We were hitchhiking to Montana from Rhode Island, and after a few short rides with backwoods psycho-types, Cal and I got lucky. We got picked up by a guy in a big trailer truck who was going all the way to Chicago. His name was Sylvester, and he looked kind of like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. He was a former Black Panther. At least that’s what he told us. And he had Polaroid photographs of his various “ladies” from around the country all taped to the dashboard. They were all naked in the photos. Sylvester said the pictures kept him awake and focused while he drove. And he smoked a good deal of the pot we had brought along with us. He chain-smoked joints the way my Aunt Sophie smoked Winstons. Every half hour or so Sylvester would just smile and say, “Whyn’t you twist up another one of those fatties for us.” But, he was a good storyteller, and the miles flew by. Then, about three or four in the morning, Sylvester …

She felt a promising sensation reach for her core and opened her dark eyes with soft anticipation. She found his blue eyes not gazing into hers but into the upper corner of the room, up over her left shoulder, with a look of something like boredom mixed with purposeful indifference. All sensation fled. Later, alone, she sometimes wondered if it would have been better to simply have kept her eyes closed. Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her poetry and short prose are widely published in literary magazines. Recent book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers and a novel, Soleil Madera.

Her English teacher called her Mousy, perhaps because she often wore a wooden mouse pin with red rhinestone eyes and a thin leather strip for a tail. She didn’t mind. The pin had been her mother’s idea of adorable. There was a lot of confusion in those days. Roman soldiers didn’t particularly float her boat, for instance. All the same, she wrote a story about two of them once, and to her enormous surprise, her teacher, a former Jesuit priest, now happily married to a former nun and teaching at her Lutheran all-girls school, was so impressed with her story, he asked if he could have it. She was flattered and said of course and handed over her exercise book, almost empty otherwise. Since she wasn’t interested in Roman soldiers in the first place and soon couldn’t remember what she had written, she was hardly going to miss the story. Not long afterwards, the school decided to let the teacher go. Some of his views were considered too radical for an all-girls school. This in …

Leaving school at fifteen was a mistake that I couldn’t undo. The teachers had predicted I’d fail every subject I was set to take and my theory was it was better to drop-out early than waste the next few months of my life working towards failure. I spent the following few months in bed watching bad TV shows and lounging around in my pajamas well into the afternoon. It was a perfect time and knowing that I’d somehow managed to dodge hour after hour of miserably dull school classes in exchange for these heavenly duvet days felt like I’d easily made the best decision of my life. It came to a tragic end in July. Around two days after my sixteenth birthday when my Mum came home after work and told me to sit down, she said, ‘You can go back to school or you can get a job,’ I slumped there in dull despair while she continued, ‘what you can’t do is lay around here playing on the computer all day.’ When she finished …

We’re getting rid of my grandparents’ cat, Julius. And when I say we, read my girlfriend, Sarah. After grandpa died, the family entrusted Julius to me, but his favorite game deals with biting the toes of anyone passing by. Sarah’s his usual target because her signature sandals leave her exposed, but he’s tagged my bare feet, too. “We can’t have people over,” Sarah says. News flash, we never had people over before the cat. Yet, her argument wins, and now, the animal rescue center appears on a hill behind a steel mill. The road isn’t even fully paved. The car’s tires bounce over every hole in the gravel path that circles up to the concrete pad in front of the building with a worn awning and tinted double doors. The cat crawls around the fabric crate my grandparents bought for him. His paws press through the bottom and into my lap as the whole car shakes, and I lift the container so that his claws don’t pick at my skin. My grandparents used to always …

We were halfway between McMinnville and Lincoln City when the smell of shit overwhelmed us. It was overwhelming, this smell of shit, when the windows were up more than when they were down. The smell was potent enough to cover twenty years of stale cigarette smoke in the car. It was strong enough to cover the smell that had been affecting us negatively, the smell coming from the trunk. “Fertilizer,” I said. “I guess.” He fussed with the radio’s dial. We picked up a preacher’s sermon and then a talk radio station. “I don’t think I’ve listened to AM radio even once in my life,” I said. “It’s an old car,” Bobby said. “We can walk back from Newport,” I said. “Shouldn’t take too long.” “Four, five days,” Bobby said. He sighed. “I don’t want to do that.” “I don’t really want to either,” I said. It was true, I didn’t even want to walk from my apartment on 23rd Ave to the bar on 17th when Bobby called. It’s not that I’m lazy, it …

