That Claire and Clara are dressed the same could be kind of creepy. But they carry it off well. Look cute even. It helps that they are so similar anyway. They both have the same wide smile, the same large, lively blue eyes. They go shopping together, they eat together, they even sleep together sometimes. Claire finally has the sister she always wanted. And their relationship can only get stronger, especially when Clara gets older and learns to talk. Until then, Claire can content herself with buying and making identical clothes for her daughter.

by Neil Campbell

The crows came together and landed on the rooftop: comic-walked over puddles, drank from puddles, dipped bread crust into puddles. The black span of wings came floating in over the overpass, through the blue sky. Sometimes they crashed into the top branches of the surrounding oak trees. Their calls brought a man to the window to watch. He threw bread crust out, watched the birds come: magpies, seagulls, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, nightingales. But the crows were what he waited for, always in pairs. And then he wondered if it was always the same pair and decided it was.

He was looking from the window. The silence was unaccustomed because the road had been closed for repair. He saw no birds, heard no birds, looked into the blue sky waiting. Then the balloons came, so high he couldn’t hear the flames. He watched their floating beguilement and the different colours other than blue. Something of their silent float reminded him of the float of birds, the crows especially, when they rested their wings mid flight and simply glided lower to land on the rooftops.

At work he spent most of the time checking emails. A vast digital clock told him the time in blinking red. There was a clock on the computer screen. He had five minute eye breaks and sat with a cardboard cup of coffee watching Sky News on a long plasma screen big as the side of a stalled bus. There was a Scottish girl who sat near him. She had bleached blonde hair and fake tan and wore a lot of gold jewellery. When he walked past she often leaned back to reveal her nicely soft, slightly flabby tanned stomach, bejewelled in the bellybutton like a sunrise over a sand dune.

When one time the two of them happened to be alone together in the lift he thought to ask her out for a drink, but missed the moment before a batch of call centre workers got in and stood around without talking. He tried day after day to be in the lift with her at the same time, but she began to sense this, stopped leaning back in her chair when he passed.

One day he started to shoot the birds. Stealing magpies first, then the shitting seagulls, the tweeting black birds and the throaty thrushes and, hardest to hit of all, the singing nightingales who he made sure would sing no more. He shot one crow and the other one returned alone to flick through the mayhem of feathers. Listening to its croaking from the rooftop, its head looking from side to side through the immensity of the surrounding sky, he felt something for it, shot it last, waited for the bang on the door.

The neighbours began to abuse him, most often in the middle of the night when they must have known he was trying to sleep. They started to put the dead birds through his letterbox.

Almost a year to the day the balloons came back. And those in the balloons held boxes, and began to shake them out, and from the boxes came the birds, boxes full of birds. They fell vertically like waves turned sideways, and then like waves hitting rocks they unfurled in explosions of light. They weren’t like birds he’d seen before. They were yellow, blue, scarlet, green, and when they landed on the rooftops some of them began elaborate dances, bobbing and shaking, moving and twisting, wings flapping or tucking back in while the others just sat there, on the edge of the precipice, watching as the people in the balloons kept emptying more and more boxes of birds out into the sky.

He watched as the sky turned to a rainbow of birds, an aurora borealis of birds, a shooting star sky of birds, a sunset and sunrise of birds, and he opened his windows wide so there was room enough to leap through, then turned round and went to the kitchen, and he started running from the kitchen to the opened window and halfway there thought himself stupid.

Back in work he spent one morning looking on the internet at all the species of birds. He thought they were magnificent but then realized they weren’t in the room with him. He ordered some binoculars and found out the places where he could go and see birds from hides. And one day she was waiting for him by the lift. He listened and looked at her as she spoke. At first he struggled with her accent but then he got used to it, and after that, every time he walked past, she always leaned back in her chair to show him her bejewelled midriff.

Neil Campbell studied novel writing at Manchester Met. He had a collection of stories, ‘Broken Doll’, published by Salt in 2007. Recent stories in Orbis, Staple and elsewhere in The Pygmy Giant.

December 1984: not a single cloud marred the skyline that noon summer day in Sao Paolo. But there was rain.

The favelados called it Imaculada Chuva, the rain being born seemingly out of God’s own eyes. For the first time in over a decade, the 95-year-old was able to bend his knees and kiss the muddy ground. The entire street knew him and they all rushed to help him up, thinking he may be dying. When they came up to him, they saw that he himself was crying. “Mary is crying for us,” he said. “The dead are weeping with forgiveness.” When Jose Carlos was young, he had led a sordid life. He led a bootleg operation 1920s, but there were rumors in the favela about his involvement with crime lords, that he did unforgiveable deeds on people just as poor as he is now. Jose Carlos never thought that God would offer a true miracle to the favela before he died.

Little Davi splashed his bare feet under the warm trickle of dirty water from the gutters above, unaware that his parents inside were making love after having a terrible fight over a broken dish.

The twins, Maria and Mariana, laughed infectiously as Maria fried plantains and Mariana sewed up her child’s torn pants. He had been playing with the older boys again and she was worried he was going to fall in with the wrong crowd.

The bare-chested men practicing capoeira at the beach stopped to squint at the rain falling from the sun. When the rain dried, the capoeira dancers at the bottom of the hill began their furious dance again, refreshed. Their lightning feet struck the air, kicking out rainbows over the hillside of the favela.

