THE COLOR OF CALIFORNIA — ALEX NYE

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When she yells at me, I feel as if I am in Wyoming, wasting away in gutless yellow.  My Rand McNally United States map hangs on the wall and I place my girlfriend in salmon-colored-California.  Her lungs fill with insecurities of our relationship before she exhales them on me.  She never raises her voice, but my lack of words give hers more power.  They sail easily through the open passages of the Rocky Mountain’s valleys while mine struggle up their tallest peaks.  When they get close to the top, about to tumble down onto her, my words stall.  They come crashing back to me and shrivel inside.  The elevation of the Rockies, with its thin air, don’t let her words reach me. I can hear them, but cannot process what they mean.  The less I say, the higher the range between us builds.

The color of Illinois is turquoise, but I don’t remember seeing that color during my drives through its southern cornfields and farmlands.  The summer is slipping by and in the days to come she will be studying abroad thousands of miles across the ocean.  On the bottom of maps are scales to measure distance.  One inch can represent hundreds of miles.  Picturing this, the distance doesn’t seem all that bad.  Vienna to Marquette is two palms away, but that’s the worst thing about maps, they often lie. 

Have you ever pondered the scent of another human being, their chemical make-up, their natural odor?  When my girlfriend leaves me in the terminal alone I notice her smell has changed, it is different.  A turbulence reaches my core and disrupts a balance in me.  It turns my insides the color of the Atlantic Ocean, a place few words are written, because even the map can’t describe how I am feeling.

The color of Michigan is burnt orange, and this is believable, like in fall.  The pumpkins get fat and the chlorophyll in leaves are dried out by an autumn pallet.  The smell of spice and pleasantries are all I can imagine.  This was what it was like when I first met her.  I fell in love with her smell.  I wanted her to sweat and not take a shower because her chemicals and my chemicals lined up, and photosynthesis was alive and covered up the true colors of her leaves.  She wore too much perfume when we met, gotten good at masking her natural odor, doing this many times before.  Or maybe I put my senses on hold, losing myself in her bottled scented beauty in order to lose my virginity. 

Desperation isn’t a color on the map, it’s just a lens to see it all through.  When winter came and the snow buried me deeper and it was hard to navigate the icy passages of the Rockies, I lost her scent entirely.  When spring comes and she returns, her smell isn’t the same and my yellow no longer feels gutless.  It’s confident now, courageous, and I am finally ready to end this year long fight.  But what is the color of leaving?  Is it the smoky grey of Canada?  Or is it the color of South Dakota?

An unexpected blue.

Alex Nye is a MA student at Northern Michigan University in the quaint city of Marquette, Michigan, positioned right on the shores of Lake Superior. You can find him on twitter and instagram @alexnyeguy.

SPEED LIMIT — JeFF STUMPO

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When Amber got that ticket in the mail, with its photo of her old Firebird and a $50 fine, she crunched it up like her little brother crushed ants, threw it across the room, and fumed, fumed, fumed. Nobody had been in danger. Hell, she'd been on her way out of town, just shy of where the speed limit made its climb from 55 to 65, when the new camera grabbed her. If it'd been Sheriff White, he would've told her daddy but let her go. If it’d been Jake, just five years older than her and still called her Bamber, he would have let her go and not told her daddy either. But that camera didn't think, didn't know her, not for real, just like the town, the damn town, that tacked beer guts and "good old" on to all the boys sooner or later and made last year's beauty queen into next year's new mama, that rotted from the ground up like Old Man Badger's front teeth, that dragged on Amber like a cigarette, and that's what that camera did, dragged on her, wasn't meant to stop nobody from driving fast into town, was facing out of town, 2 miles past the nearest intersection, just daring her to try and get out faster than it wanted to let her, didn't want to let her out at all, and Amber walked across the room and picked up the piece of paper and uncrumpled it and crumpled it and uncrumpled it again like she was maybe going to make one of those origami birds she never learned how to, and she crumpled it up one last time and threw it back down. Damn that ticket and damn this town. She wasn't going to keep paying, no sir.

