CORNHOLE, BAGS — JOHN JODZIO

Some of the old people called it cornhole but we called it bags. We called it bags because we went to church sometimes and everyone there called it bags, too. The church’s bags board was painted with a glowing face of Jesus and you tossed your beanbag into his grinning mouth. We also called it bags because we asked the youth pastor, Pastor James, what Jesus would have called it—bags or cornhole—and Pastor James said “bags” with no hesitation whatsoever, responded so quickly that we felt this meant he had a direct line to heaven.
             Some of us were only decent at bags, but some of us were great at it. Sometimes we bet on our bags games when we were drunk at the park. Sometimes Pastor James would walk by with his golden retriever and say "see you at church on Sunday" and we would say sure, sure, yep, of course, no doubt, and then go puke into a bush.
             One night, a man named Nelson came to the park to drink and play bags with us. Nelson was a square shaped man in his 40s, and he wouldn't stop calling it cornhole. Cornhole this, cornhole that. Ugh. We beat Nelson in bags and then we punched him in the gut and stole the rest of his beer. Unfortunately, Pastor James was walking his dog when this happened and he called the police on us. Some of us went to juvie, but some of us only got community service.
             Most of the church members forgave us when we came back to worship, but some didn’t, wouldn’t ever. One woman hissed whenever she saw us and one of the deacons threw an empty Diet Coke can at us while we biked home.
             A few months later Nelson died after his car skidded into a gravel pit. We couldn’t help but wonder—was this a random accident or was God delivering some sort of divine justice? Maybe some of both? We asked Pastor James at youth group.
             “Are you asking me if Nelson died because he called it cornhole?” he said.
             “Yep,” we said. “Uh-huh.”
             Pastor James had just been explaining a parable about some weeds and some wheat in his confident church voice, but now his voice turned sad and shaky, a voice we recognized from the park, from that night he’d called the cops on us.
             “God wouldn’t do that,” he told us. "God wouldn't do that," he repeated, but we knew otherwise and so we gathered up our things and made our way past him and out the door.

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John Jodzio's work has been featured in a variety of places including This American Life, McSweeney's, and One Story. He's the author of the short story collections, Knockout, Get In If You Want To Live and If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home. He lives in Minneapolis. 

HELL — JENNIFER WORTMAN

Felicia runs off the church bus straight into your yard and screams, “I can’t play with you no more, Sarah. You’re not saved.”

For a second, you’re glad. Most days, Felicia sprints into your yard, grime ringing her lips, and leaps on your swing set like it’s her own, pumping hard until the front poles kick up. One kick is enough for you, but she keeps going, as if she wants the swing set to keel over, wants the smack on the back of the head. Felicia’s older than you, so you don’t yell, “Stop!” You don’t cry.

Felicia’s mom is big and mean and her stepdad is small and mean and you never run to her yard.  But, now, when Felicia vanishes into her old stinky house, you feel a loss. She’s a part of your world, like the buckeye tree at the edge of your yard and the cardinals and robins that land there, and the dandelions everywhere, and the fat worms shining on the sidewalk after it rains.

You don’t go to church. And if your town had a temple, you wouldn’t go. “It’s just a bunch of gobbledygook,” your dad likes to say.

“Saved” means the jar of coins you keep in your bedroom until it’s full enough to matter. Your parents help you count: “Good job!” your mom cheers when you count a big stack. “You see?” your dad says. “Doesn’t come easy.” You nod, glad to understand the lack of ease. To save means to grow up.

But that’s not what Felicia means, your dad, that night before bed, explains. Felicia means Jews go to hell. “There’s no such thing as hell,” he says. “Except the hell people make, right here in this world.”

The next day, Felicia’s in your yard again, her pumps jerking the swing set off the ground. You clutch the chains, silent as always, hating her, her grubby mouth and stinking house and stupid church, hating your fear of her, your fear of the coming fall, the slam of soft grass turned hard at your back.

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Jennifer Wortman is the author of This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love., a story collection forthcoming from Split Lip Press in 2019. Her fiction, essays, and poetry appear in Glimmer Train, Normal School, DIAGRAM, The Collagist, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, The Collapsar, and elsewhere. She is the associate fiction editor at Colorado Review and an instructor at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Find more at jenniferwortman.com.

PLASTIC ANIMAL HANDBOOK — EVAN NICHOLLS

[Alphabetical] Order:

             Defenestrated, back in the day, when we had rooms high enough and the windows open wide. When we had buildings. Now you don’t go high.

