April 26, 2017| ISSUE no 215
Literary Magazine
crack the spine
poetry Melissa Benton Barker Jessica Barksdale
short fiction Nick LaRocca Kelly Marages
ISSN 2474-9095
creative non-fiction Mike Ekunno
flash fiction Jeff Burt Nan Wigington
micro fiction Ron Riekki
Letter From the Pantry
The fish oil you mailed has gone rancid and the borage sits clumped. The ginger root, half-shaved, bagged, pungent as the first day, fits perfectly, almost hidden, on the top shelf of the pantry, the deep root end more stump than core, as if having turned its butt toward me in juvenile retort to not being used more often. Sawgrass, lemongrass and verbena leaves, all crushed and squeezed into tea cloths bound by twine sit like dumplings on the spice shelf. That special blend of spices in the Mason jar has been used often. I don’t know what’s in it, but the blend is good on tilapia, like you said, and my pork, but I’ve found it goes even better on a peanut butter sandwich, acting like salsa for a tortilla chip. I’ve even used it in coffee when the mood has stuck me, a little salty, but the rest of the concoction is a good mix. And good daughter, that vitamin drink in the non-fat yogurt—I left it out on a hot day when I mowed out back. It burst and exploded. It took me a week to clean up the mess, bit by bit as is my habit. It smelled rotten, and I can’t imagine drinking something that smells that bad when it’s fresh. Thank you for these gifts, but I’m old, and like all men when they reach being this old, the world has gone to hell or will likely end there, just like it has for generations, and will for generations to come. I have depleted the bags of curry and have empty burlaps of rice. I’m using them for sandbags this winter.
flash fiction by Jeff Burt
The Floater
short fiction by Nick LaRocca
Before he fell apart from the head of his penis inward, Paul was a floater for Mike Grieco, a “numbers monster” shuttling between Kia showrooms from Coral Gables down south to Boca Raton up in Palm Beach County, a South Floridian I-95’er who’d left behind the moribund winter pall of the Jersey Shore for the fast life during the boom, hell during the recession, and now recovery during the recovery. A meth addict and, more broadly, an adrenaline addict on the rebound, he knew the product line inside and out. He’d sold not Audis, with their low, mean efficiency; nor Mercedes Benzes, with their professorial aspect; nor Maseratis, with their bob-and-weave stoutness, but Kias, good, old, reliable Kias. Except Kias weren’t quaint these days, and unleashed from the sober home where he’d spent the last ten weeks assimilating a severe perspective, he saw something sociopathically whorish in the I-can-be-whatever-you-want-me-to-be way this South Korean make hoped to morph into a ferocious Jaguar, a muscular Chevy, and a youthful Ford all at once, even as it courted BMW’s douchey high-ender—with its two luxury models, the Cadenza, a fine automobile even a rookie could sell cold, and the K900, a soulless pontoon on wheels one reviewer likened to “your grandfather’s dusty Buick” and which no one, not even Paul, could get on the road because it handled like a refrigerator. After recovery, he wasn’t too into sales; it wasn’t in his heart to kill, kill, kill. He was still esteemed by all the right people, and Bobby Giamatti had told him directly, “When yer ready to rock and roll, kiddo, come see me at Mike’s new place up in Delray, and I’ll put you on the floor straight off.” Grieco’s regional sales manager, Bobby went on to lament that working for him in Delray Beach were “a bunch of Loxahatchee hicks and, look, I’m no racist or nothin’, but two sand niggers, both named Moustafa—no shit. They try to act confident, but they’re nerve-wracked. I’m tellin’ you, these assholes are gonna bomb the place.” He went on, with a kind of Trumpian tautological insistence, to talk about how much he hated “that shit-dirty part of the world. Fuckin’ Nine-Eleven, man.” Paul didn’t have a racist bone in his body. His best friend in the sober home had been an obese, waddling, second-generation-Haitian-Egyptian-American pain pill popper named Elvens, who had a face as pretty as Muhammad Ali’s and flashed perhaps the sweetest demeanor of anyone Paul had ever met. Elvens was so sweet he was mistaken for mentally deficient. It turned out he was well-read and soft-spoken in a sensitive way, an aspiring literati who’d gotten mixed up in a faux-literary lifestyle that substituted song lyrics for poetry and peer-pressured him into Oxycontin. “To be honest, I thought it cleaner than heroin—manufactured. I was deluded, I’m aware.” Paul had been an English minor, and on the porch at the Jim Rob Cane Space for Recovery and Renewal, the two of them got into solid discussions of cinema and novels. Whatever Elvens’ sweetness, it wasn’t saccharine, and Paul found him profound enough to debate. So he couldn’t much bear Bobby on the phone now, and that whole world of sales, ultra-masculine, breezily racist, slit-eyed-competitive, derogatory to whomever the other guy was, including your coworker in the sales bullpen, blew. He made up an excuse to hang up. He didn’t stand up to Bobby, however. A former salesman is still a salesman—or a politician—or a human being: he kept his options open. Sales or not, a living had to be made. One of his buddies in the sober home was grounds chief at a string of mansions on A-1-A in Highland Beach just north of Boca. Paul sent him a text asking to come on—something physical to take his mind off the loose bones of an active recovery. His guy replied by asking how Paul was holding up and, more to the point, whether he could be trusted—“Be straight with me, man. This is my livelihood we’re talking about.” When Paul made it clear he was clean and would be staying clean—“I’ll drown you in piss tests, if that’s what you want”—he was told there was an older couple who would be heading up north for the summer. “They need a house sitter. You on board with something like that? It’s a lot—I mean a lot—of housekeeping. I don’t want you feeling like a bitch.” “If it pays and isn’t sales, I’m in. Sign my name on the line that is dotted.” The house’s size was an inhumane challenge. There was something rogue and dehumanizing about such a behemoth, as complex and disjointed as an office building, with two main staircases off the front entrance leading to separate wings, with wainscoting and chair rail everywhere to buttress and segment and make less daunting the home’s towering interior walls, with mixed marble splashes in the bathrooms and an oasis room that featured a massage pod set under a paddle fan like some kind of futuristic boutique-dentist’s office. Paul found the house conquerable only if he challenged it in sections. He approached it not as 11,865 contiguous square feet but as a nation divided into roughly 2,000-square-foot states, and would rotate among these states mornings after his walk on the beach, cleaning with monkish devotion and a stylist’s attention to detail. A single strip of wainscoting, in the first or second study—depending upon which staircase you ascended—this study done with the cold creative bursts of a banker appreciative of art but approaching it with Asbergers-like proprietorship, drove Paul batty. It fried during sunrise over the ocean out the big windows, and he was forever polishing in it. The amount of wood polish he had to inventory alone was a kind of job; he found himself online at the end of each day, ordering product—cleaning products, fragrances, a Lil’ Giant twenty-four-foot ladder so that he could reach, allegedly, the tallest light bulbs in the house. Even this ladder didn’t give him