SANCTUS SPIRITUS, 1512 — SARAH ARANTZA AMADOR

They brought her down the mountain the afternoon before the earth shook and the sea retreated and then returned four times stronger and taller. It was dry winter, and the camp was bored; the captain sent a troop of soldiers to push a slave up into the hills in search of gold. The further they climbed, the more desperate they all became, and when they found her half-frozen in the icy damp of a high cave, a shock of iridescent scales and bare breasts and buttocks, they forgot about the gold completely and stole her instead. As they wound their way through the camp, people stopped and stared at the woman tightly bound in horsehair rope. She was locked into a livestock crate brought off one of the ships after she attacked a cook who had reached out to touch the opaline spines along her back, and there she sat unblinking, slow pulse, as slaves, soldiers, and mistresses alike delighted in the way she changed colors when they poked her with sticks through the bars. After the disaster, the dead were disentangled from the mangroves and piled with trash into mounds along the beaches. The camp cried and prayed, and she sat in her cage, focused on the smell of sea brine and the cook’s meaty neck.

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Sarah Arantza Amador is a graduate of the Creative Writing BA program at UC Santa Cruz and is a former Ph.D. Candidate in Spanish and Latin American Literatures at NYU. She lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains with her dog Roscoe. She's most recently had fiction and poetry published in FIVE:2:ONE's #sideshow, sPARKLE + bLINK, Vending Machine Press, The Airgonaut, and Word Riot. You can find more examples of her fiction, scribbles, and oddities at cheapfruits.tumblr.com. She tweets @ArantzaSarah.

14 & KNEELING — KRISTIN GARTH

(Content Warning: Sexual and Physical Abuse)

First time you kneel for a man—non-related, non-religious—is freshman pre-algebra. You’re fourteen.

50-something, teacher, JV defensive line coach, places mint green progress reports on the left-hand corners of desks during a pop quiz. Guessing half your answers, you peek. Yours says D. Throat constricts. Skin burns like leather licks, anticipated pain, explaining failure to your father. Grade less than C means beating. Beating means touching. This D guarantees all of this tonight. 

Pencil falls to paper with tears – numbers, wet blurs. You’re terrible at math. Why when the bell rings, you make the pitiful path to his desk to... request? Confess? Horror but less than what you’d face at home. 

Students fling quizzes on Coach’s desk, filter through doorways to greenery or halls—except three who play football. Approach Coach, inconsequential unfinished quiz below quivering green calamity gripped in fingertips.

“Is there a problem?” Oldest of four jocks at his desk waits for what is small and shivering to speak, seek something. 

“I can’t bring home a D, Coach Dyer. My Dad he’ll”—green paper makes good cover for disgrace, your face blubbering; though, you know, from experience, it’s what he’ll want to see. Drop pride with papers. “You don’t understand. He beats me.”

He’s squinting, not warm/cold/sympathetic/sold just studying. He says, “Are you asking me to change your grade?”

It’s there. What you need. Best hope? Earn extra credit. Salvation never comes free. Its price today – four pairs of panting, wet, unblinking eyes. Blonde with puppiest-blue pair, belying full-grown frame nearly the same as pit bull Coach, nods. Coaches you to emulate.

You cooperate. Nod shyly but wily, unfortunately acquainted with wanton wishes of middle-aged men.

“Yes. I’d like you to change my grade.”

Leaning back, rolling chair, he leers at your profile. Three pairs, adolescent eyeballs stare. You’re their Nintendo game, some seminal serendipitous pornography.

He says, “Beg me.”

His words reduce you to holes, your voice something between whisper, wheeze. You make lips move. Hear yourself saying, “Please.”

He says “Knees.”

You appease. Industrial khaki carpet scratches quaking knobs where socks end, and you are bare porcelain. Your three classmates, gold-rimmed letters on adolescent chests, snicker.  Puppiest bites his lip approving how quickly your little body behaves -– would do anything to save itself a beating.

Low, sweaty, single thought now: will they touch you? Here? During school? It seems they may – the way they all look like your father, older and younger variations, while you wait, kneeling to obey. 

A door bounces off a wall stopper. Another female enters dismayed. Waif locker wall commentator on your weird religion, compulsory long skirts, watches, nothing to say. Doesn’t look or walk away. Makes it safe to stand, flee, after his desk—green paper D you divest. You watch his red pen amend it to a B.

B, tonight, makes you untouchable. No one will feel. Tomorrow, three teenage boys know you’re a girl they can make kneel. 