On that morning, the favelados said that all sins had been washed away, that they were given another chance and the favelados celebrated in the evening until their legs were no longer good for standing. When they woke up again, life resumed as it always had, though there was an exuberance in their eyes where, before, they were only the abused eyes of the desperate and forgotten.

a few years ago i took a creative writing class at stanford (nice to be back on the Farm, i’ll tell you…) and the teacher i had (she was superb) recommended that each week we come to class with a piece of very short fiction: no more than a page long and with a certain weekly theme. these themes ranged from 1) write a piece of short fiction without using the letter “s”; to 2) write a piece of short fiction with sentences no longer than 3 words. each of these restrictions ironically created the most wonderful pieces…

i recently came across the one i wrote with the rule: “write a piece of short fiction in which the first line is the same word repeated three times.” and here it is…

No. No. We served focaccia drizzled with honey. And it wasn’t May, it was July. And the way the paper napkins tried to fly from our laps in the wind made me think of seagulls. No, it was not for him, it was for Simone. Because she needed it. Simone with her soft pink skirt and dark hair. And Simone got honey on that skirt and cried and cried. No, it wasn’t really the honey that made her cry. No. But she did look beautiful. Simone. Even crying. She was such a pale little thing, sitting there with her feet crossed at the ankle and with her napkin, like a dead bird in her hand.

No. No. It was late afternoon and, unlike the week before, we had wind. And those two little girls danced with the ribbons from their hair. Remember? And it made Simone smile. No, we were happy that she smiled, though it didn’t last. To think that we only had her for that day in her pink skirt and she only smiled once about the ribbons. No, I know we can’t think that way. But I remember her hands were cupped about her face. And her hands were white and curved, like two small shells. And I thought she must be cold. But I ate, while the honey dripped down my arm, and I spoke with someone else. No. No. Not Simone.

And to think I could have told Simone that her hands looks like shells. Or that honey could easily come out of her skirt with just a little touch of white vinegar. Or that her smile at the ribbons could be enough. No, I did not. But none of us did. We all held her away, like a fragile cup that might craze if the tea is too warm. We held her at a distance that enabled us to see her as pink and white and small and cold. And that portrait of her, that way, must have seemed romantic to us who did not know how to help. So instead, we ate the warm focaccia and savored the sweet honey and watched the napkins and ribbons flutter. And left her there, to the wind. And though none of us said a word, Simone must have heard “No.”

Offering
Nightmare & Vision #17

My lover’s hands left my breasts and caressed their way down my chest and belly to start feeling their way through my bush. I leaned back into him and spread my legs. His long, strong fingers played with me, running over my mound, tickling my thighs, sliding up and down just to the sides of my mound. My breathing quickened, and I started whining and moving my hips to position myself under his fingers. He teased me for only a short while, though, and I arched and moaned as his massaged and then parted my labia. I was so hot and wet. When he dipped that first finger into my slit I positively gushed with pleasure. Other fingers lazily circled my clit. I convulsed every time a finger swiped across the little nub. I brought my own hands under his overreaching arms to my breasts, caressing myself, and let my head fall back on his shoulder.

I was in heaven. My widely splayed feet found purchase on the sides of the sofa, so that I could press back against his body or wiggle and thrust my pelvis up into his busy hands. His fingers tickled and spread me, rubbed me outside and dipped inside. He toyed with me, increasing my pleasure slowly, agonizingly, giving me just enough to get that much higher, that much more desperate for more. When I could feel the first tingles of my impending climax in my spine and belly, I jerkily humped up into his fingers, and savagely pulled and tweaked on my own nipples. I turned my head and found his mouth with mine in a burning kiss. The fingers of one hand spread my lower lips open, allowing those of his other hand to slide from the bottom to the top of my vagina to rub my clit in just the right way.

I gasped one last time, taking breath in for what I knew would be an earth-shattering orgasm. And then, just as the automatic clenching, relieving spasms of climax were about to hit me, a cock thrust into me.

The next second passed in slow motion yet took no time at all. My eyes flashed open and I broke my lover’s kiss, snapping my head around to see the grinning face of a stranger. I heard my shuddering sigh turn into a surprised grunt, then a confused wail. Even the smell changed as the colognes of my lover and the new interloper clashed. And the feeling… the fat shaft now planted in me throbbed, and my contracting pussy squeezed back with all it had as my orgasm crashed around me.

I came helplessly around the stranger’s cock. I couldn’t stop it. Spitted by his rod, I stared almost unseeing into his gaze. His eyes smiled unkindly at me. His grin turned lusty and his lids closed part way as my pussy clutched and milked him. I tried to say something, to protest, but the only sounds I could emit were indistinguishable cries of passion and betrayal. All I could to was cum. My lover’s fingers were still busy on my clit, his other hand stealing up to my breasts to take over from my own paralyzed fingers. His mouth nibbled my earlobe, cooing to me as if nothing were amiss. Lost in its climax, my body humped and ground itself against the hairy pelvis of the intruder. The orgasm, so long in coming, took forever, searing and ecstatic despite, maybe even because of the spoiling presence of the stranger and his fat hot cock.

Finally I started to subside. Anger and fear took over as my passion faded, and I brought my hands up to push the barrel chest away from me. My protests and objections finally became coherent as I cried for help and screamed at the stranger to get out of me. Instead of coming to my aid, however, my lover wrapped his arms around mine and drew them back, pinning them to my sides. With new confusion and rising panic, I saw and felt the stranger’s hands reach down to my waist and take hold of my hips. My increasingly desperate questions and demands ended with a shriek when the stranger drew his cock most of the way out of me and then slammed back in, the head of his member thumping up against my cervix. He began fucking me, slow and hard. I tried to say something, anything, but the words were driven from me each time the cock rammed home. I couldn’t catch my breath…

The crease and crinkle of paper caught Dave’s ear as he walked passed his bedroom. Looking around the door he saw his son crouched on the far side of the bed.

