Trick or Retreat

Contributor: Gary Clifton

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Hillary Washington had been Mrs. Clarence Washington until two years earlier. Then cancer took Clarence.  In a neighborhood where ninety-eight percent of the population was terrified of the other two percent, she was unafraid - Clarences's.32 still lay in a kitchen drawer.  She opened the door to a young white man.  The pirate-like bandana atop his head was probably a costume - it was Halloween.  But no treat was involved.  Her trick reward was rape, murder, arson.
    Homicide sent out Detectives Harper and Garnet.  Red Harper, in Homicide since before electricity, with a thin rim of red hair surrounding plenty of bald head, was big, tough, and never without a nasty cigar polluting the atmosphere.  Margaret "Maggs" Garnet, new in Homicide, was leggy, black, beautiful.   A graduate of Texas Tech via a track scholarship, she could outrun and then kick the ass of most men they encountered.
    As they examined Mrs. Washington's crime scene, a patrolman caught Harper's eye.  "Neighbors report a white guy wearing a plaid doo-rag ran from the scene."
    "White boy on foot around Fair Park shouldn't be hard to find," Maggs said. "Sure a fine day to look," she gestured to the beautiful autumn day.
    So as cops should, they cruised the area.  Harper, driving missed the light at the Grand Avenue entrance to the Cotton Bowl.  Three U.S. Marines, splendid and ram-rod straight in their dress blue uniforms were manning a "Dollars for Wounded Warriors" booth on the sidewalk.  A clown, presumably another Marine, stood ringing a bell.  Maggs winked at an African American Marine who was movie star handsome and bigger than Harper.  The kid smiled back.  
    They hadn't driven two blocks when Maggs shouted: "There, Harper."  In half a heartbeat, Maggs had bailed out and was full bore after a greasy white kid with a plaid bandana tired around his head.
    With Harper following in the car, to Maggs's chagrin, the kid went over a fence on Grand avenue and disappeared into the vast housing project behind.  She'd lost him.  When Harper puffed up, Maggs waved a shoe.  "Tennis shoe?" Harper said.
    "Christ, Harper," It's a Michael Jordan...costs two hundred.  Somewhere back in there is a white guy wearing a damned rag on his head and one shoe," she gestured, "...who just might have Mrs. Washington's piggy bank in his pocket."  They radioed a description of the suspect to all units.  Another hour's search failed to find their man.
        They'd just dropped the Jordan at the crime lab behind Parkland Hospital when dispatch advised them to look into an assault victim wearing one Jordan who'd just been ambulanced into Parkland.  In the ER they found, Jim Bob Griffin, white male 20, with two convictions for assault and robbery.  He had sustained six broken ribs, two broken arms, a fractured jaw, and a concussion   But, he'd retained plenty of mouth.  "Damned clown jumped me, them some others tried to kill me.  Ain't did shit."
    Then, E.M.T.'s wheeled a clown down the hallway, closely followed by three uniformed Marines.  The clown lay face down, a gash to his left shoulder blade.  "That's the crew from Far Park," Maggs said.  Besides the patient on the cart, the kid she'd flirted with was bleeding from his right hand.
    Harper turned back to Jim Bob's gurney.  "Mean ol' clown beat up on you, huh.  Maybe we just found this bully.  Shoulda picked on the Easter Bunny.  Heard he's a real whoosh."
    "Kiss my ass, pig.  Ast the sumbitch for a little change and he done this to me.  Am I gonna die?"
    "Absolutely, dude, and with any luck at all that would be today."   
    A uniformed officer walked in, holding up a stubby switchblade in a plastic bag.  "This jerk-off thought he could take on the Marines with a Barlow knife," he grinned.  "He...uh finished second.  After they kicked the dog shit out of him he ran in front of a D.A.R.T. bus."  He leaned close to Harper and Maggs.  "But them kids did all the damage...the bus just glazed him."
    Harper stepped into the curtained cubicle where a physician was stitching up the clown's back.  The patient was lean and muscular with a tattoo:  Semper Fi  on his forearm.  "You guys have to report this?"
    "Yessir," all four snap-answered as one.
    Harper sat down and wrote out the following report:  "Suspect, Jim Bob Griffin,  suspect in a rape, murder, arson earlier in the day, attempted armed robbery of U.S. Marine Wonski who improvised, adapted, and took evasive action.  Suspect fled, ran into the path of a D.A.R.T.  bus and sustained injuries requiring hospitalization at Parkland.  If suspect survives, he will be charged with armed robbery, assault, and  damaging a city owned vehicle."
    As he finished, his cellular rang.  He spoke briefly and hung up.  "DNA on the Jordan matches Mrs. Washington and ol' Jim Bob both," he grinned at Maggs.  "Hey, Jim Bob," he called into the cubicle where Griffin lay on a cart.  "Your Halloween treat is a needle and a three-poison-juice cocktail."
    Maggs, who'd peered over Harper's shoulder as he wrote, said:  "Only just injuries, huh?  Gotta contingency plan if this dirt-bag dies."
    "Haul the carcass to the dog pound?" he rolled the cigar stub.  He tossed a carbon of the report on the injured clown's gurney, then followed Maggs out.  As they cleared the door, Harper fished a fresh cigar from his pocket.
    "Trick or treat officers," the clown called behind them.


- - -
Gary Clifton, forty years a cop, has over thirty short fiction pieces published or pending with online sites. He has an M.S. from Abilene Christian University.
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The Female of the Species

Contributor: Shannon Barber

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“I had my hands around your throat last night while you were sleeping.”

I’ve been watching you all morning. I watched you shave and carefully put on your blue shirt with white French collar and cuffs, your matching tie. Now I’m looking at your face while you give me one of your ever-patient smiles.

“I’ll be that was a whopper of a dream.”

I try to laugh and you kiss me on the cheek, then the nose then so tenderly on the lips that I want to punch you in the face.

“Don’t forget to take your pills.”

You don’t understand and I don’t have the words to tell you. What I meant to say was that last night while you were sleeping I turned over and looked down at you and put my hands around your throat, I felt your pulse under my thumb and the only thing I wanted to do was squeeze. I wanted to squeeze until you came awake clawing at my hands trying to pull them off.

I wanted to watch the red dots bloom in your eyes, I wondered if your hyoid bone would break. I held my own breath and had to crawl out of bed, go out to the couch and masturbate furiously until I came three or four times, by the end tears were streaming down my cheeks because I felt ashamed. Beneath my shame at my arousal I felt burning lust.

Since my body began to fail I smolder inside. When I tried to tell you, when I tried with tears in my eyes and an I.V in my arm, you took my free hand and said it was cold. You said you understood that I must feel so helpless and how much you wished you could give me the strength to express my rage.

I’m getting better. I wander around in my pajamas, every morning you kiss me and tell me not to forget my pills. You just have no idea what is happening to me.

You don’t know that some days when the light of mid afternoon is filtering into the kitchen that I pull the huge sharp knife out of the block, I take my jammies off and press the cold metal to my nipple. I test the edge there, just enough to make the flesh pucker and tingle. I let the neighbor you hate watch.

You don’t know that today I will do this, I am already watching the angle of the light on the floor because I’m shaking so hard, I'm grinning and wet. So wet.

Something happened during the long pale blue hours in the middle of the night at the hospital. I spent all those hours hooked to IV’s, monitors, and the catheter I still have nightmares about. I’m not sure what it was that changed, perhaps the veneer of being nice or decent just wore away.

I had held onto this belief that I was not the kind of human being who could do something destructive simply to be destructive. Somewhere deep inside that wakeful unconscious I found my violent molten core. The nurses gave me stress balls when I couldn’t sleep and I would lay in bed squeezing and squeezing, my hands got strong while the rest of me was dying.

Eventually I realized that something in me had changed and would never be the same. After many long nights, surreptitious masturbation and violent fantasies, I am calm. I feel real.

I shuffle back into the kitchen and look at the counter where you thoughtfully put a new tin of my favorite tea next to my pile of pill bottles. You have been so solicitous and kind through all of this bullshit, nightly I want to murder you in your sleep.

I can hear your voice in my head as I make myself lunch and take my pills. The sun is almost to the right spot on the floor and as I rinse my dishes I stare at the knife in the block.

Maybe today I will draw blood, maybe today I will feel human.


- - -
Shannon Barber writes things, crochets things and drinks a lot of hot beverages. She also is very interested in pie.
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Things unseen

Contributor: Marie Chavez

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I have a friend who is a storyteller. Which is, in my opinion, just a nice way of saying he's a liar. The trick to being a convincing liar, I’ve heard, is to believe the story you’re telling. I always wanted to believe the stories he told. The temptation, I think, was that there was always a tantalizing amount of truth in his lies.

Over the years, the Liar has told me bits and pieces of a story. When he was a child, he lived in an old house out in the country. Way in the back, nestled along the wooded tree line, there was a shed. In the shed lived a little boy who would often play with my friend the Liar. When he got a little older, the Liar moved away, leaving the shed and the old house behind.

The boy from the shed followed the Liar, making his new home in the Liar’s closet. Though he’s moved many times and is now a grown man, the Liar still makes sure to keep his closet door firmly closed at night. Only now, the little boy in the closet is no longer a little boy. He too is a grown man.

