Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 22

THE FINAL VICTORY OF LIEUTENANT GENERAL JOHN BELL HOOD, CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA, fiction by Thom Bassett

He kept the canvas tourniquet strap Canklin used to amputate his right leg at Chickamauga beneath the mattress of the twins’ crib. Anna saw him at night, leaning on the crutch, kept from his days of command, his right hand slipped through the crib slats, searching, stopping, his numb left hand laid on Otho’s rounded, rising and falling belly, the arm ruined at Gettysburg hanging there slack over the top bar.

He told her every time that everything was fine, to go back to bed. “I’m with my boys,” the disgraced ex-general said every time. “You’re still not well, Anna. Go back to bed.” She waited in the doorway until he slipped his hand from beneath the mattress to stand as straight as he could to look into the mirror hanging over the crib. “Good night.”

She was downstairs in the kitchen with the other one, trying to spoon some rice boiled to paste into him, when her husband trapped the wolves running wild and fiery in his son’s head. The fever had burned for days, the child wailing until his throat gave out, when he realized what had to be done. He watched Otho’s scarleted face, the child’s mouth wide, lips cracked, tongue white and foul-smelling, the dried snot bone yellow on his cheek. Then he knew: Wolves could be penned like lambs. You just had to get them where they couldn’t escape. Wolves to the slaughter, that’s what came next.

And there they were: the boy’s skull was like a cauldron burned dry. He could hear the bones in it crack and split from the heat. He could hear the wolves snap and snarl inside his boy’s brain. Saw furrows high up inside the child’s skull from wolves leaping to escape the white flames that burned all the blood to the surface of the child’s skin. They were there and they were his.

The general listened. Anna was singing to the other one. Be Thou my vision, Lord of my heart. Naught be all else to me save that Thou art. He licked his dry lips and reached beneath the mattress. They were his now.

He held the canvas strip in his teeth while he lifted the child’s head up. His hair was like scorched grass on the Texas plains he had chased Comanche over 20 years ago. He leaned awkwardly to his left, dangling his usless arm that now had a use down by the child’s head. He tugged at it with his right hand until the child’s head rested on his left wrist.

There was enough space between the bent neck and mattress to slide the strap through. He worked the strap over the pudgy throat and into the buckle. Pulled the strap until the buckle pressed into the child’s throat and lifted his chin. The boy’s eyes tightened, relaxed. He was still asleep.

He’d kept the screw key in his pocket since the war ended. He took it out and slipped it into the threaded hole in the middle of the buckle. He turned it, lowering the fitted horizontal bar set into the buckle against the strap. He turned it more and the wolves scrabbled furiously for escape.

The day before he had asked Anna if she had ever seen a victim of yellow jack. She was from New Orleans, after all. But for once he was lucky, so he told her after she found the child that the fever could leave its victims’ eyes bloody, their tongues black and swollen from their mouths.

“It was so fast.”

“I know.”

“We can’t let anyone see at the funeral, John.”

“No one will come. They’re too much cowards to face me.”

He dreamed of wolves the morning of the funeral. Wolves pouring from the trenches ringing Atlanta that burning summer of 1864, endless wolves that swallow endless lines of cannon, endless miles of trains, endless wolves that kill and run on, Hood riding among them, whole again, his perfect commands like wind roaring in their ears and it was perfect obedience.

His wife told them it was his grief that kept him home. She had found him before dawn, sitting in a broken slat chair leaned against the open window, rain flickering silver, cooling his neck and face. I was dreaming of him, he said. For a long time she held his head against still-sore breasts. The late morning sun made the ground beneath his window steam after she left for the church.

Thom Bassett is from South Carolina but now lives in Rhode Island. He is a regular contributor to "Disunion," The New York Times' online series about the Civil War (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?s=%22thom+bassett%22). He also teaches writing, literature, and humanities courses at Bryant University and is at work on a novel.

Christmas with Nola, fiction by Joey Dean Hale

Greg had been seeing Nola for over a year and a half and he was pretty sure he loved her.  At least it felt like love with all the crazy sex and good times.  They were both twenty and friends with all the party people though she seemed to make friends more easily than he did and much of the time he felt as though some of those party people would just as soon he disappear so they could have Nola all to themselves.

Since she had migrated to Wabash City from up north Greg had never met her family but in December ‘87 he agreed to ride up and spend the holidays at her parents’ house.  He figured all they knew about the guy shacking up with their daughter was just that he was some longhaired broke-ass construction worker who grew up on a farm and was now laid-off for the winter so Greg thought it might be a good idea to pop in and change their impression.

The snow fell like feathers throughout their four hour trip and as they entered the east end of the northern Illinois town her Ford Escort seemed minute compared to the filthy white heaps plowed up twelve feet high on each corner and freezing solid under the evening streetlights.  He’d pictured Chicago but the population here equaled only a few hundred more than the largest town back in Stanford County, with bars and cafes and stores on one side of the main drag and a double train track running parallel on the other.

She had navigated the overloaded car up the snowy highways and over the black ice slicking the bridges and now she slid perfectly into a parking slot between a black Cadillac and a city pickup adorned with a yellow light and a wide iced-over snowblade out front.

Nola kissed his cheek and said, “We’ll check in here first.”

He killed his beer, dropping the empty bottle into a trash barrel buried halfway up in snow before following her into the bar and grill.  Country music and the bellows of loud patrons leaked out the door of the old brick building, out onto the frigid winter street.

“Nola!”  They all said and she laughed and whooped it up as Greg squeezed into an empty space at the bar and ordered a drink.

Two uncles and three aunts kissed and hugged her tightly.  Cousins and nieces and nephews and then, “Oh, there he is,” some of them said and a tall pot-bellied gentleman with slick black hair swaggered in from a side-room containing various flashing and ringing gambling machines.  He wore black slacks and a black western shirt with red roses embroidered on the pockets.  A turquoise bola and ostrich skin cowboy boots.

“Could’ve sworn I heard my little Nola out here, but that can’t be right cause she never comes to see her poor old daddy no more.”

“Timber!”  She rushed to him and they embraced, dancing for a moment to the twangy song on the jukebox.

“How’s my girl?”

“How do I look?”  Nola removed her heavy wool coat and hung it over the back of a barstool while her boyfriend from out of town did not.  The bar was plenty warm but recently several warts had blossomed across Greg’s fingers, tiny tender cauliflowers remaining bloody raw and aggravating between each digit, so now he was reluctant to remove his black gloves and he didn’t want to look like a fool wearing gloves and no coat.

“You’re getting skinny, Baby Girl,” Timber said.  “Don’t they have nothing to eat down there?”

Finally an uncle yelled, “Hey!  Who’s that young man there in the leather jacket?”

“Take off your coat and stay awhile,” an aunt cackled and Greg smiled and meekly toasted them with his whiskey glass.

“Daddy, I want to introduce you to somebody.”  Nola tugged her father over for an introduction.  “This is Greg.”

“Hands cold?”  Timber twitched his thin mustache as if he smelled something unpleasant.

“Not really.”  Greg smiled and pulled off the leather gloves, but then quickly slid out of the jacket and fumbled the gloves into a pocket so as to keep his hands busy and out of sight.  “Nice to finally meet you.”

“Call me Timber.”  He lit a cigarette and coughed deeply.  “So young man, just what are your intentions?”  And again the room erupted with laughter and already Greg wished he had stayed back home.

Someone said, “Ol Timber’ll line him out.”

Her old man patted him on the back.  “Anything you want in here, it’s taken care of.  You guys hungry?”

Nola said, “Thought we were all going over to Jackson’s for dinner?”

“That was the plan at one time, but sometime between when that plan was hatched and now, I seemed to have lost your mother.”  And again everyone yucked it up.

“She’s already over there,” one blond woman said.  “I’m Nola’s sister Rhonda, by the way.”  She smiled at Greg.

“How ya doing?” Greg said.  He thought she resembled Nola.  They were even dressed similar, with black jeans and fringy boots, plenty of make-up and big blond hair-sprayed hair.

They finished their drinks and drove down to Nola’s parents’ two-story house to unload their bags.  Nola said, “Me and you’ll be staying in my old room.”

“That’s cool,” he said.  “Figured I’d get stuck on the couch.”

“Oh no,” she said and smiled.

They rushed over to meet more family and friends at Jackson’s, another bar across town, decorated with poinsettias and holly and red and green ribbons and bows.  A long buffet table ran down the middle of the large room.  Some smaller groups of people sat at individual tables and booths though Nola’s family had arranged the long tables as if for a banquet.  Again Greg hovered over in a dark corner of the bar, his jacket draped over the back of the stool.

When Nola’s mother came over, a skeleton of a woman, Greg stood and she hugged him, not warmly but rather as if attempting to read his aura.  “I’m Del,” she said, snagging his hands in her boney clasp, burning his thumb with her cigarette.  He jerked back but did not escape her clutches and after she offered, “Sorry,” more as a formality than an apology, she inspected his fingers.  “Boy, you do have a mess of warts, don’t you?”

Surprised and a little embarrassed, he agreed.

She looked them over again.  “I see eleven, right?”

He had to calculate them himself before saying, “Yeah, I think so.”

“You just wait right here.”  Del crept over to her place at the table and dug through her bag, eventually extracting a small change purse.  She sifted through the coins until she sorted out eleven pennies then returned.  “Here,” she said, pressing the pennies into his palm.  “Now go outside somewhere and close your eyes and turn around three times, then throw those coins as far as you can.  But keep your eyes closed and don’t watch where they go.  And those warts will be gone in a couple weeks.  I guarantee it.”

He stared into her serious blue eyes, wondering if he was the target of some family prank.

“Hurry back in,” Del said.

At least it was an opportunity to get outside.  He walked around the corner of the building and slung the pennies in the manner directed.  Then he smoked half a joint before returning inside and taking a seat beside Nola at one of the long tables.  A mug of beer foamed beside his plate full of fried chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes and brown gravy.  A biscuit on the side.

Nola rolled her eyes.  “My cousin Robyn already fixed you a plate from the buffet.”

He scanned the room and found the only woman there better looking than Nola smiling back at him.  She was about their age, with short blond hair and plenty of cleavage to go around.  He smiled back and took a sip of his beer.

Nola’s family sucked their greasy fingers and ordered drink after drink, laughing at endless inside jokes.  Greg merely grinned and nodded throughout the meal and when the waitress asked if he’d like another beer he leaned into her and asked, “Can I get a whiskey and Coke instead?”

