ALL THREE SIXTEEN — CHELSEA VOULGARES

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All three of us are sixteen. Two girls, one boy: all in flannel shirts, with wet-look hair that smells like grapes. We get ready at your house—jostle for a spot in front of the tiny mirror in your room—while Rusty plays Nintendo on the bed. We have done this every weekend for years, but before it was just us two. I find an eyelash on your cheek, wipe it off with my fingertip and tell you to make a wish. You blow on my finger. “What did you wish for?” I say, but you shake your head and laugh.

We storm the Mansion of Terror like Vikings, made brave by the six-pack of cheap beer we downed in the back seat of Rusty’s Ford. The guy in devil makeup takes our tickets and leers at us, his red face and horns an invitation. Rusty pushes to the front, puffs himself up. The devil looks at his feet while Rusty ushers us past.

Rusty walks in front, you in the middle, me in back. We enter a butcher shop, the table filled with human feet and hands. Clowns, an electric chair, an asylum. We grip and giggle, try to scare each other even more.

The fifth room is full of light. A fluorescent hum. I don’t understand what’s scary here, but then I spot her in the corner, a woman crawling toward me on hands and knees. Black hair masks her face. She grabs my ankle, and I scream. I run to the door, it jams, too heavy in my shaking hands. Rusty opens it, hugs me, and laughs.

Next we confront the maze, so dark my eyes hurt. The walls are covered in rough fabric, and are so tight I have to squeeze my shoulders toward each other. I am teenager thin and don’t know how grownups make it through here, or fat people. I grope along, duck down when the ceiling drops. I stub my toe when the floor suddenly rises and I reach out for you, for Rusty, but my fingers wave empty against the cold, damp air. I listen for your breath, and wonder where you are. I wonder when I will ever get out of this darkness.

When I finally escape the maze, you and Rusty are kissing in the red light of the hallway before the last room. He sees me and nudges you to stop. My stomach is like that butcher’s meat, and when you turn you avoid my eyes. I try to smile. A chainsaw screams ahead of us and the gas fumes burn my nose. We charge into the room, you two in front, and try to run past the man in the mask who blocks our way. When I fall behind, the chainsaw blocks me. A toll booth. A gate. Your black hoodie fades through the exit door, and I can see only the flood-lights in the parking lot outside.

Chelsea Voulgares grew up in Ohio catching lightning bugs and watching bad horror movies. She now lives in Chicago, where she’s working on a novel and a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Midwestern Gothic, Literary Orphans, The Millions, and Bust, and has been recognized with grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. You can find her online at chelseavoulgares.com.

HOW THE ANIMALS DANCE — EVAN NICHOLLS

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Parcher, take a drink.

He’s in the ring, and the bull of a man across from him has been whipping his ass all over the room. They call the bull across from him Ganado. He’s a fat, meaty man. Ganado is being given water right now.

Parcher, take the drink. Open your mouth. There.

Parcher’s ring-man is giving him something to drink and Parcher is just barely opening his mouth to take it in. The drink is alcohol, and here they call it mezcal. Parcher accepts the fluid. His tongue is a dried agave leaf.

He’s gonna hack you if you don’t drink. You’re spewing.

The ring-man is talking to him about bleeding. Parcher sits on his side of the ring and is thinking no. He resents that his own ring-man thinks he can’t tell he’s bleeding. He can tell. Though his eyes are swollen bad.

Have some more, Parcher.

He can barely open his swollen eyes but what he can see is Ganado’s feral hands looking like a landscape, bare-knuckle hilltops and the torrid earth of his palms. The man has snuff pressed up in his nose, and he snorts in, hard.

Parcher. Drink.

Parcher is feeling his tongue getting spikier and bluer and blue like an agave and numb. His ring-man is pouring more mezcal into his mouth. He’s looking around the room and at the ring of shouting earthy faces and remembers the names on the bills pasted outside. He didn’t know what they stood for, but they read like animals. Ganado was a bull.

More.

Parcher was wondering why he was drinking so much alcohol, and how a good ring-man had been so easy to get when he’d only been in Juarez one more day than a week. His ring-man was doing him good by giving him a drink. Parcher tasted his tongue; spike.

