I knew this was going to happen. I shouldn’t have let Archie talk me into this whole thing. But it was a done deal as soon as I got into his flivver. He and his gal Grace thought they could show me a grand old time.

“Best time you’ll have this side of the Rouge,” he said. I wasn’t convinced, but I had nothing better to do after getting off from the factory, and it’d been a bit since I had a real drink.

Archie drove us up to the place, which was in the back of a hat shop. It was after hours, but the door to the front of the store was unlocked. The three of us walked to the back where there was a little door hidden behind some display racks.

“This is how we get into the joint,” Archie said. “Joe down at the foundry said you knock five times. Guy asks who wants some tea, and you say Warren G.”

And it went just like that. Five knocks and a harsh voice and Archie giving the code. A bruiser of a guy opened the door and led us down to the basement, where there was a jazz band and about forty guys and gals drinking and having a grand old time. Even the piano man was knocking them back.

“Hooch came in over the river from Windsor,” Archie says. “The Purple outfit has been running some high quality stuff from the Canadians. No turpentine or any of that crap, won’t turn you blue or put you six feet under.”

“How reassuring,” I said, taking a seat next to Grace. She was a looker alright, but I didn’t let my eyes linger lest I piss off Archie.

The three of us were in there for about an hour and thirty minutes before it all went to hell. The barman hit a switch that flipped all the shelving behind him back into the wall, a horrible crunching sound overcoming the playing band. It was all for naught. The fuzz busted in real quick. All of us were pretty loaded, and the only way into the basement was through the stairway, which was where all the heat was. Apparently there was a passageway off to the side, as most of the people in the know snuck out that way, including Archie and Grace. That left me and a few straggler members of the jazz band. A big burly cop decked me in the gut and sent me reeling. When I got up back on my feet, he and his goon partner had me cuffed.

“I didn’t do anything, officer,” I managed. “I just came down here to check the joint out.”

“Well, I assume you know that speakeasies are illegal, and that drinking in one is as well.”

“I guess, I just don’t see the harm,” I managed.

The cop chuckled. “The harm is that you happened to be at this particular establishment, which many of our fellow officers hold in disrepute.”

“This establishment?”

The other cop started chuckling.

“What the sergeant is trying to say is that we are much more amenably inclined towards Morty’s off of Woodward.”

I put two and two together.

“What’s the word?” The cop who decked me undid my cuffs. “They ask who pays the piper, and you say Al.”

“Simple as that?”

“Yeah.”

The cops proceeded to bash in the place with their billy clubs, but they let all of us out. Helluva world we live in these days.

Michael Hughes is an author living in Los Angeles. His novels include Pumpkin Farmer, The Crimson Shamrock, Inland Intrigue, and Loafing by La Brea. 

John Monroe lived on Lost Creek by the covered bridge. John ran cattle for decades and always wore a big cowboy hat. John rode round-up in the fall with Leonard Bradshaw. John would hunt mountain lions with Tom Tibbetts as they both kept hounds, and Tom said John was the best lion hunter in the county. Tom said they’d start off together and split apart in opposite directions so their hounds would not get mixed up during the chase. Improving the family income with bounties on the big cats every winter as each lion brought $50 from the state, and $10 from Jackson County.

John would not have electricity in his home until a short time after a man walked on the moon. He then gave in to his wife and got electricity and a modern phone. They’d had a crank phone for a time, when Lloyd and his brother were kids. In 94 years, John, had only been to Medford six times which was 24 miles away.

Once, John’s sister decided to take him to the ocean in a car and they were gone for 3 days. John saw the Redwoods and went to the beach.

Everyone had a distinct cattle call; each owner’s beasts knew his masters call. Many of the neighbors knew each other’s call. According to Emil Pech, John’s call was a good one, with a “Whoopee! “on the end of it.

John gave up on horses when he got old and drove an International Diesel tractor. John was up the South Fork looking for cows and didn’t make it back one evening. Lloyd, John’s son went looking for John with his brother-in-law. After finding the tractor at the bottom of a steep grade, that went up to Conde Creek, they began calling out for John in the dark, pretty far up the South Fork of Little Butte Creek and up on Hepsie Mountain, past Grizzly Canyon.