             Regarding this text, Plastic Animal Handbook operates in a line of relevance, not alphabetically. That is, read this all the way through while your Survival Partner / Mate / Bed Buddy stands guard outside the tent flap. This manual, albeit brief, is relevant to your survival. Read it carefully, in one sitting. When you are done, take your Survival Partner’s / Mate’s / Bed Buddy’s place outside. Now they read. You watch.
             Scrutinize the wilderness that’s gonna murder you someday.  

Plastic:

             The New Skin.

Gun(s):

             The Old Tool.

Animal(s):

             Once were, now aren’t, except in a Plastic way. That is, the Animals are all Plastic now. Linguistic. Dexterous. They shoot people               with Guns on the weekends. They want your scalp.

             Depending on where you are in the world, you may encounter certain Plastic Animals. In Africa, the Plastic Hippopotamuses, Honey              Badgers. Europe and Asia, the Plastic Persian Leopards, Arabian Horses, Eurasian Wolves. Based on this book’s publishing             distribution, you are probably in the Americas, and probably North America. Which means Plastic Giant Otters, Anteaters, Jaguars                  (South America) or Plastic Pumas, Grizzlies, Big-Horned Sheep (North America). All Plastics mentioned above are ruling species on               their respective continents. They want to wear your skin.

             On the basis of North America being your locale, Plastic Animal Handbook covers North American species in further detail:

                          Sub: Grizzly Bear

                                       Running zig-zags does NOT work (tested). What you need is a Gun; gross recoil, big pay-off. Multiple slugs are          
                                       needed to put a Plastic Bear into the ground. The body won’t decompose, only melt at a later date under the always-
                                       winter sun.

                          Sub: Big-Horned Sheep

                                       They are bad shots on account of the hooves. Will charge.

                          Sub: Puma

                                       Faster than most. Also, teeth. Inescapable.

                          Sub: The Rest

                                       Avoid.

Man Hunt(s):

             The Danger. Was ‘okay’ when we did it. Now the reason for one eye open, and also only one eye.

The New Earth Diet:

             Us. Some Plastic Animals were not previously meat-eaters but now participate in Man Hunts. Also, after being plasticized, some no
             longer prescribe to their Old Earth diets. Plastic Anteaters have been seen gorging on fresh, dark-blooded Survival Partner / Mate /
             Bed Buddy carcasses. Plastic Wolves have been witnessed grazing polyethylene scrub.

The Unknown:

             What We(e) Humans Don’t Know. Also, what was in our food, factories. Also, maybe, How The Animals Got Plastic. History.
             Somebody gave them Guns, language, made them a durable, cold material. Said revenge. (See Coldness).

Coldness:

             What Plastic Animals feel. What separates us from them. Like the end of a Gun’s black barrel. (See The
             End).

The End:

             Comes at you low. Like in the bush. Like you deserved it, but never saw it coming. Inevitable. Destroys
             what you Love (see Love).

Love:

             What is left over. What is standing outside the tent flap, for the short time it has. Absolutely vital.

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Evan Nicholls has work appearing in Passages North, Maudlin House, THRUSH, Pithead Chapel and Whurk among others. He is from Fauquier County, Virginia. Follow him on Twitter @nicholls_evan.

JUST AFTER JOY — MOLIA DUMBLETON

In her hometown, when Melody was thirteen, a nineteen-year-old flipped his Trans Am on the highway feeder road right outside the main entrance to the mall where Melody used to get dropped off to meet her friends at the food court outside the cinema multiplex, and the next day The City News printed a picture of the upside-down car on the front page, which is where Melody saw it in black and white: the car fully upside-down and teetering on its crumpled hood.
             There wasn’t any blood or anything, that’s hard to tell in black and white, so Melody looked extra hard just to be sure, but the story was that the boy had been speeding—really speeding, not just a little-bit speeding the way your parents might if they were late for something—and tried to take that turn too tight, and so over it went, the Trans Am, all three thousand pounds of it—with both its windows wide open, it being August, and the song, My Hometown, blaring from the radio as the car sat there rocking, upside-down with a dead boy inside of it.
             Melody felt every inch of that story in her bones every time she passed that spot in the car with her parents for weeks afterward, even as the little pieces of glass and metal on the road gradually spread out and disappeared—and later, too, when she was learning to drive—and as an adult, any time she took a turn too tight—and even after that, too—for the rest of her life, really, whenever she almost started to get that feeling that you feel, that forever sort of soaring feeling, when it’s August and late, and you’re free.

