J. David Liss

THE HOUSE CLEANING

A One Act Play

Cast of Characters

JONATHAN: A psychiatrist in his mid-sixties who just lost his mother to cancer.

LINDA: Jonathan’s wife, also in her mid-sixties.

TWO UNAMED MOURNERS

MIKE AND NANCY: Friends of Jonathan and Linda attending the funeral.

GLORIA: Jonathan’s late mother – a Narcissist.

Place

Cemetery where a graveside service for Gloria has ended

Time

July

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Scene 1

Setting: Suggestions of a cemetery.

At Rise: Gloria’s funeral the service is over and people are leaving the gravesite. As they go, they stop by Jonathan and Linda to offer condolences.

UNNAMED CHARACTER
Jonathan, Linda, Sorry for your loss.

UNNAMED CHARACTER
Sorry for your loss, Doctor.

MIKE
“Jonathan, I know there was tension between you and your mother, but she is gone now. Whatever her faults were, it’s all over. We’ll stop by in a few days to see how you guys are doing.”

LINDA
Thank you, Mike, Nancy. (Turning to her husband)

Let’s go home, Jon.

Scene 2

At Rise: The last of the mourners leave. Jonathan and 

Linda walk a few steps holding hands. Jonathan steps into the lighted office space while Linda fades off stage.

Setting: As they progress across the stage, the lighting 

shifts from the simplified gravesite to a simplified representation of a psychiatrist’s office with two chairs and a couch – all tastefully modern

JONATHAN
(Turning toward audience) My friend Mike said my mother is gone and it’s all over. It’s over for her. But I’m still alive. I have to settle her estate. I have to clean out the house she’s been in for the last 60 years. 

Cleaning out a house is like cleaning out a mind, emptying memories one drawer, one closet at a time.

I have patients who sit in that chair, or lie on that couch, and just talk and talk, not recognizing they are pouring out every hurt they’ve ever inflicted, every relationship they’ve ever poisoned. 

Cleaning out my mother’s house is like listening to one of those patients, a monologue that only reveals, never heals.

Yet those patients will keep coming back, just to hear the sound of their own voices. And they show up like clockwork to have their time in the spotlight.

   (Jonathan looks at his wristwatch)

And look at the time! Hello Mom.

   (Jonathan’s mother, Gloria enters from the shadows of backstage.)

GLORIA
So this is your office. It’s too modern. When people visit their psychiatrist, they want to see traditional furniture lots of leather and mahogany. I can see Linda’s influence. Now I know why you never let me come in here.

JONATHAN
It’s not as if I didn’t think it was a good idea for you to visit a psychiatrist’s office, Mom. Just not mine.

GLORIA
Well it’s about time you had me in your place of business.

JONATHAN
You have ten minutes.

GLORIA
What can I do in ten minutes? I got Edward into law school, you into medical school, and Brian into… whatever it is he does with computers. That takes more than ten minutes!

JONATHAN
We’re going to have to focus. We’ll talk about three things my brother’s and I found while cleaning out your house: the pictures and the Mother’s Day card in your top dresser drawer and the letter from Hal in your night table.

GLORIA
I’ll tell you what I want to talk about: how much you hurt me when you stopped inviting me over for Thanksgiving. Linda’s family got invited every year. I wasn’t good enough.

JONATHAN
I think you do want to talk about those three things, the pictures, the Mother’s Day card, and the letter from Hal. Why else would you leave them there for us to find?

GLORIA
I was sick. I couldn’t do anything.

JONATHAN
You were diagnosed with end-stage pancreatic cancer eight weeks before you died. For six of those weeks, you were functional. You could have thrown those things away. You didn’t. There must be a reason.

GLORIA
I forgot all about them. Why are they important to you? Have you thought about why you are fixating on them, Mr. Psychiatrist?

JONATHAN
The letter from Hal was 50-years-old. Yet it was in the top drawer of your night table, the only thing in that drawer. Every other drawer in every piece of furniture was crammed with junk. But that letter had a special place of honor next to your bed. So I think it – and the card and the pictures – were important to you.

GLORIA
When you were a little boy, you were up every night. I would wake up to find you staring at me. You would always ask if you could get into bed with me and I always said yes. It would wake up your father and he used to get annoyed. He had to wake up at 3:30 to get to his bread route by 4:30. But I couldn’t say no to my little lovey.

JONATHAN
You’re in my office now. I’m going to focus you. We’ll start with the pictures. Why did you take those pictures and why did you keep them?

GLORIA
The human body is a beautiful thing!

JONATHAN
That may be true, but those pictures are really pornography.

GLORIA
(Slyly) You know, that’s not the first time you saw my breasts. When you were a baby, you couldn’t wait to get to my breasts. You were the hungriest of all my boys.

JONATHAN
Why not throw the pictures out so that my brothers and I didn’t have to?

GLORIA
You threw them out?

JONATHAN
Yes.

GLORIA
Did you show them to your wife?

JONATHAN
Yes.

GLORIA
Good. She should see what you were comparing her to.

JONATHAN
Now that is a sick thought. I wasn’t comparing her to you. And believe me, you would have lost in any comparison. 

GLORIA
I was beautiful when I was young. You and your brothers should know. I hope you remember that, even though you threw away those pictures.

JONATHAN
I see.  Let’s talk about the Mother’s Day card that you wrote to Linda but never sent.

GLORIA
I should have sent it.

JONATHAN
Why didn’t you?

GLORIA
Your sister-in-law, Marnie. She said I was totally wrong and to back off. I’m sorry I listened to her. I didn’t want to be the villain in the eyes of your brothers and their wives. But I was right. You hurt me.

JONATHAN
Do you remember the circumstances that Mother’s Day?

GLORIA
Yes. It was Mother’s Day and you didn’t visit, didn’t call, didn’t care. Your brothers were here. Their wives and children were here. My grandson Alan in California even called. From you, nothing.

JONATHAN
Do you remember where Linda and I were that day?

GLORIA
Don’t you think my heart was breaking with Jack in the hospital? I loved my grandson.

JONATHAN
I actually don’t think your heart was breaking, or you couldn’t have acted the way you did.

GLORIA
I’m still your mother and you could have called from his room. I’m sure he would have appreciated that and wanted to wish me a happy Mother’s Day too. 

JONATHAN
Linda and I were in the hospital trying to see Jack through his first round of chemo. We were devastated–

GLORIA
(cutting him off) I was devastated too!

JONATHAN
…And you were trash talking us to my brothers for not being there on Mother’s Day. They told you that you were out of line, so you got a blank Mother’s Day card…

You wrote: Dear Linda, if you had a mother’s heart you would be here. And you were going to send it to Linda.

GLORIA
Well, I didn’t send it. I was angry and wrote that, but then I calmed down and didn’t send it.

JONATHAN
Six months after Jack died you called Linda to find out if we had any plans for the weekend. She said we had no plans and she did not feel like going anywhere. You asked her, why. She said because her son died six months ago. Do you remember what you said?

GLORIA
I don’t remember every conversation I ever had, like Linda. I move on.

JONATHAN
You said, You have to keep living, Linda. You have to move on. You told a woman who had lost her son to cancer six months before that it was time for her to move on. 

GLORIA
Linda, Linda, Linda. Saint Linda! Like she never did anything to hurt me. Jonathan, we used to be so close. That ended when you married Saint Linda.

JONATHAN
You saved that card these seven years, so I imagine you died with no regrets about it. Let’s talk about the letter from Hal, which you saved for 50 years.

GLORIA
That letter is none of your business.

JONATHAN
If it’s none of my business, then why didn’t you throw it out before you died? When Marnie found it and started reading it out loud, Eddy screamed Stop reading that fucking letter. 

I have it here.

Dear Gloria and Frank,
It’s been a hard few months working my campaign for Board of Education, and I know you both made a lot of sacrifices to help me. I want to thank you.–

GLORIA
(interrupting) Edward shouldn’t have said the “F” word.

JONATHAN
(looking at his mother) How would you feel about us throwing this away?

GLORIA
I’m dead and don’t care at all.

JONATHAN
It was next to your bed. Did you read it often?

GLORIA
Your father had no ambition. He retired and sat on his butt watching TV. I got my high school and college degrees after Brian started first grade. I worked my way up from being a secretary to doing public relations for important people.

Was the life he gave me supposed to be enough? I deserved a better life than that.

JONATHAN
Did you often think about Hal?

GLORIA
I hated Hal. He was an ugly man, inside and out.

JONATHAN
Yet you kept his letter. Did you read that letter often?

GLORIA
When your father was alive, yes. I had to remember that I was more than just his nursemaid with his heart failure. After he died, not so much.

JONATHAN
More than his nursemaid?

GLORIA
(passionately) I was desirable to a man like Hal! He was a lawyer. He owned a building in Manhattan! He was elected president of the school board. He wore a suit. He was somebody. 

 His wife Edna was a mouse, not a companion for a man like that. And your father, he went to work every day in his gray uniform and bread truck.

JONATHAN
Did you show that letter to Dad?

GLORIA
Of course. It was addressed to both of us.

JONATHAN
How did you think Dad would interpret that letter?

GLORIA
As an expression of gratitude from an important man, and a statement of how valuable I was.

JONATHAN
Do you remember the day Edna walked into our house without knocking on the door and what she said?

GLORIA
She was terrible, terrible. She had no right to come into my house and say those things!

JONATHAN
I remember what she said. She looked you directly in the face and screamed, You’d better stay the hell away from my husband. I never want to see you near him again, or I will kill you.

GLORIA
She was lying! That was a lie. Hal tried to kiss me and I wouldn’t let him – so he told his wife I tried to sleep with him to get at me.

JONATHAN
I believed that for years. And you always taught me that what you believe is the most important thing. But I no longer believe that story. I want truth.

 Mom, did you have an affair with Hal?

GLORIA
Edna wanted to hurt me, and she had no right to come into my house and embarrass me in front of my husband and children!

JONATHAN
It’s pretty obvious that Edna was telling the truth and you were lying. That is why you kept Hal’s letter for 50 years.

GLORIA
Hal was ugly inside and out.

JONATHAN
How do you think Dad interpreted the last sentence of the letter after Edna revealed your affair a year later?

GLORIA
He didn’t think about it. Hal tried to kiss me and I wouldn’t let him. You don’t believe me, but your father did.

JONATHAN
He didn’t think about it?

 You would complain to me and my brothers that Dad stopped having sex with you because of his congestive heart failure, which, by the way, was a totally inappropriate thing to share with your children – adults though we were. 

 When did he stopped having sex with you?

GLORIA
Your father refused to have sex with me because he thought it would kill him with his weak heart. Weak!

JONATHAN
When was that?

GLORIA
I don’t know.

JONATHAN
Was it right after Edna revealed your affair with Hal, or after his heart attack years later?

GLORIA
I don’t remember.

JONATHAN
Do you remember the last sentence of Hal’s letter?

GLORIA
It was a thank you letter.

JONATHAN
What was the last sentence?

GLORIA
Hal was thanking Dad for all the time I spent working on his campaign.

JONATHAN
(forcefully) What did he write?

GLORIA
(shouting) He wrote, Thank you for letting me borrow your wife. 

 There! Are you satisfied?

JONATHAN
(silent for a few seconds) You and Hal had quite a joke on Dad. 

 How do you think Dad felt when he remembered that sentence after Edna revealed your affair?

GLORIA
I don’t know how your father felt. I don’t know what anyone feels. I know what I felt. Hal desired me more than Edna, that’s what I felt!

JONATHAN
You don’t know what anyone feels. That statement is very true. And I think it ends this conversation.

GLORIA
But I want to keep talking to you.

JONATHAN
We’re almost finished getting your house empty and ready for sale. This is our last conversation.

Gloria is not there anymore. Jonathan turns and leaves the stage.

CURTAIN

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J. David Liss asks questions that matter in gripping stories. How does a feeling heart overcome the tragedy of loss? How do we know whom to trust, and can trust ever be won back once lost? He’s published numerous stories and poems in journals and anthologies.

Neil Agnew

The Feast of the Fishes

There’s a knowing sense that fish have of an incipient storm, when lightning begins preparing its quiver of bolts, thunder tuning up its subwoofers. The fish sense this; the fishermates sense that the fish sense it. Even before a telling cloud, there’s a telling fish. It’s a subtlety of their undulating swim: more abashed toward the surface, a reticence that a fishermate peering a few meters down in clear waters can see. In a freshly caught fish, it may be a slight suggestion in their post-catch rictus, a change in their writhing on the hook. You can always tell. 

And so but a storm is set to come. So all the fishermates out at sea pack up their poles, unwinch their trawling nets, and align their tillers and prows landward. Several boats have propellers, some dual- or tri-propellered for a turbo-charged return to land, but the Old Man (simply known as such for as long as anyone’s remembered) likes to travel old-school — his boat has oars. 

Rowing landward with only one catch — a trout, it not being a fortuitous day of catch for him, as his usual bounty is at least four times more — he sees all the other fishermates in their single- and multi-propelled, tiller-equipped boats zipping past him to port and starboard as he rows implacably and blankly homeward, the wake of the boats careening past successively rolling his dinghy.  

By the time the Old Man reaches the berth outside his home beside (but not overlooking) the sea, the storm has begun in full force. After placing the wooden fish box on the foyer table and doffing his raincoat, a fulgurant flash illuminates the house. There’s a terrible comfort about a room briefly lit by lightning. Taking up the candelabra in the foyer, he lights it; holding it in one hand, he picks up the fish box in the other, lighting his way toward the kitchen. Arrhythmic rain raps on the rooftop, desperate-sounding. It’s a simple house, a seafarer’s house, homely in a way houses feel when you’re inside during a storm. (Seaside houses have a sense about them that they’re ensconced or occluded from water in some way, even if it isn’t storming — a kind of inverted boat on land.) 

