Issue 1 - Spring 2016

Fiction

For Their Own Good

Ronald Jackson

Alek, Stella, and I lay in our pajamas at the fringe of the worn Persian runner in the upstairs hallway. We craned our necks, saw most of the dining room table downstairs. A coil of kielbasa from dinner sat on a white, gilt-edged plate, and Uncle Larry sliced a piece off and bit into it. The smokiness of that sausage lingered on my tongue from the late evening meal our aunt had served us.

Still chewing, my uncle raised a shot glass to his mouth, then paused and held it out from his nose, reddened by the January cold he’d just tramped through. Aunt Felicia leaned forward, crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray. She had an about-to-scream look on her face.

He finished chewing, ran his free hand over the wispy hairs on top of his head, then knocked back the whiskey. “She won’t last the night.”

My aunt leaned into the table. “Who said? The nurse?”

“No, damn it. The lady doctor.”

“Calm down.” They were talking loud, and we heard everything. “You talked to her?”

“Doctor Segal,” he said. Then he poured another shot. “Let’s take the kids.”

I stretched my neck out further. My mother’s sister turned her head sideways, looking somewhere not in the room. Or maybe at my mother’s framed picture from last fall, which I had placed on the buffet so we could see it during meals.

Her husband leaned forward, waited for his wife to meet his gaze. “Your cousin Tommy was there. He says let them remember her all prettied up. I’m not so sure. It’s their mother, for crying out loud!”

Earlier in the day, Mother took a turn for the worse, and they marched us into her room at Temple University Hospital. She wore a baby blue nightgown of soft cotton, and was doped up, hardly knew we were there. Aunt Felicia had applied face powder, rouge, and lipstick, until she looked like a doll. We stood solemnly around the bed while my aunt ran a brush through her hair with long, slow strokes. She tied her hair back with a blue satin ribbon, ran it just inside her hairline. It looked like a tiara.

At the table downstairs, my aunt turned toward her husband. “Flossie, down the corner store. She says the kids had enough. I agree.”

Our uncle poked the air with his finger, about to make a point. Then he sat back. “It’s your sister.”

Our aunt got up from the table. “I’ll go say my goodbyes. You stay.” As she left the room, she turned and added, “It’s for their own good.”

We’d heard it before. When they thought we were out of earshot, they’d go on about us. We were too young to deal with it. Let them remember her from last year. Mother said make sure we listen, they were the only family we had. When she went back into the hospital after the holidays, our aunt came over every day, cooked, sat in the dining room smoking and drinking. She would come upstairs once or twice an evening to make sure we were cleaned up and headed to bed. Many nights, we fell asleep to the sound of Johnny Carson on the TV downstairs. They slept it off while we lay awake listening to the jokes carry upstairs in the quiet house.

When the front door closed, my little brother looked scared, my little sister buried her face into my side, said in a muffled voice, “I want to go.”

Alek shushed her. “Don’t be a goofus. Do as we’re told.”

“No,” I said. “We go.”

“How?” Alek asked.

***

We let half an hour go by before we made a whispered phone call from my mother’s empty bedroom at the front of the house. We waited at her window a long time until we saw the car pull up. Our uncle lay snoring on the sofa as we crept down the stairs and across the living room to the front door. He stirred, called out, “That you, Sue?” He was dreaming of our mother, had a crush on her, called her sweetheart, or Susie. We held still a moment when he struggled to raise his head. When he flopped back, we slipped out the front door to the waiting car.

The light from the street lamp at the far end of the block didn’t reach our house. Poplar Street was mostly dark, but our living room lamp shined a faint rectangle of light onto our sidewalk, illuminated the soot-blackened snow out at the curb. The three of us stepped through it in our boots, pajamas, and winter coats. From the driver’s seat, Camille leaned over the front bench seats, threw the back door open, whispered, “Get in!” We piled into the old Bel Air, and he pulled his black cabbie hat over his head, told me to shut the door. He kept down, brushed the steering wheel with his hat bill, like that would make us invisible. I said, “Better move. Our aunt’s coming back.”