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Kristin Garth is a poet from Pensacola who occasionally, in a fever dream or ear infection, writes a little prose. Her prose has stalked magazines like X-R-A-Y Lit, SCAB, Sidereal Magazine, Trembling With Fear, Mojave Heart Review, Rhythm & Bones and Luna Luna Magazine. Her poetry chapbook Pink Plastic House is available from Maverick Duck Press and she has two forthcoming: Pensacola Girls, (Bone & Ink Press, September 2018) Shakespeare for Sociopaths, (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, January 2019) as well as a full length poetic collection Candy Cigarette womanchild noir (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, April 2019) Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie) and her poetry column The Sonnetarium (spidermirror.com/the-sonnetarium). 

SADIE CRIES — PETER J. STAVROS

Sadie cries when I’m not around, when she thinks I don’t see. But I can always tell all the same, despite her best efforts to compose herself: dabbing her damp eyes with a crumpled tissue, blaming it on allergies (the pollen and the ragweed), inhaling a deep breath through her nose and exhaling through her pursed lips, allowing her unruly chestnut locks to dangle in her face. Sadie doesn’t want me to blame myself,  promises that it’s not my fault, and I trust it’s not. Yet I still feel bad about it, and I still feel responsible, because I can’t seem to do anything to help her. No matter what I try.
             Sadie cries in the car, running errands, driving to the gym, when she hears a song on the radio, when she notices children waiting on the corner for the school bus. She cries when she passes that billboard on the expressway with the elegant fashion model at some exotic beach, azure sky, wind tousling her hair, with the message You Should Be Here with no indication where Here is or what that billboard advertises. Sadie cries during the evening news, so many people who have it worse than her. She cries when it rains, and she cries when it’s sunny. She cries when she reads the paper, unable to avoid the obituaries—the irony of the smiling, happy pictures of the deceased obviously oblivious when those pictures were taken that they would be used someday to announce their deaths. Sometimes Sadie cries when I call her from work, the most mundane, adding milk to the grocery list or that I saw so-and-so at lunch and they asked about her, just to check how her afternoon is going. I catch it in her voice, a subtle pause, a slight quiver, before she murmurs she has to go and drops off.
             Sadie’s been crying for a while, too long, and I fear longer than I realize. But whenever I bring it up, ask her why she’s been crying, why she’s sad, she snaps at me, uncharacteristically, and questions why she needs a reason to be sad, why she needs to explain. Why it isn’t it enough that she’s sad and can’t I leave it at that? And I can, and I do. I leave it at that as I try to understand, because I hate to see Sadie sad, because Sadie deserves to be happy. We all do. So I sidestep the issue, and do whatever I can to take her mind off whatever it is. I pull her closer, and I gaze into her eyes, those beautiful broken blue eyes, and I tell her that I love her, to convince her that I do, and I do. And I hope that helps, and maybe it does, although I can’t seem to do anything to help her, no matter what I try, when Sadie cries.

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Peter J. Stavros is a writer in Louisville, Kentucky. His work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, The East Bay Review, Hypertext Magazine, Fiction Southeast, Juked, and Literary Orphans, among others. Peter has also had plays produced, including as part of the Festival of Ten at The College at Brockport – SUNY, for which he was named Audience Choice Winner. More can be found at www.peterjstavros.com.

