The old man descended the stairs on his matchstick legs to the outside section of the bar and hobbled out to the rusty fire pit where the glaring sun rendered Cherise invisible. As he approached, her body diffused as though he was nearing a pointillist painting.

He arched back, shielding his eyes from the sun, “I can barely see you, Lady! What you doing back here all by yourself?”

Before Cherise could answer he hollered, “Well, I’m Manny and you wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through!” his legs bent stiffly like they were held together by stick pins. He wore holy jeans and an Iron Maiden t-shirt with an aged black leather vest. His face was sunken and his quivering smile revealed few teeth.

Manny said to Cherise, “What do you think about this plan: I’m starting a Saturday sermon out back here at three o’clock. Because church is closed and people are suffering! Hell, I’ve lost a few friends, not from illness but from loneliness! What do you think of that idea, Lady? We won’t out and out offer alcohol but it will be available.”

Cherise replied, “I think it’s a nice idea, Manny. I’d go, but I don’t go to church. I know what you mean about the loneliness though.”

Manny looked at Cherise with his watery eyes and cried, “That’s what I’m talking about! Loneliness is such a god-damned ignored thing these days!” he slapped his leg and Cherise imagined a big bruise already forming on it. He focused on the driftwood benches surrounding the firepit as though imagining them filled with a congregation, then waved and shuffled back inside the bar. Cherise closed her eyes and tilted her head toward the sun, its rays scattering her apart particle by particle.

Susan DeFelice graduated from Sonoma State University and recently moved to Georgia where she writes fiction and bakes.

Frankly, I blame the flowers.

It’s a nice gesture, bringing flowers to a grave. But people only think about the bringing. Not about the leaving. They don’t think about the roses three days brown and the cellophane slick with rain.

Do you know what a bouquet lying on a grave looks like? Like someone was there, but then left.

Certain flowers don’t get left. Because nobody put them there in the first place.

You know what wildflowers in a cemetery look like? Like covered tracks tripping up the surfaces of ground and underground. An overnight carpet of wild violets and snowdrops—that’s fuzz on your teeth. That’s sun on your cheek. That’s natural.

The bouquets in their plastic sheaths are natural too. It’s natural that the living want to arm themselves on entering a graveyard. Natural that they would want to leave something, too.

But this? This wasn’t natural. This was a grave turned to garden: Tulips plugged in the four corners. A banner of chrysanthemums, framed by freesia. Symmetric sentinels of foxglove. Not a bare patch of earth. Not a blade of green. Roses too red. Daffodils too yellow.

And the worst: the daisies with their pincushion pupils— a hundred wide-open mustard eyes lifted to the sky.

Who could sleep under all that watchfulness? Who could rest under such landscaped elegy? Could you lie still, laminated in petals?

Floral claustrophobia it was.

If I were Daniel Lazare, I would have risen from my grave, too.

Elizabeth Kiem is the author of a fictional series about psychic Soviet ballerina spies and a non-fiction series about George Balanchine’s ballets. She was born in Alaska, raised in Virginia, calls herself a New Yorker and lives in London.

Learn more about her TrapezeWriting workshops at elizabethkiem.com.

Alice and Robert made their way to the small beach near their apartment each afternoon. A summer surrounded by the same cluster of families, they had created private nicknames for the regulars there – Red Cap, Red Cap’s Husband, Chessman, and Silverback – but greater intimacy had not yet been theirs to savour. Although they were constantly learning words and expressions, the language barrier was still too high, their presence still too new. Foreigners did not come to live in this town and Alice had no idea how to relieve the locals of their circumspection. Simple greetings had thus far proven ineffective, but she hoped time would eventually bring them closer.

‘Are you coming for a swim?’ Robert asked her.

‘I’m too comfortable here. You’ll have to go without me this once.’

She watched him zig zag gingerly between the resting grandparents and restless children. Inch by inch, pebble by pebble until the lake was his again.

Robert swam out a hundred metres to where a number of small boats lay anchored. He hauled himself aboard one of them and Alice found herself envying his view of the ruins on the hill behind her. She wondered if she shouldn’t swim out to him, but getting to her feet, she sensed a change in the atmosphere. Something was happening. A stillness had fallen over the beach – it was as if they were at the theatre and the curtains had just parted. Frisbees and balls, so long the objects of fascination, were now allowed to simply roll away. A child ran up to Silverback and excitedly muttered words to him, one of which Alice understood – Irishman.

