BATHROOM MIRROR, AFTER SCHOOL — MARLIN M. JENKINS

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According to the Internet, he's smaller than average but he’s not sure how close to hold the ruler or if he has some more time to grow. He's well aware of all the black stereotypes and he gets the jokes from his new white friends - both boys and girls. And he doesn't want to believe what they say. But he does know that these kids can't run like kids did back home. Or play basketball. He's not being racist. After gym, in the locker room, Kevin asked if he was on the team at his school in the city, where he tries not to think about gym, where he got picked last and called Urkel because of the glasses he wore in middle school. He told mom he didn't like the glasses. He told her a lot of things before he had to move in with dad.
            It's almost 5:00 and dad will be home soon and if it's like any other day they'll sit silently at the kitchen table and pretend there's no time to make up for. He'll think about how dad met mom, wonder when dad moved to the suburbs and why this house has three bedrooms. He'll think about the few years mom and dad were married. He’ll pretend to remember having both home at once.
            He hears the automatic garage door open and pulls up his pants, zips. Washes hands. Puts the ruler away, sits at the kitchen table.

Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit, and he studied creative writing and Black studies at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan. His work has been published by decomP, Squalorly, Black Heart Magazine, The Molotov Cocktail, and others. You can find him online at marlinmjenkins.tumblr.com and @Marlin_Poet.

FIRST GENERATION — STEPHANIE DEVINE

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“What you need is a nice relaxing spa day,” your college roommate tells you as she leans over your desk and nudges a stack of papers until the edges come into alignment. And it reminds you of all the spa days you and your sister shared when you were in middle school, begging for the latest issue of Jane from your tired mother while you waited in line at the Shop n' Save, both of you small behind a cart piled high with frozen bags of chicken nuggets, two-for-one boxes of pasta, and that juice that came in a tube and still looked like a tube, softening in the bottom of a stained, plastic pitcher. Later, once you got bolder, you’d put a Cosmopolitan and a single sleeve of Reese’s on the dirty belt and mom would say, “Stuff will rot your brain,” but not make you remove them. Then when she was gone working a double or with her "friend," Rob, you and your sister would bring that magazine into the kitchen and mix, so carefully, recipes for D-I-Y face masks of eggs and yogurt and honey. You would paint each other’s faces and make tea, sipping it slowly in the ripped kitchen chairs, with the used bags of Lipton placed over one eye, then the other. And how you wish you could be there again, wasting hot water in your mother’s shower, sitting with your sister under the stream, when you proudly open the door of your faux-wood paneled mini-fridge and show your college roommate these things—eggs, and BOGO yogurts, and store brand honey—that you spent a quarter of your monthly food allotment on, and say, all possibility, “Look what I got. For a spa day.” How you wish you could be so still, mask washing away, rivulets of milky white dripping down your neck and trailing across the fiberglass tub floor, as your roommate looks back at you and says, “I don’t get it,” laughter already spreading across her face.

Devine_pic.jpg

Stephanie Devine’s work has recently appeared in Atticus Review, Fiction Southeast, Treehouse, and Glassworks Magazine, and is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature and Pembroke Magazine. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Georgia State University, where she is the Fiction Editor of New South. 

BRAZEN — LAURA RELYEA

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There’s a picnic blanket in an otherwise blank room and you are laid upon it reading. It’s here that I know I’m in your shallow square pocket. Later, again, when rye and bourbon have made us a bit awry, conversation turns to social dynamics and I realize – I’m an oblong, surreally smooth stone you hold in your calloused palms as you drive. A totem oblivious of its own benefit. How without this Africa-shaped talisman your shoulder will cramp halfway between Mississippi and New Orleans, somewhere in the bayou. My thoughts potter a buck shy of five hundred miles.

What if I fell out of your shallow pocket in transit into the passenger seat of a woman’s black car? You have no intention of buckling in again. Reeled in, I am a spool pulled taught, preoccupied by the fading memory of a blue linen shirt that reflects the sky everywhere and two unopened bottles of beer in the door of my refrigerator. What is it to unwind – the contents of a sunroom bleached? Oysters scrubbed for shucking? A levy, in want of a hurricane? 

I am everything, including coy.

