Across the Years by Tony Press

The guy walked to his motorcycle, climbed on, made the sign of the cross, and drove off. I wondered did he do that every time or was there something on his mind that prompted the act. There was no church on the block, so that wasn’t it. But away he went, heading south toward the highway, and I continued in the same direction, but on foot, and, as far as I could tell, less protected than he. I’ve heard that poetry is prayer, and I’ve read that writing is prayer, and I’ve played in both pools, but I’ve never felt any more secure after doing either.

For most of my life I had no religious or spiritual leanings, but I have a sort-of-a friend who is a priest, and a real friend who used to be a nun. I also knew an ex-priest toward the end of his life, and that was a powerful time for each of us. I think had I known him earlier – he had been a priest for thirty years, then not one for twenty – I would have learned something more, though I can’t say what it would be, about my own life. I now claim I’m a Buddhist but sometimes it is only a claim.

Once I was a disc jockey, in the days when disc jockeys played music and spoke into the night with dulcet tones. I worked the late shift, and sometimes the all-nighter, spinning tales of woe and wonder and lust, with 45s, albums, and my own voice. I felt connected to unseen folks in ways I’ve rarely felt with people right in front of me. It’s like when I travel and speak Spanish, and I find my self far more open, with new friends and with strangers, than I am at home, in English. Speaking into the microphone, tucked into Studio A and the dim light of the board, I was both encouraged and encouraging, with no sense of expectation. Would that all of our conditions offered the same.

I wasn’t religious or anything, in that radio time of my life, but there was something about giving my words into the night airwaves, just putting them out there, where they might descend beyond my control or imagination. Everyone should have such an opportunity. All these years later, I often wonder if anyone remembers what I might have said. I can remember much of the music, but little of the language.

All these years later – there’s a phrase I never anticipated – I speak less, and listen more, if someone speaks to me, or near to me, and feel more alone than ever.

Maybe the motorcycle guy feels the same, and that’s how he deals with it. At the corner, coming from a jukebox across the street, I hear somebody sing: “I’ll never get out of this world alive.”

I make the sign of the cross and walk on.

Tony Press lives near San Francisco. Poetry: The Postcard Press; 34th Parallel; Postcard Press; Contemporary Verse 2; Right Hand Pointing; Inkwell; Spitball; more. Fiction: JMWW; Rio Grande Review; BorderSenses; SFWP Journal; Switchback; Toasted Cheese; Boston Literary; Qarrtsiluni; Foundling Review; Menda City; 100 Word Story; Tales from the Courtroom; and more. Non-fiction in Quay and Toasted Cheese. He strives to live with compassion and awareness.

Fumeral by Donelle Dreese

There are things that happen in this world that don’t make any sense. You can try to figure them out, but the rational mind is a field where only a certain kind of flower grows, and eventually it becomes apparent that there are different fields, and different flowers, so where do you look for answers? Sometimes you have to find a willow tree and sit under it for a while, or maybe you prefer a park bench that faces a gushing fountain, a porch step that overlooks a busy city street, or the top row of bleachers at an empty softball field. Sometimes you have to just wait and let the answers flow through you rather than seek them out.

Kerri had been my friend since the sixth grade. I don’t know when she started huffing. Perhaps it started innocently in art class with a bottle of glue. I remember one time Joey Danforth gave me a fresh bottle of glue and told me to sniff it for a good high. I sniffed. Nothing happened. Maybe it affects people differently. But I never thought of glue in the same way again after that. This stinky, gooey substance that is designed to mend and hold things together can actually tear someone apart. It may have started with glue for Kerri, but it didn’t end that way. It ended with that stuff people use to blow the dust off of their computer keyboards. I’ve never used it. Once a week or so, mom sweeps a damp rag over my keyboard to clean it off. Even if I had a mangy keyboard, I’m not sure I would care.

