SIT PRETTY — KATRINA PROW

After the examination—the heels in stirrups, knees toward opposing walls, the scoot your bottom down, closer to the edge, that’s it—the doctor smiled.  Everything looks great, she said.  The gloves pulled back from her skin with a snap.  Just great, she added.  She pulled a closed file from its plastic compartment on the door, those bare fingers traced the lines.  She hummed. Then, Stay.  The room was lined in cartoon teddies, and according to a chart on the wall, I had slept with 8,712 people—stick-figured men and women, signs for the bathroom.  Just one more thing, the doctor said as she took a pin-prick of blood from my index, cold hands on mine as the cotton pressed and a heartbeat began its slow, internal throb.  The door closed, and I sat: my waffle-print skirt fluttered as I stood and stretched for a coil of pants and underthings on the floor.  Imagine my surprise when I saw it.  A single chocolate kiss sparkled at the head of the paper-lined table, a small treat for this good girl, for a job well done.

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Originally from California's Central Coast, Katrina Prow is a Ph.D student in Creative Writing, Fiction at Texas Tech University.  Her writing has been published online and in print with Literary Orphans, Passages North, and Pearl.  She is currently writing a collection of short fiction about the restaurant industry, a product of many years in the 'biz.  

THE MUFFIN MAN — JON SINDELL

The Muffin Man had sliced the circumference of his beaten top hat all the way around save for three inches in back that served as a hinge, and he’d flip the lid and pull out a muffin. I wouldn’t share because of my weight, but it moved me to think that a poor man would share. I met him with Mom on my first visit to Occupy, one–hundred or so pup tents down by the bay. We brought blankets and food, and Mom was my guide. Gregory flipped his “sun roof,” and Mom laughed so hard her hair whipped her face. Later she said, “He reminds me of a hippie charmer I knew.”
            I returned without Mom, with canned beans and soup. Gregory sat at the opening of his tent with his arms wrapped around his hiked–up legs. It made him look small, but he was tall and solid. His smile was so white, and the whites of his eyes were so bright, I guessed he was twenty–seven or so despite his leathery face. “It’s a lived–in face,” he said with an apologetic sort of grin. He pulled an article about income inequality from the band of his top hat. “Lincoln kept legal notes in his hat band,” he said. He smiled like this was the coolest fact ever. “Did your Mr. Marvel tell you that?”
            Mr. Martin, my revered AP Gov teacher, had not.
            “It’s tragic,” I told Mom at home as we cooked. “Gregory’s house was foreclosed by the bank.”
            “One of those adjustable rate loans, I bet. The banks pushed those like drugs.”
            “Hell of a way to treat a veteran.”
            Mom arched her brow in that annoying skeptical way.
            On my next visit, Gregory shared canned tomato soup in his tent. He hung pen flashlights and glow sticks, and it looked like a bistro.
            I told Mom, “He has PTSD from the war. His nerves are a mess.”
            She snapped her knife onto the cutting board. “And what makes you think this drug bum is a vet?”
            “He told me! God, you’re suspicious!”
            Gregory wrote poetry about the war and read it to me. I told him his words were like bleeding flesh. He asked me to write a poem called “Bleeding Flesh,” and I did, and he loved it.
            “Jennifer—that’s enough! Don’t you see what he’s trying to do?”
            I thrust my lower lip. Mom knows she can’t order me around when I’m wearing my fish face, so she gripped my shoulders. “Jenny,” she said. “This person doesn’t care about you.” She scanned me from my big stupid glasses down to my big belly. “He just thinks you’re available, hon.”
            In Gregory’s tent, I lay on his shoulder. He smelled like liquid soap and earth. He laid his hand on my belly so gently, I could almost feel a baby in there.

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A human, Jon Sindell earns his bread as a humanities tutor and a professional–writing coach. His short fiction has appeared in dozens of publications; these include Hobart, Pithead Chapel, Word Riot, Connotation Press, MadHat Lit, New South, The Good Men Project, and Weave. He curates the Rolling Writers reading series in San Francisco and practiced law once’t.

