SAY NOT REALLY — ADAM SCHUITEMA

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Today’s garbage day, and there’s a windstorm. Torn envelopes and food wrappers scurry through the neighborhood like tumbleweeds. Trash bins lie in the road with their lids flung agape. Warren steers wide around them, headed home from the post office, where the woman behind the counter told him they couldn’t just stop Beverly’s mail from arriving. “You have to go online, to the Direct Marketing Association’s Deceased Do Not Contact list.”
            “On the computer?” he said. “I’d rather kill myself.”
            And he could almost hear Beverly’s voice then, whispering into his ear: Say, “Not really.”
            At home, there’s paper sticking out of the brass mailbox. It had come in the ten minutes he was gone.
           He parks, gets out, and removes advertising circulars, Valpak coupons, pre-approved credit card applications—all in Beverly’s name. Warren holds them above his head before liberating them like frantic release doves. “Fly, you fuckers!”
            He cleans his glasses on his coat and heads inside. It’s only three-thirty, but he wants to drink until he blacks out and maybe sleep forever.
            Say, “Not really.”
            Beverly was a habitual finger-crosser and wood-knocker who refused to stay on the fourteenth floors of hotels because she knew they were really the thirteenth. When the disease stole all but the last of her memories, she’d still make Warren say “not really” to quash the bad luck of his black humor.
            When he cut his finger with a kitchen knife and joked he’d bleed to death.
            Say, “Not really.”
            When he mused that the Chinese would enslave us within a decade.
            Say, “Not really.”
            There’s gin and bourbon in the kitchen, but he runs cold water and makes coffee instead. While it brews, Warren gazes out the window above the sink. Along the fence runs a hard-packed stretch of dirt that had once been Beverly’s garden. In the perfect purgatory of her disease—when she remembered past blooms but not the words “iris” or “dahlia”—he’d pierce the dirt with the plastic stems of silk flowers, and she’d stand before this window and smile.
            The first sip of coffee fogs his glasses so that, for a moment, he’s lost in a cloud only he can see. He ambles down the hallway to his small study, rests his mug on the desk, and opens the lowest drawer, removing matches and his usual stockpile of candles: pillar and taper and votive. A half-dozen tea lights Beverly once put in jack-o-lanterns. He arranges some on the desk and the rest among bookshelves. After lighting all of them he shuts the door, closes the curtains, and turns off the lamp.
            Among the dim orange light, Warren sips coffee and reads the newspaper while, outside, wind-thrashed branches rasp against the siding. Soon the room’s air has burned so thin he feels high as if on wine. It’s something like amnesia. He breathes deeply, head floating, wanting to be blessed the way she was cursed, with a mind scrubbed utterly free.
            But not really. Not really. Not.

Adam Schuitema is the author of the forthcoming novel Haymaker (Switchgrass Books, 2015) and the short-story collection Freshwater Boys, which was named a Michigan Notable Book by the Library of Michigan. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Glimmer Train, the North American Review, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, the Black Warrior Review, and Crazyhorse. He’s an associate professor of English at Kendall College of Art and Design and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife and daughter.

HISTORY — NICK BEVAN

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At the age of 10, Paul Wilcox and I decided to write a history of the world. If we wrote alternate chapters it didn’t seem too onerous a task. At that age I was obsessed by the Norman Conquest and not greatly interested in the rest, but felt that I was prepared to put myself out a little for the sake of the fame and publicity. We decided that I would do the first chapter (Stone Age to Celtic Britain), he would cover the Romans and we’d take it from there. Working largely from my father’s School Certificate history textbook, I don’t think we’d clearly distinguished between British and world history. We only had a couple of ruled exercise books to fill so a degree of brevity was taken for granted.  
            I sat down on a Saturday afternoon and imagined what life was like for a Stone Age family. I felt that a human interest angle would be more meaningful.  If I picked the specific family that then discovered bronze I could combine emotional engagement with historical narrative.  
            When we compared notes on Monday after school I had completed five pages and Paul had only written one. In 55 BC Julius Caesar invaded Britain. In AD 122 Hadrian built a wall.  And so on.
            You’ve made it up, he said. How do you know that John invented bronze on a sunny day in May? You’ve just copied down a list of dates, I said, no one is going to want to read that. You need to bring history to life through imaginative reconstruction I said. Of course you don’t, he said, it’s dead, that’s the whole bloody point.  I’d never heard him swear before. He left without taking his work and before my mother had served the cake.  
            I felt I had the ability to see it through, but somehow without Paul I couldn’t continue. I kept both exercise books. Interestingly, neither of us had thought about how we’d manage with alternate chapters written in different notepads, although as a way of presenting history that might have been a first.

