DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION - VAGINA SAINT ISSUE

2012-02-23T18:56:00.003-08:00

jereme dean

xTx

2012-02-23T18:54:00.002-08:00

The voices came in morning chimes. Filtered to her in a way she felt she could trust. Small bits easy for swallowing.

In the beginning, she listened. Later, she heard. Eventually, she trusted. Finally, she believed.

The day she put out the signs, the day she opened up her home to them was jumping from a bridge and

she

fell

her dress rising above her head in a shroud, the water coming up fast beneath her. No undoing. It had already been done. Midway between action and impact, she readied herself.

They did not come like parishioners, they came like torch bearers; unconcerned with anything to do with burning, but swollen hard with the fervor that builds within mobs intent on taking what they came for.

Still, she let them prey. Her ears to God’s with words not close to holy.

She thought of Abraham and the sloth of his knife. And as they took her, and took her, she wondered if she had acted too quickly.

jonathan deane

2012-02-23T18:53:00.007-08:00

A vagina saint is the English adaptation of the Latin _vagina sancta_, or "holy sheath," which supposedly contains the _spatha Dei_ or "sword of God."

Does that seem confusing? Well, the word "vagina" didn't mean anything in English for a long time, but in Latin it's meant sword-sheath for centuries. "Vagina saint" was first used in English as a sort of awkward mistranslation by an Elizabethan, Sir Thomas Coke. He was an early dissenter with serious Puritan leanings, and Shakespeare supposedly mocked him in one of his portrayals of Puritanical types in Measure for Measure.

The term "vagina saint" was last used by Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who was well-known as an English Civil War cavalry commander, when he was discussing the proper method for conveying the royal regalia swords to France while fleeing the wreck of the monarchy. At around the same time (the mid-17th century), physicians began using the term vagina to mean the female reproductive passage, but of course both terms derive from the Latin for sword-sheath.

lindsay hunter

2012-02-23T18:53:00.002-08:00

Vagina Saint. Noun. Lady who sprinkles her wares for the greater good. Like when Pigface's momma laid it on that old half-dead geezer down the street. Didn't even ask could she have a ride, could he spare some green. Did it out the good of her heart. We tried to watch but the old man had some decorum, turns out, had drawn the yellow curtains. We made do watching the trailer thunder side to side till Pigface shot at us with his BB. We ate grilled cheeses his momma made after her shower and watched the old man on his porch, watched him admire the blown glitter of an evening's swarm of fireflies. This was a day to remember, we had that in common. See there's no cure for loneliness, but a vagina saint could slather you in balm and set you to wobbling, happy and lit as a dark-drunk firefly.

eric beeny

2012-02-23T18:51:00.006-08:00

Since orgasm is a prayer reduced to its simplest

expression, I consider myself deeply spiritual. (1)

On his knees he prays, believing in nothing. I’m hollow as my womb without me, he thinks. There are rumors no one has ever spoken. Utterly unuttered. I’ve heard them all. Cocooned by halos, she tastes like hope—he promises not to tell. Pressing his cell phone against her thigh, he uses her landline to call himself. Why are you male, he thinks. Where are your breasts. She pulls the pillowcase over her head. Where did you first learn about love. Her thigh, vibrating—a caterpillar praying—, the cell phone display glowing against his cheek—in his ear, the hum. When did you first. Closer. How long will it be until you remember. A butterfly’s wings an atheist’s hands, praying. (2) Tell me everything you know about crying. Life is a joke he’s heard so many times. You were in love once. He forgets how it goes. You have pictures. Proof. She doesn’t laugh. You can’t wait to tell her about this. One day she’ll come. He wants her to come. You can’t wait to confess. He’ll promise he’s changed. You’ve done nothing wrong.

1. Excerpted from Jeffrey McDaniel’s poem, “Twentynothing,” from his collection, Alibi School

2. In reference to Ted Kooser’s poem, “Praying Hands,” from his collection, Delights & Shadows

rachel hartley-smith

2012-02-23T18:47:00.002-08:00

My ten year marriage to a limp dick (attached to an ass who failed Ethics) ended with eye-punches, counseling, and court dates. While he had fiddled with his tool pump, I practiced pleasing myself. Masturbation, of course, is never enough, and – though I will never get rid of it – the vibrator with bunny ears is only cold plastic.

Newly divorced, I renamed myself Anne Sexton, picked up long cigarettes, and placed an ad online. Responses came from a beer-sucking war veteran (not unlike my father) and a hipster who painted his penis from multiple angles, in vivid colors. A third man responded, with a blurry photo mysterious enough I could shape him into a being of passion, grace, and open-mind. I wrote him my life-long confession and convinced myself he wanted me more than anything. So it happened.

We met at sunset in the parking lot outside my therapist's office. He was older, balding, a tech-head with quick fingers. Honesty made for easy conversation. We made love in the front seat of his Nissan Maxima. Grateful, I enveloped him well-practiced. His apoplexy went unnoticed until I reached a conclusion.

elizabeth ellen

2012-02-23T18:46:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to listen to WTF podcasts and the new Jeezy song with Andre 3000 and smoke cigarettes in my basement but I’d had a headache every day for half a week and Barry wanted me to write 200 words about vagina saints and he said he’d already asked Amelia and Mary and xTx and even though he didn’t want to lick any of our vaginas except Mary’s, I couldn’t say no, even though I wasn’t religious and didn’t know shit about saints and didn’t feel inspired. I got online and went to alt lit gossip even though every time I go there I fantasize about crashing an AWP offsite party and shooting up some hipster’s apartment like it’s a high school and there were the usual updates about Tao and --- and chicks who try to write like Tao and --- and other people I don’t give a shit about but feel compelled to look at anyway and I still didn’t feel inspired. My daughter came in the room and asked me what I was doing and I told her I had to write 200 words about vagina saints and she said, that’s stupid, and I said, I know, and still I had a headache.

jereme dean

2012-02-23T18:44:00.004-08:00

dj berndt

2012-02-23T18:43:00.000-08:00

This will be a dramatic retelling of our entire relationship. It will begin with when your aunt gave you a fancy pair of shoes for your ninth birthday and you thought about a boy from school. It will end with the last time you order gin and still think of me. It is a very dramatic retelling so it will contain swordfighting and wilting flowers and a lot more sex. I’ll skip the part about how I was too drunk and you were too hopeful to notice distance. I’ll gloss over those Tuesday nights when you came over after work and we watched half of a shitty movie before I started a fight through omission. Were there really that many nights neither of us wanted but happened anyway? I’ll include a made-up villain in the retelling because I don’t want to choose which of us was the protagonist. The climactic scene will depict a man drowning in his bathtub at the hands of a jewel thief, and it will be a metaphor for everything I've ruined, everything we thought we could save.

robert duncan gray

2012-02-23T18:42:00.000-08:00

[vuh-jahy-nuh seynt]

If I were to press the palms of hands together, as if in prayer, and insert myself into you until elbow-deep, you might cry out in joy.

The lubrication of my holy ghost with the menstrual blood of the lamb.

I squint and you look almost like my mother smiling and you welcome me home again.

There is a body in a box. The body is me and the box is you and a third person is burying us. We are both alive.

I stick my dick through the holes in your hands and ask you to consider my apology.

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION - BEN TANZER ISSUE

2012-02-18T11:31:00.000-08:00

NOAH

SALPICON (FOR NOAH) - ben tanzer

2012-02-18T11:29:00.001-08:00

You turn your back to him. And jam your hands into your pockets. It is raining and your every thought is dark, infused with anger and ready to take flight. You stare off into the distance and you do not look at him. You can picture him however, crouching there, not moving and watching you. He is bemused, lips pursed, smirking. You think about his beautiful skin and the missing tooth that somehow only enhances his smile. The baby fat is all burned away now, but you can still clearly remember his birth, the forceps, the black eyes, the fear and excitement. You can’t remember though why you were so angry at him just moments ago. Why you gripped his skinny little arms the way you did before turning away. Is this about your own unrealized hopes and dreams, the loss of freedom that parenting brings or is it your endless inability to express pain and confusion? Because how could it be about him? He is so small with everything yet to come. But you cannot make sense of it, and so you don’t even attempt to look at him until he walks over, hugs your legs and whispers, “sorry.”

AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: HOW DOES BEN TANZER WRITE SO MUCH FICTION? - tom willams

2012-02-18T11:28:00.001-08:00

Understand you don’t share anything you see and do here with anyone. Not your momma, your best friend, your girl. Watch your step.

Over to the left, that’s Plot. Character and Dialogue is next door. Once they get all that stuff humming, the manuscripts go upstairs to Style and Emotional Content, where the real work begins.

You thought Mr. Tanzer did it all by himself? Who’ll look after the boys if we’re not here 24/7?

He still comes in sometimes after a jog. Dropped a sweaty arm over my shoulder once. Happiest moment of my life.

Setting? Third floor. Can you believe they tried You Can Make Him Like You in New York first?

Damn right, it’s a Chicago book!

Across from Setting , they handle Tweets, Status Updates, the blog. I started there, wrote emails to jokers like Tom Williams and Barry Graham. Jeez, they go on.

You’re Proofreading, right? Fourth floor. Elevator’s this way. The pages’ll start coming soon. Trust me. The work isn’t easy, but like we say here, there’s a little bit of all us in Ben Tanzer and a little Ben Tanzer in all of us. Just remember that, buddy. You’ll do fine.

RUNNING BACK HOME - bl pawelek

2012-02-18T11:27:00.001-08:00

The run to the west, down a military ridge trail, frozen in winter, slippery and dangerous. Even the sun is cold.

But the body is reacting well to running again. The times are down, the body not soar. Except for the bleeding and the cuts and scars.

Ben Tanzer and 99 Problems was the first step back. The second a continual worry about a sickening heart. A guilt of possibly leaving the loved ones too soon. So, I started again.

I only begin sweating after the first mile, strangely like clockwork. The breathing easier, a cadence. A pattern of lungs and stretching legs.

After five miles, I circle to start running back home, and the bleeding starts again. At first easy to control on gloves and wool hat. I choose to run harder, faster – teach and mold the body to overcome such things.

The blood runs harder too, from drops on white snow to clots and blood not containable. I run harder yet to get home, the sixth mile, the seventh. The blood-sweat mix running freely from face.

Faster for fear and embarrassment. Another mile with unsteadying legs, the path growing darker, home just so far away.

ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITTANICA ENTRY FOR BEN TANZER - ryan w. bradley

2012-02-18T11:26:00.000-08:00

A machine created in the second half of the 20th century, intended to revive literature in the early 21st century by writing more books, stories, and essays than any human could in the same amount of time. Though designed to assimilate into human culture, was eventually unmasked because of his incredible output. Publishing forty-five books over a two-year span ended up raising suspicions, which were later confirmed by The Smoking Gun. However, by the time the news was revealed America and much of the world was already hooked on Tanzer’s unshakeable prose. The Tanzer Lit Machine, as his work was later credited, produced five thousand volumes of written work over a mere twenty years, becoming the world’s only true canon of literature. Today, little else is read or remembered. Many libraries house only Tanzer’s complete works. The Tanzer Lit Machine was eventually retired and out-moded technologically, but due to the rabid affection for the Machine’s works no replacement has been introduced.

