Note that any artwork that may appear on a Down in the Dirt issue web page
will appear in black and white in the print edition of Down in the Dirt magazine.

Order this issue from our printer as a 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback book (with both an ISSN# and a ISBN#) a Creative Journey

A Creative Journey Kerry Lown Whalen     I inhabit darkness, narrow and bleak. Encased by high walls, my senses are numb. I wait for inspiration, plumb my mind for specks of light. The stale air I breathe mirrors my thoughts. Coldness settles on my skin. Self-belief shatters. It is a hopeless, maddening search, yet I persevere.     My need to create shouts to be heard. I rack my brain. Fossick for ideas. Make choices. Discard them. I seek equanimity and confidence but disappointment and regret co-exist. I am alone in a void. My mind is empty.     I step back. Consider my lot. Time ticks by.     A word comes. I weigh it. Toss it around.     A beam of light penetrates the darkness. I blink and focus. Elusive and playful, it beckons, daring me to follow. The promise of myriad ideas and creative energy is irresistible. I grasp it and words erupt like lava. I shape them with a rhythm and cadence that enchants. Strong and lively images leap onto the page. Settings amaze. The sun dazzles. The sky soars. And words like precious jewels sparkle in pleasing patterns.     My world is restored.

Kerry Lown Whalen biography     Kerry Lown Whalen lives with her husband on the Gold Coast of Australia. She has won prizes in literary competitions and had short stories and poems published by Stringybark Publications, Bright Light Multimedia, Margaret River Press and Down in the Dirt Magazine.

Cave Woman / Cave Man Soliloquy III William F. Meyer, Jr. (for Gabrielle) I am so dirty and afraid he will find me in the back of the cave —I can’t sleep. I know my family is dead or run off. I am so sore and scraped and scratchy I am so alone I have seen him drag women in here that he raped and killed and ate their hips and breasts. I need what I don’t know.

The cat takes the mouse Fritz Hamilton     The cat takes the mouse/ the dog takes the cat/ the boy takes the cake & eats it too.     “U can’t take the cake & eat it too, Fred.”     “But I can & have, Jesoo.”     “Why can’t U give me a bite?”     “What’s the sense? U’re going to be crucified whether yr stomach is full or empty.”     “I just don’t want to be crucified on an empty stomach.”     “Why?”     “What difference does it make to U? I’d just feel better on the cross with a little cake in me. When the anthropologists find me in a thousand yrs or so, they’ll be fascinated to find traces of cake in my bones.”     “They’ll be fascinated to find yr bones with or without traces of cake.”     “But just think how this’ll blast the nonsense of ‘U can’t have yr cake & eat it too’. This’ll make an ass out of that conventional wisdom.”     “But why care?”     “It’ll be another historical correction. They’re made all the time. We now know that George didn’t cut down a cherry tree.”     “We don’t know that for sure.”     “We have never found the remains of a chopped down cherry tree.”     “We’ve never found the bones of Jesoo either.”     “Do U think Jesoo cut down the cherry tree?”     “I think that’s the pits.”

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers hosting the open mic 10/8/14 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago, where throughout the evening poems were read from cc&d magazine (v251) and Down in the Dirt magazine (v125). The beginning of the open mic starts with Janet Kuypers reading Eight to Sixteen, then (after Patrick Hurley & Dan Weinberg read) she read the Becky Grush poem untitled (tree). The Bill Yarrow read poetry from cc&d magazine. Then Bob Rashkow read, and then Janet Kuypers read the cc&d mag Zoe Broome poem The Headless Elephant, then, after Jerry Pendergast read, Janet Kuypers read the Down in the Dirt magazine poem by Fritz Hamilton titled Why line yrself up against the wall?... Readers then were Jenene Ravesloot, Tom Roby, Joffre Stewart and Gerry Reynolds, where Janet Kuypers ended the evening with her cc&d magazine poem Depth of Field.

Breakfast Companions David Hutt     It’s not the fly’s fault. Not really. He wasn’t to know he was landing on my bacon and eggs and shitting all over my breakfast. He was just hungry, that’s all. The bacon and eggs looked as good to him as they looked good to me. And it’s not my fault she left. Not really. I just have a taste of alcohol and wanted to go out on a good drunk. She didn’t have any space in her stomach for my well-rehearsed apologies, she said she heard them all before – and the promises too. I ignore the fact he had vomited all over my eggs and shat himself on my bacon and I enjoy my breakfast.

Janet Kuypers reads writing appearing in the v125 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine, titled a Creative Journey Including “Breakfast Companions” by David Hutt, “Dodgeball” by A, Lenkeit, and “Subliminal” by Michael J. Grodssky.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading writing appearing in the v125 issue of Down in the Dirt mag, titled a Creative Journey live 10/22/14 at Chicago’s the Café Gallery

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers hosting the open mic 10/22/14 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago INCLUDING THIS PERFORMANCE

Isles Liam Spencer the isles are tough to navigate for a lone person at night as they’re clogged with families loud children who rarely get out exhausted men trying to seem fine with it all walking beside their unhappy women who struggle to find a mere once of happiness as they pile their carts high with cheap food and few goodies you pass by knowing to not be annoyed but to be thankful you’re not them other things flood your mind anyway you chose your items quickly and make way to checkout where lines are long some push their way ahead of those nice enough to allow the louder and more aggressive steal their way and impose themselves makes them feel bigger I guess a little girl behind you in line picks up the divider you set and swings it around then smacks your eggs her mother yacks on the cell while piling food high on the conveyer the checkout woman glares someone steals your empty cart while you pay your bill theirs was too full $50, half wine, gone 4 bags, including the eggs Your head aches but You remember you’re not them The cashier takes a few moments away to grab you a cart while you bagged such a person is rare indeed and makes the night a bit better

Document The Shooter in Light Blue Chris Milam     The ball is as comfortable in his long fingers as a brush is to an artist, a pen to a writer. He had the grace of movement commonly found in a ballerina, albeit one dressed in a light-blue maintenance uniform. I watched as he flicked his wrist and the ball drifted thru the air with perfect backspin on its way to the bottom of the net, its typical landing spot. His arm remained extended out in front of him, hand bent straight down. The follow-through of a shooter.     During break time, my coworkers would play basketball or, at the least, try and one-up each other. Lowell couldn’t dribble nor shoot but he was a menace on defense, he got in your face and stayed there, smothering you. Robbie was the floor general. He would fling passes around his back, dribble between his legs with a fair amount of precision. He was the table setter, controlling the flow, making life easier for the shooters. Rory was a behemoth, a space eater. He would stand in the lane with a smirk on his face, daring anyone to drive his way. If you chose that course, a sharp elbow would make you rethink that decision in the future. The talent assembled on this concrete court wouldn’t exactly win a title at the local YMCA but the guys played with a measurable amount of passion. Then there was Latroy Banks. He scored 14 points before I chewed up my second     I’ve worked at Gaylord Corporation for three years. I started working here at eighteen but after grinding out shift after shift, my mental age is pushing forty. It’s easy to become cynical and disillusioned when your career choice doesn’t align itself with your dreams. Like most kids, I wanted to be a baseball player or a rock star when I was young and naive. Hitting a game winning home run in the bottom of the ninth at Fenway Park or belting out a power ballad at Wembley stadium, my adoring fans hanging on every clichéd lyric. But I couldn’t hit a slider and I have the voice of a banshee so that wasn’t in the cards. But I had an esteemed high school diploma, so this factory was where I watched my aspirations begin to write their own epitaph.     Being analytical or computer savvy wasn’t a prerequisite for my job, I just banded skids for a living. I would unspool the metal banding material and loop it around the cardboard covered skid of parts. Crank it tight and cinch it with a metal clip. Three bands per skid, properly strangling the precious cargo. I repeated this process over and over, 10 hours a day. There was never a crowd applauding my efforts, just the silence and drudgery of lost time.     Most of the guys that worked here were solid people. The kind of guys that would give you a ride to work if your alternator abruptly died and wouldn’t charge you gas money. Or they would come over on the weekend and help you repair your car, a knuckle-busting fist-bump as payment. Simp!e men with kind hearts. Rory, Lowell and Robbie were my closest friends at work. We occasionally hit a bar after to work to suck down some draft beer and knock some balls across the felt or we would hit the lanes and bowl an embarrassing score. Sometimes we would put together a poker night, not a profitable endeavor for me. I had a tendency to talk too rapidly when I was sitting on a monster hand. They fleeced me with ease.     The guys slapped the moniker Boneyard on me due to my slight build. I just called them by their names because I could never think of something clever or cool to pin on them. They always asked me to play some hoops at break time but I never accepted, I was more of a watcher than a player. I liked to tell myself that I was the sensitive and scholarly type, that their blue-collar game was beneath me. But, no, I desperately wanted to play but I wasn’t a shooter, or a dribbler or a defensive mastermind. Unlike Latroy, this kid couldn’t play.     The factory floor was all various shades of pale. Not borne from bigotry in the front office or something sinister. It’s just that the town we lived in, Lancaster, was predominately white. When Latroy walked in the door six months ago the employees took notice but nothing was ever said. Latroys gentle spirit disarmed you before you could even begin to form a negative thought in your mind. He laughed at our jokes and tossed in a few of his own. The kid could work a room.     His uniform was the first thing you noticed about him. He tucked his shirt deep into his pants, the shirt buttons lined up perfectly with the zipper on his work pants. A black belt, tan steel-toed boots and a bleached white undershirt completing his ensemble. Rumor has it that he irons his uniform every night before bed but, as of now, that is unconfirmed. He just looked put-together, he looked crisp and professional, he cared about his appearance. Most of us had mustard stains or missing buttons or pants that were frayed at the bottom but not Latroy, he was the factory fashionista.     He was also engaging. He wasn’t a loquacious man but he listened intently as you told him a personal story, his eyes fixed on yours, absorbing every word and emotion. He might offer a piece of advice or remain silent, he knew when to speak or just listen but he always put a light hand on your shoulder before he walked away. We all liked him, most of us gravitated towards him and his courteous vibe.     Another thing that made him stand out to a certain degree were the books he always read at the shorter breaks, when there wasn’t time for a game of hoops. While the rest of us hot-boxed a Marlboro or made amateurish jokes, Latroy had his nose in a book. Donald Ray Pollock, John D McDonald, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, there wasn’t a discernible pattern to his reading habits but he loved to feed his mind while the rest of us silently wished we more like him before we stubbed out our cigarettes and shuffled back inside the plant.     A conversation I overheard one time between Latroy and Rory addressed a question that always lingered in my mind.     “Why are you here, man? You don’t fit in here. You’re smarter than most of us, you’re more athletic, more self-aware. I just don’t get why you’re here, shouldn’t you be in college or something?”     “Poverty is why I’m here. My mother needs me to work because my dad chose to indulge his demons and he never came back home, it’s that simple. College can wait a couple of years, my family needs my income, it was the easiest decision I’ve ever made.”     He was really no different from us, you do what’s necessary to survive, you do things for your family. We could all relate.     One thing about banding skids for a living was that you had plenty of time to contemplate your life. I thought about my loneliness a lot on those long days. I knew I wasn’t a catch, I was average looking, I had an average intelligence and an average apartment. My ambition was less than average. I didn’t know how to proceed in the dating world when I lacked the confidence that seemed necessary to find love. I’ve yet to have sex, something the guys will never know. But as I looped the metal around those skids, I kept seeing Latroys handsome face. Love, lust, infatuation, I don’t know exactly what I was feeling but I knew that he made my heart scream, my skin tingle. He was rooted in my thoughts when I watched adult entertainment, he was anchored in my bones when I drifted off to sleep at night. He was there in my coffee cup in the morning, beckoning me. He shadowed me everywhere I went, visible but untouchable. I was falling hard for the shooter in the light-blue uniform.     One major drawback of having feelings for another man was that I couldn’t discuss it with the guys. I’m not convinced they would react negatively or terminate our friendship but I’m not willing to risk it. Part of me thinks that if I revealed myself, there would be a palpable undercurrent of disgust or disapproval in the back of their minds. They would accept me but then dismiss me in hushed tones or shun me with their body language and a dark glint in their eyes. Or maybe I just felt ashamed that I didn’t lust after the secretaries or the cute bartenders like they did. I didn’t gawk at a woman’s ass when she sauntered by. I didn’t care about breasts or long legs.     I would love to get feedback from Rory or Lowell or any of the other guys about Latroy. You think I have a shot? Do you think he’s attractive? Should I ask him out? Is he out of my league? Does he ever talk about me? These are questions men ask their friends about women, not other men. I was on an island, there was no coworker to divulge my secret to, no friend to guide me. I was alone in my confused state.     Courage is a funny thing. It ebbs and flows, gains steam then dissipates. Linked together with your insecurities and a fear of rejection it creates a conundrum. We want to know the answer, we want or must find a resolution to a basic yet poignant question: Do you like me? Or any other manifestation of a similar refrain: Do you desire me? Does your heart slam against its bone prison when I walk by? Do you find me attractive? Do you miss me when I’m not around? The answer to these questions have the ability to build or destroy. To slay or heal. To strengthen or cripple. But we must know the answer, we have to make ourselves vulnerable to the casual dismissal or approval of a person whose attention we seek. In the end, courage takes hold and you plunge forward, it’s the only course.     Earlier this morning Latroy was repairing a hydraulic leak on one of our forklifts in the shipping area. My area. My head swiveled from the skids in front of me to his well-muscled forearms. From the banding machine to the mocha skin on his nicely sculpted face. Anxiety was leaking out of my pores, my lungs were heaving desperate breaths. My mind was clicking its way through various fantasies. My courage led to footsteps in his direction.     “Hey, Latroy.” He glanced up at me with those alluring and curious eyes of his, melting me where I stood. “Sorry to bother you, but I want to ask you something.”     “Fire away, Boneyard. I’m all ears.”     My courage was looking for the nearest exit.     “Look, don’t take this the wrong way or anything. And I certainly don’t want to offend you but...look, I just want to know... would you be interested in having dinner with me or a drink sometime?”     My eyes landed on anything that wasn’t Latroy. I have never felt as pathetic and small as I did in that moment. I wished I had stayed over there banding my skids. It was a safer place than waiting on a reply from the man who controlled my fate.     When I finally looked at him, he was staring at me. Seeing my weaknesses, my averageness. He analyzed and processed my question with a deliberate slowness.     “I’ve got a girlfriend, man. I’m sorry, Logan.” He said with his ever-present smile. He softly touched my shoulder, grabbed his wrench and went back to fixing the leak.     As I sit outside at the concrete court, sipping on my RC cola, I watch Robbie skip a pass to Latroy who is stationed at the top of the key.     Earlier, It would’ve been nice if Latroy had cupped my face in his slender hands and agreed to have dinner with me. Or just punched me in the jaw and called me a freak or something, show some form of emotion. He let me down easy, though and I suppose that was for the best. I was crushed and reeling but still functioning.     He catches the ball and rises into the air like a ballerina. His right elbow tucked close to his body when he flicks his wrist and compels the ball to rotate and float in a gorgeous arc towards the bottom of the worn-out net. I watched the man who would never be mine with a practiced awe. I knew that this was going to be my last day at the factory. Fear of exposure, tired of banding skids and the sting of rejection made it the easiest decision I’ve ever made in my life. It was time to move on and find whatever I’m looking for. Find myself.     As I head back inside the plant, I turned around and saw Latroy drain another long jumper. I smiled to myself. The kid could play. sandwich. The kid could play.

