UPCARD — MELANIE DUNBAR

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Smokey Joe taught her to deal Black Jack on their honeymoon thirty years ago. In their small town of Ryder, one Saturday a month the Starlite Roller Rink converts into an arena where amateurs box and wrestle in front of the population. After, she deals a few hands to the old boys in the back. If she can tell who is down on their luck, she will take a card on a hard seventeen. Other times she relies on seeing Smokey’s face in the atmosphere behind the head of the man in need. It was easier before the No Smoking laws. His face would appear in the smoke. Now, everyone has to step outside, and the air in the room is clear. She misses him.

Melanie Dunbar is a Master Gardener who lives in Southwest Michigan with her husband, youngest son and their rooster, Mr. Beautiful.  Her poems can be found in the Silver Birch Press Where I Live series, Your Impossible Voice, and are forthcoming in Gargoyle and Sweet: A Literary Confection.

HIGH HEEL DEAD DROP — FORTUNATO SALAZAR

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They came to substitute one extinguisher for another. Just like that, the old extinguisher was gone, its fall softened by training and more training. Thanks a bunch! And the marshmallows were so gooey that she thought she might have heat stroke soon. She really needed a break.

No, what she really needed was a fun-filled round of scratching at her rash, in nothing but her tan lines. Fuck! She was both allergic to and addicted to marshmallows. A very good friend of her sister who was also an enemy of her sister had introduced her to marshmallows.

As for her other preferences, they would have to wait. She felt too lazy to break the seal so she stretched the box while kicking it in. Inside the box was something that looked like it needed to get accustomed to living in the vicinity of humans. Never mind, she had her share of anxious bitterness.

That was truly scary, the way her eyes watered when she got pushy, which happened when she was in this kind of mood…pushy and huge and stomping on a whole delicious commune of marshmallows…stomping for real as opposed to a listless round of stomping.

Whoa, it was so hot indoors that the barbecue set was melting! No wonder she couldn’t shake the gnats! The gnats were attracted to the aroma of the melting barbecue set. And just when she’d been working up to launch into the barbecue set with her entire collection of boots!

*

Or wait, maybe she’d put a dent into a batch of overflowing marshmallows, then make a nuisance of herself at her sister’s. Her sister was exhausted but not too exhausted to complain about the scabs, all that leisurely scratching while snacking.

If only she could get these clothes off, she would do something about the blue bruises, because they were beginning to look sparse. Okay, she would multiply the bruises, but first she needed to get out of these clothes. She would adopt some fun new bruises, chubby little bruises!

Something squealed from the direction of the batch she’d totally forgotten about. How had she lost sight of a whole batch?! It would take a month to pay off that debt! Meanwhile, she was looking down the barrel of tomorrow! She didn’t need a break, she needed an exorcism!

At the same time, the inside of her skin felt lined with marshmallows, that’s what the heat did to her chest. What she really needed was a vacation where her hair would fly every which way while she pummeled something like a springboard, only less forgiving, a springboard that had made some serious resolutions.

One little peek into the sink. Ouch! The mottled brown flow from the ceiling fan had reached the sink, almost. Enough negative thinking! It was time to rip out the ceiling fan! First, though, some emergency takeout. Wait, she’d left her phone inside the barbecue set! Oh fuck, fuck, fuck!

Fortunato Salazar lives in Los Angeles and has recent fiction at, or soon at, Tin House, New World Writing, Spork, Hobart, Juked, Corium and elsewhere.

