WE HAPPY FEW — TIMSTON JOHNSTON

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Tucker. Rusty. Calvin, Connor, Cooper. We have names that once belonged to Golden Retrievers. 

Everything about us comes together like chalk and weeds and clay. We’re separated only by fence posts. We share our mother’s crushed geraniums, their yellow garden trowels in half-dug holes, red checker-print tablecloths, flies and oniony potato salad, hammers and drills on pegboards, the smell of paint and grass clippings and stilled hose water dripping without sieves, birthing the puddles that draw millipedes and catch cottonwood seed.

We bored. We Cat’s Cradle gazes. We silent five. We breathless nothing. We pebble-kicking misfits of our own alley.

Ants rain from the oak that hangs over home plate. They crawl behind ears, underneath collars, line the brims of our hats. They bite, but we do not take our eye off the ball’s stitching. We swing. We miss. We curse and search the weeds behind us. We’re at fault. We’re our own catchers. We hate the curve, the knuckle. We love the slider but always call for heat.

We joke that Calvin jerks it to Rusty’s sister. He pictures her Keds—virginal white soles, pink laces, red tongue. We say we don’t masturbate at all. Until one of us admits it. Then we all admit it. It’s every day. It’s our morning coffee. Our afternoon tea. Our bitter nightcap.

Connor’s heart palpitations eat him, gnaw his ribs. He says it feels like the frog’s croak, the slide into second base, the catch, grip, and grind on gravel. He beats his sternum, the one-and-two-and-one-and-two, reminding the heart of its rhythm. We stomp our feet with him, accent the two, grunt the and. We remove our gloves and slap mosquitoes to our chests. The one. The one. The one. We taste dust. We count red dots and mashed wings.

We chase strays as they bark and nip, run in circles, round bases from third to first to right field to left. We never conceived the rules. We never established a way to win. We are speed and torque and centroids. We are nature, unleashed. We wield the club, our ancestral tool, and we strip ourselves of civilization. We territorial. We one. We aim. We swing. We maim. We kill. We pant. We breathe. We won. We scatter. We howl.

Timston Johnston received his MFA from Northern Michigan University and is the fiction editor of Passages North. His work appears in Midwestern Gothic, Ghost Town, and Cartagena. He likes Reese's Pieces. 

THE SHREW — JANE LIDDLE

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The shrew told her husband for the millionth time to shut off the light in the bathroom. The shrew had been telling her husband to shut off lights for forty-eight years. She had also been telling him to close drawers all the way, and to quit doing that thing with his mouth. But for the past few months the husband’s forgetfulness and self-control had gotten worse. The husband was sick. He experienced a great deal of pain every second of the day. The shrew would feel bad about nagging him but couldn’t help it. Even if the husband had all the sudden started to shut off the lights, close the drawers all the way, and stop doing that thing with his mouth, the shrew would still probably yell at him about these things. One day the husband asked the shrew to help him kill himself. The shrew dismissed this idea and even admonished the husband for thinking such a thing. The husband requested her help in dying with the same persistence the shrew had asked the husband to shut off the lights and close the drawers all the way and to stop doing that thing with his mouth. The shrew went for a very long time ignoring the husband’s requests until one day she stood outside the kitchen and watched him struggle to open a can of soda until he broke down and cried. When he was done crying he put the can of soda back in the fridge. The shrew set to work to procure the proper drugs. She did this through her sons, who normally avoided interactions with the shrew, but complied because they were delighted to fulfill such a strange request from their strict, tight-laced mom. Maybe the shrew was finally lightening up. The shrew did not tell them the real reason. The shrew waited for the husband to bring up helping him die again and she didn’t have to wait long. When he did she said that all was settled and that he could die anytime he wanted. He wanted to die that very day. The shrew set up the bedroom to be lovely with flowers and candles. It looked romantic. The husband took the pills at sunset. The shrew and the husband waited for the effects to take hold. The shrew watched with irritation as the husband did that thing with his mouth, but she didn’t say anything.

Jane Liddle grew up in Newburgh, New York, and now lives in Brooklyn. She has recently completed a short story collection and a flash series about murder. Other murder stories have appeared in NANO Fiction, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Everyday Genius. You can find her on Twitter @janeriddle or at liddlejane.tumblr.com.

