MYSTIC HUSTLER — ERIKA VEURINK

Every morning I face my window overlooking Times Square in just a thong and release one thing I don’t need to carry. On my toes, arms outstretched, I open myself to the universe. My husband can’t help but put down his work phone and watch. I roll my head back so I’m facing the ceiling. I spin slowly, ignoring gawking, ant tourists. “Angelic,” he said once. Usually, he mutters, “Jesus Christ.”

My husband is desperate to finalize the divorce. He hates my newfound spirituality. He hates that I was having an affair with our doorman and blames it on my awakening. People think that because I have the body of a woman and the face of a girl I can’t have a transcendent soul. And people think that someone with a transcendent soul should be bound to traditional definitions of marriage. It’s not my fault my love is cosmic.

I’ve adjusted my sleep schedule to avoid his negativity. I put on false eyelashes at night when he gets home. I walk the empty streets gripping mace and prayer beads. I’m hunting for signs. I recite prayers I’ve screenshotted from daily meditations. I read them over fountains and ATMs, planting positivity. I’m a mystic hustler. Everyone is a child of God. My teachers are the beggars, the ads on top of taxis, the posters taped to streetlights that ask, “Do you need freedom?” They all speak to me. And I listen. 

Last night, the sky was green with pollution. The street drains buzzed with feral trash and neon liquids. I ignored a call I knew was from my husband or the doorman. I held my inhale and then released. I was the kids lighting a joint under scaffolding. No, I was the stack of day-old magazines a rat was climbing. Actually, I was floating above them, like the invisible cell tower connection—watching, hoping, knowing, awakening. 

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Erika Veurink is a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Iowa. She is receiving her MFA from Bennington College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Entropy, Ghost City Press, Hobart, Literary North, Midwest Review, x-r-a-y, and elsewhere. 

SHE PROBABLY DIDN'T MEAN IT — DANA LIEBELSON

You often go to the dinosaur museum to avoid your mother. You eat edibles and sit in the planetarium and watch the Pink Floyd laser show. You touch the bronze bones of Big Mike. You lick golden lollipops from the gift shop with preserved mealworms. You dance the scroll of deep time, humanity reduced to a sliver of paper on the wall. Deep time makes you dizzy, like the first time you realized your mother would die (during Titanic, the part where the Irish woman puts her children to bed before they drown; you were nine.) In the museum, there is a small dark room where the curators play boring black-and-white films of scientific experiments. This is your favorite room. If you cry, no one else is ever in here to ask why your sad breath smells of insects. 

Ernst Chladni was a German contributor to the field of meteoritics, says today’s boring film. He collected reports of rocks dropping from the sky, and in 1794, published a book theorizing that they come from space, according to Meteoritics & Planetary Science. At the time, he was dismissed for grounding his evidence in stories considered to be “folk tales,” the journal reported. You wonder aloud (stoned): How do you prove a fireball that only burns in your mother's memory? The narrator does not answer your question. Chladni is also credited with this experiment where he put sand on a plate and drew a bow across the plate, causing the sand to leap into patterns, the narrator continues. Through the speakers, the hair of the violin bow whispers like the devil, but the trembling designs look to you like maps drawn by someone’s God.

There’s something wrong with you, your mother said. The words play in your head like a car stereo thumping in the distance. You see the vibrations of your mother’s voice, shifting sand into shapes. There’s something wrong with you. The shape of her frozen red mouth, smiling even when she is angry. The shape of “good enough," a resonance not reached. The shape of her white cowboy boots, which you are wearing now to be more “beautiful.” There’s something wrong with you. In deep time, femurs last longer than words and you never feel alone at the dinosaur museum. You stand and smooth your frayed jean skirt. As you leave for home, you imagine tipping over Chladni’s plate, the magical pattern falling through your fingers; it’s just sand.

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Dana Liebelson is an M.F.A. candidate in creative writing at the University of Wyoming. Her journalism has appeared in HuffPost, Mother Jones and The Atlantic. She grew up in Bozeman, Montana. 

THE STONE GIRL — LUCY ZHANG

(Basalt)

The stone girl appears more air than mineral with her cavities and pores of hardened lava trapping dissolved gases, the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Over time, she oxidizes into hematite, taking on a rust-red that mars her grey-black surface. When a child picks up one of her pieces from the dry stack rock wall surrounding a garden of mulch and hyacinths and drops it onto the driveway, not a single piece chips off. 

(Travertine)

To some, the stone girl appears more fibrous and concentric, a cream-colored mass of calcium carbonate. They look at her and think yes, years ago, she precipitated to the bottom of a hot spring and now with the water evaporated, she emerges in solidarity, strong enough to forge ancient Roman temples and aqueducts.

(Something else)

Before the sculptor carves into her, he knocks off her limbs, positioning the point of a chisel against her elbow and swinging the mallet in one stroke. Her arm breaks off. When he is satisfied with the general shape, a stump with a few rough edges, he measures the width of her nose, the curve of her lips, the length of her eyelids with calipers, and draws lines marking the removal area. He softens his strikes so he can remove the small parts with precision–excess flesh in her cheeks, the bit of her temporal bone that protrudes a centimeter too far, the bump in her nasal bone. He pushes a riffler across her scalp and carves out locks of hair that extend past her shoulders. She has hair now.