“What are you looking at?” he asked as he came around to see.

Spread out between in front of James was the curvature of breasts and buttocks and a finely manicured lawn with the staple as her bellybutton ornament. Dave stood and rehearsed the reprimand forming in his head, but was interrupted.

“Do you wish that Mum looked like this?”

Fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Every place is the same.  Fucking fuck.
God.  He’s everywhere. Here.  Before. Before that. And sixteen times before that.
Fuck.
It’s like nothing can be done without God.
god.
They have no faith in anyone in these facilities.  Why am I here. Why am I here.
?
Hey man.
(a large black woman with a hair net)
You ok?
I don’t know.
Fucking God.
God bless you, she says and leaves.
And all I want is a drink. Anything. Vodka. Gin. Bourbon. Grain.
Grain. 180 proof.
They come in and out of my life in here, slide in and out, like transients.  And they all spew the same old jive. God this. God that.  Carrying little printed Bibles.
Fuck God.
God left a long time ago, you pitiful, spineless fucks.  There’s no one here. We’re all alone.  God hasn’t been here in millenia.
She comes and touches my cheek.  She looks down in between my legs.
Alexandra.
She says she’s devoted her life to God and to the Twelve Steps and that each day is better than the last.
Another one.
Good luck lady.
But I still want to fuck her.
What did you say? She says.
I don’t know.
What?
What did you say? Just now.
I don’t know. Nothing.
Are you all right?
No.
Are they giving you meds?
Librium and…

in florida one morning high on meth i spotted a krispy kreme truck instead of going to work i followed the van all the way up military trail from ft lauderdale to west palm beach hoping it would lead me to the krispy kreme factory when instead it went to a storage facility it was a private moving truck bought from the franchise but not changed over to reflect its new status i lost my job as a doorman in boca raton and afterwards i went to a bar which served romanian visinata and got drunk on nearly one gallon of it

…diazepam.
They’re giving you diazepam?
Yes.
That’s good.  Have you found Jesus yet?
What?
Jesus. Have you found Him.
I don’t know.  Which annex is he staying in?
I laugh.  My face hurts. My head feels as if it’s in a vise.
She looks in between my legs again.
I want to fuck her.  This Jesus freak. This Bible thumper.  Is it wrong? Is it sinful?
What?
I don’t know, I say.  Why?
She laughs.  Why are you here?
I signed myself in.
Without Jesus you’re nothing.
All right, He co-signed.
I still want to fuck her.  More so now.  I hate her.  Alexandra.  I hate these people who find meaning in all the wrong corners.
What’s that on your cheek, she says.
A burn mark.  I burned myself with a hot knife sharpener.
Why?
I don’t know.  I need the pain. To keep me from going insane.
She puts up her hand and makes a “stop” motion.  And she shakes her head.
You don’t want to help yourself; I can tell that, she says.
And leaves.

–

Mark is the ex counselor who landed in here after a bad relapse in his garage.  He was caught by his wife drinking vodka out of a milk jug painted black, which supposedly held a spare gallon of gasoline for his boat.  Mark is a good guy.  But he’s also a God guy.  He smokes incessantly.  I like his voice.  He’s calm and settled.  I guess that’s what happens when you let Him into your heart.  I don’t know.  I don’t know about that.  Mark snapped one afternoon during a counseling session with a sixteen-year-old goth girl in Tallahassee, Florida.  She told him about being sodomized by her father with a toilet paper roll dispenser.  She confided in him that she liked it.  And that’s when he closed down his practice.  Mark is a good guy.  He reads from his Bible every morning.  He takes long breaths.  He doesn’t push anything on me.  He has a nine-year-old daughter.  He’s divorced.  His wife and kid live somewhere in Utah.
We’re in Erie, Pennsylvania, I think.
I play cards with Mark.  And backgammon.  He lets me win at backgammon. I can tell.  He makes one wrong move.  I tell him about my grandfather.
He tells me about the house they renovated before his relapse in the garage.
He was a professional chef, before he had his practice.  He met his wife at Florida State.  They were both MSW candidates.
Double sixes, he says.  Lucky man.
I move my pieces on points.
Mark is a nice man.  He doesn’t push God on me.  But I can tell he doesn’t understand how I live like this.  Without anything.  I can tell he doesn’t understand how I can ever get better, without God.  And it’s all right; because I don’t understand how he lives like he does either.
Wanna take a smoke break?
I say yes.
We go out.  He lights his Salem.  Then mine.  We stand there.  And don’t say anything the entire time.

I find myself in the elevator with Serena again. Just me and her. As she steps in she smiles at me, big and bright. She reaches out for the button to the 17th floor, our floor.

“Oops. I guess you’ve pressed it already. Duh, silly me.” She laughs and I chuckle along.

“How was your weekend?” Serena asks me. I wonder if she’s going to want to talk the whole ride up.

“It was good. Yours?” I ask her back.

“Good also. Except I had to run errands for Natasha all of Saturday.” She said, still with a smile on her face.

