Barbara Dalton

Countdown

The world was gonna crash and burn on December 31st, 1999. Our bomb shelter was filled with the sustenance of life.

We canned food at the Mormon survival factories. We filled and labeled gallon sized tins with powdered milk, vanilla pudding and egg powder, and vacuumed out the air. My boys dutifully measured dehydrated peas. My daughters pitched tiny fingers into burlap sacks of wheat berries.

"This food will last five years," said the black-suited man to the long line of people waiting their turn.

I scanned dry food cookbooks, hungrily looking for recipes to replace my shepherd’s pie and spaghetti sauce. We bought hybrid seeds and a short wave radio. We bought elixirs and pills that purify water. My husband got a state of the art generator. Our firewood stacked higher than the weeping willow.

We had it all over the pedestrians. We gathered in weekly meetings with our like-minded friends and discussed the panic and chaos that would surely knock on our door. Some guy wailed over the radio from a stone fortress in Colorado.

All the clocks crept toward Zero.

In the morning of the year two thousand, I woke up. I saw from my kitchen window that snow had fallen the night before.

Then I noticed a sixteen point buck grazing by the pond and figured we wouldn’t need the meat.

CP

Barbara Dalton is a professional artist who loves to write. Born in Boston, she works in her studio above a barn and lives on a farm with her cat, Rufus, in Southern Michigan. She has previously published a 'how to' article in Legacy Magazine and is currently working on her first novel, Lost in Place. Her media is 'found object' art and she displays her work in various galleries all over the country. Her blog is here.

Tom Mahony

Gone

There are places in the Coast Ranges still in essentially primeval condition. The creeks run clean and the forest is complex and the wildlife abundant.

You can bushwhack into the mountains and sit by a creek and think and wonder and experience what humans did thousands of years ago. Or what animals did before there were any humans at all. Maybe the closest thing to time travel you can find. Feels like you're in the middle of nowhere, the wilderness stretching forever, not a hint of human disturbance in any direction.

But examine an aerial photo and you'll see the place is just an island surrounded by an advancing sea of concrete, the wild core shrinking with each passing day. Stuff that's never coming back.

Going. Going.

Gone.

CP

Tom Mahony has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in Surfer Magazine, Flashquake, The Rose & Thorn, Pindeldyboz, Foliate Oak, Decomp, Long Story Short, and many others. He is looking for a publisher for several novels. Visit him here.

Sally Roberts

THE PRAYER

In the stillness of a hot summer's afternoon, Susie and Paul are playing in their patch of garden. He is digging the biggest hole ever and she is mixing mud pies. The window and door of the kitchen stand open to the sunshine. Shouting breaks the calm, Mummy and Daddy shouting at each other in the kitchen. Susie does not take her eyes off the old saucepan, she stirs the mud. “Make it stop, make it stop. Make it stop,” she whispers.

The house falls silent. Susie looks up. Paul looks like crying. She can't leave him but she has to be sure that everything is alright. She leads him through the kitchen, down the hallway. She can hear her parents in the front room, still angry with each other. “Come on, Paul,” she says. “We'll play upstairs now.”

On the stairs she can see them through the open door. Daddy is waving his fist. She takes Paul up to her room. Paul sucks his thumb. She sits and rocks on the bed crushing her teddy bear to her chest. “Make it stop, make it stop. Make it stop,” she whispers.

Summer ends and then comes her seventh birthday. She is given a baby doll with a soft body and blonde hair. It has a cradle too. She names it Louise. The next day, Mummy fetches her and Paul from school. “We are going to live in a new house,” she tells them, “you'll like it there.”

It's not as good as our old house, thinks Susie but she says, “Where's Daddy?”

“Daddy doesn't live here with us,” Mummy says, “Now come and see your new room.”

It has stopped, but she has lost her Daddy. “That isn't what I meant,” she whispers.

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Sally Roberts started writing fiction shortly after starting school. Forty-five years later, she has got to the point where she is happy to share her efforts with others. Sally lives in England, near the Welsh border, where she works in local government.

