He met his neighbor in the driveway to explain the flashing lights and police officers across the street. With a wry smile he relayed the shooting that occurred before they took the man away. It was about time, too—that man and his wife in that gingerbread cottage of theirs. No kids or family to speak of. Every other lawn in the neighborhood manicured and new-looking as the houses, he motioned across the street with a sweep of his arm, everyone but that hideous eyesore. That prissy pink dollhouse was visible probably even from space.

Leading his neighbor toward the parking strip, he reminded him how they had all heard the altercations from the couple’s yard. Actual punching and scratching couldn’t compare in violence to their shouting and screaming. He presumed his neighbor remembered how the wife had nagged her husband ceaselessly while she worked at her flower beds and lawn decorations, and how, in the back yard behind their white picket fence, he had taken out his frustrations by cutting fire wood. The more she had yelled at him, he said, nodding in dismay, the more he had hacked away at the log pile. He must have chopped four cords of wood this summer. Sometimes, he searched for his neighbor’s eyes, you could see him glaring at her, panting, holding the axe for a moment’s consideration before splitting the next log.

When the shots and screams had echoed through the neighborhood, he knew what was happening. Like anyone else peeping over his window sill, he had seen the husband working his way from the carnage in back and changing clips while he churned the flowerbeds into heaps of brightly colored terra cotta chips. The wife must have given up trying to stop him and had resigned herself to following him around, sobbing and collecting broken pieces.

He chuckled to his neighbor about how the husband had stormed all over the yard, cutting them down like chopping so much wood. Pointing to a pile of shards near the front stoop, he said the female gnome had been shot “right in her big fat kitschy ass.”

Following his neighbor’s gaze to the driveway, he laughed at the bullet holes in the family of gnomes decal on the back of his wife’s mini-van. From there the husband had dropped the semi-automatic pistol and empty clips and set about squeezing off six more gnomes with a big revolver.

“He shattered every gnome on his property but one,” he said as the neighbor slipped away back home. Pointing toward the corner sidewalk, he continued, “It had to be the only one he ever liked, probably the only gnome he ever brought home as a gift for her. Squatting with its pants down,” he said, turning to find his neighbor gone. He looked back to the scene across the street and said aloud to himself, “. . . the grumpy little codger smiling and flipping the bird. You just have to know he left that as a statement to the rest of the neighborhood.”

B. E. Smith is a freelance writer from Utah. In addition to essay and article publications, his stories and poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Gutter Eloquence, Zygote in My Coffee, The Legendary, Static Movement, the delinquent, and in the current issue of The Binnacle. He lives in Salt Lake City and is writing a memoir.

The post Goodbye, Fairyland by B. E. Smith appeared first on Microliterature.

At this time of year the tour buses arrive early, while it’s still cool. Today, the first are there before he’s finished his coffee, before the street-cleaners have swept and hosed the pavement in front of his building. From the window, he watches the drivers edge their vehicles into place under the plane trees still shading one side of the coach park. Next stop, the food stall, a cigarette, then a snooze on the back seat with the air-con running.

By mid-morning, though, they’ll be gone, so the tourists, mostly interested in seeing the cathedral, being photographed outside it and buying souvenirs from the shop, don’t have time to linger. In a steady stream, backpacking, camera-toting, chattering into their ’phones, full of the joys of affluence, they cross the river by the new footbridge put there to save them a walk through town and wait near the café on the corner for their guide and the back-markers to catch up.

It’s as if they’re gatecrashing, visiting on a raid, impatient to get what they’ve paid for, ticking off items on their wish-list one by one, competitive, dead set on missing nothing. Watching them, noticing how noisy they are, how brash, he wonders if he behaved the same way when he arrived, a self-important stranger adrift between lives, sensation-seeking, trawling the surface of a world he thought he could handle but didn’t understand, scurrying around in circles like a bewildered ant.

Memory says he did. Later, when he’s been to the market, he’ll see them again, footsore probably, because going back has a way of seeming harder. Ready for a drink, too, and to be out of the heat for a while. If he hears anyone speaking his mother tongue, though, he’ll ignore them, he’s already decided that, because the part of his mind that knows he has to go further never stops explaining how much further there is to go.

Although resident in South East Asia for a good many years, Ken Head, who is married and has two children, now lives in Cambridge, England, where he was, but is no longer, a teacher of Philosophy and English Literature. His work, as author, poet and reviewer, appears regularly both online and in print. 2013 saw the publication of Prospero’s Bowl, his most recent poetry collection.  

The post Foreigner by Ken Head appeared first on Microliterature.

Gretchen shuddered as the train edged noisily away; tried and failed to forget where it had come from, where it was going. Hard-hitting snowflakes assailed her hair and cap, dotting her form with bits of frost that refused to melt, that clung tightly to her as if content to wait for spring to come.

She trudged painfully through the deep snow covering the sidewalk, shivering in spite of the long woolen coat, the thick-knit gloves, the fleece-lined boots in which her feet were comfortably entrenched. She could not have imagined how terrible, how terrifying this winter would be.

The caretaker was waiting at the house when she arrived, rubbing the gnarled hands she recalled from her youth over a warm, cheerful fire. Hands now aged, blotched with spots; hands that had faithfully spent the last forty years in her mother’s service.

“She kept up the garden real nice,” he assured her kindly. “Right until the end.”

Well she remembered her mother’s garden. The loving care with which she’d tended it, tilling the soil before the frost had truly gone, coaxing flowers up out of the dirt before the sun had barely begun to shine through the winter clouds.

“Did she suffer?” she asked abruptly. “At the end?”

“No,” he answered slowly. “No, I don’t believe she suffered much.”

Gretchen bowed her head and gazed out the wide, wintry window, at a world cloaked in white, punctuated only by the bare brown branches of naked trees poking up through the snow, ice crystallizing each limb from tip to stem.

“No one blames you,” the caretaker said softly. “For leaving her. All other things aside, she was…” He swallowed in the sudden silence. “A very cold woman.”

Yes, a cold woman, she thought, bidding him farewell in the bitter chill that froze her breath and numbed her fingers, the cold to which she thought she could never again become accustomed. The cold she had left behind.

She couldn’t help but remember, as she sat now by the hot, glowing fire, how her mother had so earnestly described it, that one night four decades before, when Gretchen herself had been scarcely more than a child. How she’d breathed deeply and relayed the entire story at once, as if she’d been holding it carefully in reserve, waiting for her daughter to be old enough to hear it. The trains arriving one after another, crammed to their icicle-laden rafters. The passengers disembarking, standing shivering in the winter snow. The orders being given to undress, to run naked on frostbitten feet before the selection staff. The frozen barracks, their bunks jammed tight, ever tighter with women, ever more sick prisoners, more starving inmates. The cracks of the whip and the sadism of the guards wielding it; the insistence of the block-leaders on wielding it while its victim stood bare-backed in the chill wind that blew here, through Oswiecim, through Auschwitz.