I often wonder how much of this story was true, and what it meant to him. There is symbolism in it for sure, though I don’t know how deeply to read into it. I don't know if he has been trying to tell me something, or if it was just a tale he told me to pass the time. I’ve always wanted to ask, but considering the number of times I've caught him in lies and half truths, I don’t know if I could trust his answer any more than I trust the story itself.

#

There is a rental house situated on the lot at the back of my parent's property. Many years ago my friend the Liar came to visit. We went for a walk out to the pasture and passed the little house. He told me he had seen a face in the screen door, pressed up against the mesh fabric. It had been a woman’s face, angry and terrifying, her hands clawing as if fighting to breach the threshold.

He wove a convincing tale, his description was so vivid. When your best friend is a liar, though, you learn to suspect every word. My family had built the house, and nothing strange had ever happened there. There was no reason to put stock in his story. Haunted houses needed history, a death, something--or so I thought.

While in college I moved out to the rental house, my first taste of freedom and adulthood. I was often home alone, working late on projects. There were always strange sounds in the house coming from the crawlspace and the roof. The noises didn’t bother me, I always convinced myself of some explanation or another. That is until the couch I was sitting on while studying one night was kicked--kicked hard enough that my cat leapt from it and ran into the next room. Though I convinced myself I’d had too much coffee, that I’d imagined it--part of me worried at every sound and shadow.

Time moves quickly, and I moved on, much like my friend the Liar, leaving the rental house behind. My great grandmother lived there for many years after, growing bitter and senile. It was strange to see the matriarch of our family turn mean and angry, a woman who’d always been so full of joy and life. She finally passed away, a husk of the woman she’d once been, leaving the house once again vacant.

Pregnant and happy for the opportunity to be so close to family, I moved back without hesitation. My husband and I lived there for a little more than a year. The scampering, scratching and scraping noises along the roof at night, the rustling under the house and porch--we assumed were the activities of the herd of cats left by my grandmother. There were times, that I’d go outside to try and figure out just how a cat was making that sort of noise on the roof. It never seemed to make sense, the noises came from places that no cat should have been able to reach.

Adding to my sense of unease were the times that I could have sworn I’d seen someone in the hallway. Shadows often seemed to flicker then fall out of place. I began to have unusual, vivid, and occasionally bad dreams. Symptoms of lack of sleep and new motherhood, I'd convinced myself. Then there was the increasing tension between my husband and I. He seemed to hate the house and living there for no real reason. When we left, our marriage was in shambles.

It took nearly two years to patch things up, and we’ve lived happily since then. Though our troubled relationship could be explained away, I couldn’t help but think of that angry face in the screen, the kick to the couch, and my grandmother growing bitter and crazy.

The house has had many tenants over the years. From time to time I’ve asked if the animals seemed to make an unusual amount of noise--if they’ve noticed anything odd while living there. No one else has noticed anything out of the ordinary, or at least haven't mentioned it.

So now I wonder, was the house haunted by some angry spirit, or just a story told to pass the time? Is my friend actually a liar, or does he have a gift to tell the stories of things unseen? The skeptic in me will continue to wonder, while the dreamer half-believes.


- - -
Marie Chavez lives in Seattle with her husband, son, her furry daughter(a mutt of a little dog), three cats and six chickens. When she's not tending to any of the previously mentioned beings in her life, she tries to find time to write.
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Some Portal

Contributor: Erik Storey

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Mike stumbled down the dim corridor. He couldn't remember where he had been. He knew he was headed somewhere, but couldn't recall where. The distant lights above him were dim, making it hard to see his shuffling feet as he watched himself put one in front of the other. He abruptly fell when his forehead smacked into something solid. Somehow he managed to get to his feet and stared in awe at the shimmering portal before him. It glittered and waved, weaved and shined. It seemed to transform every time he looked at it from a different angle. There was a white aura surrounding it, and around that was nothing but darkness. While standing on his left foot, it seemed to be round, and started to split into two, but when he shifted his weight to his right, it became a rectangle and, amazingly, solid. But if he leaned back and closed the other eye, it changed again into a glowing yellow sliver that was wide, then smaller, and then suddenly disappeared. When both eyes were open it came back. Now it was brown, a rectangle, and had something glowing in the center, near the side. Mike tentatively stepped up and touched the glowing thing. The portal moved away from him slightly and that yellow sliver of light came back. He wanted that light. It summoned up some deep need in him, something just remembered. Stepping away, Mike thought that somewhere, at sometime he had seen something like this, but it seemed so fantastic that it must have been in a dream. Suddenly the portal vanished and two human shaped, ghostly phantoms crept past him. He shuddered in terror and disbelief, as the portal rematerialized. Mike decided to steel himself and enter through this gateway to nightmares. He ached for the light. He took three deep breaths, sighed, rocked back and forth, then pushed on the portal with both arms. It moved quickly, and Mike flew through, stumbling up to the wooden bar. The last thing he heard before the darkness took him was the bartender asking him, “What'll ya have buddy?”


- - -
Erik spends most of his time outside. If he has to be cooped up, he spends it reading and writing. He lives in Colorado with his wife, daughter and three dogs in a very small house.
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Take A Drive

Contributor: Jesse Campen

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As a retired man, the thought of stealing someone’s car never even occurred to me. That is, until the doctors said that I only had six months to live. Since then, I’ve taken walks every day just to take the suburban neighborhood in. Five and a half month’s later, I was there, in the suited man’s sixties hot-rod.

Nearly every day I took a walk, I saw it parked just a few blocks between my place and Shining Grove Hospital. The suited man always had a dark, strictly business style about him. To be honest, I was always looking at his car more than him. It was sleek, black, and souped up. It roared louder than a panther, and went from zero to sixty in less time than it’d take you to say “black mamba.” I’m not exaggerating when I say I was actually scared of it at first, but when I had three months, I realized something about the car.

One time, when I took a glance into it, I saw that all the doors were unlocked. Not only that, but the man left the keys in the ignition every time. I never knew why he would do that, but it bugged me.

Could I take it for a short drive around the block without him noticing? I began thinking with every passing day.

My conscience always told me that I couldn’t. Even before I was diagnosed with cancer, my license was revoked.

The thoughts became even stronger.

Do it! I’d tell myself.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

The doctor gave you two weeks to live. What have you got to lose, anyways?

Then one day, after the dark suited man had went into his house, I ran back a block to his car. Quickly, I grabbed the ice-cold silver handle to the car and pushed the button to release the door. I threw the door open, and sat myself in the car. After I shut the door, a shiver ran up my spine from the chilling air that filled the car.

A feeling of worriedness filled my mind just being in there, but soon I grabbed my wits, and turned the keys to the ignition. Just as before, it revved louder than a thousand wolves howling at the moon. If the suited man didn’t know someone was going to steal his car before that day, he knew now.

Rolling the window down to let the warm afternoon breeze in, I shot five blocks ahead before both of my hands were on the wheel. I can say that it was the first time a natural smile came to my face in half a year. I was laughing out loud. Cackling like a hyena on rollerblades as I flew by Shining Grove Hospital, the place I was born.

I placed my right hand down to the stick and shifted gears. I felt so glad that I had made the right choice, even if I was scared at first. Coming up was Shining Grove Elementary, my stomping grounds. All of the children stared at me as they shuffled out of the school.

“Have a good day, kids!” I shouted as I waved out the window.

Most of the kids stopped to wave, with big smiles on their faces. I couldn’t help but feel that some of them looked familiar.

I rushed past more places: My high school, my college, the church my wife and I were married in. Eventually, I raced past my old veterinary practice on the edge of the city, Shining Grove Animal Care.

My assistant who died a year before I retired is standing there. She smiles wide and waves. All of the animals that passed away that I knew are there too. It filled me with joy to finally see all of them again.

Now, the sun is at the edge of the horizon as I drive through rolling farmland. Dogs, cats, and animals of all kinds ran at my side and played in the fields, filling the air with their voices. Even though the sun was going down, the light seemed to have become brighter and brighter with time. Joyful, nostalgic tears came to my eyes as the light immersed me and the car drove me slowly into the roads of the afterlife.


- - -
Jesse James Campen is a working student from Maryland, and likes to write specifically to entertain. He is currently attending Full Sail University to get his Creative Writing For Entertainment BFA. Jesse likes story telling in all forms, including stories from video games and themed music albums.
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Seasons of Change

Contributor: Victoria Elizabeth Ann

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Palliative care.

She read it again. That couldn’t be right.

Patient is receiving palliative care. Terminal renal cancer. Metastasized. Lymphatic system.

The words jumped off of the page. Her father’s cancer was far worse than he had admitted. He had entered the final moments of his life and it was a surprise.

Last winter, he called her at the start of her final semester in college. He let her know of the diagnosis, assuring her that they had caught it early, it could be easily treated, and that she shouldn’t worry about him. Focus on her life. Enjoy her last few months before the “real world” roared into focus.

“Michelle,” he had chastised her, “This is the spring of your life. Everything is open and blossoming for you. Don’t waste it worrying about me. Enjoy the last bloom of your adolescence – it goes so fast.”

And so she did. Parties, classes, the beach. All spring, all summer; she lived for herself. Stopping home to visit only every few weeks. Calling her father to complain about her problems. Boys, teachers, shoes. A solstice of triviality that only immaturity can permit.

