Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 29

Dennis Mahagin's FARE now available!

 

Check it out here.

Opening Day, fiction by Nathan Graziano

The forecast is calling for rain on Opening Day—not showers, but a holy-shit-the-sky-is-pissing April downpour. He packs his books into the boxes he picked up at the liquor store while his wife stands in the doorway to their bedroom, her arms crossed. “Will you be out of the house by Thursday?” she says.

“It’s Opening Day for the Red Sox,” he says and reaches onto the shelf for another handful of books, the McCarthy novels he read in a college course. “I’ll be out by the weekend.”

“Why doesn’t your girlfriend help you move?” She says “girlfriend” like she’s spitting poison from her mouth.

He rolls his eyes. “I don’t have a girlfriend,” he says. “She’s a friend, and we were talking at a bar. She grabbed my cock, and I told her to quit it.”

“I hate you.”

“I know.” Calm and deliberate, he takes a box cutter from the pocket of his jeans. He’d like to slice a handful of her hair from her head, maybe scalp her a bit—nothing life threatening. Instead he slices the duct-tape and tosses another box of books into the corner of the room.

With her back again now turned to him, his wife says, “Why can’t you be out by Thursday? I can’t stand seeing your lying ass around this house anymore.”

“It’s Opening Day.”

“I just remembered that our son has baseball practice on Thursday,” she says. “You said you’d bring him.” Though he can’t see it, his wife grins.

“It’s supposed to rain,” he says and imagines the crack of a bat, the slap of ball hitting a glove, the rustling of the stadium crowd, everyone waiting for nothing and everything. He imagines his son catching a pop fly and dying to tell him. He imagines the skinny kid staring into the stands and seeing only his mother’s scowl, her bitter lips and slightly-scalped head. “I’ll take him to practice,” he says and starts packing another box of books.

Sure, the girl grabbed his cock, but he wasn’t surprised and she wasn’t his girlfriend. She’s just some girl he invited to a ballgame, if it doesn’t rain.

 

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. He has an MFA in fiction writing from The University of New Hampshire and teaches high school. A memoir Hangover Breakfasts will be published by Bottle of Smoke Press this summer. For more information, visit his website at www.nathangraziano.com.

Puercos Gordos, fiction by Michael Gills

She was a year younger than me and semifamous.  I’d seen her all through high school, and then on the hood of a white Corvette as Miss Lonoke in the Soy Parade, a distinction that sent her to the Miss Arkansas pageant where she’d been first runner up to a raven– haired Miss Texarkana. She’d won a scholarship to some kind of modeling school, but by that summer she was back with her parents, clerking for old man Jolley at Lonoke Pharmacy and Drug.

This was Arkansas summertime, the heat was brutal, and my delivery truck was unairconditioned.  Kimberly inhabited the cool inside the pharmacy’s double doors, a fluorescent-lit delight to the flesh and blood.  I’d already hit Lowman’s, Mr. Templeton’s IGA and Knight’s Grocery, with its ten-foot tall suit of armor.  It was Friday afternoon, payday, my labor was almost done.  I had tickets to the All-Star game that night where Elvin Floyd Taylor was slated to suit up in Jackrabbit purple.  It was a good, good time to be alive.

I carried a forty-pound bundle in past the soda bar.  The air was fresh with the sprays of display perfume and medicine.  She stood behind the counter in a white sundress, the spaghetti straps of which lay over tanned shoulders where spilled honey-blonde hair all lit up by the most extraordinary hazel eyes.

“Hi Joey,” she said.  “You set those over there.”  The sweat between my shoulders was cold.

For lack of anything better, I said, “Hey.  Look here,” and pointed at my byline under a front-page story about a pig farm converting to ethanol.  “That’s me.”

She laughed, a single note ringing. “What’s funny?”

“Puercos Gordos,” she said, and tapped my article three times with a fingertip.  “Las Higas des puntas.”

The picture above my name was of three spotted hogs, snouts stuck in a trough.  Snorkey’s corn will be turned into a new kind of gasoline… the caption said.

“I’m the author.”

She said, “Oh,” and nodded her head at me, narrowing beauty queen eyes.  “I see.” “Want to get together?”

“Together?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Why?”

She’d had a boyfriend, I remembered.  A B-team lineman named Joel or something, though the dirt of their story escaped me.  Her father was a famous drunk, an amputee who’d once been a football star.

“Maybe I’ll write a story about you.  Take a picture of your trophies.”

She said, “Okay.”

###

 The next afternoon I drove out Mt. Carmel Road, past the Confederate Cemetery into the countryside with its lush green hills rolling off into pastures where farmers had just mown and raked hay into long rows that shone acre after acre, and I remembered working for a man named Guess, hauling up a bale with a sliced in half king snake dangling from a wedge of green.  This country was in my blood, where every house had a vegetable garden growing up to its back door, and dead animals littered the roadside, opossum and raccoon, squirrel and car chasing dogs.

Every few miles was a schoolbus stop, where communities had constructed tin-roofed shelters over rickety benches, like the one Kim Burgin sat on that second, her hair yellow like a fire, waving me into that ripe Saturday evening in June, when the air we breathed seemed blessed and golden.

“Looking for somebody?”

“You.”  When I opened the door she slid in beside me, and we drove real slow up the gravel drive to where her Daddy, a double amputee, sat fiddling with a ham radio hooked to an orange extension cord that was duct taped across the front porch.

Mr. Burgin looked up and nodded, then went back to his radio.

“Daddy.  This is Joey.”

“Hey Joe,” Mr. Burgin said, and the radio let out a staticky cackle.

“He’s coming to supper.”

Mr. Burgin regarded me.  His tee shirt was sweat stained and there was tobacco juice on his left shoulder.  His pants were tied in knots below his knees.  This close, he reminded me of Mama’s people, colorful, nobody’s fool.  He wheeled my way and I shook his hand, trying not to look.  Kim was radiant at his side–I have to tell you.  There was nothing fake about her in the least–she was real to the bone.  And I could see she had his face, the fine bone and shining eyes. “Well,” he said, “we could do worse.  Tell me when.”

Inside, food was cooking, purple hull peas, it turned out, cornbread and ham.  A blackberry cobbler steamed on the stove where a mess of okra drained on paper sacks.  I was fed a fine country meal with sliced tomatoes and crookneck squash, lemon squeezed in the tea.  Kim’s mother said the prayer, then set a hot plateful in front of me.

Buttered biscuits got sent around the table, along with a jar filled with syrup and mashed butter–poor man’s jelly.  Across the room, a woodstove sat below a mantel where pictures showed Mrs. Burgin with a baby in arms, daddy Emile standing beside them with a big wide smile.

“You was a running back, no?”

Kim looked at me, and Faye got up for more tea. “Yessir.”

“Number 45,” he said.

“That was me.”

“I was back oncet too,” he said.  “But I ain’t never fumbled on no one yard line in a playoff game.  Ha,” he said.  “Ha, ha.”

“Daddy.”  Kim grinned and I could see that she loved this man.  This all happened thirty years ago when I had no notion whatsoever how daughters loved their fathers.

“It was wet,” I said.  My senior year, I’d lost the ball, and in turn the game, one rainy night against Bauxite Pirates.  You’d think football was God or Jesus or something.

Mr. Burgin passed the cobbler, said “S’Okay, and looked me straight.  “You be nice to my girl.”

