JERRY UNDER A PINE TREE — PAUL RUTA

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Hard to get a signal out here, Jerry, but I finally got through. They’re on the way. Be here in a jiff. Don’t worry, they know these woods like their own backyard. It’s a Sunday drive for them. We’ll get you outta here. Who knew a pine tree’d fall so fast. Holy crap. One bolt of lightning and zap, down like a sack of cement. I didn’t see it coming, did you? No, guess not. Sorry, Jer, just trying to make a little joke there, hope you don’t mind. You know, you’re not supposed to try to catch the damn thing. What’s that? Sure, let me grab my canteen. Take a sip. Nice and easy. Whoops, let me wipe that up. Gotta look good ’cause they’re gonna send one of them medic chicks in a tight uniform to fix you up. We’ll get you out real quick. Then we’ll go to Sal’s. Walk right in there with a big cast on and some crutches and everything. They’ll go, Well looky here if it isn’t Paul Bunyan, and then they’ll take your picture and put it up behind the bar. They’ll turn the TV down to hear the story. Tell it slow, Jerry, real slow, and they’ll set up the brewskies all afternoon. Man, some people will do anything for free beer. That’s you, you sly old dog. They’ll be here any minute. Don’t worry. Do you think they have sirens? Pretty sure I hear sirens. We’ll get you outta here. Happy thoughts, happy thoughts. Hey, remember Morty’s birthday that time when Cheryl made a chocolate cake? And Morty goes to blow the candles out and spits a huge wad of gum right into the top of the cake and it sticks there like one of them flowers they make, you know like how they make roses and shit out of icing, and you went Hey Cheryl, is that a peppermint chocolate cake? And everybody cracks up except Cheryl, that old sourpuss. Cracks me up every time I think of it. You’re a funny guy, Jerry. You’re fuckin’ funny. But I’ll tell you this, next time I go hunting with you I’m bringing a chainsaw. Give it another minute, buddy. They’re coming. Want another sip? Here. We’ll get you all fixed up and we’ll take June and Sandra out to that new Italian place like we promised, the one over on Pine — Pine, shit, sorry, it didn’t even occur to me. Sorry. I hear they have good veal parmesan, not too much tomato. Some places they put too much tomato on top, you can’t taste the veal, then they go skimpy on the cheese. Goddammit, where are they? Should’ve been here by now. Don’t worry, Jer, I hear them coming. Just another minute. Get you out in a jiff. Get you fixed up good. We’ll go to Sal’s. We’ll drink every bottle of Michelob in the place. They’ll turn the TV down. What’s that? Tell Sandra what? Tell her what, Jerry? 

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Paul Ruta is an old ad guy living in Hong Kong. He has talked baseball with Vidal Sassoon, smoked cigarettes with Johnny Rotten, and won a trophy for throwing a Frisbee very far. www.paulthomasruta.com

MA BARKER: REDUX — CANDACE HARTSUYKER

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When you’re the gangster’s mother, you know your son loves you more than money, more than his favorite lavender gray cat that used to curl up in his lap, tail draped over one knee. Your initials are scratched on his chest with a needle. He did it himself, handkerchief daubing beads of blood. The first letter of your first name and the first letter of your last name, a permanent tattoo and testament to his love for you.

In the bedroom with the light dimmed, you can pretend any man is him. You remember when he was a boy, eyelashes sticky with tears, face mashed against your breasts. Your arms around him, your hair covering him, keeping him safe from the other boys who’d shoved him and given him a split lip.

Your eyes follow him everywhere. Clinking against your throat: a gold locket, a strand of his clipped baby hair locked inside. He collects broads who are younger versions of you. Halfway between girlhood and womanhood, they slink around corners, look at him through half-lidded eyes, touch their bruised mouths with the side of their thumbs.

You’re satisfied until he starts bringing home a girl in a squashed, felt hat. He used to buy you pearls, a fur coat, fresh cherries from the marketplace, plump and unbruised, red staining your teeth. Now he buys all these gifts for her. Soon, everything he’s earned will go to her. You can imagine it, the veil framing her face. You’ve thought about getting rid of her, flipping out a switchblade and pressing it against her swan-like neck. But you know that wouldn’t work; he’d find another girl. Maybe he’d even try to get rid of you: his mother, the one woman who has never let him down.