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Molia Dumbleton's debut collection of short fiction was a Finalist for the 2018 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Individual stories from that collection have appeared in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Witness, SmokeLong Quarterly, Columbia Journal, and others. Her work has also been awarded the Columbia Journal Fiction Award, Seán Ó Faoláin Story Prize, Dromineer Literary Festival Flash Fiction Award; Kelly Barnhill Microfiction Award; Third Prize for the Bridport Prize; Third Prize for the Bath Flash Fiction Award; and a spot as a Finalist in the SmokeLong Quarterly Flash Fiction Award and Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award, among others. She is a reader for The Masters Review and a member of the Curatorial Board at Ragdale. Full publications list and other info can be found at www.moliadumbleton.com. 

ON MY TOOTHBRUSH THERE IS ACETONE — JENNY FRIED

There is a wolf in my city who wears padlocks in her ears. Her fur is long and it falls and whorls in gray sputters of dying ink. There is a wolf in my city and I have seen her in the walls of my apartment.
             The wolf in my city eats dumpster lettuce and pigeon popcorn. She holds them in her mouth but I have never seen her chew. Her teeth are chipped and black and sometimes when I go to sleep I can feel them in my stomach. She watches me while I shave my face and my chest and paint my nails. I sometimes think that she is jealous.
             There is a wolf in my city, a wolf, and she lives in the sidewalk cracks that I do not step on. She lives in the flickers in the streetlights and in the cabs of sleeping cranes. I left my razor out for her one night, in the space between the wall and my refrigerator, but in the morning it had gained only a drop of blood. I checked for gray hairs everywhere I could think of, but I only found one. The lonely red drop was too sad to look at, and I went to work that day with stubble.
             There is a wolf in my city with a scratch on her nose and a belly of fall leaves. In the winter her fur is full of roadkill. There are men who whistle at me while their cars are stopped in traffic. I look at the wolf through the cracks in the sidewalk and when I get home I paint my teeth black.
             I wrote faggot on my chest once, a secret punishment for the skirt that slept under my bed, for the smooth skin and paper-cut mouths built from the slipping of my fingers.It bled through my shirt, a charcoal rubbing on a gravestone. I can taste it now as I spit out flecks of black nail polish. I rinse my mouth and try hard not to swallow.
             “There is a wolf,” I say, and I grip my toothbrush tighter. “There is a wolf there is a wolf there is a wolf.”

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Jenny Fried is a trans author living in California. Her work has appeared previously or is forthcoming in Bad Nudes, Jellyfish Review, X-R-A-Y, and The New York Times. Find her on twitter @jenny_fried.

THE SOUND OF HER VOICE — VERONICA MONTES

It happens when she speaks. Her husband’s face disassembles itself, and the pieces do not slide back into their proper slots until she stops making sounds. Sometimes she forgets and a single word escapes her—a word like “no” or “when”—and her husband’s left eye migrates to the right side of his forehead for a moment. She cannot bear to see him out of sorts in this way.

It’s her fault. Her side of the conversation was always filled with pauses because she could never seem to find the right words, and so she would backtrack to the beginning and come at it in a different way, a way she felt might be better, or might better express, maybe, the point she way trying to make. Her husband once mentioned that he didn’t like this, that her tendency to speak in spirals was maddening. You’re driving me fucking nuts, he said.

She makes use of gestures now. There is a whole language, after all, that incorporates fingerspelling and body motion. She’s consulted a website that claims this language can improve relationships. Also—did you know this?—gestures are an effective way to speak with babies who don’t yet vocalize. She keeps this in mind for the future.

Maybe she’ll take a class in this language. For now, though, she wings it (holds arms out to the side, tilts body to the left, then the right). Near dinnertime she raises both hands, fingers spread, so that her husband knows his meal will be ready in ten minutes. Later, when he’s settled onto the couch to watch television, she cups her hand around her ear to ask if he’d like the volume turned up. Sometimes a raised eyebrow is enough to telegraph her message, and she’s found that there are many different ways to nod even though they all mean yes. He seems grateful for this silence; he sighs as if content.

In bed tonight she places her cheek over her husband’s heart to indicate that she’d welcome intimacy. She’s surprised to find that his heartbeat feels like a tiny punch, punch, punch against her face. It makes her laugh. Afterwards there is a rustling outside the window, and she knows that it’s the two deer who come to feed off the apple tree at midnight.

Can you hear— she begins.

He strokes her hair. He places his hand over her mouth. Shhhh, he says. Shhhh.

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Veronica Montes is the author of Benedicta Takes Wing & Other Stories (Philippine American Literary House, 2018). Her online fiction can be found at SmokeLong Quarterly, Spelk, and Lakas Zine. She is the Managing Fiction Editor at daCunha.global.

