HACKER — RYAN J. OUIMET

I open the edges of your cloud like bees pry petals, because there is something inside that I need.  The bee needs pollen to feel like a bee.  I need you.  I need pictures, late night conversation, desperate hello and goodbye. I need your faces and bodies, your millions of images, your billions of thoughts, to feel human.  The first time I did it I promised myself I would only observe.  I would never take, and never give you away.  
            They gave me my first computer when I stopped talking. Age 10.  My parents thought it would open me up to the world.  They were right, but I didn’t talk to them as they’d hoped.  I could only talk to the faceless.  I could only say what I meant to a void.  The warmth there is limitless.
            I started to hack.  I hacked my way into your many hearts.  It’s a violent word for something so abstract, so perfectly nothing. I could see into strangers lives and what I saw was beautiful.  Everyone as strange as me.  Everyone as stupid.  Everyone as hopeless and needy.  But trying.  Struggling exquisitely.
            There are lovers tangled.  There are lovers alone.  There are old ladies learning to type for the sake of their families, who don’t have time for them outside of email.  There are children hunting for the disturbing face of the world.  There are so many secrets, out in plain view.  So many people dying to be loved.  Willing to hurt themselves for it.
            I have never met a person.  I have only seen their private thoughts, their private photographs.  I am sure they would hate me if they knew, but I don’t mean harm.  Only to solder myself into the scramble of lives out there. 
            I would love to show you all one another.  If you could see what I have, you’d not feel so lonely.  If you could see into thousands of files, like the contents of souls, you’d feel at home finally.  You could all know each other finally.  I could give that gift to everyone but I won’t. 
            I told myself when I started to pry, slipping past the membrane of these heavy, strange clouds, that I would leave these worlds undisturbed.  I promised myself I’d come in and out of many lives without anyone ever knowing me. Only a bee, opening its flower and then floating away.

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Ryan J Ouimet is currently living and writing in upstate New York.  His work has appeared in Mulberryfork Review, Bartleby-Snopes, and Fifty Word Stories.

ORION'S TOOTH — PETER CLARKE

Stargazing is a real thing I try to explain to my fellow creatures every chance I get. At the moment I have something stuck in my tooth, which doesn’t sound like a very big problem until I explain that it’s a dentist’s probing instrument and along with it he has both of his entire hands shoved into my mouth. I can’t speak and pretty soon my whole jaw is going to come ripping off my head when all I want to do is patch up a simple cavity.
            In other circumstances, as I was saying, I would right this very moment be telling all about the marvels of stargazing. The last time I talked to a spry old Jack Russell Terrier about it, I started getting through to her right away. She hugged my knee and barked as I pattered her head. The way her playful nub of a tail wagged, I knew she understood completely.     
            Dear lord, my jaw! Not to mention my aching tooth! And my dying face! I wanted to scream… The pain was almost intolerable. Why wasn’t it numb yet? Numb thoughts, numb thoughts. Please dear god make it get numb already!
            This is exactly why I never go to the eye doctor, why I never get my hair cut, and why I only eat food that never requires the use of silverware. All of these things are impure and simply serve as distractions from stargazing. It was only when my tooth started to clearly rot itself out of my head that I knew I needed some professional help.
            This dentist may be the only one of my fellow creatures I ever refrain from telling about the wonders of stargazing. He may never get to know those incalculable joys. As I was saying, if I ever get out of here alive, I know exactly what I’m going to do. First thing, I’m going to head straight for the dog pound, then to the candy store, and then back into the hills for good.

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Peter Clarke is a writer and musician with a BA in psychology and a JD in intellectual property law. His short fiction has appeared in 3AM Magazine, Pif Magazine, Curbside Splendor, Hobart, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. Native to Port Angeles, Washington, he currently lives in San Francisco. See: www.petermclarke.com.