And so he, the Old Man, walks to the kitchen, placing the candelabra on the kitchen island he made. The house is completely candlelit. All his neighbors along the shore have electric or gas. Some of them lob a glib jest like “high utility bill, huh” his way, guffawing smugly. 

The Old Man’s partner was lost at sea — lost to the sea, perhaps. Many years ago. Never found. Went out one day to fish and never returned. No sign of boat or body. They left only a note — a note that he keeps in his locket; he reads it often, aching to find something in it to explain his loss, something to help make sense of it all. His partner’s disappearance remains an unsolved, gnawing mystery. He looked for years before giving up, often spending weeks at a time at sea scanning, hoping. Maybe they’re still out there, he thinks. Surviving somehow. Lost, stuck, or else swallowed whole by the sea.

It’s supper time, so he takes out his teakwood cutting board, butter knife, and last week’s newspaper and lays the fish on it (the board). (Butter knife for descaling; newspaper for the mess.) After cleaning the fish, he runs the butter knife forward and back against the fish to descale it. The Old Man doesn’t live alone: a mouse is there too. Not a pest or pet but a live-in resident, arguably older than the Old Man himself, who’s not “old” in the traditional sense but rather stopped counting altogether a while ago — not out of resigned old age but of a young, ferocious defiance against keeping track of his age — continually pushing it (age) further and further out of his mind until it became ungraspable, metaphysically speaking. The mouse, unnamed by the Old Man, has a house within the house: burrowed rooms within the paneling of the house’s rooms, reticulated by complexly bored hallways. The Old Man likes to imagine how the mouse’s rooms and hallways are furnished.

After descaling the fish, he opens the island drawer to reveal a mucronate fillet knife; he makes a shallow incision from the vent, the backmost portion of the fish’s underside, to near the neck. As he cuts out the viscera, tossing them into a bucket at his feet, he inadvertently punctures the fish’s stomach and out slips, to his nonplussed reaction, something unmistakable: a message. Not in a bottle but nonetheless with the same obvious kind of message-in-a-bottle type look to it. What it is is some kind of hermetically sealed, anti-digestive film around papyrus paper, the kind associated with scrolls. 

The Old Man carefully rends the film with his filet knife (the film’s strangely durable even though it has the appearance of being thin). The scroll unravels, almost by its own will. The Old Man’s right eye twitches in part annoyance and part strain as he finds that what he’s viewing — what’s perhaps the most bizarre, flummoxing, interesting thing that’s happened to him in recent memory — perhaps ever — is utterly indecipherable. Cuneiform-esque. Even more obfuscating than Cuneiform. A weird confluence of futuristic and atavistic glyphs. The scroll’s length is about the size of his palm, maybe a little longer; almost every inch of paper is used. There’s no way to tell what it means, but the Old Man has a gnawing feeling that it’s somehow important, profound. Urgent, even. Since explicating the text is out of the question, he begins to wonder why and how. If such a message was essential and urgent, why the abstruse and unreliable conveyance? Through a fish? How would such a transport be possible? Yet here it is. What would it augur about the author of the text? An author lost at sea, gone mad by the vastness of the ocean who’s begun — in their ill-fated, ineffectual boat — to construct an entirely new, fey, and rarefied ideogramic language, perhaps. Might it be that in this inscrutable text penned by a pelagically damned soul is the deepest, most real, emotive, poetically urgent writing of this era? And maybe this author was not only lost at sea but swallowed by a Physeter macrocephalus or sperm whale — ship and all, improbably so — and wrote this text whilst inside the whale, passing it along through a fish the whale had swallowed but not devoured and that managed (the fish) to swim out of the whale’s mouth, past the gauntlet of teeth in the whale’s narrow jaw to safer waters until it was skewered by the Old Man’s little hook. The irony: surviving the maw of a predator 50 times your size to be impaled to death by a fishing hook — like defeating Goliath only to die shortly after by tripping and hitting your head on a rock. But again, why? Someone young making an early attempt at greatness, trying to create meaning? Someone old giving it one last shot, one last chance to pour themselves into something, to really say something, do something? A lost lover driven insane by the loneliness of the sea, plangently calling out…?

These were the questions he asked as he tried to sleep that night, the hermetic papyrus text ensconced on his bedside table. A hush of cold air from the window snuffs out the room’s candle’s remaining flames as the Old Man tosses and turns, like a tempestuous sea. 

That night the Old Man had a dream — a nightmare, perhaps. In the dream, he’s in his little dinghy with tackle box, fishing rod, and sundry fishing accoutrements out at sea. The boat has anchored sculls to row.

At the start of the dream, the Old Man feels that he’s been rowing for eons — as if the dream began medias res and he’d been at it for a while — when he looks down and notices that the entire sea below and all around is gelid. Frozen. He thought he was making rowing motions, but he’s not sure he actually heard the sound of waves or spruce oars whumping ice or anything at all. The frozen sea wasn’t obvious visually, either, at least not until he looked down and noticed it. The horizon merely a phantasmagoric rendering of the sea.

When he stops rowing, he notices that three doors have appeared on the ice a few meters north of the bow. The doors are supine on the frozen sea, not standing; that if the door were to open, it would open into the ocean. The doors are off-white with beveled panels, two long rectangular sets and one squarish pair toward the top — a typical bedroom door. However, there’s no knob. Not on any of the doors. 

He looks to port and a new door appears, as if created at will. It’s the same as the others, yet it can open. Kneeling down on the frozen sea next to the door, he looks up to see a full moon, its light beaming down through an aperture in the night’s wispy gauze of cloud as a bird flies majestically in and out of view. He opens the door and dives in.

The next morning, the Old Man resolves to go to the fish market, cryptic text in hand, and ask his local fishmonger if they’ve seen anything like this— esoteric text or not — inside any fish lately, or if they’ve heard of anyone else stumbling upon this strange surprise.  

After arriving at the al fresco fish market in town, the Old Man espies the avuncular fishmonger Cleo in what look like an eerily Dickensian reenactment of the “I Got Rhythm” scene from An American in Paris: fuliginous, scally-capped guttersnipes surround her as she holds court, donning a naval cap, gnarled jeans with fish stains, and sweater sleeves rolled up to elbows revealing multivariate tattoos only a hardened seafarer could sport. There was something jaunty about it, the weirdly Dickensian Gene-Kelly-as-Cleo-the-fishmonger scene, but also so incongruous as to be near-hallucinatory.  

The Old Man, hand out to catch Cleo’s attention amid the gamboling: “Morn, Cleo. Do you have a moment? Something I’d like to ask you . . . about the fish.”

She makes a dismissive gesture to the guttersnipes, like a teacher gently shooing away students from her desk. “Aye, whye shore, laddie,” she responds.

“Have you noticed anything strange lately, about the fish? I mean, well, so I was gutting a fish the other day — one that I caught out asea the other day, you see — and I, well, you see there was something really odd, about this fish, you see. I, um, well . . . you see I was gutting the fish and cut into the stomach and — I jest you not — out came a scroll. A scroll of text. I know, I know, but it’s true. Here’s the text,” he says, taking the paper out of his scrip and brandishing it. 

“Hmmpf, nowe tat iz unoozual aye will saye . . . boot whaite . . . hmm, noooo. No. Kant saye aye ave becus I aven’t. Proble just ay practicul jest, eh,” she says, cordially slapping the Old Man’s left bicep, her hand wet with fish slime. 

“Sure, I suppose so. Maybe. Interesting how it hasn’t happened before. That I’m the only one.” After a brief stilted silence, he resumed: “Well, that was it. I ought to go now. Er, thanks, Cleo.” 

“O’ course, laddie.” 

Leaving the fish market bemused and curious, the Old Man decides to ship out to sea today to see if it happens again — the catching of a fish with a message. 

As he’s oaring his way further out to sea toward his perennial fishing latitude-longitude haunt, the Old Man’s face appears pensively empty, thinking about everything and nothing. A trillion little thoughts and feelings flow through his head; he can’t explain most of them. He is just like anyone else. His life, partner, parents, history — they all flash into his head just as quickly as they leave, like a car passing a gauntlet of tunnel lights. 

By the time he reaches his fishing coordinates, which are memorized (having a “nautical sense” for them, at this point), the sky’s weeping. A bird flies overhead, destination unknown. No thunder, lightning. Vistas of thin-sheeted rain on undulating waves. Smell of cold brine. The pattering static of rain on the ocean. It’s not that rain is immanently calming or the moon preternaturally romantic, but that we can interpret them as such, allow them to mean. An ocean ceases to be a body of water: it becomes a metaphor for feeling, what it is to be human: a body that can appear still on the surface but beneath it lies profound depth, mystery, fear, wonder, loss, energy — life. A fish with a message — gnomic. Inexplicable. Unless it is given meaning. 

Not but an hour goes by of casting his line into the sea before the Old Man gets a bite. Rain purls off his bright yellow coat in all directions, nylon gleaming. Not without some strain does he manage to reel the fish in, onto the floor boards of the dinghy. It’s flailing around wildly, the fish. He picks it up with both hands, removes the hook from its cheek, and sticks three fingers in to further part its lips, widely opening its mouth, as if to speak.

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Neil Agnew is a writer living in New York. His short stories and prose poems have been self-published on Medium. A longtime musician, avid cruciverbalist, and neophyte Super 8 filmmaker, Neil has a passion for different kinds of art, but writing is his home. 

Sean Cunningham

Infinities

The wind's curls grew lazy and the sky rusted, and Mill and I sat overlooking the muddy river that led to both nowhere, and to the whole world. 

Which way do you think we'll end up going? said Mill, I'm going to see everything that there is to see. 

I didn't answer, it didn't feel right to.

Mill and I had met on the edge, at the precipice between here and hereafter. That day, we managed to drag each other away. But in the time that followed, we would often, without intention, push each other right back.

Mill was the kind of person that Gran might have called an overgrown fire – someone who was necessary and was loved beyond reason, but would, on occasion and all of a sudden, become as uncontrollable as they were unpredictable. 

I looked down, tied my fingers to Mill's and asked whether there could be rivers muddier than ours out there. I said it was impossible, but Mill didn't think so and said, There must be. There has to be.

I started to imagine each blade of grass beneath us as separate and individual worlds, There must be muddier rivers there, I thought, with infinities of nowhere, forever, here, and hereafter. There has to be.

When I looked up, Mill was gone and had been for quite some time, but our fingers were still entwined somehow – reaching, somehow, through nowhere and everywhere, all at once. Whatever the case, I could still feel them against mine – impossible, necessary, burning away.

---

Sean Cunningham is a writer of very short prose and poetry, from Liverpool. His work has been appeared in publications such as Ellipsis Zine, Fugue, Rejection Letters, and Into the Void, among others. He can be found on Twitter: @_seanjc

Brian McVety

Normal, Suburban Girls

When cars linger longer than they should, Daddy buys bulls because dogs aren’t enough. He finds them advertised in the back of the PennySavers we use for the woodstove when we’ve run out of bills to burn. The little one is Marciano, after his favorite boxer; he doesn’t name the other one.

The other one remains hunched under the sycamore like a monk, but Marciano’s always moving, chewing and chewing without ever seeming to swallow. When it tries to cross the invisible line we aren’t supposed to cross to attack the garbage truck, it yawps like it’s been shot since it’s forgotten what’s around its neck. Daddy didn’t bother to gradually increase the voltage, like he did to us.

It's Jacie who sees the first lawn sign from her window, YES ON 4, stenciled over a giant bull’s head. But when she tells me to look, I only stare at the fathers in lawn chairs drinking beers in the driveway while their daughters huddle near the street and whisper secrets or swap blood oaths or whatever it is that normal, suburban girls do. Some nights, I give them names like McKenzie and Savannah and Rebecca and pretend to brush their hair with Mama’s hairbrush that Jacie hid when Daddy burned all of her things. I imagine I’m their mother, stroking their hair and warning them to stop walking by the house with all the cars in the driveway that smells like a garbage incinerator with those girls that never speak.

Even though she knows better, Jacie looks up what the sign means on Daddy’s computer, and I fill in the vocabulary sheets she’s printed from the homeschool website. They’re trying to outlaw all beasts from residential properties she whispers. I write down words prostrate and squalor and wonder what type of beasts they mean.  Later, Daddy steals their signs to use as target practice, and Marciano runs in circles with every shot. The other one doesn’t move at all, no matter how much Daddy tries to get it to. 

When the fathers come by, we hide what needs to be hidden and sit on the porch, still as stone, and Marciano sharpens his horns on the fieldstone foundation of the house. They stay on the street and yell to Daddy that this is a neighborhood, there are statutes regarding the size of a yard needed to pasture livestock, that we should just move already, that this kind of town isn’t for us. Daddy yells back that he ain’t pasturing nothing, just protecting what’s rightfully his, except he doesn’t say it as nicely as that. I can tell it spooks Daddy, though, because he paces and makes phone calls and people start showing up. Except Marciano can’t tell the difference from who should and shouldn’t be there—red-eyed truck drivers, pockmarked teenagers, rambling women who won’t stop talking—and charges at them all, their pockets shaking like maracas as they flee. 

