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@fwrictionreview
We are indefinitely on hiatus. In the meantime, please feel free to check out all the wonderful prose and interviews in our archives.
Thank you, as always, for your readership and enthusiasm. You rock, all the waffles.
Best,
fwriction : review

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“Invasion from Planet Z-4000,” by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (November/December 2015)
“New Routes,” by Jane Liddle (September/October 2015)
“The Rat King,” by Kerry Cullen (August 2015)
“Last Train,” by Paul Crenshaw (July 2015)
“Missed,” by Sergei Burbank (June 2015)
“What World We Build After All That’s Burned Away,” by Justin Lawrence Daugherty (May 2015)
Invasion from Planet Z-4000, by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
It is ten o’clock on a spring morning in Death Valley and the dunes have started singing, heated sand grains avalanching with a bass hum like the blades of ghostly helicopters. Before this week, Alec never knew that this happened.
The temperature is somewhere in the nineties. Sweat already bands Alec’s forehead under his hat and slicks the nape of his neck beneath his headphones. The nosepieces of his glasses—his grandfather’s frames, Alec’s own prescription lenses recut to fit—slip and begin to raise the day’s fresh welts. Alec hears the natural wonder of the singing dunes and lets a ragged wail tear out of him. Two extras in their eraser-smelling lizard-man face masks turn to give him a wide berth en route to the card table stacked with bottled water and packets of instant coffee, the shoot’s attempt at a craft services department. White-knuckled, Alec grips his clipboard schedule—already two hours behind.
There’s the squeak of a rusty door spring, a familiar prod between his shoulders from above, and Anna spins him to look her over. She jumps the stairs of the women’s prep trailer and poses against its tawny, bug-spattered siding. The camper is one of the mismatched caravan of three they have dragged to the dunes with borrowed pickups.
“So?” Anna says, and sweeps her hand across her body. Her hair is still bedridden and heat-damaged, her face mapped with creases from their pillow. She and Alec have pitched their tent in the lee of a truck for the past two nights, forgoing a spot in one of the RVs as insurance against mutiny. Anna has always hated camping. But she is a good sport this morning—already in full costume as Jane Solomon. Sand-colored linen shirt ornamented in snaps and buckles; many-pocketed cargo shorts that fall voluminously to just above her knees. A lot of khaki, Alec had worried at first, but on his wife it’s classic sexy field-scientist, bit of an eighties throwback vibe. The leading lady character design was genius on the part of Matt—Alec’s writing partner, former roommate, and current male lead. And after weeks of shooting in the outfit, indoors and out, Anna’s calves and forearms have tanned desert-credible. Alec hopes the change hasn’t been picked up on camera, to be patchily edited out of order.
“You’re ready,” Alec observes.
“How are we this morning?” she asks, her voice arch pre-coffee.
“Behind.” Alec scrapes his fingernail over a freckle on his forearm.
“How far?” Anna stretches. Her voice is kind but tinged with something that blips on Alec’s Geiger counter. A radiation of warning that has been building between them in the weeks they’ve spent hemorrhaging their newly joint savings on the movie.
Anna cocks a hip and waits, adjusting her pose, folding and refolding her arms like a cheerleader at her senior portrait. “Alec? How far behind?”
“Not bad,” he says. “We’ll get what we need. Coffee?” He thumbs over his shoulder and shuffles backwards toward the table. Sand piles against the heels of his sneakers and filters into his socks. Anna squints at him and, finally, nods.
Invasion from Planet Z-4000 was supposed to be the jewel of Alec’s BFA in Film Production last year, a collaboration between him and Matt. Planetary geologist Jane Solomon and jaded vet Rex Hampton, dishonorably discharged for a crime he didn’t commit, team up—begrudgingly at first, though rough edges turn to love by the third act—to defend Earth against invading forces of humanoid lizard aliens from a distant asteroid, bent on colonizing our world and terraforming it into a desert monoclimate. Classic space western. Lawrence of Arabia meets Alien. At once a celebration and transcendence of the subgenre, was the agreed-upon goal.
New Routes, by Jane Liddle
I.
Renee sat at the freckled desk and stared at the test questions as they blurred together into little black clouds of lost facts. She looked at the clock. It was keeping alien time, the second hand dissolving into a point dissolving into the clock. Renee needed water. She needed to get out of there. Her surroundings morphed into a panic room that she had forgotten the code to escape. She was forgetting everything. She was dying. She tried to concentrate on a letter at a time on the paper in front of her in a hope that they would lead to a word that would lead to sense, but she could follow nothing. She stood up and slipped into darkness. She was there for seconds that took on the quality of days. She opened her eyes to strangers’ faces hovering over her with a look of concern that had never been directed at her before and this caused a panic renewed. One stranger, the test moderator, gently lifted her to a sitting position and put a water bottle to her lips. This infantilization was enough to trigger Renee into a calmer state. She took the bottle from the moderator and gulped down half the water. She said thank you. Then she said I’m sorry ten times as she gathered her things to the sighs of her fellow test-takers whose sympathy had eroded into annoyance now that it was clear that Renee was fine, that her brain had just experienced a little blip of lowering PH levels that activated neurons in the almond-shaped amygdala that caused a suffocation alarm to ring throughout her body. Renee went to her car, sat in the front seat, and cried over her brain’s betrayals as the air conditioner burst hot air through her hair before turning cold.
II.