He brings the girl up to his bedroom to listen to records, closes the door. Ear pressed to the hallway wall, needle skipping, you hear their hushed voices. For his birthday, he wants her to jump out of a cake. It will impress the other men. They’ll envy him, wish to have all that he has.

The day of his birthday, it’s easy enough to divert her, send her off to the bakery to bring him his favorite sweet: a cheese blintz. The celebration underway, the cake wheeled in, you pop out like a firecracker in just your slip. He never sees it coming, the gun in your hand. And then he’s the firecracker, the one who goes pop, and you’re holding him like a bride trying to save her dying groom, the gun skittering to the floor. From far away, the wound is a flower, a carnation, a gentleman’s lapel. You tenderly push a lock of hair out of his eye. Blood pirouetting from the wound in his chest, you remember teaching him how to tie his shoes, your hands over his, one loop and then the other, and how the laces looked like the ears of a newborn bunny rabbit, cotton-tailed and quivering.

 Candace Hartsuyker has an M.F.A in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and reads for PANK. She has been published in Okay Donkey, Heavy Feather Review, The Hunger and elsewhere.

PAPER CATHEDRALS — CHARLOTTE HUGHES

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After “Anamnesis” by Ravi Mangla  

The quiet came after I almost drowned at the Jersey shore, the salt water rushing down my pink throat to fill my belly; after a boy drove my powder-pink Chevrolet ninety down my front driveway and then rear-ended into an oak tree, either for revenge or to impress me—I don’t remember which; after I went to basement parties and never the library and left college with a bright ring instead of a piece of paper; and after I decided girls like me became secretaries, so I gilded my eyelids with gold glitter for company events on the weekends, and on the weekdays, memorized the coffee order of my boss, the president of the largest insurance company in the world; after I always rode the subway way past my stop to explore, and picked up dimes and lost earrings and tortoiseshell buttons from in between the seats; after I lit prayer candles wrapped in thin red paper in Saint Patrick’s with my husband, and while he was turned away, blew them out to hear my breath echoing across the marble and colored glass; after we watched sitcoms at night filled with housewives that were perfect, groomed, stiff like paper dolls; after my husband said, drunk, Why can’t you be more like that?;  after I maxed out the library card with self-help books and wrote out checklists for my self-improvement and started reciting New York is no place to raise a child after anything bad happened; soft gum, lost ticket, cold front. The quiet came after I gave up on the big city, after I filled the paper walls of a red-brick house in the Carolina pine forest with cross-stitches of lambs and doves and babies and my husband always came in late, filling the entire house with the rumbling of the car engine; after I decided it was easier just to stay home and manage the bills, receipts, papers; after my children grew feet and after they left and after I tried to fill the quietness in my house with more—handbags that smelled like skin, spice sets, made-for-TV product subscriptions; after I started going out for breakfasts of biscuits and gravy with my husband and called it eatin out as my mouth started to lilt and drawl and lose its last letters; after my husband’s body ate him from the inside out. The quiet came after, when I hired a girl down the road to help me sort out all my papers—those checklists and certificates and insurance receipts, all the pieces of a life. I sat in the living room watching a Christmas movie marathon when the girl walked out, drowning in a stack up to her forehead, and as she tripped on a loose floorboard and all my paper cathedrals fell down, a brief thought fluttered past my mind—perhaps embarrassment for at some point having built my life around a box of papers—before falling to the floor, too.

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Charlotte Hughes is from Columbia, South Carolina. Her writing can be found or forthcoming in CutBank, Meridian, Waxwing, PANK, and Monkeybicycle, and her poetry has been honored by The Kenyon Review, Third Coast, Princeton University, and The UK Poetry Society, among others.

DID I CRY BECAUSE I’D SEEN OR HEARD OR READ OF CRYING? — BENJAMIN MCPHERSON FICKLIN

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Supposedly there was a time when we lacked microcosms, which not only means we lacked maps, but also means we couldn’t look at something outside of ourselves, say a squirrel struggling to find a buried acorn, & see its similarity to our own lives, like our own search for sustenance, & I know this seems absurd, but explanatory microcosms are so formative to our experience of reality that we can’t possibly imagine a time without maps, maybe the first maps were dots etched in cave walls: star dots—dots of galaxies, some credit the first “world” map to the Greek philosopher Anaximander, his map centered on the Mediterranean Sea & had three continents, but I don’t trust that his map was the first: Whiteness—Eurocentrism—colonizing worldview have all tried so hard to engrandise its history while murdering everyone else (& I do my best not to trust a serial killer), that I think Anaximander was probably only the first Greek to make a map. Maybe not even.

