lolwho CC poet in the market square i tell my brother, i can see ghosts i say, my eyes are dice gambling my nightmares i tell my sister, i can predict the future i say, tomorrow you will find blood in the sink i have built a relationship with a razor i know the right places to cut… my brother plucks a rib from my chest builds an ark, says my madness is a flood eating up the family name. what is in a name but denial what is denial but to tie the tongue into a knot & hang a child for seeing ghosts i tell my father, i think i can speak in tongues now i think my screams are angels trapped in my throat struggling to find melody i think the deliverance worked i don’t cut anymore, now i slash, i slash my knees as though cutting grass, i think the deliverance worked last night while combing my hair, earthworms fell out & i caught them midair & stuffed my mouth with them, like spaghetti i have an ulcer of the mind an ulcer so deep, it sucks up light i am trapped in a body eating itself like a snake swallowing its own tail i am tired of eating my voice because it makes you uncomfortable father during the deliverance the ghosts say amen father during the deliverance they dance around me father how do i tell you i need a psychiatrist without a volcano pouring out of your mouth where does one hide an illness, that lives in a sentence when i say, the test was nice i mean, my script was soaking wet with tears & sweat i mean, the pen was so heavy i could only write my name i mean, while writing my name I saw the letters leap off the paper like butterflies & i was chasing them all through till the lecturer said time’s up when the praise leader says, with the holy ghost, there is no room for depression i want to ask him why he was crying last night why he cries every night why he curses god every night in his sleep but ok whatever i have a needle stuck in my tongue my words come out wounded but how do i see a therapist / when you all are holding whips / ready to beat stigma into my skin / because i ache different Pamilerin Jacob is a young Nigerian poet & mental health enthusiast. He writes to ease internal turmoil & also to shed light on the stigma surrounding mental illness. He is the author of Memoir of Crushed Petals (2018) & forthcoming chapbook, The Depression Gospels (2018). Pamilerin lives in Sango-Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria. He is a staunch believer in the powers of critical thinking, Khalil Gibran’s poetry & chocolate ice cream
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1/1/2019 0 Comments Elastic Skin by Elias Andrevn Elias Andrevn is a young writer who has befriended silence as a form of living. He writes with depression as a creative companion. He currently lives in Benin City, Nigeria where he also schools. He's a Young Critic Literary Fellow at Wawa Book LTD, and also an editorial intern with Nantygreens.com. 1/1/2019 0 Comments Poetry by Jen Rouse Alex Naanou CC In Metal, Wax, & Bone #1 I bent the metal of your mouth to my mouth. Filled the cavernous emptiness with clouds. What you expect from me is bent in my mouth and burning. Metal. When I am most ill, it paints my tongue in ashes. Your mouth is not allowed here. Bent, the metal I make of you is twisted—the storm of you in every song. Leaves me metal. O what shape? What mouth-of-metal you would stay beside me? Nothing becomes the metal of me—no shimmering lake, no Saturn on a stick, no grown-from-home heart, and I hang in the absence, as you take every mouth not mine and metal. #2 When she dresses you with bits of hair and tattered felt, a quick blood kiss across the curve where lips should meet, wax doll of featureless face, what does an eternal scream feel like when no one hears you? When no heart beats inside your haunted breast? Wax doll: the pins, the pins, the pins. My god. The pins. How she holds you to the flame, and small bits of you melt on her fingers. How she brushes you away, like you were never there to begin with. #3 Maybe I made you up. Maybe these bones were always wrong. No matter. I have finished carrying you. Myth. Muse. And for so long. I will give each bone back. Pluck the skin like feathers and pull them through. Because the words I don’t want you near me are never quite enough. Let me unhinge each vertebrae, a small and perfect stack, from burn to powder in your palm. Easter Because you’ve run this fever like a race every night for weeks now—you think something must give—you think you must either walk into or out of this life completely. Into—like Adrienne Rich’s floating love poem, thundering in your lover’s mouth a rhythm a whole delicious chorus again come again this is the abandonment you end—scream, Beauty, want me Stay! Out of—Like Edna Pontellier her awakening a drowning—sweet sea anemone opening, closing Chopin’s inspired Creole passions meeting grave after watery grave—literature repeats itself in Ophelia form no matter your desire to see it stop and smell you differently. Your hair sweat-knotted on the pillow—your voice still somewhere in Ireland folding its legs around the first girl—She said to her fiancée from the phone booth, I feel something. You didn’t know, laughed when she shaved her