The block-leaders, she thought, her stomach sickening at the recollection as she stared about her mother’s warm, welcoming house with its quaint, outmoded furniture, its thick, heavy drapes, its bright, cheerful windows opening onto the garden, where in spring she had liked to watch the flowers growing up out of the frost.

She heard a thump from somewhere outside, as of a bottle of milk, a newspaper being delivered to their doorstep, a peaceful sound out of her childhood days, before she’d heard her mother’s story. Before a thump brought to mind the evil images, of men in uniforms come to drag the innocents away, men and women and young girls, just like her, just like she had been.

She tiptoed to the front door; opened it guardedly against the wind and snow that swirled even harder in the descending nightfall, against the cold that penetrated her defenseless skin. In the darkling dusk she discerned two trails of ragged footprints penetrating the snow, leading to and from the porch in hapless, unsteady array, as if made by a man uncertain of his errand, unsure of his way. The source of the sound lay at her feet, a small pot containing a cluster of tiny white flowers. Galanthus nivalis, she thought, automatically recalling the scientific nomenclature for the flower that bloomed first in the spring, that survived even the late snows. How proud her mother had been to refer to it that way; how she’d scorned the native term.

She bent to retrieve it and descried a note tied to the slender stalk, a scrap of snow-dampened paper fluttering in the icy air, a coarse handful of block-letters etched upon it in quivering ink. She retreated inside and closed the door behind her, shutting out the terrible, terrifying cold.

“For the funeral,” she read.

Perhaps some had learned to look past it, to see her mother only as the mild old lady gently tending her garden, caressing the fragile petals and stems of her beloved plants with delicate fingers, as if fearful of doing them harm. Perhaps some could forget, could feel sorrow over an elderly woman’s passing, compassion for the long-lost daughter who would suffer and mourn at her death. Or perhaps there were no longer any remaining, of those who had known her before.

She turned to gaze at it, her mother’s most prized possession, the treasured photograph, still standing proudly on the polished end-table by the sofa where she had liked to sit. Her mother, young and pretty in her SS uniform, smiling brightly at the camera as if untroubled by either cares or conscience. And meticulously arranged in a vase beside her, her mother’s favorite: snowdrops, the flower that disdains the cold, and survives the frost.

Tomorrow, after the funeral, she would return. Take the flowers and leave them there, in remembrance of the thousands, the tens and hundreds of thousands who had stood waiting with their feet buried in snow to learn whether they would live or die. Those who had waited in vain among the snowdrops for the spring to come.

Lori Schafer is a part-time tax practitioner and part-time writer residing in Northern California. Her short stories, flash fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online publications, and she is currently at work on her second novel. You can find more of her work at http://lorilschafer.blogspot.com/.

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She’s¹ my best friend’s² girl.³

1. I want to tap out in Morse code on her skin all the things I’d do to her if I could.

2. He doesn’t deserve her. He never did.

3. The code that strips her of her maturity is the same code keeping me silent.

A professional technical writer during the working hours and an aspiring short form writer any other time, Mikkel Snyder is a biracial author currently residing in St. Louis, Missouri. An ardent fan of experimental language, unconventional formatting, and diverse voices, Mikkel has been previously published in The Legendary and FreezeRay Poetry.

The post Coded Thoughts by Mikkel Snyder appeared first on Microliterature.

Martin B. Crisp
22 Sparrow Lane
Nutley, New Jersey 07110

May 1, 2014

Sally Amen
Director of Advancement
Handel University
84 Erie Avenue
Passaic, New Jersey 07055

Dear Selection Committee,

I know it’s an unconventional opening gambit, but I’d like to start by asking you a question. How is this day different from any other? In truth, I wish I could take credit for that line of inquiry. It is the creation of a famous clown, which I can assure you I am not nor do I aspire to be___ I just want to be your chief events coordinator.

Returning to the question, however, we might ask ourselves to deal with it impartially. We could start by doing a quick inventory of what we’ve been up to since the moment we decided to get out of bed today. Maybe some of us never slept. Maybe some of us were awakened from a happy dream and thought that was unfair. Maybe some of us were up to no good. Since then, however, what have we done to brighten the corner where we are?

Let me list a few things that occupied me in the beginning hours before I sat down to write this, my opening salvo to you, dear committee.

First there was Costa Rican coffee, some gentle exercise and the jotting down of what I call throwaway scenarios, a discipline. Here’s an example.

A husband gets impatient with his wife and makes a remark. She’s familiar with the pattern and won’t buy in. No sale.

She says, “If you’re looking for a fight, there’s the mirror. Go fight with yourself if you want to fight somebody. I’m not going to have this fight with you right now. Look, you’ve made the dog unhappy.”

In this scenario, I like her. I’m even betting on her. She’s her own kind of situation.

Much of my morning is passed this way, cooking up sketches, dramas, vignettes, all of an instructional nature, I hope. I like to think of them as events that might trigger some discovery about myself or if shared, benefit someone else.

I had the radio on at one point, and the song playing was an oldie called, “Did You Ever Have to Make up Your Mind?” Good song. Only a sampling was used, because the sports guys on the radio wanted to talk about a potential trade. I missed the sport. Anyway, the host of the show interrupted his partner before he could explain the particulars. He was nearly apoplectic, “What was that music? Who picked that music?” he wanted to know.

Then the producer chimed in to throw the partner under the bus. “Just wanted to show ya not everything from the 60s was classic, Mikey! They had their share of schlocky music.”

“Schlock! That’s being kind,” the host shouted.

Everyone laughed, including Mikey. What else could he do?

I share the story because sometimes I don’t know how to feel about this gang—the crowd that mocks and mocks.

I know people don’t read him much anymore, but Socrates said a mouthful when he said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

I say this knowing that if talking about the meaning of life was all one ever got up to nowadays then they’d probably not make much of a living. And don’t think I don’t realize the ironies here. But mocking in my book, is not talking.

In this scenario, you can be sure I’m betting on Socrates. He knew what he was doing. He had gravitas.

My employment history, education, list of the major events I’ve coordinated and the names of movies, TV specials and commercials for which I have done background work are attached. If requested, I can provide a number of personal references and recommendations.

