Author Archives: oblongmagazine

Mar 24 2015
Leave a comment
Fiction

The Reader

 

   

By Lynn Mundell

 

I build you a little house in the forest with my time and a pencil stub and with run-ons for hallways and for each wall. Fragments for the windowsills. My serviceable metaphor, of course, is the roof, like an acorn cap over its nut. My favorite punctuation—the dash—I save for the light switch—on—off—on. Can you see it yet? I write you, my tiny reader, into the corner, give you an armchair made of a rounded, solid U, wrap you in an afghan of lacy Qs crocheted together. After I install the stained glass in rouge and sapphire, I make us a fire in the hearth with bundles of brittle numbers, so we can stay warm all winter. Next, I shut the oak door with finality, as I would the heavy cover of an important book. Then I lock us in together with my very. Last. Period. But you have crept out the window I carelessly left open! All I can do now is watch your little footsteps disappear through the snow, like black type fading until there is only, once again, the empty, white page.

 

– Lynn Mundell is co-founder and co-editor of 100wordstory.org. Her essays have been published in “The Sun” and “The San Jose Mercury News,” poetry in “Free State: A Harvest of Maryland Poetry” and “First Class Lit,” and fiction in “Eclectica.” She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from American University in Washington, D.C.

Tagged , ,
Mar 17 2015
Leave a comment
Fiction

No Heat

 

by Mitchell Grabois

 

The woman who owns this Umbrian farmhouse is poor at property management. She’s left us here to stay for the winter with no heat source but a wood stove, and no wood. The Australians used it all. They lied to her, and she didn’t check it out. It’s the coldest winter in Europe in a decade. All the seasoned wood has been taken. The only wood available is green as a fresh leaf. Even our Italian friend in Arezzo – so connected – cannot help. At least there’s a book – Boccaccio’s Decameron. My wife and I can read to each other all winter. We will not perish of the Black Death.

We will not perish from Ebola. We will not perish from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. And we will not perish from leprosy.

There’s a leper colony in South San Francisco, a little known place, run by the Little Sisters of Poor Claire, a quiet residence with clean hallways where long meditations unfold. Poor Claire was wealthy until she ran from her family to follow St. Francis. How they must have loved each other!

The Little Sisters of Poor Claire are selfless, but sometimes, in certain areas of life, lack judgment. The lepers, when they know they’re close to death, follow a self-generated tradition: they take a large duffel bag filled with their clothes into the City – sometimes Market Street, sometimes Potrero, sometimes Golden Gate Park – and scatter their clothes over sidewalks and lawns, hang them on water fountains. The sisters passively allow this. The Little Sisters of Poor Claire have wealthy benefactors and provide the residents with very nice clothes, so the people who find them never suspect that they were left by lepers, living and dying in a leper colony, not far away. Most of the time, the clothes are not contagious.

 

– Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over seven hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for work published in 2012, 2013, and 2014. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. He lives in Denver.

Tagged , ,
Mar 10 2015
2 Comments
Fiction

Mother-In-Law

 

By Leslie Blanco

 

We used to go shopping at stores we’d been told we could not afford, buy nothing, stand around smelling things at perfume counters, tap our feet at the saxophone players outside. Snow flakes blew innocently in every direction, as if they’d been born in mid-air. No one rushed us at all. Once, at a football game, we sat alone, without our men. We ate gummy bears, chocolate kisses, hot chocolate, pretzels, coffee, encouraged each other to eat more. They couldn’t tell us not to. She had a house she’d lived in thirty-five years. There were pictures of gap-toothed children on the walls, home-made rag dolls in clear plastic boxes in the closets. I liked to breathe the air there. I liked to hole up against winter and take the plastic lounge chairs out to the shade of the oak when spring finally came. Because it made me feel better she hid things from her husband too: the chocolate chips in the cupboard, the price of her Talbot’s shorts.

I asked her once the secret to forty years of marriage, and smiling, she told me a most un-Cuban thing: learn to hold your tongue and eat crow.

I never got to say goodbye to her. After the lies he told she wouldn’t even answer the phone. And I still dream of her. That her breast cancer has returned. That no one wants to come home for Christmas. That secretly, she thinks it was her fault.

