GOLF BALLS — DANIEL W. THOMPSON

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In a cocaine haze I flush the motel room toilet and check my face. It’s good light so I see the blue cavities under my eyes and tender reds of my nostrils. I repeat squeezing my fists to inflate my forearms and look to the bathtub for a couple of inclined pushups. I want to feel flush and virile but it’s a narrow bathroom and I’d have to lie across part of the toilet compromising the pushup angle. I do a couple more fist squeezes and hold the last one until my face turns pink in the mirror.
            She’s sitting on the couch. The television is on, SportsCenter. I know she’s not watching it because I asked her what her favorite sport growing up was and she said bobbing for apples, then laughed for a minute straight. I shouldn’t be nervous or self-conscious since I’ve already paid, but I can’t help wanting to impress.
            Once on a date I talked so long about working at the driving range my date went to the bathroom and never returned. I have to ensure that each golf ball is struck at least 5,000 times before it can be thrown away. Of course this is an impossible task, unless you implanted a pedometer of sorts in the balls, and I’ve tried to figure it out but can’t. Instead I pick a golf ball up, let it roll around in my hand, squeeze the dimples, maybe bounce it on the pavement parking lot, and by doing all that I can tell whether it’s been hit more than 5,000 times. There needs to be a certain reflex in the ball. A tone.
            This is my first time paying for sex. Old Junior, this Vietnam vet who comes down to the driving range pro shop to drink coffee each morning made the suggestion. Said he’s been paying since the seventies and that some of the buzz disappeared when they made him start wearing condoms but now he wholeheartedly endorses the policy. He gave me a number. I think they call her a madam and she asked me if I was a cop. Did I have any diseases? How much did I weigh? I lied about the weight. I told her I was 165 but really I’m 130, maybe 135 when I’m flush.
            It was the girl’s cocaine. Said she was feeling shitty. Said if I was cool with it, she’d even give me a discount. I told I already paid over the phone.
            I walked over to the couch and she looked up at me. Her nostrils were red too and there were shadows around her brown eyes. I asked her if she had ever been to a driving range and she said no. It was the first time I realized she had an accent and smelled a little like garlic bread. I sat down, turned off the television and started explaining why I throw away golf balls sometimes.

Daniel W. Thompson’s fiction has appeared recently or is forthcoming at publications like Bartleby Snopes, Camroc Press Review, Literary Orphans, decomP, and Spartan. As a child, his grandfather paid him $5 an hour to clean up frozen cow patties and pull stones out of the vegetable garden. Now he lives in downtown Richmond, Virginia, with his wife and two daughters cleaning up diapers and dog fur—no compensation has been offered.

EPITHALAMION — CEZARIJA ABARTIS

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What she liked best about the Fourth of July fireworks was the cloud underneath the illumination as the breeze blew the smoke away and the next firework lit up the space where the previous fireworks used to be. In the churning smoke she saw, for an instant, Michelangelo’s masses and curves of Dawn and Night in the Tomb of Lorenzo de Medici. Who had the confidence, even arrogance, to plan his own tomb? In another instant she saw a whale sailing the sky. She would herself like to ride that bucking whale. The children ooh-ed and ah-ed when a particularly large firework exploded or a rapid sequence of small ones. The sound of the explosions thumped on her chest.            
            Alan was recording the event with his new digital camera. She saw three or four people around them doing the same.            
            “This is a great little camera,” Alan said. “Look at this–even in the dark, with no tripod.”
            She agreed that the colors were vivid. But it really was not the same thing. The screen was a four-inch rectangle. But the real sky was all around her, so that she had the sensation of floating.
            After nearly fifteen years of marriage, Alan could read her mind. “I know that you’re thinking I should just be watching the moment. Well I am. I’m pointing this and I’m watching too.”
            “I didn’t say anything.”            
            “And I’m trying this out for the wedding.”            
            They were going to their niece’s wedding the next week. A spectacular blue ring exploded, and the crowd cheered. A yellow peony followed and lit up the billowing smoke underneath. The presenters followed that with a smiley face. She laughed at the cheesiness and wit.            
            Let Katy and Gavin have a full, happy, layered life filled with fireworks and marble statues and whales in the sky. Let them have the sharpness of the smoke smell and the strong feeling of the sound against their bodies. Let them hold their breath in wonder and laugh at the release of the light. Let them sleep with a sweet slumber and wake to a happy dawn. Let them have the stars above and the stars below.