access to every light: midsummer, when a bulb in the grand foyer went out, he had to call in a specialty electrician who, to change the thing, brought in portable scaffolding: $980 to change a light bulb. Among the home’s finest features was a flurry of sheer, white, linen drapes lining a wall of windows in the second floor guest master, facing the ocean. Alone in the big, glowing house at night, Paul would open those windows—the summer heat was not yet relentless—and stand mysteriously in the fluttering drapes, his chemistry another long day closer to homeostasis. He would imagine what he looked like to a distant ship, an unblinking dot of light riding the edge of the horizon where the black water met the charcoal sky, the blue bloom of rushing, subtropical clouds that for some jungle reason made him sick-horny. He imagined a woman on deck, bitter by boredom, behind her a lifetime of compromise to an uncompromising man whose money owned her body, turning a set of bejeweled binoculars casually landward and catching his lean figure. Would she know he was an addict? A gigolo? A dick sucker, in the end? Would she know he knew what it was like to gag on a cock, to subjugate his heterosexuality to material need? Was she him? He’d whisper at the ocean, “I can seduce you, and I’ll never even make you eat pussy.” He cracked up at the bullshit of sexuality, how life and sex hardly intersect except by Maslow’s hierarchical needs. You had to eat. You had to, if you were an addict, score. Snort. Shoot. Swallow. Smoke. You did the rest for that purpose. “Way deep in it,” he whispered, grinning ferociously at the little light creeping to his left, making its bright way north, “I’d have let you drive that ship up my ass for a hit. Fuck everyone,” he said, with abrupt bitterness. “And I’ll bet you agree.” He knew one thing: he could sell that little light anything he wanted. There had been a murder in the house. The current owners, who ran a specialty commercial glass supply company, the uniquely American rich who’d found a niche in glassworks to the tune of hundreds of millions, had picked up the place for a song because after the murder, no one wanted to touch it; apparently, the super-wealthy are superstitious. The murder had been of a young man, 19, who had been found in the foyer with his shirt off and a bullet through his head. The oddest part of the story, which Paul read up on, finding archives of news coverage online (after the day’s inventory was complete), was that the then-owners of the home had come back from a night out to discover this young man lying on the floor, and they did not know him. Some of their items had been tossed to make the crime look like a robbery, but the disarray was too random and nonsensical to be anything but a ruse. The young man, a stranger, had been kidnapped and brought to the house to be executed. The assailants, in masks on the security footage, were never caught, and the former owners found themselves, this according to the groundskeeper with whom Paul was close, embroiled in a scandal. Their neighbors were full of salacious conjecture: Were they involved? Did they know the murderers? “Things like this don’t happen randomly.” And, “I knew they were too young to have so much money.” And, “Drugs. It always is.” The then-owners were left hostile, contentious, and privately crestfallen, depressed about man’s violent inhumanity to man on the one hand and the isolative nature of suspicion and gossip on the other—the innuendo that makes life steamy but takes victims with reckless abandon, with nothing of the storyteller’s at stake and no motive greater than the hedonistic search for a new, juicy story to tell, lie or truth. Dealing with twin disappointments, which made for one disappointment too many, they sold the house after the market rebounded, breaking even after a criminally large commission was paid to their realtor, and split out of Highland Beach, leaving behind their dreamy white mansion on the sand. They moved to Seattle to be among the egalitarians. Paul didn’t know with whom he empathized more, the former owners, forced away by talk of neighbors up and down A-1-A, one of the most exclusive streets on the planet, or the victim, who had been whatever he was—the reports were infamous and damning—but was still 19 years old, a Haitian kid named Stevenson Faustin with a tattoo of something or another on his sinewy neck in a DUI mug shot, a gray-green tat that blended badly with his skin to look like vitiligo. Paul could channel one person or another. He could channel the husband, glancing at his wife with misery, the two of them understanding they would never feel happy nor complete nor reasonable until they hightailed it out—and having to wait, wait, wait, because the murder occurred in 2009, and you couldn’t sell a gold bar for a penny in 2009. Or he could channel the victim, his last moments, which here and there Paul had lived: There was, at Paul’s lowest point, a particular moment of victimhood when with his eyes closed and a man’s dick in his mouth he felt the man bring his hand around to the back of his head. He swatted the hand away, but the man, quietly, softly—not gently, maybe more or less carefully—returned it, and Paul did not have the fortitude, self-esteem, or confidence to swat it away again: money had to be made. Snort, shoot, swallow, smoke. The veiny cock this guy had. The bulbous head like a venus fly trap. This man, who’d found him on Craig’s List under “Casual Appointments,” had insisted on a role-play scenario wherein he was a travelling businessman (that much was probably not a fiction) and Paul his nephew, on the road with Uncle Rapist to learn the ropes. He arrived at a Motel 8 in Hialeah and spent twenty intellectually agonizing minutes improvising a scene in which he called the man Uncle and pretended to talk about a meeting they would have the next day, and “Uncle” coached him through how he should behave and segued into the purpose of their liaison by saying, “Let’s do something to relax and get our minds off of tomorrow. You know what I do to relax?” The look on his face, so lecherous it was like an expression of cancer, was, now, what allowed Paul to see inside that car on its deathly ride up A-1-A from Deerfield Beach, where the young man had been kidnapped, to his execution in Highland Beach: to kill someone, figuratively or literally, you had to be at the height of need. “What do you do, Uncle?” Paul had asked. He was a long way from the showroom. He was, maybe, dying. “I cum, silly boy.” He slapped the bed beside him. “Sit down next to your favorite uncle.” The entire time Paul was sucking his dick, Uncle Jericho made him glance up on cue and answer the question, “Is your uncle’s dick sweet?” “Yes,” he had to whisper, with throaty desire. Even at the end, when, standing, clutching the back of Paul’s head with both hands and thrusting his little cock down Paul’s throat, as drool as thick as Penzoil fell down Paul’s chin and waterfalled in strings like clear glue onto his bird chest, his wilted, emaciated, druggie’s chest, which had turned the man on—“You look like David Fucking Bowie,” he’d said, out of character within the roleplay—even then, as Uncle banged the head of his cock against the back of Paul’s throat, he would pull out and say, “Is your uncle’s dick sweet?” “Yes.” “Say, ‘My uncle’s dick’s sweet.’” “My uncle’s dick is sweet.” “Fuck yeah it is, you little junkie bitch. I want to fuck you up for good.” So clean, yes, sober, fine, but how to feel essentially normal? The raw carnality of Paul’s life had never allowed for an entirely straight-forward personality; since childhood, he was always