NOMINATIONS — BEST OF THE NET 2014

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We are pleased to announce our nominations for Best of the Net 2014:

"Two Thousand Miles Running" by Anthony Martin
"Jellyfish" by Zara Lisbon

We owe everything to all of our wonderful contributors, and it was a challenge to select just two, but we felt these pieces really highlighted our focus and drive here at CHEAP POP.

We wish Anthony and Zara good luck, and if you haven't already, now's a great time to read these stories. 

YOU'VE GOT YOUR RESOLUTIONS, WE JUST GOT RESERVATIONS — JUSTIN BROUCKAERT

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In better days, we used to lie in bed together and quiz each other about the world. Sveden, you’d say. Svitzerland. Just to hear the sounds. You’d grab my tongue with your fingers and make me say it wrong. Because I don’t know shit about geography, I asked who you would fuck if you could fuck someone famous. No one, you said. You shook your head. You smiled your smile. It made you so happy and it made me so mad. I couldn’t take you seriously when you played the game all wrong.
 
Now you say it goes back to alignment, but I disagree. And really, shouldn’t I know? I’ve climbed every step in the ladder of your spine. I played you song after song on my sternum and you kept rhythm with your finger between my ribs. You shed that skin already. I see it now in a glass case on a shelf next to a card from your mother. Remember that? I ask. The card? you ask.

I’m on your couch eating pancakes when you tell me you’re sorry, but you’d probably take a crack at him if you had the chance. You point to the TV, some smooth-faced German kid who can sing. You’ve got your other hand on my knee and it dawns on me that you’ve been waiting for a punch line. I try to whistle instead and the sound makes your small white dog scream out the window. Sorry, I say. I guess you never taught me. You smile, and it means something. Taught you what?

Justin Brouckaert's prose and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Passages North and Hobart, among other publications. He is a James Dickey Fellow at the University of South Carolina, where he serves as fiction editor of Yemassee. 

SHELTER IN PLACE — BRENT RYDIN

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Wolf Blitzer was on the muted TV, a block away from our building again. The news-ticker ran across the bottom of the screen, “…shelter-in-place. City of Boston has issued a shelter-in-…”
            “You don’t have work,” my husband said, smoking a cigarette at the window. I’d noticed him getting out of bed in the night, but hadn’t noticed him not coming back, and I woke up to dusty spring light whispering later morning than it should have. I  panicked at my lateness and nausea snagged my stomach as I tripped, tangled, from the bed. “Christ,” he said. “There’s a tank parking at our corner.”
            “What?” I said, not even sure what I was responding to.
            “Or, I don’t know. A hummer with a bunch of guns and shit.”

I remember being a kid and sitting on the carpet, feet from the screen, watching bombs fall in Kosovo in the night-vision TV light. I asked if we’d need to buy gas masks, and my father laughed, and my mother scowled at him. “Just imagine,” he said, like I wasn’t there, as she hugged her knees and bit her fingernails, “our little girl riding her bike through the neighborhood in a gas mask.” He crouched down to me. “No sweetie,” he said. “We’re safe here.”

Daniel got up and held his arms out wide and wrapped them around me. Anytime I smelled cigarettes since we’d quit, it was like burning tinfoil, but the tobacco mixed with his deodorant and coffee and it had this feel of home, more home than we already were.
            “I missed your hair like this,” he said, and kissed my forehead. I’d dyed it last week, the night before we went to City Hall and cried in the clerk’s office and stuck a mini bride-and-groom into a cupcake. “I’m going to shower,” he said.

I watched the bombs on the TV, in backpacks down the street and hurled from cars across the river. I imagined a glittering yellow bicycle, a rainbow of beads spinning in the spokes, a little girl giggling in a gas mask. I hugged my knees and bit my nails, and my stomach cramped and churned, deep down, like a sheath of paper clumsily balling up. I failed to choke down sobs at the picture of that little boy on the TV again, with his crayon sign. No more hurting people, it said. He had this beautiful, goofy little half-smile. Peace.

