FINGERLESS GLOVES — IAN DENNING

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We both graduated from high school that June and took jobs at the Sizzler by the mall. A year off for each of us. Your skinny arms stuck out of your Sizzler polo. When you talked, your blonde ponytail bounced and vibrated. So much energy bound up there behind the soup bar. We didn't know each other in May, but by July we were best friends.

I was seeing Chris who ran the grill. Evenings after work we turned on the box fans and banged in his little basement apartment, and afterward he fried fish in his cast-iron, naked, hot grease spitting and pinking his stomach. You and me and Torno who worked the counter all piled into Chris's tricked-out Honda, hotboxed it, and rolled up Southcenter Parkway, blasting Biggie, a glittering fireball. You rapped along, little white blonde thing. I looked at you, bouncing in the back seat, and felt all the bones in my face.

We showed up for brunch service hung over, smiling in complicity, knowing that beneath this morning—the slow families and black coffee and Gilbert sliding across the floor like oil in a skillet, glad-handing the customers—beneath this morning was a night we shared. Neon lights slick on the hood. Brown bottles in one apartment party or another. The smell of futons. Laughing your voice away.

I went to college the next fall and your year off turned into two, then three, then you were a bartender, then you were a manager at a different restaurant. When I was twenty-five, I figured out that I liked women just as much as I liked men and suddenly it made sense, like a Magic Eye emerging from colorful noise, how I would sit in Chris's Honda, my hand on his thigh, smelling of him but smiling at you. How we were high at work once, slicing open boxes in the freezer, and you said, “You know what I love about fingerless gloves?” and I said, “What?” and you said, “They keep your finger webbing warm, but they don't give a shit about your fingertips.” And I laughed and you reached out your hand, fingertips poking from the fraying yarn, and I kissed them. How they were blue and soft.

Ian Denning's work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Washington Square Review, Tin House's Open Bar, the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. He edits prose for the Lettered Streets Press and fiction for Pacifica Literary Review. Ian lives in Seattle, tweets at @iandenning85, and can be found online at ian-denning.com.

WAR MUSE — JEN KNOX

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Then the day came that his feet became shovels. It happened on his sixtieth. There was screaming near midnight. The First Lady ran to grab ice as a black car waited and the hospital room was prepared. 
             The flesh of his toes turned an angry red. The skin peeled away, and when the cold metal revealed itself, POTUS felt no more pain. His legs were heavier after the shift. 
             Other world leaders sent bundles of flowers and sympathy cards that POTUS pitched across the room, one by one.
             Doctors were puzzled. The best surgeons advised against intervention. The worst of them offered to remove the feet above the ankle where a rod had formed, then rebuild in hopes it wouldn’t happen again. Prosthetics designers were called in from around the world.
             Meanwhile, the president’s condition inspired a barrage of sketches that, ultimately, led to models for next-generation drones, underground deals that could shave away earth and find terrorism from below.
             POTUS dragged along, then learned to power ahead like a machine. His grandchildren loved that he could move sand at the beach in such an efficient way. He scooped water and tossed it their way, and a lucky photographer got the shot. The photo inspired a nation.
             The news got a lot wrong, and the more immediate the reportage, the more eager the reporters. POTUS used his shovel feet to distract as he commanded his new underground army via a smartphone application.
             Two years to the day it appeared, the metal began to retract. Slowly, POTUS’ iron levels increased and his body broke down the waste. The flesh regenerated like a lizard tail. He wiggled his smooth toes. His wife pinched his big toe, leaving a white mark that quickly faded. 
             The lightness in his legs caused POTUS to feel peace and, therefore, want peace for the world.
             World leaders did not send cards when they heard news of the miracle. The sneak attacks had gone too far, tunneling into the ground and surfacing only to aggravate areas of unrest.
             POTUS worried that the shovels had affected his judgment. He shared the worry with his wife, and she admitted he hadn’t been himself.
             Neither of them screamed when his fingers split at the creases, when the blades began to form. The pain was ephemeral, but the impact would be felt for decades.  

Jen Knox is the author of After the Gazebo (Rain Mountain Press, 2015). She directs Gemini Ink's Writers in Communities Program and works as a freelance writer and writing coach in San Antonio. Jen recently completed her first novel. Connect with Jen at www.jenknox.com