He steered the car into the swishing street and we made our way through North Philly toward the hospital. He breathed heavy, repeated, “I’m getting in trouble.” Camille was also sweet on Mother. From Venezuela, he’d come to study, but his English never got good, and he took a room over Flossie’s, got on with the cab company. He helped out at Flossie’s when he wasn’t hacking. I accompanied my mother in there almost every day for milk or bread. She carried her gold lamé purse, full with quarters from her coat check job at the Polish Club. When Flossie wasn’t around, he’d shoo us off when she tried to pay. “Get going,” he’d whisper, “no charges today.” She never argued, just closed her purse and left. Every Friday over tea, she prattled on to my aunt and uncle about Camille, how kind he was. Uncle Larry always went out back and dragged on a Lucky when she did that.

We pulled into a parking spot near one of the hospital’s back doors. Camille said we had to wait, his friend would signal when Mother’s room was clear. We sat for a long time. He ran the engine and heater every ten minutes or so, constantly checked the back entrance through the rearview. Alek complained for a while, but was the first to fall asleep.

I asked Camille if he loved my mother. “Tu madre es una mujer hermosa,” he said. “Susan is beautiful. Inside and outside.”

A year ago, she was also silly, which we loved. It meant things were normal. She lived with big energy when she could, and if you didn’t know her, you’d never guess what she was up against. She posed for that picture we kept on the buffet, sitting sideways on the porch rail in the back of our row house, in her navy blue dress with the white Peter Pan collar. She flashed her impish smile, one hand on her hip, the other primping her dark hair.

Last fall, she brought Alek and me to the Polish Club. We manned the coat check window after the first big rush of customers, while she went out on the dance floor. We peeked through the portal window on the lobby door to watch. Uncle Larry always danced the waltzes with her. At Christmas, after she’d started chemo all over gain, she relived every tradition we’d ever done. She never said it, but we knew she was thinking one last time. She hosted Christmas Eve Wigilia, with her sister’s help. They served all the courses—Polish black mushroom soup, a large flounder, fried smelts, sauerkraut flavored with brown sugar, onions, and mushrooms, all the side dishes, and an endless stream of sautéed pierogies onto the table, with every stuffing but meat. Our mother stood at the skillet until they insisted she sit down to the table. After dinner, we put the bubble lights on the tree, laid the train set around it, first time since our father left. We got everything we asked for Christmas morning.

All that played back while we sat waiting. It was getting colder faster, and Camille started running the heater more often, shaking his head each time. Just as Stella fell asleep, he looked in the rearview and shouted, “Vamanos!”

A chubby Latino man in green scrubs held the door open, said, “Get moving!” as his eyes darted up and down the street. Alek and I ran to the stairwell, with Camille right behind, carrying Stella, her head bobbing on his shoulder. The man led us in silence to the third floor. When he was sure the hallway was empty, he motioned us out of the stairwell.

***

“Mother?”

I stepped close, leaned over as she lay sleeping, exhaling with the breath of an infant. My duffel coat fell open and one of the button pegs rested on her nightgown. A plastic tube had been inserted into her nose and I could hear the oxygen flowing in. It reminded me of the harness horses wear.

“Mommy?” said Stella.

Our mother smacked her lips silently, like two damp layers of tissue separating and closing.

Alek touched her shoulder and whispered, “Mother?”

She woke with a start and we all stepped back. She coughed softly, sounded like a child clearing her throat in another room. She grimaced, then opened her eyes. “My babies,” she whispered. We wouldn’t have known what she said if we hadn’t heard it many times before.

For the next hour we leaned over her as she drifted in and out of sleep. We were mostly silent, said our Sweet mother’s and I love you’s from time to time. Stella stroked Mother’s hair and whispered, “Baby mommy.” Twice we left an opening for Camille, and he stepped forward, kissed her cheek softly, said, “Te amo.”

At 2 A.M. there were two soft taps at the door. Camille herded us into the bathroom shower, pulled the curtain shut behind him. We huddled close, felt each other’s breath on our faces, heard someone enter the room, walk around a few minutes, and ask “How you doing, dear?” Then came a rustling of objects, then silence. We went out again and mother’s breast rose and fell more slowly. Once, I thought she stopped drawing air, but her breast heaved slowly again after a moment. When the clock said 4 A.M., Camille said we had to get home before sunup. Alek and I kissed Mother on the forehead, and Camille followed. I helped Stella climb up on the bed and she nestled into her arms. Mother’s eyes opened slowly, Stella said, “Don’t go, Mommy,” and just then our mother’s eyes widened, she took in a quick breath, let it out slowly, and stopped breathing. Everything changed for us, right there. Hope and life and family and future—all that abandoned us with her last breath. Camille snapped out of it, told us to hurry, they’d be in soon. We gave our last kisses, full of tears, ignored Camille’s pleas to leave until he shooed us out with his hands. I had to cup my hand over Stella’s mouth. We left the way we came, before the night nurse made it back in.

