Category Archives: Fiction

Dec 16 2014
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Fiction

Cal Poly

by Michael Fertik

 

You’re bombing down from Palo Alto to LA for work, and you’re driving because you made the wrong choice, basically, but you could use the car time, for the privacy and quiet away from your 1,000 square foot apartment with your two tiny sons, and you say to yourself that you can make calls on the Bluetooth, though Sirius XM is just better than the phone backlog for the first couple hundred miles, and you pull off 101 when the email you’ve been waiting for comes in, because you want to respond but last week the Statie gave you a ticket for ‘manipulating your phone while driving.’ It’s happenstance, or it’s fate, or it doesn’t matter why, but the next exit you come to is the first ramp into San Louis Obispo, where a hundred years ago mom did a masters in psycholinguistics. Mom called it Cow College and Aggie School the ten or twenty times she mentioned it while she was alive. It wasn’t like it was a present episode in your upbringing. Something she mentioned on great occasion or when the family visited California and drove to see her friend Tops from back then who still lives in Santa Barbara. A chapter of a pre-life that doesn’t seem to have registered high on the arc’s importance scale. You’ve never been before. You pull onto the shoulder on the first street, and you notice the arrow pointing to ‘State College.’ Immediately you feel a slow and early warning agony. That’s the kind that comes when you know you’re going to do something you don’t want to do, because it’s the right thing but is so laden with baggage that you’re going to be depleted and in existential crisis in the coming 12 hours. It’s 60 days exactly since mom died, finally succumbing to a 20 year illness that first grim reaped your happiness when you were in high school. 60 days is like a mini yahrzeit, isn’t it? That feels important. You know as soon as you see that sign that you’re going to go looking for the campus. It’s not like an hour out of your way will make you miss any meetings in SoCal. That’s why you departed a day early, that’s why driving is the wrong choice. You put the car in gear and eyeball the 101 South ramp straight across the intersection, and then you peel right without signaling, which is definitely not your way. Good-looking blonde, carefree, California girls walking in groups in the other direction signal that the state college is close. You enter the grounds in your car without fanfare, which is what would obviously happen except in the mind of someone who is suddenly aware he is going back in time. What was your mom doing here? A dark-haired, anxious, Jewish girl born in Brooklyn and raised in the Five Towns, transplanted from Hunter College to the permanently sun-blanched Santa Lucia hills. You remember that the only thing she said about California when you were growing up was that she hated it, that everyone there was intellectually bereft and noncommittal. That made sense now, in a flash, after 3.5 decades of hearing it. She had been in the wrong part. You curve your way around the campus’s main artery at 5 m.p.h., trying to decipher which buildings would have been there when she was, what the college would have looked like when she had been a student. The thought breaches your mind that the buildings are all you have left of her. She must have been 22, 24, when she was here. She told you once that in hindsight psycholinguistics was exactly what her anal personality required her to study at the time. Where would one actually study anal-satisfying psycholinguistics on this campus, in this sun, with these good-looking Aggie girls? In which building? You drive past a series of recent sports team constructions and cheering posters with the galloping horse mascot plastered on the front. Had your mom been a Mustang? Had she realized she was one? Did she feel like one? Someone who so hated sports and did psycholinguistics in this environment? In your 35 years, you haven’t till now seen your mom in a place when she was younger than you are, frightened, exploring, navigating her arc and the world around her, feeling its bigness, its indeed infinite possibility but equally infinite personal impossibilities, the incongruities that you finally grow up enough to realize don’t fit. You pull over into a bike lane and crane your neck around to see if you just passed the psychology building. You wish it’s there, so you can see it, and you wish it’s the same as it was back then before you were born. Your eyes alight on the empty car seat on the passenger side behind you, where your 3.5 year old sits, and the rows and rows of tiny grasshopper stickers that he has plastered on the inside of his window. And I cry because I have never missed anyone so much.

 

– Michael Fertik lives in Palo Alto, California, where by day he is the CEO and Founder of Reputation.com. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Recent published fiction can be found in december, Litro, Eclectica, eFiction India, etc.. He recently wrote and produced a short film that can be seen at femtofilm.com. He can be found at @michaelfertik on Twitter.