I want to tell her to rest her bad knees.

I want to tell her that all her pleasures are taken on the sly.

And that if she is to keep a secret, let it be that she has a lover, that he feeds her guanabana milkshakes in bed and sings her boleros and is kind.

 

– Leslie Blanco’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, Confrontation,The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing and screenwriting at Lemoyne College, Syracuse University, and the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Mar 03 2015
5 Comments
Fiction

When

 

By David Bussell

 

When the waiter poured the man’s wine and offered a casual ‘Say when,’ the man did no such thing.

Instead he watched, steadfast as the wine filled the glass, until eventually it found the rim and overflowed onto the tablecloth. The waiter cocked an eyebrow as if to say ‘Play fair, sir, say when,’ but the man remained staunch as the wine cascaded off the sides of the table, soaking the carpet and pooling at their feet.

Soon the wine collected around their ankles, then their shins, and still the man said nothing. Sweat beaded the waiter’s brow as the wine flooded to the edges of the restaurant and began pressing at the windowpanes. Say when, the waiter’s eyes screamed. For God’s sake say when! The bottle faltered in his hand but still the man said nothing, so still the wine flowed.

There was a sound of splintered glass, then the windows gave way and the wine gushed onto the streets; a claret tsunami. Traffic overturned, buildings toppled, civilians disappeared beneath the crimson riptide. Soon the Earth was drowned in wine – a wet ruby glistening against a jeweler’s black velvet.

‘When,’ the man said.

 

– David Bussell is an award-winning British humourist. Born in 1976, David spent his early years growing increasingly larger until he reached adulthood. Among his interests are amateur parkour, the Oxford comma, and writing about himself in the third person. Rumours that David was conceived on an Indian burial ground remain largely unfounded. David would beat you in a fight.

Tagged , ,
Feb 17 2015
Leave a comment
Fiction

Hate Me

 

By Ron Riekki

     

I had an ex-girlfriend who was into voodoo. When I was dating her, I thought it was really cool. It was when we broke up that I worried. I started thinking I could feel tingling in my arm.

I went to the V.A. doctor and told her I was having voodoo pain. The doctor asked if I was having suicidal thoughts. I said no, just voodoo pain. The doctor asked if I had any PTSD. I told her I was stationed stateside. I was in the military between the first Iraq War and the second Iraq War. If I had any PTSD, it would be horrible memories of Kentucky. Fort Campbell. You can’t have PTSD when you were stationed at a place that’s made up of the words “fort,” “camp,” and “bell.”

The doctor told me it was hypochondriasis. Psychosomatic. The doctor looked like she was a prom queen. She looked like she wrote award-winning villanelles. I wanted to have sex with my V.A. doctor, but I’d asked one out before and I realized that if you’re going to the V.A., you’re a failure. The V.A. is made for veterans who can’t find jobs. And there are a lot of us. In the waiting room, I looked at all of us. The only way the room could look uglier is if it was filled with hobgoblins. Vets are some sorry ass motherfuckers when you see them up close in hospital lighting.

I went home and looked for Wanda’s number. I couldn’t find it. I must have called her a Fish Called Wanda ninety thousand times when we were dating.

I called her a Trout Called Wanda.

A Shark Called Wanda.

A Cod Called Wanda.

Now she was making me pay.

I’d slept with her brother. Not actual sex though, so don’t get angry with me. It was just mutual masturbation. And I was high on disco biscuits, so you have to give me a little leeway. The hug drug gives you the decision-making skills of a crack whore. But here’s the thing – I decided to fight fire with fire. I googled “how to voodoo,” but got nervous the FBI would see my search history, so instead I DuckDuckGoed the same and I found out it’s easy as hell. All you need is a doll and a lock of hair from the person you want to curse.

The doll doesn’t even have to look like the person. I thought it does, but wikiHow said no. Just get a doll and a hair.

So I stole an Elmo doll from my nephew and then I found some hair in the shower. It was long, so I knew it had to be hers. There was a possibility it could have been my mother’s, because she had used my shower once or twice, but odds were pretty good it was from my ex-.

