First Love
Shaindel Beers

Anxious for the nine o'clock break,
at eight-thirty I would light the porch,
line the sink with gauze, cotton balls, peroxide-
austere tools of love-
wanting him to bring his hands to me—
small, delicate hands
an artist's or surgeon's
displaced by the lack of a diploma,
twisting wires ten hours a day.

When his Grand Prix rumbled into the drive,
I would look not at his face
but his hands
and nightly make the same, sharp sigh
when I had counted ten
like a new mother,
knowing that metal which cuts bricks
could lay siege to fingers too.

I'd fold his hands in mine
like folding sugar into butter
and lead him past my disapproving parents
to my makeshift triage
under the fluorescent buzz of bathroom lights.
Awed by the horrid beauty
of minuscule rivulets of blood,
the muted glitter of metal shards
just under the skin,

I'd begin my gentle ritual
of tweezing out steel slivers,
flooding the red rivers white with peroxide,
softly blowing away the sting—
then, I would send him back, bandaged,
with a sandwich,
to the big, block building just outside of town
and return to my geometry.

—From A Brief History of Time

CP

Shaindel Beers is a Professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon; the Poetry Editor of Contrary; and the host of talk radio’s Translated By. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. A Brief History of Time, her first book of poetry, is available here.

Mimicking Mom
Jeri Dube

We’re all in the living room when the fight starts. My father yells at my mother. She yells back.

I head to my room. I close the door and turn on my radio. Sitting at my desk, I’m not as scared. I get out my colored pencils and paper, and then draw a picture of a dog getting hit by a car.

I know this is a really bad fight because my mom’s screams become screeches. They sound worse than when Miss Miller uses a piece of chalk that’s too short and she scrapes her fingernail on the board. That just gives me chills. My mother’s sounds make my stomach hurt because I know what’s coming next…the worst part. The silence.

My baby brother sleeps through it. I wish he were older so I’d have someone to talk to when they fight. I wish he was older than me so he could tell me everything will be okay. Then we’d play Scrabble Junior and he’d let me win.

When I finish my drawing, I open my door. I don’t see either of my parents. My dad must have left for his meeting. I find my mom in the kitchen. She’s sitting there staring at nothing.

“Mom, I’m hungry. Can I have some milk?”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t do anything. It’s like I’m not there. I get my milk myself and take it back to my room. When I finish drinking, I get into my PJ’s – my pink and purple ones. They don’t make me feel any better.

Even though I’m a little worried about not putting the glass back in the kitchen sink, I get in bed. I snuggle in under the covers, but leave the light on so I can stare at my posters.

After a really long time, my mom stands at my doorway.

“Goodnight Libby.”

Although she’s not yelling anymore, I can tell she’s still angry.

“Libby, can I give you a kiss goodnight?”

I just keep staring at my posters. She stands there a minute more, then turns the light out and closes my door. I hear her crying as she undresses. The slam of her dresser drawer scares me but I get out of bed anyway and go to her doorway.

“Mom, I’m sorry.”

She stops crying but says nothing.

“Mom, please kiss me goodnight.”

She doesn't even look at me. I go back to bed.

CP

Jeri Dube is president of a communications company and enjoys challenging her creativity. She has written short stories, produced a documentary film, and raised children. She and her husband are currently performers for Village Idiots Improv Comedy in Rochester, NY.

THE DAY THE SKY FELL
Nana Ollerenshaw

It fell from nowhere,
cracked Bombala's heated afternoon with sound
and brought the sky
down to lie along the ground.
The massive trunk and branches
sprawled across a mangled fence,
bridged the play pit toys next door
to fill the neighbour's yard
with unexpected heaven wood.
The mass of limbs,
the spare green leaves, bark nests
amid this mighty flesh,
this huge and white untidiness
is fodder now for chainsaw,
proof that Chicken Little had a point.
The tree has given back
its space to air.
But no one dares to think
what might have been
had we been playing there
in just that tip of time and place
as we had been so soon before.

