THE GINGERBREAD METHOD — PATRICK WILLIAMS

/

Comrades, the school should have a special baker if children are to eat the alphabet. Picture a long list of gingerbread words arranged according to length. The child gnaws letters from left to right, learning to read. The first old-time reading primers included this method. But even early on, boys and girls were driving away teachers by spelling out troublesome little dough rhymes about American history like “John Adams did die and so must I” and “While patriots do paraphrase, torture is largely commonplace.” In modern teaching practice, reformers have discarded these methods as trash; most of the gingerbread books were scathingly denounced. Nowadays, for example, Ruth texts Timothy harmonious moral lessons of childhood street genius. Then he marks the texts read and may return them later, perhaps with pictures of things. And thus the pupils are taught to read in glimpses of narrative, in a variety of forms, all while handling different styles of mechanical objects. One cannot protest: the child soul revels in crude play. For millions of present-day users, however, the combination of multiple devices and thinking in scraps of thoughts results in extreme confusion.

Patrick Williams is a poet and academic librarian living in Central New York. His work has appeared in publications including The Metric, Word Riot, 3:AM Magazine, M58, The Collapsar, Hot Metal Bridge, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Really System, a journal of poetry and extensible poetics.

ÇA VA — WHITNEY TEAL

/

Gilly was too much like Ryan for him to ever love her. Ghanian by way of London, she had a way of being that an American would describe as “scrappy”—a euphemism that only seemed to be applied to people made ruthless by terrible circumstances. Ryan and his friends back home would call her a hustler. The type of chick who knew how to take care of herself.
            Tonight she breezed in, brown sugar-colored skin, long, straight weave and bright pink lips. Neither of them French, they kissed each other on both cheeks anyway, before she gave him a peck on his lips.
            “Ça va?” She asked him. “You look happy to see me.” Gilly looked down at the hard-on Ryan had been nursing for the past hour, thinking about when he’d see her.
            “Bah ouais, tu es en retard,” he replied, in the slow and deliberate French that made native speakers lose patience.
            They were both foreigners in a city where they could be whatever they wanted to be, yet, still, they’d managed to be exactly who they always were.
            As such, Gilly didn’t need preamble. Sweet talk seemed to upset her and foreplay didn’t hold her interest. It was only sex, but that was enough because sex with Gilly was like nothing Ryan had ever experienced. Sometimes he thought it was her height, at almost six-feet, her frame overwhelmed him, enveloped him and some part of her body seemed to be always around him when they fucked. He could smell only her when he breathed, his tongue would recognize only the taste of her, he could only see her.
            On a more practical level, she was a shameless freak. Her body was all-access. She gave every move her all.
            After, one of his faded Georgetown sweatshirts covering just to her crotch, she made the English-style tea she always craved, using the whole milk he bought only because she liked it.
            Balancing a small mug on his mattress before lying in his creaky, low-slung bed, she puffed on a small wooden pipe filled with weed. Occasionally he took a drag.
            “Milk kills,” He told her, stretching his arm around her shoulders and dropping the pipe in her upturned palm.
            She refilled the little groove on top with plants and then lit the tip again.
            “So does sex,” Gilly said. “Doesn’t mean we have to abstain.”
            “You going to church tomorrow?”
            “Every Sunday. You finally ready to come?”
            “I don’t speak French,” he said.
            “You haven’t got to. God speaks to you in your language, eh?” Smoke billowed from the round bed of her o-shaped lips. “The spirit will be high tomorrow. I can just feel it.”

Whitney Teal is a journalist, essayist and creative writer from Fort Worth, Texas. Her nonfiction has been published in lots of magazines and on lots of websites devoted to women. Read some of it at whitneyteal.com. She swears a lot on Twitter @whitney1016. 

PERSUASION — ERIC BOYD

/

“You’re going to have to go back there.”
            “What do you mean?”
            “It says here you’re not well.”
            “All it says is I have nightmares sometimes.”
            “That means you don’t have a clean bill, and I need it spotless.”
            “Jesus Christ I’m telling you I’m alright. I just have a few night terrors here and there. I’d say that’s perfectly goddamn normal; it’d be abnormal if I didn’t!”
            “You wanna keep on yelling and I’ll go ahead and knock you right here. If you can’t meet the conditions of your parole, then you’re revoking the privilege of being on parole, get me?”
            “Yeah...When do I go again?”
            “I’ll call them... Sphinx Therapy? Hello, I need a second appointment with DOC Number 17882.”
            “...”
            “Right, I’ll tell him. Thanks.”
            “...”
            “Okay, they'll fit you in next week.”
            “I’m not crazy.”
            “That’s not up to me to decide. You’ll go see the shrinks again.”
            “Do you think I’m crazy?”
            “I think you need to see the shrinks again.”