Penny Brett Milam     With one final grunt and thrust, he edged off of me, turned to a sitting position and walked out of the room with a snide, “Bitch,” in his wake. I rubbed my throat where his hand had been. There was blood from when his fingernail must have scratched me on the side of the neck. He was limp; it wasn’t my fault, but the red handprint on my throat didn’t indicate that to him.     I slid my hand under the covers. If he wasn’t going to get me off, someone had to. This was our nightly ritual. He’d thrust, thrust, choke, thrust, choke, yell, “Bitch,” and thrust before giving up in a ball of rage. He’d leave the room to go watch some bullshit on television and I’d finish myself off. I had a vibrator. He didn’t know about it, under the floor panel under the bed. I reached for it now. Donatello (yeah, after the turtle – don’t ask) was much friendlier to me than him; he moved sensitively down there and could last as long as possible.     After he was finished, I put Donatello back and pulled out my sketch pad and lit the little lamp next to the bed. Nothing fancy tonight, but I felt like hearing the sounds of the pencil etching across the thin paper.     “What are you doing?” Charles said, as he re-entered the room in only red boxers. He still had remnants of a high school six-pack stomach; he didn’t drink and he stuck to mostly steamed vegetables and cod. He brushed a strand of black hair from his eyes with the swipe of his hand – god that was sexy – and went over to his side of the bed.     “Just drawing, Charlie,” I said, as I moved the pencil across the pad, starting in on a portrait of a soldier with his legs blown to pieces.     “I’m going to read Middlesex,” he said, and pulled a book from the bedside table drawer.     “What is that, some erotica?” I said, not looking at him or the book.     “No, it’s a book in Oprah’s Book Club; you wouldn’t know anything about it,” he said, removing a bookmark that looked to be only set a few pages in. I thought the bookmark had dinosaurs on it. I had never seen it.     For the next two hours, I sketched and he read in complete silence except for the occasional page flipped from him and the scratch, scratch my pencil made. Then he turned out the light on his side and said, “Let’s go to bed.” I had just erased an errant line that made the soldier’s nose look snake-like, but otherwise, it was shaping up okay. I put the pad under the mattress, the pencil on the table and put head to pillow. I wasn’t tired. I scratched at the reddening on my throat.     The next morning, I made him a vegetarian omelet. I had found some recipe through Google and was following it, but I never could get the spatula to navigate the eggs right. He sipped black coffee, reading Middlesex again; he must have been at a good part.     Fuck, I tried flipping the omelet over and half of it spilled over the frying pan. I tried to scoop it back into the pan, but burned my finger. “Shit!” I said, as I licked my finger and then brought it under cool water from the tap.     “You have such a dirty mouth,” he remarked, not taking his eyes off the page he was reading.     I guess “bitch” wasn’t a dirty word, then. The omelet looked like an IED had gone off inside of it, but I put it on a plate with a bit of garnish – he insisted on that part – and stepped back. He dripped barely a morsel of hot sauce onto the omelet, took a slivering bite, masticated for not even a full second and then knocked his plate off the table. Pieces of green pepper and egg intermixed with the broken black plate on the floor.     “Clean it up, I’m late for work,” Charles said, and he scooped up his black coat and was out the door before I could say something sarcastic back.     I didn’t clean it up until five minutes before he was to return from work. Because, fuck him.     In the meantime, I went to a local coffeehouse dubbed the Howling Flame Cellar, which made no sense because it wasn’t an Irish Pub, but the coffee was delicious, anyhow. I sat at a corner by myself and opened my laptop. Immediately, I went to OkCupid. I wanted to chat with someone normal or at least, as normal as you could find on an online dating Web site     I found someone named Robbie. He had done two tours in Afghanistan, had three pitbulls named Curly, Larry and Moe. Cute; I clicked and sent a quick message:     hi, Curly, Larry and Moe don’t exactly strike me as fearsome, ravenous pitbulls, but cute. Want to chat? :)     He was online, so it didn’t take long for a response:     Penny? I don’t think I’ve ever met a Penny before. Well, at least one without a beard before...     Heh, cheesy, but I’ll take it because he was good looking. He had a strong jawline like you would expect with cropped brown hair and a mole on his cheek that was kinda sexy.     I responded:     Usually, I get the Penny for Your Thoughts line, but an Abe joke, not bad. But let’s get down to it. I’m sitting in a coffeehouse, the Howling Flame Cellar, yeah I don’t know either; do you want to come over sometime? Grab a cup of coffee, do this or that, whatever.     Within seconds:     Yeah, I have some time on leave. That’d be great. Ha, maybe you can even meet the Stooges.     We set up a time and date; I closed my laptop and was out the door and back home in a few minutes.     I wanted to get to my painting. Nothing quite drew me in like a blank canvas. I hadn’t had a gallery opening in a few weeks, but I was hoping this new piece I had in mind would be the catalyst I needed.     Destroyed buildings, flames still licking at the façade, body parts strewn across a bloody cobbled road, a small child weeping over her mother’s fallen body, a dog sitting perched under a street lamp, not understanding, a tank rolling around the corner, two young men exchanging their last cigarettes with blackened hands, an unused grenade rolling toward a sewer and the sun creeping up in the background, shining a light on the aftermath of a conflict.     I was thinking Tears of a City, no, too on the nose, maybe What Is It Good For? No, I didn’t want to borrow...well, the title could wait.     By the time I finished the last brown brush stroke on the dog’s tail – tails were always the hardest for me, worse than hands – it was almost time for Charlie’s arrival. And that fucking omelet was still mashed on the floor downstairs. I put away my supplies and threw a ravaged tarp over the canvas and ran downstairs. I scooped up the broken plate and pieces of food, which smelled worse than a foxhole and discarded them in the trashcan. I brewed coffee, poured it in his Price is Right cup, and leaned in against the counter, waiting.     I heard as the chain of the garage door struggled to pull the maroon door open, the smooth engine of our, well, his, Cadillac, a work vehicle, into the familiar spot and the door slammed shut. In he came. He had flowers. Sunflowers, to be precise and dammit, I hated when he did this. My stomach fluttered on instinct. He kissed me on the cheek, handed me the flowers, took off his coat, grabbed his coffee and took a long sip, even though it was hot. Ugh.     “Thanks, Charlie,” I managed.     “Come on, put ‘em in some water,” he muttered, between sips.     I did. I inhaled their fresh scent and smiled; they smelled as if just pulled from fresh dirt after a mellow rain shower. Or they probably sat lonely on a shelf under fluorescent bulbs in a store sprayed by a water bottle once in while from a middle-aged, minimum wage woman until Charlie happened by them.     Later that night, the ritual had begun: thrust, thrust, thrust. He really tried hard this time, sweat dripped from his reddened face, his eyes contorted into concentration; he looked like a bald eagle about to swoop in on its prey, but I could already feel him beginning to go soft. Just like every night. This time there was no choking or bitch-yelling. He gently rolled off me, gasped for breath and twisted to his side.     I said, soft as I could, “Maybe, maybe we should finally see a doctor about it, Charlie.” I touched my hand to his side and scooted closer.     Within seconds, he was on his feet and had turned on me. He grabbed me by my auburn, curly hair and punched me in the mouth.     “Don’t ever say that,” he said. He didn’t scream. It was barely a whisper.     “But I,” I started to say, and he pulled back his bleeding fist from where it had connected with my teeth before and thudded his fist into my mouth once more. This time it felt like one of my teeth loosened, I didn’t know which one, though, because I was too busy – panicked about the trickling blood, my heart clawed at my chest, and the tears scorched.     “God, Penny,” he said. I didn’t even hear him. He walked over to the dresser, looked into the mirror and smoothed back his hair. His shoulders rose for what seemed like the longest time and then dropped back down. He looked in the mirror again and saw me wipe the blood off my lip with the comforter.     He came at me, but tripped over my black heels, and reached for my throat. I tried this time to resist; I scratched at his face and kicked, but his hand was at my throat, tightened. I could see where I got him with a scratch next to his left eye, but it didn’t seem to bother him. His hand sure wasn’t going limp.     Then he stopped and was off of me. I wasn’t dead. I gasped, coughed, coughed, coughed, coughed and sneezed. Blood, snot, tears and spit. I looked at him through blurred vision. A strand of his hair hung over his eyes, but he didn’t swipe it away.     His eyes turned to my canvas with the ravaged tarp. He walked over to it, ripped off the tarp and looked and looked and looked and looked...     “This is shit,” he said. He left the room.     I sat up and felt dizzy and lied back down. Son of a bitch. Then, I heard footsteps returning up the stairs. Charlie came through the frame of the door with something in his hands.     A knife.     He slashed at the canvas, ripped and tore, scratched, scratched. I fumbled through the comforter and flailed out of the bed, screaming at him. I grabbed him around the ankles, crying and spitting and bleeding and yelling. He turned on me and kicked me in the mouth. As if my mouth hadn’t had enough.     My eyes slid open. I was still on the bedroom floor. My head throbbed, my mouth throbbed harder and I could feel the thick texture of dried blood on my mouth. I looked to my right and could see the pieces of my canvas everywhere. I managed to sit up and then roll to my knees. I picked up a piece of the canvas that was the damn dog’s tail. Maybe a bit bushier than I intended, but well, I need a newer brush...I threw it across the room. Goddammit.     I didn’t go to the bathroom to clean up, like I usually would. I stumbled, bumping against the walls and the railing, down the stairs. I came into the kitchen to find him smelling the Sunflowers. Middlesex was turned over on the table, as if he had been reading it prior.     “You have a limp dick,” I said. Wait, did I just say that? I felt the vibration of the syllables on my tongue and “dick” had a particular elongated bite about it, but I didn’t believe I had actually said anything until I saw him turn around, his eyes open wider than I’ve ever seen them, but not in rage, something else entirely, something I had yet to see from him: sadness and disappointment. But I pressed on.     “You’re soft. You’ve never pleasured me before, ever. You know what I do, Charlie? I take out a vibrator from under our bed, and I pleasure myself after your limp dick leaves. Donatello – that’s what I call it – is better to me than you’ve ever been,” I said, and held onto the chair in front of me to steady myself. I whipped my hair out of my face. He stood against the counter, his hand still holding onto the vase the sunflowers sat in.     “And if you weren’t limp, your dick is ridiculously small; I wouldn’t feel anything, even if you managed to keep it hard. It’s amazing you can find the fucking thing to piss. Remember when you told me how many girlfriends you had before me? Surely they faked every orgasm you ever thought you gave them because that little limp fucker couldn’t do anything for anyone. You’re a pathetic loser, Charlie. You bring those sunflowers home and think it will make me forget your limp dick in the evening and the thud of your fist afterwards? Fuck you, Charlie. Fuck you. God, that feels good to say. Fuck you, you limp dick son of a bitch,” I said, and my chest was on fire and my head was spinning. I had to sit down. I did.     Charlie was quiet.     He grabbed his book, noted what page he was on and left the kitchen. I heard his feet on the stairs and then the bedroom door closed.     I must have been blacked out for a while, as it neared six-thirty in the morning. I turned on the tap and washed my face and scrubbed and scrubbed. Then I grabbed the vase of sunflowers and tossed it into the trash.     The sun glinted through the small kitchen window; the sky filled with purple and orange hues. It was beautiful. I gravitated to the front door, opened it, turned toward the bedroom door, lingered and then left. I didn’t know where I was walking to or why or how awful my face looked, but I kept walking.

Second Chances Robert Bates     Michael Johnson sits alone on his bed staring at an old photo of himself and a girl at their senior prom. He realizes that the girl he is looking at probably doesn’t even remember he exists, but he can hope.     “You should call her,” his older brother says, walking into the room.     “How long were you standing there?” Michael asks suspiciously.     “Long enough. Whatever happened to that girl?”     “I have no idea. I don’t even know where she is.”     “Maybe you should track her down.”     “It’s been five years; I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want me back in her life. Anyway, seen any good movies lately?” Michael asks, clearly trying to change the subject.     “You should call her,” Matt says persistently.     “I’m not going to call her,” Michael says defiantly.     “She was your high school sweetheart.”     “Was.”     “You need to call her.”     “I don’t even have her number.”     “She could still have the same one.”     “I highly doubt it.”     “Just try it!”     Michael finally picks up his phone and dials in the numbers. After what seems like an eternity, a familiar voice answers.     “Hey! Um...this is Michael Johnson,” he says nervously.     Matt watches his expression change from a look of blank nervousness to a slight grin.     “Yeah, I still live here.”     Matt can only hear one side of the conversation, but it sounds like it is going well, and Michael hasn’t stopped grinning.     “You’re kidding?” Michael says, his expression changing to absolute shock.     “Yeah, that sounds great...groovy...interstellar,” Michael pauses for a moment, puts the cell phone down to his chest, and covers it with his hand so the girl can’t hear.     “Why am I talking like I’m from the seventies?” Michael quietly whispers to Matt.     “Just keep making words, you’re doing fine,” Matt assures him.     Michael raises the phone back to his ear and begins making more words.     “Yeah, see you at seven,” Michael says as he hangs up the phone.     “She’s in town?” Matt asks in a surprised tone.     “She’s in town!” Michael exclaims happily, beginning to pace around the room.     “That’s awesome! It’s six forty-five; you can pace later, go get ready!”     “I am!” yells Michael, rushing out of the room.     “I’m going to head out!”     “I’ll let you know how it goes!”     “I’ll be at the wedding!” Matt shouts as he walks out of the front door.     Michael changes several times, but finally manages to find some clothes that he looks decent in, and gets to the restaurant before she does. She walks in fashionably late at seven-fifteen and sits down at the table.     “You’re late, Sarah,” he says with a playful smile on his face.     “Well, I had two dates before you and they were both better looking,” she says with the same smile.     “I’m glad to see you haven’t changed at all.”     They order their food and are quickly served, but there is much more talking than eating.     “So, how is the love life?” Michael asks, scared to know the answer.     “Well, my boyfriend and I broke up a few months ago,” she says simply.     “What happened?” asks Michael, leaning forward in his chair.     “He turned out to be a girl,” she says with a smirk on her face.     “Why did it take you so long to find out?”     “You know how I am, I like to take things slow.”     “Unfortunately.”     “And that comment is why I’m letting you pay for dinner!” she says with a satisfied smile on her face.     “I’m so glad I found you,” Michael says sarcastically.     “You have a lady in your life?” Sarah asks quickly, side-stepping his sarcasm.     “Ah, yes, her name is Lafonda and we are getting married tomorrow,” Michael says with a smirk on his face.     “I know that’s not true,” she says bluntly.     “Because of the ridiculous name?”     “Because you get this stupid smirk on your face when you lie, it makes me want to kiss you and punch you at the same time. Plus, I know that I’m the only person who will ever put up with you,” she says, raising her glass.     “And I with you,” Michael says as they clink their glasses together.     “But your last statement begs the question, am I getting kissed or punched?” he says, finally feeling some confidence.     “Well, I guess you’ll just have to walk me home and find out,” says Sarah, winking at him.     Michael begrudgingly pays the bill and they walk outside into the chilly night air.     “So, where are you staying?” Michael asks her while putting his jacket on.     “Just up the street actually,” she says, pointing into the distance.     They walk up the white sidewalk and arrive at a rundown apartment within minutes. The paint looks like it has endured a war, one wall looks like it has been pushed in by a bulldozer, and another wall looks like it is trying to leave.     “It’s a...nice place you got here,” he awkwardly lies.     “Don’t patronize me, it’s worse than your dating life,” she replies smartly.     “I was just trying to be a supportive friend,” he says defensively.     “I know. You just suck at it,” she says while turning towards him.     She suddenly leans in and kisses him on the lips. She doesn’t say anything and walks right up to the door to go inside. But right before she enters, she turns around.     “It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, life gives us a chance to fix something we messed up the first time,” she says, with a rare dose of sincerity.     Michael pauses for a moment, not really knowing how to respond to an overly sentimental statement like that, but he finds some words eventually.     “Are you saying you messed up?” he asks with a satisfied look on his face.     “Don’t push it,” she says, her smile coming back.     “I’ll call you,” he says with a goofy smirk on his face.     “You better,” Sarah says, walking into the house and shutting the white door behind her.     Michael tries to make sense of the weird interaction that has just occurred as he walks away from her house with a smile on his face and a strut in his step.

Thanks Eric Burbridge     A tingle alternated from my head to toes, but I couldn’t move or hardly see. A muffled female voice said, “Blink, if you hear me!”     I obeyed. Where am I...who are you? The haze cleared; I saw fingers fanning.      “You see me?” She straddled me, grabbed my collar and pressed the black mask she wore against my nose. “Surprise, player, I’m Clara, thanks for inviting us over.” She released me and my head hit the floor. I couldn’t throw up the helplessness that churned in my gut. “Ah...don’t cry.” She ran her fingernail under my eyes.“You thought you were going to get some, didn’t you?” She laughed, got up and adjusted the lighting.      I saw speakers hanging from the floor joist. Groans and sobs echoed from the darkness on my right.      I’m in my basement!     The masked female stood over me topless, black bikini panties hugged her vanilla hips. “The drug will wear off after while, Lester.” She propped up my head; I saw my hands.     Jesus! I had a vise grip on huge chef’s knives that pointed upward. I couldn’t let go. My arms were propped too.     She laughed in my face. “Big, thick and long like you say you are, pretty boy; you piece of crap! I hate guys like you.” She rubbed her finger along my eyebrows, nose and lips. “Beautiful hazel eyes, perfect nose and lips.” A shrill voice in the corner tried to penetrate a gag. Clara jumped up and kicked something, “Shut up!” More groaning and then a dragging sound.     What was it?     The mask hovered over my face like a nightmarish apparition. She held a naked blonde by her hair she drug out of the dark corner. She was bound and gagged with duct tape. She lifted her, “I hate pretty people, don’t you?” She held her face over the blade in my left hand and slammed it down. Blood shot out of her eye and ran down the blade like water out a faucet. Clara’s long bony fingers wiggled her head around the blade. Pieces of eyeball dropped on my leg as she hollowed out the socket. Blood curdling screams seeped pass the duct tape’s edges. She snatched her head, slit her throat and left her impaled neck to drain and pool under me.     I tried to scream! What will she do to me? Where did she go?     She’s dragging something else. “Surprise again...Lester.” She dropped a bound, naked brunette on my right hand, repeatedly. The blade went through her breast like butter. She screamed and went limp. “Those were the cuties you took home for a threesome, remember? I told you I wanted to watch. You forgot; no surprise...my concoction causes memory loss.”     She was right.     She put her glove-tipped fingers on my lips. “Don’t try to talk, in a while you’ll be babbling like mad to the police. Now...I have to clean up, I don’t want to get caught. That’s where you come in. Thanks for taking the blame...bye.”     I moved from under the bodies and pulled the blades out of Clara’s victims. I strained to open my right hand to drop the knife, but I couldn’t. I heard shouts and running upstairs. The basement door flew open. Cops stormed down the stairs. Two huge officers saw the knife. “Drop it, drop it!” I shook violently and fell on my face. “Stop it, stop it,” a feminine voice said, followed by slaps to my face. I grabbed at a hand and tried to avoid the assault. “Wake up, Lester; wake up you fell out the bed.” My wife straddled me. “You OK?” I nodded and wiped sweat off my face. “You’re hard as a two by four. I call myself giving you a good wakeup call and you have a damn nightmare. I keep telling you vodka and pizza with anchovies doesn’t mix.” She got off me. “You scared me, get up.”     My heart beat slowed. “You’re right...no more pizza, but I can’t say that about the vodka.”