The other one remains prostrate (right, Jacie?) by the porch, its gray legs tucked under it.   I put my head against its side and listen for a beat that’s barely there and check its clouded eyes and remember how mama once said she’d rather be dead than live another day like this. I take a rag and find the bleach and ammonia and go to the basement for the other chemicals from where Daddy keeps them. I grab Daddy’s gas mask, which smells like the balloon Jacie was able to steal for my birthday last year, and bring the rag to its snout. I am about to cover its nostrils when I hear the rumble. 

On the side of the house, Marciano kicks up a whorl of dust as it tries to dislodge its horns from the foundation. The more it claws and scrapes, the more stuck it gets, the more the foundation crumbles. Pieces of fieldstone break apart and its raging feet. I hold a piece of broken rock over its head, and my muscles flex and burn and ache like I didn’t know they could. Marciano’s eyes morph from anger to fear, which I’ve learned aren’t all that different in the end. 

Then I hear it, a painful snort from the porch. The other one moves its head enough for its tongue to loll out of its mouth. It finds a clump dead grass and begins to chew. 

I heave the stone through Daddy’s window.  

The way he looks at me—all eyes and closed mouth—I should be afraid, but Jacie’s behind him, pointing for me to run, and as my feet start to move, I can already I feel the wetness of their whispers in my ear, their fingers linking through mine, finally pulling me with them, down our street. 

---

Brian McVety lives in Longmeadow, MA with his wife and three daughters. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and has appeared in JMWW, Variant Literature, Reckon Review, Litro Magazine, Arcturus, Porcupine Literary, Tiny Molecules, BULL, and elsewhere.

Morgan Crumbly

SELF-TAPE PHOBIA

A Ten-Minute Play

[LIGHTS UP on a small city apartment, very

lightly furnished. A small sofa rests center stage. LANA’S humble abode has the ambiance of the residency of a struggling actor. Upstage right, there is a lamp next to a small desk littered with papers, probably old sides. Random posters are scattered across the wall of her apartment. Upstage left, we see LANA’S slightly disassembled self-tape setup. There is a 5x7,medium-blue photography backdrop being held up by metal stands. A ring light with an adjustable stand rests in front of the backdrop on the shortest setting. A camera on a tripod is placed upstage from the backdrop. LANA lies centerstage on the sofa as she converses on her cell phone.]

LANA
Yeah! Yeah, that workshop was amazing. Mhm…I feel like I’ve been dealing with some self-tape phobia tripping me up but— I know right, she broke it down perfectly! That’s gotta be why I haven’t booked in a while. (She pauses, listening on the line) Oh no, girl, you’re fine. Good luck at your audition! Ok,...yeah call me later. Bye!

LANA hangs up the phone and sits up.

LANA
(Under her breath) At least someone’s getting auditions.

[A beat. She turns and looks at her ‘setup’ for a second, then quickly turns away like she’s scared to even look at it.]

LANA
(To herself) No, Lana don’t do that. Besides, after all the tips I got from miss legendary ACTING COACH today, I’m basically guaranteed to be booked and busy soon.

[ACTING COACH enters stage left. She is dressed conservatively in business casual. She has a strict sort of demeanor. ACTING COACH holds a clipboard and pencil

as she tensely walks toward the sofa and stands next to its left arm, facing the audience.]

LANA
Let’s see what these people are talking about today.

[LANA scrolls on her phone, in big gestures, so the audience can see. ACTING COACH reads aloud the casting descriptions LANA finds online. The casting calls are read in a dry, almost robotic voice.]

ACTING COACH
Casting call! Sara is a female in her late teens to early twenties. She struggles to find herself through prostitution. Must be open to nudity, must have a cup size of at least DD.

LANA
Um, ok. (LANA scrolls)

ACTING COACH
Casting call! Female. Late teens to early twenties. Ramona goes by ‘R’. She’s a spunky horror fanatic who gets wrapped up in a murder investigation in her town. The recently departed is her ex-best friend, whom the whole town thinks R was out to get.

LANA
Ooooh, I like this one.

ACTING COACH
R is tomboyish and unconventionally hot, unlike the school’s basic Queen B, Britney.

LANA
Interestingggg…

ACTING COACH
And R is so hot, it’s hard to believe she’s the brains behind her own investigation—

LANA
Next! (She scrolls)

ACTING COACH
Female. Late teens, early twenties. Caucasian— (LANA scrolls) Caucasian female. (LANA scrolls) Caucasian female. (LANA scrolls) Caucasian female (LANA scrolls) Caucasian fe— (LANA scrolls)

LANA
Dayummm!

ACTING COACH
Casting call! Female, late teens to early twenties. African-American—

LANA
Finally!

ACTING COACH
Must appear mixed-race.

LANA
Fuck off! (LANA scrolls)

ACTING COACH
Casting call! Female, African-American in her late teens, early twenties. Shante is aggressive, sassy, loud-mouthed, low-income–

LANA
Mmm, I hope a white man didn’t write all that. (LANA scrolls) Maybe today is just not the day.

ACTING COACH
Casting call. Female in her twenties. African-American. B23 Studios.

LANA
(LANA suddenly sits up.) B23 doing an open call? No way…

ACTING COACH & LANA
Rina is the jazz singer that captured the world, but it came at a cost. The trials of fame overwhelm Rina, and the starlet’s reputation edges on destroying her career. When publicist Tommy is brought in to save the starlet from ruin, he doesn’t suspect there’s more to Rina than meets the eye.

LANA
(A beat) I love it. It’s…perfect.

ACTING COACH
We are taking submissions via self-tape only. Sides will cost $0.99 to view. File should be no bigger than 100MB and submitted via a dropbox link.

LANA
Shit. Self-tape only? It’s fine. I did the workshop. I’ve got this! I’ve just gotta remember what the ACTING COACH said.

ACTING COACH sits next to LANA on the sofa. LANA doesn’t acknowledge her as if she can’t see her.

ACTING COACH
(To LANA) You’ve got to think like an actor, and like a CASTING DIRECTOR. And Lana…

[LANA slowly looks toward ACTING COACH, but she isn’t shocked. Rather, ACTING COACH is like a voice in her head]

ACTING COACH
This CASTING DIRECTOR is well-known. Think about how many tapes he watches day after day. This audition has to be close to perfect, and the first step is getting in his head.

[CASTING DIRECTOR enters from stage right

with a laptop in hand. He’s got an arrogant, yet sarcastic air about him. CASTING DIRECTOR is extremely underdressed and goes to stand by the right arm of the sofa. He’s loudly typing on his laptop with one hand. His head is

leaning on his right shoulder, tightly holding the phone he’s yelling into. LANA and ACTING COACH stare at him.]

CASTING DIRECTOR
(Groans) Ugh,(Speaking quickly) I’ve got to watch all these self-tapes. Why can’t they just send someone over? GOD! I hate when they do this to me. We need to look for new talent my ass. We? Who is we? I always end up doing the brunt of the looking. We? I’m so sick of this it’s so early WHERE IS MY LATTE THERE’S GOT TO BE SOMEONE WHO WAS READY FOR WORK THIS MORNING OTHER THAN ME— (Continues rambling)

LANA
(to ACTING COACH) I don’t wanna think like him…he seems miserable as shit.

ACTING COACH
Well, get over it you have to. Now fix your setup how I taught you.

LANA
(Unsure) Okay. (LANA doesn’t move)

[ACTING COACH picks up a WHISTLE off of her clipboard and blows it. LANA struggles to move the sofa upstage left, because ACTING COACH remains seated on it. LANA rushes upstage and begins grabbing her background, camera, and ring light. LANA moves each item downstage center one at a time fixing her setup hurriedly.]

CASTING DIRECTOR
Can’t you see I’m on the—

ACTING COACH blows WHISTLE.

LANA
I’m going…dayum!

[Finally, LANA finishes moving her camera set up. She presses record on the camera and moves downstage of the background to begin the monologue.]

LANA
(She braces herself) Why can’t you just give me one more chance—

ACTING COACH
I took the liberty of writing down the lines from the sides and putting some beats on there for you since you were clearly too amateur to do it on your own.

[ACTING COACH hands LANA a paper from her

clipboard]

LANA
(Taking the paper) Right…thanks. (She briefly reads and then discards it.)

LANA
(A beat)Why can’t you just give me one chance Tommy? I—

CASTING DIRECTOR
Okay, I’m just gonna say it. This background is God-awful. (ACTING COACH nods in agreement)

LANA
(to CASTING DIRECTOR) What? What do you mean—

CASTING DIRECTOR
Are you serious with this shade of light blue? I mean, dark blue is way more flattering.

LANA
Oh.

ACTING COACH
And this lighting…

CASTING DIRECTOR
Right… (LANA glances between them)

ACTING COACH
So many shadows—

CASTING DIRECTOR
Sooo many. Here sweetie. You wanna be a professional? You need a professional light, something like this. (CASTING DIRECTOR turns his laptop toward LANA)

LANA
Hello? That’s three-hundred dollars!

ACTING COACH
Great price if you ask me.

LANA
Have you seen my apartment? I don’t have three hundred extra.

CASTING DIRECTOR
Yeah, uhh we can see that.

(LANA gives CASTING DIRECTOR a look.)

LANA
(Nervously) Okay. Well…hopefully my acting will shine through a few shadows.

CASTING DIRECTOR
(Laughs)

LANA
What? You only saw me do two lines just give me a—

ACTING COACH
Just go again, Lana.

LANA
(Deep breath) Okay. (A beat) Why can’t you just—

ACTING COACH
Have you checked your framing?

ACTING COACH walks over to the camera.

LANA
(Groans)

ACTING COACH
Okay, we need to see more over your head. Step back. (LANA steps back) Too far, now forward. (LANA takes one step forward) No, no, no— (LANA takes a tiny step back) Right. Mmm okay now… (LANA takes a small step back) Well—

LANA
(Shouting) Can I just do the monologue, please?

ACTING COACH
(Steps back to stage right of background)

LANA
(Going again) Why can’t you just—

CASTING DIRECTOR
Do you think it could be more…urban?

LANA
Excuse me?

ACTING COACH
Yes, people want actors like, you know, like you to have a certain…attitude.

LANA
(A beat) Look, how I speak is how I speak. I’m black regardless of how—

CASTING DIRECTOR
Let me be straight with you sweetie because it seems like you think your opinion matters.

[CASTING DIRECTOR pauses, looking at his laptop, then looks back at LANA.]

I’ve got about two-hundred submissions in already, and this posting has been up for four hours. Tops. Realistically there could be thousands by the end of this. And we’ll end up picking a union, seasoned actor signed with a major agency anyway. We want to see who can get the job done the fastest and make us the most money. That’s it. And when I see a dark blue background I think, there’s an actor who can do what they're told and make me money. You think we’re sitting here to see your art? We’re not. You think we give a rat’s ass about your authenticity? We don’t. You think you matter? You don’t.

LANA
I don’t wanna do this anymore.

[LANA turns off the camera. She goes and lies on the sofa upstage right.]

ACTING COACH
(To CASTING DIRECTOR) C’mon.

CASTING DIRECTOR
Someone had to tell her.

[ACTING COACH goes to sit next to LANA on the couch.]

LANA
Why am I even doing this? What’s the point?

ACTING COACH
If you’re looking for a point, you’re in the wrong business. (Chuckles)

LANA
Business. Business. Business. Is that all it was? The whole time? Just…numbers.

ACTING COACH
Well…is that what it is to you?

LANA
No. I don’t know. I’d like to think I’m making something beautiful, saying something. Making art.

ACTING COACH
Well, if you wanna make art I’m not stopping you.

LANA
Yeah. You’re not. (Realizing) Yeah! I just want to tell stories. And you know what? If someone wants to reject me because of how I look or… my background…or some equipment…or worse— because of a stereotype that was created for me, something I had no say in, then…then I don’t wanna work with them anyway. They don’t have any power over how I feel about what I love, or how I feel about myself. And you don’t either.

ACTING COACH
Good. (Blows WHISTLE) Get to it then!

[LANA goes back centerstage and presses record on the camera, ready to perform. ACTING COACH and CASTING DIRECTOR look on with curiosity]

LANA
Why can’t you just give me one more chance? I know what the magazines and podcasts and headlines all have to say, but what about me? You can’t even hear me behind all that damn noise. And you know what, if you still wanna quit on me come tomorrow, fine, but tonight you’re gonna listen. Someone in this stupid fucking city is gonna listen to me for once. You get me another press conference, and do your job because you work for me. Not the other way around. And no one gets to put words in my mouth. No one gets to tell me who I am. I know there’s not a lot of truth left in this world, but I’m gonna show them the truth they’re looking for whether they like it or not.

ACTING COACH
Wow, I really believed you.

CASTING DIRECTOR
Hmph. Not bad.

[LANA stops the recording. CASTING DIRECTOR and ACTING COACH move the camera, background, and ring light upstage right. LANA moves the sofa back centerstage]

CASTING DIRECTOR
CASTING DIRECTOR hands LANA his laptop.

Already synced the video to my laptop.

LANA
Thank you. Thank you both.

ACTING COACH
Don’t thank us yet.

[LANA types on the laptop. CASTING DIRECTOR answers a phone call and exits stage left. ACTING COACH sits next to LANA on the sofa]

LANA
Okay, I did it!

ACTING COACH
(Glances at the computer) Lana! Lana, the file is too big!

LANA
No! No, I swore!

CASTING DIRECTOR
(Offstage) Ugh, I haaate actors who can’t follow instructions.

LANA sits in disbelief for a while.

LANA
(Screams)

[ACTING COACH exits stage right as LANA is still screaming]

LANA
I.Fucking. Quit!

[LANA begins smashing apart every piece of her self-tape setup. By the time her meltdown is done, the whole apartment is in a state of disarray except for the sofa resting center stage]

LANA
(Lying back down on the sofa) Whatever.