In his younger days, Nick Bevan published poems in several little magazines in the UK; in middle age he focused on committee reports for internal audiences and articles and reviews in professional journals for a slightly wider readership; most recently he has had a couple of stories published in Every Day Fiction.  

A PREDICTION OF JANE — KEVIN BAKER

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There will be a girl. She’ll be called Jane. She’ll dream of being a dancer, and waitress to get by. 
            When she’s twenty-five, Jane will meet a boy. He’ll be called David. He’ll dream of becoming a rock star, and wash dishes to get by. 
            Jane will talk to David at his station. They’ll flirt a little and nearly get together at a Christmas party. For the next few months they’ll dance around the possibility, like Ross and Rachel from a show called Friends. (This show will be very popular – so popular that it will continue playing in a loop until the end of time.)
            One day Jane will say to David:
             “Old people love my hair. That’s two tables today who have said so. Do old people ever say that to you?” 
            (They will both have red hair, though Jane’s will be the reddest, tumbling like autumn from her head.)            
            “No,” David will say, “they normally just say, ‘Get off my lawn,’ or ‘Stop doing that to my dog.’”
            Jane won’t say anything, and for the rest of the day David will be worried that he ruined his chances with a stupid joke.
            Jane and David will marry two years later, then separate amicably in their mid-forties. David will be bald by then, and Jane will be turning grey.
            Ross and Rachel will marry 1.2 million times before the sun explodes.

Kevin Baker is a writer and musician currently based in Korea. He's a regular contributor to the arts magazine Retroussage, and his work has appeared in Adbusters and The Island Review among others. He is currently working on a novel.

ULYSSES' INTERLUDE (2) — DANIEL A. NICHOLLS

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She kept me in her room; I wanted to head home but the wine was strong and it was far to walk, and I had the barest design on where to go. Some seductions are slow and sad, a writhing girl holding you with your collar down to the bed for, she says, just a little. The language is not her first, her tongue comes apart in burs around it, but she pushes it like a tongue across a chest.
            Barren-brained I stared away, I made excuses, I made denials, I dreamed of the sweet A/C blowing cool upon me and on the icy silence between my seat and hers, her dash-lit rage burning blue. But she was near as far gone, down deep below an ocean of wine, as she let on, and I no more wished her dead than I wished to not go home.
            So there we were, a white-walled apartment in the dead-black woods, and sure it had been a long swim through the years with no arms around me but vengeful mermadonnas plucking at my feet in the swirl of memory—but could you, could I, so thoroughly lie for the sake of perfect form?
            the burns upon her eyes
            the glistening, working thighs
            and who could guess her lips would taste like cloves
                        when they glow, when their bright orange coils shred
                        the dark paper in the dark?
A fever and collapsing and staying through the night. A waking with a panic and knowing that you’re drugged. She’ll draw you out, she’ll pour you back; a phial, a pharmakon.
            If you thought you were lost before, brother, if you thought you were lost before.

Daniel A. Nicholls can be found declaiming poets and poetry on Twitter (@nomopoetry) and Tumblr (nomopoetry.tumblr.com). He has poems online in Agenda, The Honest Ulsterman, Open Letters Monthly, Compose Journal, Specter Magazine, and Halfway Down the Stairs. From 2010 until 2012, he was Writer in Residence at The Starving Artist in Keene, New Hampshire. He now resides in Arizona.