Renee was drunk. Her cares were behind her and in front of her. Her friend Laurel sat next to her on a bar stool and braided her hair. Renee listed potential careers she could embark on now that she had given up on being a lawyer. Renee took the panic attack as a sign: an accumulation of all the doubts suppressed into a forty-nanometer-wide synapse traveling around her brain pathways. Laurel had just switched careers from neuropsychologist to special ed teacher, so she had just the optimistic perspective Renee craved. Laurel smelled like parsley and this made Renee think of the color green. “I’ll be a horticulturalist,” Renee shouted. “Or a botanist? Is there a difference?” Laurel said probably and the bartender put another tequila shot in front of Renee. She drank it, leaned into Laurel’s shoulder, and said, “I grew up in a field and most of the time it was cold or about to be cold, but then the spring came and there’d be raspberries growing wild and scallions in the ground. There was a big lilac bush in the middle of it all that we’d use as second base when we played baseball. I never tried to steal third when it was in bloom.” Laurel said that was beautiful. “It was, until Emmit accidentally set the lilac bush on fire. Which of course became my fault for not keeping a better eye on him. My parents and their indulgence in his science experiments were blameless though. Who could have predicted that would lead to disaster?” Laurel said, “You can’t cure someone of their obsessions. Done!” Renee felt her hair and it was woven in an intricate crown. Renee and Laurel danced on the bar tops then danced on the floor with regular men then danced on the sidewalk. The ethanol interacted with the pertinent receptors that manufacture memory-creating steroids. Unaccounted-for time passed. Renee blinked and Laurel was gone. Renee blinked again and she was at her car struggling with the keys and before she even knew she was driving, a car crashed through her windshield and another car smashed hers from behind and Renee was both flung about and crushed at once.
III.
Renee was on her back on the ground again. The blood flow changed within her angular gyrus and her self split in two: an object and a light. She was hovering among the concerned strangers looking down at herself. Her head was a balloon next to a man wearing a uniform. He was asking questions that sounded like bird noises. Renee wondered: if she could float above herself amid the crowd, could she also soar with the birds? Could she do the opposite and swim with the fishes? Could she rise above the guilt and finally go anywhere? She wanted to go to where the sun reflected off the water so bright it blinded you. That would be a trip.
The Rat King, by Kerry Cullen
I moved in with the rat king because things between my girlfriend and me fell apart. Of course, I mean this literally.
Six months in, she gave me a necklace that she’d made of silken string and sea glass—to commemorate our relationship. She held it clasped in her pressed-together palms for the whole drive to the beach. When she opened them, hinged at the wrist like a mollusk, her hands were damp and weak from clutching. Before we had even walked three more steps across the sand, the pendant had fallen inexplicably off its chain and shattered against a stone.
A year later, on our anniversary, she made me a dress. She gave it to me at breakfast; I stripped bare and pulled it on right then, leaving my t-shirt and jeans in a puddle on her kitchen floor. By evening, it was slipping off my shoulders, the seams loose, threads stretching in laddered patterns at my waist. In bed, she pulled it off me in pieces. “Easy access,” she said, but her smile was shaken.
I had been thinking about leaving her for some time. It was a hot, arid summer. The silverware burned our fingers. That evening, I put a mug—her coffee mug, the one I gave her, with the sunburst pattern that framed the one-eyed queen—of tepid water in the freezer and went to bed without thinking. When I woke up, it had cracked into three rough-edged pieces. I packed my things.
*
The rat king, a regular customer but not regularly very talkative, explained himself while I pulled his four espresso shots, pounding the grinds with the heel of my hand hard on the tamper. I didn’t believe him.
“Just wait ‘til dusk,” he said, pointing out the smudged window. “I’ll show you. You’ll see.”
He had stone-dark eyes, dark hair combed to one side, and a few days’ worth of stubble. His hands trembled. I figured he was high, or an artist, or both—in one way or another, he had chosen to teeter on the line of reason.
Sure enough, though, as soon as the sun had sunk full-on down, he sidled back up to the bar. I was cleaning espresso dust out of the machine’s cracks with a wadded up napkin, checking my phone, waiting for her to get home and notice the spaces I’d left. I was prepared for a slew of words, or a barrage of absence. I’d drunk eight shots of espresso in the past hour, and wherever I looked something lurked sharp and dangerous under a skein of blear. The rat king’s eyes were wide, the irises orbs of broken glass glued back together. He leaned over the bar, holding his whole weight up on his bony elbows.
“You wanted to see,” he said. I dropped the napkin, wiped my palms on my aproned thighs, and followed him outside.
He led me to an alley along the side of the shop. He stopped short; I bumped up against him. “So?” I asked.
“Wait.”
A thick, lazy wind pushed through the alley, breathing on the sheen of sweat at the back of my neck. I pulled off my regulation baseball cap and shook my hair out. The rat king sat down in the dry sludge of hot dust. I crouched across from him, balancing on the balls of my feet.
He did nothing to invite them. He did not whistle; he did not reach out his hands. The first scurried toward him with aimless purpose, sniffing, flirting. It stepped forward, then back. The second darted up with purpose. It scampered across the rat king’s legs—back, forth, then settled at his elbow, curling up and falling asleep right there, its whiskers brushing his skin.
Then there was another, another, six more.
“To be fair,” I said, “This is New York.”
“They’re not touching you,” he said, jerking his chin at me, staring at the empty half-circle in front of my feet. His voice was simple; calm. He was right. When I said I had to go, he nodded and did not move.
*
I had planned to crash on the couches of a rotating cast of friends—mostly hers, so I was prepared for debates and half-hugs, for side-eyed sympathy and carefully chosen words. That night I was due at Jon’s, my manager at the coffee shop, who had given me the job based on her recommendation. He said he didn’t mind.
Jon was also a personal trainer and he was hot; older, moneyed women loved when he smoothed his strong hands over their flabby bellies, so he was loaded. Every surface in his apartment was lacquered or plush and the space brimmed with natural light; even after night fell, it held a soft permanent glow.
He lied to me, though, about minding. “Loretta,” he greeted me with a brisk nod on my ninth knock. He avoided my eyes. He scooped up a folded towel from its perch on the arm of the sofa, and trotted off to take a shower with barely a word except to call back, “I’ll be done in a jiff.” Two minutes later, he emerged, rubbing his golden hair dry, finger-combing it tousled. He grinned widely at me.
“I have to do some work,” he said. “If you need me, I’ll be in my bedroom.”
I stretched out on the bare couch and stared at the ceiling. The fan cast cycling rays of shadow around the room. I tried to follow one blade in a full circle, but they spun too fast for me to hold them in my eyes.