To Speak for Janey Liz Betz     There is a clearing that separates Ben Hyde’s farmhouse from a huge sprawling junkyard of rusty machinery that he and his father, and a couple of farmers before them, have abandoned rather than repaired.     Inside the house that deserves abandonment too, Ben’s wife Mary Ann dresses and quickly applies the slightest amount of makeup. Not so much that her husband could claim that she looks trashy but enough to bolster her confidence. She is a woman of 35, with the plain honest face that seems to come from work in the fields. Dusted across her nose are freckles leftover from her childhood.     She tugs furiously on a hair brush but with the humidity today she can only gather the tangle of red curls into a hair holder. Then with her hair pulled back, she becomes conscious of her overbite. Well, she frowns, short of a small fortune and an orthodontist they can’t afford... but she smiles slightly in memory of Janey’s statement that her teeth were cute, and suddenly she seems younger. How kind, she thinks, for a kid to say that, but that’s what Janey was like. She nods to her reflection then a question crosses her face. Did she mention Janey’s kindness? Or is that implied by loyalty to friends?     Mary Ann lays out Ben’s suit and fresh underwear on the bed, and then tucks in a matchbook into his pocket. He’d remember his smokes but not necessarily anything else. That’s her job. She glances out the window as if she could hurry Ben by doing so. But Ben’ll be dragging his feet. He’s shown his irritation a hundred little ways, since she got involved with this funeral.     She inhales deeply to push her ribcage out, for it seems her very bones squeeze when she thinks of the day ahead.     Let her speak well for Janey. Please.     She pauses at the window. Her hand rests above a water stain that has crept out from beneath her repairs. Spit and denial- Ben’s way or prayers or patches –hers- haven’t halted the house’s decay.     The sky, Mary Ann decides, tells her a storm will move in. She can sense the electricity that can conjure clouds up from nothing. Rain would be so welcome, and might even settle Ben’s nerves. But if it rains on his fresh paint...     Just this once, she prays, just this once, don’t let him be riled.     He’s right. She’s the last person they should have asked to do Janey’s eulogy. But Janey’s sister tracked her down at the second hand store only minutes after she heard of the death, to ask for her help. Shock more than anything made her say yes, she told Ben. Really there isn’t anyone else. She gathers her notes. She could read them again, while she waits for Ben, but she doesn’t. Maybe they’ll sound right in the church. Please. Then she pauses in front of the mirror to pull at her rust coloured, second hand, silk pantsuit. Ben hated it the minute he saw it.     Now Janey. Janey would have loved it. She would have draped her turquoise scarves around the neck or the waist. She would have posed and strode through the day wearing it, like a magpie in her boldness. She would never have tried to change it. But the silk is meant to be the color it is, god awful with her hair or not. It resists the black dye, she tries and in the end she is glad. Ben is not.     Ben is outside painting on a bit of slab fence, might as well; he said when he discovers a half pail of paint amongst some boxes from an auction sale. That he would choose to paint this morning, hung over, with the service at 10 is just like him. But if Mary Ann said anything...     Let him glance at his watch. Let him put away the brush and the paint. Let him do it now. Please, show this mercy. Her stomach knotted. Time has run short.     Janey had plans for her time on this earth. That’s how she used to call it, “Mary Ann”; she’d say “we just have a certain amount of time on this earth. And we ought to fill it right to the brim”. The braveness she had as a teen. The life they dreamt of having. The life they should have by now.     Finally Ben comes in and bangs and clatters as if the very walls have to move to accommodate his presence. His shadow looms in the doorway and he enters the bedroom where he sees the clothes that Mary Ann has laid out.     “Do I have to wear that?” he asks but Mary Ann pretends to be preoccupied as if she isn’t ready to go.     “Frigging hot and I have to wear a monkey suit.” He says as he sucks in his stomach to do up the buttons on his shirt then he frowns.     “Jesus. You’re going to melt in that...that silk.” His lip curls.     Mary Ann looks down at her hands. Her unpolished nails, she never thought, but then she’s hardly had time. It wasn’t until Ben’s brother Eddie drug Ben off to the bar last night that she had time to write the little bit that she has, let alone anything else. But in the past, Janey and she painted their nails all the time. They talked about their life that just called out for pink passion or rascal red as if they belonged in Hollywood.     Ben is ready and they get into the half-ton truck, but not before Mary Ann arranges an old cloth on her side of the bench seat. Ben’s lips grow thin, but he says nothing. They drive to town and are soon pulling down the street where the church is. Clusters of people are outside.     Let it be cool inside. Let her find the words.     It is only a few minutes before the service, when they find a parking spot some distance from the church. The number of vehicles proves one thing about rural communities. No matter what the circumstances of the death there is always a good turnout for a funeral. The hearse is the only clean and polished vehicle. That says something too.     They walk past houses; one yard contains a picnic table with legs half rotten, and then another has a swing set with one chain unattached to its seat. Beneath a cracked window Mary Ann notices a group of rose bushes that are bravely covered with buds, although many thistles intertwine.     This kind of turnout for a funeral as well as the drinking last night, with Janey’s brother-in-law buying the rounds, is tradition. Mary Ann isn’t the only woman this morning whose lips hold tight on words as hangovers subside.     Then Eddie swings in beside them. He’s wearing sunglasses, dark against his pale skin.     “Can I bum a smoke?” Eddie asks. Ben should say there isn’t time but they stop and the brothers light up. Mary Ann hesitates, she could go on by herself but that wouldn’t go over. Best she wait it out, even Ben wouldn’t make her late on purpose. She looks as the men light up, thinks of a calm draw of smoke.     “Relax.” Ben tells her and he turns her dress label back into her neck line, “Don’t get your shirt in a knot. We’ll go in together.”     Fifteen years with Ben and Mary Ann knows not to hurry him unless she wants to go more slowly. Then she thinks, what is her rush? It isn’t as if the family will have some last thoughts for her eulogy. It isn’t as if someone else will jump up to speak if she’s not there. That impossible hope dispels like smoke. It is, as Ben continually points out– frigging well up to her.     She nods at a couple of people, and watches as a little crowd stalls outside instead of stifling into pews for the ceremony. This late June day may turn out to be the hottest one of the summer. Then suddenly everyone is going inside. The brothers step on their half smoked cigarettes and they file in behind the others.     Mary Ann tugs at her shirt, lifting it away from her body. She only now realizes the fabric doesn’t breathe and will turn dark with sweat. She will be in front of everyone with dark rings under her arms. Please let it be cool inside the church.     Ben and Eddie sit on either side of Mary Ann and begin to talk. First is Ben’s estimated cost of the floral arrangements. Then it is Eddie wondering how much the whole thing has set Janey’s family back. Even dead, bloody women will cost you, is Eddie’s bitter assessment and Mary Ann winces.     Is this what they talk about in the bar? She can picture them puzzling life and death through mugs of beer and in the lyrics of country music.     Janey said it often, if they think we don’t give a shit, they’ll leave us alone. The words are cruder than what would cross Mary Ann’s lips today, but the truth of it stands.     Surely Ben and Eddie can be quiet now, but they aren’t finished.     “What I want to know is why did she have to come back to off herself. She could have done it in the city, couldn’t she?”     Mary Ann is felled by the words.     “I’m sure I don’t understand why any woman does anything.” is Eddie’s reply. The brothers nod in agreement on this mystery and glance at Mary Ann as if she would be the next woman to bewilder them.     “Keep your voices down. This is a church!” Surely they know they could be overheard. Ben’s eyes narrow at her affront and then a blush slowly rises on his cheeks.     “It’s not like anybody’s being fooled here.” He mutters but quietly.     “I know. You’re right but this isn’t the place.” Mary Ann pats his hand then says a little louder, “It’ll be a nice rain, when it comes.” Ben and Eddie glance at one another but finally are silent.     There is a rustle of hymn book’s opening and people arrange themselves for the service and grow silent. Mary Ann draws comfort from the crowd that has gathered. These neighbours have found reasons to pay their respects, if not to Janey herself then to her family or a sense of community. They are good people, even if many think like Ben and Eddie.     The first hymn begins. Would that it buoy her upwards, would it inspire.     Mary Ann gives in to the organ music that has begun and the familiar patterns of light high on the altar. This is a place of peace and a haven for the likes of her.     Quickly it is her turn. She takes a deep breath. Let people remember something worthwhile. Of Janey.     She arranges her papers on the stand and leans forward to the microphone. A squeal erupts and the minister steps forward to adjust something. He nods at her to step forward again.     “Janey was my friend” she says, but to her ears there is falseness to her bravery. She should have said no. No she couldn’t. Not her. Then she wouldn’t be here. Facing these people. She swallows. There is no choice but to go on.     “Janey loved color and brightness and textiles, and she had a dream to become a fashion designer. But...” Mary Ann’s papers tremble. “But, sometimes our dreams are not to be.” She draws an unsteady breath. “I don’t know how she lived. I wish I did. But I do know how she planned to live; she was going to live large and unafraid. She was going to have adventures, and she was going to love. I remember her dreams as well as I remember my own. Those were our days. We thought we’d live the life we decided on. We thought we couldn’t loose. Those were our dreams.”     Mary Ann looks in Ben’s direction with an expression that asks -do you remember-, but many faces blur in front of her eyes and drive her head back down. “But somehow Janey’s life turned out differently then she expected and today it’s hard to see past that. But I remember Janey. Janey with her whole life ahead of her. I like to think of her like that. She was ready for fun. Loyal to her friends. Kind. Defiant. Bold.”     Mary Ann looks up and catches the glint from Eddie’s sunglasses; he has put them back on. Janey’s family seem as though they are wax figures, even Ben avoids her direct glance by rubbing his eyes. No one is really listening.     Hope drops away like the weak thing it is. It is impossible it is to erase away Janey’s failures in this community. Mary Ann catches the eye of Janey’s sister, who’d asked her this one thing and she sends a meek, I’m sorry gesture.     She senses the minister’s approach behind her. She is so tempted to take his rescue, but shakes her head at his offer. She has one last thing that she can do. Mary Ann turns to the list of dates and places of employment and a summary of addresses that the family gave her. It’s a sorry conclusion but she reads it before she makes her way back to Ben’s side.     Ben whispers “Remember this Mary Ann?” His voice comes as if from a distance. “Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, if God won’t take her, then the devil must.”     Then he chuckles and several people glance in their direction. Only Ben could mark this moment like this. Surely God will find mercy for Janey. Mary Ann’s breath is shaky and tears threaten.     Ashes to ashes. Mary Ann thinks of the ashes from those boozy bush party campfires. Embers of light that went upwards then disappeared into blackness.     Dust to dust. Little spurts of dust from under bike tires as Janey and her race down back alleys.     Those summer evenings, so long ago, with this town watching them like an old dog ready to snap at a mongrel pup. A town more than willing to say ‘Janey dresses like a tramp because she is a tramp’. None of them knowing that the garish colors and sensuous fabrics eased a hunger in Janey. And helped her deal with what had been stuffed down her throat.     Janey confides that her father is always after her. But Mary Ann didn’t know what she meant; thinking of how her own father might demand homework done or help for her mother. It is years before she really understood and then she is hot with shame that she could not help. Her own youth and innocence is no excuse to her. She should have done something to stop the sadness from slamming shut on Janey.     Mary Ann swallows back a lump of tears. And now she’s failed. Miserably. When she could have spoken out for Janey. Around her, people have stood and she realizes that the service is over. Outside, beneath a forbidding sky Ben and Eddie smoke another pair of cigarettes but when the thunder booms, Ben says it’s time they get home. Mary Ann feels nothing but relief. She won’t have to face Janey’s family at the luncheon. Nor will she have to keep watch on Ben any longer. She tells him, good. She holds her arms over dark circles of sweat and pretends she is still comfortable in her silk pantsuit.     Back at the farmhouse, Mary Ann slips downstairs. She stands on the corner of the plywood that serves as a floor for her washing machine and begins to undress. Next year perhaps, they’d replace the house. But that’s unlikely. It’s been 15 years and all that is happened is that Ben now has a prosperous stomach, and a full blown bad attitude and she still has these buck teeth, she’s still making do with second hand clothes, and still waiting for better things. And Janey? She has no idea of what time might have done to her. But then she realizes that she does know. Janey is dead. Time destroyed her.     A close clap of thunder startles the farmhouse and the basement window above her shivers in its frame like a goose had walked over a grave. She struggles to pull her garment off. She has to peel it off her skin. Finally she pushes her clothes under the sudsy water, to wash out all traces of today. There is another thunder rumble and big drops of rain begin to smash against the window. The turmoil that has been building will now be released.     She can hear the toilet flush on the main floor and then Ben opens the door to the basement. Mary Ann has placed her bra and panties in the water too, only to find that her housecoat is gone astray.     Ben unbuttons his dress shirt.     “This will need a wash too.” He says as he crosses the room to drop his shirt into the washing machine. He closes the lid.     “Hmm. I’ve found a naked woman.” Ben lifts the hair off her neck to place a kiss, while pressing close. Mary Ann can feel his erection on her hip, the way you might feel a train coming if you were laying on the tracks. He nibbles on her ear and then traces one finger on her shoulder. He doesn’t notice her flinch.     “There must have been some dye make it into your pantsuit after all. It’s come off on your skin.” Ben murmurs, pointing to a stain on Mary Ann’s breast. She understands that if the dye is on her, then it’s in the wash too.     “Never mind. Bend over. Put your hands on the washer. That’s it.”     His urges are not hers. Love, honour and obey, she remembers the promise, but this? Did she somehow misunderstood and promise to submit and endure? Detachment, Janey taught her, could be found in a shrug of the shoulder and thoughts of something other than what is happening to you. Janey faced desperate choices born in the darkest place. Did she gaze skyward, looking for shapes in the clouds while the train came closer and closer? Waiting until she had no option but to jump from the tressle?     Mary Ann imagines the black dye releasing back into the water as the vibration swirls the load, changing the color of some things and not touching others. Ben pumps into her, the washing machine vibrates though the wash cycle, its load unbalanced. There is another rumble of thunder.     Is there a hum of movement to be felt within a coffin, the spin of the earth perhaps, the bombardment of a storm? God save you, Janey. God save them both.     Her body draws her back, surprises her with response. She is caught up in Ben’s release. Then for a moment they are frozen, caught without a pillow to turn to. The washing machine shudders dangerously. Mary Ann reaches to open the lid.     She can barely see Ben’s sheepish expression, past the thundercloud that has squeezed into her brain.     “Heh, heh, we can still manage to steam up the windows.” Ben avoids Mary Ann’s eyes, the way small planes avoid dark skies, but he adds almost proudly, “I haven’t come like that since I was a teen.”     Trembling, Mary Ann looks at the rivulets on the window, that fall like tears over glass cheeks. Reaching into the washing machine she begins to rearrange the unbalanced load.     Years ago, she and Ben had been necking when Janey pounded on the window of their car. It was beginning to rain hard. Ben laughed and locked the door. Mary Ann protested. But she didn’t insist that they let Janey in for shelter. It seems to her now that it incident was a signal to Ben that she would always let stronger wills decide. And so she has, but heaven as witness, it is wrong.     She reaches into the washing machine and pulls up Ben’s dress shirt. Even wet they both can see the streaks of dye that stain it.     “God damn it” Ben starts, but the words falter when he catches a glimpse of Mary Ann’s expression. “Oh, that shirt is too tight, anyway. Time for a new one. Don’t worry.” He chuckles.     “It’s not do or die.” He laughs harder. “Dye? Get it?”     There is a long moment before Mary Ann responds.     “No, it’s not.” she answers, “It’s ‘nobody needs to take no shit’.” Janey’s words.     Mary Ann turns her back on Ben as she closes the lid on the washing machine, very, very slowly.

Liz Betz Bio     Liz Betz writes from rural Alberta. She considers herself a late bloomer as a writer but recommends retirement as the last option to pursue dreams. Her published stories can be found through her blog.

the Last Day he Drove (notes from the police report) Drew Nacht An elderly man stands next to his car in the middle of an intersection Blocking a garbage truck, driver of truck asks elderly man if he is okay, Elderly man in an agitated voice says, “no, do you know Gates Ave.”? Driver of truck attempts to help with directions But the elderly man becomes increasingly agitated, Driver of truck calls police and officer Ryan reports to the scene And confirms no accident has occurred and elderly man is physically okay. Inspection of driver’s license confirms elderly man’s street address as Gates Avenue And a last name of ‘Zheimer’. Officer Ryan drives Mr. Zheimer home Which is only two blocks from the intersection. As officer Ryan pulls up to the house a woman is standing in the doorway, Mr. Zheimer says to the officer, “what is she doing here, this is none of her business” Officer Ryan confirms the woman is Mrs. Zheimer, who lives in the house With her husband of 52 years. Mr Zheimer shakes the officer’s hand and says, “call me Al”.

Utopia Matthew Hlady     “You look exhausted. Startin’ to get old, are we?”     I swatted Beor. “Emphasis on the ‘we’ you codger.” I was tired though. The weight strapped to my body had drained my strength and, try as I would to hide it, the fatigue was surely showing through as I unpacked my horse. And this is after only one night of carrying it. I glanced at Beor, noting his height and thicker muscles. Maybe he should be the one carrying it. Hell, why am I carrying it? I am getting a little old to be reliable anymore. Trying to ignore the unfamiliar constriction of leather straps wrapped around my chest beneath my shirt, I shoved the thought aside and finished unsaddling my horse. I’m thinking too much. Reflection’s not healthy in this line of work. Gloomy as the pre-dawn was, my fingers were accustomed to working in the dark and did not fumble or slip. “Alden,” I called over my shoulder to the lanky shadow that was tying a feedbag to its horse’s head. Alden had already slipped his sleeping roll beneath an overhang in the rock that would keep the sun off of him while he slept. Greedy bastard probably claimed the spot the moment we got here, I thought, chuckling. “Climb to the top of this outcrop and lower a rope so that nobody breaks his neck exchanging watches.”     “If anybody breaks his neck climbing in the dark, they probably shouldn’t be here,” Alden pointed out. “If some idiot managed to kill himself climbing during the day, then I’d say he’d probably mistaken himself for a pigeon and tried to fly away.”     He was creeping up the stone, a rope wrapped around his body, when the fourth member of my crew slipped around the corner of a boulder and pulled down the cloth that masked his face. “Hah! I hate wearing these things in the summer! I can’t breathe in them!”     “Better than breathing sand!” Alden called from above.     “Or getting killed if a local recognizes you after a mission,” said the fifth man who was hunched and working over something in his lap.     “Did you cover the tracks?” I asked.     “The sand’s still loose enough around here that the wind will sweep them away.”     Beor turned from his horse, paused, and inspected the speaker in the growing light. “Oi! You’re jus’ a boy! How’d you get chosen for this mission?” Beor was right. The lad couldn’t have been twenty.     “I’ve been going on missions since I was thirteen. You know, pretending to be a cup bearer and all,” the boy said, shrugging and grinning. “I guess the brass think that I’ve got talent. And I’ve been to Dawnburg before. My name’s Thorn, by the way.”     “‘Thorn?’” Alden asked. He rappelled down the rope that he had somehow secured to the top of the rock. “That can’t be your real name, is it?”     “No, but it’s better than the one my mother gave me.”     “Ha! You’re not old enough to be tough like a thorn,” Beor said. “How ‘bout I call you ‘Thistle?’ eh?” Beor, the others and I laughed while Thorn just shrugged again and laughed along. Beor clapped him on the shoulder and said “I’m Beor! Good to meet ya!” We were all slender and lean, but it was jarring to see the contrast between young, wiry Thorn with his brown scruff of beard and looming Beor, with his arms like bunched rods of steel and the black mane on his face. “Just stick with me an’ I’ll keep ya alright! Either that or the cap’n ’ll set ya straight.” He gave me a little salute and I smiled back. “Always listen to him. Rogdrin an’ I’ve been together for years.” Beor’s clipped way of speaking somehow comforted people. Maybe it was how casual he sounded, or maybe it was his friendliness. He’d endeared himself to people this way ever since he got sick of being a solitary kid when he turned fifteen. I doubt that there was a person back home in the army who didn’t at least know of him. I could always count on him to watch my back.     The hunched figure got to his feet and turned to Thorn, his tan face shadowy in the early light and his head rising only to my chest. “You’re one of us now, so you just call me if you need any sort of...” he whipped out his knife and held it to his own throat “assistance.”     “If he needs theater lessons, you’ll be the first he goes to,” I laughed. “Put that thing away. You can shave once we’re all settled in.” Despite my weariness, I knew that sleep would be difficult, so I took the first watch atop the rock formation while the others rolled into the boulders’ shade and slumbered. The stone was worn smooth by the wind and I thought of the almost daily sandstorms that assaulted Sandhold, often cutting off trade with the outside world. After our army’s last campaign, storms killed almost as many men as the last battle had. They even cast aside their wounded to better carry the pillaged goods back home that would maybe feed the city for a year. It could have lasted longer if the priests and lords hadn’t thrown a feast for themselves and the soldiers. Thorn climbed the rope and sat beside me before I could spiral too far into my thoughts. “You should get some sleep,” I said, not taking my eyes from the dust-obscured horizon. I doubted that anyone aside from us was traveling this stretch of desert, but it paid to be cautious.     “I know, but this mission bothers me. Why are we risking our lives for this one kid? He’s not a prince or anything. The lords of Sandhold told us that it’s a charity mission while the priests are saying that it’s got something to do with our god. Why then, are we risking some of our best men on this?”     I chuckled mirthlessly. “Don’t let them fool you. It’s the same as any other mission I’ve been on. Sandhold’s going to sack Dawnburg this time and we’re going to make it possible by taking away the city’s ultimate defense.”     “How though? Dawnburg has never been breached. It’s supposed to be perfect! They’ve never fallen to invaders, the citizens don’t get sick, and there’s always enough food for everyone. Those are just the facts, sir! I’ve been there! I’ve tried to find a weakness in their defenses and couldn’t. Don’t get me started on the rumors about how nobody dies until they’re ninety years old! Just living that long is supposed to be impossible along with everything else about that city. How is busting some random kid out of jail going to change all of that?”     The wind began to strengthen, swirling dust over the plains and making the few skeletal shrubs dance as they held to the thin earth for their small lives. “About a week ago, one of our ‘merchants’ explored their catacombs and found a guarded chamber. Before that, he said that the city had made its yearly ritual sacrifice to their pagan god the Black Cripple, giving a young boy to the priests to be taken away and killed. When he found that chamber in the catacombs, he saw that same boy there, held in a cage where he was apparently forced to... absorb all of the needless suffering that the citizens would otherwise feel. He said he boy was screaming and far from dead.”     “That sounds like pure fancy to me,” Thorn said.     I nodded. “My words exactly. However, the mages searched our spy’s memory and, while old memories can warp and fade, they figured that ones as fresh as the arrow in his back tended to be clear and sharp.”     “So how do we get him out? I’d bet that Dawnburg’s put all sorts of locks and enchantments on that cage just for people like us.”     I reached under my shirt, undid the straps, and pulled out the key that they secured to my chest. The key did not shine or sparkle in the sun, seeming to reject the light and take the form of void. When the priest with the gleaming eyes and rancid breath had dropped the key into my anticipant fingers, I had almost pitched forward under the unexpected weight. Holding it with both hands for Thorn to see, the key seemed even heavier. This thing’s like a slab of granite, I thought. “This is our city’s greatest treasure and dearest secret, crafted centuries ago solely to divulge our rivals’ secrets. It is our hope and maybe our city’s salvation. It can open any lock, mechanical or magical, and has never failed.” Nor have I. “Bringing this back home is almost as important as the mission itself. Before that, though, we free the kid, give the signal for the attack, and watch as Dawnburg burns.” Those words tasted bland as I strapped the key back to my chest.     Thorn was silent. “Then it’s war?” I nodded and he fell silent again. “I don’t like war. I’m nineteen and I’ve already lived through eight. Hells, I fought in three of them.”     “Fought?” I asked, turning to him. “You’re too handsome to be a soldier.” Soldiers were beaten enough during training that most of them at least had broken noses before earning their combat scars.     He shrugged. “I was an assassin.”     Not quite the same as being cut to ribbons on a bloody field, I thought. “Then why should you be bothered? You’ve killed, you work in the shadows, and Sandhold’s people honor you more than the poor bastards cut to ribbons on the bloody field. Battles aren’t a problem for you.”     “It’s bad enough when I kill one person myself, but when thousands die?” He shook his head.     “Do their lives make you feel so guilty?” I could sympathize. I had felt the same when I was fifteen after witnessing the aftermath of a battle that I had helped start by killing a prince.     “It’s not their deaths. It’s the people that they leave behind that bother me.” He hugged his legs to his chest, withdrawing into himself. “Especially the kids.” Thorn’s eyes were shadowed. He looked as small and frail atop the eroding stone beneath the murderous sun as I felt.     “Ah,” I said. “You’re an orphan, aren’t you?”     He glanced up. “How’d you guess?”     “I’ve been running missions for fifteen years and I’ve realized that our city’s built on war. We’ve no pastures, no farmland, nothing to support us. We have to take what we need from others. Comes from living in a desert, I guess. With war comes fatherless children. If Sandhold is built on war, it’s built on orphans too.”     “But how’d you know I was an orphan, and not just fatherless?”     I looked away from him. “Because starving orphans have nothing to lose. They’re the ones recruited off the streets.”     “Oh. You’re one too, aren’t you?”     I nodded. “Ever since our women became spies and assassins like us, orphans have become the majority of our city. You, me, Beor, I’d even be willing to bet that Alden and Drake are orphans too.”     “We are,” came Drake’s muffled reply. “Satisfied? Now could you please keep quiet? It’s hard enough to sleep with the sun baking us like this.”     “Yeah,” called Beor. “Plenty o’ time for your life-story once we get ‘ome, master bard!”     I chuckled. “What, don’t you want me to sing it? I was just coming up with a tune!” I looked at Thorn again. “Go to sleep. Dream of endless riches.”     “Right.” He got up to leave, but turned one last time. “We are going to come home, right sir? We can actually pull this off?”     “Of course. Our spy said that the city’s magic didn’t work beneath the earth, so once we get inside, the mission will be essentially done. Now sleep. And call me Rogdrin, already!” Thorn nodded and jumped from the rocks to land without a sound near his bedroll.     Home, I thought. A decaying city amidst a whirl of sand and blood sustained by feasting off of the corpses we make. It’s better than nothing though. I shook the thoughts from my head. Stop it! What’s gotten into you? Just focus on the mission. But try as I might, the thoughts crept back throughout the day and weighed my mind just as the key weighed down my body. Drake relieved me of duty and, after an hour or so, sleep relieved me of thought until nightfall when we set out again.     Over two nights, the landscape changed from desolation to pleasant fields and thriving forests. It always felt so alien to move amongst growing things whenever I left the city. We reached Dawnburg as the sky turned grey and hid ourselves in the forest bordering their western fields. I climbed a tree to survey the area before I again took the first watch. As I scanned the land, my gaze was drawn to the fields. My breath caught at how vast and green they were. From my vantage point, I could see the city walls’ outline in the far distance, but I could not discern the edge of the crops. Before me was a verdant sea. A harvest like that could feed Sandhold for two years.     I recalled Sandhold’s crowded streets, lined with skeletal men and women, their spines standing out like mountain ranges from their backs, huddled in dark, filthy alleyways. Even when we returned to the city with the spoils of war, there wasn’t enough to feed everyone. Then again, I thought, the lords could’ve handed the victory feast out, rather than tossing the scraps into the gutter and leaving the beggars to kill each other over a loaf of bread. Eager as I was to bring the food back, I knew that it wouldn’t last. How long then before the next campaign? What if we lose a war? I wondered. Will we all starve in the streets? No one can be victorious forever. Dawnburg’s people never have to suffer like that, do they? Not with this kind of land. I shook my head and lowered myself to the ground.     After assessing the city’s defenses, we decided to walk through the front gate, leading our horses and dispersed amongst the crowd with our equipment hidden under our cloaks. The guards weren’t searching anyone who came through the gates, so why bother scaling the walls in the dark? The gates even stood open at night, but we decided that it would be safer to walk amongst the huge day crowd, rather than stand alone in front of the guards at night. Still, I felt exposed where so many eyes could see me. All around were smiling, laughing, healthy people, some of whom even greeted me as they went their way. Even in the streets, people chatted, strolled unafraid through alleyways, and giggling children played around our horses’ legs before being called away by parents or other friends. People here did not walk around furtively with their eyes on the dirt as people in Sandhold did. Guards strolled the streets, but were often gossiping with the townspeople and barely spared me a glance as I passed. I suspected that they never robbed the citizens either. Even a funeral procession that we passed seemed almost cheerful. I had seen other prosperous cities, but never one so carefree and relaxed. It was so... strange to me. “These guys’ve gone soft since nobody can get murdered ‘ere,” Beor noted once we all regrouped at a stable that Thorn had directed us to where the owner asked no questions. “Why do they even ‘ave guards if they aren’t gonna do anythin’?”     “Why do they have merchants when there’s no need to bring money into a city with this much food?” Thorn shrugged. “I guess everybody’s gotta do something with their time.”     “Speaking of which, did anyone see any beggars?” Drake asked.     “Did you expect any?” I asked in return. “I bet that even the stableboy here gets his own bed, rather than sleeping with the horses.” What I would have given to be born in this city. The thought flashed across my mind unbidden. I squeezed my eyes shut. Stop it already! You’re here to make sure that this place is raped!     “Rogdrin?” Thorn was looking at me. “I was wondering. With the money that we’d get after this mission, do you think I’d have enough to start an orphanage back home? It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while.”     My brows knitted together. “You know that this whole group only gets one percent of whatever Sandhold gains from the war we’ll start. I doubt that you’d have enough to keep an orphanage running for more than a few months after you built it.”     “Well, I’ve been saving money for years and...” he blushed, “if you guys wanted to help, we could keep it going for at least a few years.”     Beor shook his head. “The lords wouldn’t allow it. Rogdrin already told you that starvin’ orphans are th’ main source of soldiers, spies, and assassins. If you give ‘em a place to go other than the military, then the city loses most of its potential recruits. Can’t ‘ave that, can we?”     “Besides,” Alden dropped into the hay, ready to sleep. “You have any idea just how many of those kids there are back home? Forget feeding them. You’d never find enough space in the city walls to build them a place to stay. Just spend your money enjoying life while you can. That’s what we do.” ***     We found the catacombs with little difficulty and slipped in at night, undetected. The winding tunnels were lit by torches ensconced on the barren walls, close enough to each other to cast some light on everything, but far enough that they left shadows between the faint orange glows. We pressed deeper, passing graves and skulls, the key’s weight around my neck dragging me further into our descent. We slipped from shadow to shadow, a reflex to me after so long. Beor had often taunted me for skulking around my own house, but in Sandhold, the city lords might kill me whenever they decided I knew too much. I had good reasons for avoiding windows and keeping the lights dim. When will I become too dangerous to them? I wondered. How long until they decide that my knowledge outweighs my usefulness? Such was the fate of every major spy and assassin in Sandhold. At least my name will be carved in the memorial wall for whatever that’s worth.     We heard voices from beyond the next bend. My thoughts silenced. I peered around and looked through a stone doorway. Several guards surrounded a cage that seemed to hang in the center of the bright room beyond.     We drew our weapons and Alden stepped through the doorway. The guards shouted and I heard Alden run back toward our hiding place. He jogged past, pretending to be slow for the guards. Three men barreled around the corner. Drake, Thorn, and Beor opened their throats before the men were two steps past the corner. My men muffled their dying gurgles. Alden ran into the room again, brandishing his sword and shouting as he attacked the seven remaining guards. He kept their attention while the rest of us crept up behind the soldiers. We killed four of them in a flash and Alden slew another who turned in surprise as his comrade beside him fell to my blade. I retreated, too valuable to risk. Thorn finished the job, slipping past the two remaining guards’s defenses and hamstringing one, parrying the other’s blade, and spinning behind his last opponent to stab him in the back. He’s good. I thought as he stood without a bead of sweat on his brow, his face impassive.     My men ended the screams and cries for help and Alden turned to me, his clothes and armor stained the deepest of reds. I watched as a tear of blood crept down his cheek.     “Hurry, sir! Someone might’ve heard the commotion.” I nodded and dashed forward through shadow and white light as I passed beneath... what?     I looked around and realized the immensity of the chamber we stood in. The high, domed ceiling was lined with glowing runes and bright circles from which long, thick beams of light reached down to converge into one ray that pierced the thing hanging in the center of the room, all of which illuminated the space with a white glare. Within each shining shaft there slid a procession of black droplets. I could feel them from where I stood. Each droplet permeated the air with... something. I can only describe it as a miasma of pain and despair. I choked on it. Suspended five feet above the ground by a thick chain was the cage.     I couldn’t describe the thing within as human. It sat curled in a ball on the floor of the cage, the steel chafing its flesh raw. Its head was hairless, its skin so tight and stretched that every bone showed through. The creature’s skin might have been pale when our spy saw it, but now it was as black as the abyss, dyed from the droplets tormenting it. A droplet touched the creature’s body. The skin sucked it up and the thing convulsed in agony, its toothless mouth gaping in a silent scream. Its voice had long since failed.     Blind, white eyes rolled toward me, and I felt as though the child was pleading for my help. My stomach clenched. I took a step back, repulsed by the grotesque thing.     “Captain!” Thorn gripped my shoulder. “Hurry and free that... thing! We need to get out of here.” Beor positioned himself to lift me to the cage. “Just make it stop writhing like that!”     I took a step forward and found the coal-colored key in my hand. I’ll release you from your prison. My men urged me toward the inky creature while I took another step over a guard whose vigil for the city had ended. I will be a hero again and rich. My people will be wealthy.     The guard’s hand grasped my foot. “Please,” he groaned. “Don’t. If you open that cage, the black will fall and seep into the earth. You would poison us all!” Beor planted his knife in the guard’s neck and the grip on my leg loosened, but I remained frozen.     Everyone? I would poison the entire city? I was less than an arm’s length from the child. If we sacked the city, it would be the same result. I thought. I could see blood in the wretch’s throat as it gasped for breath. If I don’t do this, I can never go back to Sandhold, I realized. Sandhold would hunt me as a traitor with too much knowledge and as a thief with their greatest treasure. Hells, the people here in Dawnburg might kill me just for thinking of destroying their home. There’d be nowhere to go.     “Hurry!” Beor was crouched and waiting.     The money we get from this won’t last. I thought. It never does. Sandhold’s going to die. I looked down at the key that held all of the world’s dangers wrought into its fangs.     “For the love of the Almighty! Give me the fucking key!” Alden grabbed my clenched fingers. I twisted away and drove my free hand into his throat. He stumbled back and crumpled to his knees, wheezing.     I spun and sprinted back the way I came. Someone seized me. “What are you doing?” Drake yelled, his fingers digging into my armor. “You have to get that kid out of there before we’re found!” I wrenched free as the other men began closing in. I rushed through the exit, the men screaming and pursuing me.     “Sir!” I heard Thorn yell. “Sir! Come back! Don’t go”     “Rogdrin!” Beor bellowed.     Through the passages dappled with torchlight I streaked, up the stone stairs, and into streets of the perfect city. I found my horse and barreled through the still open city gates. I glanced back at the guards. Instead of shock or anger, pleasant smiles followed me into the night as I held the key to all of their suffering in my trembling fingers. I turned back around and looked at the forested horizon. As much as I dreaded it, the moonlit wilderness beckoned.

