Contributor: Penny Estelle

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There were so many people. Who would have thought this many would show? I made my way through the crowd, listening as friends reminisced about old times and sharing remembered stories.
“Do you remember when…” or “What about that time…” followed by bouts of laughter.
This is how it should be, I thought, chuckling at some story, a little red-faced at others.
Women were dressed in white, pink, red and blue, while men sported kakis, Levis, polos, or sport shirts. I loved it. Just what I had asked for.
I heard a laugh that always made me cringe. Sophie Martin! What was she doing here? Her ass, covered in a tight, magenta spandex skirt, looked like two beach balls, ready to take out anything that got in her way. “She should have done herself a favor and worn the traditional black,” I muttered.
“We do not speak unkindly of others,” a voice boomed behind me.
I practically jumped out of my skin. “Oh Jacob, I didn’t know you were around.”
“I will be…around, until orientation.” Jacob was a distinguished looking gentleman. Thick gray hair and blue eyes that had dulled with age. I had not seen him actually smile. There was a smirk, but that may have been gas.
The grating laugh again. “Well, seriously, look at that ass!”
“Nor do we swear.”
“Well, I don’t know why she’s even here. I couldn’t stand her when I was alive!”
Jacob was gone.
Cindy Murphy, one of my closest friends, was crying as her hubby, Tim, was comforting her. She was pointing to a poster size collage. I looked over her shoulder. Pictures of our Vegas trip. Such a good time. There were pictures of me alone and with friends. “Oh my God,” I yelled. “What the hell?” There I was, at the beach in my bathing suit, looking a lot like Shamu!
I knew he was behind me. I turned to see him across the room. His white linen shirt was tucked into brown cotton pants. His air of arrogance was stifling, not to mention, annoying.
“Okay, I know, but float on over here and look at this picture!”
Jacob leaned in and in that same old emotionless voice said, “Stunning.”
“Yea, that’s the word I’d pick!” I hadn’t lost my sarcasm, even in death.
“It is time for orientation. Please come with me.” Jacob started toward a closed curtain, framed in a brilliant light.
My steps faltered a little. “Jacob, the story goes that when people bite the big one, and the bright light appears, then all’s good with the man upstairs and your ticket up is a go.”
There it was – an actual smile. He said nothing, just pulled the curtain aside, almost blinding me.
I looked at him and then back at my group of friends, remembering nothing but good times. I walked to Jacob, putting my arm through his and said, “Let’s do this!”


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Author: Penny Estelle

Contributor: Dan Nielsen

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Pamela Wilson sat in the car working a crossword puzzle while her husband Glenn and her son Billy grocery shopped. She heard Billy's voice, looked up, and saw him running through the parking lot. Billy got in and sat crouched over as though in pain. He cried. He sucked his thumb. He rocked back and forth. He looked at his mother.
“Billy, what’s wrong?" Pamela said.
Billy said, “Daddy fell.”
“How did he fall?” Pamela said
“On his head,” Billy pointed to his own head.
“Is he okay?”
“No.”
Pamela, in robe and slippers, wasn’t about to get out of the car. She flipped open her cell phone. She flipped it shut.
“Billy, tell me exactly what happened.”
Billy took a breath. “Daddy had eggs. He dropped them and stepped in it. His legs flew up and he landed on his head.”
An ambulance, lights flashing and siren wailing, pulled into the parking lot and stopped by the supermarket door. A small crowd made way.
Pamela’s cell phone rang. The Caller ID said Piggly Wiggly. Pamela turned off the phone and started the car.
“Billy, put on your seat belt.”
“What about daddy?”
“He’ll be fine,”
Back at the house, Pamela applied makeup and chose a matching skirt and blouse. Billy asked if he could watch TV.


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I have almost no imagination, but what little I have is extremely vivid.
I can foresee the future, but only the foreseeable future.
I am a autodidactic uniglot.

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Author: Dan Nielsen

Contributor: Rich Ives

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Whence the migration of pain. Whence the horror. A happy little bumpkin wets his willy and the jig is up. It doesn't hurt so much. He can't hurt so much without experience.
Sometimes duty gets delivered to the wrong address. A package of surgical sponges instead of dinner. A piece of the right patient through the wrong end of the microscope.
Whence the incumbent derives his verity. While we wander the garden paths below the hospital with our own. It’s a big hurt and we love it dearly, sugarpants.
She wanted more and he just wanted.
The child of knowledge and the child of ignorance. Both chopping the same onion.
A big hurt indeed and we came down from the towers into the land of breaking and keeping, into the land of another before us.