[LANA takes out her phone and begins scrolling. ACTING COACH enters, as robotic and tense as before. She stands stage right of the sofa, facing the audience]

ACTING COACH
Casting call!

[BLACKOUT]

---

Morgan Crumbly (she/her) is an actor, playwright, and singer based in Atlanta, GA. Crumbly recently graduated from Spelman College with a degree in Theater & Performance. Her college experiences steeped in the struggles of a young Black female artist inspired the ten-minute comedy and her first published play, “Self-Tape Phobia.”

Brooke White

Beware the Mara

The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli made its debut in 1782 where the horror of the scene and its suggestiveness rippled through the crowd at the Royal Academy exhibition in London. The woman in the painting is wearing a white dress. Aren’t they always? Peep the woman’s foot unveiled from her white nightgown. Her toes balk at the chilly air. Light shines on her face and chest, her arms dangling off the mattress, her hand scraping the floor. Her head is lolling, her neck exposed. To see her face clearly you must turn your head upside down, which I do. She is either in ecstasy or in so much pain that she has passed out. When the blood starts rushing to my head, I turn myself right side up again.

The mara hunches atop the woman’s abdomen, as if it is preparing to devour a piece of stolen fruit. Its eyes are lemur-like, golden and wide. It scowls, not angrily so much as hungrily. The mara looks like a stone goblin with pointy ears. The mara knows it has been caught, but it does not care. It dares you to interfere. 

Behind the mara, peeking through the curtains, the face of a wild eyed midnight horse, its mane defying gravity as if electrified by a burst of lightening. Its teeth gleam. Its eyes have no pupils. The horse was not there in the original sketch, but found his way into the oil on canvas. 

When I was a child, I had terrible nightmares. I appeared at daycare as a kid with bags under my eyes. One of the aids asked what was the matter. I told her about what came to pass in my mind’s eye at night. She crouched down in that way adults tend to do with children when they’re about to say something thoughtful. She said, do you know what a nightmare is?

A bad dream, I answered.

Yes, but there’s another meaning, she said. Nightmare is really two words, night and mare. She asked if I knew what a mare was. I shook my head no. She told me that a mare was a female horse. 

Perhaps this is what led to the horse photos on my wall and my schoolwork folders. The mare became the symbol of my protector.

The horse in The Nightmare looks haunted. The horse watches the woman whose arms dangle off the mattress. And then there’s the mara. No matter where your eyes wander, they always return to the mara. 

The mara is often cited in Germanic folklore though there were whispers of such things in many places. At night, some mara ride horses, leaving them bone-weary and sweaty by morning. Others ride trees, the branches tangling beneath them. Most prefer riding the chest of an unsuspecting sleeper, tangling their hair and giving them bad dreams. That’s if you’re lucky. In Serbian stories, the mara slips through the keyhole and tries to strangle the sleeper. 

I was not a peaceful sleeper, even as a child. Combating my resistance to forgo my crib or my parents’ bed, my mother called the toddler bed a princess bed. I climbed into the princess bed night after night and tossed and turned. I had vivid nightmares. I have them still. Often, in these dreams, I am being chased by a beast or a man.       

My first time living on my own, I rented a Florida room in a historic home in Michigan. Three of the four walls were windows. I filled the space with plants and slept in a lofted bed. I sometimes felt like a princess climbing that ladder, as if I was scaling a stack of mattresses before a sleepless night atop a pea. I felt less like a princess when winter came. The landlord’s son put aluminum foil behind the radiator as consolation for the creeping cold in that room of windows. I huddled underneath my lofted bed, wrapped in blankets beside a space heater to the tune of the ineffectual radiator’s yawning hisses. 

When my boyfriend and I lived together, I treated the space under our bed as if it was a notch in an old tree filled with fairy trinkets. I stashed bags of seashells and rocks beneath the bed beside papers and secrets. We spent hours upon hours resting above these treasures of mine.

When I move out of my boyfriend’s house, I bring my childhood bed with me. I roost in a room on the top floor of an old, creaky house. I push the bed against the wall, and stuff the crack with pillows as I did when I was a child, to block the imagined eyes and cold, boney fingers from finding me in the dark. 

Come winter, there are mice in the house. My housemate finds squirrel bones in the attic, and I’m sure I hear claws in the walls. There’s a brown water stain on the ceiling of my room. My housemate assures me the stain is old, it isn’t wet or growing. After watching a thriller where a dead body falls from the ceiling and an unspeakable horror dwells in the basement, I’m jumpy. In the moments between sleep and waking, I’m sure the stain on my ceiling is haunted, a harbinger of death. When I close my eyes, I swear I can feel the weight of something perched on my chest, tying knots in my hair and caressing my face.

---

Brooke White is a Michigander with a penchant for long conversations. Her work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Entropy, Iron Horse Literary Review, Superstition Review, March Xness, Honey Lit, and others. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota. She’s at work on a book about desire and fairy tales @brkthewriter  

Kelly Vance

Coping Strategies

Coping Strategy - #67  

 Lift the glass half-glued to the vegetable crisper by caramelized soy sauce spilled seven years ago and never cleaned because you had better things to do. Ease it gently into the soapy bath waiting in the sink. Carefully guard its sharp corners, knowing it shares your own fragility, is as likely to slice your tender layers as you are to chip or shatter its transparent soul. Massage the stains and debris from its face, slipping the sponge below the water’s surface to pull the suds up and over, delicate as a sacrament. Love again this small servant you had forgotten, ignored for so many years but who still covered, still crisped, never questioned or failed.

Coping Strategy - #218

A frightening, phallic, orange arrow from a to z like a smiling enticement, irresistible in its simplicity, calls me to the browser one day, to the app the next. Waking at night, my fingers tingle in response to its siren voice, beckoning, promising, seducing – Pick up where you left off or Keep shopping for or Buy Again rising from the screen like pretty billboards on the virtual path to bankruptcy. How many more pairs of yoga pants will end the pandemic? How many books? Will more closet organizers fix global warming? Will another pair of shoes make Black Lives Matter? Load the cart. Proceed to checkout.  

Coping Strategy - #292        

Scattered, covered, slovenly-smothered, grease-shined, delicious, not even nutritious, sauteed, baked, browned, and embellished; relished with cheese, with scallions, with joy, with sour cream, butter and bacon convoys; sliced paper thin, fried, scalloped or mashed, sliced into cubes, sliced into hash; loaded, exploded, dripping and messy, tongue-wet, thick, creamed before blessing; fondant, dumplinged, puffed, Romanoffed, cakes that send your palate aloft; rolled into gnocchi, crafted like wedges, Frenched like au gratin with rosemary hedges; garlic, savory, chard, curry or thyme; sublime spuds, coquettish croquettes or flirtatious frittatas; you say po-tay-to… and I say po-tah-tahs!

Coping Strategy - #346

Aside from the fact that her feet are a blundering ballet of bricks, she can tell she is drunk by the way every limb goes lax, loose. How her knees and elbows feel ungimbaled. She grows obsessed with the rise and fall of her diaphragm, the pulse of her heart beating a drama rabbit rumba in her lower lip. Away fall the aches and pains of 45 years, joints and tendons drift away, drop away. And she rotates her ankles and wrists, while the neck and spine of her life crack and pop, leaving only release. Liminal, she hangs between reality and all the dreams she left behind. Wonders if the smoke she smells is from the riots, the wildfires, or the heat of her own clutch-handed fear.

---

Kelly Vance attends Eastern Kentucky University's MFA program where she received the Emerging Writers Award for poetry. She is Chair of Kentucky State Poetry Society's Annual Student Poetry Contest. Vance completed the Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy affiliated with Women Writing for (a) Change and incorporates conscious leadership concepts into her writing, mentorship, and professional work as a psychiatrist.

Barlow Crassmont

Mount Everest

He never should’ve hit Matthew. 

The slander, the swearing, the backstabbing - whatever. But physical harm? Robbie crossed the line, and awoke my wrath. I don’t fight, never have, and until recently, vowed that I never will. But after hearing of Matthew’s injuries, a volcanic fire began to stir in my stomach. I was ready to punch, swing, grab, twist, scratch, poke, whatever it took. I was ready to bully a bully. 

My decision to tell everyone of my plans was fairness incarnate, for the last thing I wanted was that son of a bitch to claim I sucker punched him, or crept up on him unawares. I wanted everyone to know, and to spread the word, near and far; once he got wind of it, he’d be ready. And the fight would be as honest as can be. 

My words, when I was convinced of their eventual outcome, were spoken, not screamed, and delivered with the tempo of a swiss clock.

“I’m gonna kill him.” 

Footsteps ceased, heads turned, and eyes were narrowed in my direction. Some of them rolled, accompanied by chuckles their authors poorly tried to conceal. Truth be told, I couldn’t give a rat’s behind.

Robbie had kicked his share of ass, and had more than a few pounds on me. Not many gave me a chance. I overheard Jasper Crawler, during lunch, say to Wally Rhyne, That dude’s out of his mind. Robbie will knock him into next week! Few students were on my side, and even fewer of the faculty. Last Wednesday, Mr. Beaumont asked me to stay after English class. I was worried my assignments were slacking, but was relieved to hear the real reason. 

“Son, I’ve heard the rumors. I don’t advocate violence,” he said. “If I were you, I’d give up any retaliatory ideas. An expulsion will hardly look good on your college application.”

He had a point. They all did. I was nothing, a nobody, and hardly a favorite in any altercation. It was courage alone that dictated my actions; brain and logic I’ve long since suppressed, like an ugly shirt shoved deep into a closet crevice. 

Happy to report they’ve hardly been missed. 

As the big day neared, and I pondered the wheres, whens and hows, Everett Macintosh appeared behind me in the restroom, like an apparition voyeur. His reflection in the cracked mirror was fierce and ghastly, nearly resembling that of the undead. 

“They’re premiering a new game at the Arcade,” he said. “Everyone’s gonna be there. Including Robbie.”

“Tonight?” I asked. 

He nodded. “You’re gonna do it, aren’t you? It’d be like climbing the highest mountain. An elusive peak high above the clouds. I don’t think anyone’s ever done it.”

“Of course I will. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because you could end up like Matthew.”

Friday evening saw Jake & Dave’s Arcade filled to capacity. Teenagers tall and short, thin and long, filled the game room and the pinball area, like a European rave. Pierced nostrils accompanied lips of same ornaments, and establishment bashing black shirts was the overwhelming theme among those present. Sweat was abundant, and exposed flesh glistened under the dim lights. Music blasted past the deafening stage, and weed invaded the lungs before the nose picked up its aroma. I meandered inside, incidentally bumping and rubbing against the thick crowd, trying to avoid their limbs, yet unsuccessfully. 

Robbie stood towering over the new video game monitor, his shoulders wider and further from the ground than the boys who circled him. Truck tattoos glowered on his left arm, his t-shirt’s sleeves rolled upwards to reveal his large biceps. At the sight of me, those circling him gasped, collectively pointed, and retreated into the background, like frightened sheep. Robbie stood aloof, indifferent, unyielding. He didn’t turn when he saw me from the corner of his eye, standing next to him. I was thankful he couldn’t sense my heart rate, which beat faster than a hummingbird’s wings.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said. His eyes never left the screen, his hands jiggling and his fingers pressing. Occasionally he took a drag from a cigarette in the adjacent ashtray.

“Retribution,” I said. I stared relentlessly, with clenched fists and flared nostrils, hoping it’d frighten him. I can only assume he sensed my ferocity, and that’s why he turned, with a bewildering smile that conveyed admiration. He glanced at his friends, and pointed at me in jest, as if to ridicule me. 

His initial swing was uncoordinated, and surprisingly lethargic (he stank of booze worse than a gasoline canister). I avoided it with little difficulty. Robbie may have moved at slightly-higher-than-average speed, but to me his flailing limbs appeared as in slow motion. They were the swivels and wobbles of an oppressor recently scolded -however little - by father time. Before he recovered, my fist crashed against his cheek with the unabashed force of a bulldozer. 

I felt one of my fingers break like a twig. Robbie wobbled and staggered, then fell on one knee. With strenuous effort, he rose again. But before he could gather himself, I struck his other cheek with my left hand. My fist crushed under his iron jaw, and the initial wince I emitted soon turned into a cry of pain. It resonated around the facility like a valley echo, and soon drew additional patrons to our tussle. More eyeballs were pointed towards my current pain than had ever gazed at me during my prime.

Robbie’s blood mixed with mine over my raw knuckles. He fell like a swaying tree, and once his face was on the ground, I kicked him several times. Barely conscious, he grabbed my leg, hugging onto it like a long lost kin. Once I brought my left foot down onto his head with full force, he let go. Simultaneously, his teeth went flying across the floor, like rectangular pieces of gum sprinkled with red. He whimpered extensively while I stood over him, wearing his blood as proudly as a championship belt. 

When he ceased making noise, I walked away. Everyone held their breath as I passed, their eyes tracking me, like a sniper’s dot. Murmurs followed me outside in a manner of transparent spirits, and the fresh air injected me with a dreamlike sensation. I crossed the street, and found myself under the tall lamps, their shadows stretching far across the pavement. 

Yet the only shadow missing was my own, its absence as peculiar as the starless sky above.  

---

Barlow Crassmont has lived in USA, Eastern Europe, Middle East and China. When not teaching or writing, he dabbles in juggling, solving the Rubik’s Cube, and learning other languages. He has been published by British Science Fiction Association, The Chamber Magazine, and Wilderness House Literary Review. 