The Curious Nest Jennifer Ihasz     The best time to kill wasps is when it is coldest. That is why he and the little girl waited until nightfall to go out, waited until it was darkening, as if even the atmosphere itself had turned a blind eye to what they were doing.     The night before, the sound of men woke her from her curled sleep and she had silently crept out of her room and into the hall. There, she could watch their shadows on the wall, cast from the sputtering of pale, dusty light, without fear of being caught. Their voices were loud, carried by beer and moonshine bravery. She could smell their yeasty breath as their stories rose in excitement. A question had been brought to this rugged council, and the men were eager to top one another, aching to be the one who answered.     They went on, until deep in the night, just as our ancestors had probably done as we evolved, gathered around their own sputtering flames, smelling of men and the night and all things heavy. The girl listened as they went on, telling of nests the size of boat bobbers, the size of engines, engulfing entire rooflines, and of pouring gasoline onto ones underground and lighting them on fire. Nestled within their stories, lingering among the loud words and bragging, there ran a thread of something the girl had not expected, fear. They could have been gods that night, with their big shadows stretched out on the walls and their daring and laughter, yet their plan was to sneak up on something smaller, subdue it and attack.     The little girl had never known that wasps could build their nests under ground. She didn’t bother to wonder why they would do that. What she did wonder was why all those grown men, all those big men, were afraid of tiny wasps that you could smash with your hand.     Her Uncle had told her, when she asked, that wasps were right bastards, that they would swarm on a man and sting him over and over, filling him with poison. He told her that when a bumblebee stings someone its barbed stinger got stuck and tore them apart as well. A bumblebee, he had said, would have to be really serious about stinging, but a God Damn wasp could sting whatever it felt like. Its smooth stinger would pull out over and over again, poison-filled and endless. And wasps was mean, he told her, rather kill a man as soon as look at him. Wasps, he told her, had a real problem with authority.     The girl had found the nest the day before, wedged into the side of a large tree by the side of the house. She hadn’t been playing, but sitting under the tree when she had looked up to see something that looked like grey foam wedged into the crotch of one of the branches. It reminded her of the rough, striated arc of the seashells the man at the thrift store had shown her. They were sealed inside a smooth, glass bubble with gentle sand and a tiny thing meant to look like a sign that said Ocala Fla. on it. The old man had twisted it in his hands, making the shells tumble like a dry surf and told her about the seashore until her mother had noticed her missing and dragged her away. She had told her mother about the nest, who in turn told the Uncle, who proceeded to find out how to kill it.     Her mother had gushed on a bit about how lucky they were that the Uncle was there to save them, there to take care of them. She slurred these accolades a bit as she leaned down to speak to her little girl, her elbow slipping off the side of the table making her jackknife alarmingly close to the girl’s face before she caught herself. Her hair, lanky and shriveled into tendrils from its weight and grease, swung into her face. The girl had never known her mother’s hair to be any other way. She could not remember a time when it didn’t smell like old smoke and something fermenting. It was hard like her face, eyes, and the shriveled frame her faded dresses hung from. The girl suspected she had shot from the womb just as she was, stiff and unchangeable. She brushed away the careless hair in a practiced, shaking motion, pushing herself upright and seeming to forget what they had been talking about in the first place. Her eyes locked on to the girl, trying to focus, like some lusty bird attracted, so the girl got out of the kitchen as quietly as possible.     Since her Uncle had come, he and the mother had often sat at the old kitchen table, two bookends without any books, and drank. They spoke in loud voices, often waving their glasses around, their pointing finger sticking out as they jabbed it in the air to illustrate their strong feelings on something. As the night wore on, their words stretched like elastics then wore themselves down into shadows as their heavy eyelids threatened to close. The mother often fell asleep before the Uncle.     Sometimes, the girl imagined herself to be a wasp, being able to sting and sting until she killed someone, then fly away and build a nest wherever she pleased. She imagined being filled with poison, being hard. She could hold her body rigid, making herself into a stinger, but it never seemed to help.     The girl didn’t remember her father. He had left when she was just a baby. Her mother only told the girl that he was a bastard. The girl had learned not to ask about him. Sometimes her mother would talk about him anyway, and she would spit when she talked. The words would drop out of her mouth as if racing, short and wet, inflicting themselves on every surface around her. Sometimes she would scream and throw things and the girl would hide in her room. Sometimes she would tell the girl a happy story and, with the exaggerated steadiness of someone drunk, would touch the girl’s face.     The night was almost full dark when they headed out, the uncle and the little girl. She had on jeans under her flimsy nightgown. It had become more of a shirt as the girl grew, its pink pony with the sparkles had washed away almost entirely from the front, and what once had been a ruffle on the bottom was now a static, limp roll that had collapsed in on itself over time. It was all over pills and the sleeves rucked up over her growing arms. The Uncle should have told the girl to get a sweater, but he wasn’t the type of man that would say something like that.     He rounded the side of the rickety shed with a red plastic gas can. It was red and battered like the suitcase he had brought with him when he had showed up there. Her mother had not been happy to see him, but had taken him in. He was family, after all, she had told the little girl, and you had to take care of family. The girl knew he kept a wad of cash in that suitcase and she was pretty sure that was what her mother had welcomed into her home. She had never even mentioned having a brother before that, and the little girl knew nothing about her mother’s family. Since her father had left it had just been the two of them and the occasional boyfriend, until he left and then it was just the two of them again.     Her uncle set the gas can down and hooked his thumbs, one neatly on either side, over his shiny gold belt buckle. The girl tensed and relaxed. The uncle fished through his pockets and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a lighter. If the girl thought it was dangerous for him to smoke near the gas can, she didn’t mention it.     The cigarette he managed to fish out of the pack after a few tries was also crumpled, but the uncle didn’t seem to notice. The flame jittered as he tried to light it with his shaky hands. When he finally did, he took a long drag, then blew the smoke out of his nose in stream. Satisfied after a few drags, he pinched the end off the butt and carefully placed it back in the pack, then placed the pack back into his tattered, loose jeans. He had a scar roped across one forearm that he had once told the girl he had got from roping bulls, but her mother had laughed when the girl had brought it up and told her it was more likely he got it in a bar fight, or in prison.     Tonight, with the gas can banging against his hopeful leg as he walked, it was almost as if he were signaling all the bulls in Pamplona. It was, after a fashion, the only thing the girl could see of him in the dark. That red can and, once in a while, the glint of that big, ugly belt buckle.     The nest was silent in the night. She imagined the inside filled with fragile hallways and tiny chambers, a slumbering wasp curled in each one. She imagined they felt safe there, in that nest. They didn’t know that bad things were looming in the dark.     The girl knew that her Uncle really wanted to burn the nest. She knew he wanted to stand there, in the light of that fireball listening to the soulful ruffle of their papery damnation. But this nest wasn’t in the ground. It was higher, and hung there more like the product of some long, organic growth. It didn’t look a bit rebellious, but the girl knew the Uncle felt there was danger in it, so it would have to go.     He pulled a cylinder from his pocket. The girl couldn’t see it in the dark, but she knew that on the side was a red circle with a line through it and a black wasp on its back, x’s where its eyes should be. When her uncle had showed it to her earlier, he said that it was filled with poison smoke that would kill the wasps while they slept.     The girl thought that sounded like an easy death. She thought, in this case, it was a good death. She had no quarrel with the wasps.     He handed the little girl the gas can as he wedged his foot between a rock and the tree, giving himself some height, some closeness to the nest. The girl watched him, saw the flatness of his belly as his shirt hitched up, saw the glint of that belt buckle again. He was twisting and reaching, trying to propel himself closer to the stars, to that curious nest, so it would be easier to destroy it.     The girl watched for a few moments, amazed by his loose and drunken grace, sloshing the gas in the can as if judging its weight, and fingering the stolen lighter hidden in her pocket.

Dodgeball A. Lenkeit you said my email was bad and my only response was silence got no reason to call anyway so I’ll leave my phone on the hook I’ve got no reason to write telling you things you’ll only dispute with all this shit in your text message I’ve decided what’s the use? my only hope is in silence and time my only home is in silence and time

Janet Kuypers reads writing appearing in the v125 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine, titled a Creative Journey Including “Breakfast Companions” by David Hutt, “Dodgeball” by A, Lenkeit, and “Subliminal” by Michael J. Grodssky.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading writing appearing in the v125 issue of Down in the Dirt mag, titled a Creative Journey live 10/22/14 at Chicago’s the Café Gallery

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers hosting the open mic 10/22/14 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago INCLUDING THIS PERFORMANCE

