Shades

Ann Birch

Jeff wondered whether he’d been smart in accepting his father’s invitation for a weekend at Long Beach Island. His father was not his dad. Dad was dead, and Mom, too. His father and he had connected through a database, and Jeff had always been curious.

 “Our little Einstein,” his parents had sometimes called him. Never particularly questioning, the couple who had adopted him as a baby were always firmly on his side whenever he probed. The Sunday school teacher had been angry when he pressed her to explain exactly how the Holy Trinity worked, but Mom and Dad told him not to worry about anything she said. Learning to diagram sentences in middle school, Jeff had maintained that “man” must be the subject of the sentence “The dog bit the man,” because the man was hurt, and so the sentence was about the him.  “I see your point,” Mom had said, when he explained it to her.

Occasionally Dad had employed an old bromide like, “Curiosity killed the cat” or “Let sleeping dogs lie,” but mostly his parents encouraged Jeff’s curiosity. Still, maybe if Dad knew about this meeting with his biological father, he might say, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

His father showed keen interest in him when they first talked by phone. He was all questions. What did Jeff think about this, do about that? Where did he stand on artificial intelligence and on the upcoming election? Jeff looked forward to spending time with someone whose approach to life might be as eager as his own. Perhaps, though he had loved Mom and Dad, he had been holding his breath all along until he would find a family where he fit more naturally.

He hadn’t expected the little boy who met him at the gate of the beach house, but it appeared that Jeff was not his father’s only son. The child, who must have been about six or seven years old, was playing alone in the sandy yard when Jeff drove up and parked. He might, he marveled, be seeing the image of himself at the same age.

As Jeff introduced himself, their father, who must have heard his arrival from inside the house, bounded down the porch steps and offered a hearty handshake. “How long did it take you to get here?” he asked. Then he saw the Volvo and said, “Nice car! How many miles to the gallon?”  It surprised Jeff that, unlike either of his sons, this man had red hair and freckles.  As if just remembering the child in that moment, their father tousled his straight brown hair and explained, “I have him for the month.”

“I’m Ernest,” the boy said, and it took Jeff a beat to realize that was the boy’s name.

“Ernest has some other half-brothers on his mother’s side, don’t you, kiddo?  What is it?  Two?  Three?” and turning to Jeff he said, “You like seafood?  I hope so.  I’m making stuffed clams. They’re my specialty.”  Jeff had arrived in the middle of the process.  He and Ernest watched as their father mixed the ground clams into the cracker meal.

“Jeff here is working on his doctorate,” their father said, as if certain this fact would be the one a second grader might find most interesting. “He’s a physicist, Ernie, and that means he’s interested in motion and forces and particles.  You know what particles are?”  Their father was mixing everything manually and going on about protons and neutrons and electrons. Jeff and Ernest looked at each other.

“You ought to ask him about black holes,” their father urged. “They’ll devour the whole universe sooner or later.  Just gulp down those galaxies till finally…,” at this point he held a ball of the clam mixture in both hands and then squeezed it through his fingers as if to illustrate.

After he had stuffed the clam shells, he began peeling potatoes.  “Are the eyes of the potatoes poisonous?” he asked Jeff.  Jeff said he wasn’t’ sure but that it might be safer not to eat them.  “Well, I’ve heard if you plant the eye of a potato, a new one will grow.”

Jeff thought maybe what he and his father shared should be called “the why chromosome.”  He offered to help with preparing the meal, but their father shook his head.  “In a minute I’ll pop this stuff in the oven and we can sit down and get to know each other better.”

“That’ll be great,” Jeff said. “But I’ve been sitting in the car so long, it would sure feel good to walk on the beach and stretch.” Ernest caught his eye. “Want to take a walk with me?” The child nodded hard.

“Be back in forty-five minutes!” their father commanded. As they left, he pointed to a box of mixed seashells. “That’s Ernest’s collection,” he said.  “Ernest, maybe your brother here can help you identify your shells while he’s around and get them organized.”

Theirs was a quiet walk, but they were comfortable. On the beach, Jeff thought the boy seemed to bloom, like the paper flowers they used to buy that were hidden inside shells. The shells were wrapped shut with a strip of paper, but after they sat in a tall glass of water for a while, the paper dissolved, the shell opened and a red paper flower floated up into the water on a thin string.