Thanks so much,

Martin B. Crisp

P.S. I realize I really didn’t get past midday with my inventory of self, but I believe I have answered the question regarding how today is different from yesterday and the day before and so on___ can You! say as much?

Wayne Cresser’s fiction has been published in the print anthologies Motif 1-3 (Motes Books) and 10, Carlow University’s MFA Anthology ,online at Wandering Army, The Written Wardrobe (@ModCloth),The Oklahoma Review, The Journal of Microliterature, Shark Reef Literary Magazine and The Burlesque Press Variety Show, and in such print journals as The Ocean State Review and The Sound and Literary Art Book (SLAB). Work is forthcoming in the Blue Lake Review and The Journal of Microliterature.

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Once started, the university professor yielded the floor to debate. Students in Philosophy 101 voiced pros and cons up and down the lecture hall—back and forth across the rows, before settling in the middle.

Sitting on the left side of the aisle—row seven, seat eight, a young man in a white T-shirt and blue jeans stated that “People don’t need faith.” A detached look of assurance on his face, he flipped his bangs out of his eyes before continuing with “We can just as easily navigate the world with reason alone.”

Up the steps and on the right side of the aisle, a young man of continually rankled forehead sputtered in response, “You can’t—egh. You don’t—ugh. I mean, you’d have to be crazy to think that people don’t need faith!” If his emphatic eyebrows and his face of heavy consternation didn’t convince people of how seriously he took his responsibilities as Student Body President, then the dark serge suit and tie with white shirt he wore for church or business extinguished all residual doubt.

“Maybe you do,” said his new-found theological nemesis, tossing his hair and spreading an incredulous smirk across his face. “But that doesn’t mean everyone else does.”

The class president’s furrowed brow clenched alternately in anger and surprise to his classmate’s remarks. After he heard that impertinent voice mention “science and evidence,” he flushed red glaring down across the aisle and interrupted with “Don’t tell me about science! I have faith and I’m a scientist!”

Upon the next word from seat number eight, the Honors Society president—bald, phallic, and standing up behind the class president, rifled down an accusatory finger, “Hey! You take it easy on Spunk there!”

“His nickname is ‘Spunk’?” number eight rejoined. “Happy-go-lucky or jissom?”

Amidst the laughter, a plaintive cry from a seat in the shadows near the top of the hall begged, “Please, I’m the valedictorian. No profanity! Please!”

When the well-read hoodlum suggested that scientists work with evidence and not faith, Spunk bolted upright from his seat and shouted what his force and volume suggested had to be the conclusive salvo in the debate, “Are you trying to tell me Einstein didn’t have faith when he invented the light bulb!”

B. E. Smith is a freelance writer from Utah. In addition to essay and article publications, his stories and poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Gutter Eloquence, Zygote in My Coffee, The Legendary, Static Movement, the delinquent, and in the current issue of The Binnacle. He lives in Salt Lake City and is writing a memoir.

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Her name was Mary, her mother said, like the Virgin, which Mary always hated. Not the Virgin. The reminder her mother felt compelled to say to keep Mary on the right path, although they weren’t Catholic, barely Protestant, and it had been a month of Sundays—however long that is—since they last went to church.

A fork in the path was reached one Christmas, when she was sixteen, and I, a year younger, met again, after five years—more like strangers than family—cousins on our mothers’ sides, seconds, thirds, or twice removed—never quite sure how we were related, only that we were.

Mistletoe hung in the archway between dining room and kitchen where she first kissed me, pulled my head to hers before I knew what happened or anyone saw. The feel of her soft lips lingered on mine through the evening, my not knowing what that kiss meant, as we ate dinner, sang carols as we had when we were younger, when hormones had not yet kicked our bodies into libidinous hell, where we knew what we wanted, but didn’t know how, only vaguely how, from locker room stories and a scrambled porn channel filled with barely discernible figures of intense negative colors, while listening for parents coming home so we could quickly switch channels, throw ourselves onto the couch as though we’d been there all night watching the Cartoon Network, or the Discovery Channel—Animals Gone Wild.

And that night, actually morning, while everyone slept, Mary woke me with her right hand, not her lips, on my mouth, whispered Shh and pulled my arm with her left. Hand in hand, we slipped through the dark house, she in cotton nightgown, me in flannel pants and tee, to the mistletoe archway where she kissed me with lips as hard as Aunt Grace’s sugar cookies no one would eat, until my lips felt bruised and swollen.

We might get caught, she said, and pulled me through the kitchen, down the basement stairs into the dark, blacker than the house above, except for a small light in the far corner by the washer, where she led me and turned quickly, pressed her lips against mine—gentler this time. I want you, she said, as she lifted her gown, bent over, forearms on the washer. The soft light illuminated her round cheeks like crescent moons. I wanted her, cousin or not, and wrestled my flannels off my hips, letting them pool at my knees. Hurry, she said, before I change my mind. And I did. But she was too low. I half crouched, but my knee hit the washer, a deep metallic sound we knew everyone heard. Shh, she said. We held our breath and listened. I need something to stand on. That wood block by the workbench.

I shuffled into the darkness where she pointed, my flannels pulled halfway up my legs, waistband clutched in left hand. I wrestled the block to the washer one-handed. A trickle of sweat slid down my right temple. Mary stepped up, bent over, forearms on the washer, while I let my pants drop. I stretched on tiptoe, but couldn’t reach. So she twisted on top of the machine, and lay, propped on elbows. Her legs, spread, dangled off the lip of the washer as I stepped on the block, leaned forward and the wood wiggled underfoot, sent my knee into the washer, and me onto the cold floor, the concrete hard against my left butt cheek.

Mary slid from the washer; her gown fell from her hips, cascaded down her legs. Her eyes glistened in the dim light as she looked at me on the cold concrete floor, exposed, and she turned away.

Ray Carns lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he divides his time between writing, photography and film making. He has work has been previously published in the Journal of Microliterature, Bourbon Penn, this—a literary webzine, and Rose and Thorn Journal.

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We met in the coffee shop and exchanged only a few words. Neither of us took cream and sugar. There seemed to be a connection. So when Martin invited me over for dinner I agreed. To be honest, he was man of steel handsome and I was getting lonely ever since my one male friend relocated half way around the world, somewhere in Thailand.

Dinner was nice. He served a little salad with beets, biscuits with butter, and tofu steak with mushrooms. I excused myself to go to the washroom after the meal. Next to the toilet was a small table with a box of Kleenex, some lotion, and on the wall directly across a framed picture of Kim Jong-un.

When I came back the dishes were already cleared away and what appeared to be a freshly printed copy of the Communist Manifesto was placed where my plate had been. And on his side of the table was a worn out copy stuffed with bookmarks and colored tabs.