HIDING PLACE — WILL SIMMONS

Standing on the top rung of the footstool, up on his tiptoes, he could just reach it.  His mother’s secret stash was kept in an old cookie tin on the top shelf of the kitchen pantry.  She didn’t think anybody knew about it, but he’d seen her once, through the backdoor, arms stretched out of reach.
            The top shelf was a graveyard for failed gifts.  Nobody went up there.  It was where they kept the pasta maker his father had given her for Christmas, back when they were married.  They’d probably only used it a couple of times.  The counters covered in flour, a clothesline strung up across the room to hold drying fettuccine.  He’d thought it was fun, but his mother said it was a pain in the ass.  Also up there was a fondue set and a fancy coffee maker, each with a similar history.
            She’d squirrel things away in other more obvious places too.  He’d been through desk drawers, jewelry boxes, a set of those Russian dolls that sit inside each other.  He’d climbed up on top of the refrigerator and found a box of black licorice secreted behind the flour and rice canisters.
            Sometimes he would turn up a bag of sweets and slip a few out if there were enough to not draw suspicion.  If he found a lottery ticket or a gift receipt or a dry cleaning tag, he’d just look at it and try to imagine where it had come from and why she held on to it.  The paperwork on the desk was largely unintelligible, but in a pinch, he’d excavate looking for clues on the blotter underneath.
            Coat pockets and a black day planner she called her brain held the biggest mysteries.  Scraps of paper with phone numbers, dates and times, and abbreviated names.  One time he’d gotten bold and telephoned a number from a matchbook found in the bathroom trashcan.  When a man’s voice answered, he’d panicked and hung up.
            Her shift ended right around the time Solid Gold came on.  He’d make sure to be soundly planted in the beanbag, in front of the TV, with his RC Cola and Little Debbie oatmeal cream pie.  Hi honey, she’d say, coming in the door with a bag of groceries, what did you do today?  Not much, he’d answer, not much. 

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Will is a musician, writer, photographer, and general curious soul.  He grew up in cheap "soda" country, but does his thing in Pittsburgh, which is firmly "pop"—an adjustment that still feels weird.

DATE NIGHT — BRIAN LEE KLUETER

I get in my car and drive the ten minutes it takes to get to the nearest fast food restaurant. Five bucks worth of chicken and fries can never fill me up, but that’s all I have to spend.
            I can tell by the sound of her voice that the girl working the drive-thru has been there all day. When my car pulls up to the window, she can see all the various paper and plastic bags lining my back seat, and when she hands me back my change she silently judges me with a solemn “Have a nice day.”
            The greasy smell fills me up like an appetizer. I get home quickly and don’t even bother getting out a plate or silverware, the idea of wasting time on that unnecessary task bringing a thoughtful exhale out of my mouth.
            I almost forgot what I’ve ordered until I notice the white bag says Wendy’s.
            Good. I love Wendy’s.
            I throw the bag on the ground after emptying its contents, and it falls on its side, the red face of the Wendy’s logo staring at me.
            It’s okay. She can watch.
            It tastes so fucking good. I know how bad this is for me, but my superego is taking a break for the moment. This is almost on par with sex, and I’ve had sex. It was a long time ago, but it happened, for sure. If given the choice between the two, I’d probably at least think about if for a while.
            I turn on the TV to add to the romantic scene and it’s a Wendy’s commercial—irony incarnate.
            Spicy chicken nuggets that look better than the one’s I’m eating. I look down and the bag is still looking at me, and I stuff a handful of fries in my mouth in spite of her.
            The food is colder, but still tastes great. The commercial ends, but another one, another Wendy’s one, replaces it. It’s a bunch of kids laughing because they’re eating salads.
            Fucking assholes. I know they’re laughing at me, laughing at my fat rolls, laughing at my double chin hidden underneath my beard, laughing at the danger of the clogging heart that will end me before I reach my sixties, the pain of a heart attack so close that I’m sure I’ll die slow enough for each second to replay every meal that’s led to this point.
            I begin sobbing, then crying, then shouting at the TV, my mouth still filled with food, the Wendy’s bag still staring at me, judging me like the drive-thru worker, and I shake so violently that I can’t tell if I’m still eating, or if I hate that bag more than I hate myself.

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Brian Lee Klueter will graduate from Bowling Green State University in May with a BFA in creative writing. He is also the creative nonfiction editor at Prairie Margins, BGSU's undergraduate literary magazine. He has previously been published in The Blue Route and Enormous Rooms, and is obsessed with chicken fingers.