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Dec 09 2014
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Fiction

Rorschach

 

by William Yarbrough

 

He says: Dead people kissing. She says: Ant ribs in the sunroom. Little corpses I’ve dragged in from the yard. He says: See? She’s scared. She says: I am not. He says: Remember when we were at the lake house, and you wouldn’t jump in the water with me because you were too afraid of there being snakes at the bottom, even though I told you it was fine? She says: Henry was a baby. He says: My niece offered to watch him. He would have been fine. She says: What about Tuesday, when I found him on the porch? He says: Don’t act like you saved him. You just don’t want my parents knowing you smoke. She says: I quit during pregnancy. He says: I could still smell it on you. Those Pall Malls stink to hell. She says: It was your lighter he was playing with. He says: I had it in my pocket. She says: That’s not what I saw.

 

– William Yarbrough is a writer of short fiction. He is 24 years old and lives in Paoli, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in “Smokelong Quarterly”, “Right Hand Pointing,” “Squalorly,” and others. He can be reached at wyarbrough23@gmail.com, or by well-directed carrier pigeon.

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Dec 02 2014
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Fiction

Study Abroad

 

by B.J. Best

 

I remember fondly the summer I spent in France as a surrealist wine taster. Naturally, we didn’t taste any wine. Instead, we wrote descriptions such as, ‘This ’87 Chablis blooms widows’ breasts’ or ‘Joe’s beau blazes no oboe’s Beaujolaises.’ Sometimes we wouldn’t write anything, but instead send the client the remnants of a motorcycle crushed by an elephant or three days in autumn. Although the French had their own masters to look to, one day the owners brought in a decrepit Salvador Dali as an outside consultant. His face was melting off, little puddles wherever he walked. I asked him how best to live. He said the purest life is sitting on the couch, watching TV, eating crackers.

 

– B.J. Best is the author of three books, most recently But Our Princess Is in Another Castle, a collection of prose poems inspired by video games. I got off the train at Ash Lake, a verse novella, is forthcoming from sunnyoutside in 2015. Visit him online at bjbestpoet.wordpress.com.

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Nov 25 2014
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Fiction

The Autonomy Directive

 

by Tendai Huchu

 

The Soviet mycologist Grigor Grigorovich Bogomolov was a rising star in the science fiction literary scene. His first novella, Glorious Red Mars of the Eternal Revolution, was met with lukewarm acclaim, selling several hundred copies, enough for his friends to compare him favourably to Grigorii Grebnev. By day, Bogomolov battled with hosts of dermatomycoses, his particular focus being (and he always blushed when asked) vulvovaginal candidiasis. His colleagues at the institute were proud to have a published author in their midst and understood when he came for work in the mornings, red-eyed and weary, that Bogomolov was burning the candle at both ends in the service of literature and science.

Bogomolov was stuck in a block, unable to follow up with a novel despite the heartfelt urging of his publisher who believed in his talent. It didn’t help when three years after the publication of Glorious Red Mars, the critic Stepanischeva wrote a scathing review in красный гигант, denouncing the novella as ‘a thinly disguised subversive work pandering to western capitalist ideology bent on the ruination of the glorious revolution’. In his review, Stepanischeva argued that Mars was famously depicted by H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds to be home to warmongering, marauding Martians who seek to destroy the earth. He wrote that Bogomolov surely could not have missed the irony that Mars is dead and desolate. The article ended with the chilling denouncement: ‘Bogomolov should know that the red of Mars can never be compared to the glorious red of the Hammer and Sickle, of the blood of patriots spilt during the Revolution of 1917 and more recently during the Great Patriotic War!’

The review sent chills down Bogomolov’s spine. Colleagues at work began to view him with suspicion, refusing to share the table with him in the canteen during lunch as though he carried an infectious contagion. His editor, Boris Kropotkin, telephoned him in blind panic, voice quivering down the line and insisted they had to do something. The красный гигант was an influential journal and if the author was compromised, so too was his publisher. Bogomolov pointed out the absurdity of the review’s central premise since the journal itself was named after a class of stars that have exhausted their core hydrogen and switched to thermonuclear fusion in the shell, i.e. Red Giant was emblematic of a dying star and therefore unconsciously carried a more subversive message than Glorious Red Mars.

