2021 AWARD NOMINATIONS

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NO SUBMISSIONS — NOVEMBER 2021

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Some news, dear CHEAP POP readers:

We will NOT be open for subs this November 2021. Our team needs some time to center. We're sorry to disappoint, but hope you understand.

We'll be back in 2022 and can't WAIT to read your work then.

In the meantime, we’ll still have NEW stories ALL NOVEMBER long. Get hyped.

And if you missed our 2021 stories, now’s the time to catch back up!

Thanks for all your continued support. ♡♡♡

COUNTING DOWN — SARAH FANNON

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I didn’t expect to see so many sheep when I died. There’s a sheep for every night I couldn’t get to sleep and counted them on my fingers instead of in my head, unfurling and refurling my hands in the dark. In my bedroom, I would imagine the sheep inverted, white faces and black fleece just for the hell of it. They didn’t hop fences but winked into existence one by one and bunched together on my rug. It never really lulled me to rest. I made them too mesmerizing, and it pushed me farther from sleep’s reach. But I liked their company. 
           I had a boyfriend once who told me I made noises in my sleep, not snoring or gibberish, but a strange animal sound. When I asked if it was like a sheep baa, he frowned at the strangeness of how I’d guessed it, how I’d made him recognize something he hadn’t been able to place for weeks. You know what, he said, I think you’re right. He looked at me differently after that, as if afraid I would leave wool in the shower drain.
           Now the sheep are all staring at where I’ve materialized in front of them, like they are the humans in a car waiting for a bundle of lambs to cross the street and I am the offending animal slowing them down because I don’t know what streets or cars or time is, just what it means to walk from one place to another. But there is nowhere to go for any of us here in this borderless black space like a closed mouth. It is only me, a young woman dead from some accident I can remember about as well as a dream, and all the sleep-sheep I’ve ever conjured, lined on top of each other like monstrous teeth.
           I’ve had trouble sleeping my whole life and always suspected it wasn’t disorder but fear of death so potent it turned sleep to enemy, induced a primal dread that armed my body against the rising tide of evening. I tricked myself into thinking I could stockpile time if I stayed awake, blinking at fabricated sheep that didn’t blink back at me.
           And now they are all here with me at the end, as if they’ve pulled me into existence for their bedtime. The sheep watch me with glowing eyes that are fully black and mask their rectangular pupils. Their gaze is upsetting and comforting at once, as it's better to be seen than to be alone. But I am too afraid to touch them and find they are just made of more darkness.

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Sarah Fannon is a graduate of George Washington University's Honors English and Creative Writing program and she continues to live in the DC area. Her work is featured or forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Dark Moon Digest, Diabolical Plots, Divination Hollow Reviews, The NoSleep Podcast, and others. You can find her on Twitter @SarahJFannon, Instagram @ampersarah, and online at www.sarahfannon.com

NEW MEXICO — LESLIE WALKER TRAHAN

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We’re at a stoplight when I spot the bird nesting on top of a street sign, it’s made its home out of sticks and leaves but also straws and scraps of paper, and I wonder if they have birds like this in the desert, I want to ask you, but you’re still talking about your uncle in New Mexico, saying he was the only one who had ever stood up to your dad before you did yesterday, and you know he’ll help you get a job, and I can finish school and get a job, too, when I’m ready, when the baby’s ready, then you smile at me and say, “We’ll work it out once we get to New Mexico,” and I remember what you said yesterday on the street outside my house, Dad and Gayle’s window already gone dark—“Maybe it won’t be perfect, maybe we won’t get it right at all”—and that feeling starts up again, like someone turned the knob on the faucet too far and the whole thing broke off, and I think of Gayle at the kitchen table last week, tapping her red fingernails on a coffee cup, saying, “I guess you’re more like your mother than we thought,” with Dad looking out the window like the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were all three in the backyard waving a sign with his name on it, then the light changes, and I point to the bird’s nest and say, “look,” but the bird is gone now, and without the bird, the nest doesn't look like anything, just a bunch of trash on top of a street sign, then the car jerks forward, and you’re on about your uncle again, talking like our future is sealed up in a little package with a bow on it, already in the mail on its way to New Mexico, so I lean my head back and close my eyes, and I listen to the sound of your voice, and I listen to the sound of the wind rushing against the car, and I think of the desert, and I think of New Mexico, I’ve never been but I’ve seen pictures, I think of mountains punching upward, I think of earth whittled out of rock, I think of long curtains of sky, sand as white as spilled milk.