Eventually they heard his “Whoopee! “and followed his call in the dark about a half mile from the tractor. He was cold, wet and muddy and had the big hat pulled over his ears with a plastic sack tied round his head to hold it down. Each of the men got a shoulder under the old cowboy and got him off the mountain.

“I think I had a stroke,” John said to Lloyd on the way home in the car, long after midnight.

A few weeks later, John fell while feeding calves, the calves tromped the old man until he crawled under a flat bedded wagon, he hauled the baled hay on.

For a brief time, they put him in a nursing home in Medford. John became so sorrowful because he was embarrassed when they took his clothes away. One day, he found his overalls and his flannel shirt and made a break for it out of the nursing home. After that escape his sons took him home and cared for him there. At the age of 94 John passed, three months after his wife Ida Marie had died. Lloyd said, John would say, of his one trip to the ocean:

“Oh, that’s a mad thing to look at! That’s a mad thing—those waves coming in!”

James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don’t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA) Flash Fiction and Rue Scribe have all featured one or more of his stories.

Andrew was about to master the art of paper folding, but his self-confidence was suffering from serious deprivation. The Origami evening class was engaging and well structured — and the teacher, Mr. Nakamura, one of a kind — if it were not for Blaine.

Andrew’s eyes wandered discreetly across the table to feeble hands sculpting fiery red paper as if they were defining material behavior at will. His paper crane, on the contrary, had a will of his own and was never tired of resisting his attempts. Of all twenty-four participants, Andrew had to share a table with Blaine. Twenty-three adults and one soft and pedantic boy, Andrew thought.

“Now here’s what you do,” he said and folded the sheet of paper in front of Andrew. “You can’t skip a step, this is crucial.”

Mr. Nakamura came to help. “Everything clear?”

“Yes,” Andrew grumbled.

Blaine disagreed: “Not at all. He mustn’t skip a step.”

The Origami class was a birthday present from Andrew’s parents. Alone during the day and lonely at night, the slightly overweight 36-year-old had been looking forward to a change from his downbeat routine. He couldn’t admit it, since it was too shameful, but he enjoyed this minimalist craft with all that enchanting and recyclable sculptures. Unfortunately, every Monday evening, Blaine had one hour in which to spoil his joy. And it worked every time.

After the class, Andrew rushed straight to his car, and his drive home was a long rant about his classmate. “That little braggart!“ he shouted. “He does need that satisfaction, doesn’t he? Because he failed to get anywhere in life! Narrow shoulders, tiny hands … He is calling himself a man, but is just a boy! And what is this name anyway? Blaine sounds like a girl’s name. I’ll show him!“

Next day at work Andrew was still annoyed. And the day after. The entire week there was a low-lying pain in his chest, hurting with the wrong movement of thought. It came from a sting which Blaine left in him, and next Monday he thrust it deeper.

“Evening, big guy!“ he said with a lower tone in his boyish voice.

“Today we’ll make a dragon. Can you do that? Can you handle the dragon, champ?“

“Yes,“ Andrew grumbled, irritated by Blaine’s stilted masculinity.

Mr. Nakamura detailed the folding of the paper dragon step by step, and Andrew noted that his unpleasant partner was observing him. Pretending to be unaware, he followed Mr. Nakamura instructions. First Blaine stayed quiet, but at step number five he ventured to comment.

“Careful, you need to …“

“I know,“ Andrew said contorting with pain and turning sideways. It took him ten minutes and a flawless hunter green dragon was already posing from the other side of the table, but he managed to finish his own.

“Excellent work,“ Mr. Nakamura said. “And yours is good too, Andrew.“

It was the first night since beginning the Origami course that
he drove through the cold city lights with peace of mind. He did not understand Blaine’s smile when he examined his correct and — to a lesser extent — decent dragon, but it seemed there was no competition between the pair mismatched by nature. At the moment of this insight, the pain in his chest vanished, and he got a full night’s sleep. The following working week ran smoothly, and Andrew overcame the shame and told Jim, one of his closest colleagues, about the success of the paper dragon. He had never heard of Origami though. “Why paper? You should do a dragon out of plaster and paint it with varnish colors. That would be something.“

Andrew returned to the course for the very last time with a fresh sense of self- confidence. It came to an end after eight weeks and he found it a pity. The one he would not miss sat at the table and did dry-runs with pale white paper. Blaine was in such a too-good mood that Andrew’s ignorance couldn’t impede his vigorous flow of words.