Lily-scented oil seeped out from strategically placed square vases tucked in corners. The smell was so heavy that I could taste it, but too sparse to feel filled by it. I took a few calming breaths. I imagined myself climbing the bookcase, pulling out book after book, letting them thump on the floor until Jon might come out in all his glossy puzzled glory and ask me what the fuck I thought I was doing.
And what would happen then? I imagined slamming myself against him in desperation, crawling all over his perfect body, running my hands across his chest, my thumbs over his jaw. He would try to resist, his hands fluttering against my rib cage, before giving in, his tongue an eel in my mouth. I imagined kissing down his neck and chest and abdomen, nauseous and unstoppable.
“i have to leave” I texted Jon, “she and i are working out some things”
“legit,” he replied, “good luck sweetie she’s a keeper”
I watched the bar of light under his bedroom door. Nothing shifted. I wondered if, in some unspeakable history, they had ever hooked up. My nose twitched as I considered the tan, athletic sex they would inevitably have had, in which they would have stared earnestly at each other’s strong jawlines while their flat stomachs skimmed against each other.
I let myself out without breaking the silence. I shook off the resonant glow of the apartment and chose the direction of the street where I’d left the rat king sitting on the stairs just half an hour ago. While I walked, I kicked a long, skinny shard of broken glass out in front of me until it hit a pole and split in half.
*
He was still there, almost obscured by a skewed shadow. He didn’t see me coming. He broke into a tense smile and patted the space next to him on the stair. “You’re back,” he said. “I had a feeling.”
“What are you still doing here,” I whispered.
“I live here,” he mock-whispered back.
“Outside?”
He jerked his thumb at the door behind him.
“Why aren’t you in there, then?”
He pointed at the square-fenced sapling across the sidewalk. A small dove-grey rat, barely larger than an obese mouse, sniffed around the base of its trunk.
It turned away from us to scratch at the dirt. Its tail twitched in the dim light.
“Okay,” I said, “That one’s kinda cute.”
The rat king’s dimple tucked sweetly in his cheek. The sound of rustling paws crested and slowed in waves around me, but I couldn’t see any of them except for the one by the tree, pointing his nose to the sky in a searching way, mildly philosophical.
“Do you keep them? As pets?”
“Don’t need to.” He looked at me, his head tilted, dark hair falling down across his pointed chin. He pushed against the ground and stood up, fishing his keys out of his pocket.
“Are you coming in?”
My throat misted; clogged. I nodded. I put my hand in his and let him pull me up.

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Last Train, by Paul Crenshaw
The woman sat alone on a bench on a cold night in winter an hour before the last trains ran. She wore a coat that was too thin, and no gloves. She kept looking up and around at the snow that came swirling out of the night and through the faint light of the platform.
Two men came up the stairs to the train platform, talking loudly, faces flushed with alcohol.
“So what did you do?”
“At first? At first, I covered my fucking head and prayed. I said, swear to you God, if I get out of this fucking shit alive, I’ll give everything I own to charity. I’ll quit drinking. Fuck, I’ll go to church.”
They reached the bench where the woman sat waiting for the train. The wind howled out of the north, but they didn’t seem to notice the wind, or her. They had short hair and were clean-shaven and they talked very loudly to be heard over the wind. The woman watched them from the corner of her eye.
“And then what?”
“They quit shooting. I guess to reload. I could hear by then. The Hummer in front of us was overturned, smoking, but they hadn’t gotten all of us.”
“You returned fire?”
“We returned fire. We returned so much fucking fire I thought the desert would catch, burn like it did in ‘91 when Hussein lit the oil wells.”
“Pinned them down?”
“Pinned them down in the fucking rocks and tore them literally to fucking pieces. If you’ve never seen what a .50 cal. can do to a body, you need to.”
“You leave any alive?”
“One. At first. Found him hiding in the rocks, cowering. Crying. Praising Allah, probably.”
“You end him?”
“With a knife. Fucking Jameston was dead, we already knew that, the way the Hummer flipped when they hit it. We didn’t kill him quick.”
They looked off into the lights over the city for a moment and watched the snow. The woman huddled deeper into her coat. She scooted farther down the bench.
“What’s the first thing you did when you got back?”
“Home?”
“Home.”
“Got in bed with my wife.” He leaned over the edge of the platform to look down the tracks.
“I did the same thing when I got back.”
“It was different, though. Not exactly sure how, but it was different.”
“It had been a while.”
“Yeah. But still. It was like she didn’t know who I was. Or I had changed. She even cried out once, and she’s never done that before.”
“Were you rough?”
He stuck his hands in his pants against the cold. “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”
A gust of wind came and they turned out of the wind. The woman saw them notice her. One of them nodded his head to her, then they turned back toward each other. The woman reached into her purse and kept her hand there.
“It almost sounded like fear.”
The light of the train came bearing down on them out of the darkness. They stepped closer to the edge of the platform.
“You don’t forget what that sounds like.”
“I hear you.”
“Yeah, I know you do.”
They watched as the train slowed to a stop. When the doors opened, the two men climbed aboard.
“It sounds like a siren. Or a baby crying.”
They disappeared into the warm car. They kept talking about what it sounded like.
Missed, by Sergei Burbank
--Hey you, there. Don't know why you're not picking up. I thought you were acting weird at the place during the thing, didn't want to bring it up in front of everyone, like maybe you wanted to be free to ... whatever after the party, so I thought ... Don't know if you're home yet. Or if you went home. Saw you talking a lot to what's-his-name there. Maybe you wanted to continue that conversation in a more private setting? I know it's none of my business, you -- we -- want, we agreed to not use titles, but maybe. I don't know. Maybe we should. Talk about it. Anyway. Call me back.