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Rich Ives is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. An interview and18 hybrid works appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he has been nominated twice for Best of the Net.

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Author: Rich Ives

Contributor: Eric Suhem

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Oliver, just out of jail, was in the supermarket committing a holdup, threatening the employees with curare-tipped darts. As the frightened store manager was opening the safe, a bag boy emerged from the produce section, and threw fruit at Oliver’s head. A cantaloupe knocked Oliver out, and he slipped into oblivion.

The next thing Oliver knew, he was entering a pool hall, feeling disturbed by the neon-colored sprouts on the outside sign, which lit up the bleak alleyway in an organic glow. “Another sign of gentrification,” he declared darkly, walking through the door. He approached the cashier and upon payment was given a rack for the game, each pool ball replaced by a fruit or vegetable. The cue ball was an orange, the 1-ball was an apple, the 2-ball a head of lettuce, the 3-ball a lemon, the 4-ball a lime, and so on.

The rack was set and it was Oliver’s turn to break. He hit the cue ball (orange) into the 2-ball (head of lettuce), and it rolled across the felt, unraveling quickly, resulting in lettuce leaves strewn across the table. Oliver took a deep breath, trying to maintain his temper. After enough times hitting the cue ball (orange), it started to spring leaks, with orange juice and pulp joining the lettuce leaves on the felt. As the 6-ball and 7-ball (blueberry and raspberry) engaged in a number of collisions, they also began to come apart. “You have now created a fruit salad! Congratulations on your accomplishment, as we are also a dining establishment!” announced one of the proprietors cheerfully from behind the counter, quickly handing menus to Oliver and his opponent. The pool hall had been purchased by a nameless, faceless conglomerate that was combining various services to increase profits. Oliver glared at the proprietors, annoyed by the distractions.

Looking towards the dart board, Oliver pulled out a small case he had brought, filled with darts and a vial of curare. It was his hostile use of curare that had landed Oliver in jail. “When I was a kid, all I heard was ‘Eat your fruit, Oliver’…and now this,” he said, looking at the fruit scattered across the pool table. “I just wanted to play a simple game of pool, but now it’s time to play darts,” he added grimly, dipping the tip of a small pointed missile into the poisonous curare, aiming towards the proprietors.

Oliver gazed over at the pool table one more time, noting the tangerine in the middle of the green felt, which transported his thoughts back to when he was a kid. “Eat your fruit, Oliver!” There was always a bowl of tangerines in the middle of the kitchen table. The neighbors had a rickety pool table in their basement. Young Oliver was the best pool player in the neighborhood, and had gone on to win a number of tournaments. Everything seemed so full of promise. What had he done with his life since then? Oliver looked at the tangerine, and knew those days would never come again, but suddenly things seemed a little more clear. Maybe there was still time to change?… He put the darts and curare back into the case, grabbed the tangerine, and slowly walked home through the dream.


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Eric Suhem lives in California and enjoys the qualities of his vegetable juicer.

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Author: Eric Suhem

Contributor: Sue Ann Connaughton

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Snap, Snap, Snip, Snip

Whenever he felt lonely, Beau dug out the puppet, talked to it, played with it, as though it were George. He made the puppet, himself, after George moved, by cutting and pasting a photo of George’s face, dark and grainy in that schoolyard-photograph manner, onto cereal box cardboard. For the handle, he taped a twig on the back. Primitive, but Beau was only six years old. He stored the puppet in a secret shoebox, hidden behind clothes in his wardrobe.

When Beau was ten years old, his grandfather died. He hunted through family albums for photos of his grandfather and used them as models that he drew onto a rubber ball. No matter how the ball rolled, his grandfather’s face was always visible, always available to play a game of catch.

Beau’s parents divorced when he was seventeen, just as he was leaving for college. It wasn’t a surprise; his parents had separated once before, so he was prepared. Beau chose a photograph of them together, smiling. He mounted it on black poster board. With a razor-sharp tool, he carved it into a jigsaw puzzle with one hundred, tiny, intricate pieces. It worked as a two-sided puzzle: a person could put it together with the expected photo side up; or for an added challenge, fit together the reverse inky side, without pictorial clues for a guide. After he finished the puzzle, Beau immediately dismantled it and sprinkled the pieces into his secret shoebox, tucking them around the puppet and ball.

At age thirty, Beau married Doria, whom he adored so much that he began shooting photos of her from their first date, in anticipation of the day she wouldn’t be around.