*

“Hi, didn’t expect to see you? I was wondering why the name looked familiar. Why are you back? I thought we cleared you?”
            “That fucking P.O. is a real hardass. I still owe the county a couple thousand in court costs and I know he won’t lay off until that’s over with.”
            “Between you and I—okay?—you don’t even want to know how much money the county gets for referring people to us for therapy; but I'll be honest, most of these men need it. You don’t, so, what did he even send you back for?”
            “When I said I had nightmares. He took that as some disorder or whatever.”
            “Ohh. Yes, that sounds like something they’d stick to. They’ll send people for a second evaluation whenever they can.”
            “Can I just help you rewrite the damn thing?”
            “Well now, I feel bad for you, but I can’t do that.”
            “You’re a doctor, right? Therapist, whatever.”
            “Yes, and that means…”
            “That means you need to help people in need; me, I don’t need help.”
            “But I can’t let you write your own mental eval.”
            “We’ll do it together. I won’t actually type it or anything, I’ll just help out.”
            “I’ve never done that before, I really don’t know if it’s a good idea.”
            “Would you rather see me ten more times so I can tell you how I slept the night before? I’m fine, you know I’m fine, and it’s three buses for me to get out here...Please.”
            “Oh my….jeez. Alright, alright. I’ll let you help. What do you want it to say?”
            “Just clarify, make it real clear that, although I may suffer from night terrors—or however you wanna put it—that’s perfectly normal for someone just released from jail for a long stretch. Just say that it will pass over time...that everything will be okay. Say that I’ll be okay. Back to normal...all...better…”
            “Hey...hey, are you alright?”
            “Yeah, sorry. Do you get all that down?”

DSC00465.jpg

Eric Boyd is a line cook living in Pittsburgh. His work has been published by The Missouri Review, Guernica, Akashic Books, and PEN, among others; he has upcoming stories appearing in Akashic Books’ Prison Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, as well as Make Mine Words, a teaching manual from Trinity University Press, featuring work by Oates, Jamaica Kincaid, Tim O’Brien, and Denis Johnson, etc. Boyd is a winner of the 2012 PEN Prison Writing award, a program which he now mentors for. His tumblr page is featured on the poetry section of that website, highlighting his daily six word stories / poems, as well as longer works.

REPORT: WHY WE SHOULD SKIP EARTH — JENNIFER A. HOWARD

/

Yes, earthlings study the movement of objects in space, and they have developed many units of measurement and languages and methods of transport, and fantasy football looks delightful, but they cannot sleep without pillows or walk long distances on bare feet. They had to invent forks, and clocks, and nail clippers, and they harvest the milk of other animals. They plant grass around their houses just to cut it short, get so drunk they can’t remember how to get home, give every damn stretch of running water a name starting with a capital letter. They draw pictures of flowers when there are flowers right there. 
            When they mate, they put their tongues in each others’ mouths. They help each other take off the clothing they put on for the taking-off moment. They worry whether they are the one who is more in love than the other. They think, am I touching him enough and in the right places and how much of the touching is because I want my hand on him and how much is so he can feel my hand on him? The more they think, the less sense they make: Why doesn’t he look more happy, if this is the most happy we get? Are his eyes closed for the same reason my eyes are sometimes closed, which may be to imagine other bodies and may also be for no reason at all? When he opens his eyes, does my face look like I love him, because I am pretty sure I love him even though sometimes, outside of bed, he speaks to me as if I am his enemy, and when he leaves me, which I hope will be any day now, my face will never look like this—like I hope it looks—again, and why doesn’t it make this horrible man sad—why doesn’t his face look sad now—to think about how much he will hurt me when he leaves. 

Jennifer A. Howard teaches and edits Passages North in Michigan's snowy Upper Peninsula. Her collection of flash fiction, How to End Up, was published by New Delta Review. 

TUESDAY'S QUESTIONS — LUKE WIGET

/

I remember asking my mother about the puddles in the sky.
            Clouds? she says.
            Yeah, clouds, I say. I knew that they rained and that the rain puddled. I understood that much.
            But what is a cloud? I say.
            Well, a cloud is water before it’s water, she says.
            I don’t understand and she sees my face say so. We both look up. The sky is so simple sometimes. It’s so simple this way, only blue along with these uncut sheets of white. It had rained the day before and all around us are puddles as thin as glass and my feet are still dry. I look up at her, about to ask again how it all worked, when she says, Okay, a cloud is a puddle. I suppose you’re right in a way. A cloud is a kind of puddle before it’s a puddle, she says.
            I told you so, I say.
            So it really was one puddle pouring into another and could the clouds quit and what makes them come and go? And was the moon involved with the clouds as it was with the waves? Or was that after? Was that something I asked after that one Tuesday or Wednesday or whenever it was when she and I talked about the rain for so long? Either way, she understands and says how God would never let the clouds quit. We would be just fine because God waters the world’s crops and people, and the ocean would speak water back to the sky for as long as she and I would be around. But what is it that God drinks? I say, and she just laughs.
            That day there were clouds everywhere in the world and we just happened to be looking at ours, our oblivious clouds. I was only beginning to learn how water worked. I didn’t know then that those closest to death look driest. I couldn’t have understood her lying in bed while we watched M.A.S.H. for the millionth time and she looked as cracked and sad as an old and unused tennis court.

Luke Wiget is a writer and musician born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, who lives in Brooklyn, New York. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in decomP, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, and H.O.W. Journal, among others. Luke is co-curator and host of drDOCTOR (drdoctordrdoctor.com), a reading series and podcast in Brooklyn. Twitter: @godsteethandme.