“She made you work on Saturday?” I say with a bit of distaste and shock. Both for the fact that our boss, Natasha, made her work on the weekend and also that Serena did the work.

“Oh it’s no big deal.” She interjects a laugh. “I didn’t have anything else to do anyways.”

I look at Serena, very seriously. “Next time, make plans. And don’t change them for her.”

Serena only laughs some more. She waves off my statement. “Oh, Chrissy. You’re so funny.”

I shrug and think, well, I tried.

“Did you get that email from Accounting? They still haven’t reimbursed Natasha for the conference last week. I mean, they just need to–” Serena keeps talking but at this point I’ve managed to zone her out.

It’s 8:55 AM and, officially, work hasn’t started yet. And Serena must be out of her damn mind if she thinks I’m going to spend the remainder of my freedom talking shop. I can feel her smile beaming at me as she rambles on. And I can feel myself smiling back. And I know that Serena feels so comfortable talking to me so much because she thinks I’m nice, like her. Because out of all the people in the office, I am one of the nicest; a close second behind Serena, who reins supreme in congeniality.

But the difference between me and Serena is that I’m only nice to the people I feel deserve it. I refuse to kiss ass in this place and I doubly refuse to ever work on the weekends. This place doesn’t deserve that kind of effort or energy from me.

Serena likes to come into my office sometimes and commiserate, as if we’re the same. But, one time, when the maintenance guys came in to fix the AC she complained that it took them forever and complained more that they needed to hurry up before our boss got in. This is when I realized that Serena and I aren’t the same at all.

When they left that day I handed them a couple of bottle of waters, apologized for Serena and thanked them for their service. I asked for their names, and made sure to remember them. And when we see each other in the parking lot, we always wave and say hi to each other. I know we’re not the bestest of fiends, but I respect them.

The elevator dings and we’ve reached our floor, finally.

As we step off, Serena is still talking. I somehow have managed to be listening the whole time, somewhere in the back of my head, which I use for “conversations that don’t matter.”

“Yeah, I’ll go down and talk to them today. They probably just never got the check request. I’ll fill out another one.” I tell Serena.

“Ah! Thank you so much, Chrissy. You’re the best!” She smiles so wide it makes me want to punch her a little.

We walk down the hallway together to our respective offices and pause when we see Paula. Pregnant Paula.

I genuinely smile when I see Paula, as she is the kind of person that deserves it. She’s one of the hardest working people here, and she hasn’t slacked off even with her pregnancy.

“Oh my god, Paula! Look at you!” Serena screeches out.

“I know. I just saw myself in the bathroom and realized I should not have worn blue today. I look like the Goodyear blimp.” Paula says with a humor about herself I appreciate

“You look good, Paula.” I assure her. “And blue’s a good color on you. It breaks out your stomach.” I jab back at her and she laughs.

“Chrissy! Don’t listen to her, Paula. You look absolutely radiant! Just radiant!” Serena layers it on.

Paula smiles at us as we all continue on our way. Serena is silent a moment, waiting for Paula to be out of ear shot.

“She really is getting pretty big. She should start watching what she eats. I mean, I know she’s pregnant but, really.” Serena laughs as she walks into her office. I realize even more that Serena and I are nothing alike.

She squeals suddenly when she sees that someone has left some candy on her desk. She reads the thank you card aloud. It is from the Design team on the 13th floor. They appreciate all the hard work she’s done with helping them set up meetings with Natasha last week.

She offers me some, but I decline.

“You should ask Paula. She loves chocolate.” I tell Serena with a smile. She gives me a funny look and I head into my office.

9:05 AM. I’ll start doing work in 10 minutes.

I submitted a version of this story to Six Sentences last week. Between now and then I thought the idea had become somewhat tacky. And I got my rejection letter today. Tell me what you think.

*     *     * 

On their first date he gave her a fern. That’s when she knew he would be different from the others, the ones that brought flowers or chocolates. He gave her something that needed daily love and care to grow.

Every morning when she awoke she admired the fern. It was new, it was beautiful. She watered it, she pruned it, she placed it near the window so it would grow. The plant did grow and eventually she repotted it and gave it a beautiful new home. Visitors commented on how beautiful she and the plant were together.

She and the plant had some good years together. They would finish each other sentences. They hosted several successful cocktail parties and made new friendships, rekindled old ones.

Eventually the novelty of the fern wore off. Some days she forgot to water the fern. She would forget to prune it and it would become unruly. The fern started drinking more often, even when they weren’t at a party. The fern lost its temper and scared off friends, got mad at her for no reason. She tried to love the fern but it grew cold, disinterested.

One morning when she awoke she realized she no longer loved the fern. As carefully as possible, so as not to wake the fern, she placed it in the dumpster outsider her apartment. She never saw the fern again.

Abigail walked into the store and looked around. When she saw that the waiting area was empty, she walked up to the doctor at the counter and said, “I gots the female trouble.” She stared at him with dark, black eyes.

Dr. Johnson’s face turned stone cold and his voice chilled the air like the Arctic wind, “No ma’am. Ain’t no cure for the lazy lay.”

Baked potatoes with a few pats of unsalted butter are one of my favorite comfort foods. Last night I had dinner in a steak house and forgot to ask them to leave off the sour cream so I could wallow in my butter and potato. I scraped most of the sour cream out, so my potato was still able to offer a satisfying carbohydrate calm.

