OVER THE PHONE — DUSTIN PETZOLD

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I rubbed the candy bar all over the receiver, even though everything I knew about the world led me to believe that no, you can’t smell things over the phone. Flecks of chocolate were getting ground into the little slits where your voice is supposed to go.
            “Are you getting anything?” I asked. 
            “No. Here, I’m going to spray some Jordan cologne.” It was so cool that Bryan had his own cologne already. Mom said I couldn’t get any until I was twelve. “One, two, three…”
            I heard spritzed liquid hitting plastic. I drew a deep nose-breath into the earpiece, but all I smelled was the same combination of dog hair and hardwood flooring that my house always smelled like. Of course you can’t smell over the phone, I scolded myself. What kind of Fourth Grade Science Fair Winner even tries that? You can hear over the phone because the receiver captures sound waves and carries them over an invisible wire to another phone… or something.
            “Nothing?” Bryan asked.           
            “Nope.”
            “My dad has some instant coffee. Can I try that?” 
            “Uh, sure, whatever.” I put the phone on speaker and walked away.

***

Ten years later, I called the same number, this time without any experiment materials by my side. 
            “Hello?” A woman’s voice answered.
            “Hi, Mrs. Handler, it’s David. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. I really just didn’t know what to say. But I’ve thought about Bryan every day these past six months. I guess I just want to you to know that I enjoyed growing up with him, okay? It sounds weird, but whenever we did things together, I sort of felt like anything was possible.”
            “Thank you, David. Thank you.”
            “I’m kind of late, but please let me know if you need anything. I hope you’re doing okay.”
            Mrs. Handler said that my timing was just fine; after the first few weeks, all the sympathy cards, visits, and homemade baked goods go away. People move on and forget. But Mrs. Handler remembered everything. When she talked about the night it happened, I could smell the smoke that came from that single gunshot. When she told me about the family-only funeral, I could smell the rain-drenched headstone and the muddy grass. When she brought up the university investigators who came looking for signs they could’ve missed and ways they could keep this from happening to someone else, I could smell the stale cigarettes on their breath. I could smell the tears being soaked into tissues, and maybe trickling down the phone to where the cologne had been. I don’t know how; I just could.

Dustin Petzold graduated from George Washington University in 2013, and currently lives in Washington DC. When he is not writing fiction, he is writing other things, some of which have been published by Salon and Philanthropy. Dustin is a co-founder of Crooked Scoreboard, a blog focused on humor and culture in sports, and writes at FlipCollective.

MADE IN QUEENS, NY — CHRIS WODICKA

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Nolan decided that, no, he didn't know English after all. On the playground of another school, they'd demanded the proof of speech, and his stubborn, useless mouth refused to budge. In his closet, he found the white face paint, the leftovers from his Halloween costume. He applied it in gobs, rubbing and rubbing, blotting out that face of his. He found his parents in the den. It was tax season.
            He started off slowly. He constructed a box, indicating those four familiar walls. He'd seen a mime on TV, in a movie, in a dream. It seemed simple enough. His parents looked up with concern, then amusement. A performance! A show! Their creative little boy. Their little genius.
            And where was he from, people asked. Columbus. Before that, Billings. No, originally, they'd say. China? Japan? One person guessed Hawaii. Queens. Just Queens.
            A domestic adoption.
            Nolan was no pro. They didn't teach these skills in fourth grade. He memorized multiplication tables, wrote a story about his weekend, and even listed the presidents and their terms, but why and for what? He took a punch to the shoulder. Another to the arm. Pushes and shoves. A more pressing matter: how to breathe inside the box. How long did he have? He calculated the minutes and seconds, the life expectancy of himself. Math was a strong suit. Inhale, exhale.
            Now he realized claustrophobia took many forms, could manifest suddenly, just like speech became more than grammar and syntax and “I’m fine. How are you?” He waved his arms. He pounded his fists, pounded the sides of the box. He wanted to burst out, rupture the air. He was suffocating. If only he'd known. They hadn't taught that in school either.
            His arms couldn’t take anymore. Then his muscles and lungs. Yes, he wanted to scream, but oxygen had become precious, and then he couldn’t help himself. He gasped and gasped, growing woozy. He hoped they’d liked it. Would there be applause? His father clutched Nolan's body and shook him, saying, what's wrong, what's wrong? His mother stood teary-eyed and wondering about parenting and missed opportunities. Questioning their choice of social worker and adoption agency. All the moving, across the country, then across the state. Too much to put into words. Easier for the three of them to sit spent on the floor, with Nolan cradled in the middle. His parents’ clothes, the carpet, it was all covered in splotches.