STUCK BETWEEN STATIONS - david tomaloff

2012-02-18T11:24:00.000-08:00

Ben Tanzer called me a reckless lunatic. I threw it into reverse. I said, I don’t care, Ben. That old woman made you cry, and I don’t like to see you treated like some idiot. My coffee emptied into my lap. I didn’t see the furniture truck until it began to crawl into my mouth. Ben Tanzer exploded on impact. Why are Wednesdays always so hard? I said.

I took Ben Tanzer for a walk per the usual Thursday ritual. Have you ever pondered the wavelengths of certain light? I asked him, his leg aloft to the probable ire of a young spruce. He didn’t pause; he never even broke expression.

Ben, I asked—

I heard you, he said.

So have you ever—

The room could have existed anywhere when I awoke. I focused on a crack in the ceiling. Ben Tanzer? Tanzer. Isn’t he that writer guy who’s married to the chick from the Hold Steady or something? Yeah, I know Ben Tanzer.

I was sleepy-eyed and waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. I’m gonna be here until Sunday with this, I said. I really gotta get me a new Ben Tanzer. Tomorrow. I nodded in agreement. Tomorrow.

FUCKING BEN TANZER - dave housley

2012-02-18T11:22:00.000-08:00

Fucking Ben Tanzer has published another story. Or maybe another novella, a collection of short stories, or even a novel. Fuck. Burns stands, walks away from the computer. He paces. Fucking Ben Tanzer. Fucking Ben Tanzer publishes the way a bull moose in heat copulates, with a robotic persistence that’s more John Connor than Flannery O’ Connor.

So what is this one? Burns pours a glass of wine, puts a cigarette and the lighter in his pocket, walks onto the patio with the laptop. Fucking Ben Tanzer has published a new short story. Check that. Short story collection.

Burns doesn’t have to keep track, of course, because he is Facebook friends with Fucking Ben Tanzer, so fucking Ben Tanzer’s friends do a more than adequate job of keeping Burns informed. Hey, Fucking Ben Tanzer has a new novel! Fucking Ben Tanzer is doing a reading! An interview with Fucking Ben Tanzer!

Burns lights his cigarette. Fucking Ben Tanzer supposedly has a wife and children, a real job. How could he possibly find the time to write this much? How could it possibly all be that good? Burns pictures Fucking Ben Tanzer in tennis clothes, a sweater tied around his waist, taking leave from some cocktail party to shout instructions into his iPhone: "more witty pop culture banter! More surprisingly touching moments!" On the other end of the line, a handful of MFA graduates sit in a dim Williamsburg apartment, churning out witty, affecting short fiction about fathers and sons, men and women, about the real stuff of real fucking life.

Burns finishes his cigarette and goes back to the computer. He was on a fucking roll until Fucking Ben Tanzer ruined it. Burns works just as hard as anybody. Harder than Fucking Ben Tanzer. He sits in front of the computer again. Don’t open Facebook, he tells himself. Just write.

He stares at the screen. He wonders how many words -- maybe an entire story, maybe three, maybe a goddam novella -- Ben Tanzer has written in the past few hours.

Don’t open Facebook.

Focus, he tells himself. Write. What would Fucking Ben Tanzer do? Motherfucker! He is asking himself what Ben Tanzer would do? This is getting worse.

He opens Facebook.

"Goddamit," he shouts. "Unbelievable."

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fucking Matt Bell has published another story. Or maybe another novella, a collection of short stories, or even a novel…

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2012-02-02T17:27:00.000-08:00

ME AND JULIA GOGOSHA SHOOT TO KILL AND IT'S NOT OUR FAULT YOU GOT IN THE WAY - mary hamilton

2012-02-02T17:24:00.000-08:00

Julia swims with sharks. She puts her head underwater and feels the pressure in her ears. She opens her eyes underwater. She likes the way the light becomes a hazy mesh curtain. She wants to cut it into strips. She wants to make it a dress or a shirt or a nice pair of pants. She wants to cut it into strips and tie it up her arms and make sleeves out of the sunlight and the way it splits and breaks and falls into ever distancing pieces of light down to the bottom of the ocean. She reaches out her hand and a shark swims under it, lets her move her hand over its back, its dorsal fin, its tail. It twists back, it moves toward her, swimming without showing effort. A smooth angle toward her body, her center. Julia treads water. She is still holding her breath. Her eyes are still open. Her ears still throbbing with the weight of the water around her. Her skin starting to chill. The shark’s eyes roll back. She doesn’t focus on the white eyes, the white teeth, the sun’s light making the body of the shark blend with the shadows of the ocean. She puts her tongue out and what she thinks is that it is so strange, this salt water. She thinks it is so strange that she can’t open her lungs and breathe. But then, she does. She does take a breath and everything is fine. Everything works. And she laughs. And she breathes the water. And she laughs. And everything is fine.

Mary Hamilton

www.gogosha.com

On the Rocks

Grieves

THIS IS EASY - alex miller

2012-02-02T17:21:00.000-08:00

I spot him from across the room at Allison’s party, the one she threw at the end of junior year. Alpha male Brad. Mightiest of the jocks. I run a hand through my hair, adjust my skirt, cross and re-cross my legs. I want him to notice me. Idiot teammates surround him. I am ignored. So I wait. And he drinks.

A seat opens beside him on the couch. This is easy. I sit down, casually press my thigh against his blue jeans. This is easy. I ask about sports. He stares at my legs, my tits, my crotch. This is easy.

I lie naked in a child’s bed. A Power Ranger glares disapprovingly from a poster on the wall. Brad mounts me. He looks strange without his shirt, hairy and white. Brad is extremely drunk. His bulk suffocates me as he pounds away, going at it like we’re making a video. I feel nothing.

Brad grunts, spasms, stops. This is not what I wanted. But I take it. Treasure it. Because I know what it feels like to have nothing. Brad’s crushing weight, his skank breath, his varsity cock violating my lonely cunt--they are something.

Alex Miller
miller.alex.77@gmail.com
The Nuclear Age
Tim O'Brien

OH, PARTY! - katie seling

2012-02-02T17:20:00.000-08:00

I ran down the sidewalk laughing, hoping I would remember the way back. Strangers holding tall boys cheered from the porch. I grabbed two girls on the way. We held hands and nourished our lungs with the rushing summer air.

I didn’t know this street or this yard or the yard next door or the street I just crossed, racing like a child, with no reason, with abandon, with total joy, in the dark, and the lights were like brush strokes and the stars were all falling, forever looping.

“Do you know Pretty Girls Make Graves?” I said later, and was misunderstood to be preaching facts. It could have been caused by the vodka on either side of the conversation.

On the steps, there were tears invested in a stranger. They needed to be cried by someone and the bottle spun in my direction.

I stayed too long, told too many truths, and resigned my body to the hood of my car at 2 a.m.

Katie Seling
katie-is-nt.tumblr.com
The Chronology of Water
Lidia Yuknavich

HE - chad redden

2012-02-02T17:19:00.001-08:00

When we moved to Mason Street, a neighbor introduced himself to my father as a registered sex offender. I don’t know what he did. My father never told me. On Halloween, the law required him to keep the lights off at his house. He waited in a church basement with other sex offenders for hours until children finished trick-or-treating while his wife waited in the dark at their house.

He repaired lawn mowers in his garage. I watched him. I threw frisbees into his yard while he repaired the lawn mowers. He never looked at me or the frisbees. I threw footballs on his roof. I walked around without a shirt in the spring, summer, and fall. He never noticed the footballs or me. I don’t know what he did, but I wanted to know if he’d think about doing whatever he did to me. I wanted to know if I’d be worth it to him, or maybe someone like him. I just wanted a stare. At the time, I didn’t trust my reflection in mirrors.

Chad Redden
http://naplitmag.com
Swimming to Cambodia
Spalding Gray

BLIND DATING IS ONLY RECOMMENDED FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR - ASHLEY NISSLER

2012-02-02T17:18:00.000-08:00

He likes how her skirt’s pleats fall like a picket fence before she sits, how its ridges and folds make her body guesswork. But blonde. She looks like she’d understand a pleasant meal ends with a toothpick. This puts him in a good mood. He rubs his nose and tells his best joke about a greased pig and a corset.

She hopes he’s here incognito and this isn’t how he really dresses. If she blinks often enough, she spends less time having to look at him directly.

He asks if she has something in her eye and shrugs when she says no.

She says, “Look, this is something I ask everyone: If you had to frisk me on the highway, where would you put your fingers? Don’t be mushy about it.”

When he drops her off, she decides the best way to say sorry is to kiss him. She’s surprised by the burn, by the way he bites her lower lip.

Ashley Nissler
ranissler@mindspringcom
Train Dreams
Denis Johnson

WHILE STOPPED AT A RED LIGHT - josh olsen

2012-02-02T17:16:00.001-08:00

While stopped at a red light, I looked to the right and saw a man huddled on the sidewalk, crying. His knees were pulled to his chest, his back was against the brick wall of a Thai restaurant, and his face was twisted in anguish, but my windows were rolled up, providing a barrier between me and him, which made staring more comfortable, so I decided to open the roof, and the car filled with the piercing wail of the man on the sidewalk. I cringed at the pathetic explosion bursting from his lungs, but figured I wouldn’t have long to listen. It shouldn’t have been much more than a few seconds before the traffic light turned green, and the crying man would be in my rearview mirror, but before the line of vehicles in front of me began to accelerate, I saw a young jogger, blond and svelte and tan, his white shoes and red vinyl shorts the only things that covered his sculpted body. With long, effortless strides, the jogger swiftly approached the crying man and, rather than go around, unsuccessfully attempted to hurdle him and fell hard on the sidewalk, skinning both of his knees, his palms, and one of his elbows. The man on the sidewalk continued to cry, uninterrupted, even after the young jogger regained his footing and punched him on the side of his head before returning to his afternoon jaunt, and as traffic finally began to move on, I found myself driving alongside the jogger, his body still practically flawless, except for the blood that ran down his legs, into his shoes, which only now made him appear a little bit dangerous or rugged or, in other words, even more beautiful than before, and as I drove with one eye on the road and the other on the jogger, I swore he cracked a smile, possibly thinking of the story he now had to tell later that night at the bar while intoxicated coeds traced the abrasions on his palms and stared at his defined abdominal muscles, and at the next intersection, I sharply turned without signaling but stopped short before striking the jogger with the fender of my car, yet his legs gave out from under him. This time, when he pulled himself up off the concrete, he screamed and spit and slammed his fist on the hood of my car. He even tried to open my door, but it was locked, so I laughed at him, and as he limped his way to the curb, I stepped on the gas.

Josh Olsen
http://www.zygoteinmycoffee.com/taintedcoffeepress/zygoteendoftheyearblow.html
Alec: The Years Have Pants
Eddie Campbell

CRADLE AND ALL - joshua michael stewart

2012-02-02T17:15:00.001-08:00

My grandmother awoke one night with the sense of someone sitting at the foot of her bed, but no one was there. The next day, a phone call: her aunt had passed. My grandmother would wait in a candle-lit room for her dead father to appear in a mirror. She said that a baby died in her house, years before she bought the place. Someone bumped into a stroller, and it crashed down a flight of stairs. I’ve heard it crying, a cigarette bounced between her lips. Your grandfather was drunk on the couch, watching Rockford Files, but I heard it. She asked if I wanted to spend the night.

