BEING THE MURDERED MOLL — CATHY ULRICH

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The thing about being the murdered moll is you set the plot in motion.
             Rain will be falling when you die; they’ll say rain was falling. They’ll say you woke with a knot in the pit of your belly, tugged your lover’s arm at the peek of sun through the hotel room curtain. They’ll say it wasn’t raining yet, it wasn’t raining then.
             Your lover will clutch your bullet-riddled body, they’ll say bullet-riddled. He’ll howl his rage to the storm clouds, vow vengeance in your name. He will become Romeo and you will be Juliet. You always wanted to be somebody, they’ll say. You always wanted to be a star.
             They’ll say the night before, you sat up with your lover in the dark of a hotel room after the convenience store robbery, suitcases stuffed with leaking liquor bottles, whiskey-sticky dollar bills. You gazed out the open curtain, knees tucked to chin. They’ll say you were wearing your best dress the night before you died, say it was growing threadbare frayed, but you were still beautiful in it, still beautiful in a hard, hopeful way.
             Sitting like that, they’ll say, you looked out the window at the sky, your lover’s fingers entwined with yours, the stars, you said to him, the stars, the stars.
             The stars envy us, don’t they?
             And in the morning, they’ll say, curtains drawn, slant of sunlight wisping across your face, you woke with a knot in your stomach, woke knowing, reached for your lover’s arm.
             It will be raining when you die, stolen car dragging in the back-road mud. They’ll say there was a pepper of gunfire; they’ll say you were wearing your best dress again, wearing it still, were smoothing the folds over your lap, looking out the window at the falling rain.
             They’ll say there was a gun on your lap, you were the kind of girl who’d carry a gun for your lover, say you were turning to your lover, opening your mouth to speak.
             Maybe, you said, maybe we could —
             The way the pepper of gunfire will punctuate the falling rain, the way he will cradle your body in the mud, the way he will rise up, guns blazing, they’ll like that—guns blazing—the way he leaves you on the ground before he falls too, your mouth still parted in death from the last words you had spoken, your mouth still parted, waiting, waiting for your Romeo’s kiss.

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Cathy Ulrich has a favorite Depression-era criminal, and it isn't John Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd. Her work has been published in various journals, including Passages North, Black Warrior Review, Pithead Chapel and Gigantic Sequins.

ANARCHISM IS NOT ENOUGH — AMY STUBER

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They let the house get taken. At first it was just a juniper that grew as tall as the eaves and started pushing at one of the gutters. The tree had a clear and insistent path (up and out), and there was a regal, piney “fuck you” to anything in its way.
             They stopped hacking at the rhododendrons, which had been thigh-high when they’d first had their daughter, until they made an unforgiving cape around the front porch. Squirrels stopped differentiating between porch (for people) and shrubs (other animals). Ravens stalked circles around the house in the morning. Bluebirds flew right up to the window glass, their orange throats ablaze.
             It was ridiculous. There were cars with TVs in them and children eating plasticy sugar in the shapes of fruits out of packages; whole human children shouldn’t just disappear. But their daughter, four and wearing nothing but a giant t-shirt one of them had left on the floor by the bed they all usually ended up in, had been in their backyard when they were pulling garlic bulbs and trimming their pink papery flowers, and then she was gone. No movie reel of her departure to unfurl in their minds later. Nothing.
             Soon they were living with squirrels. Hell, maybe they were squirrels. An opossum worked its way into the upstairs bathroom, tried to drink from the toilet, and was knocked dead by the lid when it snapped down. They didn’t even bury it. They flung it by its tail from an open upstairs window and into the backyard where it decayed in a cloud of insects until a hawk lifted it to the sky.
             They started leaving the windows open and without screens. Mice built nests in rolled-up rugs in the storage room. Banana slugs were yellow question marks in every corner. The ocean was something they could see out an upstairs bedroom window, but they felt sure they would never walk down to it again, down the hill and through the grid of the town and past the flocks of nasturtiums and the water towers and down the path with all the blackberries and bees that were too delighted and busy to sting.
             They started sleeping outside, at first in sleeping bags and a tent and eventually just sleeping bags, but not letting themselves lean into each other. They slept intermittently and without ease and then it was fucking morning all over again.
             They built a fire in the backyard made of all the stupid fence posts that had surrounded their property. They started pulling wood right off the house and throwing it into the flame, which was taller than their shed. They lay too close to the fire on their backs. The stars were too pretty for them to see, so they closed their eyes for hours without actually sleeping. Animals roamed around them but never touched them.
             They wanted to be taken. Let them be taken.