“You sure can, Hon.”

Later he leaned on the bar, drinking his drink and watching Nola work the room.  He wondered if she was related to all these guys she was hugging or if they were all friends from school or what.  Then he started wondering which ones she’d slept with.

One of Nola’s uncles trudged over with his tie loosened at the neck.  “What’s the name of that town you’re from again?”

“Wabash City,” Greg said.  “It’s about four hours south of here on the Little Wabash River.”

“Ain’t much to do there, is there?” the uncle said.

“Depends on what you like to do, I guess,” Greg said.

Nola’s cousin Robyn slipped up beside him.  “I say we blow this joint and hit some real bars.  What do you say, Greg?”

He said, “Whatever you and Nola want to do is cool with me.”

_____________

The next morning found Greg naked in a strange upstairs bedroom of an unfamiliar home, the cool northern Illinois air seeping in around the window frames.

Rhonda burst through the door and sat on the bed.  “Way to piss off the old man.”

“What happened?”  Greg rubbed his eyes and tried to focus.  Nola sat up in bed beside him.

“The spare room was all fixed up for you to stay in,” Rhonda said.  “But you slept in here with Daddy’s baby girl.  And now Timber’s not too happy.”  She laughed and punched him in the shoulder.

“We live together,” Nola said.

“That doesn’t matter to him.  This is his house.’”

“You told me to sleep in here with you.”

“Oh, it’s no big deal,” Nola told Greg.

“By the way, Stallion,” Rhonda said.  “You didn’t by any chance smoke any dope down in the basement bathroom last night, did you?”

He sifted through the hazy footage of the film that was the night before — after leaving Jackson’s Bar he and Nola and her cousin Robyn and another cousin — Frankie or Freddie or something — had cruised around — hitting the bars in nearby Pontiac — or Fairbury — or maybe some other town — he met some of Nola’s old friends — a few hot girls — a couple preppy guys he had considered punching in the face — he pounded several shots of bourbon — and cheap tequila — then after last call they returned here to a full house — the family still drinking and smoking cigarettes and yucking it up — cousins and uncles and aunts and a neighbor or two — his eyes drawn to Robyn’s body like a magnet — her funky hair — the laughter dancing across those lips — her top unbuttoned just enough — a few more drinks — Robyn had caught him burning a bowl in the basement bathroom and Greg had invited her in — locked the door.  Had he propped her on the sink and nuzzled her perfumed neck?  He vaguely remembered his hands under her shirt.  No bra.  Her tongue in his mouth.

“Must’ve been somebody else,” Greg said.

“I’ll bet it was Robyn smoking pot,” Rhonda said.

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Nola said.  “That little bitch was pissing me off last night anyway.”

Greg sat there naked beneath the covers and said nothing.

After Rhonda left the room Nola said, “I don’t care if you was getting high in the bathroom.  Just stay away from Robyn.  She’s a little whore.”

_____________

For the remainder of his stay Greg tried to lay low.  A couple times he slipped away to that tavern they’d gone into when they first arrived in town and no one but Nola even seemed to notice.  She’d track him down then sit at the bar for a couple drinks before giving him a ride back to her parents’ house.

On Christmas Day Greg watched from the sidelines as the family exchanged a multitude of gifts, slurping beer and wine, and since not one present was addressed to him he managed to avoid practically any conversation until Robyn smiled at him across the Christmas dinner table and said, “Maybe I’ll just come down there and see you sometime.”

“What’s the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Nola said.  She sat her glass down and wine slopped over the rim and stained the white table cloth.

“I was just thinking about coming down to visit you guys.”

“You little bitch.”  Nola scooted back from the table and took her wine with her when she left the room.

Robyn made a face and shrugged her shoulders but everyone else stared at Greg until he excused himself and went after Nola.

They had planned to stay the entire week but Nola decided to pack the next day.  And so they drove back home quietly, this time the sun blinding against the flat icy white fields, dead stalks and stubble protruding through the glare.  He awoke just as they crossed over the river bridge into his own hometown.  Gigantic snowflakes continued to fall, adding another layer to the preexisting drifts, the streets packed slick from previous traffic, though now vehicles were scarce under the streetlights.

Nola slid to a stop in their driveway and flung open her door.   “Don’t worry,” she said.  “You won’t ever have to go back.”

“Now what’s wrong?”

Greg followed her in the house, carrying his duffle bag, but Nola quickly disappeared into the bedroom.  He raised the thermostat until the furnace grinded into gear and the smell of gas saturated the room.  He removed his boots and clicked on the television, waiting for her to come out from the bedroom and ask if he had brought everything in from the car just so he could say something smartass like, “Well, I carried in all my presents.”  But then she didn’t come out.

He wanted to call his own parents but his phone had been temporarily disconnected.  Ice glazed the metal frames of the windows and the worn tan carpet felt cold against his sock feet.  He kicked back on the couch and covered his legs with a blanket, wondering what Nola’s family was talking about right now.

 

Joey Dean Hale is a writer and musician in the St. Louis area.  He received his MFA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and has published stories in several magazines, including Fried Chicken & Coffee, Roadside Fiction, and Octave Magazine which also has his song “High Noon” posted online.  In September 2012 he was the featured writer in Penduline Press.  Hale’s story “Access Closed” is included in the 2013 Bibliotekos Anthology — Puzzles of Faith and Patterns of Doubt.

Marshmallows, fiction by Jacob Knabb

It all started like this. We were in the kitchen microwaving marshmallows, watching ‘em grow into big lumpy blobs before they exploded, when Jeannie-Gaye came home. We were nuking marshmallows because we had already run out of grapes.  Grapes were better for obvious reasons. They’d shrivel down like raisins, then poof up until their skins got shiny and – BOOM – the grape was gone and the insides of the microwave was coated in mucus yellow guts and we’d laugh at that and pretend to blow our noses onto each other. I’ll admit it was pretty childish. Sometimes I’d even scrape grape goober loose and smear it onto Lana’s neck. Lana and I were born exactly one year apart, a fact that led some to call us Irish Twins, even though we aren’t Irish. Lana’s marshmallow made a really fizzy noise when it blew up and we fell onto the good linoleum laughing over it when suddenly Jeannie-Gaye stood over us. She crossed her arms and frowned. What is this obsession with the microwave you two have lately? You’re too old for this kind of shit and I don’t need more messes. Go outside. There’re more groceries to carry in.

It was kind of early in the afternoon for it to be that obvious that Jeannie-Gaye had been drinking and everything seemed funnier as I remember it. Here was our mommy, her lips were cracked and matted in rusty-colored lipstick, smelling like peppermint and talcum powder and gin, home from Kroger’s. And of course she’d caught us blowing things up in the microwave again. I looked at Lana and she laughed, squinting her eyes like she does, the tears just rolling out at the corners. Jeannie-Gaye stomped off. I jumped to my feet and ran after her. She was muttering shitty children. Because my life is what you’ve taken from me and nearly tipped forward when she threw the screen door open. I rushed past her and outside, leaping from the porch into the lawn.

It was January cold: the oaks across the street all caked in old snow. The exhaust from the 4-door BMW 535i that Mawmaw Adkins bought for daddy smelled almost sweet. I scooped four plastic bags with each hand and started scooting like a roadrunner to keep them stable, banging Jeannie-Gaye in the shin on the way back towards the house. She thought I did it on purpose and maybe I did. I made it into the kitchen before my face and neck were stinging too bad from the cold.

Lana was still on the floor by the microwave. I kind of hurled the bags at her and waddle stomped after them sumo-style.  She was laughing again when I crouched over her with my face about an inch from hers, smiling. Jeannie-Gaye must have crept up behind me and tapped my behind with the ball of her foot which pitched me forward. I guess it was bad luck, but I jumped to avoid crashing down on Lana and smacked into the space beneath the wall-mounted microwave.

I lay there for a second just trying to figure what had happened and then I stood back up. That was when Jeannie-Gaye saw the blood. Lana started crying. I didn’t feel anything that unusual, maybe a small strip of pain where the top of my head had scraped across the underside of the microwave. I ran my hand over my head and it was shining red and wet. I felt it then, blood running over my cheeks. It was quiet for a moment and then Lana sprang up and ran into the family room to get Daddy. While she was gone, Jeannie-Gaye pulled a dishtowel around my head and gripped me to her. Don’t cry, Randy. This is all just a freak accident.

I couldn’t remember the last time Jeannie-Gaye had hugged me and I started to cry. Lana still rested her head in Jeannie-Gaye’s lap sometimes on Sunday afternoons when Jeannie-Gaye would come down for breakfast. I’d watch as Jeannie-Gaye would run her fingers through Lana’s long brown hair, and talk with Daddy about strip mining and chemical run-off or some new store out by the Wal-Mart on Corridor G. But she and I weren’t close like that and hadn’t been for some time and I mostly just wished I could be anywhere else but home.

Daddy’s face was lined from where he’d been asleep on the living room carpet in front of the bigscreen. He clutched at me and then pulled back. I stopped crying. Daddy said take the towel off his head so I can see how bad it is. Jeannie-Gaye didn’t like that and told him it’s pretty gruesome, Kendal. You know that I’ve seen some blood in nursing school so I’m telling you it’s gonna leave a scar you might be able to see through his hair. I started crying again and Daddy grabbed me away from Jeannie-Gaye.  He guided me across the linoleum and sat me down at the table. Jeannie-Gaye talking over his shoulder all along about the nature of the injury, using medical terminology she’d learned in school. Daddy’s left eye drooped more than normal, the lid twitching. I think the adrenaline must have faded some by then because I started to feel a burning and it scared me.

The smell of Jeannie-Gaye’s drunkenness. Daddy pulled the towel off and placed his hands firmly over my ears, tilting my head forward to have a look. I felt real pain then for the first time, a stickiness tingling into a sharp line. His hands trembled and he turned away. There was blood on his fingers. I remembered the sink was full of dishes and wondered who would have to wash them. Daddy said to Jeannie-Gaye to go and start the car.