“Do the black holes scare you?” Ernest asked, and Jeff told him they were scary only if you thought about them in a way that made them seem real.

“They’re probably just something we’ve made up to explain something we don’t fully understand,” Jeff said. 

As they walked, Jeff remembered how his parents used to stroll during their seaside vacations, smiling, along different stretches of sand beside the same ocean.  “Morning’s at seven,” Dad would sometimes quote in contentment.  “The hillside’s dew pearled, God’s in His heaven, All’s right with the world.”

Ernest scampered ahead to pick up a shell.  He held it up to the sunlight. It had a blue tinge. He turned and held it first to the sky and then to the ocean. “Blue’s best,” Jeff heard the boy whisper, before slipping the shell into his pocket. Jeff nodded and knew the shell would join the jumble in the box, never to be classified, and that was all right. Actually, it was best.

 

Ann Birch lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her recent stories have appeared in The Ocotillo Review, Funicular, Change Seven, Half and One, and Grim & Gilded.

 

Art from the Heart

Abbie Doll

Shauna grew up poor, and she knew it.

But love didn’t cost a thing, so there was always an abundance of that, and she knew that, too.

It was just her and her Mama, who was so easy to love it might as well have been a sin. Shauna didn’t see her enough, but that was okay because it taught her to appreciate the time that they did share that much more. Shauna learned young. And if there’s one thing she knew for sure, it was how hard her Mama worked to keep their little family afloat.

They were so poor that poorness itself became a possession—an odd way to look at it, sure, but it was undeniably hers, after all, and besides, poorness got a bad rap; Shauna’s lack of personal property ended up enhancing her innate sense of creativity. Turns out, when it comes to imagination fuel, need can’t be beat. But Shauna didn’t need a ton of toys—no assorted-pile-of-plastic mountain, no whiny doll that conditioned these fresh-out-of-diapers schoolgirls into caretakers themselves. Her mind was better than all that. And if you asked Shauna, she, herself, made an excellent show-and-tell contender; her body made it tangible. She was poverty on display—a living, embodied portrait of it.

The teachers, while less convinced, still admired her ingenuity. 

Shauna and her Mama slept in the same square room in their little studio apartment. Sure, it was all they could afford, but it was enough; Shauna liked living in a pocketsize place, liked the closeness of the walls, the intimacy of the space. It resembled a womb: plenty of room for growth.

But the best part of their meager life, by far, was their dainty décor. They couldn’t afford any furniture that wasn’t secondhand, no museum-quality artwork, hardly anything that wasn’t based in necessity…but there was one thing. One papery, precious thing.

Payday was grocery day, a joyous time, where Shauna got to sample the benevolence of Father Christmas. Twice a month, Shauna’s Mama let her pick a shiny pack of paper plates off the shelf. It was their one indulgence. Now, while their frugality never ceased (the plates were reused and milked for longevity), Shauna was permitted to keep one fresh and pristine. For the wall. Those plates got the gift of preservation, the gift of being memorialized as art on an otherwise barren, off-white wall.

Shauna secured them sensibly, using an inch-long piece of tape wrapped in a loop—just enough adhesive to stick each plate in place. They budgeted everything, but her Mama always allowed her this one luxury. And after years of scraping by, their wall was filling up—faux fancy platters with shiny splashes of gold, vibrant Van Gogh recreations, mesmerizing mandala galaxies, all sorts of intricate designs that made Shauna’s heart soar. Each one was a pictorial burst of imagination that inspired memories of meager meals, yes, but also treasured time shared.

Holidays, of course, had the best in-store availability: all the haunted houses, grinning jack-o-lantern’s, coal-smile snowmen, decked-out trees with present piles beneath. Each depicted a snippet of merriment that otherwise would’ve been out of reach, but through their festive depictions, Shauna got the gist.

The plate wall served as her place of worship, a trusted confidant, full-time guardian, an ongoing geometry lesson, and a security blanket all cocooned into one. They didn’t own a TV, so she’d gaze at the plates for entertainment, often drawing up elaborate backstories until each evolved into a full-fledged character and friend. With every new addition, she’d conduct this whole choreographed ceremony, welcoming the newcomer to her wall of fame with a dance and a smile.

The plates were her true gurus. They themselves were indisputable proof that anything possessed the capacity to be art—even the most mundane commodities. The plates taught Shauna that art didn’t need to lug all these limitations around; there were always fewer boundaries than the world led you to believe. Someone had designed these images that now wallpapered their home. Any object married to meaning, to memory, was undoubtedly art.

