Contributor: Lauren Hoyt

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I see the world through men’s faces. Men with religious beards and carefully acquired wrinkles. I see women and I don’t. Every woman has my mother’s face, my wife’s face, my daughter’s face. Only the eyes change. Black, almond, brown, round, squinted, sometimes painted up like a cheap whore. Masha’Allah, the eyes.
I walk through the streets of Dammam and see women paces behind their husbands. Their eyes are hidden behind their niqab. The men nod to me, Salam, muttawa. I sift through my prayer beads, reciting the Qu’ran. I hear the Salah ring through the streets, and I go to a mosque. We wash our hands and feet in unison, speak in unison, pray in unison, bow to Mecca in unison, in a sea of black eyes. Praise be to Allah. We try to be the same in our piety, a world of uniformity. I do not want this for my sons, my daughter, their sons, their daughters.
I leave the mosque silently, their bodies still posed in worship. I hear the House of Allah moan prayers, shout praises, curl words. I walk down the dusty road, staring at the beads in my hand. I feel the smoothness of them and the soft whisper of the tassel brushes my palm. While walking, I see a man with blue eyes sitting on a bench. I let go of the beads and they drop onto the filth of the street. I hear men leaving the mosque, muttering praise be to Allah.


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Lauren Hoyt is a senior majoring in English with a minor in creative writing from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. She grew up in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia, but her family is from Baytown, Texas.

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Author: Lauren Hoyt

Contributor: Allie Coker-Schwimmer

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Jeremy tried to hatch eggs by sitting on them and keeping them warm. It’s not funny. He did a lot of things like that- he was just an odd kid. Ok, Jeremy was a weirdo. He invented a time machine which really meant he would lock his “friends” in the closet and flick the lights on and off, then when they got out he would hand them a faded rock from the driveway claiming it came from prehistoric times and show them a black and white postcard of the Queen Mary trying to pass it off as a picture he took of the Titanic in 1912. I don’t know if the Titanic was sunk or not by then, but regardless that was always the year he claimed- 1912. Jeremy often pretended he was a dog. He would lay on all fours mimicking a dog’s position while he lapped water from a bowl and scratched invisible fleas. At night he would curl up into a tight circle and drift off to sleep, truly believing he was of the canine world. Except for the time when he was a human marrying a dog. Back on the blacktop at recess, a group of us gathered to be the witness, flower girls, and chorus for his wedding to Wishbone- the ever famous t.v. dog. The wedding procession was set to Christmas carols. It was April. Another one of Jeremy’s favorite activities was making outrageous claims. He told us he would win the Nobel Prize for writing and that he could be an Olympic ice skater one day if he wanted to. He didn’t know how to ice skate very well though. Then again, anyone can win the Nobel Prize I suppose. I could win it for this eulogy for all I know. Jeremy boycotted the rise of all boy bands. He thought they were cheap and that bands should stay female only. Due to this he had very little to converse about with his peers at snack time. He also loved to keep files on everyone. After snatching a copy of Harriet the Spy from his older sister’s bookshelf, he became enthralled with the idea of spying on people and keeping tabs on them. Jeremy loaded a box full of notecards where he listed each classmate’s name and what was good about them and what wasn’t. Much like Harriet, he got caught. Yes, Jeremy was a strange kid. He’d eat lunch in the bathroom or the hallway early in the morning just to avoid the fear of loneliness and rejection from others. He held block parties in his room like they did on the radio where he was the DJ and the only guest aside from his 50 stuffed animals. It’s all true, but it’s not funny because now he’s dead because of you. All of you. He was 20 and because all of the shit you put him through in college and high school and middle school he killed himself. You had to go all the way back to elementary to even find me- his only true friend- to write his eulogy because you all treated him bad. I used to say it back then when people would laugh at him and I’ll say it again now. It’s not funny.


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Currently, I am obtaining my MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University in Charlotte and live with my husband in Durham, NC. I also wrote a book which is due to be released later this year.