She looked out towards Robert. He was readying himself to dive from the boat and the beach held its breath. He hit the water a split second before the loud clap of his belly flop reached them. Infectious laughter met this punchline and Alice wiped away her tears of amusement a little guiltily. But they had seen her – she knew their secret now and Chessman approached her pleadingly with a finger over his lips, merriment in his eyes, begging her to keep it to herself.

‘Of course,’ she answered, ‘of course.’

The next afternoon, Alice and Robert swam out to the boats together. Leaving the water a little later, ears still echoing from the thunder of the latest impact, a young girl winked at Alice and offered delighted gestures of thanks. They could trust her now, for they had shared laughter. Ice broken, barriers unexpectedly surmountable now, it seemed the beach was beginning to open its arms in welcome.

Kevin Dardis is an Irish storyteller and musician based in Germany. Most of Kevin’s storytelling is still done orally. His stage shows – in German – relate in music and words his adventures, trials and tribulations in Northern Bavaria.

The 6:30 am train moans its way along the Mahoning River, steel on rusty steel.  

The odor of human liquids and solids waltzes into the camp, worming its way into your borrowed tent. You pull the sleeping bag over your face but the smell of old sweat triggers your gag reflex.

You begin to stir. The pills should have kept you out cold longer, but your mind is active, increasingly alert. Thoughts long to be thought. You don’t consider the events that brought you to tent city, the cocktails of booze and meth and heroin, the yet-to-be-named substances. You don’t ponder all the things you’ve done to get those drugs. The begging. The selling of possessions and self. Lying, stealing, conniving. You can’t recall the shameful deeds committed in the dark, not this morning, lying in the shared filth of a homeless camp under the bone bleached Sycamores of downtown Youngstown. But the day will come when you remember all these things. And more. Then you will know the penetrating grip of regret. 

You will also know love, forgiveness. But before they come there will be pain. This thought of pain comes at the gut level. A deep ache rises in your belly. A mixture of hunger and intestinal discomfort. Your liver? You wonder if the harm is reversible. One day you will know this too. Not today though.

You crawl your way out into the overcast city morning, stumble your way to the woods and promptly throw up on a windblown piece of plastic. No one hands you a rag to wipe your mouth or a cup of coffee to wash away the bile. You’re out of cigarettes, and you’re jittery and awake. Of all the things you could be thinking, a song comes to mind. And you are sitting on a dead tree by the river humming Jesus Loves Me, watching the flow of water carry debris away.

Gene Brode, Jr. is a Northern Virginia native residing in Ohio. He studied Spanish and literature at GMU and works on fire alarms for a living. You can find him alteredplanepress.wordpress.com and at facebook.com/GeneBrodeJr/.

The dragon was beautiful, and dangerous. It had lain here since the beginning, and it would lie here until the end, until the kingdom in which it dwelt had become dust, and its people had passed into memory. From the dragon’s perspective, anything that could happen had already occurred, or would happen once more in the future. This was all preordained.

The king arrived, as he always did, with his golden sword and shining armor, each link forged with care and craft. He drew his blade, and atop his steed said, “You are a monster, and I have come to slay you.”

This was not the first time he spoke to the dragon, nor would it be the last.

The dragon knew the king, and worse, knew his heart. This was the greatest crime.

“With your death, my realm will finally know peace.”

The king recalled a moment, years ago, when he himself had suffered a grievous injury. Since then he had resolved, with every choice made, and choice left unmade, never to know sorrow again: He would guard his heart. And thus he was brought, as he always was, to the dragon in the cave.

Slowly, slowly the king thrust his sword into the dragon. And then, after a moment, its heart went still, and the land was saved.

He saves it, always. Again and again.

Jeremy Akel is an attorney and attended Vanderbilt University. He received his law degree from the University of Florida, and his Master of Laws from George Washington University. He also teaches Aikido, a Japanese martial art, and is certified by the United States Aikido Federation as Fukushidoin. His work has been published in Altered Reality Magazine.

The rooms are less than luxurious. Indeed, there are no rooms as such. Instead, an assortment of pup tents greets each visitor.