And now here they were. Ten months later. The feathery petals of the dogwood trees were falling outside the window of the sterile room. Was it October already? Had autumn, with its promise of cold, bleak days to come, filled her world with its ominous presence again? How did it sneak up on her so fast?

Her father, lying in the hospital bed, an IV filled with morphine going drip, drip, drip. Her, a diploma on the wall, real life going knock, knock, knock.

Why didn’t he tell her the truth? How much differently she would have lived! Winter, spring, summer, and fall – she would have given them all to him. Weekly visits, heartfelt conversations, a semester off from school. What’s one more season? Graduation could have waited.

A completely dissimilar existence she would have spent. The guilt of selfishness, the superficiality of youth – they weighed down on her as she watched the gentle rise and fall of his chest.

She pulled a CD player out of her book bag and placed it on his bedside table. The CD was old, scratched. She hoped it would play.

“Let me tell you a secret, about a father’s love. A secret that my daddy said was just between us. Now daddies don’t just love their children every now and then. It’s a love without end, amen.”

Their song. His promise. Her life.

She watched the bluest summer sky in his eyes, his hand held tightly in hers, as the time between the beeps on the monitor grew longer. Longer. Stopped. His chest didn’t rise again.

The hibernation of her youth had started. In the spring, she would be reborn again, an adult. The real world would blossom in front of her, offering with it the sweet petals of opportunity, of challenge, of pain, of joy. But for now? Now, it was her winter.


- - -
Victoria Elizabeth Ann is a lifetime student of the arts, literature, and life as a whole. She is currently studying Creative Writing at Full Sail University and aspires to publish a novel in the near future.
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True Love at the Reality Cafe

Contributor: Pranas Perkunas

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For lunch I strolled over to the Reality Café. It was a clean-looking, red brick building in a friendly enough neighborhood, so I was a little surprised to see only a few patrons there, especially after I got a gander at the menu; my eyes lingered long on the items advertised with bold, colorful letters or written in fancy fonts: TRUE LOVE, HARD WORK=SUCCESS, GOOD KARMA FOR GOOD PEOPLE, IF IT’s ON TV IT’s TRUE, etc. And the prices were so reasonable! I shook my hoary head with smiling disbelief.

“Herow, may I hep you?” I looked up from my menu to see an astonishingly lovely waitress of the Asian kind, rockin’ that famous jet-black hair cut straight across her forehead and sporting lips like first-prize cherry blossoms.

“I bet you have a lot of Facebook friends,” I said.

“They shut my account down—so stupid—just ‘cuz that’s where I met my last boyfriend,”

she said, speaking now in an entirely Midwestern American accent.

“Who was your last guy?”

“The Pope,” she said with a giggle while kicking up one of her sparkly, pink heels with a dolphin sticker on it until it smacked up against the back of her matching shorts.

“What happened to your charming accent?” I asked.

“Don’t stereotype,” she said. I looked back down at the menu.

“I was considering ordering the TRUE LOVE,” I said, “but can this price be RIGHT?”

“Yup: Honesty, Sincerity, and just being Yourself.”


“Then I’ll take it!” I exclaimed, my hopeful heart leaping like a baby dolphin.

She calculated the going rate for honesty and sincerity on her Domo cell phone: twenty-one cents: American. I cheerfully handed her exactly that, and when I held out and glanced at her twenty dollar tip in my hand, I saw that President Jackson was now finally combing his wild, rock star hair, the old lecher.

The waitress giggled, kicked up her other heel and pranced back into the kitchen. My reverie was rudely thumped when something not-at-all plushy landed on my head. It was a sparkly, pink, high-heel shoe with a dolphin sticker on the heel. I took it as an omen—a good one. O how my heart jumped like a hormonal, teenaged dolphin!

While my eyes were busy glazing over with vanilla-frosted longing, I was rudely interrupted by a hard finger poke right between my shoulder blades. The digit belonged to Ms. Blevins, a co-worker who looked a lot Big Bird might without the yellow costume. My heart plunged like a dolphin tossed from an imagined heaven into an oil spill of epic proportions. From her altitudinous height, to her angular frame and sharp, hawk-like facial features, Ms. Blevins was the antithesis of one who could quench my hells.

I felt almost as badly for her as for myself, but I couldn’t conjure up attraction for her anymore than I could blame her for repeatedly inviting me to “see her jacuzzi” or take her “out for cocktails.”

“HI MR.G!” she screeched with her wrecking-ball of a voice. Then she smiled until her face crinkled like a contour map hastily shoved in a glove compartment since 1974. I bristled with horror as her scaly toe sandpapered up my shin.

“WAITRESS! WAITRESS! I demand to see the MANAGER!” I cried while getting up from my seat and gesticulating like a seventh-grade English teacher. The same waitress from before emerged looking risquely disheveled, and so did the manager next to her. His face was old and severe, and he had a long snow-white beard. (This was no Podunk manager.)

“Sir, I believe I ordered True Love,” I said trying to strain the sarcasm from my tone.

Old Snow Beard guffawed as he held his quivering belly in his hands. I recognized him then as the HEAD, head manager—of everything—if you catch my drift.

The waitress kept her professional cool even as a tiny, upright reptile struggled to topple the already shaken stay-calm tower in my toy brain.

“THIS isn’t what I ordered,” I said as Ms. Blevins ran her bony hand through my spray-on hair. The manager smirked as he warmed the waitresses’ bottom.

“Oh, I see,” he said, “WHOM did you have in mind?” he continued in a voice that was bellowing and seemed to echo from some deep cavern. Funny thing though: his lips weren’t moving.

“You KNOW well, SIR,” I said looking him dead in one of the eyes which had sprouted all over his face and body. Ms. Blevins excused herself to the “little girls’ room” after showing me the E=mc(2) tattoo on her unmentionable. The manager goosed the waitress, and the eye on his palm laughed as he pulled it away.

“Look, BUB, if you want a shot at one of my FINEST, you strolled into the wrong café, but you’re INVITED to my place across the street,” he said.

“Your OTHER place?” I said.

“They’re ALL my places, son,” he stated while pointing out the window, as a bead of sweat--or something--dripped from his finger. I bolted out of there because I had no intention of paying the bill. Once safely outside, I saw a line of people snaking halfway down the block. I made it longer.

“Where’s it we’re all waiting to go?” I asked the sad-looking rodeo clown in front of me.

“You know where,” he said in a monotone and without even looking my way.

After an hour or so of the line inching forward, I could finally read the sign in the distance:

DELUSION DINER. I have to say, they have the best menu in town, though the prices are higher than anyone suspects. Just the same, I’ve been eating there ever since.

- - -
Pranas Perkunas (pen name) rejects everything you probably believe in. He fervently hopes that a new reality exists somewhere or sometime which is not predicated upon the premise of a food chain. If this is the only current reality, then God created surrealists as a kind of collective think tank.
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Silence

Contributor: Sean Crose

- -
We drove on, past the marshlands and amateur photographers, past the pavilions and dog walkers and made our way to the end of the park. It was a bright, warm day in early May.
Stepping out of the Chevy, we tossed our Dunkin Donuts cups in the public trash can and looked around. Couples, young and old, were scattered about, along with shirtless stoners and fishermen.
The most striking thing about the park, though, was the silence.
“Quiet,” Tara whispered as we headed toward the trail.
I nodded my head.
“Sometimes there's nothing louder than silence.”
We worked our way up to a set of wooden steps that led to a rocky hill overlooking the water. It was steeper than I had remembered.
“What's keeping you? I'm already at the top.”
“Gimme a minute,” I said. “I'm getting there.”
It was still quiet at the top of the rocky hill. From where we stood we could see the beaches and pavilions to the right and a lone sailboat far off in the water, to the left. Tara pointed to the stone pier that jutted out from the nearest beach.
“Look at those fishermen out on that pier. Think they'll catch anything?”
“Probably. Sea Robbins, at least.”
“What are Sea Robbins?”
“The kind of fish you don't want to catch.”
“What kind of fish do you want to catch?”
“Around here? Blues mostly. Blues and snappers.”
I looked out at the fishermen on the pier. They were probably using Bunker and Mackerel as bait. Frozen, of course. The salt water would melt the ice away in minutes, if not seconds.
“What are you thinking about?”
I shrugged.
“Surf casting.”
“Surf casting?”
I pointed out to the pier.
“What they're doing out there.”
“Why do they call it surf casting?”
“I dunno.”
“You used to do that, didn't you?” she asked. “Surf cast, I mean.”
“Sure did,” I nodded. “A long time ago.”
I turned away from the pier.
“Too long ago,” I added.
“What's that?”
“I said I should start surf casting again.”
“There's a lot of things you should start doing again.”
She was looking right at me.
“Life gets in the way.”
“Yeah. If you let it.”
I squinted out at the sailboat. It was far away by this time.
“Look at that sailboat,” I said. “All by itself out there without a care in the world.”
The silence was further broken by the sounds of two stoners making their way up the rocky hill from the opposite direction. They seemed surprised to see us, why I don't know. Maybe they thought they'd be all by themselves on top of that rocky hill, all by themselves without a care in the world.
They stood there for a moment, the two stoners and looked out at the fishermen on the pier before moving on.
“That was fast,” Tara laughed.
“I think they wanted to get going once they found out we were here.”
“They were probably just looking for a place to smoke.”
I nodded my head in agreement.
“Ready to move on?” she asked.


