From the Snag

By Christine Stoddard

I am the owl and I saw it all on that red and black night. The stars shattered the heavens with their brightness and cast an eerie light upon the scene below, like a stage light perhaps. They wanted to illuminate the drama taking place beneath them. If I remember correctly—and I do—it was quite a theatrical sight, what with the star beams and the melancholy man. The moon, if she could speak, would attest to that.

In the ghostly forest full of birch trees, I holed myself inside of a rickety snag to shield myself from the wind. It was a blistery summer evening and my feathers alone could not protect me from the mix of hot and cold. Too irritated to hunt, I decided to rest. I could afford to starve for one day if it meant feeling comfortable. The mice and voles, as I recall, were quite grateful. Continue reading »

Free Depilatories!

by Miss Binky

Nowadays, with millions of Americans hoarding all their cash for trivial things like food and rent, it is essential to ferret out creative ways to keep up on personal grooming.

I don’t care how poor you are, nobody wants to see facial hair on women, ear hair that could be knit into sweaters for third world children, or violently menacing eyebrows that threaten a duel to the death with Martin Scorseses’ eyebrows. Continue reading »

You Have to Have Friends

By Bear Jones

All six of us sat on a big couch. I was told which direction the cameras were. The reporter asked each of us a few questions, and then he came to me.

“So, Miss Reed, how does it feel to win a Grammy?”

“Pretty good, I have to tell you.” I traced the trophy with my fingers, reassuring myself it was real.

“I’ve heard of rags to riches, but I’ve never met someone who was actually homeless once. Did you really live on the street?”

“Yes. I slept under a bridge when it rained, curled around a trash can with a fire inside when it froze, and slept out on top of a high rise parking garage in the heat because it was breezier there.”

“This was before you lost your vision? You could see then?”

“No, it was after I went blind.”

“You were blind and homeless? How did you survive?”

“You have to have friends.”

*****
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LILITH

by Ron Metzger

She was beautiful, loving and created by the same Earth as Adam. Lilith was Adam’s first wife. When she wouldn’t accept subservience from Adam, she was banished by God from the Garden.

It wasn’t easy back then to be born as an adult with no experiences from childhood. God just plops you there – full grown and naked. Lilith was the rebel, so she got kicked out and got dubbed the “bringer of disease and death”.

“Well, Adam,” God said, “we can always create another woman for you. We just have to remove one of your ribs.”

“Will that hurt?” asked Adam. He kind of liked Lilith, but she didn’t obey God well enough.

“I’ll do it as painlessly as possible – but she will become your perfect mate as long as she obeys my rules.”

When Adam awoke, Eve was sitting at his side swabbing the wound on his rib cage. They were immediately in love. Lilith was watching this fiasco from over the hill and she laughed at Adam’s naivety.

She watched as Eve glared at the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge. Lilith watched the serpent enticing Eve to take a bite. She watched when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden. She laughed at their anguish (which she had already been through).

God thought ‘Damn bitches. You just can’t make them in your own image.’ He watched as the Garden of Eden was overcome by pollution and nuclear waste. Lilith just watched on and wondered if God had made a mis-judgement of the feminine species.

The Vanity Crisis

by Matthew Dexter

Mrs. Milner took one last look at her naked body before it collided with the floor. She was hoping she would never have to see those wrinkles in the mirror, but could only watch the lines grow clearer as they shook. The image of an elderly lady was one she had seldom admired, especially her own. The bony contours exposing the top of a torso so ghostly. Those purple veins that defined the bottom of her legs in the shape of an octopus. She had never hated gravity so much in her life. A bag of bones, Mrs. Milner watched it all fall, as if she were an athlete in slow motion, knowing all the while she had never looked better.

She was a skeleton. So skinny and delicious to all the lonely old men with the dead wives who attempted to seduce her every time they saw her in the hall. All the good that had done her now. The bathmat was in the drying machine. Her hip was broken, probably along with a few ribs, and her head was bleeding. “Well Jesus almightily I’ll be damned,” she said, “at least the glass didn’t shatter when I crashed into the shower door.” Continue reading »

Careless Mistake

By Lauren Kelly

Another deep night surrendering to dawn’s burning glow, another job swiftly completed. A slight sardonic grin caresses my lips as I focus the tiny photo lens in my cell to the scene in the narrow alley lying before me. The softly rising sun giving the prostrate male a haloed angelic quality, if you could ignore the growing scarlet pool of mortality he was bathing in. The morbid serenity was broken by the harsh snap of the shutter as the image was captured. Nothing personal honey, you were just a job. As I waited for the delay to display the photo my attention was sharply caught by a discordant sound of air trying to fill a torn lung. I snapped the cell shut and tucked it into a small hidden pocket on the side of my black body suit. Careful to not be touched by the glistening crimson stain I crouched down to get a closer look at his chest. With my head slightly cocked to the right, I waited to see if it was just a last reflex of a dying body. After a few moments stretched in a seemingly endless allotment, there it was again; a desperately wet and rasping attempt to breathe. With my eyes so close to him, I could actually see the minute red bubbling rising through the small hole in-between his ribs.