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Author: Allie Coker-Schwimmer

Contributor: Regina McMenamin Lloyd

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There was a sound. It was ear piercingly loud. My chest was ripped open. It felt like the warming sting of heartburn, like the time as a girl I swallowed a whole blue mint and waited gasping for the sugars to melt. It was reminiscent of the panic attack I had on a roller coaster when I was a teen, it felt like the first time Pete Gorman, my first boyfriend, made my toes curl between the rumpled sheets of my first dorm room cot. People say at death’s door your life will flash through their eyes. For me it was my brain remembering the feelings of this throbbing anguish and trying to identify the source.
I felt myself float out of my body. Before that moment, I had felt the body that housed me was me. But I knew all of me was still here in this purple plasma jelly. I tried to force my body to pull me down, like the string on my jelly plasma balloon soul. I felt unformed and free. My body is solid, concrete like a stone of unmovable flesh below. My soul is a float in a mass of spilling energy like the hot gas of the sun.
I watched the shooter taken out in handcuffs. I had no idea who he was or why he had shot me. The news reporters will probably say “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
But like trying to read in a dream, I cannot speak. I hear talking but it is murmurs and I can’t make out the words. It makes me angry to listen, like the adult on the phone to my Charlie Brown ears. My body lay against the blacktop in the street. Strangers are circled around me.
I followed my body to the morgue. The undertaker took photographs of my body. His hair was greasy black and combed over the waxy balding spot of his head. He measured the bullet wound. My body was naked and I felt humbled. The gaping hole in my chest looked so shameful I longed to cover it up with newspaper or a paper blanket. I stared at that weird mole below my left breast. I had always thought it was ugly.
The undertaker moved to my breast and flicked my nipple. I watched annoyed. I saw him turn and run his hand over the length of my body. The hair stood up on his forearm. I could see he was aroused. His hands pawed my body in a frantic molestation. I was disgusted at him even though I couldn’t feel his exploitation of my corpse.
When he finished with my body, I lingered. Where would I go now that my carcass had been killed, and violated? The doors opened. A corpse is wheeled in. She is about 9. Her hair hung in 2 long French braid pigtails. Someone had lovingly cleaned the vomit from her angelic face. Her purple jelly plasma balloon wafted in after her body.
The undertaker began taking off her clothes. The hair stood on his arm. I was finally able to move my own purple jelly plasma balloon away from my remains.
“We are done here; I will take you to a playground.” I say.
“Where are we?” She asks.
“I don’t know, but we’ll find out together”
This time, I was in the right place at the right time.


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Regina McMenamin Lloyd is a mother of two young children, a wife, and a Writing Arts Major at Rowan University. Regina recently was an honorable mention winner of the 2012 Denise Gess Literary Awards for poetry. Regina McMenamin Lloyd’s writing has been featured on Smithsonian.com, Your Kind of Town.

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Author: Regina McMenamin Lloyd

Contributor: Allie Coker-Schwimmer

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“I heard it was murder.”

“It wasn’t murder, it was an altercation. Self-defense if anything.”

“Wait, what happened exactly?”

“Well, the Daniel guy was trying to get out of drugs, trouble- you know what I mean. Trying to get his life back together. He never really was the same after his sister passed away.”

“Yeah, I heard about that! That was so shocking and sad.”

“Yeah it really was. So, he had this party and a few of the guys showed up with stuff. They were trying to shoot up in his bathroom or something, and he didn’t want them to. One guy got really upset- said he was “disrespecting” them or something, can you believe that? Just because he didn’t want them doing drugs in his bathroom? So the fight between them just got bigger and bigger.”

“Wow- well, what did the rest of the people at the party do?”

“I don’t know…you would think there would be some interference.”

“Yeah, really. I’d be scared shitless if I were there though.”

“No kidding. So then the guy pulls a gun on the Daniel guy, or there was a gun near them, I’m not sure whose gun it was or where it came from but I just know Daniel shot the other guy first.”

“So it was self-defense. Kill or be killed.”