As their first wedding anniversary approached, Beau secretly crafted a special gift for Doria. He sifted through hundreds of photos and had the prettiest one enlarged on heavy stock: a photo of Doria descending a staircase in her wedding gown. He sliced it into precise vertical strips, which he wove into a form and molded into a basket with the rearranged image on the outer side. On the bottom, he attached curved strips of balsa wood, so the basket could rock. On their anniversary, the “paper” anniversary, Beau presented the basket to Doria.

She examined his offering, inside and out. With her index finger, she traced the intersections where her image fractured into abstraction.

His heart pounded as he braced himself for the possibility that she might laugh at his foolish gift and leave him right then and there. Why did he ever think he could reveal the fruits of his weird hobby to a woman as normal as Doria.

Doria set the basket in the center of the dining table and tapped it, lightly.

“What an ingenious construction! I’ve never seen anything like it. Look, Beau, how easily it sways at the touch of my fingertip.”


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Sue Ann Connaughton writes compact fiction from a drafty old house in the witch capital of North America, Salem, Massachusetts

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Author: Sue Ann Connaughton

Contributor: Manuel Royal

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Vingy was dead: first of all. He caught on fire -- well, somebody lit him on fire. Plus, he fell 300 feet from a revolving restaurant, onto a public fountain featuring a bronze statue of the Little Mermaid. That usually does it.

The fountain's flowing water put out the fire and rinsed a lot of blood down the drains, but Vingy's intestines and spine remained draped over the statue. The scene was cheerful in its color scheme (at first, until the blood darkened as it clotted) but, frankly, depressing in every other way.

Three blocks south from where much of Vingy was spread out so publicly, three dozen people had distributed themselves amongst a hundred chairs in a ballroom, mostly in the middle rows. They flipped through their seminar materials and waited for the main speaker, Reggie Vingy, to come out and explain how they'd get rich by badgering their acquaintances into distributing kits that would, at some point down the slope of an imaginary pyramid, allow somebody to sell somebody else a product, all using a principle that Vingy called Dynamic Value Exchange (DVE).

Vingy never showed; he was the late Reggie Vingy in every sense. Two senses, anyway. This became a family joke, repeated every Christmas when Vingy wasn't there to trim the tree. His children hung a Little Mermaid ornament and lit a candle.

His widow inherited the mantle of DVE royalty and strove to honor Vingy's legacy. And indeed, she ripped off many, many people, so perhaps somewhere Vingy was smiling. But definitely dead.


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Manuel Royal was born, like Tristram Shandy, with a broken nose. He will die. In between, he lives and writes in Atlanta.

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Author: Manuel Royal

Contributor: Heather Haven

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Wallace Pitkin had not seen a dentist in 43 years. It was not just that he was a firm believer in if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, but as a child, his father had experienced a horrifying incident. A sloppy dentist and a wayward Novocain-filled needle had left one side of Pitkin Senior’s face paralyzed for life.
It was then a family tradition was born. All the Pitkins learned to deal with tooth pain in the same way: aspirin, Tylenol or ibuprophen, washed down with significant shots of whiskey.
During Mr. Pitkin’s end-of-the-year physical the doctor noticed the swollen left jaw coupled with the standard Pitkin foul breath.
“You know, Wallace,” The doctor said, looking into Mr. Pitkin’s hazel eyes, “the health of your teeth affects the health of your entire body. I’ve been telling you for years to see a dentist. Now I can’t okay you going back to the loading dock until you have them taken care of.”
“But I only got one more year and I can retire with full benefits,” Mr. Pitkin replied.
“It’s the best Christmas present you can give yourself. Don’t come back to me until you get your teeth fixed.”
For three eight-hour days Mr. Pitkin had his mouth worked on by a dentist who sweated profusely and cursed under his breath. Mr. Pitkin refused to have Novocain but the laughing gas had done him just fine. Even the crabby and corpulent Mrs. Pitkin, with whom he hadn’t shared a kiss for 15 years, looked pretty good to him at the end of day two.
On day three, Mr. Pitkin was leaving the Gardner, Zucker and Langusto Dental Compound when he realized he was enveloped by the faint sounds of music interspersed with occasional chatter. It was with him wherever he went. If he opened his mouth it got louder. If he closed his mouth and put his hand over his jaw, the volume decreased. This was good for when he was trapped in an elevator or in line at the grocery store. Mr. Pitkin liked the music. It soothed him.
Feeling very mellow, Mr. Pitkin returned home and his wife met him at the door. He grinned at her broadly. His mouth played “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.”
“What the hell is that?” she demanded.
“It’s my new fillings. They’re picking up this 24-hour a day radio station.”
“Well, turn it off. I can’t stand Christmas music.”
“I can’t turn it off. Besides, I like it. Get over yourself, fatso.”
Mrs. Pitkin hauled off and hit him across the face as hard as she could.
He slapped her back.
She picked up a nearby frying pan, swung, but missed him by several inches.
One thing led to another.
Céline Dion warbled “O Holy Night,” while Wallace Pitkin strangled his wife.
The lawsuit of Pitkin vs. Gardner, Zucker and Langusto is still pending. But the music lives on.


