COLLISION MONITOR — LYNDSIE MANUSOS

I can’t un-see it, so I carry it with me. It was in the midst of walking past the shops on Rush, away from the doctor’s office, that I saw the pigeon on the sidewalk. At first it seemed like any other pigeon, with tiny marble eyes and a head on a swivel. Then I saw the bent beak, scattered feathers, its body half-flattened on the sidewalk. It must have fallen  –– plummeted, really –– and now seemed fused to the street. There was only the smallest outline of blood. I had read about this, about bird collisions in the city. I had almost signed up to be a monitor. I had liked the idea of watching the skies. Of looking up. I tried to remember what to do, if there was anything I could do. 
             Birds will try to fly toward glass they cannot sense. Birds will even fly towards their own reflection.
             The crowd on the sidewalk went around the pigeon, assuming it was already dead. But there it was, jerking its wings, neck twitching. I had seen roadkill before. Plenty of dead mice and squirrels and birds to be had in Chicago. This pigeon should’ve been no different. I should’ve known what to do. 
             It is estimated a billion birds die each year due to window collisions.
             My father used to call bad memories or images “spare change.” He taught me to stuff the change in my pocket. 
             “Leave it there,” he used to say. “Don’t take it out.”
             My pockets were full.
             Instead of following my father’s advice or remembering what I had read on bird collisions, all I could do was stare. Here was an embodiment of a half-life. I had a lightning hope, sudden and hot, that the pigeon might inflate into a balloon and fly. Up, up, and away. I imagined it floating beyond the glass windows of Chicago’s skyscrapers.
             People brushed past me on the street, knocking against me like rocks in a river current. Or, more likely, I was a dying fish flattened against that rock. 
             It’s important to contain a bird before something else harms it.
             The pigeon’s movements turned stiff, twitching and flapping with less animation. I knelt, waiting for air to pump into its purple chest. It smelled of asphalt and rot. I reached out, but at that moment its wings lowered, and its head fell to an acute angle. It imploded on itself, stretching to a pool of feathers on the concrete. It left me.
             If you cannot contain the bird, attempt to move it to a protected area, such as under a bush, or away from the street or sidewalk.
             I had stopped, knelt, and watched. Now I was beholden to continue. Now I had to stand and go with the current again. Eventually. Eventually I knew I must. I would place my hands in pockets and go forth, away from the shops and doctor’s office, letting blood congeal around the pigeon’s breast.

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Lyndsie Manusos’s work has appeared in Gone Lawn, Apex Magazine, The Masters Review blog, and other publications. Her story 'Everything There Is to Love on Earth' was listed as a finalist for SmokeLong Quarterly's 2018 Flash Fiction Contest. She lives in Indianapolis.

HOW COULD YOU KNOW? — JOAQUIN FERNANDEZ

It was the last thing he said before the accident.

They had spent their first summer without the kids at her family’s lake house, wine drunk and constantly naked. She began to relish her morning hangover, lazy hours spent prone in recovery while he doted, tender in middle age. Half-cooked eggs and burnt toast, weak coffee and bad tv until the midday sun pulled her out of bed.

The month before the accident, they had gotten into true crime. Unaccustomed to free time, she felt the need to study. He grew perplexed, then fascinated, then terrified. Phantom crime scenes spilled out of his imagination, stalking his wife unseen through the corners of empty rooms. In his heart, he panicked, quietly pulling her close when he passed her in the hall. He studied the curve of her face after a documentary on The Black Dahlia, tracing the line of her cheek as if she’d just survived something.

They spent weeks examining the gulf between them, comparing old wounds while they learned about monsters. They followed the through-line of their lives. Jonestown after her right-wing mother. Patty Hearst after his hippie father. Zodiac for their California childhood. Their long days on the lake gave way to long nights; hands held while the unspeakable unfolded before them, glass after glass of wine taking them from the couch to the bedroom.

The week before the accident, they moved to family annihilators, grimacing in disbelief. She looked through old pictures of the kids, birthday parties and graduations, but all he saw was old stories about fresh scars and all of it his fault. They called their daughter at Tulane, their son in Atlanta, chatty and awkward, their voices rambling with rosé and apology. He learned to cook eggs and finally mastered coffee, but the toaster remained just a little bit broken. She drank less and slept more, waking him sometimes with a lingering hand, teasing him awake just below his ample belly.

On the day of the accident, they had moved on to Ted Bundy. They held hands in the car while Ann Rule described him. It was an hour into town and an hour back, all quiet highway and antique upstate main street cobblestones. They followed Bundy from Seattle to Colorado to the sorority in Florida whispering no, no, no.

How could they not see it?