“So Susan, what do you think of my cooking?” Martin called from the living room as he motioned for me to join him, away from the kitchen and the manifestos.

With my mind still in the bathroom I responded without thinking. “Nice, nice, and those beets were so red.”

“Thanks. I belong to a collective rooftop farm right here in Soho,” he responded proudly. He does have Lenin’s eyes I thought.

The TV was on CNN with some story about tense relations between the Koreas. I’m a bit of a rabble rouser so I thought I’d see where this little train ride of a date would take me.

“You know Martin, I read somewhere North Korea officially denounced Communism back in 2009. Maybe they’re planning on turning over a new leaf?” He didn’t bat an eyelash.

“I hadn’t read that Susan. Please send me a link won’t you?” he deadpanned.

The train eventually got back on its rails and we had a nice evening, sans pamphlets, enough to make up for the lotion and the picture. Quirky isn’t illegal. As I was leaving he gave me a polite peck on the cheek and asked if I’d like to come back another time. “Certainly Martin. And I’ll bring apple pie.”

A week later I was back with my dessert. He was the picture of charm and accompanied me into the kitchen to put my pie in the refrigerator.

“So what are we having tonight?” I asked, scanning for new literature.

“Buona gnocchi Susan, buona gnocchi,” Martin replied in perfect fake Italian. “It’s no done yet. Let’sa seet in the other rooma. Let’sa talk.”

As we moved to the living room I thought, Italy and North Korea don’t exactly mix. Am I in for another ride?

“That’s pretty good fake Italian Martin. Where did you learn to speak it so well?” I rabbled.

He laughed out loud. “Aw I’m just joking around. But seriously, have you seen any good movies lately?”

“As a matter of fact I have. Legally Blond one and two.”

“No, no, I mean real movies, Fellini, Bertolucci…” he trailed off.

I could hear a distant whistle in my head. Was the train veering off the tracks again? Or were the tracks just a bit highbrow and nothing more? On a hunch I excused myself and headed for the washroom. No sooner did I walk in than I turned around, rushed out to the living room to grab my coat, and left without saying goodbye.

* * *

When I got home I plopped on the couch and called my sister.

“You’re home early? I thought you had a date with that Martin?”

“I did.”

“Well then, what happened?”

“Mussolini.”

Ken Schweda used to be a jazz musician, has a degree in Philosophy, drove trams at an amusement park, programs computers, and writes fiction and poetry. His work has appeared in theNewerYork, SPANK the CARP, and will appear in an upcoming issue of The Bookends Review. Read more at kenjeavus.com.

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SIMSEX is a sex simulator that can be programmed to offer any sort of virtual sexual experience with the touch of a screen. Recently, a scandal erupted when anonymized customer data indicated that around 10 percent of women who use SIMSEX selected “rape.” Some said the data proves that many women really do want to be raped. Others claimed that it doesn’t, because rape is by definition non-consensual and therefore can’t be “chosen.” “This is not about sex,” one prominent public intellectual was quoted as saying, “but about ontology.” A spokesperson for SIMSEX disagreed. “I don’t even know what that means,” he said. “But I do know what women want, and that’s a choice.”

Niko Osobito is a writer who moves between Ithaca and New York City.

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My knowing is granted in shades. The first is me dressed as a schoolgirl Britney Spears taking shots of vodka off our wooden dorm dressers.

The second is browned out: me drunk and seated on a folding table somewhere in Brooklyn. My roommate bottle-feeds me water. She tells me how badly she wants to dance.

“Will you watch her?” she asks the man standing next to us.

“No,” he answers.

“Okay,” she tells me, “he’s going to watch you.”

I slither down the club’s stairs and call my friend to come and get me. I yell to him that I do not know where I am. A boy, a stranger, tells me.

“You’re lying,” I say, “I can’t be stranded on Nostrand.”

I know that next morning I am hung-over and tired from waiting outside the club until four am for her. I know that I never saw her leave.

This morning I wear my red polka dot dress and the white Keds I routinely borrow from her side of the closet. She has not come home.

When I think of me knowing, I think of me in the polka dot dress and how she has not answered her phone in twelve hours. When she walks in, I am mad and I am yelling. I tell her I could have gotten raped. She is sorry. She is so, so sorry.

She says, “You have every right to be mad.” And I do, but only for a few moments. Only until her phone rings and I learn what has happened. She tells me she spent the night at a stranger’s apartment. When she woke up he was inside of her. She tells him to stop. Or, she thinks she told him to stop. Maybe, though, he did not.

Outside, I call my boyfriend. He asks me if it what happened was violent. I tell him I do not understand the question.

“Was there a gun to her head?” he asks.

No, I agree, there was no gun.

In March we dress ourselves to go out. We wear black, because we are in New York or just because we now know we are not in California.

I see her pull at her panty lines in the mirror.

“Just don’t wear underwear,” I say.

“I’m never listening to you when you tell me not to wear underwear. Look what happened last time.”

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“He might’ve given up if there’d been an extra step.”

I want to tell her there is little we, the drunk and young, can do. I should tell her, as the magazines have told me, that it did not matter what she wore or that she trusted a stranger.

Forget, I tell myself, that your Asian roommate dressed as a Chinese take out box. That she scrawled “thank” across her breasts and “come again” across her underwear-less vagina. Forget the terms objectify, preventative measures, buddy system.

Forget chances. Forget it was the leaver and not the left.

Scarlett Grace McCarthy is an undergraduate Dramatic Writing student at NYU. Her writing has received awards from YoungArts, Scholastic, Bennington, Hollins University, and The Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, among others. Follow Scarlett on Twitter at @scarletttini.

The post The Leaver by Scarlett McCarthy appeared first on Microliterature.

Estelle was stabbed 26 times. That’s why her death made the front page though it wasn’t the headline story. Peggy, the shelter manager, called before the morning paper was delivered with instructions to keep it from the women.

“That’s not how they should find out,” she’d said.

After breakfast, the children were sent out to play. The women were gathered into the dayroom.

I took a place at the back. Peggy was joined by the crisis counselors. In a low tone, she announced that Estelle had been killed in the night before.

Gasps across the room.

Peggy quieted the group. “We will not dishonor Estelle by giving into fear,” she said. “You’re safe here; we remain shelter for you.”

The counselors’ services were offered to anyone wanting to talk.

The women trickled from the room.

Peggy, on her way out, gave me a hug, whispered in my ear. She knew I’d developed a relationship with Estelle.

“You don’t judge, you don’t advise, you just listen,” the counselors had told us at the volunteer training.