- - -
My name is Sean Crose. I'm a writer of fiction, non-fiction, scripts and poetry (although fiction is where my heart and soul is). I live in Connecticut with my wife Jen, and Cody, the world's greatest cat.
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The Little People Inside Marcia's Head

Contributor: Jeff Suwak

- -
Several dozen little people lived inside Marcia’s head. At night while Marcia slept they crawled out of her ears to talk to me. Their appearance was initially disturbing, but I came to enjoy their company.
Marcia was an angry and abusive person. She often mocked me and said I was stupid, lazy, and pathetic. So it was that I laughed when the little people told me they had been poisoning Marcia for years–not enough to kill her, but just enough to make her feel sick and rundown.
One night the little people invited me to meet their queen. They gave me a thimble full of elixir that turned me into a little person, and I followed them into the dark complex of caves inside Marcia’s head.
The queen lived in a chamber in the heart of the caves. Inside the chamber was a well, and at the bottom of the well lived a little girl. All day long the queen shouted insults at the girl in the well. That was how she poisoned Marcia, for the girl at the well bottom was actually a little version of Marcia. Anything that the little version of Marcia felt, the big version felt, as well.
The queen launched derisions into the well. “Quit crying,” she hissed. “Fat, ugly, stupid girl.” She sneered in malicious joy as the little girl sobbed in the darkness.
The queen wanted me to poison Marcia’s body, just as she and the little people were poisoning Marcia’s mind. “Together we could make Marcia soooo sick,” the queen crooned with laughter. She promised me that the little people would visit me every night if I poisoned Marcia, and I would never be lonely again.
I went for a walk in the caves to think. I did not want to poison Marcia or anybody else, but the little people were my only friends, and I did not want to lose their companionship.
Running water echoed from the depths of the caves. I followed the sound until I reached a chamber in which a waterfall cascaded down a rocky wall. A movie played on the waterfall like a liquid television screen. The characters in the movie were all the little people from Marcia’s head. I realized as I watched that the movie was Marcia’s memories, and the characters were all the people that had mistreated her in her life. The queen was in the movie more than anyone else. The queen was Marcia’s mother.
Suddenly understanding that Marcia was so mean and abusive because of the little people poisoning her mind, I ran back to the queen’s chamber in rage. The little people tried to stop me, but I fought through them with ease. It turned out that they only appeared to be strong, and were actually quite weak.
I threw the queen outside the chamber and swore to kill her if she returned. I told the little Marcia at the bottom of the well that the queen was a liar. “You are beautiful,” I said. The little girl stopped crying. In time, she climbed out of the well into the chamber.
The queen ran in shrieking and clawed at little Marcia’s eyes. The little girl, realizing how powerful she was now that she was finally free of her prison, grabbed the queen by the neck and tossed her down into the well. The little people, awed by the girl’s strength, bowed in sublimation.
Marcia ordered the little people to dig a tunnel out of the caves into the sunlight above. She declared herself the new queen and vowed that her rule would be brighter than her predecessor’s. She thanked me, we embraced, and I left her to her new life.
I never returned to Marcia’s head after that night, but I still see the little girl that climbed out of the well every day. I see her every time that Marcia laughs, and every time that Marcia is kind to someone. Marcia does both of those things often, now. She does those things so often, in fact, that I often forget that there was ever a time when she did not do those things. It turns out that all she needed was for someone to silence the little people inside her head and to set her inner child free.


- - -
Jeff is a writer and editor living in the Pacific Northwest.
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A Little Deception

Contributor: John Laneri

- -
Most Saturday mornings, I bypass the town cafe and head straight for breakfast at Aunt Jillie's Boarding House. It's a large Victorian known throughout Texas as the finest establishment in Neverton, a small community along the cattle trail to Fort Worth.

Once there, I always eat breakfast with Jillie, my best friend. She's an good looking, fun loving woman that folks call, 'Aunt Jillie'.

That day though, Lucinda, Jillie’s maid, stopped me in the foyer of her house, whispering, “Miss Jillie's too busy for pancakes.”

Surprised, I replied, “But, she always eats a stack of your pancakes on Saturdays… says it’s her favorite.”

“She's too flustered to eat,” Lucinda said. “All she’s been doing is flying around like a whirlwind. I’ve never seen her in such an excitement.”

Hearing a flurry of activity coming from the parlor, I turned about to see what the commotion was all about.

“Why Sheriff Carson!” Jillie said, in a startled voice. “You surprised me.” She paused to wipe the moisture from her cheeks then continued, “I've had a busy morning... got up at five o'clock.”

While Jillie was usually well groomed and fashionable, today a scarf covered her hair and a man’s shirt with long tails hung to her knees.

“You’re lookin' mighty casual this morning.”

She pecked my cheek with a kiss. “Lets have coffee. I'll tell you all about it.”

With my stomach growling for pancakes, I followed her through the dining room, toward the back of the house where we settled across from one another at a kitchen table.

“Why so busy?” I asked, as I poured some coffee.

“I’m getting the house ready for the Senator,” she replied, smiling brightly.

In the background, I noticed the aroma of a pot roast slowly cooking. Savoring the smell, I went on to say, “I take it, you’re referring to that fellow passin' through from the state capitol.”

“Can you imagine, a real senator staying at my house. There’s so much work to do.”

“You seem to be going to lots trouble just to please a senator.”

“If I treat him right, he’ll go back to the capitol and spread the word that my house is the finest in Texas.”

“Your house already is the finest in Texas.”

“But, I want the important people with lots of money to know that too.” She touched my arm. “He’s promised to pay me one hundred dollars.”

“One hundred dollars,” I said, surprised. “That’s a powerful amount of money for one of your girls.”

“He wants me,” she replied, happily. “I’m getting’ one hundred dollars for a night of pleasure as well as a pot roast dinner and a splash in my new bathtub.”

It took me a few moments to sort through her words. Finally, I said, “What I don’t understand is, how you plan to satisfy both the senator and me at eleven o’clock – our usual Saturday time.”

She removed the scarf from her hair and began adjusting several knots of ribbon hidden underneath. They were the kind women use to tie the hair into little balls close to the head. It's a grooming technique that most fellows know give ladies a terrible look.

Smiling, she continued. “I didn’t think you’d mind postponing our Saturday night, knowing it’s for one hundred dollars.”

While I generally enjoy the rich texture and reddish highlights in her hair, the curlers distracted from that pleasure. Forcing a smile, I asked, “What about that girl from Abilene, the one with the blue eyes. She gets fellows plenty excited.”

Jillie paused to adjust another curler. “She's too skinny for a distinguished gentleman, and besides, she likes to use spurs... can I get you a coffee refill?”

I rubbed my belly, my eyes still directed to the curlers. “I’ve had enough coffee. Some things tend to upset my insides something awful.”

Finally, she replaced the scarf saying, “I hope you’ll come by the house tonight and visit with the Senator.”

“I doubt the Senator will be much interested in me,” I replied, as I reached for my hat. “Actually, I'm thinkin’ of playin’ poker with some of the boys at the saloon. I need to win some money... seems my pocketbook is getting mighty thin. I'll need at least another twenty dollars so as not to go hungry before the end of the month.”

“Your official presence would make the house more comfortable for the Senator. You know how often fellows get out of hand when they get liquored.”

“One of my deputies can check by every hour or so.”

“Your official presence would mean so much to me,” she said, as her bare foot began creeping playfully up my leg. “What time can I expect you tonight?” she asked, her voice purring sweetly.

Setting the foot aside, I came to my feet saying, “I need to get going. Some of the boys are already tossin' horseshoes over by the livery stable. I might just win a few extra bucks to carry me over.”

In desperation, she finally said, “Would twenty dollars be enough money to buy your official presence?”

Laughing to myself, confident that a little deception works like magic, I stuffed the twenty into my pocket and headed for the door, knowing that if I played my hand right, the Senator would end up getting spurred, and I'd get Jillie as well as a splash in her bathtub and generous portion of pot roast for my evening meal.


- - -
John is a native born Texan living near Houston. His writing focuses on short stories and flash. Publications to his credit have appeared in several scientific journals as well as on a number of internet sites and in short story periodicals.
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The Harvester

Contributor: Robert Srange

- -
Seventeen-year-old Christine Anderson had been missing for twelve years and eleven months. No ransom note had ever been sent and no body had been recovered.
The police and the FBI had searched under every rock, in every place they could think of to look, but had given up the search. Her mother and father had given up hope of ever seeing her alive again and closure is what they sought most desperately. Just to know what had happened would have been a release. But no news ever arrived. No call had ever been received. They sat silently and waited, staring at the walls, together.