Karma William Ogden Haynes Bien Hoa Air Base, Republic of Vietnam 1964     It took twenty-two hours to get from the Oakland Army Base in California to Bien Hoa Air Base. There, Private First Class John Mattingly was greeted by a wall of heat that felt like entering a sauna. Not only was it beastly hot but he was entering an unknown realm from which he may never return. As he pondered this depressing notion, his attention was drawn across the tarmac to a group of soldiers laughing and cutting-up like kids on summer vacation. They were about to board a plane called the “freedom bird” that would take them back to the world. A world John Mattingly had just left. A world that also had its hot days, especially in the summer on the south side of Chicago. Seven Years Earlier, Chicago Illinois, Summer 1957     “Come on you chicken shit. They’re at work this afternoon and we’ll just be there a minute or two” said twelve year old John Mattingly to his friend Stephen Cohen. They were hiding in the bushes by the Russell’s back yard. One of John’s favorite activities was to visit the back patio of the Russell family who lived one block away from his the three story brownstone on the south side of Chicago. The Russells stored wooden cases containing bottles of Coca-Cola behind their house. Regularly, John would sneak onto their patio when they were still at work and pilfer a bottle or two for his own enjoyment but today Stephen was his accomplice.     “You sure we won’t get caught? I don’t need any more trouble with my parents” said Stephen.     John looked at him with his hands outstretched “Easy peazy Japanezy man. I’ve done it a hundred times.”     In a minute John said “One, two, three go!” and the boys ran full tilt toward the patio, picked up a Coke and beat a return path into the bushes, pausing there to see if anyone came out of the Russell house. When the coast was clear, they jogged a block further down the alley that made a corridor between back yards of houses on Ridgeland Avenue and Cregier Street. Further down the alley John showed Stephen how to open the bottles by catching the edge of the metal cap on the top of a fence post and hitting the top of the bottle with his palm heel. The cap would come off and he would have to quickly suck the foam from the newly opened bottle before it ran down the side. Although it was warm, the Coke tasted good and the refreshment was even better because it was free. But it wasn’t just that. It was because they had stolen it without being caught and that was the sweetest thing of all.     They were out of breath from running down the alley. “I’ve never stolen anything before” Stephen murmured between taking deep breaths and sips of cola. Stephen was also twelve years old and lived in the building next to John on Ridgeland.     “Well, now you have Steverino! We’re partners in crime!” said John laughing his infectious chuckle that got Stephen cackling too. And indeed, that turned out to be the beginning of their crime spree during the hot summer vacation of 1957.     John’s parents Millie and Jack, were good friends with next door neighbors Ethyl and Harry Cohen. Both mothers were housewives. John’s father taught engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Harry Cohen owned a clothing store downtown in the Loop. The mothers were ecstatic that their sons were old enough to entertain themselves during the summer so the boys would not interfere with the morning routine. At least three days a week, after their husbands went off to work, Ethyl and Millie would go to one or the other’s apartment, have coffee and watch their television show As the World Turns. After eating a light lunch, they would return to their respective apartments for an afternoon of cleaning, cooking and laundry.     John and Stephen were loners who had few other friends and spent much of their time reading, watching television and jointly playing with miniature plastic army men. You know, the kind that come in a large plastic bag from the dime store. When Stephen and John combined their forces they had quite a formidable army. The khaki army men were of all different types shooting rifles, pistols, mortars and bazookas. Some didn’t carry firearms but were radiomen, flag bearers and medics. They stood, knelt and lay prone on the ground to aim at their targets. The boys also had a squadron of jeeps, tanks, trucks, ambulances and half-tracks. They would place their army in elaborate configurations in the small back yard behind fortifications of stones and branches. They made buildings out of shoe boxes, cutting windows and doors in them for the soldiers to shoot from. After everything was arranged, they would spend the afternoon shooting the enemy with Red Ryder BB guns until all the men and vehicles were tipped over. Then they would gather up the men so they could be set up to fight another day.     Both John and Stephen were members of Boy Scout troop 517 that met once a week down in the basement of the local Methodist church. Neither boy was particularly enthusiastic about being in the scouts, but their parents wanted them to join because they had agreed that it was a place to learn valuable life skills. They were convinced that building a fire, chopping wood, tying knots and earning merit badges were, as Harry Cohen put it, “Stepping stones to success.”     In July of 1957, Boy Scout troop 517 was holding a well-publicized drive to collect money for the Cerebral Palsy Association. Ads were placed in local newspapers and flyers were put up on store bulletin boards and nailed on trees saying the scouts would be calling on residents during the month of July to collect cash donations. The troop even provided a laminated card the scouts could read to their neighbors explaining about the fund drive. So, the chute was greased and all the scouts had to do was knock on doors and talk to people who already knew they were coming.     The first and second weeks of the fund drive the boys didn’t even go out of the back yard. They were too interested in shooting at the latest fortification of army men. But one evening after dinner both sets of parents confronted them about not participating in the troop’s effort to raise money. After all, the mothers had seen the announcements everywhere, were home all day and could see that John and Stephen never left the yard. The confrontation with both sets of parents made it clear to the boys that they at least had to make a token effort just to keep the parents off their backs. Then they could turn in a paltry sum to the scoutmaster and be done with it. So the next morning John and Stephen met in John’s room to don their scout uniforms and set out to solicit donations. The summer uniform had a short sleeved shirt, shorts and knee high stockings. The boys had to admit as they looked in the mirror that wearing the outfit made them feel special. It was impressively decked out with a hat, neckerchief, lanyard, and patches. As John said, “Who the hell could resist a couple of good-looking scouts like us?”     The boys decided to split up and work opposite sides of the streets. So they started up by Stony Island Avenue and after two weeks had worked their way up to Jeffrey Avenue, an area of about thirty-three square blocks. John and Stephen went door to door asking whoever answered the knock to contribute, helping researchers find a cure for this dreaded neurological condition. Neither boy had the slightest idea what cerebral palsy actually was except that it turned a kid into a spaz. They even mispronounced the term as “cerebrial palsy” as they read their schpiels to potential donors on opposite sides of each street. When they would come out of each apartment building the boys would look across the street and give each other the thumbs up if they scored a donation. Both John and Stephen used old metal first aid kits into which they would place bills and change donated for the drive. Even though the boys thought they would only solicit contributions for a day or two they realized that they liked the people giving compliments on their uniforms and how they were such good boys to be helping out a worthy cause. They decided to continue the collections until the end of July. After the fund drive was over, John spent the night over at Stephen’s apartment. Ethyl made popcorn for them and they watched Shock Theatre’s presentation of The Mummy on WBKB. After lights out, John and Stephen brought out their metal boxes and under the illumination of a Boy Scout flashlight, counted the money they had collected. In two weeks they had accrued over $450.00 mostly in contributions of five dollars or less.     “Steve, I’ve been thinking. Why should we give all this money to those fucking spazmos? I think we deserve it after all our work” said John.     Stephen looked up from the pile of money. “You’re not thinking of keeping the money. The scoutmaster would find out because people have seen us on the street collecting it.”     John replied, “No, I’m just saying we should take a cut. No one will notice. Besides there isn’t a record of how much each person gave except what we write down. We didn’t have to give them receipts of anything. We didn’t take checks so they just gave us some spare cash they had laying around. Besides, we are still going to turn in most of the money to the troop so no one will be the wiser. Think of how many more army men we could buy and maybe a couple of those new Crossman CO2 powered BB guns.”     Stephen pursed his lips. “This isn’t just stealing a couple of Coke bottles. We could get into really big trouble for this.”     “Well, the Coke bottles didn’t get us in any trouble and neither will this. Don’t be such a pussy” smirked John.     The following week each boy put $125.00 into an envelope and turned it in to the assistant scoutmaster at the weekly meeting, keeping $100.00 each. John kept his money in the metal box hidden under some games in the bottom of his closet. Stephen buried his box under a bush in the back yard.     Three weeks later John and Stephen walked down to Sears and bought two new Crossman BB guns. Ironically, it was Stephen who came up with the strategy. The boys knew that their parents would certainly notice two new BB guns and wonder where they got the money to buy them. While John and Stephen received a $5.00 weekly allowance for doing chores it would have taken them many months to save the money to buy a $50.00 rifle. So, Stephen noted that since none of their parents were active in the scouting program they would have no communication with the scoutmaster. The boys could walk the few blocks to the church for meetings and the parents didn’t even have to drop them off. That’s where the award for fund raising came into play. The boys would tell their parents that they were each awarded $25.00 because they were the top fund raisers in the Cerebral Palsy campaign. They would come home from the scout meeting on Friday night each holding a crisp twenty and a five dollar bill and tell the parents they tied for the fund-raising award. Not only would the parents be proud, but it would explain how they could buy new BB guns by combining their award money with their allowance savings. As John told Stephen through a fit of hilarity, “That was a fucking stroke of genius Steverino... standing there all puffed-up in our uniforms, holding up that stolen money and telling them it was an award for raising the most funds for Cerebrial Palsy...I thought I was gonna shit my pants!”     Every day the next week Stephen and John played their war games with the new firepower provided by the Crossman Company. The army men took considerably more of a beating from the BBs traveling at a higher velocity, so the boys had to buy more plastic bags of figures to replace the soldiers who were maimed and left ragged from their daily barrage. And as the summer of 1957 ended, the two twelve year old nascent criminals looked back on it as the best summer vacation ever. Ia Drang Valley, Central Highlands, South Vietnam 1964     Private First Class John Mattingly was nineteen years old, a draftee and a member of the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Division. He and his cohorts were deposited by helicopter at LZ-X-RAY, a clearing about as large as a football field bordered by a dry creek bed to the west. Upon disembarking the UH-1 Huey, Mattingly scurried to the scant cover to await orders. Since the landing zone was so small it would not take multiple Hueys landing at the same time. Sixteen landings and takeoffs were planned, and John Mattingly was among the first.     But his initial experience at combat would be short-lived. He was hiding behind a mound of dirt while the other soldiers were disembarking and his thoughts traveled back to the game he used to play, hiding the soldiers and then shooting at them behind inadequate fortifications. Fucking ironic...and now it ain’t no BB gun. If John had been able to track the course of the bullet shot by the sniper he would have seen it in slow-motion traveling toward him. He would have seen the bullet spiral into the area between his neck and upper back before the blackness and bleeding. John was one of the lucky few who were airlifted to a field hospital that day mainly because they could get him on a returning Huey. After getting emergency medical attention from a corpsman he was taken to Da Nang, then Clark AFB Hospital in the Philippines and finally to Great Lakes Naval Hospital north of Chicago. Great Lakes Naval Hospital, Chicago Illinois, Winter 1965     Captain Marcus O’Neill, MD stood at the foot of John’s bed in the hospital ward at Great Lakes Naval Hospital. He detached the patient chart hanging on the foot of the bed and started reading.     John had been dreaming. This time it was about being a kid back on the South side and all the fun he used to have with Steve Cohen, especially in the summer of ‘57. But one lesson he had learned from his time in the army is that he would never again have a desire to shoot guns at helpless plastic soldiers hiding from the enemy. He had been in their situation and it wasn’t a good feeling. In fact he thought when he got home he would have Millie gather up all his plastic army men and put them in a place of honor on his dresser so he could see them from bed, however long he would be confined there. As he opened his eyes he said “Hi doc, how am I doin?”     O’Neill looked up from the chart. “Well John, you’ve gone through a lot of trauma from that bullet wound. It almost completely severed your spinal cord, but luckily, it only damaged half of it. We call it hemisection of the spinal cord. You are left with what’s called Brown-Sequard Syndrome which results from partial destruction of nerve tracts going from your brain to your legs.     He looked up at the doctor. “But I can’t move my legs when I want to anymore. Sometimes they move by themselves. They won’t straighten out.”     O’Neill moved around to the side of the bed. “That’s called spasticity which results in unwanted muscle contractions. There is a chance that it could get a bit better with time. Some people are lucky that way. But even if it doesn’t get better, many people live a productive life even with spasticity. You know, like children who are born with cerebral palsy.”

The Woman Without A Shadow John Paul Younes     Isabelle watched the man in the dark blue suit, with his black hair slicked back and his face strong and chiseled. People who didn’t appear to know him were buying him drinks everywhere he went in the Iceberg. Women followed and clamored around him. It was a transparent, exciting sight. He wanted to buy weapons. He’d come from his skyscraper to meet with the owner. He’d looked in the owner’s eyes and demanded a fair price. Obeying the instincts of an arms dealer, the owner took the man to Lawton’s table.     It was so blatant of the man in the suit. Isabelle couldn’t remember the last time she met anybody so arrogant they would commit a crime so obviously. As for Lawton, he was a known hired gun.     The club had been Lawton’s refuge till now, hiding him like a terminal disease. Isabelle hated him for being able to hide in the shadows, while she had to hide without protection, in the limelight. She was also frightened that somebody as corrupt as Lawton would need shelter from someone so badly—the same person she was hiding from—that he wouldn’t even brag to her about it.     One week ago, she paid Lawton her last few thousand to find her kidnapped children. He kept it and did nothing, saying if she trusted him enough to give him so much money, her “animal instinct” was off. She was still angry about that. No one else could help. She couldn’t go to the police. And Lawton stole her money during the same week she was homeless, looking for a place to live in the hardest city to find decent living.     So she almost felt sorry for Lawton when she saw the man reach across the table and slam his head down on it.     Isabelle looked over the length of the Iceberg. It was a dark, sweaty place, like a meatpacking plant that was old. The dancing bodies all shouted from inside the music—she could tell no one had noticed. She walked directly to the man at the table. Maybe he could help her. Lawton wasn’t moving.     “Leave,” the man said, without looking up.     “I saw what you did. Why did you do that?”     “I got what I needed.” The man looked up at her, and she wished she had the same strength.     “Which was?”     “A name.” He turned and lifted one of Lawton’s arms, putting it under his head as if he were asleep.     The Iceberg was new every night. Some of the worst moments of her life had happened there. But, just like everyone else, it kept pulling her back.     And with each step she swallowed tears for the children she couldn’t find, the orphans she took in. And then she’d remember how they looked at the last moment, or later how their kidnapper laughed and she was terrified, or later that she might find someone twisted enough to help her find them. But every time she looked around the club she saw shadow faces full of promise until the lights swung around to show the hollow, the lost, staring blankly at her and in need of the same hope.     Until tonight, she thought as she sat down across from the man. His hands were scarred, reminding her of the small scar that looked like a dimple on her left cheek. She had the feeling he might suddenly flip the table over and bolt. But he didn’t. He stared calmly at her. He was in command. She treasured people like that, because she was either in command or locked in a mood swing. Sitting across from him, it was easy for her to contemplate being loyal, but hardly faithful.     She told him everything. How she found the orphans and adopted them. How they were kidnapped by a man named Sionis. “I only allowed myself twenty-four hours of madness,” she said in a high voice. Then she frowned and said more calmly, “I cried, I screamed, took a lot of Xanax, made myself sick,” and then lighthearted, in her high voice: “Now I’m done. I need your help, because I don’t have anyone else to ask, and he took all my money, Lawton did, please. I don’t know what to do.” She lit a cigarette. She twirled her hair around a finger because it would just never stay put.     The man nodded. “The first night is always the worst.”     “Did you lose someone?”     There was a pause.     “Sionis took his daughter, too,” the man said, making a gesture toward Lawton. The man explained how he tracked Lawton down, using a bullet casing, to the club. How Lawton confessed he was doing kills for Sionis, who held his daughter captive. Isabelle tried to listen closely despite the electronic music.     And then, as if to twist her life even more, she realized she was relaxed for the first time in a week, and it was because of the man in the suit. She felt safe. She had spent many hours terrified of herself, not comfortable, never enjoying it. Just acting out a role and always stiff. She had a huge complex about the kidnapping and everyone assuming she invited the harm because of her crimes. She believed it would all end in isolation. But not anymore.     There were many moments like this in the Iceberg—when someone came into her life to change something, to tell her something, and so forth. Through these experiences, she learned she always had hope; it’s not something anyone can acquire. She just needed to discover it. And like most things with her, being an avid Pandora’s box, once it was out in the open there would be no going back. Never. She loved being in touch with her power like this, it was an incredible feeling to own.     “I can help you,” she said.     The man narrowed his eyes. “How?”     “Sionis. I know things.”     The man paused again. Then he spoke slowly, his voice low.     “Don’t try it.”     “I swear on my children. I’ll help you.”     The man’s eyes relaxed again.     “But,” she said, “if I’m going to trust you, I need to know who you are.”     He considered for a moment, then replied: “Someone who wants to get your children back.”     Years later, she would long to be sitting at that table again with him, creating something together, out of God’s sight.     She could tell something forced him to trust her. He had blue shadows under his eyes like she did. Now they matched each other stare for stare until the man spoke again.     He knew of a park where kids made drum circles at night, providing adequate cover for them to meet. She knew the place. She’d been stealing from a nearby charity every month for the past year, always for abused women she knew, always savoring the steal for a few days before paying it forward, always thinking she’d help the women take their lives back, always believing the women wanted to take their lives back, always savoring the steal because she was afraid how little good it would actually do.     The man requested she write down all information and meet him the following night. She assigned a time and offered to bring a gun, if he didn’t have one, so that he could kill Sionis. He refused because he never killed. Lawton groaned. Isabelle took a long pull on her cigarette and nodded at the man.     Then he stood up and walked away, into the music and dancing bodies. She watched him go, flicked some ashes on Lawton, and went home.     But she was in a bad state—depressed, with a week of little to no sleep. As soon as she lay down, she had nightmares. First they were about the children.      Then they shifted to her pegged on the ground in an open field with crows attacking her, roaches crawling all over her and into the cuts from the crows. Isabelle opened her eyes, and her roommate was shaking her, doing what she could to wake her up.     Isabelle stayed in her friend’s tiny, broken apartment. When she understood how bad the dream was and how trapped inside it she’d been, the dirty home seemed to glitter like a dirty diamond. The only time Isabelle ever came close to defining what it all meant for herself was during times of abuse. There was no chance for the impossible, no chance that—and, hopefully, she wasn’t the only one—she would ever compromise her potential if it meant dimming her shine, fading out. So this nightmare was a moment of glory. She was sure she was a heroine because she refused to be the victim in the dream.     As for the man in the suit, who spoke from inside a cage like her and must carry just as much guilt, but who didn’t have a focus for his rage, because he couldn’t locate Sionis: she would help him with everything she had. He needed to redeem himself, and it was her golden opportunity to find her children.     Isabelle ransacked the apartment, found a paper and pen, scribbled down every rumor, known associate, and statement made by or about Sionis in detail, providing her personal memories of how she felt during each encounter with him, rather than just describing the factual. She wrote for two hours. When she finished, she stared at her handgun on the dresser. She put it in her purse.     Then she cried.

Facing Doom George Semko     During our four years in South Bend, my wife-to-be, Janice, worried her way through a bachelor’s degree and a nonexistent brain tumor. For three more in Columbus it was graduate school and unreal episodes of carbon monoxide poisoning in our apartment, our Dodge Caravan, several overheated lecture halls, and whatever room, hallway, nook or cranny our young son, Louis, managed to find his way into. In the five married years since, as an assistant professor of psychology here in East Lansing, she has worried herself more energetically and imaginatively than ever, hoping, no doubt, to bring her emotions to a fever pitch on the day she receives tenure.     Two weeks ago on a Saturday morning, Janice was adding last-minute touches to a paper she would present at an important academic conference. I was down the street, picking up bagels and coffee for breakfast. Louis was still in bed. Troubled by the deafening silence, Janice checked to see if our son had stopped breathing. He hadn’t, of course, but across his pillow, his sheets, his hands and face ran a trail of blood—or what looked like blood. Certain that he was suffering from some rare form of hemophilia, Janice mobilized, and within seconds, she and Louis were racing along the familiar route to the university clinic. Unfortunately, a block short of the entrance she sideswiped a parked pickup truck with our hybrid, the impact of this minor accident giving our son a minor nosebleed, the nosebleed confirming Janice’s worst fears: Louis would die in her arms only moments before help could be reached.     What came out in the wash is that Louis had been eating french fries in his bed the night before—french fries and enough ketchup to drown a rat. For punishment, I grounded him that afternoon to the spare bedroom. This is where I keep my collection of golden-age science fiction. Like many materials engineers, I am crazy about science fiction. Like most nine-year-old boys with IQs well north of one-forty, Louis is crazy about it as well.     Two days later Janice flew to the nation’s capitol for her weeklong conference on developmental psychology. While she was away, Louis came down with a bad cold that quickly turned into bronchitis. I decided not to tell her until she got back.     Louis developed his first symptoms—sniffles and a scratchy throat—on Monday morning, only minutes after we waved goodbye to Janice at the airport. He wasn’t complaining, so I dropped him off at school. That evening, though, his temperature shot up to one hundred and two, and on Tuesday morning his cough turned nasty, so I made an appointment with Millbury, our pediatrician. Louis spoke not a word on the drive to Millbury’s office, nor a word while we were inside. He is normally a quiet, solemn child, so it wasn’t until we completed the twenty-minute drive home in unbroken silence that I became suspicious.     “Well, Spock, I’d like to know what you think,” I said as our garage door inched upwards.     Brows furrowed, Louis collected his thoughts. Once satisfied that he had them in proper order, he answered. “I think when Mom called last night, you should have told her I was sick—and not in the bathroom.”     “But, at the time, you were in the bathroom,” I responded, accurately if not innocently.     I didn’t know whether Louis accepted my answer. He opened his door and walked into the house. Reaching over to shut his door, I wondered how many minutes would pass until Janice’s next text and whether I could manage to put her off the scent when she called tonight. I wondered also if I might be imagining things: three days after the accident and our car still smelled like ketchup.     Janice’s call came late. Her day had been hectic. I suspected from the tone of her voice that it had also been triumphant. Before she could ask, I told her Louis was in bed. He was, in fact, sitting up in bed, dressed in a suit and tie and staring at his blank computer screen. But Janice didn’t need to know this.     “I can even see him breathing from here on the sofa,” I said, anticipating my wife’s next question.     “Aww, the poor sweetie. He must think his mother doesn’t love him.”     “He knows you love him, Janice. He also knows you’re very busy,” I said, changing the subject. “How was your presentation?”     “I’m worried,” she said excitedly. “I don’t think they understood it.”     “I’ll bet they did,” I said with supreme confidence. When it comes to the higher psychobabble, Janice is as clear and levelheaded as a Vulcan in a three-piece suit.     After we said our goodbyes, I dropped the phone to the floor, right on top of my tablet, the phone’s darkened screen eclipsing the words of an early steampunk anthology. I was now capable of nothing but sleep.     By Wednesday morning Louis’s temperature had dropped to one hundred and his cough sounded much less menacing, so I felt safe returning to work. That evening the fever was gone. Zelda, his nanny, sipping tea at the kitchen table where I joined her after checking on my dozing son, said she was still concerned. “I think he really misses his mother,” she added with a hand on my wrist so as not to offend. “The poor child hasn’t spoken a syllable all day.”     The moment Zelda was out the door I cracked open a beer and ordered pepperoni pizza—my son’s favorite. I would surprise him with it when he woke. Halfway through a Bruce Sterling story the doorbell rang. Wanting to celebrate, I gave the delivery boy a generous tip. The pizza smelled like heaven.     “Hey, Bones, look what the Borg brought,” I said, mixing my Star Trek and setting the steaming box on the foot of Louis’s bed. He had been awake and typing in his notebook. Atop the current screen I read, “My Will, Part IV, by Louis W. Kennedy.” After glancing at the pizza, he gazed up at me morosely.     Trying not to lose my momentum, I flipped up the lid and began sawing away slices. “You want something to drink with this?” I asked with great cheer. “Pepsi? vodka? battery acid?”     Louis shook his head slowly, like an adult disappointed too many times by a much-loved child. “Dad, I really don’t think now is the time for either of us to joke,” he said, “—or worry about beverages.”     “Maybe not,” I conceded, pressing a palm against my son’s cooling forehead. I sat down beside him and noticed he was wearing the same suit as yesterday but with a different tie. “What is it time for us to worry about, Louis?”     I waited patiently through a full minute of silence while he prepared his reply.     “Mom won’t get to see me before I die, will she?” he finally asked, voice cracking, but still dry-eyed.     “What makes you think you’re going to die?”     “Doctor Millbury never gave me those painful shots in the abdomen, so I figured it was already too late.”     “Son, that’s only for rabies,” I said, not mentioning that I thought this treatment was now obsolete. Since our trip to the doctor, my boy had been bravely facing doom, not wanting to let down the man who—as stated in his will—would inherit his manga, video game and insect collections.     “Isn’t bronchitis the same as rabies?” Louis asked.     “No,” I said, watching him struggle against hope. “Hydrophobia is the same as rabies. Bronchitis is the same as going back to school on Monday.”     “Oh.” Louis looked noncommittally at the pizza, then at his computer screen, then up at me. He loosened his tie and I felt my throat constrict. “I guess I’ll have the battery acid,” he said without cracking a smile.