Amy Stuber's fiction has been published in American Short Fiction, The New England Review, The Colorado Review, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She has new work forthcoming in 2019 in Hobart, Arts and Letters, Split Lip, J Journal, Pithead Chapel, and Wigleaf. She is a flash fiction reader for Split Lip. Find her on Twitter at amy_moss_ or online at www.amystuber.com.

POLAROID SNAPSHOT: SKINNY DIPPING IN THE LITTLE JUNIATA RIVER — PATRICK THOMAS HENRY

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We thought the place where the cattails thinned was still the shallows, but the water came up to the inverted “V” where your ribs fused together. The Xiphoid process—a name I cannot forget, an extraterrestrial name for a bit of ossified cartilage that welds the ribs into a cage. The moonlight beamed upon the stream, a silvery light seen only in B-movie abductions. In the faded still shot, your backlit torso had  already dematerialized, a silhouette where a body ought to have been. On the water your torso’s twin, a water-severed reflection, surrendered to the mercury-white column of light. A tractor beam, drawing you from us. That’s no moon, we heard you say. It’s a trap! (Would you scream that, those months later, when your Humvee raged over the packed earth toward what you thought was a dry-rotted beam?) Your muscles didn’t ripple that night but the water did. Abductee’s terror, apostolic rapture: whatever you felt, it compelled you to raise your hands above your head. The cattails’ wands raked the water; they were brown-black as sticks left in the fire ring, charred as the remnants of afterburners kicking a vessel into the stratosphere. From one of your hands, creek water sieved in silver grains. We know it can’t be so, but even then we thought each drop struck the water and sizzled like molten fragments of shrapnel.

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Patrick Thomas Henry is the fiction and poetry editor for Modern Language Studies. His work has recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Fiction Southeast, Massachusetts Review, Clarion, and Passages North, amongst other publications. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota. You can find him online at patrickthomashenry.com or on Twitter @Patrick_T_Henry.


POPEYE — ULRICA HUME

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In one of the cartoons I watched as a child, Popeye the Sailor gives Olive Oyl a bouquet of flowers. She is thrilled, he walks on air, thinking they will marry. His one-eyed heroism is soon challenged by Bluto however, who pours cement into Popeye’s bath. It goes on—one disaster after another. The message is that love is hard. How crafty men are! And women, too.

At Whole Foods a man stands behind me in line. He holds a bouquet of roses. He is gruff, but charming, a throwback to another era, perhaps a spirit. He shoves the cellophaned roses my way. Whaddya think? he asks.

I inspect the hopeful clump. The individual petals are pink, or rather salmon, with notched brown edges. The roses are in distress. This is almost an embarrassment, the flower heads fallen away, each from the other, a mania of foliage.

Aren’t they wilted? I tactfully ask.

They’ll get me in the door, he answers.

I yam what I yam, Popeye would boast. Because he accepted himself, his one eye seeing the world aslant, his cans of spinach giving him superpowers. He started out as a crewmember on a ship destined to a casino on Dice Island. His life was rough, catastrophic, his surreal brawls the stuff of dreams. As a child I was mesmerized by this porthole to the world of grownups. Bluto (or Brutus, as he was later known) was Popeye’s nemesis. He was a sharp point on the love triangle that involved Popeye and the hysterical damsel, Olive Oyl, who was her own woman, who faltered, but briefly, who gathered in her swift affections, remained enigmatic.