Dorothy Mae Swanson was a quiet girl. She was the kind that enjoyed serene meadows and babbling brooks. She also loved poetry books and every month, when a new volume of prose arrived she would find a quiet place and read.
She had been going to an old cemetery that overlooked the river near her home to read her books for some time and she particularly enjoyed the silence of the headstones. It wasn’t a morbid feeling; it just made her calm and able to immerse herself in each poem, after all she felt something compelling amongst the tombs, something reassuring.
One afternoon she felt drawn to explore the garden at the center of the mausoleums. It was a peaceful, well-manicured garden with benches and a park like setting. The garden seemed to bring her pleasure and she delighted in returning day after day.
This went on for some time and it began to take a toll on her. Her mother asked if she was feeling all right, but she just shrugged it off and smiled as she left for her daily walk in the garden.
It had been almost a month since she began to sit in the garden, when she heard a voice. It started out small but it began to grow louder and louder. It was a beautiful voice she thought and it brought her peace. She began to listen to the voice closely. It seemed to come from all directions at once. But sounded so beautiful, so lovely.
The voice began to call to her. It called her to an old gate that closed the entrance to a tomb, a very old tomb. As she reached out for the gate it began to move and opened on its own. Normally this would have frightened her, but the voice was so soothing so beautiful and it beckoned her to enter the dark room beyond.
Within her heart she began to scream but nothing came out. It seemed as if her throat was frozen, but the soothing voice called to her, its lullaby and harmony was so enchanting, so irresistible. She screamed with horror deep within herself, but her feet kept moving forward as if they moved of their own will and not hers.
Within the dark chamber of the tomb there appeared another door. It seemed to have been painted shut with rust and corrosion. “No one could open such a door” she thought within her subconscious mind and it made her heart leap to think she could go no further. But the door began to open; its rust and corrosion fell to the floor as the door began to open with a loud and terrible sound.
Her mortal soul was fighting and kicking, she howled with fear within herself, but the voice continued to call and her body listened. So calming, so lovely.
The doorway opened to a spiral staircase, its walls narrow and confining. She continued down into a room that held a sarcophagus its lid had slid partly open and revealed its contents.
In the scant light that fell from the open door above she could see a mans body stretched out in eternal sleep, his hands and face uncovered, he looked as if he was made of marble and his body was shrouded by a thin veil of cobwebs. The ghastly scene was almost more than her struggling mind could accept.
Against her will she moved to the sarcophagus and peered within. For a second she stood in abject terror peering into the dark tomb. Then suddenly to her horror the corpse moved, it shifted slightly and then its arms reached forward and drew her into the stone box. As she caught one last, fleeting glimpse of the room, she could see in the dim glow, skeletons and corpses desiccated and scattered all about the room and volumes of poetry, dusty and falling apart lying everywhere. The lid slowly closed behind her with a scratching, hollow sound that echoed through the chamber.

Lt. Gill was a detective. He had been hired to investigate the disappearance of Dorothy Mae Swanson by her parents, hoping he could find something to lead them to her.
He was exhausted, he had followed every lead and tracked down every detail possible, it had led him nowhere. He was about to give up when the phone rang. It was the gardener at the cemetery on the hill. The old gardener insisted that he meet him in the garden at the center of the mausoleums.
Arriving at the garden he found an elderly man standing near a locked gate. He was holding a small book of poetry, his hands shaky with age. He said that he had found it lying next to a tomb entrance and that it was an important clue to the disappearances.
Lt. Gill took the old book from the old mans weathered hands. It was in very bad shape from lying in the ferns and garden soil and it was certainly found in an odd place.
He opened its brittle cover and on it’s inside leaf, barely legible, the name, Christine Anderson.


- - -
I have been writing fiction and short stories since college.
I'm currently writing all kinds of short stories.
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Commuters

Contributor: Hannah Garrard

- -
I followed the woman’s head nodding forward as she teetered on the brink of sleep. Her hair fell about her face and her jaw slackened. On her lap she clutched a designer handbag and a cake in a box with a clear lid, through which I could just make out some birthday text amongst the whipped cream.

That cake won’t make it home in one piece, I said to myself. I was suddenly struck by a stab of Schadenfreude, triggered perhaps by the expensive handbag.

It wasn’t difficult to spot the haircut to my left, because it belonged to a man a clear head above the rest of the crowd- squashed against the doors of the rumbling carriage. But the haircut was just the beginning: Armani sunglasses flashed reflected neon as the train sped past LED advertisements. I surreptitiously followed the angular lines which began at his crown and led to his muscular body, scantily clad in black mesh. Next, came white Lycra leggings that had every intention of turning strangers crimson. Finally, at the bottom amongst a mob of scuffed loafers, stood luminous green sling-back trainers. He looked amazing, like a futuristic Mardi Gras. I looked down at my own white t-shirt, splattered orange with ramyen from that day’s lunch.

The designer handbag emptied itself onto the floor of the carriage, followed by the cream cake. The woman woke up with a jolt and Happy Birthday was ruined.


- - -
Hannah is from the UK but now lives in South Korea amongst the neon signage. From her apartment she can see the ocean, and a rusty cruise ship that makes tired laps around the peninsular. You can follow her travels and her writing at: www.lookingformyhat.blogspot.com
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REFOCUS

Contributor: Gary Clifton

- -
She was female and appeared young, burn damage too severe to really tell. "Tied to that bed, McCoy," the Medical Examiner bent over the carnage. "The autopsy will tell more."
"They's been a man comin' up there nights...when her roommate is away at work," the apartment manager worked on a tall boy and a menthol filter tip at 3:00 A.M.
"Tonight?" McCoy asked. It was his turn in the barrel for Homicide deep night call-outs. He'd handle the preliminaries and begin the follow up on Monday - so he thought.
"Dunno...could be...just dunno." she exhaled smoke.
The victim's name was Lynn and she had a lover, Charlie, a bouncer at an all night, b.y.o.b. lesbian club on Fitzhugh. McCoy figured Charlie was working when her roommate had been murdered by the man the manager had mentioned, so he delivered the tragic news alone. Then he'd crawl back in bed.
The alleyway was pitch black. McCoy was used to dark alleys. Charlie, a dumpy little number in black Doc Marten's, had a silver chain hanging from her belt. Flash of a badge and a quick word normally would have salved the way to a very sad meeting. Instead, Charlie clipped his chin with an overhand right. "Gonna kick your ass, sumbitch," she spat. When she yanked on her belt chain, out came a mace.
He grabbed Charlie's shirt and tossed her headfirst onto the sidewalk, then quick-stepped down and kicked her in the ribs. Yeah, the book said don't slap women around, but this was a little different.
A second bouncer landed on McCoy's back, grappling for a choke hold. He slid away and Charlie's helper landed hard on the pavement. Four more appeared in the doorway. Time to give a little ground...consider pulling a pistol.
Then, behind him, three more figures blocked the street. One was African American and big. Two and three were smaller, white and waved those metal flashlight-clubs. "What the hell's goin' on?" the African American stepped forward.
"Just conferring with Charlie here," McCoy waved his badge.
The African American turned to the doorway. "Police business, ladies, everybody back inside!" Distant streetlight twinkled off the badge on his chest.
"Why no call for backup?" one officer asked.
"Good question." McCoy pulled handcuffs. "I came with tragic news, but I'm afraid Charlie just shot off her foot. Charlie, you're under arrest...murder. Dunno why the hell you didn't just disappear."
"Lynn...my little Lynn was cheating...with a man, for Christ's sake. She said she'd love me forever," Charlie sobbed on the sidewalk.
"You still coulda just split," McCoy shook his head. His mind morphed to notifying next of kin. Suddenly he felt very old and bone tired. No sleep tonight.


- - -
Gary Clifton, forty years a cop, published a novel in national paperback and has published or has pending articles in several online magazine sites
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The Runaway

Contributor: Chris Sharp

- -
He had an unusual first name, “Stave,” which was at first explained was given as a gift by his parents to make him feel more unique. Later he learned “Stave” was a compromise between his father who preferred “Dave” and his mother who wanted to name him “Steve.”
Stave stood outside his apartment door that day, locked out again. Sometimes he thought that if his name were either “Dave” or “Steve” he would have been saved from so many absurd situations in addition to being locked out. He also recognized that a man named “Stave” was somewhat like a clown named “Bozo,” which guaranteed many kinds of funny encounters. But since Stave was an only child, he kept his name going strong to honor his parents.
While he stood at his locked door, waiting for something better to happen, his neighbor Scott whose life was always as normal as his name asked:
“Did you lose your keys again, Stave?”
“They sneaked away from me, when I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Oh no.”
“I guess it just won’t let up,” said Stave, spitting on a clump of grass.
He had finally started to think of his keychain by the pronoun “she” because of the personal way the keys ran away and hid from him. He confirmed he would never marry anytime soon, if even a lifeless thing like a keychain couldn’t resist abandoning him in a time of need.
One thing was in his favor that day. Like most of his fellow workers that he knew, Stave had to keep taking days off and stay under a 40-hour work week to keep his corporate owner from giving him medical benefits. On this latest day of loss, he had the whole day to retrieve the keychain at the two neighboring places where he had just wandered.
“I used the toilet here this morning, so my keychain might have bailed out on your bathroom floor,” he told the outlet store manager from the place he had checked out for earphone sales.
The manager shook her head even before she poked through the drawers at the point-of-sale. She shook her head harder when nothing turned up.
The other place Stave had been was a Mexican restaurant where he stopped for a breakfast as a reward for another day he had had taken off.
“It’s a sneaky keychain,” he told the young Latino man at the counter. “I lose her a lot, and she hides in the cleverest places. It’s like she wants nothing to do with me, like I’m too ugly for her or I’m too dumb for her.”
When the young Latino man repeated “keys” he went to three far-away places to look. “No,” said Stave when he came back. The young man – who acted reluctant to say a word – shook his head.
Stave went back to his apartment and pressed his hand hard against a back window, and suddenly it slid open. When he jumped inside, he felt at least a little progress was made. The first thing he found was a duplicate car key that he had kept under his silverware.
He kicked everything around on the floor for a few minutes, and the keychain turned up. It had been laying low between a cardboard box of old newspapers and another non-descript box.
“You,” said Stave, looking at the keychain with all the life he had left. “You feel important don’t you because you made me think about you all day long. But I’m sorry. You see I’m sorry I didn’t look to see if you were with me this morning when I just closed the door and just locked out everything in the world to me.”
A few months later he went through the same episode all over again.
“Oh no,” said Scott, the neighbor who continued to look as all right as his name. “Don’t tell me the keys are lost again, Stave.”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do, Stave?”
“Look for her again.”