‘Please, I beg you; put such thoughts out of your mind. красный гигант is very powerful, you can’t win,’ Kropotkin wailed down the telephone. ‘You must do something that will distance you from that damned novella!’

‘What can I do?’ said Bogomolov dejected.

‘Write a new story, a patriotic story denouncing the evils of western individualism,’ Kropotkin declared. ‘We will publish it in our own journal, New Horizons, next week.’

All week Bogomolov didn’t attend work. Instead he stayed in his cold garret feverishly writing his last masterpiece – nearly forgotten now, but a classic of the Soviet short story – The Autonomy Directive. The language was stilted and bland, but the story was ideologically sound. In The Autonomy Directive, an unnamed western nation (the reader is invited to see it as the United States of America) builds a great computer the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza with one objective, to solve the main contradiction of western society, that of the primacy of individual rights within a collective society. A pact was made that whatever solution the computer came up with would be enforced by law. For years the capital was tormented by the sound of the computer’s cranking gears, its churning magnetic tape and the whirr of hot air blasting out of its cooling vents. In the seventh year, the computer printed out its solution. The government was shocked, but bound to these instructions all the same. The story ends with the ominous view of whole cities built of skyscrapers of velvet lined titanium coffins in which the citizens were entombed, each forever separate from his fellow man.

Bogomolov collapsed when he finished the story, and had to be rescued by his landlady, the kindly Vera Pavlona. The Autonomy Directive was published in New Horizons the following week, and was well received by красный гигант and several other leading journals. Kropotkin ensured that any remaining copies of Glorious Red Mars of the Eternal Revolution were pulped now that crisis had been averted. He turned back to Bogomolov and asked if he would now write something else. This is what Bogomolov said to him:

‘I can never write again, for now I have laid myself in my own velvet lined coffin. You and Stepanischeva can nail it shut together.’

He died a bitter old man in 1992 without ever having written another word.

 

– Tendai Huchu is the author of The Hairdresser of Harare. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Manchester Review, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Gutter, AfroSF, Wasafiri, Warscapes, The Africa Report, The Zimbabwean, Kwani? and numerous other publications. In 2013 he received a Hawthornden Fellowship and a Sacatar Fellowship. He was shortlisted for the 2014 Caine Prize. His next novel will be The Maestro, The Magistrate, & The Mathematician.

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Nov 18 2014
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Fiction

Soul 2

  

by Doug Hawley

 

All of the following news articles appeared in the Daily Northwest News.

March 15, 2044 Copenhagen, Denmark. A little over a year ago, S waves were discovered at the Denmark National Physics Laboratory by Magnus Albreck. Originally they were only detected in humans, leading some to claim that they were a physical manifestation of soul. We just received news that weak S waves have been discovered in chimps.

The same panel that discussed the original discovery has been reconvened to discuss this revelation.

Daytona Brown: As we indicated during the panel of March 5, 2043 which I led, we are now having the follow-up discussion of S waves. The timing is great because of the news that S waves have been found in chimps.

We have a panel with some of the original members and some new ones. Unfortunately, Chester Ogilvie, leader of Baptist USA, died recently, and abortion supporter Sue Feldman is unavailable, but we have Jason Evans of the Los Angeles Universalist Church and Mary Proctor from Planned Parenthood to replace them. Biologist and atheist Roger Sawkins, Magnus Albreck, the discoverer of the S Waves, and Jeremy Atkins from PETA are back from last year’s panel.

Brown – Opening statements?

Evans – I don’t know how Mr. Ogilvie would have felt about these results. Maybe that there are many mansions in the Lord’s heaven? Chimp mansions and human mansions? I don’t think that these waves necessarily represent soul, but I’m keeping an open mind.

Sawkins – No matter how many animals or objects give off S waves, I don’t believe in God or heaven. However, finding another source of S waves is intriguing.

Proctor – This has no effect on me. We don’t get much call for chimp abortions.