It’s your fault we can’t grow old together. I heard you on the radio. If only it had been a production from the golden age! I could have known better. You would have been dead and buried before I heard you. Damn this radio play renaissance that brought you into my living room. It isn’t fair. You sounded young and beautiful. You are beautiful, you know. People probably used to tell you that more often. I imagine now you get called distinguished. Or statuesque, maybe. You’ve had four husbands but I don’t think you’re fickle. All of your marriages lasted years and years and here I am, barely old enough to vote. It isn’t all your fault, but can’t you see why I felt tricked? You sound a quarter of your age! I don’t know what I’d have done if you were as young as the character you played in that production. Propose, I suppose. Though it probably wouldn’t have worked. Once I found your picture online and realized I had been deceived I wavered. …

I think back to falling out that window and sneaking across the open field. Maybe I fell, maybe he did. His golden retriever followed us barking too loudly and we shushed him, as we lit our way with our small red flashlight and parted tall yellow grass which seemed above our heads, but I’m sure was not. After parting the seas, we turned out the light, and took off our pajamas, left only in our under-clothes, so recently stripped of Batman and Wonder Woman emblems. The dark was protective, but still we ran and jumped into the obscurity of the lake. It seemed a lake then, now it seems like a pond, expanding or retracting by the rhythm of summer showers. But we whispered Marco Polo, and tried not to laugh. The dog waded next to us, knowing that we were naïve and alone. There were lights shining. At first we thought they were fireflies, out past their curfew, but then a flame appeared on the water. It did not evaporate, but magnified, and he …

It was intermission and I was descending the stairs from the theatre balcony when I saw her, which was remarkable considering the crush of people in the lobby. After the initial shock, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to say hello or hide in the men’s room until the lights dimmed and the play resumed. I had decided on the latter when she looked up, smiled and twenty years melted away. She’d never been a beauty, but just as age can diminish an attractive woman, it had enhanced her. She walked toward me, piercing eyes, always her best feature, never leaving mine. As in the past, I was enveloped by her presence, my awkwardness countered by her warmth and charm. Though I never understood why, she’d always loved me more than I loved her, and I had basked in the high opinion she held of me. She was attending the performance with her niece. I was there to write a review for an online theatre magazine. She’d heard my wife had died several years ago …

“He acts like a robot,” she thinks. It’s a warm evening in the outdoor area of a nice restaurant. His strong tattooed arms are lying on the table, her black curls are contrasting with her red lipstick. She could fall in love with his slow but steady movements or the depth of his voice, but she doesn’t notice it. She tries to look right under the skin to see all the wires and cables, to find the metal heart pumping electricity behind them. The one with a script inside that repeats in a circle: work, gym, home, friends. Stability. “A bad date,” he thinks, looking at her thin hands with numerous bracelets. “It feels like she’s not alive at all. As if she’s not here, but lost in her ideas about higher matters, in philosophical theories, in art-house movies and books.” “Most people are NPCs,” says a young artist in worn jeans as he walks on the opposite side of the street. “They live in a culture of consumption. Either of goods or of other …

Imagine you were strong. Powerful. Majestic. You can wield your strength naturally, as if it is first nature. Your nature. Your muscles bulge under the thick, leathery skin, intimidating and threatening. Your skin is baked red, soft under the softest of touch, hard under pressure with a pattern of Savannah desert with cracks that move with you. You’re decorated with a leather mohawk down your spine from the top of your head to the tip of your tail. Each triangle spike represents all the times others preyed on you; each spike is a defense mechanism against anyone who dares do it again. The tail is heavy but easy to move. Imagine a snout with nostrils open to sniff out anything. Or deep green eyes beautifully surrounded by thick black lashes, eyes that should have been fiercely orange-red. Your breath is hot enough to burn enemies to a crisp. Imagine being part of a fantasy. A good, beloved fantasy. An admired myth. Imagine people believing you’re part of an old past. Fantasy novels in the middle …