“Pretty much. The bad part is that the Daniel guy felt so bad and freaked out about shooting this guy that he yelled to his girlfriend to call an ambulance, and then while she did that he went into the other room and shot himself.”

“You mean he’s the one that killed himself?”

“Yeah. What a horrible situation to be in….”

“So he murdered himself.”

“You can’t ‘murder’ yourself.”

“Then he murdered his guilt.”



Walking around the neighborhood and hearing people talk this way, I know they have it all wrong. Sure, they may have the story down more or less- but not the details. Nobody living knows the exact details. They may know the story, but they don’t know a damn thing about my cousin Daniel or the reasons why he probably shot himself. And they never will. For some reason it makes me bristle to hear people conjecturing, discussing things in such a calm manner. And every time I hear someone proclaim that suicides go to hell, I go red and think, “So will you.”


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Currently, I am obtaining my MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University in Charlotte and live with my husband in Durham, NC. I also wrote a book which is due to be released later this year.

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Author: Allie Coker-Schwimmer

Contributor: George Sparling

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Smoking black hashish with Mary as we sit on a foam mattress upon plywood held up with cement blocks in a one-room shack at the edge of a hacienda, bathroom in an adjacent white concrete building. I saved money from my American job and then quit. I fled bosses, alcoholic DTs, a woman who may or may not have told cops I raped her, collection agencies, jail time for two bad checks, my infant son taken away by my ex-wife, hiding from loan sharks I owed money.

1968: the army massacred students in the Tlateloco housing project in Mexico City. Mary and I know some of the students but not what happened to them. Who knows the fate of our bones or how many times we’ll be buried.

Shit, I was high. Mary stares at my reflection in the window, hashish made from female flowers of cannabis plants, females stronger than males. I stare at her glassy image too. Mary says, “Take a look at yourself,” and I took my hands off her breasts.

Have I got uglier since we first met? She deflects my potential to verbally or physically attack her, and says, “I know a drummer in San Antonio, let’s hitch there, it’s over 800 miles, here’s the last of my Dexedrine.” I put up no resistance.

We each swallow two tablets and finally make it to a main highway headed north. The truck driver evicts his partner from the cab and he must hang on to exposed cargo. Shaky life being odd man out. Mary chatted a bit in Spanish, the driver pleased to have a nice-looking gringo so near and sometimes he touched her thigh after shifting gears. He pulls over and we get out, the helper climbs up and assumes his rightful place.

Nearer the border, I try conversation but she turns her back. Mary will not have sex with me across the road in well-concealed foliage; we could, and she knows it and looks peeved, her face serious. What’s a reflection mean?

Mary’s stern face, her eyebrows bent low over bright green eyes, her smooth arms hug me out of comradeship, and she spits a thick wad of mango into the dirt and says, “Not ripe.” Fatigued, I want to quit and sleep by the side of the road, hoping some peasants will feed me when I awake and take care of me forever.

Yet it isn’t that bad hitching, especially when we talk about the students and revolution. Mary reads headlines at a nearby newspaper stand and tries to learn more about the students.

“Sometimes I think those students should give up,” she says, “Don’t you ever get that feeling?”

“I don’t think real revolutionaries ever give up. Do you?”

“They should save their lives if they know they’ll lose.”

She gives me $50 so when we cross the border, agents will not consider me a bum.

Neal Cassidy, close friend of Kerouac’s, died on Mexican railroad tracks earlier this year. We talk about the psychedelic bus’s name “Further,” what it means, and how Cassidy threw a 4-pound hammer in the air ad infinitum, catching the handle every time, and Mary tells me her drummer boyfriend had dark skin beneath hollowed out eyes like Neal. A small herd of goats crosses the street with a bearded goatherd.

I see her as she walks fifty feet ahead, standing on a road in position for a ride to the border, while I lag behind watching her black hair blow around her head, and remember sitting in a dark theater and saw Kim Novak in the movie about “The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders” on our first date, my first time with a young Italian woman, how I stroked her hair, its black, lustrous strands in affectionate darkness.