head, bought you vodka sours, put you drunk so drunk to bed, loved you, at least for those few hours. Now you simply want a cool spot on the sheets—a glass of water—You don’t want to think about the last three years—the shudders of lifeless breath—like Poe came in while you slept, mortared a wall of bricks to your chest—You are not strong enough to see who is casked inside, or even worse—who is kept out. Eyes glassy with grief and illness, together like the moon and tide—An empty bed seems license to be listless—or you could take it all in stride —or you could long just a while longer for someone to truly understand those strides-- She might be worth it—if she is quiet-- if she absorbs fever like a damp cloth—if her sleep is soft—and her need. You might stay for that—You might not. At the end of the book, the water bleeds. Telling the Therapist Good-bye After a while, wisdom does not matter-- in the wake of so many small sacrifices, infinite sadness. The deepest cut you talked me through—a voice in tender contrast to the jagged leaps, dives of smashed glass, blood like a bright sangria catching on the edges of what your words fell through. Sometimes words are all I have to give, words like diamonds caviar real fur coats-- such weighty indulgences, bereft gifts you will soon stop unwrapping, having had enough of the endless verb-kiss. So what will we speak of when the silence ends—death and love already wrung out. Or will it just be me wringing my hands in your mailbox twirling my keys on your answering machine. Never again my frantic eyes to read or the watching of your fingers twisting strands of hair, your long, booted leg kicking quickly when I say suicide sweetly. How have we gone on like this? And what have you noticed? A miserably triumphant Morse code. Summer Crush You are all my triggers-- old, lovely, an entertainer-- my drag queen shrink. I haven’t looked into your eyes for weeks. Summer has stolen you anyway—sun-fucked and drunk on a backlit stage. And you are Joplin or the luscious Grace Slick. You are the girl who never touches down. So many yous I’ve loved through summers like this, a tangle of tawny legs, beer cans telling tales in the driveway, fingers lingering on light switches, and secret cigarettes on boat decks. There are only so many ways to go down to the river. Maybe this year I’ll choose a man instead, one who makes moonshine in his basement and makes me do something as simple as smile. Some nights when we’re both alone, he sends me a midnight snack. Anything to wake from dreaming of your hand slowly rubbing my back in something less than sobs. Jen Rouse is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Gulf Stream, Parentheses, Cleaver, Up the Staircase, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist for the Mississippi Review 2018 Prize Issue. Rouse is a two-time finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize with Headmistress Press. Her first chapbook with HP is Acid and Tender, and her forthcoming book is CAKE. The Poetry Annals published her micro chap, Before Vanishing. And Riding with Anne Sexton, Rouse’s second chapbook, is recently out from Bone & Ink Press in collaboration with dancing girl press. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse. 1/1/2019 0 Comments Dope Sonnet by Logo WeiDope Sonnet I knew a boy once who stole an anthology To read just a phrase from a line from a poem Over and over, his right hand fondly tracing The veins that veered like vines from the left, I knew a boy once of muscle and youth, Winsome, funny, forthright, and improper, Often licking the chip of his false tooth, ‘Starry dynamo in the machinery of night,’ Two years, then his casket was heavy, I’ll advance the following theory, That souls don’t float away, they pool, Filling their compartments up, Be they blood vessels, yew, or suits of black wool, Watching the delicious machine crumble. The fifteen lines of this sonnet are Ben’s. Logo and spouse live in the upper Midwest with their puckish quadruped. He has worked with patients, students and those enduring homelessness. Logo writes (and bakes and bikes) as solacing means of existence. Logo's poetry has appeared or will appear in The Notre Dame Review, Pedestal Magazine, Parhelion, AZURE, and others. 1/1/2019 0 Comments Poetry by Jennifer Wilson lolwho CC Pomegranates (i) through tears she is bloodless, paper thin and breathing shallow as time allows and she makes shapes on the windowpane, a geometry of fading grief uneased by lifting fog (ii) the fabric of her skin softens against the harshness of her bones as she unfolds from her hands two coins of no value but the dead take them, bemused by the faces on their surface yet accepting regardless their dullness their lack of silver shine (iii) a wisp of cloud wails as well as any wind looming with a look like grief “ O give me give me give me give “ (iv) something like a poppy reaches out of the grave “take it” bids the god of jests though her mouth is senseless in death and burnished with worms, she takes six seeds of the pomegranate small and in bitterness planted between her teeth as she mediates - speaking jewels with a breath of life to a god far beyond the light and