Joshua Michael Stewart

www.joshuamichaelstewart.yolasite.com

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

Terry Teachout

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2012-01-20T18:31:00.000-08:00

Artwork courtesy of Amy Crockett and Chari Crockett

NO ONE HAS EVER LOVED SOMEONE IN A FIRE BURNING - JX Falber

2012-01-20T18:28:00.000-08:00

I was born in a bathtub underwater. No one has ever loved someone he saved from drowning. Our mother was a thin ghost bred of the ash at the pit of a cob pipe and we found you crying in the bottom of a deep gravel quarry in a fire burning. No one has ever loved someone in a fire burning and not ever has anyone loved someone, we've learned. For years we'd searched for the smell of it like steam in the bottoms of jars or in the morning grass, but grew content to sleep in the still terror of knowing something new of the world.

“We've learned enough,” we'd say.

II.

You wanted to be an actress and carved the word in the webbing between your middle and index fingers with the head of a sewing needle. Thirteen—I drank the blood. We kissed to the fractured and distant applause of our mother beating the dust from the laundry line. You stood to take your bows. That night we found the glass of a flower vase tangled deep within your hair and you promised your life to a performance of a young woman growing treacherously old, clutching a dream of being loved and passionate between her fingers.

III.

We grew together as orphans, coming to understand the nature of the world in observing the strange and dark colors of dawn—in wonder of times when there was a sky and others when there wasn't any.

IV.

We made love in singular thrusts spread hourly over the course of a month, falling asleep entwined and penetrated. On the thirtieth day you moaned an imperceptible frequency the exact pace of your lowering yourself into the bath and this was the manner in which I loved you, I said. In days, without a voice and still moaning, you wrote in a breath spread across the window:

“This is joy and may it be forever.”

You had me set a fire to char the kettle empty, standing stiffened in the far corner. The air inside it turned to smoke and nested in the rafters and together we grew hot and starving, the bones of our fingers rattling against each other the sound of wanting.

VI.

Our mother dead and we learned of your inability to harbor a child. I pressed my hand against you, thanking God in whispers while forever you exhaled a great bellow of warmly scented dust.

VII.

Tired, you tapped the glass at the birds, watching it crack into long and black spiderwebs in a trance or a kind of meditation you hadn't known yourself capable of. Small pieces broke into the sink and broke again, bursting into pinpricks of sunlight in an arrangement which could have meant something only to you—and you promising yourself to remember it always. Later you thought of digging a hole to bury it, bleeding into the meadow brush and again picking the glass from your hair.

VIII.

You bore blood into the floorboards. We left it to scab black and high in the wood grain, for time to spread to dust.

IX.

You pinched between your fingers, walking the house in the pattern of fruit gnats and wandering spirits, your face sharp and soaked tar black—profound with an understanding of growing older. You bit your lip at the door off its hinges and the ivy vines pulling back the frame and wanted to know where something had gone that had never been there.

“Life is both violent and dull,” you said.

You were white with bathwater and rage and I poured a kettle over you. There was a fly dead in the water, touching your breast in a rhythm and our home had grown dark with the deaths of too many things.

“Life is violent,” you said, “terrifying and rapid.”

I poured the kettle again and you sank to meet the fly.

“I was born in a bathtub underwater,” I said, “and you, in a fire burning.”

You were a still fury and steam, then swallowed the fly and sank again. You sank and kept sinking down until you were the bottom of things. You sank and you were the bottom of things born in a fire burning—born in a bathtub underwater and born in a fire burning. I was myself and poured the kettle and you were the bottom of things born in a fire burning.

“No one has ever loved someone he saved from drowning,” I said.

JX Falber

jxfalber.blogspot.com

Equal Love

Peter Ho Davies

TOWN CLOCK - kara vernor

2012-01-20T18:25:00.001-08:00

They are prepared. They’ve dabbed perfume between their thighs, ripped the hair off their upper lips, strapped on heels meant for stages. They’ve tucked rubbers into their wallets, washed their balls with peppermint soap, withdrawn enough cash for anything. For drugs, women. Paying off a cop. They don’t know what exactly, but they can feel it coming, the adrenaline humming in their stomachs.

They’ve gathered at the clock to watch one year become the next, to see what they can glean from this final hour. Boys hurl fireworks that clear bald spots on the street, fireworks the crowd sees coming because faces are turned up, waiting for the clock’s hands to move from reclined to fully erect.

The cheer is unanimous for the girl who delivers, the one who is sober enough to climb the “Don’t Walk” light yet drunk enough to flash her tits. The crowd is relieved someone has finally mounted something. To this they raise their bottles, their plastic cups of champagne. MoreMoreMore, they chant and shove closer like believers vying to be beamed up first, like she is there to save them, to climb atop the clock itself and fuck the life out of its death march.

Kara Vernor
kara.vernor@gmail.com
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands
Nick Flynn

A HEALTHY JEALOUSY - matthew antonio

2012-01-20T18:23:00.001-08:00

At first, I thought to slice off his face and wear it over my own. Our bodies were similar, though he was perhaps a little taller and perhaps a little thiner, but still close enough that she wouldn't notice. Nor would she notice the red seam running from my hair to my ear to my chin. She never looked that closely anyway.

Then, I thought it better to slice off my face and place it over his without his knowledge. Impractical as it seemed, I imagined I would laugh a gurgling, wet laugh from my new red face as her desire to look at him gradually diminished over the weeks. He'd weep through the holes in my old face as he came to understand what it meant to live in her radiant indifference.

In the end, I found the greatest joy in wearing her face over mine.

Matthew Antonio
www.littlemachines.net
Incidences
Daniil Kharms

THEY WILL DIE BEFORE AUGUST - megan perra

2012-01-20T18:22:00.001-08:00

He is lonely like Adam with every rib. He does what he’s always done. He grabs his rifle and his hat to escape into the forest, the mountain spines, the only woman who will have him. Nature takes him back into her womb with a sigh of summer air; humid and thick with mosquito clouds. He searches diaries of mud and paw prints to escape his singularity. By the salmon-stinking river his feet stumble into water and his heart into joy. Steady now against the empty bed, the vacant sweaters, the spaces he can't bear to fill; the rifle butt kisses his shoulder as she used to. The old grizzly looks up just in time to hear the bullet song penetrate her skull. He touches the mountain of her withers and is alone again. Then he notices.

He cries with the two cubs.

Megan Perra
megan.perra@gmail.com
Wildwood
Colin Meloy

THE ILLUSIONIST - ken poyner

2012-01-20T18:21:00.001-08:00

Now that there are more zoos than animals, I am much in demand. I can play a marvelous monkey. I can swell in contained water to any size of hippopotamus you want. I’ve even done birds. The key is that not only will you believe I am that one animal you were wishing to see, but I will believe it, too. I will believe it like the taste of salt on sugar. I can be almost anything. For a short time, I can even be a box turtle. When my shift is done I merge quickly into the crowd and shuffle along as though I had been embedded in the populace all along: moving from empty cage to empty cage, peering in all the corners and hiding places just in case this is the cage that today has the animal, just in case I have found the one prize that today has been put out, sunning in the shadows. When I find it, I look at the animal face on, eye to eye, hackle to hackle: and I say this is not me, how dare they hire an imposter. This crowd deserves the best and there is no one better than me. I demand only the best for my crowd. And I have to be stopped from breaching the safety fence.

Ken Poyner

Complete Poems

Randall Jarrell

SNIPER - marcus speh

2012-01-20T18:20:00.000-08:00

I sat on top of a Sycamore tree, comfy, and looked around, aimed here and there without any real passion for aiming until a girl appeared. She looked like Little Red Riding Hood without the hood. — The tale came back to me right away and with it a painful memory: how I’d wet the bed when my grandma first told me. Grandma in her own bed, blanket pulled up under her nose, our family’s nose, a little bulbous, strong-willed, strong sense of smell, grandma speaking Grimm into the dark. Both of us smelling the scent of the beast in the story. And then the ruckus when I peed myself! — I could smell the girl on the street now. She dragged a teddy bear after her and scolded him as little kids do: you stupid bear! I wasn’t sure she deserved to be shot at. I took aim: this was going to be tricky. I hit her between the shoulder blades. She turned, bent down, picked up the candy bar, dropped the teddy and ran off without looking up just as I imagined she would. The teddy on his back didn’t smile and he didn’t seem surprised either.

Marcus Speh

http://marcusspeh.com

Elmer Gantry

Sinclair Lewis

HOW - david greenspan

2012-01-20T18:18:00.000-08:00

how they survive the upper peninsula
Sarah only sings out of tune when she’s in the shower. Her eyes are shipwrecks in Lake Michigan. Francis masturbates in their bed as Sarah butchers low-fi indie pop. He decides not to leave their bed. He decides he is Lake Michigan. Sarah dips her toes into his shore. She breathes under his water and decides her neck has gills. While Sarah is underwater she builds churches, meets Elvis and buys insurance from great white sharks. Sarah emerges to kiss each of Francis’s toes. She tells him I have been baptized in menthol cigarettes, pennies and slot machines.

how they forget to water the plants
Sarah flashes her clavicles to hungry stockbrokers. They yell stork legs, while fingering their five hundred dollar silk pants. Francis manages a bookie’s office. The bookie smokes chunks of plaster wall and mumbles my keyboard is on fire– ants, ants are everywhere. Francis displays small paintings of bicycle tires inside Sarah’s left ear. Sarah moonlights as a movie critic using the alias Leonard Maltin. When their heating bill is past due, Francis and Sarah record themselves fucking. They sell the video as an instruction manual on how to cure Aspergers Syndrome.
how they talk with ghosts
Francis sculpts Sarah’s ankles with orange peels. Sarah thinks her most attractive features are her ankles and her laugh. Francis can’t draw her laughter but he says I will sketch pigeons as they flurry from your mouth. Sarah paints every door of their 1997 Ford Escort a different color. The rear driver door becomes a monument to Nas. Think graffiti and Uzis and black plastic and cigar guts. Think sharp pinky fingers. Francis and Sarah rattle a spray paint can. The ball inside chops off zombies’ heads, but not in the way you might think. It leaves the heads draped over telephone wires like so many Converse. The spray paint ball reveals itself to be a masterpiece on the rims of each tire: Francis and Sarah inside Urban Outfitters, building small deer.
how they are an island in the sun
There is electric guitar fuzz on my face, you can’t really call it a beard, Francis says. And on the seventh day God created power pop, Sarah says. They listen to the entire Weezer discography while Sarah shaves Francis’s guitar fuzz. When his face is brand new, Francis talks to the rain. He watches James Bond movies in an empty theater. He dances with Sarah on their ceiling and they defend The Green Album. Francis and Sarah fuck every time Rivers sings about heartache. They fuck a lot. Francis comes as three chord anthems tickle Sarah’s neck. He says I will crush your pretty toenails into a thousand pieces. Sarah responds let’s sew our pants together.
how they go to an a.a. meeting
Francis and Sarah move pixilated characters around a black and white screen. The pixels jump over gorges, rescue kittens and always make it home for dinner. Francis types c++ into their computer and the pixels begin to drink. Candle wax slides from their mouths. Sarah is turned on, she hides behind a Yellow Cab and touches herself. The pixels watch and drink and feel sorry for watching and drinking. By the time Sarah comes, the pixels have checked themselves into a hospital. Francis pawns his rosary beads to pay for the pixel’s medical bills. Minutes later, Francis and Sarah reminisce about the pixels and say they were bent carbon, dumb luck, a very small lake.