Part of her considered bringing a plate or two to show-and-tell, but she couldn’t bring herself to disturb the collection. Considering they were also camera-less, she couldn’t snap a pic of it either. Maybe it was better that way…sharing risked misunderstanding.

The plate wall was a provider in its own right. No birthday parties, but she had a plate for each year bursting with balloons. Direct proof of their celebratory love. Fresh flowers, too, were out of the question, but not flower-rimmed plates—livening up the room with bright, exotic blooms that never wilted.

Sometimes her Mama even let her design her own. Shauna had one pack of crayons, all down to stubs, but what a privilege to make her own! To contribute. To be up there right alongside those legitimate designs was the greatest gift she could’ve gotten.

Their impoverished life taught Shauna to be meticulous, thoughtful, and never wasteful. She knew how to make the most out of every little thing and every little moment, and she kept that paper plate wall up long after her Mama was gone. It grew into a memorial for their relationship, one she couldn’t bear to tear down, even with the privilege of disposable income.

The plates never fell, never loosened. It was as if they were adhered to the wall with love itself, and the tape, never necessary.

Shauna became a first-rate artist in her own right, using the very same paper plates as her canvas. She made it her life’s work to prove their plainness was a mere façade—to share that fierce love embedded in their pulpy hearts.

Dead center of that wall-to-wall display was a single polaroid—faded now, but the one picture they’d taken together when she still toddled, taped to a glittery, heart-shaped plate, both of them beaming raw like hardships were never a thing, like they never needed anything more than the love they’d made.

 

Abbie Doll is a writer residing in Columbus, OH, with an MFA from Lindenwood University and is a Fiction Editor at Identity Theory. Her work has been featured in Door Is a Jar Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, and Pinch Journal Online, among others. Connect on socials @AbbieDollWrites.

 

Ragweed Farm

Mary Lucille Hays

That first summer Ruth and David didn’t mow at all. They had enough work to do inside to make the house livable for the kids. Ya was five, and Duncan was just a toddler, and anyway, when Ruth went out to start the mower, the pull cord broke. David said he could fix it, but it would be a bitch. They decided to just let the yard go this year. How bad could it get?

Turns out it could get pretty bad. The ragweed grew up all over the back yard about fifteen feet high—tall, thick stalks that choked out all the grass and then got woody at the end of the summer. Ruth got a machete and chopped a path out to the machine shed. In the front, it was thistles and goat’s beard and some sunflowers. That patch only got about waist high, and was kind of pretty, so she let it stand.

That first summer Ruth planted a vegetable bed to the west of the house, where it was sunny from late morning and then all afternoon. Just the basics. Tomatoes and peppers, potatoes, onions, and turnips. She had never even had turnips before but decided to plant them because it seemed so homestead-y, and that first summer turnips grew in abundance. Ruth and David tried them steamed, but that was kind of dull, so they sliced them thin and sautéed them. That was okay, but the best way was mashed, like potatoes, with butter and salt and pepper. She planted spinach, too, but it didn't do well at all. It was stunted and the bugs chewed the leaves down to lace. She pulled some onions when the stalks were green and crisp. She sliced them, green parts and all, for salads and to stir-fry. But one day the leaves began to wither and brown until they fell over onto the ground. Then she pulled them up, crumbs of earth clinging to the roots and braided them into long braids and hung them in the kitchen stairway to cure.

Those first years, two kinds of spiders lived on the farm. In the house were big brown ones that could straddle a quarter with their spindly legs, maybe even a half dollar. They were shy and built ghostly tunnels in the dark corners of the basement and even upstairs in places. Oh, there were lots of crevices for spiders to hide when Ruth and David first moved to the farm. You get used to them after a while, and these brown house spiders quietly watched from their tunnels, their many eyes like shiny black beads, two big ones on their face, smaller ones clustered where their mouth should be, all blank, but somehow watching.

The outside spiders were even bigger, but less creepy. They were more colorful, for one thing. Black and bright yellow, bumblebee colors. Fat bodies, like berries, and they kept their legs together in pairs, so they were like big X's. They made spreading, beautiful webs in the garden and all over the yard. Their webs were the size of a dinner plate or bigger and had a zigzag pattern of white down the center.