--Hi. Your phone made that little beep thing when it rang. I think you're on the other line, maybe? You should ditch the bimbo and talk to me instead, ha, joke from movie you wont get and I can't even remember. Yikes, okay, let's start again. Hi, this is the girl you came to the place with and left without, remember me? Yeah. I'm not mad -- and I'm not doing the thing we usually do when I say the opposite of what's true, because I'm not mad. You didn't need to leave with me, I'm not completely incapable of escorting myself home, and it's crazy, we agreed -- okay, I insisted, you agreed -- that this didn't need a title, a name, so fine, I'm fine with that. It's. Fine. I wanted to make sure you were okay, because we didn't get to talk and you seemed weird at the place during the thing and – did you meet the guy there, what's-his-name? I was talking to him about your work pretty much the whole time, which made me feel quite the fool since you should have been telling him yourself. Or talking to me. Oop! I think I beeped. Someone's on the other line. Call me.
What World We Build After All That's Burned Away, by Justin Lawrence Daugherty
My husband had started to believe his left arm was a lie. We'd gone to the redwood forest where we'd first conceived to bury the memory of the child we never shared. It had been months since the loss, so long since some part of me was gone. We lay in bed in a hotel room, Bryce's ear to my stomach. He did this often: listened, cooed and awaited some sound from the deep of me. “It's not supposed to be there,” Bryce said. He held out his arm, commented on its ugliness, its deformity. “I was born wrong.” “Everything's where it's supposed to be,” I said. I laid my left arm across his, ran my nails down his skin. I asked if he felt the heat in my fingers, the chill from the slightest touch. “That's how you know,” I said. Our child was never much larger than a lime, the fingers and toes barely losing their webbing. I wanted to feel more like Bryce did, but I'd felt the miscarriage as a subtraction, almost as a ghost or spirit leaving me, finally free. There was a man in Atlanta who managed a doomsday vault. He filled this chamber up with seeds of all kinds from around the world. He awaited disaster daily. If bombs fell and blacked out the sun, his doomsday vault held all of the seed copies necessary for the eventual rebuilding. I met him at the airport, on his way to give a talk in Chicago about his project. I was on one of the many trips I'd taken that year to get away from all the things I had to run from. He showed me the seeds of a rare pepper. I asked him if he was certain the world was going to end sometime soon. “It's not the world ending,” he said. “The world will be fine. It will move on tumbling through space. It's us we're worried about.” “But, what if all of us are lost?” I asked. He put his seed pouch back in his bag. “It's pretty narcissistic, I suppose, to believe some of us will be left to start over.” He got up to head to his terminal. He gave me his card and said he'd be happy to talk some other time. Before he left, I asked if he thought we'd survive. He said, “Eventually, even the universe is going to freeze, all the heat of it lost to the cold.” I called Bryce when I touched down in Seattle. He said he had contacted a surgeon about taking his arm. He had found a group of people on the internet who talked about their unneeded limbs, their vulgar hands and toes. I told him no surgeon would take his arm from him, that it went against their oaths to first do no harm. “I want to be rid of this,” he said. I ran my hand over my belly, searching for the scar. “I need someone to come and cut this away from me,” he said. “I need to feel like I'm rid of the thing that was never supposed to be there.” Bryce had found me crying in the bathtub after it happened. He'd come home from work and I was curled up there, unmoving. He said we needed to go to the hospital. On the way, I was almost delirious, not myself. He'd tell me later that I had asked him where the baby was, if it was a boy or a girl, if it was safe and sleeping or hungry and in need. I met the man from the doomsday vault when I returned from Seattle. He spoke of doomsday preppers he met at the conference, how they misunderstood. He wasn't in the business of hysteria, he said. Seed storage was about insurance against loss. I asked if he was married, if he had ever had children. He took out a flask and poured liquor into his coffee. He drank deep and long, ignoring the heat. He shook his head, said he'd had someone once. He drank again. I watched all the people coming and going past the patio where we sat. I wondered where they headed, what worlds they couldn't return to. “We lost a child,” I said. This man felt like the only person I wanted to tell about the miscarriage. I hadn't talked to Bryce about it in months. I'd awoken in the middle of the night twice to Bryce whispering to my midsection. “My husband's not dealing with it well. It's been so long and I don't know what to do, where to turn. He's falling apart. But, what I'm afraid of is that I'm not feeling anything.” He asked why I would tell him any of this. I said I had no one to talk to, that all I wanted was somewhere to put all the words I had forgotten I needed to say. He reached in his bag and produced boxes of seeds for peppers, tubers, medicinal plants. He said he often looked at the world and thought not much of us was worth preserving. He wondered why he did what he did, sometimes. “But, it's not about preservation or continuing,” he said. “It's about what comes after, what world we build after all that's burned away.” I found Bryce in the kitchen one afternoon with all our knives on the counter. An ax from the shed leaned against a cupboard. There was a handsaw on the table. There were small, still-bleeding cuts on his arm. “If no one's going to do it for me, I'm going to have to do it myself,” Bryce said. If I hadn't shown up then, would he have started sawing? How far would he have cut, ignoring the pain until either he could go no farther or until his body shut down from the shock? I gathered the knives, took up the ax. He asked what I was doing and told him he'd lost it. I went to the table and he did, too, and tried to get to a butcher knife before I took it up. He yelled for me to stop, but I walked out the door with the knives and the ax and the saw. He tried to follow but I drove quickly. I thought to take these things far, then I thought to go to the vault, to bury these things that could do such harm. Later, we got him help and I started to fill the empty space inside me. At that moment, though, I drove toward the vault, thinking of locking up myself and Bryce and those we loved. I wanted to find ourselves inside, waiting out the ruin, waiting on a chance to emerge into the newly-made world.
2014: A Year in (fwriction)Review
"The Boy Who Turned Into the Man Who Ate Himself," by Paul Davenport-Randell
"The Plaything of Whales," by jamesclaffey
"Apollonia at the Retirement Home for Great Apes," by Martha Otis
"On Returning," by flynnwaslike
"Balcony," by sarahmarian
"A Character of Fiction," by Simon Barker
"Tim Time," by David Parker Jr.