I nicknamed her Moll but she never came up one for me.

Three rides later, we were so near the border that we walk across a bridge at Nuevo Laredo, then into Laredo and at customs border guards separate us, Mary led away and I enter a room with five uniformed guards and show them my passport. They strip search me. For drugs? For guns? For intimidation? For political suspicion? Cannabis aroma? I grab my balls, and one checks my rectum with a flashlight, jokes about my girlfriend, Did I sleep with her? Mary tells me they did the same with her, but brave enough to curse the guard when her rough gloved fingers were abusive.

We wander around the U.S. side, uncertain of the unaccustomed noise. We finally make it to San Antonio, and Mary phones her friend who picks us up. He has an apartment and looks at me as suspiciously as the guards had, and he and Mary talk about old friends, what happened to them. Had they intercourse or just talked, I didn’t care. I flop on thick coats, using a few shirts as a pillow. They stood in the next room as drummer talked about making it someday. “You gotta keep the band together, otherwise the band breaks up faster than one night of quickie sex.”

Later, around noon, Mary tells me she’s not going back, she wants to stay in San Antonio with drummer. Mary gives me another $50 and we hug, bonk fists like revolutionaries do. Too tired and winded for my 26-year-old body, I’m vulnerable and afraid I’ll get busted. Suddenly, it’s like a four-pound hammer hitting my head---we no longer are a couple.

I hitch back to the shack, smoke hashish on the mattress, and see my double stare back at me in the windowpane. After more hits, I see Mary’s face, but it slowly dissolves.


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Author: George Sparling

Contributor: Allie Coker-Schwimmer

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Gray sky, cars honking, and a homeless man sitting against a doorway with a brown-bagged wine bottle behind him - another day in the city. He was almost your typical homeless man, with a withered face and ratty gray dreadlocks, his black skin creased by the sharp chilly fall weather of at least a decade. Now it was hot and sticky in the midsummer heat. He had an unusually cheery demeanor though, talking to all who surrounded him and not asking for anything though a hat with money sat in front of him. His left pant leg was torn, faded, and rolled up to the upper thigh revealing his prosthetic. People passed- a lady with a chic leather trench coat, a man carrying a bouquet of flowers, several youth covered in headphones or talking on cell phones. And then there was a twelve year old boy passing through slowly on his red ten-speed bicycle. He was almost your typical boy, with an LA Dodgers baseball cap and a backpack carrying what little math homework he had been assigned. He stopped in front of the vendor situated a few feet from the homeless man and ordered a blue popsicle. As he pushed the change on the counter towards the vendor, he turned to hop back onto his bike, when he noticed the man sitting in the doorway smiling despite his rotten luck. He looked at the popsicle, then at the man, and then rode his bike up in front of him.
“Hi! My name’s Manny. Like Manny Ramirez,” the boy said in a friendly and unafraid tone. He may as well have been talking to anyone he just met.
“Really? You don’t say,” the homeless man rasped. “I’m Billy.”
“Like Billy Joel!”
“Yeah, yeah! That’s not bad.”
“Would you like a popsicle, Billy?”
“Oh, thank you, thank you! That’s so nice.”
Manny handed the popsicle over to Billy who gratefully took a lick and smiled back at the boy with the few teeth he had left.
Just then a different nearby vendor came over and present Billy with a hot dog, then walked back to his stand. Apparently they were old friends.
“I love you, man!” Billy yelled. The vendor laughed.
Manny eyed Billy’s prosthetic leg but knew he shouldn’t ask.
A female cop walked up and Manny got nervous she would be angry.
“Hey Billy, how are ya?” she asked with a small smile.
“I’m alright, I’m alright. Got this young man here and that clown over there being all nice to me. It’s great.”
“Making new friends, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Well, good. I’ll be back to check on you later.” The woman walked off slowly and calmly.
Manny drank the man in through his eyes.
“It was really good to meet you, Billy,” Manny said.
“You too, you too. Thanks for the pop! You too.”
Then Manny hopped back on his bike and pedaled back to his home near the tracks.