he is amused with a blackness that rots he turns the fruit to ash and has it as soot upon her lip for the char is what he wants the use of carbon the blood gone black and blown like dust away, away from weeping women and the frailty of words as she “please” and “mercy” and kneels upon her tongue to make of him a king and he decrees in his vanity “ yes, take it but cry cry and make me a god of life give me give me soul” (v) regained in dampness it quickens, sickened by its rheumy eye as it takes in her whole and she, being mother, holds it makes it tender in her care easy on the thorns and tending to the twigs as they wend up and delve so deeply in her hair the witch burns in water (we noticed) you were not in work this saturday it is not standard procedure (to remove the eyes from your head & hide them in the river) & not call to give us notice so we can arrange some cover for your shift please come tomorrow at 11:30 to discuss why you felt (the need to give your voice away to the function of waves & take up the silence of water instead) without satisfactory explanation (the green muddy will not make gods of the unworthy) your first official warning will be awarded (like a mouth full of stones) & we will be monitoring your attendance (in the weight of rings & the sincerity of your fall) Jennifer Wilson lives in Somerset, England, with her husband and spends her days as a faceless retail drone. Her work has appeared as a part of Molotov Cocktail's 2018 Shadow Poetry Award, the webzine from Fly on the Wall Press, and is forthcoming in Awkward Mermaid and the YANYR anthology from Rhythm & Bones Lit. 1/1/2019 0 Comments Witness by Joy Wright
moominsean CC
Witness You were 12, Mom, as the story goes, when you showed your first signs of not being right. You were 12. They say your father left that day because he couldn’t live with you. Your fault. You were 12, Mom, and you held up a kitchen chair, threatening to hit him with it. You stood up to your father and he left, but that’s not the story. The story was whispered by your mother, my grandmother; you have never told it. Grandma said you caused your father to leave. He couldn’t live with a child who threatened him with a kitchen chair. You destroyed your family, she says. You were 12.
There are other whispers of your break-downs, though the word crazy is only implied, never used. Grandma would do anything to be sure you never got any mental health treatment; were never labeled crazy. Yet she blamed you, your outbursts, your anger, for all the losses.
You were 12 that day you threatened your father with a kitchen chair and he left forever. You never saw him again. When he died, he left you his taxi cab. I, your oldest daughter, was 9 then. Only then did Grandma say she saw him all those years, and so did your brother. It was you he left, but years later he would come and watch you and us, your children, in the park. Grandma said he saw us right before he died. Your children are beautiful, he said, as the story goes.
Five years ago, Mom, you slit your throat with a plastic butter knife, sawing back and forth, back and forth. I was having your furniture replaced and your apartment, in the public housing unit for people with mental disabilities, fumigated. Bed bugs. I was trying to take care of you, as I always did, but you didn’t understand that. I told you, but you didn’t remember. You thought they were stealing everything and you wanted to die. It was only then, when you were taken to St Joe’s psych unit and kept inpatient for four and a half months, that the words mental illness were used. Dementia and a long standing mental illness. Words like personality disorder, psychosis, depression.
I see you Mom. I bear witness. I know what he did to you. It was done to me, too, and my sister, my cousins, by others. I know Mom, even if you never let yourself know. He destroyed you. She would not protect you. You never had a chance.
I bear witness. I see you, Mom. I hold you accountable for all you did to us, for blaming me when I was 12 and you slit your wrists, covering me with your blood. I hold you accountable for leaving us for days, for the predatory men you brought home. But I do not believe you were responsible. The responsibility lies in the violations in the dark, the secrets held tight, the chair held above your head as you fought to stop him, the fact that no one believed you. The responsibility lies in the systematic destruction of a little girl that happened long before I was ever born. I see you, Mom. I believe you, even if you never believed yourself.
Joy Wright is a social justice, anti-violence activist, poet, storyteller and single queer Mom to two beautiful teenagers, a dog, a cat and two guinea pigs. She works as a non-profit fundraiser by day, and spends her weekends playing in an all mom garage band called the Hot Mamas and driving around Chicagoland not-so-cleverly disguised as a soccer mom. You can see Joy storytelling or reading poetry around Chicago, including at Louder Than a Mom, Do Not Submit and SHE Gallery events. Publications include Voice of Eve, sinister wisdom, ESME and a regular dating piece in Rebellious Magazine http://rebelliousmagazine.com/.