Cezarija Abartis' Nice Girls and Other Stories was published by New Rivers Press. Her stories have appeared in Per Contra, Pure Slush, and New York Tyrant, among others. She participates on ShowMeYourLits.com and Zoetrope.com. Her flash, “The Writer,” was selected by Dan Chaon for Wigleaf’s Top 50 online Fictions of 2012.  “History,” published by The Lascaux Review, was chosen as April Story of the Month by The Committee Room. Recently she completed a novel, a thriller. She teaches at St. Cloud State University. Her website is http://magicmasterminds.com/cezarija/.

SHOPLIFTING — LAURA CITINO

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Every day that summer we went down to the corner store on Oak Street. We went late afternoon, when the heat reached the edge of madness. The sun shot sharp at our eyes as if angled through a magnifying glass. Anyone with a lick of sense was inside with a fan or beer or weed trying to make the hours pass. Men in oversized t-shirts with brown papered-bottles tucked between their legs sat on collapsing porches. Sometimes they'd wave to us. 
            “Girl,” they called. 
            “What up, mister?” We twitched our hips a little as we walked by.
            “Who you think you fooling?” they called. They grabbed their crotches and hollered.
            The dusty brick building never had many customers. Our classmates spent afternoons at the gas station trying to get the older kids to buy them cigarillos – the kind that made your lips taste sweet like maple sugar. The corner store seemed from a bygone era, a relic from our parents' childhoods when the drunks were stumbling but harmless and hard candy cost sofa change. Metal grates crisscrossed the windows and a handwritten sign declared NO LIQUOR with the Arabic translation scribbled below.
            We stole more than we bought. I'd get a Milky Way or a warmed over hotdog to keep up appearances while you'd sneak out handfuls of cheap taffy in the pockets of your cutoffs. Once onto the pavement we'd high five and cram the sugar into our mouths. We weren't poor, at least not to our own knowledge. But the neighborhood was. We could feel it in the last dying elm trees, stiff chewed-up gum and cigarette butts sticking to our shoes. Bad folk loping the streets. Even at fourteen going on fifteen we were sucked dry of ambition and the neighborhood replaced it with the dangerous feeling of being disadvantaged. 
            We'd split the share at the old elementary school playground, which was abandoned in the summer except for gangs of smoothed skinned boys playing three-on-three. Curses, slurs, and the rhythmic bounce of a ball on concrete echoed through the air. We lazed in the uncut grass, the straps of our tank tops pulled down to avoid tan lines.
            We talked about boys. Endless enigmatic intent hidden in a bit lip, a coarse laugh, a hand on a knee on a leg on a shoulder. A boy named Jason, another named Marcus. Hands on bellies on your ass cuddled in recliner chairs in my parents' basement. 
            You blew your bangs out of your face and undid the top button of your shorts. The roundness of your lower belly sticking out was a little disgusting. Naked. Soft. You caught me looking.
            “I'm a growing girl,” you said. You scanned me up and down. “Bet I could wrestle you.”
            I grinned. You went to move but I was faster. Your wrist was in my grip. You leaned forward and whispered, “Go ahead then.”
            Quick as a blink I was on my back.

Laura Citino is a fiction writer and essayist from southeastern Michigan. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Midwestern Gothic, Bluestem, Passages North, and Sou'wester. She received her MFA from Eastern Washington University. She currently lives with her partner and teaches English in Terre Haute, Indiana.

KNOW IT ALL — TODD MERCER

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Nostradamus sits in darkness, rocking his chair by the front door as his errant daughter Madeleine sneaks in. She startles when he flips on the lights.
            He holds a bronze plaque that says “2:46 a.m.,” which is of course the actual time.
            “It’s getting old,” Maddy says. She smells like cigarettes.
            Her Dad quit opening mail in early middle age. Maddy holds up envelopes and Nostradamus guesses the contents.
            Junior year of high school she says, “Guess what, Dad? I’m—“
            “—pregnant,” he finishes. “A girl. Seven pounds, nine ounces, one blue eye and one brown. A linguist who also collects butterflies. Have her watch for signs of diabetes.”
            Maddy says, “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
            Nostradamus is already over it, eating a sandwich above the kitchen sink.
            Madeleine hears one day that the country’s declared war. She rushes to her father with the news. The kitchen table is covered in scribbled parchment.
            “The complete history of the war!” he tells her, “Such supreme folly, this one.”
            She couldn’t tell him anything.
            All the other Dads were early European versions of bumbling sitcom Dads, morons of obliviousness, objects of both pity and chiding ridicule.
            Sure, it’s nice to know the order that the ponies will finish at the track. Cool to know which year the Detroit Lions win the Super Bowl. But a girl could use a father, one who makes a few bad calls, one who isn’t holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments while she’s learning sin.