Then there was the nighttime spider, who made a web across the doorway every evening when it was black-dark, and then tore it down before dawn. If they came home to a shadowy house late at night, the first one in would get a face full of web if they didn’t remember about the spider. But if the kitchen light was on when they came home, the web would be backlit, and everyone would admire it before reaching for the doorknob and ducking under it to go in. In the morning, though, it was always gone, and once an overnight guest told Ruth and David that he had watched the spider deconstructing the nest when he got up before dawn to go for a run. He said it was cutting the support lines one by one, and balling up the silk.

In those early days of weeds and spider webs, the machine shed had bales of hay stacked higher than the big barn door in the back. The shed was like a giant tunnel, so you could drive the combine in the front and park it, but the back door was blocked by the hay, so you couldn’t drive it out the back door anymore. Hay was piled in stair steps, and the rope was still tied to the rafters—the same rope that Ruth swung on as a kid when her grandpa was still alive. It had a knot big enough to sit on and you would carry that knot to the top of the hay and then straddle it and jump off. You'd swing to the front of the barn and almost out the front door, and then back up over the hay and then forward again, but not quite so far, and back again with that feeling like you left your stomach behind just a little bit, and again and again for a long time, but each time a little lower, a little slower until you ended up almost hovering a bit above the floor and then you'd hop off and the next person would have a turn.

And now Ya and Baby Duncan would grow up out here. Ya was big enough to swing on the rope, but Ruth didn’t let him swing from the top. Duncan was too small. But she let him climb around in the bales of hay. Once when Ruth was at work and David was home with the boys, they went out to the shed. David figured it was okay. He was working on a painting when they asked to go out. Ya was now seven and Duncan was two, and David figured that there was nothing to hurt them out there. Later, when Ya came in without Duncan, David felt the shadow of panic, but brushed it away. Ya said he thought Duncan was in the weeds by the apple tree, but David called and called and didn't find him there. David felt fear knot his stomach and grow gradually into a near terror, but after a long fifteen minutes he found the baby in the machine shed. Duncan had fallen down between some of the bales of hay. He was just sitting in a hollow between the bales, looking up. He was quiet now, but David saw tear streaks in his dust-stained face. Duncan silently reached his pudgy arms up and David felt a choking in his heart. He reached down and pulled the boy up out of the hay and held him tightly, nuzzling his head. Duncan’s hair smelled like baby sweat and dusty hay. He lay his head down on David’s shoulder, and David cupped the baby’s curls in his big hand, and stood there, suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of relief and responsibility. When Ruth came home later, he told her about it like it was joke, a funny thing that the boys did, but as he stood in the big barn looking at all that hay and felt the tiny hand softly pat-pat-patting his shoulder, he felt his heart swell and his throat close up and hot tears form behind his eyes. He brought Duncan inside and fed the boys lunch and then got down on the floor and played Legos with them for the rest of the afternoon. 

Mary Lucille Hays teaches writing at the University of Illinois and Zhejiang University in China. In 2015 she was the Jesse Stuart Fellow at Murray State University, Kentucky. Hays’s work has appeared in many journals. In 2007, her poem, “Tippet Hill” garnered the Gwendolyn Brooks Award. She was a founding editor of New Stone Circle. When at home in Illinois, she raises chickens, turkeys, and other birds on her grandmother’s farm.

 

Galvanized

Rob Keast

A red-tinged puddle, hubcap-sized, on the basement tile near the foosball table. She spotted it peripherally—it was the sheen of it. Helena waited. Ten seconds later, a drip. She carried the stepladder over, under the main bathroom. When she reached and pressed her finger against the rust spot, she felt the moisture. The pipe’s stain reminded her of a bug bite. She gathered rags, a sponge mop, a spray bottle of cleaner. She positioned a bucket, then used her phone to time the drops. Eighteen seconds. The resonant thook of drip on plastic. Twenty. Something always happened when Ray was overseas.

That night she checked the bucket: clear orange, an inch full. The next morning, another inch. She emptied it into the laundry tub. After dinner she showed the pail to her son and daughter. “Check twice a day. Whenever you’re home. Don’t let it get near full.”

“Who?”

“Both of you.”

“Can’t we fix it?”

“Can you?”

The pipe ran along the ceiling’s bare beams together with old cable TV and speaker wires—a previous owner’s. The speaker wires, pointless as anything, probably worked just fine, but her actual water pipes? Mutiny by decay.