Consideration Janna Willard     I’m tired. I blink a couple of times, and the digital clock on the VCR comes into focus. 11:00 p.m. — no wonder. I sigh and nestle a little closer to Kevin, content to stay here forever if he’ll let me.     Kevin rubs my arm softly. His hand is warm on my bare skin.     “Mmm, that feels good,” I say, smiling up at him.     He smiles back, his teeth bluish in the glow from the blank TV screen. He kisses my forehead. “You should go home, Mel.”     I close my eyes and lay my head on his shoulder. “What if I don’t want to?”     “You can’t stay here overnight, you know that.”     “Why not? It’s better than home.”     He’s silent for a moment, considering that. Then, “Because I don’t want there to be any regrets between us.”     I feel the heat rising in my chest, and I push myself up and away from him, out of his embrace. “What regrets?” I ask, biting back tears. “Nothing we do could be different or worse than what happens at home.”     He purses his lips, licks them, bites the bottom one, looks at me, sighs. “I could sleep on the couch, I guess.”     “Or we could share the bed.”     He looks at me sharply, opens his mouth to speak, but I cut him off. “I just don’t want to be alone tonight.”     “Are you sure?”     I nod. I’m not, really, but it feels like this is my only chance — for what, I’m not entirely sure — and I’ve decided to take it. Kevin sighs and turns off the silent television.          Kevin has a queen-sized bed. It’s got one of those soft cushiony tops. I’ve been in his bedroom before, but always during the day, always with the light on, always alone.     He turns on one of the table lamps and sits down on the edge of the bed. I stand just inside the doorway, watching him. The room itself is pretty bare: just his bed, a dresser, a couple of night tables with lamps on them, and a book case overflowing with books. I take a gulp of air, suddenly nervous, and close the door softly behind me.     “So, I guess...”     “Do you want to wear one of my t-shirts?” he asks, standing up and walking to the dresser.     I rub my arm where he had rubbed it earlier and shake my head. “No, it’s too hot out. I’ll just... I guess I’ll...” I close my eyes, willing myself to take slow breaths. Panic will not help now, and I’ve put myself here all on my own. It’s not like Kevin forced me to stay or anything. I open my eyes and shrug, unzipping my shorts and stepping out of them. “I’ll just sleep in my underwear, I guess.”     Kevin nods solemnly and opens a drawer. He pulls out a pair of pajamas and sets them on top of the dresser. “I’ll wear bottoms, though, okay?”     “Wear whatever you want,” I say, more flippant than I feel, as I peel off my tank top and let it fall on top of my shorts. I make for the bed. “Which side is mine?”     I can feel his eyes boring into my back. “You choose. I’m flexible.”     I pull back the covers. “I’ll take the left side, then. I like being near the window.”     Kevin nods and watches as I get into bed and pull the sheet up over my body. I leave the duvet and blanket turned down. It really is a hot night. I curl up and roll over to face the wall, giving him some privacy to change into his pajama bottoms. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, but I understand that he doesn’t want to jeopardize our friendship, and I respect that.     I feel the bed shift with his added weight, and I stifle the terror as best I can. He turns off the light, and we are both still. When I’m feeling calm again, I roll onto my back and find that he’s lying on his back, too, staring up at the ceiling.     “What are you thinking about?” I ask. I’m suddenly wide awake, and I need company in my wakefulness.     “Just the things I’m glad of,” he says. “Like, tomorrow’s my day off, and I’m going to have dinner with my family. And my sister and her husband have been married for three years on Sunday. Things like that.”     I roll over onto my left side and rest my head on my hand. My right hand plays with the sheet, tracing designs and picking at wrinkles. “You have a lot of good things in your life, don’t you?”     “I suppose so.”     “Is that why you keep me around? To remind you that you’ve got it good?” I realize that I sound more bitter than I actually feel when he winces.     “I keep you around because we’ve been friends for years and you know me better than anyone.”     “Even Cheryl?” Cheryl’s his ex-girlfriend. She’d never liked me, called me a whore and a tramp every chance she got. She’s the one who looked like a hooker, with too much makeup and her big hair right out of the 80’s.     Kevin runs his left hand through his hair and leaves his palm resting on his forehead. “Especially Cheryl. She was only interested in me because of my money and my career.”     I put my right hand on his cheek and turn his head so he’s looking at me instead of the ceiling. “Well, no worries. I’m not your friend because of your money or your career.”     He smiles a little. “You aren’t?”     “Nope.” I lean a little closer. It’s terrifying and exciting, how close we are to each other, but I lean into his ear and whisper, “You have a good heart, Kevin. That’s why I’m your friend.”     I pull away and he turns his head and our eyes meet. I find myself wondering if he slept with Cheryl in this bed, but I don’t dare ask. His hands come up and he takes hold of my shoulders. Before I lose my nerve, I press my lips onto his.     His hands relax and start stroking my arms, and I shift my body closer to his. My lips part to allow his tongue into my mouth.     Before I really know what I’m doing, I roll so that I’m lying on top of him. His hands move to stroke my back and they come to rest on my bra band.     I freeze.     He drops his hands back down to my shoulders, and he pushes me away. We’re both breathing hard.     “Melissa, I don’t want to do this if it’s going to be too hard for you.”     I nod and close my eyes. “I know,” I whisper.     He wraps his arms around me and I let my head drop so that our foreheads are touching. I open my eyes.     “Not all men are like him. You know that.”     “Yes.”     “Okay.” He rolls to his right and deposits me on the bed. He gets up. “I’ll be right back, okay? Don’t go anywhere.”     I shake my head and watch him leave. Time is frozen while he’s gone. I don’t even realize I’ve been holding my breath until he’s back under the sheet beside me.     I wrap my right arm around his chest, pull myself closer, and rest my head on his shoulder. He puts his arms around me cautiously, like he’s afraid I’ll break. Maybe he’s right.     “Thank you,” I say as I start to drift off.     “What for?”     “For seeing me.”

Dybbuk David J. Tabak     When I died, the last thing going through my mind was not regret or fear, but the driver’s side window of my Honda Accord. I didn’t see a heavenly light or the flames of hell—nothing but the small cottonwood tree at the bottom of the rapidly approaching culvert. The tree flipped my car over, throwing my head into the window’s void.     If I could have said anything as the wheels stopped spinning, it wouldn’t have been a complaint or even an expression of horror. I would leave that to good Samaritans who stopped to see if they could help me and then vomited when they found my headless body or bodiless head; I would have said it was a shitty end to a shitty day.     Waking from a nearly sleepless night, I found myself in a puddle of my own snot and the remnants of a box of Triscuits and chunks of summer sausage. It had been my dinner with a side of Heinekens followed by shots of Jameson’s for dessert. My first thought was “not again” and the next was “where the hell am I?”     I shouldn’t have been puzzled. I had been living in this Red Roof Inn for nearly a week since Ronnie, my wife, threw me out of the condo for nothing more than having sex with her ex-best friend who had dropped off a casserole while Ronnie recovered from her hysterectomy.     To salt the wound, I also lost my job as syndicated columnist on family issues for a chain of suburban papers when my editor learned I was not the clueless dad to three adorable, yet vastly wiser, redheaded triplets named Ryan, Briana and Susan. The fact I didn’t have any children may have also annoyed him, but at least it explained why I never brought “those adorable scamps” into the office. If you asked me, Ronnie was being a bit unfair. After all, I lost my job and my wife was in the hospital. Besides, I wasn’t the one with bad taste in friends.     I stumbled out of bed and stepped on a plastic glass that had been my companion last night. The glass shattered under my bare foot and a shard managed to nearly slice off my little toe. The best I could find to staunch the bleeding was a roll of toilet paper the consistency of 200-grit sandpaper.     The idiot illegal immigrant who moved the dirt around my room forgot to replace the coffee packet in the bathroom. My choice was to make a pot of decaf or head for the lobby and hope I didn’t run into the imbecile businessman from the day before who was incapable of silence. Yes, it is plenty “hot enough” for me. All night the air conditioner blew warm mold-laden air across my face. All I want is a cup of coffee, half a bottle of aspirin and for you to either shut up or fall asleep while driving.     What were the chances of the same guy being there two days in a row? He was a salesman (or I thought he was); he should be in Whogivesadamn, Kansas, by now. I opened my door with the trepidation of someone making a cameo appearance in a sniper’s scope.     I was stopped by the shrill cry of “Look, mommy, that man isn’t wearing any pants!” I looked down and realized that I was wearing nothing but white boxers, through which my penis had snaked its way out. There was a scream and I would have been back in my room if I had not forgotten to take my keycard with me. Through the slit in the curtains I could see it on the small table, right next to my wallet.     There was nothing left to do but sit on the ground surrounded by the gathering crowd of amused bystanders and wait for the police to arrive, which, judging by the multiple sirens, would be soon. Right in front of me, with a smirk on his pock-marked face, was the Indian desk clerk with whom I had argued about the odd smell in the room yesterday. Of course he couldn’t smell anything, he reeked of sweat, pus and curry.     The police were unsympathetic. I shouldn’t have called them “pigs-who-had-nothing-better-to-do-than-bust-the-chops-of-a-guy-obviously-down-on-his-luck,” but frisking me against the wall in my boxers was uncalled for. I was fortunate to get back in my room with a few shreds of dignity and a summons to appear in district court on an indecency charge.     My cellphone was buzzing Livin’ La Vida Loco while sambaing across the vanity. It fell to the tile floor and the newly cracked screen announced “3 m ss d alls.” The telephone number belonged to Ed, my former boss. He called twice, and hung up angrily each time, before leaving a message on the third try.     Ed started his message with “you son of a bitch” and got worse from there. Apparently, I was unsuccessful in getting my last column past him by sending it right to layout. “You didn’t think I’d let this paper go out without reading your column. Maybe you did because I am, and I quote, ‘a mindless, knuckle scraper who caters to the worst in dead-eyed suburbanites who will slurp up whatever drivel I vomit up.’ Jesus, and all this time I thought you were just an asshole. I should have known no one could have ever been that clueless as a dad and be so good humored about it. You aren’t an ordinary asshole, you are a Grade A, Prime, All-American Asshole. You really take the prize. But I am going to give you your wish. I am going to publish your final article tomorrow, just as written, even though you spelled ignoramus wrong. And God help you when your wife, your mother, the mayor, the school superintendent, Democrats, Jews, Muslims, dogs, cats, U2, Lady Gaga and the Netherlands read what you wrote. Jesus, when you go all out to be a jerk, you don’t go half-ass. If I were you, I would get out of town and not come back.” He slammed his phone down.     Maybe I had gone too far. I could have titled it “Goodbye and Good Luck.” “Schmucks,” though sonorous, was gratuitous. I found my watch under the bed. It was almost noon; within 24 hours the paper would be in the hands of the paper boys delivering my doom to just about everybody I knew. My capacity for hindsight is unparalleled. So much of the misery in my life would have been avoided if only I had listened to myself. Ed did have a good point— perhaps a road trip was in order. There was a whole coast I hadn’t yet insulted.     The good thing about being thrown out of your home with little notice is that it makes packing easy. All I had to do was throw my toiletries and last Heineken into the Walgreen’s bag and I was out of there. I probably should have checked out, but I figured Apu had my nearly maxed-out credit card; let him do his worst.     Of course, if I took the time to check out, I wouldn’t have come face-to-grill with a flying Weber that exploded out of the back of a white pickup truck that cut me off on the Dixie Highway, causing me to careen into the eastbound lanes narrowly missing a semi, its horn blaring as if I didn’t know I was heading in the wrong direction. A wide turn to the left, down the culvert, nearly missing the tree . . . well you know the rest.     It was only when I heard a woman’s scream that I realized I was a bit more than hurt. She tripped over a rock that wasn’t a rock at all. “Oh my God! It’s a head!” She ran behind a tree to vomit in private. It was amazing to witness the effect the discovery of my bi-partite body had on would-be good Samaritans. They parked on the side of the road and ran down the hill to lend a hand. Once they realized that no help was needed, they retreated to the side of the road to wait for the police or get on with their lives now that mine had so obviously ended. They had done their good deed for the day, right?     With sirens blaring in my ears for the second time that day, I found a Macy’s shopping bag in the car’s trunk. I stumbled across the field, training my body to take orders from a head twenty feet away. I placed my head in the bag and walked over to the tree that had been the root of my misfortune. I leaned against its twisted trunk, tilting the bag so I could see out of the top. First came the young state trooper who shuffled down the hill and tried to not look nauseated as he peered through the windowless window. Then came the ambulance crew who had obviously seen worse and left making jokes that I was head over heels dead. A gray van with the words “Medical Examiner” printed in small letters on the side pulled up a half of an hour later. Within fifteen minutes both parts of my body were placed in a body bag and shoved into the back of the van. Finally, a wrecker unceremoniously righted the car and pulled it onto the back of a flatbed, but not before pocketing the change I had in my ashtray.     I was alone, watching the cars speed by, their occupants completely unaware that a man had died not fifty feet from where they were driving. It was nearly dark when I asked “now what?” I had no doubt I was dead and would not need to worry about mailing the mortgage payment that was in the glove compartment.     My uncle Alois told me ghost stories when I was a kid. Most of them were pretty lame and involved him speaking very softly and then yelling when he got to the climax. As a four year old, I was scared. When I passed ten, I would roll my eyes and by eleven I was beating him to the punch line, causing him to grasp his chest in mock infarction.     However, the story of the Dybbuk scared me as a kid and still scared me as an adult. As far as I could tell a dybbuk is a Jewish poltergeist. Unlike gentile ghosts, he haunts himself. He wanders the earth seeking to undo some past misdeed. In all the stories, the ghost is more pitiful than frightful. I could fully imagine that I had experienced too much to be confined to a single life. There were too many regrets to be confined to a single lifespan.     I wondered if I was a dybbuk. If so, what the hell was I doing in the middle of nowhere? I had done plenty wrong at my childhood home, at school, at college and lately with my family and work. As far as this field was concerned, I was pretty sure I had done nothing more malevolent than throw a can out the window as I sped by. Was recycling the task I had to complete before I could find eternal rest?     It seemed patently unfair I should be punished for something I did and provided with no information on what that was. Hell, even Jacob Marley knew what he had done wrong. I would think damnation would come with an instruction manual.     To make matters worse, I could think of many things I could do to make amends. The problem was most of them were at least 20 miles away and my only means of transportation was a pancaked Honda on its way to the junkyard.     Or was it? There was no reason to suppose that I was confined by mortal constraints. I was a ghost after all. What if I could fly or simply wish myself somewhere else? Someone had obviously done their homework when it came to post-mortal punishment. I could fly no more than 2 feet in any direction. So far, the afterlife sucked.     Something stirred in the bushes. I assumed it was some sort of animal, most likely a deer or a coyote. But then I saw a near-transparent set of legs come out of the grasses. One foot wore a high-heeled shoe, the other was bare.     A chenille dress appeared next, lacy at the bottom, bloody at the top. There was something sticking out of her chest. It took me a moment to realize it was a silk umbrella, the type favored by bridesmaids and antebellum belles. All I could see was the handle and a few of the ribs (the umbrella’s, not hers) sticking out. Dried blood in the shape of a flower spilled down the front of her dress. When her head finally appeared, it looked like it had been used for batting practice. One eye was closed, the other drooped unnaturally in its orb; obviously the cheek bone was broken. Her lower lip was nearly torn off from her face and I could see quite a few of her teeth were missing. A small wreath of white flowers circled her head like a halo. It looked like it had just come out of the box and I wondered how it could possibly remain pristine after the trauma she had obviously suffered.     She floated to a spot fifty feet from me. She looked down at something and her shoulders sagged. Walking a bit closer, I could see a small wooden cross with the faded inscription:     Cynthia     1984 – 2005     R.I.P.     She swiveled her head, which was not attached to her neck as tightly as it once was. Even in the dark, I could see the bloody veins in her eye, drawing a bull’s-eye around the iris. She was gruesome and I wanted to run away, but she was the only other being who could tell me how this life-after-death thing worked.     “Excuse me,” was all I said.     Her eye nearly fell out of its orb. Then she screamed. I turned the Macy’s bag around to see what was creeping up on me. Nothing. I then realized she was afraid of me. There truly was no rest for the dearly departed. She not only started to run away, she began to fade.     “Wait,” I said from the well of the bag. “Please don’t leave me.”     She blinked like a child peaking out from under a blanket to make sure there were no monsters under the bed. She held the shaft of the umbrella like a sword in a sheath. “S . . stay where you are. Who . . . who are you?”     It was an interesting question. I knew who I was. I wasn’t sure what I was now. I shrugged. “I used to be called Russell by my mother, Russ by people who didn’t know me well but wanted to sell me something, and RJ by everybody else. But nobody ever heard of a ghost named RJ. Because that is what we are, right? We’re ghosts?” From the bottom of the bag, I tried to make contact with her good eye.     It was her turn to shrug. “I guess so. No one told me anything after I died. One moment I was at my cousin Judy’s wedding. I was in her wedding party, my third wedding party. Always a bridesmaid and obviously never will be a bride.” She made us wear these awful dresses that looked like we were going to a tea party. We had to carry these awful lace-covered umbrellas.” She flicked the handle impaled in her chest. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t want it.”     “There was this guy,” she said, looking as wistful as her crushed face would allow. “You know the type. Long brown hair with eyes to match. A slightly upturned nose. And dimples. Deep, deep dimples. I am . . . was a sucker for dimples and the whiskey sours that we kept downing on the veranda overlooking the eighteenth hole. I have no idea of how many we had, but it was enough for me to get into his Charger without thinking. I wanted to dump the umbrella in the trash on our way out to the parking lot. He insisted I bring it with me. God only knows what fantasy he had in mind.”     “He drove so fast. The engine growled and pushed me back into my seat and then from side to side when he hit the turns. I laughed and laughed, feeling like I was on some roller coaster. Well, that lasted a mile or two. They say he didn’t even try to make the last turn, just drove straight into the culvert, smashing the front into us. I guess I was holding this stupid umbrella. I really shouldn’t blame it; the paramedic said I died of multiple traumatic injuries. If the umbrella doesn’t get you, the windshield will. I don’t mind dying; it wasn’t like I had accomplished anything in my life. I don’t mind being a ghost. But do I really need to spend forever with this thing sticking out of my chest?” She gave it another flick.     “You want to know the worst thing about it?” I shrugged as best as a man without a head could shrug. “Actually there are two worst things about it. One, that son of bitch didn’t die in the accident. The paramedics loaded him into the ambulance, while they left me to be picked up by the coroner. And two, I don’t remember his name, if I ever knew it. This guy killed me and I can’t find him to haunt him. It’s not fair.” She shook her head and it looked like it was in serious danger of falling off. That was okay, there was room in my bag. She sighed. “How did you die?”     “My car flipped over because of a flying grill.” I pointed in the direction of the tree that was now listing nearly 45 degrees.     Either her lower lip was about to fall off or she was pouting. “I liked that tree; it had pretty white flowers in spring. Did you have to hit that tree?”     “Next time I will try to be more careful.” We stopped talking. All you could hear was the wind blowing and the cicadas’ complaints. The moon spied from behind the clouds, painting everything blue. If I wasn’t already dead, it would have been eerie.     “So what comes next?” I finally asked her.     “What do you mean?”     “I mean what do we do?”     “Do?” she asked, looking around as if I was talking to someone else. “We do this. We walk around in the dark.”     “No haunting? No mischief?”     Her good eye narrowed as if she thought I was looking for trouble. “No. Just walk around here.”     “Are we alone?”     “Alone? No, we have the people on the highway. Occasionally my mother stops by to put flowers on my cross. The guy in the Charger never comes.     “No, I meant other ghosts? Are there other ghosts around here?”     “Just Roy. He’s been here since the seventies. He was duck hunting and didn’t notice his shotgun barrel was clogged with mud. His face looks like a colander.”     “Have you ever asked him what we are supposed to do?”     “No, Roy doesn’t talk much. He just makes duck calls.” On cue, we heard a quack from the bushes.     “I always thought that ghosts tried to correct mistakes from their life and that’s the only way they can find peace.”     She smirked. “It would take me an eternity to correct all the mistakes I made in life. Which one would come first? Quitting high school in tenth grade? Sleeping with the night manager at the Hampton Inn? Having an abortion when I realized he was also sleeping with the head of housecleaning? But I guess I should start with not getting in the Charger with that drunken asshole.” She wiped a muddy tear with a hand with at least three broken fingers. “So that’s my story. What would you work on?”     I watched the moonlight stream through Roy’s head as he impotently called water fowl.     Clearly I had something to atone for and unless I came up with something soon, this was going to be a long forever. What could it be? My list of ills was long and rich with possibilities. I was a dishonest, jealous, vindictive man. To that list add lazy. My highest aspiration was to do as little as possible. Tomorrow was always ideal for repentance, all the way until I ran out of tomorrows.     The word “tomorrow” rattled in my brain like Jacob Marley’s chains. Wait, tomorrow was nearly today. My avenue to forgiveness lay in the final column that Ed threatened to print. Who would mourn me or even remember me fondly after they read the article? I shuddered to think what they would put on my headstone — “Here Lies a Real Asshole.”     I had to stop the column from being printed. It was my only hope. But how? So far I didn’t seem capable of affecting anything in the physical world. Just my luck. Even if I made it to Chicago in time to stop the presses, the best I could hope for was to paw at the stop button impotently and diaphanously. Fuck it. They all deserved it. Screw ‘em.     No, that was what I would have thought when I was alive and see where it got me? Just because I could hurt people didn’t mean I had to. I could be better. Maybe that was what I needed to do. To show some sort of contrition. Wouldn’t it be great if I could rewrite the column as sort of a confession? An apology from beyond? Ed would scratch his head, wondering how the column changed. Was he losing his mind? Had he misjudged me? Would he write an editorial encomium? I would have liked that and maybe even Holland would forgive me.     Without a word, I started walking north as fast I as could.     Cynthia cried behind me “Hey, where are you going? You are not going to leave me with Roy. Was it something I said? Be honest, it’s the umbrella, right?” I turned to explain and saw the look I knew too well. Even in her broken and battered face, I saw disappointment. It was one expression I never confused. I saw it on my parents’ face. I saw it on my friends’ faces. I even saw it in the mirror. As our marriage settled down into a series of betrayals and lies, it became Ronnie’s mask, protecting her from hope.     No one in Holland gives a damn if I was sorry for calling them Gouda-heads. Lady Gaga could fall asleep on her mattress made of $100 bills and not care what I thought of her. I had come and gone and very few people took notice. Those who did weren’t impressed. Now that I was dead, I could easily witness how well the world did without me. I looked heavenward, impressed by the punishment God had devised. I always knew I was a jerk, I never suspected I was irrelevant.     The only person for whom I wasn’t irrelevant was sleeping 20 miles north of me, perhaps dreaming I could be a better husband, not realizing those chances were now less than zero. One word bubbled up from the Macy’s bag: Ronnie. I needed to apologize to her. Perhaps if she forgave me, I could rest. Remembering all the things I had done, her forgiveness would also take an eternity. That didn’t matter; I had to apologize even if she didn’t forgive me. I could stomach roaming the field forever if she heard “sorry” for the first and last time from me.     I felt sorry for Cynthia, but I didn’t have time to explain. I had a long way to walk and no plan for when I got there. I thought I heard Cynthia shout something about men being all the same, but it could have been the wind blowing through the tilting tree.     I walked for several hours, taking time to scare a guy who had pulled over to take a leak around 2:00 a.m. He screamed, wet himself and jumped back in his Jetta. Although I was on a mission of redemption, I couldn’t help but laugh. Clearly being dead had its advantages.     Ronnie. All I needed was a minute or two to tell her I was sorry. To tell her I was wrong. Now dead, I discovered regret as the tears started to stream out of my lifeless eyes. The bottom of the bag was getting soggy and I forced myself to go back thinking about the guy with the urine-soaked pants in the Jetta.     I could see the orange glow over the lake. Ronnie would be getting up soon. I wanted her to be awake, but not too awake. I didn’t want to scare her; I hoped she could attribute my appearance to a dream. A horrific dream with a happy ending.     I walked faster as the sky blanched. I turned down our street as the sun finally rose over the two-flat across the street. I felt dizzy, looking down to make sure my head hadn’t tipped over. It was gone, bag and all. So were my legs and hands as I melted into a sunbeam.     The moon rose over the trees in the field. Roy was stalking a deer that stared through him, dumbly chewing grass. “Good night,” a voice said from behind me. I turned to find myself eye to umbrella. “How was your day?” Cynthia asked, trying to look as annoyed as her broken face would allow.     “How did I get here? The last thing I remember was walking up to my building.”     Cynthia let out a sigh reserved for rookies. She clearly wasn’t in the mood for giving more detail than necessary. She scratched the area where the umbrella exited her chest. “That’s the deal. You disappear in the day and come out at night in the place you died. Once the sun’s up, we’re not.”     “But that’s not fair,” I objected.     She shrugged, loosening her head until she was staring up at the stars with her good eye. “That’s death.”