*****

Daddy had grown up without a father and that’s where our money came from. Pawpaw Adkins worked as a mechanic for Chessie Railroads and was electrocuted one day working on a train. That was bad enough but it didn’t end there. To make a long story short, the conductor didn’t see Pawpaw laying on the tracks. He started the engine up and the train sawed Pawpaw in half when it rolled out. I know this because Lana and I researched our grandfather’s death one summer. The story was gruesome and caught on in the local papers for a few months as the case played out. We went through everything we could find on microfilm at the Kanawha County Public Library where Jeannie-Gaye dropped us while she went drinking over in the Badlands. Mawmaw Adkins sued and it went to trial. Things got nasty. It came out that there were safety violations. Corrupt inspectors. The conductor had been drinking. In the end, they settled out of court and CSX paid out the nose to make it go away.

Daddy has the Sunday issue of Charleston Daily Mail framed and hanging over the fireplace in the living room. It’s an early one, a cover story. “Blackened Mechanic Cut Down by Drunken Conductor.” Daddy was born six months later. He got upset a few years back and took the frame down off the wall, opened it up and tore the paper in half, then re-framed the halves and hung them again and that’s how they are to this day.  That was his Christmas present to himself, he said, then he and Jeannie-Gaye drank a pitcher of spiced cider and made out on the couch.

But Daddy got religion and stopped drinking. He took to watching the God channel and making wheatgrass milkshakes, driving Mawmaw Adkins to her doctor’s appointments and Church Circle meetings. Jeannie-Gaye took to drinking when she thought no one was looking, stowing bottles around the house, and meeting some girls from her High School class at the Moose Club on weekends. Jeannie-Gaye had always been an alcoholic, but she never thought anyone knew that. Most nights we’d help Daddy carry her up to their bedroom. I’d hold the curtain back while he’d toss her into their four-post bed and we’d look at each other and never say anything. Lana’d take Jeannie-Gaye’s heels off and place them side-by-side at the foot of her vanity. On weekends, Daddy must have done it himself since we’d already be asleep when she’d get home, though that year I’d started staying over with my new High School friends as many weekends as possible and so I wasn’t around for it either way.

*****

Jeannie-Gaye and Lana had heaved the rest of the groceries from the seats of the BMW and scattered them all over the driveway. When Daddy pulled out, something popped beneath the tires. Lana looked back, shrieking about a 2-liter of Canada Dry gushing foam in the driveway.

We were quiet then and I closed my eyes and leaned against the car-door. Lana was examining my slash. I tried to breathe in and out as evenly as possible because I felt peaked all of the sudden. I kept feeling my cut while Lana watched. It was deep, and the outer layer of skin kind of flapped on one side. It felt like a wet sunburn. I realized that Daddy had been mumbling to Jeannie-Gaye in the front seat and I focused on his words as he told her that this had gone on long enough. Our family has become dissolute and I am filled with disgust most of the time.  I feel like it’s coming out of my pores. Like I’m drowning in it. Mother thinks you need to go to rehab since our prayers have little effect on someone as dedicated to slothfulness as yourself.

You’regonnamakeitchamphangintherekid Lana grunted into my ear and it startled me. I pulled my hands away from my head, flinging blood onto the window and the back of Kendal’s seat. Bile floated up into my throat, and I made a noise like a pterodactyl. Lana was grossed out and she moved to the other side of the car. I tried to listen to Daddy again but they weren’t talking any more. Jeannie-Gaye was crying.

*****

 Kendal gripped my hand as we crossed the hospital parking lot. Jeannie-Gaye slouched beside us in the waiting room while Kendal signed me in. She wasn’t crying by then and all but refused to look at me. She snuck drinks from the flask she kept hidden in her purse for emergencies. The blood had slowed and Lana scraped some off of my neck with her pinky nail. The people in the waiting room were staring because of all of the blood and some of them were muttering. Jeannie-Gaye glared at an elderly man across from her who was watching us, and told him my family is not your concern, you decrepit old bastard. The room fell silent and I could sense everyone judging us. Lana leaned closer and whispered in my ear sometimes when I’m thinking about lots of things at once, I realize I don’t know which side is my left and which is my right and it’s weird. I asked her how bad she thought it was. You’ve got a big cut, Randy. I asked her what does it look like? She sucked on her bottom lip, popping it before she answered. Told me it looks like a smile down the center of your scalp. I’m pretty sure Jeannie-Gaye’s right. It’s gonna leave a big scar.

Jeannie-Gaye glared at us and yelled you two stop whispering about me. The old man across from us stood then, loudly shaking the wrinkles out of his jacket before putting it on. He shuffled towards the nurses’ station, glaring back over his shoulder as he went.

Jeannie-Gaye zipped up her purse so hard I thought she must have torn it. Her eyes were going in and out of focus. Daddy came back with a skinny nurse. I was ashamed, because I knew the old man must have said something to the nurses about Jeannie-Gaye drinking in the hospital. Daddy seemed nervous when the nurse examined my gash. I hoped that they wouldn’t take us away from him since everybody in Boone County knows about Jeannie-Gaye’s reputation. The nurse told Daddy that she was going to get a room prepared right away. It’s a deep wound, Mr. Adkins. The sooner we can get it cleaned out and have the doctor stitch it up the better.

Jeannie-Gaye turned to the nurse and tensed to speak more clearly. If it is such a concern to you, then why didn’t you people alert the doctor at once? My son should never have been left sitting here bleeding all over himself like this! The nurse must’ve known Jeannie-Gaye was going to lose it if she didn’t say something to diffuse the situation so she started backing away and apologizing.

Jeannie-Gaye slammed her fists down and stood, towering over the poor woman. This is not how I was taught to run an ER when I was a student at Garnett. There are some patients that are a priority. He is your priority! The nurse just stood there shocked and Jeannie-Gaye lurched towards her. She wavered for a moment, nearly falling back into her seat before steadying herself, and she went right at Daddy who seemed to think she was trying to embrace him. Only she wasn’t. It was like he wasn’t even there and she slapped his hands away and staggered towards the row of green chairs across from us. Daddy started after her, but she had gotten her weight all going in the same direction and was at the far end of the room by then and she started to run, exploding through the double doors. The people in the waiting room watched us until Lana started crying and that made them turn away, pretending never to have been listening. The old man hadn’t returned. Daddy came back to my side and he and the skinny nurse stood me up and walked me to a small operating room.

I sat there on a table under lights that made my skin look purple while they cleaned my scalp and face, and then shaved the hair around the cut like an inverted Mohawk down the center of my head. The doctor came in while the nurses were finishing up. He washed his hands with his back to us. Daddy stood looking on. The skinny nurse gave me two shots to numb my scalp but I couldn’t see her doing it. It took ten stitches on the inside of the cut and twenty-three more on the outside to close it. I lay beneath a paper sheet, with a hole left for the doctor to work. The sheet glowed from a bright light above the table and I felt like I was floating. I kept trying to touch the stitches before they were finished, so I could feel them, and the nurses had to restrain me, each one holding a hand, the skinny nurse stroking my forearm while the doctor finished.

*****

It had warmed up enough to snow while we were in the hospital and tiny flakes were falling all around us as we looked for the BMW. We were all shivering and the snow was sticking to us before Kendal finally admitted what we all knew that Jeanie-Gaye had taken it. He took us back inside of the emergency room and said he would go and call Mawmaw Adkins. If your mother comes back you just try to keep her calm, aright?

I stretched across the seats with my head in Lana’s lap. Lana and I watched Daddy talk on the payphone and Lana scraped her fingers back and forth over my bandages. We figured that Jeannie-Gaye would be passed out in the bed by now. Lana said I don’t think this’ll ever end, Randy, not until she drinks herself to death. I nodded, thinking unless she kills someone first. What was weird to me was that somehow I wasn’t mad at my mother even though I had every right to be. That was when I realized that Jeannie-Gaye must have been hurt more than anyone I knew because I still loved her even still and that just couldn’t be possible otherwise. Love doesn’t just appear in people from nothing.

Daddy came back from the payphone and told us that Mawmaw Adkins would be there soon to get us. She’s going to take you kids over to her place for a few days while I figure out what to do about your mother. I said I love you and Lana said I love you too, Daddy. But we both knew Daddy loved Jeannie-Gaye too much to kick her out and I got scared all of a sudden, the most scared I’d ever been. How could I love a mother like that? I don’t like to think about it, to be honest, but I do almost every day. Scars like mine don’t like to keep quiet. And what I remember the most about that day is the panic I felt laying there in that waiting room while my mawmaw got into her car and drove out to the hospital to get us. I just couldn’t calm down inside. It was like I knew it would happen all along and I’d been trying to stop it but couldn’t. I felt like a smallmouth bass left floating in a land-reclamation pond at HOBET with all of the coal ripped from the hill beneath me, like I was floating there in the water and could see a shadow looming above the surface of someone who was trying to get at me to devour me, like they were standing there breathing in the last quiet moments of my life before coming after me with a hook.

Jacob S. Knabb is the Senior Editor of Curbside Splendor Publishing and has been known to take an author photo or two. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, The Collagist, Knee-Jerk, Everyday Genius, THE2NDHAND, & elsewhere. He lives in Chicago with his brilliant wife and two willful Chihuahuas.

 

Wilfred, poem by Sandra Giedeman

He was proud of his blue tick hounds, his

sixty acres of hills, hollows, creeks filled

with copperheads and cottonmouths;

nights utterly still except when a smell or sound

riled the hounds from their sleep

to bay like old mourners.

 

My uncle read aloud Sunday mornings

from the Book of Job in a nasal voice,

about hating the night and waiting for day

only to find in the day that one wished for night,

about how we are here for a flicker of time

then reflected in no one’s eye.

 

My aunt had the custom of hill people of keeping

framed photographs of dead relatives in their coffins.

When my uncle died she got rid of his hounds, his

jew’s harp, said she was through with men

and their ways, but she kept his death photo displayed

on a lace doily in her living room.

 

Sandra Giedeman grew up in St. Louis and moved to California in her ‘20s. She’s been published in various literary journals and was awarded the Mudfish Annual Poetry Prize by Charles Simic.  She was owner of Upchurch-Brown Booksellers in Laguna Beach and past president of the Orange County Chapter of PEN. She worked as editor of various trade magazines. She lives in San Clemente, California with her husband.