***

At the funeral, Camille sat behind us near the center aisle, gave us each a pat on the shoulder every so often. Aunt Felicia, Cousin Tommy, Flossie, and other family and friends slumped in their seats down the pew and behind us, with identical faraway looks. How could this happen? She was so young. Just before the service started, Uncle Larry slid into our end of the pew, away from the grownups. He leaned toward us, we could smell the whiskey on his breath.

“You get to see her?” he asked me, as softly as his gravelly voice allowed. I must have looked guilty, he read my silence as yes, and nodded. Then he reached across me, gave Alek a pat on the hand, and held Stella’s hand for a moment. “Wish I could have been there.”

“Did you tell?” I asked.

“Hell no. You don’t either.” He looked at the casket standing a few feet away, then at Aunt Felicia and the other grownups far down the pew. He smiled through watery eyes. “It’s for their own good.”

Ronald Jackson writes stories, poems, and non-fiction from his home in Durham, NC. His work has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, Firewords Quarterly, Kentucky Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Prime Number Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and other venues. Recognitions include honorable mention in the Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition in 2012, third prize in Prime Number Magazine’s 2014 flash fiction competition, and honorable mention in the 2014 New Millennium Writings short-short fiction competition.

Missed Connections in the Prophet of Jupiter Cafe

C.A. Cole

The espresso machine is hissing, a line of customers pressing into the tight space, before Doke, tying his apron, bursts through the kitchen to take his place behind the veined granite counter. Even though the morning line is long, Lorean wants the barista with “Doke” on his apron, blond ponytail straight as horsehair, to wait on her, because he slips her sly glances that ignite her nerve endings and pumps her extra shots for free, tracing foam on top of her drink in arabesques of paisley clouds. Rob, too, waits in line for his latte, not sure what he appreciates more, the ass of the woman ahead of him or that the barista is consistently late and takes his sweet time shooting steam into the heavy ceramic mugs.

Doke scribbles indecipherable orders on napkin scraps and eyes the erect older gent as the line pushes the woman with the beautiful hair and smell of orchid blossoms towards the counter, towards him as if she is his true destiny. She likes his cloudy smile, like he’s thinking of something to whisper to wake her, because her boyfriend doesn’t talk in the mornings, not really, just groans he needs his cup of joe to get his brain cells greased. Rob measures the woman, imagining her on tiptoe, his dick swaying gently, slowly, like the sun’s steady rise, between her meadowy thighs; she’d twenty years his junior but has reddish hair like a dissipating sunrise.

If only Doke’s damn girlfriend wouldn’t hog the bathroom every morning after sex, he would be able to leave on time, but as it is, every morning she escapes from the tangled sheets like handcuffs around her ankles, and bolts the bathroom door, expecting him, he supposes, to brew coffee in his naked, sticky state. Funny, but Lorean never sees the man she lives with drink anything in the morning, unless it’s a swig of beer pooling in the bottom of a bottle, flat, stale from the night before. The line edges forward, the large male behind him bumping Rob into the redhead so he’s afraid she can feel his hardness against her butt; there isn’t much he can do as people crowd inside to escape the morning drizzle, pressing, pressing, pushing, and even at forty-two, he can’t control his member.

Doke’s hands shake as he ejects the shots for the pretty woman whose hair reminds him of ripe peach fuzz, a texture and color he’d love to have whisk down his bare chest. Something hard nudges her rump and she slides forward a step, wishes she were brave enough to leave her drunken boyfriend because even the sex isn’t much good these days, hardly lasting long enough for her to settle her booty in the pretend silky sheets. With a jolt, an unexpected chill sweeps across Rob, as the woman steps forward, creating a gap, and takes her cup from the counter guy, her hands trembling when he whispers to her, his voice a breeze meant only for her ear, her hair puffing as if he’s blown the words her way.

Doke’s sure this woman, her cheeks the ripe blush of an apricot, would luxuriate in bed with him, her hands on his body and his in her hair, not barricade herself away from his caresses; he wishes he could brew magical words the way he did espresso so that they would break through her self-contained expression, some phrase that would make her leap the counter and kiss him, her lips warmed with her first morning foam. The thing is, Lorean knows she’ll have to give up the coffees, even if they are the best part of her day, the closeness, the barista’s long fingers touching hers when he passes her the ritual cup; she knows she’s pregnant, knows she can’t expect better than the baby’s drunken father. Rob wants to nibble the reddish fuzz on her swan’s neck; when she turns, her lips twisted in a smile that could mean she’s not angry, that she never felt his body’s betrayal, it dawns on him she has no inkling of the sway she holds over men; he tenses, sensing she might cry.