Thomas Sheehan

Korean Echoes

My turn had come;
Billy Pigg, helmet flown
lost, shrapnel more alive in him
than blood free as air,
dying in my arms.

Billy asked a blessing, none come
his way since birth. My canteen
came his font. Then he said,
“I never loved anybody.
Can I love you?”

My father told me,
his turn long gone downhill;
“Keep water near you, always.”
He thought I’d be a priest before
all this was over, not a lover.

—First appeared in Qarrtsiluni

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.

Matt Mok

Silhouettes

They had us shoot at silhouette targets during basic training, paper facsimiles that stood stationary while our rifle muzzles spat fire and sent round after round of lead through them. We became proficient at turning paper into pulp. They said the silhouette shape would condition our minds for combat, the theory being that it would make us less hesitant to pull the trigger in life or death situations--our lives, their deaths.

But as we are pinned down in these trenches, bullets ripping into sandbags and spewing debris, the circumstances are not so ideal. Even when our lives are in danger, there are those among us who fail to shoot back. Some pray. Some cower under the enemy's barrage. Some do nothing at all. For the ones that do return fire, our actions lack the discipline and certainty we had in basic training. Our trigger pulls are unsteady and our breathing is uncontrolled. In the chaos of battle, our conditioning wavers and no matter how many times we wipe the perspiration from our eyes, the images at the end of our rifle sights remain unchanged.

Here, the silhouettes move. Here, they shoot back. And when the firefight is over, sometimes we can hear them scream.

CP

Born and raised in Queens, New York, Matt Mok currently resides in Hampton, NH, where trees and fresh air still scare him. His stories have been published in a variety of publications. Matt resolves to one day dream up a brilliant idea which he will turn into a completed novel.

Peggy Duffy

Challenge With a Capital C

My co-worker sits across from my desk in a plain office chair, a woman who over three years has become a good friend. How was your week? I begin, wanting to catch up after my vacation. I have breast cancer, she says, amid tears. She is an emotional person. I am not, but suddenly I am in her arms and crying too. She curbs my rare display of emotion with reassuring words. The doctor says it is cancer with a little ‘c’, she says. The treatment will be a challenge, but I’ll be fine. That little ‘c’ stays with me all day, the weight of an anvil, a Challenge with a Capital C.

A year ago, maybe two, I wrote a short story about a girl in Nazi Germany, saved by the lie of age her mature body allowed her to tell, now a woman fingering a small lump beneath her armpit. The history is real, the girl invented, as are her overly large breasts. The woman is no particular person, rather a creative amalgam facing the dread of discovery all women I know share. I fall into her world and in the dreamlike state of the writer, words appear like fine grains of sand, illuminated by the light of imagination, as I recount this new tale.

Fall back in time many more years, an earlier version of that same writer sits with a notebook and pen scribbling, so as not to forget, the experiences of another good friend with breast cancer. I am relating her story, writing it down to preserve it because she is no longer around to do the telling. I don’t want her to be forgotten. That is what I tell myself as I write this tale, one wrought with unrealized hopes and fruitless dreams. My thoughts wander into uncharted territory, strolling off the narrative path, searching for my place in the story while I walk this dark trail. That story is written and rewritten between long lapses of time, striving for the right tone and voice, seeking purpose and meaning.

Almost a decade later, that story finally emerges, fully shaped and formed, accepted for publication in an anthology of similarly themed stories. The other story, the fictional one, has already appeared in print. They are but small pieces of me, these stories, specks of dust in their initial creation, fashioned by the blow of the writer’s metaphoric hammer, molded from observation and the heat of experience, curved by the design of imagination. The woman I created with the big breasts reaches out for the touch of her adult daughter. I gave her hope, what the woman I once was, a younger version of myself, tried to discover.

Yesterday my co-worker, a friend, a fellow woman, comes into my office, takes a seat in a plain office chair. Fear strides in with her, sits in my lap. I rise to hasten it away, but it cannot escape the windowless room. Shared now, we stand and embrace it, my good friend and I. Together we attempt to keep it at bay, one letter at a time, this cancer with a small ‘c’, this story I tell, a journey wrought with bends and twists, forged for meaning, the weight of the hammer heavy upon the anvil.