I said, “I will.  Promise.”

The Burgins sent me home full, with a paper sack of tomatoes and crooknecks, a jar of muscadine jelly and some chow-chow.  Country people will give you the soles off their shoes if you let them.  I drove away with the gifts in the front seat, and the taste of Kim Burgin’s lips on mine.

###

Next day I looked up the history of how Emile Burgin lost his legs.  He’d been an athlete, all-District the year the Jackrabbits went 10–0.  He’d been offered a full ride at Arkansas Tech in Russellville and accepted the Wonderboy’s offer.  The week before he was to report for summer two-a-days, he took a job with Alfred Tipton manufacturing as a night shift supervisor, where they turned out mobile homes for poor whites who set them up in cow pastures from Butlerville to Vilonia.  Report-in day came and went at Tech.  That’s where he lost both legs, at Tipton’s, when a prefab truss machine grabbed him into its works.  Only Mr. Tipton’s lawyers twisted it so it was Emile’s fault, a pint whiskey bottle that materialized in his locker was followed by negligence charges.

The case between Alfred Tipton and Emile Burgin was settled out of court when the former agreed to allow the latter to take ownership of a newly manufactured home.  Kim was just a girl, a toddler, when Faye took over.  There were the monthly disability checks and a holiday ham every Christmas from Tipton’s.  A series of DWI’s almost got Emile jail time, and it’s fishy how he skated clean.  He built a front porch on the house trailer on a piece of land he’d inherited from his people.  He took up the ham radio, long distance conversations that blurred his nights into mornings, when Kim would crawl out of her bed and turn the radio off, cover her father where he lay, and put the bottle back in its place.  That’s the story, the best I could make of it.

By Mid-Summer’s Eve, Kim and I had taken to meeting in an old barn two pastures over. I’d drive out after dark, park on the roadside in blackberry briar, and sneak through the barbed wire and out to the barn, where the door hinges would squeal and there’d be Kim on a bed of straw, little white streaks of moonlight pouring through the board cracks onto her bare skin.

Once on a full moon, she brought a drugstore– scented candle in and lit it.  Then, thrown up large on the barn wall, our shadow.  She was pregnant.  We talked about eloping to Memphis, Kimberly and me, putting the Mississippi between us and Lonoke County.

And you think that would be enough.

There came a night when I was supposed to tap on her bedroom window, load a suitcase and drive off to our new life.  But the truth is, I chickened out and went on back to college.  What did I know?  I was afraid, and that fear dogged me for a while, and then it went away.

So it was with mild surprise, not so long ago, that I found the stamped letter in my mailbox, careful writing on a scented envelope.  Joey, it said.

###

This is a story about quiet and what breaks it, the hour after Mama’s lain down for the evening and the light bulbs from Daddy’s radio throw a blue sheen on his face, and if you don’t get here this second I’m going to kill you. A liquory voice speaks time to time and Daddy’s eyes flutter.  He has an ongoing fight with this Mexican–Daddy thinks he’s a Mexican. They call each other fat pig and son of a whore in Spanish and I believe the Mexican’s drunk as Daddy–these nights.   The other quiet is the waiting for the far-off crunch of gravel, cicadas thrumming and a whipporwhil’s lonely call and the starlight on the white bedspread Mama crocheted, new-washed for tonight and smelling of June sunshine.  You’ll be past the mailbox now, the moon throwing your shadow past the tomatoes and bush beans Mama’s hoed, up past the well-house where Daddy peed my name in last spring’s snow. Are you deciding whether to walk away from me, to forget what we’ve promised each other, that I’m not worth it.  Even though our rings are bought, bright shining this second in Mama’s old suitcase under my bed, even though our course is plotted and new life aches for us to join it out there round the bend. Our baby?  You walk away from me now?  Get in your car and drive across the river bridge and leave me and him stuck in Lonoke County for the rest of our lives?  Hell with you.

“Hey, higo de punta?  Are you listening, my brother?”   The Mexican slurs everything. The words reach and touch Daddy in that place he goes to these nights when we’re all in bed and he takes it straight.   “Puerco gordo?”

Joey’s saved four hundred dollars from his newspaper job, and he’s been working up a portfolio to show around Memphis, once we get there and find a place to hang our hats.  I’ve got just as much down there in the suitcase, plus the crisp $50 Mr. Jolley handed me from the register when I told him I was quitting.  He cried, the old silly, “We’ll miss you around here.”

He waved a hand so dust twirled round a shaft of light.  “I’ll send a letter of good standing with you. You’ll need that,” he said and lowered his brow.  Then he went off sniffling.

“Snorka, snorka.  Fat piggy?” the Mexican says.  “I have nice slop for you. Here pig, pig.” Through the half-open door, conked out in the recliner, Daddy’s not fazed. But I know that if I walked in there and turned the thing off he’d yell. Besides, when Joey Harvell taps on mywindow and I crawl out of this house for good, maybe that radio will mask us.

Daddy’d played football, too.  I’ve seen the pictures of him running on the green field, throwing stiff arms and forearm shivers, diving over the line for the endzone. Then he went to the Tiptons. “They’ll get you from me too one of these days,” Daddy says.  He’s got this car with knobs so he doesn’t need legs and he’s got this riding mower rigged up too, though he uses it mostly to drive out to the mailbox by the highway, to see if the check’s come so he can make the trip over to the county line and restock.

What I’ll carry from my life here?  Soon I’ll feel it kicking to get out, just like me. I haven’t thought of names, they just won’t come, but I’ve read in the Health and Wellness section at work that babies never forget the air their mothers breathed while they were in the womb, that it above all will be sweetest to them and they can never ever be happy until they fill their lungs with it for good and ever.  So you-know-who can never have him.

“Son of a whore–you answer me.”

For a while I walk the back pasture after dark, sneak through the barbed wire and out to the barn, where the door hinges would squeal to where he used to be.  I knew nothing about life or money or how things get accomplished in this world, I didn’t know that I’d get stabbed in the back, or that I’d stab back.

I kissed and he kissed back.  We’d marry, find some old farmhouse and make a houseful of good-looking babies.  The fall chill’d come and we’d dance altogether in the front yard when a good rain came.  We dreamed ourselves grown old in love, and swore to one-another that no matter what, there’d always be this, what the candle flickered on the cedar wall–and it didn’t take a stretch of the imagination, then, to feel the life we’d made find heartbeat.

“Si Bueno?”

The Mexican, where does he get off?  Daylight’s coming, I can see it out the corners of my eyes, like the monster you see slinking under your bed when you’re eleven and the quiet comes on and you don’t dare dangle a hand off the side of the bed to the floor that’s cold to the touch, even though it’s June, and you’re eighteen now, and a new life is out there round the bend, fattening on the quiet.

“Señor?  It is good with us then?”

This is a story about quiet and what breaks it, Joey.  I waited.  Goddamn you. For a long time. This matters.  I’m serious.  How could I tell him about you, how his eyes are the same blue and why he was faster than the rest?  Why I loved him like I’d die?  Here’s his football picture, number 45, just like you. The wreck wasn’t his fault–it was some drunk, we never found out. There’s a plaque outside the stadium with his picture on it, and two other boys from the State Championship team.  We were there for the memorial.  Eddie Stutt’s daddy broke down. I said some words.  Well, that’s all from here.  Still love, k.