A woman dined alone in the next booth. I never saw her face, just her wavy, shoulder-length gray hair. Along with her baked potato and steak, she ordered a glass of Cabernet. Mmmm. Just like me. She also ordered a glass of milk. I know people who have eaten mayonnaise and peanut butter sandwiches, pineapple and peanut butter sandwiches, but milk and Cabernet are right up there with foods that should never be joined. I can’t imagine either one of them tasting very good – dulled taste buds from a glass of cold milk followed by wine? Savoring the blackberry and earthen aromas of a Cab then drowning them in milk? I sipped my own wine and tried not to think about it.

One of my dinner companions ordered a frothy, fruity, icy drink topped with a few tablespoons of whipped cream. I can do without the fruit blend, but I adore whipped cream. A few dollops on a piece of pumpkin pie, swiping my finger through the bowl after whipping the real stuff, or un-whipped cream poured over apple crisp. Yum.

Across the aisle were two women finishing their dinner. One of them leaned across the aisle and asked what the drink was called. Then she attempted to sell us on her favorite food combination of all time – whipped cream with steak.

I said I’d hold off on blogging about food for awhile, but I couldn’t let this pass. You can’t make this stuff up. Surely one of these will be appearing soon in a piece of flash fiction.

Many many years ago, I discovered Might magazine.  It was a funny, silly magazine that spoofed everything (but had a serious backbone, too).  (You can order back issues here).  And so, I subscribed around issue 13.  When the magazine folded (with issue 16–and you can read a little bit about that in the intro to Shiny Adidas Track Suits) it somehow morphed into McSweeney’s, and much of the creative team behind Might went with them.

The early volumes (1-5 are reviewed in these pages, and the rest will come one of these days) are a more literary enterprise than Might was.  There’s still a lot of the same humor (and a lot of silliness), but there are also lengthy non-fiction pieces.  The big difference is that McSweeney’s was bound as a softcover book rather than as a magazine. And, I guess technically it is called Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern as opposed to Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Issue #6 came with a CD of music by They Might Be Giants.  And from then on it was anybody’s guess what the next issue would look like.  (This Wikipedia page provides a nice summary of all of the issues that have been published, including authors).

The latest issue (#33) is being printed as a newspaper (just to give an idea of the diversity of product here).

The books (for most of them are books, despite the above newspaper) come out occasionally.  I gather it was supposed to be a quarterly, but I don’t know that they’ve ever really kept a schedule. Many of the books are hardcover (beautifully bound).  Some have been paperbacks.  Occasionally they come in a fancy packaging (boxes, slipcases etc). You never know what you’re going to get, which is a lot of the fun.

Although you do know that you’re going to get quality short stories.  The list of fantastic (and well-known) authors grows and grows. (Just a few: Michael Chabon, Stephen King, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Roddy Doyle, A.M. Homes, and Joyce Carol Oates.)  And mixed in with them are less well known (ie. more indie) authors, as well as occasional unknowns.  And even if I don’t love every story, I know that they’ll all be worth a read.

McSweeney’s itself has grown from a publisher of this quarterly to include an empire that publishes books (their book of the month club is the way to go), an official periodical (The Believer), and a video magazine (Wholphin).

I am probably a little too steeped in McSweeney’s-world, but I’ve never been disappointed with a release of theirs (okay, that’s not true, they have published a few clunkers).  I’m always excited to get the box with the little chair as the return address.

And, of course, I began a Wikipedia page of all of the McSweeney’s Books. I’m delighted to see that folks have been adding to it!

Original mention in Periodicals Page:

McSweeney’s. Technically a periodical. A collection of short stories and things like it. I’m usually too overwhelmed by the time this comes in, and frankly, I am many many issues behind on reading this. However, I plowed through 21 and 22 recently, and just got 23. So, I’m looking forward to it and its brethren. I got turned onto McSweeney’s because I used to subscribe to MIGHT magazine (R.I.P) which was a hilarious magazine ala Spy (R.I.P). Might ran for a dozen or so issues and then strangely morphed into McSweeney’s. I think somehow my subscription ran over into McSweeney’s and the rest is 23 issues of fun!

Derek tucks his pot belly into the slim-fit jeans along with the thick white cotton shirt. Four months of a personal trainer and he still can’t lose those last few pounds, although these days he calls them kilos. The heavy heels of his embroidered cowboy boots improve his posture, forcing him to walk straight and tall. The matching factory-stressed leather jacket still squeaks at the armpits, but the daily wear will soon get rid of that. His steely grey hair should be long enough by then too. Then he’ll show her, then she’ll see what she left behind, once he’s lost those last few kilos and has his pony tail.

His hand snaked up to the shutter’s bulbous handle. In doing so his jacket sleeve retracted like a cobra’s hood and shot his shirt cufflink into my vision. Blinking at me like a gold tooth in a skull. Who wears cufflinks in this day and age? Especially as he didn’t tally it with the formality of any tie. He gestured with a sweep of his arm that resheathed his glinting fang. I noticed that it had borne his monogram, in florid tendrils of script. Now he was inviting me to deduce the name of another man beyond. This one ensnared in briars, swathed in poison ivy.

I approached the glass aperture. It was ideally poised for my height. Which must mean that it was nearly always mothers and wives undertaking this task. Unlike in the asylums. Where they were forever having to fetch me a crate to mount in order to peer through slots, ordinarily admitting cursory views by doctors and orderlies. Why is it always Atlas, a musclebound male, depicted bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders? We’re the round shouldered ones. Hugging ourselves in slumped hope against hope.

