Contributor: Cheryl Anne Gardner

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It had finally hit the triple digits, and the beach looked like a garlic pizza with roasted humans on top. While I was snoozing in the sun, I had this bizarre dream of a glass lemon hanging in the air above my head as a waiter dressed in black tie towered over me reciting a menu in French. When I opened my eyes, an oily bohunk in a slinky banana hammock was standing over me. He was so greasy, he could have slipped, nipples first, into another dimension. He had a fistful of sand, which he proceeded to fling into my face. I spit some exorcism in pig-Latin at him, and he smiled, then asked me if I wanted to go dancing. I told him to "fuck off," so he left only to return five minutes later with a pina-colada that had an umbrella in it so huge that it eclipsed the sun.

I really did want to go dancing, but my feet had always been too big for high heels. I can clunk, I can funk, I can jump strapless off the shoulders of a naked barista ... but I can't glide in them enough to dance.


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Cheryl Anne Gardner prefers novellas and flash fiction to writing bios because she always seems to forget what point of view she is in. When she isn’t writing, she likes to chase marbles on a glass floor, eat lint, play with sharp objects, and make taxidermy dioramas with dead flies.

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Author: Cheryl Anne Gardner

Contributor: Cheryl Anne Gardner

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Before the killer cheeseburgers and sex toys, I was a free man, listening to my own love dirge in the wee dark hours with fatal abandon. Then it all caved in around me: crystal wine glasses, decadent desserts, and dirty pool water. That's how these things happen in the real world. It's a party -- no extra legroom and the incandescent lighting's a little weak. Glen, my best friend, wanted revenge, domination in a single drop of sweat. She'd never been his girlfriend. She had hits in the millions. She was a ghost, a construct, bountiful acres of flesh he hadn't had the sense to manhandle the way he'd wanted to. He said she was ugly, pixilated, but I didn't think so. She had small hands and big dreams. Now she was my baby strange pushing the hard edge in the periphery. Our romance was a brief and righteous act of lust and longing, not a snot-palmed-purplish song of internet dating desperation, I can tell you that. She was mine, in real life. I was in the back of the room; she at the bar, and I watched her squeezebox a penny in those lacy little capris with her ankles bare and her warm lips crusin’ the cocktail rind at ten seconds to midnight. Five, four, three, two, one ...

She didn't kiss anyone, so I texted her site, hoping she was still mine.


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When she isn't writing, Cheryl Anne Gardner likes to chase marbles on a glass floor, eat lint, play with sharp objects, and make taxidermy dioramas with dead flies. She writes art-house novellas and abstract flash fiction, some published, some not.

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Author: Cheryl Anne Gardner