 

The Burial of the Dead, fiction by Murray Dunlap

They shaved his beard for the funeral.  I can’t begin to understand why.  Who told them to do it?  He looked like pink-cheeked drag queen.  But the funniest thing was watching my brothers squirm in that front pew.  The four biggest men the in this tiny church, and they shoved them all onto the front right pew.  The sons should sit together on the front row, a man in a suit said.  Who are these people making decisions?  They squirmed and sweated.  Massasauga, Alabama in August.  If there was air conditioning, you couldn’t feel it.  One brother would lean forward when the other leaned back because their shoulders were too broad to sit side by side.  Ren, the oldest, sat closest to the center aisle and mouthed the words cold beer three times through a blood red, exasperated face.  I sat with the wife, ex wife, and mistress on the front left pew.  The wife, Celia, sobbed and sometimes moaned into her endless cleavage.  The ex-wife, Joy, had Alzheimer’s and asked me four times, “Georgia, when is the movie going to start?”  The mistress, Loretta –my mother, sat as rigid and lifeless as daddy.  I never saw her blink.  I never saw her cry.  Whenever Celia moaned, mother whispered stupid whore to no one. As far as awkward events go, daddy’s funeral was world class.

The Reverend Macallan led us in a very short, very ordinary service.  He read from the bible about ashes and dust, and the organist played Lift High the Cross.  For a moment it seemed as if it could have been a normal church service, any given Sunday.

But then the reverend wiped his brow with a white handkerchief and made more than one self-deprecating joke about his weight.  Apparently there is a wine called Fat Bastard, and the reverend shared a bottle with Celia the night before.  So much for normal.

“We got to chuckling and raised a glass to fat bastards everywhere,” he said. “We found it quite appropriate, as Bennett often called me a fat bastard, and it is also how I referred to him.”

“He went to Yale and I attended Harvard, so bit of good natured ribbing was only natural.”  The reverend winked at the congregation, which got him a few laughs, but I’m absolutely certain that at that moment, the reverend Macallan was looking at daddy’s wife.

“Stupid whore,” mother whispered.

Then daddy’s sister, Eleanor, walked up the center aisle with an armful of goldenrod.  Eleanor is tall, thin, and stunning.  She has a doctorate in psychology and counselor’s easy, welcoming face.  For as long as she can remember, she has been told that she looks like Christie Brinkley.  Eleanor developed a dear me, aren’t you sweet routine that we’re all sick of.  She placed the goldenrod on daddy’s chest, the tiny yellow flowers tickling his shaven chin.  The church swished with the sounds of legs crossed and recrossed, arms crossed and uncrossed, uneasy hands rubbing, folding, and adjusting neckties.  Eleanor turned and faced us and gave an audible sigh.

“As Bennett’s twin, I guess I somehow knew I would be doing this someday.”

Ren leaned back, which forced Baxter, the youngest, to lean forward.  Baxter scratched the back of his scalp through quarter-inch hair.  He adjusted his tie and coughed.  He tugged the thin blonde triangle of facial hair under his bottom lip and quickly searched the room with his eyes as if mapping an escape.  Despite his black suit, he wore running shoes.  New Balance.  Baxter never wore anything else.

“I am grateful that Bennett’s struggle was short and that his pain was limited.  I am happy that he was not subjected to the tortuous road so many alcoholics walk at their ends.  I am relieved that Bennett died with dignity, and that he did not act out, that he did not give in to his old penchant for tantrums.”

Eleanor paused, glancing up from her papers and scanning the room.  I wondered if she could make out the look on our faces.  Who on earth was she talking about?  Not our father.  Not the man who hired an acupuncturist to fly in from Seattle and heal his pain, only to laugh at the man’s effeminate hands and offend him to the point of leaving unpaid.  Not the man who was prescribed a painkiller that induced hallucinations and immediately mounted a disco ball over his bed and hired dancing strippers.  Certainly not the man who packed a bag and moved into a hotel with the red headed Celia –one of the strippers and soon to be second wife– while his first wife, Joy, was at the hospital giving birth to Wallace, their second son.   Not the man who had been dying by a slow scotch-induced-suicide for years.

Wallace sat at the far end of the pew, leaning forward and gaping at Eleanor.  He had already removed his tie and used it to wipe sweat from his forehead.  Then he pinched the corners of his tremendous moustache and ground his teeth.  Like Ren, his face glowed red.

Between Wallace and Baxter sat Shane, the first born of the second marriage.   Shane leaned back with his arms spread out across the spine of the pew.  His head bobbed with sleep and then jerked back to attention.  The Buddhist tattoo on his shoulder of two fish swimming in an endless circle showed through his thin white shirt.  He grinned through a full red beard.

“We are all here because we loved Charles Bennett Porter, Jr.” Eleanor said, reading from her papers.  She stared at the typed words.

Then she looked up, took a deep breath, and chose to speak off the page.

We loved him in our own ways.  Bennett did not make it easy.”

Ren looked at me across the aisle and smiled.  He mouthed the words here we go.  Celia stared, her eyes wet and starry with valium.  The reverend Macallan gripped his knees.

“Bennett was intelligent, handsome, and when we chose to be, extremely charming.  But if he was charming in the last ten years, I missed it.  The days of our summer sailing trips ended so very long ago.  The weekends spent water skiing up on DogRiver, gone.  The only activity Bennett maintained to the end was hunting.  He created a world of his own at the cabin in Barlo.  But I believe what was once a sport for him became an outlet for anger.  A very brief and very rare moment of control.  He was sensitive and uncomfortable with emotion.  He chose to anesthetize his feelings rather than process them.  Most of his choices were self-destructive.  His wives may be able to say otherwise, and I’ll let them speak for themselves.  The same goes for his children.”

She looked at me and said, “All of them.”

“I hope you have all come to terms with the ways in which you were and were not connected to Bennett.  We each have to find our own way to define the relationship.  We each have to find our own way to remember him, and our own way to let go.”

Mother leaned in and whispered, “No one came to get their head shrunk. Bitch.”

Joy leaned in and whispered, “When did Christie Brinkley start acting?  She’s not bad, but I sure wish they’d put more action in the plot.”

“The real reason we are all here today is to mark the end of a battle,” Eleanor continued.  “A long difficult battle we all fought.  I, for one, am glad it’s over.  When Bennett and I were children, when we were home from boarding schools in the summer, I loved to run outside on the very first morning and gather armfuls for goldenrod.  I brought them into the house and filled vases in every room.  I twisted and tied the branches and made a wreath for the front door. By the time Bennett came down from his room, his eyes had turned red with allergies and swollen to the size of soft boiled eggs.  He had already sneezed a dozen times.  If she was sober enough, Mom would pull the tip of his nose and say, hello Mr. Sneeze, let’s get you medicated.”

Eleanor walked down from the pulpit and gently patted the goldenrod lying across Bennett’s chest.

“One last jab, brother,” she said. “One last jab.”

Then she returned to her seat.

No one else rose to speak.

We filed past Daddy single file for communion.  Shane placed a bowl of rice and a pint of Johnny Walker inside the casket, returning to his seat without taking any wine or bread.  Celia dropped her wafer into her cleavage.  Without a moment’s hesitation, the Reverend Macallan plucked it out.

When we were seated again, the reverend concluded the service by proclaiming, “My peace I give you.  My peace I leave you.”

Then he led us through the side door and along a brick path to the gravesite.  The brothers acted as pall bearers, lifting and guiding the pine casket easily on their shoulders.  I’ve been told that six men would normally be required, but that after one look, the reverend Macallan said, four titans such as these could lift the casket if it were still inside the hearse.

A few passages were read.  Each brother dropped a handful of dirt onto the casket.  Eleanor stood under the shade of a long-leaf pine and cried in silence.  Celia sobbed and moaned.  Mother repeated, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore.  Joy held my arm and smiled.  I looked through the trees and stared at the coppery bay, perfectly still without wind.  I watched a pelican glide a few feet above the surface, scanning the water for fish.  I watched the pelican fly until she was out of sight, never having spotted anything worth diving for.  The brothers shifted foot to foot, loosening ties and sweating.  Four reddened faces with nowhere to look.

Finally, the reverend Macallan said, “Amen.”  And then, “This fat bastard has never been so hot.  Let us retreat to the shade.”

We filtered out of the graveyard and moved under the pines next to the church.  A few platters of finger sandwiches and a bowl of potato salad sat on a picnic table, just beginning to sour in the heat.  No one ate.  We all crowded around the lemonade and cokes at another picnic table.  Who made these choices?  No catering, no beer or wine.  Money wasn’t an issue, so why did this have to be so pathetic?

When we all had a cold drink in hand, we looked around at one another.  What could anyone say?

Celia looked up at me through bleary eyes and put out her hand. “I’m Celia.  How did you know Bennett?”

“He was my father,” I said.

Celia stared at me.  Not one muscle in her face moved.  When she finally blinked, a bead of sweat dropped from her chin into her cleavage.  I guess all sorts of things must fall in there.

“I rather enjoyed the movie,” Joy said.

“Another day,” Shane said to Celia.  He took his mother by the arm and led her across the pine needles to Baxter, where he jogged in place.  Eleanor asked Baxter, do you understand what obsessive compulsive disorder means? 

“Was that necessary?” Wallace asked.

“She asked,” I said.

“But today?”  Wallace waved away a fly.  “You don’t know this, but I’ve got bigger fish to fry.  Have you been told about the will?  Of course not.  I’ll tell you.  Wait right here.”

As Daddy’s illegitimate child, I’d spent more than a healthy number of nights wondering about that will.  Wondering if Charles Bennett Porter Jr. would stay true to tradition and leave me out, or if, just maybe, he could see clear to leave something to his only daughter.  I’d already been left out of the college trust fund business, but that never bothered me.  Daddy would have been forced to tell Celia about me, and we’re talking about a man who couldn’t come clean to his own sons about why he left Joy –whose real name is Joyce, by the way– for Celia in the first place.  Daddy was a boob man.  Plain and simple.  Celia had stripper boobs and white bikinis.  Joy wore a giant one piece number with the frilly skirt attached.   Back when Joy was giving birth to Wallace, way before the Alzheimer’s, one crying baby was a little too real for daddy.  Just the thought of two little screaming monsters made his lip quiver.  Celia took uppers and downers and loved a late night spent at the clubs.  Of course, Celia was ill-equipped to use birth control with any measure of accuracy.  Shane and Baxter were inevitable, but I was impossible to explain.  Mother had breasts like soda bread.  She also had an alley cat’s temper and claws to match.  By the time I was born, daddy didn’t have the energy for another wife, another child.  And Celia had calmed down enough to play nursemaid to daddy’s slow decline.