Chris Wodicka lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared previously in Juked.

NOMINATIONS — QUEEN'S FERRY PRESS BEST SMALL FICTIONS 2015

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We are pleased to announce our nominations for Queen's Ferry Press Best Small Fictions 2015:

"Jellyfish" by Zara Lisbon
"Two Thousand Miles Running" by Anthony Martin
"Paint Job" by Tatiana Ryckman
"Heat Wave" by Aki Schilz
"Nettle Creek Cemetery" by Eric Shonkwiler

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: we are nothing without our wonderful contributors, and while it was difficult to pare down all our stories to just a handful, we feel these exemplify what we're looking for in short—popping!—micro-fiction.

We wish all of our nominees good luck, and if you haven't already, check out their pieces (and thank us later)!

A DIFFERENT THING — MEL BOSWORTH

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We’re sitting opposite each other on worn but comfortable chairs and the shelves around us are crammed with spines I don’t know. He asks questions, nervously smoothing the front of his shirt, and I don’t know but say yes oh yes of course I know. This goes on for a few minutes and I am polite. I am not literary though I understand the plight of this store and others like it. It is my business to understand its difficulty. And so I smile because they tell us it’s good to smile. Through the storefront there is a particular gloaming, a late-summer pinking that could make a lesser sky fearful of winter. I am respectful, sipping and nodding to familiar sounds. My right shoe dangles over my left knee and for a moment I lose myself in my laces, admiring the leather, the knot. Feeling a sharp expectation, I grip my heel. He has asked a different thing and I am caught. I smile and he suddenly sees me behind this veil and it makes him smile, too. Before removing the note from my jacket I hesitate to allow us this time to be everything better.

Mel Bosworth is the author of the novel Freight. Visit melbosworth.com.

BASH THE BISHOP — DEIRDRE COYLE

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“I dreamed about masturbating on the highway shoulder,” he tells me. “Standing in some bushes. I turned and saw a corpse right behind me, by the side of the road. A cop pulled over. I said, ‘I know this looks bad, Officer, but I wasn’t masturbating to the dead body.’ He didn’t believe me. I went to prison.”
            I am either imagining this man bashing the bishop or imagining him in prison. Imagining him in front of a dead body by which he is theoretically not aroused. I think, this man understands me. I think, I will place hidden cameras inside his mind. But I don’t need cameras—I know as well as you do that the devil’s in the discoveries as much as in the details. I’ll discover wide swaths of information that don’t require minutiae to speak blackness from one tongue to another. I’ll hold his eyes open and see nothing that will make me look away. I know as well as you do that the devil’s in our dreams. I’ll join his self-lovemaking, and there will be no dead bodies, only little deaths everywhere.

Deirdre Coyle is a non-practicing mermaid living in New York City. Her writing has been published in theNewerYork, Fwriction : Review, Control Literary Magazine, Internet Poetry, and elsewhere. You can find her at deirdrecoyle.tumblr.com and @DeirdreKoala.

ROY ROGERS, MY GRANDFATHER, AND A DEAD DUCK — SARAH SHIELDS

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Here in my grandfather’s basement, behind the stocked bar, is a photo card of a young and smiling Roy Rogers. Framed and hung next to it is a photograph of a more serious, older-looking Roy Rogers standing with my grandfather and a third, nameless man. There is also a circular cut of leather on the wall, a token from a special event signed “Roy Rogers” and “Trigger”. My grandfather shot alongside Roy in the 1969 Two Shot Celebrity Goose Hunt in Lamar, Colorado. 
            He tells it like this, “I outshot The King of the Cowboys that day. While everyone had fancy guns, mine was old and useless-looking─but it had always worked just fine. There were forty competitors in the shoot-out, and I won every competition.”
            Listening to the story, I buzz with pride. Then my bones warm with rum and prickle with some indistinct connection buried in the marrow there. I wish he was my real grandfather.
            There are geese and ducks just about everywhere in this basement, even on the plastic tissue box cover in the bathroom. Fowl hunting magazines. Cowboy magazines. There is pride of the western frontier down here. I look for this famous gun from my grandfather’s story, mounted to a wall maybe, but it's not down here. Must still work. 
            I pick up one of the magazines and flip to the article I know is there about The King of the Cowboys. I love that Roy Rogers and other performing cowboys like him, Gene Autry for example, had no fear of stripes or fuchsia satin. Double-headed arrows embroidered below the shoulders, a trail of blossoms all the way down the sleeves to the guitar. Ivory hats and silver spurs flashing like they’d never had a speck of dirt on them.
            Sing, my dear fancy cowboys, sing me a merciful tune of desert dust and vultures flying overhead so that I’ll forget about the dead duck by the cast iron stove. My eyes climb over the tops of the glossy, magazine pages. I can't help but look at the kill. Its green feathers are perfect, glass eyes deep and still. It is standing. How is it made to stand there? Must be weighted. I look at something else: the teapot on the stove is pretty and always cold. But no matter where I look, I think about the duck and wonder where the gun is.