Helena didn’t like workmen in her home; they left it dirtier. The one time she had splurged and paid painters, supposed professionals, the crown moldings looked like a first-grader’s smudges. She’d redone most of the work herself.

Thook. If she were trapped in a cave the heavy drop might be the sound of survival, but in her basement it announced the spending of money. Again. Plumbers’ websites. Reviews. She typed, “Will a dripping pipe get worse?” It will. Either gradually or all at once. When she discovered a woman plumber, Helena called. “Are they galvanized?” the plumber asked.

“I don’t know.”

“When was your house built?”

“Fifty-four, I think. Will it be you who comes out?”

“I’m the owner. I’ve been doing this twenty years. Unless the house was re-piped at some point, they’re galvanized.”

“Is that good?”

“That’s bad.”

 

Where Ray was, you didn’t collect water just to dump it down a sink. Years ago he’d been deployed to Afghanistan. Then Iraq. Now he keeps going back as a civilian contractor. More money, shorter stays, supposedly safer. Leaving Helena to run the house.

How could galvanized mean outdated? Anything subjected to galvanization should last forever. Were the powers of fire slipping? Was vulcanizing next? At her next Parent Input Board she’d ask Jack Jeffries. Jack was in charge of the school district’s buildings and grounds. What kind of pipes did the high school have? Wasn’t it about as old as her house?

A few mornings later the plumber backed her trailer into Helena’s driveway at 8:01. Her name was Mel. Helena asked, “Does rust ever settle in the leak and fix itself?”

“Ha.” Mel crisscrossed the basement, pointing a flashlight upward. “You want rust to be the good guy?” What if each turn of Mel’s flashlight revealed a new flaw, a fresh revolt of wood or metal? Every board, bolt, and bracket paying what’s owed to the god of rot. The previous century’s builders and their delusions of permanence and their ignorance of carcinogens. Galvanism sounded like Calvinism: certainties that haven’t aged well.

Mel spun the open stepladder and climbed it nimbly. She pinched the pipe and beamed her light from close range. “Right now it’s a pinhole leak.”

“Can you plug it?”

“I can but I won’t. At the very least you should replace the pipe from here” —she pointed—“to here. Let’s see what else you’ve got.” Mel roamed the basement, and if water passed through it, she didn’t like it. The main line emerging from the floor: corroded. The water heater: on borrowed time. The wastewater drains. The pipes to the kitchen. “Give it enough time,” Mel said, “and water always wins.”

On the Parent Input Board, Helena never supported shortcuts. Spend more now, do the job right, save in the long run: her budgetary golden rule. Where Helena and Ray lived, they knew what it was to neglect infrastructure. To swerve around potholes as wide as their bathtub and half as deep.

She couldn’t ask Ray, not while he was gone. He would snap, over email or Zoom, “I can’t think about pipes. Just make the right call. You’re managing the show, so manage it. I don’t ask you how to do my job here.” But Helena remembered the deployment when she had bought a new car, not because she had wanted one, but because it had been repair after repair. Ray never seemed convinced and told her, incorrectly, she didn’t know what the phrase “good money after bad” actually meant.

Mel went outside to her trailer, returning with a splotchy pipe the length of a yardstick. “I cut this out yesterday, a ranch about as old as this house. See that? I’d bet anything your lines are just as bad.” The pipe, rough-edged from the saw, was so full of black corrosion that it was all but plugged. By the end, how had water even reached the faucet?

If Helena spent money they didn’t have and they dropped into the negative again, that was her fault. If she opted to replace just the one short section, and a few months from now when Ray was home a pipe blew out and the basement flooded, that was her fault too.

“It’s not my house,” Mel said, “but if it were, I’d get it all done at once. Then, your water’s clean and your basement’s safe. You ever thought about a reverse osmosis system? I could put that in at the same time.”

Helena peered into the corroded hole. It had the mouth of a lamprey gargling asphalt. Soon they’d be paying two tuition bills. The galvanized pipes might hang on.

She couldn’t think; her head had clogged. Only her ears worked. Another rusty drop squeezed through the pinhole, thooking the bucket.

  

Rob Keast is the co-author of Centered, Anthony Ianni’s memoir of growing up on the autism spectrum and playing college basketball. Rob's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Sun, Post Road, Michigan History Magazine, The Piltdown Review, and elsewhere. He lives near Detroit and teaches high school English.

