WHAT HE GAVE HER — MONICA FRIEDMAN

She was five-one and weighed one hundred twenty-three pounds when they fell in love. He was five-eleven and three-fifty. After about three months, they moved in together and went halves on the grocery bill, except he ate about three quarters of the food. She felt cheated. She began to overeat to get her fair share, but she could never eat as much as he could.
            When they broke up six months later, she weighed one thirty-eight. After ten years, she still couldn’t get rid of the extra pounds. She ran into one of his old friends at a party.
            “You were really good for him,” the friend said. 
            “We made each other miserable.”
            “No, he was happy. He lost fifteen pounds while you were together.”
            She said, “That I didn’t notice.”

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Monica Friedman's short speculative fiction has appeared in Bards and Sages Quarterly and NewMyths.com. Her nonfiction publications include 30 entries in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2006) and the young reader’s biography, Rosalind Franklin’s Beautiful Twist (Learning A-Z, 2010). In 2003 and 2004, she served as fiction editor for Third Coast Literary Magazine; she also edited nonfiction at WW Norton. Since earning her MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University, she has lived in Tucson, Arizona, running a copywriting business, volunteering in a local elementary school library, and studying the stark and spiny splendor of the Sonoran Desert. 

THE PILL BOTTLE — CHARLES McLEOD

In the photo her back is turned and the light is that late afternoon light that at least in the photo, and through the white linen curtains, past her, seems self-conscious, shy or otherwise mild, a kind of light that does not want to be there but has accepted itself as having to be there, a sad portion of the capitalized Light, a castoff bit of light, the aunt without children, the friend who remains unmarried or otherwise without partner, the part of light that enters into any situation awkwardly and wants nothing more than to be gone but cannot be; light that would not be termed bright but has not yet gone gray nor been afforded some bit of color from the impending sunset, flat light, forgotten light, a dying species of light, and her back is turned in the photo, and she is standing off-center in the jamb of the doorway to their bedroom, and she has her hands in front of her, near to her chest, in the manner one would when reading a book or saying a prayer or struggling with the clasp on a necklace, some task that requires a bowed head and at least a bit of focus and it is October, in the photo, late afternoon, and they have come upstairs so she can get a sweater, a striped sweater, a horizontally-striped grey and orange sweater, a cardigan, the collar of which sits low on her back, pulling down her shirt collar with it and showing fully the pale skin of the nape of her neck, those two inches between the collar and her short blonde hair and because she is wearing the sweater, has it on in the photo and is standing with her back turned to him, she knows that they have lingered longer in the bedroom than the time it would take to just grab the sweater and go, but she has no idea now where they went that day, only that it seemed a necessary thing to get the sweater and put it on before they went, and that in that span of time something else caught her eye or otherwise overrode the idea of leaving, something that involved her hands and a bowed head, but she has no idea now what that thing was.

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Charles McLeod is the author of a novel, American Weather, and a collection of stories, National Treasures. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the University of Virginia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and San Jose State University, where he was a Steinbeck Fellow. His third book, a prose hybrid titled Ascoliasm, Zemblanity, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press/Maize Books as part of their new 21st Century Prose Writers series. His Web site is charlesmcleod.net.

TWO POUND THING — CHRISTINA DRILL

Laura Olivia grabs her bean-shaped thing down there in the Daffy’s bathroom stall and yells, SQUEEGEE! But this shrimp’s got no idea. The truth is I have been rubbing my legs together since I can remember. I used to think it meant cancer; telling of some genetic disease folded so inside my little self. I’d pray to my guardian angel to spare me. Anytime I’d get away with it, I vowed never to do it again. But then I always did. It was so good. It was like a crystal hanging over my bedside lamp I wanted. That I could get. “Please make me feel stupid,” I used to pray to my pillow, focused, sweating over those pre-sex thoughts that allowed me to feel what i thought was too good of a feeling to belong to me. Put me in a Violet Beauregarde costume, paint my face purple, roll me down the stairs, and call me Mom. 

