Fiction: Go! Go! Datsun, Go!

The sky is split open now, hanging thick with anvil clouds. Way up farther than I can see, the air, it purges indiscriminately, guilty of something tragic and unforeseen, but I’m no stranger to that sort of thing. Darryl yammers on in the passenger’s seat, he’s got girl troubles, and I’ve got troubles of my own. There are no spring chickens in Iowa this morning, and it’s about a six pack to Davenport, in the snow. Go! Go! Datsun, Go! The engine drones on like drums of war, only less dramatic. Muffled by our stocking caps, sound waves break from trough to crest, freezing up and dropping to the floor. Every now and then the piston clanks up against the cylinder head, and I’m reminded of the baby blue Datsun and all of the things that Darryl said to me about his grandmother’s brain turning to mush just enough, her life savings under the bed. Darryl yammers on in the passenger seat, he’s got girl troubles, and I’ve got troubles of my own, like one too many microwaves burning in my brain, confused morals, it’s all the same, in the snow, Go! Go! Datsun, go!

All rights reserved to David Peterka
Originally published in Volume One

Fiction: Dominic Saucedo

He looked into the child's room and said: go to sleep.

The first few days he had paused in the hallway long enough to let his eyes adjust to the dark. But he knew that the kid was there, sitting under the blanket, sleepless, and unwilling to sleep.

He went into the kitchen, splashed water on his face. When he lifted his head from the basin he was met with his reflection: stubble on his chin, premature gray. His wife had hung the mirror over the sink, said it was for studying eyes. Sometimes at the end of her dishwashing she would dry her hands, take a grease pen and trace the lines of her face—almond-shaped eyes, smiling lips. Out of the bubble of her mouth was a message: food’s in the oven, I love you. Or, I took Omar and Elias to the park. At the end of summer he had come home to find the house quiet, her angry face watching him from the mirror: I took the kids to my parents. Don’t come. Don’t call.

He sat down at the table to make the call, but instead he began to smoke. She had loved cigarettes when they were young. They drank, made love, afterwards she’d light cigarettes, one for her, one for him. Then she quit them. Took the ashtray out of the bedroom and made him shower before sex. It was just like her to change like that, change her mind. At the end, when things were going badly, he had dreamt they were young again when Omar was a baby. She was naked before him, on her stomach, and he drew deeply from his cigarette, blew the smoke up the valley of her spine, between the fine ridges of her shoulder blades. And he dreamt too that he was at the other end, ready to receive his own breath.

When he woke her she told him, in half sleep, that it was a selfish dream.

He frowned at the idea.

He was not a selfish man. It was him who had encouraged her to go back to school. Take classes at the JC, he told her. Take that art class you’ve always been talking about. Look, I even bought you the pencils for the drawings. She did beautiful pencil drawings—clumsy at first, but later beautiful. Oftentimes he’d get to work and find that she had taken the pencils out of his pockets, the ones with the name of the furniture store where he worked, Zimmerman’s. Little drawings popped up around the house, signed, Zimmerman. Later, just a big Z. She had a sense of humor when things were going good, he thought.

When he first saw her he had been carrying a chair out through the loading docks. That’s for me, she told him, and instead of waiting for him to carry it down the side stairs she gently took it from him, heaved it into the trunk of her red Datsun. His face reddened and he could feel the laughter of the men who worked the stock room. Thought about the merciless teasing that would come later. He had to talk to her, the only way to calm the laughter, and so he jumped down from the dock and smiled.

—We’ve had that one for a long time, he said.
She stepped back from the car and looked at the chair.
—It’ll be perfect, she said.
—For what?
She shrugged.
—For everything, reading, sitting, sleeping.
—It couldn’t be too comfortable to sleep in. —Well, I’m still working on a bed.
He put his hands on his hips and motioned back to the storeroom.
—If you come back next week I can get you half off on a bed.
She raised her hand to her eyes, squinting in the sun. But her mouth was a smile.

The manager nearly fired him when he asked for half off on a bed. You don’t even work on the sale floor, he told him. And do you know how much those frames cost? Even the laminated ones cost more than you make. He finally told him that he could have a mattress set for thirty percent off, one of the rejects. David spent an hour combing through the storeroom, searching for one without too deep a tear, or dirt on the corners where the plastic covering had ripped.