- - -
Chris Sharp has several stories in the archives of Weirdyear, Yesteryear Fiction, Daily Love and Linguistic Erosion, with his short stories accumulating the most Internet hits listed under Google as “Short Stories by Chris Sharp.” His book “Dangerous Learning” is distributed by Barnes and Noble.
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The Years of Feast and Famine

Contributor: Stephen V. Ramey

- -
February 17, 2007 began the Year of the Pig according to the Lunar New Year calendar. It was on that date that I started my quest to become Earth's fattest man. A side of bacon for breakfast, three Big Macs and triple fries for early lunch, then a plate of ribs at Zibo's an hour after that. Dinner was the immobile meal. I would routinely stuff myself so full of potatoes and pasta, with occasional salad (heavily dressed, of course) that I could not move from the sofa for hours. I began relieving myself into buckets. My wife complained, but kept cooking. I loved her more than life itself, but not more than a good steak rubbed with pepper and cooked over a low, blue flame.

February 7, 2008 brought in the Year of the Rat. I was at 390 pounds, and growing fast. I had been given permission to telecommute, and routinely did my job as a traffic analyst while chomping down bags of Doritos, Cheetos, and pork rinds. Coke was my morning drink. At noon I switched to sweetened tea, with so much sugar you could watch it precipitate out when you put the pitcher in the fridge. This was the year I began my affair with Meghan Chives. Almost every night after my wife was sleeping, blindfolded and tooth-guarded in her bed, I would squeeze through the doorway and make the laborious trek three row houses down to Meghan's. We would eat greasy chicken or meat skewered on metal. I think it was the adrenalin fear of discovery that drove me that year, though it could also have been that Meghan's cupboards were well stocked.

2009 initiated the Year of the Ox. I was over 500 pounds now, and every movement became a labor. I was dragging the world around. No surprise when the company laid me off. Times were tough, and my work had degraded. It's difficult to click when your finger is larger than the mouse button. I stopped my affair with Meghan. Lugging my heart monitor and O2 tank was not worth the reward.

2010, the Year of the Tiger. I took charge of my weight gain with a vengeance. My wife, with Meghan's encouragement, it turns out, had been working toward staging an intervention. They even arranged for a famous weight clinic to hoist me out of the apartment and put me under house arrest. There were whispers of stomach staples and liposuction. I put a stop to it. I was not about to waste three years.

2011 was the Year of the Rabbit. And it's true that I now had to forage for myself, nibbling through our pantry one shelf at a time. A difficult year, best left unrecalled. My wife was gone, and so was Meghan. I lost nearly a hundred pounds.

2012, the Year of the Dragon. I have refocused on weight gain, even as it consumes my hoard. I will soon be forced to return to my women for nurture, and I will do so without regret. It may take a week to make it down into the basement where the freezer is, but I will make it one way or another. And they will be there.

Next year begins the year of the Snake.


- - -
Stephen V. Ramey lives in beautiful New Castle, Pennsylvania, with his novelist wife and three obstructionist cats. His work has appeared in various places, including Linguistic Erosion, Smashed Cat, A Capella Zoo, and is upcoming at Weird Tales. He edits the annual Triangulation anthology from Parsec Ink, and the speculative twitterzine, trapeze.
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From "Cat People among Us #6"

Contributor: Kyle Hemmings

- -
I take a bus into the heart of the city of neon shams and unforgettable faces. It's a rickety old bus that wheezes and whirs and I imagine the headlights as two big eyes that can never see but provide some kind of light. The way I think about the medium who lives five stories up on Grant Avenue. Imagine if those headlights are eyes that are wired to a brain that can remember everything.

Not like mine.

Some years ago, I was diagnosed as brain damaged. It was very late at night and I was driving to see a woman who broke into night sweats or incomprehensible soliloquies at the thought of being alone. I was the psychiatrist on call and I made the mistake of sleeping with her, of becoming too close, of being wrapped in her own nightmares. She was once a prisoner of a war her ex-lover invented. That's how she explained it. Love turned into torment and all kinds of ingenious tortures. He made her confess to crimes she never committed, such as taking in stray cats and starving them. He made her wash his clothes on the wrong settings until the colors bled.

My patient/lover used to tell me that she wanted to keep my smooth baritone voice in a glass jar at night. It would help her sleep. She later died by her own noose.

On the way to her house that night, I had made a wrong turn and crashed into a tree. For months, I couldn't see. I kept hearing my mother's voice. She said "Son, just open your eyes. Do it for me." She had been dead for some time. But that was only a manner of speaking.

With a slice of moon in the medium's eyes, I lay all my cards on the table. The floor is not a quivering mouth. It's never as dramatic as in those movies directed by obscure Leftist directors who died in North African prisons or on islands too tiny to think about. I close my eyes and see the women of my life scurrying around the house, digging dirt under nylon loop carpets. My sister has the voice of the tabby cat who died under my bed. Some form of feline cancer. Whenever she talks about her life, she describes it as a series of casualties, or of aborted love affairs with what she calls "matchstick men," more often than not, with her being the one who was burned.

In the séance, I am standing in the middle of the living room and I say to the women of my past, "Can you come back and stay?" My sister acts as if I'm not there or anywhere, really. She disappears into rooms of unused closet space. My mother turns around, drops the dustpan and corn whisk broom.

Her face is glass perfect, as if behind an unscratched TV screen, bold close-ups of gleaming smiles and beautiful planet eyes. "No one ever helps me with these house chores. And that son of mine hardly ever writes from that manufactured war." She opens a bolt lock, retrieves the mail. She reads aloud a letter that must have been written by me. I can't make out all the words. She mocks my "Sincerely Yours," and improvises her own "Insincerely Yours." She thinks sons make up phony wars to get away from their mothers. I want to shout that "I'm coming home." She closes the door. At some distance, over the years, we die unnoticed, the blink of a cat's eye. We die in some form or another. We continue on as zombies. My sister, who does not survive an accident on Interstate 90, continues to walk underground. I open my eyes. I hear a distant knocking, of jars shattering. The sounds fade. I'm cursed again with tunnel vision.


- - -
Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and prose: Avenue C, Cat People, and Anime Junkie (Scars Publications). His latest e-books are You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press and The Truth About Onions (Good Samaritan Press).
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Purple Pelt

Contributor: Benjamin F Jones

- -
I have never really been into pedigree felines but when I saw the Persian Violet advertised in the Evening Standard, I knew it had to be mine.

I took my cousin to the purchase; she is an expert on household pets and there are all sorts of horror stories about dangerous animals being botched together, re-sprayed and sold on.

We arrived at 57 Nutbush Road shortly after 7pm. I was carrying a cat-box and a wodge of money. The cat played in the uncut grass of the terraced house, opalescent and glittering in the sun; racing and pouncing through the heads of dandelions. As the owner gave me a brief service history my cousin checked the oil; apparently there is an old trick where treacle is put in to disguise rattles – the cat was clean and we took it for a walk around the block. Some of the tail-bearings seemed a little worn but the bodywork had been well looked after.

The street was peaceful when we returned. Far off I heard a petrol mower – the smell of cut grass drifted like gold in the air. My cousin gave me the nod and I knew I had a good deal.


- - -
Benjamin F Jones is a writer working in South Wales. He loves pizza, photography and moist clay. When it rains he catches drops in his open mouth. He creates poetry, flash, absurdist snapshots, prose poetry and humorous fiction. Shuffled Fragments can be read at http://graphitebunny.wordpress.com/
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When I Can, I Will

Contributor: M. Scibelli

- -
Before sunset everything appears readily apparent. He pedaled his bike into the high school football stadium at half past five. A game had been played earlier that day, and the tattered bleachers on both sides had a number of balloons tied to them. Getting off of his bike, he braced it against the home bleachers and strode down the fine gravel track toward the far end. Due to the hour, long shadows were flung to the ground by an over-zealous sun dying of age. He turned and regarded the trodden field, tired from the day’s use but still fresh at the start of the season. The field seemed to smile bleakly at him; it was a tired runner at the start of a race that it knew was much too long for it.
Above the landscaped grass swarmed several dozen dragonflies, bounding off of unseen air currents and darting through the shallow sky. Each one would stop for a short period of time, reconsider its life, and turn and rocket away, only to repeat itself moments later. Dragonflies only seemed to come out for several weeks before they were gone again; the recent surge of these creatures impressed a strictly ephemeral sentiment on the youth;.
In his mind, the stadium incased a single instance. Although cars on the highway close-by could be heard. To him, they didn’t matter, or at least they seemed to not. A wind howled by, a campaign caller for the Fall-Winter ballot that hung up after the third ring.
He ambled back down the track toward his bike, halting at each of the helium balloons as he went. Wrapping the string around his fingers, he then tugged severely at it until the line frayed and gave. The bicycle, leaning on the splintered handrail of the bleachers, screamed of a youth he should no longer be in; indeed, he wasn’t.
The boy released the balloons into the air. At first gregariously remaining grouped together, they soon parted ways and began to form smaller and smaller profiles against the waning afternoon sky. He watched and he stood, he killed summer. The balloons floated higher and higher into the atmosphere, bolstered by air, until they were far out of reach of his vision.
He looked melancholy but gazed resolutely toward his bicycle, then got on and pedaled away. He knew that while he couldn’t see it happen, the balloons would all pop. Sometimes the sparsity of air around balloons would cause them to fill too large, and unwillingly kill themselves.