The Pro Mark Herden     Radly and Preston stood behind the rental counter at Skate World. Preston, whose job it was to clean the arcade held a skate upside down, studying its broken front axle. At eighteen he was already heavy, slow of hand. As he concentrated he shifted his mouth to the side. This is what got him, he said to Radly while tilting the wheel to recreate what had happened when George, the skating instructor, fell and broke his leg.     Radly looked to the expanse of polished floor and pictured George, a razor-thin former skating champion with an angular face and shock of silver hair skating out there, weaving his way around clusters of slow and faulting teenagers, his hands behind his back, leaning into the corners, legs working in easy rhythm.     Radly, a high school senior who collected entrance fees from the skaters looked on sadly. I can’t picture George falling. He’s the best skater I’ve ever seen.     The skates we got here are crap, Preston said. He knew that, but last night he forgot his own, and look what happened. The pro made a fatal mistake.     He’ll be out for a long time.     He’s fifty-five years old, Preston said. It’ll take time for his leg to heal. He pushed away from the counter he had been leaning on. Larry’s got other instructors, he added, sucking in his stomach.     What’s George going to do? Skating is all he knows.     He’ll find something. Don’t go feeling sorry for him, because he can’t roller skate. He should’ve known better than to use our skates. Besides, he’s way too old to be skating real fast going backwards and doing tricks and that. Young guys like us, we’re the ones who should be doing that stuff.     Yeah, if we could. . .  Is he married?     Does it matter?     It’s a shame, that’s all.     You look too deep into stuff. Look, Preston said, unscrewing the axle housing from the skate bottom, if you want to visit him tonight, tell Larry. Well . . .  no, don’t tell Larry. You know how the son-of-a-bitch is. Even though George is his brother, he might fire you if you left here for ten minutes to visit him. You’d think that Larry, being the owner of this place, would be nicer to George.     Radly often thought of Larry as a human bowling ball, always dressed in black, a round, fat face. Larry’s jacket, black with a silver outline a skater, crouched, leaning into a curve, looked out of place on him.     Zip down to the hospital when Larry goes out to eat, Preston said. I won’t say nothing. Take that old bike back in the room where what’s-his-name . . .  Mike paints the arcade games. Sneak out the back.     Radly stepped behind the ticket counter and waited for Larry to open for the night. He looked over the softly lit wooden floor to where the DJ booth was. Without the music and the sight of a hundred faces flashing by, Skate World seemed a lonely and hollow place.     Mounted in the wall near the entrance was a display cabinet of skating trophies people had won. Some of George’s old trophies stood in the back row.     Radly had a few minutes until the doors opened at six. He decided to check in on Mike.     He walked to the back and looked through the shop door. He spotted Mike kneeling down, sketching a figure on the side of an unpainted pinball machine. Arcade games, old bowling machines, machines that test driving skills, Star Trek games, all sat about the room, some with their panels taken off for repainting.     He made his way back to Mike.     Mike looked up, and then stood. He adjusted his wire rim glasses, and with both hands tugged at his black ponytail. He had a slight build and his low voice sounded as though it were coming from a much bigger man. How’s it going out there? he asked.     Okay. Heard about George breaking his leg?     Yeah. He shook his head. The world’s a hell of a place sometimes.     George is different. He hardly talks. You see him every day, then you get to think he’s always going to be there.     Mike looked at Radly. You like him because he’s not like anyone else his age. Hard to say what’s behind him.     Radly studied the sketch on the side of the pinball machine. It showed Wonder Woman breaking from chains anchored into the side of a cement wall. That’s cool.     Look what I did over there. Mike nodded to indicate another game. Radly looked to see a purple bat-like face with pointy teeth and steel armor. You’ve got great ideas.     That’s Buel, a guy who wants to destroy Spiderman. I used to read comics as a kid. In this business you’ve got to know all these characters.     You’re talented.     Thanks. He knelt again and picked up a black pastel.     I’m going to visit George later.     You’re probably the one person who’ll take the time to check on him.     Radly returned to the ticket counter.     An hour later he slipped out the back and rode to Geneva General Hospital.     George looked pale, small in his bed. He didn’t smile when he saw Radly.     How you doing? Radly asked, feeling that maybe he shouldn’t have come.     I’ll be fine.     It’s not the same place without you.     George laughed, making Radly feel foolish. Hey, don’t worry about me. Things happen.     I was going to drop by your apartment and leave a card, but I didn’t know if I could get in or not.     Radly had heard that George is embarrassed by the little room he has.     Well, I don’t usually have people over, he said.     How long are you going to be out of skating, you think?     Don’t know. Got some things to think about. Been skating my whole life.     What made you stay with it for so long?     George smiled. Wish I could answer that. Funny thing, as far as skating goes, I always thought of myself as a hand on a clock going around and around, unable to stop. He looked away for a moment. I guess we all get caught up in something. The years go by, first thing you know, you’re my age. I don’t want to get into all that though; it’s not in the gentleman’s code. ***     Radly rode along the broken, tree-lined sidewalk, feeling that something unimaginable, but brutal lay ahead, poised to strike. He decided to take a shortcut back to Skate World. He rode as fast as he could and turned onto a wide street that led to a highway lined with old industrial buildings that loomed like giant dominoes. Distant city lights shone in the spaces between the buildings. He thought of George and wondered how his brother was able to show no concern for him?it was all so unfair.     He noticed an embankment off the side of the road. He let the bike coast over to it and looked over the edge. At the bottom lay a small dump. Piles of clothing, a mattress and a refrigerator door were the largest castaways. He got off the bike, aimed it toward the edge and pushed it over. It wove its way down, hit the refrigerator door and tipped over.     Radly began walking and looked to an expanse of grass separating two dark, brick buildings. For a moment he imagined life-like figures there; Mike’s paintings come to life; Superman, Wonder Woman, and Flash stood in the field looking back at him. Scared at his imagining he turned away for a moment, looked back and they were gone.

Horsefly Donald Gaither drunken horsefly the size of a bumblebee wobbles in its flight

Speak to a Stranger Lisa Gray     “Shut Up!”     I did. But I was fuming. Why did Matt always have to speak to strangers? This was America. And we were standing on a deserted railway platform at an unearthly time of the morning. Wackos were around. The world was a dangerous place. And Matt treated it as if everyone was his long lost buddy. Yet that’s what had attracted me to him a year ago. His openness. His friendliness.     But not here. Not with this man. The only man on the platform.     “Howdy! You going far!” the man had said.     I took one look at him and turned away. The wild, unkempt hair, the round neck, stained, navy tee-shirt under the open, dirty, denim shirt. The crumpled blue jeans. There was no way I was speaking to him.     But Matt felt differently.     “Boston,” said Matt, edging closer to the man.     “Me too,” said the man.     Damn! I thought. What if he followed us?     “Train not going all the way!”     “What do you mean?” said Matt.     “We got to take a bus from Swampscott.”     “A bus!”     I hadn’t meant to talk to him. But he’d taken me by surprise.     “Yep!”     I was about to say more. But the train arrived. Matt and I climbed the unfamiliar stairs and entered the car.     I cursed as I saw the long bench-type seats. I resisted the impulse to slide over to the window as I normally would have done. There was no way I was leaving space for the man to sit down beside us. I moved halfway along the bench and waited for Matt to take his place beside me. But as he did, the man slid into a seat across the aisle from him.     I dug my elbow in Matt’s side.     “What?” he said.     “Don’t speak to him!” I said in an inaudible tone.     “Don’t tell me what to do!” said Matt.     “Well, you can’t speak to people here. It’s not like back home! It’s not safe!”     I turned my head towards the window and gazed out blankly. Remembering the Boston Strangler.     Avoid eye contact. That was the way to do it. Matt had only to do the same.     But Matt didn’t. When I looked round, he was chatting across the aisle to the man as though he’d known him for years. Though I couldn’t hear what they were saying.     Damn! What was wrong with him?     Did he want to get us mugged? Or murdered?     I never spoke to strangers when I travelled.     But then maybe that was my problem.     I’d told myself it was for self-preservation. Who was I kidding? I was shy. Lacked confidence. Was frightened of everything. Until Matt came along.     I hadn’t even spoken to Matt. He’d spoken to me. That was how we’d met.     But then Matt spoke to everyone. I found that out later.     I’m just jealous, I thought. Jealous of Matt’s popularity. And popular he was. With men. With women. With this guy.     Positive Matt with his friendly outward demeanour. And negative me worrying about everything. Always prepared for the worst scenario. That’s why I’d taken out the big insurance policy.     “You’ve got to be careful when you travel,” I’d told Matt. And Matt had agreed with me.     But then Matt agreed with everything. He’d agreed I’d keep my own name and my own money when we married six months ago. And he’d agreed to this holiday. Though I’d paid for it. Agreeable Matt. Too agreeable, I thought, glancing at his face, fixed firmly on his travelling buddy.     “Swampscott!”     The guard’s voice bellowed out as he made his way down the car and out the door at the end of the car.     I stood up and motioned to Matt to move towards the door. If we were quick we would leave the queer guy behind. I reached the door of the car. I could see the guard’s face framed like a glass portrait facing me.     And in his hand a key.     What the hell does he need a key for? I thought.     His hand turned the key in the car door.     I turned to Matt.     “He’s locked us in!” I said, panic all over my face. “What’s he done that for?”     “Probably for safety,” said Matt.     But I was already imagining an accident. And us trapped in the car. Unable to get out.     “That’s dangerous!” I said.     “Life’s dangerous, ma’am!” said a voice behind Matt.     Oh God, the queer guy was right behind Matt.     But Matt didn’t seem bothered.     The train came to a stop and the guard turned the key in the car door.     I made my way down on to the platform and lingered there waiting for Matt. I saw the queer guy get off and hurry off with the other passengers after a woman calling the way to the Boston buses. A little way ahead of us he boarded the first of two buses.     “Get on the back bus!” I said to Matt.     “Why the hell are you always telling me what to do?” he said.     “Because we want to avoid that guy!” I said, angry that he couldn’t see danger.     “He’s harmless!” said Matt.     “How do you know?” I said. “He could be a mass murderer!”     Matt laughed. A hollow, dull laugh.     “I don’t think so,” he said. As if he knew more than me.     My eyes never left the bus in front for the whole journey to North Station. I even waited for the bus in front to close its doors before I motioned quickly for Matt to descend.     “Quick. There’s a cab over there. Let’s get it!” I said.     I pulled him over to it and thrust him in.     “Where to?” said the driver.     “CambridgeSide Galleria,” I said.     We’d be safe in a mall. Among lots of people.     It was mid-afternoon before I spotted him. Matt and I had had lunch after a tiring morning’s shopping. I hadn’t done any. But Matt had. He always did. On himself. I didn’t normally resent it. But this time was different. It was my birthday. Why was Matt spending on himself?     “What about my birthday present?” I said as Matt returned for the third time to look at an Armani watch he had been obsessing about all morning.     “You’ll get that later,” he said roughly.     I turned away so he couldn’t see the tears that threatened to well up.     That’s when I saw him.     He’d pulled back into the doorway of a clothes store. But the faded, dirty blue jeans stuck out there even more.     “It’s that queer guy from the train!” I said to Matt, quite forgetting how upset I was with him.     Ben looked round annoyed I’d distracted him.     “So what?” he said.     He didn’t seem surprised.     “I told you not to speak to him! He’s followed us here!”     “So?”     “So we’ve got to lose him!”     But we didn’t.     We tried. We spent the rest of the day trying.     But he seemed to be everywhere.     “Let’s get out of here!” I said, aware the day was growing old and we had to get back for the last train. “It’s the only way we’ll lose him!”     We shouldn’t have left it so late. I realised that when I saw the empty station.     “You folks travelling to Swampscott?” said the man at the enquiries desk. “You’ve got to take the bus. Follow me.”     I looked around. There was no sign of anyone. They must be on the bus already, I thought. Well, at least we’d be safe there. With people around.     I could stop worrying.     But the bus was empty.     At least we’ll be safe, I thought.     Just Matt and me.     But just as the bus doors were closing he jumped on.     “You travelling to Swampscott?” he said, waving his wild hair about. “Well, how do you like that?”     Matt smiled. He didn’t seem worried. But I was. Why was this guy following us?     “We gotta take the train from there.”     His short sentences were beginning to worry me.     I couldn’t imagine what he and Matt had found to talk about earlier.     The guy seemed a one sentence moron to me.     Well at least we were safe for the moment. The guy wouldn’t attempt anything with the bus driver here. Then there’d be people on the train. People travelling from Swampscott.     But the train was empty.     The queer guy got in the car and sat down.     “I’m not going in there!” I said to Matt, as the train moved off. “It’s too dangerous!”     There was a funny look on Matt’s face.     “I’ll speak to him,” said Matt. “Maybe I can get him to switch cars!”     “Don’t go in there, Matt!” I said. “Let’s get the guard!”     But Matt had already gone into the car.     I closed the door behind him and stood looking through the glass. Should I call the guard?     I saw Matt’s mouth moving. And then the queer guy’s. Surly. Turned down at the corner. Then I saw him reach under his shirt.     “No!” I screamed as I saw the fire-arm.     But Matt had seen it too. He grabbed hold of it and wrestled with the man, the gun waving at first wildly in the air and then disappearing desperately out of sight.     Even through the car window I heard the bang.     “Matt!” I screamed, opening the car door and rushing in.     One man crumpled.     But it wasn’t Matt.     “Oh, thank heaven!” I said, throwing my arms around him. “I told you he was dangerous! Let’s get out of here!”     “No, you stay here! I’ll get the guard!”     “Don’t leave me here, Matt!” I said but Matt had already gone. The car door slammed ominously behind him.     What if the guy wasn’t dead? I thought.     I leant over him foolishly.     A hand reached up and grabbed me by the neck.     “You gotta get out of here!” he said in a strangled voice.     I tried to pull his hand off my throat.     “F.B.I. He knows we’ve been following him. He’s wanted for the murder of his previous two wives. Get out of here!” he said his hand slackening its grip on my throat and falling to his side.     The guy’s a wacko, I thought.     But he was right about one thing. I had to get out of there. I had to get the guard.     He was right there. Standing behind the glass of the car door with the key in his hand. Thank God! I wanted to cry out. Lock the car door! Let me out then lock the car door!     But as I reached the door that I realised it wasn’t the guard. He was lying in his underwear on the floor outside the car. It was Matt. Matt dressed in the guard’s uniform. The car door opened slowly and Matt stood there grinning, the gun pointed directly at me.     “You were right. America’s not safe. The guy was a wacko. He attacked you and the guard. I wrestled with him and the gun went off. You were right. It’s not like back home. It’s better. Easier. You made it easy for me. I’ll claim self-defence. I’ll get off. And I’ll claim the insurance.”     He raised the gun and pointed it directly at me.     “Happy Birthday!” he said.     It was then I realised. Realised where I’d gone wrong. What I should have done a long time ago. And what everyone should do.     Always speak to a stranger.