CP

Nana Ollerenshaw grew up in Connecticut, married an Australian, and moved to Australia in 1965. She changed from school teaching to nursing in 1988, and currently lives in Buderim on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland.

The Broccoli Incident
Rebecca Gaffron

It's not surprising that she paints her fingernails neon colors.

Colors. Plural. Each nail a different shade. It is absurdly flamboyant—almost gaudy. She carries it off with aplomb. My sister loves color, bright splashes everywhere. Her paintings are collages of abstract color. They pull at you.

We should have known she'd be like this. The broccoli incident gave it away.

I watch her now, no longer a child. You'd never know it from her impish grin. She sits drinking from a two-liter bottle of Mt. Dew, using a piece of licorice as a straw. She blows bubbles in the soda, raising an eyebrow at me. It's an unspoken challenge to the older, responsible sister. I laugh in spite of myself. She's old enough to know better but I don't make her stop. Truthfully I don't even want to—like the broccoli incident.

It happened when she was very young, maybe four.

An urchin-like child with wispy curls and huge dark eyes stood on a chair in a yellowing kitchen. She was helping. She watched as our mother dumped quart after quart of freshly steamed broccoli into the sink of chilly water. Her job was to help bag it, once the tender florets were cool enough to handle.

She waited. She said nothing. She didn't want to bother her busy mother or older sister. She waited. She wanted to be useful. The sparkles sat with the other art supplies on a shelf above the sink, beyond the reach of small hands, unless the child happened to be standing on a chair. She watched, fascinated by the mesmerizing emerald green bits floating in a stainless steel pond. She waited, the broccoli still too hot to handle.

Purple and silver sparkles caught her eye. Her small fingers reached for them, her big eyes gleamed. She shook the sparkles, tentatively at first, and watched as shimmering patterns formed, coating the bushy jade trees. She put the sparkles away, never uttering a word.

Mom gasped in disbelief when she saw it, quarts of broccoli ruined. Those sparkle things never come off.

"I made it beautiful, Mommy."

She still does.

CP

Rebecca Gaffron is a mother, former teacher and writer who recently traded the lush valleys and rolling hills of her native central Pennsylvania for a wind-swept barn in Britain. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cynic, The Salt River Review, SNReview, Internet Review of Books, Literary Tonic, and Sniplits.

Donna D. Vitucci

Blackboard

Meredith rinsed diapers. She lifted the back of her wrists to her eyes to interrupt the sting rising from the scalding water. Previous owners had replaced the basement stationary tub with a kitchen sink so Meredith swished the baby's dirty diapers against porcelain where Mrs. Gotterich had probably squeezed grapes for jellies, had ground meat for goetta. Bleach fumes and baby waste merging with thoughts of food turned her lightheaded, and Merry had a fluttery stomach anyway.

She lay down and set her cheek and her palms and her bare arms and legs—anything not covered by summer fabric—to the cold basement floor. The caustic smell had got in her nose, burned inside her head. She felt scoured out. As she lay there, absorbing solid earth, she read what someone had scrawled on the toy black board. Paul said, "What does a little boy want with a blackboard?", but Meredith and her sisters had loved, as girls, playing school in their cobwebby cellar. Bennie and that boy from behind the house, far beyond the tangled grape vines, had been whooping it up down here.

The words chalked uphill read: Sex is good. Sex is powr.

Misspelling forgiven since the boys were only in kindergarten, but good sex?

Merry felt eviscerated. Her mothering skills were nil, they trailed her into the deep no-good, and dragged her little Bennie through the filth of only-five-ness and into her failure.

She curled and brought her hands to her face, smelled the orange peel under her nails from breakfast. She put her fingers in her mouth and sucked on them. The washer endured its spin cycle, vibrating the floor as if the plumbing had burst. She would lie there, and lie there, until Paul threw open the basement door, calling for her. And what of Bennie, and the baby?