Todd Mercer won the first Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest, and his chapbook, Box of Echoes, won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest. His digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, is forthcoming from RHP Books. Mercer's poetry and fiction appear in Apocrypha & Abstractions, Blue Collar Review, The Camel Saloon, Camroc Press Review, Cease, Cows, Dunes Review, East Coast Literary Review, Eunoia Review, Falling Star, 50-Word Stories, The Fib Review, The Lake, The Legendary, Main Street Rag Anthologies, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, One Sentence Poems, Postcard Poems and Prose, Postcard Shorts, Right Hand Pointing, The Second Hump, and Spartan.

BEES (A HOMETOWN STORY) — CARMEN LAU

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One summer, while you were walking along the canal, a cloud of bees settled on your head.
            You kept very still and let them crawl through your hair, tickling your scalp with their tiny feet. You let their wings beat your face. It may have been hours or days, you just standing there trying to rein your thoughts in so they didn't produce screams. If they buzzed into your ears some secret that would help you later on down the road (for there is always some such creature that whispers some such secret, and it is in us to forget their words until some pivotal moment), you couldn't know, though you listened very carefully – scared, as you were, for your life.
            For your mother had warned you about bees. Their stings are incredibly painful, she said. They feel like little jolts of lightning going through your nerves. And after they sting you their stingers stay embedded in your flesh, so when they try to pull out their entrails are pulled out of their bodies in a miniscule string, and then they die, the bees. It's hell digging a stinger out of you, you need to go to a doctor for that. Also, some people are allergic to bees – they swell up and die of asphyxiation after a single sting. That's what happened to the boy in My Girl. He was so young, wasn't he? Some people are just unlucky like that and you can never tell if you're one of them.
            At last the bees grew bored or remembered something else they had to do and flew off en masse. You walked home; your legs had aged decades during that period of standing, acquiring the feel and creak of old ships.
            Yet it was all right – more than all right – when you got back. Your mother was standing over a wooden box, pulling a comb dripping with honey from its rumbling interior.
            “It's got an unbelievable flavor,” she said. “I've never tasted anything like it. I can't imagine where they've been.”

Carmen Lau's fiction has appeared in The Collagist, Gigantic, Hayden's Ferry Review, Fairy Tale Review and other journals. She is working on a collection of Hometown Stories. Find her online at  carmenslittlefictions.wordpress.com.

YOU'RE GOING TO BLACKMAIL THE PET PSYCHIC — JOHN JODZIO

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You’re going to blackmail the Pet Psychic but he doesn’t know it yet because he can only read the minds of cats and parrots and not grown ass women.  You’re sitting on your couch waiting to secretly tape him having sex with you. You’ve done this type of thing before. You’ve done this type of thing a bunch. Married doctors, lawyers with jealous mistresses, once a state senator. You aren’t pretentious enough to call yourself a psychic, but you’ve got a gift for seeing the future too. You can always tell when a man will stray; you can always tell when he’ll feel guilty, you can always tell if he’ll pay you to keep quiet.          
            You met the Pet Psychic at a bar. You recognized him from his TV show. You listened to him brag to the bartender about all the lost pets he’d tracked down over the years. When he was drunk you told him your dog Henry ran away last night.        
            “Can you find him?” you pleaded.          
            The Pet Psychic looked you up and down, his tongue darting across his lip.      
            “I need an item of Henry’s to commune with,” he slurred.
            “Back at my apartment,” you said. 

You watch the Pet Psychic press his nose into Henry’s dog pillow. If he was really psychic, he’d realize Henry’s not lost, he’s dead. Dead for six months now, nailed by a mini-van when he got off his leash. Henry’s chew toys, his dog sweaters, sit in a pile by your fridge. Your brain tells you to toss all this stuff away, but your heart hasn’t given your hands permission yet.        
            “Take down any lost dog flyers you put up,” the Pet Psychic says. “They don’t work for shit.”
            The Pet Psychic closes his eyes, sniffs Henry’s water bowl. When you close your eyes, you can see how the next hour will unfold. You’ll cry about Henry. The Pet Psychic will put his arm around your shoulder. You’ll curl your head into his chest; arch your lips toward his lips.  