David Greenspan
davidgreenspan.blogspot.com
Seeking the Elusive Flower
Steven Crist

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2012-01-06T14:33:00.001-08:00

WHAT LOVE IS THIS - howie good

2012-01-06T14:32:00.000-08:00

Shiloh means “place of peace,” she tells me. I tell her that Freud endured thirty-three operations for cancer of the jaw. It’s already the afternoon when we’re visited by a man with sleep-tousled hair. Life has been reduced to the paper one accumulates passing through it. Years from now, we’ll make the rocks leap and split. Meanwhile, the circus bears must dance their creepy minuet.

I have a pale, wretched face, an injured hand, but your breath tastes purple to me and far from everywhere.

And when I fill you, you’re Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins, and I’m a cart loaded with the groaning wounded, we’re twelve grains of gunpowder floating mightily through the air, a new kind of pearl-handled combustion, and the only patch of snow to endure to evening on our quiet street.

Howie Good
http://apocalypsemambo.blogspot.com/
Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-91
Charles Nicholl

OBJECTION - kyle bilinski

2012-01-06T14:30:00.000-08:00

When the preacher asked the question, Jim didn’t move. He felt stuck, like a piece of rusted machinery. From the last row, he watched Julie search the congregation. She flipped up her veil and looked right at him. That's when he realized he was standing, trembling, about to yell.

Kyle Bilinski
http://kylebilinski.weebly.com/
The Road
Cormac McCarthy

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE LINES - samuel cole

2012-01-06T14:27:00.000-08:00

I know her face but forget her name; she works out at the same gym, sometimes beside me. Different in life clothes, hair down she’s almost attractive. She takes the other, longer line reserved for big ticket items and cash.

“I hear you crossed over to the dark side,” she says, arms full of packages tied up with string.

I laugh. “I didn’t want to but I had to.”

“We miss you, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah, I miss you guys too.”

Some man behind me huffs. I take two steps forward and then one more for good luck.

“Think you’ll ever come back?”

“Maybe. It all depends on the price.”

“Forty dollars is a lot these days.”

“You’re telling me.”

Some lady behind me giggles. I turn around into sagging skin, eyes void of brightness, eyebrows full of gray.

“What’s the dark side?” she whispers, leaning forward.

“Anything you want it to be.”

She giggles, and for a moment I feel free.

Samuel Cole
http://maneuverableword.com/
The Street of a Thousand Blossoms
Gail Tsukiyama

A VERY SMALL DEATH - kira clark

2012-01-06T14:22:00.001-08:00

I do not sleep. I lie in the night trying to hear a baby shrieking, an exploding howl leaking from its pink skin like some bird.

I wonder Did I swallow it? Did I eat my baby all wrong? Did my fork aim incorrectly, miss the peas, stab flesh instead?

Oh, my throat. My throat is sticky with much spit. I can feel it at night the most, when the stillness of my throat is submerged and resting in saliva. How many baby throats I could fit inside my large throat!

The husband, he has bulbous eyes on his face skin that close when he sleeps like well like a baby.

I was not raised on a farm with grandparents and babies but I remember it that way. I remember babies in the grass crawling up up up me. I remember my skin being soft and hot and my skin it woke open and ready.

There is a tear on my belly where they carved it out of me. My eggs have froth like sea foam.

The husband, he drinks tea while I swirl around, locating the missing hands.

Kira Clark
MsKiraClark@yahoo.com
Ever
Blake Butler

NAKED, I INTERROGATE A PHOTO PORTRAIT OF TWO WOMEN - dewitt brinson

2012-01-06T14:19:00.001-08:00

I see they are naked too. Their breasts are tits and boobs. They are the life of their own libido. I look in their eyes and they register empty. They recognize nothing. They are not new. Not more than light. They are expenses of energy from within me and without me. They are moments already faded. Leaves crumble in the hand of a horny child. I love this child and the forest he crushes. These women are looking at me because I forced them to, because I forced myself to. This bondage is a bandage for the horny wound.

These women are expensive and tasteless.

These art forms are cheap and delicious.

When I’m dead, my eyes will look like the pictures I masturbate to.

Poetry.

Desmond Tutu. Mahatma Gandhi.

DeWitt Brinson
dewittcb@hotmail.com
Happiness
Denis Robert

AGAIN - leah givens

2012-01-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

Tiger wakes rumpled, whiskers crinkled, the blue of her eyes soggy with sleep. This was not the morning she envisioned, summer turning in for the year, fleece blankets and long pajamas emerging and under-cover cuddling the way to get warm. She didn't sleep last night, and neither did I. I crashed, face-down like Tiger must have, into a corner of the airless green couch, turning my head to escape its sueded depths. John slept at ease. I curled myself into one position then another against his long frame to say silently he loved me. It seemed his pores could communicate an unconscious caring. Maybe mine could too, so if we lay together long enough, skin breathing in skin, he would start to believe. When he woke he struggled back into his shirt, asked for a soda to wake him up for the ride. I gave him my last cold one. He would call, he said. When he needed me, he would call.

Leah Givens
leah.givens@gmail.com
The World I Live In
Helen Keller

POLARITIES - peter tieryas liu

2012-01-06T14:12:00.000-08:00

I’ve often wondered where cities begin and where they end. The polarities imply natural magnetism, direct currents in confluence with circuitry and the cathodes of memory. History seems marginalized by the only print people seem to read nowadays- restaurant menus. Tiger prawns, Kurobuta pork, Hackleback caviars- the lexicon of privilege, the scholarly diodes of culinary vibrancy. Deconstructionism is a matter of salad forks and steak knives, says my blind date, who’s also performing a phenomenological analysis on the culmination of sautéed recipes. She tells me her dream is to quadruple her weight so she can document her corpulence for an internet show. I ask her if she’d like to venture to a buffet after the meal, and her eyes glimmer in affirmation. I can almost see the thought bubbles above her- if only she’d grasp the poetry of grenobloise and rainbow trout, she’d emerge from irrelevancy into the palms of epiphany- or is that obesity?

Peter Tieryas Liu
http://tieryas.wordpress.com/
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2011-12-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

'BIRTH OF CHRIST' - rhys

THUMBLING - marcus speh

2011-12-23T08:39:00.001-08:00

They fucked every night like weasels. Making love seemed to be the only way to fend off the sure knowledge that they’d both wrinkle and die one day. Before daily sex they’d tried: community work; mad shopping; robbing a bank; overeating and puking; complaining; bullying other couples. Only when Kate got pregnant though an army of doctors had assured her that she was barren, did they slacken and returned to a less heated cycle of lovemaking. Ms Dobbs, who lived next door, was glad for it and resentful, too: she slept better now but her dreams got as dull as they had been for the sixty years before the young couple moved in. But things change when they change. As Ms Dobbs sat down to finish an embroidery of a baroque scene showing a shepherd leaning on his strong staff looking at a lolling Virgin Mary, she suddenly noticed a small door in the wall. It wasn’t taller than a thumb and in it stood a perfectly formed, handsome young man who beckoned her with his little finger in the most delightful way so that the old lady willingly put her handiwork aside.

Marcus Speh
http://marcusspeh.com
New Grub Street
George Gissing

ONE WAY TO RIO - kevin o' cuinn

2011-12-23T08:38:00.001-08:00

The band’s previous singer got some Old Time Religion and just couldn’t—anymore—sing stuff that condoned and sometimes encouraged shoplifting, weed and giving head. Judith assured them she had no issue. There had been other applicants, the guys told her: like Marina and Maud. Maud had ties and couldn’t tour, Marina could tour but couldn’t sing. Judith said she could do both, and if they were nice she’d do them too. The whole age thing though, one of them said, We kinda wanted someone our age. She asked if they knew Virginia Plain and started in before they could answer; Baby Jane’s in Acapulco, we are flying down to Rio. They were sold, all four—two lead guitars, bass and drums. Is your passport valid? Both of them, she said. They laughed, said Good one, you’re in. High-fives and Heinekens. How'd you hear about us? She’d seen the ad in the supermarket, on the wall beside the wanted posters. Her year book picture; so much younger then.

Kevin O' Cuinn
www.kevsville.blogspot.com
Baby Leg
Brian Evenson

SOMETIMES I THINK A RELATIONSHIP BASED ON DAILY TEXTS IS POSSIBLE - elizabeth ellen

2011-12-23T08:36:00.001-08:00

But then I’ll have a bad day and being touched will seem like a necessity.

Elizabeth Ellen
elizabethellen.net
A Sport and a Pastime
James Salter

THE POINT OF THE BOTTLE - caroline kepnes

2011-12-23T08:35:00.001-08:00

Vera snaps, “What’s the point?” “The point of what”, Charlie says. Charlie reads the news. Vera hates the news. She’s an artist. Charlie’s favorite item today: Bottle lost in a Maine nor’easter is found twenty years later by a beachcomber in Northern Ireland. Vera sighs. “There is no point”, he says. “It’s just beautiful.” He wants her back, he plays, “We’re so white right now, with The New York Times, the eggs benedict and the sugar substitutes. You don’t get any whiter.” “It’s your newspaper,” she says. She won’t play. The waitress comes up, alabaster white, Jet Blue eyes. “The tip’s not included”, she says, smiles, goes. Charlie pats the newspaper. Vera will paint today. In his experience, black girls thrive on incidents like this. The point of the bottle: A bottle has no points, literally. Rounded things float eternally like a fat whitey in a chlorine lazy river. “What’s so funny?” she asks. He leaves a big tip and the waitress clings the bills, nudges the busboy, “My mom is wrong. New Yorkers aren’t cheap.” Beto doesn’t speak English. He sees the photo of the beach, the woman. He will swipe this art and tape it on his wall. Beautiful.

Caroline Kepnes
http://www.readinista.com/2011/12/interview-with-audrey-hart-and-giveaway-of-the-dig/
Riding on Duke's Train
Mick Carlon

WEST KILL - adam moorad

2011-12-23T08:34:00.000-08:00

He pawns his Fender. Buys a bug zapper from the Salvation Army. He hangs it from a branch outside. She plugs it in when she’s bored and horny. She knows him, how the crackle of static placates his inner voice. She sits him on a bucket. Squirts a tube of lube into her hand. He examines her bosom, warts protruding from it like quartz nuggets on a pewter sheet.The zap of a bug kill volts through the mosquito screen. Die motherfucker, he says. She shushes him. Says, take off your stinky buckskin, The smoke of thorax drifts in through the window and spreads itself. She drizzles a translucent gel across his forehead. Her hands tremble.He flares his nostrils, murmurs, Die motherfucker. Die.

Adam Moorad
adamadamadamadamadam.blogspot.com
Morocco
Kendra Grant Malone and Matthew Savoca

MARION COOK DOESN'T PURCHASE SNACKER - lohel hochberg

2011-12-23T08:32:00.001-08:00

Marion Alice Cook (28) of Port Orange, FL, walked into the Dunlawton Ave. KFC this Saturday with, observers report, “her money in her hand, like she just wanted to give it to someone—anybody,” (Angel B. Williams, age 47; customer) before immediately exiting the restaurant. Friends Pauline and David Kester offered no explanation, though were eager to mention her “close relationship” with “challenging music,” “Twitter” and “KFC Snackers.” Cook, when asked for a comment, seemed to glaze over, passively stating: “I thought I knew what I wanted.”