Millions of dollars.  Of course I’d thought about it.  But daddy wasn’t exactly the kind of guy you just up and asked a thing like that.  No one knew what he had in mind.  No one but Wallace.  He’d gone to law school, passed the bar — barely, and set up with a firm here in Massasauga.  He was the only one who hunted with daddy.  They took weekend trips up to Barlo and killed ducks, doves, and deer.  At least they said they did.  None of the other brothers grew into that sort of mold.  Ren was a professional balloonist, floating various company logos over corporate parties, football games, and golfing tournaments in his commercial hot air balloon.  Shane was a river guide and conservationist.  He worked for an environmental program devoted to saving Alabama’s rivers.  He converted to Buddhism.  Shane guided children down the Cahaba and taught them how acid rain kills water lilies, how lawn mower oil can end up in the gills of a rainbow trout.  Baxter was still in college.  He ran.  His grades were decent, but running took top priority.  He kept a shaved head, tan shoulders, and steel piston calves year-round.  Baxter broke three hours in his first marathon.  He didn’t say much, but my god could that boy run.

Daddy didn’t connect well with anyone but Wallace, and even that relationship was tenuous.   Wallace went to the wrong law school, took the wrong offer from the wrong firm, and absolutely bought the wrong car –all according to daddy.  But Wallace ignored him, focusing on the money he intended to inherit.   I’m keeping the wheels greased, he was fond of saying, since no one else will.

I watched Wallace –we called him Walrus when we were kids– gathering the brothers, whispering in ears, and squeezing shoulders.  He kept his brow in a knot and pointed an index finger at one brother, then the next.  He tugged his moustache.  He was in full-on dictator mode.  He said: you don’t know this, but… and the brothers rocked on their heels and listened.  Shane sat down.  Ren made a fist.  Baxter jogged in place.

I decided I would find out about the will soon enough, so I walked along a dirt path through the trees to the bay.  A little breeze had kicked up and tiny waves rolled onto the thin strip of sand.  I took off my shoes, stepped barefoot into the course sand and shallow water and closed my eyes.  The heat seemed to let up a bit with the breeze and the shade of the waterside pines.  I decided to not think about the will and money for now.  I decided that whatever happened would be fine.  That my job caring for the angelic, ninety-year-old Jane was a good one and that I would be optimistic about finding another kind woman to care for after Jane was gone.  That I would not fall apart when Jane was gone.  She was my informally adopted grandmother, and it would be hard.  But it was critical that I hold it together.  My secret was not a terrible one, I decided, and that when my baby arrived I would do right by her, with or without daddy’s money.

I let the tiny waves lap against my ankles and the breeze cool my face.  I heard shouting behind me, but I kept my eyes closed.  I was doing my best to focus on my baby.  A little girl, I was sure.  I would name her Jane, of course, and I would protect her from this freak-show circus we called a family.

Murray Dunlap's work has appeared in about fifty magazines and journals. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, as well as to Best New American Voices once, and his first book, –an early draft of "Bastard Blue" (then called "Alabama") was a finalist for the Maurice Prize in Fiction. His first collection of short stories, "Bastard Blue," was published by Press 53 on June 7th, 2011 (the three year anniversary of a car wreck that very nearly killed him…). The extraordinary individuals Pam Houston, Laura Dave, Michael Knight, and Fred Ashe taught him the art of writing.

 

Estuary, fiction by Caroline Kepnes

It was a bad idea, smoking up in the parking lot before going in, but it was too late now so Laura took another hit. Women were such suckers. In Laura’s next life, she’d invent Bath & Body Works and be a zillionaire. The monotony of women and their bodies, women working on their bodies and rubbing stuff on their bodies and trying to shape them into shapes they didn’t wanna go into and now gathering at night in a rec center—a rec center—to save a body of water that didn’t wanna be saved. What a waste. Laura had no beauty regime. No exercise routine either. She did not like regimes. And it wasn’t just because she had good genes. She thought if she was one of these gals, at this age, she would let her thighs spread if they wanted to. She wouldn’t go to Curves or Zumba and fight. Life changes you. Shit looks different. Look at these wedding rings. How ridiculous they look now on those swollen fingers, sparkling like the wedding was yesterday, like the past 20 years lived up to the expectations. He went to Jarred. Love went out the window.

Baked now. Laura fucked up. She had never wanted to be one of these moms with nothing better to do than show up at the rec center at night to meet with other moms. She had never been drawn to the sisterhoods that formed around birthdays and slumber parties, the bonds woven now through causes, cancers and school boards. Laura preferred men. You could respect a man. Men didn’t try so hard to make the world a better place. If they did, they did it on their own. Would a group of men gather to feast on burnt coffee and munchkins under the pretense of saving the planet? Would a man print out a flyer that screamed SAVE THE SOUND? Hell no. Nonetheless, Laura had to do this, cross the lot, which was a sheet of black ice. No rock salt? Really, Ladies? She fell twice. Both times she wanted to say fuck it and get back in her car. But, when you’re fucking your best friend’s husband, you have to do things. You have to go where your best friend wants to go. Your best friend thinks a bunch of ladies can save the sound in a rec room with a pot of coffee? You have to think so too. She was stoned. But she was here.

The room was ripe with sweat. Women were sweating under their wool and on their shiny cheeks and the sweat of their sons lingered from earlier that day, basketballs coasted in sweat were gathered in a corner. Sweaty balls, Laura thought, and she laughed. She found two chairs. Relief. She laid her coat on the empty chair and patted it, a chair for Angela. She was a bad person and she vowed to change. No more cheating. She would become the woman she was pretending to be right now, the one volunteering to SAVE THE SOUND as she SAVES a seat for her best friend.

“Hello, Laura,” someone was saying. Was it Anne Something?  Amanda? How did anyone remember anyone’s name?  Whoever this woman was, she was built for this, for talking to women she hated while pretending she liked them. She had thin everything, lips, legs, eyebrows. You had to wonder if it was from meth but then if she were a meth head would she have come to the rec center to save the world? Also, her jeans were ironed. Her fisherman’s sweater wasn’t pilled. The evidence that she was just another housewife was abundant and Laura had a flash of being nineteen and on her bed and dreaming of living in New York City, away from wool sweaters and thin, Spartan lips.

 “Laura, I’m surprised to see you here. You never get involved.”

“Well, Angela made this out to be life or death. I just want to help.”

Thin lips smirked “So, how’s Ray?”

 “Ray’s Ray. He’s good.”

It was Laura’s turn to ask about Mr. Thin Lips. But who knew what his name was? And why wasn’t it good manners to be honest? What Laura wanted to say: “I have no idea who you are, I don’t care about your husband and I really wish you’d stop talking to me.”

Laura watched Thin Lips move on to another woman in another folding chair. How’s Ray? The worst question. It wasn’t fair what marriage could do. She was sewn into him. It didn’t matter how many times she made love to Ted. Even if they divorced, she would hear that question forever, How’s Ray? She took a bottle of Coke from her purse. You don’t drink Coke around women like this. Social code dictates that Diet Coke would be the right thing. You want to act like you’re at war against your body too.  But Laura liked her sugar and she opened the bottle and drank her calories. Women were looking at her. Let them.

 One time, Angela told Laura to write a memoir and call it The Revenge of the Highly Metabolic Woman. Laura didn’t know what to say. It was so sad, the idea of Angela brainstorming names for Laura’s unwritten memoir. And Angela was no wordsmith, didn’t use words like “metabolic”. Laura had chuckled, “Angela, you finally opened up a dictionary.” Angela hadn’t laughed. It was not long after that conversation that Laura started fucking Ted. Somehow, Angela had given permission that day in a way that could never be explained exactly. But she had. She had calculated an inadequate insult, revealing that she was jealous of Laura, everything Laura. And once Laura had that cloak of jealousy laid on her shoulders, she could do anything she wanted because Angela had essentially announced that she no longer considered herself a woman, in the metabolic, hot ass having physical way.

“What are you, blowing the bottle?”

Laura spit up Coke. “Angela. You’re here.”

No kiss on the cheek hello tonight. Did she know?

“I just had a little to smoke.”

 “Are you kidding?”

“I was thirsty. You know what I mean.”

“You’re wearing fur.”

 “This scarf is raccoon. Who cares about a little raccoon?”

“We’re here for the environment, Laura.”

 “Well I’ll take it off. But really, Angela it’s a scarf.”

“It’s an animal who feeds and thrives in the very estuaries we are trying to save.”

Laura shoved her scarf in her purse even though it didn’t really fit. “I didn’t wear an estuary.”

“Do you even know what an estuary is?”

“Donna Kendrick drove here in an SUV. Why don’t you go egg it if we’re all supposed to be such heroes?”

“That’s different.”

Ugh. Getting high with Angela was the greatest, but being high near sober Angela was the worst. Angela could leave you without getting up. She’d always been good at that. Second grade. Angela and Laura in class, their tables facing each other. Give me that tape, Laura. Laura had gone mute. Angela said it again Give me that tape. And Laura obeyed; she gave Angela the tape. A real friend would ask for the tape, but Angela hadn’t asked; she’d commanded. A minute later, Laura asked for the tape. Can I have it back? But Angela ignored Laura’s attempts to get the tape back. She doled out one insufficient piece at a time. She could make stealing seem like a justified act of redistribution.  Maybe that’s why Laura was fucking Angela’s husband, because of the tape, because she was owed some damn tape.

“I wish we’d just get started already. We could be an underwater ghost town in fifty years if we don’t change our ways. This meeting needs to start.”

“Oh, come on. That’s a little dramatic.”

“These are facts.”

“Angela, nobody knows the future. And if we’re meant to be underwater, we’ll be underwater.”

“Are you kidding right now?” Angela was huffing and puffing. “Laura, this is serious. If we keep using rock salt we might not have any water to drink. Have to import Poland Fucking Springs and spend an arm and a leg and have no beach to go to in the summer.

“Oh, come on. You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. It says so. Did you even read the reading material?”

Laura simmered at the redundancy. Read the reading material. Why hadn’t she moved away long ago when she could have, before kids and wrinkles? “Yep.”

“Laura, rock salt throws off the balance of every natural…bacteria and all the, the stuff, the natural stuff. And over time the rock salt’s gonna dry us out.”

“Tell me this. When I got here tonight, I fell, coulda died. You know why? No rock salt.”

“You smoked.”

“The littlest bit.”

Angela looked down at Laura’s boots, the two-inch heels. “You ever think about getting duck boots?”

“That’s not the point.”

“You fell because you smoked up in heels.”