SEPARATION ANXIETY — BECKY ROBISON

I left him there because she’s the only other thing he took to. Not his father, not his brother. Only the sheep’s dirty pink belly, and me.
             Eighteen months and he’d still scream when well-meaning people tried to touch him, to coochy-coo his buttery lump of a chin. No toy would satisfy him, no blanket, no diaper. He’d flinch and squall like the whole world was a lit stove. He refused to crawl or walk. The doctor chided me whenever I brought him in, as if I were the one who needed to stop clinging.
             It was him, though, the baby, always clinging. Not to me, but to my skin, soft sticky hands wriggling beneath my shirt, past my waistband, into my mouth. And the nursing. Eighteen months and my milk was still all he would take. After his teeth grew in, he chomped down like he wanted to brand me, so no one else could have me.
             His brother was never this way—couldn’t wait to toddle into mishaps. His father, well. His father was sympathetic, but his father slept through the night.
             The county fair was his brother’s idea—he was finally tall enough for the rides. I used to love thrill rides—The Zipper, The Tilt-A-Whirl—my hips slammed into metal or squeezed by the lap belt, my hair flying everywhere, trying to escape my skull.
             Because the naked little darling wouldn’t leave his mother’s arms, his father accompanied his brother on the rides. While they got their thrills, I walked him through the barns to see the blue ribbon winners. Pigs labeled Pork, cows labeled Beef and Milk. The sheep were just labeled Sheep.
             One of the sheep had recently given birth. She lay on her side, bloated with nourishment for her new litter. The still-slick lambs scrambled for her, shoving one another aside to get their fill. The mother didn’t look at her brood. She kept her head steady, her eyes closed for minutes at a time.
             I don’t know whether it was the scuffling of the lambs’ contest, or the smell of another creature’s dung, or something I did that caused him to turn. But turn he did, blinked his lashes at the scene in the pen, reached his pink fist toward the animals.
             Nothing had ever fascinated him besides my body, and what mother would deny her child what he wants? I nestled him in the thick wool at the sheep’s back. He didn’t scream—nor did he stay. His legs were weak, but his arms were strong from constantly pulling himself closer to me. Instead of crawling, he dragged himself to her stomach, bulldozing the hay before him and leaving a trail of dirt in his wake. He squirmed between the other mother’s children, and being significantly larger, he easily found a nipple for himself.
             The other mother didn’t seem to mind.
             He took to her and I took off, leaving him well-fed and cared for.
             I bought a ticket for the Kamikaze.

---

Becky Robison masquerades as a corporate employee in Chicago, but at heart she is a writer and a world traveler. A graduate of University of Nevada Las Vegas’ Creative Writing MFA program, she’s currently working on a novel and serving as Social Media and Marketing Coordinator for Split Lip Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in [PANK], Paper Darts, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @Rebb003

GRAND MOTEL — TRIA WOOD

Before we moved here, I swam in rivers. Now, it’s the little pool at the Grand Motel for a dollar a day, no lifeguard but the concrete steer atop the Palmetto Steakhouse across the street. Tracy brings Nicole, and we lean our bikes on the cyclone fence before stripping off our fathers’ tee shirts. We always ride together because Tracy says the Panty Man will knock you from your bike, and steal your panties right off if you ever ride alone. Where’s the grownup who’ll stop him? I wonder, not sure if I believe her. I do know she once kissed the boy whose name fills my diary, and all summer long we croon That Boy’s name to every love song on Casey Kasem’s Top 40 until her momma hollers up the stairs that she’ll blister our butts if we don’t shut up and be quiet. Tell me again, I beg Tracy, Tell me about the kiss, but all she’ll say is he has a really Frenchy tongue, and we giggle as we count up all the girls he’s kissed—Amy, Donna, Lori, Raquel—so I can believe my turn’s coming up. That Boy never comes to the pool, though every time Tracy calls to ask him, he says yeah maybe, and so she gets Nicole and me and we three go and wait, sipping Sprites and rubbing Hawaiian Tropic on each other’s backs. Now that we’re thirteen, we never swim. We sit at the edge and dip our feet, talking and talking about That Boy, but still hoping the other boys will notice our new swimsuits. Those boys dive and flip, push each other into the deep end, splashing and screaming. Ryan waits for one of us to look, then shouts Gimme head! Arms up, fingers pointing down to where his wet swim trunks cling. All the boys have started doing this, the summer filled with shouts of Gimme head! It makes no sense to me, sounds like something the Red Queen might demand, but the way the boys laugh makes my stomach curl up into itself. Tracy raises one eyebrow and declares Ryan gross, but Nicole just laughs, her tan shoulders cocked just so, then reaches out with one finger to flip up my chin before my gaping mouth can form the question. Why do you gotta be such a homegirl? she asks me, meaning the one who writes in her diary at home while everyone else gets kissed. I look down and kick at imaginary minnows, watch the ripples circle out, bounce off the boys to smack the algae-stained tile.

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Tria Wood is a writer and educator who helps children and teachers become confident creative writers through the Writers in the Schools program in Houston, Texas. Her work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Sugar House Review, and Literary Mama, as well as in public art installations.

DR. DAD — BENJAMIN NIESPODZIANY

The boy's father was a harvest jar overflowing with ground beef and sock lint. The boy called him Dr. Dad. He sticky-tacked marathon medals to his office ceiling. The open-door policy windchimed his victories.

Dr. Dad was a desert locust. Spent his boy's childhood outside. While the boy drew snakes in dirt, Dr. Dad battled cows for high grass, up in the carob trees, shirtless, shouting about chocolate. He read sports.