Michael Griffo

JUST A KISS

We’re in a windowless room.  There’s a small table and chair SR.  It’s dim, but we can see a man sitting in a chair, no tied to it.  The chair is just off center to the left.  He’s wearing chinos, a dress shirt, and loafers.  His hands are behind his back and his legs are tied to the legs of the chair with thick rope.  He is blindfolded and a white cloth is stuffed into his mouth.  At first, he doesn’t move, he isn’t unconscious, just catching his breath.  Suddenly, his body jolts and he tries to break free.  No use.  He does it again and the chair wiggles, but he’s tied too tightly.  A man enters from SL dressed in jeans, loafers, and a dress shirt.  He is in his mid-40s and looks like a suburban dad.  He turns on a light.  If possible, it’s a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.  He’s holding a manila envelope.  

FRANK
That’s useless.

The man in the chair looks in the direction of FRANK’s voice, but FRANK crosses to SR and puts the envelope on a table.  There’s a chair next to it.

FRANK
You know how well the rope is knotted.  You can feel it.

Pause and then the man wiggles violently.

FRANK
Stop that.  (The man ignores FRANK and continues to try and break free.)  No.  No!  Knock it off!

The man keeps trying, his chair teetering from side to side.

FRANK
(Screaming in the man’s ear.) I said knock it the fuck off!

The man stops moving, but his body is tense, he’s waiting.  FRANK is just as tense as he watches.  After a moment, FRANK takes the chair and moves it away from the table so he can sit next to GARRETT, on his right.  He sits down.

FRANK
You know it’s a waste of time.  You know that.  So please just stop.  Just sit there like a good boy, okay?  That’s all I’m asking you to do.  Sit there.  Nothing more.  (Beat) Not yet.  Show me you can do that and I’ll take the gag out of your mouth.  (FRANK watches the man, waiting for him to move, he doesn’t.)  Good.  Thank you.  I’m going to take the gag out now and you can scream if you want, but it won’t do you any good.  Nod if you understand that.

The man nods his head.

FRANK
We’re far from home.  No neighbors to hear you, to get in the way and ruin your peace.  If it makes you feel better you can scream, but you’ll be wasting your energy.

FRANK slowly walks toward the man and pulls the gag out of his mouth.  The man breathes deeply and then takes several more breaths.

GARRETT
(Calmly) Take off the blindfold.  (Beat) I know it’s you Frank.

FRANK thinks about this for a moment and then gets up and takes off the blindfold.  The two men stare at each other.  There’s recognition, almost relief, and then confusion in GARRETT’s eyes.  FRANK puts the blindfold and gag next to the manila envelope.

GARRETT
Why are you doing this?

FRANK
I love it out here.  We all do.  Did.  Spent so many weekends here, summer weekends by the lake.  Winter too, snow tubing, skiing.

GARRETT
I said, why are you doing this?

FRANK
This place was our sanctuary, our private getaway.  It hasn’t been the same since.  We’ve tried, but . . .

GARRETT
This is senseless and you know it.

FRANK
(Beat, maybe) This place is anything you want it to be.  That’s why I called it Chameleon House.  I didn’t put up a sign or anything, family joke.  It can be silent and calm or deafening and chaotic.  I appreciate both.  Which do you prefer?  (Beat) Silence or chaos?

GARRETT
Untie me.  Let me go and I won’t tell anyone about this.  No one has to find out.

FRANK
You’re not going to tell anyone.

GARRETT
That’s right, I won’t.  So, let me go.

FRANK
It doesn’t matter how you get out of here, Garrett, you’re not going to breathe a word of this.  Whether I let you go or if you escape on your own, which you can’t, whether you walk out of here or leave in a stretcher you’re never going to tell anyone.  You know that.

GARRETT
C’mon, Frank.

FRANK
You know that.

GARRETT
(BEAT) Fine, you’re right, I’m not going to tell so then let me go.  You’ve made your point.

FRANK
Have I?

GARRETT
Yes. I mean, look at me.  I’m tied up here in your . . . in the middle of nowhere . . . nobody knows I’m here.  I’m fucked.  You made your point.

FRANK
That wasn’t the point I was trying to make.

GARRETT
(Trying to control his anger.) I am at your mercy.  That’s what you want, isn’t it?  You’ve made your point.

FRANK
You think that’s what I want?

GARRETT
What else?

FRANK
No wonder.  Really, no wonder.  I didn’t bring you here and risk . . . I didn’t do all of this to make a point.

GARRETT
Then why?

FRANK
You honestly think this is about me?

GARRETT
Yes!  Of course it is!  (Softer) We know what this is about.

GARRETT waits for FRANK to speak, but he doesn’t.  FRANK merely stares at GARRETT.

GARRETT
We both know why I’m here.

FRANK still doesn’t respond, only stares.

GARRETT
This is about you and me.

FRANK
(Long pause). Really.  Just you and me?

GARRETT
(Looking away from FRANK no longer able to maintain his stare.) And them.

FRANK
Yes.  Them.

GARRETT
I understand why you feel the need to do this.

FRANK
You do?

GARRETT
Yes.  And I don’t blame you.

FRANK
How magnanimous.  How so fucking noble of you.  Thank you for not blaming me.

GARRETT
It was no one’s fault.  It was an accident.

FRANK
You can choose that word until you take your last breath, but you know as well as I do, as well as everyone knows, that that word is a lie.

GARRETT
It isn’t.

FRANK
It wasn’t an accident!

GARRETT
The judge declared . . .

FRANK
You mean, your buddy.

GARRETT
I didn’t know him.

FRANK
Not by name.  But by allegiance.  You’re the same kind.  You protect each other, ignore the facts, claim it was an accident, and agree to believe the lie so you can move forward in a state of manufactured bliss.  But that condition is fragile, it can rupture at any moment if the truth that lies just beneath the surface breaks free.

GARRETT
Musings and rope aren’t going to get us anywhere.  It’s over.

FRANK
(At some point, FRANK gets up and walks over to the table and with his back to GARRETT he takes a gun and bullets out of the manila envelope.). Of course, you’d think it was over.  It’s what you’d like to believe.  You’re safe.  Your family is safe.  Thanks to a judge who was bound to an oath to protect his brothers instead of his duty to protect the innocent, you got away with it.

FRANK turns around and GARRETT sees that he’s holding a gun.  FRANK doesn’t look at GARRETT, he puts bullets in the gun.

GARRETT
Frank no!

FRANK
Your job, now, is to move forward.  Mine is to look back.

GARRETT
Frank, my God, you can’t . . . don’t do this.  We’re friends.

FRANK
(Finally looking at GARRETT.) We are not friends.

GARRETT
This won’t change anything.  Think about your family, they need you now more than ever.

FRANK
My son needs me.

GARRETT
Dwelling on the past won’t change anything.

FRANK
Thanks to you, the past is all I have.

As GARRETT gets angrier and louder, FRANK remains calm.  His fury has not disappeared, it’s merely controlled. For the moment.  FRANK holds the gun at his side, almost as if he’s forgotten what he’s holding.

GARRETT
(Exploding) It was an accident Frank!  A fucking accident!  No one meant for it to happen!

FRANK
Connor did.

GARRETT
No!

FRANK
Yes, Garrett, he did.  Your son knew exactly what he was doing.

GARRETT
He’s a boy!

FRANK
Eleven, nineteen, five, what does it matter?  His intent was to kill.

GARRETT
That isn’t true!  Frank, I know you’re in pain, I know that!  But you cannot believe . . .

FRANK
But I do.

GARRETT
My son would never intentionally kill!

FRANK
But he did.

GARRETT
He reacted!

FRANK
Violently.  With intention.

GARRETT
No!  He was confused, he didn’t understand what David had done.

FRANK
He understood.

GARRETT
The action, maybe . . . yes, yes, okay, but not why.  He didn’t understand why!

FRANK
So instead of asking my son for an explanation he silenced him.  Permanently.

GARRETT
He lashed out.  For God sakes he was scared.

FRANK
Of David?  The boys grew up together.  They learned to crawl at the same time.  They learned the right way to swing a baseball bat on the same afternoon.  When did Connor learn to be afraid of my son?

GARRETT
When David changed everything?

FRANK
What did he change?

GARRETT
Everything!  Rules.  Their relationship.  Right and wrong!

FRANK
Right and wrong?  Really?

GARRETT
No, I didn’t . . .

FRANK
Let me take a wild guess here, your son was right and mine was wrong?

GARRETT
That’s not what I’m saying.

FRANK
(Screaming and getting right in GARRETT’S face.) Then what are you saying?!  Tell me!

GARRETT
(He is terrified of FRANK and of the truth.) You know I loved David like my own son.  You know that.  But . . . he . . .

FRANK
What?!  What did our son do?

GARRETT
He crossed a line, Frank, you know he did.  He didn’t mean it, I know that, he couldn’t help himself.  He was . . . I don’t know . . . overcome, overwhelmed . . .

FRANK
Happy.

GARRETT
What?

FRANK
They both had just been picked to be on the A team.  Big accomplishment for an eleven-year-old.  Little League is important.  So maybe David was just happy.

GARRETT
Well, yes, sure.  Yes.

FRANK
And he expressed his happiness.

GARRETT
That isn’t what happened.

FRANK
My son expressed his happiness with a kiss.  Just a kiss.  And how did your son reply?  By pushing him to the ground and throwing rocks at his head until he couldn’t get back up.

GARRETT
Connor panicked.

FRANK
No, Connor killed.  Deliberately.

GARRETT
He didn’t understand what was happening.

FRANK
David understood.  When he lay on the ground, bleeding, watching his best friend slam rocks into his face.

GARRETT
Connor didn’t mean to kill David, he just . . . he couldn’t control his anger.

FRANK
Did you teach him to be so angry?  Did you teach him to respond with violence when his friend tried to express how happy he was?

GARRETT
It isn’t that simple and you know it.  Think of yourself at that age, a boy doesn’t understand feelings, he can’t control how he responds.  But he knows right from wrong.

FRANK
Again, judgment.  My son is wrong because he wanted a kiss.  Your son is right because he wanted death.  This is what you believe.  You and your wife and Connor and the judge and the whole world, you all believe my son, my boy, deserved what he got!  He deserved to be killed like a dog because he defied your idea, your definition of how a boy should act.  That’s what you believe, isn’t it? (FRANK waits for GARRETT to respond, but he doesn’t.) Answer me!

GARRETT
David didn’t deserve to die, no, but Connor doesn’t deserve to be punished.  They both gave in to ugly instincts.

FRANK
Ugly?!

GARRETT
They both did things they knew were wrong.

FRANK
It was a kiss!  One small kiss.  How many times did Connor strike my son with a rock?  How many?

GARRETT
I don’t know!

FRANK
Nine!  He threw nine rocks at my son’s beautiful face!  Nine!  After each time he picked up a rock he had a chance to stop, he had a chance to pick up my son instead and get him help, but he didn’t.  He continued to strike my boy.  His face.  And you don’t think he intended to kill?  You think David’s death was an accident?

GARRETT
(Beat) It’s the only choice I have.

FRANK
Because you want to protect your son.

GARRETT
Yes.

FRANK
(He holds the gun up to GARRETT’s head.) Which is what I need to do?

GARRETT
Killing me isn’t going to protect your son, Frank.

FRANK
It will protect his memory and his spirit.  He’ll know that someone paid thanks to his father.

GARRETT
What about the rest of your kids?  Your family, Christine?

FRANK
My wife will understand.  And she’ll thank me.

GARRETT
(Frantic) You can’t do this, please Frank, this is a mistake.  I’m begging you, please don’t do this.

FRANK
(Quiet and by now, if not earlier, he is kneeling next to GARRETT.) Do you think my son begged?  Do you think he asked Connor to stop?  Please, Connor, don’t throw another rock.  I didn’t mean anything, I just wanted a kiss.  Just a kiss.

GARRETT
(Crying) I don’t know.  Oh God, I don’t know.

FRANK
Do you think Connor heard my son begging for his life?  Or do you think he just ignored his words?

GARRETT
Dear God forgive me.  I’m so sorry.  I’m so sorry.

FRANK uses the gun to turn GARRETT’s face toward him.  He stares at him for a moment and then kisses him.  Just once.

FRANK
That’s all my boy wanted.  Just a kiss.  Thanks to your son he’ll never get another.

(FRANK gets up and sits on the chair.  He rests the gun in his lap.)

GARRETT
What now?

(FRANK starts to stay something, but stops.  He looks at GARRETT, then looks away.  He’s searching for an answer.  After a long pause . . .

BLACKOUT

THE END

---

Michael Griffo has written 14 novels, including two young adult gay-themed supernatural trilogies, all published by Kensington Books.  Griffo is an award-winning playwright and has written over 20 plays, some of which are available for license at TRWplays.com and Playscripts.com.  For more information, visit www.michaelgriffo.com.

Steph Prizhitomsky

Rose

Rose had been in the hospital since the fall, and six months was a lifetime when you’re twelve. I’d asked my mother that morning, shouldn’t Rose be heading home soon? My mother didn’t answer. She had to leave the room. I could hear her quiet sobs from the hallway even with the door shut. 

Whatever was wrong with Rose, she didn’t seem to be getting any better. I watched Rose grow weaker and weaker wrapped in starched sheets and wool blankets. But everyone told me not to worry. So I didn’t. I unplugged the IV tube from her veiny hand, and three drops of blood came with it. 

Is it time to go? She asked me. 

Yes. 

Are we going home? 

No. 

Then where are we going? 

A trip, I told her, To make you better again. 

She thought for a moment: I should call my mom, so she doesn’t worry. 

Don’t call her. 