THE HAM BAG — TODD MERCER

Rocky used to be the best dog ever. My Mom used to be married to my Dad. Now Dad is in Jamaica with Aunt Sandy. Mom said Aunt Sandy is dead. I said, no, I’ve seen pictures of her lately with Dad in the Caribbean. Mom said, she’s dead to me. 
            We live in two rooms over a dry cleaning shop. And now, so does Rusty. Mom’s boyfriend thinks he’s a renaissance man, but he’s a shoe salesman with bowling issues. He used to be a bowling ball salesman with shoe issues, but as Rusty says, he’s evolved. 
            Rocky and me were inseparable since he was a puppy. Until Rusty moved out of his Ford Econoline and into Mom’s room, Rocky used to follow me to the fishing hole. He’d run alongside when I rode my bike. He gets excited by the noise playing cards woven through the wheels make. When I broke my arm jumping off a swing, Rocky knew I was hurt. He’d lay his head down on my cast. There never was a more loyal dog.
            Rusty started carrying a baggie of ham pieces in the pocket of his jean jacket. Everyone knows Rocky is hopelessly addicted to pork. Rusty calls my dog nicknames, like “Cochise,” and “Ole Yeller.” He scratches the scruff behind Rocky’s ears. I hate it. 
            Once the ham bag comes out, Rocky forgets that I’m his person. He runs right over to Mom’s boyfriend. When we’re by ourselves I tell Rocky he’s too smart for that, but he looks at me like he doesn’t have a clue. He really isn’t as smart as I thought.
            Mom says I’ll like Rusty better if I give him a chance. 
            Mom says Dad isn’t coming back because of something called extradition laws.
            Rusty asked if I wanted a new bike, and a nice ten-speed, not a piece of crap Schwinn one-speed that Rocky runs beside. He calls me “Sporto,” and “Champ,” and “Killer.” I hate that.
            I’m never going to like him. Him and Mom think I’m asleep when they have Alone Time. I’m not asleep. I just don’t want to talk about it. Sometimes a man has to be a man, Rusty says.
            Rusty watches Jeopardy on TV and shouts the answers out while I’m trying to read books. When he’s right, Rusty says, “Golden.” He sits there slipping Rocky ham and whispering things in Mom’s ear that make her giggle and smack his shoulder. It’s gross.
            Mom says we can become a real family or else I should move out on my own. 
            I tell Mom that I’m fifty-five years old, and now isn’t the right time yet. Some people desert their families. Other people, you can count on them forever and ever.
            I thought Rocky was loyal, but I was wrong.
            Dad’s postcard had a picture of white sand on the front with Come to Jamaica!! written on it. He forgot to write anything on the back except our address.

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Todd Mercer of Grand Rapids, Michigan won the first Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest. His chapbook, Box of Echoes, won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest and his digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, is forthcoming from Right Hand Pointing. He’s a multi-year judge of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards and Independent Publisher’s Poetry Book of the Year Awards. Mercer's poetry and fiction appear in Apocrypha & Abstractions, The Bactrian Room, Blink Ink, Blue Collar Review, The Camel Saloon, Camroc Press Review, Cease, Cows, Cheap Pop, Dunes Review, East Coast Literary Review, Eunoia Review, Falling Star, 50-Word Stories, The Fib Review, Gravel, Kentucky Review, The Lake, The Legendary, Main Street Rag Anthologies, Melancholy Hyperbole, Misty Mountain Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, theNewer York, One Sentence Poems, Postcard Poems and Prose, Postcard Shorts, Right Hand Pointing, River Lit, The Second Hump, and Spartan.

THREE WORD NAMES — H. TUCKER ROSEBROCK

Tick. The sirens had been going for so long, they began to sound like the wind. Tock. Somewhere, behind the choppers and the swat teams and the megaphones, the tower beats a bass line. Tick. Around hour three or four, he started to feel his heart tune to the rhythm of the great clock's pulse.

Tock. “Even if you can't see what's coming...” His dad would say when they were alone together in the cold bunker in their backyard. His words came out in icy white puffs. “You can always be prepared.” Tick. That's why death had never frightened him. Tock. The air in the tower is thick and full of dust. Each breath feels like a creation of a plantation in his lungs, where it flourishes, bright and horrible.