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Leslie Walker Trahan’s stories have been featured in New Delta Review, The Forge, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other publications. She lives in Austin, Texas. You can find her online at lesliewtrahan.com and on Twitter @lesliewtrahan.

SEAR — AMY WANG

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The stickiness of a six-table Korean barbeque restaurant is the only token of small-town solemnity that you can still hold onto, twenty years after you first moved away from home. The menu, clinging to your fingers as you flag down the waitress. The air, as you take deep breaths and wait for your father to come out of the restroom, where he has spent the last thirty minutes sitting in a daze. You tear the napkins into shreds, watch the salt flutter over the knots you’ve tied in the table cloth.
           In the booth where your father’s shadow sits down to eat, the smell of burnt meat hangs sullen. As he picks at the chicken, you make a home of the silence in his throat, coaxing out his words and catching them before they can fall. No, baba. You cannot eat the moon. No, baba. You cannot fist my name and press it to your mouth,  if only because the syllables feel foreign as they go down. No baba. Don’t touch that. You’ll burn your fingers. Chives, on table. Heat, caressing cheek. This place is familiar in all the wrong ways. Halfway through the meal you smile at your father’s attempts to pick up the shrimp with both hands and remember that once, he used to have control over all of his fingers. Once, when he still remembered how to, the two of you would sear teriyaki together, and laugh at the puns in the fortune cookies. 
           Tongs in weathered knuckles. Words rolling gingerly between teeth and tongue. As you eat, the taste of cast iron and burnt chopsticks is tender, like eyelids after sleep. Like the way his full name sounds as you say it to the lady at the front desk of the nursing home when you drop him off. Before she leads him away, you smile at him and he smiles at you, and his hand feels like the rind of an orange in yours as you let go of it.
           In the parking lot, you come to a conclusion. Yes, you might be raw. But at least you’re not undercooked. This is not real barbecue, was what he said the first time you went to that restaurant together. Yes, you cannot speak your mother tongue, but at least you’re assimilated. Not real barbecue, but the best you can offer. The best you could do, on your own.

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Amy Wang is a Chinese-American writer from California. Her poetry and fiction have been published in X-R-A-Y Lit, perhappened, Twin Pies Literary, and elsewhere. A high school sophomore, she enjoys reading and crying over fanfiction.

HUNTING KNIFE — LISA MICHELLE MOORE

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My father shows us how to do his knife trick. He moves the blade between each of his fingers, stabbing the table, faster and faster until he nicks the webbing between his thumb and pointer finger with the tip. It’s not a trick. He slurs and looks at us with slow eyes. It’s a game. Who can go the longest without stopping? Blood runs out of his skin, but he keeps playing. My brother puts his fingers on the sun-bleached picnic table. Now let me try. I look back at the kitchen window, but it’s empty. Nah, Dad finally says. This isn’t for kids. And then his arm slips and he spills his bottle of beer over our hands.
           My brother is arms-deep in the deer’s chest. Its hindquarters are strung up from the ceiling, dangling like wind chimes. I stand on the periphery of the garage, smelling blood, gasoline, whisky. The dog smells it too, and she scratches against the door, utterly ignored. My brother lifts out the deer's heart and passes it to Dad. Dad drops the smooth dark muscle into a plastic bag. Dad’s friend yells get the hunter here a drink and my dad nods. They laugh and hand my brother a glass of Crown Royal. He cleans the bloody knife blade with a paper towel, his fingers shaking.           
           Later, they find my brother’s truck parked off an oil road, out where he used to hunt. His ex-wife sends us the stuff left behind in his last apartment. Arranged in a box on his bed. His old compass, Grandpa’s broken watch, Dad’s hunting knife. Dad sits alone with it in the backyard. I call my mother every Sunday now. Sometimes I watch him through the kitchen window. Just so he’s not alone out there.

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Lisa Michelle Moore is a healthcare provider and writer living on the Canadian Prairies. Her poetry and prose has appeared in The Cold Mountain Review, The Quarantine Review, The Daily Drunk and the forthcoming Essential Voices anthology from University of West Virginia Press.