She shook her head. She was talking about Bundy’s girlfriend, about Ann Rule, about every girl that disappeared into his VW Bug. Before the accident, he looked at her. He saw every line and freckle on her face, every day and hour between them. Before the accident, he squeezed her hand and asked her.

How could you know?   

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Joaquin Fernandez is a recovering filmmaker and Miami native perpetually drifting west like an errant rain cloud and tinkering with his first novel. His fiction has appeared in Okay Donkey, Cotton Xenomorph, Rhythm and Bones among others. He can be found on Twitter @Joaqertxranger and on his website joaquinfernandezwrites.com.

SIXTY-SIX — JEFFREY RICKER

Darryl didn’t start out intending to be a thief. He didn’t think “Maybe I’ll make my living by taking other people’s things and running from the law,” when he started sneaking quarters, nickels, and dimes from his dad’s change jar. It never occurred to him that he might get caught.

Every time he took some, Darryl headed straight down to Pic ’n’ Save to buy more Star Wars cards. There were seven in a pack, along with a sticker, and a piece of bubble gum that he always threw out. A complete set was sixty-six cards plus eleven stickers. He had all the stickers and sixty-five of the cards. He just needed one more. 

It was 1977. The packs sold for a quarter.

The change jar was on top of a bookshelf in his dad’s den, a dark room that smelled of pipe tobacco and something stale and alien. Darryl’s eyes were level with the bottom of the old Mason jar, filled halfway with coins. He had to pick up the jar and bring it down to himself in order to dip his hand in. Usually there was a quarter on top, but sometimes he had to hunt for one, the change rattling and the pennies making his fingers smell like copper, like blood.

As time went on, he had to dig deeper. It didn’t occur to him that his dad might notice when the change in the jar was more copper than silver. But every time he biked down to the Pic ’n’ Save and handed over the change that was not his change, he opened the pack of cards to find the same ones he’d already collected.

He never did get the sixty-sixth card. What he did get, when his dad finally realized Darryl was stealing the change, was yelled at, smacked, and grounded. He learned something in the process, though: take the pennies. People cared more about one quarter than they did about twenty-five pennies.

That knowledge served him well over the next eleven years. He stole pennies and left quarters, took singles but left twenties, socks but not jeans, gum but not candy bars. When he stole the three twenties from his dad’s wallet, he figured it would be a while before his dad noticed their absence, considering he also stole the keys to his parents’ Blazer. His dad might have said Darryl stole the Blazer itself, but that wasn’t true: he kept the keys, but he left the car at the bus station.

No one could say Darryl hadn’t learned his lesson.

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Jeffrey Ricker is the author of Detours (2011) and the YA fantasy The Unwanted (2014). His stories and essays have appeared in anthologies and magazines including Foglifter, Phoebe, Little Fiction, The Citron Review, The Saturday Evening Post, and others. A 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow and recipient of a 2015 Vermont Studio Center residency, he has an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia.

PEAK CUTE — KATHERINE HEATH

All year I hold my phone up to the small airbus window, tilt the screen and film wings fluttering as the plane descends. All year, noise cancelling headphones filter out the rattling of a drink cart and sound of a newborn’s first flight. 

All year he texts “make it ok?” and waits for a response as I enter the focus group facility, where all year, I stand in front of a two-way mirror unveiling new products to moms and children, asking, what do you like about it? Does it seem new? Fun? Special? What do you imagine the play experience to be like? All year ‘the ones’ listening behind the glass pass me notes under the door—“Little girl in green”—and I casually move behind the child with undesirable opinions, the child who says the pony doll is not cute enough, not special; standing there, all year, in order to redirect the conversation; in order to sacrifice empathy for market research. 

All year I wear a continuum of gray: slate tinted boots and an over-sized sack dress to conceal abnormal bloating, a body cocooned for safekeeping. All year he sends hydrangeas to the hotel when it’s that time of the month. 

All year I walk down the aisles of drug-store chains at night, indulging in the miracle of stuff; lifting nonessentials from the shelf, cradling the smooth plastic bottles, tracing silky labels with fingertips; tiny bottles of shampoo, face wash, night cream, hair spray, lotion. 

All year I line up miniature toiletries, shoulder to shoulder, like siblings, look how cute, oh look at them, next to the more adult prescription canisters for sleep and anxiety and the cramps. All year I think about things that are small and cute, things I carry with me from city to city. Things I carry with me all year, like secrets. Like how I brush with the brand of toothpaste he hates, eat the cheese-dusted chips outside his diet, chew the wintergreen gum he refuses. All year, I fall asleep next to empty soda cans and unread messages, “Still up? Wish you were here.”