Sarah Shields is an alumna of Colorado State University where she studied Psychology. She mothers, writes, and illustrates in San Diego, California, and is currently working on her first middle grade novel, a macabre and humorous Western. She is an active member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Her work has appeared in Underneath the Juniper Tree.

SKILLET — IAN D. WALLACE

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We've been trying to season the cast iron skillet. Even after we read everything on the imaginary pin board website, we couldn't get that rich black we’d seen on cooking shows.
            We used canola oil at first. The skillet took on a sticky texture. After, we used lard. Old-fashioned, god’s honest lard from boiled down animal fat. Still, the skillet came out sticky and smelled strong. We tried frying a bunch of bacon and smearing the rendered fat with our hands. Nothing was good after that.
            Things changed. We started to smoke more cigarettes in summer evenings, and spent less time away from the house. We wrote letters to Alton Brown and Guy Fieri. We hired men to tear up trees from the backyard and spent days chainsawing logs to build raging white fires.
            We stopped sleeping in the same bed because it was my fault the skillet wouldn’t season, and it was her fault for not being the girl I was secretly falling for on Facebook. We brewed strong coffee and let it sit for days in the skillet over low heat. Eventually, I threw her copy of Prodigy’s Fat of the Land in there and let it melt, hoping for something that would ultimately never happen.
            While I slept on the hardwood floor, she clipped all my nails off and tried rendering them down. Cranked the stove up as hot as it would go, and then the oven. I cut pieces off the cat she loved. The one that shit on the floor and destroyed my chair with its freedom claws. Those just made the skillet smell like burned hair and fat. I threw in old love letters that were so sappy I worried they might ruin the skillet. We bought cartons and cartons of cigarettes and went through so many lighters with all the forest fires we set and all the cigarettes we smoked. When we were smoking was the only time we really talked anymore.
            She would inhale the smoke cleaner than the air in the house.
            “You read the article about never putting soap in the skillet?”
            I took a drag off my cigarette.
            “I’ve never touched soap to that fucking thing.”
            It would be Fall soon. I would smoke cigarettes and fuck the Facebook girl and like every Facebook status she put up. My ex would stop smoking and drink less, and pretend to lose weight in profile pictures. Eventually, one of us would take the skillet.

Ian writes in a quiet office in North Carolina. He bakes. On a good day, the cat will be near. His work has appeared in Split, em:me and Cairn.

TIME AND SPACE — WILLIAM DAVIDSON

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Jane and Mark found the cycle path that had once been the railway line to Selby. Now models of the planets were spaced out to scale along the route. The sun was just down from Tesco near the edge of the racecourse. They sped past Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter. They stopped beyond Saturn at the Trust Hut and bought Fruit Shoots.
            “This is marriage,” she said.
            “Drinking Fruit Shoots?” he said.
            “This. The solar system,” she said. “Light and explosions at the start, then so much happens so quickly. Planet! Planet! Planet! Work! Children! Houses! And then the planets spread out.”
            “It’s not our marriage because I couldn’t be an astronaut,” he said. “They wouldn’t have a vegan astronaut.”
            “We’re not astronauts,” she said. “Marriage is just the solar system.”
            Uranus and Neptune were miles apart. Jane and Mark spent a long time looking for Pluto. The track stopped at a small car park by the A19. They leant their bikes against a fence and poked around the hedges.
            “Maybe they took Pluto away,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a planet anymore.”
            Pluto, they found, was at the top of an overgrown slope. Pluto was pea-sized and on its plinth someone had written tosser.
            “Isn’t tosser a bit eighties?” he said.
            “Time and space,” she said.
            “So your marriage solar system thing,” he said. “Marriage ends up near a car park just short of Selby and someone’s written tosser? It doesn’t really work.”
            “It works,” she said.

William Davidson lives in York, England. His stories have been published in Synaesthesia Magazine and The Puffin Review.