More. 

He could feel the heart of the plant gone down his throat and into the pit of him. The heart boiled in his stomach. His ring-man violently shook the remnant drops of mezcal from his smoky plastic jug. 

There.

One of the faces of the ring banged a dinner spoon on a dirty black pan. Tin sound. Now was the moment to raise hands. Ganado snorted a pinch of snuff and got up from his dumpy balsa chair. Parcher got up shaky from the heart and the alcohol. A great feeling came up into him from his pit. He looked around him and the ring shouted. He looked at his ring-man. His ring-man showed his teeth and they were like shoeshine. Parcher was thinking. This was how the animals danced. He came to the middle of the ring and fat Ganado stood in front of him. They touched their knuckles together. 

He was full of drink. Now he wanted meat. He scraped his spike along the ceiling of his mouth.

There.

Evan Nicholls is a high school student and musician from Fauquier County, Virginia, and has work appearing in The Hoot Review. He will be attending James Madison University in the fall.

GRACE & EVIE — JOHN HARKEY

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This is neither a rising nor a falling action. They are elsewhere. She's glad she's here. They are happy enough here, not talking. They are thinking & watching the water fold in on itself.

Smooth warp of the water, solid warmth of early or late light through cool air. Is this morning or evening. Is this a memorial. The world spins slow & drifts.

They can carry their own boat, thank you.

*

She thinks about her. She didn't, she doesn't, know much about her. She doesn't know what to think about her. She doesn't know what to think as she thinks about her, sliding along the road, across the watery winter ground.

Here she is, returning, dragging her giant shadow.

*

Somewhere else, an old house is being pulled down. This is a good thing, a falling action, the walls spent from standing. This is just work to be done: taking care of an already ruined thing.

*

The sun burns along the tree-line. The late hour is heavy with light, but night will & does finally fall. Is this a test. Someone is gone or missing.

Everything’s broken by & soaked in strong tones: what was, what may be, what might have been. 

They talked, they would have liked to talk, like this.

*

Morningtime slides along grooves & the pedals rise & fall as she bikes to work. Her thoughts, too, move steadily in grooves. They loop & overlap. She follows herself tracing these worn paths, these woven grooves. Is she somewhere else, on some other side.

Her pedal-pulses rise & fall & she slides toward work.

*

This is work. This is a good or a bad thing: transactions, repetitions, the clatter of plastic on plastic. Such fluorescent clarity, so many goods. People & things endure, she thinks, but they slide around, fade, change places, get lost.

But a little abandonment is in order, too. It feels good to be pushed around by your friends. It feels good to swerve & rattle, to move fast across the floor, through the aisles, through the clothes & toys.

*

This is falling, a falling action. It is a tough break. There is another side. This is the other side. Is this a test. Where is she. She returns to herself. Elsewhere.

*

Everything’s soaked in strong tones, heavy with light.

*

And why wouldn’t she call. They would have said things, back & forth. Her voice trailed off. To hear each other's ghost is a small struggle & a great pleasure. Their voices trailed off, would have trailed off, then returned. They return to each other, elsewhere.

*

Something somewhere is burning. Something is burning at the edge of the day. They hurry across the ground, toward the fire. They hurry toward the edge of the day. They don’t speak. They don’t soar over the burning thing. Is this a memorial. There is a rising action. This is a rising action.

They wait, then they start over.

John Harkey lives in Columbus, GA, where he teaches high-school English. He received his Ph.D from the CUNY Graduate Center, where his dissertation was on "small poetry." A few of his poems can be found online, and his chapbook Mask Work was published by Little Red Leaves. 

EVOLUTION — J. BRADLEY

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I didn’t tell Seth that I knew what the shadows were beneath the waves. I didn’t think we were good enough friends for him to follow me under. I was wrong until I got caught in a strong current; Seth got smaller and smaller. I was more worried about the turbine waiting for me at the other side of the pipe, if it would chop me up as it churned me around and around. I had about 30 minutes of air left. I hoped it would be enough time.