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Fiction: Matt Jones

I watched them through a slit in the fence, a microcosm of wood so rotten and waterlogged that I could push my fingers through it like warm clay, squeeze it in my hand. I let the gray moisture into my mouth, the splinters catching in my throat, so I could not call out or speak without a burning in my eyes. I pressed my face up to the slit, my knees burrowing into the damp grass, the pixilated wood grain bouncing in and out of my peripheral. I saw three boys, three boys through a slit that would prove to constitute everything that world was and could be in that exact time and place. I saw three boys, dressed by their mothers, cowlicks in their hair reaching out to the sun like daisies, and freckles on their cheeks catching that very sun in pinprick pools that spilled over into wrinkles and hard lines when they grew older.

These boys were cruel and novice and boys in every sense of the word. These boys would grow into men that I would know later in life, men who were worse off than me in only the most superficial sense of the word. All would be married, all to wives that I would rather stable and board across the county line than share a bed with. All would have jobs that held weight, a weight that could only crowd the jowls and clog the arteries of a man who knew weight to be anything other than something that hurt to carry.

One boy held a knee to the chest of a writhing and whimpering canine, a canine that I had befriended over the preceding months. The other two, leaner and cast like crumbling stone in the sun, stood over his shoulder with looks that ranged somewhere between devious triumph and inquisitive disgust, a coal shovel propped up against one of their thin frames. Often, I walked home with him through the alleyways between the houses, alleyways overrun with chinch bugs and tall grass and rusted wrought iron that snaked its way up fence boards and around gate posts like it was trying to grow. I called him Rodger because that was his name and he walked with me.

His hair was wiry and gray and grease-tipped and knotted at the roots. One of his incisors could not be tucked into his lip and always stood out to give the appearance of an ugly and misinformed snarl. My parents did not like Rodger, or dogs, and I spent many days after school with him between the fences, among the chinch bugs.

One of these boys was Joseph Turner, the one with his knee pressed into Rodger’s chest, the weight of his body breaking shallow breaths down into heaving sighs that eventually turned into quiet. Joseph Turner was fat and his mom was fat and his dad was a pussy and couldn’t integrate himself into a world of fat, so he often spent his nights on the porch with warm tea and a sweat-stained collar while Joseph and his mother raided the refrigerator inside. The men in our town were so tired. They spent their days breaking the most vile parts of the earth into ash and dust that they inhaled quicker and deeper than the beers that they used to chase down the dryness. They inhaled deep enough so that it would sit in the pits of their chest and collect into loose piles that they would breathe and cough into the air around them, so much so that it coated the linings of their throats and blew toxic into everything they touched. The women were the first ones waiting at the door when they came home, ready for open-mouthed kisses that rivaled sucking the orifice of a chimney.

Joseph’s dad was a teacher. He did not drink or make love but I’d seen him crying many times.

It was hard for me to sit there behind my slit, that infinitesimal tear so gaping it could pull you through with the force of a black hole and shred your being into lunchmeat. However, that is what I did. I knelt in the grass and did not make a peep when Joseph Turner raised the coal shovel high above his head. I did not move a muscle when he brought it down once and then twice and then a third time, cracking what was surely the larynx. And I surely did not bat an eye when he looked through that slit with an expression that could suck the stitches off of a freshly sewn wound. Instead, I went to a sleepover at his house in the sixth grade, one where Mr. Turner made nice eyes at me and traced my skin so that it tingled while the other boys disemboweled nascent rodents born in a bubbling broth under the gooey glow of the moon. I got drunk with him in the eighth grade and many times after that. We chased the same girls and played on the same baseball team in high school. We bummed cigarettes off each other and spent late nights lamenting the fate of our town. During a party after high school graduation, I told him his dad was a faggot and he said he knew, and he said that I was a faggot too. I told him that he killed my dog and he said that it wasn’t my dog and we were never friends again after that, or before that. Just stuck in the same town.

However, before all of this, on the day of Rodger’s death, I did not go home. I stared through the slit until the sun fell and I could no longer see the tiny mass of gray hair, speckled red. I walked between the alleyways and the biting chinch bugs avoided my blood for they would have died of sadness if they took a taste. I walked past the houses out on the main road, the one that took the men away every morning to journey down to the molten center of the earth so they could beat on solid stone until their knuckles bloomed purple and their respiratory systems were transformed into an anomaly of modern science and an adaptation of brute industry.

