CELEBRITY — BROOKS REXROAT

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She was brunette back then, doing the same thing I was: escaping family to walk down the beach. At some point we fell into step together and I did the sort of uncharacteristically adventurous thing 15-year olds do only on vacation: I spoke. Some dumb thing about the nice weather. She followed my dumb thing with an unexpected thing: she smiled. Every time I saw her smile after that, I judged it against that first one, that one which seemed so genuine. I never saw her smile like that again.
             “It’s always beautiful here,” she said. “Peaceful. We come every year.” She acted like she didn’t notice adult men snapping their necks for a double-take, or their wives glaring and elbowing. Even then, people couldn’t help but gawk at her. 
             There were lots of things I could’ve told her, but she seemed the sort who’d heard enough of football or honor rolls or youth groups, so I told her I played music. What I meant by this was that I owned a guitar and had a spiral-bound notebook full of melodramatic scribbles about heartbreak I thought I’d known.
             “Really?” she asked. “Me too. Who’s your agent?”
             I went red, told her I was still working on that.
            She turned at the pier, too. On the way back, we walked so close our shoulders touched once—a shock of soft warmth. She laughed a lot, though her laughter wasn’t predicated on anything being funny. It was more a vocal smile.
             “How long are you here?” she asked. “Tonight,” I told her, and she looked sad, didn’t say anything else.

•

“What are you doing?” Dad asked when I dutifully sat down between my folks.
             “I said I’d come back.”
           “But—” Dad was flushed and speechless. “You were walking with her and you stopped? Go!”
             But of course, she was gone, a trail of craned necks left in her wake.

*

MTV’s name was not yet a lie, so I was sofa-watching videos the next time I saw her. It was October, and I went pale as her face filled the screen. The camera zoomed out to her whole figure, to that pleated skirt, then she danced. I was excited—and then crushed because the song was terrible. I hated it, but couldn’t help wanting to see her again and again. The song went into overdrive rotation; I think my cat memorized the melody.
             At Sonic Boom, I ignored the clerk’s incredulous brow when I bought that CD. I flipped it over so the cover faced downward but the clerk pointedly flipped it before she scanned. “That’s 15.98.”
             Every time I went back into the shop, the same girl was at the checkout. She knew what I’d bought, and she deemed me unworthy to browse the row of bins labeled alternative. She crinkled her pierced nose and half-snorted every time I brought the Vaselines or Sonic Youth to the register, and I just smiled back, because what did she know, anyway? 

Brooks Rexroat lives and teaches in Huntington, West Virginia. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing-fiction from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and his work has appeared in such publications as Day One, Weave Magazine, The Montreal Review, Matchbook Literary Magazine, and Midwestern Gothic. Visit him online at http://brooksrexroat.com.

2015 FLASH FICTION CONTEST...IS HERE!

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We're so excited! We're partnering with the excellent Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters (GLCL), a literary nonprofit located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to host our 2015 Flash Fiction Contest...and that contest is here!

—SUBMIT HERE—

Starting on August 1, 2015, submit your 500 word (or less) pieces to us, for a chance to win prize money and publication with CHEAP POP! Not to mention, all pieces will be read and judged by author Phillip Sterling.

Details:

Submission Period:  August 1 – September 30, 2015
Announcement of Winners:   Friday, October 30, 2015  
Prizes:  $500 for 1st place, $250 for 2nd place, and $100 for 3rd place. The three award winners, along with three honorable mention entries, will be published with CHEAP POP.

Read more about the contest here.

—SUBMIT HERE—

LA MESA, CALIFORNIA, 1953 — RON DAVID

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The San Diego suburbs expanded into East County where we raised chickens for eggs and meat, and taking avocados and persimmons from neighborhood yards was not called stealing. The post-war boom paved our gravel road. Driving with my father when I was six, I looked out the passenger window at the fresh asphalt and thought to myself that black is never really black unless it’s in a shadow. I peeked at my father’s dogged family-man face, at his tight lips and eyes that never shifted from the pavement to me, even in the absence of traffic.  I told him the priest said the most important thing to him was saving his own soul. My father had converted after seven children to please my Catholic mother. He said, “I’d say my family is the most important thing to me.” We drove on past fruit groves that would soon surrender to asphalt and concrete. I’d never be closer to him.