 

What Have You Got to Lose?

Joseph E. Lerner

I awake to find Lena no longer in bed beside me. I search for her everywhere, bathroom, kitchen, living and dining rooms. Finally, I slip on my coat and boots and go outside.

It’s still raining. Waters flood the riverbanks and surge toward our front door. Slogging through the mud, I head toward the small boat-shed where we store our kayaks and canoes. I see a lantern glimmer within.

Opening the boat-shed door, I find Lena crouching inside one canoe. Barefoot, shivering in her nightgown.

The canoe, secure in its rack, is where we keep our cache of postcards, photos, letters, tape cassettes, and old phonograph albums, both LP’s and 45’s. They’re mostly Lena’s from before we were married, she childless and long divorced, and I, an aging bachelor.

It’s Lena who asked me to move the boxes, saying she no longer wants them in the house, but the boat-shed’s roof leaks badly, and I thought it would be a temporary move and Lena would change her mind. Still, I covered them in tarp to store well off the floor in an old canoe we no longer used.

I step past the other kayaks and canoes, several in disrepair. My parents owned a tackle-and-bait shop in town, and, when they died, I expanded the business to include rafting trips and other guided tours. It was how I met Lena, vacationing with other retired schoolteachers several years ago. She was with someone else then.

Lena’s reading a letter now, folded and refolded many times. I avert my gaze, respecting her privacy. She looks up, her face flush, beautiful, aglow in lantern light.

“Lena, please come inside the house.”

“I’m fine, I can’t sleep.”

She doesn’t hide the letter, but doesn’t want to talk about it, either. Lena’s life has been long and eventful, her students adore her and still write to her. Once she hinted she had a child, but I’ve seen no photos of one, nor of her husband.

I crouch beside her. Out the window, we watch the waters rise and hear the rain beat against the glass. An icy breeze blows through the cracks, and the boat-shed whines and shudders.

“At least let me fetch you a coat or blanket.”

She says nothing, but I retrieve an old horse blanket hanging on the wall and wrap it about her.

“Winter’s nearly over, we can go kayaking again, just the two of us, before the crowds come. If you’re up for it.”

“Yes, but not the tandem kayak, I want to use my single.”

As late as last summer, the waters were swollen and the rapids dizzying, dangerous. I don’t dare state the obvious, that she hasn’t been well the past two winters and can no longer handle the rapids alone.

The rains and winds abate. Through the window, the full moon glimmers, reflections dancing upon the waves.

Finally, she rises unsteadily, and I help her out of the kayak. Together, we refold the tarp over the boxes, tucking them in as if they’re a sleeping child.

Leaving the boat-shed, my wife leans on me for support. Around us, cedars and redwoods climb to the sky, their girths stately as pillars, vigilant and immobile, beside the still raging waters.

In the mudroom, I gently wash Lena’s feet, slip on clean socks and slippers, and lead her to bed. Soon she’s asleep, but sleep eludes me, and I rise from bed.

Lena’s letter, which she took with her, has fallen to the floor, where it’s bathes in a pool of moonlight. I gather the letter and go to the kitchen, where I light the gas lamp, stoke the wood-burning stove, smooth out the letter on the tabletop.

The hand’s nearly illegible, the letter dated three years ago, before our marriage. I’m tempted to toss the letter, unread, into the flames, which leap, snarl, roar.

“Darling,” it begins, “you can’t possibly love him, come with me, what have you got to lose?”

I stop reading, refold the letter, and set it on the table. Slipping on my coat, I go outside, where I stand in the rain, the river surging, the cedars and redwoods casting their long shadows, the lantern still aglow in the boat-shed.

My hand, my letter. I return to the house.

 

Joseph E. Lerner’s micro fiction, flash fiction, and poetry have appeared in such publications as 100 Word Story, [Alternate Route], BlazeVOX, Decomp Journal, Fictive Dream, Gargoyle, matchbook, Mojave River Review, and the new print anthology Fantastic Imaginary Creatures, edited by Gerry LaFemina (Madville Publishing). In 1981 he founded, as editor/publisher, The Washington Book Review, and, in 1992, Furious Fictions, a Magazine of Short-Short Stories, one of the first literary journals devoted exclusively to flash fiction.