 ###

The letter sits now in a box on my chest with a newspaper page from the Star Herald that announced the engagement and coming marriage of Miss Kimberly Lynn Burgin, daughter of the late Emile and Faye Burgin to DeWayne Tipton of Lonoke, son of Alfred A. Tipton of Lonoke. The bride and groom are softlit, and old Lamar’s given them the premier place on the page, what youth and beauty will get you when love turns chickenshit.  Tipton adopted the boy.  He comforted Kim on the sunlit day of the funeral last June, that’s all I know.

But all this is neither here nor there.

I don’t know why it’s all come back to me now, given the turn of events, Renee’s mother’s passing and the grief and sorrow that’s come down on us all over that.  Only something happened during Renee’s visit to Florida, just before the hospice, when the bed scenes with her mother got the most intense–the very end of it for them.  I was home with Lara in Utah.  There was a night about half-way through it all when I’d cooked Lamb Curry, measuring out the happy-hour bourbons that took the edge off.  And this one night, the one I’m thinking of, my daughter and I watched a movie together on the couch, some silly-ass love story or another, doesn’t matter, and it got me thinking about Kim and her now dead father, Emile, the person that I’d been once, and how things could have turned out different.  So I mistakenly nursed this reminiscence with another whiskey until, well, until I woke up with Lara crying on the telephone, her mother distraught, long-distance–on the other end.

“It’s okay,” I had said.  “I just fell asleep.”

“On the fucking living room floor?  Joe? We put mother in hospice today.  They’ve removed food and water.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I’ll do better.  I love you.”

When the phone went dead, Lara took the receiver from me and placed it in its cradle.  “Time for bed, Dad,” she said.

  ###

In June, I delivered the eulogy for the Rockerson family at the Episcopalian service.  We’d rented a place right on the ocean and, afterward, in the ungodly heat, Renee, Lara and I burned sage near the surf at a spot where sea turtles landed nightly to lay eggs.  We took Lara to Disneyworld, and that made her happy–she loved the faux New Orleans haunted house best, the spectral images that laughed and drank wine in the old house splendor.  So all the other business, that’s over with now, we’re moving on to a new chapter of our lives.  Lara’s nearly twelve, she’ll come of age soon.  It’s happening already.  Renee’s finally through the worst of her change, and, after the operation, the endless bleeding and night sweats have let her be.  We move forward.  The Cap is coming for Thanksgiving, and I’m planning to fix up a room for him in the basement, though, after two-hip replacements, he barely gets around.  I’ll lay in that handrail we’ve needed for so long, rip up the old stained carpet for new.  We’ll track down a bird as big as a barn and light the holiday candles.  I’ll lay in whiskey and a good stash of wine and we’ll watch the bowl games on a wide screen.  The first holiday after is always the worst.  We’ll take out the old photographs and laugh and cry and console, play the old songs and pretend we’re not crooked to the goddamn core, every one of us.

In honor of the newly dead, so help me.

 

Michael Gills was McKean Poetry Fellow at the University of Arkansas and Randall Jarrell Fellow in Fiction in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. He earned the Ph.D. in Creative Writing/Fiction at the University of Utah. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Oxford American,Verb 4, Shenandoah, Boulevard, The Gettysburg Review, The Greensboro Review, Quarterly West, New Stories From The South and elsewhere. Why I Lie: Stories (University of Nevada Press, September, 2002) was selected by The Southern Review as a top literary debut of 2002. A 2005-06 Utah Established Artist Fellowship recipient, Gills is a contributing writer for Oxford American and a board member for Writers @ Work. He is currently a professor of writing for the Honors College at the University of Utah, and is promoting a second collection of stories, THE DEATH OF BONNIE AND CLYDE, and a novel GO LOVE..

 

I Need Help (CANCELLED AFTER SO MUCH SUPPORT!) THANK YOU!

Financial help, that is. My printer is sucking up print cartridges like meth. Because of various reasons, all unavoidable, I don't have enough money to buy printer cartridges to finish Dennis's chapbook. I need just a few bucks, maybe $25. This is not a 501 c3 corporation, so I can't promise tax deductions. It's a matter of love. if you like what we do and you'd like to see Dennis and Tim and Rosemary's and Ben's chapbooks sooner than later, send me a couple bucks via Paypal at XXXXXXXXXXXX. I never did this well while Night Train existed, which is part of the reason I chose to shut it down. I hate asking for money, but I don't have any right now. I'll even promise a return of your cash when I get flush again if you'd rather loan me money. Thanks.

Wow. Thank you all so so much.

Goodnight, Gramaw, by Misty Skaggs

Every night, at two a.m., I kneel

at the altar of her rust-brown recliner.

After the credits roll on past The Big Valley,

and Miss Barbara Stanwyck

has her last, hearty laugh,

I fill a plastic pan

packed home from the hospital

with lukewarm city water

and Epsom salts.

 

As I sink her tired feet to soak,

I wonder how many miles…

 

It’s hard to think

through the camphor stink

of Dr. J. R. Watkins’ white liniment.

But I manage to imagine

where rough heels

used to be,

ghosts of calluses that come

with hard work

and thin-soled shoes.

 

The medicine burns

my gnawed-up nails.

The effort of her smile is the part

that tingles.

“You’ve got Pap’s hands,”

a blessing,

“All palm and no fingers.”

 

Misty Marie Rae Skaggs, 30, is a two-time college drop-out who currently resides on her Mamaw's couch in a trailer at the end of a gravel road in Eastern Kentucky. Her work has been published here on friedchickenandcoffee.com as well as in print journals such as New Madrid, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Limestone and Inscape. On June 9th, she will be reading her poems on the radio as part of the Seedtime on the Cumberland Festival. When she isn't baking strawberry pies and tending the backyard tomato garden, she spends her time reading and writing damned near obsessively in the back porch "office" space she is currently sharing with ten kittens.

The Stray Cat, fiction by CL Bledsoe

Joey had been successfully dodging Tommy, who’d had been tweaked out on homemade meth for nearly a week, until Tommy decided he’d had enough of the stray cat nosing around the house. So he told Joey to leave some tuna out for it and, when the scrawny thing got full, catch it and bring it to him. Joey thought maybe Tommy was going to drown it or wring its neck.

            He took several bites from the tuna, left a little in the can out by the front door, and hunched down inside the screened-in porch a few feet away, slapping at mosquitoes, and thought about school starting back up in a couple days. He missed the cafeteria. As long as you didn’t attract attention, some of the kids were okay. He had a couple buddies.

            He heard a rustling and sat still. A mosquito landed on his arm. He could feel the sharp itch as it drew blood. It was dark outside, but he could see a shape and hear the tuna can scrape against the broken stones that used to be a kind of walkway up to the house. He listened to the thing eat and jerked to his feet when he realized it might not even be the cat—it could be a coon or a possum. He moved to the door and suddenly heard the sound of the thing purring. He was pretty sure coons didn’t purr.

            Joey knelt and put his hand through a hole in the screen. His fingers smelled like tuna—he was a little afraid the cat might mistake his hand for dessert—so he kept them balled into a fist. At first, the cat went quiet, but in a moment, it brushed tentatively against his hand.

             Joey could feel the cat’s bones through its thin skin. He brought it into the living room and sat on the floor with it so Tommy wouldn’t yell at him about having it on the tattered, broken couch.

