EVERYTHING THAT BLOSSOMS — JARED YATES SEXTON

You always said I had a problem with happy endings. That whenever my narratives got near the end they started to spoil like coddled milk. You were the optimist, the one who looked at the uneven and crooked pictures on the wall and said their imperfections gave you something to do tomorrow, something to live for.
             I tried to argue, standing in the living room, shouting as you cuddled under a quilt with Duke, our old and chubby basset hound. I said the rule of the universe was entropy. Death and destruction.
             You just shook your head. What you’re not seeing, you’d say, is the beauty of it. The rising buildings. The walls. The ceilings. The way it all grows and blossoms.
             But those walls will tumble. Those ceilings cave in. Everything that grows must die and everything that blossoms must wither.
             You were never convinced. Here, you said, handing me a sheet of paper. Write me a story. Write me a happy ending.
             Duke had sloughed his way off the couch and taken a seat on my toes. Once, when I was in one of my states and obsessing over dying, you told me you knew I wasn’t because he wasn’t worrying over me, wasn’t nursing me with attention. I wrote, Duke was born without a name and with a mother who couldn’t recognize him. He grew old and white in the muzzle. He died and was buried under the pine tree in the backyard.
             When I handed it to you I expected a shaking of the head. I expected you to crumple the paper and toss it in the corner. Instead, you leapt from the couch. Here, you said, framing the story with your fingers on my desk and then narrowing them until only He grew old and white in the muzzle was left. There it is, you said. You found it.

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Jared Yates Sexton is a born-and-bred Hoosier living and working in the South as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University. He's the award-winning author of three story collections and a crime novel. His work can be found at jysexton.com.

LOST AND DELICATE — BRIA M. BERGER

Alice’s mother was laying on her bed—above all of the covers—with her arms perpendicular to her body, like a supine, yogic Christ. Her eyes were closed and she grimaced, as if on cue, when she felt Alice’s gaze.
            “My triceps are killing me,” Alice’s mother said quickly, through clenched, closed eyes. “My new trainer told me to keep them away from my heart center to build strength.” Outside, the wind stood still listening to the leaves fall between the bony fingers of the naked trees.  
            Alice stood silently. Her mother rolled her hips around on top of Alice’s bedspread. “Your bed is sagging in the middle, you know.”On the cold city streets, dislocated cracks of sun fell through the horizon, dripping down the backs of cold steel buildings.  
            Offended by the light, her eyes fluttered open, then closed again, settling on Alice’s empty hands in the door frame. “Oh god, did you forget my Starbucks? Alice, I told you I flew in at 6 am—I’m exhausted!”
             Alice’s legs stiffened in the door frame as her eyes left her mother’s languid body and moved to meet the gaze that bore her own. Alice’s gaze was not challenging, but soft; soft like the particular softness in the middle where her mother lay—the weeping sagginess that is gentle in its willingness to allow for others’ misuse, that mushiness that lays silent without complaint. Soft like her own triceps, which were not hardened by a trainer. Soft like the autumn light, radiating upwards from the ground through the broken blinds, waking up the first floor with its exposing touch.  
            Soft like the aching dust of disconnection

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Bria M. Berger is a writer and social worker from Michigan with a Master's in Social Work from University of Chicago. Her academic work has been presented at Sarah Lawrence College, Michigan State University, University of Chicago, and the Society for Social Work and Research.