on the sly, his libido pressingly on the lookout for a ripe body, searching for a woman stretching her body before him in a doorway, making herself accessible. He’d lived to make money and fuck. A needful woman and the easy sex she promised in exchange for even the perception of affection and protection was a siren song he could not resist because he had no method to repudiate her. Everything—the essential parts of life, at least—seemed to come down to whether he could repudiate them. Like the parts of a woman, he could not repudiate less-than-wise decisions, could not invalidate them, so he made them—in explosions of debauchery and self-destruction, never an intentional, quiet moment. But his direct, simple suffering—what should he do with it in a world of refugees, in a world where dashcams blast gun-downs over the Web, where a little boy’s Syrian body is washed up onshore in jeans and striped shirt, where his little-boy-body lies dead, dressed tidily, on the sand, a boy of five, the powerless, innocent body of a child? What should Paul do with himself, a man whose suffering is, by comparison, modest? To whom does he tell his misery? Living in a mansion on the beach, he was very much alone for the first time in his life. Back when life was hot with closing the deal, he couldn’t have a meal without inviting half the universe. He would take to Facebook to post his soon-to-be whereabouts: “Having lunch in an hour at Zona Fresca if anyone wants to join me. Kick ass ceviche!” Something like that. Real salesman-type rah-rah. I want you interested. And “friends” came because everyone had so much money they could afford to pay for company. Some were members of his life, others emerged out of the woodwork or worked tangentially with him in the cashier’s office or in parts and service—he would put the invitation out there and whoever came to meet him, that was the gratifying soul he had lunch with. In the sober home, they’d talked about getting centered through introspection, about finding your true emotions, which had been chemically saturated for years. Elvens had gotten back to writing, a thing done in solitude, and he was reading real poetry for the first time and was giddy about it, too, like he’d discovered an ancient artifact. “This stuff is so good.” What do you say to that? Paul was pretty well read, and he knew that on the one hand, the poetry Elvens was reading had always been around, and he’d been an ignorant kid who’d thought poetry was stuff written by dead guys or the emo song lyrics he belted whenever someone uttered something close to a line from a song. In rehab, someone might say during group-up, when they all gathered in a circle, “What can you do?”, and Elvens, from his chair, would sing a line: “There’s nothing / you can dooooo / I don’t love youuuu!” But what did Paul know about poetry, really? What did he know about anything worthwhile except the Kia Optima, the Cadenza, the boat-big K900? He didn’t get into anything that might overtake or occupy him while he was in recovery. He didn’t so much resent as he did defy the trends that took over an addict’s life in the process of ridding his system of all the guilt, shame, and cosmic disturbance that came with the life he’d led before he’d arrived on Jim Rob Cane’s porch and Cane checked him in and talked with him relentlessly for months until Paul decided life was worth living—or didn’t, for as Cane once pointed out in a moment, finally, of pure, honest agony, “People do die here.” Then he said, “I know what you think of me, Paul, that I’m a certain kind of salesman just like you. Because you think I’m selling rituals and mottos as truth, but I’m only selling them as a pathway to the normal truth.” That got to Paul: a pathway to the normal truth. Elvens had found his. In a certain sense, the businessman with the little dick and bulbous dickhead had found his, too, for somewhere in that roleplay, which he probably would repeat and repeat for a decade or two until he finally got his libidinous wits about him, was a pathway. The executioners had found theirs. Paul felt like the only man on earth who hadn’t found a path to take. As the weather grew hotter and more humid, he started to take walks earlier in the morning, when the sky was already mellow with sun and the day hadn’t fried, been hosed down by a sudden shower, and refried like a bean. This early in the morning, six, seven o’clock, he ran into the same people on the beach, seniors speed-walking, sometimes in groups of three like a wall coming at him, breaking around him, as though he were a rock, one flanking him toward the water, the other two toward the barrier landscape and the commercial-truck racket of A-1-A, audible but invisible. Because of the barrier foliage on the west edge of the beach, all he could see of civilization were the upper floors of condominiums and the big Marriot with its mauve barrel tiles and terra cotta paint job, up ahead to his left on the northerly leg of his walk. He had the ocean to accompany him, but he was growing lonely, and his eyes would linger too long on women who’d found their half-naked way to the early sand. Passing them, his thoughts would go too far into scenarios of touching them, making love to them, being with them. After his walk, he kept up a smart, addict’s regimen, finding work to do, rotating each day between areas of the house, going over every nook, cranny, and meeting point—the high corners of rooms were in particular touched by enough dust to pass the time. Even then, he was finished by noon. Adventurous were the days when something broke and he could interact with the world by calling in a repairman. He either spoke too much to these men or they spoke too much to him, so that every exchange was off-putting for one or the other. He masturbated often, sometimes out on the balcony with the glass wall slid open here, there, and there, at all three exit points, and the curtains fluttering. Three mornings a week, a yogi came out to the sand by the water to run through her vinyasas. She would take to waving to him by July, and he wondered whether she knew he was masturbating to her, though only his turned head was visible above the balcony wall while he was seated on the wicker chair he’d set outside. He wondered whether his neighbors watched him. His south neighbor had a third story observation tower like a personal lighthouse, and Paul was clearly visible from that window. Did those people know the owners of the home for whom he was working? Would they make a phone call? Was Paul now the gossip, the necessary story to buzz their lives electric? Were his neighbors even in town? He grew more exhibitionistic. For his morning walks, he took to wearing a very short pair of swim trunks he’d found at a surf shop nearby. He had nice legs, lean and muscular and not hairless, the sort of legs that turn the eye, and his torso was slender and tan. He looked maybe the best he’d ever looked, with his morning walks and lunchtime gym visits, with all the cleaning he was doing, which when it was all put together was near-to an athlete’s cross-training regimen. He felt the lonely white of need, but he didn’t meet women now, only masturbated to them, to the women at his gym—there was one who came in ripped and dressed for business during her lunch hour and hurriedly changed, got a hot pump, showered, redressed, and left back to work—and to the beautiful yogi, bent hither and yon. It started with a line in his head. “I want to show you my body.” It was something about David Bowie, which came from was the businessman’s hotel room, not so much the man himself, though he’d been the one to utter it, but the room, with