Lohel Hochberg
iohelhochberg@gmail.com
The Physics of Imaginary Objects
Tina May Hall

MICE - carol deminski

2011-12-23T08:31:00.000-08:00

I lay in bed. Eyes open. Every sound is a mouse scrabbling across the floor. He hasn't called in days. I haven't called him either. I hear a click and imagine a baby mouse gnawing on electrical wires behind the dresser. There's tapping. It must be mice crawling behind the baseboard. I can't sleep. I'm not thinking about why we're not talking. The mice are chewing holes through sweaters in the bottom drawers, curling up beneath where the pilot light keeps the stove warm. When the sky lightens all the tapping and ticking and scrabbling stops. I don't hear the mice anymore. I get up and turn on all the lights but I see no sign of them. I didn't get any sleep. We're still not talking. Tonight or tomorrow night.

Carol Deminski
http://cdeminski.wordpress.com
Letters From New Orleans
Rob Walker

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2011-11-18T09:58:00.001-08:00

SUMMER DAY - AREF HOUSHYAR

DARK LOVE - kim goransson

2011-11-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

The body lay on the riverbank, its face a cool and tangled mask of seaweed and regret. Seeing off the curious gulls, inspector R. inhaled the salty-repugnant perfume that all expired beings waft of. Turning his attention to the set of footprints leading away from the body that, sure enough, appeared to be one-footed, he began to hum.

I am the darkness that swallows all. I know a dark love. My heart is a thousand-feet-deep stone chamber that you will never pry open. I have been known to murder babies only to return them to their mothers in pieces. I am the original motherfucker. Hear hear, who is calling, I am the darkness that swallows all.

Inspector R. carefully replaced “Mass in B Minor” on the turntable and with the first note sank into the abyss. Walking the narrow corridor with the 111 doors again: the terrified screams, feeling every handle. There was the unbearable stench, both familiar and strange. There, in his left shirt-pocket, heavy and close to heart, lay the solitary key.

Kim Göransson

kitchenpoet.blogspot.com

Life and War with Mikey Fatboy Delgado

Mikey Fatboy Delgado

A MAN OWNS HIMSELF UNTIL THE GATE - shannon elizabeth hardwick

2011-11-18T09:54:00.000-08:00

I'd rather be a tree than you any day. She drew diagrams whenever she was nervous. Made lists and stuck them everywhere. A tree stands still. That's all. A tree doesn't mind distance or noise or earthquakes or babies.

Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick

shannonhardwickpoetry.wordpress.com

The Giving Tree

Shel Silverstein

THOMAS JEFFERSON IS EVERYTHING - dolan morgan

2011-11-18T09:52:00.000-08:00

Thomas Jefferson – now recognized by scientists as a disease that only coincidentally took the shape of a man in early America – has been detected in a number of household objects. Shipments of Chinese toys are reported to be contaminated with the politician and are being recalled due to isolated incidents of fatal child legislation. A vaccine is being developed – but is years from completion. Some speculation has arisen that Thomas Jefferson accumulates in closets and under beds. Children have demonstrated profound ability to recognize the viral presence. Adults are asked to avoid areas wherever there is a screaming or frightened child. Some religious conservatives have suggested that there are no people, but only the many manifestations of Thomas Jefferson – humanity merely a temporary accumulation of a hive-like intelligence that we have only just glimpsed and can never hope to understand.

Dolan Morgan

www.dolanmorgan.com

Valis

Philip K. Dick

SIDESHOW - daniel romo

2011-11-18T09:50:00.000-08:00

The Chinese contortionist has several suitors:

The lion tamer who stuffs his head down the beasts’ throats claims, “My ability to elude the deadly jaws of the jungle shows life with me will be breathtaking.”

The trapeze artist boasts, “Our love life will be a display of aerial courtship and passion, complete with funhouse mirrors and swinging chandeliers.”

And the greybeard ringmaster who rescued her from Beijing poverty reminds her, “Remember, I’m the greybeard ringmaster who rescued you from Beijing poverty.”

But at night she slinks out of her dressing room to be with The Fat Lady, away from numerous suitors enamored with the way her slippery noodle body bends. Instead she’s content to curl into a taboo embrace of security and comfort with a stationary body that never ends.

Daniel Romo

http://danielromo.wordpress.com

The Angle of Yaw

Ben Lerner

WHOLE LIFE - gary v. powell

2011-11-18T09:47:00.000-08:00

In 1987, we sold life insurance. After selling family and friends and the few easy marks they referred us to, we cold-called, my partner Mahoney and me. We stalked the chiseled streets of Chicago, coked-up predators in wool-blend suits.

We overcame objections: You don’t mind your wife whoring herself out after you’re gone? We closed with: No one plans to die, but you can plan for death. We carved the hearts of guys with mahogany desks and suburban aspirations.

Once, between pitches, I heaved in a gutter; vomit freezing on contact, pizza chunks glittering like rhinestones. We summoned guilt, conjured insecurity. It’s okay if your kids shop at Goodwill? We created dreams and painted nightmares. Pay me a little today or the tax man a lot tomorrow.

The Great Lake lay gray and flat as a policy binder. We cut lines with razor blades on its indelible surface, inhaling them in the marbled Men’s Rooms of venerable law firms. We saved the souls thrown from the Sears Tower, catching them in our financial safety net.

We explained the difference between term and whole life. You can rent or own. Landlord or tenant; what kind of man are you?

Gary V. Powell

www.authorgaryvpowell.com

Towney

Andre Dubus III

NETI POT - XTX

2011-11-18T09:45:00.000-08:00

She keeps saying, “Neti Pot” and it’s all I can do to not scream and cover my ears.

Neti pot. Neti pot. Neti pot.

It’s every fifth word. Every fourth. I want to make her stop saying it, but her hospitality keeps me quiet.

Neti pot.

And now she’s describing how it works. And now she’s describing how it doesn’t work. And now she’s demonstrating how it works. And now and now and now.

She leaves and comes back with the Neti pot. It’s in a small box. It’s out of the small box. I want to get up. I want to leave. Saline solution. Warm Water. Fill levels. More demonstrating. Nostrils. Head tilt. Nasal cavity. Flow. Drip. Flow.

I cringe and hold back my real face. The one hiding under the nice face. I sip my drink. I eat a cracker. I eat a piece of cheese. My real face is begging her to please stop saying it. Please stop. I don’t want to hurt you. Please. Stop.

I am on the verge of. I know what that means now. I know I will now be able to sympathize with certain horrendous news stories. I will whisper, “Neti pot,” after I read them and then try to fold the paper away without tearing it apart with clawed hands.

xTx

Ayiti

Roxane Gay

www.notimetosayit.com

INDUCTION - erin fitgerald

2011-11-18T09:42:00.000-08:00

Fold time into a tight, careful accordion and fan others with it.

If you are not angry, you must eat bacon. Tug hard on its black crunchy outline with your sharp little apnea-ground teeth. Each time your upper and lower molars connect, think of the person you'd most like to tell to fuck off. Your progress should be measured by the number of people it takes to chew through a piece that is the length of your middle finger.

If you are not tired, you must eat almonds. Place them on your tongue and let them drift in your mouth as they see fit. Breathe slightly through your lips, if this allows to you remember a sweeter taste. When the almonds tell you that they are bored, grind them into a paste and swallow them. Do not pause.

If you are not sad, you must eat hardboiled eggs. Tap them gently against your plate, and nod vigorously when the sulfuric fumes curl around the broken shell. This life, this possibility, it has died so that you may live. Observe the grey layer that is visible between the yolk and the white. That is the soul. Swallow it whole.

Erin Fitzgerald

www.rarelylikable.com

Death Wishing

Laura Ellen Scott

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2011-10-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

SCRATCH THE PAGE - melissa duckworth

A SERPENT TO STING YOU - nicola belte

2011-10-15T11:21:00.001-07:00

We haven’t been out together for ages. We bicker like fuck when we’re drunk, but his sister’s been nagging because she just moved and it’s Halloween and she wants a party. What’s wrong with that?

We go as Frankenstein and his bride and I wear a white nightdress and a black beehive. He’s in a torn jacket with lopsided shoulder pads, covered in green facepaint that’s already looking patchy.

She’s made blood-red rum punch with candy skulls and luminous chopped off fingers floating in it. He drinks most of it and starts eying up Morticia, leaning in really close and looking at her tits telling her that joke that I hate.

The bolts fall off his neck and my wig begins to itch and he pisses on a pumpkin in the garden because he can’t walk. I slap his face and he tells me I’m a boring bitch.

In the morning, our heads ache and the washing machine rattles. For months, our sheets are green.

Nicola Belte

The Crimson Petal and the White

Michel Faber

FLORES DESHOJADAS - laura elizabeth woolett

2011-10-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

after the painting by Ramon Casas i Carbó

Defloration. Defoliation. Lost flowers, lost leaves, lost spillages on sheets. Pink perfumed tissue paper. The carnival is over. Confetti on concrete, Cadiz. Deflowered maiden, half-asleep, fumbling over the cool stone shade. Not a stitch on body. Not a hair on pubic bone. We are lost. We are in despair. We look pure and smell impure, as the daylight impinges, stretches across our numb, wormlike sleep (seeping sickly, alcohol-sweet into consciousness). A little white dog is scampering. A little white dog is sniffing the untarnished blue-black hair. A little white dog relieves itself, unseen, on the public pavement.

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

lauraelizabeth@live.com.au

The Malady of Death

Marguerite Duras

LADDERS AND MATTRESSES - jay robinson

2011-10-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

He did not know the train from its whistle. But who did anymore? Everyone blamed the economy for everything: terraces pocked with animal tracks, a series of refrigerator failings, tornado warnings dispatched to the wrong counties. I’d like to airlock you, he said to her. But you’re better for burning. But he didn’t say it, of course. He was talking to himself. At the gallery on the night they met, the painter took the knife, smeared it across the horizon. All the other people there were salt and chert: celebrity weddings; ladders and mattresses. And every morning now the raw husk of sex pulls through the trees like a swallow finding his home. But if we fucked the au pair, she told him as they stared at three panels in black-and-white, our names would change at midnight. The next morning: a white bird hovered in the neighbor’s kitchen. He whistled, and it whistled back. The coffee pot sputtered a row of dazzling notes. Even the streetlights couldn’t help themselves. Like lamps in the desert.

Jay Robinson

www.barnowlreview.com

O Holy Insurgency

Mary Biddinger

THERE IS NO ANIMAL EVIDENCE TO PROVE HOW HUMAN WE ARE - peter schwartz

2011-10-15T11:16:00.000-07:00

once upon a time we took every living piece of us through every dirty trench we ever found and lost and discovered it was dead weight, that whatever the uniform or code of light, however we angle ourselves, it’s still just a grab at kite wind, mercury, but it’s okay; none of this has been gentle for a very, very long time.