CP

Peggy Duffy's short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Newsweek, Notre Dame Magazine, and Brevity. She has an MFA from George Mason University and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website is here.

Sara Crowley

Four Skulls

I have a photo of Helen, Keith and Bob, sitting on the greenest, lushest grass imaginable. The sky above them is poster paint blue, the sun so bright that Helen is squinting a little into the camera, despite her wide brimmed hat.

I have looked at it often. Cornwall: Bossiney Cove. Keith has a spliff in his hand. We smoked many joints that holiday. Skinny rollies filled with "giggle grass" that worked like magic. I have never laughed so much again. All four of us saw a cloud elephant.

"This is an important sign," said Bob.

"What of?" I asked.

"Well, what do elephants make you think?"

We shouted out, India, curtain tassels, boxes, mice. Stupid answers to elicit more mirth.

"Never forget," he said, solemnly.

"What shouldn't we forget Bob?" said Keith.

And he said "This," and gestured to the hill, the sea, the sky, us.

We went to a teashop, ordered scones and clotted cream, but it took us ages to get the words out. Then, when the tea came in delicate china cups we rattled them in the saucers with our laughing hands. We snorted, spluttered, and thought they were going to ask us to leave, but they didn't. They smiled at us; infectious we were with our big fat youthful happiness. We drank pints in the pub and ate cheesy chips, we played pool, and smoked. We gossiped and sung along to the jukebox.

Fifteen years is a long time, and no time. I haven't seen Keith in fourteen of those years. I see Helen once in every couple, and we hug, squeeze, and promise to catch up but we don't. I didn't see Bob after his diagnosis; he didn't want to be remembered as a dying man. So I look up to the clouds and every one of them is an elephant, no matter its shape.

CP

Sara Crowley has had fiction published by Pulp.Net, 3:AM, elimae, flashquake, Litro, Cella's Round Trip, Dogmatika, Red Peter, Better Non Sequitur, and a variety of other lovely places. Salted, her novel in progress, was shortlisted for the 2007 Faber/Book Tokens Not Yet Published Award. She blogs here.

Stacey Dye

Blind Trust

Your words sink like rocks.
Eager to believe you
I kick down to the water’s murky

bottom blindly feeling for the truth.
Repeatedly I emerge
breathless, empty-handed.

Convinced stones of veracity hide
in the poison of your promises I descend
into the depths yet again

prospecting in the mud of your deceit—
nails black with the filth of your lies.

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Stacey Dye has been writing radio and television copy since 1979 and does voice overs at a local cable TV station. She's been writing poetry since she was a teenager. She is a member of the Internet Writing Workshop and the Wild Poetry Forum.

Angela Carlton

Hamburgers, French Fries and Love

We met, usually on Wednesdays, escaping the hum-drum office environment for hamburgers and fries by the fountains. I always loved the sound of the water rushing as we sat in the open air, me, getting a little closer to your mystery.

I'd nibble on a pickle or a tomato while you talked about your adoration for other women. There was always a Stephanie or a Carrie or a Jennifer involved. Each one, sad little victims of your greatness: the piercing wit, the depth, the charm. Most of the time, my food would get cold, soggy on the plate.

I often had trouble finishing my lunch, but there was one Wednesday, this one rainy Wednesday, when we were forced to sit inside, that you did make a fuss about it. Laughing too loud, you told me to try something else on the menu. “Switch it up, Sophia, do something different, Babe.”

But I didn't. Sweat forming on my brow, I still couldn't. I never could speak up.

For there is this odd sense of comfort in knowing that hamburgers, french fries, a deep kind of adoration, this quiet love for you, is all. It’s all it can ever be.

CP

Angela Carlton's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction at Work, Every Day Fiction, Longstoryshort, Pindeldyboz, The Dead Mule, among others.