IT SNAPPED — KATHY BUCKERT

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Geoffrey is a drug addict.
             I find myself praying for a miracle. Playing his savior has been my role for far too long. I fight his battles at school and with his father. Enabling comes at a price, a price that could cost his life if I don’t wake up and see my son is in trouble. I am a control freak, but I make one plea into the heavens: “Do whatever you need to do, but please spare his life.” My prayer is a trajectory of surrendering my will.
             Our intervention is ready to begin. My husband calls Geoffrey to join us in the living room, the anger in his eyes shows our plan was compromised. I told his girlfriend. I simply shoot her a stern look when she sits next to him on the couch. She enables him. She treats him to her drugs. She is her own disease.
             It occurs to me that this is happening because we left rural Vermont. Nothing in New York can match the mountains, fresh air, and good people that surrounded us there. I am no longer a stay at home mom. Although I am here for him when he arrives home, it is not enough.  I trusted my instincts. I listened to his promises. The cost of believing: drugs are ravaging his body. The skeletal remains of our lifeless familial ties are fighting for one last breath.
             When we start the intervention, I inventory the reasons why we love him. My love has weathered so many storms from the time of your conception to this very moment. I have been your advocate. I have been your defender. I have carried your anger in my soul. Let’s bury our shame. Let’s keep our mother and son bond intact. Together. Let’s. Just. Be. Stronger.
             He listens to the letters written by the family.
             I am helpless. I am ravaged by his decisions. I need my own intervention to stop controlling him and let him become his own man. Letting him hit rock bottom may help him fight his way to the surface again—on his own. I am losing my son because he refuses to get help. He is leaving our home, our place of safety. His drugs have taken my place. And I cry. Not because my son is heading toward a life of uncertainty, but because I know he is resilient. He will scratch his way back to the surface and so will I. 

Kathy Buckert holds a Master’s Degree in Education from St. Michael’s College in Vermont. She also holds an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Goddard College’s low-residency program in Plainfield, Vermont. Her work has appeared in Stories: The Magazine, Riverlit, The Blue Hour, Black Mirror Magazine, Electric Rather, Silver Birch Press, and other publications.  She is an adjunct assistant professor at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York. 

SNOW — TODD McKIE

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Natalie tiptoed through the living room. On TV Ellen was doing one of her crazy dances and  everybody in the audience was clapping and cheering, but Natalie’s mom was passed out on the sofa. Natalie put on her polka dot boots, her parka and her mittens, and went outside.
             Natalie lay down in the fresh snow and pumped her arms up and down. She wished she could take off and fly away to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mom said that’s where her dad was, shacked up with some goddamn bimbo half his age. Good riddance to bad rubbish, said Mom. Natalie didn’t care if Dad lived in a shack. Mom said bimbo like it was something bad, but Natalie was sure it had something to do with the circus. That’d be awesome, going to the circus whenever she wanted because Dad’s girlfriend was in the circus show.
             Natalie did arithmetic in her head: if the bimbo was half Dad’s age and he was the same age as Mom, then two goes into thirty-four is seventeen. A teenager! She could be like Natalie’s older sister. Wouldn’t it be cool if the bimbo’s real name was Shannon? When Shannon wasn’t at the circus she’d tell Natalie all her secrets and then Natalie would tell her own deepest secrets to Shannon and they’d be friends forever. They could tease Dad and he’d be like, Oh, you two drive me nuts! but he wouldn’t mean it because he loved them both. Natalie pumped harder and harder and thought about Pennsylvania and what it would be like when she lived down there.
             But soon her arms felt like they were catching on fire right through her parka even though the temperature was zero below. Her fingers were sore too, and tingly like an electricity shock. She remembered what they learned in school about weather and how you could catch frostbite if you stayed outdoors too long and how in a few days your fingers would turn black and fall off. Maybe her fingers had frostbites on them already, even with mittens on.
             Natalie stood up. She brushed the snow from her arms and legs. She swiped a wet mitten across the frozen snot below her nose. She took a long look at the snow angel. It was really an inside-out angel, an empty hole in the snow, like an angel used to be there and then flew away. Natalie looked up and saw the angel flying high above, flapping its shiny black wings. Instead of singing some pretty church music, though, like Hallelujah or Come All Ye Fateful, or just calling out Natalie’s name in a friendly voice, the angel screamed caw, caw, caw.
             Natalie felt like a total dope to mix up a dirty old crow with a beautiful angel. Maybe her brain was getting frostbite too. She headed back inside, hoping her mom was still passed out so she couldn’t yell at her for tracking snow all over the goddamn carpet. 