its heavy, yellow lighting, every lamp turned on, because the man had wanted Paul to see the veins in his cock nice and close and pulled his cock out and said, “Trace them with your finger. Gently. The veins. Trace them, Nephew.” What Paul remembered was the way the yellow light of the room touched his fingertip as he traced the veins. Paul was absolutely zipped on methamphetamine, which the businessman had just about suffocated him with like they were going on a vision quest, and he thought he could see, in this forensic brand of light, the pulse of the man’s bloodstream in his cock, which seemed to expand and contract, fill to 120 percent and drain like an angioplasty balloon. The guy had mentioned David Bowie, and soon on his late afternoon jaunts online, after the ordering was done and the daily message was sent to the home’s owners with attached pictures of the rooms in which he’d that day toiled—he had all these pictures on his phone like a record of the Sisyphean rotation of his life—soon after he was done with business, he would google Mr. Bowie and find images of the man back in the 70s and 80s. Here was Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, an emaciated maiden transsexual, her breasts slophed off. Here was Bowie as the mysterious man in black, biting and cunning, Warholian Bowie, Basquiatian Bowie, hanging with Dennis Hopper or, in one picture, Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swan, the southern quarterback and graceful wide receiver for the Pittsburg Steelers. From there, it was straight to bisexual porn, which he watched to study the deep, evil lust of women who were into that extreme sort of thing: pegging a man while he shoved his dick into another man, the three of them making a sandwich, one slice of peculiar bread and two of hardy muscle. It was like watching an undulating monster gather himself, like time-lapsing a pulsing mound of tumors. The yogi didn’t know what he had in store for her. You want to bend and flex, and you like eyes on you, coming out here mid-day, when I take my little break from wing one or wing four, from the house-state of Idaho or Tennessee. That’s verified and true, so what would you mind? If I got you all the way fucked up high, how far would you go? He had imaginary conversations with her, very reasonable conversations there on the balcony. He talked about the hotel room. “The light was astonishing. It was a study in anatomy. You would have joined us, I’ll bet.” “Of course I would have,” she would whisper with throaty desire. “His cock in my mouth, my cock in yours?” “Yes.” He could have texted it to her if he’d had her phone number—so much better to text these things, to not have to look her in the eye nor be sitting opposite the potential explosion of manifesting such an idea or the potential letdown of such an idea being beyond the pale. The enormous home and the yogi became one unconquerable circle jerk. He bought a set of binoculars and stood on the balcony with his cock in his hand. She had to be able to ascertain what he was doing, for though the balcony wall was tall and made of concrete block and stucco, the particular twitching of his right shoulder surely indicated a frenzied, invisible motion down below, and what adult couldn’t tell what he was up to? The yogi wore a tanga, red or white or pink or blue or green, but always a tanga, and she arrived oiled up, so that as she undulated, stretched, posed, held, posed, stretched, and undulated through her one and a half hour program, she was nearly nude, and every pulsing, ripped, sturdy muscle in her powerful legs and glutes, her streamlined abs and athletic arms, her shoulders and neck trembled like a synchronized show. Paul would get music in his head, David Bowie crooning about the dangerous night in his tenor yawp. Of a morning in August, out on the balcony, when it was very hot and Paul was very cranky and tired from an afternoon when the Swifter broke, which meant resorting to the hot mop that had to be plugged in every seventeen feet, so that he wanted to throw the thing out the very sliders that now were open behind him, allowing a.c. to flow onto the balcony in a cool stream like a refreshing brook, he halted his self-love and leaned forward with his hands on his knees in a stiff, upright position like a man on a doctor’s examining table. The tip of his erect penis was aimed at his chin like a firearm. He asked, “May I tell it all to you?” He’d thought he was going to confess his childhood molestation, trace the confused agony of his adrenalized sexualization all the way from victimization to rock-bottom, his final self-victimization with Uncle. Instead, he told a fiction, the story of the car ride, with Stevenson Faustin. During the ride, it was Paul, in the fictional telling, who held a gun on the victim. “Times his chest would just start rising and falling crazily, and other times he settled into a real tough-guy nonchalance, which was when I got to hating him, because when he was breathing like that—I’ve been there, doing shit I was being raped to do, and breathing like that. That was when I loved him most.” When he finished the story, he waved to the yogi. She was saying hello, but he was saying goodbye. He stepped inside and shut the sliders behind him. He took a pillow and blanket to the entryway, and like a body lay between the two staircases. He could easily be Stevenson now, curled into a fetal ball on the marble floor. The floor was cool to the touch. He caressed it, moving his fingers along the deep blue splashes that patterned the tile like veins in the pale sunlight.
poetry by Melissa Benton Barker
The image disappears, shrinks into itself, is gone. Perhaps that’s how we deal with our pain in my mother’s family. My Grandmother forgot her husband was dead. He sat forever beside her. Her world became soft again. Perhaps that’s how we deal with our pain in my mother’s family. She could no longer see. Her glasses sat useless beside her bed. Her world became soft again. My uncle forgot he was grown. He spread his arms and flew down the hill. She could no longer see. Her glasses sat useless beside her bed. He flew with my two boys. They became three boys together. My uncle forgot he was grown. He spread his arms and flew down the hill. My aunt worried that he would fall. I told her we were already falling. He flew with my two boys. They became three boys together. Sometimes I wonder if I am already falling. My aunt worried that he would fall. I told her we were already falling. In my uncle’s house, pieces of memory are buried in drawers. Sometimes I wonder if I am already falling. Buried amongst my Grandmother’s fallen beads, tangles of silk handkerchiefs. In my uncle’s house, pieces of memory are buried in drawers. I didn’t want to find them. Remembering is a curious gnaw. Buried amongst my Grandmother’s fallen beads, tangles of silk handkerchiefs. They kept forgetting, until they were only husks of themselves. I didn’t want to find them. Remembering is a curious gnaw. The last memory left. It groaned out of them. They kept forgetting, until they were only husks of themselves. They went to a hill, home to the husks of a thousand memories. The last memory left. It groaned out of them. They passed through the eye. They went to a hill, home to the husks of a thousand memories. Here, we look on, from the other side of the mirror. They passed through the eye. The echoing reflection of two mirrors held together. Here, we look on, from the other side of the mirror. The reflection passed back and forth forever. The echoing reflection of two mirrors held together. Until the image disappears, shrinks into itself, is gone.