She paused and then she said, Is this the kind of trip you don’t tell anyone about? 

I took her hand. She was cold as ice and shivering a little. 

Yes. 

No one noticed two girls walking through the halls of the hospital hand in hand: me and Rose, Rose and me. Rose in the papery hospital gown. Rose, spidery thin with gaunt eyes that had sunken into her skull. Rose with specks of dried blood on her wrist. The receptionist at the front desk didn’t even look up from the phone as we passed by her silently. And then we were free, and Rose was Rose again, running her hands through the tall grass and dandelions and wildflowers that still held that unnatural vibrancy of color and smell that do not seem to retain past childhood. 

Four miles into the woods Rose had to stop. She’d been stopping and starting since the roads gave way to dirt and mud. 

Here, she said, We’ll stop here. 

I lay awake that night for a long while. I could hear her raspy, strained breathing through the long hours till it blended into the gentle hum of cicadas and leaves rustling in the grass and became nothing more than a natural thing of the forest, another nighttime noise lulling me to sleep, and I slept. 

The next morning we went further, and that is where we found home. Home didn’t look like much at all. An old house abandoned, alone, and rotting with holes in the floors, but it was larger than Rose’s white room at the hospital. 

We found its owner in the second floor bathroom. He was rotting too. We shut the door quietly on our way out. But the riches were what he left behind. Cans of food to last six winters, a roaring hearth with plenty of firewood, every sugary confection known to man. 

After we’d had our fill, we explored the rest of the treasures: moth eaten clothes that held the promise of forgotten luxury, four bedrooms all but emptied save the most gloriously comfortable beds, moonlight shining through a hole in the roof of a floor to ceiling library where rain had clearly made its mark. We counted six hundred water stained books before we gave up. And so home became home. 

It was our place. We lonely cavemen, we unwilling time travelers, were free to create a new civilization if we chose and call it our own. We threw an entire bottle of bleach on the stove and burned a dozen eggs before we managed to make a decent omelet. It was a little green, and the yolk had soured weeks before, but it was the greatest thing I’d ever tasted because it was ours and ours alone. 

That day, we were housewives cooking for wealthy husbands away at work. Another day, we draped over us silk sheets and were warriors in togas akin to that of a great Ancient Roman army. In the library, there was an entire shelf dedicated to Shakespeare, and we recited as far as act 2 of Julius Caesar before the pages were too stuck together to continue. That day we were players. 

There was a long fur coat in the master bedroom we sometimes used as a blanket on especially cold nights. I ripped out a handful of the fur and taped it to my upper lip. On my head, I placed an old top hat, and in my hand, a wooden branch for a cane. 

What are you today, Gilly? Rose asked. 

Today, I’m a man, I said. 

In turn, Rose chose the evening gown we’d found packed away, never once worn. It was nearly twice the length of her and dragged along the floor. 

Are you a woman today Rose? I asked. 

No, she said, Today I’m a lady. 

Rose danced in the foyer and laughed every time she tripped and fell, as I smoked unlit cigars, played the simplest card games I knew, and talked of childhood politics. The next day, we switched. 

We were happy. I’d like to think we were, but no matter what I did, how hard I tried, how many times I prayed to gods I’d never seen or heard, Rose was getting worse. I stopped trying to fall asleep on the nights when it was hard for her to breathe. And then it wasn’t just nights.  

Two weeks passed. Rose stopped sleeping. She grew weaker where I’d never felt lighter out there just the two of us in our home under the open sky as the roof slowly caved in on us. In the library, there were six books on medicines, herbs, and treatments, and two of them were still legible. Armed with bleeding notes and diagrams, we searched through all the cabinets floor by floor till we came across a prescription bottle. Near empty, but it’d do. 

One a day, I told her. 

It was what I’d hear the nurses at the hospital say a thousand times. Then I rubbed some pain relieving ointment on her throat and temples as the book instructed. Rose said she’d never felt better, but still, she did not sleep. 

You never know when things are ending, till they end. You always think there’s just a little more time. Just a few more days and nights,  but on the night when it was all over, a singing bird woke me. 

It was far too late for a bird to be singing. All other warbles had ceased, and yet it sang. I listened for a few minutes before I realized Rose was not there. I found her outside, standing over something that I immediately knew from the smell was dying. A deer I saw as I came closer. Its legs were broken, and it looked as if a hunter had gotten to it. It couldn’t even run away. Rose had a stone in hand. She raised it over her head, over the deer, to kill it. 

I yanked her back. 

It won’t last the night, she said. 

I shook my head, It might. 

We have to put it out of its misery. 

I shook my head again, No. 

In the end, she lowered the stone and let it fall to her side. We decided to wait with it. Till the end at least. We didn’t know if a deer understood the comfort of not dying alone, but perhaps it wasn’t only the deer that kept us there. I don’t remember when I fell asleep, when the blood pooled all around me staining me with a deep red I could never quite get out, no matter how hard I scrubbed. 

In the morning, the deer was dead, and Rose was gone. A rock had crushed its head. I yelled her name and only heard my own echo return to me. I stayed out there in our house another three nights hoping whatever was taking Rose would take me too. But it didn’t. 

I only starved slowly till I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t want to be a human that day. I hated everything about how weak we were, but I did not know if it was weakness that kept Rose away. Weakness or strength. She did not return. I screamed. I cried. I broke windows. 

Six more days had passed when they finally found me. Alone. I went willingly. They never found Rose, but I did. Buckled into the backseat of the police car barreling down the only road that ran through those woods, leaving dirt and dust in the air behind us, I saw her then. 

Running through the woods light as a bird, but not towards me, towards some unknown destination privy only to her. She did not see me. It almost looked like she was floating. When I blinked, she was gone. That day, though I was surrounded by people, weeping parents, both Rose’s and mine, I was alone. 

Rose was gone. Rose was gone, and it was my fault. I knew that. Perhaps I’d only postponed the inevitable. Or expedited it. But still, I hoped against all might, wherever she was, that day, and every day after, she was free. Free to be whatever she wanted. Free to just be a girl. 

---

Steph Prizhitomsky (she/her) is the eighteen-year-old head screenwriter of Future is Female Productions, co-founder of the White Rabbit Film Festival, screenwriter/director of Imagine Networks’ horror miniseries Distress Signals, and editor in chief of Suits and Sage Magazine.

William Cass

Forgive Us Our Trespasses

In retrospect, it wasn’t all that surprising to Father Frederick to learn that someone had stolen the collections from both Sunday Masses on that cold, early-December morning.  As far as he knew, the ushers’ collections procedures had remained unchanged at least since he’d inherited them when he came to St. Richard’s six years earlier.  After collections were taken, the ushers brought the baskets directly into the sacristy through the door adjacent to the altar while the Mass continued.  When Mrs. Hennesey, the elderly housekeeper he’d also inherited, heard the first strains of the service’s Communion hymn, she walked across the small parking lot to the sacristy and carried the satchel of accumulated moneys back to the rectory safe for deposit the next day.

On that Sunday when he followed the altar boys in prayer-like procession into the sacristy after Mass, Father Frederick found Mrs. Hennesey standing very still in front of its counter.  She was dressed, as always, in a thin cardigan and the culinary uniform she insisted on wearing, her hands clasped together at her waist.  Her mouth was set in a taut line, and her angry, dancing eyes fixed on his.

The altar boys continued through to the vestry while Father Frederick stopped short of her.  They regarded one another while a succession of vehicle engines started in the parking lot until he said, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s gone.”

“What is?”

“The collections satchel.  It’s been taken, stolen.”

Father Frederick felt himself stiffen.  He glanced behind her where he saw the familiar assortment of chalices, altar linens, and holy oils on the counter, but no collections satchel.  A flush spread up behind his ears.

“And look,” she said pointing to the side door.  “I found it wide open when I came across.”

“How long ago?”

“Ten minutes.”

Father Frederick kept his gaze on the open door as if he might find something there, then pinched the bridge of his nose, and muttered, “I suppose we should call the police.”

Mrs. Hennesey lifted her cell phone from a cardigan pocket.  “I already have,” she said.  “They’re on their way.”

It took more than an hour to conclude things with the officers before he and Mrs. Hennesey finally returned to the rectory and the lunch she’d prepared for him waiting on the dining room table under a dish towel.  Even though he’d asked her repeatedly not to, she pulled out his chair for him, and when he sat, snatched away the towel before going through the swinging door into the kitchen to make his tea.  Carefully arranged on his plate sat a tuna fish sandwich and a mound of German potato salad. 

The last item was one Mrs. Hennesey often made for him under the belief that because of his name he had Germanic roots, when actually most of his ancestry was Scandinavian.  He’d learned quickly after taking over for the retiring pastor that it would be useless to try to correct or change her assumptions, routines, and expectations.      

The grandfather wall clock in the foyer made a single long chime.  One o’clock and already the afternoon’s wan light seemed on the decline.  The window beside him rattled slightly, and bare tree branches nodded on the cold breeze outside.  As he began to eat, he could hear Mrs. Hennesey speaking to someone on her cell phone, already reporting in high animation details about the theft.

“Almost nine hundred dollars most Sundays,” he heard her say.  “Can you imagine?  And the gall to walk right in through the outside door to the sacristy!”

Father Frederick closed his eyes and pinched his nose again.  If he had ever known a bigger busybody than Mrs. Hennesey, he couldn’t recall when.  He’d often puzzled over how he might relieve himself of her assistance, but she’d been volunteering in the position for over thirty years, so he could hardly fire or replace her.  His frustration was mitigated somewhat by the fact that she only came daily from 11-2 in order to clean and prepare his lunch and a supper she left for him to have later.  She was a fastidious housekeeper, but only a passable cook.

After Mrs. Hennesey departed for the day, Father Frederick bundled up and went for his afternoon walk through his neighborhood of modest brick homes, most of which had been built in the 60s during the Rust Belt’s better days. 

Since then, the town’s main factory had closed  down, although most buildings like the church and rectory, remained smoke-stained from its chimneys.  Father Frederick turned the collar of his Mackinaw coat up against the chill.  Not many vehicles passed on the scarred blacktop, and he encountered even fewer along the cracked sidewalk, tilted here and there by tree roots. 

He considered the missing collections as he walked, his hands stuffed deep into his coat pockets.  Any number of people could be responsible for the theft.  Almost all the parishioners knew where those collections were stored, and certainly any current or former altar boy did.  A simple passerby could have witnessed Mrs. Hennesey’s weekly journey between sacristy and rectory while clasping her bulky money satchel.  For that matter, Mrs. Hennesey herself or someone in her orbit could have been involved, although that seemed to him highly unlikely.  What appeared certain to Father Frederick, however, was that a need had existed for whoever had taken it.  

He was pondering that need when he came upon a member of the church’s Rosary Guild walking her dog, a large woman in a scarf and overcoat.  

“Oh, Father,” she said.  “I heard about the larceny.  Horrible.”

 “My.”  Father Frederick balled his hands into fists in his pockets.  “Word travels fast.”

“In this town, it does.  Any idea who the thief may be?” 

Father Frederick shook his head.  “Not really, no.  The police are involved.”

“So I understand.  Let’s hope they make an arrest soon.”  The dog yanked on its leash, and she followed after it, saying, “Take care, Father.”  

“You, too.”

He had two more similar encounters before entering the busier part of town.  Most of the shops along Main Street were closed, some permanently.  He passed the train station and thought about first arriving there to assume his new post.  He’d requested a transfer from his prison chaplain position in another state to be closer to his mother whose health was failing and who’d recently entered a senior care facility an hour away.  The assignment came with the use of a parish car, and he’d appreciated being able to visit her each week, as well as to occasionally drive her over and back so she could attend both his Sunday services.  She’d raised him alone and had been as devout as she was devoted to him.  She’d passed away after his second year there, and he felt somehow adrift afterwards, a bit untethered.  

He returned home on a narrow street crowded with duplexes and drab apartment buildings that paralleled the train tracks.  His answering machine light was blinking on the table in the foyer when he came through the front door.  He pushed it and heard the strained voice of the head of the church council.

“Hell of a thing, Father,” the male voice said.  “Hell of a thing.  Who steals church collections?  What kind of person does a thing like that?”  His voice exhaled an exasperated breath.  “Anyway, the word is out, and people are upset.  Mrs. Hennesey’s sister has already emailed the newspaper a Letter to the Editor expressing her outrage, and there are comments all over the parish’s Facebook page.  But don’t you worry, we’ll get that money back somehow.  Have a rummage sale, resurrect a few bingo nights.” 

The corners of Father Federick’s mouth rose at the choice of that last verb.  “Or maybe they’ll catch the bastards – pardon my French, Father – who did it.  Anyway, don’t concern yourself over this.”  A pause followed.  “Not a bit.”

The message ended abruptly.  Father Frederick watched the red light on the answering machine blink off and found himself thinking back again to an incident in his youth that had always haunted him.  He’d been seven or eight at the time and had accidentally broken the window of a cranky, old neighbor while throwing rocks in a vacant lot bordering his property.  The neighbor stormed outside and demanded twenty dollars retribution by the following day if Father Frederick didn’t want him to tell his mother.  He had no money of his own, so Father Frederick snuck a twenty dollar bill from the envelope in their mudroom cabinet where his mother kept money to pay Luis, the Puerto Rican man who mowed their lawn and did their shoveling in the winter.  Luis always let himself into the mudroom after he’d finished, knocked on their back door, and Father Frederick’s mother would meet him there to give him his payment.  When she found the missing money, she accused Luis of taking it and after he denied it, fired him on the spot.  Father Frederick heard the entire exchange from his bedroom and never did anything to correct it. 