Peter Schwartz

http://ww w.mainstreetrag.com/BGraham_MI.html

'Nothing or Next to Nothing'

Barry Graham

SOLILOQUY ON MA - bobbi lurie

2011-10-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

Ma warned me about women. Ma could be disarming and disturbing but she believed in spoiling me and my sister because she was Cuban and Cubans believe you need to spoil children to give them happy memories to fall back on when life turns into LIFE, the way my mother saw it: through cancer, mental breakdown, institutionalization. I did visit her there but my sister didn’t. My sister moved to Cuba with one of our cousins. The restless spirit of an older sister can be a motivating factor for someone as attached to family heritage as me. “Your sister is a slut,” said Ma over supper. I know that’s a reason I tried to hide my interest in women from Ma. “They’ll always disappoint you,” she said. “All my women friends stopped calling after I got sick.” She never got over this. Dad tried to call her friends back to her but Ma broke down before anything could be done. Sarah, my sister, was already gone. “Me duele el corazon pensando en ella,” Ma used Spanish, the language of compassion, for all emotional statements. “No me dejan, mi hijo precioso." So, I’m the son that didn’t go.

Bobbi Lurie

bobbilurie495@gmail.com

Scham / Shame

Robert Kelly, Birgit Kempker

PLAYING EVERY DAY - molly lurie-marino

2011-10-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

Finally, after some hourly's credits rolled, I let my air out. Five AM, another moon passes his face, laying on concrete outside. Saw him get into some fight over origin of species, a where you from? and throw half a closed fist.

Guess the guy said the two looked the same to him, Cubano, Siciliano, whatever, right? Chains, dancing, drinking, dictators. Or something. And his laugh exploded, Capiche? he said, fingers splayed. This bicho, mi papi, disagreed. Well, the facts are just a lot of things that don't change, puto, he said, but who knows what that means. I looked out the window, stopped watching the boxed friends of late-night.

He pushed the other guy, Irish by the way he held his drinks and his gut. Three of his friends showed up—four Irishmen with a fifth, there's a statement—my Señor Perdedor lay in the steps, and morning came, paper boys gathering in a circle while the moon and sun exchanged words. Every day we play, he'll say stumbling in later, sun and moon shaking, and I'll turn back to the TV. But for now, I wait.

Molly Lurie-Marino

X - PERIMENT - howie good

2011-10-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

What did the doctors say? you ask. Something about Nazis and interrogation, the clicked heels of polished black boots, and that if my devils ever leave me, my angels will take flight, too.

Whom pain has brought to despair, but not yet to death, boulders, a tree stump, room after room of covered mirrors, if you’re going through hell, keep going.

Ten years or more of pills and ashes and the endless black windows of empty streets. Is it me? Is it? Or is there really a bird with a broken branch for a beak?

Howie Good

https://sites.google.com/site/whiteknucklepresscom/

The Devil All the Time

Donald Ray Pollock

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2011-09-30T09:24:00.001-07:00

GARDENING IN SUMMER - ross mcmeekin

2011-09-30T09:21:00.000-07:00

After every rain we’d take hammers out into the garden. We’d crack snail shells, get sticky film on the hammerheads. The best finds were under long leaf lettuce and at the base of the spinach and chard. Little circles of moving stones in the shade of the tomato plants, beneath the broad leaves of summer squash.

Once we tallied the results we’d fill our palms with table salt. We’d drop one grain at a time on brown slugs and see how many it took before they rolled over and showed us their grey bellies. The big ones fled. The small ones balled.

Sometimes, crows would gather. We’d grab our guns. If we downed a few, we’d tie up their legs with twine and hang them from the awning of the porch to scare the rest. Afternoons, we’d drink and watch them spin in the breeze. Within a few nights, they’d disappear, twine broken. We never found out what took them.

Ross McMeekin

http://www.rossmcmeekin.com

The Longest Part of the Night

Midge Raymond

THREE SHORT FICTIONS - parker tettleton

2011-09-30T09:19:00.000-07:00

Three Left Over

One day is wherever if it’s still there. In five minutes there might not be a third sentence. There is, this time, & here is as relative as I get.

Nothing Papa

I wasn’t born anywhere this year. Stripes walk in. I’m always non-birthday. Don’t you love a cigarette when it’s an Elliott Smith song? No one inherits social security. There isn’t a fucking way I’m showing my id.

In Front Of Me I’m Looking

I love you enough to not, include the rest. If there is a line this is one. The correct response after so much certainty is Where are my yellow Chuck’s? I don’t own or have any. In this way, everything is said all of the time.

Parker Tettleton

http://parker-augustlight.blogspot.com/

Owls Do Cry

Janet Frame

STAMPEDE - kelly scott

2011-09-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

He told me a story about when he was a child in Missouri, when farmers in his town began keeping bison.

“Do you know how high bison can jump?” he asked me. I shook my head. “Neither did they,” he answered, explaining how the ranchers had rounded the bison up, not expecting them to spill out of the open-topped trailer like a waterfall. He was still sleeping when he felt the thunder of the stampede, the plastic dinosaurs falling off the shelf above his bed.

“Wow, why didn’t they try to stop them?” I asked him.

“You can’t stop a stampede,” he told me. “You just have to let them run until they get tired.”

I imagined him haunted by this notion that nothing could be done to keep them from running. He must have thought about it when his wife left him, taking his children with her. I thought about it when we made love, his hands roaming my body with an absent-minded lust.

You have to let them run until they get tired. They will not stay with homemade chili or impromptu sex in the bar bathroom.

So this is what it feels like when they leave.

Kelly Scott

kellym.scott@yahoo.com

Normal People Don't Live Like This

Dylan Landis

SPEAKER PHONE - josh olsen

2011-09-30T09:16:00.000-07:00

My neighbor stood in my front yard, talking on her cordless phone. Who knew why, but she had the person on the other end on speaker phone. While she remained her usual cold and stoic self, the woman she was talking to was sobbing in French, and I concluded that it must have been her sister. I had recently been informed that their mother had been diagnosed with a rare and inoperable form of brain cancer, and so I assumed that that was what they must have been talking about, but why she was in my front yard, and why she had her sister on speaker phone, for everyone to overhear, whether or not they understood French, I had absolutely no fucking idea. She seemed oblivious to the fact that I was sitting, in plain sight, on my front step, reading a book, less than ten feet away from her. Of course, I couldn’t understand what her sister was saying, but the anguish in her voice was universal – unmistakable – and it was only after a smiling woman walked past and greeted us both with a heartfelt "Good afternoon!" that she decided to continue her conversation in private.

Josh Olsen

http://zygoteinmycoffee.com/taintedcoffeepress/sixmonths.html

Supergods

Grant Morrison

JUICY - michelle morouse

2011-09-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

Tomato tributary merging with watermelon river breaching mayo dam at counter’s edge and Tiger within a whisker of tripping Joey, knife in hand, and Sarah at the grill scorching eggplant. Sure, she’s old enough, Joey’s old enough, when you were their age…. And it’s art, it’s science…. And the rest return, hauling stuff-we-already-have from the roadside stand, chopping, peeling, whisking, sautéing, so certain they could soar if everyone would keep the hell out of their way. It’s in the downstairs freezer, not the deep freezer the refrigerator freezer and Tiger yowls and scratches from the laundry room. And Wow the steam from the corn is really making your hair frizz up….and Grandma did it this way and Aunt Josie did it that way and then I’ll do it this way and you will love it. Then it’s three months gone and there’s ruby sauce, congealing gravy, the roots, the warm and crusty, crisp duck skin, quince and cinnamon, and you save the last sip of wine for after the last bite and it’s too damn fast.

Michelle Morouse

michellemorouse@ymail.com

You Think that's Bad

Jim Shepard

THE PART WHERE HENREDON WAS HAPPY AGAIN - caroline kepnes

2011-09-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

Henredon and his wife sold their L.A. house in 1990 for $275,000 because she was lonely in L.A. They pull up to it and see new people in his living room. His wife says their living room. You can’t go back in time and please start the car so we can go back to Vegas. The car won't start. No, really. The battery is dead. The homeowners are named Packard. They love their house ($1.3 million). Their batteries work. The Packard man braces the battery clip and Henredon hopes Packard will fry, the wife too. How silly, says his wife on the way back to Vegas. We could never afford it now anyway and they were such nice people. People you will never see again, he says. She says nothing. She is a blackjack dealer and she will tell the story to all her players. She will say her husband should get over it and the tourists will agree because they want to win money. She will leave out the most important part of the story, the part where Henredon wanted those Packards dead. That way, she will get tips and maybe someday they can buy their house back.

Caroline Kepnes

carolinekepnes@gmail.com

the narrows

anne petry

SCARECROW - john oliver hodges

2011-09-30T09:11:00.000-07:00

She hated that he would wink at her. She hated that damned wink. She’d be talking and he would wink. And his shins were sharp enough to cut garlic. He wanted to wrap his leg around her at night, but what woman would stand for that? He proved with a tape measure that she was five foot six instead of five foot seven. It gave him pleasure, didn’t it? She hated his long eyelashes, and his big lips that seemed made for kissing, these beautifully shaped little red pillows. There were so many things about him that she hated that she could talk on about it without repeating material. Whenever he tried talking about himself, her list of stuff shut him up. She was coming out of her shell. She enjoyed telling him what a selfish bedraggled scarecrow he was, how lost he was going to be without her. He blew it. He would not be able, ever, to look in the mirror because he would know that he was just exactly what she told him he was: a scarecrow.

John Oliver Hodges

http://www.hamburgereyes.com/2011/08/31/john-oliver-hodges/

Citrus County

John Brandon

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2011-09-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

NAKED PEOPLE AT SYDNEY MARDI GRAS

SLIPPING AWAY, FOURTH FLOOR - sandra ketcham

2011-09-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

Gravity pulls at her toes as she sits on the couch, her legs dangling off the edge. Gravity stretches her legs into long, thin strands of plasticine. Gravity changes her DNA.

Her voice is softening into someone else's and her body is eating itself from the inside. She's lost several muscles and a lung already. She clutches her kidneys at night. She carries her heart inside her purse to keep it safe.

She lives with a man who loves her. The man shows his love by plucking out the hairs on her head and body. He does this while he fucks her, while they watch TV. Only a few strands remain.

Tonight, she drinks red wine and spins and spins. She covers her body with glitter and paint to transform it into something visible. Tonight, she flies, over her neighbor's balcony, over the bushes, the jasmine, and into the pool below.

When the man that loves her finds her there, floating in the pool, he notices how the water clings differently to her hairless parts. He mentions this to the forming crowd. They nod in agreement. The glitter and paint spread out from her body, forming wings in the water.

Sandra Ketcham

http://sandraketcham.tumblr.com/

Paris Spleen

Charles Baudelaire

FORECLOSURE - jay robinson

2011-09-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

Once, they spent evenings at the defunct Drive-In. Movie screen as a billboard no one was watching. Its sun-bleached Wal-Mart logo. Weeds as tall as them, taller. Stalks like wrists. Cracks in the pavement you could lose yourself in. Sometimes they parked in a spot overlooking town. His house in the distance covered in fog or the permanent haze of post-industry. He munched popcorn. She told him, Isn’t it fun to watch the place where you grew up disappear, one foreclosure at a time? She lit a joint, inhaled, clouded the car. He brushed seeds onto coffee-stained floor mats. Later, at twilight, she rested her head on his shoulder, described the purpose of bioluminescence in mating. Her hands buttoned and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. Moonlight blinking off pale brown shell with each movement of her fingers.

