HALF-LIFE — DINA L. RELLES

After the kids crush the moth on our driveway, I can see its rich red underwings more clearly. My oldest flits off to destroy an ant hole along the street’s edge. My younger son and I stay and stare at the crunched wings and legs, what’s now just a shell of a thing.

The sky’s cadaver blue and you can hear the first cracks of thunder over the hills that taunt beyond our yard. We run inside ahead of the rain.

“I’m scared,” says the littlest, who sleeps on the floor, when the storm wakes him in the middle of the night.

I think, me too, but don’t say. I sit cross-legged beside him on the carpet, my fingernails, jagged stubs, stroking his soft, hairless back. I’m scared of rain we run from. Of storms that stay at our backs. Of empty nights that fall one into the next. Scared, not of the dying, but of living half a life.

A half-life, in nuclear physics, is the time it takes for something to reduce to half its original value. 

That night, I dreamt in metaphor—a man I hardly knew placed his hands on my C-section scars. I woke and wrote in the morning: We used to chase fireflies in your front yard and now you call me ‘old friend.’ 

What I want to write is how it feels to be in the night air with someone who’s not mine. The suggestive way dew smells before sunrise. The thrill I get from driving too close to the median strip on Brookside Road. 

Sometimes I’ll undress in front of the black window, lights on, and wonder if anyone’s watching.

It’s when isotopes become unstable that they begin to decay, emitting radiation in levels that could be harmful. 

I took the express train all those years ago, after the boy in Brooklyn let me loose, watched the Raritan River pass through the plexiglass. I married the man under the mistletoe at the other end of the line. We moved out to the country. Bought a van. Sometimes we take a drive just to be anywhere other than where we’ve been.

Isotopes can lose enough of their atomic particles to turn from one element into another.

When I’m alone, I play radio music too loud and cry at the sight of cornfields and spend long afternoons on the blacktop with the children circling round.  

The term half-life can also refer to any type of decay.

And now I see the kids have crushed—sneaker to asphalt—not a moth, but a spotted lanternfly. A parasite invading where we live, threatening the fruit trees and farms. One thing always gives way to another. Not everything goes on.

What I want to say is: I’m still alive.

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Dina L. Relles lives and writes in rural Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Atticus Review, Brevity’s Blog, matchbook, River Teeth, Rise Up Review, and Full Grown People, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a blog editor at Proximity Magazine and slowly penning her first nonfiction collection. You can find her at www.dinarelles.com or @DinaLRelles.

SABBATICAL — AMANDA J. BERMUDEZ

She lies in the jungle for four days, fingers interlaced across her chest, like a lunatic.
             She thinks about the telling of time, ordered by a clinical calendar of due dates/thank yous/bills adjustable for 72 hours in either direction. The obsolescence of the lunar.
             She thinks about the death of Elliott Smith. She strives to recall whether his name is spelled with one T or two.
             She does not eat; she feels hunger.
             She breathes the freshest air ever breathed, damp with earth, exhaled by the leaves of impossible plants. The way fish are to other fish, each graceful and alien, she wonders how plants breathe underwater.
             She thinks of how her mother used to say “jungle,” scoffing, eschewing the left-wing “rain forest” with its delicate, non-violent precipitation drizzling through layers of benign undergrowth.
             She thinks that creation is the only thing that ever made sense, the beautiful inert, more than orgasming, more than legacy. She thinks of God resting. How God must rest.
             She hears noises, vicious and immediate, unsettling in their disembodiment. She wriggles her toes.
             She wonders if Scotch ever made her smarter. She bets it did.
             She feels a millipede crawling across her face, a thousand gentle legs cresting the bay of her right nostril. She plucks its little body, compact and curled in her fingertips. She delivers it to a patch of soil, a new continent.
             She abandons the experiment, alive and profoundly bored.
             This is no way to live, she thinks.

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Amanda J. Bermudez is a writer and director based in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been featured at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, the National Winter Playwrights Retreat, the Yale Center for British Art, and in a number of literary publications, including Concis, Sick Lit, Spider Road Press, and Iron Horse Literary Review. She is a National Merit Scholar, recipient of the Jameson Prize, a Writer’s Digest National Award Winner, nominee for the Spotlight Culture & Heritage Award, and winner of the 2017 Cinequest Film Festival screenwriting award.

