STRANGERS — AMANDA MISKA

We meet at a sticky-floored bar where the jukebox plays Conway Twitty's "Hello Darlin'", and you’re sitting alone, mouthing the words between sips of beer.  I just finished slow dancing with an old high school boyfriend who I wanted to make jealous—he’s engaged now. This town is too damn small. I sit down beside you like we aren't strangers. I am drunk. You are not. I ask you to dance. You say you don’t dance. 
            “Ah, but you sing.”
            You blush.  “I can’t help it. Old country songs remind me of my dad.”
            And just like that, you’re telling me your life when all I wanted was to sway against you for a few minutes and leave with someone else.
 
But I leave with you. And you’re so nice, like, the personification of the word nice.  For weeks, every time you ask me out, I wrack my brain for an excuse, but can’t think of a good one.  When we fuck (what I call it; you insist on saying making love), you tell me I’m the most beautiful girl you've ever been with, the most beautiful girl you've ever seen. You whisper it in my ear, like throwing bread to a starving mouth. In hindsight, the right word is overeager. For both of us.
 
And then the test shows two blue lines.  I am afraid of how calm I am as I dial your number. I invite you over to talk in person, even though you've never been to my place—we’d always stayed at your trailer because I have room mates, even though you have cats, and I hate cats. Especially your cats, two black females who liked to snake between my calves every time I walked in.

You are strangely elated when I tell you I want to keep it.  When your phone rings mid-conversation, you leave the room to take it. Through the thin door, I can hear you excitedly tell whoever is on the line that I’m pregnant; That Girl I Was Telling You About is what you call me.  I wonder what else you've said about me, how you've painted me to strangers.
 
You had gone through two pregnancy terminations with previous girlfriends. I don’t know why, but you told me that on our first date, bringing me into your confidence too soon, always saying too much, like:
            “You could move in. We could get married. I’d get rid of the cats for you.”
             “I don’t want any of that.”
            Sitting on my bed, you take my face in your hands and try to kiss me, and I pull away and slap you clean on the cheek.
            “Don’t. Don’t do that.”
            So you disappear. And I’m alone again except I’m not.  
 
I try to love the boy, but he looks so much like you. It was easier before his eyes turned gray, before his milk-pudge melted, before his downy blond hair all rubbed away and grew back copper.

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Amanda Miska lives and writes in Northern Virginia. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from NIB Magazine, WhiskeyPaper, Black Heart Magazine and Buffalo Almanack.

THE MOMENT BEFORE THE EARTH WAS DESTROYED — JARED YATES SEXTON

Before humanity was destroyed the aliens paused time and took Tex Halders aside. He was standing in a parking lot in Houston. The sky paused. The traffic paused. The neon light at the Hard Rock Café across the street paused. The aliens approached Tex and told him the score. All human life has been paused and will be destroyed in short order, they said in their hive-voice. We’d like a tour and we’ve chosen you to be our guide.
            Why me? Tex said.
            Why not? they said.
            You’ve got a point, Tex said.
            Everything everywhere was paused. Monster truck races. Twinkie factories. High-fructose corn syrup distilleries. Marketing firms.
            What do you want to know? Tex asked the aliens.
            Well, the aliens said, take us through the whole of human achievement. Before we destroy we like to know. For ages and ages we’ve observed. It’s been quite informative, but we’d like to have our questions answered.
            All right, Tex said, ask away.
            Why war? the aliens said. Why genocide?
            Hell, Tex said, I don’t know. At some point you got to start killing.
            The aliens looked at each other. The answer didn’t seem satisfactory to them. But, they said, why war?
            Listen, Tex said, if you’re gonna ask questions I’m gonna give you answers. If you don’t like ‘em, then go screw off.
            All right, the aliens said. That’s fair. Tell us then, they said, what about art?
            You’ve got the wrong guy, Tex said. I don’t know fuck-all about art.
            What about Van Gogh? they said. Picasso? Pollock?
            Here’s what I know about art, Tex said. I know sometimes there are pictures of flowers in my hotel rooms. You want to know about pictures of flowers in hotel rooms, I’m your man.
            What of the great books? they said. Explain them to us. Explain literature. Explain philosophy.
            Tex was tired. The sun, frozen like everything else in existence and suspended overhead, was beating down. Hey, he said, I get that you’re curious, but hell, it’s hotter than a fat boy’s crotch out here.
            Fine, the aliens said. What about this?
            They took Tex to another quadrant of the parking lot where a steel gray minivan was parked. One of the aliens motioned his hand under the rear bumper and the hatch opened on its own.
            Oh, Tex said, that’s an easy one. Let’s say you just got done shopping at the Target. Say you got an armload of groceries. He pantomimed like he was carrying an armful of sacks. All right, he said, you can’t reach out and open the hatch, right? He moved his foot under the bumper and the hatch opened again. Open sesame, he said.
            Interesting, the aliens said in their hive mind. Utility. Common sense.
            That’s right, Tex said.
            The pinnacle of human achievement, they said.
            You bet your ass, Tex said.
            Fine, they said. Thank you, they said and blinked the Earth out of existence.