“I fell because there’s no damn rock salt. Save the sound? What about the fucking humans?”

“That rock salt could kill your daughter some day.”

Laura tingled. Kill your daughter. Did she know? Did she?

“Laura, why don’t you just go? I know you hate this. I don’t know why I told you to come.”

***

On the way to her car, Laura took her time. She was careful to stare at the pavement before stepping. She was like a kid on a pond that’s not quite frozen. It took a long time getting to the car. She pretended she was a solider, navigating a minefield. She wobbled. What a waste of her time, a waste of her life. If there were rock salt in the bed of one of these trucks, she would have dumped it. Her phone buzzed, Ray.

“You done saving the world? Jesus what a waste of time.”

“Everything I do isn’t a waste of time.”

“Whoa, whoa. I didn’t say that.”

“Yes you did.”

She was down, hard. Foul mood. She could have cried. She could have yelled.

“Laura?”

“Yes what?

“I was trying to have a laugh, you’re the one thought it was funny, hens saving the world.”

“Well, at least they’re trying. You don’t know the right from the wrong in all this.”

She stumbled. She wasn’t paying close enough attention. Why did Ray call at the wrong time? All time with Ray was wrong time.

 “Ray, we could be underwater in fifty years if we keep this up.”

“Oh, come on. That’s a load of bullshit.”

“Do you understand what happens if we lose our estuaries?”

“The fuck’s an estuary?”

She hated the question. She didn’t know the answer. She hated him for not being an intellectual, for not being the kind of man who pushed, who played. He didn’t say, see, Laura you don’t even know what the fuck an estuary is. He didn’t like to catch her in a jam. He just sighed and he was over it. And she supposed this was why she was having an affair.

***

The fuck’s an estuary? Laura was still thinking about that question a few days later. It had killed her buzz. It had sent her into the motel to meet Ted because Ted didn’t ask dumb questions. But she didn’t love Ted.  Why then? Why was she doing Ted? Indeed, what the fuck was an estuary? She tried to center herself the way Zen types do. She muttered aloud.

"I am Laura Winger. I am in the laundry room. I am washing my husband’s things. My husband is Ray. My daughter is Ella. They are together upstairs. They don’t mind each other.

She opened her eyes. She could hear a little more clearly now, Ray changing channels, Ella lobbying for her crap, Ray tolerating it a minute, then seizing power. The two of them would go on like this all day on a Sunday. There was nothing for Laura to do in there and she decided right then that they would have a different kind of day today.

At the top of the stairs, she slammed the door shut. “Come on, you two. We’re going to Ted and Angela’s.”

Ella rolled her eyes and looked at Ray. They all know it would be Ray’s call.

“Dad, no.”

But Ray hit the mute button. “Laura, ten minutes ago you said you were tired and didn’t feel like it. I already called ‘em and said forget it.”

 “So call ‘em back.”

***

Laura was sitting in the backseat trying to remember when this happened. When did she give up the front seat to Ella? Was that normal? Did Angela sit in the back? No, definitely not. It was too cold out. There was no cold sun conniving with the world today, drawing you out here only to make you freeze. It was weird of them to get into this car and go somewhere. Laura could have bawled right now. She was overwhelmed by the urge to cry. What the fuck’s an estuary? She used to know things, how to be a mom,  a friend. Had she unlearned these things the way only a few Spanish words remained from her middle school vocabulary or had she forgotten them all at once, the way a memory leaves you and you don’t know it until someone else brings it up.

It would be good to kiss Ted. They’d find a way. He’d see how in need she was today, a cold Sunday, a laundry day. He would find a way to be alone with her and kiss her. She looked forward to the physical things, the feel of his hair in her hands, his tongue, more direct than Ray’s, scratchier somehow, and his hands on her ass. And then they’d leave the bathroom. They didn’t want to get caught. They didn’t want to run away together. They were just trying to find out what an estuary was, she supposed.

When had Ella gotten into the car? She was here now. She had brushed her hair back, low and tight. Her eyes were Ray’s, her hair too. She was nothing like Laura. Laura used to think maybe there’d been a switch at the hospital. Or maybe she’d been on some drug and had never even been pregnant. It was easy to imagine an outraged, indignant mother showing up and saying YOU STOLE MY BABY.

Laura would have happily let Ella go and be with her real mom. Maybe Ella knew that. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t all that nice to her mama.

“Honey, I like it when you wear your hair down.”

“You’re such a weirdo, Mom.”

“Why am I a weirdo?”

“Every other mom sits in the front seat. Who wants to sit in back? It’s like calling reverse shotgun.”

“I like it back here.”

Ray got into the front, set the case of beer on the middle partition. Ella reached for it. Teamwork. “Don’t knock your mother, kiddo. She can’t help the way she is.”

“It’s embarrassing. She should sit in front.”

“Well it’s eighteen degrees on a Sunday morning so fortunately for you, I think you won’t be shamed today.”

He popped the clutch and they were on their way.

***

It would always seem like something that could have just as easily not happened. When they got to Ted and Angela’s, the child protection lock was on in the backseat. Laura banged on the window. Ella opened the door. That was the only trouble with the backseat; sometimes you were too much of a child, dependent on others. And Laura didn’t like feeling trapped so she stepped out of the car too quickly. Her heel clicked onto the ice. Shit. Ouch. Fast it happened. She grabbed at the car door, but her mittens were soft, uncharacteristically soft, not like the leather gloves she usually wore.

                        WHY WAS SHE WEARING MITTENS?

The fall was fast and brittle. Sensation stopped, all sensations fled. Everything left her. It was over now. She learned later what she was now, what life for her was. She was paralyzed. No more walking for Laura, but, as the doctor said, she was very lucky to be alive, very lucky that furry scarf had cushioned her head against the ice, so lucky, so very, very lucky.

                        THANK GOD FOR THOSE MITTENS.

Maybe if she hadn’t been doing laundry down in the cold basement she wouldn’t have reached for large soft mittens.  Maybe if Ella had made plans with friends and hadn’t been home, maybe if Ray hadn’t been on that couch, maybe if he’d pushed to go to Ted and Angela’s when they were supposed to go instead of being a pushover.  Maybe if the backseat door had been locked and she’d sat up front for a change, or maybe if the child protection lock hadn’t been on and she could have gone where she wanted, when she wanted. Maybe if she had had a second child years ago, maybe if she hadn’t tried to save the sound, maybe if she’d never kissed Ted, that first hot kiss, dark snowy night, maybe if she hadn’t become the kind of asshole who wanted to be kissed in the snow in the dark by a man who wasn’t meant to kiss her.  Maybe if Ella had been an Ellis, a boy, and she didn’t share the house with a girl who was difficult, impish, certainly not on her side. Maybe if she’d never been born in the first place.

                        HA. TELL THAT TO THE MITTENS THAT SAVED YOUR LIFE.

Maybe if she’d never kissed Ray in that basement, Bryan Adams singing about a good summer a long time ago. She’d known she was settling. She’d known what she was doing. Those had not been the best days of her life but she had played them like they were. Maybe if Angela hadn’t been late to the meeting at the rec center. Maybe if there was no sound in the first place, maybe if the land had never eroded. Maybe.

                        MAYBE IF NOBODY EVER INVENTED MITTENS.

Maybe one of those women, maybe all of those women, maybe they had all wished this sort of fate on her. Maybe they had gathered to save the sound, to destroy the Laura. Maybe they had more power than she knew. Hell, maybe they would even save the sound the way they had destroyed her. Maybe if they hadn’t convinced Angela to forgo rock salt. Maybe.

Long days not moving and still, Laura did not know what the fuck an estuary was.

***

People grew shy of her and their faces around her were sweet. People looked younger, less confident, the ones who came by anyway. They were polite. They asked how she was feeling; she knew they wanted to know if she hated the world. They asked if they could bring her anything; she knew they wanted to know if she thought of offing herself with pills. She had Nan now, a widow, a PCA, which stood for personal care assistant. Nan helped around the house, lied and told callers that Laura was napping so she wouldn’t have to talk on the phone to people she’d never liked then, didn’t like now. She had Nan and so it was never possible to be alone with Ted. She couldn’t ask Nan to go for groceries so she could see Ted. But he hadn’t tried all that hard to see her. And why would he? They hadn’t been in love. Paralysis of her body didn’t break his heart let alone his marriage.

Now she sat in the backseat for a reason. She had to, what with the difficulty of getting her in and out. Every day she and Nan tried to think of somewhere to go. She liked to get in the car early, sit in the backseat in the driveway, no heat on, cold as fuck, no music, just looking at nothing, maybe a kid walking home from school, maybe a guy walking his dog. Nan didn’t ask why. Nobody asked why. People did not ask the questions they really had.

Kids in the neighborhood stared at her, cripple in a car, how could you not? Two little girls with scooters, one chubbier than the other, stared the most. Their blank curious faces hanging there like balloons tied down. Whisper stare whisper stare.

Angela came by once a week.  Coffee, gossip, crap like that. Those girls in the neighborhood seemed more at ease when Laura was sitting with Angela, like they were less afraid of Laura, because she had a friend.

“I think they think I’m crazy,” Laura said. “But they like you.”

“They’re just girls. Kids. Someday they’ll get it.”

“Get what, Angie?”

“Why you’re here.”

“What’s to get?”

Angela crossed her legs. She covered the smile taking over her face. Laura looked instead at the two girls. Of all best friends in the world, one was always brighter, one would always come out a little higher. One would get to call the tape her own tape and one would do try to make the most of what tape she got. There was nothing that unique about Laura, after all, or Angela, or anyone.

“Angela, how are those estuaries?”

"Those what?”

 “The save the sound stuff. Are you still doing that?”

 “No,” she said. “We finished that.”

 “Finished saving the world.”

 Angela smiled but she didn’t laugh and she didn’t say anything else. In another second she’d start talking about something else, because she didn’t owe Laura anything, never had, never would.

Caro­line Kep­nes has been split­ting her time between Los Ange­les, CA and Cape Cod, MA. Her fic­tion has been published in The Barcelona Review, Cal­liope, Dogz­plot, Eclec­tica, Metazen and Word Riot. She wrote and directed a short film, Miles Away. In her spare time she enjoys read­ing about meth lab busts, Florid­ian crim­i­nal activ­ity and wild animals.