All year I don’t want to be in a hotel. But I don’t want to be home either, ending each day at the same neighborhood bistro, enjoying two variations on chicken until one glimpse of a family leads to reexamining work schedules. All year he waits for me to say: I’m coming home. I’m ready.  

But instead, I tell him about the kids in my studies who also love anything cute. I tell him about the girl whose superpower is “camping.” My side nearly splits as I describe the room of 6-year-olds who asked I exit and return so they could “play dead.” 

I exhaust him with focus group anecdotes all year, that year before Dr. Huang removes my uterine lining, before the weekly couples’ appointments, before the ultimatums and vows undone. That year, when all I managed to text back was: wish I was there too.

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Katherine Heath is an essayist and journalist from Saint Joseph, Missouri. Her work has previously appeared in The Paragon Journal, Breadcrumbs Magazine, No. 2 Magazine, and others. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.

🚨 (SHORT) HIATUS UNTIL 2020 🚨

Friends!

First, we are GRATEFUL to you readers and writers, everyone and anyone who engages with CHEAP POP in some way. We do this FOR YOU and for no other reason than because we love publishing and editing and curating work and important, diverse voices.

That being said: WE WILL BE TAKING A (SHORT) HIATUS UNTIL 2020.

This means that submissions will open back up again in 2020 (tbd).

There will be no 2020 Season 1 stories.

2019 Season 2 stories are still going live on Tuesday, August 13.

Stay tuned for more information on when we’ll be coming back officially (along with some other really special projects we can’t wait to announce).

Thank you for understanding, and, as always, you can check out FULL archive here (and for free, obviously).

We’ll be back soon, we promise. ♥️

2019 SEASON 2 STARTS TUESDAY AUGUST 13!

Mark your calendars, y'all: 2019 SEASON 2 starts on TUESDAY AUG 13!

You can find a full listing of our AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, and OCTOBER authors here.

💙💕💞💙

SUBS OPEN JUNE 2019

Hi, friends!

We adored our Season 1 stories from this year, and are stoked to announce that SUBMISSIONS will be open for the month of JUNE 2019. We will be actively reading for Season 2 of 2019—these pieces will run August into October 2019.

(As always, for more information on what we're looking for, or how to submit—when we're open!—please check out our submissions page.)

Please note: We will not respond (accept/reject) pieces until after a submissions period is closed. You are free to query us, but our method is to read every piece we get, even ones submitted at 11:59 PM on the last day. It's important to us that every piece gets the same care and attention. This also means we generally need a small buffer of time after submissions close to read and gauge pieces.

We’re excited to read your work! For additional info, click here!

SEA TURTLES & SIX PACKS — CAVIN BRYCE GONZALEZ

You know those plastic ringlets that attach six packs of beer and such? Well I cut them up every time. That’s right. Not because I’m some kind of nature tuned druid or a saint with a golden moral compass. No. I certainly hold no compass. I did it originally because my ex-girlfriend told me too. She’s a vegan, see, and she loves animals. She loves sea turtles, too, specifically. And one night while we were on a date, her with her big bottle of wine and me with my six packs, she saw me throw that ringlet away. She told me it might kill a sea turtle one day. And I remembered all of the stuffed animal plushies I had as a kid. Most of them were of turtles. Sea turtles specifically. I loved those stuffed animals, cried if I were ever without one. I thought about how the baby turtles survived scavengers and predators and made it to the ocean based on instinct and chance. So I cut up the ringlet. She was very impressed. We had sloppy, drunk sex and fell asleep. It was very peaceful. For the first time in my adult life, I thought that monogamy was genius. Monogamy was a blood oath. Exclusivity was a treasure. We were each others people, so we weren’t ever alone anymore.

Three weeks later I found out that she had fucked the guitar player of a local band, indie, probably, if you care, because on the night that she fucked the guitar player we got in a fight. Our first fight. Only fight, really, and it wasn’t even a fight. Just a misunderstanding.

Part of me hopes he gave her an incurable form of the clap. A strain evolved to be resistant to antibiotics and creams and lasers. Part of me hopes that he is an okay guy, because I want guys to be okay, you know? And I hope she didn’t hurt him. And I hope he didn’t hurt her. But I’ll tell you what: I still cut those ringlets. Every single time. Because whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy or whether I initially cut them to impress a girl or not, the sea turtles still exist. They were here before me and they will be here after me. They are innocent bystanders in all of our human games. And I love them for that, for their innocence, so I cut up the ringlets.

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Cavin Bryce Gonzalez is a twenty-one year old graduate from the University of Central Florida. He is the prose editor for SOFT CARTEL and book reviewer for Pidgeonholes. He's on twitter and his available work is located here: provolonesinatra.wordpress.com.