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Currently, I am obtaining my MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University in Charlotte and live with my husband in Durham, NC. I also wrote a book that is due to be released later this year.

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Author: Allie Coker-Schwimmer

Contributor: Jim Harrington

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I crouched behind a lilac bush and watched the horse gallop down the street and stop in front of my place. I hadn't received any mail for three days and wondered what was going on. I thought maybe kids were pranking me.

The rider wore a Stetson, chaps, and cowboy boots with silver inlays in the toes. His back was hunched, and he must have weighed 125 pounds stepping out of the tub. He rode a black stallion big enough to win a game of chicken with a bulldozer. His pants were AWOL.

"Hey, pardner," I said, as he reached down and opened my mailbox. "What the hell ya think you're doin'?" I didn't normally talk like this, and even odder I felt like spitting into a bucket.

He snatched my mail out of the box, rifled through it, and spurred the horse on to Fred's. I sauntered over--I'd never sauntered before either--and repeated my question. He looked at me like I was the one who belonged in the hoosegow.

"Only advertisements." He looked at me and shrugged. "Same as you get every day."

We stared at each other for a moment and when I didn't respond, he reached down and opened Fred's box. The horse snorted and pounded the ground as if instructed to count to three. I took a step back.

"Well, it just ain't right--stealin' a man's mail," I said, my thumbs hooked in the waist of my jeans.

When I realized where my hands were, I lowered them and watched the rider take Fred's mail. It didn't look any more important than mine. Still…

I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't want to get into an argument with anybody, especially someone not wearing pants. I couldn't call the police. They'd ask lots of questions and make me write stuff down. I was too busy for that.

I looked up and spotted Fred waving at me through the window. I couldn't see him well enough, even squinting over my glasses, to know if he was waving me inside or telling me to get away. I knew he wouldn't come out until the guy left, then he'd blame me for his mail being stolen. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Fred knew about the half-naked highwayman before I did.

I turned to see the rider put something back in Fred's mailbox. Without looking at me, he said, "Bill. I got enough of my own." He closed the box and picked up the reins.

"Well, tomorrow I'll be out here with a gun," I said. "So you better not come back." I realized my hands were at my sides as if I was reaching for a pair of holstered, pearl-handled beauties.

"Tomorrow's Sunday," he said and rode off to Edith Clanton's.

I watched him stop at two more boxes before I turned and headed into the setting sun, even though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon.


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Jim Harrington began writing fiction in 2007 and has agonized over the form ever since. He serves as Fiction Editor for Apollo's Lyre ( http://apollos-lyre.tripod.com/index.html) and Flash Markets Editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles (http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/). Jim's Six Questions For . . . blog (http://sixquestionsfor.blogspot.com/) provides editors and publishers a place to “tell it like it is.” You can read more of his stories at http://jpharrington.blogspot.com.

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Author: Jim Harrington

Contributor: Marissa Halvorson

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Whimpers pierced the cold, dank air of the dark room. In the shadows cast by the dim light filtering through the bars, stood a woman. Dark hair tumbled down her shoulders in voluminous curls. A hood, attached to a black cloak, hid her face. She faced the room, where a man lay on his cot, whimpers caught in his damaged throat.

“Franklin Jae Lynford,” she called. Her voice rang out in the emptiness like bells echoing off the dark walls. Her rich voice held no trace of emotion.

The whimpers came to an abrupt halt, and the man uncurled himself and looked around. A thin sheen of sweat covered his face and soaked his shirt through. Bright with fever, his eyes darted from side to side. The woman stepped into the dim light.

A grimace twisted the man’s features as illness once again overtook him and he pushed himself away from her. The spasm lasted several seconds before he was able to look at her once more.

Finally, she removed her hood. Underneath, her skin glowed pale, her eyes red. A cruel smile warped her features, which would otherwise have been quite beautiful. She undid the clasp on her brooch and let her cloak fall as she stepped forward, toward the man. “Franklin Jae Lynford, you have been summoned.”

