THINGS WE BELIEVED WHEN WE WERE SMALL — KENDRA FORTMEYER

She had been on fire for four years now. It was hot and made people uncomfortable. Also, they said, there was the smell of burning hair. The girl couldn’t really see the problem. She was always light and always warm. She was great at camping. Maybe she left scorch marks all over the furniture—so what?
             “Honey,” her mother said, over the phone. “Are you still doing that fire thing? Your father and I worry.”
             “Yes, Ma,” the girl said. Sometimes, when her mother called, they had two different conversations. Her mother: You should go back to school. The girl: I feel like I’m really self-actualizing. The mother: There’s a nice new boy at church. The girl: I think I’d like to go to China.
             A nearby philodendron curled up, smoking, and the girl leapt to her feet.
             “It’s just that—well, honey,” her mother said. The phone was melting. It was hard to hear. “Men don’t make passes at girls who are on fire.”
             “What?” the girl asked.
             Her mother was saying, “Maybe you should consider letting someone else be on fire for a while,” but the phone was a bubbling mass on the floor, now, and the girl backed away from it carefully. “Bye, Ma,” she called down into the puddle, “I love you!” and as she doused it with salt, imagined that it said beautiful things.
             She went out that night with her friend, Marjorie. There were only a few bars in town that allowed people who were on fire, so they went to the same places over and over. Marjorie didn’t mind. Marjorie was depressed. She claimed the sameness of the bar was a pocket-sized representation of the unchanging bleakness of her life. Every night, they drank the same beer and Marjorie left with the same kind of man: the kind who had just one thing too many wrong with him for other women to take home. A large mole, or a receding hairline, or an anger management problem.
             That night, while Marjorie talked sadly to a man who was just trying to find himself, you know?, the girl on fire stared into the pitcher. When she was little, she’d thought beer looked like liquid gold. She’d thought lots of things: that all grown-ups were smart, that there was a heaven. That someday, if she was hard-working and true-hearted and smiled a lot, people would be attracted to her like moths to a flame.
             She looked out at the couples pouring hand-in-mittened-hand from the diner across the street, laughing, all inside jokes and Corgi puppies. Her phone was buzzing in her pocket. It was the newspapers, the talk shows, the President of the United States; they wanted to know her secret, how in five easy steps, they could be on fire, too. Marjorie waved a sad goodbye, and the girl lifted her glass. The beer hissed at her lips: a scorching cloud of steam, the adult bitterness of gold.

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Kendra Fortmeyer has an MFA from UT Austin and edits fiction for Broad! Magazine. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Nonrequired Reading and has appeared in the Toast, PANK, Smoking Glue Gun, NANO Fiction, apt, Psychopomp and elsewhere.  You can find her at www.kendrafortmeyer.com or on Twitter @kendraffe.

ACTING FUNNY WITH A GUN — PAUL LUIKART

He’s been acting funny with a gun. Out back by the woodshed. I see his boot prints in the snow from the back door. I hear him giggling. He twirls that pistol on his finger like a cowboy with too many whiskey slugs in him. All alone. He fires at ducks and muskrats and cornstalks that bust apart in pops of yellow splinters.
             He says, “One day, Mae. To the moon. Blam-o! Straight to the moon.”
             The dog is dead, the kids are gone, the neighbors’ barn burned and they cleared out.
             Lately I’ve felt my heart flip-flop. I have to beat my chest and lean on the stove and ride it out. But still I watch him—a sliver of a man, born of the gray sky, shaking like a de-ranged puppet. Firing and laughing and dancing like mad—like mad—till he runs out of steam and lays down like a corpse between the mutilated stalks. 

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Paul Luikart's work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Curbside Splendor, Hobart, New World Writing (coming soon!) and Yalobusha Review among others. His MFA is from Seattle Pacific University. He lives with his family in Tennessee. 

ONCE FOR YES AND TWICE FOR NO — CHLOE N. CLARK

The Fox Sisters were known for their ability to speak with the dead. They listened to the rap, rap, raps of the spirits knocking on walls, on tables, on the inside of cabinets. The raps were letters spelling out secrets. They said a man had been murdered. Buried beneath their house. Such secrets.  Secrets are better left unsaid. Sometimes, Maggie and Kate Fox would try to close doors, cover their ears, not listen. The public called for more, for more, voices like pounding. The taste of alcohol was sweet compared to the pounding.
             Maggie dreamed of the sky bleeding into her skin whenever she went out at night. The stars in her veins shimmered and fell. She didn’t ever wish upon them. What could she have wished for? Kate began to manifest the spirits onto stages across America. They shimmered and shook. The spirits never asked for much. Rapping, rapping.
             After years, the sisters finally admitted to fraud. The rapping merely the cracking of their toes done in unison. “We only wanted to play a joke on Mama,” they said. Voices shaking with age, with years of drink. The public moved on easily.
             Years later, children playing in the ruins of the old Fox house found white sticking out of the ground. So chalky-colored, so smooth. They were the bones of a man, murdered some said.