"Ogdensburg," by myfanwycollins
"London, 1973," (novel excerpt) by J.E. Reich
from American Past Time (novel excerpt), by Len Joy
"Ghosts in the Termini," by Joel Hans
"Some Girl," by bettysueblue
"You Think I’ll Actually Be Nice About This?" by Elizabeth Green
You Think I’ll Actually Be Nice About This?, by Elizabeth Green
Lisa was late, and when she sat down he could tell she had been drinking for breakfast by the way she flopped into her seat and sat up straighter than usual, as if it were a chore to do so.
“I think you should have almost everything,” she said, eyeing the list that Sal had laid on the table next to the well-used condiment bottles, their insides oozed out and hardened at the mouth. The list consisted of everything that they had bought together right down to a few Ikea shelves.
“You should eat something,” he said.
The waitress plopped a small plate in front of Sal. Scrambled eggs jiggled up at him. He had asked for over easy but decided not to complain. He grabbed a strip of bacon from his plate and made Lisa eat it. She did, with a flourish of tiny bird bites.
“I’ll have coffee. And a veggie wrap. Do you have a spinach wrap?”
The waitress blinked at her. “A wrap full of spinach? No, we don’t do that.”
“No, I mean the wrap is made out of spinach.”
“Well, no but we can take some spinach and maybe make a salad for you. That sounds like a salad, dear.”
“No, no, the wrap…well, it looks like any other wrap but it’s green. Squished, and processed and stuff.”
“Oh!” she said, understanding. She thought a moment. “No, we just have flour.”
“I’ll take that then.”

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Some Girl, by Beth Gilstrap
1984
The van was all hot breath and man stink so I closed my eyes, resting my head against the fogged window. This was what I wanted –to be squished next to Brandon and headed west where the country unfolds until its spine’s exposed, flat and easy to leave, a good spot to mark for return, a pause. This land was always right where you left her. The sound of rubber on asphalt merged with an Iron Maiden song blaring from Steve’s headphones. Turn the volume down on everything but her. Clenching my jaw, I tried my best to push age on my girl’s face, to add six months to it, subtract baby teeth, but try as I might she looked the same. She stayed a fresh seven-year-old in my head, with her wiggling incisor and flurry of birthday energy lifting her hair as she danced and drew and built a fort.
“Come see, Mom. Come see,” she said.
“I see, baby.” Only her legs visible under her tarp house. White ruffled socks in purple clogs. Mud splatters from yesterday’s rain. When she was thinking, her right foot crossed behind the left, a little tick that gave her away.
This is what happens when you run.
Whole days showered in freezing rain, turned hard to touch, worse to navigate, but maybe, almost prettier behind that sheet of ice, but you can’t get home, not for a long stretch and it’s preserved and out of reach in you. Bourbon or sun or open road don’t fix it.
“Turn that shit down,” I said. “You are killing me.”
“What’s that, doll?” Jay asked over his shoulder.
“Not you. Steve’s music’s loud as shit. Does he ever listen to anything aside from Maiden?”
“He thinks if he listens to it enough, he’ll sound like Bruce Dickinson.”
“Christ, is that it?”
“Climb up here with me. They’re passed out anyways.”
As I angled my shoulder down, Brandon’s head lolled to his chest. His hand slid off my thigh and landed palm up, showing the number some girl wrote on his palm. Last night, all I could do was smile at the little thing with her Sun-In orange hair and shove him in the van. Girl has no idea. She’ll be more than smudged marker on their hands before long. Where she’s headed, these band guys will chew her to bone. She won’t know spooling herself around these guys doesn’t save you anymore than walking into the eye of a hurricane, but sometimes you got to go on thinking you’re some kind of buffalo.
On the next seat up, Rory curled into himself like an insect, his hair hanging over his eyes. “Where are we?” I asked, climbing over the cooler.
“On 412. Next town’s Orienta. Passed Fairview a few miles back. Ever heard of it?”
“May have passed through here with daddy as a kid. Fairview, I mean.”
“When you were a kid, huh? Must’ve been about four years ago?”
“Is that flirting or are you just a moron?”
“Both, maybe,” he said as he fished for a beer. “Running low.” He wiped the wet can on his jeans.
“Guess I’ll take the attention where I can get it. Brandon seems to hold all the stock in flirt, lately.”
“You ain’t used to that by now? You’ve been with us a while now.”
“Some nights I’m okay with it. Some nights not so much. Don’t make any sense, I know, but hell. I’m not sure how much sense is in this van.”
“This shit ain’t easy. Not sure we’ll ever get to the point where we don’t have to work like hell to sell records. I don’t expect to fill superdomes like Steve does.”
“You don’t really seem like rock gods.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be our little cheerleader?”
“Right. You got me pegged. It’s just, other than Brandon, you’re a bit timid for heavy duty spotlights.”
“I guess.”
“I mean it as a compliment. You’re purer that way. Something about all this glam shit now jags my heart. These boys and what’s that chick group?”
“Vixen.”
“Right. So many of these bands took a wrong turn and just said to hell with it. A devil baby made of from disco’s day old crotch and the stinking armpit of rock. Give me Patty Smyth and Scandal over Vixen any day.”
“Must be all the coke.”
“Anyway, I’m glad I hang with guys who care more about music than image and women. There’s still pieces of the blues in your songs. Poetry even.”
“It’s nice someone notices. I’m waiting though. Waiting for Brandon to take it another direction,” he said.
We both knew what was coming.
“God, look. You ever see mountains shine like that?”
At the horizon, the land rose sharp into buttes. Jay and me kept our eyes forward on the formations, gathering light and dark and reflecting so much more than the physics of musicians careening in the guts of a blue conversion van. I could tell it’d be a good bit colder when we got out, but I didn’t dig for another layer, just buttoned my jacket and unrolled the bowls I’d formed at my elbows.
“Looks like a good spot for a walk,” Jay said leaning over.
“It’s thick in here anyway,” I said, with my boots propped on the dash. “And my legs are getting twitchy.”
“I only got about twenty minutes til I piss myself anyway. Should be there by then, I’d think.”