Damn it! I dropped my head to my chest as the extremity of what my almost mistake could of cost me. It wouldn’t be the lack of payment that would hurt but the repercussions of failing is not something a girl could just walk away from. Not in this business. I closed my eyes and drew in a slow cleansing breath. I must have had the blade tilted slightly to the side; his lung taking the most damage instead of slicing through the aorta as planned. But, I had to have grazed some part of the heart; there is just too much blood loss to be solely from a lung. That’s what I deserve for getting cocky, but it’s easily fixed. I slid the stiletto from the concealed sheath in my boot, cursing myself silently for the sloppiness that requires a second thrust. As I lifted my head my crystalline blue gaze was suddenly locked with a deep green one. All that was reflected in those sage depths was confusion and agony.
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Caitlin, Tollgate Collector

By Tom Sheehan

The sun, angling into her eyes, had come up “like thunder out of China ‘crost the bay,” and even as Caitlin Bordeaux made music of the poet’s words, she couldn’t remember his name. Nothing was right in the scene though the day had begun in promise. Nick had just gone through mere minutes earlier, the load piled high on his flatbed rig. Most of the night the truck had been parked in front of her house, the neighbors probably talking again. She didn’t care, his mouth still alive on her.
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Snow Shelter

by Lia Mier

The sun came up early, but all around her she felt shadows. Eva awoke as she always did, acutely aware of the cold. After being raised in the long dark Alaska winters the sun-filled mountain crispness should not have bothered her as much as it did, but this cold was the kind that radiated out from the bone; an internal cold that never warmed. Rolling over, she savored the warmth of the blankets and curled her body tightly against her sleeping daughter, breathing in the smell of baby shampoo and crayons that always hung around her tiny body. “Time to wake up Monkey” she whispered. Flora squirmed in bed next to her and grunted a little with disapproval. I know why she can’t wake up thought Eva, I kept her up to late last night. In fact she had been keeping her up to late every night. After long days of work and school she wanted to squeeze every moment out her time together with this child. At four years old, Flora was no longer a baby and Eva was shocked with how fast time had flown. And now, another winter had crept up on them, another semester of college, another day.
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Wilson

By Tom Leventhal

Wilson sat on the rocks overlooking the water and watched the cat. It was a scrawny thing, skinny, jittery and full of fleas much like him. Wilson shook the last bit of sleep out of his eyes and waited. Sooner or later the lady would arrive. She always did.

Wilson inventoried the contents of his pockets as he waited: 35 cents in panhandled change, a small pocket knife and the Zippo lighter he bought in Saigon so long ago. The Zippo had been through it all with him- the Corps, his triumphant return, the failed marriage and too many jobs and drunken nights to remember. Wilson flicked the wheel and was heartened to see that it still lighted.

The cat jumped up on a rock and stared at him, its back slightly arched as though it knew of his intentions. Hissing, it backed away and hid under the rock pile with half a dozen others like it. All were waiting for the lady.

Wilson looked up at the bridge that spanned the waterway. Most of the traffic flowing across it was headed in the same direction. The bridge was his crude calendar. This much traffic meant that it was a weekday as the commuters headed for their jobs. On the weekend, the traffic was quieter in the morning and later the cars would be full of families on their way to the park, beach or whatever. Wilson was past caring where they went.

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Wishing You Poverty and Chastity this Christmas

By Amber W.

“Thank you for putting together such a great package, Class,” my teacher said.

I had taken several cans of corn and green beans from our pantry to add to the adopt-a-family donation my high school class put together. Some family, right here in our own town, was going to have a brighter Christmas. The bell rang and I was officially on Winter Break. I left through the double doors and walked the half-block home.

I walked slowly, in no hurry to make it back to the house. It had undergone a horrifying transformation in the previous month. Like a beacon to spacemen, the house was lit up on all sides. Several mechanical reindeer bobbed their heads up and down in the snow. The crabapple tree boasted about a million twinkling lights. Santa, complete with motion detector, waited at the door to greet me with an ass-shaking rendition of a song telling me he was coming to town. I stood in the driveway amazed at the work my dad had done and amazed at how much I hated it.
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