NAMES FROM NUMBERS — KYLE COMA-THOMPSON

Seven billion. That was the number. Among the oddly stable vortex of hylozoic energy were seven billion points of conscious sensitivity, grown out of the tiniest dots of matter. Each an embryo in their time, each taking shape into larger and larger more complex patterns according to a delicate narrative: chemical triggers initiating this-and-this change, in this-and-this sequence, to achieve this-and-that development. To think a child would eventually come from so much genetic chaos and would one day open its eyes and stare back at its parents…that was humbling enough. But that it could as well think, "there's Mom", "there's Dad", in a language that hadn't been native to it before birth—that was frightening, that was miraculous.
            And so here I am, writing this, sifting words from a system of abridgements, arranging them in order, one after the other. What's this but a reenactment of my prior birth ex nihilio? The infant boy born underweight and malformed (undeveloped hip joints) has grown into an adult male (whose hips still hurt him). He sits in a room in presence of ample sunlight. It's a winter afternoon. He switches on a desk lamp. He opens his laptop. Into the monitor's light he begins typing. What's he writing about?
            The statistical results of multi-census research. The population of the earth is currently upwards of seven billion people. In thirty to thirty-five years, the number has been projected to reach eleven billion. He imagines them as firefly flicks playing across backyard darkness. Signaling to each other. Millions in unison. Millions in scattered, off-pattern pulses. Some go out, darken for good, drop to the grass as husks. Others wink bright for the first time, answering some instinct they were born from. How can the sum total of them be counted, if they're out of step with one another, marking their own local square inch of night with occasional bleats of bioluminescence? Appearing, vanishing, though technically always there. Rate and frequency of appearance and disappearance predictable by probabilistic measurement? In the abstract, with closed eyes, thinking of them, perhaps. But eyes wide, limited as one person in one point of space and time, impossible. It's the impossibility which provides ample evidence of their elegance: that they could exist and signal their existence with something so subtle as cognitive light. 
            Yes, something from nothing. As cosmologists have theorized. Proof of such theories having been derived, supposedly, from mathematics and observation of cosmic radiation. But what calculation for the yes, the yes and then quick quiet no of one consciousness, then another? As a son of subtle light, I would like to know. As one of seven billion, am bound to fear and wonder. 
            What do they add up to, if they can't be fixed and counted? What is subtracted, when eyes close and mind falls out? Thinking now of people who don't exist, inventing them (but why?), adding to the larger living number. Angelo Garca. Pamela Ellis Greene. Jeeyoung Sparkman…

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Kyle Coma-Thompson is author of The Lucky Body.

CROCODILE TEARS — KATHRYN TRATTNER

In all things there is a starting point, an X to mark the point of origin. Later she would tell me that I didn't know what I was talking about, what the truth was. That word. I hate that word.
            There never was any truth in that woman.
            She wore her skin like you would a coat or pair of gloves. She would peel herself out, exposing muscle and bone, the yellow of her teeth muted against the hot red of her cheeks. The whites of her eyes soured, thickened, and when she blinked large crocodile tears oozed free. The big toe on her right foot was deformed, pinched and swollen all at once, from being stuffed like a Christmas goose into high heels too small and too tall. They barely brought her to five feet, without them she wandered down below my chin, breathing air that didn't belong to me and seeing the world as a slightly larger, slightly taller place.
            I reached out once and skimmed my hand over the top of her head, touching nothing but sizzling air. She glared, mouth pinched up and sucked in so that she didn't seem to have any lips at all.
            "This is where it started." I pointed at emptiness, because that's what fingers were made for and I couldn't poke through her; I couldn't melt her like butter with body heat and lick her from my hands. Her taste sour and sharp, sneering, as she dismissed me.

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Kathryn Trattner writes from the middle of the United States supported by three cats, two kids, and one husband. Her fiction can be found at Wyvern Lit, Minotaur Lit, and Dragon Poet Review. Find her @k_trattner.

WHISPER — AARON J. HOUSHOLDER

She said, “It tickles a little.”
            Yes, that’s what she said. Now of course you’ll want to pause there and consider what was said before that sentence and what tickles and what part of her is being tickled. Fine, do that. Try to create some context, and do it quickly, before your mind gets carried away and takes you places that might prove to be dangerously wrong or scandalously right.
            Ask yourself, “Who is ‘she’?” That’ll help. This is a different story if “she” is three years old or twenty-four or seventy-eight.
            And what is “it”? Really, “it” could be anything.
            Is there disappointment in “a little”? As in, it should tickle a lot. Or is there disappointment in “tickles,” because “it” should do more than that, or less, or something different?
            What if the words carry no disappointment? Maybe they’re a statement of fact, an observation. Can they be neutral?
            Are we done now? Good. Now forget all that. What matters most is to whom the words were said, and when. You should have known that. Check this out:
            Maybe it was last night. That adds some urgency, doesn’t it. And maybe those words were said to me. Maybe they were whispered to me. Yeah, that’s the good stuff.
            Now let’s push it a little, just for kicks. Maybe they were whispered last night by someone at the carnival, someone – come on, push it further, blow it up – someone too old to be waiting in that line with all the kids but doing it anyway. Someone waiting to sit on the clown’s lap, say, waiting to make a request for a balloon animal and a birthday surprise. Someone who sat there a few seconds longer than necessary and then whispered those words we’ve been wondering about.
            So as I said: maybe those words were whispered to me.
            And maybe I responded.
            And maybe I’ve tucked my response away somewhere safe.
            And maybe now you should stop wondering about things that don’t concern you.