I put the pin right over Elmo’s heart and just held it there. The floor below seemed to hold a lot of hell underneath it. I felt my feet getting hot. I felt my elbow hurting. I tried to think of what would be a good decision in this moment. Good people have such easy lives. They die of cancer at 45. They kiss high school sweethearts.

I was having a train wreck of a life. My dad committed suicide in a Walmart parking lot.

I kept staring at the needle. I thought what Neil Young would do in a moment like this.

I put the needle down, went over to my CD collection, and threw out every cover that had a skull on it, any CD that had songs with “Kill” in the title. I decided from now on I was doing shit like going on more hikes. Even if my elbow fell off. Sooner or later she’d get exhausted with putting the pins in. I went outside, walked into the woods behind my house. The trees were herpes infested, city diseased. I went further inside the branches, convinced if I went deep enough I’d stop hearing horns, stop smelling driveway. It felt good. Like being salutatorian. I kept walking. It was post-midnight. The moon was Texas Chainsaw Massacred down to a little sliver of a C. Beautiful.

 

– Ron Riekki’s books include U.P: a novel, The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book, Wayne State University Press), and Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (May 2015, Michigan State University Press). He has had seven nominations for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions from publications such as Blue Fifth Review, Moonshot Magazine, WSU Press and Verse Wisconsin.

Tagged , , ,
Feb 10 2015
Leave a comment
Fiction

The Silver Bird

 

By Sean Mulroy

 

Not long ago the Silver Bird flew over our valley and every child ran into the clearing so tall poplar trees could not distort their view.

When the bird flies over, circumstances are always the same; it passes around midday, each time there are seven days between one sighting and the next and it only ever glides over for a few fleeting moments then is gone.

The Silver Bird is constantly hungry and always angry; its stomach growls repeatedly while flying overhead and often there is a thin white trail left behind that looks like clouds. Some say the clouds come from the Silver Bird, that it is their mother, but others don’t believe so. Many have noticed that the white trail soon disappears and therefore the substance cannot be a cloud but something different.

Older children raise their arms up to the Silver Bird until it disappears into the distance, perhaps hoping it will fly down and carry them away. Younger children cover their ears with both hands, scared by the bird’s anger, and peek frightened glimpses up every now and then imagining where it is going to. Sometimes in dreams they can see that place but when awake are unable to describe it and as they grow older those dreams leave them forever.

The Elders of our tribe mostly sit down and gaze eerily at the bird or pray or offer their most valuable possessions up to the magical creature. Once the largest enawene fish ever remembered being caught was cooked and laid out for the bird, in hope that it would swoop down to accept the gift and bless the giver with many wishes or even just one. Some of the adolescents, or fighting young men who feel they have something to prove, throw sharp spears at the bird and beat their chests; but this is frowned upon and often afterwards most stay away from them, fearing, because of their sacrilege, they will bring bad luck.

Once, after a heavy rainstorm, a child found a strange piece of rock in the mud that had washed off a small hill. All were transfixed by this rock as it resembled the Silver Bird’s skin, particularly the way it glimmered under sunlight. Awa has now stuck that rock to the tip of his totem staff and carries it around everywhere.

Today the Silver Bird flew over our valley louder than ever. Smoke like that from a fire fell from its rump and there was no trail of white clouds left behind, only black smoke which smelt strange. Everyone shouted at seeing this and as the powerful-being fell lower and lower some screamed and wailed. The creature collided with the forest and the whole earth shook louder than thunder. Now there is a terrible fire off in the distance. Tall trees are ablaze and their billowing smoke rises to the dark sky in waves or like ripples in a pond, one after the other. More great birds have gathered in the sky. They too must be angry, because each one constantly growls while floating over the area where the Silver Bird fell; perhaps they are searching for someplace to land and rest. Although none can see the birds, it is much too dark for that, we can see their eyes; they glow and some must have many eyes, one bird has more eyes than I have fingers, I know because I counted them off. They resemble small moons that flash light pale colours.

Even though it is dark and cold tonight, we are all getting ready to greet the great multitude of giant birds. Awa has put on his best skeins and Mashco-Piro, the witch woman, has collected multiple bones and skull fragments from each family’s recently deceased. She is hard at work threading them together into a long necklace. We shall give those flying giants the best offering we can, our most precious. All, who have not already, are applying red clay to their bodies; we look impressive.