Ron David lives in Detroit. He is a UAW-Ford hourly retiree. He is a social justice and union activist who contributes to labornotes.org. He teaches EFL/ESL part time and helps raise a 13 year old daughter.

SAUDADE — ZAIN SAEED

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Every time I think of her now I think of the word “pungent”. It didn’t immediately come to me, the word. I spent ages looking for it in places in my mind I could get to only by climbing over things that weren’t pretty. I needed it, desperately. I needed it to describe the smell of her shawl because indescribable things were known to ruin lives and people. Her shawl was black. The first word I came up with for the smell was “sweet”. I came up with it as she sat by my side on a bench talking about clouds and how she woke up that day to the sound of a storm whooshing by her ears which she later found out had been the sound of the rumbling of her stomach made evil by a tired brain. That was the first day I’d seen her wear the shawl, the first day I smelled it as she threw it over herself and wafted towards me a smell that reminded me of a fruit I used to love when I was a child. I didn’t remember its name, but it was clear that I’d been thinking of her since a time when I wasn’t even old enough to think inconsequential things.  She sat there saying things like “violence is necessary” and “what do people who die for love think after they’re dead?” I sat there listening but really only trying to figure out what to call the smell of her shawl, and whether it smelled the same as the rest of her. The second time she threw it over herself was when she laughed out so loud that the ants toiling away in the grass at our feet stopped dead in their tracks and looked incredulously up at her. It was sharp, acidic, the smell and her voice. It made me want to run away but not just yet, or maybe to never run away. It made me want to ask her what she did in times of utter happiness, if she did anything at all, and whether she wore her shawl outside even in the rain. What seemed like years later we talked about things like books and music and other things that made us feel but somehow could not feel anything themselves, how selfish. The shawl had black lace on its edges, and it was blacker in sunlight than in the dark. It got cold and she asked if I wanted some of the shawl. I said yes. When it was covering both of us I smelled it, I smelled a word. For the rest of that night and the years that would follow till they stopped following and we went our separate ways, I kept on looking for that word. Years later, now that I've found it—“pungent”—it’s all I ever think of, all I ever smell. It’s not the best place to be, because now she’s nowhere to be found.

Zain is currently studying linguistics in Freiburg, Germany. He was born and raised in Pakistan. His work has appeared in The Freiburg Review, FLAPPERHOUSE, Bird's Thumb and Eunoia Review and is forthcoming in Third Point Press, Bahamut, Apocrypha and Abstractions, and others.  He is just getting used to tweeting at @linguistictrain.

PEANUT BUTTER AND BACON — KATIE CORTESE

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In Umbria, they have peanuts and butter, but never together. Instead: pork sliced, baked, fried, cured, and ground into fat salciccia; truffles in the spring; and boar in the fall, during hunting season. It is tough and gamey, though. Aria warns him not to expect too much.
          Last year, his parents visited them in Perugia where he is studying, huffing uphill with their big Midwestern smiles, windbreakers tied around waists. They’d eaten homemade tagliatelle con funghi, pizza with gorgonzola and noci, and risotto with pomodori and peperoni, laughing over the way “pepperoni” in America meant little round salami slices, but in Italy it’s bell peppers only. Something got lost in translation, his mother said at dinner, and though he knows Aria understood every English word he will pretend to translate so he can tell her in his getting-better Italian that this is brave for his parents, eating in an honest-to-God Italian restaurant with no pictures on the menu. Reciting her guidebook Italian, his mother had told the waiter, Prendo il pizza con quattro formaggio, per favore, then blushed when he’d asked in English what they wanted to drink.
         Aria said, during that dinner, in Italian, They are very sweet. She’d said, in Italian, I want to fuck you in the bathroom. Now, please and thanks. After she excused herself, he told his parents he’d be right back but had to make a call. The restaurant bathroom was unisex. The stall door went to the floor.
            This year, he flew with Aria to Detroit, then drove to his parents’ in Lansing. He showed her his childhood bedroom, left her poring over high school yearbooks, saying, When I come back, you are in for a treat. He was thirty minutes in the kitchen, and when he returned with a plate of finger sandwiches, she was doubled over laughing with his freshman photo trapped under her thumb. That’s before my braces, he said, but that bowl cut? There’s no excuse for that. She kissed the picture; kissed his knee; reached for the plate in his hand.
         Not so fast, he said, setting it between them on the sea-green deep-pile rug. First, a classic. Peanut butter and strawberry jelly, he said, pointing to one crustless triangle. Then, in a circle: Peanut butter and banana. Peanut butter and honey. Peanut butter and bacon.
          Pancetta e peanuts? she asked, wrinkling her perfect nose.
            Just trust me, he said, lifting it to her mouth. She let it sit on her tongue before chewing. Salty, she said, in English. Sticky. Savory. Sweet. He said, I want to fuck you on my childhood bed. Now, please and thanks. It still had a baseball comforter. They had the taste of salt and sugar in their mouths. After, she said she liked it. Peanut butter. It was like a Norwegian cheese she’d had once. Brown and sweet and grainy. She polished off the crumbs and licked her fingers, growing used to the taste.