The man’s eyes widened, and he stumbled out of his cot, away from her. Her red gown swishing around her ankles as she moved, the woman laughed, a cold, cruel laugh. “You cannot run from your fate, Franklin. This is who you are.”

“Who are you?” Franklin’s voice rasped out, barely audible even in the silence of the room.

“Franklin, Franklin…you ought to know. You spent most of your life worshipping my master. Why, then, do you run from him now?”

“I have family,” Franklin gasped. “My children—they’re counting on me!”

“Be honest, Frank. Your family lost faith in you a long time ago…I believe it was after you murdered that poor woman…what was her name? If I recall correctly, Jane Kaikoura died on the night of December 24, 2001. Six years ago. Her family spent Christmas in mourning. Isn’t that right, Frank?”

Frank whimpered, deep in his throat. He covered his eyes, as if by acting like she wasn’t there, it would make her go away.

“Then, of course, you knew what would happen, so you ran. Am I right, Frank?”

Frank moaned and his fingers clutched at his face. “Stop. Please stop,” he groaned.

The woman smiled. She tossed her dark hair over her shoulder. “So, you ran, but you didn’t stop. Your murders continued all the way through the country as you traveled from place to place. I could list off every single one of your murders. How about it, Frank? Would you like to hear about your kills?”

Frank lifted his face, his eyes wide and full of unshed tears. “Please, no more. I know what I’ve done. I’ve changed, though, I swear!”

The woman threw back her head and laughed. “People don’t change, Frank. I know that better than anyone. Devlin summons you, Frank. Do you answer his summons?”

The tears in Frank’s eyes spilled over and poured down his unshaven cheeks. “No!” he cried. “You can’t take me!”

“Frank, you know what will happen if you do not answer the summons. Your life is over. You are dying. If you do not answer Devlin, you shall never have an afterlife. Devlin would be most disappointed. He might even be disappointed enough to appear here himself to…convince you.”

Frank’s face paled, rough stubble standing out against the white of his face. “I don’t want to go,” he whispered. “I don’t belong there. I’ve changed.”

The woman held out her hand and her cloak rose and draped itself over her shoulders. “The summons is not an option, Frank. Either you come, or we take you. Devlin takes you.”

Frank squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his fists tight. The woman watched his fists relaxed and he fell limp. “Alright.” He slumped against the wall. “Take me to hell.”


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I have been writing since I was ten and have been working towards publication of my novel. Occasionally I write short stories and flash fiction, and I'm hoping for publication of this one as my first.

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Author: Marissa Halvorson

Contributor: Elyk S. Von Ire

- -
Jon’s drunk again. Swaying at the table. Willing his eyes to stay open. Hebrew swirls in the air around us with the smoke. Jon stares forward. His eyelids are anchors that tow his head down with them. He snaps it back up and looks around. Again, he stares. He nods.
The three Israelis are either too stoned or too wrapped up in their own
conversation to notice Jon’s slumping head or closing eyes.
But I’d never be able to tell for sure. I don't speak Hebrew either. Maybe they are discussing it ad nauseum.
Jon nods. His eyes closed. When he opens them, slowly, he looks at me. His eyes are glistening. He opens his mouth to speak but doesn’t. His eyes rest on the bottle of rum, it's triumphant last inch still at the bottom.
He grabs the bottle and turns the label towards him. I assume he is staring, not reading. His hand slips a little and the bottle wobbles, then rights itself.
Jon leans back in his white, plastic chair. On two legs, against the wall, he looks up through closed eyelids.
Suddenly, he snaps his head forward and stands up. Again, I thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. The Israelis look at him, conversation on pause for one pregnant second, then turn back to one another with bouncy, guttural conversation.
I wonder what Jon’s thinking about.
I wonder if he's going to be whistling in bed like my dad used to, his iPod speakers on all night, music coming through the paper thin walls to my room.
Like last night.
But we were on mushrooms last night, so maybe that had something to do with it. That Irishman, I tell you. Quite an influence.
I look up from my reverie and Jon is nowhere to be seen. I’m not about to venture from my hammock, so I start to wonder what the Israelis are talking about.
I know two of them. The guys. Besides Jon we’re all in our early twenties. Gal and Eron are fresh from mandatory military service, and I met them and Jon a couple days earlier in La Cieba, just a quick ferry ride from the island.
The third Israeli is the girl I never officially met. She’s been at the hostel for awhile now, at least a couple of days. I saw her at a different hostel back in Guatemala too, so I recognize her. Attractive people, Israelis, that’s hard to deny.
Cool accents too.
Goddamn I miss Emily.
Jon has resurfaced. He peers out the door, leaning heavily on the
frame. He looks at me.
"Diving man," he says, managing to keep his eyes open almost the whole time he speaks.
I nod. Diving indeed Jon. I think to myself as he sinks back into his room.