Wayne Scheer

A Balanced Life

If Franklin Meeks stood completely naked, he would still look like he wore a pocket protector. Of course, the black tape he used to hold his glasses together may have offered a clue.

"Why don't you replace them?" his friends would often ask. "You look like a nerd."

He'd smile, nod his head, and re-tape his spectacles.

Franklin lived a life as carefully balanced as his meals. He played racquetball with Al Brunette, a fellow actuarial, on Tuesdays and Thursdays and had sex with Linda Myers from accounting every Monday and Friday. Thursday evenings he stayed home to read the New Yorker, Newsweek and Scientific America. Saturdays, he packed a lunch and hiked a vigorous six miles up Mt. Landlow.

Sundays, he volunteered at the hospital where his sister had been admitted over twenty years earlier. Although the doctors had tried helping her, her life had careened violently out of control. She killed herself while Franklin still attended college.

After her death, he studied mental illness and decided that a healthy life consisted of a balance of eating right, exercise, intellectual stimulation, a meaningful job, good sex, and giving to others. He graphed his life accordingly.

Franklin understood his desperate attempt to keep his own life from breaking apart. The tape on his glasses remained his personal reminder.

CP

Wayne Scheer has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, Notre Dame Magazine, Eclectica, The Pedestal Magazine, flashquake and The Internet Review of Books. Revealing Moments, a collection of twenty-four flash stories, is available as a free download here.

Jeanne Holtzman

Nothing Bad Happened

The week started out pretty okay. A bunch of planes flew over, but they didn’t drop any bombs so they weren’t a surprise attack by the Russians. No one got stuck in the elevator. I didn't even have any elevator nightmares. All the lights were on in the good stairway, and my mom got up and dressed every morning, so I didn’t have to ask my best friend Diana to walk me all the way home and up seven floors. She just walked me halfway.

By Saturday morning, nothing bad had happened. At 10:30 Diana called and wanted to go bike-riding. I knew I couldn’t get my bike down the stairs. My mom was still asleep. My dad was gone.

I tried to be quiet in the kitchen. I cleaned up last night’s dishes. The beer bottles made a huge clatter when I threw them all down the incinerator in the hallway.

Diana called again and asked when I was coming. I thought about asking her to walk over and bring my bike down the elevator. I said I would be there soon.

I made my mom a cup of black coffee, and knocked on her door. Knocked harder. Opened it a crack.

The room was dark, but I could see the shape of a big man next to my mom. My dad was small.

I closed the door. I called Diana. I asked her if we could go roller-skating instead.

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Jeanne Holtzman is an aging hippie, writer and women’s health care practitioner, not necessarily in that order. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various print and online journals including Night Train, Dogzplot, The Legendary, Swink, The Iconoclast, flashquake, Salome and Hobart.

Hattie Wilcox

—photo of Mark Wood by Hattie Wilcox 2008

Fiddle Music

I imagine a home inside a violin
sleeping in the dark hole
until the case opens
and I'm awakened by the
squeak and screech
of a 4-year-old's
chubby hand on the bow
swept up in a brush with
the kiss and swish of hair and strings
the swell, ebb and flow of a virtuoso
perfumed hair and the whisper
of a barely-there red-satin dress
the chop of a tobacco-chewing
hollerer from the hills
the booming stomp of boots
pounding a wood-plank floor
I am loved every day
tucked under a chin
against the warmth of skin
hovering above a shoulder
a jostling ride, rocking
every which way in the box
reeling and shaking
the singing vibrations
the grunting and sweat
the depths the rhythm
the strain the offering
breathing
someone's soul

CP

Hattie Wilcox's love of poetry and piano led her to songwriting and the 2008 release of her debut CD, Red Bird Tattoo. She has won prize money for her lyrics and has lived to see her first royalty check. She continues to write poetry—her first love.

Some Thoughts on My Father-in-law
S.C. Morgan

He shuffles to the opposite end of the yard ever veering to the right, his upper body cantilevered over twisted lower limbs. Like an old horse with one blind eye he steadfastly compensates for the loss of ground and ends up at the irrigation ditch­­ where he wants to close the weir.