They released the lockdown for a while that night. The only store open was this gourmet place down the street, and he came home with champagne and brie and crackers and pepperoni. “Fancy night,” he said. “There was no real food left. No bread, no milk, no chicken. People smarter than us, I guess.”
            “Or something.” I turned back to the window and put out my cigarette. He put the groceries on the table and wrapped his arms around my neck. I leaned into him. “Are we safe here?”
            "I love you," he said.

Brent Rydin lives and works in Boston. He is the founding editor of Wyvern Lit, and has work published or forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, The Island Review, Cartridge Lit, and WhiskeyPaper. He has a website at brntrydn.com and tweets at @brntrydn.

URBAN EQUINES — E.B. BARTELS

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In the red of night, I float between places. The neon sign across the street fills my dark room with a sharp scarlet light. I live in a neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen. There’s a bar up the street named Perdition, and a demonic mural on the corner, but it’s only in the middle of a restless night, in the bloodshot glow, that this place feels an inferno, and in those moments, when I can’t sleep, I count the bright stripes on my blinds and listen for horses.
            I once lived in St. Petersburg, on that hook of Russia reaching out towards Finland. Time was hard to track so far north. In June, the nights were white. At two in the morning there would be a dim dip – dusk and dawn together – but besides that almost a full day of sunlight. But in winter, the darkness was perpetual. Even the daylight hours between ten and two were gray and thick with snow. I took vitamin D pills and looked for other markers of time.
            I rented an apartment on Karavannaya Ulitsa. The street runs along the Fontanka Canal and perpendicular to the busy avenue Nevsky Prospekt. Karavannaya spills into the Bolshoi Saint-Petersburg State Circus—full of bicycle-riding bears and trained cats and horses. Late each night, almost morning, at three or four, a trainer walked the horses down from the circus and along Karavannaya, so the equines could stretch their muscles, and when I was up late reading or writing or in a drunken fight with my boyfriend or rolling with insomnia, I heard their hooves on the pavement. I would notice the rhythmic sound. I would hear the beating of minutes like clock hands. I would breath in pace to their steps. I would count each clip and clop. I would realize the time, that I was up too late, and I would think that maybe it was time to sleep, and the horses, four-legged sandmen, would lull me into a dream.
            There are horses in New York. They pull carriages up 10th Avenue by my apartment toward Central Park, and many live in the stables two blocks over on 48th Street. I hear them in the mornings, and the afternoons, though then their sounds are less sharp – buried in sirens and horns and groaning buses. They clomp by, lethargic, in the evenings, tired from pulling tourists. And sometimes, I hear them late at night, just like I heard the horses in St. Petersburg, at two in the morning, as I lie in the red glow.
            Soon, though, the horses might be gone. I agree with the mayor. Horses don’t belong in a crowded city. Pavement is hard. Space is cramped. Tourists are heavy. But I, selfish, want the horses to stay: my fellow out-of-place creatures, a comfort to an American in Russia, a New England girl in New York.
            I lie in the red dark and hope to hear them.

E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Ploughshares, Fiction Advocate, Agave Magazine, Vitamin W, The Wellesley Review, Wellesley Underground, and the anthology The Places We've Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35. She is finishing up her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and she was the 2013-2014 Online Content Editor and a Co-Founder of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art’s literary blog, Catch & Release. You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com.