When the Pet Psychic leaves you’ll watch some old videos of Henry. Maybe the one where he’s chasing the squirrels at the dog park. Or the one where he won’t stop barking at the ceiling fan. 
            “Don’t worry,” the Pet Psychic says as he pulls on his shirt. “I’ll find him for you.”              
            You watch the Pet Psychic glide down your front stairs. Tomorrow you’ll call him and explain how sad it would be if his wife received the video of the two of you fucking. You already know how this conversation will go. He’ll take a deep breath, won’t say anything for a long time. You’ll wait him out; listen to the tiny hisses that grind away in the background of the call, little clicks that remind you of metal crushing bone. Finally the Pet Psychic will clear his throat and like all the others, he’ll say, fine, okay, shit, how much.

John Jodzio is a winner of the Loft-McKnight Fellowship.  He’s the author of the short story collections, If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home (Replacement Press) and Get In If You Want To Live (Paper Darts Press).  He lives in Minneapolis.  Find out more at www.johnjodzio.net.

SUPERHERO — GARY BERG

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The waterway narrowed and they passed a dock with agricultural warehouses on the left side.  At the end, the river opened wide.  The father pulled the houseboat over to a dock on one of the islands, and tied it up.  The island stood out on the horizon because it was one of the few places with tall trees.  The two filled a backpack with sardines, crackers, apples, and two bottles of water.  The boy followed his father as he took a familiar route up a slight hill to the grove of pine trees.  At the base of one tree they ascended.  The father pushed the boy up first with one hand.  “That’s far enough,” the father said as the boy reached a clearing in the branches.  They put their backs against the trunk and stretched out with a view of the mouth of Delta in front of them, and their houseboat docked off to the side. 
            “I don’t understand why you can’t just stay together?” the boy said.
             “You are too young to understand.”  The father looked at the boy, and continued:  “It’s not about you.”
            “But I’m the one who has to live in two different houses.”
            They silently ate the sardines in thick olive oil dripping off the crackers, and then finished with tart green apples. 
            Back on the houseboat they set out further across the Delta with the sun going down.  The father released the anchor off of Tinsley Island, and then set up the boat for the night.  He rolled up his sleeves and started dinner while the boy positioned himself on a bunk bed and played with a Wolverine action figure.  “His bones are metal.”
            “Must be nice,” the father said flatly with his eyes fixed on the grill of the stove. 
            “He’s my favorite.”

Gary A. Berg has an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA, and is the author/editor of eight non-fiction books.

PAINT JOB — TATIANA RYCKMAN

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I saw an old Doritos truck pulling out of the Farmer’s Market parking lot last weekend. By old I mean re-purposed, I mean no longer traveling for the marketing and distribution of salty snacks. The yellow triangles that once floated down the side of the truck as if to say, “Snacks are casual and fun!” were painted over with white. The paint wasn’t opaque enough, though, and didn’t match the white of the truck. Even more conspicuous were the wide, straight strokes someone had used to paint over them. Tapering rows of stripes that made me think of whiteout that comes on a little roller were piled in the shape of chips across the side of the vehicle, and I had to wonder how many people it would have taken to hold such a large whiteout roller. And where did one purchase such a thing? There was an Office Max just a few blocks away, but I’d never seen a whiteout dispenser that big at one of those stores. Maybe they are kept in the back? Maybe you just have to know? 
            Maybe someone really just paints that way? Maybe they were sick of conforming, so instead of tracing the chips with their brush and filling them in the way patient third grade girls color, they went with stripes, like pyramids of brush strokes. Maybe they had limited shoulder mobility and could only move their arm in a straight line across the front of their body? Why didn’t they ask for help? Why didn’t they hire someone? Or was this person hired? Was someone hired to paint in this specific and obvious and not at all subtle way? Maybe it’s exactly what they wanted? Maybe the goal wasn’t to hide the fact that this truck once carried suspiciously colored snacks to pimpled teenagers all over the country, maybe it was a commentary, a riddle, a statement about the evolution of our culture and our values and our needs and the way some needs never leave us, no matter how we cover them up. How even if we stop watching Wayne’s World (both I and II) every few months, we can’t escape the fact that it shaped us. Shaped us into the equilateral triangles of something mass-produced but iconic, a tiny piece of our cultural geometry. 
            I went back to the vegetable stand where I work. I thought: forget about it. But there it is, white-washed across my memory. Maybe forever.

Tatiana Ryckman was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of the chapbook story collection, Twenty-Something, and assistant editor at sunnyoutside press. Tatiana leads Creative Writing workshops through The University of Texas at Austin and her local library.