One day, Kerri started dusting, not her computer keyboard, but her brain. I wonder if she was trying desperately to clear away the clutter and confusion of this thing called life that our parents say will only get more difficult as you get older. It would be nice if they gave us something to look forward to. I can’t blame them entirely because I’m sure life at forty has its own set of challenges, but the pessimism does not offer much hope to a lost, insecure, and unpopular sixteen-year-old who already feels as if her life is controlled by the hounds of “no” and “not now.” I wish she would have used laughter to clear the cobwebs from the dark corners of her psyche instead of a toxic aerosol can that burns your brain cells, but who am I to judge? I deal with my problems by falling into fits of depression that drive my mom up a wall until I am finally able to pull myself out of the slop bucket of malcontent. But Kerri didn’t die from burned brain cells, she died because her heart couldn’t take it anymore. The dusting made her heart stop. She died from a broken heart and most of us will never know what caused it, or what made her start huffing and dusting in the first place.

The drive home from the funeral was silent. Mom drove while my friend Veronica and I sat in the backseat passing slips of paper back and forth with different drawings of frowning faces. Veronica drew a picture of a frowning old lady with curlers in her hair while I drew a picture of a frowning baby who had one hair swirling up from the top of his head. The drawings made us smile, if only for a moment. I suppose it’s in really poor taste to find humor in the faces of sad people, but funerals are like that sometimes, aren’t they?

When we got home, I opened up the trash and noticed that mom had tossed away all of the markers and bottles of glue in the house. “Mom, it looks like an art supply store threw up in our trash can. Why did you throw all that stuff away? I’m not going to start huffing.”

“I know honey. I just don’t want to look at that stuff for while,” she said quietly. “These kinds of things just shouldn’t happen. I feel so sorry for Kerri’s parents.”

Everyone has their own way of coping, I suppose. Veronica is probably the most introverted person I know, but she doesn’t feel the need to analyze and figure things out the way I do. Maybe it’s because she lives on a farm and she witnesses birth and death all the time. Maybe it’s because she lives near a small stream and has learned to go with the flow. Regardless of the reason for my overactive mental tendencies, I did draw a conclusion. When people say “stop and smell the roses,” I know they mean that we should all slow down and remember to enjoy life, but that phrase means something else to me now. I could sit under one thousand willow trees and never understand why this had to happen to my friend Kerri, but I’ll never forget that my breath is my life and what I inhale becomes a part of me. So if you have the choice between a rose and an aerosol can, always choose a rose.

Donelle Dreese is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Northern Kentucky University where she teaches multicultural and environmental literatures, creative writing, and composition. Her most recent publications include short fiction published in Gadfly Online, Sunsets and Silencers and Postcard Shorts.

Not Much Left to Say by Daniel Pontius

The crowd roars now—a small auditorium full of red-faced and pale-faced goons who yell sporadic vulgarity and demand more. He’s already handed over his world.

He’d never been good for anything. Always he led a private life in a public way. He made attempts at friendship, at being a good son and brother, at expressing love. But it was all driven away. The maintenance of his private life devolved into abuse without fail. He ran with the other private people who self-destruct in communion in places where there is no judgment. Wet-smelling wooden places like dark stages and always him sitting quietly, a big attractive man capable of so much love that these things he’d attempted seemed pitifully insignificant. Life demands a more substantial sacrifice.

Routine stuck in his foot like a splinter. He knew more serious people wondered, ‘who do you think you are?’ The love he had to give fermented in the wet, dark places. Time and comfort were more suitable sacrifices. Life, as he couldn’t begin to define, was wasting him and as the well-meaning voices began to fall away, he knew he was on to something.

He wrote about these places he’d go and these people and mostly about himself. His time wasted away, people fell off their stools, and teeth were lost. Bottles of poison drained for celebration fueled grotesque couplings, nightmarish abstractions, moments of fine art, transcendent bridges of flesh. He began to know beauty. He embraced the ends of each night like the end of Life. More well-meaning voices fell away.