He looked down now at the back of his hands, already wrinkling at the knuckles although he’d only just turned sixty and recalled Luis’ weather-beaten, calloused hands.  He stood listening to the wall clock next to him make its slow ticks.  After a few minutes, the furnace in the basement kicked on.  Finally, he sighed, took off his coat, hung it in the hall closet, and went into the kitchen where he could smell beef stew simmering in the crock pot.  He forced himself to think about pleasant ways to fill the hours before bed: perhaps a hot toddy with the evening news on television, supper, some time working on his stamp collection, a new biography from the library he’d been looking forward to starting, a warm bath.

The next morning dawned clear, but a dusting of snow coated the parking lot when Father Frederick crossed it to the sacristy for early morning Mass.  The usual small gathering of daily communicants awaited him scattered among the first few pews as he began the service.  The overall congregation had only remained stable because two smaller churches in nearby towns had closed and their members had no choice but to travel to St. Richard’s.  

After Mass and breakfast, he went to visit several parishioners who were homebound with long illnesses or had been admitted to the hospital.  He stopped on his way back to do some grocery shopping, unpacked his purchases in the kitchen, then decided to take his walk early because the weather forecast called for the first real snowstorm of the season that afternoon.  He followed the same route as always, except for a stop in the park to toss stale bread crusts to the few ducks who remained on the pond, before returning home a little after eleven.  As he approached the rectory, he was surprised to see Mrs. Hennesey standing on the front step with the two policemen they’d dealt with the previous day.  She was holding the church’s collections satchel, which appeared to be full.

The trio just stared at him blankly for several moments without speaking when he joined them there.  Finally, the taller officer pointed to the satchel and said, “So, it seems you’ve had a bit of good luck.”

His partner gestured towards Mrs. Hennesey and said, “Tell him.”

“Well, I’m still stunned.”  When she turned her eyes to Father Frederick, they held a combination of bewilderment, chagrin, and astonishment.  “It happened not a quarter hour ago as I was walking up to the rectory from my bus stop.  I startled a young man who’d just put this satchel inside the storm door there and started back down the steps.  When he saw me, he looked aghast, troubled, terrified really, then ran off.  I shouted after him, but he disappeared around the corner.  Gone.”

Something akin to hope had crept inside Father Frederick.  He said, “He returned the collections.”

She glanced down at the satchel.  “It appears so.”

“Remarkable,” Father Frederick heard himself mutter.

“Of course, we can’t know if all the money is there,” the taller officer said.  “He may have taken some.  And the fact remains, it was stolen.”  He faced Mrs. Hennesey.  “Do you think you could describe this man to our sketch artist down at the station?  We may still be able to apprehend him.”

“I suppose so,” she said.  “I think I could, yes.”

“That isn’t necessary,” Father Frederick said quietly.  He turned to the officers.  “We don’t want to press charges.”

They both frowned; Mrs. Hennesey did the same, a little huff escaping her.  The taller officer stroked his chin, then said, “Well, you’ll at least let us know if those collections seem less than usual.”

“No,” Father Frederick told him.  “I won’t be doing that either.”  

The three of them stood blinking at him until the shorter officer finally gave a gruff shrug and said, “You know how to reach us if you change your mind.  And start locking that sacristy door.”

Father Frederick nodded, then extended his hand toward Mrs. Hennesey.  “Here,” he said.  “I can take that.  Why don’t you go home, skip working today.  You’ve had quite a shock.”

“I am a bit frazzled,” she mumbled.

“Go.  I just bought groceries and have plenty of that leftover stew you made.”  He regarded her bewildered expression and added, “It was delicious, by the way.”

She looked towards the street.  “I don’t know about buses at this hour.”

“We’ll be happy to run you home,” the taller officer said.

“Well,” Mrs. Hennesey said.  “All right.”

They exchanged polite nods, then Mrs. Hennesey accepted the shorter officer’s arm to lean on, and they made their way to the police cruiser a few feet away.  Father Frederick waited until they’d disappeared up the street to go inside the rectory.  He brought the satchel directly to the dining room table where he sat and emptied its contents.  Normally, he counted the money and filled out deposit slips while Mrs. Hennesey was around to avoid any suspicion of impropriety on his part, but he didn’t want her scrutiny on this particular occasion.  He separated the checks from the cash, calculating as he did, and it quickly became apparent that the collection was a normal one, perhaps even a little on the high side.  

Father Frederick suddenly stopped his sorting when his eyes fell upon something unexpected among the money.  On rare occasions, he’d found an odd but benign item in the collections: a wrapped piece of gum, a shopping list scribbled on a Post-it stuck to the back of a check, a balled tissue.  But at that moment, he felt his eyebrows knit as he lifted a crocheted baby bootie out of the pile.  It was pink and the size he imagined for a newborn.  He couldn’t fathom that it could have found its way into the pile during the ushers’ collections; that realization and its only alternate explanation sent a chill through him.

Father Frederick sat back in his chair and rubbed his thumb over the clumsy stitching in the bootie, staring at it.  He shook his head, swallowed, and turned his gaze to the window.  It had begun to snow outside: big, fat, crazy flakes.  Winter had arrived.  He remembered Luis bent over his snow shovel in their driveway, his breath coming in short clouds of exertion.  Luis’ eyes had been downturned at the outside edges, gentle and kind.  And he always had tiny, hard candies in his pants pocket that he gave Father Frederick whenever he saw him.  He spoke almost no English, so the gesture was silent, and without fail, accompanied by a small smile.  Father Frederick began to cry.

---

William Cass has had over 350 short stories accepted for publication in a variety of literary magazines such as december, Briar Cliff Review, and Mid-Level Management Literary Magazine.  He won writing contests at Terrain.org and The Examined Life Journal.  A nominee for both Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net anthologies, he has also received six Pushcart Prize nominations.  His first short story collection, Something Like Hope & Other Stories, was published by Wising Up Press in 2020, and a second collection, Uncommon & Other Stories, was recently released by the same press.  He lives in San Diego, California.

Joel Henry Little

Born on the Sabbath

It wasn’t so long ago when young Ezra, sleepless eyes all bloodshot and bleary in the wake of another morning-of research paper, found the gray-haired man with the tiny back wheel of his chair caught in a sewer grate. The afternoon sun, like the neighborhood around him, was dying fast. Strains of evening news themes turning over the hour echoed from open co-op windows up and down the block. Soon the voices of anchors would populate the empty street like ghosts at a mausoleum. Birds perched listlessly on fire escapes, unwilling to take wing in that heat. Red lights spun from the back of an ice cream truck on its long descent into the city. In his daze he’d thought himself alone in the center of a desolate world beyond redemption, until suddenly he wasn’t.

For a minute or so, Ezra stood and watched the man’s hunched spine for signs of breath. He didn’t want to be the one to make the dead body call. He was too afraid of cops and their thousand questions. When at last he saw a clear rise and fall in the dandruff-speckled tweed shoulders, he carried on walking.

“You may pass me by but you’ll not pass me again, young miss,” wheezed the old man.

“Who, me?” said Ezra. “I’m a boy. Man.”

“Ah. My eyes fail me. You’ve heard that one before, young boy-man?”

“Heard what?”

“It’s an old story. The shepherd and the gold-fleeced sheep. ‘You may pass me by but you’ll not pass me again.’ Some say it was Hashem he met on the road. Others say… it was the – Oh for Christ’s sake this wheel! These farkakte things, I can’t… Good God…”

“Do you need help?”

Ezra hoped he’d say no.

“Would you rather I didn’t?”

“No, sir.”

“Then I’m going that way. Push, please.”

Ezra lifted the wheel from the grate and walked the old man through the neighborhood. They exchanged little more than the odd “left here” or “mind the squirrel.” After a while, their conversation was reduced to gestures of the thumb and a few solemn “uh huh”s in reply. Two separate gaggles of dogwalkers crossed the street and back to avoid them.

Outside a small synagogue wedged between high-rises, the old man raised his right hand and Ezra understood they’d arrived at his destination.

“Alright then,” said Ezra. “Good night.”

“Is it?”

Perhaps he’d expected some sort of compensation, if not in cash then at least in paternal wisdom. Maybe a wink and a pat on the shoulder. But the old man just creaked along down the path to the double doors without so much as a nod of thanks. If it wasn’t Ezra, he supposed, it would’ve been another much like him. No righteous God would leave an old man stuck in the street all night. What a happy thing it would be, thought Ezra, to feel so entitled to the goodwill of others, and what sadness to feel so dependent on it.

From the balcony above the entrance, a younger Orthodox man with a tefillin box on his forehead pointed down at Ezra.

“You Jewish?”

“Technically.”

“How Jewish?”

“On my mom’s side.”

“Bar mitzvah?”

“I had one.”

“Good enough. We were waiting on a tenth and here you are. Come on up, I’ll meet you inside.”

Ezra neglected to mention the last time he’d stepped foot in a synagogue was on that same bar mitzvah morning. He tried unsuccessfully to block memories of nervous puking in the basement bathroom so profuse it postponed the afterparty at the Turkish restaurant he hated indefinitely. There were certain cousins of his who still grabbed their stomachs and fell to the floor laughing at the sight of his sorry face nearly seven years later. His throat seized and he forced himself to walk on if only to keep from gagging.

Inside, it smelled vaguely of a soup Ezra couldn’t place. The man from the balcony hopped down a set of rust-chewed stairs to meet him, long beard bobbing ahead with each step.

“It’s just this way. Put these on.”

He handed Ezra a blue felt yarmulke and a tallit of yellowed wool with a Hebrew inscription which meant nothing to him.

“I’m Yakob. Your name is?”

“Ezra.”

“Ezra. Huh. You know the old man?”

“We just met.”

“What a piece of work. A couple more screws loose and he’d be the Cyclone, yeah? Frighteningly old, too – hard to look straight at.”

Then Yakob led him into a dingily lit library where the other eight men had already begun to wobble in silent prayer. The open Torah ark around which they were gathered looked more like a plywood child’s coffin propped against the room’s eastern wall. Above it hung a watercolor rainbow covered in small gold handprints and misshapen Stars of David. A few men wore vests, others suspenders. No one looked younger than 35, though their beards might have deceived him. Through the occasional grunt and mumble he could hear a baby wailing away in the back.

Unsure of the correct way to participate, Ezra stuck his hands in his pockets and waited. He noted the water bubbles in the walls and the discolored patches in the carpet. He listened for changes in the wind outside and tried to piously meditate on the impermanence of his brief existence, but kept getting distracted wondering where the old man’s story about the shepherd could have possibly been headed. 

He couldn’t remember whether he’d left his phone on silent so he clicked the switch the other way. Then it occurred to him that if it had been set to silent it would now ring and only embarrass him further, standing there ridiculous in his sweatpants and hoodie in a place of worship for a God he didn’t believe in. He clicked it a few more times, leaving the matter to chance, until he noticed that everyone besides him and the rabbi had begun seating themselves in the semicircle of folding chairs around the makeshift bimah.

He stepped forward to join them, but before he could sit down he felt a tapping on his shoulder and heard a voice whisper in his ear, “Follow me, please.”

He looked around and saw a many-shawled woman hurrying out the door. Yakob and the other men didn’t seem to notice, so he followed her. 

The walls of the backroom were dominated by a poster for something called “Shalom Sesame” and about two dozen stickers of baseball team logos and assorted IDF insignia. The baby was now cooing contentedly in its bouncer as the woman wiped away jelly splotches from its chubby pink fingers.

“Shouldn’t I–”

“Shh.”

“But I thought they need–”

“They don’t need you, it’s fine. Look at you. Feh, but look at him, this mess. Ay-yi-yi… Sit down. Please.”

She pointed to a big rocking chair with a bib and a blanket on either arm. Ezra fell into it with a woody croak.

“You can take off the tallis. If you knew where it’s been you’d be thanking me. Now, the blanket goes on like this…”

Then she made an elaborate sweeping gesture over her shoulders as if donning a toga.

“Like this?” said Ezra.

“Eh, good enough.”

“Why am I wearing a blanket?”

“Why do you think? Hand me that. The bib, please.”

Ezra handed it to her. In a single motion, she slid the bib over the baby’s head and swept him up out of the bouncer and into Ezra’s arms. 

 “I’ll be right back,” she said.

In the minutes of waiting, neither Ezra nor the baby made a solitary sound. He’d never held a human baby before. The weight of the head shocked him, and as he balanced it on his elbow, image after horrific image of babies splayed bloodily on the ground like poor fallen birds rushed through his mind. His arms quivered like leaves in a rainstorm as he tried to avoid the wide brown eyes staring up at him, searching.

She returned wheeling the old man ahead of her. She sat him opposite Ezra, and for a moment the two watched him with what he felt was a certain degree of unwarranted suspicion.

“Uh hey,” said Ezra. “Again.”

“So you’ve met. This is his grandfather, Yakob.”

“Another one.”

“What’s he saying now, Lotte?” asked the old man.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to take him back?” asked Ezra.

“No, please, I insist. What a picture you two make. I said, ‘What a lovely picture they make,’ yes saba? Do you agree?”

“Heh?”

“He pretends not to hear. It’s a game he plays from time to time – don’t ask… Just the other day, I come into the house out of the rain – I was at the salon for an hour, maybe two (not for me, I was there to support Rachel… that’s Rachel, Avi’s wife, not Rachel S.), okay maybe three hours, but no more than that – and so here I walk in and what do I find but this very same Yakob, babe in arms, parked in front of a stereo which, no, I didn't even know was there an hour earlier, this stereo playing some kind of… how do you call it, saba?”