Meredith watered the concrete with her tears and her ugly, ashamed sweating. No one came, no one called, not even the baby cried from her upstairs crib. First steadying her weight on her knees, Merry stood, with the sink rim for help, squeezed out a soppy diaper with her bare hands, then swabbed the blackboard. The quickening in her womb, so familiar this third time, linked less to buoyant memories, anchored blind-eyed and cozy, to every nasty thing that wormed its way under ground.

CP

Donna Vitucci raises funds for nonprofit clients in Cincinnati, OH. Her fiction has appeared in dozens of print and online journals, including Hawaii Review, Meridian, Front Porch Journal, Beloit Fiction Journal, Storyglossia, Insolent Rudder, Turnrow, Juked, Night Train, Smokelong Quarterly, Monkey Bicycle, Gargoyle, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and Another Chicago Magazine.

My Dusty Bed
Dawn Dupler

I look at my dusty, dry bed and remember
how it once leapt for joy, throwing itself against the wall
and walking the room like a self-absorbed professor
teaching doe-eyed, blushing coeds his own kinky Kama Sutra.

I jump onto the shocked, stiff mattress and I feel as though
it's been violated, assaulted, by my aloneness and me.
My phantom companion releases a chain reaction
that cannot be stopped.I writhe, wrestle,
smack myself and scream. I beg the ghost
to feed on me, fill me, fuck me, and share his soul.
Then he leaves before all the dust is gone. I wipe clean
what I can. Maybe later.

CP

Dawn Dupler has written and edited newspapers and books most of her life. One day evil compelled her to earn an engineering degree. Eventually she drop-kicked her briefcase and never looked back. Her works have appeared in GlassFire's print anthology, Loch Raven Review, and others. She is wrapping up her first novel.

—Photo Follow Me by Ruth Douillette

The Same Path
Ruth Douillette

You were here where I am now.
You are there where I'm going.
You walked where I now place my feet.

In thirty years, will I be sitting where you sit?
Stroking the cat. Watching television.
Waiting for the phone to ring.
Missing the man I married.

Will I share meals with people I see more often than family?

I march forward. You hobble on.
I fear I will pass you as you stop to rest
in the familiar comfort of people and places that no longer exist.

Then who will I follow?

In thirty years will I be sitting where you sit?
Stroking the cat. Staring out the window.
Waiting for time to pass.

Will someone bring me my pills and dress me?

I turn back.
There's a door.
But though I pound,
it remains sealed by time.

I'm on a one-way street.

In thirty years will I be sitting where you sit?
Will I nap in a chair before noon?

I look over my shoulder.
A young woman strides confidently toward me.
She smiles, long hair blowing behind her.
She reaches for my hand.

Slow down, I want to say.
But I know she won't.
She can't.
She walks the same path.

In thirty years will she be sitting where I sit?
In a nursing home, holding her mother's hand?

CP

Ruth Douillette is a freelance writer and photographer. She's an associate editor at the Internet Review of Books and blogs at Upstream and Down.

Her Bottom
Meg Pokrass

Haley was lovely and talented and it was hard to be her best friend. We were both students in our first year at a small acting conservatory. Her hair shone like a searchlight, had an impossible silkiness. She'd whip it around and make a soft tent for herself when she was feeling low. I used to pet it like an animal.

Every physical feature was doll-perfect—except for her large, round bottom, which gave her character. It seemed to smile, as though proud of being her only flaw. She covered it with long sweaters.

Her boyfriend, Ray, went bowling weekend nights with his friends—and she took it personally. She had her hair highlighted, bought books with titles like, "Foreplay Facts". He didn't believe in self-help books. She'd tell me how much sex hurt with Ray—like it did the night he took her virginity away. She said he was tired of her complaining, was tired of her, and she didn't know what to do about it. Wasn't sex supposed to be pleasant? Was there something physically wrong with her?