So now I must prepare myself as well. For I too will leave this valley to trek up glowing red hills under a smoky sky, following my Wayãpi towards those blazing flames that eat into our jungle and there, on the crest of the highest hill, kneel in worship before fallen Gods.

 

– Sean Mulroy lives in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. His writing has previously been published in AntipodeanSF.

Tagged , ,
Feb 03 2015
Leave a comment
Fiction

Garbage Day

 

by Arman Avasia    

    

The man and the woman had names but they often forgot them. Both still had a living parent who missed the dead one, so they weren’t yet old, and their memory problems should have been a cause for concern but there was just so little they cared to remember. They knew Tuesday was garbage day because their neighbor always knocked on the door and reminded them. If she didn’t remember to remind them they wouldn’t remember to put it out. She knew this because when she didn’t, they wouldn’t, and the smell of the garbage drifted down the hall to her apartment like a lingering ghost. Once, in her younger and wilder and more indifferent past, she had lived next to a corpse for more than a week before notifying the proper authorities. She tried to last the full month, but her cat started to look at her with a hunger that would not be confused with desire, so she sullenly called her landlord who frantically called the cops. Neither she nor the cat ever really forgot about what had transpired between the two of them.

‘Jordan,’ the neighbor would say, in a quiet but firm but polite voice. ‘Jordan, it’s Henrietta. It’s garbage day.’ The man and the woman would look at each other blankly, trying to figure out if either one of them was Jordan. ‘Jordan. Jordan, it’s garbage day.’ At this, the woman would nod and the man would nod and he’d unlock the door with a simple grace that never failed to make the woman stare with wonder. ‘Thank you Jordan,’ Henrietta murmured. ‘Thank you,’ the man muttered, and shut the door.

In the moments after garbage day, the atmosphere of the studio apartment was happy and accomplished. The woman stood beaming by the stovetop and the man sat contentedly in his chair. A quiet bliss floated lightly between them and held their gazes together. It never lasted long. The moments after the moments after were maddening. Neither knew quite what to do with their hands while their faces held themselves in grim parodies of the easy smiles that had earlier graced their lives. Inevitably, they fought. The woman and the man did not fight like you and I do. They did not use words or fists. They did not use guns because they did not have guns and they didn’t use knives because there was only one. What happened between them was something beyond language— something that came before. It happened on a physical level and also an emotional one, so of course it happened most of all during sex. When they fought, they fucked like people who didn’t care about each other because, when they fought, they were people who didn’t care about each other. There was no winning or losing but if there was, it would have been the woman who won more, since she was the one most often left unsatisfied and awake. It was only when she finally fell asleep that they were truly together again. They lay next to each other and dreamt different versions of the same dream. The woman dreamt of the man before him and the man dreamt of all the women that would come after.

The man and the woman lived like this for a long time. If it wasn’t love, there’s no other word for it.

 

– Arman Avasia lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. His poetry has appeared in Folio and Glass Mountain and his music criticism can be found at Inyourspeakers.com.

Tagged , , , ,
Jan 27 2015
2 Comments
Fiction

Gravity is the Enemy

 

(from The Echoes)

by Ranbir Singh Sidhu 

 