C.A. Cole is currently looking for a job in Colorado and taking online courses instead of working on her writing. She volunteers with a group of local Hispanic students helping them apply to college and for scholarships. Upcoming work includes Gargoyle and Dogwood Journal. Work has recently been included in Blood and Thunder and Smokelong Quarterlyand other places online.

Colonial State of Mind

Part 2 The Departure

Madiha Khan

I took a deep breath when I arrived in Windsor and it made my lung hurt because my lungs were not used to such clean untouched unspoken unwounded air. And look here please directly at the covers of my skin: I am not white. I start off all my stories with this statement because this is the most defining aspect of me it is why I cry to allah when my mind mumbles and rumbles for dirty things it is why I still can’t eat pork without my stomach revolting and punishing me with immaculate peristalsis it is why I still get sad when I think about the sun shining off ma’s hennaed hair it is why I can’t hold back my tongue when they laugh and hiss and scream and tell me that I am wrong because listen here fuckers: I am not white and don’t you dare think I am ashamed of that.

They say that the concept of race never existed until the whiteman ventured out of whiteman’s land (he had gotten tired of looting and uprooting his own people) and when he saw the beautifully rooted people that inhabited this new clean world he needed a reason to massacre them and burn their pureness down. So he invented reds and yellows and blacks and browns and greens and blues and he mixed together all the primary colours of the rainbow so that he could label these others as others and because they were others and because these others were not his colour he didn’t feel quite as bad when he spread blankets of disease and death and shit over their once pure lands and is it any wonder that there is not purity left in the world?

The whiteman didn’t feel bad about ripping apart an entire people because the whiteman lacked the fundamental concept that every other people in the world seemed to have taken as an innate characteristic of human nature: broad-minded and well-rounded morality. The key to this catastrophe was that the whiteman was under the impression that his very narrow self-limiting concept of morality was somehow more truthly than the other moralities that existed in opposition. With this self-limiting and graciously self-defined concept of morality you can bomb entire cities and still get a good night’s rest because you are safe in the knowledge that your white jesus is better than my brown mohammad.

Even worse: the whiteman’s brand of designer-drug morality dispersed and metastasized over the oceans of the world like an aggressive carcinoma of destruction until even dark babies still in the womb sighed because of the battles they would face when they encountered the hideous vibrations that were sinisterly spread by this massive lack of awareness.

Look: I am not bitter but sometimes I can’t help feeling that maybe in the corner of the back of mind that maybe if the whiteman had just stayed and fucked up the land that he was allotted-with his gunpowder and greed, and grotesque lack of guilt-than maybe just maybe the world wouldn’t have been fucked up to such a massive degree.

I was once ischemic with thoughts that made me feel that the world was watching every blink and twitch that ran through me. In the hospital that brought me to my knees there was a man that lay in bed and spoke in little strings of words and he would stare off into space all day because his brain had burst open and made him unable to have full ownership rights of the left side of his body and look here: this man was white but I still felt like crying for him because even his whiteness hadn’t protected him from the disasters brewing within his own body. And even when I was sad I looked into his eyes as I tried to realign the spasm-rippling muscles and waves in his body and I tried to tell him that I knew that I got it that I understood but of course I didn’t because thank allah none of the vessels in my brain have burst open yet and I can’t stop thinking about it happening and that’s why I can’t fall asleep these days.

But that was three months ago and this is part two and I am still a terrorist for terrorizing my innards with terrible thoughts of the terrors that I can commit to myself in the name of assimilation.

That was back when I had still had deluded the neurons in my mind into thinking that we could for once undertake a task and finish it without disenchanted awareness and in the end I could not do it. I could not realign my personality and morality to their rules and policies and ancient archaic systematically inherently flawed OBJECTIVES and now I am back in the southeastest part of Canada which is just another metaphor for my state of spirits but also it is the present location of my current reality.