Atkins – I think that we have more evidence that higher apes are our brothers and sisters and should be treated with respect equal to humans. In fact, that respect should be accorded to all non-human animals.

Albreck – I was amazed at the discovery of S waves in humans. Now that they exist in at least some animals, I wonder what will find tomorrow.

Brown – In what way do these later results affect your thinking?

Sawkins – Before, when S waves were only found in humans, I believed that there was a qualitative difference between humans and animals. Now I have to question that. What will we find with more sensitive machines?

Evans – We Universalists are divided about a supreme being. If we can identify S waves as representing the soul, I believe that will tip the debate.

Proctor – Until S waves are confirmed to exist in fetuses, I think that the majority of the US will still favor allowing abortions as now permitted by the law. If S waves are found in the fetus, we have a whole new ballgame.

Atkins – It doesn’t change my thinking at all; it confirms what I thought all along.

Albreck – It makes we want to see if we can refine our EMW machinery to find any S waves anywhere else , perhaps with lower amplitude than those presently detectable.

Brown – Closing statements?

Proctor – Regardless of whom or what has S waves, let’s use science and education to keep abortions safe and rare.

Evans – Whether or not you believe in God, any person or animal with S waves is special.

Atkins – I concur with Mr. Evans.

Albreck – I’ll be back in the lab. I’m elated to be living in these times with the progress we are making.

Sawkins – I hope that Dr. Albreck will collaborate with my fellow biologists to see what the implication of S waves is in the animals that have them.

 

– Doug Hawley is a former actuary (extuary) who writes, snowshoes, volunteers and hikes. Formerly was a volunteer wheel chair jockey (pusher, roll model, unpaid escort) at a hospital and now is a volunteer book seller in support of his local library and a killer of invasive species at his local park. He lives with editor and musician Sharon. He currently resides in Lake Oswego OR and has lived in Manhattan (KS that is), Atlanta, Louisville, Denver, LA and marvy Marin CA.

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Nov 11 2014
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Fiction

Places to Nest

 

by Joy Clark

 

You’ve seen her somewhere before, this female officer with her bleached hair and tree stump snarl. Maybe at the dentist’s, bending over a crate of soda on aisle five, slipping into the back at an Easter church service? So many of your childhood memories are stories you told yourself under the covers: I ran away from the orphanage, I was rescued from the orphanage by pirates, I have the orphanage stored inside me somewhere between lungs and liver. Your parents never liked these stories.

Your parents: Why can’t you ever daydream about nice things?

The female officer sifts through the items in your trunk as if she is looking for shells on a beach. Handful after handful, slipping between her fingers back into the night sky that is your trunk. You look up. Above you is the damp concrete of a parking garage, a horse head graffiti alongside the red-painted words ‘fuck them.’ How long has that been there, you wonder, how long have those words slept above you warding the death angel away from your flaky-skinned Corolla?

Now the officer has found your shells. The plaid underwear your sister bought you in secret when you were thirteen, the small tobacco pipe you stole from your cancerous uncle, a few bars of melted down crayon bits your mother poured into muffin tins when your dad said there was no money for stupid new crayons.

Female officer: You know it’s illegal to sleep here.

The exact same thing a manager at Kroger told you last week. You had your sunshades up in the windows, the metallic fabric protecting you against moonlight, streetlight, and prying eyes. Curled up in the backseat like a cat, nose pressed against your knees. You had just used a bit of your remaining $90 to buy microwavable ravioli with pull-off tabs that you would eat cold and gelatinous. It was piled along with instant coffee and a few jugs of water in your floor board. The manager at Kroger wrapped the roof of your car with his fist, a sound like hail. He said he’d call the police.

You drive deep into the wooded backcountry of Nacogdoches. County road after county road, each twisting farther back, a thread of them hopelessly tangled together. You find an abandoned trailer park, drive behind it, slip your way into the backseat and hug yourself close under a blanket.

When you wake, you think you can smell pine and wet earth. Somewhere through the trees you hear a man yelling at his dog or his wife or his child. The trees take the words, they protect you from the sharp obscenities, but the waves of his anger roll over you. You crank your car and leave.