            “What’s that?” his sister Chyna asked. She came down the stairs and stood in front of Joey.

            “Cat,” he said.

            “Better get it out of here before Tommy sees it.” She put a hand on its head and smoothed its fur. It purred.

            “Tommy wants it.”

            “Oh,” she looked worried. “What for?”

            “Don’t know.” He shrugged.

            “Don’t let him have it.”

            “Okay,” he said.

            “I’m serious. Joey.” She stared in his eyes.

            “Okay.” He looked away.

            She put her hand on his arm. “Really. Just let it go. He’ll never know.”

            Joey scoffed. “Sure.”

            Chyna was quiet. She petted it some more. Joey set the cat down on its back and rubbed its stomach. It purred loudly.

            Both brother and sister jumped as the bedroom door slammed open. Chyna stepped in front of the cat and tried to block Tommy’s view of it as he stalked into the living room.

            “What’s that behind you?” he asked.

             Tommy took the cat by the scruff of its neck outside to the shed. He told Joey to go get the gas can from the back of Tommy’s truck. Chyna came out to watch. Tommy doused the cat with gas. It shrieked loud and twisted to plant a claw in Tommy’s arm. He cursed and held it out. He pulled his lighter out and lit it. Chyna clapped her hands over her mouth as the cat screamed. Tommy let it go, and it ran—a fiery dart—back into the house and planted itself under the couch. Tommy cursed again and ran in after it. Smoke was already pouring out the front door. Joey went in to see the couch in flames, the flames spreading up the walls.

            “Get that TV out of here,” Tommy yelled as he ran out with an armful of valuables. Joey and Chyna ran into the open door of the master bedroom and found their mother, still asleep, and dragged her out into the grass.

            “Quit wasting time with that old skank,” Tommy yelled. He ran back in and came out with clothes and his records.

            Joey and Chyna roused their mom and explained what was happening.

            “You damned idiot,” she said as he ran out with another load of records. He backhanded her and turned back to the house, which was blazing, now.

            “Tommy,” Joey said. Tommy turned on him with his hand raised. Joey pointed. The eave above the door—already sagging for as long as Joey could remember was ablaze and falling.

            “God damned cat,” Tommy said.

 ***

            They went to a motel for the night—Tommy and Joey’s mother in the bed, Joey and Chyna in the backseat of Tommy’s car. The next morning, when Joey knocked on the door to ask to use the bathroom, he overheard Tommy on the phone with Joey’s grandmother, who owned the house.

            “I couldn’t call the damn fire department because the damn phone was on fire,” he was saying. “I don’t know how it started. Probably the wiring. That thing was a death-trap for years. If you weren’t so stingy…” He put the phone away from his ear and noticed Joey. He made a fist at the boy. Joey went back outside and walked out into a field near the motel to pee.

           ***

            Joey’s grandmother showed up later from Parkin. She pulled up to the room and waved Joey and Cyna over to her car, a steel whale painted an institutional green.

            “Are you children hungry?” she asked.

            “Yes, ma’am,” Chyna said.

            She waved them into the front seat and took them to McDonald’s. As they were ordering, Joey asked if they could get something for Tommy.

            “He can get his own,” Grandmother said.

            Joey started to say that Tommy would get mad, but Chyna squeezed his hand to shoosh him.

            Back at the motel, Grandmother left the kids in her car while she went in.

            “What do you think they’re talking about?” Joey asked.

            “She’s tearing them a new one.” Chyna stared at the door with a sullen look.

            After a half-hour or so, their grandmother came back out. The kids’ mother stood in the doorway watching as she got back in the car.

            “How would you children like to come stay with me for a little while?”

            “Thank you,” they both said.

             She stopped at Wal Mart and bought them new clothes. While she was looking for shoes for Joey, she noticed his were duct-taped.

            “What happened to your shoes?”

            He shrugged. “The bottom was coming off so I fixed them.”

            She got them five outfits each and shoes. She bought them backpacks, paper, and pencils. They put their bags in the car, and Grandmother showed the kids the receipt. “I just spent nearly two hundred dollars on you kids,” she said.

            “Thank you,” they both said.

            “’Thank-you’ don’t pay the bills.”

 ***

            When they got to her house, she put them to work mowing and raking leaves. They gathered up fallen branches and weeded her plants in the front of the house. Joey had to climb up on a rickety ladder and clean out the gutters. By the time they finished all the chores she’d listed for them in her close handwriting, it was late afternoon. Joey knocked on the door, and Grandmother sent him around back. She made them both undress and rinsed the mud and detritus off with the garden hose and gave them towels. They dried off and stood in their towels in the entryway, shivering. She gave them each a set of clothes, and they dressed.

            “Minimum wage is three-twenty-five per hour,” she said. “You two worked for four hours. Can either of you tell me how much you earned?”

            Joey raised his hand.

            “Minus room and board expenses,” she added.

            Joey lowered his hand.

             They ate early, and when they finished, the kids cleaned up. “May we watch television?” Joey asked.

            “I don’t like television,” Grandmother said.

            She sent them to bed early.

            “May we read?” Joey asked.

            “All right.”

            They searched through the house. Chyna found a Readers Digest Condensed book called Dark Desires. Joey found a paperback Tom Clancy novel behind a bookcase. They sat in their beds on top of the covers, afraid to wrinkle the sheets. Joey woke from Chyna shaking him.

            “You were crying in your sleep.”

            “Dreaming about that cat,” he said.

            They sat up reading their books for the rest of the night.

 ***

            The next morning, when they came down to breakfast, Grandmother had another list of chores. They spent the day cleaning and repairing things around the house. For lunch, they had soup from a can that she mixed with two cans’ worth of water and had them share. For supper, they ate pasta with a thin sauce that hardly stained the noodles. They were in bed by dark and Grandmother came and knocked on their door. They quickly turned their lights out. She opened the door and said, “Happy New Year!”

            “Thank you,” they both said.

            When she closed the door, Chyna spoke: “I miss mom,” she said.

            “I don’t,” Joey said.

            “We could run away.”

            “Where would we go?”

            “Back to Crowley’s Ridge.”

            “Hell, why bother?” They were both quiet.

 ***

            The next day, they went into town to watch a parade. She gave them the rest of the afternoon off, and they searched the house again for more books. The following day, they begged a ride to the library.

            “I’m going to have to deduct the gas money from your chores,” Grandmother said.

            They started school the next day. Grandmother drove them into Crowley’s Ridge and dropped them off. Joey collected his first black eye, and Chyna got into a shoving match with another girl. At lunch time, they were called to the office. Their mom was standing by the principal’s office. Chyna gave her a silent hug. Their mother stepped back and looked at them.

            “You guys look good. What happened to your hands?” She fingered the blisters on Chyna’s palms.

            “Grandmother made us do chores.”

            “Nothing’s free with your grandmother.”

            “Where’s Tommy?” Joey asked.

            “At the house,” his mom said.

            They drove out to the house at Hunter’s Rest, a one-time resort community that sat, now, on a stagnant pond. Drunken fishermen threw lines in the green water and pulled out a gar now and then. They passed the gate and turned in to the dirt track that led to the remains of the house, which sat, surprisingly to Joey, just like it had before—sagging and weatherworn, except now, it had a blackened hole burnt in the roof. She pulled up to the house, got out, and went to the workshop off to the side and slid the aluminum door up. Tommy was inside, sleeping on a mattress on the cement floor. As soon as they slid the door up, he started cursing.