Supposedly there was a time when I’d never had my heart broken, a time when I’d never broken a heart, but how many heartbreaks had I seen in movies or read in books or heard in songs by the time I was left standing alone outside my locker, school having been out for an hour, watching her walk away & toward the bus she’d already missed, & I was crying, & did I cry because I’d seen or heard or read of crying after heartbreak? Did I yearn for love because a love story is one of our favorite types of stories? Was it an act? I don’t think so, I don’t think so because I didn’t want to fall in love that night in Xela, because all I’ve wanted these last six or so years is to maintain a kingless palace in the mountains, or a below-ground labyrinth of roses, but they (The Wild Creature) laid it all to ruin simply by being, being, being, igniting hills of dried lavender, & now I know that my oasis is one of flame.

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Benjamin McPherson Ficklin will never surrender—Benjamin McPherson Ficklin will always love you. They're the author of the chapbook A Cynical View of Dystopian America. Their work has been published in Lomography, wildness, Ursus Americanus Press, STORGY, Clackamas Literary Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Autre, Oregon Voice Magazine, and included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and Best American Essays 2020. When not on the detective trail, they teach literary seminars in their hometown of Portland, Oregon.

SIX YOUTHFUL ENCOUNTERS WITH DEATH — JULIE CHEN

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  1. The spirit we summoned while Ouija boarding in Kathy’s car, parked outside Chuck E. Cheese, was named “Tqoqp.” He died at age fourteen, a teenage ghost, probably while chaperoning a younger sibling in the ball pit, its fatal rainbow cascades. We asked if he was gay and the pen we’d all hooked our pinky fingers around wobbled toward 6. In hindsight that must have meant the high end of the Kinsey Scale.

  2. “RIP JAMIE THE LEAF BUG!!!” is a YouTube video with 10 views, 3 dislikes. A shaky camera follows a hand digging a two-inch diameter hole in the ground with a plastic spork. Another set of hands spills from a Solo cup a bright green bug, its six legs crumpled at acute angles. Death comes at you sharply, precisely. As the displaced soil is sprinkled over the body, and the cup inverted as a tombstone, let’s waste time…Chasing cars…moans a one-hit-wonder, pitch-shifted to avoid copyright infringement.

  3. The skater boys next to us dropped a Costco red velvet cake on the ground. We squatted around the bloody mess and dipped our fingers into the cream cheese frosting. Jess stood back, her crossed arms crushing her waist-length hair against her chest. This is gross and those guys are cute, she hissed.

  4. When we started bringing hand mirrors to school, we’d flash them in the eyes of students across the quad. In the period after lunch, I’d check if my eyeliner was smudged. Inevitably it looked amateurish, terrible, so I’d wipe it away with my index knuckle.

  5. Do you think of me, as much as I think of you? Do you embellish the past like I do? I shove it deep, let it steep, then flourish, in nostalgia. Every story I tell is a resurrection or an open casket.

  6. Back then we could create anything out of nothing: life, death, happiness, sadness, reasons to crush, reasons to hate ourselves. Today I’m young enough to play hooky but old enough to try to spend that time “productively,” if I’m not going to be rolling around in the grass with you. I sit in the park, and my laptop dies on my kneecaps. I’ll never love again.

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 Julie Chen is a writer from San Jose, CA, based in Brooklyn. She was a 2019-2020 Fulbright Fellow researching a creative nonfiction project on the Chinese community in Prato, Italy. Her work is forthcoming in The Shanghai Literary Review and has been published in IDK Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Hyphen.

AT THE MOVIES — BILL MERKLEE

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The Wizard of Oz (1939)
           Witches. Magic. Demonic flying monkeys. Forbidden fruit in our house. Must-see TV for all the other kids. Every year I lie about having seen it. But Dorothy is my friend. 

The Ten Commandments (1956)
           Another annual event, this one church-approved. Everyone looks forward to the parting of the Red Sea. I look forward to it closing back up. I wouldn’t mind looking like Charlton Heston.  