Todd McKie is an artist and writer, staggering between canvas and keyboard, sometimes dazed, often paint-spattered, but ever grateful for the exercise. His stories have appeared in PANK, Fiction Southeast, Pithead Chapel, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. Todd lives in Boston and blogs sporadically at toddmckie.blogspot.com.

THINGS WE BELIEVED WHEN WE WERE SMALL — KENDRA FORTMEYER

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She had been on fire for four years now. It was hot and made people uncomfortable. Also, they said, there was the smell of burning hair. The girl couldn’t really see the problem. She was always light and always warm. She was great at camping. Maybe she left scorch marks all over the furniture—so what?
             “Honey,” her mother said, over the phone. “Are you still doing that fire thing? Your father and I worry.”
             “Yes, Ma,” the girl said. Sometimes, when her mother called, they had two different conversations. Her mother: You should go back to school. The girl: I feel like I’m really self-actualizing. The mother: There’s a nice new boy at church. The girl: I think I’d like to go to China.
             A nearby philodendron curled up, smoking, and the girl leapt to her feet.
             “It’s just that—well, honey,” her mother said. The phone was melting. It was hard to hear. “Men don’t make passes at girls who are on fire.”
             “What?” the girl asked.
             Her mother was saying, “Maybe you should consider letting someone else be on fire for a while,” but the phone was a bubbling mass on the floor, now, and the girl backed away from it carefully. “Bye, Ma,” she called down into the puddle, “I love you!” and as she doused it with salt, imagined that it said beautiful things.
             She went out that night with her friend, Marjorie. There were only a few bars in town that allowed people who were on fire, so they went to the same places over and over. Marjorie didn’t mind. Marjorie was depressed. She claimed the sameness of the bar was a pocket-sized representation of the unchanging bleakness of her life. Every night, they drank the same beer and Marjorie left with the same kind of man: the kind who had just one thing too many wrong with him for other women to take home. A large mole, or a receding hairline, or an anger management problem.
             That night, while Marjorie talked sadly to a man who was just trying to find himself, you know?, the girl on fire stared into the pitcher. When she was little, she’d thought beer looked like liquid gold. She’d thought lots of things: that all grown-ups were smart, that there was a heaven. That someday, if she was hard-working and true-hearted and smiled a lot, people would be attracted to her like moths to a flame.
             She looked out at the couples pouring hand-in-mittened-hand from the diner across the street, laughing, all inside jokes and Corgi puppies. Her phone was buzzing in her pocket. It was the newspapers, the talk shows, the President of the United States; they wanted to know her secret, how in five easy steps, they could be on fire, too. Marjorie waved a sad goodbye, and the girl lifted her glass. The beer hissed at her lips: a scorching cloud of steam, the adult bitterness of gold.

Kendra Fortmeyer has an MFA from UT Austin and edits fiction for Broad! Magazine. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Nonrequired Reading and has appeared in the Toast, PANK, Smoking Glue Gun, NANO Fiction, apt, Psychopomp and elsewhere.  You can find her at www.kendrafortmeyer.com or on Twitter @kendraffe.

ACTING FUNNY WITH A GUN — PAUL LUIKART

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He’s been acting funny with a gun. Out back by the woodshed. I see his boot prints in the snow from the back door. I hear him giggling. He twirls that pistol on his finger like a cowboy with too many whiskey slugs in him. All alone. He fires at ducks and muskrats and cornstalks that bust apart in pops of yellow splinters.
             He says, “One day, Mae. To the moon. Blam-o! Straight to the moon.”
             The dog is dead, the kids are gone, the neighbors’ barn burned and they cleared out.
             Lately I’ve felt my heart flip-flop. I have to beat my chest and lean on the stove and ride it out. But still I watch him—a sliver of a man, born of the gray sky, shaking like a de-ranged puppet. Firing and laughing and dancing like mad—like mad—till he runs out of steam and lays down like a corpse between the mutilated stalks. 