OPEN DOORS CAN LEAD TO CLOSED SPACES — CHRISTIE WILSON

Is it possible that my eighth grade algebra teacher conveyed the importance of math, and I just missed it, choosing instead to watch the sunlight move and caress the back of that one boy’s neck, disperse its packets of energy on and under the thick gold chain he wore, that he allowed me to wear, once before a basketball game. 
             Probably not. Probably she didn’t tell us anything of the sort. Didn’t tell me that later, while searching for meaning and clambering for doors, I would obsesses over physics, and then I would need the ideas, need the tools to exercise the square roots from the denominator. She didn’t tell me, didn’t walk down the aisle, didn’t push her palm against the side of my face, and didn’t say, “this boy will not be important, but this fraction will.”
             I spend some time watching online explanations of how to simplify a fraction, and I take notes. I want to understand relativity, and later I drive my daughter to play practice at a church we have just begun attending in a town where we just moved, and I recognize that watching the videos about the fractions and standing in a sanctuary, nervous and itchy from the new wool hat are indistinguishable, or at least derivatives of the same instinct.
             The boy wasn’t important, or maybe he was.  I saw him a few months ago, right before the summer took leave. Naked in his tendency to repeat prepositions, plain in the way he never spoke directly to me, and clear in his desperate, shaking limbs was the leveling path of all those substances that had scoured their way through his veins. I wish I had pulled him to me and said, “It’s ok. It’s ok. We’ve already made it this far.”
             But I didn’t, and I’m certain he could see the disgust I was struggling to swallow, see it leaking right out of the corners of the smiles I worked so hard to construct as I pulled my child back from his hand. I can’t always be my best. 
             And just as his life opened for me that day, the books splay wide on my desk, their private interests on display, asking me to see them and not wither. The search for knowledge is always obscene. I like thinking of them, alone now in my office, the pages whispering dirty jokes to one another as they huddle and speculate about my progress, my inability to go forward without taking oh so many steps back.

---

Christie Wilson lives in Illinois. Her work appears in Atticus Review, Driftwood Press, apt, and New World Writing among other publications. She is currently writing a collection of prose and a novel. Visit her at www.christiewilson.net or follow her @5cdwilson. 

BUDDHA AT THE WALDORF — RISHIKA BATRA

Day One: He gives away his complimentary salad—the chef’s best case for the value of material pleasures—to some huddled mass of blankets on the street. Who eats it too quickly to savor the evenly chopped walnuts, the twist of lemon peel. Then Buddha sits on the pavement, crossing his legs in lotus and closing his eyes until the sky blackens. When he emerges from meditation, passers by have left him: two dollar bills, a handful of coins, a boxed salad from Duane Reade.

Day Two: Buddha is unimpressed by opulence. Golden suite, atop New York City, a bed built for a king. “Look how big your suite is!” say the hotel managers. Buddha smiles, gestures out the window, replies, “Tiny compared to this jungle.” The managers throw up their hands, but they have achieved, unwittingly, a minor victory. Buddha has tasted Fiji water, and he finds it remarkably crisp.

Day Three: Suite 4416, at the Waldorf Astoria, now harbors the highest concentration of homeless people in Manhattan. Shocked managers knock at the door, and Buddha asks, “Am I not allowed to throw a party?” “This is not a party!” “But it is—these are my friends.” Room service, perfectly professional, comes by to drop off a hundred and two Waldorf salads. “A hundred and two?” a manager asks. Buddha smiles, lifts two plates off the cart, and hands one to each manager. They want to throw up their hands, but they’re holding expensive salads. Plus, they’re kind of touched. 

Day Four: The head of hotel operations, manager of managers, opens the door to the uncapping of a hundred bottles of Fiji water. His moustache bristles in bemusement. “Mr. Buddha, we have to ask you to leave the hotel. Your credit card has been declined.” In addition to his stern glare, he has brought a posse of gun-toting officers. “Well,” replies Buddha, “I know that’s not true. But if you send us to the street, you will see us in the street.”