When the nuclear power plant worker found me sitting on the side of the reservoir, he asked how I got here. “By accident,” I said. I stared into the distance, implied trauma so he wouldn’t ask any more questions. I couldn’t wait until the next morning to check my neck for gills, if my skin could stop a knife, or whether I could finally catch a bullet between my teeth. 

J. Bradley is the author of the linked short story collection The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and lives at jbradleywrites.com.

LOOKING FOR: ASSISTANT EDITOR

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Yup—CHEAP POP is looking to expand our roster with an additional Assistant Editor! We're thrilled with how much we've grown in the past few years...but we need help. 

What are we looking for? Ideally, someone with experience working on a lit journal/magazine (or in publishing of any kind)—although, we're not opposed to a newbie with little experience but the passion of a thousand burning suns. Social media experience is not required, but please let us know if you're familiar (it would be a bonus). 

**Please note: We are going to vet every single person who emails us, but preference is going to be given to women, people of color, queer or trans or otherwise marginalized peoples. Diversity is hugely important to us—getting a chance to give folks a place in publishing to have their voices heard and to make a difference is something we're all in on.**

Send us a cover letter/resume to cheappoplit@gmail.com. Tell us why you'd like to work here, why we'd like working with you, why you like flash fiction...all that good stuff. 

THE BACKYARD GARDEN — MATTHEW SMART

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His wife tells everyone that he’s doing fine and that he just loves to garden and maybe he does. He owns a number of shovels. At least five. Lately he has carved a good-sized garden out of the backyard since the diagnosis. He has a lot of time on his hands.

He owns a number of shovels but really he prefers to use his hands to dig new garden space. He sections out chunks of sod and shakes the heavy clods free of all their dirt like he is wringing out a sponge. The dirt falls away like dirt. Dark soil falls off into the hole where the yard used to be until it’s like the grass never existed the hole gets so full. He digs his fingertips into it and strangles out the rich soil until it falls away. He’s left with a clump of brown root and dead grass in his hands with a bit of green on one side. Like a snarl he holds it in his blackened fingers and then tries to throw it against the back fence but it’s so light without all the dirt it usually falls way short of the mark he’s aiming at.

He tries to provide for them. The kids don’t miss the yard. They never play anymore, hardly leave the house unless going somewhere. He plants tomatoes and beans and red peppers and peas and cucumbers and they all grow sort of. They grow but not like he expected. He imagined a jungle of tall lush plants but instead he gets slightly larger specimens of what he planted. They live but do not thrive. They grow, but crooked and unsteady.

Only the weeds do well in his garden. He tears healthy weeds from around his struggling vegetable plants with guilty fervor. If only weeds created some edible fruit or some beautiful bloom. But then they probably would be too hard to grow. Some of the weeds are really just grass of the same grass he painstakingly cleared in the first place. Weed is a subjective term he thinks.

He feels like the hot sun shines only on him. As he turns and turns the dirt he imagines the individual rays of light born millions of miles away in the nuclear furnace of the sun seeking out his poor back, embedding themselves deep in his skin. They dig right into him, these chosen light beams. They sink their roots into his soil and they prosper within his dark dirt-like self. He can feel the wild growth inside him. He is a solar garden of their most beautiful buddings.

Matthew Smart lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where he works as an information technology analyst. His writing has appeared in Vestal Review, Dead King Magazine, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Unbroken Journal, Smokelong Quarterly and elsewhere.

WELCOME TO OUR HOVEROFFICE — JON METHVEN

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A few rules before we get started with the tour: No sudden movements, no sneezing, no wobbling the Hoveroffice back and forth. This building can, and nearly has, toppled over, all eleven stories. Hence the Nerf ball architecture.

Welcome to the world’s first state-of-the-art, self-balancing Hoveroffice. We consist of exactly 128 professionals, all atop their own hoverboards, working in synergistic harmony in a building attached to a massive, gyroscopic wheel. If one of us calls in sick, someone else has to work from home. If someone uses the restroom, someone else has to hover to the coffee pot to make up for the balance disproportion. It probably seems impossible to you folks, who still depend on feet for locomotion, but when you hover for twelve hours a day, five days a week, you become a phantom appendage of your colleagues’ rhythms.