I remember saying, "Don't worry. When Ray calms down and can really love you, it will feel different. It will."

"He might be gay," she said. "Gay or bi. Nearly all the men here are."

From personal experience, it was hard to agree—but I did. Persimmons were in season, so we bought one, cut open, and tasted the Fall.

She won every good role, and all the students were jealous. I defended her, saying Haley was the only one of us that had could really pull it off. Wendy in Peter Pan, Liesel in Sound Of Music. Her father knew the artistic director, Byron. She let everyone know where she and Byron dined, how he would nibble cocktail shrimp from her salad. Byron never addressed me, probably didn't even know my name.

She showed me a picture of her father in his movie producer suit, dark glasses, cardboard forehead. Her step-mother, his second wife, a dancer, all golden and tan. Long. It's all plastic, she said, one afternoon, pacing. She said she hated the Jewish act her step-mother put on during the holidays, the phony way she'd say "oy, so svelte!" She begged me to come home with her.

***

Twenty years later, I watch Haley's show in it's fourth season on the Disney Channel. The way she says "gawd" gives her away, though she is a stick now. Without her round bottom, she has no character. I imagine it rising and deflating, snug in a box in her attic, along with our letters. Her forehead is cardboard. She plays the part of the teenage star's sarcastic, hip mom.

She smiles at her daughter, says, "Honey, sex is wonderful, but only when it's time." Her daughter, played by a famous teen actress with blown-up lips, nods. "Or, not," Haley says. The canned laughter cuts like a cake knife. My dog beats his tail near the front door, needing to pee.

Haley kisses the teenage actress on her lustrous head. "When you love someone, everything changes. I promise, it will." She is using my inflection, my voice.

CP

Meg Pokrass lives in San Francisco. Her stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming here: 3AM, Keyhole, Pindeldyboz, Wigleaf, Elimae, FRiGG, Word Riot, DOGZPLOT, 971 Menu, Thieves Jargon, Eclectica, Insolent Rudder, Chanterelle's Notebook, Toasted Cheese, 34th Parallel, Bent Pin Quarterly, The Orange Room, among others. Meg has recently joined the editorial staff of SmokeLong Quarterly.

A Pact with Mephistopheles
Earle Davis

The extent of human ingenuity
makes one marvel at the mind of man;
creative, scientific intuition
has laid subservient the laws of nature,
air, sea, and land;
all invention is a sign of progress,
but in time of war it functions in reverse.

The German land-mines and booby traps
are causing cumulative inconvenience,
sudden death, and horrible mutilation.
Every spot we take is likely to explode
from six to twelve hours after capture.
Crossing a mountain stream is suicide;
every rock is wired to fifty pounds
of dynamite; safe crossing depends
on thorough detonation by rifle-fire.
The chimneys of every house conceal bombs
hanging from above by tiny ropes.
One never collects souvenirs twice; bodies
cover cunning death-dealing devices.

The Germans have adapted a British invention
called the anti-personnel mine;
it is a long, hollow iron tube
buried in a ground with tip exposed.
Contact trips a bullet through the tube
Straight up. It has acquired the name Castrater,
although it usually shoots one through the foot.

Yesterday an officer sat down in a chair
in a house which had served as enemy headquarters;
every stitch of clothing was blown off him.
He will probably live, but he was burned as badly
as anyone could be and still survive.
Jimmy Gordon finished dinner tonight
and walked away to confer with a superior officer,
just missing one of those delayed explosions
which mangled eighteen of his company.
Everybody's nerves are on edge;
one hardly will sit down upon a rock
without shooting it first from a safe distance.
Whoever thinks up all these devilish things
has signed a pact with Mephistopheles.

—From An American in Sicily, originally published in 1944

CP

Earle Davis (1905-1991) served in World War II as a U.S. Army officer with the 1st Infantry Division. An academic after the war, Davis also authored Vision Fugitive: Ezra Pound and Economics, and The Flint And The Flame: The Artistry Of Charles Dickens.