As I got to know Estelle, I hoped that she would not be like my mother or many of the other women who would always make use of the revolving door policy.

She talked to the counselors. She, by choice, had no children. She’d gone to a community college.

“It was hard, though,” she’d told me. “If I had male teachers, he’d sometimes show up during class.”

Still she was able to get a certificate in some program. It gave her the courage to dream of going further: an associate’s, a bachelor’s. “In education,” she confessed. “Can you imagine me a teacher?”

I could.

Estelle had the key—she just couldn’t find the right door.

“I wish she’d sought us out,” Peggy had said to me.

I don’t know if the security cameras are viewed every day. I think only if there’s an incident is the film pulled. But if Peggy ever views last evening’s recording, she’ll know that Estelle had come.

“We don’t have any beds available,” I’d told her over the intercom. We stood on either side of the glass entrance door. It was a lie, but she didn’t question why I didn’t offer her a sleeping bag or the sofa/bed in the dayroom or to take petty cash and put her up in a motel.

I thought from the corner she’d again found herself in, she might see the other options available. If she couldn’t come back here, maybe she’d understand she had power to create a place — grow from there.

I didn’t think she’d go back to him.

“You’ll have to practice patience,” we were also told. A counselor said it took ten to twelve times before a woman would leave her for good.

In the seven months I’d been here, Estelle had come eleven times.

I was going to be at the shelter all night; I would’ve given her the keys to my place if she’d only asked.

Why didn’t she just ask?

Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz is a writer and photographer. Her work has appeared in various online and print journals. She infrequently blogs about her creative life at http://wwwonewriter.blogspot.com.

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She rocks, the antiquated chair creaking quietly against the worn wood of the porch. The sun blazes high overhead and she pauses; bends to steal a sip of lemonade, pink from the pitcher on the table beside her.

“So what do you think, Ma?” He nudges her back into consciousness, awareness of his presence.

She reflects, scrutinizing her son, seated still at her feet, nearly aged himself now: back bent, head bald, beard white. Just like his father, God rest his soul.

“I always wanted to live by the ocean,” she replies, turning away from him to face it again: the calm azure horizon, the warm gentle breakers foaming white off the shore.

“I know you did,” he says, turning, too. Seabirds scuttle back and forth across the muddy beach, forcing their beaks into the saturated earth when the waves retreat; retreating themselves when the wet wash returns.

She continues to rock, clasps her hands tight in her lap as she watches, thinking sadly of Herbert, the view they might have shared had he only lived longer.

“It’s lovely,” she admits at last. “But I don’t like having so many new people in town.”

Herbert Jr. leans back on his callused palms; extends his lanky legs down over the wide wooden steps, the familiar front stoop of his long-ago youth.

“They had to go somewhere,” he reminds her gently.

“I suppose,” she concedes. “But I do hope they’ll go home soon.”

He peers worriedly into the gray fog of his mother’s eyes. “They can’t go home, Ma. Remember I told you? Their houses are underwater now.”

“Still?” she inquires, astonished. “But it’s been so long.”

He swallows. “Don’t you remember, Ma? I told you what happened, with the sea level and all…”

“Laziness, pure laziness!” she sputters, an old fire rekindling itself in her cool clouded eyes. “In my day we knew how to work, how to rebuild after a catastrophe. Why, when your father came back from the war…”

He allows her to ramble while he again seeks the sea; descries the encampment at the foot of the dunes to the north, the shanty-town set upon the cliff to the south. For once he is grateful that her sight has grown dim.

“…There wasn’t a country in the world that could match us for productivity! We were proud to be Americans, proud to belong to these fifty states!”

“Forty-seven,” Herbert sighs without thinking.

She ceases rocking, cold choler in her countenance. “I’m not senile, Herbert. You think I don’t know how many states there are?’

“Sorry, Ma,” he answers contritely.

She sips her lemonade sourly. “You should be,” she agrees. “I suppose next you’ll be telling me it isn’t awfully warm for November?”

“No, Ma. You’re absolutely right; it is awfully warm for November.”

She resumes her rocking, a bit more fiercely; squints past her son at the calm azure coast, the light tranquil breakers, the warm gentle waves lapping ever nearer, ever closer to the old family home.

Lori Schafer’s flash fiction, short stories, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online publications, and she is currently at work on her third novel. Her memoir, On Hearing of My Mother’s Death Six Years After It Happened: A Daughter’s Memoir of Mental Illness is being released in October 2014. You can find out more about Lori and her forthcoming projects by visiting her website at http://lorilschafer.blogspot.com/.

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A friend read my course load for spring semester, shaking his head at one of the class titles. “Women in Literature?” he asked. “You’ll never get laid in that class.” I had learned to step away from him when I saw his eyes wander from our conversation to women walking along the quadrangle. He stood agog but my gender made me feel as culpable as the passing women deemed me complicit.

I had purchased my books, read the course outline, and looked forward to the poems and stories of female authors I would be reading. Waiting in the hall for class to begin one day, a female classmate with short brunette hair shouldered her book bag and mentioned the reading assignment. She asked if I wasn’t getting a little tired of stories about teenage menstruation. I realized that I was not alone. In fact, when I suggested the “Lab Fee” was probably for the cost of personal examination mirrors, she laughed and said, “Yeah, I thought I was taking a literature course, too.”

As one young man among thirty women and their professor, I would offer an opinion in her class and be ignored. Once the pronoun attached to my words had changed, my femaile peers were willing to discuss my ideas. They were free to plagiarize me, repeating what I said verbatim, as if I hadn’t just uttered those very words. Until they needed another talking point, I drifted.

Having moved a thousand miles away from home years ago, I found myself corresponding with a friend who was working as a nanny some fifteen hundred miles away near the Gulf Coast. She was blond, heavy-chested, and wending her way through life with her body. With me, though, it had been Chinese takeout and fortune cookies that read: Sorry, I can’t; I’m saving myself for marriage. Regardless, we remained friends as life lead us in different directions.

On a night when the Santa Anna winds were scorching my Indian summer, she called me. Hearing a friendly female voice was comforting, but I hadn’t given her my telephone number. The next call from Houston was a hundred percent hot with frightening humidity. Her voice was panicked and pleading for help.   Apparently she had a boyfriend, and he was beating her again. She couldn’t take any more. “He’s black and he’s gonna kill me,” she cried. “But I don’t have enough money to leave, Robert!”

“You’ve got to get out of there!” I said. I couldn’t bear knowing my friend was in pain. So I wired her a thousand dollars that night and told her to stay in a hotel by the airport.