FRIDGE POETRY — JENNIFER CHARDON

Pat said I should quit the coffee and aspirin thing. I asked him which one he thought was worse. He left the room. He’s been doing that a lot lately. I know he thinks they’re both as bad as each other. That’s what he wrote on the fridge with the poetry magnets while I was in the shower. Both bad.      
            I push start on the coffee machine and set up my canvas so the sun won’t blind me in the afternoon. Pat likes it when I paint at his place. He likes to come home from his bullshit day job and see that art still rules the world.      
            Pat is an artist too. A few years ago he wrote a screenplay, raised some funds online and made the film. It screened at a few good festivals. Mostly he’s happy because he has something to talk about when he sees his family at Christmas.      
            I don’t see my family at Christmas. Last year I pretended to be going home but stayed at Pat’s while he was gone. I spent the four-day holiday wired and making black-and-white stories on his fridge.  
            I’m afraid Pat’s going to dump me because I’m always tired and always a little bit sad, even when I’m not. I wouldn’t mind so much except that I don’t want to lose his apartment. I got rid of my secret spare key after Christmas, terrified that he’d catch me with it. Sneaking in while he’s at work wouldn’t be an option.      
            His apartment is a converted warehouse. There are no real walls, only windows. The lighting is always good for art. And other things. I take my aspirin bottle from the top of the fridge and start rearranging the magnets.

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Jennifer Chardon is a writer with secret dreams of also becoming a comedian and/or hairdresser. She is currently at work on a novel, Chasing Summer. The title will probably change. Jennifer has spent much of the last six years backpacking, journal writing and staying up late. She recently bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii because she refuses to live another winter in New York. 

FINGER SPELL — CHASE BURKE

I went out for a run in the late night, after midnight, maybe after two a.m., when my neighborhood was darkest, the streetlights brightest. This is what I did sometimes.
            At work, hours earlier, I saw a friend shred her fingers in the swiftly spinning blades of a garbage disposal. Her hand went in the disposal and an oblivious coworker turned the machine on. She yanked bleeding slivers from the drain.
            My neighborhood was in a good part of the city but I still wondered whether it was safe to go for runs at night. Then I would wonder if my assumptions about the safe-or-not qualities of my neighborhood were sound, or based on some misunderstood aspect of demographics. I might have had all of the angles wrong.
            My friend, when she pulled her fingers from the garbage disposal in the large sink in the kitchen of the restaurant where we worked, she was screaming, and every thought I had then while holding an order of chicken-fried ribs related to horror films, to the implied, and maybe you thought of that too. Instead of retching in the nearest trashcan I walked out of the kitchen and served table 6, and even there in the restaurant I could hear my friend’s voice. She was a tough kid. We shared a cigarette later that night, after she taped up her fingers, after the bleeding stopped and you could see that the cuts were minor, were only small slices.
            I don’t know what this has to do with my running in the middle of the night, but sometimes I can’t keep still, and sometimes I can’t settle down, and sometimes I think about where I might be—as a person, I mean, as an event participant—if my hand were in the proverbial garbage disposal. Nothing’s wrong with me. I like the feeling of lukewarm semi-humid night air on my skin.
            Outside by the dumpster while stubbing out her cigarette, my friend, always the trooper, said that the next time this, the disposal, were to happen, after I had moved on with my life to the real world of dreams realized, she would send me a postcard and sign it with stub blood, because you can only escape the implied once. After the first time you’re fair game.
            I went running with my eyes closed.

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Chase Burke has lived in Florida for most of his life. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and has taught English abroad. His short fiction has appeared in Gigantic Sequins, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Literateur, East Jasmine Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and others.

DRESS UP — MATT BELL

Because of the father's overwhelming love for his younger daughter, he carried her away from her mother and her older sibling, and in a distant land he held her in a series of towers and caves, castles and keeps. As the younger's childhood waned he began to suspect that her most beautiful day was soon to arrive, and by his unlimited resources he commissioned great dresses, one for each day, but without the fashionable girdles that might confuse her shape or give it to him falsely—he wanted, he said, only to see her exactly as she was. In each consecutive dress she was more lovely than in the dress before, a terror he soon could not stand, because while each day's showing had brought him more joy, he knew there would come a day when the next would bring him less. And because he could not live with this knowledge he sent her away from him, or else not away but up, but down, into taller towers and deeper keeps, where the showings would continue without him, held before flawless mirrors bought at the younger's demand, for she too had come to love the lace and the stockings, the heels and the necklaces, was almost stupid with vanity, her father thought—but where he also thought he would not have to watch her as she learned, one day, to lessen.

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Matt Bell is the author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods.

THE WOOD AND THE BLADE — ANNA PRUSHINSKAYA

He said that the wood came from a cuckoo clock. She nodded. What she knew about cuckoos: her elementary teacher had explained that the birds counted life with their calls. She sat at recess instead of playing games. The playground was next to a forest. The bird was arboreal, her teacher had said. They rarely occurred in pairs. They laid eggs in other nests. She asked the bird to predict her age at her death. She went back to the bird plenty because she wanted to live longer. The clocks made sense with the birds. They counted lives in living rooms, hour to hour, day to day. She thought the bird was propelled by springs, but he said weights. Oh, she said. They all come from one place. The weights? The clocks. In Germany. He wrapped the knife in an old t-shirt. She asked, and what about the blade?

