird persists. I have no choice but to kill the bird now and take back what’s mine. I snatch its wiry leg midflight, dragging it down from the sky, and throttle the thing between my knees. I push a long index finger into each side of its precious neck, waiting for its final flutter until at last my eye is my own again. I remove my patch and let sunlight wash into the dark hole of my face one final time. The Gas-N-Go for a tube of cherry chapstick—that’s where I’ll go first. I stand and plummet from the roof—a false step misjudged by a depth perception I have not known in decades. In the commotion, the lifeless bird falls too. And though dead, it is not without one last act of cruelty, crashing into my face once more, its dead beak gouging through and taking my other eye.

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Max Andrew Dubinsky is the creator of the online graphic novel Dislocated. His work has also been featured on Chicago Public Radio as audio fiction, and on McSweeney's Internet Tendencies. He's the narrator and curator of the podcast The MAD Fictioncast, and his favorite animals are Godzilla, Bigfoot, and the giant squid. Follow him on twitter @maxdubinsky for more.