Dr. Dad lasered warts, warned diabetics. Told golf jokes. Asked about updates on the wedding, on Kathy's First Communion. A heart throb is not always a good thing, he joked, wrote down the best cardiologist in town.

Dr. Dad told his son about an angry patient who had a hole in his foot. The man noticed the doom back in spring, spent four months with a marker making his wound a mouth. Fed it cigarettes, Mountain Dew, gin, gave it teeth, watched it grow.

Dr. Dad was Indiana's chief meteorologist small-talking tornadoes over Lidocaine and Coumadin prescriptions, his handwriting so bad the pharmacists needed a second opinion, half convinced the script read “amputate.”

The boy's father removed his own toes every night. With each pluck, he promised himself a better tomorrow. A jump-higher, fly-longer tomorrow. A listen and climb and tighten tomorrow. To proudly display every Froot Loops necklace his son made without eating it first.

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Benjamin Niespodziany is a night librarian at the University of Chicago. He runs the multimedia art blog [neonpajamas] and has had work published in Ghost City Press, Pithead Chapel (forthcoming), HOOT Review (forthcoming), Occulum, and formercactus.

PAROXYSM — GEORGIANA NELSEN

When we were eight, your dad loved baseball and wanted to coach. Boys and girls could play on the same team then, so we sat in the outfield and made chains of clover, tying tiny knots in the stem of one around the blossom of the next. Afternoon stretched to evening without anyone ever hitting a ball our way. We swatted our gloves instead at honey bees swarming the clover on our necklaces and crowns. The flies we caught at dusk blinked to light our fingers: fleeting, precious jewels.
             When we were ten, I waited while you cut the grass wearing shorts and no shirt. The mower echoed between oak and maple; the songbirds quieted. I heard your yelp over the machine’s growl, and you slapped at the air as you ran to the house. A splatter of bees smeared against the glass door into ooze. Your pale skin swelled into crimson pillows across your bare chest where the stingers pierced. Neither you nor the bees noticed me watching. You put on your blue flannel shirt, jeans and shoes, and poured gasoline into the nest in the ground. You dropped a match and the bees, some flaming, rose into the smoke. The birds sang.
             When we were twelve, we sold flags for the Fourth, a fundraiser for Little League. Rubina lived in the house between us, and signed our order form in her garden. Musk of red geraniums blended with citrus of white daisies into an exotic perfume, mellowed by the sweetness of blue forget-me-nots. Rubina smiled and shaded her eyes. “I’m happy here,” she told us, smoothing her headscarf. “No one tells me what to do, where to pray, how to dress. I’m proud to be American now.”
             We found her there when we returned with the flag, her face swollen, clasping a bouquet of dead-headed geraniums, the barbed stinger of a yellow jacket deep in her palm.
             When we turned eighteen, my birthday only a day behind yours, we registered to vote. We’d be old enough next election. Your parents drove you to the base and let me ride along. You wore crisp fatigues and scratched at the stubble where your hair had been, like an insect bite you couldn’t ignore. Heading down our street, mounds of red, white, and blue flowers bloomed. We passed the Little League flags in the lawns, and you sat taller. “It’s worth fighting for,” you said. Your mother’s eyes glassed with tears.
             Then you kissed me goodbye.
             You write of the beige sand and buildings. The only color you see bleeds from your injured friends. The only scent you breathe a perfume with the acrid tinge of sulfur. Bombs burst in the air and you are afraid.
             I hope you take care and come back whole, unstung. I hope you remember crowns of sweet clover and catching fireflies. I hope you remember me.

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Georgiana Nelsen is a business lawyer in Houston, Texas. Her short fiction has appeared in print and online in several publications, most recently in Tiferet Journal and Bending Genres. She spends her writing time mostly wrangling with the characters of her novel. Find her at @rosespringvale on Twitter, gsnelsen on Instagram, Georgiana Steele Nelsen on Facebook and occasional updates and book reviews at sunrisesandsuch.blogspot.com.

NOMINATIONS — BEST OF THE NET 2018

We are pleased to announce our nominations for Best of the Net 2018:

"Half-Life" by Dina L. Relles
“How to Exploit Your Ancestors” by Aram Mrjoian

We owe everything to all of our wonderful contributors, and it was a challenge to select just two, but we felt these pieces really highlighted our focus and drive here at CHEAP POP.

We wish Dina and Aram the best of luck, and if you haven't already, now's a great time to read these pieces.