Warmth from the previous shopper’s hands makes me shiver with repulsion as I clang a trolley loose from the line. How can the handle still be warm anyway; the shop is as good as empty this early on a Sunday morning. Although the virus was long gone I dig into my handbag for a Wettie and wipe the trolley handle and my hands clean. The vastness of B&Q swallows me up and I zig-zag past store front displays of special offers all clamouring for attention. A huge advertising photo of a paint-splashed couple decorating their bedroom as if it were the most joyous act in the world, contrasts starkly with my domestic life. Lisa and I had been a team like that. Once. The ballcock valve had been leaking in our en-suite toilet for days, but my partner, Lisa, refused to fix it claiming that Sunday is a day of rest. Lisa worked as a plumber so her inaction was galling. Earlier that morning, deciding to fix it myself with the help of a YouTube …

I’m not exactly sure what to make of it, to be honest. Sprawled out in front of me lies some sort of “creature”, if I can even call it that. It has a face that might almost look human under a certain light, but just about everything else is foreign and otherworldly: the pondweed hair, the spiny protrusions on its back, the hummingbird-green scales covering most of its body. The most fascinating part of the specimen has to be the fishlike tail that lies where its legs should be, stained with saltwater and tinted a dark cerulean. “And you said you found it like this?” I ask Luca, but he stares at the ground and fidgets with the hem of his raincoat. In a different world, I probably would have told my younger brother some sort of excuse when he asked to explore the beach this late — something about the impending storm, something about how dangerous the ocean can be at night — just so I wouldn’t have gotten into this dreamlike mess. Unfortunately, …

He reads—“New… Naïve… Art”—and snorts. “The hell?” Whenever my father inhabits his Andy Warhol mode, he detests the museum’s humble collections. There had been a Degas exhibit here last year and a Rembrandt one before that, but the local sculpture filling the spaces left by these normally un-gettable exhibits draws only sucks and blows. “It means artists who work outside the lines,” I answer. “Amateur hour with clay.” He strokes a phallic-looking vase. “Hope the divorcée who made this didn’t quit her day job.” “What makes you think a woman sculpted it?” He points to the placard below the clay stalk. “Says here first name’s Leslie.” “Could just as easily be a man. Leslie Nielsen?” “Doesn’t count.” Andy is my father’s favorite dead artist to play. He sounds like a sewer-mouthed Socrates sizing up everything that ever frustrated him: bills, bosses, women, daughters who didn’t know what they were until they weren’t anymore. “Can’t you just appreciate the time it took this person to create that?” I cannot bring my father to museums anymore without …

One bright spring afternoon, my mother convinced my stubborn father to see the doctor. The insomnia, which had blighted much of his adolescence, had returned with a vengeance, and the sleep-deprivation was starting to give him throbbing headaches. Occasionally, the pain was so severe that he would retire to his bedroom and lie there in the absolute darkness. Something had to be done. Chaperoned by my mother, he returned from the appointment as the daylight was starting to fade. “It’s not good news,” he said, slumping down in his armchair. “I’ll just sit down for a moment.’ But, once he was down, we couldn’t lift him back up and we had to summon Dicken from next-door to help lug him upstairs, like hoisting a six-foot-tall bag of cement. After that, his legs were too weak, so in bed he stayed. Well-wishers came to the house in a relentless stream, bringing Tupperware filled with hearty, homecooked meals. But, despite their generous starchy offerings, my father’s strength declined, and his work-hardened hands lay atop the bedsheets, turning …

The angel sat on my left shoulder. The devil sat on my right. Both whispered and cooed and prodded and cajoled. Voices like harps and kettle drums appealed to my finer and baser instincts. Calls to action and pleas to turn aside. Would I take the easy path or the turbulent stream? Two roads diverged in my kitchen before I’d even had my first cup of coffee. Or herbal tea. I couldn’t take the constant bickering between the two of them or the demands and suggestions they were making of me. Finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I tilted my head to the left until I was eye to eye with the angel. She stood barely four inches tall and appeared just as anyone would expect her to, as if she’d stepped out of some religious painting, a living piece of bondieuserie. I asked her, “Isn’t that my sinister side?” The devil on my right cursed out loud. The angel shrank back and grew quiet. First, her face turned red with embarrassment. Then …