            “The old bat give you any money?” He asked.

            “She’s making us pay off our debt for room and board,” Chyna said.

            “And she bought—“ Joey began, but Chyna nudged him silent.

            “What’d she buy?” Tommy said.

            “Gas. She made us pay back the gas money she spent taking us to school,” Chyna said quickly.

            Tommy laughed. “Find anything valuable in her house?”

            “No sir,” Joey said. “She doesn’t even have a TV.’

            Tommy laughed again. “Stingy old bat.”

            Tommy had a TV hooked up to rabbit ears on a chair. The kids sat on the hard concrete and watched it while he and their mother talked outside. When they came back in, the kids’ mom asked if they were hungry. They went and got in the car and she took them back to school.

            After they’d cleaned her entire house and fixed everything that needed fixing, and by their reckoning paid her back with interest, Grandmother lost patience with the children. She snapped at them constantly, for their looks, for their smells, for every reason she could think of, and whenever she ran out of reasons, she would simply pinch them whenever they strayed too close.

            “My freezer’s empty,” she complained. It was true, the day before, she’d thawed a cake she’d frozen three years prior, according to the date. She refused to let them leave the table until they each finished a slice and then complained about their gluttony.

            They decided to sneak away during school and return to their own home. When Grandmother dropped them off, they went inside, waited a few minutes, and left. They walked over to Wal-Mart, just catty-corner from the junior high school, and then made their way through neighborhoods and back streets east, generally following highway 64, until they made it the few miles out to Hunter’s Rest. The gate was open, and they found the house as it had been. Their mom’s car wasn’t there, though, and when they knocked on the shed door, no one answered. It was chained closed, so they couldn’t investigate. They went inside the burnt house and waited, making themselves as comfortable as they could.

            Other than the living room, which was soot-stained with a hole in the ceiling, the house was much the same. They dragged the charred furniture out and went upstairs to their old room. Their things were still there, though they reeked of smoke.

            They waited out the rest of the day and that night. It got chilly inside because of the hole in the roof, but they huddled under blankets and toughed it out; neither of them could sleep anyway because of the dreams about the cat and Tommy. When no one came the next day, they hiked back into town and spent all the money they scavenged from their combined savings on food. The kids carried their bags back out to the house, joking and laughing for the first time since they could remember.

            After they ate, Chyna went next door to a neighbor’s to borrow the phone. She called Grandmother and told her they were staying with their mom again and that she’d kicked Tommy out. They broke into the shed and found an extension cord and ran it to the house to power the TV.

            They lived like that for six months. Joey got a job in town at Pizza House and Chyna got a job delivering papers. They spread a tarp over the roof and fixed as much as they could. When they plugged the phone back in, they discovered that it worked, but it only ever rang when the school called about them being absent, so they unplugged it again.

            Then, one day, they heard noise outside. Tommy and their mother pulled up in an 18-wheeler. They’d been driving cross country all this time.

            “Piss-poor job on the roof,” was all Tommy said. He and the kids’ mom reclaimed their old bedroom.

            “Maybe we should go back to Grandmother’s,” Joey said.

            “Let me think about it,” Chyna said. Joey sat beside her, quiet, while she stared straight ahead.

             The next day, Chyna and Joey rode their bikes into town to the nearest payphone.

            “School’s good,” Chyna said in answer to her grandmother’s first question. “Mom’s seeing Tommy again. He moved back into the house.” She spent the rest of the call talking about her job and how she hoped to move up to shift manager by summer. They stayed in town for a while and rode back out to the house in time to see the end of the battle. Grandmother stood by the doorway while Tommy loaded his car. The kids’ mother sat by the shed, smoking a cigarette. Chyna went up to her.

            “Mom, if you ever cared about being a good mother to us, don’t go with him right now. Go and meet him later when Grandmother’s gone. Do it for us.”

            Her mother sat, stunned, as Chyna turned and walked away.

   ***

            Grandmother watched Tommy leave. She went to the kids’ mother and lectured her at length while the kids watched. Finally, her daughter in tears, Grandmother left. The kids went over to their mother. She looked up at them and smiled through her tears.

            “You can go, now,” Chyna said.

            Their mother’s face dropped, and the kids went inside the remains of the house.

CL Bledsoe is the author of the young adult novel Sunlight; three poetry collections, _____(Want/Need), Anthem, and Leap Year; and a short story collection called Naming the Animals. A poetry chapbook, Goodbye to Noise, is available online at www.righthandpointing.com/bledsoe. Another, The Man Who Killed Himself in My Bathroom, is available at http://tenpagespress.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/the-man-who-killed-himself-in-my-bathroom-by-cl-bledsoe/. His story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South's Million Writer's Award. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 5 times. He blogs at Murder Your Darlings, http://clbledsoe.blogspot.com Bledsoe has written reviews for The Hollins Critic, The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, Prick of the Spindle, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. Bledsoe lives with his wife and daughter in Maryland.

Poems by Mather Schneider

FIRST HUNT

The first night I had my driver’s license

I drank a 6 pack and borrowed my mother’s car.

I turned the headlights on, backed out

and was about a half mile down the road

when I had a collision with a big deer.

He slid onto the hood as I hit the brakes

and when I skidded to a halt

he scrambled down and ran off,

leaving me with a broken light,

some blood on the paint, fur in the grill,

staring into the woods on a dark country road,

not a scrap of meat for my troubled mother.

MY GOTH GIRLFRIEND

In the cemetery shadows

she pushed me against somebody’s grandpa’s

grave stone,

knelt in the excelsior

of the pine mulch

and showed me

that god walked the earth.

Death’s rock etched my back

as I fought but

lost myself

into the wet velvet corridor

of her throat.

My balls howled and a dark angel

clung to my leg.

Slowly the moon pulled

itself back together.

Not fifty feet away

beyond the flimsy border

of bougainvillea

rushed the insane traffic

of lost souls.

 

I was born in Peoria, Illinois in 1970 and have lived in Tucson, Arizona for the past 14 years. I love it here, love the desert, love the Mexican culture (most of it), and I love the heat. I have one full-length book of poetry out called DROUGHT RESISTANT STRAIN by Interior Noise Press and another called HE TOOK A CAB from New York Quarterly Press. I have had over 500 poems and stories published since 1993 and I am currently working on a book of prose.

http://www.nyqbooks.org/author/mather...

NASCAR, poem by Perry Higman

NASCAR (Pennsylvania 500  at POCONO, July, 1998)

To:   Governor Tom  Ridge of Pennsylvania, giving  a guest politician's dull monotone delivery of the command, "Gentlemen, — start — your  -  engines," at the start ofthe Pennsylvania 500  at Pocono  –

From:   the young  freckle-shouldered man on my right, wearing an old black Darrell  Waltrip tank top, holding his second  half-quart of Bud –

"He just doesn't fucking get it, does he."

 

 

It's a gathering of Americans from New York,

Boston, Rochester and

the South,

an uncountable crowd

of over one hundred  thousand, come to celebrate

the thrill of freedom we feel in working, saving up

for a car,

settling into the seat and sensing the weight of driving  a steady 70, tank after tank of gas, across the country

on the Eisenhower

Interstate System.