Dementia - a pantoum
microfiction by Ron Riekki
We heard it’d get you high and had this idea it’d be like fireworks shooting out your feet. Ditter convinced me. He was depressed because his birthday’s December 23; he said it’s like having a birthday on 9-11. Terrorism and Jesus’ll always get more attention than some Milwaukee middle-schooler. I felt nothing, so I ate more. I wanted to see angels. Instead I vomited on the tree, its decorations the same color as my insides. Dad threw it out, so we unwrapped presents under a cartoon-tree Mom drew on the wall, like a big dead arrow.
We Thought It Was Missile-Toe
What a soldier remembers – 19 random facts about the human heart, its weight (much lighter than your average handgun), its size (comparable to a fist), the number of times it beats in a day (100,000), the number of gallons it pumps per day and the number of miles of blood vessels it pumps through (about 2,000 and 60,000 respectively). He remembers – The names of the 43 Egyptian deities the dead confess to and the name of the god who eats your heart when it is judged to be heavier than a feather. What a soldier knows – Everything he wanted to be, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. The boards, the back alleys, the mayors, the sergeants, the spelling of every fort, town, backwater, bush, burg, hinterland, and backwoods he has ever been assigned to. But the name and the face of the girl he killed? No. Her father, the one who decided to run the roadblock? Abdul, age 41, black hair, green eyes. Her mother? Donya, 28, red head scarf, nails bitten to blood and flesh. Still the girl? People told him her hair was black. She wore blue. This the soldier knows. The passenger side of the windshield where eight of his bullets entered? Cracked like ice. He could see the sea beneath. She was the sea. Even at night when the girl's ghost comes to him, he can't identify the shape of her nose or the angle of her eyebrows. If only the teeth and bones, the sand and sun meant something. Sometimes the ghost flays him for forgetting. Sometimes the ghost paces back and forth on wood floors. Praying. Crying. Beating her breast. He gets dizzy. So much emotion. And all in Pashto. Sometimes the ghost snuggles in next to him and whispers to him in perfect English – “It's okay. I like it rough.” Sometimes the ghost beats on his chest and he wakes gasping. Most nights, the ghost opens his head and takes out his brain. Sometimes she eats it. Sometimes she watches it shrivel and turn gray before she puts it back in. Click, thunk.
flash fiction by Nan Wigington
Hearts and Minds
short fiction by Kelly Marages
Pluck your eyebrows at 4 a.m. Drink orange juice. Swish it around. Wonder if you should brush your teeth again. Brush your teeth again. Get under the covers. Lie on your back. Regulate your breathing. When regulating your breathing fails, think of sheep. Resist the urge say, Fuck you, sheep fuckers. Think of the all men you’ve fucked. Be sad that they all have one-syllable names. Names like Shane and Greg and George and John. James and Chad and Paul and Tom. Resolve to meet a Carlton, a Carlucci, an Edwin, an Eduardo. A Michael who doesn’t go by Mike. That time you did karaoke at the office Christmas party—it wasn’t so bad, right? You weren’t so drunk, right? That time you kicked Shane out at 3 a.m.—it wasn’t so bad, right? You weren’t so drunk, right? It wasn’t so cold that it mattered he didn’t have time to get his shirt on. Resolve to give up drinking. Take your dog for a walk at 5:45. Say, Look at the sunrise, Ladybug! Whadya think, girl? Whadya think? Snap picture of your dog looking at the geese on the lake in Central Park, still solid and dark and brooding before being lit by the flint of the sun. Instagram picture of your dog looking at the geese on the lake in Central Park. Caption it “Good morning, New York! #newyorkpretty #ilovemylife.” (Think “This sucks. #imissnashville #fuckyousheepfuckers.”) At work, say things like, Good morning! Beautiful day! I love your necklace! When a coworker compliments your outfit, laugh and say, This old thing? Keep under-eye concealer in your pocket for touch-ups in the bathroom. At 4:30, get giddy that you feel the tug of tiredness, the gravitational pull toward letting go. Go home. Make dinner—a mushroom and Swiss quiche with leeks because you have mushrooms and you have Swiss and you have leeks and you have a cable plan with four cooking channels. After eating, relax with a glass of wine. Tell yourself you will not have a second glass. After a second glass, come across your wedding photos while checking your email. Look at the photos while drinking a third glass. Accidentally let an hour pass gazing at your knee-length dress, your nose-length veil, your early 2000s interpretation of 1950s optimism. Accidentally find that picture where your chin in profile and your ex’s chin in profile form the top of a heart that funnels the sun between your bodies—as if you could harvest it and can it for winter. Accidentally look at that picture for a long time. Accidentally look at it for a bit longer. Accidentally have a fourth glass of wine. Accidentally have just a nip of bourbon. Drink water. Get into bed at midnight. Be happy that you’re buzzed enough to sleep. Wake up with a headache and a sour mouth at 3 a.m., think: Fuck. I’m a moron. Drink more water. Swallow Tylenol. Swig orange juice. Think, I am pretty, right? I’m not old, right? Realize you didn’t brush your teeth. Wonder if you will get cavities. Think of the drill and the mask and the metallic smell and the buzzing. Think of the laughing gas. Think of the laughing gas! Hold off on looking at your phone. Look at your phone: 3:27. See that there are no messages. See that Neil is not in bed next to you. No, Neil is in bed next to Samantha who was smart enough to take what you left behind. Remember that you left Neil. Remember he said he loved you, that he would do anything to win you back. Forget that this was rendered null and void by Samantha. Do not remember that no one is waiting for you. Or that no one is pining for you. Do not think of that phrase you thought up that one time which was: Old lovers gather no moss. On Saturday, shop for a dress in Nolita. Walk to the 5 train. Notice the old couples—silver-topped, khaki-draped—ambling arm-in-arm. Picture them going to breakfast, to the Met, to the hospital, to wherever it is old people go. Notice the young families, too: The ponytailed women pushing strollers. The mates with newspapers under arms. The five-year-olds trailing. They are whole solar systems, each one, circling around the baby-sun. Wonder why you, a lone planet, a Pluto!, a Mercury!, moved to the Upper East Side. Know that you don’t want a baby-sun, or a man-sun, or any particular sun. Just that you want to be with some other planet, circling around something, anything—but keep it vague, please. Remember that once you pair up, once you orbit, all you want is to be alone. To carve your own track. To designate a no-parking, no-touching, no-sweet talking zone. You are always looking for something more, which leaves you with nothing at all. You are always loving things, but only once they’re gone. Think, No, not true. Not necessarily. Remember