Laura Relyea is a writer in Atlanta. She's the Managing Editor of Scoutmob and the Editor and Chief of Vouched Books. Her work has been featured in Necessary Fiction, Monkey Bicycle, Coconut Poetry and elsewhere. Her chapbook, All Glitter, Everything, was released by Safety Third Enterprises last October. She both fears and respects Glitter. 

B-MOVIE — W. TODD KANEKO

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We will make it out of the Death Pagoda because we both know how to dance. You are a beautiful salsa instructor and I work at your uncle’s restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown. We both know how all the other busboys swoon for the way your legs kick sharp on one, the way your hips roll dangerous on two. When your uncle is kidnapped by gangsters, you turn to me—a young Kung Fu fighter from Hong Kong who snatches fruit flies out of the air with chopsticks. We will track him to Fisherman’s Wharf where I’ll scrap with a judo expert, put him down with a knife hand to the throat: cha. I’ll brawl with a boxer on the Golden Gate Bridge, sidekick him headlong into the grill of an eighteen wheeler: cha. I’ll duel with a Karate champion at the top of Coit Tower, launch him to his death with a flying backfist and a spinning roundhouse kick: cha cha cha. We’ll make out on a cable car en route to the final battle. We’ll make out in case we don’t make it out. We know that in the end, we’ll dance for our lives against that black belt cowboy and his swarm of ninjas in the Death Pagoda. You brandishing a mean high heeled shoe. Me whirling a pair of nunchakus around both our bodies. We know that every dance is a blood sport. We can save the world. We can destroy everything.

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of the Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor, 2014). His poems, essays and stories have appeared in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Barrelhouse, the Normal School, the Collagist and many other places. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches at Grand Valley State University.

RESORT TOWN — AMY SILVERBERG

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Look at this: a woman on vacation. Watch her at the airport, tall and dark-haired, no suitcase, she has nothing but time. Watch her buy a coffee, and while she waits, watch her make small talk with the man behind the counter. Listen. Her voice is like water bubbling over stones. Her laugh is sudden and low, like a drawer opening. She sits with her legs crossed, chewing ice. Watch her watch other people—a woman in a flowered head wrap, a little boy chasing a rolling suitcase, dragged by his father. Oh, don’t fathers look tired.
            Watch her on the airplane, eating the bland-tasting peanuts one by one, rolling them between her fingers. Through the window, she watches the ocean, impossible-looking—dark blue and far away—pocked with boats so small she could flick them with the tip of her fingernail. She watches a speedboat, its wake ripping through the water like a torn seam. Picture her on the deck of that boat: sun-drunk and dizzy, wind churning through her hair. The plane lands unsurely on its wheels, and she waits for everyone else to file out before she unfurls her spine, knob by knob, and stands.
            Watch her walk slowly down the breezeway and hail a cab, where she sits in front, and says something to the driver in a different language, because she has a knack for that, for picking up where someone else—someone she has never met—has just left off.
            Watch her check in at this resort, all white washed walls and ocean and sky, blue/white, white/blue, what a contrast for those postcards she collects but never sends. Watch her eat breakfast at a large round table with eight empty chairs. She eats slowly, in courses, with a book at her side. She never opens it. Watch her spend money like she spends her time, easy, in abundance. I’ll have another, she says, of everything. Cubes of melon in a parfait glass. Watch the juice drip down her chin.
            She walks down the beach. She takes a swim. She emerges, blinking in the sun, the lone figure with the wet hair. It falls long and heavy down her back. Watch her re-tie the strings on her bikini, the white lines of skin briefly visible, then watch her turn away.
            Keep watching. Keep listening. Every day, she is reinvented. Every day, she lies. She talks with everyone—older couples from New Jersey and Boca Raton, a mother and daughter from California, a group of widows from Denver. She pays them compliments they only think they deserve. Do you know who you look like? she asks the too-tan divorcee by the pool. A young Goldie Hawn. No honest, you do.
            One day, she is in medical school. A resident, she says, and yes, the work is hard. The next day, she is grieving the death of her father, and that night, she is a flight attendant, but only in the dark. Is this a layover, a freckled man asks when they’re in bed, and her voice is gravel-scorched when she mutters into his shoulder, Over-time. She fits on these new personas, zipping them up and over her long legs and arms like a vacationers’ tan. She seeks her reflection in store windows; the ones that sell brightly colored sarongs and straw hats which the tourists will never wear again.
            Don’t think she doesn’t notice you.
            But you won't stop watching. You can't. You want to learn how to be alone.