Jenna Post CC Rooms Of The Dead So many in the rooms of the dead. In North Carolina, in Chapel Hill. In Evanston (a suburb of Chicago), and in Chicago itself, near downtown, at the Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital. In North Carolina the room for the dead was located in the basement, street level, so the morticians could wheel the bodies out into their gleaming Cadillac hearses pulled up in back, usually after dark. In the room of the dead there stands my father, my gentle father, who said the rooms of the dead were made to honor the dead and to honor life. You needed to determine the cause of death, so that the survivors can know and the doctors can know and learn to improve their treatments. The rooms of the dead serve knowledge and life. It is five in the morning; I can hear the cars out on the bypass — the sound, like ghosts in the distance keening. Last night I passed a major accident on Highway 21 driving home to College Station from Austin. I counted two ambulances and four police cars, and now I have woken in the dark of early morning from dreams of the rooms of the dead. The year was 1954. I am in the fourth grade. I see graffiti scribbled in black on the highway overpasses in Chapel Hill “Kill Joe McCarthy.” Yet a liberal spirit finds a small voice here in this university town. The story is that the Yankee General lodged his horses in some of the ivy colored building on the University of North Carolina campus. My father explains how while an undergraduate in pre-med, he worked as a soda jerk in the University of Iowa Union, and if there’d been more slack time and he’d sat down a longer time at the Communist meeting in the large room across the hall, even for twenty minutes, he could, during the McCarthy era, have been fired from his job. Even though Chapel Hill is a university town, outside the city my father points out the pro-McCarthy signs. I sometimes get beat up for being a Yankee on the way home from school. My classmates shout at me, “Save your confederate money, the South will rise again.” One afternoon in the spring the school calls us back to the cafeteria for an assembly. The principal says that the Supreme Court has ruled that children, whatever their skin colors, must go to school together. “How do you feel about going to school with Negroes? How do you feel about drinking from the same water fountain?” When the principal calls for a vote, the children overwhelmingly vote to go to school with Negroes. They have been brought up to share. The principal tries to remain calm but it’s clear he is shocked. He explains the situation again in a more nervous voice. The children vote again with raised hands to share the school. A university town. One of the most liberal towns in the South in the early 1950’s. My father is called down to the hospital on a Sunday. My mother does not want me around, so I go with my dad to the hospital. He is in a hurry and takes me into the room of the dead. This is a new university hospital. The refrigerator units that hold the bodies have gleaming chrome doors and the tables where they examine the bodies are shiny aluminum. My mother is an anesthesiologist, a doctor like my father. “Don’t take him in there,” she has said. “He’s too young.” “It’s good for him,” my father replied. “He needs to know about death.” My mother has given up on her medical practice. She stays at home in our Glen Lennox apartment, talking long hours on the phone with her father in Minnesota. She hates the muggy heat of Chapel Hill and the closed-in feeling of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A maid comes twice a week. Sometimes I go to the maid’s house for the day and play with her two boys. I am shocked at the condition of her house and the houses up and down the dirt road where we play kick the can. The houses on the street have holes in the walls that are mostly glued over with newspaper. I am surprised to see how the street contains only black people and how I am the only white child, but what do I know? I am nine years old.
My father, in a hurry on a Sunday morning, takes me down to the morgue. Dad has received an emergency call from the coroner to ascertain the cause of death. We find girl my age lying dead on the morgue table. She is pretty girl, and her face is calm, but her body and arms are burned. She is a Negro girl who has died in a fire. I am stunned. “If you ever see fire, just run,” my father says. “Get out immediately. Don’t take anything.” He goes to a small desk in the corner of the room to fill out papers. “Go play in the hallway,” he says. “I won’t be long.” So many times with my father in the rooms of the dead. I am twelve and we are back living in the North in a western suburb of Chicago and I have come down on a Saturday to my father’s work — he always worked six days a week —come down because my mother wanted me out of the house. “He’s a boy,” she says. “He makes too many demands. He drives me crazy. He needs to be with his father.” I don’t remember what I am doing to kill time while my father worked. Perhaps I was strolling through, as I often did, the Pathology Lab’s museum of monsters (as I called it) — large wood cabinets, eight feet tall with tall glass doors. So many brown cabinets in the old section with high ceilings, and in the cabinets, hundreds and hundreds of glass “crocks” or containers filled with the preservative formaldehyde, and in the see-through crocks specimens of abnormalities. Two headed babies, babies joined at the back and sharing a heart, babies joined at the head, their brains lopsided into one big brain — all