why you moved to New York. Remember in the darkest Neil hour when you went to Percy Warner Park. You climbed those stairs—the stone crumbling and humbled. The grass green enough to make you say, New start, new start, as you climbed the hundreds of steps. Remember how you expected to feel triumphant at the top. Instead, you saw the flagpole at the base mocking you like a dead oracle. And past that, over the office complexes and trees and apartment buildings, there was nothing taller than you. All 5-foot-4 of you. Nothing bigger than you. And there should always be something bigger than you. There should always be something bigger than what’s expected. Look around now. Breathe out hard. Vow to move downtown when your lease is up. Breathe in hard. Vow to move to Bushwick instead. Nod off to the ding-dong of the subway doors. Wake when the train stops and sighs, settles in like a marriage at Flatbush. Get on the uptown train. Nod off again. Jolt awake at Eastern Parkway. Walk through Prospect Park. Notice that it’s like Central Park, except maybe nicer for not being Central Park. Revel in your contrarian nature. A contrarian nature is what makes you smart. A contrarian nature is what let you, a publicist, get a job in a psych lab in New York. New York, new you! A contrarian nature is what makes you say, No, no, nothing’s wrong—as you log more and more mistakes. Remember that time that you read a study that said the brain, when taking in nature, is more creative than the brain inside. (Picture a brain on a beach. A brain on a hike with trail mix. A brain in an office chair. With a tie. And a stack of papers.) Remember that time you read a study that found people, when brainstorming, are more creative under high ceilings than they are under low ceilings. (Picture tiny people in giant rooms, giant people in tiny rooms.) Remember that time you read on Neil’s email that Neil, when staying late at work, was actually fucking his intern Samantha. (Picture Neil in a tie fucking his intern Samantha. Picture a pile of papers swirling around them like a snow globe.) Remember that time you forgave him and took him back. Remember that other time when he went right back to her when you called things off. Remember that time you read that clichés, when acted out, aren’t clichés at all. Remember that time you didn’t actually read that, but felt it instead. Remember, oh never mind. . . Remember when your boss said happiness is a choice. Think, Wow! That nature thing really is true! Pick a flower. Pick two flowers. Smell them. Note that this is a good cliché. Text Shane. Tell him your brain is high on nature. Interpret it as a good sign when he writes, Huh? Text back: Come over later? Note the sky dimming. Wonder why some time slips by in stockings while other time plods past in boots. Buy a cheap flower dress at a place on Flatbush. Say, Yes, it is for a special occasion when the girl at the register asks. Do not question her sincerity. Buy a decent bottle of red at the liquor store in case Shane comes over. Buy a less decent bottle for if he doesn’t. At home, zip up the dress and twist up your hair so you feel like a bouquet, something worthy of being presented. Even if it is to a bachelor—are they still called that?—with slightly hard hair and a slightly soft intellect. Make a quiche, this time with ham (Virginia baked) and cheese (American). Think of the ingredients you could have, fresh herbs! fresh attitude!, if you could grocery shop at 3 a.m. Think, I am not the problem here! Society is the problem! With its rigid hours, its conformity, its worshipping of an arbitrary clock. Look at the clock: 10 p.m. Practice optimism. Open the nicer bottle of wine to let it aerate. Text Shane, Hey. Where are you? Take Ladybug for her walk. Notice the hush of the sidestreet. Recall that week you meditated. Hear your feet on the pavement; hear her feet on the pavement; close your eyes; hear your breath. Hear the jangle of another collar. Open your eyes. See your dog’s ears perk up. See another dog pulling toward her. See your dog freeze, stiffen. Block her with your body. Will the man to cross the street. Say: I’m sorry, she’s not friendly. Hear: She’s not? Or you’re not? Say: I’m sorry? Hear a snort. Feel a tide of thoughts in your brain swelling to a roar that sounds like: So what if my dog is scared! So what if she shows her teeth, her right to growl? Maybe everyone should. At home, get a text from Shane: Sorry. Dinner running late. Midnight ok? Feel heart race. Dinner? Pour a glass of wine. Drink it. Slam glass down. Dinner with whom? Text back: Fuck you. Dump whole quiche into garbage. Drink more wine while waiting for Shane to not answer. Wilt into your covers, but do not sleep. Pluck your eyebrows at 2 a.m. Drink orange juice. Swish it around. Brush your teeth again. Look at the clock: 2:15, ha! It’s not insomnia ‘til the clock hits 4! Search for movie times—documentaries, you are always self-improving. Marvel at the internet. Think, isn’t it great that I can see cats who look like Hitler? Cats who look like Putin? Cats who look like male models? Wonder if life would be better with a Putin cat. Remember that time Neil called last week to see if you could talk. It wasn’t so bad, right? Remember you said, I’m so happy for you, when he told you Samantha was expecting. It wasn’t so bad, right? You expressed the right emotion…maybe? Assure yourself Neil was supposed to say, It means so much to me that we have your blessing. That the we is okay. That it’s better than, It means so much to us. Like there’s still a piece of Neil that doesn’t fully belong to her. Wish you were a cutter. Look up cat adoption. Compose emails to friends in Nashville. Tell them what a great time you’re having in New York, one year in. How stimulating it is to meet new people. How here, it feels like problems are flushed out via tunnel to the understudy cities. (Tonight, the part of New York will be played by… Hoboken! [The crowd groans.]) How the problems stay in smaller places—how there, you sit like a potato, softening in your own stew. Here, you stay hard. You are al dente. You are to the tooth. Tell them New York truly is the city that never sleeps. Appreciate your secret wittiness. Use many exclamation points. Not that it matters. These emails will stay in draft. Wonder who would show up if you weren’t homesick but real sick. Would Neil? Would he bring Samantha? Would you have to play it cool even then? You, dying. You, holding their baby and cooing, Hello, baby. I’m so glad you could be in this world, baby. Toss. Turn. Wonder if anyone likes you, or if they just like the idea of you—your curly hair, your quick retorts, your cherry-red rimmed Sunday-best smiles—the idea of you next to their idea of them. Recall that time you were squeezed between two women on the uptown 4, their warm thighs gently splinting yours. Your shoulders brushing theirs. The tingly feeling that passed through your stomach—humanity! Recall that time you tried to reenact it. How you parted the two strangers like Moses, scattering them across the 1 a.m. desert of the Bronx-bound local. How you watched a can of Sunkist slosh its way to the end of the car hoping it’d find its way out. Remind yourself to buy garbage