YOUR WONDERWALL — RON RIEKKI

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He shouts for the groupies to get away, that he isn’t going to have any more sex, that he’s sick of it.  He wants nobody near him.
            An eighty-year-old lies nearby on a gurney; I’d later find out he was an artillery forward observer during WWII.  He’ll tell me about a time on a sub where they had to descend so fast that every person slid down the floor until they were all piled on top of each other against a wall, bones broken, a man’s back pressed up against his open mouth.  Nostalgia.
            The schizophrenic thinks he’s a Brit pop star.  He has the accent and everything.  It feels real, except he’s from Alabama.  He’s ODed on everything he could find in his grandmother’s bathroom cabinet and the bad news is grandmothers have a lot of medicine.
            A paramedic keeps yelling for Ringo to calm the hell down or he’s going to call the cops.
            The cops are already in the room.
            Schizophrenics don’t need any more noise.  They already have enough in their head.  You want to give them quiet, reassurance, tell him the voices aren’t real.
            A woman throws her curtain back.  She looks like her makeup was put on while riding a bouncing motorcycle.  “We don’t want to have sex with you!” she yells, “No one does!”
            Quiet falls.
            No one else seems to exist now.  The schizophrenic Beatle is captivated by a woman he keeps studying as if she’s the Virgin Mary.
            “I need to set fire to the room,” he says.“No,” she says.  She’d come in for suicidal tendencies, wanted an HIV test.
            Psych patients, you’d be surprised, in hospitals tend to be the lowest priorities.  We shove them in rooms until all of the patients needing immediate care are treated.  Because we don’t know how to treat psych patients.  E.R.s are not for psychology.  They’re for controlling bleeding, keeping an airway, making sure the heart keeps beating.
            The security guard motions to me, holding up four fingers.  I’m not sure what it means.  Four seconds and he’ll shoot?  There are four of us near the patient who could all tackle him at the same time?  Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?
            I know not to move.  A finger being pointed can turn into a gun.  Schizophrenics take normal stimuli and twist it into new ways you wouldn’t believe.  The schizophrenic looks at his Virgin Mary as if he’s found his mother.
            “I hear a man’s voice,” he says.
            “So,” she says.
            “There’s a demon here,” he says.
            “I’ll kick its ass,” she says, “Sit.”
            “Wasps,” he says.
            “Sit or I’ll let every demon in this hospital on you!”
            He sits.  “It’s a bad day,” he says.
            She puts an arm around him and security dives.  I join them.  The doctor tries to slip in a needle.  We’re all pressed against the wall.  The difficulty of breathing.
            Above us, the prostitute looks down, goddess-like.  The white of her gown, celestial.

Ron Riekki's books include U.P. and The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (a 2014 Michigan Notable Book).  He has books upcoming with Michigan State University Press, Arbutus Press, and Finishing Line Press.

SUNDAY MORNING AT JONSEYS' DINER (BIDDEFORD, MAINE) — LOUIS RAYMOND

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1.

Ol’ Bill Dubois sits with a huff and a groan. Without missing a heartbeat, Sandy  bounces over to him with a pot of black coffee. He sits hunched, the sports page pinned under his elbow, and exhales into his clasped hands. “How are ya, bubba,” Sandy asks in her usual way, but among the after-mass chatter in the diner, Bill allows for a moment of heavy silence. When Sandy comes back to ask if he and his wife—Diane, his high school sweetheart—would like their usual, Bill responds by meticulously stirring his coffee. He is bound by quiet. Sandy leaves, but later, without lifting his head, Bill cuts into his bleeding yoke, glances at the empty seat beside him, and offers to no one in particular: “There ain’t a thing usual about today.”

2.

Two college kids—Daniela and Amanda—sit by windows, eating western omelets. Daniela has been going on about semiotics for about an hour. “I’m just saying,” she says, pushing her too-large glasses up, “love is an idea, a product of language, therefore it is nonexistent.” In response, Amanda forks a pepper and eats it, shaking her head at her roommate’s cynicism and defiance. She feels there must be a counter argument, but she hasn’t found the words. Then the waitress Sandy—who Daniela calls “Plain Jane”—swings by to ask if they need anything. The two shake their heads, but when Daniela goes back to pontificating, Amanda finds herself briefly mesmerized by Sandy as she bounces table to table, beaming at patrons: angelic in her grace.

3.

A family sits around a table. Four kids: Carl, Ray, Susie, and Elaine. Two parents: Becky and Estelle. Carl and Susie ball up bits of napkin and, with spoons, catapult them at each other across the table. One hits Estelle in the eye and she pretends that it hurt. All the kids laugh at their mother feigning pain, briefly forgetting that the real pain is inside her. They can’t pronounce it—Lipfnoma? Lympnomia?—but they hate it. They understand what it means. Then Susie pipes up and suggests they say a prayer. “Lovely idea,” Becky says, winking—and they all bow heads and hold hands while Sandy, hovering over them with a fresh pot of coffee, closes her eyes.

Louis Raymond is  the author of the story collection Vacationland. His poems and stories are published or forthcoming in Umbrella Factory Magazine, Poydras Review, Bartleby Snopes, Extract(s), Dum Dum Zine, and elsewhere.