Her boyfriend calmed down for a week, until she needed more money, I would learn. She had taken me for another grand before I caught on to her scam. I imagined them laughing at me from their deadbeat apartment, smoking their crack pipe and convinced they could fleece me a third time.

Class ended upon a student’s recitation of a short story. After which the brunette in the desk across the aisle from me muttered in discontent, “Did anyone else see anything wrong with an adolescent girl trying to escape her period by climbing a cherry tree?”

B. E. Smith is a freelance writer from Utah. In addition to essay and article publications, his stories and poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Gutter Eloquence, Zygote in My Coffee, The Legendary, Static Movement, the delinquent, and in the current issue of The Binnacle. He lives in Salt Lake City and is writing a memoir.

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Early on a chilly, gray morning in November 1941, Henry Miller, bored from his drive across the country, stopped for breakfast at Eudora Welty’s home in Jackson, Mississippi.

Knowing him only from reputation, Miss Welty was at wits end. What will we do, she thought. This will be like diving into cold water.

That same morning, near the center of town, Warden Love said breakfast grace at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. After the meal, he announced that the Asylum would be moving that day to the new facility across the Pearl River. A shiny-faced man jumped up cheering and danced around a table where another had just vomited his breakfast. Several inmates rose simultaneously and began speaking while others hid under a table. The Warden ignored these outbursts.

“Divide the inmates into groups of two,” Warden Love explained to his assistants. “Each pair will pick up a bed and carry it over the bridge to the new facility on the other side of the river.” Then he nodded to the staff who circulated from table to table matching up the inmates.

Word spread quickly and many Jackson residents turned out to watch the spectacle.

Perfect timing, Miss Welty thought, watching Miller sip his breakfast rum.

“Put your glass down and get your coat, Mr. Miller. We are going to see a show.”

At eleven o’clock, a line of old men in ragged overcoats against the chill marched their beds down the street and onto the bridge. People pinched their noses against a thick urine-tainted wind.

A woman standing beside Welty and Miller asked, “How can Warden Love suffer crazy old men to such a task in weather like this?”

Miss Welty smiled uncomfortably. Miller burped.

At mid span in the bridge, the lead pair of inmates dropped their bed. One man picked up a rock from the road and began to beat it against the bronze handrail — stone against bronze, stone against bronze. Others followed suit. Stone against bronze, stone against bronze grew louder and swelled from the bridge over the crowd and out across the marsh.

The beating bronze voice caught the attention of an armed farm boy counting shells in a duck blind north of the bridge. He readied his shotgun and looked up as a cloud of pigeons dropped from the bridge and blew upstream. Miss Welty watched that cloud and a spearhead of ducks that rose out of the brown marsh grass and flew south.

“Isn’t this something, Mr. Miller?”

Miller, head dulled from rum and creosote, nodded like a silent orange on a tree.

Lukewarm, Miss Welty thought.

The inmates continued — stone against bronze, stone against bronze. The ducks flew high out of range. The pigeon cloud dissipated

“It isn’t often,” Miss Welty said, “that Jackson has so much to offer.”

Louis Abbey is a retired Professor from VCU in Richmond, VA. He has an MFA in Creative Writing and has published poetry and fiction in Indiana Review, The MacGuffin, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. He has published online in Grey Sparrow and Toasted Cheese. He currently lives and writes in Revere, MA.

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1976:

We came, hurly-burly, from Maine to Chicago that hot summer, for my dissertation defense. Staying at the studio of my wife’s painter-friend, I hung my best pants (black Lee Riders) on an easel, and went to bed. Early the next morning, I reached for the pants: they were about five sizes too small. “Liz, Liz, what happened to my pants! Did you wash them or something?” Since the defense was at nine, there was no time to buy a new pair. Defend a dissertation in shorts? It turned out our friend had come in late and hung her pants, identical but smaller, over mine. (I passed.)

Moral: When you have something important to do, stay out of your wife’s friend’s pants.

2012:

In a New York hospital, with almost-kidney failure, I shared a room with an orthodox rabbi suffering from chronic, multiple complaints. As (Tuesday) evening fell, his wife reluctantly left for the five-hour bus ride back up to Monsey: she did not drive. “Don’t forget my pants,” he reminded her. Presumably, they left as few things as possible in the hospital room. The next day, ten bus hours and a short night’s rest later, she was back. The red tape for his discharge took hours. Finally cleared, and anxious to leave, he snatched the pants from the shopping bag in which she had brought them. They were beautiful, dark blue, possibly made of silk. “Oh, no!” he cried in horror. “You brought my Shabbos pants!” I can’t remember the resolution. Did he wear the Shabbos pants, desecrating them? Or did she hurry out to buy him another pair?

Moral: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way.”                     

Satire by Ron Singer (www.ronsinger.net) has appeared in numerous venues. He has published seven books in varied genres: A Voice for My Grandmother, The Second Kingdom, The Rented Pet, Look to Mountains, Look to Sea, From a Small Fish in the Floating World, Geistmann, and The Parents We Deserve. In 2010 and 2011, Singer traveled to six African countries for Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with Pro-Democracy Leaders (forthcoming).

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On the Left Bank, surrounded by new classmates, white-footed terrier at my knee, I press close to the café table. The cold marble nips my palms. Foamy beverages arrive. I lean down, sip, recoil—too warm, too bitter. I try to catch the eye of the woman across from me, smile. She stirs her creamy drink, clanking spoon against china. She’s Scandinavian, may be Finnish or perhaps Norwegian.

On my left, the girl from Berlin with blue-streaked hair, who blushes when called to conjugate, says in English that her feet hurt.

“I look terrible in tennis shoes,” says the American, on my right. Her glance darts over the dog, skips down my thigh. She frowns at my offending trainers. My legs freeze. If she stares too hard, my shins will shatter. Across from me, the Scandinavian giggles. In halting French, she explains that today she bought new sandals. Under the table, her unpainted toenails and fuzzy legs stand firm as horses.

The American is wearing espadrilles. Espadrilles! The soles are not real rope, I am certain.

“Tu portes des espadrilles,” I say, hoping I have not made a mistake.

“Donna Karan,” she says with a smirk.

Should it have been les espadrilles? D’espadrilles?

“My mother bought them for me.” She rolls her eyes. The Scandinavian chimes in—mothers, fashion crimes, phone calls home.

Just as the American is about to open her mouth, I remind her, my accent veering towards South London, that we are here to learn. We’re supposed to speak French.

Lips pressed together, nostrils pinched, she holds her breath, as if protecting herself from a foul vapor. Silence reigns. The stone of the table, which had seemed grand, elegant, bears pits and scars.