You only ever sleep in your clothes now. You shower at the local college rec center, and you always take an extra shirt in the shower with you to scrub and scrub at the red dribble of ravioli down the front.

You know there has to be a way to make friends at school, a way to find someone to help you, protect you, or at least buy you a hot meal. They seem compassionate enough, these clean-faced girls in the hallway wearing gym shorts and t-shirts. Laughing, arms draped around one another. But they cannot know you; they cannot know you as you have known yourself.

What you want to say to the female officer: I’m sorry. I am going to get a job soon. Any day now. Somewhere that will hire me, do you know anywhere that will hire a girl with no high school diploma, no work experience, no connections? When I get a job I will find someone who needs a roommate. I will sleep on someone’s couch or air mattress. I will check craigslist every morning in the student center.

What you want the female officer to say back: I’m sorry too. For those scriptures you were taught at home, your so-called education. Sorry that your dad held a nail gun to your head when you wanted to leave, sorry that your mom said you should be discreet, chaste, a keeper at home, good, obedient to her own husband. You have a car, at least. You’re going places.

There are sirens in the distance as she closes the trunk. She doesn’t comment on the blankets, the emergency first aid kit, the cans of food. The drugs that she was hoping to find are blank shells: you have nothing more than a tube of Neosporin.

Female officer: It is legal to nap almost anywhere. Say, if you’re taking a long road trip. And you just need an hour or two of shut eye.

You: It’s been a long trip.

Female officer: I expect you to be out of here by dawn.

You watch her as she climbs back into her patrol car. She seems tired, drives out slowly, a longboat with no wind in the sails. You catch a glimpse of your own reflection in the glass. Greasy hair, grey eyes, an earthbound bird nesting. I think I’ve seen you somewhere before, you tell yourself. The lights of the parking garage beam like eyes: proud, supportive, distant.

 

– Joy Clark is currently pursuing her B.F.A. in Creative Writing at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. She has been published in HUMID, the undergraduate literary magazine of her school, and she currently serves as a Fiction Editor on HUMID’s staff.

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Nov 04 2014
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Fiction

Practical Solution

 

by Melissa Ostrom

 

Ernest painted in oils and either brushed as many details as he could fit into a diminutive space, like a village reflected in the curve of a cane handle, or exhausted over a large canvas one detail, like a blade of grass in all of its minutiae: the tear from a rabbit’s gnaw, dew’s glitter, the vein through the middle.

Eden supposed she liked his work. At least she didn’t dislike it. She’d seen his microscopic and telescopic approaches in the gallery owned by the university where he taught. He’d won some acclaim. She didn’t particularly care.

She was a potter, intent on creating objects intended for daily use in a home. Usually this imagined home included elements she missed or lacked, a parent who baked a favorite dessert, a child who trailed a favorite blanket on her way to the table. Her pot could find its way into these domestic scenes, and she liked to think it might become yet another favorite something for someone.

Mostly she sold on consignment. She taught, too, at the university, just twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday evenings, enough to augment her irregular earnings.

In the beginning of the fall semester, she greeted her new students. One was the artist professor. Ernest. While she reviewed the syllabus, he wandered from the worktable where the class had gathered. He smiled at the glass case that exhibited her pots. He smoothed his thin bangs across his forehead. The students’ eyes followed him. When she finished trying to recall their attention with her list of course expectations, she asked if anyone had questions. They didn’t know if they had questions. They hadn’t been listening.

However, Ernest, with a tap against the case, called across the studio, ‘Don’t you sculpt?’

‘No.’ Eden neatened the extra syllabi into a stack. ‘I work on the wheel.’

‘Ah.’ He returned to the stool he’d vacated earlier, gently kicked the floor and twirled a little so that he faced her directly. ‘Just functional pottery.’

‘Yes.’ She patted the syllabi against her thigh. ‘Dysfunctional pottery wouldn’t work so well for people.’

He sneered.

She was annoyed and confused. She hadn’t misrepresented her class in the course description. She hadn’t set out to trick students into thinking she taught the fundamentals of sculpting. Clearly, her class focused on wheelwork: wedging, centering, opening, raising walls, shaping, trimming, glazing and firing. Yet he made her feel fraudulent.