It was no different from taking out a pair of pants that have gotten too tight, she didn’t know why Ralph was making such a fuss, it wasn’t like she was shooting junk into her veins, which was all the rage, by the way, not like she hadn’t thought about doing that because let’s be honest, who hasn’t thought about it, and if she wanted to, why shouldn’t she, why shouldn’t anyone, a woman should be able to get it on the NHS, get a prescription, just want a bit of a lift today, doc, feeling down and frowzy if that’s a symptom, why not offer junk, could do the world a lot of good, have you seen the way people walk down the high street, Ralph, with their stone dead faces and children screaming and carrier bags, why not give them heroin, why not give them coke, better than a book of green stamps and the football pools and a council flat that’ll kill you from the ugliness and boredom of it much sooner than shooting golden wonder into your veins; the only difference being, she continued, was that in this case she was the tailor, it was her widening the waist on the pants, adding a little room under the arms, putting a little play in the shoulders, yes, Ralph, me, my own self, and she wouldn’t make apologies for it, didn’t see the reason, it was her body after all, her head, her skull, no one had any right to say a thing to her, not even Jack, and she was married to him; and oh Ralph, you have to feel it to understand, she said, drawing closer across the bed and adopting, for the first time since the argument began, a tone of conciliation, because, she said, it’s not a drug, it’s not a thing I’m doing to myself at all, it’s a thing I’m doing with myself, with my whole body, think of it as me giving myself a gift, but not something I unwrap one day, wear for a week and throw away, this is much better, it’s like a new pair of eyes or another head, a whole head, think of all the things you could do with a whole other head, she said, I promise you, it’s not mutilation, it’s augmentation, and soon everyone’ll be doing it, from dukes and duchesses all the way down to the char lady pushing her trolley down the hall; it’s going to be a new world, Ralph, we won’t need words, that’s what they say, we’ll hold up colored cards showing our mood because what else is important, really, I’ll hold up a red card, say, showing I’m feeling a bit wild and passionate, and you’ll hold up a blue one, showing you’re not really up to anything, maybe a bit down, so I’ll hold up a purple card, showing sympathy, and you’ll hold a green card showing you’re feeling a bit more relaxed now you’ve got some sympathy and someone’s seen your color, and life will be so much easier because no one will have arguments because they won’t use words and it’s words that cause arguments and instead we’ll walk around floating a little bit off the ground, think about it, Ralph, we’ll be high, totally high, but all the time, no one will ever feel bad again, we’ll have moods of course, everyone has moods, they should have moods, but no one will ever feel really bad about anything again, just a bit bad, even if you’ve done something terribly wrong, say killed someone you shouldn’t have, you’ll hold up a black card and people will understand, they’ll understand it was a mistake and they’ll understand you feel bad about it, and because of that you’ll feel better almost at once and that’s what’s important isn’t it, to feel better, and in no time at all your black card will turn to a blue card; and it’s so simple, it’s amazing no one’s done it before, just a little thing really, you already touched it last night, and look what it did for me just by touching it, I’m not even sure it’s supposed to do that, but it did and last night felt wonderful and I’ve wanted oh so to tell you but I thought you’d make your serious face, your big serious black card face, that you wouldn’t understand, or at least that you’d pretend not to understand, because I think when it’s explained everyone understands, they only don’t want to say, they’re afraid, Ralph, and she told him that she understood why he would be afraid, it was natural she thought, because if he did it he was going to make a leap from being one kind of person to another, and all that was needed was a tiny little hole, a small hole drilled in the head all the way through the skull, to relieve the pressure on the brain, it’s cooped up in the prison of the skull, it’s solitary confinement for your whole life, why do you think babies and small children are so happy, it’s because their bones haven’t built a prison for the brain yet, it’s not shut away from being able to breathe — to breathe, Ralph! — oh how many years did she feel the pressure, her own skull weighing down all her thoughts, stopping her thinking, from feeling anything at all, all that weight, all that gravity, but she understood now, gravity is the enemy, she said, and one day soon everyone will know, everyone will be able to feel as free and happy and weightless and high as she is right now, and feel that way all the time…

 

– Ranbir Singh Sidhu is the author of Good Indian Girls and a winner of the Pushcart Prize in Fiction and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. His fiction appears in Conjunctions, The Literary Review, The Georgia Review, Fence, Zyzzyva, The Missouri Review, The Happy Hypocrite, Other Voices, Alaska Quarterly Review, Word Riot and other journals and anthologies. His first published photographs are forthcoming in Portland Review and F-Stop Magazine, and most nights he can be found DJ-ing at the Black Rooster in Chania, Crete. Visit him at ranbirsidhu.com.