I can see translucent skin and bony spine between shirt and jeans as he bends down. The belt has a few new notches punched in it since I saw him last. Some in the family think he may have had a stroke because he drools now and when he sits he slumps to the right.

He would never go see the doctor about it unless coerced, and he sure as hell wouldn't go in for any of "that therapy business."

“I’m as good as I ever was, just a little slower,” he says.

There is no forcing this man to do anything. His jaw is jutted forward the same way it has been his whole life. He closes the weir; the sprinklers give a final spurt and fall silent.

My father-in-law grew up an orphan in North Dakota and came of age during the Great Depression. He was a CCC kid. Most people don't even know what those letters stand for anymore, but they saved his life. He loves Franklin Roosevelt although he has voted as a registered Republican in every election since.

Unasked for, he outlived his wife and having survived that blow fifteen years ago he will not go down easily. Who are we to tell this man how to live out the last years of his life? Would he really be better off if he went into a Home to rest?

The end is only the same as the rest of his existence and although he may complain about it occasionally, he accepts it. There is nothing wrong with his brains, it is simply that the mechanical parts are failing him.

I watch him shuffling back to the house and am reminded that he is only thirty-five years older than I. An eye-blink in time. Recently, on a trip with my adult children, I was looked after as though I might get lost—not remember the way back to the car. It made me angry. Now I understand the evasive answers my own parents and my father-in-law give me when I ask about having someone come in to help around the house. I’m sure they feel suggestions of incompetence are implied.

All of us know who we are. We have lived in our skins for our entire existence and even if we aren't always comfortable with who we are, we are at least familiar with the terrain. We cling to that dignity and carry ourselves to the grave fighting to retain as much of our essence as humanly possible. All the older members of my family seem to be doing that with as much class as they can muster.

There is not that much time left.

CP

S.C. Morgan lives on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. An American expatriate, her writing has appeared in Escape From America, Real Travel Adventures, and Notre Dame Magazine. She writes about nature and human nature—anything that is interesting.

Almost Magnificent
David Erlewine

After bathing him and helping rub his toothbrush over soft gums and small teeth, we climb into bed. Books I don't read aloud say he should be sleeping in his own bed by now. If I'm not ready to be alone, following Carol’s car accident, how can I ask that of a four-year-old?

Tonight he picks out Carl is King, a recent purchase. Last night, I stuttered on the penultimate line of the last page. I replaced "magnificent" with "wonderful". Though he can't read, he gave me a look.

Now, I squeeze his shoulder. "So you had fun at Ms. Jennifer's today?" He tells me about a boy running into the couch, the baby that always cries, how they watched "Bob the Builder." He yawns. I can't help but hope that he falls asleep before I reach the final page.

A few minutes later, he’s snoring on my chest. I stop reading, listening to him breathe. When I was his age, I tried to imagine what I’d be like as an adult. I could never picture it. I pull the covers over his chest and try to fall asleep.

CP

David Erlewine's stories have appeared, or soon will, in dozens of venues, including Word Riot, Ghoti, Pedestal, Pank, Keyhole, elimae, and SmokeLong Quarterly.

My One and Only Grandmother
Peggy Duffy

My grandma was not my grandmother. She was my mother’s aunt, my great-aunt, but in the absence of any living grandparents of our own, she served as a surrogate to my sister and me. She was the real grandmother to my two cousins who lived in New Jersey, about a half hour’s drive across the George Washington Bridge from our New York home.

Home to my grandma was a one-room garden apartment with a couch in the living room that converted into her bed, a small kitchen, and a large closet you passed through to get to the bathroom. Visits were always day trips. We’d park on the street and walk up the cement sidewalk to her front door, the farthest one from the road. After a short while, we’d all pile back in the car and drive over to the adjacent town where my cousins lived.

My cousins and I liked grandma’s apartment, so different from our more traditional style houses. We also liked that she was born in 1900, making it easy to calculate her age. Although she was just in her sixties, she was very gray, very wrinkled, and extremely dowdy in both dress and bodily shape. This is not just in memory. I have the pictures to prove it.