- - -
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Quarantine

Contributor: Kevin Pierce

- -
“Next.”
A man walks up to my desk with a small girl in tow. I glance up just enough to see that his shirt and pants are dirty, a contrast to the girl’s Sunday-best blue dress.
“Name?” I ask.
“Margaret Brooks.” he says.
I press the button on my intercom and restate the name. “One moment, sir.”
The man places his hand on my desk and leans over. I can feel that his face is close to mine. “How long will we have?” he asks.
I focus on his dirty shirt. “One minute.”
“But I have so much to say.” His voice shakes.
I sigh. “So do they.” I say, gesturing behind him to the endless line of fidgeting onlookers.
He straightens up. “You’re right, of course. One more question. Does she know?”
I look up at his face for the first time. His mouth is drawn tight, and looks like he could use a shave. His eyes are at once open wide and sharply focused as they meet my own. “No.” I say, looking down and pressing the button on my intercom. “One minute.”
A woman’s voice rings out from the speaker. “Hello? Roy, is that you?”
The man moves forward and kneels down, face to face with the intercom. “Yeah, Maggie, it’s me. Clara’s here too.”
The girl’s face brightens. “Hi Mommy, it’s me.” she says.
The woman laughs. “I’d know your voice in a second, sweetie. Have you been a good girl for Daddy?”
“Yes, Mommy, of course. He’s been letting me stay up late and even let me skip school today – it’s been so much fun! His cooking isn’t as good as yours though. I miss you – will you come home soon?”
“Of course, baby. They told me it’s all going to be okay, and that I’ll be home in a couple of days.”
I look up at the man in front of me again. His eyes are wild, brimming with tears as they dart around the room. His fists clench as he turns to his daughter. “Say goodbye to Mommy.” he says. “I’d like to talk to her now.”
The girl nods enthusiastically. “Daddy wants to talk to you now.” she says. “I love you, and I’ll see you soon. Bye bye!”
“Bye bye back, Clara. Mommy loves you.” says the woman. “How are you, Roy? I hope it hasn’t been too much of a hassle while I’ve been away.”
The man’s fists begin to shake, but his voice remains steady. “It’s been no trouble at all, Mags. Listen, I just wanted to say how sorry I am about all of this. All the arguments, everything – you wouldn’t be there if not for me.”
“Oh honey, don’t be sorry.” says the woman. “It hasn’t been bad at all – like a vacation, really. And I’ve never missed you so much. In a way, I needed this. I can’t wait to see you.”
The man swallows hard. “I can’t wait to see you either.”
“Ten seconds.” I whisper.
“I – I have to go now – our time is up.” says the man. “I love you so much.”
“I love you too.” says the woman.
The moment she finishes the phrase, I press the button on the intercom, silencing it. I scan the list on my desk, crossing off the woman’s name to the sound of sobbing in front of me. Looking past the man, I gesture to two large men behind him to escort him out. I take a deep breath and look back at my list.
“Next.”


- - -
Kevin Pierce is a recent college graduate and amateur writer. He recently finished his first novella, and also writes short stories, flash fiction, and poetry. He is currently working on his first novel-length work.
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Seen But Not Noticed

Contributor: Jude Conlee

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Most of the things he doesn’t understand are the kind of things that you can comprehend right off. Like his surroundings. There’s no way to argue against heat, for example, but he doesn’t comprehend that so much. I mean, he burned his own hand off once because he couldn’t tell the difference between heat and coldness. I don’t enjoy being him, really. Because I am him, you know. Well, you wouldn’t have known it if I didn’t tell you, but who cares, anyway. I don’t. He doesn’t. You do, but I don’t care about you. Like my hand. I didn’t care about that, either.
Do I not care, or do I just not comprehend? You know, like the thing with the hand. Or cars. I just don’t comprehend the movements of cars sometimes. Most times I cross the street, I nearly get run over. They yell at me and say, “Are you trying to kill yourself? Didn’t you see me coming?” Yeah, I saw you coming, but I didn’t notice.
Once, I got hit, you know. Well, you didn’t know that before, either, but now you do. And the lady who hit me, I don’t remember, she gave me some angry, idiot rant about how reckless he was and how he should have looked, for God’s sake, and how it’s people like him who create a public menace just by existing. But then she realized that she needed to get him to a hospital, because you don’t just hit someone and rant about it. So they took me to the hospital, and the doctor said I had some kind of brain damage, and I said it doesn’t matter, I can deal with it. I scared him. I liked scaring him.
I haven’t told you the story with the heat yet, though. So it was some time after that car incident, so he’d already had brain damage. So you’d think that it was the brain damage that made it happen, so he couldn’t feel his hand burning off, but no, he’d had trouble with that kind of thing before. Not with his hand getting burned off, though. Not that. Not yet.
But so he was at his sister’s house, where she lives with an evil husband and two dogs, one of them’s nice and likes licking people’s hands, and one of them’s smelly and apathetic. Now, you’re probably wondering if the husband’s really evil. He is. He’s evil to half the people he meets, and he’s nice to the other half. He’s nice to women. Some of them. His wife.
But I was at the house, and he wanted me to help him with the fireplace, because he wanted me to help him start a fire there. So he put a few logs in but he also puts crumpled-up newspapers in there, too, because it helps the fire catch better. And once it all caught fire, he wanted me to put in the newspapers.
So the evil husband left for a moment to get something, and the one who was left behind started putting newspapers in there himself, right, and they caught fire and all. And so he said, is fire hot or cold, I don’t remember. I’ll find out.
So he left his hand there a while, and it caught fire. Yes. And after it was burned enough, he said, “Alright, it’s hot, okay.” And he left the room to put water on his hand, because he wanted the fire out, of course. And his sister saw it and she screamed because he’d burned his hand so much, and the evil husband started ranting at him. And they took him to the hospital. More hospitals.
Well, they told me they had to amputate my hand, and that didn’t bother me so much. I mean, you can get by without a hand. Okay. What made me angry was that it was the evil husband’s fault. He tried to burn my hand off by sending me to deal with the fireplace. Hideous fireplace. Never liked heat, anyway. He wanted my hand gone. To spite me. And I tried very hard to thwart him, but he did spite me. He did.
So now I’m minus one hand and I’ve got a bunch of people “marveling” over the fact that I see things but don’t notice them. I can’t tell the difference between heat and coldness. And I always have trouble with cars. Had trouble with one, once. Had trouble with a fireplace. And a hand. And an evil brother-in-law who wants to spite me. Who did spite me. All because I don’t understand things. It wouldn’t have happened to you, because your brain works. Mine can’t. Like I said, most of the things I don’t understand are the things you’d comprehend right off.


- - -
Jude Conlee resides in the West Coast of the U.S. (which is possibly irrelevant) and writes poems, SF, psychological fiction, and other things in a similar vein (which is possibly not irrelevant). Other than the writing, Conlee drinks tea, enjoys psychedelic art, writes songs while playing piano, and speaks in the third person.
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CHINESE DRAGON