JeFF Stumpo owns Wonderland Books & Games in Martin, Tennessee, where he has taught classes for the English and Honors programs at the University of Tennessee branch there. His wife is the smart one. His dogs, until recently, numbered four. His daughter is three going on thirteen. He has a website at www.jeffstumpo.com.

EVERYBODY LOVES THE BOY DETECTIVES — CATHY S. ULRICH

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In this story, we’re amateur detectives. We solve a crime that has baffled the entire police department. We’re heroes, shaking hands with the mayor and getting an honorary key to the city. The key to the city is large enough that we can hold it together, both of our hands clasped round it.

In this story, someone says And I’d have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.

In this story, there’s an unmasking and a criminal with gnashing teeth.
             How did you figure it out? the reporters ask. They all wear hats with the word press tucked into the brim, and the lady reporter who believed in us all along will smile knowingly.

In this story, you and I wear matching neckties and our shoes are spit-polished. Your parents aren’t divorced, and mine don’t mind my low grades in algebra.
             He’s a genius detective, they say. Who cares about algebra?

In this story, you and I can hold hands all we want, and none of the older kids call us faggots or flush your socks down the toilet.

In this story, your mother doesn’t take you away because she caught us kissing, just once, to see.

In this story, we’re best friends for always. We’re the boy detectives. We’re the heroes. The town holds a ticker tape parade in our honor, and you and I ride on a float, and wave, and wave.

When Cathy S. Ulrich was a little girl, she wanted to be a detective like Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew. Or a race car driver.

PERCY'S GRIEF: A FRAGMENT — JAMES DIAZ

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In the part of the room that she crosses there is a change brought to things by only the shift in a state of mind, so small, sudden, that what has been transformed is not really a noticeable artifact. She has often found herself going to the window like this, with no expectations or complicated intent buried beneath her movements, only the dull attenuated physical effect of setting aside a portion of the curtain, and looking out into, what exactly? It is, suddenly, that everything was bothering her, the discomfort that recalling certain memories of the past most often brings with it, an indescribable itch, a bitterness, a steely, stubborn sadness.
            A childhood friend of hers had been found murdered, it had been a home invasion, the details of the whole tragic thing in the paper that lay face up on the counter top, next to her untouched coffee. Jessie, her closest ally since they had first met in middle school, Jessie with the blond hair and look of a girl who never noticed her own beauty, who just walked around all of the time with the simplicity that such things shouldn't matter, at least not in the way that people always thought it should.
            What do you do when you loose someone, not something, an actual person who used to be one of the most important parts of your life. Are you supposed to call up all of the good memories, omit all of the bad ones, and cry over it all until you become hungry or tired? Out in the field that was peppered with a heavy morning frost, she watched as the black birds pecked into the earth, searching for sustenance, and suddenly, she thought to herself that what she wanted most in that moment, was to be just like these birds, to be able to just go out and peck into the earth and find what you need, so simple, so un-awkward, unassuming, without pain.
            What she needed to pull out of the earth was something that is given to none of us in times like these, something that instead requires hard, long, unending work. A sitting and screaming with the pain, a looking out the window, and most of all, a not knowing what to do or how to remember or mourn in all of the right ways. That was the human sustenance, though harder to find, it was all the earth could afford us, and all that we could expect, all that we deserved, perhaps.

James Diaz lives in New York. His poetry has appeared in Pismire, Epigraph, Ditch, Collective Exile, My Favorite Bullet and most recently in The Idiom Mag.

LIMB — RON MacLEAN

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I wear my father so he shows.
            I wear him like a crime scene, a Christmas sweater. A dead skin, scored and perforated. I wear him (only) at high tide, wary of mucking in the shallows. I wear him like a felled tree: a used sports section: a tired mug. Like the striped thrift store shirt (too big) I wore too long (believer).
            I am the carpetbagger in the basement; an unschooled kid with a rug-burned eye, a soiled face. I stayed until I could read the score in the ink on my fingers. (The dog crawled into my lap and died. I've never been clearer on what a being wanted.)

