ROCK COLLECTION — SABRINA HICKS

The first rock struck me in the head after a neighbor boy told me to go to hell. I can’t remember why, only that he had blond hair and a vicious smile, smelled like the boys at recess with their peanut butter fingers pulling at the training bras worn by girls like me, impatient to become someone they could imagine. I pocketed the rock to feel the weight of hell. It stayed in my backpack for years, whittled down by the edges of childhood.

The second was in high school, kissing a boy on a soft patch of grass under an olive tree. A rock pinched under the weight of us pressed together. I dislodged it from my backside, cursing before slipping it into my pocket, shifting my body onto a bed of stones, sinking into the hard points. The boy followed me. Better? he asked, his face unsure in the moonlight before he swallowed what I knew to be true: A lone nail will impale you, but a bed can be laid upon. The kissing boy was my first taste of gravity.

The third rock presented like an anchor, a gift from a college boy who had slipped in and out of my room, my classes, my mind. He had nice teeth, the kind that saw a dentist every six months and remembered to floss. He was as beautiful as the sea, placid and vast. And so, I had a rock in each pocket and a rock I would twist on my finger and leave in a bowl at the end of the day so I could remember what it was to be weightless. 

A flood of rocks came after, turning my limbs to stones, my feet to concrete. My hips widened to make room. My hands grew, too. I became a monument, worshipped, public, exposed until I blended into mountains and no one saw me at all, a woman with her pockets full of rocks. No one had to tell me that if I walked into the ocean I would sink. I just knew this to be true. And so, I became a woman on the shore, staring into a stitch of blue.

From my seaside window, I see people pointing at the tall mounds of stones I have emptied from my pockets over the years, calcifications I’ve shed to walk upon this earth. The cairns on my front yard, a nest of angles, reach up and up and up. Women stop and stare, nudging their husbands and lovers, their sons and brothers. See there! they say, their eyes climbing each rock until all they see is someone they could imagine, a woman no longer on the shore. 

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Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf Top 50, Split Lip Magazine, Lost Balloon, Bending Genres, Barren, Matchbook, Ellipsis Zine, and other publications. More of her work can be found at sabrinahicks.com. 

THE ETERNITY BERRY — GRACE Q. SONG

           “Don’t make me sad, don’t make me cry.”
           —Lana Del Rey 

Every night has a rhythm until Roo breaks it. One night, after I tuck the blanket under her chin and kiss her forehead, she asks about Mama. She wants to know ten things about her, and I tell her. I tell her about the Beatles records stashed downstairs, the lullaby she used to sing as a sad song. I tell her how much she looks like Mama with her ebony hair and midnight eyes. I tell her how Mama loved blueberries: the hard, the ripe, the sweet, and even the bitter ones. Like handfuls of love, she used to say. I tell her how much she loved Baba. How much she hated being his wife. He left for long periods of time, and the neighborhood wives would laugh until she was bone-bruised. I tell Roo about loneliness. Is that why she’s not here anymore? she asks. Her voice is small. I take her hand and tell her Mama loved her more than all the blueberries in the world. I tell her that sometimes, love just makes people sad. What I don’t tell her is how you’ll die if you love the wrong person. How Mama loved him until all the blueberries were gone. 

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Grace Q. Song is a Chinese-American writer from New York. Her poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Up the Staircase Quarterly, DIALOGIST, The Margins, Crab Creek Review, Passages North, PANK, and elsewhere. A high school junior, she enjoys listening to ABBA and Yoke Lore.

THEY'LL STEAL YOUR SKIN AND OTHER LESSONS FROM THE WORLD'S FAIR — ERIN VACHON

The produce section was a bio-dome of beige and brown food. Eye-holed potatoes bagged like corpses and Italian cheese wrapped in plastic like ivory. Dead flesh and soap. I was trying to blend in with the yellow onions and the unpeeled garlic, there among the husks (trash bins of corn silk). The leftovers meant for compost. I pushed my rickety mini-cart in slow loops, aimless, earbuds blasting Riot Grrrl snarls against conversation. Why had I uprooted myself from bed that day (gnarled parsnip, my least favorite)? Depression had sucked my days dry of flavor (room temperature water, nothing at all).
           A hand on my forearm, (dehydrated-apple) index finger pressed to my sleeve tattoo. A man in his 80's, bent like a fruit tree. Tilted felt trilby over (tomatillo) eyes. I yanked out one earbud, impatient with his engagement, yet when he asked, Can I tell you a story? It's important, I said yes. I said yes when he whipped his (dehydrated-apple) finger away because he moved like the sweep of the quill pen curling down my arm, the ink drawn on my skin because of how I loved stories so (half-remembered buffets). I thought, this fucker's got style.
           He said, In the 60's, I lived in New York. I worked at the World's Fair and got bored on the weekends (dirt-beaten potato pile), so I went to see a film in the city, a documentary (cheese sliced with executive precision), and do you know what it was about? No, I smiled, and he smiled, and I was caught (salmon shining on ice). Ah! The wrinkled (apple) finger poised ready. The filmmakers went to see a woman, up a dark stairwell (a papaya split in two, black seeds spilling), and they said, Madam, we've heard tales of your legendary collection. May we see it (mangos, a sunset of red, green, yellow)? And there she was sitting among her volumes (a crowning watermelon stacked atop a pile). Do you know what was inside? No, I smiled, and one last touch, his finger to my arm (plucked fruit giving way). Skin! Tattoos! Pages (heirloom carrots) upon pages (vine-fresh tomatoes) of tattoos (basil, mint, lemongrass)! So if someone asks to see your tattoo, (all zest, orange and lime and lemon) just know, they might be trying to steal your skin (jalapeños torn open and waking the tongue)!
             Another trilby tilt and a tap of the (apple) finger to the side of his nose before prancing away past the plantains. I was doubled over laughing from deep in the hollows of my belly, there among all those ripening fruits, suddenly realizing how very hungry I was.