He dug deeper. Rejections of what he unearthed piled up. People did not want to hear it. He couldn’t stomach inventing characters. He knew too many people so desperately being themselves. He wrote them bigger and better or worse, more or less of who they were rewriting themselves as. Most people didn’t know what the fuck was happening. Even these private people he thought worthy didn’t see things the way he did. He continued to write.

Time wasted away with great fervor. Life was digesting him and he saw this as the ultimate gift. He’d found a place for some of this love. These bars and alleys were so full of it. He’d woken up on the steps of a church once. He assumed all the disgusted looks from the well-dressed people stepping around him had something to do with the throbbing he felt under his right eye. He excused himself and began to walk north. Walking home, blindly lighting a cigarette, he found the peaceful laughter of the damned. It would sustain him through anything.

He tried to write laughter. He tried to write fulfillment. He tried to justify his existence with words, but all he found were parables. The voices were gone now. Even the desperate letters had ceased. He was now on his own, beholden to no one. He felt incensed like never before, the last dregs of guilt finally drained. Life was his; he was God.

By the time his first acceptance letter arrived, his art had justified itself and he had hundreds of stories. It wasn’t long before he began to receive unsolicited responses to his work. He couldn’t believe his eyes: voice of your generation, brutal, unbridled, unprecedented honesty, genre-bending narrative. He had dreamed of this and it was briefly nice to be noticed.

It was fun for a while. Four collections out and people flocked to find him in those dark, wet bars, to turn them into literal stages. The discoveries he’d made were mined like precious minerals. The exploration to which he’d been devoted was now a pilgrimage. Life had taken shape as he felt its weight. He felt it digest him and learned. His life took shape as the world crowded around. There was no private place now and he’d seen himself in what he’d inspired. There was continued success and his habits became more pronounced as he was not so easily wasted anymore. He gave them what they wanted and he’d never known a hell so complete.

The crowd roared and shouted vulgar things they thought he’d approve of. He drank from the bottle an old man now. As he gulped, the crowd rejoiced. He was their God, their Life, and he wasted himself with great courage.

-I’ve got my fucking shotgun tonight, case any of you mother fuckers wanna come at me, he slurred angrily, brandishing the thing by its double-barrel.

The crowd knew it was real. They trusted him and gave him the recognition he’d fought to never need. He’d created selflessly and found an impossible beauty at the bottom of the day. He felt them tear through the pages for his life. They found truth that wasn’t their own and that wasn’t him and he could’ve written a story to explain, but he was tired and he’d given it all away.

The crowd roared as the empty bottle arced from the stage, end over end through the strong white lights. They roared so loud, the boom of both barrels didn’t sound like much from the cheap seats.

Daniel Pontius is a writer living in Philadelphia. He works for Philadelphia Stories, a non-profit literary journal and participates in a number of weekly writing groups. He’s currently working on a full-length collection of flash fiction and on the second draft of his first novel.

Her Voice in My Ear, Jackson State, May 4, 1970 by Helen Silverstein

Her voice coming through her chest has a completely different sound. I like it. Her words mush together, vibrating in my ear, mom talking to dad about Jackson State and how good it is they took us to see where the shootings occurred. Bullet holes in the walls of the dorms, is what I remember, and blockades; police everywhere. Students killed for no reason. No reason, I hear, looking out the window of the station wagon with my two brothers—my Dad driving, my mother talking, talking. More bad things are happening; I feel sick with fear.

Sick means on the drive home I ride in the middle, up front between my parents. The coveted position. My brothers sleep behind me, one stretched out on the second seat, one in the way back of the station wagon. My ear pressed to Mom’s chest, I pretend to sleep so she might keep her arm around me longer. She pat, pats my shoulder kind of hard, but I think this is like a hug, like she wants me leaning in against her, wants me hearing the timbre of her voice through the bones and skin of her. Held this way, fear slides away. I don’t care what my parents are saying. I like where I am.

I don’t remember when she pushes me away. When I become too bothersome, a heavy thing putting her arm to sleep.

I don’t remember another time when she holds me.

Helen Silverstein is the co-editor of Southern Women’s Review. She writes fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Her works have appeared in publications as diverse as OBIT magazine and Big Pulp. For more information, please visit her website at www.helensilverstein.net.