Throughout the semester, he deigned to watch her demos. But instead of taking his turn at the wheel, he spent the remainder of each class at a worktable, his tools carefully arranged around him, and attempted to teach himself what he could about sculpting. After she showed her students how to alter a lip for a pitcher, he experimented with impressing objects into a slab. The next class, after she demonstrated pulling a handle, he sidled back to his table to connect the slabs in an artful way.

Only once, during a workshop’s final minutes, when it was time to bag clay scraps and clean tools, did he try the wheel. Eden had the satisfaction of watching him struggle with a too-big lump of clay. It flayed in his stranglehold. It spewed red iron oxide droplets across his shirt. He looked like a cowboy wrangling a rabid steer. She turned to hide her grin.

He was never short on advice. He instructed her on how to use her own tools (for decorating purposes) and showed her photos from ceramists’ books that proved how pots – distorted, composited, employed as round canvases – could escape functionality. She smiled politely and got back to work.

Toward the semester’s end, he stood over her where she still sat, having just modeled a technique for handling an especially large portion of clay. Then he suggested, ‘You could cut right into that vase with a pointed slab and proclaim something violently poignant about the atrocities of modernity encroaching on the mundane rituals of everyday life.’ He went so far as to demonstrate what he meant. With a slapped-together sword of clay. Straight into her vase.

She gasped.

The students shuffled back.

‘See? Now that makes a statement.’

The Tuesday night they mixed glazes, he asked her out on a date.

Eden mutely stared at him. She thought about the violence with which a circumstance can encroach on her life’s peaceful rituals. But she didn’t tell him off. Rather, she invited him to meet her here on Friday, at eight o’clock, when she planned to start the glaze firing.

They met by the gas kiln. It was large, a room in itself, domed and bricked. Its interior held shelves of imperfect work. It would take years for the students to produce anything that didn’t possess the unevenness of a kindergarten project. Years. She told him this. She was defending the years she, herself, had committed to the learning, the practice. She was giving him a last chance.

He snorted a laugh then stepped into the kiln to better examine the peep hole where she kept the small cone that would bend in accordance to the heat.

The next semester, she taught her evening class. But one night in her own studio, she wedged an incredible amount of clay, a kind especially laden with grog. It was not a throwing body. Its substantial structure made it a sculpting medium. She threw it on the wheel anyway, ignoring how its grog of hard fired bits cut into her hands. She made this pot big, enormous actually, until she had to stand on her stool to finish the neck and flare its inch-thick lip with her piece of wet chamois. When it was done, her arms ached, and her palms felt crucified. But after she stepped off the stool, she took in her work.

It was the grandest pot she’d ever made, large enough to collect a year’s worth of rainwater, hold a bacchanalian feast, envelop, like a womb, a grown man.

 

 

– Melissa Ostrom lives in rural Western New York with her husband and children. She teaches English at a community college, serves as a public school curriculum consultant and writes whenever and however much her four year old and six year old let her.

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Oct 28 2014
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Fiction

Isle of Soay

 

by Jay Hodgkins

 

Over there you see the Isle of Soay. The permanent population of Soay is currently three, of which I am one. It used to be four, but my wife had difficulties with the isolation. She left. It’s a difficult life, and it’s not for some people. I, myself, have lived there for more than 40 years and, looking back, if I had the chance to do it again, I think I would have done it the same. There’s a quietness to the life that suits me.

‘Soay’ means ‘Sheep Island’ in Old Norse, but I don’t tend sheep. I’ve always found my calling out here, on the sea. For 25 years, I made my living trawling these waters for prawn. This is my first season ferrying people to the islands. I’m delighted to have you on board and will do my best to ensure you have a lovely journey. This is my dog, Pup. He’s a sheep dog by birth, but he’s taken quite well to life at sea. When he watches over the rails, you’re most like to see porpoise jumping or seal basking on nearby rock. With any luck, we’ll see them, but I always say the wildlife finds us, we don’t find it.