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In my career, I have written flash fiction, short stories, plays, comedy acts for performers, and novels. I am the author of the Alvarez Family Murder Mystery series and the 2nd book of the series, A Wedding to Die For, is a finalist in the EPIC best eBook mystery of the year, 2012. Yowser!

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Author: Heather Haven

Contributor: Ron Koppelberger

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He consumed the savory bee wrought toil of honeycomb and syrup in great gulping gasps, adamant in his swallowing cadence. “GGGGGGGRRRRRRRROOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRR!” the bear grumbled and rumbled in sticky sensations of satisfaction and belly full fashion.
The zodiac sparkled heavenward and the wind coursed through his dark ebony assay of fur in refined miasmic mists, the perfume of bears and wild beasts in frenzied fuming hunger, wild in tandem with a rare rose and the drizzle of pine sap drifted in the lazy tendriled currents.
The baby cooed and the bear nuzzled its tender flesh, just a bit of honey and the chewed remnant of a briar hare, the baby suckled and ate. Laughing the baby touched the mother bear with outstretched fingers, tiny wrinkled and pink.
The bear drizzled a bit of honey from it’s maw and amber droplets of honey sang in dewdrop nourishment as the tiny child cooed a lyric cry of survival and adaptation. The lyric of bears and man, babes and wild claims of springtime miracle and as our elders say the mystery of the baby perfect in wild and tame, in bond and instinct, the mistress sings,

“Vanguard in reflection

Souls in perfection,

A tidy boarder breached

The lord in angels we beseech,

The lyric tale of babes and beasts,

Mans amend to the festival and the feast,

He portends the light in the wood

And the glow in what could,

The first burning passion in human force

And divergent shades of summer course,

The cleft between will and untamed lands of harvest mill,

Asserting the covenant between bear and babe,

Mystery and rave,

In ancient sums of harmony and song,

In rest of days eternally long.”

*And the babe was named chance for the wont of mans unease with the world.


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I love to write and have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. If I can touch the reader with the gift of dreams then I have done my job.

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Author: Ron Koppelberger

Contributor: Drew Hays
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It started like the common cold. Jeremy Ashell sneezed mucoidal yellow gristle and rubbed his nose tender with brown tissues from the schools bathroom. When he got home, he coughed his way into his living room, standing up, holding a plastic electronic guitar as Aerosmith blared from the speakers. He was 9, and had no prior history of seizures, but thats what his parents thought he was having as he screamed and shook while they held him, pinned and flailing within his space, to the linoleum. In the panic, they didn't pay much mind to the slackness of his skin, or the heat he failed to give off at all.
They bound his wriggling, panicky form to the bucket seat of their rheumy van and took him to St. Martys. The nurses were frightened, and two EMTs with tense forearms hoisted his kicking legs and bucking head onto a gurney where he groaned and bit at his cloth facemask. The Doctors hurriedly spoke of blood tests, and pretty much everyone thought it was rabies from the get-go. He was such a biter, one remarked, that nobody thought to take his temperature until after he was tranquilized.
Noting the absence of a heartbeat after a shocking read on his temp, the staff at St. Martys assumed they had ended Jeremys life, and apologized profusely to the parents, who were now in a state of emotional and physical drainage. Phil Ashell had been bitten.
When he got home, Phil poured a foaming splash of Hydrogen Peroxide on the gouge in the space between his thumb and index finger. Threads of red ran like jellyfish tentacles off of his forearm and into the sink. The wound was not quite bleeding, but had a wet sheen to it, and contracted lightly with his slowing pulse. He looked in the mirror and shook his head while wrapping a strip of gauze in a tight sleeve on his thumb. The horror and shock of his sons death were not yet upon him, as the horror and shock of his son biting him with salivary lips and teeth and savage eyes still flared ubiquitously in his memory, and he could only shake his head and turn out the light as he muttered about his luck and life. He stood in the hallway and looked out the window, hoping to see his wife pull in from the hospital so he could comfort her, and be comforted in kind.
He needed a drink. As he walked to his office his knees cracked aloud like billiards and pain shot through his thighs. Spasms took his quadriceps for a moment and he stood panting in the hallway for a moment before straightening with an ache and made it to the office, where he sat down and poured some gin he kept in a sandblasted bottle under his desk. Pain slithered sharply and angularly through very perceivable regions of his brain, though the more familiar vague glower of a conventional headache was present as well. He looked down at the wound, and saw a wet red circle. The bandage was quickly loosening and bloating with blood that seemed remarkably thin, almost less substantial than water. And then he stopped looking.
His eyes pinkened and reddened and ran soaking with crimson as the heart beating in his chest gave stronger and stronger beats, each farther apart until it imploded and froze. His blood turned to sludge in his veins as dying platelets made a stew of his circulatory system, and his limbs contorted and stiffened as nerves went haywire and muscles locked up. He stumbled towards the bookshelf and fell against it, as the cage of his muscles constricting his frame quivered and jerked. His jaw slackened, his eyes rolled lazily, and his legs began to shuffle. He chewed thoughtlessly on his own lip, which tore away loosely, and staggered out of his office.
The rumble of the garage door buzzed the house, and the shadows of the furniture stretched and shifted as the headlights of an SUV shone inside, and Tina Ashell pulled into the driveway. She grabbed the corn chips she had picked up on the way home and walked inside the house. Phil was holding half of Fritz by the tail. She screamed, and the sound was inhuman.