He leaves the sculpture uncovered before retiring to bed, a twin-sized mattress on the floor, next to his toolbox of chisels and wall mirror.

The stone girl watches her reflection as the sculptor snores. She thinks she has never looked so symmetrical, so delicate, and she wonders if this is what having skin is like. Or maybe this newfound fragility is because she stays awake the entire night, waiting for the sun to strike at dawn, for its rays to heat her face.

When the sculptor wakes up the next morning, he notices a crack down the girl’s face: a jagged line between her eyes, off-center and slanted, tearing through her philtrum and off to the edge of her chin–she resembles a Picasso painting. I can work with this, he thinks as he picks up his chisel and attempts to pivot his artistic muse–embrace the asymmetry, work with serrated and pointed and straight edges rather than curves that start and end at the same place. But when he strikes the mallet onto the end of the chisel, a chunk of her face cracks off, falls to the ground, crumbles to unevenly sized chunks and dust. The other half of her face stands upright, its remaining eye staring at him, as though to ask what he’d do next.

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Lucy Zhang is a writer, software engineer, and anime fan. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House, Parentheses Journal, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. She can be found at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.

AWARD NOMINATIONS — 2020

We’re so excited to announce our 2020 nominations for the Best of the Net,  Pushcart Prize, and Best Microfictions (400 words or less). We wouldn’t be here without our amazing contributors—quite frankly, we owe them everything. It’s never easy to select nominees in a given year, but we felt these pieces really highlighted our focus and drive here at CHEAP POP.  

Editor’s Note: Not all stories have been published yet in 2020; we look forward to you being able to read these soon, and publication dates indicated below. Find links to all of the nominees here.

Best of luck to our nominees and a huge thank you to everyone who submits to our site; you’re all a part of the CHEAP POP family!

Best of the Net

• “How Could You Know?” — Joaquin Fernandez

• “Be Conscious of Form” — Myliyah Hanna

Pushcart Prize

• “Graffito” — Andrew Adair

• “Rock Collection” — Sabrina Hicks

• “How to Get a Message Behind Enemy Lines” — K.S. Lokensgard

• “All Churchgoers are Fanfic Authors” — Andy Lopez

• “They’ll Steal Your Skin and Other Lessons from the World’s Fair” by Erin Vachon

• “The Stone Girl” — Lucy Zhang

Best Microfiction (400 words or less)

• “Collision” — Jennifer Mcgaha

• “After Sex, We Find a Praying Mantis in Our Bed” by Cortney Phillips Meriwether

• “The Eternity Berry” — Grace Q. Song

• “Mystic Hustler” — Erika Veurink

THE GRAVITATIONAL CONSTANT — BILL GILLARD

I sat behind Hassan McMillan in a tiered classroom for Physics junior year at our NYC Jesuit all-boys high school where Father Doyle brooked no haha but I was bolder then and during the course of his forty-five minutes I gently shoved Hassan’s chair inexorably forward across the polished wood floor until his feet hung in the air a foot above the tier below and he punched helpless at my calves whenever Father Doyle turned not often to the chalk board until with a slow crash Hassan cartwheeled forward onto Bruce Chow’s indignant back both of them sprawling onto the floor clutching knees and ankles until the eclipse of Father Doyle whose seismic rage dimmed the lights flaying the skin of innocent Bruce and Hassan left me paralyzed by what I had wrought a silent bystander for all Father Doyle knew and the most courageous act I have ever seen was when Hassan looked back at me with anger in his eyes and then instantly relented he could see the fear in my eyes me and my D in Physics and then set his desk upright apologized to Father Doyle and to Bruce and then sat down and reopened his Physics notebook I don’t know why he didn’t ID me I certainly would have except that maybe Hassan this basketball playing giant of a young man knew he could catch what Doyle was throwing but in that moment when he made his decision he wasn't sure maybe I could and maybe that’s why and he wasn’t wrong let me tell you Father Doyle was just about the scariest thing since the H-Bomb that we learned about in Chapter 4

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Bill Gillard is an award-winning teacher of creative writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. His writing has appeared in dozens of journals, and he is the author of the poetry collection, The Vade Mecum of the True Sublime, and two chapbooks, Ode to Sandra Hook and Desire, the River. He is co-author of Speculative Modernism, a study of the origins of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He is the Fiction Editor at the literary magazine, Masque and Spectacle. He earned an M.F.A. from Fairleigh Dickinson University, is a recovering youth hockey coach, and lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, with his wife and two daughters

A(UTONOMOUS) S(ENSORY) M(ERIDIAN) R(ESPONSE) — JULIA LoFASO

She shaves your beard. She strokes your forehead. She reads you Lord of the Rings. She is not your mother, not your girlfriend, not your wife, not your lover. But she is gentle, with soft skin—you feel like you can feel it through the screen—and wide green eyes.

You’re a sensation seeker, always have been. You move like smoke. You like cats better than dogs. You’d follow a jangling arm of bracelets for miles and you’d let anyone filled with the right kind of light place a sacred cube of sugar on your tongue, then stretch your long, lean self paws-to-tail to let its warmth spread through you.