floating in the glass crocks for eternity. I am in shock, I am in awe. I don’t have the words yet for my feelings Today I can ask, do they not have souls? Why are they put on display instead of buried? I do not have words but I sense that if God is the designer, he must not be a perfect god, for his hands have slipped, at times, in the challenge of making. My father calls my name. I turn and see him coming out of the morgue. He has removed his rubber gloves but still has on a white apron speckled with blood. “You’ve got to see this,” he says. “I don’t let you go in here much, but you’ve got to see this.” I enter the morgue, the room of the dead. It’s an older style morgue compared to the hospital in North Carolina. The refrigerator doors are made of wood and the tabletops are pinkish-white marble. Stretched out on the table is a tall, large muscled man. So far they have not cut into him. Senior doctors and residents and interns from all over the hospital have come to look at the man. I’ve never seen so many in the morgue. They are staring at the man, who looks to be about fifty years old. He is from the Ringling Brothers Circus that has been playing in Chicago for a month, and his body is covered with tattoos — up and down his arms and legs, over his back and chest and stomach. Everything is tattoo, except his face, hands, feet, and genitals. I am fascinated and shocked. There’s a sticky sweet smell in the room. I want to study the man’s body as you might examine a painting in a museum. I want to figure out what the tattoos on his body mean. A white-coated doctor points at his side and says, “Jonah and the whale,” but I can’t look. Something says it’s wrong to treat the dead like a freak show. I don’t know the word desecration yet but that is what I am feeling. But another feeling comes and whispers, ‘No, no, it is all right. This is honoring the man.’ By the time I start college we have moved to a suburb north of Chicago, Evanston. Now my mother never leaves the house. She rarely comes out of the bedroom. My father gets my sister up in the morning for school and prepares breakfast. During the summers I work at the hospital to make money for college. I sometimes help still my dad with autopsies. He will hand me a scalpel and I will slice open an abdomen. I will remove the liver and hand it to my father to be weighed on a scale. I will remove the intestines for examination and weighing. I will pack the empty torso with balled up newspaper and sew the skin back with suture. I will take an electric saw, and after peeling back the scalp, cut a door in the skull to take out the brain for examination and weighing. Did this person have a stroke or a tumor? It was my father’s job to find out. My father tells me never to talk of his work. “They won’t understand,” my father said. “They will not comprehend that this is science. It will seem lurid and ghoulish.” While helping my father in the rooms of the dead I would stare at the faces, trying to make out the meaning of death, or the personality before me, but without words and motion, the faces say little. All kinds of people come through the rooms of the dead — mostly the old, but sometimes the young. All colors. All faiths. They are together, rolled in and out on trays from the refrigerator units built into a wall for holding bodies. One time I remember my dad getting a call in the middle of the night because the electrical power in the morgue had failed. I’ve never needed to read Stephen King novels, I’ve never felt the urge to slow down on a highway to gape at those injured or killed in automobile accidents. I have no desire to watch horror movies and have never seen Arnold Schwarzenegger as the robot who kills for good in the Terminator movies. When angry men tried to pick a fight in a bar, I have been able to walk away. I’ve been around boys and young men fascinated with killing and death. I have known young men who could not believe they were men until they killed their first buck. I have known a veteran, son of an air force colonel, who believed he was not a man because he refused to carry out the lieutenant’s order to kill Vietcong prisoners captured on patrol in the jungle. This veteran would sit on the sofa of my living room, drinking beer after beer in an alcoholic haze, and tell me he would kill to prove himself a man someday. Two years later he killed a man, shooting him in the back of the head. I feel so lucky. I was jarred awake by dreams early in this morning, but now it is close to noon, and I am typing what I’ve scribbled in longhand in the still darkened bedroom. I always keep a pad by the side of the bed. My wife has gone to work and I’ve taken my daughter to school. Last night I got a call from my son Will and talked to my grandchildren Kenda and Quinlin. I am so fortunate. I never saw what my grandfather Hall spoke of, how the bodies of loved one who died at home were washed by a family members in preparation for burial, but I went to the room of death when I was young, unlike the young today who romanticize death playing video games or watching movies. I saw the blood being washed from the morgue tables down the drain. My hands felt the cold stiff flesh. I struggled to straighten arms and legs. When civilians and soldiers are burned or bombed on the streets of Baghdad or in the capital of Liberia or in a bar in Paris or Bali or Baltimore, I see the faces. Death has never seemed to me romantic or heroic. The smell of death is unforgettable. When near the dead you take in part of them with the smell. Early I learned a bit of compassion. I have been in the rooms