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Chloe N. Clark is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Environment. Her work has appeared such places Booth, Sleet, Rosebud, Menacing Hedge, and more. She studies ghosts and magic, doughnuts and monsters. Not necessarily in that order. Follow her @PintsNCupcakes.

A PIGEON — MATTHEW KABIK

Joe didn’t want to think about what he’d see when he got to the top of the hill.
             Bill Young was the first to find it, and he ran. Ran all the way to a teacher who just told him to leave it alone. It’s true he didn’t go back up the hill, but he did tell every other fifth grader at recess what he saw.
             Bill said it was a gopher, and it looked like a dog had gotten it about a week ago. Instead of whatever he was supposed to see, guts and all, he saw the back of Andrew’s striped shirt. He looked like a roly poly bug, hunched and thick around.  Andrew was kneeling over something, and only turned his head when he spoke to Joe.
             “It isn’t a groundhog,” he said.
             “How did you get up here before me?”
             “Come look."
             Joe heard someone at the base of the hill shout and his classmates laugh. He wished he was playing tag on the creaky jungle gym. He tried to imagine anything else. The slide, the red kickball, Ms. Peter’s loose shirt. No-matter what, his mind went back to what was in front of him.
             Joe thought of Andrew’s too-tight clothing, his crooked clammy hands.  He didn’t want to get closer, he was worried Andrew’s overly sweet breath would get stuck in his nostrils and make him sick. Still, Joe walked next to where he knelt and looked down.
              Just a bird, or what was left of one. There was hardly anything to it, just a head and the brittle stench of something’s bones drying up in the sun.
             “A cat got it, I think,” Andrew said.
             “I guess so."
             “I wonder if the cat dragged him up here or caught him in this spot."
             “I don’t know.”
             “I know you don’t,” Andrew said, wiping a hand across his face.
             “What?”
             Andrew rolled his shoulders like he was getting frustrated. “How could you know how it happened?”
             Joe wanted to ask Andrew if he acted like this on purpose. He wondered why Andrew wiped his mouth and why he wouldn’t get up to face him.
             “Don’t tell anyone I’m up here, and don’t tell them it’s just a bird,” Andrew said.
             “What should I tell them, then?”
             “Anything else.”
             Joe reached the edge of the hill to see everyone still staring.
              He looked anywhere else but the crowd of kids around him when he reached the bottom.
             “So, did you see it?” Bill shouted.
             “Yeah,” Joe said, walking past the crowd and back towards the school, “I saw it.”

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Matthew Kabik is the editor in chief of Third Point Press and lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Sundog Lit, Pithead Chapel, and Atticus Review, among others. Follow him on Twitter @mlkabik or visit his website for a complete listing of published work: www.matchstickcircus.com. 
 

THE MISSIONARY — JACQUES DEBROT

The Missionary has been sick for days.  But after leaving Iquitos he’s gotten worse.  Now he can’t keep anything down.  Even water makes him vomit.   
             During the hottest part of the day, he drags himself under the frayed canopy stretched across the motorboat’s afterdeck. There are whitecaps on the river.  The faint reek of diesel.  Sweat rolls off his arms and drips off his elbows.  The boat seems not to be moving. 
             At dusk, the Niaorunyo boat hands—stunted, muscular men with long, perforated earlobes—pitch tents on an exposed sand bar.  The Mission—a jumble of palmwood shacks, a crude chapel—is no less than a two-day journey from here.
             The boat hands chop up a rotten log for firewood and cook a sparse meal.  Piranha, some boiled platanos, a handful of rice. Lizards crawl among the food bags.  Their pale throats pulsate slowly.
             The Missionary is too nauseous to eat.  He can’t stop shivering.  His lips are numb.  The Niaorunyo stare at him.  Attentive but detached.  When the sun sets, they let the fire smolder, but the mosquitoes swarm them anyway. 
             It storms during the night.  The rain smashes down loud and straight into the river like pig-shot.  The Missionary’s stomach is a clenched fist.  Pure agony.  Each time he vomits he brings up only air and saliva. 
             When the Niaorunyo enter his tent, their faces are streaked with red achote.  The Missionary watches them rifle through his knapsack.  They look as if they’d been slaughtered and had their heads stuck on poles and left to blister in the sun before being reunited with their bodies.  He tries to speak.  Only his lips move.  No sound.  Then another wave of nausea comes over him and he curls himself into a fetal position and coughs up more bile.
             The Indians squat beside his head and roll him over, their broad feet caked with river mud.  They take his rosary.  Search roughly through his pockets, under his shirt, surprised to find he has a navel.
             That afternoon, lying half-alive in his own filth, the Missionary dreams about the Niaorunyo Mission.  In the dream the men are bathing in the river. They wear fiber bands that press their penises to their bellies. The women are naked. Their glossy black hair is cut straight across their foreheads. Red serpents painted on their brown legs. 
             The Missionary takes off his clothes and wades into the river.  The water is the color of tea.  Suddenly he is crying.  Why?  He doesn’t understand.  Loud, racking sobs.  As if observing himself from a great distance, he waits for it to pass, the sunlight falling everywhere through the tall trees in yellow, smoky shafts, like the light in a vast cathedral. 