Blood Money Austin Harrington     At nine in the morning on any Saturday, my neighborhood is quiet. I can hear the traffic from the major intersections but no cars come down my street. All the hookers left the streets at dawn. The cops made their rounds long ago to quiet down the late night partiers. The pit-bull puppy from down the street that’s already mean because his owner thinks it’s tough to have a growling dog at his side, even he is still sleeping. I am left alone to walk the few blocks to the plasma center. The sound of each step echoes in the silence and makes me think about the current state of my life. I’m thirty years old but most people place me around forty five. It’s the prematurely grey hair or maybe it’s the drug abuse and alcoholism from my younger years starting to show on my face. I still indulge, but not at the reckless level of days gone by; now I smoke and drink with all the respectability of a married father of two. Each wrinkle or bag under my eyes tells a story like a line on the inside of a tree tells its age. I live with my wife’s family and have two kids but no job. I start to think that leaving my temp job wasn’t the best plan.     It wasn’t much of a life but it was easy. Easy has never been my goal. But after a while of being hooked on cheap wages and ordinary life, I became comfortable, too comfortable. I knew it was time to leave. I found my first excuse and walked out. I’m happier when I struggle. When I have to pick up odd jobs to pay the bills or pawn a record to buy a bottle of wine for Mia and me to drink after the kids go to bed. It’s the role I am best suited for. The life I am happiest in.     I walk past the empty cars that line the street. At night I would be looking behind each one to see if there was a crack-head waiting to break my skull open with a pipe just for the loose change in my pockets but in the early light of day this street was as safe as any other in the city. The cars themselves amazed me. Beautiful classic Impalas, brand new Cadillacs and all sitting in front of houses with boarded up windows and eviction notices nailed to the doors. I tried to criticize their priorities but then quickly remembered choices I myself have made and realized that I belonged in this neighborhood. I was with my people.     As I left the side streets and hit a main road I saw the life of the city that had vacated my street. Cars roared by as I walked on the outside of the wide sidewalks to get as far away from the fumes as I could. A bus slowed down just enough to gas me with the thick black exhaust that pumped from its tailpipe like a new form of the steam engine. The plasma center shared a parking lot with a gas station. I crossed the street against the light and hit the parking lot on a run to avoid the last car coming on the outside lane. As I walked up to the building I had to stop every few feet to let cars go by. I missed the calming emptiness of my street.     The building was one storey brown brick. The type of building that no one ever noticed. It looked obsolete. Useless. Depleted. I pushed open the glass door and walked into the lobby. The floor looked like the tiles found in a Mexican restaurant bathroom. A faded blue with obvious signs of overuse. I walked up to the counter to ask a woman sitting behind a computer screen how to donate. Without looking up from the screen she pointed at a clipboard that read “New Donors” and then went back to typing. I signed in and took a seat in the lobby.     There were about thirty people waiting. They sat in folding chairs with worn out padding. In the front of the room a flat screen TV played “The Princess Bride” without any volume. Most people still stared at the movie and a few even read the subtitles out loud. The lobby looked like every jail I had ever spent the night in. Crack heads with chapped lips walked up and down the aisles talking to themselves incoherently. Old men fell asleep in the corners and every time a name was announced the lucky next donor would run up to the counter while everyone else looked at them with resentment.     For the first half an hour I watched as people were called up and then were taken through a door at the back of the room. Nobody called my name. A fat black man in his mid-twenties sat down next to me. We were both too large for the small folding chairs which gave us no other choice than to touch. Our shoulders pushed together and neither of us wanted to lean so we both held our ground.     “Damn. This shit takes too long,” he said after rubbing shoulders with me for fifteen minutes.     “Is it always this busy?”     “Mostly. Is this your first time?”     “Yea.”     “Oh, shit. We got a virgin!” he laughed loudly. One of the employees behind the desk yelled, “Shut up, Tony.”     “I was just messing with the new guy. He knows I was playing. Don’t you?”     “Yea, sure.”     “My name’s Tony, in case you didn’t hear,” he laughed again and stuck out his hand.     I usually don’t like to shake hands but I had already spent a quarter of an hour pretending to be conjoined twins with Tony. I grabbed his hand and said “Austin.”     “What do you do, Austin?”     “I’m a writer.”     “Write anything I might have read?”     “No. How about you, what do you do when you’re not bleeding?”     “I’m a record producer. Maybe you’ve heard of me. You ever hear anyone talking about Big Tony?”     “No.”     “Sure you have. Big Tony?”     “No.”     “Well, you need to get out more. I’m famous. I’ve worked with Puffy, Tech Nine and did a show with Snoop last week. I told you, famous motherfucker.”     “I didn’t know Snoop was in town.”     “He wasn’t. Flew me out to Cali. We smoked blunts all weekend and then the show got canceled, otherwise I’d show you some videos.”     “That’s alright. I can imagine.”     “Austin,” the woman behind the computer screen yelled. She was an older woman with dyed brown hair that looked too vibrant for her face. Years of over exposure to florescent lighting had left her looking like a faded Polaroid copy of her younger self.     I got up from my seat quickly, glad to leave Tony behind. Before I got to the desk I could hear him asking another donor if they had ever heard of “Big Tony.”     “I’m Austin.”     “Fill out this form and bring it back when you’re finished.”     I took the clipboard that held the form and grabbed a pen shaped like a flower from a pot on the counter. The purple pen appeared to be in full bloom which made it difficult to see around while writing. I found another open seat away from Tony and started filling in the questionnaire. Most of it was standard medical information about allergies and history of drug abuse but a few of the questions threw me off.     Have you ever had a sexual relationship with another man since 1974?     Have you ever had sex for money, since 1974?     Have you ever visited the Congo, since 1974?     Well, no but it made me wonder if there was a gay man from the Congo having sex for money every day until the end of 1973, when he gave it up as some sort of New Year’s resolution, would he be able to donate plasma?     I gave up and moved on to the rest of the questionnaire. I lied on a few minor details to make sure that I wasn’t turned away. Just little stuff, not all of my gay sex in the Congo during the mid-eighties but little stuff. I said that I had never had any piercings but I have had several. Most were taken out due to infections or by angry ex-girlfriends with quick hands. I lied about my asthma because I was pretty sure you couldn’t contract asthma from a plasma transplant. I slipped by on the sex for money thing; I have had sex with prostitutes but I was dating them and not paying them, so I don’t think that counts.     I finished the questionnaire and returned it to the woman who refused to look up.     “Here’s my form.”     It had become almost a challenge for me to get her to make eye contact.     “We will call you in to see the physician when he’s ready.”      I tried to dip my head into her line of sight but she never would look at me. Her grey eyes reflected the light from the computer screen but were otherwise void of all animation. I admired her commitment.     Someone had taken my seat that I was using to avoid Tony but luckily a skinny woman had taken the seat next to him. I sat on the other side of her because it was the only seat left open. The woman must have been in her late teens but looked to have packed a lot of experience into those years. She divided her attention between Tony and her cell phone. She had stringy blonde hair that hadn’t seen a brush in days. Make up that hadn’t been washed off from the previous night or maybe the previous week. The dark circles from the makeup made her look like every poster for domestic violence I had seen in welfare offices. Meth was an obvious part of her life and she made little effort to hide that fact. She wore a white tank top, pocked with burn holes, that was so loose every time she leaned over to scratch her leg or pick up her phone when she dropped it she flashed half of the room. The men in the room started to notice one by one and soon “The Princess Bride” was not the main attraction.     “Fuck,” the skinny woman said loudly while she furiously attempted to make her phone work.     “What’s wrong, girl?” Tony asked, pretending to be very concerned.     “My god damn phone died,” she said and pushed herself quickly back into the chair hitting me with her boney elbow and then pushing off of me to get out of her chair. She ran to the front desk.      “Do you have a phone I can use?” The woman behind the desk pointed at a sign over her shoulder that read “Donors May Not Use Phone.” The skinny woman looked defeated and sat back down, slamming into me once again.     “Waiting for an important call?” Tony asked     “Yea. Fucking phone always dies when I need it.”     “Can’t depend on technology. It fails at the worst times. Once when I was doing some DJ work for George Clinton...” Tony took the opportunity to tell another story of his greatness. She just looked pissed and never once even pretended to pay attention, which didn’t seem to bother Tony.     Person after Person was called to the front desk and they would disappear behind the door like every other person before them. The lobby filled and emptied three times and my two new friends were gone long before my name was called again.     “Austin.” I stood and walked up to the desk. “The physician is ready to see you now.”     Another woman led me back to the office. There was a keypad next to the door. The woman used it to unlock the door but made sure to stand so I couldn’t see the code. She stuck her head in the door and said, “Austin Harrington.”     The Doctor had short red hair and pale skin to match. He dressed the part of a physician. A long white lab coat. Stethoscope around his neck. I looked for a leather doctor’s bag underneath a coat rack with a trench coat, umbrella and fedora displayed proudly but he must have left them at home. “Name?”     “Austin.”     “Ok, well the first thing you need to get used to around here is when people ask for your name you need to say your full name and the last four of your social security number. So let’s try again. Name?”     “Austin C. Harrington, 2525.”     “Good. Have you ever donated plasma before?”     “I have but it was a long time ago.”     “Where? Here?”     “No, down in Tulsa.”     “Why would anyone ever go to Oklahoma? If you don’t mind me asking. I have family down there. It’s a horrible place.”     “I don’t mind at all. It was horrible but it happened to be where my first college was located.”     “First college? How many schools have you been to?”     “Five or six. Graduated from a couple.”     “I guess that happens if you go long enough,” he laughed. As we talked he put a stack of paper into a binder one piece at a time. It was exhausting to watch. I wanted to reach over and do it for him. By this point I had been waiting for more than two hours and I was starting to give up hope of ever seeing any cash.     “Does it always take this long?”     “No, the first donation takes the longest. We tell people to expect to be here for six hours but today we aren’t really that busy so you might get out in four.”     “I’d hate to see this place when you’re busy.”     “Yea, you would. Let’s get started. I am going to ask you some questions. I know they are the same questions from the form you filled out earlier but you might as well get used to that. We ask them every time you come.”     “Ok.”     “Have you lived or traveled to the Congo since 1974?”     “No.”     “Have you paid for sex or exchanged drugs for sex since 1974?”     “No.”     “Have you been in jail for more than a 24 hour period in the last six months?”     “No.”     “Have you had sex with another man since 1974?”     “No. Does that mean that gay people can’t donate plasma?”     “Yes, unfortunately it does.”     “Why?”     “Because of HIV/AIDS.”     “You do know that straight people get AIDS too?”     “Of course I do. But the way this company runs their business is not up to me. So for now this is the way we do things.”     Even now, that moment stays with me. I wanted to walk out but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I needed the money. I could tell the Doctor hated saying it. Hated asking the question. His annoyance didn’t make the statement any better but at least I wasn’t the only one in the room who had sold his integrity, plus I assumed gay people would just lie like I had about everything else.     The questions went on and eventually I had to submit to a urine test and physical. The urine test had me a little worried but the Doctor assured me that they didn’t check for drugs, it was only for a protein count. I guess you can take as many needles as you want but one dick and you’re out the door.     After the physical, I moved on to the prescreening process. It involved my being taken into a tiny room and being asked the exact same questions I had been asked before. Only this time they took my blood pressure and temperature. Because my heart rate was above one hundred beats per minute they made me return to the lobby for an additional fifteen minutes. I went back to the prescreening room. The same woman from the front desk who had refused to make eye contact with me was waiting. She told me to close my eyes and think of a calm lake. This irritated me even more than the lack of eye contact but she refused to check my pulse until I submitted. My pulse was down to ninety two beats per minute, so I was approved.     A security guard led me down a long corridor that opened into a large room full of all the missing people from the lobby. The front of the room had people sitting in chairs waiting to be hooked up to the plasma machines. Throughout the rest of the room high school nurse style cots were set up to hold the donors. Each person lay back next to a large white machine that sucked blood from their arms, drained the plasma and returned the blood. It was a scene from a strange Sci-Fi movie. I sat in the corner of the waiting area and waited once again. Phlebotomists raced about in white lab coats and jammed large needles into impoverished arms. Some people squirmed. Others closed their eyes and bit their lips. The old pros just watched TV or read their books, never blinking as the needle pierced their skin.     Bottles of plasma hung at the bottom of each machine. They looked like jars of milky piss. I started to read a poster next to me explaining that plasma is something in your blood used to fight infections and boost immune systems. The poster called me a hero. I was in a room full of heroes. People taking time to save the lives of those less fortunate than themselves. Looking around the room it was hard to imagine the less fortunate. There were men and women still in their work clothes, bleeding for a few extra dollars. I started to feel guilty for even being there. These were the people who were really fighting to survive this life. They didn’t have family to catch them every time they fell like I had, and I fell a lot. They were working two or three jobs just to make it and I had just quit a job because they told me not to read at work. I was selfish. I understood that now but it didn’t change the fact that I needed money. If it was by choice or by pure circumstance I was one of them and there was no denying that.     When I saw Tony I felt a little better. He was telling more stories to his corner of the room. This was another man like me. A man who thought he was better than he really was but would probably never be able to admit that fact. As much as I wanted to despise Tony and his stories, I couldn’t. On some level I knew we were the same.     “Austin,” a tall, thin man said my name and I walked up to the counter. “Full name and last four?”     “Austin C. Harrington, 2525.”     “Did they explain what we are going to be doing here today?”     “Yea, mostly.”     “Ok, well we are just going to hook you up to the machine, take your plasma, put your blood back and then you sit back in the chairs until we pay you. Got it?”     “Got it.”     “Which arm?”     “Right, I guess.”     I followed him through the rows of donors losing blood. Gallons of red blood flowed around me and each person looked as though the life was being drained out of them. I watched as people rolled their arms from left to right in an unlikely attempt to form a comfortable bond with their needles. Large, tough-looking men grimaced as they were stuck with shiny silver spikes and small fragile looking women fought back tears as their handlers searched for a vein with several stabs.      I spent a lot of my younger years around heavy drugs. I never shot up but I watched it on a daily basis. I saw people shoot up between their toes and on one strange occasion under their balls only to finish, smile at me and say, “wherever there’s a vein.” But to be in a room full of people being stabbed with needles made me uneasy. Junkies I can handle, but volunteering for a needle with no high at the end seemed against nature somehow.     I rested on my cot, waiting for my needle jockey. The movie had switched to one of the Home Alones, but I couldn’t pinpoint which one.     Within a few minutes the same thin man came back to set the needle. He carried a chart and once again asked me for my name and last four. I replied and he checked it against his file before setting up the machine. The machine itself looked like a science experiment from the 1950’s. It had hoses jetting out in nearly every direction, flashing lights and made a loud beeping noise as if something was wrong.     I watched as the thin man wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm, swabbed my vein with iodine and prepped the needle for insertion. While sticking people, the workers wore clear face shields just in case any blood decided to spray from an open vein. This did not inspire great levels of confidence. I started to look around for blood stains on the cots and floor. Nothing was visible but the room had a feeling of being just a little too clean. I assumed that they kept the bleeders locked up in the back room to keep the other donors calm. No reason to lose all the plasma sacks sitting in the waiting room just because someone is spraying blood around the room like a dismembered Samurai. After all they had a business to run.     The thin man approached me with the needle and asked if I was ready. I wasn’t afraid of needles, I never have been but something about this room freaked me out. Still I agreed. He walked to my arm slowly, lined the needle up carefully and slid the tip into my vein. The initial bite made me wince slightly but after that it was bearable. He applied several strips of tape to keep the needle from falling out and then walked on to stab someone else.     I bleed for nearly an hour before it was all over. When I was finished I walked back to the empty chairs and waited to get paid. That first trip landed me twenty dollars. I walked back home and the neighborhood had come alive. People were sitting on porches, smoking and drinking. Dogs barked at me and cars abandoned their parking spots.     When I got home I found a letter in the mailbox saying that my unemployment benefits had been denied. I hadn’t been expecting to get anything, but had applied just in case. The temp agency I had gone through fought my claim because they said I violated the attendance policy of the company. They were right. I guess I did. So there wasn’t much to argue with. I walked in and kissed Mia, then took the letter and threw it in the trash. I watched my kids play and thought; at least the twenty dollars would feed us tonight. Tomorrow, I would find another way.

About Austin Harrington     Austin Harrington is an essayist currently working towards his MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Lesley University. His work has appeared on Word Riot and in Bifrost Literary Journal, among a few other smaller publications. He is currently living in Des Moines, IA with his wife and two sons. You can follow him on Twitter: @freedwords.

Subliminal Michael Grodesky The silver dollar my father kept in his pocket is soft and smooth with the year of his birth faded into the casting. I carry it now along a weathered seam hoping it will not slip through. I had wanted to dance with indifference but instead I walk quietly listening to the white rain he sends to penetrate my coat.

Janet Kuypers reads writing appearing in the v125 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine, titled a Creative Journey Including “Breakfast Companions” by David Hutt, “Dodgeball” by A, Lenkeit, and “Subliminal” by Michael J. Grodssky.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading writing appearing in the v125 issue of Down in the Dirt mag, titled a Creative Journey live 10/22/14 at Chicago’s the Café Gallery

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers hosting the open mic 10/22/14 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago INCLUDING THIS PERFORMANCE

Hollow for so Long Already Janet Kuypers (01/24/12) After dealing with a needle too many years I was told I could do good give back to the people if they just used another needle to take more out of me so, trying to be the good Samaritan for once I offered myself to them four times but they were never satisfied with my identification     you know, I’m doing     something good for you     and you’re the ones     putting me through hell I’m used to the needle by now I’ve avoided the track marks on my arms shoved the needle in once saw my vein move out of the way move the needle watch my vein move again since that felt good, I switched to the other arm and they keep talking about the highs but right now, all I feel are the lows as I sit here time number five trying to do the right thing waiting, to let them hollow my out     haven’t I been hollow     for so long already? time to stare at all the technicians wearing white jackets rubber gloves plastic face masks, saying it’s to be hygienic     anything for them to avoid     coming in contact     with anything to do with     me # what the hell am I saying, “giving back to the people” they say altruism is good but they pay you money to take what’s inside of you so without a job for six years I’m tired of living on the dole so let them suck out my insides just so I can afford to get drunk again # I knew a man with no job who used to donate whole red blood cells when he found out he could be paid at this place he decided to stop with donating blood ‘cause you see, a man’s gotta survive any way he can # I love playing these waiting games because here I am at visit number five reading their paperwork verifying I don’t have AIDS that I haven’t lived in the Netherlands     well, that’s what I’m from,     but I can’t afford to visit I mean, I don’t even have enough money to stay drunk enough while I’m here, if I’m giving up my insides to drink, you think I can fly to Amsterdam for over six months to stay stoned? so thanks for checking, but no I’ve had no blood transfusions that I’m aware of I wasn’t born anywhere in Africa and although there’s no test for Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease, as far as I know I have no fatal brain disease,     (my brain     may be diseased,     but I’m afraid     it’s not fatal) so while waiting here someone asked for my two month old Wall Street Journal that someone gave to me I said sure, because newspapers may be dying in the twenty-first century but sometimes holding those pages, getting that ink on your fingers, can really be addictive # so in hour number three of waiting the news on tee vee says the tax forms for a presidential candidate say they made millions last year I hear this as I sit in hour number three, waiting for them to take my insides so I can have money to drink # so finally, on the fifth visit after waiting over three hours they call me, paint ultraviolet ink on my fingernail — so I don’t donate somewhere else today then they check my vitals, take my blood ask me about my travel past ask me about my military history ask about what drugs I take then send me to an RN where after driving over for five visits, after waiting for over three hours, they explain to me that they are taking from people to help a certain kind of sickness by looking at my medication, they see I already have that certain level of sickness so even though I’ve offered myself to them after I tried for too long they say they don’t want me # all I can think is: lovely. at least I didn’t miss work for this I can’t help myself and apparently no one else can help me either now I just have to figure out who will help me with my next drink   (this is a poem about a plasma clinic)

Watch the YouTube video of Kuypers reading this poem at the open mike 2/15/12 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago (w/ music from Cousin BonesÙ “At the Plasma Clinic”) from the Samsung

Watch the YouTube video of Kuypers reading this poem at the open mike 2/15/12 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago, from the Kodak

Watch the YouTube video of Kuypers’ intro to the open mike 2/15/12 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago, plus other open mike poets, and her poetry (from the Kodak)

energy Janet Kuypers haiku 3/25/14 tension burns my skin dark energy destroys us, rips us like a bomb

Visit the Kuypers Twitter page for short poems— join http://twitter.com/janetkuypers.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku energy live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (C)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku energy live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (S)

force Janet Kuypers haiku 3/25/14 I am drawn to you — this attraction I feel makes you a force of nature

Visit the Kuypers Twitter page for short poems— join http://twitter.com/janetkuypers.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku force live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (Canon camera)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku force live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (Sony camera)

knees Janet Kuypers haiku 3/25/14 bring me to my knees make me shake in fear of you force me to break down

Visit the Kuypers Twitter page for short poems— join http://twitter.com/janetkuypers.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku knees live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (Canon camera)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku knees live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (Sony camera)

you Janet Kuypers haiku 3/25/14 face scarred like war paint I stick you into my eyes before I cut you

Visit the Kuypers Twitter page for short poems— join http://twitter.com/janetkuypers.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku you live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (Canon camera)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku you live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (Sony camera)

this is only a test Janet Kuypers haiku 3/25/14 during the cold war, the states wanted to test nukes by bombing the moon

Visit the Kuypers Twitter page for short poems— join http://twitter.com/janetkuypers.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku this is only a test live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (C)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku this is only a test live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (S)

jobless Janet Kuypers haiku 3/25/14 people ask for change but you’re jobless, have no money what do you do then?

Visit the Kuypers Twitter page for short poems— join http://twitter.com/janetkuypers.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku jobless live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (C)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku jobless live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (S)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading (S) her poem jobless from her “Partial Nudity” book release feature live 6/18/14 at Chicago’s open mic the Café Gallery

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading (C) her poem jobless from her “Partial Nudity” book release feature live 6/18/14 at Chicago’s open mic the Café Gallery

errors Janet Kuypers haiku 3/25/14 I miss the needle magnifying the scratches, playing what’s not clean

Visit the Kuypers Twitter page for short poems— join http://twitter.com/janetkuypers.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku errors live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (Canon camera)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku errors live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (Sony camera)

misogyny Janet Kuypers haiku 3/25/14 he loves his daughters but wishes his wives could have given him a son

Visit the Kuypers Twitter page for short poems— join http://twitter.com/janetkuypers.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku misogyny live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (C)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku misogyny live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (S)

everyone Janet Kuypers haiku 3/25/14 everyone sobs as diseases ravage you, while you ignore pain, smile

Visit the Kuypers Twitter page for short poems— join http://twitter.com/janetkuypers.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku everyone live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (C)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku everyone live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (S)

ourselves Janet Kuypers haiku 3/25/14 the government should protect ourselves from ourselves so I’m free of blame

Visit the Kuypers Twitter page for short poems— join http://twitter.com/janetkuypers.

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku ourselves live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (C)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her twitter-length haiku ourselves live 3/26/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (S)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers performing from memory her poem Keeping a Record of Going Too Far in her 4/5/14 Beast Women audition in Chicago’s the Den Theatre (C)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers performing from memory most of her poem Keeping a Record of Going Too Far in her 4/5/14 Beast Women audition in Chicago’s the Den Theatre (iPhone)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poem Keeping a Record of Going Too Far from memory live 4/23/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (C)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poem Keeping a Record of Going Too Far from memory live 4/23/14 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (S)

---

Janet Kuypers Bio     Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.     She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.     She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org and chaoticarts.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images.     Since 2010 Kuypers also hosts the Chicago poetry open mic at the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).     In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the 2013 ISSN# color art book Life, in Color, Post Apocalyptic Burn Through Me and Under the Sea (photo book). Three collection books were also published of her work in 2004, Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art).

---

this page was downloaded to your computer