Lines My Father Left for Me
Thomas Sheehan

Crow a little bit when you’re in good luck;
Own up, pay up, and shut up when you lose.

Fishing is the great solace in sports. It’s for the mind,
not the hook. It’s the time when you measure wins

and losses in the truest angle of all, a slant of unbearably
beautiful sunlight through morning’s alder leaves, water’s

whisper of confidence on rocks you think you can hear
later in the night, the pointed miracle of a trout beating

you at his game, letting you know the wins and losses
do come and do pass by, even standing still.

It’s like the game of golf or the game of pool,
the green is highly coincident. And early in sports,

at the edge of my first failure, marked by the touch
of his hand on my shoulder: You come into this life

with two gifts, love and energy, and words and sports
are going to take both of them for all you’ve got.

I think his heart remembered a loss, his knees their pain.
When they took his leg off, the pain did not leave him.

CP

Thomas Sheehan’s latest books are Brief Cases, Short Spans and From the Quickening. A collection of cowboy stories, Where the Cowboys Ride Forever, is now in the hands of a western publisher. His work has also appeared in many print and online publications. Sheehan has several Pushcart nominations and won the Georges Simenon Award. His web site is here.

LEAVING
Anitha Murthy

A modest dwelling.

A period at the end of
a lane of more
self-conscious houses

An abode that reeks
of childhood dreams
with dustbunnies
hiding Easter egg
memories in every corner

The feast is over,
we tell the silverfish
and we raise a storm
of cleaning,
scouring old scars
that won't go away
with the trickle
of tears

What to take?
What to discard?
All answers are wrong,
uneasy.

We discover words, frail but
still ready to embrace us
We discover pictures, black
and white, pixellated
freezers thawing us out
We discover buttons and nails,
needles and blank sheets
awaiting closure

When the truck speeds away
taking a hundred thousand million
of our breaths with it,
I turn and see
Father bending
trying to pick up
a strand of thread
from the dust
with shaky fingers

—First appeared in Shakespeare & Company on Ryze

CP

Anitha Murthy lives in Bangalore, India. Her writing has recently been published in EveryDay Fiction and MicroHorror. She won the SMS Poetry prize at the Kala Ghoda 2009 festival, held in Mumbai, India. Her home on the web is here.

LOSING MY MOTHER
Nana Ollerenshaw

The worst
is not her anger
bad enough
or even her confusion
sad
not pain
but her not knowing
what she used
to love.
No words
for one who lived
and sang them.
The blank face
the silence
all that once described her
gone.
And when she's somewhere else
at last responding
it's not here
with me
but in some darker place.

CP

Nana Ollerenshaw grew up in Connecticut, married an Australian, and moved to Australia in 1965. She changed from school teaching to nursing in 1988, and currently lives in Buderim on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland.

In a Top Drawer

Shaindel Beers

Unaware that touching cottontail rabbits
gives them pneumonia, out of the best
of intentions, we tried to save them.

My mother bought babydoll bottles; we fed them
milk replacement, changed the hot water bottle hourly
so they wouldn't miss their mother's warmth.

Eight in all, we named them. But one by one
they perished, leaving tiny graves in the back yard.
And I invented my odd religion,

pretending they had been reincarnated
in my bean bag rabbit—and talked to him
every night, murmuring their names.

The first year after you were gone
I saw you everywhere. Every blond man
was you. In the grocery. Behind the cello

at the orchestra—Right now, there's
a mannequin of you sporting a suit
and tie in a nearby suburb.

Things haven't changed much between
the six-year-old girl tending rabbits
and me. Your mother's letter rests

in a top drawer next to a report card
where Mrs. Brown wrote in the comments section
How are your rabbits?