THE STRONGEST MAN ON EARTH — MICHAEL MUNGIELLO

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A dancing bear for East Orange was what I was. Fridays I’d score goals on the fucked-up soccer field. Saturdays I’d recite cantos from The Divine Comedy in my great-aunt’s garden to an audience of drunks. I masturbated crouched under the bathroom sink, wads like chewed-up bubble gum on its curved marble underside. I shared the bed with two newborn brothers and recited my name to lull them to sleep. Once I found a worm in our laundry. I tried to stick it up my older sister’s nose and my mother caught me and threw the worm into the toilet. This happened twice.
             The first time I met a prostitute I was sixteen. She shook my hand, then wiped her fingers on her mini-skirt. I imagined reading the first time I had sex. Then I actually read from a book the second time I had sex, the first time I was able to come. William Carlos Williams’ Paterson.
             Harvard was the only college my parents had ever heard of, so it was the only college I ever wanted to go to. I applied to Harvard and then a few weeks later I opened the letter, having known since I got out of bed that morning it’d be a rejection. I began smoking more, doing steroids, spent whole days down the shore. My dad got sick. There were problems with his liver. His whole face turned yellow. Some days it looked green. I stopped smoking but did more steroids and had more sex.
             I got engaged to a girl I met at a roller-rink. She worked at a hair salon, until her doctor put her on bedrest. Pregnant. My mom and sister helped a little bit but not enough. Anyway, what they really had to offer I didn’t want. I started sending stories out for publication and sold popcorn at the movie theater underneath our apartment. Every Sunday night they would show a Fellini. I could hear them all from my concession stand, but my Italian was slipping away from me and I couldn’t understand what most of it meant. I’d forgotten Dante. Most of the people I’d performed for were dead.
             I didn’t want to go anywhere else if Harvard wouldn’t have me. By the time I would’ve been driving to I don’t know Rutgers in my dead dad’s tiny Chevy, my fiancé was in labor.
             Bike horns and beach balls. My son slid out like a seal.

Michael Mungiello is from New Jersey. His work is published or forthcoming in Nanoism, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Short Fiction Break, and Construction Literary Magazine.

FOOLS GIVE YOU REASONS — SARAH SCHIFF

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The aquamarine paper mask obscured the bottom half of the nurse’s face, but her eyes sparkled brown beneath ink-coated lashes.  The doctor regretted not weeding his salt-and-pepper monobrow.  The top of your face assumes so much responsibility for expression when you work in a hospital.
             The man on the table was mumbling—something about needing to stop.  Not many people enjoy a rubber tube up the ass, and even fewer must like it when it’s a welcome-to-middle-age medical procedure.
             The doctor wondered what the nurse liked.  He wondered if she loved her new husband—the man wasn’t much to look at, the doctor thought, but packed a lot in the wallet.
             So many marriages are forged out of something other than love.
             He wondered if he still loved his own wife, if there was a point to their communal existence now that the kids were grown and gone. 
             “Leave it alone!”  The man on the table was yelling now, not unheard of, but the doctor was intrigued by the unexpected.  The nurse increased the dosage of the twilight drugs then quieted the man with a pat on the back and a shushing sound.  The doctor imagined her lips in the shape of a kiss as he maneuvered the tube deeper.
             “Looking good,” the doctor said, tilting his head toward the screen televising the man’s lower intestine.  The nurse met the doctor’s eyes, then looked away.
             His heart lurched, and he imagined them together, smuggled in a mothy, anonymous freeway motel.  The thrill under covers.
             An aeolian moan escaped from the patient’s mouth.  He was bald except a ring of white hair around the base of his skull.  With the glow of the florescent lights, it looked like a halo.
             The nurse cleared her throat, her eyes angled toward the screen.  A polyp pulsed red and menacing.  The doctor welcomed the opportunity to brandish his electric wire.  “It’s pretty beastly.  Can you bring me the snare and cautery?”  He hadn’t meant to rhyme and winced at the echo.
             “What euphony,” she said, bringing him the mirrored tray.  He tried to convey a smirk through his eyes, a return of her witty flirtation.  But also to play it safe.  Coded flirtation may not be flirtation at all, but the doctor knew from experience that it usually was.
             The man on the table was mumbling again, fidgeting too.  Reluctant to begin the polypectomy with such a mutinous patient, the doctor opened his mouth to call for nitrous.
             “Stop that right now.”  The patient’s words were sober and clear, punctuated like the bullet points of a lecture.  
             The doctor heard the words, and the patient exhaled and lay still.
             When the doctor handed the nurse the seared polyp, she sealed it in the orange bag and asked him where he was eating.  The doctor pretended not to hear, said goodbye to the sleeping patient with his eyes, and left the room.  He was going home to his wife for lunch.

Sarah Schiff earned her PhD in American literature from Emory University but is now a fugitive from higher education.  She writes short fiction and teaches high school English in Atlanta.  Her essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, and Arizona Quarterly.

ONE OF OUR MORE SERIOUS POETS — TARA ROEDER

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She’s one of our more serious poets.  Seventeen affairs and counting.  (Several with Russians.)  Since 2003 and on a daily basis she has produced from 5:17 a.m. to 7:03 a.m. on a slice of gravlax and a cracked mug of black coffee.

Her tiny daughter Sophia Maria goes to a Montessori school.

No flippant ball of energy, no kittenish ingénue, she excavates deeply.  Her work washes over you like a brilliant benediction (claimed one reviewer), and leaves you panting and jealous.  Not a word is wasted.  Her vocabulary stalks you.

But she looks so good too.  The dirty sweater dresses.  The smudged, seven hundred dollar glasses.  That little V shaved on the back of her head.

Fuck.