THE HERO YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR — MAX HIPP

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If you loved yourself you would’ve left this one-trick, podunk town. If you loved yourself, you’d have asked for a raise at the meatpacking plant years ago, you wouldn’t have paid your husband Harry’s credit card bills until yours maxed out, and he wouldn’t be rutting with your best friend, Mona.

Loving yourself, Be the Hero You’ve Been Waiting For says, is the path to self-actualization. Loving yourself means saying sorry less and no more. Love yourself because your parents couldn’t love themselves, because if they had, you’d know how, but instead, the world shuts freezer-tight against forty-year-olds who don’t love themselves. Love yourself the way your dog, Mitchum, loves his woobie.

If you love yourself, take your father’s Colt Police Special and search motel parking lots for Harry’s blue El Camino, the back of which y’all used to pad with blankets to watch meteor showers, the car he would wax every Saturday and say at night, “Rub my shoulders, Eva.” If you love yourself, find the El Camino under a lonely light in a quiet lot, slip hollow points headfirst into each chamber, smooth as his promises in your ear.

When you love yourself, put on makeup in the rearview, tease your new haircut, slide on the purple sandals. When you love yourself, snap down the walk to the only window with a light on and bang the door with your fist. When you love yourself, say, “Harry? Mona? We need to talk.” When you love yourself, feel the in-suck of the motel room door, smell the musty stench of them, hear the placating words from his cherubic face, Honey, it’s not and Sweetheart, don’t and tell him he’s the lowest snake that ever slithered.

Loving yourself means cocking the hammer and backing them onto the bed, slamming the door to revel in their sheet-white faces, how neither can beg for their lives without clearing their throats. Loving yourself means telling Mona she hates herself and that’s why her boyfriends are always married men. Loving yourself means remembering how cheap Harry is when it comes to his own money, lighting a Pall Mall and cuddling heat delicious in your lungs until he cusses about how they’ll charge him for smoking in the non-smoking room. Loving yourself, aim the pistol and say, “Harry, you’ve got to visualize the life you want. You’ve got to let go of self-defeating behaviors.”

Loving yourself is saying, “Stay in the room, or eat sweet lead.” Loving yourself is opening the curtains so they can watch you crank his El Camino with your key, aiming it downhill toward the trees at the end of the motel property. Loving yourself is popping it in neutral and watching it crash into the ditch filled with riprap and shopping carts. Loving yourself is leaning against your beater as they squirm in the motel room lamplight until they can’t take it anymore and turn it off.

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Max Hipp is a teacher, writer, and musician. His work is forthcoming in Janus Literary and Atticus Review.

SWARM — M.W. BROOKE

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Three days after my uncle died, flying ants poured from the mouth of our chimney-like rainwater from a gutter. They arrived with conviction that rivaled a plague of Egypt and burrowed into the golden shag carpet they might’ve mistaken for grass. Hundreds of iridescent wings shivered in the swarm. My brother and I took refuge on the couch. We pretended the floor was lava, teetering on the edges of chairs and end tables, giggling and screaming and itchy with the creeps. Dad knelt at the fireplace and coaxed a flame with old newspapers and splinters of too-green fatwood reserved for winter. Sour, pitchy smoke lifted from the kindling, thick like wool—a hopeful deterrent for any stragglers. He heaped on logs, waited for the fire to bite and start chewing, then tiptoed across the living room to open the windows and front door. Summer air stuffed with rain blew in. Dad scooped me and my brother up, an arm looped around each of our bellies, and carried us down the hallway. In our parents’ room, Mom was buried under sheets and a heavy duvet. I hadn't seen her since I found her crumpled and wailing on the kitchen floor with the landline receiver clutched to her chest. I didn't understand then, the shattering devastation of loss—what it meant to have a brother ripped away by the force of his own hand—but when Dad set us on the bed, instinct commanded me. I crawled to her, and my brother followed. We clung to her shape. In the morning, she rose from the bed with cobweb eyes, a blanket and grief hanging off her shoulders. I slipped my hand in hers and we shuffled into the living room. The fire was snuffed, the front door and windows still agape. The ants were gone, but their wings littered the carpet like shreds of tissue paper, abandoned as if their work was done.

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M.W. Brooke is a queer writer originally from the American Southwest, now living in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Atticus Review. She is currently on submission with her first novel and hard at work on her second.