Paul Luikart's work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Curbside Splendor, Hobart, New World Writing (coming soon!) and Yalobusha Review among others. His MFA is from Seattle Pacific University. He lives with his family in Tennessee. 

ONCE FOR YES AND TWICE FOR NO — CHLOE N. CLARK

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The Fox Sisters were known for their ability to speak with the dead. They listened to the rap, rap, raps of the spirits knocking on walls, on tables, on the inside of cabinets. The raps were letters spelling out secrets. They said a man had been murdered. Buried beneath their house. Such secrets.  Secrets are better left unsaid. Sometimes, Maggie and Kate Fox would try to close doors, cover their ears, not listen. The public called for more, for more, voices like pounding. The taste of alcohol was sweet compared to the pounding.
             Maggie dreamed of the sky bleeding into her skin whenever she went out at night. The stars in her veins shimmered and fell. She didn’t ever wish upon them. What could she have wished for? Kate began to manifest the spirits onto stages across America. They shimmered and shook. The spirits never asked for much. Rapping, rapping.
             After years, the sisters finally admitted to fraud. The rapping merely the cracking of their toes done in unison. “We only wanted to play a joke on Mama,” they said. Voices shaking with age, with years of drink. The public moved on easily.
             Years later, children playing in the ruins of the old Fox house found white sticking out of the ground. So chalky-colored, so smooth. They were the bones of a man, murdered some said.

Chloe N. Clark is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Environment. Her work has appeared such places Booth, Sleet, Rosebud, Menacing Hedge, and more. She studies ghosts and magic, doughnuts and monsters. Not necessarily in that order. Follow her @PintsNCupcakes.

A PIGEON — MATTHEW KABIK

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Joe didn’t want to think about what he’d see when he got to the top of the hill.
             Bill Young was the first to find it, and he ran. Ran all the way to a teacher who just told him to leave it alone. It’s true he didn’t go back up the hill, but he did tell every other fifth grader at recess what he saw.
             Bill said it was a gopher, and it looked like a dog had gotten it about a week ago. Instead of whatever he was supposed to see, guts and all, he saw the back of Andrew’s striped shirt. He looked like a roly poly bug, hunched and thick around.  Andrew was kneeling over something, and only turned his head when he spoke to Joe.
             “It isn’t a groundhog,” he said.
             “How did you get up here before me?”
             “Come look."
             Joe heard someone at the base of the hill shout and his classmates laugh. He wished he was playing tag on the creaky jungle gym. He tried to imagine anything else. The slide, the red kickball, Ms. Peter’s loose shirt. No-matter what, his mind went back to what was in front of him.
             Joe thought of Andrew’s too-tight clothing, his crooked clammy hands.  He didn’t want to get closer, he was worried Andrew’s overly sweet breath would get stuck in his nostrils and make him sick. Still, Joe walked next to where he knelt and looked down.
              Just a bird, or what was left of one. There was hardly anything to it, just a head and the brittle stench of something’s bones drying up in the sun.
             “A cat got it, I think,” Andrew said.
             “I guess so."
             “I wonder if the cat dragged him up here or caught him in this spot."
             “I don’t know.”
             “I know you don’t,” Andrew said, wiping a hand across his face.
             “What?”
             Andrew rolled his shoulders like he was getting frustrated. “How could you know how it happened?”
             Joe wanted to ask Andrew if he acted like this on purpose. He wondered why Andrew wiped his mouth and why he wouldn’t get up to face him.
             “Don’t tell anyone I’m up here, and don’t tell them it’s just a bird,” Andrew said.
             “What should I tell them, then?”
             “Anything else.”
             Joe reached the edge of the hill to see everyone still staring.
              He looked anywhere else but the crowd of kids around him when he reached the bottom.
             “So, did you see it?” Bill shouted.
             “Yeah,” Joe said, walking past the crowd and back towards the school, “I saw it.”

Matthew Kabik is the editor in chief of Third Point Press and lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Sundog Lit, Pithead Chapel, and Atticus Review, among others. Follow him on Twitter @mlkabik or visit his website for a complete listing of published work: www.matchstickcircus.com.