of the dead and in my own way I have played the silver taps, as they do every year at my favorite Texas A&M ceremony. I never became the doctor, yet thanks to father — the pathologist — I learned in the rooms of the dead. Chuck Taylor was a chemistry nerd in high school and did research into diet and heart disease. He started out as a PhD in renaissance literature teaching Shakespeare. Later he switches to creative writing and has published two memoirs, two novels, two short story collection, and eight books of poetry. He collects stamps and performs magic at children's birthday parties. Exodus’s writing aesthetic includes strange, obscure flash-fiction, emotional and character-driven fiction and fantasy, and nonfiction writing that aims to create a healthier world for us all. Her publications include flash-fiction stories with Valley Voices and Indicia, short fiction with Literary Orphans, and a non-fiction essay with Luna Luna Magazine. She is a Cruger, Mississippi native, and a graduate of Mississippi Valley State University with a BA in English, as well as Mississippi University for Women with a MFA in Creative Writing. More Than Beat Ethan slid his hands inside the waistband of his jeans and rubbed his lower back. His throat longed for a drink, needed carbonation to tickle and moisten the dry tissues. His eyes burned from working in the dusty woodshop all day. But he’d made it through a full week at his first real job. He looked forward to going home after his drink to crash in his own shit-hole. First apartment, first job, and his first time in a bar. Last week he had been in high school, his nights spent wandering the streets and driving around or shut inside his room playing video games. But this was his life now; these were his choices to make. The guys from the shop went to Buddy’s to unwind, so Buddy’s it was. If anything, chugging a ginger ale on a barstool would be a welcome change from playing Mortal Kombat on the couch. Most of the guys at Buddy’s worked in the shop. He hadn’t met them all yet, just his boss and the seven from his room. They had been friendly enough, not that he needed friends. It was enough to watch them, try to figure them out. Who were the tough guys? The pussies? Who should he avoid? He had expected more girls to be there, but so far it was only Putty’s girlfriend, who was off limits and not that fun to look at, and the one serving drinks. His eyes lingered on her, middle-aged with a pleasantly wide ass. He watched her deliver beer and smiles around the room. When she brought him his second ginger ale, she gave him a wink that reminded him of the sluts from back home with their alcohol-induced confidence and stupid giggles. He asked her if she wanted to meet up after work, and she laughed flirtatiously. “You’re cute,” she said, “but I don’t date customers.” Ethan wasn’t sure she meant it. The way she looked at him suggested otherwise. He kept watching, especially when she cleaned the tables and the denim strained over her cheeks. In the corner where the light was brighter, Putty, Roger, and Bill played pool. Beyond them, Choo had challenged their boss to arm wrestle. They cleared a circle and picked sides. Bossman Owen was an ex-football player who had stuck around town after high school to work his way up the furniture company. He still had his linebacker-build, but Choo was getting lots of support. No surprise. He may have been old and scrappy, but if something in the shop needed lifting, Choo was the one you called. Ethan headed over to watch and maybe stand beside the waitress, accidentally rub against her, find out what she smelled like. “You’re going down,” his boss threatened. Choo was unphased. Owen sat at the table, arm raised and ready. Choo grasped his hand. The waitress counted down and the fight began. Owen stared at Choo with a smirk on his face, his forearm muscles tensing, veins popping from his skin. Choo struggled, groaned, leaned his body into it. But Owen was too much for him. With one last grunt of exertion, Owen pushed Choo’s hand to the table. Cheers went up across the room. When the cheering subsided, Owen hugged Choo and said, “I love you, man.” As the men went back to their drinks and games, Owen helped the waitress put the table chairs back in place. Ethan returned to his spot at the bar and watched his boss make the rounds with high-fives. They respected him. Ethan had to admit he was a good boss. The shop ran smoothly, and even though Ethan didn’t know much about carpentry, Owen had been helpful without being a prick. Owen eventually made his way over to the bar. He clinked his beer against Ethan’s glass. “I’ve been losing against that fucker for three years. Feels good. Like the first time you beat your dad at something, you know?” “My dad’s dead,” Ethan said. He had never held his father’s hand to arm wrestle or for any other reason. Owen apologized and motioned for the waitress. “What’re you drinking?” “Nothing,” Ethan said. “I’m done, heading home.” He pushed away from the bar and headed for the exit without returning his boss’s goodbye. The last thing he wanted was to get into a conversation about his father. Asshole had been gone six years now. Nothing needed to be said. Besides, he’d rather be home playing video games. His shit-hole was on the third floor of a sad-looking building. People were always coming and going. Drugs and hookers, Ethan suspected. This place was only temporary, until he saved enough for first and last somewhere else. When he got to his floor, the neighbor’s angry shouts filled the hallway. She’d fought with her boyfriend every