In the pictures, she looks traditionally grandmotherly, but in real life she didn’t fit the mold. She couldn’t cook. Once when I stayed overnight, we made beef stew, a meat and potato concoction boiled in water. Her baking wasn’t any better. She served the same hard, tasteless dough balls she called sugar cookies whenever we saw her.

I saw her every month or two, and sometime during my teens became aware of our family lineage. She was the sister to my mother’s father, the man whose wife was my true grandmother, a set of grandparents whose images were preserved in a few old sepia photographs. But my grandma was the only grandmother who’d ever instructed me in the kitchen, although she hated to cook, or attempted to teach me to crochet, a skill I couldn’t master. Not being authentic did not make her any less real. She had no culinary abilities, but she fed me a lifetime of memories that would last.

The last picture I have of my grandma was taken in early 1981. She is sitting in my mother’s living room chair cradling my newborn daughter in her arms. She looks frailer but otherwise as gray, wrinkled and dowdy as I’ll always remember her. She looks very grandmotherly.

—originally appeared in A Bouquet for Grandmother

CP

Peggy Duffy's short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Newsweek, Notre Dame Magazine, and Brevity. She has an MFA from George Mason University and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website is here.

Beaters
Jessie Carty

A green van is in the breakdown lane,
smoke curling from its open silver hood.
A woman stands several car lengths
away, a child on her hip.

In profile, she reminds me of you.
If you were here now you’d be 55.
Would you still be driving those old beaters?

There was that mustard yellow sedan
that had to be strategically parked
because it couldn’t go into reverse.

And that Olds 88 you never wanted
to give up, even when the floors
rusted through. You covered the holes
with grey plastic mats. I’d lift them,
tossing candy onto the road.

I had to be careful, though,
to sit in the middle of the bench
seat because the doors
were known to ghost open.

CP

Jessie Carty's work has appeared in journals such as Margie and Iodine Poetry Journal. Her first chapbook will be published by Puddinghouse Publications in 2009.

Behind the Retina
Thomas Sheehan

Just behind the retina,
hidden in a cluster, is a little room
with a secret door and passageways
and key words other
than Sesame.

If you’re lucky enough
to get inside that room at the right
time, there’s ignition, there’s light, there’s a flare;
now and then there’s pure incandescence
like a white phosphorous shell
detonating, the core room
of memories, the bank

holding everything
you’ve ever known, ever seen,
ever felt, spurting with energy.
The casual, intermittent presences
you usually know are microscope-beset,
become immediate. For those glorious

moments the splendid
people rush back into your life
carrying all their baggage, the Silver Streak
unloaded, Boston’s old South Station
alive, bursting seams,
tossing images.

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.

The Top of the Mountain
Ethel Rohan

Mother and I have never gotten along so well, now that she's dead. In death, she's never been happier: her sight, hearing, sanity, and vitality restored. Now she is all that I ever wanted her to be. She is everything she wanted to be.

We meet nights at the edge of a cliff, Mother alight in the dark, knee-deep in bright red poppies and infused with the smell of wildflowers. She is tall now, lean, dark and glittering, only her skin marble-ivory. I recall her body's softness, its powdery scent.

I bring her news, jokes, and my troubles. We don't gossip or argue, done with poison. Everything I want discarded Mother tosses over the cliff, into the bottomless gorge.

We do not touch. There will be no more scars.

We dance, floating as if it's ice, not damp earth, beneath our bare feet. In her presence, like this, I feel brave and beautiful, beloved. She feels the same. We never say it, but regret is there, solid as a third dancer.

Some night, when we're back to the beginning and it's just the two of us again, we will dance right off that mountain together. We will soar.

CP

Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, Ethel Rohan now lives in San Francisco. She received her MFA in fiction from Mills College, CA. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from over thirty online and print journals including DecomP; Cantaraville; Word Riot; Identity Theory; mud luscious; Clockwise Cat; Ghoti Magazine, and the Journal of Truth and Consequence. Her blog is here.