Cabaret (1972)
           Holly’s parents love me. They make plans, how we’ll both go to Wheaton after high school, become missionaries and have lots of babies. Her father is some kind of film exec, brings home a screening copy of Cabaret. Their basement—wood paneling, overstuffed couches, recessed lights—reeks of hot greasy popcorn. It doesn’t take long for the room to get smaller, the couches less comfortable. When Liza Minelli dances with Michael York and Helmut Griem, I let go of Holly’s hand.

That Certain Summer (1972)
            A made-for-TV movie I watch when my parents are out. I love Hal Holbrook. The two men are lovers, but so cautious for the camera. I want them to kiss or hold hands. 

Dune Buddies (1978)
            I’ve known Aaron since we started Sunday School. He’s the only one I can talk to about what tears at me every day. He takes me to a seedy Jersey City theater for my first gay porno, to see how sick and depraved that life would be—a literal Scared Straight intervention. It isn’t the education he intended. 

Making Love (1982)
           Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean! Kind of corny. I cry my eyes out anyway in an empty theater. I can see myself married to Kate Jackson, making dates with guys behind her back. I write Holly from San Diego. 

Longtime Companion (1989)
            Not exactly a date flick, but Estéban has heard good things. It’s devastating. And still we’re not careful. My faith feels like excuses for an abusive spouse. I find a church that doesn’t believe He has sent a plague.  

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)
           The first film I see with my parents after I move back from California, alone. They’re disgusted by the gay couple. Not a word about Robin Williams in drag. They pray for my soul. I want to pray for theirs. 

Philadelphia (1993)
           My friends aren’t sure I should see it, all things considered. But Antonio Banderas is just my type. The opera scene swells and crushes my heart: The place that cradled me is burning. I bring sorrow to those who love me. We sob and hug in the parking lot.  

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
           Dad: Why does Hugh Grant have to say the f-word so much?
           Me: That’s what bothered you? Not that Andie McDowell slept with like thirty-four guys?
           Mom: That gay character had no right to mourn his partner like that.
           Me: Whatever.

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Bill Merklee’s work has appeared in Cabinet of Heed, Flash Flood Journal, Ellipsis, Bending Genres, X-R-A-Y, Ghost Parachute, Gravel, Columbia Journal, and the HIV Here & Now project. He lives in New Jersey. Occasional tweets @bmerklee.

THE MAGIC OF SPICES — SUDHA BALAGOPAL

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Mother says cinnamon can improve ovarian function. She mixes me a drink of hot, dust-brown liquid, sprinkles the powdered spice on my oatmeal in the morning and on my yogurt at night. I ask if she knows that if it's not Ceylon cinnamon, the bark is useless.

I don't tell her it's more than my organs that need help.

My husband gripes that the house smells like a cheap, fast-food restaurant.

Mother says the compound curcumin in turmeric is a potent antioxidant that can dissolve uterine fibroids. She stirs turmeric into curries, into stews, and into my cup of warm milk. I ask why anyone would consume such a hideous rhizome with its bulbous shape and bumpy joints.

I don't tell her there's an aching void in my lower abdomen, day and night.

My husband laments that our white kitchen counters show ugly yellow stains.

Mother says chili powder can aid the reproductive system. She places liberal amounts in soups, pastas, and sandwiches. I ask her how she doesn't know that, technically, chili peppers are a fruit and cause heartburn in those susceptible.

I don't tell her my heart's aflame without the chilies.

My husband protests that spicy foods make his eyes water, his nose run.

Mother says I should chew two cloves of garlic, a well-known aphrodisiac, every day. She instructs me to believe, to swallow the garlic, and wait. I ask her why she calls garlic a spice when it's a member of the lily family.

I don't tell her it's foolish to believe in magic.

My husband grumbles about bad odor, increases the distance between us.

Mother says ginger will help keep my eggs safe, repair tissue, increase blood flow, and remove toxins. I ask why she needs both turmeric and ginger, each more ghastly than the other.

I don't tell her that none of her attempts matter, nature cannot knit this.

The essence of ginger chai, gingersnap cookies, and ginger stir fry wafts through my clothes, past my skin, into my arid, starved cells.

My husband doesn't complain anymore. He has stopped eating at home.

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Sudha Balagopal's recent short fiction appears in Smokelong Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine, Pidgeonholes and Milk Candy Review among other journals. She is the author of a novel, A New Dawn. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction and is listed in the Wigleaf Top 50, 2019.