bags tomorrow; you’re on your last one. Remind yourself to sweep Ladybug’s hair off the floor tomorrow because sweeping now, sweeping at 3 a.m., would be crazy. And you, you are not crazy. Just sleep-deprived and imaginative. Wonder how long you can do this. Wipe welling tears. Recall the study you filed that found a lack of sleep results in overreacting as well as the symptoms of certain mental disorders. Recall that time you read that the ancient Greeks believed a weakened body could cause insanity—the ancient Greeks or the ancient somebodies. Remember that you forgot to buy more dog food and you are out of dog food. Realize you are an asshole who deserves your fate. Practice positive thinking: Your dog is adopted! You posted fliers for a lost kitten once! You baked for a cancer bake sale! You call your nephew on his birthday! You have friends! They are 900 miles away and you don’t hit play on their voicemails, but you do have friends and who leaves a voicemail?! You are smart and worldly. You are a woman. Samantha is a girl. Babies having babies. You know how to exist in the world. You know how to not need sleep. You know how to not need anybody. The Red Sea, see? You’ll cross that fucking Red Sea! Look up today’s sunrise time: 6:44. Sunset: 6:53. Twelve hours and 9 minutes of daylight. Wonder why everyone’s so concerned about the length of day instead of the length of night. Toss. Turn. The period of more darkness, it’s coming. Try to wait for sunrise. Fail. Take your dog for a walk at 6 a.m. Choose to make yourself happy by letting her off the leash. Snap blurry picture of your dog running in circles. Instagram blurry picture. Caption it “Make your own happiness #ladybugladyrules #newyorkpretty.” Hope it garners many likes. Hear a clatter of wheels on the sidewalk behind you. Become tense. See that Ladybug, rolling in the grass, has not yet heard them. Distract her by running. Trick her by looking happy. See two boys rattle by on scooters, the sworn enemy of your dog. Catch up with Ladybug. Leash her. Feel relief. Begin walk home. Hear the scooters turn back. See Ladybug notice the scooters. Hear her snarl. See the kids’ glee when they see they can affect the dog. Keep saying, Good girl, Bug, good girl. Hope she stays calm. Hope you stay calm. See one boy pushing his scooter faster. Closer. See Ladybug trembling, aggression warmed by fear bubbling to the surface. Tell the boy: She’s not friendly. Hear: Why not? See him approaching still. Say: She’s just not. Hear: Let me pet her. Say: She’ll bite you. Hear the barks explode; feel her pull; hear metal snap; feel her leash go lax. See Ladybug charge. See the children drop their scooters, run. See her run faster. Hear them scream. Picture her jumping on them. See her panicked face while being impounded. See yours. Run. Call her name. Yell. Dive. Catch her hind legs. Hands (arms, legs) trembling, reattach her collar. See grass stains on knees. Feel tears on cheek. Hear: That dog is crazy! Say nothing. Hear: Why don’t you get rid of her? Say nothing. Hear: Why don’t you get nicer dog, lady? Hear, from you: Because I love her! Okay? Drag her away, fighting your pull. Wonder why this sounds like the truest thing you’ve ever said. At night, sleep. Maybe not a lot. But long enough to differentiate the line between before and after. Strike your weekend from the record. Appreciate the pep in your step this morning. Stop yourself from questioning it. Notice your breaths, the moment! Notice the September-blue sky! The air that doesn’t register as too warm or too cold! Forget your caffeine rules! Treat yourself to an extra espresso shot in your latte! Plan to email potential friends to hang out after work tonight! Be okay with thinking in exclamation points! Celebrate thinking in exclamation points! Stifle a yawn and keep on striding! Stifle a smile and keep on striding! Do not call in sick; do not call in sick ever again! Do not call Neil; do not call Neil ever again! Do not text Shane again! Take Ladybug to a trainer! Take yoga! Take trips with friends! Take in art in foreign cities! Walk along pink beaches, white beaches, black beaches. Look at yellow sunsets, orange sunsets, pink sunsets. Look at them hard. Look at them harder. Look at them so hard that when you turn away, they’re still there.
On Staying Up: A Guide to Insomnia
How to Roast a Pelican
poetry by Jessica Barksdale
If you can catch one, you must first kill it. You may stop out of necessity or belief system. But if you’re hungry, if you feel the flesh on your teeth. wring its neck. Next, pluck. I can’t tell you how. I know only pull. Worse verbs follow: Slit. Empty. Chop. And nouns: Head. A sharp object. Blood. It’s like Thanksgiving, your regularly scheduled program: dead bird flesh on a kitchen counter. If times are as difficult as they must be, build a fire. Cook the bird without burning the skin. Do not tempt the fire with what is yours, what you’ve worked so hard for. Never mind the bird and all the time it took to live into the body you need to survive. Watch the fire. See wing water fish
creative non-fiction by Mike Ekunno
Artificial Intelligence
The default turf where I encounter Artificial Intelligence is on the chess board – the virtual board. That is where I meet and play Chess Titans, muted, stoic, and non-living according to scientific taxonomy but conscious, even self-conscious. Which should tilt the single criterion for classifying living and non-living more towards ABBA’s in Move On: What really makes the difference between all dead and living things - the will to stay alive. My non-human opponent has all the will to stay alive on the board and fights off my challenge with the knights and other officers and men at her service. I chose to set my play level with Chess Titans closer to the Level 10 limit. For that, I have been getting the beating of my life from the inexorable app. My buffer against this disrespect is to unilaterally agree that we play on two modes: Practice and Contest. Playing on Practice allows me retract my poor moves. Repentance is a virtue. Retraction is a humble pie to ingest but it is better than sacrificing an officer in broad daylight. More humbling because my demure opponent never retracts. How do you feel asking a favor from a friend who never reciprocates the nuisance? Self-respect’s loss with retraction however, is experience’s gain. Going one, two, or three steps backwards has won me many a game. By so doing, I gain perspective on the road not taken. This is a dividend of playing non-human opponent. Retraction is against the rules but, even worse, an ego issue with human opponents. It is the only rule I bend while playing against AI and, that, only on Practice mode. The catch is that I decide which mode is at play at any time. Contest mode can morph to Practice if I see a trashing coming. Hey, I own this laptop and downloaded her apps! Practice or not, the app records and tabulates the outcome of every game to one of four categories: win, loss, draw or stalemate. Contest games bring out greater presence of mind from me. Not that it makes any difference to my ruthless opponent. I do get to beat her without any amendment to the rules: fair and square. But it is always a long-drawn out