Pastries arrive, and I wish I had ordered one. I sip my tepid drink.

The American spoons whipped cream into her mouth. The dog stirs, stretches, settles back in my lap. I’m sure the American is about to comment that dogs are not allowed in New York restaurants but I am wrong.

“Tu me permets?” You allow me? she asks. She breaks off a bit of biscuit, holds it between fingertips. “Pour le chien?” For the dog?

I nod, and my terrier snaps up the offering. He licks his lips, raises his ears, cocks his head. Around the table we exclaim: How cute, like mine, like a baby, my little brother, he wants more! I laugh, stroke my boy’s silky ears, warm fur. The Berliner slips me a bite of profiterole—sweet fluff. We chat, lick spoons, pay the bill, and rise to leave, the Berliner and Scandinavian still comparing test results.

“Come,” the American says, “I’ll take you to my favorite place in all of Paris.” This time I don’t object to English. I scoop up my little dog and join her on the street.

Katherine Gleason’s most recent book is Anatomy of Steampunk: The Fashion of Victorian Futurism (Race Point Publishing, 2013). Her short stories have appeared in journals such as Cream City Review, Papirmasse, River Styx, and Southeast Review, and online at Camroc Press Review, Mississippi Review online, and Monkeybicyle online.

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The child sleeps numbly, but she still rocks it randomly, its head rolling now and again out of the bowl of her arm and then attentively pulling itself back onto the pillow of its own chest. She brushes away flies from the child’s face, but lets them land on her own matted head covering, on her one bare shoulder, across the tent of her lap where her crossed legs form the stick struts that hold her dress flat across her.

Venders have pushed her down to this end of the market. They do not want her and her cup; her thin, elastic frame and her cup; her sack of bones child and her cup; they do not want her cup competing for the stray coins that might buy a bootlegged DVD or an imported all-the-way-from-China shirt or last night’s left over dough dollops that the baker thought better about just before he was to throw them out. She does best outside of the mixed grain bakery and the cluttered meat scraps places. The people who shop there are almost as close to the street as she, and they will find not much to give, but a little, and a little from enough people will make enough. At the high end of the market, where whole cuts of meat and pants with zippers and shoes with laces are bought, she is simply something to walk around, and the shopkeepers push her down the street, down the street, down the street until she is at this end of the market, one of a dozen women without means and without the fat to do well in prostitution. As the last man to have her said, if a man can feel the floor through her dark spot of a body as he works his anger against her pinned mystery, then it is time to give up the sex trade and go for her bucket of sympathy more directly. None of these women have the means to not be bowed under a man who could afford to pay. A man of just small means could feel the floor or the wall or the table top through any of them, senselessly blunting himself.

Some hold out their hands, kiss the dangling hands of strangers who drop coins, though sometimes what the strangers drop are only buttons, bottle caps, stones. She stays as still as she can, unless she is rocking the child, and has the begging cup that once was a can of something – those earlier wealthy contents now forgotten – situated prominently where the strangers will see it, will have to walk around it when they walk around her, and where the older children cannot reach to steal it without discovering her unsuspected quickness.

When the street is too noisy with wailing and calls of recognition and carts and arguments over the price of second hand barbed wire or fiftieth-hand virginity, she will reach unseen into her clothing and pinch through the thin cloth the baby’s leather behind to get him to wail, to fling an arm over his head and let fly just one scream. She has not done the math, but she thinks this pushes her away from the school of other begging women as she competes for the customers’ alms. The other women beg of the passers by, lean pathetically forward and babble about lost husbands or sons; but the child screams, as though an Almighty equal, at God; and some people listen close enough that they will toss one coin or two into her chiming metal cylindrical bank.

By the end of the day there is a film at the bottom of the nicked cup: eight or ten coins, a bottle cap, two buttons, a plug from something mechanical. She puts the money in a purse that hangs inside her dress between the dry of her breasts, and threads the cup onto a cord that has been unseen about her neck all day. She wakes the child, who seems no different awake than asleep, and begins the two mile walk to her village, where home is a corner of someone else’s one room utility, a family bounty with a rain moat dug around it and thatch that is mixed with tar paper and stolen canvas scraps.

When, brittle bone weary and numb to the ankles, she arrives, she gives the child to his mother and says this one will not do any longer. Tomorrow it will be someone’s girl, a girl child with a little more life left in her, a bit of animation. She gives the mother one of her coins and begins to stagger to the river where she will place her feet in the water and sit peering at them as the coolness begins to work its way slowly from the toes to the arches to the instep, and her heels sing to the mud like she and the river bed were sisters, or brothers, or united like a hungry, anciently snarling pack of jackals.

Ken Poyner has lately been seen in “Analog”, “Café Irreal”, “Cream City Review”, “Black Denim”, and many other wonderful places. His latest book of short fiction, “Constant Animals’, is available from his web, www.kpoyner.com, and from amazon.com.   He is married to Karen Poyner, one of the world’s premier power lifters, and holder of more than a dozen current world power lifting records. They are the animal parents of four rescue cats and assorted self-satisfied fish.

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I was strapped to the feeding chair by my legs, my arms, and my head. The chair was one of six in a room with concrete walls and barred windows. The other five were empty. My eyes still watered from the insertion of the feeding tube through my nostril. I had quit eating their meals, and now they forced blue glop into my stomach twice per day. A medical technician and two guards stood together in my peripheral vision.

I wore white socks, plastic sandals, and the orange jumpsuit given those prisoners at Guantanamo Bay deemed non-compliant.

Several men in camouflage uniforms entered the room and were saluted by the guards and technician. When formalities had been concluded, they stood before my chair, discussing me in a language I did not understand. I could not infer rank from their insignia, but one of them was older, with white hair cut close to his head and a stomach that pressed against his shirt, and the others listened carefully to him. I had not seen him before, and I thought that perhaps he was a visiting leader.

“Please, sir,” I said to him in my language, “let me die.”

He spoke with a young translator I knew and then turned to me and answered in his language with a smile like a thorn. Many of them laughed, but the translator looked grim as he delivered the message.

“He said, ‘Do you call this living?’”

Daniel Wilmoth is a writer and economist living in urban Maryland. He enjoys finding the wild places hidden amid the asphalt and concrete.

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Thinking of Ben Franklin, the young printer smiles walking into work late again. Nodding to himself in bemused assurance, he considers the tenure of Mark Twain; he ponders the constant flux of moveable type during the many editions of Leaves of Grass. The risk had been worth the sleepless night and the foreman’s menacing glower. Workmates sneer at him because they have witnessed such belated and disheveled appearances at work before. Yet the young printer’s smile broadens while comparing last night to a friend back in high school.