My phantom sister treats me to tea she pours from her handless arm. Her skin smooth where it burned. We have dinner on Tuesdays: she roasts meat and root vegetables. We sit close at her too-small table and disagree about the past. Rutabaga. Parsnips.
            My phantom sister fixes flat tires free of charge. She smells of rubber, glue, and ash. Lives with a set of identical twins who don't get along. This doesn't trouble her. "They've never gotten along," she says.
            My phantom sister carries a canned ham in a cloth bag. She says the only scene worth believing in is one that's impossible to understand. She says: sometimes the waves knock you over. (What then? Get back up: walk wet.)

My father sits in a recliner in the corner. Wallpapered-over. Mummified. His presence delicate: if bumped, it could crumble uncontained. I hover with a flashlight, tired of this teasing husk. My shirt, shorts, shoes drip water. The flashlight too big. Its beam bounces—off musty flocking, rug remnants, exposed pipe. For half a second, I steady it:
            Hello?
            The cellar abounds with beets (luminous, magnificent) that no one—not even my sister—will claim. We walk, hand in handless. The ham in the bag bangs against her leg. Slosh. Accept the weight of wet. The way you feel—adjust for—a limb no longer there.

Ron MacLean is author of Headlong and Blue Winnetka Skies (novels), and Why the Long Face? (stories). His fiction has appeared in GQ, Narrative, Fiction International, Best Online Fiction 2010, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of the Frederick Exley Award for Short Fiction and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. He holds a Doctor of Arts from the University at Albany, SUNY, and teaches at Grub Street in Boston.

HE'S ALL HUMANITY — AMANDA MALONE

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The homeless man living outside my building occupied himself with rearranging his fantastic collection of junk into fantastic shapes and sometimes even spelling out things like THAT’S JUST NO GOD. I thought it was kind of beautiful. Had plenty to say, too. Some nights, I left my window open just so I could hear him screaming about the reprobates in Congress and consumerism for hours on end. 
            The first time I walked outside and heard him yelling, I’ll admit it scared the daylights out of me. WE’RE BUILT FOR DEATH, he’d said to me. RUNNING ON SUFFERING, WE BLISTER OUR HANDS IN THE FIELDS FOR NAUGHT. There was just something inexplicably charming about him, but I still kept walking. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk. I just didn’t know what to say. So I kept my head down and he hollered at me like any other passerby. It wasn’t enough, though. I knew I needed to be different. He’d had a new sculpture up one day and all I did was say HELLO and I LIKE WHAT YOU’VE GOT THERE. You know what he did? Scurried right back into his box, didn’t say another word to me. 
            He quit hollering at me altogether after that. 
            I started getting worried, thought it was my fault. I tried again the next day and he just hid in the box again. Every morning, I would try again and he would always hide. It turned into a routine we kept for the longest time, ‘til one day I couldn’t take it anymore. I came right out and said, PLEASE TALK TO ME I LOVE YOU. Of course, he got startled and hid in one of his boxes with his head poking out.
            I’M NOT LEAVING THAT EASILY, I said and sat down in front of him. 
            He stared at me for a few moments, then spoke. SORRY I REALLY DO THINK YOU’RE PRETTY, he said, BUT I’M NO GOOD AT THIS. 
            My heart was all a-flutter at that. WE CAN MAKE IT WORK, I said. 
            He turned away from me and I was sure I’d lost him again. But he just started digging around the junk nearby and pulled out a a tin can, threw it at me. There was a thin string connecting it to another tin can he was holding. THEY HAVEN’T TAPPED MY PHONES YET, he said, CAN I CALL YOU SOMETIME? Then he turned away and said, RING RING. He looked back at me and jerked his head towards the other tin can.  His voice grew a bit louder. RING RING, he said, RING RING. 
            I picked up the can and held it to my ear. For a moment, I was afraid the string might break, but it held fast. I smiled and said, I MISSED YOU.