The Mailwoman by Stephen V. Ramey

When the mailwoman collapsed on the doorstep, neighbors claimed they saw Frank Rowe take his mail from her fist and storm inside, angry it was mostly bills again. What he really did was check the woman’s pulse, then hurry without quite running to the phone.

The ambulance came and two burly men hurried through the chain-link gate, up spalled cement steps to the porch where they deposited boxy equipment beside the woman’s face (blocking the view for Janice March next door, who was taking notes).

They proceeded to revive the woman, undoing three buttons to plunge a syringe directly into her quivering heart, placing an oxygen mask over her lips. All this while Frank Rowe leered, Noreen Perkins would report from across the street. The truth is his mouth did gape, but only because he had not been so close to death since his brother’s funeral last spring.

As the men bundled the mailwoman off on a stretcher — naked as a blue jay according to Jennifer Strong — he noticed their resemblance to pallbearers and winced. A wince is not a smile, no matter what Francine Jenkins told her husband.

And when the lead man stumbled, the rusted gate snagging on his uniform pants, Frank Rowe laughed outright a majority of the women recounted. Yet his doubling over was not the result of some reflexive cachinnation, but a physical pain in his gut, a metaphorical kick to the solar plexus resulting from a momentary vision of his brother’s pallbearer tripping, the body sliding from the splintered pinewood coffin amid a confusion of flowered wreaths and wire stands. “You get what you pay for,” Frank’s wife had later commented, meaning the coffin.

That night at the Moose Lodge he listened to the tragic tale unwind second-hand from various husbands to the laughter that accompanied his complicit actions therein, and he smiled. A simple smile to be sure, nothing fancy. He had never been one to stand in the way of fun.

Afterward, when they bought him a round and toasted his antics — Stealing the mail from a convulsing mailman? Talk about post haste! — he only pretended to drink.

Stephen V. Ramey lives in New Castle, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in The Journal of Compressed Literary Arts, Bartleby Snopes, and Orion Headless, among others.

Almost Spring by Kel Daniels

Jeanie slowed her pace so as not to pass the man before her. Something to look at to distract from the approaching hill. Plus, she’d rather watch him from behind than be watched by him. One, two, three, four. She counted her steps, sucking air as the path rose into a pocket of cool. The hard little buds covering the bare limbs overhead were moments from bursting into color, but they held back. They’d been fooled before. Winter had one last exertion.

Not today though. Blue sky. Wispy clouds. Last fall’s leaves made a mottled, powdery carpet along the path and out under the trees. The runner before her panted in his effort, one of those guys who wouldn’t let it beat him, gravity. A dark stain grew from between his legs, and sweat tracked down his bare, narrow back. The bottoms of his shoes, dirty red, blinked with stupid monotony. Jeanie’s lungs burned. Why was she even doing this? Hadn’t she read somewhere that walking offered the same health benefits as running? But if he wasn’t going to give in, either was she.

What did he look like? Somehow it had become tremendously important she find out. She could pass him—if she had the strength—and glance over for a quick view of his profile. What is she flew by and then stopped to tie her shoes? Was there any reason to face back while she did this? No, no, no. They were nearing the crest of the hill, leaving the river valley for the flat land above. Soon the trail would dump them onto 30th Street, just across from Steve’s Olde Barbershop and the Hilltop Tavern, a mucky part of town.

“Hey,” she shouted, surprising herself. “You up there.”

The runner looked back over his shoulder, still jogging slowly. He was a college kid, pimply faced, probably not even old enough to drink. Nothing at all as she’d expected.

“Never mind,” she said, and gasped for breath. “I thought you were somebody else.”

Kel Daniels’ fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, Sonora Review, South Dakota Review, Third Coast, Eyeshot, GSU Review, Orange Coast Review, Mayday Magazine and other literary publications. He lives with his wife and son in Rock Island, Illinois, where he teaches creative writing at Augustana College.