Tara Roeder is an Associate Professor of Writing Studies in New York City.  Her work has appeared in multiple venues including Monkeybicycle, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Bombay Gin, and Haggard and Halloo.  Her chapbook is forthcoming from dancing girl press.

AT THE HOME DEPOT — REEM ABU-BAKER

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Life imitates art, so I buy a lot of impressionist prints from the discount bin at Big Lots. I fill the apartment with them. Pastels everywhere, the green-blue dabs that I hope will make the air cool and fragrant, my home a place of peace and the safe kind of beauty. On the walls, the painted white ladies walk the parks and twirl their parasols. You must stay out of the sun! they chant, We all must stay out of the sun!, their voices like bells or wind chimes or some other cute metallic thing. I tell the parasol ladies they are being classist, that some people have to work outside because they have no choice, and did the parasol ladies ever think about that? The parasol ladies say Look in mirror, remember what the doctor said about skin cancer, how you have you have this risk inside you? I scoff at them, and throw shards of glass into their cardboard. How’s this for a mirror, I say. Later I feel guilty and I apologize. The parasol ladies say it’s fine but I sense some distance between us still.
             In the dermatologist’s office, there are also women on the walls. The doctors remove the problematic mole and express sympathy about the hideous scar they are leaving. We can fix that too, they say. And the women on the walls are like: I used to look this, but now I look this. The message is you can buy whatever kind of look you want.
             Me, I like to look like an impressionist painting. You can get some cheap-ass lipsticks and you can punch each shade against your vanity mirror and turn your reflection into a Lisa Frank kinda cloud. I’m saying you can be all pinks and purples.
             I’m saying you can even dye flowers now, even cacti. There are these gasoline rainbow succulents that catch my eye at the Home Depot. They are beautiful and I buy eight of them, hold them against my breast and stagger through the parking lot stroking their spindles with my chin, whispering: all you have to do now is stay alive. 

Reem Abu-Baker lives in Tuscaloosa, AL, where she is the fiction editor for Black Warrior Review. Her work is published or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Meridian, NANO Fiction, and other journals. 

THE BOOK — LUKE KOKOSZKA

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You're going to love this book, his wife told him every time she sat in her chair reading it. When she had finished it a month later, she gave it to him. He sat under the orange glow of a lamp and read the entire thing in one night. Closing the book after finishing the last page he realized getting married to a woman who didn't know him at all had been a terrible mistake.

Luke Kokoszka is a writer and musician living a short drive outside of Vancouver, BC. He can be found eating Bánh mì and exploring the vast roads of Canada. His writing has previously appeared in Carte Blanche, Potluck Magazine and The Louden Singletree.

LITTERED LIVERS — LEXI SENIOR

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I was drunk when I was told Palmer’s father was dying from liver failure. He was a large man, an ex-pilot, and an alcoholic with shiny eyes and a thick head of hair he combed in three strokes every half hour or so at their country club, where he would order the entire table beers and club sandwiches because, as he said, who doesn’t like a goddamn club sandwich?
             I was out with a new man, a man who treated me with something like respect, who found time to sneak behind me in the kitchen, kiss my neck, lift me to the counter, and tell me he wanted me and that all the bad things I thought about myself were untrue (and I trusted him when he said it). The night got away from us, our bartender heavy-handed, and me feeling ornery over work, and me also feeling like I should drink more as a result, only to find out in front of a white porcelain toilet that history does, in fact, repeat itself.
             I answered Palmer’s call in this new man’s bed while I bent my knees over his, just as I used to with Palmer, using smoky sheets to make a tent over our bodies, where the air stank of liquor and no one could tell us we were littering our livers. He wasn’t the type to call even when he did love me, falling asleep before I returned home and not waking up until halfway through the night, head heavy with whiskey and comforted by the whoosh of AC and a low TV, a drunk’s favorite lullaby. To call after I left him months before, when I, bottle-bodied, took all of his glass replicas of torso and hips and smashed them in the sink, beading it with what was poisoning us, seemed strange. And there it was—his father was dying, would I come say goodbye? Yes, of course I would, and this new man, a good man with clean hands and dark hair, held me as I cried for Palmer in his bed.
             At the hospital, Palmer’s father reclined in a sea of green sheets that covered once thick legs suddenly thin as a young girl’s. His face, always round and red, was emaciated. His arms were bruised, so weak that the IV caused injury. Believing him too feeble to embrace, I kissed him on the cheek, the skin familiar like leather of an old, loved purse. But he grabbed my wrist with a strength that surprised me, that I should have known he would show even then, and breathed, “Take care of each other.”
             But you don’t tell a dying man you won’t take care of his son because you can’t, because he cannot take care of you or himself, because you both share the disease that damaged his liver beyond repair. You just say, “OK,” and then you go home to the new man you know is there, awake and waiting for you to return.

Lexi Senior is a Florida-based writer and MFA candidate at University of Central Florida. She can most regularly be found roaming the country for inspiration. Find her on Twitter at @discoeternal and read about her travels at www.lexisenior.com.