Contributor: Jesse Campen


- - 
 The warm breeze of the late-evening desert flows through my car while I drive eighty miles per hour towards my destination: Las Vegas, Nevada.
     Most go to Las Vegas with others.  I prefer to walk away with my sins alone.  No one is in my car to block the sound of my blaring-loud music.  My vision is a blur from having driven so far.
     "It’s okay," I say to myself.  "The road is straight anyways."
     Something past a mountain catches my eye.  Is it the lights of my destination?  No.  I know it isn’t.  I’m miles away from there.  I have a half hour to go.
     I see what looks like fire shoot out of a low-flying aircraft.  The explosive sound reaches the road a second later, and cancels out the noise of my loud music.
     Thinking it might be good to get something like this on video for YouTube, I pull over immediately and turn the radio low.  I get out of my car and get my phone out, holding it steadily. I’m recording the vicinity of where I saw the object in the air before, when suddenly, I see something coming from the clouds.  The silhouette is long and flowing.
     Fire belches out from the thing again.  Then, I saw it.  A giant, red, scaly creature with a… white beard and eyebrows?  Its short arms seem to push across the air.  Then I catch its yellow-gold eyes, staring directly at me.
     A fireball shoots from its mouth.  I begin to wonder if I’m already in Las Vegas and am in a drunken dream.  The ball of flame flies past me and blows my car to smithereens.  This isn’t a dream.  This is really happening.
     I hold on tight to my phone and run like hell.  A terrifying screech comes from the monster that deafens me to the extent that I can only hear a ringing in my ears.  I take a quick look back, and see it only a hundred yards away.  Its mouth is open, baring its rows of razor sharp teeth.  It’s gaining on me quickly.  I continue running away.  I’m not going to be this things next meal.
     All of a sudden, when I didn’t think my ears could be damaged anymore, blood begins flowing out of them at the sound of some explosion behind me.  Whatever it is, it sends me rolling along the ground like a dust bunny in a super nova.
     My prized phone is lost when my hand slams into the ground and breaks at the wrist.  When I finally land, I’m on my stomach facing the Chinese dragon.  I can’t hear anymore, but what I see is unbelievable.
     Stealth jets are flying all around, pounding the thing with missiles and bullets.  Explosions and debris are everywhere.  At times like this, I wish I hadn’t lost my phone so I could keep recording what’s happening.  I try to adjust to the chaos around me and make my way to my feet, but instead, I fall to my back unconscious.
     When I awaken, my face is covered in dust and I have the taste of sand and smoke in my mouth.  The next thing I notice is the orange hue in the sky.  It must be early morning.
     My body feels sore and broken.  I can’t hear a thing and yet, I have a whopping headache.  Above me stands two shadows that, as of yet, I can’t make out.
     One of them gets closer, kneeling down next to me.  He looks like an agent right out of a T.V. cop drama.  The other one points his finger down at me.  He’s shouting something but I can’t hear it.  I can only see the camouflage color of his long-sleeved fatigues.  Another figure comes into sight and is handing the agent something.  I try my best to lean my head up and talk.
     “What’s going on?” I say, without hearing my own words.
     The agent takes what the person handed him, and stabs me in the neck with it.  I can see it close enough now to realize it’s a syringe.  A clear liquid slowly injects into me.  My thoughts and memories of the incident seem to flutter away.
     Maybe it is a dream.  Hell.  Even if it isn’t, I won’t remember a damn thing.


- - -
Jesse James Campen is a working student from Maryland, and likes to write specifically to entertain. He is currently attending Full Sail University to get his Creative Writing For Entertainment BFA. Jesse likes story telling in all forms, including stories from video games and themed music albums.
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A GAME OF HEART ATTACK


Contributor: Mark Slade

- -
Colored pebbles dream because they were apart of the genetic makeup. Softcover Mother at the touch of keywords, sitting in a synthetic chair, had to steal the body of water indefinitely.

       In quick steps inside the end of the night, People babbling to themselves, playing a game heart attack.

                          A droning sound of daydreaming teardrops fell from memory.


- - -
my name is Mark Slade. I live in williamsburg, VA with my wife and daughter. I have been published in Burialday.
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American Boat

Contributor: Andrew Ross

- -
Topic Sentence
“It’s my fault,” the man said to himself. “I did this.”

Initiating Circumstance
A boat. Water. Wind. Rain.

Dialogue
The man sits on the pillowed bed deep inside the sailboat’s cabin. Sees water slipping through the closed door. He thinks. Moves from the obvious to the speculative. Figures his wife and their two friends are dead. The water must have flooded the rest of the cabin by now. The boat’s probably already submerged. That bang must have been the hull hitting rocks, another boat. Maybe it was the boom collapsing. His friends were smashed when the boom fell. If he had been on deck he could have maneuvered the boat to safety. He could have prevented the mast from crushing their skulls. He could have saved them. He could have—

Backstory
The man had a recurring dream haunt him since youth. The man would enter the land of dreams and envision himself bathed in darkness. But soon he would be expelled from this warmth, the safety of the surroundings he was familiar and comfortable with. He would spiral through a dark tunnel and be pulled into scathing bright lights. His eyes pained, his body weak, he would open his eyes to frightening masked faces and sharp metal objects. The last connection to his warm darkness, to life as he knew it would be severed, and he’d long to travel back up the tunnel, to reside once again in a safe world. But to go back is impossible. And he would begin to cry.

Thoughts
The water slides around the man’s knees now. Still he doesn’t move. He thinks.

Rising Action
His friends—another husband and wife pair—were on the deck keeping watch. He remembered falling asleep. His wife went to the bathroom and he had heard heavy rain. No rocking yet though. He would never see his wife again. She closed the door behind her and he had rolled over and closed his eyes.

Backstory
When the man was a boy his father told him never to read the biggest book on the bookshelf, the book ordained “Holy.” His father told him he could read any of the hundreds of other books, but to never read “The Holy Book.” This book was off limits. When the boy asked why, his father responded that this book contained dangerous ideas, revolutionary philosophies that could provoke fickle loyalties and unbound submission.
His curiosity unhinged, the boy snuck into the library late one night. The book called the boy, attracted him with its size and fancy lettering. He stood on a chair and reached for the red-bound cover. The book was too heavy and they fell—boy and book—to the floor. Scrambling over to it, the boy laid the book in his lap and opened to page one.
The boy’s father heard the noise and entered the library. He asked his son what he was doing. The boy responded that he was reading a book. When the father saw the book, he told his son to get out. He told his son that he could never enter the library again. The boy carried the book with him and turned to see the door to the library close forever.

Feelings
The man feels water nibble his genitalia.

Rising Action
When the man had awoken, the boat was rocking back and forth, tipping with what must have been large waves—the man guessed at least five feet. Really he had no idea. This was the man’s first trip on a boat.

Dialogue
The man curses himself for falling asleep. He should have been on deck. He should have stayed awake after his wife went to the bathroom. He should have realized the heavy rain meant a terrible storm. He should have—

Character
The man feels water around his neck. He sits still. He thinks about life.

Climax
The man holds his breath.

Resolution
“It’s my fault,” the man thought to himself. “I did this.”


- - -
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Why Laugh in Ultimate Suicide?

Contributor: Geoffrey Carter

- -
They say your entire life flashes in front of your eyes before you die. They also say that light travels at a speed of 299,792,458 meters per second. Of course it is easier to tell how fast light is going than it is to tell what you see before death. The only reason people say this is because they believe the ones that go about bragging that they “died for six seconds.”
 It’s like trying to remember how many kids were on the bus on your first day of kindergarten versus how many sharks there are in the sea. I think there were eighteen kids minus the eighth graders who boarded after I did and forced me to move out of “their seat” in the back.
                As for the sharks, the only amount I can give you is number swimming beneath my tired feat. I count one…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight...nine...ten…eleven…twelve…thirteen. Thirteen of them dashing around like the people in Grand Central Station.
                I am breathing in. I am breathing out. I am breathing in. I am breathing out. I am breathing…..a trick my mother taught me when crying over spilled milk, stressing out over a late research paper or vomiting on the linoleum floor, or, in this case, in the almost black ocean. It was rolling out of my mouth like yellow paint.
                I shut my eyes and flip over like a “Worst Case Scenario” card that says how to swim at sea for long periods of time. The answer to this is, according to the card, is to do just as I am doing now: lying on my back and occasionally kicking my arms and legs. This is a game I used to play with my cousin Greta, but instead of actually playing the board game that went along with it, we would spend hours at a time by the fire at her father’s house just reading the cards out loud to each other in hope of gaining some sort of knowledge of what to do in desperate situations.
Like this one.
I guess the reason for our game was Greta’s father himself. He would never let her have any friends over to his dusty old mansion. Or any relative, for that matter. I would have to sneak out of my own house and meet her at the back door when her dad was out. That was rarely possible.
When we were inside, I could usually catch a glimpse of her backside which was a rainbow of mostly purples, some blues. Or, she would just flinch as a response to my touch.
“My father,” she explained.
 And I understood.
We’d take our mind off things with that only game Greta had in her house. It was kept in the bottom left corner of the dresser in her father’s bedroom. Sometimes we would just sneak around the living room and eventually end up in her minimalized bedroom and stay there until the man she dreaded came home.
                I’m still doing what the card tells me to, staring up at the starry, starry night and holding my breath and letting it out with a loud whoosh. The breaths become closer and closer together until I am back to where I started: A hyperventilating body in the water frantically thrashing my arms and legs trying to stay afloat, but the monsters beneath my feat swam dangerously near and I could sense them smelling the vomit swimming amongst them in the water.
                It reminds me my father telling me how much barf attracted fish. The bigger ones especially. We would always take these fishing trips at my grandfather’s expense in the heat of the summer when the fish were slow and tired.
                I went on the very first one that was offered and was never planning on going back.
                How was I supposed to know I get seasick?
                After I had spent approximately an hour puking over the side of the boat, many fish would swarm like poor children after a French fry was dropped. We had about ten fish that night because that was the limit, and my father made me come the year after. And the year after that. And the year after that.
                They were obviously ore of them now which only made me kick harder.
                Fourteen…fifteen….sixteen sharks join. It only adds to my fear and I begin to tremble. Or It could have been from the ice cold water, I don’t know, but I am beginning to kick my feet again and the only thing to do is kick harder. I remember the card again: Only kick when absolutely necessary. My eyes shut. Forget everything that I know
Except for this.
3.14159
And then I cry.
Because that is the thing to do.

- - -
I am a junior in high school and really want to be a writer. I took a writing class at a local college for a couple of weeks over the summer and am now taking a year long course in school. Other interests include playing music, crocheting, and skiing.
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