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Photo (C) Jamie Miles 

Aaron J. Housholder teaches writing and literature at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Relief Journal, Wyvern Lit, Chicago Literati, River Teeth, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @ProfAJH.

THAT THING THAT KILLED RITA HAYWORTH — DYLAN SMEAK

There's too much turquoise in my apartment for it ever to be attractive again. The blue-tumored stemware, the lizard lamp in the living room, the three-piece candle set I bought myself. All birthday presents. A tradition my dad started doing until he started forgetting things instead. The first gift, though, was from my mother: a faux-Navajo pattern blanket that hangs over my living room couch, tussling with the lizard lamp for notice. She left me in the blanket, wrapped like a womb, and then split the day after I came home from the hospital. My dad, he remembers none of this. I tell him he married Rita Hayworth and left her because the sex was bad. I tell him how they're building condos on Mars, but the weather's too shifty. I tell him to wear pants. I tell him my name. I tell him I could leave and he'd never notice. He nods, smiles.
            Every Sunday I pick him up and bring him to my apartment for freeze-dried Stroganoff. I let him brown the already cooked meat in a skillet over no heat and turn on Hannity in the kitchen while I cut tomatoes. I tell him the story of how, when I was little, he and I would lay on the back porch, looking for constellations that I couldn't find on my own. At 14, I was finding Perseus before he could put on his glasses. "Tell me about Mom" I would ask, adjusting my back on the concrete.
            After dinner, I walk him to the bathroom and turn mute the TV so I can listen for the flush. It comes, so I grab the turquoise blanket to share against the cold winds and we go out to the porch. No matter the weather, we always sit on the porch and I look up and we point out the constellations we can make out through the glow of the street lights. I point out the Big Dipper. I make him point it out, make him say the name. "The Big Dipper," he mumbles "the Big Dipper." Through the stretch of street lamps and legislation-stunted billboards, you can make out the blinking taxiway lights of the airport and if you squint a bit, the runway bleeds into the horizon line.
            We sit on the porch, slack-eyed and wrapped in dyed cotton, both waiting, but for different things.

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Dylan Smeak lives in Brooklyn, New York where he is an MFA candidate at The Writer's Foundry. His fiction is forthcoming in New World Writing.

DEEP-SIX — MATT TOMPKINS

Why else would you have found yourself awake at 3 am, your pupils bathed in bluish glow, perusing (and erasing) search results for how to self-induce a fatal heart attack, if not to spare your busy wife and teenage son the hassles heaped on suicide survivors—endless, dim what-ifs and whys and what-could-I-have-dones—if not to give them (and yourself, post-mortem) all the benefits, the dignities, accruing to a “natural” demise—in light of which they’ll be allowed to feel their shock and sadness unalloyed—their righteous, cleansing anger leveled at the universe (and/or at their respective gods) unsmudged—and spared unhappy, fruitless speculation as to what exactly might have been so awful in your quiet, privileged life that you’d be eager to engage that everlong ejection seat, to jettison your soul and end your days before your stamped expiry date—and plus, the nuisance of insurance claims investigations: best to spare them that as well, if possible, and see that they’re provided for without the contestations, protestations, probate snags and such (and yes, of course, there could be other ways to go—like maybe in an “accident” instead—a certain gawkish, bleak allure; a grim and somber flair—but don’t those single-car collisions, don’t those arcing falls from shaky ladders, don’t those skydive/hang-glide/parasail “mistakes” just always strike you as a little fishy—don’t they leave the faintest whiff of doubt—and so, so much the better if it looks as if your body turned against you, mutinied, because who’d ever will that fate upon himself—who even could—and so, who’d ever even question (question, even for a moment, ever) whether there was any cause to cast suspicion on your tragic, early death?)?

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Matt Tompkins lives in upstate New York with his wife, daughter, and cat. His stories are forthcoming in H_NGM_N, Post Road, and a couple of other places. You could read more of Matt's writing, if you feel like it, by visiting his website: needsrevision.com.

SUMMER BREAK 2015

Last winter we decided to give ourselves a break—we're only human, after all—and with the summer being what it is, so much business abounding, we decided we'll be doing the same thing so we can recharge our batteries and hit the fall running.

We do hope you'll pardon us as CHEAP POP takes an oh-so-quick break from August 1 - September 7 (still summer, believe us), so we can retool, refresh...all that jazz.  Starting then on Tuesday September 8, new stories for the rest of the calendar year (well, until our next mandated winter break, that is).

Thanks, again, to you all for supporting this endeavor. Lots of good stuff coming your way.

Best,
Elizabeth + Rob