BEEF JERKY — ALLISON LEE

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The last time wasn't the first time I drove through a flash flood to send a package to my father in Florida. That time it was mixed nuts and beef jerky and on the way to the post office, I knew that if I was swept into a ravine, I could survive for days on that feast. The hurricane was battering the coast, and a retreat inland was inevitable. If only he could wait out the storm until my supplies landed.
            When I called him on his birthday to ask if he had gotten the drop, he said he had not.  The men were getting weak. When would I be sending it?  
            A few hours later my mother called. She said the package had arrived Saturday, two days before his birthday. He had developed fevered nightmares and a leg rash that night.  
            But it was the way he looked at her when she laid the package on the kitchen table that was most disturbing—his blue eyes clouded black and then he raised a hand to salute. She hadn’t known whether this was out of respect or hatred or both.
            He sat in a reverie eating his jerky. My mother had no idea so many kinds of beef jerky were made these days. Blueberry beef jerky. Habañero beef jerky. Teriyaki. None of these appealed to her.  She opened the vacuum sealed packages for him and he never complained. 

Allison Lee lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with two Siberian huskies. She was the Copy Editor of the 2013 poetry anthology, Poetry in Michigan / Michigan in Poetry, and a recipient of a 2013 Gwen Frostic Creative Writing Award in Poetry at Western Michigan University.   Her poetry is forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, and others.

THAT'S WHAT YOU TELL YOUR FRIENDS — CHRISTOPHER DAVID DiCICCO

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You'd been watching me work on the car all day. I couldn't get out from underneath. You laughed—and I saw. My brother came over and we drank and later you fell down the steps and broke it. Your wrist hurt so bad, you told me, “Never touch it again.” That's what happened. That's what you tell your friends.
            When you witnessed my searching Amazon, unable to spell the word ELECTRIC, you looked away, coughed into your hand—and you dropped my glass on your foot. It smashed and the shards got you. That's what happened. That's what you tell your friends.
            You wanted to call your sister Susan. She had the baby. I wanted to call John. He’d called me earlier. Your phone died. You pulled at mine. I let go. It was your fault. It was your hand that hit. It’s not even bad though, looks like a beauty queen's lip, almost pretty—that's what you tell your friends.
            You shoveled the entire driveway out. I threw snow in your face. It wasn't funny when I slipped. It wasn't funny to laugh at me on the ice, pawing at the ground, trying to get up when I was down. I smashed it hard into your shirt, let the snow crush between your breasts.
I locked the door, rummaged through the cabinet, forgot you were out there in the cold—because the fall hurt my back, because the way you laughed—tell them or the police or the neighbor or your mom or no one at all. Tell them on the hotline I said hello.
            And in the summer, your best friend Jane stayed over all day while you worked. My clothes on the floor. I told you she'd been here a few minutes, standing in our bedroom, waiting for you to come home. I dressed in the bathroom. That's what happened.     
You stayed out late, forgot to bring cigarettes. Your grandmother's German figurines, the little spoons from fifty states, they fell, bent, broke, whatever you want to hear.     
You went through my phone, into my wallet, you moved my keys, you forgot to lock the door, you smirked, you turned the channel, you finished my sentence—you got in a car accident. Nothing that won't heal. It could be worse. You could’ve died. Maybe, you should stay inside, rest. I'm taking care of you.
            Tell everyone.
            I'd been drinking all evening, holding your wrist damn tight. I held you to keep my balance, told you, “You’re not worth what I’m paying.” It was a joke. 
Leave that part out.  
            I fell forward, burning myself on the grill, letting you go in the process. The heat hurt. I shot away from the pain, threw myself onto the steak fork you held. The two long steel prongs pierced me, in my kidney, out my spleen. 
            You were only standing there. 
            That’s what happened.
            That's what you’ll tell your friends. 

Christopher David DiCicco writes weird minimalist stories. Work in or forthcoming in Superstition Review, Bartleby Snopes, Litro, WhiskeyPaper, Sundog Lit, Literary Orphans, Psychopomp, Five Quarterly, Fiction Southeast, Pea River Journal and other fine publications. Visit www.cddicicco.com for more published work.