 

 

We come in a brotherhood and sisterhood

of things we know how to use

every  day –

 

tobacco, beer, furniture, guns, candy, pop

and soap –

gas, oil, Ford, Pontiac, and Chevrolet.

 

 

And we come to worship

our gods

of the open road — Dick, Darrell, Jeff, Dale, John, Bill, Jimmie and Rusty, Kenny and Mike — who, like us,

have the same names,

and who, like us,

come from hometowns no one

outside the family has ever heard of –

Chemung, Kannapolis, Hueytown, Batesville, Owensboro,  Pittsboro, Spanaway, Dawsonville,

Fenton and Randleman.

 

 

We come

in a uniform of caps, and T-shirts

to sing

with the soul

of the full-bodied American carburated V8, and to hoist

our rebel civilization

up to the whole world's broad sky,

 

and we flip the finger to sissy

computer-enhanced

thrills

and to those who

just don't understand the tradition

of outrunning the law.

 

 

We come to celebrate our country's ways — R and D in a smudged spiral notebook,

Terry  and Bobby's proud mother

signing her autograph in the pits,

and men

great enough

to thank the Lord for winning

a race and then dance destruction

into the roof

their car.

 

 

NASCAR racing

is the common  poetry of hardworking America's

industrial and corporate roar, that lets

each of us live the tingling thrill of being one

in a river of many, swirling around together with deafening power.

 

I have led a long, charmed life – parents who gave me freedom and a love for wide open spaces, a wonderful job where they let me do what I wanted as long as I did it well, good grown-up kids I keep learning from, a fine wife and a few good friends who've helped me become me through many sad and happy times.

Lazarus, fiction by Brenda Rose

His boy had been dead eight days when the preacher picked up the black, worn King James Bible with his name engraved in gold on the leather cover, and reinserted himself in the pulpit of the Mt. Calvary Holy Ghost Church, its steeple towering like a massive gravestone, casting shadows over the fields of local farmers. Since his return to the church, he’d felt a supreme anointing in every sermon he preached, every prayer he prayed. In the dark days after his son’s death, he’d begun to dream, and in his dreams, he delivered flaming sermons to hundreds—maybe thousands—of people, saving souls and healing the sick with a halo of fire blazing triumphantly over his head. The dreams changed him; now, he carried a divine power in his fingertips, and a celestial scent oozed from his pores. Like Moses, he’d seen the fire, and the fire burned over him, blazed inside him, and kindled the life pulsing through his veins. He saw his own future as a fire and brimstone televangelist, tossing out miracles, leading a crusade like the legendary Jimmy Swaggert, his sermons delivered to living rooms in homes across the country.

Six weeks after the funeral, the preacher watched his wife pull on a black dress to wear to church. He said, “I’ve missed you.”

His wife turned away from him. In silence, she pulled the hem of the dress from around her waist down to her knees. He wanted to shake her and scream snap out of it. He was sick and tired of coming home to find his wife sleeping, curled up like a giant fetus, huddled with her grief in their darkened bedroom. He’d hammered her for weeks to shake off the depression and step back into her role as the preacher’s wife. His dreams would never materialize if she didn’t put the past in the past and stand by him.

Since the funeral—since burying their son in the pale blue outfit she’d bought for his fourth birthday—she had pulled the leftover pieces of her heart into herself. A blanket of silence darkened their home, suffocating her with sorrow, extinguishing the light in her eyes. Today, though, the preacher felt the deep, unmistakable pull of his faith; he felt a rush of excitement, a thrill, a miracle in the making. After a vivid dream he’d had several nights in a row of making love to his wife on the church altar, he had prepared a sermon especially for this day. It was time to reclaim his wife and move into the future.

The preacher’s wife struggled with the back zipper. She’d lost weight. Still, she was a lovely woman with brown eyes and dark hair that fell in soft curls to her shoulders. The preacher reached for the zipper, but his wife whispered, “No.” She took a few steps back.

He knew he’d been hard on her in recent days, but it had been for her benefit. She’d wallowed in pity too long. They’d delayed ordering a headstone for the small grave in the cemetery behind the church because she said she needed time. Time! She’d had more than enough time to mourn and pick herself back up. It had been six weeks. He didn’t understand his wife’s prolonged grief; their son was dead and buried, and nothing could bring him back. It was time to put a headstone on the grave and let go of the past.

The preacher pulled a paisley tie around his neck, and said, “It won’t be easy for you today. Eli started attending services as soon as he was released from the hospital.”

He waited for her response. She gave none.

He knotted the tie. “Every Sunday he sits on the third pew from the altar, on the right side of the sanctuary. I really don’t know how in the world Sister Jody can play the piano with that freak sitting so close to her, polluting the place like he does. He stinks. It’s distracting.”

He waited again for a reaction from his wife; it did not come.

The preacher adjusted his tie, inspected it in the mirror, and said, “Eli’s face hangs paralyzed on one side, and when he speaks, he slurs his words like a sorry drunkard.”

He searched her reflection for a response etched in her face, but found it empty. Brown eyes remained sunken and expressionless, buried inside the hollow grave of her face.

He slicked back his thick, dark hair and sprayed it stiff. “He sits there every Sunday unashamed of his scarred face. Looks like the doctor was drunk when he stitched the pieces back together.” He turned this way and that, admiring his physique in the mirror. “He’s a constant reminder that our boy didn’t survive. Eli is nothing but a freak and he’s turned my services into a freak show.”

He’d expected a reply of some sort: an acknowledgment—a verbal agreement from his wife that, yes, it must be painful for him to preach with Eli present. Instead, she refused to even face him. His words disappeared as soon as they left his mouth, evaporated before reaching her ears.

She pulled up her long, auburn hair, pinning it in a neat bun on her head, leaving wisps around her sad, comatose face. She picked up her purse and said, “Then let’s go if you’re ready.”

He drove past thirsty fields of tobacco with wilted leaves browning on the stalks. For days, clouds had moved through, threatening rain, yet never delivering more than a few sprinkles. The preacher tried to draw her into a conversation, but he soon tired of his wife’s dead responses and drove on in silence, a cemetery of unspoken words spread between them.

His mind wandered back to Eli. The local media had reported that he’d risked his life to save the boy. From his hospital bed, Eli had told the Sheriff how he’d heard the boy’s cries while he was picking up aluminum cans on Granger Road; how he’d followed the screams to the deserted junkyard; how he’d tried to pull the Rottweiler, her tits swollen with milk, her newborn pups nearby, off the little boy.

In another attempt at conversation, the preacher cautioned his wife that every Sunday Eli would limp his way down the aisle to a seat near the front of the church, his vulgar, scarred face visible and frightening to the children. He said, “The freak scares the kids.”

The preacher’s wife snapped her head around, her pained eyes slicing into her husband’s face. She asked, “Who’s complained about Eli frightening the children?”

He described vicious red scars that distorted Eli’s face, pulling the flesh, mangling it into a mask, and explained to her the repulsive, raw scars had to spook the children even if nobody had complained.

His wife sighed, turned to the window, touching the glass with a solitary finger. She said, “Just as I thought. Nobody has complained. You imagine things. And I bet you’re the only one who calls Eli a freak.”