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Jacques Debrot chairs the department of Literature and Language at Lincoln Memorial University in the Cumberland Mountains.  His poems, stories and artwork have appeared or are forthcoming in more than fifty journals, including The Collagist, Hobart (web) and Wigleaf.  

2015 FLASH FICTION CONTEST

We have a contest!

We are thrilled to announce that we're partnering with the excellent Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters (GLCL), a literary nonprofit located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to host our 2015 Flash Fiction Contest!  

To be judged by author Phillip Sterling (more on him below), we'll be looking for pieces of 500 words or less that pop, just like usual. Here's some deets:

Submission Period:  August 1 – September 30, 2015
Announcement of Winners:   Friday, October 30, 2015  
Prizes:  $500 for 1st place, $250 for 2nd place, and $100 for 3rd place. The three award winners, along with three honorable mention entries, will be published with CHEAP POP.

You can read all the guidelines for the contest here. When subs ARE open, you'll be able to submit through GLCL's website.

ABOUT THE JUDGE

Phillip Sterling’s most recent book is In Which Brief Stories Are Told, a collection of short fiction (Wayne State University Press). He is also the author of the poetry collection Mutual Shores and three chapbook-length series of poems (Significant Others, Quatrains, and Abeyance) and editor of Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange.  Among his awards are an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Fulbright Lectureships (Belgium and Poland), a P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award, and a number of Pushcart Prize nominations (for poetry and nonfiction prose).  Professor Emeritus at Ferris State University, where he founded and coordinated the Literature in Person (LIP) Reading Series, Sterling spent much of August 2014 on Isle Royale, as part of the National Park Service artist-in-residency program.  He currently lives in Lowell, Michigan.

ON THE EDGE OF THE NEW WORLD — PAUL CRENSHAW

When they got back to the house he spread the peanut butter on the bread and scooped out a dead lump of grape jelly and spread the jelly and cleaned the knife, then cut the crusts carefully while she watched, her brown hair, so like her mother’s, framing her sad face. Her hands were small in her lap, her face pale above the black dress. He tried to smile at her as he put the sandwich on her favorite plate, but when he handed it to her she was crying, and when he asked what was wrong she said “That’s not how Mom used to do it.” 

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Paul Crenshaw’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, North American Review and Brevity, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University. 

IN THE LONELY NIGHT — KAT MOORE

All the girls wanted him. All the girls with scabs for hearts and whiskey for livers. I wanted him.
             The scar down his nose from the teeth of a girl and another down his cheek from a beer bottle in a fight. Dave. His name was Dave. It was in a bar that he picked me up. I had low self-esteem and thought he’d never want me.  He leaned in and whispered I’ve been curious.
             I understood and said get me out of here.
             So we stumbled out of the bar with full glasses of beer hidden in our coats, full glasses of beer that were poured for strangers and left unattended for only a second. Full glasses spilling into our pockets. The snow was melting and leaving water puddles and slush. We could see our breath. Hot. Drunk on the absurdity of a future. He was in a band. He wore a gas mask and scuba shoes when he played. Torn tights like my tights his hands would rip. We walked and held hands. We paused outside factories on back docks under drips of icicles.
His girlfriend was gone. Somewhere away on heroin. He twirled girls in and out of his apartment and I liked the dance, dizzy and electric. Then he kissed me with a daydream of different. I thought if he touched me then I was good enough. Our feet sloshed through sludge and our shoes dampened and no longer protected us from the cold.  We crossed Queens Ave and I tripped over an uneven road, fell, and pulled him down with me in the middle of the street. We stayed there with scars in our bellies, each other's tongues in our mouths, the glorious scent of youth and barley. Completely free in the center of a street, a street deserted and dark, lonely enough to hold the two of us while we did things we would forget in the morning, things we would do with others the next night. 

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Kat Moore has essays forthcoming/in Blunderbuss, Yemassee, Salt Hill, New South, Pithead Chapel, and others. Her poetry can be found in decomP, Maudlin House, Souvenir, and others. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with an old dog, a dilute tortie cat, and her boyfriend. A list of all her publications can be found here www.katmoorewriter.wordpress.com.