Sheldon Compton QA–The Same Terrible Storm

Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of the collection, The Same Terrible Storm, recently nominated for the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award. His work has been published widely and been four times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist in 2012 for the Still Fiction Award as well as a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction the following year. He is also Editor in Chief of Foxhead Books, and survives in Eastern Kentucky.

I know you work in genre fiction as well as literary. Is it too limiting to be defined as an Appalachian writer?

I’ve written a lot of short-short stories, flash, prose poetry and the like, and a lot of that as historical fiction, for sure, but most of my work is set in East Kentucky.  In fact, both my collection and the novel I’m working on now, and I imagine anything I write most likely, will be set in East Kentucky.  But I’ve never made the deliberate decision in that direction.  It’s my natural position as a writer.  I think there is a richly deep well of stories here and people absolutely swelled with personality and character.  I’m more than lucky to be from and live in a region where that’s the case.  That said, I am occasionally curious why my work is at times referred to as Appalachian literature and then other times Southern literature.  Then, more often as not, simply literature.  But that’s where it ends for me, I think.  The labels, after all, will create no change in the way I approach the stories I hope to tell.  That said, labels can be limiting and I wouldn’t welcome anything, label or otherwise, that made any attempt to place blinders on my work.

Who are your role models in writing?

2A. I’m a generation removed, I think, in this respect.  I look to writers in whose work I find honesty rather than forward momentum in respect to form or theory or other concerns.  And I say removed because I don’t spend time studying passages from Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Joyce or anyone else many may believe need to be looked at as role models, especially in the beginning of one’s own career as a writer.  My generation, though writing beautifully and wild and in new voices and looking to works from the likes of Wallace and Eggers for direction after hitting the big names first, are doing fine.  But I’m in it for the story, with a healthy obsession for language.  My role models developed in this way and I landed on two writers I will always point to – a perfect marriage for me – in Michael Ondaatje and Breece Pancake.  And I can go so far as to narrow Ondaatje to a single work, Coming Through Slaughter, just as, sadly, Pancake has only the one.  But then Pancake gave us more honesty in that one and only collection than I’ve seen anywhere else within anything I’ve read.  So I have two books as role models.  I like books that way…role models, friends, lovers, teachers.  Show me what other thing in the world can be so versatile.  Oh, and aside from this, Emily Dickinson is my first and foremost role model, my favorite writer.  The only writer of renown who wrote not for publication, but for herself.  No one can beat that today, and probably never will with the resulting success and admiration.

Your experience with Foxhead must have been good, as you’re now editing for them. Tell me how you ended up publishing and editing there.

I have a wonderful relationship with Foxhead, yes.  And, honestly, how could I not?  Stephen Marlowe is a force, and Foxhead had a clear and distinct vision for where they wanted to be now and in the future.  They did well by me when I was an author in their stable and now that I’ve been made Editor in Chief, I’m eager to do the same for writers coming up.  My collection, The Same Terrible Storm, was published by Foxhead after a few correspondences between myself and Stephen Marlowe, the Fox.  And I can say that from the moment on I knew that Steve was interested in truly bringing good work to people.  He’s a giant who hasn’t been spotted yet through the trees.  Or maybe he has, now.  I certainly hope so.

Since the first of the year I’ve been working as closely as I can with authors coming in.  It’s great.  There is so much flexibility I’m able to give a great amount of attention to my own work while being able to have the chance to see work from others, talk with them – by phone when possible, as my grandfather instilled in me the sense that true business in done face to face.  Well, face to face is difficult, but a phone call is one step removed from emails back and forth and no sense of the person you’re taking to in the meantime.

I like the way the shorter stories were interspersed in your book. Did you have a plan in mind for the order of stories, or is it more or less random?

Other than trying to vary the longer stories and the shorter ones in the hope it would be pleasing for the reader, I didn’t put any more thought into it than getting the stories in that I thought were best.

In the story ‘First Timers’, you write of some young folks that maybe aren’t ready to take those first steps into true adulthood, by way of a hog-killing gone slightly awry. The ending is true greatness. How did you come to that image?

First off, thanks very much.  I had this final scene in my head before I started writing the story.  I knew those guys were going to be under the tree sort of laughing at these boys, but I didn’t know until I got there that there would be the “pound for pound” moment that draws the comparison between the boys and the hog.  It was one of those instances for me as a storyteller where it seemed to come naturally, and I simply wrote it down before I lost it.  I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind I had the boys and the hog all tied up together and that last scene was my brain’s way of letting me know that.  It was a cool moment.  I like those times when the story takes over, and I especially like it when it takes over for the ending or beginning.

‘Purpose’ is an excellent leadoff story. I noticed Brown Bottle, from your novel, makes an appearance here. Do you publish many outtakes from it, or is this kind of anomaly?

Since beginning Brown Bottle I have published a couple chapters here and there, yourself being one who was kind enough to include a chapter at Fried Chicken and Coffee.  Many chapters can stand alone as stories.  That said, “Purpose” was the only chapter published before I started the novel.  That sounds weird as I answer, but I suppose it makes more sense when I explain that “Purpose” was the story I knew I would revisit and want to explore in a longer work.  Brown is a character close to my heart, my favorite creation.  The story works as the first chapter to the novel.

Where did the cover image come from?

What a great question!  So glad you asked, Rusty.  In the town where I grew up – Virgie, Kentucky – there’s a train tunnel very similar to the one on the cover.  It was like a carnival attraction for myself and others growing up in Virgie.  It is one of the emotional hubs of my childhood in terms of memories and a grounding of place.  I knew I wanted that tunnel on the cover.  The boy, graphic artist’s Logan Rogers’ son, was included to foreshadow the story “Go Get Your Honor”.  This story concludes with Man Dodge sitting on the tracks and waiting for a train to come.  The image was a powerful one for me, this young boy trying to become tougher, more courageous, by waiting as long as possible before getting up from the tracks.  I was greatly appreciative that Steve and company at Foxhead gave me so much creative input on the cover.

How does the guitar function in your creative life?

Ah, yes.  The guitar plays a huge role, actually.  I’ve played since I was five so it’s something that enters into many aspects of my life.  In general, it’s most often a sounding board for me when I find myself stuck on a story, something creative I can pick up and continue to keep the wheels moving.  However, I’ve also prominently placed the guitar within my work, as well.  Music in general, really.  There’s something about music that offers a reflection of storytelling for me.  I first saw this done perfectly in Coming Through Slaughter, and, little by little, allowed myself to incorporate music into my own work.  And there’s the practical part of it all, too.  If I couldn’t pick up the guitar and play when stuck, I might have to change my answer about writer’s block.  I like being able to say it doesn’t exist.

Can you give us advance info on any of Foxhead’s upcoming titles?

We have several books in the works right now.  We recently accepted a book from Michael Wayne Hampton that I’m excited about called The Geography of Love.  It’s Mike’s story collection, and it’s solid.  He submitted it to Foxhead before I was named editor and I was happy to see it when I arrived.  I like Mike’s work and have since grad school.  It’s strange how things work out. One minute you’re sitting in the lobby of the Brown Hotel in Louisville talking about craft and the next you’re embarking on the editor/writer relationship.  As for other projects, there’s plenty brewing.  But the thing I’m most excited about now is the possibility that we will be adding poetry to the imprint, and bringing in a poetry editor to head that up.  Good things ahead and full of steam.  It’s all pretty exciting, to be honest.

What new projects do you have in mind? What’s your current obsession?

 After working for nearly the past two years on my novel, I’ve finally decided to set it aside for a time.  I’m teaching more this semester than before so that requires more of my attention, and there’s the added benefit of giving those pages time to simmer for a bit.  I hope when I approach it again, I’ll see things to work on I might have overlooked before taking the break.  I’ve also been enjoying a renewed love of reading lately.  For too long I had read only as a storyteller, picking apart sentences, paragraphs, looking for story arcs, studying craft in general.  About a month back, I picked up a Cormac McCarthy novel I’d been wanting to read and just decided I was going to read for enjoyment.  And then there it was, the love of reading I hadn’t even realized was suppressed until then.  Don’t get me wrong, I love to study the craft of writing, but the two things are different.  My current obsession is my old obsession reborn – the enjoyment of the written word.

 

Court Merrigan Q&A–Moondog over the Mekong

Court Merrigan is the author of the short story collection Moondog Over The Mekong (Snubnose Press) and he's got short stories out or coming soon in Needle, Weird Tales, Plots With Guns, Shotgun Honey and Noir Nation. He is currently shopping a novel, The Broken Country, a postapocalyptic Western. Links at http://courtmerrigan.com . He also runs the Bareknuckles Pulp Department at Out of the Gutter and is an Editor at Gutter Books. He lives in Wyoming with his family.

Court sez: I lived in East Asia for a decade and have an MA in Japanese. Now I'm back in Wyobraska (I could append a map if you'd like) and that MA comes in for little use. I've been slogging up writing trail in serious fashion for a good 12 years now, and just a couple months ago finally — finally– got an agent, Adriann Ranta of WolfLit. I've racked up more than 500 rejections for short stories and novel manuscripts along the way, some of which I used to tally on my blog. Now I do some rejecting of my own as an editor at Out of the Gutter Online and Gutter Books, which isn't nearly as much fun as I thought I'd be. Sucks to turn people down.

While my current novel is being shopped, I'm working on another novel, some hardcore country noir tentatively entitled The Three Days & Nights of Lamar Tilden. I work on this when my kids (5 & 2) are asleep in the early mornings or late evenings. Bourbon helps, but not as much as you'd think.

 

Do you consider yourself a writer of literary fiction or crime fiction? Why?

Can I answer neither? I like to think what I write is pulp – aimed at maintaining the fictive dream, and all else subordinate to that.

Having said that, I wrote literary fiction for a long time, and I still like the turn of a good sentence.

The settings in Moondog over the Mekong vary widely where most fiction is set in a generic presumably suburban  place. Was this a deliberate choice? How important did you consider locale?

Oh, totally deliberate. Mainly because the locales I write about – the rural Mountain West, Southeast Asia and Japan – these are the places I’ve lived nearly my whole life, with a brief stint back east in Omaha for college. I wouldn’t feel qualified to write about the suburbs. I’ve only ever visited there, briefly. I don’t know how the suburbs work. I don’t understand them.