Helicopters fly over Portland Harbor. It’s late. A warm summer night in July; and full of flies. The bugs attack the day’s catch and are swatted away by swollen hands. Two weathered Americans carry a body wrapped in blue tarp from cold storage. The first mate trips on his boots, slips his grip, and drops the torso. “Careful, Josh! Christ,” hisses the captain. “That’s my bad,” says Josh, wiping his hands on a pair of overalls. “Bend with your knees, not your back,” says the captain. Josh nods, mindful of his form, and drops into a squat. They count three seconds in silence then haul the corpse up again and carry it to the stern. It reminds Josh of deadlifting at the gym. “What d’you think this one did?” he says. “Same thing they all do,” says the captain. “Piss off the Company.” They chuck the body into the sea, and in the same motion, the captain falls against the gunwale, out of breath. He stares at the black water until his first mate comes …

“Oh it’s a real one!” She exclaims, her wide eyes dancing about the nail salon, looking at but not really seeing the other customers. I grab her wrists as they flutter about, like caged birds, and the two Asian women remove her shoes and dip her gnarled feet into the little tub of warm water. Her toes are curled like knobs of ginger. The warmth calms her. Lou’s eyes begin to slide shut, and she leans her head towards me. “This place is much nicer than that other one,” she whispers loudly, and I know what she’s talking about. I nod, hoping she’ll leave it at that. “Remember, Jessie? Remember that fat woman sitting beside me?” “Yeah, Lou. How’s the water now? Does it feel good?” “Oh Jessie she was so fat. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Like a sausage fit to burst!” She does make me laugh sometimes. “Relax Lou,” I say. Suddenly she sits up straight. “But who’s in there?” She cocks her head, staring at the wall, and points a …

They sit at opposite ends of the kitchen table, the raw end of an argument stuck in their throats. Speechless. Depleted. Defeated. Thirty-three years of marriage and no place left to go. Outside the desert simmers in a broiling heat. There seems no escape. No way in. No way out. Trapped by their circumstances, they sit emmeshed in the hum of air conditioning and accumulated detritus of over three decades married. My god, how they feasted on each other in those early days! Starved now for affection. Compassion. Comprehension. They wait in their chrome and black-marble kitchen, time elongating. The jagged edges of their narrative have inflicted new and deeper wounds—the lifeblood of their relationship seeping away. Neither able or willing to stop the bleeding. Anymore. This latest confrontation the net result of so many others. It’s clear, they face a future entirely divorced from the one to which they pledged. How? How did they devolve from elation to desolation? How did they come to be languishing in their emotional desert where nothing thrived anymore? …

Me Why can’t I have time in your space? Why must I stand outside looking in through frosted glass? You enter me. Greedily. Devouring. Taking. I reach, but your air ices. You It’s a whirr. A sound that I swat away like mosquitoes hissing. A chilled breeze. An apparition without form. Me My ribs are cracking in your vacuum. This want feels skeletal, slithering through me like lichen, sun starved. Where is your warmth? Touch? Why does this always happen, to me. Connections that fray like severed synapses. Electricity that sizzles then deadens, narcotized? You What does this person want? Always. Clinging. Cloying. Clawing. You’re cacti, and my skin is a rash. No. Not cacti. Too assertive. You’re a pale rose, six days past the sell-by-date, blackening. Steve Gerson, an Emeritus English Professor from the Midwest, writes poetry and flash about life’s dissonance. He has published in Short Beasts, Panoplyzine, Crack the Spine, Decadent Review, Vermilion, In Parentheses, Wingless Dreamer, Big Bend Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell, and more, plus his chapbooks Once Planed Straight; Viral; …