My eyes were aligned with the glass, but they weren’t conducting me through its parallelism as yet. Instead I traced the faint swirls of the striations in the glass.  The spiral of life or something. This was a most curious sort of peepshow. Already timed out. For whatever lay beyond the glass, certainly wasn’t moving. No writhing, be they drug-induced or grand-mal episodes. A stillness always yearned for, albeit one ideally primed with breath.

I gather my flailing rods and cones. I’m losing a bit of heart for the devoir. I try and compose my thoughts. Wrangle my emotions, but I just feel blank. Here goes nothing. And everything. My whole world. I try and inhale, but my throat and nose have temporarily forgotten how to receive air. Ah, that will be the lump that comes to the throat.

I gaze down at the corpse. He doesn’t look real. His skin pallor offers itself more plastic than flesh. Blood of my blood? He has venesected his, while mine only now begins to be leeched. I concentrate on the face. The deep lined fissures, the pinched stress leather in which I ran my fingers down day after day, have vanished. That face, a death mask turned inside out in life, now unrecognisably smooth. Stilled tectonics. All tension gone. Even his egg shaped head now lies as a uniform oval. No longer contending against gravity. The weight of the world lifted from his frame. His release, signals my incarceration in the penumbral world of the ‘what if?’ A hostage exchange.

No more treading on eggshells. No more french polishing fragile self-esteem. Varnishing madcap logic, apologising for his strangeness in the company of actual strangers. If only he had been inside a proper eggshell rather than directly transfused at the end of my womb, then perhaps he would have had some protection from my toxicity. But no, in all probability the egg would have rolled off my bowed shoulders and shattered on the floor.

I nodded at the man. His snake eye beneath the sleeve winked goadingly at me as he sealed the shutter. He placed his arm above my shoulders, but left it hovering in the space above them. They began to rock and heave like a roiling sea as the sobs came.

There was never a trip to the hospital. Never a faceless voice calming saying “Code Blue” as doctors and nurses ran feverishly to a nondescript room. There wasn’t an accident. There wasn’t a fight with a long illness. His death took everyone by surprise. The doctors called it “pulmonary embolism.” A blood clot had come loose and lodged itself in his lung.

That was the technical term for it. This is how it happened. When he awoke that Saturday morning he got out of bed and fell right back into it. Joseph thought he was joking and jumped into bed with him. When Joseph touched him, his skin was already clammy. When he had stood up the blood clot dislodged itself.  He had died instantly.

Everyone kept saying that he was in great physical condition. Sure, he wasn’t going to run a marathon or anything, but he wasn’t any worse for wear than a forty-something ought to be. A tragedy, they called it. Or a shame. Everyone offered Joseph their deepest apologies, at least everyone who spoke to him. A lot of people just tended to avoid him after that, not sure what to say and not sure what to do.

His mom had died some years previous, fifteen years previous, to be exact. The doctors were less technical about her death. She just lost too much blood, they said. What it amounted to was that he killed her, but what could you expect of a baby weighing fifteen pounds? It was hardly his fault, he thought, when he did think about it.

His dad’s sister took him in immediately. They had a boy about Joseph’s age, though the two had never met before. They would stay up late virtually killing each other and talking about sex as only inexperienced teenage boys can. A friend of a friend or, on those rare occasions, a friend, had gotten with this girl or that. The details were hazy and ofttimes made up on the spot, but that didn’t really matter. They still nursed hard-ons as they described the sexual acts some other boy was committing.

It had been about half a year since his dad’s death when Joseph met Campbell. She was a year younger than him but in the same grade. She was unconventionally beautiful. She had a way of hiding behind the oversized rectangular frames of her glasses and the locks of hair that, without fail, covered her right eye, regardless of the wind or any other force of nature that tried to muss it. She had full lips, a result, she claimed, of what little Native American she had in her, a full-blooded Squaw some generations ago.

Campbell was the first girl that Joseph fell in love with, though he never told her that. They talked on the phone into the night until they both fell asleep, the line seemingly gone dead as they dozed on either end. They skipped class and went to cheap diners and talked over coffee. When they couldn’t talk, they would text. They talked about everything. The only thing Joseph didn’t tell her, or anyone for that matter, was what really happened the day his father died.

Joseph had gone into his dad’s bedroom to wake him. They had planned a fishing trip or a camping expedition or a hike, Joseph couldn’t remember which and it didn’t really matter. As Joseph waited for his dad to wake, a beautiful woman appeared in the doorway followed by the air of the otherworldly. She slowly looked from Joseph to his father and back again, all the while with a small smirk that gave her a look of loving warmth or disinterest, Joseph couldn’t decide which. It wasn’t until she spoke that Joseph noticed how tight her skin was stretched over her bones. It strained over the muscles of her jaws as she spoke.

“Joseph, don’t be alarmed. I am Death. I am here for your father.”

She spoke so calmly and serenely that Joseph thought that at first he had misheard. Surely, he thought, if someone was here to kill my dad they wouldn’t be so rational about it. Before he had a chance to articulate this she continued. “It’s his time, Joseph. We all have a time. I don’t kill people; I just take them when they’re ready.”

“No, wait,” Joseph said, and the tears began welling up in his eyes, “Wait. It doesn’t have to be his time. Please.” Later Joseph thought of so many better things he could have said. The thought of losing his dad made him more emotional than he knew he was capable of. He struggled to not only articulate this but to breathe. He felt like his chest was going to collapse in on itself.