Jay Robinson

www.barnowlreview.com

O Holy Insurgency

Mary Biddinger

ON GOING BLIND AT 40 - michael d. joyce

2011-09-16T07:28:00.000-07:00

In this bleak topography I saw now composed only of shades of grey and smears of nonsense I reached out and painted lines of black and white, etching out borders and shapes and making the ethereal tangible. I traced the outlines of mountains and the boundaries of rivers and the bricks of castles and with this self-created, self-practiced cartography I am able to explore and claim and conquer.

Sometimes when I explore this world I think I am just conquering myself. Why? Because making sense out of nonsense is the human condition. Because I'm human. Because I can't see the colors and shapes that others do. Because all the world that is, is within the human mind, and I will exert my will--my will for you--over our collective castles in the air. Because intertwined with the physical stuff that makes humans beings are the arbitrary concepts of reality--there, beneath and around and embedded in the sinews and veins and all of them crisscrossing our bodies is what it means to be alive. Because inside you I know we humans, capable of higher thought, are equal part reality and equal part imaginary.

Michael D. Joyce

michael.d.joyce@gmail.com

American Skin

Don De Grazia

DARK WINDS - dillon mullenix

2011-09-16T07:27:00.000-07:00

Jim rolls around in bed. He has to be at work in a few hours. There is cigarette ash on his stomach caught in sweat. He hates showering, and doesn’t. His woman is snoring next to his indentation in the mattress. Last night he was eating her pussy under the sheets. He had to swallow a little vomit. Despite it, Jim was proud he had still got laid. He gargled mouthwash before he walked out the door. When Jim got home there was food on the table, and she had on her thigh-highs and thong under her nightgown. He ate a couple plates, then took her to the bedroom so that life could go on.

Dillon Mullenix

www.mllnx.blogspot.com

Seek

Denis Johnson

FIGI - michelle orabona

2011-09-16T07:25:00.000-07:00

She thinks about suicide the way you think about foreign lands you know you’ll never visit. When everything builds up in screams inside you, you think; I’ll run away to Figi. I’ll live in a hut on the beach and eat coconuts for breakfast and disappear my feet into the sand. I’ll disappear my life into the ocean and at night there will be so many stars. And you’ll fall asleep out there, the ocean kissing you with its heart beat as you count the stars and create your own constellations. Everything will be okay in Figi. When you’ve finally had enough, when it’s too much and you realize that if you don’t leave now there’ll be nothing left, you’ll get on a plane without even packing a bag. Freedom is not needing a toothbrush. You’ll go, you say, one day. And your screams come out as sighs instead.

Standing in the kitchen, her hands lying limp in the dishwater, thinking about her escape. Her screams come out in sighs instead. But somewhere, buried, you both know you’ll never leave.

Michelle Orabona

http://mayaswellbeme.blogspot.com/

Lost at Sea

Bryan Lee O'Malley

DIFFERENT - meg tuite

2011-09-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

“You smell like oranges,” Danny said to Cara. They lived in the same building. She was taller than him and smarter. “Watch out for that witch down the hall,” Cara said. “She called me a boy when I helped with her groceries. I threw her poison nickels down the sewer. Anyway, the witch from Oz melted into a small, green puddle, but I saw butter melt and grow back into a long, solid lump, so no reason to believe any witch is dead.”

They ate blue pixie sticks until their tongues were punctured-purple. Danny’s face was paper-white and sometimes he screamed and Cara screamed with him. He liked that. His face was blotchy.

The day they started school, Danny hid behind the chalkboard that swung when you pulled it. He didn’t like crowds and school was full of them. Cara told her mom he hid at school and stared at her from behind chalkboards and under desks, but he wouldn’t talk, even to her. Cara wanted to whisper things to him. Mom said he was different, he would always be different and that’s why he hid like that.

So now, at school, when Danny stared at Cara; Cara stared back.

Meg Tuite

megtuite.wordpress.com

The Third Policeman

Flann O'Brien

NOT FEELING WELL - m. thompson

2011-09-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

I am not feeling well.

My bathwater is black and sloshing over my bathtub and under my eyelids my sleep is black.

The doctor attributes this to arterial sclerosis. He says the blood in my head has thickened and is hollow.

Which in the village is called waiting. In the village they are hushed. In the village they are resting when everything tumbles over.

Way below the mountains, there across the plains. I am not well and the town is roaming down a road that has no direction, going somewhere or other.

* composed of the notes and scribbles I made while reading Herta Müller's Nadirs

M Thompson

www.m-thompson.net

Rings of Saturn

W.G. Sebald

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2011-08-05T11:04:00.001-07:00

ADOLF WOLFLI

AMERICAN NECROPOLIS #14 - garin cycholl

2011-08-05T10:57:00.000-07:00

after Mark Morris

The cowboy necropolis is floodless; it extends night in long-dead, swing bands over an AM radio seeping deep into west Texas. A series of calls from payphones, blowjobs behind horse trailers. Quick! How many motel chains can you name in one breath? Count them out like playing cards. It’s a tired movie—strung on past four o’clock, the test patterns whistling you to sleep in a half-empty motel along a county highway. Your body whistles, too—but for corn chips and the channel that tunes in halfway through the dial, some documentary of cemeteries beaded along the highway you’ll travel the day after tomorrow. The list of payphone numbers buzzes in your shirt pocket. That buzz ignores every lick of jazz that’s ever been blown in the Territory. It trumpets a dead man’s breath. A dirge blown to revelry. You take off the carnation red shirt that a real cowboy wouldn’t be caught dead in. The apocalyptic numbers. You call them one by one—bars, whorehouses, broken phones outside 7-11’s. The inevitable answer, the man’s voice in love with the distance on the other end of the line. Dead talk. A voice that says it knows you. There’s snow in the panhandle—at least, so you’ve heard—and a dead man was buried in your best chaps. Wish him, “Good luck!” No empire has ended any other way.

Garin Cycholl

http://www.moriapoetry.com/bonegathebook.pdf

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu

DANCE? - joellyn powers

2011-08-05T10:55:00.000-07:00

She likes to listen to slow, sexy songs and imagine herself dancing. Maybe for a crowd or maybe not. She would be in a spot-lit bar – no. In a pool of moonlight in a bedroom, a half-dressed man reclining on the bed, watching her drop articles of clothing to the floor. My God, she will think, my God. How did I arrive here?

Out her window she sees stars, or maybe hundreds of faraway people smoking cigarettes in the dark. There is no way to decipher extinguished light from light yet to be extinguished. She closes the curtains. She is in her underwear and a K-mart t-shirt and her thighs have stretch marks and little red dots. She tries to reach a bottle of lotion without unfolding her legs from beneath her, but it is too far away. Her fingers stroke the air.

Joellyn Powers

http://especiallyfreeing.tumblr.com

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Lorrie Moore

RIDE - faith gardner

2011-08-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

The bus was stale with strangers and their air. There was the heat-wavy highway 5, dry cheap hills, slaughterhouse stink so thick it stung the nostrils. The man next to me grinned, sans front tooth, beanie pulled down to his eyes. He asked was this my first Greyhound ride. I told him yes, about the snowboarding trip gone awry, my friend with his broken collarbone and half his spleen gone in a Tahoe hospital, his mom’s crumpled Honda I’d now spend my summer working off.

The man told me not to work for no chumps. He hit my arm like a brother or a bro. Don’t be nobody’s bitch, boy. He spit tobacco juice into a Pepsi can. He called himself a drifter slash artist. I sat up straighter, showed him my sketches. You got it all wrong, he said. All straight lines and shadows – where’re the demons? He slept, he snored.

My stop came an hour later. He pulled his beanie off and the tattoo-green letters LSD gleamed from his forehead. I remember the knife of feeling as I waved goodbye and smiled away my shock. When I met my mother in the parking lot she was crying.

Faith Gardner

faithgardner.com

Short Dark Oracles

Sara Levine

TEXAS FAMILY PORTRAIT - misti rainwater-lites

2011-08-05T10:51:00.000-07:00

I don't want any breakfast. I’m still constipated from yesterday. There is no room. I'll drink two or three cups of coffee later. I put a dollop of vanilla ice cream in my coffee. That gives my day a real boost. I will hang out with my son. He will call me Pink Power Ranger. He will call me Mary Jane. He will call me Gwen. He will call me Mommy. We might dance and celebrate life right along with Richard Simmons. Perhaps we will venture outside to investigate the mud puddle. Maybe I'll sit in a chair in the carport while my son draws spider brains with sidewalk chalk. My husband will call me on his lunch break and on his drive home from work. His calls usually go straight to voice mail. The friendly student loan people will call two or three times. I am most popular with them.

II.

I eat the orange yogurt super fast so my tongue won't know what it's tasting. I put in the bargain exercise dvd and hula hoop for half an hour. I ignore the texts from Jaci asking me to meet her at the fetish boutique (black leather chokers are half off today only!). When the UPS guy knocks on the door I open the door wearing something more substantial than a leopard print bra and thong. Tomorrow I will conquer the haunted potty and suicide oven.

III.

Oh sure yeah of course he was fucking adorable in his retro princess skates and pigtail braids, scrawny arms decked out in temporary tattoo sleeves, two sizes too small cartoon kitty shorts. All the perverts would dream up songs that would never sell.

His father blames me for the speech impediment, the weird moments of awkward fumbling clarity from the boy's lollipop sucking mouth.

"Mommy? Is it okay if instead of playing rugby or chess I twirl fire batons and stand on ponies?"

"You can do whatever the fuck you want, Harry. This is Texas."

My husband the ball swinging cowboy takes to town in his dragon flame retard truck, looking for sensible pussy and the usual tonics that will help him forget the whole goddamn lifestyle for at least five or six hours.

Misti Rainwater-Lites

http://www.flickr.com/photos/roxixmas

A Sport and a Pastime

James Salter

MY FEIGNED NIGHTS - jamie grefe

2011-08-05T10:50:00.000-07:00

This place, Pure Heart, stood tucked away on a tiny street in this sleeping town. i found it by accident. The owner who introduced himself as "Master" looked Indian, but was really Japanese. His wife, cute, mixed drinks as he chopped vegetables. They had an assistant, Mayumi, who I immediately took a liking to. I wanted to know her story and would. I drank beer there three times a week and Master always overcharged me. He never kept a bill, but always seemed to guess at the price of my evening. Sometimes one beer would be 4,000 yen. "Table charge," he would say, and smile. I never complained. He treated me right while I was there. Most of the time I was his only customer. I wanted to see Mayumi as much as I could, every night of the week if possible. It was getting that bad. Master would listen to anything I said and nod and nod. He would talk on in Japanese and I would feign understanding. We got along that way, smiling, talking, laughing and misunderstanding but never admitting. "9,000 yen." "Two beers?" "Hai."