His friend Dan had raced from the football field after practice as if he were trying to beat everyone back to the locker room. While teammates showered, Dan had splashed on cologne and quickly jumped into his street clothes. Before others could towel off, he had slammed shut the car door in the parking lot and set the tires squealing and smoking en route to his girlfriend’s house. Teammates and townspeople alike all knew where he was and what he was doing. Try to call Dan about practice tomorrow or the game on Friday, though, and you didn’t exist. Nothing could distract him from his attention to his girlfriend. She was his muse, the meaning in his life.

Home from work as fast as he could drive, the young printer had set straight to writing, scrambling in a panic to put something on paper. He couldn’t be bothered with showering or cooking a proper meal. He had needed to write as much as he could before time ran out and work would haul him back to prison, handcuffed from writing and chained to the printing presses.

Angered by so many days after work he could write for only an hour or two, he had written past sundown and the ten thirty bedtime he knew he should meet if he wanted to focus at work the next morning. If he had taken a break from writing, it was to switch off the bedside alarm to prevent it from distracting him at five thirty.

Possessed, he had written page after page, making corrections and revisions instead of the dreaming about adjustments on printing presses that usually kept him from restful sleep at that time in the morning. He had written past the moments he would think he had awakened minutes before the alarm would sound, past the longings for just another half hour of sleep—his mind had pressed a Snooze button so he might continue writing sentences.

The young printer’s routine would have had him put away the dishes that had dried in the rack overnight, but he hadn’t washed them, had left them piled in the sink. As the time to leave for work had grown closer, he had written in a frenzy to get as much down as he could. He had forfeited a shower for the sake of a few more sentences. In lieu of breakfast, he had written his last paragraph before he had dashed out the door several phrases late for work.

Co-workers turn at the sight and sour smell of him. The young printer has heard rumors that he is a drunk coming in hungover. He sees in the faces of his workmates an indignant leer that wants him fired. Doubtless, they see his dark bush of ratty hair, his puffy, ruddy face and blood-shot eyes as evidence of an unkempt and degenerate life. Surely, he wears his shirts backwards or inside-out, his fly unzipped, and his shoes untied. Yet he walks past them toward his station brimming with self-satisfaction. And if he looks like he feels, then he knows the florescent lights in the printing warehouse are shining down on him, catching the clumped facets in his greasy hair at odd angles, and reflecting an angelic iridescence of unfounded superiority.

B. E. Smith is a freelance writer from Utah. In addition to essay and article publications, his stories and poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Gutter Eloquence, Zygote in My Coffee, The Legendary, Static Movement, the delinquent, and in the current issue of The Binnacle. He lives in Salt Lake City and is writing a memoir.

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RON’S SIDE

Ron knew what was coming. He knew that look, that walk, the way Leila’s legs moved, arms swung, hair swished from side-to-side. There was nowhere to go to escape the anger that hurtled toward him.

“Where do you get off treating me like that? Humiliating me in front of my friends?” she said as she stopped inches from him.

Ron backed against the wall, out of her intimidation zone. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Honest.” He threw his hands up, palm out.

“Don’t give me that. You promised you wouldn’t tell that story to anyone.”

Ron dropped his hands. “It slipped out. I had too much to drink.”

“Excuses. That’s all you every have. And it’s always because you drink. I’m tired of it. All you do is drink and do stupid things and say you’re sorry.” Leila glared at Ron. “No more. We’re through. Get some help. ”

“I don’t need help. You do,” he said. “You do. You’re the one that needs help. You do. Always so concerned about your image. Well you’re no saint. You hear that? No saint. You’re no saint. No Saint Leila.”

Ron pointed his finger at her. “Saint Leila La-de-da.” He leaned back and slid down the wall until he rested on his heels. “Saint Leila La-de-da and Sis-boom-ba.”

Ron leaned to the left, started to fall, caught himself, then threw-up.

“Get some help, Ron.” Leila turned and walked away.

LEILA’S SIDE

Leila walked toward Ron. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, part shuffle, part sway. She stopped in front of him.

“I didn’t appreciate the way you spoke about me in there,” she said.

Leila leaned her head toward him. She smelled the twelve shots of tequila on his breath. Ron staggered backward and came to rest against the wall.

“I didn’t say nothing.” He threw his hands up, palm out.

“You told that story about us on the beach and you made it sound like it was a joke. I thought that night meant something.”

“I had too much to drink. It just came out.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

Ron dropped his hands. “The guys made a bet I couldn’t outdo Brandon on shots. I had too much to drink. It just came out.”

“That’s just an excuse.”

“It’s not an excuse.”

“You need to stop drinking so much. It’s not good for you.” Leila leaned forward and looked into his eyes. “Let me help you back inside.”

“I don’t need help. You need help. You can’t take a joke. Always concerned about you. Who do you think you are? Some kind of saint? Saint Leila? Lei-la-de-da-de-da.”

Ron pointed his finger at her as he slid down the wall until he rested on his heels. “Lei-la-de-da-boom-ba.”

Ron leaned to the left, started to fall, caught himself, then threw-up.

“I’ll get some help, Ron.” Leila turned and walked away.

REALITY’S SIDE

Leila stepped outside. Ron stood in the shadows of the yard at the corner of the house. Leila walked toward him. A moth flew near her face. She swatted it away, caught the ends of her hair between her fingers, and flipped the curls over her shoulder.

Ron watched her approach, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, part shuffle, part sway. Leila stopped in front of him.

She leaned her head forward to see his face in the dark. She smelled the twelve shots of tequila on his breath.

Ron staggered backward and bumped against the wall.

“I didn’t appreciate being humiliated,” she said.

He threw his hands up, palm out. “I didn’t mean it.”

“You said you wouldn’t tell anyone. I thought you said that night was special.”

“I was doing shots with Brandon. It just came out. We had a bet.”

“That’s no excuse. You drank too much. You know how you get when you drink.” Leila reached out to him. “You don’t look good. Let me help.”

Ron pulled away. “I don’t need help. You hear that? You do. You think you’re some kind of saint, Leila. Concerned about your image. Saint La-de-dah”

He slid down the wall and came to rest on his heels. “Boom.” He looked up at Leila for a second. “La-la-de-da-de-da-da-da.”

Ron leaned to the left, started to fall, caught himself, then threw-up.

“I’ll get some help, Ron.” Leila turned and walked away.

Ray Carns lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he divides his time between writing, photography and film making. His work has been published in the Journal of Microliterature, Bourbon Penn, this—a literary webzine, and Rose and Thorn Journal.

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