Locale means a great deal to me. I’m a regionalist. To take one example, once you cross that 100th Meridian, you’re no longer in the Midwest! In Japan, I lived for two years in the western Kansai region, where people take regional pride very seriously – they have their own dialect, and pointedly do not speak like the suits in Tokyo. In Thailand, too, people are very proud of their regional identities and I always found that really fascinating. People are people, sure; but you’re going to act differently out in the open of a howling Wyoming blizzard than a snowstorm in Toledo.

My favorite story is ‘Our Mutual Friend,’ which features expert use of multiple perspectives. How did you come to the decision to label each narrative with character names?

I’ve always jealously admired Faulkner’s masterwork As I Lay Dying, which is the best example of multiple, first-person points of view that I know. I’ve been trying to imitate that novel ever since I read it, to varying degrees of failure. “Our Mutual Friend” is my latest stab at it.

Some stories, I think, are just better told when we get to hear more than one side of the story. I do wish, now, that I had included the point of view of the bad father in the story, though. He’s got something to say, too, even if it might be loathsome to hear.

‘The Scabrous Exploits of Cyrus & Galina Van’ (a Western!) surprised the sheeyit out of me as compared with the other stories. Where did this one come from?

Man, I’ve been working on various drafts of that story for seven years. It’s actually the first chapter of the novel that really recently landed me an agent. The full manuscript is a post-apocalpytic Western, but really, I started with one of the oldest tropes of them all: lone mysterious outlaw riding down a dark trail. You know all kinds of shooting and mayhem are going to follow and I just can’t resist writing it out.

I assume you’ve seen a bit of cockfighting. What’s your opinion of that sport, or sports in general like football and boxing and MMA, the ones Harry Crews called blood sports?

Cockfighting is some brutal shit, man. It may be a sport for the spectators and for the bettors, but it’s deadly serious for the birds. Birds are supposed to have evolved from dinosaurs, right? The couple of times I watched them fight over in Thailand, you could really see that reptilian side of the cocks, just slashing and slaying. I mean, roosters in amazingly stupid animals, but it’s still hard to see them in pain, especially when that pain is inflicted by the stimuli they have no control over. It’s not like they’re fighting for hens or something, you know? I don’t think I could really be a fan.

Having said that, I am a fan of the “blood sports.” Football in particular. Growing up in Nebraska, Husker football is religion, and while I know intellectually that big-time college football is corrupting to institutions of higher education and that big-time football players are, for the most part, exploited in gladiator-like fashion (what is football if not America’s gladiator sport?), I love the hell out of it anyway. Saturday mornings in the fall, man, I wake up jangly, knowing I’m going to be screaming at the TV in a few hours. I can’t justify it and I’ve given up trying.

What’s the story of your book’s publication? How did you end up at Snubnose Press?

I only ever got on Twitter because of Snubnose. When they first started out, I couldn’t figure out how to get a hold of them except on Twitter, so I made an account and started tweeting at Brian Lindenmuth, who runs the press. Eventually I got an email address where I could send a query, and we went from there.

I had various iterations of what ultimately became Moondog Over The Mekong out at as many places as I could think of, but Snubnose came through first. The whole crew there, especially Brian and Eric Beetner, who designed the cover, have been a great pleasure to work with.

How has your work as an editor affected the way you write?

Absolutely. Here’s the main thing I’ve learned: Every. Single. Word. Counts. I stop reading plenty of submissions midstream at Out of the Gutter and formerly at PANK because the fictive dream was broken (admittedly, there is a different calculus involved with poetry). I learned, too, that the writer is not particularly important in the story: the reader is. Elsewise there’s no point in writing. Unless you’re writing a diary. If you can’t keep a reader engaged, little else you do on the page matters.

What projects do you have in the pipeline?

My agent, Adriann Ranta, is shopping my novel, called The Broken Country, the first chapter of which you can find in my Moondog Over The Mekong. (Can I just say here that I only got an agent, like, six weeks ago, and it still gives me a little shivery thrill to type “my agent”?) So I’m hopeful that will find a home somewhere relatively soon. In the meantime, I’m working on two other novels, one a historical fantasy set in proto-Southeast Asia, tenatively called Strider, the other a rural noir thriller set in Wyobraska called The Three Days & Nights of Lamar Tilden. Hope to get both of those done in the next several months, with hopes that Adriann will find them marketable and so will some editors out there.

Haven’t been working much on short stories recently.

Would you like to bring attention to some of your work online, or something else you think deserves attention?

I just had a story called “The Last Ladder” go up in Plots With Guns ( http://www.plotswithguns.com/PWGDecember2012/stories/Story-merrigan-1.html) which I’m really fond of – there aren’t enough stories set in the rural Mountain West, in my opinion, so I’m trying to, you know, fill in the gap. I also have a postapocalyptic sci-fi piece coming out soon in Big Pulp, and a reprint of a story that originally appeared in Grift called “City of Screams” coming out in a Press 53 anthology called Home of the Brave. It’s about a wounded Native American veteran of Afghanistan returning home to the reservation, where he takes on the bullshit he finds there with a limp and an automatic rifle. Not based on a true story by any means, but if you google “Whiteclay, Nebraska” you’ll get an idea of the kind of bullshit I’m talking about.

I’d also like to mention that Gutter Books is up and running and we’re looking for the hardest-hitting pulp you can throw at us. Find details at http://www.gutterbooks.com/2009/01/submissions-reading-period-is-from.html And we’re always looking for good flash fiction and short fiction for Out of the Gutter Online. Sub at https://outofthegutteronline.submittable.com/submit

Thanks, Rusty, for the chat. You gave my stuff a shot both here at FC&C  http://www.friedchickenandcoffee.com/2011/08/11/first-water-fiction-by-court-merrigan/) and at the (now sadly defunct) Night Train ( http://www.nighttrainmagazine.com/contents/merrigan_11_1.php) , and both times it was a real shot in the arm, you know? I was going through a rough period then, writing-wise, and you were someone out there in the wide world who didn’t think the stories I was kidnapping pixels for were just crap. Can’t thank you enough for that.

Two Poems by John Dorsey

Boxcar Poem #6

on halloween

someone in the trailer park

put razor blades

in a few candy apples

after that we stayed in

to this day

i still won’t shave

looking like

grizzly adams

just seems

more wholesome

 

Boxcar Poem #7

we watched as a woman

stabbed her husband

five times

in the throat

when they loaded him

onto the stretcher

he was still

smoking a cigarette

and telling her

to play his numbers

that he felt lucky

to be alive

 

photo by Casey Rearick

John Dorsey is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Leaves of Ass (Unadorned Press, 2011). and Tombstone Factory (Epic Rites Press, 2013). These pieces are from his forthcoming book with Lead Graffiti Letterpress, BOXCAR POEMS.  His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

The Androgynous Coat, fiction by Nathan Graziano

I finished my beer, took a hit off the bowl Toby left packed on the coffee table and grabbed my car keys. “Let’s hit the bar,” I called to Toby, who was in his bedroom.

“Come here for a second,” he said.

Toby lived in a small second floor apartment, not far from the room I rented after splitting with my wife. Devastated and still in love, I had resumed the behaviors I had stopped when I got married and had a family—bar-dwelling and barely eating and a wide variety of drugs. Like a stumbling beast rising from the ashes of a calendar, in less than month, I had become something unrecognizable to me. Toby told me that he went through the same metamorphosis the year before, when he found out his ex-wife was sleeping with his cousin. Despite the fact that Toby—a former body-builder—was short and wide-shouldered while I was the outline of an average middle-aged man, we now shared the same shadow.

When I walked into his bedroom, Toby had crushed up a Valium and cut it into two lines of fine blue powder on his dresser. He handed me a rolled dollar bill, and I went for it.

“Look at this coat,” Toby said and held up a red and black-checkered flannel jacket that, at first glance, appeared to be a hunting coat. “I picked it up at a yard sale,” he said, taking the bill from my hand and snorting the second line. “What do you think?”

“You’re asking the wrong guy. Fashion-wise, I never got over grunge.”

Look at this,” he said and put on the jacket and raised his arms. “Look at the pockets on this thing. There are pockets under the sleeves, by my ribs, and four pockets on the front.”

“That’s a lot of pockets.”

“Fucking right that’s a lot of pockets. The other night, I put it on when Erin was here, and she told it was a girl’s coat.”

“No shit,” I said and lit a cigarette—another bad habit I’d resumed. Erin, a twenty year-old junky who had been sleeping with Toby in exchange for pain pills,  had left a pair of silky black panties on Toby’s bedroom floor, and I picked them up and used them to clean my glasses. “She would know better than either of us.”

“But why would they make a coat that fits me if it’s for a girl? It doesn’t make sense. What type of girl fits into this coat?”

“A big girl,” I said. As the Valium massaged my temples with its feathery hands, I sat down on Toby’s bed, closed my eyes then fell back. My cell phone buzzed in the front of pocket of my jeans, a million tiny pins vibrating down my leg. I grabbed the phone and saw a text message from my wife and opened it. ru @ the bar????

"Fuck it, I’m wearing the coat to the bar,” Toby said. “You ready to go?”

Melted into the mattress, I nodded my head. While in no condition to drive, I reached for my keys, not bothering to respond to my wife.

#

 Toby and I took the two stools at the far end of the bar, beside a machine that played trivia if you fed it a buck. Toby kept the coat on, every now and then slipping his hand in a new pocket. As I drank more, my head began to nod, and I was almost asleep on my stool when Toby punched me in the arm.

“Oh shit, Ray. This is not fucking good.”

At the entrance to the bar, my wife stood with a man. The guy looked younger than us—my wife, Toby and I were all forty years old—and he had a full head of black hair, compared to my thinning dome washed gray. He wore a stylish black pea coat and a scarf. My wife, on the other hand, had on a blue and black checkered flannel coat, Toby’s coat but a different color. My wife and I looked at each other. Hers were cold blue ice.

When I turned to Toby, he was taking off his coat. “I guess that answers that,” he said.

I stared at my mug, wanting to hurl it across the bar at the head of the fuckwad in the pea coat. “It certainly does,” I said and reached for my beer.

Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester, New Hampshire. He is the author of three collections of poetry—Not So Profound (Green Bean Press, 2003), Teaching Metaphors (Sunnyoutside Press, 2007) and After the Honeymoon (Sunnyoutside Press, 2009)—a collection of short stories, Frostbite (GBP, 2002), and several chapbooks of fiction and poetry. A chapbook of short prose pieces titled Hangover Breakfasts was recently published by Bottle of Smoke Press. For more information, visit his website at http://www.nathangraziano.com/.