I’m sure she’ll like the roses, I say to the man at Whole Foods. He beams, he is one of those overconfident fools who steps off ledges, gets up, pats himself off, and does it again. His laugh like a chainsaw. I’m good at it, he winks—but good at what? I wonder. Superimposing his corrupt positivity on a lady’s better judgment, for favors of sympathy. It is a metaphysical assurance.

Frank “Rocky” Fiegel was the real-life inspiration for the Popeye character. Not much is known about him, except that he was a one-eyed, pipe-smoking, rabble-rouser who happened to like children. He lived and died in the comic book creator’s hometown of Chester, Illinois; an image of Popeye marks his grave.

And so the magical sea shanty played, and love was taught to me as hardship, persecution, a false exuberance. But how to keep exploiting one’s heart, to wait with frozen spinach, these coins of complicity. I watch the man waltz off, with his air of bedraggled kismet. He will knock on a door with his subpar roses. This small gesture of sober incompleteness.

I brung you some flowers.

In 1939, Margie Hines, voice of Olive Oyl, married Jack Mercer, voice of Popeye. That they had stars in their eyes should not be faulted. They later divorced.

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Ulrica Hume is the author of An Uncertain Age, a “wickedly sophisticated” spiritual mystery novel, and House of Miracles, a collection of tales about love, one of which was selected by PEN and broadcast on NPR. Her flash pieces appear at Ellipsis Zine, Fanzine, Litro, Necessary Fiction, 100 Word Story, and in the Nothing Short Of and Things Left and Found by the Side of the Road anthologies. Find her on Twitter at @uhume.

EVERYONE WAS IN ON IT EXCEPT YOU — NEIL CLARK

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We staged a fake apocalypse, and everyone was in on it except you.
             For months, while you’d be sleeping, we’d be planning for ‘The End,’ concocting the next bogus seed to plant in your head.
             We plastered your social media with “satellite images” of electromagnetic space vacuums sucking birds and aircraft and clouds clean out of Earth’s atmosphere. Remorseful articles from reputable science journals appeared everywhere, advising to please forget everything they ever wrote. The Bermuda Triangle was re-named The Bermuda Globe. “Unexplained” power cuts occurred with increasing frequency, and the price of tinfoil went through the roof. Every film released—from Hollywood blockbuster to moody indie flick—featured species-ending obliteration out of which nobody rose up to save the day. The end title sequences were full of obituaries of the cast and crew - reason for death: sucked-out-of-Earth’s-atmosphere-related complications.
             Then the night of our false Armageddon came.
             We donned our space-suits and said our genuine goodbyes to the planet. For a meticulously rehearsed hoax, emotions ran high.
             This was really happening. Too late to go back. Way too much work had gone in.

While you were in the land of nod, seven-and-a-half-billion of us snuck out and boarded seven-hundred-million spacecraft. Destination: The Moon, where we were to hide and take our view of Earth—new population: you.
             On the lunar surface, we unpacked our telescope-cam and rigged up our football-pitch-sized screens to watch your reaction back home. We thought you’d be panicking by then, screaming “Hello?!” into every void. We’d dreamt of the moment we’d finally get to laugh at you falling for it—hook, line and sinker. We expected to be patting each other on the collective back for a job well executed; celebrating into the astral night awash with stray champagne blobs floating sideways across the carnival atmosphere.
             Alas, no space-magnums were popped.
             You never panicked.
             You screamed into no void.
             You did not scream at all.
             We watched you, perfectly content in your new-found isolation, gazing at the moon in awe like an inverse Apollo astronaut. The surface of our bone-white exosphere was already scarring. Its new population was turning on itself. Firing shots. Clamoring for territory.
             And you were witnessing it all from afar.
             You watched flags get flown. Borders form. Walls get built. You observed low-gravity mass hysteria—our people questioning why we’d come here, why nobody had thought about how we’d get ever back.
             Amidst all the chaos, we watched you watching us. We saw you enjoying your plush Earthen surroundings. The trees. The oceans. The gravity. The planet breathing a colossal sigh of relief. Most of all, the solitude. We saw you sit back with your feet up, a pot of coffee, a slice of cake, the bubble of personal space around you as vast and stunning as the sky above you.
             “I did it,” we saw your mouth. “I can’t believe they fell for it.”