You may be curious to know: the other two permanent residents of Soay are not my family. I have two children, but they are grown and moved away. My neighbors are graphic designers. Odd men, really, but perhaps odd is normal on Soay. I live on one half of the island and they live on the other. We’re quite friendly, but we do allow each other our space.

I suppose the strangest thing about them is their telephone booth. When they moved to Soay, they brought with them on their boat one of the old red telephone booths. Part and parcel as they may be to the London cityscape or even Edinburgh, it’s quite strange to see one standing alone in the middle of a field with pink puffs of blooming thistle grown half way up the sides.

I originally supposed they meant it as art. An icon of man and modernity juxtaposed against nature at her most bare and brutal. I’m not very good with art, and I don’t think I was correct because it hadn’t been a year before they turned the booth on its side, door facing up to the sky. I often walk to the crest of Beinn Bhreac – it’s not much of a hill, but it’s what we have on Soay – in the late hours of our longest summer days to watch the stubborn sunsets drag along sideways over the Outer Hebrides. It was during these walks that I noticed one of the graphic designers, Tom is his name, coming out each evening to sleep in the booth. Always Tom, never his mate, who’s a lovely Irish fellow who goes by the name of David. It looked to be as if Tom was stepping into a sarcophagus, and in a way I suppose that’s exactly what the booth had become. In any matter, the booth is still serving its original purpose, keeping him connected to the things he’s left in another place.

I suspect the permanent population of the Isle of Soay may be reduced to two soon. The solitude can be too much. It’s a difficult life, and it’s not for some people.

 

– ‘Isle of Soay’ is Jay Hodgkins’ first published short story. His work is also scheduled to appear in the Eunoia Review in December. You can read more at www.jayhodgkins.com or follow him on Twitter @JayPHodgkins. He has worked as a speechwriter and as a journalist covering cops and courts, sports, government, energy and the environment, and finance. He holds an M.Sc. in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh and a B.Sc. in Commerce from the University of Virginia.

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Oct 14 2014
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Fiction

Iconography

   

by Sophie Overett

 

Their grandmother had had cards of patron saints she’d played like tarots. Long-faced men with bodies tall in prayer, eyes like insects. The perfect circle of a halo around their covered heads.

She hadn’t played them at Beth’s funeral, like maybe Lily had thought she would, but rather left them buried in the bowels of her handbag beside her rosaries and pocket Bible.

When Lily asks her, like she would as a girl, to tell her fortune with Saint Barbara and Saint Eugène de Mazenod, their grandmother shakes her head, her large, gold earrings clanking loud and metallic through the church.

‘No mother should have to bury their daughter,’ is all she says, and Lily glances forwards at where Marla, her grandmother’s daughter, Beth’s mother, her mother, is as tall as the men on those cards, her eyes like wells of careful paint, her halo nowhere to be found.

 

– Sophie Overett is an Australian cultural producer and writer of fiction and non-fiction. Her work has been published in print and online at Voiceworks, Regime,Seizure, the Sleepers Almanac No. 9 and more. In 2014, she was the recipient of the Young Writer in Residence fellowship at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre. She blogs at www.sophieoverett.com.

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Oct 07 2014
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Fiction

Lure

     

by Eric Williams                                                                

I’d spent all my beer money, a week’s worth in one night (it had been a long day), so I figured I’d go have a smoke down by the water. A night breeze was blowing off shore, making the palmettos hiss. I stood on the docks smoking, trying to woo a fat-headed tom with a ragged ear out from under an oyster boat that had been drug up onto the planks for repairs. He stayed hunkered down there, though, unmoved and watching.

I kept away from the dock lights and in the dark I could just make out the stars. The moon’s pale thin rind wasn’t out yet, and Apalachicola doesn’t put off much light in the off-season, so I thought I might see something of the night sky. I was looking for the faint smoke of the Milky Way when I heard the creak and clatter of footsteps coming down the dock. I felt for the switchblade in my back pocket, glad it was there and glad too that I’d left my purse back at the apartment.