I flipped the tape to side B of Meddle. In the twenty minutes, it took us to get there, we zoned in and out. Gliding into piano tinks, we tiptoed on puddles. Razed by guitar, shattered in bird screams. Into the grift of momentum and pulled back down again, just so. Gotta hand it to Floyd. In all my life, I never expressed anything so true. Just once, just once, I’d like to stand up and say my piece and have someone respond. You can find so much on B-sides.
As we pulled up to the sign Jay read, “Gloss Mountains. Hours: Dawn - Dusk.”
“We got time. Sun’s not down yet.”
“No, but we won’t make it to the top before it goes down,” he said.
“See what I mean? What a poor excuse of a musician. Nothing but a rule follower at your core.”
When I poked him in the chest, he finally cut his eyes my direction. “Like hell,” he said, putting the last two beers in his pockets.
“That’s what I like to hear.”
Ghosts in the Termini, by Joel Hans
My mother’s words are not words but ripples in water: This is the right thing, my babygirl. That’s all I ever asked. Months ago she made me promise I’d never let her dry out now that she’s dead.
“I’m trying, Ma,” I say.
She shimmers: We’ll stay forever this way. Take stock in this miracle.
I fill the bathtub, home for her ghost, with the reservoir of well water I’d collected in the morning, and as the ripples slow my mother shifts back into focus, this vision bent and clinging. Blurred refraction against the water’s surface but without a source beneath—a bend both infinite and unreal.
The sunset turns my mother red—she’s beautiful like this, in a way.
Once, the sun’s falling signaled the emergence of new sounds: crickets, owls, cicadas. Once, this place was adorned green by grass and trees. Now only silence or wind and a village turned into sand dunes. Now only myself and the shimmer of my mother, the only two who refused the world’s migration towards oceans that seemed to promise they would never dry up.
I sleep outside because I don’t have the heart to tell her she can’t go on forever like this. I sleep outside because I don’t have the heart to say I can’t start missing her until she’s really gone.
A half-hour’s walk away there is a well at the basin of a valley. Every day I trek there, I cross paths with parallel lines in the sand: my mother’s heels from the night I dragged her home after finding her near-dead and already half-swallowed by the sand.
When I approach the well and begin to work the cast iron hand pump I hear voices calling to me from that drying-up reservoir beneath, ghosts who linger in the façade of the water they died nearest—the curse of this sunburned world.
When I hang my mouth beneath the trickle, this stolen few sips, the water tastes like stone. I fill the reservoir that fits on my back until it is full and then I walk home across those same lines in the sand. The sun’s arc takes up a quarter of the sky, as if melting to both the east and west.
I rest a little in the shade near the well, but the sound of footsteps in sand wakes me to see a girl standing on the dune opposite mine, well between us. For an instant, I wonder if I’m looking at a mirage or a reflection—we are both gaunt from dehydration and dressed in rags.
She puts her hands to her lips and I do the same. I have a holstered knife on my belt, but I wave instead. I smile and my lips crack, bleed. She screams and the resonance of her voice lingers like ghosts at the bottom of the well.
I blink and she is gone.
from 'American Past Time,' by Len Joy
1
September 5, 1953
Dancer Stonemason drove through Maple Springs headed for Rolla. His left hand rested gentle on the steering wheel, and in his pitching hand he held a baseball – loose and easy – like he was shooting craps. The ball took the edge off the queasy feeling he got on game days. His son, Clayton, sat beside him and made sputtering engine noises as he gripped an imaginary steering wheel, while Dede, Dancer’s wife, stared out the window with other things on her mind.
They cruised down Main Street, past the Tastee-Freeze and Dabney’s Esso Station and the Post Office and the First National Bank of Maple Springs and Crutchfield’s General Store. At the town’s only traffic light, he turned left toward the highway. At the edge of town they passed the colored Baptist Church with its neatly-tended grid of white crosses and gravestones under a gnarled willow. The graveyard reminded him of the cemetery up north, near Festus, where his mother was buried with the rest of the Dancer family. She’d been gone fifteen years now and some days Dancer had trouble remembering what she looked like.
Across from the Baptists, A-1 Auto Parts blanketed the landscape with acres of junked automobiles. His father’s Buick was out there somewhere. Walt Stonemason had been a whisky-runner for Cecil Danforth. He knew every back road and trail in southern Missouri and there wasn’t a revenue agent in the state who could catch him.
At his father’s funeral Cecil told Dancer that Walt was the best damn whiskey runner he ever had. Dancer wanted to ask Cecil if his dad was so damn good how'd he manage to run that Roadmaster smack into a walnut tree with no one chasing him. But Dancer knew better than to ask Cecil those kinds of questions.
They turned north onto Highway 60, and the ’39 Chevy coughed and bucked as he shifted into third. As he cruised north, Dancer’s fingers glided over the smooth cowhide of the baseball as he read the seams and adjusted his grip from fastball, to curveball, to changeup. He had a hand built for pitching – a pancake-sized palm and long, tapered fingers that hid the ball from the batter for that extra heartbeat.
It was the Saturday before Labor Day, and Dancer’s team, the Rolla Rebels, was hosting the Joplin Miners. Rolla was only an hour’s drive from Maple Springs, but Dancer had his family on the road early. This was going to be a special game. Not for his team – the Rebels were in third place going nowhere – but because today would be Clayton’s first baseball game. The first time he’d see his dad pitch.Dancer was eight when his mom got sick. He went to live with Cecil’s brother Clem and his wife Ruthie. They had nine kids so one more didn’t matter much. One day in late May his dad showed up at the schoolhouse and told Dancer they were going up to St. Louis to see the Cardinals play.
The Cardinals’ stadium was packed with more people than Dancer had seen in his whole life. They sat in the upper deck behind home plate. Dizzy Dean pitched for the Cardinals and the crowd cheered madly every time he took the mound. In his last at bat he hit a foul ball that was headed straight for Dancer. He stood and cupped his hands to catch it, but at the last moment the man in front of him leaped up to catch the ball. It splatted against his palms and the man yelped as the baseball rolled into the aisle. The usher retrieved the ball and handed it to Dancer.