THE MURDEROUS HISTORY OF TUMBLEWEEDS — DAVID DRURY

I remember when tumbleweeds were new. Not new altogether, but made new, to borrow from the parlance of religion. New in the way we know them now. New after what they had been for so so so so so long.
             They were not always autonomous golden wheels sheared from the ground, you see, jogged with whispers and ambition, rainbow bouncing down the lone highway. They were not always itinerant honeycomb fingerprints sprung from purgatory, pinwheeling to Gloryland. They were not always fit for cowboy films.
             They were once collectives. Conglomerates. Bits of stick and stem and leaf and heather. Scraps of chaff and gristle, fir and feather, and fur and leather and wet hair tangled together. Morsels of bone and vein and flattened lizard heads. Clusters of proud scowling cracked beaks. Shreds of nightgown and knuckle scabs and the soles of tiny shoes, swollen with blood, soaked in booze. They moved with dark intent, accumulating, amassing, stockpiling. They did not rest.
             We called them Tumbleheaps. They grew to incredible size, some large as mountains. It took a much stronger wind to carry them along, but there was plenty of wind back then. Parents who turned away for even a moment learned by way of grief. Children playing near roadways were—now and then—crushed to death by a passing behemoth, which would not only flatten, but snatch the body whole up into itself and continue rolling on its way. Born of death, seeking death, ever collecting. Funerals had to be performed on horseback.
             When the ten million years of winds died down, Tumbleheaps began falling over. They fell over, and they evolved. They ceased to be the same once they lost their murderous heart for collecting.
             Even after the heaps by some kind of time-spun miracle became pardoned in their being and transformed into the emancipated spirits we now know as tumbleweeds, it was not enough. It was not enough for me to believe in a universal goodness. It was not enough for me to hope. I was in a very low place for a very long time. But I have to say, as of the last hundred years, what I’ve seen happening with bird nests—the structural changes; the migration to ever higher branches; the hints of some marvel yet to come—turns my bleak heart into the hint of a smile every time I hear church bells cutting through a breeze.

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David Drury lives in Seattle, Washington. His fiction has been broadcast on National Public Radio, published in Best American Nonrequired Reading and is forthcoming in ZYZZYVA. He has a Masters degree in Christian Studies from Regent College (University of British Columbia) and been kicked out of every casino in Las Vegas.

MEN'S SECRETS — LEONORA DESAR

It happened when I was fifteen. All of a sudden I was hot. It came out of nowhere. One minute I was invisible and the next boys were feeling me up behind the stairs. They always say, don’t let strangers touch you, but they weren’t strangers. They were sophomores. Their names were Alan, Billy, Steve. They wore braces. Mullets. They said, let’s get this party started. After awhile they said nothing. They just did a little thing, like their legs were walking, which was code, for stairwell. We went. Usually there was a lot of tongue involved. Then the hands would start. They went up the shirt. Down the shirt. They paused at the pants and then they went there, too. They hung out. They said, hello, like we are giving you the pleasure of your life. It always stopped there, strangely. It’s like they read a book up to a certain point, and then Mom came in. After that things were formal. We sat there like nuns, or teachers. It was all very chivalrous, really. He would hold the door for me and we would go into whatever happened next, chemistry class, maybe, or the yard. Then he would ignore me and I would ignore him, or pretend to, I did what my dad does, I’d say, time does not exist except for at this moment. I looked around and murdered time. Then I took the bus.
             By 11th grade we just looked at each other. It was like a formality, like a favorite TV show you can’t give up, even though it’s in the 7th season and all the main characters have died. It was as if he’d forgotten how to feel. He was lost. He was thinking about algebra or how our teacher looked like Humpty Dumpty. It interfered with things, like sex. He put his hand over my blouse and we just sat there. And in the end he gave me this look, like don’t tell Steve or Billy. I nodded. It would be our secret. It was a bond. I told myself this. It smelled like M&M’s and menthols, like x=y2. He was the x and I the y, or he the y, it didn’t matter—we equaled out. My mother looked at me. She said, there’s something different about you, and I nodded. I was a woman now. I knew how to keep men’s secrets.

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Leonora Desar’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in CHEAP POP, River Styx, Passages North, Black Warrior Review Online, Mid-American Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, and Quarter After Eight, among others. She won third place in River Styx’s microfiction contest, and was a runner-up/finalist in Quarter After Eight’s Robert J. DeMott Short Prose contest, judged by Stuart Dybek. She was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions 2019, and Best Microfiction 2018.