Tick. When he exhales, he imagines the lungs of his ancestors, inhaling deeply as they looked upon the breadth of their domain and wept. He takes another deep breath and tries to refocus on the great wheel of time, grinding forever forwards.

Tock. It didn't matter if he'd spend tomorrow in prison or spattered on the walls, because what was done was done: set his sights in the leader of the free world, pulled the trigger and they found him, followed him, and now here they all were.

Tick. Though he was never much of a religious man (and wasn't that kind of the problem?), times like these made him think of how it might be nice to pray. Tock. He searched his heart for strength...and when that came up empty, he looked to his family (his father maybe?), and found them dead and cold too. Tick. So he turned to his heart and found it still tuned to the rhythm of the clock, echoing and vacant.

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H. Tucker Rosebrock is a Boston-based writer, speaker, and part-time superhero. He is currently finishing his MFA in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and his work can be found in Wired, Interrupt Magazine and Catch & Release: The Literary Blog of Columbia University.

A GOOD WOMAN — ASHTON RUSSELL

He lives in his Daddy’s old double wide and sometimes he sees only me. He says prove it, when I tell him I love him. Tell him he is the only man I want. His face covered in red tinted stubble, blue eyes like the ocean I have never seen.  I grab his hands and pull them towards me, put them on my small belly. I will prove it if you let me, I say.  He don’t know I’m a week late, don’t know I stopped taking the thing three months ago. Been waiting for him to come around, just like the pit-bull out back tied to the tree, desperate for a pat on the head. But when I open my mouth to speak, to tell him what I have done, nothing comes out.
            He cooks dinner, spaghetti with garlic bread that he uses to get all the sauce off his plate, mops the bread over my plate too. Sitting in the tiny kitchen—dirty dishes piled high in the sink, the woven basket full of rotting bananas hanging by the refrigerator—I think about how this could be our kitchen. I could clean all this mess. And then our lives could be tangled up like the vines of the plant he has growing in the window seal, twisting around each other, both looking for the light.

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Ashton Russell lives and writes in the Magic City, Birmingham, Alabama.

UNDERNEATH — RACHEL TAPLEY

The rain stops falling down but the ground steams upward. The air is heavy; the space of the world condensed. They are both sweating in their suits. Viv feels a trickle down her back, as though her skin cannot contain her.
            Leah drove from the airport. The dull silver of her wedding band was the same color as the sky. Her hands twisted the wheel as their exit toward I-10 peeled off, and they followed the curling tendril of their lane. Houston is a sprawling thicket of roads, spectacular in the way that they sometimes sprout from the ground and curve over each other in the sky.
            The drive to the funeral had taken them around a curve into tangled foliage. A green sign for Buffalo Bayou emerged from the mass of leaves. Viv couldn't see the water from the road, but the ground sloped away beneath the greenery.
            Viv had not paid attention to the service. She knew Abe from the brim of his hat right down to the core of him. She thought instead about the towering stand of sunflowers in Abe’s back yard—nobody’s back yard, now—as tall as the house. They had been left too long untended in the slow panic of Abe’s cancer, just like the banana plant outside the living room window with its wide leaves obscuring half the view. Viv had wondered if its roots were creeping under the house.
            There are no banana plants here, in the strip mall parking lot outside this taqueria. It doesn’t matter. The air is still sticky and fragrant. This whole city is clinging to the surface.
            The rain has washed city grit and grass alike into gutters and ditches. It smells like the world fermenting. Even though they are standing on an asphalt parking lot in a long series of asphalt parking lots, there is earth down below. There is always earth down below.
            The parking lots are webbed together with strands of road, and the highways twist around one another like vines. They are gray in imitation of the storm-clouded sky, not the other way around.
            “You know,” Leah says, while Viv is staring into the distance, the clusters of cinderblock buildings and strings of traffic lights all vanishing into the dark sky, “this place used to be a swamp.”

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Rachel Tapley teaches and translates French in western Massachusetts. Her writing has previously been published in The Toast.