The preacher’s face burned feverishly, his jaw locked in anger, coffee-stained teeth grinding in his mouth. His hands gripped the steering wheel, painting his knuckles white. How dare his wife reproach him! She’d accused him of imagining things, yet she’d been the unstable one—swallowing sleeping pills during the day, crying, holding their son’s teddy bear. His wife had no place defending the freak. Eli hadn’t saved anybody except maybe his own self. Before long, his son would be nothing but a faded memory while Eli would live out the rest of his life as a hero. Because of the freak, the town would never stop talking about the death of his son. He choked the steering wheel with such force that his knuckles popped.

 

From his king-sized chair in front of the choir, the preacher looked out into the congregation, examining his wife’s face as Eli shuffled in, his raw, jagged scars magnified and dazzling under the overhead lights. Her face softened into a one-sided grin as she turned to the freak. The preacher hadn’t experienced that kind of tenderness from his wife since their boy died. He gripped the arms of the chair and watched as his wife motioned for Eli to sit with her. A slow burning stain moved up the preacher’s neck, covering his face. His heart hammered out an angry drumbeat.

She reached over and squeezed Eli’s scarred hand with her small, soft one, continuing to hold it in her tender grip as the choir rose to sing. How dare that idiot sit next to his wife—hold her hand—his scars exposed to the church like the scars on the crucified Christ. It was blasphemy.

As the singing ended, the preacher strutted to the pulpit, confident that a halo of fire burned over his head, ready to offer the sermon that would change his wife and bring her running back to him. She’d know after this sermon that he was on fire, anointed, and the future was theirs to grab.

He placed his bible on the podium and said, “Open your bibles and turn to John, Chapter 11.” He cleared his throat. "Verse 39.” He read: "Jesus saith unto her, take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of his that was dead, saith unto him, Lord by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days."

The preacher saw his wife stiffen and rear up her jaw. He’d expected encouraging eyes; instead, she stared motionless, her mouth tight, at the three crosses hanging on the wall in the choir loft. He reminded himself that she must feel trapped sitting so close to the freak. He’d tried to warn her this morning, but she’d sulked and accused him of imagining things. Well she could suffer through the service. She’d chosen to sit with the freak and she would have to deal with the emotional consequences of her decision.

He ripped into the sermon, imagining himself as a televangelist with the cameras rolling. “Lazarus had been dead for four days, but Jesus was about to restore his life.”

The preacher slammed the Bible shut and tossed it onto the podium. He loosened his tie and said, “With enough faith, nothing is impossible. Nothing is too big for God.” His voice rose, booming, echoing off the ceiling beams. "He is lord of all. Death cannot stand in his way. 1Just imagine the stench that must have filled the air when the stone was moved. The smell of rancid meat.”

Increasing the volume of his voice, he instructed the congregation, “Inhale. Inhale right now and imagine the odor of decomposition rising from Lazarus’ corpse."

The pastor sucked oxygen into his lungs, demonstrating to his congregation that he expected them to follow his instructions. "Inhale again."

With the exception of his wife, every member of his congregation inhaled at his command, vacuuming up all sound from the small church. Even Eli drew in clumsily through his misshaped mouth and nostrils.

The preacher thundered on. "His flesh had been decaying for four long days. By now, Lazarus' heart was rotting. The kidneys hadn’t worked for days.”

Sweat dripped down the preacher’s face and dropped from his chin. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face. “Maybe the flesh had already begun to fall from the bone. Imagine it. Imagine what it was like inside that tomb when the stone was rolled back. It wasn’t a pretty scene. Close your eyes—picture it—smell it."

The preacher looked at Eli who was sitting trance-like beside his wife, his eyes half-closed as though he were hypnotized. His wife’s chalky face stared at the crosses in the choir, her colorless lips quivering. Maybe next time she’d listen to him.

He yelled, his words wet with spit, "Picture the scene. Lazarus is wrapped in the cloth of the dead. He's been in the heat for four hot days and the tomb reeks of a pungent odor."

He paused, wiped the sweat from his face, and demanded, "Inhale." And his congregation—except for his wife—inhaled again. A rushing intake filled the church.

The preacher rushed over to the podium. He picked up the Bible, ran his finger down a page, and said, “Verses 43 and 44.”

He cleared his foamy throat and began reading. “And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus sayeth unto them, Loose him and let him go.”

He slammed the Bible shut and yelled, “The lungs hadn't breathed for 96 hours. But hallelujah—praise the Lord—his lungs breathed again at the command of the son of God.”

The preacher unbuttoned the coat to his three-piece suit, pulled it off, and flung it onto the first pew. He parked his hands on his hips and glared at his congregation before calling out, "Not even death can stop Jesus. No miracle is too big for him. With the faith of a grain of mustard seed we can raise the dead. At his command, the soil will fly up and the caskets will break open. The dead will sit up in their burial clothes and climb out of their coffins, out from the cold, dark earth into the light of a new day. Nothing—and I mean nothing— is impossible with God."

In a breathless, panting voice, he cried out, "Can I hear somebody say amen?" Spittle oozed from the corner of his mouth.

His flock cheered, "Amen."

Eli crossed his legs. Uncrossed them. Released the preacher’s wife’s hand. Sat forward. Gripped the pew in front of him. As the preacher continued, Eli looked up at the ceiling and nodded. He rose from his seat and pattered down the aisle and out the double doors.

As the door closed behind Eli, the preacher leaped onto the altar, glared with burning, fevered eyes at the congregation of seventy-five men, women, and children, and shouted, "Is that as good as you can do? Now let me hear you shout amen!”

His flock cheered louder than ever, “Amen!"

The preacher’s spirit soared; he snorted like a devil blowing out smoke. He felt the fire burning both inside him and over his head. In a craze, he felt it lifting him, lifting him higher and higher to greater things. He was no longer of the world.

With renewed energy, he preached in a hoarse, cracked voice about the power of God and the resurrection of Lazarus. He sprinted down the aisle, up and down, up and down. Twice he ran the length of the church, yelling his sermon to a congregation hungry for miracles. With fiery eyes, he searched the faces of his flock. The preacher took several long, quick, deliberate steps toward a woman near the front of the church. Her graying hair hung like Spanish moss down the trunk of her back. He placed one hand on the woman's forehead and pushed her head back. Her frantic gaze scratched the ceiling. He called out, "Receive thy blessing."

A slow tremble took hold of the woman’s hands and arms, slithering over her body, rushing through her. She cried out in unknown tongues, a delirious language of the Holy Ghost. Tears streamed down her face and dripped from her smiling lips.

The preacher seared with wild madness, rushing from one member to another, laying anointed hands on their heads, igniting their souls as they spit out the miracle of unknown tongues.

Satisfied, after pulling sobbing prayers, the language of unknown tongues, and loud cries of praise from his members, the preacher strutted back to the pulpit. He wiped sweat from his face and spit from his mouth, whispering, “Thank you, Jesus, thank you, Jesus.”

As he brought the service to a close, the pianist rose and walked to the front. As she played, Just As I Am, the door opened and Eli stumbled in, his pants and shoes covered with red clay. In his arms, wrapped in his dark coat, he cradled a package. He limped down the aisle, dragging his injured leg, leaving a trail of fresh dirt on the red carpet. The preacher watched the freak gimp past his wife, past the seat on the right where he sat every Sunday, all the way to the pulpit. He didn’t stop until he was at the altar, a couple feet from where the pastor stood.

