I don’t see why I had to be the one.

The whole town’s in our store for the Big Sale and I’m stacking cans of beans. I don’t see him until he’s up close, the white suit, the grin and cow lick. He speaks in the Hound Dog voice, with that accent. Just from the air around him, I know. The real thing.

“Can you give me ‘bout five of them cans, Jim? Real good price you got on ‘em,” he grins and I stare, all shook up.

“I know, Jim, I know. I’m in the grave. But in the evenings I miss burgers and fries and at night the girls and a good tune. So I go for a walk now and then, for a sizzle with a hot tamale. When you’re the King, you get perks.” The store rings with that voice, but they’re all deaf, filling carts with canned pineapple and applesauce. “The beans, please, Jim?” he says.

No one will believe for a minute, and I don’t want to be the kook who’ll next see green Martians. I put TV dinners in the freezer, help pack; I’m fine with that. But I saw him, handed him five cans. Leaving the store he drops something, and I think good luck charm, but a kid kicks it and it rolls and is gone. I could look in the garage for my old Gibson and amp but what’s the use? I’ll just go back to the beans.

Andrew Stancek entertains Muses in southwestern Ontario.  His work has appeared in Tin House online, Every Day Fiction, fwriction, Vestal Press, Pure Slush, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Camroc Press Review, among others.  He’s been a winner in the Flash Fiction Chronicles and Gemini Fiction Magazine contests and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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We said, “Let’s.” And we did. Then the beats slowed down, the clubs dulled. Half of us flew home with large bruises. The police arrested four others. The rest toured the lesser known side of the island, where we visited a nudist zoo. A few of us stayed there because it had “more beer and more titties.” The bus dropped the rest of us off at a beach reserved for the locals. They spit on us whenever the authorities weren’t looking and said, “Tourists, we hate you.” The most depressed member in the group wanted to stay, so we left him there. We swam away from the shore toward another island, much smaller than the one we had partied on. One of us drowned. The rest of us made it to the smaller island—which we named the same name as the previous island—and celebrated our survival.

Jason Gordy Walker teaches composition at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His short-short stories have appeared online in Monkeybicycle, Oblong Magazine, Nap, The Café Irreal, and others. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Measure, Think Journal, The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere.

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If he’d crossed at his usual place, he’d have avoided her, but he didn’t, so he has to ignore her and keep walking.  Talking will be fatal.  Once she gets going, she’ll never stop.  As it is, she starts by asking him if he’s interested in building a peaceful world, then doesn’t wait for his answer before she takes a pamphlet out of her shopping-bag and offers it to him, as if what it says is so obviously important he’s bound to want to read it.  This isn’t his problem, though.  What bothers him as he does his best to look away, pretend he’s checking his email, texting more chit-chat into the Great Elsewhere, is that her eyes tell him she’s seen God.

The knowledge makes him feel feeble, thin, like someone going down with  a virus.  He can’t remember how many years ago it was he finally voted against faith, but having done it, he knows he won’t change his mind.  Not ever.  So going belly-up because he’s run into some holy josephine touting for converts will shame him if he lets it happen.  Given half a chance, she’ll chisel away at him right there on the street till he surrenders the life he’s built for himself hook line and sinker just to get out of her clutches and he isn’t about to let her get away with that.  He knows where he stands.  He’s learned it the hard way, doesn’t need a heaven to navigate towards.

God, we say, knowledge, almost meaning, but not quite.  No words for what’s lost.

Ken Head lives in Cambridge, England where, until retirement, he taught Philosophy and English Literature.  His work has appeared widely both online and in print, most recently in Prospero’s Bowl, a collection of his poetry published in 2013 by Oversteps Books (www.overstepsbooks.com).  

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Betty: Our next person with an issue is ready and wants to be known as Anonymous. What’s your issue, Anonymous?

Anonymous: She’s got an attitude and I’ve finally had enough. I’m so annoyed I won’t even speak her name and I told her so and she came right back with a snide remark.