- - -
Elyk S. Von Ire is from Minneapolis. He is currently working on his first novel. He thinks that you are just great.

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Author: Elyk S. Von Ire

Contributor: Peter Baltensperger

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Black clouds hung from the night sky, forbidding tapestry traveling slowly through the darkness, obscuring a sickle moon that should have been floating somewhere. Sharp flashes of sheet lightning carved the horizon into ominous layers, electric javelins for the brooding night. The wolf man from the carnival in the fairgrounds sat at the edge of a forgotten pond in an ancient park, waiting for a rain that wouldn’t come, trying to dispel anxieties, nightmares. The clouds refused to yield.

Somewhere an empty train charged into a black tunnel, the engineer mesmerized by the meaningless presence of a minuscule light somewhere at a distant end. The wolf man cringed with his own troubled visions of incomprehensible endings, unfulfilled promises, scratching his mind for solutions, relief. He hadn’t come to the park to wait, even though he knew well enough that the waiting was a necessary part of a whole.

A silent marching band wound its way into the park from some inscrutable source, a troupe of clowns with invisible balloons in its wake. He could hear the flapping of their oversized shoes in the dry grass, wished he had a balloon of his own, an anchor for his confusion. The marching band began to weave tightening circles around the pond, hedging him into his solitude with its persistence. The clowns never let go.

He waded into the old pond to escape the inevitable noose, only to get sucked into the silty bottom of his own destiny. He flailed his arms to keep himself afloat, tore himself loose from the treacherous mire, howled his frustration at the invisible moon, yet all he could hear was the echo of his own voice. When he freed himself from the entrapment and floated on the churned surface to get his bearings, the band unwound itself from the pond and vanished into the darkness, leaving the balloons hovering on their strings.

As soon as they were gone, he walked out of the stale pond and shook his body to rid his thick fur of the water. He grabbed a handful of strings, to remember, and made his way back to the fairgrounds, the balloons following behind, his nightmares surrounding him like an irritating cloak. There was no point in waiting, not after the clowns. He had the balloons to get him through the night, keep his thoughts from floating away, remind him of what could have been. The night might have been different.

The bearded woman was the only one still awake, the light from her window drawing him into its spell. He could see her pacing back and forth in her trailer, plagued by her own shadows, monsters in dark corners. She let him in when he knocked on her door and he gave her one of the balloons, setting the others free to reclaim his space. She let the balloon float up to the ceiling and pulled him on her bed. He helped her dispel her monsters and she screamed her excitement into the room until his nightmares cracked and shattered to the floor.

It wasn’t until then that the lightning bolts tore the clouds apart and the rain began to gush down to the roar of thunder. The sharp drum solo on the metal roof of the trailer drowned out the moans of their passion as they found themselves in each other in a brief crack of light in the turbulent night. Then the unforgiving darkness engulfed them again, plunging them back into their shadows, obliterating what they had come to know.


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Peter Baltensperger is a Canadian writer of Swiss origin and the author of ten books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. He writes, and has been writing all his life, because he has to and loves to do it, and because it adds a significant dimension to his personal quest.

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Author: Peter Baltensperger