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I am a counselor from the United States. I like to write, and I'm working on getting the punch back in my words.

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Author: Drew Hays

Contributor: E.S. Wynn
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Creak of tin as hinges bend against dust, against age. Silvered paint flakes, splinters, catches golden, attic light. Fragile crackle of faded paper, old hands trace folds, smooth them. Dear Robert, the letter reads.

I hope you are doing well. I'm eight. My name is also Robert.

I smile, no mention of a date, but I know when it was written. I know why, who's idea it was, how silly it seemed at the time, how necessary it became as I aged.

Mrs. Patterson says that I have to write you a letter. You're fifty eight years old now. I bet you look like Grandpa Irwin. Does he still have a swimming pool you can swim in?

“In heaven, maybe, if that's the way of things.” I whisper. “Grandpa Irwin died over forty years ago.”

I bet you have a flying car. I wish Dad had a flying car. We could go zooming in the clouds. We could fly to see Grandma Ethel and Aunt Ruth in Florida if we had a flying car!

I look out the window, eyes finding the sleek, pill-shaped box I call a car. Its usually vibrant ePaint soaks light with a dark, dull gray while the cells recharge in the afternoon sun. Automatic, fast, elegant, but not a flying car.

Or maybe you have a rocket pack. I'd like a rocket pack.

I look at the car again. It's a classic now, one of the older C23s from before the last major police action in the east. One of the few still left, now that the entanglement grid has replaced the old SmartWay road system. I haven't seen a rocket in decades. Orbital shuttles and 'breakers run under their own power now. Even model rockets have gone out of style.

Do you still have dogs and cats in the future? I want a puppy but dad says no.

I smile again as I remember. Dad managed to hold off the puppy until I was in sixth grade, but it was mom who finally brought home Spot. I still remember that face. Bull-terrier mix, beautiful brown-tan swirled fur mixing with white. I grew up with that dog, took him with me to college, had to take the pet deposit out of my student loan to keep him. If it wasn't for him, I probably never would have met Karen at the dog park. Never would have met Bruce. For fourteen years, Spot altered the course of my life, and when he finally passed, I couldn't imagine life without him.

I think writing you a letter would be cool if you could write me a letter back. It seems dumb that you can't. Mrs. Patterson says that time travel will always be impossible, even for letters.

That was the thinking then. Just like today, we thought we had it all figured out. I remember being fifteen, seeing the announcement of an accepted, grand “theory of everything.” Five years after that, large-scale, machine-assisted research at the Sagan Institute rewrote practically everything we knew about the universe. Now it's possible to manipulate time in ways that seemed like fantasy back then. Rules for past-time interaction are strict, but a few words of comfort or a vague letter rarely requires anything more than autonetwork approval these days.

Well, that's all I can think of to ask you.


Sincerely, Robert Era.

I blink, and the software in the modified lens of my eye comes alive with the colors and displays of the OverNet, interfaces at the speed of thought and pens the words of my mind onto a ready document already aimed for a family fax machine fifty years in the past. The letter my mind writes comes immediate, short, soft, vague.

Thank you for the letter, Robert. The letter says. No flying cars yet, but the puppy was worth the wait.


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E.S. Wynn is the author of over thirty books

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Author: E.S. Wynn