Pitched there haphazardly among the campsites nearest the inclines are numerous swirling corrosive mists. There, one almost stumbles upon them – the tents; rows of them but none too straight. Bent. Tarpaulin triangles with lightweight poles thrust harshly through ringlets in the canvas. Those poles will scrape away the gills from the fishless tourists – even the casual ones. As if there are any other kind.

The cheeky hurricanes overpopulating the less attractive neighborhoods are as insufferable as the boulders masquerading as maître d’s. They’ll tire you out before you’ve escaped the train depot. On a positive note, however, they rarely demand a tip.

Leave your gills at home or at least secured in your Samsonites with their adorable little locks and undersized wheels since the surface temperature exceeds the highest setting on most household ovens by 400° and the atmospheric pressure is 90 bars, making the possibility of palms trees, coral, or even seraphs remote at best. And a consular mocking at worst. It’s hot.

One’s luggage locks will be replaced by soldered teardrops before one resets one’s wristwatch. And the wheels will drop out of their chassis like pregnant peaches. There are no flies in the ointment because the flies are bits of ash. Torn bits of muscle. Poorly crafted limericks. Jots. Invariably, they’ll stick in your teeth. Bring floss.

The black and white photographs of the country’s navel reveal something like the inside of a backyard grill that’s been left on all night to cook itself to death. The color photographs disclose tints from the smeary mustard sands. Smeared vindictively. It’s as if she’s cooked her own navel and served it to herself on a platter too hot to touch and then finger-painted on herself with a slightly rotted flaxen rouge. It’s all rather banal.

The coastlines are ignored by the locals and for good reason. The surf is irredeemable, the jellyfish are commonplace, and the sharks guest host Food Network programs.

If it was a kiln it would bust apart. Hotter than an apogee furnace into which someone might cram an accidentally suffocated corpse – to remove any trace of it. To make it go away. To make bones bygone. So, consider a few smart linen outfits; leave the wool blazers in Amiens.

‘Cooking long after the springs are punched out. Roasting without rest – Unpacking, you’ll find a too-thick-hot-soup,’ reads a rival travel guide (tactfully omitting the wrench-like mercury-filled bread sticks from the menu).

Another competitor notes: ‘No grasses sprout, no breathing-into-nostrils-of-dust-balls was ever even contemplated; it’s pristine’ (mercurially pretermitting the inorganic fescue).

Another: ‘Spare, terse, desiccated, uncompromising.’

“A life-changing destination for the suicidal,’ wisecracks the last.

Accordingly, we recommend arranging one’s exit visa prior to arrival. Don’t rely on the expertise of their functionaries. The agents are irredeemable. It almost seems as if custom and immigration forms haven’t been invented there yet.

Simmons is a lawyer, a law professor, and a lifelong South Dakotan. His scholarship and teaching focuses on trusts and estates.. His poems can be found in El Portal, Corvus Review, Nebo, North Dakota Quarterly, Nine Muses, The Write Launch, The Showbear Family Circus, and elsewhere. His first full length collection titled “Tod Browning Loose-leaf Encyclopedia” was published by Cyberwit in 2020.

He knew it was his last get-together.  I do not know how he knew, but there was a finality about his words and a far-away look in his eyes that I’d never seen before—stillness, acceptance, voices calling from far off. 

The house was filled with chaos, family teasing, laughter, kids discovering toys, adults catching up with each other, teenagers gathering in the center of the room to compare notes on how the world was shaping up. The open floorplan allowed all to see into the kitchen where the food was being prepared and the women fussed over each dish—setting up for a grand meal. 

He was just sitting there, somber, taking it all in.  I watched him for a while, puzzled by the spectacle of aging. Wrinkled, sagging, blotchy skin, huge veins on his arms.  His friendly but droopy face—extended stomach and feeble hands. His piercing blue eyes that looked like deep pools today. His children, grand-children and great-grand-children filled the space–sucked the oxygen out of the room.  Everything was moving too fast for him. 

He peered over his reading glasses and spoke directly to me.  “Don’t forget,” he said, “don’t ever forget that you have a wonderful family.”  “Yes, we do,” I responded, as I proceeded to make small talk about the kids and some of the hair-brained ideas they had come up with lately.  He laughed a bit, then looked off in the distance at nothing that I could see.   