Eli looked up into the preacher’s face and smiled, lifting his facial scars upward, his eyes shimmering with faith. With his right hand, he pulled back the coat, revealing the blue bundle cradled in the crook of his left arm.

The preacher froze, his eyes fixing on the blue outfit. As he recognized the birthday suit, a roaring noise detonated inside him. He shook his head, as though trying to shake off a snake that had landed on him. A blast reverberated in his brain and screamed like a runaway death train plowing through his ears. The preacher’s face burst into a brilliant, shocking shade of purple. He fought to breathe, his fingers clawing at his neck, yanking at his chest. He burned from the inside out as though he’d swallowed the halo of fire that had hung over his head.

Eli dropped the coat to the floor and took a step forward, lifting the tiny corpse to the preacher’s face, offering it up for a miracle. He slurred out one word: “Lazarus.”

Brenda Sutton Rose is a visual artist and artist who grew up barefoot and poor in southern Georgia. Her poetry, essays, and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Flycatcher: A Journal of Native Imagination and other publications. She writes a blog, "Sweet Tea in Southern Georgia."

GOD DIDN'T GET ME NO WEED, by Mather Schneider

Me and Little John were sitting at the bus station behind the wheels of our taxi cabs. We were far, far down on the cab cue, so we wouldn't get a fare for a while. It was a depressing place to be, number 9 or 10 on the bus station cab cue. It was about 4 in the afternoon.

Little John was on his cell phone. His 7 teeth flashed in the sun.“Hey, Donny,” he said into the phone. “What’s up? Where you been?”

He looked at me through our open windows and gave me the thumbs up.

“What?” he said. “No, no, man…Hey, is Jay there?… Where is he?…Don’t fuck around man, I’m completely out, I mean

I had a couple of buds stashed away for an emergency but those are gone now and…What?…No, hey, you know me, man, I can’t live like this. I AM A MAN WHO NEEDS HIS WEED! Ray? Ray? Hello?”

Little John looked at me again. “Fucker hung up,” he said. “He’s blowing me off, man. But I’ll get to him if I have to drive this fucking taxi all the way to fucking Yuma.”

Little John was 5’6” and weighed 245 pounds. He had bad arches that caused him to walk with a stiff-legged lurch, but he hardly ever walked, he mostly remained behind the wheel of his cab. He was most comfortable there, and had the appearance of being a physical part of the vehicle. He was 47 years old with over-washed salt and pepper hair that fell down his neck and onto his Neolithic forehead. A wart poked its nipple-like head out of his right cheek and he had the habit of rubbing it while he talked.

"Don’t smoke pot before you come to work,” the boss told Little John one time.

“Be reasonable,” Little John said.

“Well, don’t smoke at least 3 hours before work.”

“One hour.”

“Two and a half.”

They settled on two hours but Little John smokes throughout his whole shift anyway. He goes home and smokes a joint and then he’s back in his taxi, or he just smokes in his taxi.

But today he ran out of weed for the first time in years.

"I can't live like this," he said. "I've got to work, I've got to drive this fucking taxi, I've got to make money. I've got to deal with these people, all these mother fuckers…"

"Easy," I said. “God is listening."

"Fuck god," Little John said. "God didn't get me no weed."

"You hear me, mother fucker?" he said, leaning his head out his cab window and looking at the sky. "Fuck YOU!"

He brought his head back inside the cab and looked straight ahead with a sigh. He sat there for a second. Then he gave me a worried look, and put his head back out the window.

"Just kidding," he said to the sky.

Just then a black van pulled into the bus station parking lot. The hot sun reflected off the shiny black paint. The van stopped and a muscular tattooed white guy got out the back. Then the driver got out, a fat white guy in a white shirt. He ran around the van and grabbed the first guy and started beating him in the face with his fist. He hit him about ten times, rapidly, and the guy crumpled onto the ground. Then the guy got back in the van and drove off.

Little John jumped out of his cab and ran over to the guy on the ground. A couple of other cabbies wandered over too. Little John bent down and helped the guy up, and then the guy tried to hit him. Little John pushed him off and the guy stood up and stumbled away toward Broadway.

Little John walked back to his cab, defeated.

“Some people just don’t want help,” he said.

“Did you ask him if he had any weed?” I said.

“Don’t joke about it,” he said.

“Something will come up.”

“Easy for you to say,” he said. “You’re a drunk. All you have to do is go to the store.”

“Except on Sundays,” I said. “On Sundays I have to wait until ten o’clock. We’re living in a police state.”

“Poor baby,” Little John said. “Poor god damned fucking baby.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Shit, I got to get out of this city. I got to get back to the country. I was raised in the country, you know.”

He lit a cigarette.

“We used to have chickens, goats, pigs, all that,” he continued. “That was the fucking life, better than this shitty city. This place is fucking dirty, man, and full of assholes. Plus, in the country you can grow your own weed.”

“So what’s stopping you?” I said.

“I don’t know, I’ve got my apartment. Besides, how would I get money?”

A Greyhound bus pulled into the station and emptied itself of people. A few of the cabs in the front of the cue got fares, and pulled away. Then the whole cue moved up and everyone got in their cars, moved 30 yards up, and parked them again.

“I had this one little chick,” Little John said, “on the farm. “Little fuzzy yellow thing, and she grew attached to me. I named her Peepers. Damn, she was cute, man, you should have seen her, she would follow me around everywhere I went.”

“How old were you?” I said.

“I was like 8 or 9 I think, yeah. Shit, Peepers, I haven’t thought about her in a long time. But it’s sad though, because one day we were running through a field, and I was running real fast, you know, and I guess she just couldn’t take it and she stopped. I felt bad and went back and bent over her and she was breathing real heavy and kind of twitching in the grass. Jesus, I started crying. And then you know what happened?”

“What?”

“Her heart exploded! It fucking exploded right out of her chest. Right out of her little fucking chest.”

I gave him a look.

“I’m serious, it did, exploded right out of her chest, there was blood on the ground, it was terrible.”

Little John seemed to go into another world and a tear fell down his cheek. He looked away and wiped it.

“Maybe you should just stay here in the city, big fella,” I said.

He shook his head up and down but he couldn’t talk anymore. The cab cue was dead.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ve got a personal.”

“Ain’t you lucky.”

I pulled out, to the delight of the cab driver behind me. Everything starts with moving, just keep moving and the luck would change. It was like death just sitting there.

I drove over to the Food City by Randolph Park and got a hot dog at an outdoor stand. A Mexican guy handed it to me and it was loaded: beans, ketchup, mustard, mayo, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, cheese and bacon.

I was standing there eating the hot dog next to my cab in the bright sun when I saw a man running toward me across the Food City parking lot, waving his arm. He was lugging a suitcase and it was obvious he needed a cab. Come to papa, I thought. He was running like his heart would burst from his chest.

I was born in Peoria, Illinois in 1970 and have lived in Tucson, Arizona for the past 14 years. I love it here, love the desert, love the Mexican culture (most of it), and I love the heat. I have one full-length book of poetry out called DROUGHT RESISTANT STRAIN by Interior Noise Press and another called HE TOOK A CAB from New York Quarterly Press. I have had over 500 poems and stories published since 1993 and I am currently working on a book of prose.

http://www.nyqbooks.org/author/mather...