The girl on the screen is not here, but she is filled with light. She can get you through the cruelest months in your cold city, until you can fly to a place where all the colors bleed so deeply your eyes spring tears, where every girl is beautiful because she isn’t yours, will never be yours. The girl on the screen will never be yours, either. She belongs to every searching blue-lit face, to power lines that speak in sparks, to cables and fiber-optics, to hands that see without touching, hands that know.

The science is not there, say the experts. But you are there and she is (sort of) there, and that’s enough.

Then again, maybe she is your mother. Maybe she’s everyone’s mother. It’s so hard to remember way back when your senses were blurred wide open, shortsighted eyes enraptured by the crinkle of balled paper, hands flailing to reach a soft thing you stuffed in your mouth until it soaked with the smell of you, of her, of all your animal mothers. Back when you were all sensation, lantern-thin skin incandescent.

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Julia LoFaso's writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Conjunctions, Day One, Wigleaf, New South, PRISM international and elsewhere. She lives in Queens. 

CHIEFS — JOSHUA BOHNSACK

I remember the day my mom left because I watched a guy say “fuck you” on live TV for the very first time. I heard my parents say it to each other a thousand times a day, but there was something special about the response on the sportscaster’s face when a drunk football fan in red and gold face paint put a hand on his shoulder and shouted those two beautiful words to the camera.
           I don’t remember what my mom said as she shook my shoulders for the last time. I don’t remember the pattern on our wallpaper or the way Dad pounded his fist against the wall or the color of my mom’s car as it spit gravel against the windows. I don’t remember how long I lived at my grandma’s house. I don’t remember what I did when I heard my mom’s voice on the answering machine apologizing for all those late nights and how she appreciated that her son was being taken care of. Or, actually, I remember doing nothing but listening to her recording a sobbing message. I guess I don’t remember why I didn’t pick up the phone and ask her why she didn’t come back home, but I probably knew the answer.
           I remember the first time I went to a Chiefs game and how everyone raised their hand as if it were an ax, chopping the air on each first down. I remember thinking it would cost a lot of money to change the name of everything involved with the football team. I remember wondering how they did it when the Rams relocated. I remember thinking this and not paying attention to the winning touchdown.
           I remember the Boulevard beer tasting too flat for eight dollars at a bar close to the stadium. I remember when the reporter and camera walked into the bar ready to ask us what we thought of the game. And I remember thinking of my mom as the reporter approached me with a microphone and I looked into the camera and said, “Fuck you.” 

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Joshua Bohnsack is the author of Shift Drink (Spork Press) and his work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, SAND, and others. He is an editor for TriQuarterly and Long Day Press, and lives in Chicago where he works as a bookseller.

BECOMING — KYRA KONDIS

When the ghost arrives at the photo shoot, she is a burst of cold wind, a slight tinge of silver in the air. Everyone on set tells her she looks amazing, even though they’re not sure where in the room to find her. You’re stunning today, they say. They say: you look hot. 

In the industry, it is widely known that the ghost is the best model. She has no imperfections. She doesn’t demand certain snacks or drinks or amenities. She doesn’t try to sue anyone for being inappropriate. She doesn’t show up on camera at all, of course, but that’s fine because they photoshop her in later. She can be so many things, the ghost: a tanned, oiled woman with a tiny nose; a pair of slim, long-fingered hands; shiny black hair cascading down a figure-8 body; skin so smooth people look at it and say, that can’t be real, and at the same time, they never guess that it isn’t. 

When the ghost was a girl, she got paid twenty dollars to be in one of those mall fashion shows, where kids wear department store clothes and walk down a catwalk between a Starbucks and a Pottery Barn. Her mother made her do it, just like she made her do a commercial for kids’ allergy medicine and a print ad for jellies. It’s a shame she has such round cheeks, said the show’s organizer, scrunching her face between thin fingers. 

Now she is only almost the outline of a woman, a cool air under hot white lights. Everyone wants to photograph her. She knows this is because she is whatever they want, but isn’t that nice sometimes? She can become and become and become.

Look over here, the photographer says. He is shooting an ad for shampoo. The ghost is a thousand shiny specks in the air, a glare in his lens. When she looks at the camera she cracks the lights on each side, their glass bulbs splitting. It’s fine, the photographer says to an assistant who gets up to help, we’ll edit the exposure later. 

Truthfully, the ghost misses being just one person, and not many. She misses her cheeks. She misses her flesh. She misses seeing herself in a photo and remembering what she really looks like. Being wanted doesn’t replace being her.

So while the photographer kneels with his camera, the ghost leaves the shoot, forging a chilly breeze through the studio. No one notices. When the ad goes live in magazines and Internet pop-ups months later, underneath the woman made of pixels, there will only be air. The ghost will be proud about this, for a second. Then, she will be sad.

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Kyra Kondis is an MFA candidate in fiction at George Mason University. More of her work can be found in Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, and Pithead Chapel; her flash has also been featured in the Best Microfiction 2020 and the Wigleaf Top 50 of 2020.