I lit another cigarette and turned to look at the noise. A will-o’-the-wisp bobbed back and forth above the dock, floating closer as it passed the boats. Eventually the glow, pale blue, went under a light and I saw two small figures: a kid, swinging a flashlight back a forth, holding the hand of another larger kid, this one with a cane pole slung over her shoulder. They had the unaffected walk of children on a mission. The smaller one with the flashlight even skipped a few times.

I watched them walk, saw that they must have been related. The tall girl with the cane poll had the same red hair as the little boy with the light. They got closer and I saw they had the same freckles, too. I’m not very good with kids, but I’d say the girl couldn’t have been over twelve, and the boy, small and slight in comparison to her, was younger still.

‘Doin’ some night fishing?’ I asked as they closed the distance. The boy smiled shyly and squeezed the girl’s hand. She looked me over coolly but didn’t answer. ‘What’re you using for bait?’ The little boy waved his flashlight high in the air and giggled.

‘You’re in our spot,’ said the girl. She was gangly and gap-toothed, her tone matter-of-fact. I smiled and stepped aside.

‘Be my guest.’ I moved downwind so I wouldn’t be puffing right into their faces. ‘Over here okay?’

The girl nodded but didn’t look in my direction. The little boy, excited, switched the light on and off, flashing their shadows against the pier.

‘You’ll break it,’ she said, snatching it from him. She pulled a bundle of gallon Ziploc bags from her back pocket.

‘What’re those for?’ I asked. The boy looked up and gave me a gap-toothed smile.

‘Goin’ fishin’,’ he squeaked.

The girl switched on the flashlight, stuck it in the bag, put the bag to her mouth, and inhaled deeply. The plastic shrunk around the flashlight as she sucked the air out. She sealed the first bag in a second bag and then jammed those into a third. Then she slid a pin carefully through the sealing strip of the last bag. The cane pole’s monofilament line was bare, without a hook; it waved lazily as she reached for it. She threaded the line carefully through the pinhole before tying it off with a deft knot.

The arc of the pole was heavy over the pier as she examined her work. Satisfied, she swung it out over the water and lowered the light just below the surface. The flashlight’s beam scattering through plastic and water made a hazy, lambent green glow that hung just below the waves.

The girl sat down with her legs dangling over the pier. The boy stretched out on his stomach. Both stared intently at their glowing lure. I got a little closer too, craning my neck.

‘What do you catch with that?’ I asked. The girl gave me a disapproving look.

‘You talk a lot,’ she said. The boy giggled.

Kids are assholes. I sucked on my cigarette, tasting salt through the smoke.

‘Your parents know you’re out here?’

‘Ain’t got parents,’ said the girl.

Now I was the asshole.

‘Here they come!’ whispered the boy, pointing. I guess I must have gasped because the girl shushed me again.

They were like ghosts, writhing mercury-silver bodies shot through with blue and red streaks. The first one I saw was as long as my arm, sinuous with feathery edges waving as it slid into the light. It circled the glow, delicate feelers flexing in the water. It hung there for moment before slipping back into the dark.

It was followed by a fat bell-shaped blob, its sides alive with rows of pulsing filaments. Then there were smaller darting things, worms and jellies and coils of living crystal. Scarlet shrimp hovered around the light, then flashed away as a hairy bath mat flapped into view. The mat seemed to want to engulf the light, but it scrambled aside when something huge passed by, a vast shape just outside the glow that trailed meters of pearly droplets on shimmering threads behind it.

‘What are they?’ I asked the girl.

‘Larvae,’ said the boy, carefully wrapping his mouth around the two syllables.

‘Like, fish babies?’ I asked.

‘Maybe,’ said the girl, slowly dragging the light through the water. The things swam after it, fluttering and wriggling and flapping as they followed. There was a thump behind us, and then the quiet padding of the tomcat as he crept to edge of the pier and looked down at the water.

The four of us watched the things swim round and round the light at the end of a cane pole. I checked my watch, and hoped the dawn would never come.

            

– Eric Williams lives in Austin, Texas, on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous seaway. He’s had his needlessly combative opinions about classic literature published by The Airship, a story published at The Squawk Back, and has a story in an upcoming issue of Wyvern Lit. Say hello to him on Twitter @Geoliminal.

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