Katie Cortese is the author of Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories (ELJ Publications, forthcoming 2015), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Day One, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Texas Tech University in Lubbock where she serves as the Fiction Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

 

THREE MILKS — DAVE PETRAGLIA

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The fat European was cheating. He kept his Mojito on a stack of Euros, the glass sweating the bills in the Cancun sun. 
             This was his third day there. He sat facing Palencia, the main building Sun Temple. His opponent always faced the ocean. The cards lasted for hours. 
             ‘It’s Goldfinger!’ Juan Cruz thought. 
             Juan looked up. On an upper terrace, off-limits to guests, he thought he saw something. 
             The towels high on Juan’s shoulder earned him the honor ‘Tres Leches’, a wildly popular dessert from the kitchens of Sun Temple, though a‘Three Milks’ was the lowest honor at the three-acre Big Lagoon. 
             His load, damp with pool water, spilled juices and liquor and beer, topped sixty pounds. The towels were the feathers of the headdress of a Mayan warrior. As each was added, his strengths grew. 
             After his shift, Juan rode his bicycle well beyond the world of the paying guests to the employee dorms. His roommate was away. After a cold shower and a meal of rice and beans, Juan called his mother, then watched American cartoons. 
             Later he dressed in dark slacks and shirt and headed back to the Resort. Juan sucked a flake of pepper through his teeth: the night would be good. He would be welcome at Palencia, but his movements would be confined to the lobby. Juan used his employee badge to access a short hallway with restrooms used only by employees. A door lock at the end of the hallway yielded easily, and he turned onto a stairway that led to the roof. 
             Juan disabled the light alongside an upper terrace door, and slipped into the night air. 
             He checked the time. The face of his thin, fine gold watch, a gift from the Saudi Minister of Export, glowed warmly in the moonlight. 
             He bent down at the spot where he’d seen something earlier. The finish of the railing was freshly scratched. 
             Something slapped over his head. By the nap of the terry, a towel from resort’s Vivir Grande. As he stood, a massive weight clamped his shoulders. 
             Juan’s arms were held across his biceps. He spun, and a sharp point pricked his neck. The heavy embroidery of the ‘VG’ logo had deflected the weapon. Juan Cruz lunged and pitched his foe over the railing. 
             Juan was impressed that not a sound was uttered during the descent. Still, he couldn’t help himself: 
             ‘Rookie move, amigo’. 
             The shadowy shape below rustled among the Oleander and Gardenia and finally stood, unsteadily. 
             A few feet left or right, and stands of Agave would have been his attacker’s resting place. 
             “Rookie move, Juan.” 
             Juan’s wound was covered by his shirt buttoned tightly as he made his way through Palencia’s lobby. He studied the faces of all he saw all the way to his bike in the employee lot.
             Was this a conclusion Interpol could have anticipated? 
             It would be important for Juan to appear normal now. He would have no problem with that.