Death looked at him with pity. “Usually I don’t do this. It’s not … kosher … to tell humans about what awaits them. But it doesn’t seem fair to you not to. Your dad – parts of your dad – well, the parts that matter, are taken to the Kingdom Underground. It is my kingdom, so you can rest assured he’ll be in good hands. You’ll see him again, someday.”

And just like that, as quick as she had uttered those words, she was gone. Joseph stood there for a few seconds wondering what had just happened, if it any of it had been real. It was in that moment that his dad chose to wake.

“He-e-e-y sport,” he said in a yawn as he stretched. “Why are you crying? Joseph, what’s wrong?”

He jumped out of bed to comfort him and fell right back in, and the tears continued to flow down Joseph’s cheeks.

Yesterday I discovered this spectacular online journal.  It showcases a lot of really witty, experimental prose and poetry.  I highly recommend checking out the flash fiction section.  It will not disappoint.  www.42opus.com

Be sure to read:

Story by Ptim Callan

Slow Fade by Helene Simone Wolff

The Kids by Michael Davidson

Remnant by Elizabeth Moore

The Paranoid Gentleman and His Library Visit by Jim Heynen

Hey All, this year I decided to write a Thanksgiving story.  And while I intended to write a feel good moral story about appreciating what you have, something else entirely came out (in true Free Stories fashion).  I will endeavor to write another Thanksgiving story for Thanksgiving day, but for now, enjoy this bloody ode to feasts and celebrations!

I killed him after slicing the turkey.  One swift rake across the jugular and thick globs of red squirted all over the stuffing and cranberry sauce.  His jaw dropped, and his face immediately paled.  He gasped.  After long long seconds he gasped again and then reached at me with splayed fingers, his wide eyes glaring at me with malice.  The fingers of his claw like hand curled into an accusing finger which pointed at me before shaking wildly.  The flabby ball of his torso struggled to remain erect and began shaking also.  Finally, he gasped one last time and slumped forward, landing his pale fat face in the thick slice of pumpkin pie he had stubbornly insisted on eating first.

With the evening’s daunting task completed, I sat down.  I touched my face and realized I was grinning madly, my lips frozen in a sort of snarl.  I felt a ball of energy swelling in my chest and realized I was holding my breath.  I barked a laugh.  I stopped.  Was that appropriate? I wondered.  I laughed again.  I let it roll out of my chest.  Waves of laughter rolled out of my frozen lips and flooded the table, lapping at the edges of the still warm dinner rolls and the steaming turkey.

“Oh God,” I moaned when the laughter finally left me, “thank you.”

I decided not to eat.  Instead, I wrapped my thickest cloak about me and pulled out the sled.  After positioning the long planks of the sled by the dinner table, I heaved that dead body onto it and dragged it out the front door.  With a crackling torch in one hand, and the sled’s reins in the other, I plodded through the snowy woods.  The menacing crunch of my boots on the snow, the long shivering shadows and the needle thin fingers of the branches did not frighten me, nor did the wolf howls that seemed to grow closer and closer.  Good, I thought, hopefully they can smell the blood.

Upon reaching the clearing, I set to work cleaving the body into smaller pieces and scattering them in a circle.  In the middle of the circle lay the pyre of dry wood I’d been accumulating all year.  I poured oil on it and used my torch to set it ablaze.  ”Come!”  I shouted, and the wolves howled.  ”Come and eat your fill!”

In the middle of the scattered body parts I stood waiting all night.  The wolves came and I watched them creep at the edges of the light, snatching up the body parts in hungry, slobbering jaws.  But before they did, each one lowered its head, as if in thanks.

It could have been a party thrown in her honour. She shimmied in, her slender frame clad in richly coloured silks, drawing the eyes of all. Mariposa knew instinctively how to work the room. She settled amongst the group of people nearest to her as they chatted like old friends. Then, when just the right amount of time had elapsed, not too soon to be rude or too long to overstay her welcome, she politely excused herself to mingle and join another set of friends. This she did throughout the night. She was so witty and engaging; men and women alike fell in love with her. Many offered her a drink but she graciously declined, preferring instead the same glass of honeyed liquid she carried around with her. When asked what it was, she would laugh and called it her nectar.

The moment David lay eyes on her, he was transfixed. Never had he seen such a beautiful creature; he just had to talk to her. However, none of the other partygoers actually knew who she was. All they could say was that she had arrived alone but they were at a loss as to what her name was, each assumed she was a friend of a friend. He decided on the direct approach.

“Hi, I’m David,” he extended his hand to her.

“Pleased to meet you, David. This is a wonderful party, isn’t it? Suzanne is such a great hostess. How do you know her?”

Before long, he was divulging his family history, relating amusing anecdotes, even giving her the low down on his academic history; she knew exactly how to make a person feel interesting, charming, sophisticated and yet … and yet it later dawned on him, it was an entirely one-sided conversation. By the time she had moved on, as indeed she did every time to every one, he realized that he still knew not one thing about her, not even her name.

At the onset of sunrise, Mariposa slipped out. Unseen by anyone, her silken robes transformed into gossamer wings and she flew off to alight on the nearest Buddleia, the Butterfly Bush.

The world was remade overnight. Everything became beautiful and new. Enveloped in a serene blanket of nothingness, everything was untouched.

The beauty was marred before the sun came up by those adventurous early-risers, daring disturb it with only a fleeting thought of their consequences. By noon grays and blacks had adulterated the blinding white. People scurried here and there, admiring what remained of the beauty even as they destroyed it. It had been foolish to think that the world would stop, if only briefly, to admire.