Tagged , ,
Jan 20 2015
Leave a comment
Fiction

For Those of Us Who Would Take the Side of a Bar of Soap

 

by Jacob Guajardo

 

Working retail in the Midwest in the near distant future will not be all it could have been. A tech-scare will undo all of Bill Gates’ hard work. Brilliant men will roll their eyes at us from their graves; all their years of research will be squandered by a few years of rogue machinery. The death toll will only reach one hundred and thirteen, but this number will be enough. Production on all new forms of technology will stop; millions will lose their jobs, and the Midwest, with its fertile lands and honest people, will begin to thrive. The future is bright for farmers. There will be a surge of people to the square states, all looking for jobs and houses, excited to start families, to shoot them up like crops. It will mean sickness that will catch like gum to a shoe. Gum will have been outlawed for causing cancer, and will be a rare commodity. If gum gets stuck to the bottom of your shoe, you bet you will sit for hours on your couch scraping it off and finding someone to sell it to, because retail still does not pay well. Minimum wage will increase to fifty dollars an hour, but with inflation, fifty dollars will be barely enough to live on. No one will trust robots. I will tell everyone about the time I saw a tumbleweed plié past an ATM. Shopping malls especially will be way behind. Cashiers still tap dirty touchscreens and scan barcodes. There is still a beeping noise, though studies have found the beeping decreases levels of patience exponentially. The beep is so standard on every register that we are scared to do away with it. The Midwest is angry, but what can we do? We are hunters, gatherers, hillbillies, rednecks. We hang deer out in trees in our yards to drain their blood. We sit, knees touching, when there is room on the subway. We like to be close to someone. We are not made for retail, its long hours, its pricy garments and fanciful names for things that have names already. Who decided we should start calling sweaters, warms? We are not made to negotiate the price of an item for the hole in its sleeve. We are made to sew up those holes. We have been made so our brows stick out a ways, so the sweat will drop past our eyes. Does no one appreciate the imperfections in a bar of soap? My mother once asked me as I complained that, indeed, a woman today had found fault in the skin of a cherry scented soap. A chip, a scrape, a bruise in the soap’s flesh that would melt away under water, bubble up and disappear. Retail in the Midwest in the near distant future is not for those of us who would take the side of a bar of soap, but right now, it is all we have.

 

– Jacob Guajardo is from St. Louis MI, not MO. He currently resides in Grand Rapids, MI where he is pursuing a BA in Creative Writing from Grand Valley State University. His work has appeared at Hobart, Necessary Fiction, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere. He was rooting for Tiffany. Find him on Twitter @mrsaintjacob

Tagged , , ,
Jan 13 2015
Leave a comment
Fiction

EVAN AND HIS YELLOW FIAT DISAPPEARED

 

by Scott MacAulay

 

Evan and his yellow Fiat disappeared while stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge. The fog was thick that morning.

Evan’s wife told the police he had been unsettled for weeks, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, but wouldn’t say why. She’d tried gently coaxing him out of it with kisses and hugs, and whispers of naughty things in his ears. She tried stamping her feet, speaking harshly, telling him even the cat was distraught.

The driver behind Evan’s yellow Fiat, Mrs. Yarlkowski, said she last saw it just before the fog turned thick as smoke and the traffic stopped. She couldn’t see the front of her own car then. About ten minutes into the standstill, the fog lifted enough for Mrs. Yarlkowski to see the yellow Fiat was gone. There was a car length between her and the next automobile. A Fiat is a small car and she could only guess its driver had managed to get onto the sidewalk immediately to her left and driven away, but there was a sidewalk guardrail between pedestrians and motorists and it was intact. On her right, cars were tightly jammed.

The police searched Evan’s house, his locker, his desk in the cubicle from which he worked for most of his adult life at the Liberty Insurance Company. In the desk’s bottom left drawer, beneath the remains of yesterday’s lunch, they found a child’s baseball glove and a yellowed newspaper clipping, both from the 1960s, but Evan’s wife and co-workers recognized neither.

The clipping told of a magician who, forty years ago to the day, said he’d make the Brooklyn Bridge disappear, but failed. In the photograph of the watching crowd was a little boy bent over to fetch his dropped baseball glove.

 

– Scott MacAulay is a former educator and community development worker who now devotes his time to writing poetry and short fiction. His work has been published in The Antigonish Review, On the Premises, and Bywords Magazine. He resides in Ottawa, Canada.

Tagged , ,
← Older posts
Newer posts →