A Best Small Fictions 2015 Winner, Dave Petraglia's work has appeared in Agave, Apeiron Review, Arcadia Magazine, Cactus Heart, Chicago Literati, Crack the Spine, Dark Matter, eFiction India, Far Enough East, Foliate Oak, Gambling the Aisle, Gravel, Jersey Devil Press, Loco, Marathon Literary Review, Mud Season Review, Necessary Fiction, NewPopLit, Olivetree Review, Petrichor Review, Prick of the Spindle, Stoneboat, Storyacious, Thought Catalog, theNewerYork, Utter Magazine, Up the Staircase and Vine Leaves. His blog is at www.davepetraglia.com

TOOTHACHE — STACY POST

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Whitefeather’s toothache forced her to wander.  She didn’t want the white doctor from camp.  Other sisters, who had been sick, had gone with him and never returned.
             The toothache dominated her thoughts.  Pain pulsed and sent her to the ground, prostrate in mistaken prayer.  She prayed to no one.  Her hopes were lost with her roaming ancestors.
             Her grandmother, Tall Knees, appeared, smelling of pipe smoke and gasoline.  Whitefeather knew she was on a precipice.
             Find the Willow.  Chew the bark.
             Whitefeather wanted to hold her grandmother tight.  Her gums throbbed.  She wished for a gas station ice machine where she could plunge her entire head inside to cease the pain.  She wandered in search of a cool clear stream, of a hollow hill with damp shadows.  Someplace other than inside this pain.
             A house on the prairie stood unlit and silent.  Sheer curtains wafted out of the upstairs windows.  A Willow tree behind it swayed with the same rhythm.
             Whitefeather clamored for the tree.  She lifted slender branches, crawled underneath and hugged the scruffy trunk tight.  Then she clawed bark strips and stuffed them into her mouth.  The bitterness and pungency of tree made it difficult to chew. 
             White lights emerged behind her eyes.  Would she see Tall Knees soon?
             She fell against the tree as crickets began to sing in the reeds.  She focused on the sound and waited.  The chewed bark was difficult to swallow.  Was she supposed to swallow?  She didn’t know.
             Tall Knees’ voice rode through the sudden sunlight scattered across the leaves.  If you take from the tree, you must give back.
             Whitefeather closed her eyes.  What gift could she give the tree?  What would the tree want in return?
             She remembered the wind in the curtains.  The way the tree had danced.  Maybe it would like her song.  A song she sang to Tall Knees. 
             She sang low like the crickets.  Sorrows escaped in her notes.  Her words, now freed, told the sky of her sisters that had disappeared.  Her toothache dulled.  Emancipation resonated through tiny dancing leaves. 
             The Willow listened and remembered.

Stacy Post is a Midwestern writer of poetry, plays and short fiction.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous print and online journals.  Her first poetry chapbook, Sudden Departures, debuted with Finishing Line Press.  Her short plays have been produced in a variety of festivals across the U.S. She works as a librarian by day and resides in the Indiana heartland.   www.stacypost.com

BREAKFAST WITH THE BOYS — ADAM PETRASH

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I cook them french toast because it’s the only way they’ll eat eggs. Because it’s the only protein I can afford now. I do my best to prepare a proper meal for them every morning; try to set a good example about how important breakfast is. That it doesn’t always consist of pastries with fruit filling or soft chocolate cookies like their mom gives them.
             The two boys sit at the table while I cook playing with their Lego creations until it turns into a fight over whose pieces are whose. My oldest uses a tone of voice I always heard in his mother and my youngest whines in a pitch that gets under my skin. I yell at them in an explosion of profanities and immediately see the damage. I look into my oldest’s eyes and see him holding back the tears. I want to tell him I’m sorry and that it’s okay to cry. That it’s all I’ve been doing since their Mom and I split. But I don’t. He doesn’t either. We both pretend to be strong. I look at them both and see their mother in them. See her mannerisms in them too and I hate it. Hate it even more that everything I dislike about myself is in there too. I want to tell them that that’s the reason I yelled: I don’t want them to be anything like us.
             I cut the french toast into cubes, pour sugar-free syrup, and place the plates down in front of them. They eat it up, quickly forgetting my tantrum. I look down at the frying pan; contemplate placing the palm of my hand down into it so I can feel something else than like I’m always failing.

Adam Petrash is a writer, poet, and journalist, and the author of the novella, The Ones to Make it Through (Phantom Paper Press 2015). He's written articles, book reviews, and interviews for Canstar Community News, Drums Etc Magazine, The Uniter, The Winnipeg Free Press, and The Winnipeg Review. His fiction has appeared in journals such as Luna Luna Magazine and Whiskeypaper, and his poems in Lemon Hound. He lives and writes in Winnipeg.