They wanted me to memorize their holey unwhole point of view of a narrow vision of a generally skewed demographic but I could not get mos def’s scripture out of my head. Yasiin’s gospel had been wired too deeply in my frontal cortex and in the end I spit in their face and took the train back home and the farther I got away from the whitest university in all of Canada the freer my thoughts felt (they were still restricted because many of the same functional variables remained: parents, religion, culture, personality, genetic predispositions, and overall self-inflicted brutality) but at least the most sinister and most foreign...the most whitest shall we say and the most evilest aspect had been cauterized. And listen my friends: it was the greatest failure of my life up to present reality dateness (this is the English translation of an urdu feeling) but I can breathe more easily now and I no longer feel like an oil-slicked imposter in my own scarred skin. I can look myself in the eyes for up three minutes in the bathroom mirror now and I don’t even need to be stoned to make it through the day.

I have finally figured out that all their promises of economic security and languid capitalistic propriety are not enough to make me forget myself and maybe maybe maybe there is another brown soul/body with a furrowed brow and painted skin and a soggy drug drenched mind and to them I say: listen to me brothers/sisters because their killing fields are still stenched and drenched with blood and their hands are still are dripping with fake reparations and sometimes you can’t help but feel that something is horribly incorrigibly wrong and just because they’re blind to their own blindness does not make your vision any less clear and don’t you ever let any wrinkled economically secure and academically enriched reality rejecting whiteman) tell you otherwise.

Am I making you uncomfortable? Please take three minutes to pinpoint the root of this discord: there may be neuronal pathways in your brain that you have been ignoring for too long.

I won’t apologize for this anger. My departure was steeped deep with anger and rage was present in the whole train ride back and I wrote three different stories while passing through perth-cobourg-toronto-smithfalls-london-chatham and ripped them all at the station in Windsor while I waited for my father to pick me up.

But those stories don’t matter because they were all a distraction and they did not have the undercurrent of that truthness that make words covalently organically and undeniably bond together into meaning and reason and sometimes truthfilled words can become charged without intent and commit treason and reveal the writer’s hidden sentimentations and this is why I write. I write for that electric burst of clarity shorter that the speed of light that illuminates all my white and grey matter (but mostly the brown) when I finish transcribing the oscillating reverberating renditions stuck in my head.

But their very first mistake was that they tried to put a price on my soul and they tried to tell me that keeping my head externally fixated downwards at all times was better for the overall structure of my wellbeing and even though my physical outside could have maybe somehow survived their flowering towering labyrinth of lies…my soul will never be for sale, fuckers.

But I am not a fool: I know that to survive in the present state of matters I have to play it from their side and show them my teeth in gritting spitting smiles and clap for their achievements with a gun to my back but I would rather accomplish this through calculated resistance than conscious submissiveness. I would rather wield my stethoscope with independence and burn through their social hurdles with eyes wide open mind clear and present heart-beat irregular but decadent than accept a stethoscope riddled with unspoken hypocrisy and attached to the chain of the bodies and souls below me that I had to crush in order to survive in “their way” (that-white-oldmoneyhoney-up–at-the-top-fuck-the-suckers-at-the-bottom way). That slow and long body/soul crushing climb to the top of a rotten mountain of sweltering bloodfilled (khooni) success is their tactic rooted in the vile laws they entrenched on a planet that we all helped decimate/eliminate/violate and I will consciously not take part in this ideology (though I may still have to commit a few more horrific acts of capitalistic violence I console myself with the promise that I will be aware of their horrificness and I will be cognisant of my crimes and this shall absolve my soul of at least three minutes worth of guilt from my bathroom mirror).

There are some laws of the universe that can’t be eroded but the laws of how people collide are fluid and always-changing and there was a girl I once knew at the place I departed from that had masala under her fingernails and thai curry curling in her curls and she told me about the incans and the mayans and the spaniards and the winding sliding gliding massacres of the southernmost americas throughout the centuries and I told her about all the disappeared/broken/unwoken women during the india-pakistan partition and we bonded/fucked/dissolved/finally broke apart in a shatter of dismal unbalanced biomolecules over our shared need for acknowledging the miseries of the past while being immersed in the weight of the future (as we suffocated in the present). At the time I thought it was all very poetic in the most narcissistic of terms and now I feel like laugh/crying when I think about the ease with which biomolecules can annihilate the bonds they create. And somewhere back in that white pinnacle of pornographically ignorant academic elitism there is a girl with masala laced eyelashes and rows of books by bell hooks and I hope the chemicals in her brain are treating her all right.