—From A Brief History of Time

CP

Shaindel Beers is a Professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon; the Poetry Editor of Contrary; and the host of talk radio’s Translated By. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. A Brief History of Time, her first book of poetry, is available here.

The Bren Gunner
Robert Rogge

The Bren was a light machine gun, air-cooled and magazine-fed. It was a damned good gun, but Jerry’s MG 42 spit out bullets at twice the speed of a Bren, maybe faster.

The Bren gunner in Ian’s platoon was a marvel. He could touch off single rounds with the selector set at auto and had a fine eye for ranges.

His number two man, who lugged the two boxes of ammo and the spare barrel, could swap mags in one second flat and was no mean gunner himself. They were the platoon’s firebase.

A Bren gunner’s life was scary. Rifle fire cracked sharply, but a Bren had its own sound, a heavier thumping that Jerry was always on the alert for. When he heard it, he turned everything he had on the sound and the Bren gunners took a lot of casualties.

Nobody ever volunteered for the job. “It’s like standing up and asking Jerry to take a shot at you,” one private said, “and he’ll do it, too.”

The Bren could be fired full auto or single shot. The banana-shaped magazines held thirty rounds. That was enough for two or three good bursts and a couple of follow-up shots.

The Bren gunner in Ian’s section tried to con him into taking up the weapon. He knew that Ian was a pretty good rifle shot and figured he’d be the same with a Bren. Ian gave it a go, against his better judgment.

They were in the shell of a steeple and the gunner was firing short bursts through a hole in the stonework. Ian and the number two were squatted down, reloading mags. The gunner emptied a mag, replaced it with another handed to him by his number two, and handed the Bren to Ian. “Here, you have a go at it.”

Ian held the weapon pointed up over his right shoulder and peeked through the hole. “I don’t see anything out there. What are you shooting at?”

“There’s a machine gun in that line of trees over to the left about three hundred yards. I’ve been putting bursts there to keep Jerry's heads down while our guys get through that damned wheat.”

Ian looked and saw the infantry moving slowly through the grain. “Okay, I’ll try it.”

He settled behind the Bren, moved it until it was lined up on the target and cut loose with a five-round burst.

The sights were offset to the left and Ian always wondered how they lined up with the barrel and put the bullets where you aimed.

He never did find out.

He emptied the mag and the last round was a tracer that made a red line straight from the steeple to the woods.

“Goddamn it!” the gunner, already moving, yelled at his number two. “You loaded a fucking tracer, you stupid shit!”

He scuttled backward and clattered down the stone steps with Ian and the number two right on his heels.

A savage burst of machine gun fire swept into the steeple, ricochets howling and screaming as the men ducked under a chunk of heavy beamed flooring.

The Bren gunner cursed his number two all the way back to their holes.

When he felt safe again, Ian yelled over to the gunner that he could keep his bloody Bren.

—Adapted from Fearsome Battle

CP

Robert Rogge, an American, fought with the Canadian Army in World War II. He wrote of his experiences in Fearsome Battle. Under the pen name, Robert Elliot, he is also author of The Eagle's Height, a novel of air combat in World War I.

Packers & Movers
Vrinda Baliga

We sweep in,
trampling over years,
soiling memories with our prints.
Before we leave,
whole lives will be bundled away
into neatly-labeled cardboard boxes.

We find long-lost playmates
in the dusty depths of once-unreachable corners—
marbles, beads, broken crayons—
now packed with owners, who appropriately
are living in dust themselves,
trapped forever in childhood snapshots.

And the attics! They could furnish
whole parallel universes
with alternate lives that had perhaps been,
or had once seemed, possible
before some choices were made
that eliminated the rest.

We wrap the past in styrofoam,
extricate every last inch of the frayed fabric,
caught on regrets, snagged on reminiscences.
And once in a while, we pause to wonder
if it will all be for the better or worse
when these lives are unfolded elsewhere.