Amanda Malone currently attends Georgia Southern University. She manages submissions at BULL and her own work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bartleby Snopes, Wyvern Lit, and Luna Luna Mag, among others.

WIDE OVALS — B.R. YEAGER

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His wife was in the hospital, but I’d wager you’d find him at the track on any given night.  He’d walk his little shamble up to the bar and bleat “my wife is dyyyying”—always trailing—then chit-chat and an order of clam chowder and whiskey in water. “I love her so much and
she’s dyyying.”
            “So sorry to hear that, sir,” muttered, keying the order in the POS. “$5.75.”
            Wednesday.  Thursday.  Friday.  Saturday doubles.  Sunday matinees. I didn’t work Monday or Tuesday, but if I did I’m sure I would’ve caught him at the bar crying about his wife dying like any other day. “So sorry, sir. Getcha another refill?”  I wanted to ask why he chose
this—bar whiskey and clam chowder and skinny dogs on TV—over her in a hospitable room with buzzing electric beds and disposable sheets. But there it is, isn’t it?
            He was at the track the day she gave up ghost. Of course he was.  He did his walk of shame to the bar before collapsing on mold-riddled forest carpet.
            “Benji?” His lips quivering, kissing my hand as I pulled him to his feet. “Benji? You’re such a sweet boy, Benji.”
            It wasn’t half an hour before he was back in his chair, eyes cemented to a wall of TVs, bellowing “C’monyousonsabitches” at the scared, skinny dogs running in wide ovals.

B.R. Yeager tended bar until he lost his mind. His work has appeared in FreezeRay Poetry. http://bryeager.wordpress.com

SIX YEARS AGO — SHANNON McLEOD

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This jazz café in Detroit is only open on Fridays. It is tightly packed with acquaintances. Even those you’ve never met before look familiar. And after a few drinks, it is not inappropriate to invite yourself to their tables to investigate social connections. Our stories are similar in this circle, which is why we stick together. This college boy, who is presently talking to you, has you stuck at a table that is shoved beside the corner where the musicians play: an upright bass, a piano, a guitar, two singers, male and female, who trade off the microphone between songs when they aren’t sharing it in a duet. Mounted on the burgundy walls are tarnished brass instruments and old records. The place is lit with lamps of vinyl, lace, and some Tiffany knock-offs. It reminds you of an eccentric great-aunt’s house. The couches are even embroidered with flowers and topped with clear plastic slipcovers. And it smells like dust and smoke. The college boy is studying sculpture. He is exasperated with his life, he tells you, as though he is unaware of the strange and beautiful sanctuary he is sitting in. He complains that nobody gets it. Everyone is living a life that ignores beauty and shits on art. You simultaneously hate and pity him. He claims he is not enjoying a time he will soon idealize. You drink your gin and tonic. (You never know what else to order.) He pulls out a cigarette, and you imagine what his life will be like in six years. He does not know it yet, but he will resent his family, his job, because they will keep him from evenings like this. Feeling bored in a sea of friends while musicians, who play for fun, not money, are goofing through a piano cover of Sublime. Jesus Christ, this is tiring, entertaining his boredom, nodding at how the world has already disappointed him before the age of twenty-two. He will remember this night, and the slew of nights like it. He will think about it longingly. He will misremember, though, recalling dancing along to the music, when he really just hunched over his phone and forced strangers into his conversation. You will remember letting him discontent you.

Shannon McLeod teaches in Adrian, Michigan, where she also coaches a youth slam poetry team. She has led creative writing workshops in venues as diverse as a children’s summer camp and a women’s correctional facility. Her writing has appeared in Gawker, Hobart and NEAT.