We’d sit in the diner for Sunday suppers, surrounded by grease fire and bellowed orders for fried chicken and giblet gravy. Grandpa held court at the head of our table, like Ezekiel, prophesizing about exile. “I’ve seen it all, boys, and it ain’t pretty, believe me All Mighty, but we got us some hope, I tell you,” crossing his heart, him in his rolled-up dress shirt, starched as stiff as the gospel, as holey as Palm Sunday. With his dinner fork held aloft as a scepter, he’d preach forgiveness from Colossians 3:13, saying in hushed tones over his grits, “Bear with each other, boys, and forgive one another, even if you’ve got some damned grievance, ya hear?” Or he’d lash out at sinners (forgetting all about forgiveness, I guess). “You remember your Psalms, like 145:20, where the Lord says He’ll destroy them wicked ones,” and gramps would wipe the waffle syrup off his whiskers. I’d see travelers in the diner come and go like calendar pages turning, like pilgrims to a shrine. They’d nurse a …

“You brought me toothpaste?” “Yeah. It could have been worse.” “Than toothpaste?” Gail closes her mouth. The party starts in an hour and she hasn’t started getting ready. Evan watches her rub her tongue across her teeth. Maybe she hasn’t brushed her teeth yet, he thinks. Gail turns her head. Her blonde hair edges over her shoulders. She opens her mouth and inserts a fingernail. “Everyone will be here in an hour.” “I know, I’ll, I’ll.” “You’ll take the toothpaste to the bathroom. I know I’m only turning thirty-six, but Evan, toothpaste?” Evan drags himself into the living room, down the hallway and into the bathroom. He places the tube on the sink and looks at himself in the mirror. He doesn’t bother to turn the light on so the shadows and the guilt make him look old. Haggard. Archaic. He turned thirty-three last month. Gail found an old fountain pen for him that he loves and uses every day. He closes his laptop just to use the pen. He throws his right hand to …

Harry lifted his head and pointed his chin at the face of the Ferté-sous-Jourre monument. The imposing white Massangis limestone commanded attention in the French town square. It resembled a three-panelled photo frame, its only images letters of sorrow. It glowed peach with the going down of the sun. There was a jolt in his chest when he discovered the name. It was towards the top of the right-hand column, beside a rust-coloured stain. He laughed, tear-like. In that moment of recognition, he felt an overwhelming need to share the story of John Cokley. To tell with pride and sadness how on the first day of the Great War, during the first engagement with the enemy at Mons, his great-grandfather was missing, presumed….by two o’clock on an August afternoon by the locks along the Mons-Condé canal. Only his surviving comrades would be protected by the Angels of Mons. But he was alone on grey cold steps. Instead, he bowed in reverence and offered up a prayer, his gaze falling upon the area of his body …

Ophelia held both hands in a straight line beneath her chin and tilted her head slightly to the left. It was her thirteenth or fourteenth time running through her version of the new TikTok dance she was about to post. The lengthy rehearsal was necessary. Ophelia was an insane perfectionist about all things social media, from the dance moves to the fit. And today’s fit was, indeed, fire. She wore a pair of peach Forever 21 biker shorts hiked up to accentuate her waist and lift her butt, plus a silver tri-back sports bra that held everything in just right. Ophelia pictured the comments she was going to get and caught her breath. Calm down. One more time through the choreography and she’d be good to go. Ophelia mouthed the words to “Sequin Baby” as she practiced in front of her iPhone which sat in silent appraisal on the dresser. After a few false starts, she tapped the screen to begin the performance for real. This time she captured the fluid, flirty flow she’d been …

[For Jean-Luc Godard] They were going to lock me up. I said, ‘Fuck it.’ It didn’t make any difference to me. I’d been locked up on the outside this whole time too. They didn’t know it—but I knew it. It was burned in me like a swastika tattoo, like a concentration-camp serial number, same difference. The prisons were moving outward just as the continents had lost their land masses and turned into islands. And still it wasn’t yet Christmas. This is 2000-plus years later from something but I’m wearing a gray slim-fit suit. I’ve got a Fedora on my head. I smoke cigarettes constantly and let them burn up my throat and lungs. I’m planning an early escape. It’s my modus operandi—to breathe less than your average sub, your average subhuman as I’ve been cast. Who cast me? It doesn’t matter. It’s not my lot to complain. I’m leaving town today. I’m trying to leave town. I may even go to Rome but don’t let that get out. These fuckers will follow me everywhere. Anyway …