night since he’d moved in. Her voice was muffled, probably talking on the phone. By the time he collapsed on the couch and turned on the TV, she was crying. He didn’t know what the fuck she had done to her boyfriend, but if she didn’t want to cry, why the fuck would she get into it with him in the first place? He hit the wall a few times, yelling, “Shut up!” But the cries continued. He turned up the gunfire and screams on his game and blasted some heads. When the crying finally stopped, he shut off the game and opened his computer to his favorite site. He searched for videos of women with big asses, imagined the waitress in their place, closed his eyes, and thought of himself banging her, banging the high school sluts, banging the neighbor. On Friday, Ethan cashed his check and headed to Buddy’s again. He could get a burger with his ginger ale this time. He spotted an empty parking space in the lot and quickly pulled in, cutting off another car as he did. He turned the engine off and opened his door, groaning as he twisted to get out. It had been another long week, and his back was really feeling it. Putty jumped out of his car and stormed towards him. “What the fuck! You didn’t see me turning in?” Unthreatened, Ethan answered, “Nope.” “Punk-ass kid. I should beat the crap out of you.” Ethan threw his keys down. “Try it.” Piece-of-shit wasn’t going to scare him. As Putty lunged, Owen jumped between them, pushing Putty back.“Knock it off.” . Ethan stepped away.Owen calmly looked back and forth at the two of them. “Putty has to go home to his three-year-old son tonight. Nobody wants him going home with bruises and blood.” And then Owen got in Putty’s face. “Do you really want to beat up this kid who lost his dad and is out here trying to make his way in the world? Beat him up over a parking space?” Putty held his ground, and Ethan didn't budge. “Show Buddy some respect,” Owen continued. “He doesn’t need the police or an ambulance coming here.” Putty turned back to his car, grumbling under his breath. Ethan picked up his keys. Now he was starving. Inside Buddy’s, Ethan ordered his ginger ale and burger from the waitress. Her jeans were even tighter this week. She smiled but didn’t wink. Putty entered and went to the pool table, followed by Owen, who came right over to Ethan. Sitting on the stool beside him, Owen ordered a beer before speaking to him. “It ain’t worth it.” “I know,” Ethan said. He wasn’t going to say thank you. He just wanted to eat. Owen talked a little about a camping trip he was going on with his wife then excused himself to play pool. He didn’t invite Ethan, and Ethan didn’t want to go. After four ginger ales, Ethan went out to the parking lot and sat in his car. Instead of driving home, he watched. His boss shook hands with the crew as he left. Choo and the others came out one by one and drove away. Putty stumbled to the back of the lot. And then the waitress exited. She studied her phone as she walked to her car, oblivious to him. He watched her ass wiggle, half-expecting a knock on the window from a third-shift cop. He thought about where she might be going, where she might live, how she might take her clothes off and shower before bed. He thought about her soapy ass as he watched her drive away. As he unlocked his door, he heard his neighbor crying, sounds of pathetic tears that reminded him of his mom’s. She had cried when his father treated her like shit, cried when he died, cried when she was alone, cried when something reminded her of him. The neighbor’s sobs were just as desperate and depressing. Inside, he leaned against the door and checked the peephole to see if she would come out of her apartment. Her ass was nothing like the waitress’s; she was scrawny with no shape. He watched until the boyfriend came up the stairs then Ethan quickly backed away from the door. He listened to them fight for a while, to the sounds of furniture being thrown around, the sounds of slaps and punches. When things settled down, he laid in bed and imagined filling her mouth with his fist, making her suck, gagging her cries till she was silent. Ethan had been looking forward to the bar at the end of the week again, to seeing the waitress and treating himself to a meal instead of frozen food. At the bar, Ethan grabbed a table in the corner and ordered his food. A few of the guys said hello as they passed on their way to the bar or the pool table. He waved to Owen, who came over and sat on the other side of the table. “How’s it going?” “It’s going.” They chatted about work, the dust, and the long days until the waitress, wearing a skirt and showing off her bare legs, delivered Ethan’s food. He could not get enough of her body. “She’s got the nicest ass,” he said. Owen didn’t disagree, just said, “Penny is the kindest person I know. A very hard worker.” Ethan dug into his burger, famished. Penny. “You got a girl?” Owen asked. “No.” He’d been with girls, had plenty of sex. Just didn’t see the need to have someone permanent. “I’ve got a wife. She’s my girl.” Ethan nodded while chewing. Marriage wasn’t a concept he really got. His boss kept talking. “Do you miss your family, being out here alone?” “No.” “Sorry,” Owen apologized. Ethan knew he meant sorry for the question. “My dad’s been gone since I was twelve. He was a jerk.” “Must’ve been tough.” “You have no idea.” “I don’t.” His boss didn’t try to get him to talk like the school counselor after his dad died, or try to tell him it couldn’t have been that bad like the girl from shop class he dated for two weeks. Owen just sat beside him and drank. “He beat the shit out