BENEATH THE ROSES — TREVOR DODGE

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Drove between the trees until they narrowed between my headlights. Shifted into park, left the headlight knob pulled all way out. Opened the door, interior domelight, the tan leather seats, the soft bingbingbingbing, the trees in front and all around not swaying.
            Realized why Chrysler called this car the New Yorker.
            Popped the trunk and parted the fence of trees, turned sideways, scooched, even as thin as I was. Set the suitcases down and slid through the fence before them. Dragged each suitcase through, one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one. Pushed the shovel through the ferns, one headlight throwing shadows at me, the other parting the fence line where I passed through, dulling the edges. 
            Scraped until the ferns were gone.
            Plunged the shovel blade down and down, suitcases standing vigil. Dulled shadows, dimmed light. Sweat and dirt and faded bingbingbingbing into nothing, into all quiet and dark and the hole big enough to hold the suitcases, plus the gasoline, plus the battery, plus all of New York.
            The shovel, the heap of drying dirt and dying fern. The ache of my shoulders, the burning numb of my arms and hands, the heavy weight of my back. Big throb in the soles of my feet, heart pushing all my blood with all its might down there, to hold all of it, just enough room.
            But not me with it. 
            Stopped. Piled the suitcases on top of one another. Blanketed them with heap. Patted it all solid, the chemical pleasure of reversing every muscle, the new ache upon ache, burn upon burn, weight upon weight. Lay down on top. New throb upon old. 

Trevor Dodge’s most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Little Fiction, Green Mountains Review, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Gargoyle, Metazen and Juked. His latest book is The Laws of Average, a collection of 60 flash fictions recently published by Chiasmus Press. He is managing editor of Clackamas Literary Review, lives in Portland, Oregon, and can be found online at www.trevordodge.com.

IN RESPONSE — KIRBY JOHNSON

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in response to Preface from Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads

Every time I do it it’s a learning, a tempering. A few degrees more than what I could take: a brisk cold up the side of my skirt, dry knuckles, or slight burns across my face. You leave your home without a jacket and your body learns. The internet says this is how you get used to it: this is how you change. It’s about adapting or, at least, working through a process, or maybe even just: exposing your-self, you would say: being in nature. But I mostly don’t like any of it. I don’t like it at all. This skin thickening: it’s too much feeling, too much thrashing against. It’s better to be somewhere regular, somewhere warm: like the narrow path toward your abbey. The one you walked through with half-closed eyes. Several of my friends are anxious and this is pretty normal. And I guess, if you think about it, I’m a little anxious too. You see, I read two of your Victorian predecessors last week and these men were also concerned with feeling–and I’m a little worried about what you call: that spontaneous flow of emotion. If I am a conduit of sentiment then what about everything else? How do we take that in too? Let me share something: sometimes our understanding of nature is unbearable. Sometimes we need to expose ourselves to only what is practical. The rest should be ignored. You see: I’m worried about over exposure. I try on most days to not to keep what should be kept: square.  To keep what should be mounted: tame. If my job is to feel everything, then how long can you do that before feeling nothing? So many simple things have made me cry. I do not want to see a fawn in the early morning, or witness a child play in the grass. Those things are tantalizing. I don’t want to watch a film or look at that tree in a certain light. As a child, I would sit in the dark coolness of my closet so that my toys couldn’t see me, so that they couldn’t know I was trying to ignore them. It didn’t make any sense, but I was trying to tamper with feeling. I was trying to turn some of it off.  Can you see how common life can be sad? What if everything we experience is a nocturne, or so vibrant that we cannot properly see? So you say that I should filter and form but how long is it until an open sore becomes infected? How long until this overflow is more like a drowning or worse: a layering, a method toward jadedness, or that process of adapting? Oh Wordsworth, tell me you don’t believe in your own sensitivity. Tell me this preface was an exercise of your own common pleasure: a release of beautiful words. Tell me that you lied about all of it: that path toward the abbey, the one void of smoke stacks we all know were there; your sister; and this advertisement. Tell me you were just kidding and I would believe you because I know what you claim to know of feeling could never be true.

Kirby Johnson is a writer living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She is the editor of Black Warrior Review and the founding editor of NANO Fiction. She has two cats and a lot of time on her hands.