game beating Chess Titans. Unlike human opponents who resign when their position becomes untenable, AI sticks it out to the end even if left with a pawn to your queen and two rooks. Which is not a graceful thing to do. But this unscrupulousness manages to scavenge a stalemate for AI ever so often. Seeing my opponent with virtually no odds-on chance of winning, I often get carried away and give away a stalemate. That is when the king has no legitimate move available without being under check. At such times while I sulk, I can imagine her gloating with a smirk. While I regard such stalemates as de facto wins for me, my points’ tally remains unchanged. It is such lack of grace that makes me wonder at AI’s Emotional Intelligence Quotient: is it mindless or single-minded? To be sure, Chess Titans is not completely stoic when endangered. I have amused myself often at her panic when I am two or three steps away from a mid-game checkmate. At such times, she throws literarily everything in her arsenal to stave off impending death a la defeat. Such death throes’ scrambles confirm ABBA’s thesis earlier mentioned. It should drive scientific taxonomy for organisms away from the primal two categories of living and non-living. How can a non-living thing panic at the prospect of death? It is much the same logic that informs the classification of fetuses as humans. Neo-natal imaging has been used to show fetuses marked for abortion cringing from invasive forceps. Being an American presidential election year, political correctness constrains me to stop short of these obvious Pro-life reinforcements first from ABBA’s lyrics and, now, AI. I digress. Artificial Intel in chess gained worldwide mileage with the Deep Blue-Garry Kasparov matches in 1996 and 1997. While the then reigning world champion beat the IBM Supercomputer, 4-2, in the first game in February, 1996, the rematch with the enhanced computer ended 3.5-2.5 in favor of Deep(er) Blue. In the deciding sixth game which tipped the scales in favor of the computer, Kasparov made a mistake in his opening move. “The Deep Blue chess computer that defeated Kasparov in 1997 would typically search (from) a depth of between six and eight moves to a maximum of twenty or even more moves in some situations.” Kasparov’s opening blunder is the potential cross borne by every human. Because we have a soul, we are open to the vagaries of the emotion. AI is not. Its mindlessness or single-mindedness is total. But this can also be its Achilles heel. The struggle or collaboration between the intellect/cerebrum and emotion/cerebellum is one that has been known and examined by scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists and psychics for ages. When in perfect harmony, the intellect-emotion tag team produces virtuoso art and sublime technology. The times I’ve beaten my not-so-Deep Blue opponent have been those moments of optimum balance between logic and sleight of hand. For one, my AI opponent has a blind spot with respect to pawn flank advances. It is also quite vulnerable to the pawn fork. Maybe at the highest level of play, these slight vulnerabilities are wiped out. In the interim, I exploit them for that slight advantage that often makes all the difference between winning and losing.
Melissa Benton Barker Melissa Benton Barker is an MFA candidate at Antioch University Los Angeles and serves as Lead Fiction Editor at Lunch Ticket. A writer of fiction and non-fiction as well as poetry, she lives in a small Midwestern town with her family. Jessica Barksdale Jessica Barksdale’s fourteenth novel, “The Burning Hour,” was published by Urban Farmhouse Press in April 2016. A Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee, her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in the Waccamaw Journal, Salt Hill Journal, Little Patuxent Review, and So to Speak. She is a Professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and teaches novel writing online for UCLA Extension. She holds an MA in English Literature from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the Rainier Writers Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Jeff Burt Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and a July abundance of plums. He has fiction in Per Contra, Amarillo Bay, Clare Literary Magazine, and won the Consequence Magazine 2016 Fiction prize. Mike Ekunno Mike is in awe of beauty in sound, sight and smell and is engaged in the elusive alchemy to unite them. He is head of media at Nigeria’s film regulatory authority on working days. His writings have found outlets in The First Line, Carbon Culture Review, The Hamilton Stone Review, The Artist Unleashed, Gambling the Aisle, The African Roar Anthology 2013, Warscapes, bioStories, BRICKrhetoric, Dark Matter Journal, Thrice Fiction Magazine, Cigale Literary Magazine, Middle Gray Magazine, Miracle e-zine, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, The Muse, Bullet Pen and Storymoja, the last two coming with wins in continent-wide contests. He enjoys reading Old Testament stories. Nick LaRocca Nick LaRocca’s stories and essays have recently been featured in Valley Voices, the 3288 Review, Per Contra, The Flagler Review, Outside In Magazine, the Steel Toe Review, South85, and the Milo Review, as well as Rush Hour: Bad Boys (Delacorte Press), Mason’s Road, and the Beloit Fiction Journal. His short story “Gestures” (Lowestoft Chronicle) was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize for Fiction. He is currently at work on a novel, “Jersey Boys.” He is the recipient of the Robert Wright Prize for Writing Excellence, and an interview of him is upcoming in the 3288 Review. Kelly Marages Kelly Marages is a New York City-based writer and magazine editor whose fiction and humor writing have recently appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bridge Eight, Coda Quarterly and Selfish. Marages holds an MFA from Bennington College and is the founder of the book recommendation website Literalati.com. A former longtime editor at Us Weekly, she knows an alarmingly high number of facts about the Kardashians. Ron Riekki Ron Riekki’s books include “U.P.: a novel” (Sewanee Writers Series and Great Michigan Read nominated), “The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works” (2014 Michigan Notable Book from the Library of Michigan and finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award/Grand Prize shortlist, Midwest Book Award, Foreword Book of the Year, and Next Generation Indie Book Award), “Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula” (2016 IPPY/Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal Great Lakes—Best Regional Fiction and Next Generation Indie Book Award—Short Story finalist), and “And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing,” 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017). Nan Wigington Nan Wigington’s recent fiction has appeared in Gravel, The Airgonaut, Sicklitmagazine.com, and No Extra Words. She has work forthcoming in Fiction Attic Press and Spelk. Nan has worked as an unclaimed property clerk, an accounting analyst, an ensemble actress, and a paraprofessional in a K-2 Autism center classroom.
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