Ross Eldridge

—Photo Amble Gulls by Ross Eldridge

Lighting the Now

Some years ago, I wrote a newspaper column that tended to be about days gone by, which were sometimes the good old days of my youth, sometimes about the travel I'd managed when my health and finances permitted, about people that I'd met, books I'd read, things that influenced me, the shitty experiences of childhood, conversions and diversions. My therapist thought I was getting all the past out of my system. I kept a journal for over twenty-five years, scrapbooks as well, and photo albums. Everything was on paper, somehow. As we carry the past along with us, perceiving time as we do in these dimensions, I hardly expected to get everything out of my system!

Three years ago I took all my journals to an industrial incinerator plant, along with my scrapbooks. So much for what I did in 1980; so much for the newspaper clipping of my mother's funeral notice; so much for important telephone numbers; so much for jokes that were so funny when I heard them that they had to be written down; so much for my thoughts on 11 September, 2001; so much for theatre tickets, and an address blotchy on a beer-mat, and a coin I picked up that I did not recognise. Into the fire.

I left my photo albums (and I'd been the keeper of the family photographs among my siblings), my personal papers, my newspaper columns, my reference books and notes, everything that I'd written, in an old cargo container in a damp field in Bermuda. When I turned my back on it, I knew that I'd not pay the storage fees after the first six months, and I didn't, and that was three years ago. Those things have gone. Apparently, as of three years ago, I'd pretty much dumped the baggage of my past, mentally, and the physical followed.

Back in England, I found I was unable, couldn't be arsed, to write about schooldays and fishing off the rocks and climbing Mount Pisgah on Beaver Island, though I was vaguely conscious of those times. Instead of panoramic views of driving through the Grand Tetons that just go on and on, I have a little, the smallest, Post-it Note reading "Saw the Tetons". Enough seen, enough said.

I'm tending to write about the moment, or at least last night or a day or two ago. I've taken up photography, I see something interesting, camera always at the ready, I get my snapshot, and I write about it. Or delete it. I don't save it.

And, in the night, in the last few hours before sunrise, my mind races. Something I saw the day before. I have a tiny torch, the sort that one might attach to a key ring, and I reach for it, my biro pen, and a jotter pad (they are scattered all around the flat), and I write down my great thoughts. Light out. Another thought. Light on. And through the night. Light off. Light on.

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.

Surrounded by Water
Meg Pokrass

"We live in a state surrounded by water," I'm saying to nobody in particular mixing an Amaretto sour.

"And most people never go to the beach," he finishes, as if he were my oldest friend.

Working in this bar for a while, making pretty good money, I'm still thinking one day I'll see him and know his face when he sits down.

"Did you want extra sour?" I ask.

"Perfect," he says, flipping his thick black bangs. "And when you catch a little break, you want to join me?" he asks.

"I don't sit with customers," I say. I always say.

Lou Anderson, deep into the regular shouts, "she's too fucking important, she's a dancer."

"Nope," I say to black hair amaretto. "I'm just a nurse."

He smiles with tight closed lips, salutes. We look at each other for a sec.

His phone rings, the James Bond jingle. I giggle, then stop—his face whitening like a bleach stain.

"Hello... Hello, hello, hello?"

"Wrong guy," he says into the deep, deep phone, "fuck-off, jerk-wipe,"

"Pardon my French," he tells an invisible person sitting next to him, throws his fancy phone into the trash can, our trash can—rimming it, near the register.

"So, you're a real live dancer?" he asks me as though I'm a black phone too, smashing his fist on the hard wood counter.

I look through my eyelids to check who's around. If maybe Tim, the bouncer, sees. Tim's moving toward us in slow-mo, there's enough in my peripheral to breathe now, though I pee a little in my pants anyway. The other guys, my regulars, sit very still, sucking their skinny straws like air.

CP

Meg Pokrass lives in San Francisco. Her stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming here: 3AM, Keyhole, Pindeldyboz, Smokelong Quarterly, 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.