Dancer fell asleep on the ride home. He woke up when his father stopped the car in front of Grandpa Dancer’s house. His father told him that his mom had passed, but Dancer already knew.
The hot-towel Missouri heat, which had suffocated them through July and August, had finally retreated to Arkansas. A few wispy clouds hung on the horizon, and the air was light and fresh. Dede’s head lolled backwards, her eyes closed as she let the cool wind from the open window billow her white cotton dress. She only wore that dress to church and on special occasions. It didn’t get much use.
Her short blonde hair, which wrapped around her ears and curled down the nape of her neck, was still damp from her morning shower. As Dancer had attempted to shave, she flung open the shower curtain and wiggled her ass, letting the hot water pelt her breasts. “Soap me, honey. Do my back,” she said.
“You’re getting water on the floor,” Dancer said.
She glanced over her shoulder at him. “If I squint really hard, you look just like Gary Cooper.”
“He’s taller. Close the curtain.”
Water was pooling on the floor. Dancer took the washcloth and soaped her back and her little butt. As he brought his hand up between her legs, she reached around and slipped her hand into his boxer shorts.
“Come on in, the water’s fine,” she said.
Dede knew he couldn’t fool around on game day, but she didn’t care. She could never get enough, and now they had a problem.
Traffic was light, and Dancer had the Chevy cruising along at close to sixty. Beside him, Clayton pressed his foot down on a phantom gas pedal, and his sputtering engine revved into a high-pitched whine. He drove hard, just like his whiskey-running grandfather. He reminded Dancer of his father. The wheat-colored hair, the dirt tan, and the need to race everywhere even when there was no place to go.
Dancer glanced over at Dede. She had a crooked mouth and a gap between her two front teeth that he hadn’t noticed when they first met because of her eyes. Her eyes were big, wild, and crazy-blue. They had met when Dancer was a senior. Even though she was two years younger, she had been the one to make the first move. He’d never been with another girl, but Dede made it easy. She knew too much for a fifteen-year-old.
But now, with her face half-covered by her wind-tossed hair, she appeared so innocent. She didn’t look like she was two months pregnant. Her belly was still flat, and her breasts hadn’t swelled, not like they had when Clayton was on his way.
Maybe the doctor was wrong.
After Clayton was born, Dancer had found an offseason job at the Caterpillar plant – parts inspector – a dollar an hour and boring as hell. He wasn’t cut out for factory work, but they needed the money. When he moved up to the Rolla Rebels, the pay was better, and he thought he’d be done with the factory, but Dede fell in love with the red brick house on the hill east of town. So they bought the house, and then he had a wife, a baby, a house, a mortgage, and another offseason back in the factory inspecting parts. And now with a new baby on the way, he’d have to work overtime just for them to survive.
“Hey Dad, is that the ballpark?” Clayton asked. He pointed at a well-groomed Little League field that was in a clearing surrounded by spruce and poplars.
“No. It’s just over the hill, beyond the fairgrounds.”
Mr. Seymour Crutchfield, the owner of the Rebels, was a merchant. His father had built a general store in downtown Maple Springs fifty years ago, and Seymour had taken the idea of that general store and built stores all over Missouri and Arkansas. When he expanded into Rolla, he bought the Rolla Rebels baseball team because their stadium was sitting on the land he wanted to develop. He built his store, renamed the stadium, and hired his son-in-law, Doc Evans, to manage the team.
Clayton creased the brim of the Cardinals cap Dancer had given him and leaned forward in his seat to get a better look. The hat was several sizes too big, so Dede had bobby-pinned the back so it would stay on.
“Are you going to strike them all out, Dad?”
“Your daddy can’t strike everyone out. He’s not Superman,” Dede said. She winked at Dancer.
Dancer squeezed the ball into Clayton’s small hands. “I’m going to try.”
As they crossed into Phelps County and the outskirts of Rolla, the woods and small lakes that had lined the highway for the last twenty miles gave way to cheap motels, filling stations, and car dealerships. The Phelps County Fairgrounds, with its huge parking lot and grandstand, stretched along the east side of the highway for nearly half a mile. Beyond the fairgrounds and next to the brand new Crutchfield General Store was Crutchfield Stadium, home of the Rolla Rebels.
Dancer pulled the car up to the box office. “They’ll have your tickets here. See you after the game.”
“Not so fast, mister,” Dede said. She leaned across Clayton and kissed Dancer hard on the lips.
“Mom, you’re squishing me,” Clayton said.
As they slid out of the car, Dede leaned back in the window. “Now don’t wear yourself out,” she said. And then she giggled and skipped away with Clayton to pick up their tickets.
2
Dancer parked close to the centerfield gate where all the players entered the ballpark. In centerfield, Mr. Seymour Crutchfield, looking like an undertaker in his black wool suit and bow-tie, was shouting directions to one of the Negro groundskeepers who was on a ladder applying a patch to the Crutchfield General Store sign that covered twenty yards of the center field wall.
“A little higher, boy. And move it to the right. A little more. That’s it.”
The sign had read, “Over 100 stores in Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas.” Now the “100” had been covered up and replaced with a “150.” When Dancer had joined Rolla, the store count had been fifty.
Doc Evans stood beside his father-in-law, puffing on a cigar and looking impatiently at his watch while Crutchfield finished his instructions. When Doc spotted Dancer, he waved him over.
As Dancer approached, Mr. Crutchfield turned to him. “Look at that, Dancer. One hundred fifty stores. Next year there’ll be over two hundred. Y’all be able to shop at Crutchfield’s no matter where you live in Missouri.”
Dancer was surprised Crutchfield knew his name. “That’s really something, Mr. Crutchfield.”