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Christina Drill's first chapbook, NEW BOWS, won the Five/Quarterly e-chap contest in the Poetry category. Her most recent work can be seen in Dogzplot's December issue. She is the editor of Pieces of Cake Mag and lives in Brooklyn.

THE NATURAL WORLD — JORDAN SULLIVAN

This one Sunday when I was real little and my dad was still around, him and my mom brought me down to Cannon Beach. My dad had been in the mountains working for a logging company that past spring, and he was making ok money, but he was always gone; that day was the first time in forever we were all together. We’d brought my grandpa along, and I think he liked that. He was living with us then, and he was in a wheelchair.  He couldn’t really talk much anymore since the stroke. He was just dying a little more every day, and it was all weighing pretty heavy on my mom. 
         My dad spread a blanket out in the sand. My mom had made this horrible lunch, but we all ate it and no one complained. My dad took her hand, and they rolled up their jeans and walked out into the ocean. I buried my grandpa’s feet in the sand and ran up and down the beach, scaring all the seabirds. 
         I wandered out near Haystack Rock. Washed up on the shore was a sea lion. She was just lying there and I knew she was dead. I was sure of it. I felt something inside me sinking. I called for my parents. 
           My dad came over and knelt down beside the lion, and I'd never seen him look so sad. He ran his hands across its back. Then he jumped back, startled, and I screamed a little. The lion started twisting in the sand. My dad stood up and took my hand. The lion was suddenly alive again, and my father and I watched as it made its way across the shore. 
          For a long time after that I really thought my father was god. 

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Jordan Sullivan is a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles, California.  His photographs and fiction have appeared in publications such as Dazed Digital, Dossier Journal, Twin Magazine, VICE, Third Coast, GUP, Art + Design (China), Secret Behavior, and ELLE. He was a finalist for the Third Coast Fiction Award and the Grand Prix de la Découverte/NoFound Prize for experimental photography. His work has been exhibited in solo and two-person exhibitions in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, and Houston. His most recent book, The Young Earth, published by Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art, is an illustrated novella, combining photographs and prose. His piece is an excerpt from a novel in progress of the same title. Find him online at www.jordan-sullivan.com.

SOUTH OF TOULOUSE: SNOW — KEITH TAYLOR

The inn was next to the stables where I lived above the clubhouse. They paid me four francs an hour, plus meals, to wash dishes and sweep the floors. In January there was one cold day that actually felt like winter, and I watched a feeble snowfall through the window above the sink. I jumped over the gate after work and snow fluffed away like dust when I landed on the horse path. I left clear footprints surrounded by thin snow that melted in just a few minutes.

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Keith Taylor has published fourteen books of poetry, short stories, translations or co-edited volumes. He works as the A.L.Becker Collegiate Lecturer in English at the University of Michigan, the Director of the Bear River Writers' Conference, and the Associate Editor at Michigan Quarterly Review. 

THINKING OF FRANCIS PONGE AND YOU ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON — GERRY LaFEMINA

A man creates giant soap bubbles in the park.  He has a sudsy bucket, a wand of butcher string and bamboo rods, a way of waving his arms like a conjurer.  His bubbles are larger than basketballs, than some of the dogs that bark and pull at their leashes like my heart.  The bubbles float, sunlight shimmering in the spectrum along their flanks.

Soon he invites children to join him.  Smaller bubbles appear.  Some blow up in soft explosions of suds.  Others, little dirigibles, ascend nearer the tree branches and shimmy in the slight breeze. Delicate and short lived, they wobble, uncertain in their beauty.  I want to reach out and touch one the way I wish to trace a finger along your cheek.

I’d tell you right now how I love you but fear the moment bursting, fear getting my mouth washed out with soap.

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Gerry LaFemina is the author of a bunch of books, including 2013's Notes for the Novice Ventriloquist (prose poems, Mayapple Press) and Clamor (novel, Codorus Press).  In 2014 his new book of poems, Little Heretic, and a book of essays on poetry and prosody, Palpable Magic, will be released by Stephen F. Austin University Press.  He directs the Center for Creative Writing at Frostburg State University where he's an Associate Professor of English. 