I walked out into the mines, the mountains and the mounds of ashen rock dust and gray matter. I took a lift down the central mineshaft, the cables reeling in agony as they made their way further into a system of tiny tunnels that had been chipped away by those men, our men, the ones whose knuckles bloomed purple from the work and blossomed a blackness that grew like loosestrife into their lungs until the day the mine closed. When the lift got to the bottom, I could no longer see. I did not bring a light, and instead placed my hand on the wall and walked, the jagged lines of the rock smooth on my fingertips. I walked in the pitch black for over an hour. Eventually, I placed my forehead on the cool surface of the stone and screamed, hoping that the weight of it all might crush me into such a fine spray that I could be swallowed by someone on the next shift and coughed back out into the sun and float into a layer of the atmosphere free of toxicity. When that didn’t happen, I sprinted off in a direction that I thought would lead me to an exit. I made it about four feet and crushed my nose so hard that I spent the next week and a half sneezing up loose gobs of blood and bone that looked more like melted lipstick and pepper flakes than anything else. They found me there the next morning and my dad grounded me for what would have seemed like a lifetime if I had been missing anything.

The next couple of months after Rodger died constituted the summer before the sixth grade. I spent the majority of my time throwing gravel at the side of my dad’s car, the passenger side door left pockmarked with nickel-deep dings that could only be seen in particular angles of the sun.

School started in September and Joseph Turner was fifteen pounds heavier and half a foot taller and I would spend the night at his house in a few weeks.

When class let out, I made my way back to the slit and knelt down in the shallow grooves of the dirt, made from my knees each day before that one. I pressed my face close enough to the slit that the wood splinters looked like tiny twigs floating aimlessly in the fluid of my eye. I knelt there through rain and sun and snow and market collapses and new millenniums. I knelt there until the slit was no longer a slit and just an open space where a fence had fallen and melded into the earth. I knelt there until the space was filled with concrete and the pattering of small feet and the squeaky groan of shopping cart wheels. I knelt there until my shoulders were broad and my voice had deepened and my father had gone. I knelt there until Joseph Turner was married and had kids of his own and his father had gone and I never blinked.

All rights reserved to Matt Jones.

Poetry: Lightsey Darst

Questions to ask your family doctor

But just a second: what part of this proves I’m alive? I incline to the opposite of
solipsism, i. e., the same thing, a me-shaped hole in the system

of ballgames & strippers with leather chaps & low-grade housing. Whatever the score, we
are not part of the report, are the left-out, average, unchanged, tranquil

reader. “There was a war on. I’d heard of GIs, but skimmed love poems, skipped news.
Now the bombing of a temple is a part of my courtship—Buddhas of Bamiyan—

still I never met a casualty.” Afraid we’re too complacent about politics, sure
no good will come of it anyway I paid, voted, woke & was holding a gun—this one here,

smoking & empty, while everyone around phones home. Isn’t true nothing
changes—my mother gets older, weeds grow, friends bury their darling

& the question remains, are you a force for good in the world?
“America is a force for good in the world.” Body armor & bullets, missile shield

My paper reminds me to end. I deny nothing. What can one be sure of? Partake
of the family picnic. God knows where the meat comes from. Break the wonder bread.

Monkeys think, moving artificial arm as own
Adieu. Desire to be better educated.

All rights reserved to Lightsey Darst

kevin hedman

Oh Jesus Christ, that better not be him, Annabelle thought, and right away she felt stupid for doing so. Of course it wasn’t him. He wouldn’t be dressed like that. No way. Maybe she was drunk—only slightly, she only had three weak and overpriced white wine cocktails, so only slightly—but she definitely wasn’t high. Or tripping. Or rolling. That was what people on ecstasy said, right? Hell, she couldn’t remember. That had all been so long ago, in the much better 1990s, and she was a far more responsible person now.

Well, maybe not responsible right now. Right now she was just a little bit in the bag and loitering in the sparse front space of a mid-tier semi-fancy hotel. Her high heels hurt her feet and she didn’t like the way the assholes from out of town got quiet when they looked her way. They were all square-shaped and clad in suits that made them look stupid. What they were doing there was anyone’s guess; what she was doing there she hoped they couldn’t guess. Because if they guessed, they’d probably come over and say things to her. Say that she ought to bring the bride down for them to fool around with. Say she ought not let herself get tied down too soon and then giggle at the whole “tied down” thing. Annabelle had been hearing that sort of thing all night.

In a way, it was good that the clown was there. People didn’t pay so much attention to her since there was a clown to look at. Even the drunkest douchebags coming back after their big night on the town spent only moments staring into her cleavage before catching sight of the clown about thirty feet on. Tits on display downtown was nothing out of the ordinary, but a clown? A full-on grease-paint-smeared-squeaky-nosed-orange-haired-creepy-eyed clown. That was something else.