Jamie Grefe

jamie.grefe@gmail.com

In the Blind

Eugene Marten

NINE YEAR-OLDS YOU DON'T WANNA FUCK WITH - timmy waldron

2011-08-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

We grew up in the same development. A kind of faze-one-model-home-on-the-corner–still-under-constructions-going–to-be-a-neighborhood –someday, kind of place. We’d ride our bikes through half built homes and fly off mounds of dirt left by powerful hydraulic earthmovers. We’d crash, all the time, just smash into shit with our bodies; trees, hills, and each other. Every night we’d head home bloody and scratched, home to our folks, who were fuming mad about the carnage we’d drag into their new house just before supper. Muddy footprints on the new kitchen floors, earth and dirt fell from our clothes as we were stripped naked and stampeded to the shower. They’d soak us in stinging peroxide, twisting and turning the cotton as if that pain was a punishment, like we weren’t just throwing rocks at each other, as hard as we could; or playing Star Wars with metal rods and two by fours. They’d yell and scream and try to talk sense into us, but it was no use. We bonded as a family of our own, crazy as hell, afraid of nothing.

Timmy Waldron

http://servinghousejournal.com/KennedyPoughkeepsie.aspx

Poughkeepsie, 1962

Thomas E. Kennedy

BAROQUE - michelle reale

2011-08-05T10:44:00.000-07:00

The doctor told him the figure-eight configuration on his nose was cancer. “Sonofabitch,” he said. “Italy,” Ruby said, by way of making things better. The sun as enemy was a concept to get used to. Ruby worshiped it. Dave bitched about tourist in pastels, but envied them their cluelessness in their too white sneakers. Ruby lived life allegro. Wanted the full experience of a Mediterranean summer. They stayed in an old villa. Chipped paint on the walls, oversized works of art in gold, baroque frames. “So Italian,” she said. She booked various activities for them to participate in. They went to a farm where they picked vegetables. “Goddamn sun,” he said fingering what used to be a distinct patrician nose. “Such a great Italian hobby!” she said, with her back to him where freckles broke out like little burnished pennies. She turned toward him in the carrot patch. He saw the sheen of sweat dotting the downy hair on her upper lip. She pointed to the first she would pick. She tugged on the green, feathery vegetation. It came out looking wan and thin as a pencil. Her bottom lip curled. He felt cold. Took it as a sign.

Michelle Reale

http://staccatofiction.com/market-day

Domestic Apparitions

Meg Tuite

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2011-07-11T12:38:00.000-07:00

BABY MOMMA

SHELTER LIKE A SINKING SHIP - ashley strosnider

2011-07-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

She never cared for mermaids the way her roommate did, who believed beyond belief that his grandfather had been seduced by one in Italy. Even after unearthing the family photos in Maryland, bringing them back to Nashville, narrating them to anyone he could get to sit on their couch—where, without fail, the guys and gals all gasped at how breathtakingly beautiful was his grandmother Rosie, envied the apparent devotion with which her husband eyed her. And still there was Matt just sure his granddad had snuggled up with a she-fish who couldn’t even spread her legs for him if she’d wanted to.

At lunch last week, just down the street, her boyfriend told her his mother’s bedtime tale about mermaids, where the seafaring whore gets her head chopped off in the end. She thought “that’s a little too gruesome for childhood,” but not as bad as the one that scared her worst, where a black scratchy animal gets his tail chopped off and eaten—and he moans and he howls and he asks for it back. But what’s given is gone and what’s taken we lack. When Zach was done flattering the waitress, she ordered tuna.

Ashley Strosnider

ashleystrosnider.wordpress.com

The Wet Collection

Joni Tevis

SHORELINE - lavinia ludlow

2011-07-11T12:36:00.000-07:00

I hit the pavement for a kid I met at Warped Tour, in a dream. He was shy, low-esteemed, spoke in mumbles. When he smiled, shadows drew toward him and amplified his laughter. He had sandy eyes, a wobbly stomach, and wore tighty-whities loose around his thighs. If he crapped, it would all wiggle out the sides.

He took me around to the shadiest pockets of East Oakland on bikes that rusted and fell to shrapnel. We carried the pieces to his place, a dark studio at the end of a crack hall. Similar to a crack house, a crack hall is one floor designated for crack in a complex filled with other shenanigans like whoring and chop-shopping and meth-making, possibly the sales of babies. He played the guitar for me, and then the drums when neighborly arguments over drugs, whores, or babies overshadowed base, tom, and cymbals.

We ended the night on a shady cot on the whore floor. The sheets were stained with blood, he explained, because his grandmother had died of ruptured hemorrhoids the day before. Talking side by side, he fled at the site of a striped spider, which he crushed upon escape.

Lavinia Ludlow

http://ludlowlavinia.wordpress.com/

Damascus

Joshua Mohr

LIFE WITHOUT TELEVISION - riley michael parker

2011-07-11T12:35:00.000-07:00

Mother starts transcribing our shared meals, writing down everything we say in shorthand, then going back and shaping these conversations into one act plays. She does this for weeks on end, meal after meal, urging us to be clever and dramatic, to give her work merit. Before long she has a working draft that she is proud of, and she hands it out to us before a meal of meatloaf and greenbeans, a copy for each of us, and asks us to practice our lines. We read from the script, an almost word-for-word reenactment of a meal we shared three nights before, while our mother sits and watches us recite her/our words, transcribing them, writing yet another script.

Riley Michael Parker

http://allthingsburn.tumblr.com/

THE SISTERS BROTHERS

Patrick DeWitt

DOWNTOWN LA ART WALK - stefan kiesbye

2011-07-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

The lock on the right rear door of Gray's black Lexus doesn’t work. We were having some Two-Buck-Chuck and he said, “I need to get that fixed.” I left my gallery that night and stole into his car; it smelled expensive. Maybe that kind of money pays for extra smell. He kept a camera in the glove box, and mix-CDs. I stuffed my panties under the armrest, stole some music and took pictures of myself on that camera.

I have two cats in my apartment in Echo Park, my stab at redemption. They leave pools of piss around their litter box on days I’m late. Once a year, I buy a card, wish my daughter all the love in the world and drop it in the mailbox. I leave the envelope blank.

Next Art Walk, Gray stayed after closing, and I imagined he’d found my pictures, and I said, “Do you want to show me your place?” and he said, “No, Susan,” and after three minutes he was gone. I went to the garage and peed on the driver’s seat. I wiped myself and put the napkin into his glove box. I said, “I get it.”

Stefan Kiesbye

www.skiesbye.com

zero gravity

william gibson

WHERE THE CURLY-HAIRED BOY IN THOSE OLD PHOTOS WENT - joseph pete

2011-07-11T12:32:00.000-07:00

He was gone for Thanksgiving, Christmas, even grandma’s funeral. In the morning, he would mutter that he needed a pop or had an errand, never named, on a holiday when all the storefronts were dim and all the ever-motile souls were wombed in their homes. You could barely grasp his wispy words.

On such occasions, he wouldn’t return until he knew the dip sat saran-wrapped in the fridge and the coat closet was empty. He would come back late with sand in his backpack. Sand from a Lake Michigan beach. In December. During a wind-slapped chill that would scald your deadened cheeks.

He never announced his return. Never apologized for his absence. Never explained himself at all. You never heard him slip to his room, where he would lay before the pale lambency of his laptop in the dark and mold and disorder.

You could enter the hush and the clutter of his cocoon, and ask where he went. He might say it was fine, if he said anything at all. He wouldn’t lift his eyes if he spoke. His eyes were recessed, wed to the carpet, gone. He was gone when he was there, so far gone.

Joseph S. Pete

jpete@alumni.iu.edu

Home Land

Sam Lipsyte

FRACTURED PARTS - kaye linden

2011-07-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

Today he confronts the drawing, a faded stick figure of his child with bandaged head. Tiny elves hammer at her with fists. He runs trembling fingers across yellowed paper, corners curled, and turns to trim the bonsai, snapping off one piece at a time to the rhythm of jazz fusion. The juniper mimics a Thai dancer, one arm bent east, the other west.

After lunch, he graffities his walls with keep it simple slogans as the cat rips the burlap shades, exposing a view of a hundred motor homes, a lake and dumpster.

That evening, under leafless oak branches that reach for heaven and hell, he drinks coffee from a chipped mug, wraps his gnarly fingers around its warm smoothness and watches a slice of moon ripple over the lake. His hand clenches. The cracking mug makes him jump and he hurls the fractured parts against a tree. The cat yowls out of the way.

That night, he snips the fifty- year old juniper again, one new bud here, one new bud there, a stick snaps, a branch pops and a twisted tree- to- be dwarfs again.

Kaye Linden

www.kayelinden.com

Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Fifty Really Short Stories

FLOAT - sabrina stoessinger

2011-07-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

My grandfather tells his story every time we are together. He drove that 23 hour stretch straight through, after a long day of work, after a day of city maintenance and concrete and streets filled with waste and filth, he drove into the North to rescue me. He tells me when we eat dinner and when he brushes the spiders from his begonias. Over card games and in the middle of reading his newspaper something will suddenly click and I am there when the phone rings and my mother is crying on the other end. I am there to see the tears falling from his cheeks and I am helping my grandmother pack sandwiches and coffee and apples. I am there on the bench seat of that old Granada keeping him company as the house lights slowly disappear and I am grabbing the wheel when his eyes are too heavy and fiddling with the radio trying to find any voice in amongst all these trees.

Sabrina Stoessinger

kanadatv.com

The Best of Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

2011-05-28T15:04:00.001-07:00

DIVINITY - barry graham

ANTON LAVEY - matthew dexter

2011-05-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

We would levitate when the teachers were out of the classroom or late, when the overhead florescent lights were dimmed and our breaths reeked of fresh onions and Snapple and girls wore sweaty bras that stuck to their t-shirts like an ethereal mosaic, and everything smelled of tanned flesh in the springtime, fresh cut grass, raging hormones, breathless pubescent seventh graders just wanting to lift one of us off the purple polyester carpet, touch the face of god.

Something happened, and I felt it, feel it, lifted that body weightless with pinkies and nothing more, six or seven of us around this levitating ghost of tomorrow, a corpse for a moment, while we follow dreams and nipples. I know it seems impossible, but we fucking lifted that shit and held it, everything so perfect and tight and seeing as the teacher was God knows where and the chorus room was empty and darkened and we were bewitched by Darwinism--no need for Darrin, recess, or Samantha--but give me some tits and ass and a silent erection and a Snickers bar around two o´clock and the afternoon is coming. Walking on water wasn´t built in a day.

Matthew Dexter

http://matthewbdexter.wordpress.com/

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TUNA FISH - swan

2011-05-28T14:59:00.000-07:00

My motorcycle has church-groups for wheels and runs on children’s sunburns!

Is this thing on?

So the first thing you’ll want to know, inevitably, is how I got these sweet kicks. Or these sweet kicks or these sweet kicks because I have literally closets full of them. You can tell a lot about a man – where he’s gone, if there are dogs there, how much he plays outside, etc. I’d have to say my favorites are my Nike Honeymelons. Only about 100 or these were made, 50 pairs, and I own two of them, two pairs.

No? Rhymes?

Old MacDonald had a farm

On this farm he had some bones

On these bones he’d grown some skin

Old MacDonald, it was him.

If only to have, for just one hour I’ve always said, one of those giant twirling balls on the end of a chain that makes grieving widows of the wives of the men it meets, and orphans of their children. Doling out dents and party favors, weeping with laughter, smearing the walls, spelling the word "cocktease" in bloody handprints.

What do you call it – don’t everyone shout at once – when you’ve grown too cynical for sex?

Swan

AngryMeltedMachine.com

THE BEST TIME TO THROW A LIT MATCH INTO SOMEONE'S MOUTH IS WHEN THEY'RE LAUGHING

Sam Pink