FICTIONS — ROB KENAGY

My grandma calls to talk about Notre Dame football, and I ask if the story of the man who disappeared on Birch Lake is true. “It has to be,” she says. “How can any story be untrue?” A cabin at the top of the hill, on the east side of the lake surrounded by a few dead Fords, pieces of tractor—junk. Late night, the man kisses his wife before leaving to mouse for bass. By sun break, his boat washes up in the reeds near Camp Tannadoonah. Only his clothes—neatly folded—and wallet are found. The sheriff and a few deputies drag the lake all summer, but never pull up his body. On the anniversary of his father’s disappearance, the man’s son pours a pint of Canadian Club into the lake. Grandpa thinks he ran off to Vegas with a showgirl, Mr. Templeton suspects the Upper Peninsula to skip debt. Sometimes when I dream, I’m staring up at the water’s surface, tangled in weeds, the sun breaking in murky beams. Other times I’m standing on the porch of a desert motel room, smoking the butts of last night’s cigarettes. “Where ever he went,” Grandma says, “he needed his fishing gear.”

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Rob Kenagy lives, teaches, and fishes in Michigan.  He writes and plays music as Ganges, and records with They Were Thieves.  His poems have appeared in Vinyl, Forklift Ohio, Hobart (online), and Gargoyle.  

ALL THAT SMOKE HOWLING BLUE — LEESA CROSS-SMITH

The first thing Bo ever said to me was that I had a face like an alarm clock—resplendent enough to wake him up. He and his younger brother, Cash, ran a garage on the shitty side of town. My car was always busted. That's how we met.
            Since then I'd been living with both of them—driving Bo's old truck whenever I wanted and kissing Cash when Bo was at work. Bo knew about the kissing, I just didn't do it in front of him. I slept in Bo's bed most nights unless he really pissed me off. I loved them both equally. I used to make a peanut butter and jelly joke about it but no one understood what I meant. Bo kept his shoulder-length hair slicked back and Cash kept his short. See? They were different.
            Bo had been teaching the blue-eyed shepherd puppy to howl and that's what they were both doing—sitting on the floor, howling at the ceiling. Bo was picking leftover bits of tobacco from his tongue and I reminded him again that he shouldn't smoke in the house. My hair was still scented with woodsmoke from the fire we made out back the night before. Bo stood and stuck his nose against my neck and sniffed me real good. I was at the stove stirring the baked beans.
            “Mercy,” he said. Soft. It was the name my mama had given me and he always said it a lot. It made me feel special how it got both meanings coming from his mouth. My name, a begging blue prayer. We kissed. Bo's kisses were feathery, Christmas-sweet. Cash hungry-kissed like a soldier on leave.
            Bo stuck the puppy underneath his arm and stepped outside. I watched him through the screen, howling up at the sky. The puppy was licking his face.
            Cash came through the front door and gently kicked my boots aside to make a path.
            “I thought it was my night to make dinner,” he said, clinking a six-pack on the kitchen counter.
            “You can tomorrow. I made fried chicken, potatoes and baked beans. Biscuits are in the oven. I got Bo to open the can since it scares me so bad when it pops,” I said.
            “Well at least he's good for something, right?” Cash said, barely laughing.
            “He's out back teaching the puppy to be an asshole,” I said, pointing with the wooden spoon, careful not to drip.
            “Will you cut my hair tonight?” Cash asked, taking off his ball cap and opening a beer.
            “Why? You got a crush on some girl you wanna look cute for?” I asked.
            “Yep. Some girl named Mercy,” he said, smiling. I twinkled.
            The sunset light ached at the windows. The puppy let out a brushy itty-bitty howl that went on forever. It just kept right on crackling. I'm telling you, I thought it'd never stop.

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Leesa Cross-Smith's debut short story collection Every Kiss a War will be published early 2014 by Mojave River Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like Midwestern Gothic, Carve Magazine, Word Riot, SmokeLong Quarterly, Little Fiction and Monkeybicycle. She and her husband run a literary magazine called WhiskeyPaper. Find more @ LeesaCrossSmith.com.