Day Five: Buddha, alarmingly, makes his body go limp. Mind over matter. Have you ever tried controlling a body that does not twitch? A body with no reflexes, that accepts its contortions like water. The cop’s knee drives into Buddha’s back, the back bends, does not return force, is he still breathing? A picket sign lies next to him: Excess Is Injustice. A line has formed: guests at the Waldorf, snug in their down coats. They are patient, unworried. This is a small ripple in a vast lake—easy to look away. The cop cars drive off. Buddha’s friends return to their corners, set out empty cups.

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Rishika Batra is a multigenre artist and writer, currently living in Chicago with a roommate and three cats. In addition to Cheap Pop, you can find her work in Vestal Review, 100 Word Story, River Furnace (under "Neptune"), and The Nashville Review.

THAT TIME ALIENS MADE US VEGAN — TYLER MILES

The day the aliens came to Earth they brought with them only one thing: a seemingly communicable inspiration of fear. When the bastards left, they took, well, they took the animals.

All of them.

The megafauna—lions, bears, rhinos (what’s left of them anyway), the fat elephants, the gangly giraffes, they went first. Then the fish and mammals from the oceans, sucked up in a blue flash before spitting back the world’s water and broken coral across the continents. Rivers aren’t where they used to be, and oceans are empty like those aquariums at pet stores overrun with thick green algae and upturned pirate ships.

It turns out Noah’s Arc was real after all, though no one can know now which ocean it had been sunken beneath. The aliens dropped it on a brownstone in Harlem near Langston Hughes’ East 127th Street home. 

It started just like it does in the movies: one day suddenly, giant spinny disks blotted out the sun and engulfed the cities in shadow. Then there was that damn hum. It was faint, you could almost feel the vibrations more than hear them, but they were there.

And they were unbearable. 

You couldn’t walk down Fordham Road without passing an open window with a TV or radio drowning out the spaceships’ insufferable humming. In Times Square, your eyes would jump at the site of the business crowd hustling across Park Avenue with earmuffs mid-August.

My students seemed unbothered, but when you’re in third grade, mom and dad are still far scarier than any aliens threatening world destruction—or at least global veganism. Like the chalk outline the girls used for hopscotch, or the rusty jungle gym the school district would never replace, the spaceships had become a staple for the kids on the playground. 

“Diablo, pero ta hay la vaina esa todavia!” you’d hear them shout some days as they escaped the building for recess.

The aliens hovered demigod-like for so long that it’s almost abnormal now to see the clouds and the sun, the moon and the stars; to see the natural blackness of space. Were some of us… sad they were gone? No. That’s not it. Perhaps we’d just become so desensitized to them—their presence, their vibrating song—that we’ve devolved to cave creatures plunged in their shadow. The recent months had been a strange readjustment to normalcy. 

And what am I to do as I stand now before my third graders for science period? My curriculum is made up mostly of animal education. I think the aliens made me a history teacher.

I don’t even know what others in my field are doing. I don’t speak to colleagues anymore. After school, I’ll go home, brew some coffee, and pop in a microwaveable dinner: probably tofu chili tonight. I’m a vegan now, I guess. Once my food is before me I’ll turn on Animal Planet.

It’s all I have left.

---

Tyler is a journalist from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who holds a Bachelor's of Arts in English from Penn State University, and is trying to rekindle that creative fire news writing is beating out of him.

SOMETHING ELEMENTAL — ALYSSA JORDAN

Not an hour after they gave her the news, Jules took home a stranger from her favorite bar. The mirror above her bed gave her an excellent view, a generous offering; she stared at her reflection while he undressed her, and again when he pressed their bodies together, forcing hipbones to stomach, shoulders to neck.
             When he climbed on top of her, she tried not to think about gloved hands or tight smiles.
             Jules stroked his back with heavy, bloodless fingers. Her hands traced the baby fat on his sides, the dimples in his back. A tattoo bisected the skin on his shoulder blade like the singed remains of a wing. She carefully sunk her nails into the dark, inky swirls.
             What would it be like, she wondered, to be fucked by an angel?
             Maybe it would absolve every flaw in her body. Maybe it would flatten the puckered slopes that formed her cesarean scar. Maybe it would shrink the lump in her breast, tear it down cell by cell, fixing things she hadn’t even known were broken. 
             Brimming with grace must make you heavy, Jules thought, heavy and monumental, like the tectonic plates that shifted underneath their feet, giving rise to mountains and volcanoes and oceanic trenches. She saw herself kneeling at the bottom of the ocean, mind and body bent from the steady pulse of life.
             When Jules ran a hand down the man’s heaving back, she pretended to feel the flutter of wings.