***

Back to the present: now some days I wake up feeling wounded with all the words I could have unfurled in the moments where their weight would have lifted me off the ground and some days I can’t breathe from the feeling of frightening rightness reverberating through the rivers and routes of the right side of my mind here in the most southernly stubborn summerland of southeasterly canada.

And inshallah to me my brothers in the east and mashalla to my sisters in the west because ma says all allah does is necessary for soul. And shhh please: sometimes I can almost trick myself into believing that (if only for 3 minutes).

Madiha Khan is a university student in Windsor, Canada. She loves bikes, books, and bell hooks. Her work has previously appeared in Literary Orphans, BlazeVox, Bombay Literary Magazine, and Corium Magazine.

Give Me More

Ron Burch

Especially when you're in something, when you throw out your girlfriend for fucking the neighbor stud who lives in his loud studio apartment below you in this heavy two-story cement box with black iron stairs and nothing but parking lot and wire fence with security lights.

At night she comes to you, she says she slipped out his window below because the door lock would wake him and she's outside your second floor windows, whispering to be let in again, and you stand up in your bed, and look out your window and there she is, she waves at you and you can barely see her in the dark, there's one weak streetlamp out there and part of a ficus tree and a nearby dying bush that obstruct your view and you've been drinking because you didn't want to throw her out but you didn't know what to do and since you've been drinking all you want to do is go back to bed and when you wake up in the morning, you wonder if it was real or not.

The next night she comes back again. She calls your name and you climb out of bed. This time you're more sober, not by much but more than last night. She asks you if she can come in. You say, what the fuck you doing here? I wanted to see you, she replies. Why don't you go back to your boyfriend, you reply, you got everything out of here. No, she replies, I want to see you.

She throws something up at the window, it's small and circular and you put out your hand to catch it but it's dark and you think you feel it glance off your fingers but then it falls below you in the high grass that your 45 year old landlord rarely mows. She says something else but she says she has to leave and you don't know what to say.

In the morning you find a box of her papers in your hall closet and you call her cell number but it says that number has been changed to a new number but they don't offer to tell you what it is, so you think you'll put the box of papers to the side for the next time you see her.

That night she comes to your bedroom window. You are awake and ready. As you open the window, she says, Let me come in. You think about it. You've been lonely. You've been drinking too much and not remembering very much. You catch a glimpse of her face, a flash in the streetlight, and it's the face you still love but you can't forgive, you just cannot make yourself forgive. I love you, she says, we can make it work. Let me in, she says. Remember when we went to those mountains and we went for a hike, just around the small hill we said and we got totally lost and I think you got that huge tick stuck in your leg and we stumbled into the pond but got back safely.

Yeah, you remember them, you say.

Or that time we got really stoned and made out during the entire classical music thing at the park, you remember that. I guess, you reply, but you two had been really stoned and wasn't there a fight? You remember, god, she says as if she didn't hear you, do you remember when you got that huge check and we spent the entire weekend in bed, ordering food from everybody.

You remember that time. Those were the times.

She throws something up at you and this time in lands in the window. It's one of the bracelets that you had given to her. Not an expensive one, bought at a street market and merely pieces of cloth wound together, frayed and chewed a bit from age or something. Oops, I dropped something, she says. You pick it up and you're tempted. There's been past indiscretions, you know about them, but they were tiny: a kiss here, a hug there. But this one got you.

She asks again if she can come upstairs, if she could gather you in her arms, she's missed you, she says, she just didn't realize, and you think, yeah, maybe, maybe it all wasn't that bad, and you reach back into your room, toward the bedside table and throw something out to her. It sails in an arc and lands on the cement. She picks up your keys and as she comes in, opening your heavily-wrought iron gate door, you remember what a shitty memory you've always had, but then the metal door swings close behind her with its usual loud, loud bang.

Ron Burch's work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Cheap Pop, Eleven Eleven, PANK, and many other journals. His novel, Bliss Inc., was published by BlazeVOX Books. He lives in Los Angeles. www.ronburch.com

Contributors

Ron Burch's work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Cheap Pop, Eleven Eleven, PANK, and many other journals. His novel, Bliss Inc., was published by BlazeVOX Books. He lives in Los Angeles. www.ronburch.com

Madiha Khan is a university student in Windsor, Canada. She loves bikes, books, and bell hooks. Her work has previously appeared in Literary Orphans, BlazeVox, Bombay Literary Magazine, and Corium Magazine.