No pictures please. Group photos shift the equilibrium too suddenly, and the sales team on nine has to scramble into a conference room to steady the ship.

The beauty of the Hoveroffice is that we pay no rent since we’re mobile. We have no bosses as they throw off the symmetry. We arrive and depart together. We can happen upon any street, plug in to an electrical socket, and begin our day’s work. We can pilot the Hoveroffice to the beach and swim on our lunch break if we feel like it.

Folks say we’re showing off, that a motorized, balanced office is ostentatious. But they’ve never experienced the cohesiveness of Greg instinctively shifting his weight to the back of his chair to correct the imbalance Tricia creates when she slouches to play Solitaire. Or how when Ray returns from vacation overweight, the interns each pack on an extra pound to offset his torque.

Unfortunately, most people, when they see our building hover by during the morning commute, develop the urge to physically harm us. The mere sight of our lithium-ion powered edifice sends them into a rage, causing them to exit vehicles and hurl their breakfast at our sleek Hoveroffice. They shake the Hoveroffice. That’s why we set up here, in the parking lot of this abandoned shopping mall, and run power cords to the gas station.  See, Hoveroffices are the future, a holistic approach to the corporate workplace. People who still walk to work at traditional, stationary offices can never comprehend our communal philosophy – our hoverniquess, if you will.

Can you feel that? We’re listing slightly. It’s undetectable to you bipedal hominoids, but the Hoveroffice never lies. It’s subtle, but eight floors down, one of the interns is trying to loosen a Snickers bar in the vending machine. Colleagues are performing jumping jacks to atone for the candy tantrum, but the exercise cannot counteract the intern’s thumping which is growing hungrier, angrier, ever heartier as the vending machine refuses to relinquish the snack. Think of it—the majesty of all this technology, the existence of each of us, hovering on the slightness of a chocolate stick.

Jon Methven is the author of the novels Strange Boat (2016) and This Is Your Captain Speaking (2012). His work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Buzzfeed and The Awl. He lives in New York with his wife and sons. www.jonmethven.com

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY — LINDA NIEHOFF

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1. I finally stopped at the smallest motel I could find and fed quarters into the Coke machine. Now I’m watching the electric blue light rippling from the pool. There aren’t any trees out here so you can see to the end of things. Lightning flashes, still far off. It’s pink and jagged, the kind you see in photographs on bank calendars - that nighttime shot with a distant farm along the edge and that one lone jag of lightning reaching all the way down. I’ve always wondered where that farm is. It’s here out along I-70 just stepping out of room 217 that costs $55 a night and the carpet is sticky.

2. I didn’t recognize the names on the weather map inside on TV. I don’t know if those warnings are for me. I hold the sweating Coke can and watch the sky. Shadows of sunflowers cut themselves out of the horizon. I can’t tell if I should take shelter immediately. The signs in the lobby showed a symbol of a narrowing coil - a twister. I didn’t stop to read the numbered directions below that would’ve told me what to do. Now I just stand and stare, count the seconds in between.

3. And I notice how the reflections bouncing off the pool are like its own lightning. How they ripple. How they move. How it looks like I'm under the water and not over it. Under the water you could be anywhere. Under the water looks the same in any state off any highway. Under the water you’re not the guy who’s lost everything.

4. It’s closer now, the lightning. If I recognized those counties on TV, I’m sure I’d be taking cover in the lobby with the boxed up cereal and empty coffee pot and red vacancy sign that’s curled up humming.

5. But I don’t want shelter.

6. I want to get kissed by lightning. I want it to jolt my bones, electrify my heart.

7. Maybe I’ll jump in the pool fully clothed, wave my arms, yell, “Here I am!” I don’t know what stops me.

8. The woman in 212.

9. Her curtain keeps moving, and she glances out like I’m a madman, not some guy holding a Coke can watching the storm move in.

10. Maybe tonight I am.

Linda Niehoff's short fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, Necessary Fiction, New South, and elsewhere. She's a part time photographer and a full time homeschooling mom. She tweets @lindaniehoff and blogs occasionally: www.thewrittenpicture.typepad.com.