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Anna Prushinskaya's writing has appeared in Redivider and Sonora Review, and on Two Serious Ladies and The Millions, among other places. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and she is also the Midwest editor of Joyland Magazine. Find out even more about her here: http://annavpru.tumblr.com/.

PROJECTION — LISA MECHAM

Tonight, driving away with our girls, leaving you at the restaurant curb after a stilted dinner (our broken family at the table like compass points), I remembered another time. Driving to you with a bag of crossword puzzle books, The New York Times, sundry items allowed on the hospital floor (nothing to cut, puncture or maim, please). The girls were little and I had no one to watch them (alone as we were in that dreadful, Connecticut town) so they came too. I parked near the entrance, said stay here, and went inside (through two locked doors) to give you the bag. You'd been there (involuntarily) for two weeks. Facing each other in the common room of tattered couches and tables (no edges, all round) I leaned in to kiss you but you turned away. It wasn't me you wanted (you hadn't wanted me in a long time) so I said do you want to see them? Your eyes pooled, you whispered hoarsely please, and pointed to a window at the end of a yolk yellow corridor of shut doors, trees outside flapping green (with their smug sense of serenity). So I drove around to that side of the hospital. Late afternoon, the downing sun cast its pallor over the glass but you were there. Palms pressed against it. Unshaven jaw, eyes hollowed, scrubs low on your hips (no strings, no ties). I stopped the car to point. Girls. There. There he is. Do you see him? I know they did, because one gasped and the other wept. 

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Lisa Mecham's work has been appeared in Juked, Carve and Barrelhouse Online, among other publications. Her non-fiction work has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and she's a regular contributor to The Rumpus. A midwesterner at heart, Lisa currently lives in Los Angeles. More at lisamecham.com. 

TEMPT YOUR RETRIBUTION TONIGHT — JUSTIN LAWRENCE DAUGHERTY

Jeremiah been struck three times and wasn't asking for no more. He stood at the doorway, all whiskey-drenched and stumbling, watching his girl just go. The thunder and lightning just tearing up that sky. There she go, I say. You best go on and chase after her, you want her to stay. Emma Mae knew the lightning was just the time to leave, but Jeremiah putting his lips to another woman's was the thing that made her stuff a suitcase full to brimming in the middle of that party and walk on out. 
            He asked where she'd go after she rabbit-punched him, made Jeremiah curl up. Maybe on past the county line and maybe on past that, Emma Mae said. 
            We all stood there behind him at the door, hootin' and hollerin' about this or that, egging the boy on, and he just stand there, stuck in his fearful way. That sky lit up again and again. And, Jeremiah, he says, dear God if I ain't trying to tempt your retribution tonight. 
            First time Jeremiah was struck by the lightning was the first time he met Emma Mae. She was the paramedic that picked him up. He always said he hadn't believed in angels until that moment, and that's a thing heartsick men say, but there it was. 
            Second time, he was working on the roof of the house and the lightning hit and he flew off and landed on the hood of his 1990 Geo Prizm. Emma Mae, who was living there at the time, came running out, crying and asking if Jeremiah's okay, and he just holds her face, looks at her sweetly, says, honey, you look haunted. Come close, closer, never let go.
Third time, Jeremiah's drunk and hitting golf balls in the rain, the deluge flooding the valley, and I'm out there, too, and I tell my brother we shouldn't be out there, but this was the first time Emma Mae'd left him and he'd lost about all he could lose, so a man like that ain't afraid of what's coming. 
            And, so, Jeremiah standing there like a forlorn hound, and he's just calling into the night, and all these partygoers telling him to go. And, I feel him. I see him heart-hurt and fearful. I want for him to find his way. I place my hand on his shoulder. I says, brother, what's good ain't going to last forever unless you willing to sacrifice yourself for it. And, he looks at the sky and all that flash and we hear that earth-shaking din. We all start calling to the night like wretched ghouls and stomping our feet and Jeremiah looks back, shakes his head. He looks out and takes a step. And, there he goes, tempting the fire and brimstone. Out he goes, lightning flashing, and we all hollerin' after him. He goes and goes. Emma Mae got that head start. He'd keep going 'til the lightning ran out.  

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Justin Lawrence Daugherty misses lightning in Atlanta. He wrote a little chapbook called Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise, from Passenger Side Books. He runs Sundog Lit.