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Neil Clark is a writer from Edinburgh, Scotland. His work has been published in Okay Donkey, Five:2:One, formercactus and other great places. Find him at neilclarkwrites.wordpress.com or say 'hi' on Twitter @NeilRClark.

FEVER DREAM, DREAM CITY — ANDREA LOPEZ

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Even the way she smokes tells a different story. The way she smiles around her Marlboro, breathing out a tar-like cloud like it won’t eventually find its way to clot the sky, but you know better. You offer her another one when she’s done with it, but she declines. Asks, instead, how to say, “I’m full” in your language. It’s more boredom than benevolence that you demonstrate, rolling the vowels around your mouth and watching the way she parrots the sound and the way the afternoon light around her dims a little from osmosis, the energy gathering inside her, unspooling into delirious laughter.

You’ve seen this before, this strange tourist fever—“I’m not from here.” And yup, there it is: twenty-something, says she left her 9-to-5 to see the world, ride her Julia Roberts great escape into the spicy winds of Third-World Landia. “Maybe even fall in love,” she sighs, and God, you already know she’s seen the ad, the one your government paid big, big money for. In it, your city sits on a high stool, hip jutted out, eyes stormy with promise, well-dressed and charming and every desirable thing. Who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t want to love a city like that, this city you know behind your eyes, by the sound of its footfalls?

Raised on Catholic principles, you know judging her wouldn’t be polite. Still, you wonder what the view is like on the other side of the split screen. Hardly anything extraordinary happens here. Already 1PM and the city still drags its feet. Surely, she can see the gaps; big blue alien eyes like that, surely she can see everything: hear its old bones shifting, rattling, sense the danger on its way. This you know too well; stay long enough, and the roots of this place grab you by the ankles and it’s over—next thing you know it’s been years and you can’t leave. It won’t let you.

“Look,” she keeps saying, all windowpane eyes and the curtains drawn, then, “Amazing,” and, “It’s more than I ever imagined,” as her juvenile touristy delirium takes hold, so fiercely unmarred it shoves you outside yourself. Stumbling, you look up at your body and start to shake. You imagine, for a moment, what  it would be like to possess that nearsightedness again: to see the rain and count each gray window, to track the flight pattern of small brown birds. To see everything, like children do—all this city’s DNA-rooted potential, still warring against sleep-gummed eyes, still shouting, still here, still in you.

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Andrea Lopez lives and writes in the Philippines. Her work has been published in Cyberriot, Heights Ateneo, The Thing Magazine, and other magazines and anthologies. 


BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY NOMINATIONS — 2018

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We’re so excited to announce our nominations for one more award in 2018: Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. This is the very first time we’ve ever nominated stories for this particular award, but we feel these three pieces are absolutely perfect for it.

Best of luck to these three talented writers, and a huge thank you to everyone who submits to our site. We wouldn’t be CHEAP POP without you!

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy:

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AWARD NOMINATIONS — 2018

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We’re stoked to announce our nominations for three additional awards in 2018: Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Micro Fictions (400 words or less). We owe everything to all of our wonderful contributors, and every time awards come around, it feels impossible to decide which stories to choose, but we felt these pieces really highlighted our focus and drive here at CHEAP POP.  

Best of luck to these talented folks, and a huge thank you to everyone who submits to our site. We wouldn’t be CHEAP POP without you!

Pushcart Prize:

Best Small Fictions:

Best Micro Fictions (400 words or less):

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