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Erin Vachon has words forthcoming in Brevity in 2020. She reads CNF/fiction for Longleaf Review and novels for Split/Lip Press. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Rhode Island and writes in southern New England. She is on Twitter @erinjvachon.

ST. ROCH'S DOG — DEVIN THOMAS O'SHEA

In the 1300s St. Roch journeyed from Montpellier to care for Rome’s sick during an outbreak of plague. When he became ill, our hero was banished to live in the cork oak woods alone, a leper. God’s intervention came through the brambles on four legs; a dog who brought two gifts to the dying saint: Bread, and the dog’s owner who became St. Roch’s first disciple.
             When I was in elementary school, every rival sixth-grade team called us the Saint Roaches. “Actually, it’s pronounced Saint Rock”—okay, kid. Roch looks like Roach, roaches are vermin, that’s good enough.
           Every Friday, his likeness stood before us at all-school mass. Just like a medieval peasant, I scanned the stained-glass images wondering what the symbols meant. There were goats, and sheep, and hearts pierced with swords; shepherds with crooks, and saints who tamed lions. Then, inside the tabernacle off the altar to the right, standing on a gold box which was said to contain a small piece of St. Roch’s bone, there was our weird patron saint sculpted in a posture flashing the congregation; pulling back his cloak to reveal a fat baubon on the inside of his calf; showing off his purple blister just as Jesus showed off the nail holes in his palms; proving sainthood to the skeptics who don’t believe he contracted the virus. Beside St. Rocco’s knee, the sculptor included a dog with a loaf of bread in its mouth.
             After his death, St. Roch enjoyed mild popularity since every unknown ailment of his time was “the plague.” It wasn’t until the Black Death swept through the church that our c-list saint became a household idol.
             The Bourbonic Plague forced many to doubt God’s existence, but the faithful took up St. Roch as a household touchstone which bends the distribution of God's mercy. His idol is a compromise with the cosmic deity who caused the ill to spit blood and writhe before striking them cold. One-in-three Europeans were stacked in the fields like awful lumber. Later, nine-in-ten Native Americans would succumb to pestilence brought from Europe. St. Roch “welcomed his disease as a divinely sent opportunity to imitate the sufferings of Christ… [his] patient endurance [of the physical suffering was] a form of martyrdom.”
             This is my prayer: Fuck you, Saint Roch.
             The dog is the real saint who ran the hedges, leaped the cricks, and begged for bread for the hungry. We shouldn’t listen to the fevered babbling of St. Roch seeing shadows on his eyelids which convince him death and suffering are the divine order of things. He couldn’t see that it’s only You, and I, and Nature out here in the cosmos; the new tripartite; each inextricable and divine.
             May we conspire for tomorrow and build something new, balanced upon the understanding that human and animal, plant and insect, germ and earth are One. Amen.

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Devin’s writing is in Boulevard, The New Territory, Paterson Literary Review, Midwestern Gothic, The St. Louis Anthology, and elsewhere. Chapter one of his manuscript, Veiled Prophet, is published in Embark Literary Journal. He graduated Northwestern’s MFA program in 2018.

ALL CHURCHGOERS ARE FANFIC AUTHORS — ANDY LOPEZ

You can drop the act; I know you’ve been stealing glances at my phone for the better part of the sermon. And no, I’m not lost. Have you not taken into consideration that I, too, am here for the truth? I’ve been taught your gospel for years, now let me show you mine: a 30K Fix-It Fic, the tags read: Post-Canon, Prolonged Hand-Holding, Frottage. Don’t give me that look, as if people don’t fuck in the Bible. Because people fuck in the Bible. Hell, they do a hell of a lot worse than getting it on—like crucifying the Christ, ring a bell? But those are details, details.