By night everything had disappeared. Its beauty worn before it had a chance to become common. And nobody could say for certain what it had all been about.

We relieved ourselves on the left flank of Christiansborg Palace, in plain view of the Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister, and—we both hoped—directly below the chambers of Queen Margrethe II. We had travelled from Potsdam to Berlin, two brown boys on a stolen scooter in horizontal rain, then crossed on a ferry at Ahrensoop. Neither of us spoke Danish.
We were hungry and we had no money. So we sat on a kerb in front of the Copenhagen Kommune, across from the National Museum, and begged.
Three consecutive nights we slept on a bench inside Vesterport train station, but eventually we were hustled out by two policemen on bicycles.
A middle aged prostitute put us up in one room on the promise that we would clean her flat and both bathrooms.
We spent two nights there.
In the daytime we smoked her black hash and ate bread.
There were no jobs for two dark skinned Bulgarian transients.
I spent one afternoon digging out dog shit from the channels cut into my soles.
Anastas picked at a lesion on his cheek.
We had no food that winter in Copenhagen.
Finally, for nine days we were sub-contracted by a Chinese family to clean flats and houses.
And then we put up our own fliers in coffeehouses:

hi, we are student of denmark and we are greek and nepal, 22 year old males. we are looking for cleaning job in copenhaven, as we can do good in cleaning. we had cleaned since we was in denmark and we know how to go for it. so, it wil b thankful if u provide us this short of job. we peomise to do good in this feild.
thanking you
Prakash Budhathoki and Stavros Costagavras
telefon. 26744075
Rebæk Søpark 5, 6, -748
2650 Hvidore

The telephone number belonged to a public handset in the train station. No one ever called.
Anastas prostituted himself to a handful of Japanese businessmen.
We smoked Kent cigarettes.
And then Anastas

The gravy is from last night’s stew. The ketchup from yesterday’s lunch. Or maybe Sunday’s breakfast. The oil is from when he helped fix his son’s car. The rip in the armpit is from when he launched his granddaughter, giving her mother a moment of panic. The cigarette burn could be from any day in the last 20 years. The Guinness splash is from last Thursday, the other one from Friday, and those two are from Saturday. They arrived directly after each goal. The hole in the sleeve is from when he couldn’t find the oven glove and the toothpaste … well, the toothpaste is a surprise. This pullover will be Wullie’s legacy, the story of his life.

I think one of the worst things in the world is having no control over what you say or when you say it.  Have you every met someone with Tourette’s Syndrome?  I’m kind of like that, except backwards.  The flashing light hurts me every day and that metallic taste in my mouth tells me that perhaps I was slapped several times, hard enough to perhaps make my mouth bleed for hours or even days.

I didn’t want to say anything that would harm her.  Gaby was in Brazil, she was happy with Nicolás, who had loved her despite knowing her true self.  I think that despite myself, I may actually want something like that to happen to me.  I’m  short, known as the “weird kid,” the “hyper kid,” and I hated all the boys because they liked to play with guns.  I was a lot closer to Gaby when she became…. Gaby.  Having been an only child (my parents were afraid of having children after I was born) I felt she could understand me, and because she was forced to play a part, she was practically my playmate even she was old enough to be my father.

“Where is Guillaume Bernard?!”

I spat out blood.  ”I haven’t seen Guillaume since I was a child, I’ve told you many times!”

I saw them grab what looked like car tools, something like a wrench, they began to light cigars.

“You’ll talk now…”

All four of them started burning my body with cigars, leaving marks that are still on my thighs, back, and palms today.  They used the wrenches to torture me, hit me, and I just concentrated as hard as I could, but I felt the pain later.  I began wheezing, I started having an asthma attack, then I fainted.  When I woke up, I was in a ditch of a country road I didn’t know.  I had cuts and bruises all over my body.  It’s a miracle I wasn’t raped (I think).

Uncle Guillaume was a military deserter.  He had been suffering from panic attacks and nightmares after serving in the National Army.  He came back home one day to tell grandma that she was next on a hit list, he had to become a woman and ended up liking it.  Then he moved to Brazil with Nicolás.  Then I was kidnapped for a few days.  And I woke up in a ditch.  I had learned from my father how to read the sky like a compass so I could know where I’m going.  I’m truly lucky that my parents taught me how to read the Earth.  I found a few edible plants here and there, I didn’t even bother to wash them, I probably ate an earthworm or two.  Eventually I saw the volcano that marks the beginning of Bulevar de los Héroes.  It meant I was about 100 KM from home.

There was a town called Pueblo Quieto and I found a street there with a restaurant.  I had absolutely no money, and I probably looked like a homeless vagrant.  In the busy street, Avenida Isla Mujeres, there were peddlers, children selling fruit or beaded jewelry, and women selling crafts.  I found a bench and just sat down.  A woman walked by selling corn tamales, “Would you like to buy some, dear?”

“I’m sorry ma’am.  I haven’t any money, but I can make a deal with you,” I blurted it out of nowhere.

“Yes?”

“Give me one tamale, one glass of water, and one phone call I’ll help you sell your tamales all day, free of charge.  You’re back is probably hurting?  I’ll carry them for you.”

She did as I asked.  I shouldn’t have carried them in my condition, but if there’s one thing life taught me, it’s that persuasive words are your ticket out of anything; not money, not possessions, but carefully chosen words.