What I would have given to capture his knowledge and wisdom and spread it across his full room of posterity.  What better people we would all be for it. He was a beautiful man. I loved having him as a grandfather.  He always made me feel special.  He owned a landscaping nursery and brought me flowers from time to time,  none quite as beautiful as the begonia on the morning of my fifth birthday.  It was captivating and it happened to be picture day, so I took it to school and insisted that I hold the flower in the picture.  I felt like it would keep him closer to me somehow. 

When I saw him next, he lay on beautifully tucked silk with his well-worn hands folded across his stomach.  Despite his well-lived life,  the air in the funeral parlor ached with longing and grief. I flashed on him sitting in the big green chair amid the family free-for-all just last weekend. I was never so sure that he knew his time was nigh. 

I remembered Corrie Ten Boom and her father’s words about death. “Corrie, when do I give you your train ticket?  “Right before I get on the train,” she answered.

Could it be that death is like that?  Somehow, we get our ticket right before we board, and we are momentarily prepared for our passing.

I took comfort knowing that he was ready, even though we were not.  I thought of a million questions to ask him.  So much knowledge and history gone.  I wished for one more of his warm hugs. The finality of it all was stark, overwhelming, and surreal.  I found the kindergarten picture and put it up against a small vase on the mantle for a while. 

Suzanne S. Eaton is an author and marketing consultant. She has written many corporate stories and magazines. She authored the book “Chinese Herbs,” reprinted by Harmony Press seven times. In her early days of writing, she was the first woman to get a feature article in Off Road Magazine and has been published in various magazines and anthologies. Most recently, Down in the Dirt Magazine, Writer Shed Stories and Seaborne Magazine have selected her work for publication.
https://www.facebook.com/zan.eaton.5
Twitter: @SuzanneSEaton7
Instagram: eaton9191

The woman, young but dew-dried, smiles as she moves up the aisle of the bus, in search of an empty seat to call, briefly, her own.  A nice smile but yellowing, evenly tinted by avoidance of the dentist, but tended to and healthy looking.  But yellow.  That would never have happened “when I was young” (that special time for every old fool), but I see that now with some frequency.  And there are, as there were not, so long ago, cars hustling down the roads unwashed, with a single headlight out while the remaining headlight stares straight ahead, “Nothing to see here, Officer, move on, thanks please.”  Houses and yards are imperfectly cared for, roof tiles missing, rose bushes gone to ruin, siding stained and scraped – all signs of a growing neglect as more and more money trickles out of the holes in our wallets.  “Is that a colander there, or are you just glad to see me?”  We’re glad to see a smiling face, however yellow the teeth may be, as opposed to the looming snarls of the collapse that old age and the evidence foretell, where teeth will be bared, yellow and red in the land of withered plenty, and perhaps tartar will chip off exposed bones, revealing the shiny white teeth of the childhood of ourselves and our time.  The homeless already have their dens.  They will look out of the alleys at clashes and carnage, snatch up fallen hats and umbrellas, a single shoe torn off in battle, and tuck their prizes under their heavy stained coats, before they scurry off, cackling, into the shadows.

JBMulligan has published more than 1100 poems and stories in various magazines over the past 45 years, and has had two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books: The City of Now and Then, and A Book of Psalms (a loose translation). He has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies.

My older sister Nancy and I hit mailboxes on Halloween. The world keeps taking. Nan says we need to shake things up.

I lean out the front seat and ready the bat, so it strikes with the right momentum.

Thwack. Thwack. Mailboxes explode, metal heads shattered.

“They’ll never recover,” I joke, watching streams of envelopes disperse into the wind.

“It’s sappy cards.” Nan’s smile wobbles. “We love you a thousand miles away. Everyone else always stays behind.”

“Sometimes they return.”

She takes my hand.

“I wish.”

I feel fragility, squeeze her hand back. Ready my bat. It feels so small now.

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. A self-proclaimed Romantic and Tchaikovsky addict, Yash loves autumn and dissecting dysfunction.

I was sitting in the truck in the bumpy gravel parking lot watching Zeph play basketball with the other kids when my neighbor called me and asked: “You still thinking about taking a ride up the coast next weekend?”

“Thinking about it,” I said, though I was really thinking about when I was Zeph’s age and playing on that same court with my friends, practicing our shooting form in the morning and watching the older kids play and argue and goof around at night. So I said, “Lemme call you back a little later,” and flipped my phone shut.