This isn’t about me. Why are you here? Too dark out there, in the real world? Need a little vitamin C as in Christ? I feel you. We’re here for the same thing, aren't we? The artistry that happens in this temple each week, the creation of transformative work, making prisms out of mud rock to see other branches of possibility. Want to hear a secret? There’s nothing. No secret, that is. Nothing your pastor can do that I can’t, blindfolded and bound.

Don’t believe me? Watch: in Naruto, right? No, listen. In Naruto—he chases his best friend-turned-traitor who leaves the village, leaping across countries, performing death-defying acts, and beating the odds to bring one boy back. At one point, Naruto proclaims: I’ll take your pain and die with you. A lovers’ suicide. As if to say, what good is this world without you in it?

Yeah, don’t remind me how it ends. About the kid with the blue eyes or his wife’s dark hair. The beloved man—unmoored again. I’ve made my peace. I want to believe when Sasuke thinks of home, it’s to a pair of war-hardened hands and a smile that hits like a cold drink in July. The nights in the Hidden Leaf Village are chilled, but where their hands touch between them, they are warm. What else is truer than this? I want it. A love that looks like me; a love beyond belief.

Your turn. Don’t be shy! The day of your mom’s stroke, that was God’s hand, right? After, you learned to pray. And what about Yolanda, 2013? Or last year, when you got the call from the police station—I’m sorry, Mr. Cruz, this is about your son—and God was right there with you, hours before your knees learned to kiss the carpet like a gunshot. Life is shit; old news, too bad. But we learn to throw out the old water in our lungs. We learn to choose the light.

A year later you emerge from the depths of loss with hands that know how to transmute everything they touch. You are kinetic, unbound, a body hallowed by grief. But you’re also here for the truth, as am I. Take my hand. Fellow sinner, fellow truth-maker—it’s beautiful, isn’t it, the light?

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Andy Lopez is a writer and advocacy communications manager from the Philippines. Her work has been published in Ascend Magazine, Non.Plus Lit, and other magazines and anthologies. Find her on Twitter at @andylopezwrites.

2020 STORIES START TUESDAY AUGUST 4!

We’re so excited, y’all: our 2020 stories start on TUESDAY AUGUST 4!

Stories run through October, and you can find a list of all authors we’ll be showcasing below and on our site here.

And once again, a huge thanks to everyone who donated to NAACP, Black Lives Matter, Know Your Writes Camp, ACLU, and other charities: in one month we raised an amazing $2,689!

So much good stuff coming, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

JUNE 2020 SUBMISSIONS + FEEDBACK WITH DONATION

Dear friends: 

We here at CHEAP POP are outraged by the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery. To show our support for the protests happening across the nation, we want to offer feedback with a donation during the June 2020 submissions period.

How it works:

While submissions are open for the month of June, you have the option of

• (1) a regular submission (per guidelines on our submissions page), or

• (2) you can submit + SHOW PROOF OF A DONATION + receive feedback on your piece.

If you choose Option 2, you may show proof to one of the charities listed below in any amount (or, a like-minded charity not listed will work, too) via a screenshot of the receipt or email confirmation, included along with your submission. 

With proof of donation, we will provide feedback in the event your piece is not accepted for publication.

In 2018 we offered the option of feedback with a donation and raised over $300 for the Human Rights Campaign, RAICES, and American Forests. 

This time around, we suggest donating to the following charities:

• BLACK LIVES MATTER (Consider donating to your local chapter)

• NAACP

• ACLU

• KNOW YOUR RIGHTS CAMP LEGAL DEFENSE INITIATIVE

We all feel very strongly about these charities, and as the saying goes: Any amount helps at all.

Please note: We will not respond (accept/reject) pieces until after a submissions period is closed. You are free to query us, but our method is to read every piece we get, even ones submitted at 11:59 PM on the last day. It's important to us that every piece gets the same care and attention. This also means we generally need a small buffer of time after submissions close to read and gauge pieces. You can expect to hear back starting mid-July.

We’re excited to read your work, and thank you in advance for your support. For additional info, click here!

WELCOME, ASSISTANT EDITORS RAFAELA & MELISSA

We’re thrilled to welcome two new assistant editors the CHEAP POP team: Rafaela Ferraz and Melissa Hinshaw.

These two bring with them a wealth of experience, and we are so excited to welcome them to the CHEAP POP family!

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Rafaela Ferraz is a writer and researcher specializing in strange tales from Portuguese history. Her articles and essays have appeared in Atlas Obscura, Mental Floss, Hyperallergic, and The Order of the Good Death, among others; her speculative fiction has appeared in PodCastle and Strange Horizons. She lives in Porto with her ivy plant, Theodore, and a handsome vintage medical chart. Find her online at rafaelaferraz.com or (this is more likely) at @RafaelaWrites.

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Melissa Hinshaw holds her MFA in Fiction from the University of Arizona. She's an artist and writer living in San Francisco.