Don’t kid yourself, Annabelle. Chloe’s tits would trump a whole army of clowns, she told herself. It was the kind of thought she didn’t fancy. She felt she ought to have set that kind of teenage jealousy aside sometime before her early thirties. But apparently not. Apparently not after three weak drinks. It was embarrassing, the girly shit her generation still couldn’t get over.

She wouldn’t have been there at all if it hadn’t been for girly shit. What are bachelorette parties except for the worst kind of girly shit? Who sows their wild oats anymore? Who has wild oats? No, it was like anything else in the world nowadays—a ritual for people to go through so they can move on to something else. Annabelle was keen to move on to something else now. She could catch a cab home. It was only a couple of miles. She was an attorney, she could make up a plausible excuse. Perhaps her boyfriend with meningitis. That would do the trick. Meningitis was serious and he had really been there for her throughout that whole panic-attack problem she had awhile back.

But no, no, she wouldn’t be going anywhere. Somewhere in the midst of the night she had fallen into the role of the responsible one. So she was in it for the long-haul, almost sober and in charge until the last woman standing was no longer in danger of groping some stiff-haired reprobate in a two-hundred dollar shirt with skulls on the front.

Where is this guy? What kind of customer service is this? She thought of the complaint line for his agency and couldn’t help smiling. Maybe it was a call center somewhere in Bangalore, some crisp-voiced Indian honor student trilling out a committee-written script, “I’m sorry, ma’am, that the Cowboy Stud was late for your occasion. May I offer a discount on future services? Perhaps you would be happier with the Manly Firefighter, ma’am?”

That is, unless the clown was him. That didn’t make sense, though. Rebecca wouldn’t request a clown. No one would request a clown, would they? It just didn’t seem within the realm of what could conceivably happen.

But here she was, waiting for someone in a costume. And there the clown was, obviously waiting for someone also. There was an uneasy feeling trickling down her spine, because all of a sudden it was perfectly obvious—the clown was here for her. She couldn’t fathom why and she couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong, but she knew it was true. No matter how long she tried to act like some cowboy would come, there would be no cowboy. Not tonight. Something in the evening had gone wrong, and from here on out, things would range from uncomfortable to appalling.

Don’t be so dramatic, she commanded herself. To the clown, she said, “Are you from the Ladies’ Choice people?”

The clown nodded. “Took you long enough, princess,” he mumbled. His voice was rough and his appearance—at least as far as he could tell—was not particularly promising. The chalky white paint would have made any man look ghastly, but it didn’t seem to her that someone in his line of work should have so many jowls or such yellow teeth.

“I think we asked for a cowboy,” Annabelle said. “I wasn’t expecting…you.”

He didn’t respond to this. He just looked her up and down. When he grinned, a bunch of tiny cracks spread across the livid red paint circling his mouth. He beamed up at her and that was another thing—he beamed up at her. The clown was really short. He only came up to her chest.

So although his smile was terrible, she couldn’t help feeling sympathy. His work must have been terrible on his ego. How many groups of horny and intoxicated women had he disappointed in his career? How had that twisted him inside? Unless he got off on that kind of thing. The world is full of all sorts of perversions. The twinge in her spine grew worse all of a sudden, and she found herself saying, “Well, are you all set to go up?”

“Oh, I’m ready,” he said. “Are you ready?”

She didn’t like his voice. She didn’t like the way he sounded as arrogant as a man who wasn’t five-foot-four and decked out in a clown suit. She didn’t like the gravelly tone he had, because it didn’t seem to match the happy look on his face. “Follow me then, okay? We’re up on the eleventh floor…”

He spread out one of his arms in a courtly gesture and the pom-poms stuck to the front of his outfit shook jauntily. She crossed the lobby quickly and he jogged along behind her. When they passed the out-of-towners, one of them crowed, “Look at this, guys! The story of my life!” and the rest started in with their hearty, beer-scented laughter.

“Shove it up your ass, you faggot.” the clown told him. He didn’t raise his voice, but he did break his stride. He stared into the small crowd of men until the slowest of them had stopped laughing. Annabelle had to fight the urge to pull the clown into the elevator, but the men did nothing. They just fell silent and gave the clown their dumbest, drunkest gapes. Before anything else could happen, the clown followed her into the small mirror-walled chamber. When the doors closed and shut them up inside, he gave her a slow and slippery wink. “They’re lucky I didn’t turn their stinking guts into balloon animals,” he explained, and then he let out a rasping, crackling laugh that lasted nearly the entire way up.

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