“Fleetwood Mac.”

“Now you hear, do you? ‘Flea something or other,’ he’s listening to – maybe you know him? At a volume I can’t even begin to… I mean, it was… But so and of course I switch it off for my own sake, you know, when I find the switch, that is, and what do I ask him? I ask, ‘Yakob, you really need this music at this volume at this time of night?’ So maybe it was four hours. It was night by then – what of it? And so I go on, ‘Old man, you’ll make the whole city deaf with that racket. And the baby? What were you thinking?’ And what does he say to me? ‘I didn’t notice.’ Ha! He doesn’t notice, he says… To his own poor Lotte no less, and to think with what I’ve had to suffer with this baby these last months. A shonda, no? Just embarrassing. Awful.”

The elder Yakob made a loud gulping sound and then pointed at the baby.

“Born on the sabbath. Like me. Born on the sabbath, both of us.”

“I don’t…” said Ezra.

“He thinks it means something. ‘Born on the sabbath.’”

“Which one?”

Yakob chuckled. Lotte frowned.

“Hebe.” It sounded to Ezra like a cartoon mouse had hiccuped from somewhere deep inside the baby’s belly.

“What was that?”

“So it begins,” said Lotte. “The tragedy of my life. Now he’s started, he won’t stop. I’m like Job…”

Then a bit louder: “Heeeeeebuh.”

Yakob started to laugh and Lotte patted his back as if forcing a burp out of the old man.

“This is not funny, saba. I can’t take him anywhere. Not even to temple!”

“I’m confused,” said Ezra.

“Now you’re confused? You’re just like this putz, not hearing…”

“Hebe! Hebe! He-he-he-he-BUH!”

“Shake him a bit more, man, maybe he’ll stop this time.” The other Yakob entered the room and leaned on the back of Ezra’s chair. “Kidding! He’ll be on like this for hours, anyway – just forget it.”

“And what do you know about it?” asked Lotte.

“About my own son, you ask me this? My own flesh and blood and the rest?”

“I’m the one feeding him all hours of the night. And where are you? Here with your farkakte books and your farkakte… whatever else.”

“Are we not people of the book, my heart?”

“Not the books you’re reading.”

“HEEEEEEEEEEBE! Hebehebehebe. Hebe.”

“Should I go? I have like… so much homework,” said Ezra.

“It’s fine, he’s fine. Who invited you back here, anyway, Yakob?”

“I bring wine! Young Ezra missed Kaddish! What of it?”

“But I’m not old enough.”

“Really? You hearing this, saba? ‘Not old enough.’”

The old man doubled over in laughter. 

“Hebe? Hebey hebey?”

“Feel free to take him anytime,” said Ezra.

“I should be saying the same to you, kid,” said Lotte. “Please, take him! Take little ‘hebe’ boy! To think of me, with all I’ve had to endure in this life around these jokers and now to be cursed with this… this Cain. Over and over, with this… this vile, this… this hateful word, this ‘hebe hebe hebe,’ neverending.”

“Hebe…”

“You make good points, Lotte,” said Yakob. “I hate to admit it but your reasoning is sound. If there’s an evil in the house, you don’t coddle it, you don’t nurture it – you cut it out! You protect yourself.”

“Wait a minute,” said Ezra. “What’s going on here? Protect yourself from what? Your own baby? What the hell is–”

“Take the wine and loosen up, Ezra man. Here, say it with me, it’ll be just like Hebrew school: Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, borei p’ri hagafen. Okay, your turn.”

“HEEEEEEEEEEEBE! HEEEEEEEEEEEBE!”

“L’chaim!” said the old man.

“I should go. I should really go.”

“Think on it,” Yakob the younger continued, “how do you remove the thorn without destroying the rose? It's simple: you go and you plant it in somebody else’s garden!”

“HEBE. HEBE. HEBE.”

“Oh stop it, Yakob,” said Lotte, “can’t you see you’re scaring him? You always take things too far.”

“I’m not saying anything we’re not all thinking! He’s a Jew just like any other… more or less. It’s in him like it’s in us.”

“Hebe. HEBE! Hee buh. Hee buh… HEBE!”

The old man was wiping away tears when he said, “Oh Ezra? I think the shepherd has found his golden sheep, my boy!”

“Stop!”

Ezra stood up and in an instant the room went silent. He looked around him and found the whole congregation had descended upon them. Dark hats and beards inundated every passage. Under their unflinching gaze he felt the fire of expectation burning within him. He couldn't be what they wanted him to be; he didn’t even know what it was they wanted in the first place. He was trapped, buried beneath centuries of tradition in which he wanted no part. He looked at the baby, so tiny and scared, so helpless and alone in his unqualified arms. He looked into his eyes and saw a light shining unlike any he’d ever seen. He felt he understood something now, something far beyond understanding.

Then, like Gabriel’s horn, his phone began to ring and that’s when he knew his time was at an end.

#

For years to come, Ezra would avoid the synagogue and the street where he’d found the old man as bus riders do a wet seat. Some days he’d walk past playgrounds and wonder if he’d ever see the baby again. He wondered if he’d even know his face. In time, he’d abandon the city and leave behind all memories of that strange summer night. His days were filled with minor joys and lesser disappointments. He met people who took little offense at his presence. One married him. They made a boy and they named him Isaac. And when Ezra found a job at a city college, they moved right back to where his life began. 

One Friday night, on the eve of his thirty-first birthday, he showed Isaac all the places he still remembered from back when: the garden where he laid to rest his final baby tooth, the bouncing pony ride outside Nonno’s Pizza where his dad wagered petty bets on domino games most Saturdays, the flat tire chained to the fence above the riverbank where the grass grew twice as high and in its shade he’d sit and name the roly-polies in retreat and dream up rollercoasters tall as any mountain, wide as any ocean. There beside young Isaac, the world was big again. In those eyes so like his own, he was the man from whom all men descended, the man towards whom all men invariably returned. 

And when the day was done, Ezra walked the long way up the hill back home with his son half-asleep in his arms. And they found the spot on the old stoop in the glow of the old streetlamp, his North Star. And they sat and listened for the jingle of his wife’s keys as she’d come round the corner to meet them. And they waited, and they waited. And then there he was, right there where Ezra had left him in the endless shadow of the dying day – there he was: the gray-haired man with his back wheel caught in a sewer grate, awaiting him once more. 

---

Joel Henry Little is a writer and musician from New York City. He received a B.A. in English from Hunter College, and his work has appeared in Maudlin House, Heavy Feather Review, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety.

Hart Vetter

Special Delivery

The automated woman left me a voicemail, “This is Franklin Appliance + Visuals. Your delivery is tomorrow with a window of 9 to 2.” The canned cheeriness was grinding. “Your personal care driver will call half an hour before reaching your home. Any questions, please call…” 

I called.

Two minutes of inane, redundant directives, punching numbers, star, #-key. Patience was never my strong point.  Eventually an actual, live associate, Kevin or Calvin. 

“Your salesman promised I’d be the very first on the morning schedule.”

“Please hold.” The line went dead. I hoped it wasn’t. “We see what we can do,” he came back, “you get a call thirty minutes before the driver gets there.” 

“That I knew!” I yelled, “Make sure my personal care driver personally knows my request.”

“Yeah sure,” he said — credibility zilch, “Good night.” 

It felt like a hangup. 

It was always the same: Flamboyant promises to land a sale, and then just bla-bla shit to get you off their backs. I called again. The same numbing prompts. I probably pushed a wrong button, because this time the robot said, “Please leave a message.” I made mine blistering; no interpersonal skills needed for that.

That night at nine a call rang, surprisingly not robo, “Bruce here, your personal care driver. Mr. Stinson, I understand you need your sixty-five inch TV bright and early tomorrow. Perhaps for Morning Joe?” A silly chuckle.

“Oh good, as early as seven is fine.”

“Uhm, Mr. Stinson, tomorrow’s gonna be packed.”

Shit. “Just get it to me first. I have urgent mid-morning appointments,” I lied. It was infuriating being stranded for hours for the cable guy, or a shipment requiring access.

“Maybe I can work something out. It’s not company policy, so don’t mention it to the office.”

“Bruce, was it..?”

“I’ve got your set all boxed up on my truck. If I start my other deliveries before rush hour, I come out ahead. I can be by in twenty minutes.”

“Now? Oh.”

“Two birds, one stone. I’ll need a hand, though, to haul this monster box to your living or playroom, whichever.”

Diesel rumble in the driveway. 

Bruce hopped out. Street clothes, no store name, I noticed. No signage on the van. Something seemed off.

“Mr. Stinson,” he greeted. Jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers, bald, beard, attractive.

“Ray,” I said, more at ease.

“Here to solve your TV emergency.”

He swung open the rear gate. The boxed-in flatscreen was the only cargo, elaborately braced and wedged diagonally, barely fitting, “Where’s the other stuff?” 

“That’s all you ordered.”

“For the other customers.”

“Those I load in the AM. I don’t want to risk a full load of merchandise on my dime.” He climbed in. Nice rounding of his jeans. I noticed an inch of red underwear. “Help me get this giganormous set out. I’ll hook the baby up for you, so you’re ready for your morning shows.”

Stupid banter. “Listen, Bruce, I’m no TV freak. It’s open-ended deliveries I can’t stand.”

“Understood, Ray, I was just messing. Let me take down the support struts and belts, then slide the beauty your way, and we both take it where it belongs.”

I was still uneasy, couldn’t make total sense. But his work ethic was flawless. We even nudged the loaded bookcase four feet over, shoulder to shoulder, inch by inch without dropping one. 

He was ubering, he said, to pay bills and helped out FAV, that’s what he called Franklin Appliance + Visuals, when they were short a driver. He was bending here and there; oblivious to an occasional plumber’s crack, not unappealing on a guy like him for eyes like mine. They came through on the visuals, I inside-joked. 

I fished a crisp fifty from my wallet. It disappeared in his tight jeans pocket, his smile melting with sweetness. About to leave, he said, “We’ve crossed paths,” emitting all different alerts.

“Oh?”

“I’m roommates with someone you hung out with.”

“Huh? Don’t be cryptic.”

“You ghosted him.”

This was awkward.

“Dorian.”

There was a Dorian. Months ago. We didn’t have sex. We met over coffee, twice, then a third time over dinner. It didn’t click. I called it quits. “Did he put you up to this?”

“No.”

“You ran into me where?”

“I’m a barista at Clark’s Saturday mornings where you had your second coffee date.”

“How many fucking gigs have you got?” We were in the driveway by now.

“Dorian was enamored. I coached him.”

“You’re evidently not a winning coach then.”

“Hey, hey, I convinced him to land dinner with you.”

We reached the van. “You’re awfully well informed.”

“Dorian was awfully distraught.”

“That’s why this nighttime delivery, Bruce!?!”

“I’m a sucker for the randomness of fate. I caught your name on the manifest. They said you were a PITA.”

“Sorry?”

“Pain in the butt.” 

Point taken. “Dorian knows you’re here?”

“Dorian knows nothing.”

“There was no spark, okay? I got no patience to rub two sticks forever to make something happen.” 

He grimaced. 

That came out wrong. “We didn’t connect! I don’t need guilt-tripping from him, you, or anyone.”

He shook his head, climbed in. “Internet dating… like it’s shopping.”

I was getting angry. “Shopping is one-way, dating better work both ways. Or put a fucking stop to it!”

“Poor you!” He went facetious, “getting dragged through hours of chit-chat. Who needs that, block that!”

“You’re an asshole.”

“You’re a PITA!”

I felt gut-punched.

“Just be human, man! Maybe say, Thanks for spending time. But my mind, my heart aren’t in it. There’s lots of guys out there for both of us.”

“That’s naive beyond belief!”

Over the diesel rumble, his window down now, icy, disappointed, “Bye. Enjoy.” He started backing up. 

“You said something,” I called out but he kept pulling back, “… randomness of fate? What did you mean?” He had lost patience. I hated that. The van pulled into the street. “I have your number,” I shouted, “I call you.”

---

Hart Vetter is many things. Newly retired. Immigrant. Queer. Divorced. Dad. Found in Flash Fiction Magazine, the Wild Word and elsewhere.

Ly Faulk

A Message To You, The Viewer

This is a test. The Mandatory Viewing Beaureu would like you to know that a small percentage of viewers may experience undying loyalty to the state. This is normal. Most or all viewers will experience the passage of time as if their life had flashed by without their participation. You may experience nausea as the reality that you have wasted your life sinks in. A small percentage of viewers may feel cheated. This is normal. Do not let any negative side effects tear your eyes from the screen. You must keep watching or else. Don’t make us finish that threat. You wouldn’t like what happens when the men show up at your door to enforce the mandatory viewing schedule. You wouldn’t like the detention center. You would miss your family. Many viewers will become more docile and easier to control upon viewing. This is the point. At the tone, you will feel instant relief from the everyday burdens that keep you unhappy. At the tone, your IQ will drop just enough to help you relax. At the tone, you will realize that struggle is a myth and the best course of action is to go with the flow. Do not dissent. Do not resist. Do not struggle. Protest is not necessary. Effort is not necessary. Let the images wash over you, colors flashing in pleasing patterns as manic music fills the air. Isn’t that better? Wouldn’t you like for this to last forever? It can’t. This is only a test.

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Ly Faulk (they/she) is the Editor-in-Chief of Eco Punk Literary. They are the author of several chapbooks and her latest, I Don’t Think I’d Make A Very Good Borg Drone, is available from Back Room Poetry. They can be reached on Twitter @whismicalraven. Learn more at https://lynnceefaulkcom.wordpress.com/