Amy Silverberg is a writer living in Los Angeles. She is currently a PhD Candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, The Tin House blog, Joyland, and elsewhere. 

THE WIND FARM — ELENA M. APONTE

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A few weeks out of rehab and he's keeping solid food down and ready to drink a glass of milk. Phillips likes his milk, half a glass in the morning with a bowl of oatmeal, and when he's sure he's not going to throw it all back up, he takes the bus to work. 
            It's late fall, but the fields of rural Minnesota are damn cold, covered in a sheen of frost. He finds the first bird a few feet from the turbine, a mass of feathers and not much else caught in a shrub. He grabs it with a gloved hand, stuffs what's left into a garbage bag. He wipes sweat from his brow and looks up at the wind turbines spinning overhead. 
            There's something unsettling about the way they tower over him, always spinning. They are as tall as sky scrapers, full of cold concrete and steel, painted white to protect them from planes. It's only the birds they have to worry about, the dumb ones who run straight into the blades that are as long as a football field. 
            Phillips hates the biting cold of the fields. He hates the birds he finds shredded to pieces: a clawed foot, a ball of feathers, a severed head. He hates the tremor in his hands, the ache in his bones, all telling him he should've upped his Methandone intake. But he hates those damn pills. 
            "How many you got?" 
            Nico is there, standing a few feet away, wearing a hunting hat with floppy ears. His eyes are squinty and small. He's pudgy and Italian and makes Phillips look like a POW. He stoops to pick up a severed wing. Looks like it was a falcon or something, from the way the silky feathers are colored and tapered at the ends. Into the bag it goes.
            "Seven birds total I think," Phillips says. 
            Nico hums, making a tally mark with his pen. He always takes a pad of sticky notes and tallies up the birds. Today, his notes are orange. He has the hardest part of the job, Phillips is sure of it. He braces himself against another tremor, not sure if it's withdrawls or the cold. 
            "Not as bad as it has been," Nico muses. "Seems like they're getting the idea." 
            His accent makes "idea" sound like "idear." Phillips keeps picking at the landscape. Sweat rolls down his nose. The bag is heavier with bird parts. He shivers, teeth chattering, as he stuffs more inside. The wind catches a few feathers, sends them fluttering out of his reach. The sun is pink on the horizon, not quite up yet. The turbines keep thrumming and the rotors slice through the air, birds be damned, and sometimes Phillips wonders if he's just as dumb as they are, hit with death before they even realize it. Maybe they think that the rotors are birds, too. 
            It's an easy mistake, as far as he's concerned. 

Elena M. Aponte is a recent graduate of the University of Toledo. She lives in Sylvania. 

CLODS — WILLIAM VanDenBERG

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Florida is a basketcase. I got a hotel room somewhere in the interior. The hotel was a landlocked party-barge. The primeval forest anchored it. The concierge? A jaundiced, small man. His hair was mostly gone. When I demanded clean sheets he accused me of soiling my first set. “I shouldn’t have to sleep on clods of dirt,” I argued. He sarcastically offered to call the Knight’s Inn up the road. As if there was a road. As if there was another living soul for miles. 
            That night the concierge entered my room. He sang me a lullaby. He poured a fistful of grenadine onto my crotch. I demanded that he leave. He asked about my gold skin. I explained, “The gold is my royal affliction.” He had no further questions. He climbed into bed with me. He tamped down some dirt and said, “Night, night.” 
            I dreamed of the sea. The barge was buoyant and loaded with coeds. I dreamed of bygone days. The concierge smiled at me from the upper deck, raised a pink, sparkling drink in my direction. Bygone but no better. My skin was soft and free of gold. I smiled back. 
            When I woke, the barge was burning. The concierge had dragged me from my room, rolled me down the gangplank. He roused me with a weak kiss. He turned to go back inside. I gasped, “No.” He responded, “The Captain always goes down with the ship.” There were so many inaccuracies in that statement. I didn’t know where to start. I waved him off. He climbed back up the gangplank. I saw his body burn, a black smudge against a wall of flames. 

William VanDenBerg is the author of Lake of Earth (Caketrain Press, 2013). "Clods" is part of a series called MILK TEETH. Previous installments have appeared in Alice Blue Review and The Fanzine. He lives with his wife in Denver.