CP

Vrinda Baliga lives in Hyderabad, India, where she writes short fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Cezanne's Carrot and EveryDay Fiction and is forthcoming in Rose and Thorn.

SHRINKING THE SHRINK
Michael Berger

Depression hurt;
tears freely flowed,
face frowning.
His marriage had come
apart.
Work was a prison;
Prozac didn't help.

The patient was a shrink
of long-standing.
He fell apart when
his wife had the affair.

The blow to his
oversized ego
was too much to bear.
He said that he
forgave but he couldn't
forget.

Visions of his wife
in another man's arms
haunted him day and night.

So I asked him straight away,
"How does that make you feel?"

CP

Michael Berger was a practicing psychotherapist for 30 years, published in numerous professional journals and also author of two books of short stories. Besides writing, his many pursuits include sculpting, painting, gardening, and baking bread. He says his focaccia is to die for.

The Morning After
Wayne Scheer

Gregory had been staring at the ceiling when Elise awoke. He thought he felt about as bad as he could feel, but when he turned towards her, he felt worse.

She was pretty and young. Far too young. Fragments of the night before flashed by like out-of-order images in a Picasso portrait. A party. His novel published by St. Martin's Press. The scent of sex.

His head pounded and his bladder throbbed, but he felt awkward leaving her alone in the hotel bed. He tried to speak, but even "good morning," failed to form on his lips. He thought of Deborah, his wife of thirty-four years, who had died just three month earlier. At least she knew the book would be published. He recalled how she had forced herself to smile in the small hospice room. "You'll have a new life," she whispered. "You earned it."

"I don't want a new life. I want you." He felt tears tickling his cheek.

He remembered how much he and Deborah enjoyed waking up together. He'd hold her in his arms and, without words, they'd affirm their love.

He needed to apologize to Deborah. It was far too soon to wake up with another woman. He wanted to apologize to Elise.

"I have to go," he heard someone say. For a moment, he wasn't sure if the words had come from Elise or Deborah.

CP

Wayne Scheer, a frequent contributor to Camroc Press Review, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net. His work has appeared in print and online in a variety of publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, Notre Dame Magazine, Eclectica, flashquake and The Internet Review of Books. Revealing Moments, a collection of twenty-four flash stories, is available here. Wayne lives in Atlanta with his wife. He can be contacted at wvscheer@aol.com.

Ross Eldridge

Weathering Great Britain

Winter arrived, the way it does in Great Britain.

One day the poets are out raving about the daffodils, and the weather and the scenes are picture-postcard and calendar-photo perfect.

Warkworth Castle is surrounded by golden blossoms. Songbirds are flying in from Africa. The sky is an exquisite blue that defies the palette. Our noses have stopped running. Off with the overcoats. Restaurant doors are open and the fragrance of food wafts into the street. Pretty girls and boys are everywhere.

And three or four days later the poets have to run for cover as the rains set in. Rough winds shake the darling buds of May that hadn't been shaken right off the branches in April. The people start coughing, the birds start wheezing. This is the real spring.

Right about then the summer flooding begins. The leaves hang on, however, even when the uprooted trees float down the rivers and across the tidal marshes into the sea. The two days of summer, the balmy 20°C, are remembered well as we get the sweaters out in July and when the anoraks come down in August.

A flight of birds, a mad scramble really, heralds the end of summer. A few days of glorious autumn colours and it's over.
One good thing at this point in time is that the great outdoors shops have all their unsold camping gear on sale, just in case you think it might be fit to go out and enjoy the countryside and being close to nature next, uh, summer. Now is the winter of our discount tents, sleeping bags and backpacks.

Last year, before Halloween, we had blizzards in Scotland, moderate snow in Wales and the Midlands, snow flurries in London (the earliest since 1934), and then we had about 36 hours of on-and-off hail in Amble by the Sea. Not your picturesque hail, this was heavy-duty stuff which woke me several times in the night with the clattering on the windows.