“Yes, it is, son. Yes, it is.” He looked back at the sign again and frowned. “Hey, boy!” he said to the groundskeeper who had started to fold up the ladder. “Could you clean those bird droppings off the corner of the sign? Right there by the ‘C’?” He pointed to the big “C” in Crutchfield, then turned and faced Dancer again. “Wilbur has some things to discuss with you, so I’ll let you two get down to baseball.” He extended his hand. “Good luck, son. It’s been a pleasure.” He shook hands like a preacher, holding on just long enough to make Dancer uncomfortable, and then he walked over to get a closer look at his sign.
Doc Evans stared at his father-in-law walking away and slowly shook his head. “Just stop in my office before you go out for warm-ups. We can talk then.” As he walked off toward right field, still shaking his head, it sounded to Dancer like he muttered, “Bird shit.”
London, 1973, by J.E. Reich
From the Diaries of Emil Oster
West Hampstead, London, Britain, October 1973
Here is what my wife does not do when she sleeps: cry, breathe loudly to reassure me, whimper words in susurrus breezes, grit her teeth, let her feet touch mine, linger. The window is an unabashed eye.
Here is what my wife does when she sleeps: let her fingers tremble in silent, small waltzes, with a knife under her pillow.
Ogdensburg, by Myfanwy Collins
I wore a white skirt. Earlier that day I sunbathed with his roommate while he was at work in his polyester uniform.
The roommate and I gossiped, drank wine out of plastic cups. He knew that I knew about him. I didn’t want to ask the question. It would leave him vulnerable in his world of uniforms and regulations. On his day off he could sit in the overgrown backyard and drink wine with a stranger.
There was a spring unwinding in me, pushing me out and drawing me back in. Nothing good had happened yet. I was always waiting.
The show was across the border and an hour away. Beforehand we sat at an outside bar and I drank, but he didn’t. He was baked already because, since rehab, that’s what he did. We were with another couple he knew. The woman told me she was pregnant. We ordered another drink.
I wanted to tell her I was living inside myself like a fetus, nuzzling against the heartbeat, expectant.
In the morning, I traveled home and away from him, from his roommate, from the woman. I drove along the river, the Amish clip-clopping beside me in their buggies, the tall grass pushing up, waiting on summer.

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Tim Time, by David Parker Jr.
On Thursday night, Tim Thomas's wife, Linda, gets ready to travel across town for an evening with the Ladies Auxiliary Club. Tim Thomas can hardly wait for her to be gone, but he maintains his composure as he hovers in the bedroom doorway and watches her decide which shoes to wear – the pumps or the wedges. He hopes that she’ll go with the pumps, and he feels a small satisfaction when he sees that she does. “How do I look?” she asks.
“Wonderful.”
Sometimes these Ladies Auxilary Club activities are organized around community work like planting urban gardens or clothes drives for local women's shelters. Tonight is simply bridge night. "What are you going to do tonight?" Linda asks as she wanders past him to the dresser mirror to put on her earrings.
"Oh, you know," he replies. "I think I’ll enjoy a little Tim time."
"That’s nice," she says. “You've been working so hard on your campaign.”
In moments like this, it’s hard not to notice that ever since their daughter Stephanie dropped out of college and went to work on a communal farm in North Carolina, Linda has been redirecting her maternal sentiments and tones of voice at him. All the little cooings and supportive gestures that she used to deliver to Stephanie over the phone or on parent weekends are now stroked upon Tim Thomas, a fact which he thinks about mentioning to her – after all their daughter isn't exactly dead or anything – but then again he sees the advantage of these misplaced urges to coddle him. "I've got some reading to catch up on," he says.
"You and those magazines," she says playfully. “Don’t get your blood pressure up. You know what the doctor said about stress.”
A Character of Fiction, by Simon Barker
Mr. Sherlock Holmes was seated at the breakfast table toying with his empty syringe while I stood upon the hearthrug examining the stick that had been accidentally left behind by one of our visitors the previous evening. It was a curious item, the sort of thing you could imagine being used as a prop in some theatrical production or in a work of fiction.
“Well, Watson, what do you make of it?”
Holmes was sitting with his back to me. I hadn’t let on what I was up to so I suppose that the late contents of his syringe must have activated his parietal eye.
“I thought you were cutting down on that stuff,” I remarked to him.
“Tut, tut, Watson,” he responded. “Did I not say that I would commence cutting down on Monday? Simply humour me for the moment and tell me what you can infer about our visitor from the evidence of his stick.”
I stood and held the stick in the manner of an English gentleman. “Well,” I began hesitantly, “it’s a stick….”
“Bravo, Watson, you are improving!”
“Holmes, I haven’t started yet.”
“I do apologize.”
“I was about to say that it’s a stick that appears to have belonged to a person of above average height. I make this assessment because my own height is average and yet this stick would be too tall for my comfort.”
“Excellent, Watters, excellent,” said Holmes.
“How much of that stuff did you just take?” I enquired.
“No more than my usual,” Holmes replied. “Now illuminate me, Watson, please.”
“Very well. From what I observe I believe I can also deduce that the owner of this stick was a military officer.”
“Deduce, eh? Are you sure you don’t induce it?”
“Work with me, Holmes,” said I.
“Oh, very well, if I must,” he replied.
“Let me draw your attention to the polish that the stick has acquired just here on the surface of its shaft about a hand’s breadth below the knob. I deduce—or perhaps I induce—that this results from the owner having clutched it in military fashion under his left arm, thus, as he moved about the parade ground. I would speculate further that the owner of this stick held the rank of major. Or possibly captain.”
Holmes waved his empty syringe in the air like an addicted maestro. “Watson, you excel yourself! I am dazzled! You follow my methods religiously.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said I. “Then, finally, I would guess that the owner of this stick must be a man of some considerable bravery, for note the marks along the shaft. These indicate to me some serious efforts at self-defence. I would say they result from blows received while defending against a much heavier weapon, say, a cudgel or a shillelagh, possibly one that belonged to the intoxicated Irish father of some attractive young lady, against whom the stick’s owner chose to stand his ground rather than to flee.”
“Bravisimo!” Holmes exclaimed. “I prostrate myself before your intellect, Watson!”