of my mom regularly,” Ethan said. “I watched him smack her around my whole life.” When he hadn’t seen the beatings, he had heard them or seen the evidence the next day. In his memories, she always had bruises. “Fuckin’ pervert, too.” Ethan shifted on his stool, uncomfortable. “If he hadn’t died before I grew up, I would've killed him. I’m sure of it. She didn’t care, did nothin’ about it. To fuck with a five-year-old kid, that ain’t right.” “He beat you, too?” Owen asked. “Did more than beat.” Ethan had never told anyone about those nights, nights when his mother turned his father away and his father would make his way to Ethan’s room. “Fuck,” Owen said, shaking his head. More than beat. The words brought shame. Hate. Relief. Penny walked by with a tray of empty bottles. Ethan glanced at her then looked away. Owen finished his beer. “I haven’t told too many people this, but I see a therapist for some shit I deal with. He’s helped a lot. If you ever need someone to talk to...” Owen took a business card out of his wallet and slid it across the table. Ethan stared at the number. “I’m fine. He’s dead.” Owen stood, pulled a five out of his pocket for a tip and patted Ethan on the back. “I’ll see you Monday morning. I’ve got to get home to my wife. I miss her, you know?” Ethan didn’t know, had no idea. As Owen left, a few of the guys hollered goodbye from across the room. Ethan finished his burger alone. When he was done, Penny came to take his empty plate away. He scooped up the business card and pocketed it. “Thank you,” Ethan said to her before he stood to leave. Shelly Lynn Stone lives in a small town in Central Massachusetts. She writes short stories, flash fiction, and poetry. When not writing, she works a day job, moonlights as a massage therapist, and tries to find more time for tap dancing. Her work has appeared online in Resistance Poetry, Feminine Collective, Sad Girl Review, the Same, CEO Lit Mag and The Junction. You can find her on Twitter @storybyshelly. lolwho CC
How To Find Your Wow Wow The House with Ants. That night it was just me and the living-room couch, watching a living, dark puddle-- where one wall met another-- thinning out into a wobbly not-so-straight line near the window. The puddle was really ants, flying ants, with their scouts retracing a trail. Dad and my brand new step-mom were doing some serious noise in mum’s bed. Our flat was like a sardine box with a window that looked out on another window that also happened to look out on another window and so forth. It was like watching an image repeat itself in those many mirrors, each one a bit distorted than the one before, till you’ve reached the monster at the end of the line, the root of it all. I imagined having a daughter named Hannah, holding a camera. “Smile mama, it’s the end of the world.” I’d shy away from the flash. One shutter-click, two shutter-clicks, three shutter-clicks, and then poof! She’s a blurry photo, her feathery touch a fading dream. When I looked outside the window into another window, I saw the wobbly-not-so-straight line spreading out like the sea. The Neighbors or What’s Left of Them Mrs. Macintosh's cracked heart, in its kind shade of red, was all the flying army’s left of her. It had been multi-chambered as all hearts are, but with enough room to have housed anyone who cared. Mrs. Macintosh's window overlooked Mr. Fox’s, the engineer and data analyst. I liked Mr. Fox. The wobbly raid spared his brain with all its convoluted alleys and intersections that once led to roads of success. Mr. Fox had had a charming lisp and an egg-shell quality about him, but at the end of the day his brain resembled a walnut. I craved pecans and cinnamon rolls. I wanted a latte. Love Lattes I left for the Café Denim down the street. I wanted to know where all the love went. Was it nicely snug somewhere in someone’s back pocket like a crisp ten dollar note? I saw the twinkle dance in my barista’s caramel eyes. I wanted to touch his sugary brown arms, let them warm me as I forced a tingly sprinkle of syrupy yearning. I wanted him to whisper in my ears and say: You’re one mad love, dove. The flying sea swept through the cafe, its hungry waves consuming my barista, only sparing my sweet-toothed fantasies. Perhaps “The End”? Back home, the police and the forensic specialists asked me to identify the messy pile of limbs on mama’s bed. I cautiously put on a pair of sterile, mint-green gloves and started at the top, like I do when examining ripe veggies in the market. I picked a couple of my father’s kidney stones; they sparkled like clear quartz under the neon led lights. His penis, looked like a shriveled prune that might have once been an eel. And oh my, yes! I found it too, my brand-new step-mom’s flirty vagina, could have made one hell of a fine purse. Finding my Wow Wow. I covered my face with my hand and wondered why little Hannah left. Why silence the shutter-click? But she was there, a beautiful monster, a fluttering queen in delicate sea-black. “All I ever wanted was a latte.” I told her, my face still covering my hands. The little one shook her head and gave me a “you-know-better” look. “Go find your Wow Wow.” She had said. *Listen to Riham's audio version of this story here. Riham Adly’s flash fiction appeared in Bending Genres, Connotation Press, Spelk, The Cabinet of Heed, and Vestal Review, Odd magazine, Sonic Boon, Carpe Art, and The Ekphrastic Review among others. She recently made it to the short-list of the Arab-Lit Translation Prize. She lives with her family in Gizah, Egypt. |
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