By early November, I was bundled up with the central heating turned on. I drank a good deal of hot tea to keep myself comfortable, which is not to say warm as toast. Even toast doesn't make me warm as toast. In fact, if you've been to England you know that toast is prepared the night before and served at breakfast...cold!

It's Global Warming, of course, that is responsible for this frigid weather. Thank God we don't have Global Cooling, or we'd really be fucked.

CP

Ross Eldridge lives in a tiny North Sea town on the coast of England near the Scottish border. He reads a good deal, has a go at photography, and researches family history. Ross has written a weekly newspaper column, but is now content to blog. His blog is called Barking Mad in Amble by the Sea, and it is dedicated primarily to his little dog, Cailean.

Picture Postcard from Fenway Park

Thomas Sheehan

High in the right field stands,
chaired with wheels, knowing
he will never feel the grass
beneath his feet, never feel
the chalk lines go like clouds
under foot, never face a foreign
pitcher, or dare a steal, a boy
of bright eyes and sad legs
lets go; he tries to measure
the speed a fastball has,
the gyrations of a knuckleball
or a moon-ball dipsy-doodler.

Only when he feels the weight
of his father's tears does he smile.
The scoreboard never shows it or
the box score in the next day’s
newspaper, but one man remembers,
two rows back, three seats over,
forever.

CP

Thomas Sheehan’s latest books are Brief Cases, Short Spans and From the Quickening. A collection of cowboy stories, Where the Cowboys Ride Forever, is now in the hands of a western publisher. His work has also appeared in many print and online publications. Sheehan has several Pushcart nominations and won the Georges Simenon Award. His web site is here.

IT IS ONLY NOW THAT I CAN GO THERE
Suzanne Lehmkuhl-Beste

it is only now that i can go there, those dark places

it was 2001, night driving on the 101
a bend in the road and then headlights straight on
in an instant, life so sure became
tenuous and fragile
oh my babies, my darling babies,
girl baby of one year and another unborn

i swerved the car,
tossed weightlessly by the 18-wheeler,
like the tumbleweeds so prevalent here
the contents of a life strewn like litter on the highway
darkness, piercing lights and silence, bent and sobbing,
arms cradling my belly and my sleeping baby...


my third baby was barely one when he left us
but no, he left me long before,
the untouchable always bent
two steps behind him to pick up the pieces
only this time, it was my life lay in pieces at my feet

and three little ones clung to me as if to life itself

if it weren't for Mother, Sister,
and the women who closed in around me
to pick up the pieces
who got me out of bed some days
who knew when to put the drink in my hand
and when to take it away
who bathed me
who knew when to let me cry
and when to say "enough"
who were my eyes and ears
who cradled me as the lawyers and judges
decided the fate of my children


there were the small kindnesses that moved me immeasurably
a made bed emerging from a tumbled mass of sheets
good food, wood stacked and brought inside
letters bringing chocolate bars,
books and wisdom and strength
turning over and over in my hands
errant trash cans and recycling bins tucked in

and there were great kindnesses too
myriad twinkling boxes that appeared under the tree
our first Christmas alone prompting my oldest to say
"wow, Mama, you MUST have been good!"
planes and cars bringing loved ones from afar

nature has its way and the soil turns under and grows hard
the winter is long here, cold and interminable
bright yellow daffodils are the first
to emerge through the snow and mud
unlike these, I chose to emerge from my dark places
or it's no life worth living


but i make a pilgrimage to those places, revering them
they will forever be a part of me
and from where i write now,
i feel a fondness for the darkness

for the joy born of it


CP

Suzanne Lehmkuhl-Beste, a native of California, currently lives on the shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont, with her three young children, two cats, four newts, and six chickens. In her spare time she is a systems engineer, and in her not-so-spare time, she enjoys running, Telemark skiing, hiking, backpacking, and volunteering as a math and Spanish teacher.