CHERUB WINGS — PETE STEVENS

/

This was after my husband told me that he was a cherub, when my fingertips read the shape of angel wings inked on his back. 
            These were still the days of the clove and the spearmint, when the television kept telling us to prepare for war. 
            “Not angel,” he’d said. “They’re cherub wings.” 
            And they were, their size now appearing too slight, the intricate layering of feathers now 
seemingly insignificant. 
            We sat together eating M&M’s one by one. We had them spread on the table like pills. My husband’s fist hit the table, the candied shells dancing in the light. I’d read Adler, knew that the manifestation of physical frustration stemmed from feelings of inadequacy. 
            “My mother always rocked me at night. She’d whisper that I was her precious little cherub.” 
            These were the words he spoke, words that fell like dead birds onto our hardwood floor. 
            My husband wasn’t the type to fix a leaky faucet, his shoulders and spine not strong enough to hoist me up over his head. In heels I’d bend low for a kiss. 
            He held a green M&M, another crunching between his teeth. “Why is it that the green ones are so sexy?” 
            I didn’t respond. I watched the sky flex silver, blue, then pink, like candy sucked long beyond recognition. 
            These were the days of loose thread, the unraveling of string from a spool, when the smallest of cherub wings were unable to lift us from what held us. 

Pete Stevens is the fiction editor at Squalorly. His most recent stories can be found at Pear Noir! and Blue Earth Review, while forthcoming at BULL. In the fall, he will be starting his MFA in fiction at Minnesota State, Mankato. More at petestevensfiction.wordpress.com.

HOOD ORNAMENT — BENJAMIN WOODARD

/

As a child, my father lived at a curve in the road and often woke to the grinding of automobiles against maples. He says the death of James Dean had inspired everyone to race. Most of the smashups resulted in bloody noses, bruised ribs: minor injuries. But one bastard hit the trees so hard he sheared his One-Fifty in half. When the police arrived, they discovered his right arm twenty yards from the wreckage, lodged in a wayward passenger’s seat. His hair had shocked itself a faint alabaster. My morbid father snuck out of bed to clip a lock of this hair as a souvenir, and he showed it to me forty years later on the day I received my driver’s license. It was bound by brittle twine and resided in his sock drawer with other valuables. He walked out to our station wagon, looped the twine, and let the hair dangle from the rearview mirror. A safety reminder, he said as he handed over the keys.

Guardrails now silhouette that Maple Hill bend. The trees are protected. Still, last summer, Mrs. Sullivan died there while unloading groceries. Heart attack. The story goes, she lay out of sight on her driveway for two days in the hot sun until the paperboy found her, lobstered and crisp. 

Benjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut and holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His recent writing has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, decomP magazinE, and Cleaver Magazine. He is a staff member at Numéro Cinq Magazine and a regular contributor to Publishers Weekly and Rain Taxi Review of Books.

WHITNEY HOUSTON: HOW WILL I KNOW (4:36) — BRIAN OLIU

/

And that’s the thing: there is no way of knowing, not when there are words that exist beyond words and ways to say everything but. Once, I heard that this world cannot be trusted: that we are lovers in the eyes of a deceptive god, that the prayers on every heartbeat go skyward to someone that laughs them off. And somehow the math gets done—the counting down of percentages, the numbers meaning more than what they are, the concept that this all means something, that when I wake from dreaming all that will be left is the time left before I am told that this is really love. If we are to believe the whispers as something more than the tapping of fingernails on glass—things said before alarms go off in the morning and we part ways, you, still sleeping, me, clumsy in my waking, dry mouthed, hair wet from the expulsion of smoke between the strands, we need to believe that nothing is real but the shaking—the rattle on long afternoons that keeps me wondering.

Once, I dreamed I was a butterfly. Once, I dreamed you here. Once, I dreamed you gone. Once, you dreamed us characters in your favorite show: you, the heroine, me, a small part, a face that could be cut from the credits and never talked about again—a trivial fact, a do you remember. You dream about heart attacks, about blood, about slowing, about stopping.

Later, I will run. My foot will curl outward like tea spilt on the edges of the book by your bed. My breathing will change—the heartbeat will quicken. I will skip the prayers and I will lie to myself: my head in my heart like the blossom of a dying flower closing in on its stem.

It ends with counting: the pulling of limbs from our bodies, the making of a propeller, the making of an umbrella, the making of gods and death and the hope that there is something to be bargained for here: that if I said the right thing I would know, that knowing is something that needs to be known. That what I need to know is if you’ve ever asked yourself this question, if you’ve ever seen these eyes and knew that the answer was yes, that the answer was always yes, that my dream after your dream was me dead and you gone and the reality of if you love me not.

Suddenly you wake up and I wake up and we wake up and here we are, solid and unmistakable, silent as the afternoon.

Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey and currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He is the author of So You Know It’s Me, a series of Craigslist Missed Connections, Level End, a chapbook based on videogame boss battles, and Leave Luck to Heaven, a collection of lyric essays about 8-bit Nintendo Games.