It was the first eighty degree day of the year and Zeph looked good shooting the ball because we put a hoop up in the driveway last summer and I helped him work on his form, on those warm summer evenings when there was no wind and the sun seemed like it wanted to hang around a while longer, like it didn’t want to go down because it would disappoint my son and force him to go inside for dinner.

And presently with the afternoon sun lingering and Zeph and his friends playing two-on-two on one side of the court and the other side empty, that old saying surfaced in my head, Always aim for the back of the rim, which I learned on that same burning asphalt twenty years prior, exerting ourselves more mentally than physically at times because that’s how the game works. It began there during the summer before seventh grade when Mr. Thompson, our English teacher, told my friend Victor that he had a one in a million shot of making it to the NBA, coming from a small town in Maine. So every morning just after dawn I walked and dribbled the ball past dewy lawns and dazed paperboys to the basketball court where Victor was already shooting from two feet away and then four feet and back and back. There were times of serious practice: shooting and dribbling and running drills which must have appeared silly to the people driving by on their way across town to the dump or the redemption center; and then interludes of ludicrous jokes and shooting halfcourt shots and chewing on juvenile philosophy, eschewing limitations: “They tell you you have no shot or a one percent chance or whatever because that’s how they want you to think,” Victor said to me once. “You have to know you’re gonna succeed at whatever you’re doing, because what does anyone know about anyone else?  Nothing really.”

Which was true. But I hadn’t told Zeph that story yet because I wanted him to be old enough to understand that it didn’t necessarily have to be about the game of basketball. I watched him run towards me chasing after a loose ball and then grit his teeth when it bounced off the windshield. He picked the ball up and yelled out, “Sorry, dad,” as he skipped back towards the court; and beyond, on a dim court with frayed backboards and bare rims bent down slightly and old school rap music emanating through the open doors of Mick’s low-rider truck, my friends and I pacing around aimlessly as we caught our breath after a long and drawn out game of three-on-three. The sun had disappeared ten minutes ago and it was a night like a lot of other nights in our small mill town. I was supposed to be home before dark, but I wanted to stay, and I couldn’t help but question the definition of ‘dark’.  It was almost worth sprinting the three blocks home just to be sure, just to see if maybe I could sprint back and play another game. But then I relented; I was getting hungry.  “I gotta get home,” I said.  “It’s pretty dark.”  Mick gave me a quick look of disappointment, and then he smiled and looked up at the sky as though searching for something and said: “It’s not dark – it’s just – very – not light.”

The basketball court in our town was a moving canvas: a game of fluidity rolling back and forth and a cigarette smoker standing underneath the basket cracking bad jokes and the guys in their pickup trucks nearby drinking Mountain Dew, talking about their lift kits. I remembered the time when Derek Taber tried telling a joke after spending a year in prison downstate: “I saw your mom kicking a can and I asked her if she was moving”, and no one laughed; a few seconds of awkward silence passed and then Victor said to him quite seriously: “Man, you have been gone awhile.” I remembered watching Dan Lovell dunk the ball and hang on the rim and then slap the backboard afterwards. I remembered watching Sherwood inadvertently drink urine out of a Pepsi can because Lovell put it there, and then Sherwood reacting with a laugh and a mild curse word. I remembered sitting on the porch with Victor just before Zeph was born and trading stories already known and told, because they never got old, because the fire tends to spread as you age, though only if you remember where it began.

Eventually the high school kids filtered in and it was nearing dinnertime so I waved Zeph over. He came over, caught his breath, and said: “Can I stay dad, please?”

“Your mother’s gonna have dinner ready in about ten minutes,” I said.

“I’ll walk home before it gets dark.  I just wanna watch, please?”

“Before dark,” I said. “No later. I’ll keep some green beans warm.” I smiled. He didn’t like green beans. But he didn’t hear me. He muttered, “Thanks, dad,” and ran back. I knew my wife was going to give me a little hell when I came home alone, but I couldn’t say no to the kid. I envied him.

Ryan S. Lowell is a novelist and short story writer. His work has appeared in Underwood Press: Black Works and the Workers Write Journal. His story Random Uncertainty is forthcoming in the Workers Write Overtime Series, and he is currently working on a novel based in rural Maine. He lives with his wife, son and a crew of rescue pets in South Portland, Maine.