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Alyssa Jordan is a freelance writer in California. Her work has appeared in publications like Every Day Fiction, Reflex Fiction, and 100 Word Story. Her work can also be found in two print anthologies, The Lobsters Run Free: Bath Flash Fiction Volume Two and Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. Currently, she is an Associate Editor at Tethered by Letters and the 1888 Center. Follow her on Twitter @ajordan901.

WHERE EVERYTHING IS PRISTINE — RUTH LeFAIVE

Before letting our visitors in, my mother bends with a nicotine whisper. “Play nice with Miss Debra’s baby.” I imagine a downy bundle—loaf-sized with curious eyes—benign as a rolled up sock. I’ll shield her from cigarette smoke, build cheese pyramids, and eavesdrop for words like kiss and sex. Except a meaty pudge toddles in—neither baby nor girl—something halfway in-between. She goes right for the pickles, grabs one in her tiny fist, and smears it along the edge of the coffee table. I step back.
             “So cute!” Mom pops ice from the tray. Tonic fizzes. Miss Debra’s mascara has run already. I want to hear why, but the waddler is charging down the hall to my bedroom, a green nub in each doughy hand. By the time I catch up, she squats over my rainbow rug. She’s dropped the pickles, drool lopping from her chin.
             “Pick those up.”
             She lifts one and licks its warty skin.
             Back in the living room, between saying He this and His that, Miss Debra cries like bees have stung her. If Dad were home he’d say, Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about. Mom says, “Here, drink this.”
             The baby stands and wields the pickles with clumsy accuracy, smudging my dresser, my bed, my closet door. “Mom!” I yell, tucking my hands under my arms to avoid the sour trail. “Mom!” I yell again. 
             My Barbie Dream House is in her path. I grab plastic-headed Ken by the legs and stand guard. She looks at the second-floor nursery where everything is pristine: a mini blanket on the mini rocker, an itsy bear in the itsy cradle. “No!” I prod her shoulder with Ken’s head. “Get out.” She reaches for the bear with sticky fingers, so I swat her knuckles with Ken’s face. There’s an unsatisfying silence and I want her to hurt so I whack again, slamming her forearm. She shrieks and plops down sobbing. I grab her around the potbelly and lift until her feet are off the ground. I grip tighter until her little shoes—weak as wings—kick my knees. Her middle is a ham-sized water balloon. Burst, I want to say, squeezing and squeezing until Miss Debra rushes in and swoops her daughter away. I think I hear Mom coming down the hall. I hope it’s her, but she never arrives. My room is tainted. I use a wad of toilet paper to trash the pickles.
             In the kitchen, I find the box of Wheat Thins and stuff five into my mouth. Then I climb onto the couch next to my mother and lean into the mole over her elbow. All her attention is on Miss Debra who is still He this and His that, even as she feeds the baby cheese. Both have stopped crying. I stay limp so every time Mom raises her cigarette, I sway. Flick of an ash, sway. Back and forth.

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Ruth LeFaive lives in Los Angeles where she is writing a collection of linked short stories. Her fiction has appeared in Atticus Review, Split Lip Magazine, and is forthcoming elsewhere. More at RuthLeFaive.com. 

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM CHEAP POP!

From all of us here at CHEAP POP, happy holidays!

We've had a stellar year, thanks in no small part to y'all, and we are gearing up for an amazing 2018, too. We have pieces starting Tuesday, January 9 and going through April, and submissions will be opening back up late winter/early spring—when submissions do open back up, we'll make announcements on our website here, as well as on Facebook and Twitter. So, stay tuned!

Again, thank you all for a fantastic 2017, and happy holidays, wherever you are!

—Rob, Hannah, Elizabeth, Letisia