Betty: What did she say that was snide?

A: She said, well. I wouldn’t want my clean name in your dirty mouth.

B: You have to admit that was a good one.

A: A couple of days earlier I asked her—As long as you’re up will you please bring me a glass of water? Are your legs broken? Get up and get it yourself, she said.

B: Do you think she had a point?

A: How is this remark justified? She claims that I’m the one with the attitude and I’ve got to learn a lesson or life is going to be difficult. This is difficult. Living with her comebacks and putdowns is difficult.

Last night I asked her—What are we having for dinner? Stay where you are—I’ll bring you a menu as soon as I finish printing it up, she says.

Why couldn’t she just answer a simple question?

B: Have you thought of a trial separation? Maybe you two need to be apart for a bit to appreciate each other.

A: How does a thirteen year old boy go about getting a trial separation from his mother?

Paul Beckman’s stories are widely published in print and online in the following magazines amongst others: Connecticut Review, Raleigh Review, Litro, Playboy, Pank, Blue Fifth Review, Flash Frontier, Metazen, Boston Literary Magazine, Thrice Fiction and Literary Orphans. His work has been included in a number of anthologies and published in a dozen countries. Paul earned his MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. His latest collection of flash stories, “Peek”, published by Big Table Publishing weighed in at 65 stories and 120 pages. His website is www.paulbeckmanstories.com

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Dirty and battered, a white van bumps and grinds along the track.  Its driver, probably on his way home from a few beers in the village and a trip to the local builder’s yard, veers first one way then the other to avoid the deepest ruts.  At this hour on a sweltering afternoon, when even the birds and lizards are taking it easy, the only other movement is a tepid breeze, the only other sound, cicadas shrieking.

Amid so much space, what’s near seems distant, at a remove.  Across the plain, every field is sun-scorched.  Almond, carob, olive, blackened trunks adrift thigh-deep in brittle grass and thistle, blur into one another.  Ramshackle farmhouses, some home to families whose dogs aren’t there to welcome strangers, others crumbling ruins abandoned when their wells ran dry and left for wide-eyed owls to colonize or feral cats, seem indistinct, no more than out-of-focus smudges shimmering in the haze.  Almost a mirage.

Yet, barely an hour’s drive away, if you have fuel to spare, along the unfinished motorway, past the air terminal, two or three monster construction sites abandoned by smart developers and the skeletons of unfinished apartment buildings nobody’s going to buy, the city persists, a tourist’s dream of gambling, international hookers, air-con bars and sun-tanned bodies baking under parasols, a higgledy-piggledy urban sprawl where businesses will stay to make a buck so long as the music plays and visitors with nothing else to do lie about watching vapour trails dissolve slowly into light. An oasis in the desert, you might think.

But here, in this eviscerated place, where parching heat and drought mock honest labour, as they’ve done since carthorse lives trudged slow behind a plough and silent, stubborn men climbed hillsides every day to work their rock-hard terraces, the penny still hasn’t dropped, so tankers deliver precious drinking water, trucks come and go with bits of kit for getting things in shape and on energetic days the noise of power tools rips peace and quiet to shreds.  And why not? the stubborn locals ask, why ever not?

In a cloud of dust, the van turns between sections of cinder-block wall and stops on the overgrown driveway of a house with its windows boarded up.  Dogs yap way off.  From the back of the van, the driver, a fat man with a beard, unloads coils of hosepipe, a pump, a portable generator, a couple of sizable cardboard boxes.  Piece by piece, he lugs it all inside the house  past a woman watching, stone-faced, in the doorway.

Spiky cactus, yellow flowers, brilliant, regardless.

Ken Head lives in Cambridge, England where, until retirement, he taught Philosophy and English Literature.  His work has appeared widely both online and in print, most recently in Prospero’s Bowl, a collection of his poetry published in 2013 by Oversteps Books (www.overstepsbooks.com).  

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