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Jared Yates Sexton is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University and serves as Managing Editor of the literary magazine BULL. His work has been nominated for a handful of Pushcart's, The Million Writer's Award, and was a finalist for The New American Fiction Prize. His first book, An End To All Things, is available from Atticus Books. Find him online at jysexton.com.

NETTLE CREEK CEMETERY — ERIC SHONKWILER

The children were found by a farmer two months after they were declared missing. The sheriff and his deputies and the federal agents descended on the cemetery. Tents of yellowed canvas were set up to break the heat. It waved off the gravel road, carrying grasshoppers as they fled from the cruisers. Cicadas yet to die landed on sleeves, on hats. In one of the tents an old detective sat facing the back with his gun in his lap. A deputy entered the tent carrying water in a paper cup. The air inside was musty from the canvas.
            What are you going to do with that?
            I don’t know yet, the detective said.
            Give it to me.
            The detective handed the gun to him. He turned to look at the deputy. His eyes were dark, hard and pinched from years of work in the open. What do you do when anyone could wake up one morning and kill you? Kill your family?
            I don’t know.
            There’s about an inch between you and hell at any time, do you know that? He looked past the deputy. He said nothing more and the deputy left to get someone for him. He didn't know who.

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Eric Shonkwiler's writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, Fiddleblack, [PANK] Magazine, and Midwestern Gothic. He was born and raised in Ohio, and has lived and worked in every contiguous United States time zone. His first novel, Above All Men is due out in March 2014 from MG Press.

HOW THE MOUNTAIN — C.J. OPPERTHAUSER

Winters and winters ago the moon paled and sang something unhearable, understood only by dogs. A silent howling, some said, or a whistle tucked between wind and rain and thunder, a celestial whisper low and quaking. So this song was sung and the snow began to shift, the bones on dogs and men alike with it. Mother moon sang, angry with wolves and their dogbrothers for loving man, the too-tall beast who would not howl on the equinox, who would not love its mother light the same way, whose smoke clouded night air breathless. This song, this moonsong, it rang wild along valleys, burning grass and cricket, to the tents of man and dog, pulling spines toward moon and song, pulling up with nightfingers cloudy and without gravity, without mercy, without the sun its brother present or passing, without consent of river valleys. Man-spines and dog-spines pulled and pulled and as they strained they grabbed root and rock to slow this song’s wronglifting, pathetic fingernail anchors stripping, and the earth stretched with them until mounds and hills welded coolly the foot of mountain, man and dog and earth becoming one thing.  High up finally, up enough beyond clouds to see the night sky smokeless black. Necks hardened to stones with winter, spines a ridge of rock and snow, the dog’s breath a howling heard only from the tops of mountains, where the moon is biggest.

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C.J. Opperthauser currently lives and teaces in Cincinnati. His poems have recently appeared/are forthcoming in Ghost Ocean Magazine, dislocate, and Neon. He blogs at http://thicketsandthings.tumblr.com.

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.