“Do you know why I’m doing this class? We all have stressful daytime jobs, but Origami is more than relaxing, isn’t it? It’s contemplation, it’s meditation, it’s Yoga for the hands. Here we find inner peace and learn a fine craft. Isn’t it nice to learn something new in your free time? Why are you doing it, Andrew?“

“Certainly not to talk,“ he said.

“You have a great sense of humor! I love it!“

Blaine began to laugh and Andrew froze looking at him. “Is he hitting on me?“ he thought and found alarming details in Blaine’s facial expression. There was a particular gleam in his eyes, he never saw before, a tilting of his head and pointy lips too. He stopped all the joking immediately worried that he was misconceiving the signals. The simmering embarrassment ensured a total silence on either side of the table the entire hour. At the end, both used the quiet time to finish two marvellous paper flowers. Andrew’s was better than expected, Blaine’s worse, at least measured at his talent. After the course, when they parted ways, both said from a distance “See you!“, and one of them added “or not“ in thought.

On Saturday, Andrew visited his proud parents to show his Origami sculptures and the certificate that Mr. Nakamura had awarded him. He remembered Blaine, the annoyance that he underwent, and it was still embarrassing. But somehow he was missing him as an existence in his empty life that cared about his crafting.

As usual, he went alone to the movies downtown, leaving after nightfall with a cosy warmth in his chest. Outside the cinema, a beautiful starry sky gently tarnished by the city lights greet him, and he stopped. At that very moment, somebody leaving the same movie brushed his shoulder. He turned around and saw Blaine, but dressed in women’s clothing and painted with lipstick and blusher. Disgusted by the cross-dressing, his first thought was: “I knew he is gay!“ His disgust was also the reason he made no response.

“Surprised, big guy? I’m a woman. So what?“ Blaine said and set off without looking back disappearing in the lively city.

Andrew stood motionless while his thoughts derailed. His eyes followed Blaine, but what he saw were old reminiscences of him breaching the thick layers of his twisted mind to form a strange identity. He was not a boy, nor a man. Blaine was a woman, and the thing that remained after she left was the wish to see her again. He realized, just now, that he had gone to the movies with her and that was a good start.

Hendrik Kühn has studied sociology, lives with his wife and daughter in Bremen, Germany, and works there as a researcher at the University. His short stories have been published in Amazon’s Kindle Singles program and his debut novel will be coming out in January 2020 (Luzifer Verlag).

If you did as I do, I’d call you my foe.

You’re in the labyrinth, looking for the exit. You turn right at one corner, then left at the next. Turn left. Left again. Right. Right again.

Though each wall and each corner look identical, you sense you’re nearing the exit. Right. Left. Left again.

But when you round the next corner, you are face to face with the minotaur.

There’s no escape. Your whole frame trembles. “Please don’t kill me.” You rush the words out. “Don’t eat me.”

“Of course I’m not going to eat you. I just… I didn’t realize you were coming.” The minotaur sits on the ground. “Can we talk? Got a minute?” His horns span more than a meter. They sag downward.

For a while, neither of you speaks.

Finally the minotaur starts. “Are you mad at me?”

“No, of course not. Why?”

“You never come, for one thing.” He sounds pettish. “Everybody hates me.”

“Oh, come on, now.”

He shakes his taurine head. “Sorry. I’ve just been down in the dumps these days.”

“So I gathered.”

The minotaur sighs. “They’re never going to let me out of here. I’m a total monster. Even if I got out, what could I do? Can’t exactly get a job, right? Let alone a girlfriend. Apart from eating people, I don’t have any marketable skills.” He gives his words a bitter twist. “I feel like I don’t have a future. Because I can’t change. It’s like… like wandering through a night with no moon or stars. I’m so depressed.”

You have no idea how to respond.

“And I’m always hungry. Always hungry.”

Your scalp crawls. You start to sweat. “That sounds awful.” You sit stock still, but your eyes dart frantically, searching for an exit.

“I know why you came here,” says the minotaur in soft, measured syllables. He rises to his feet.

“No reason, really. In fact, I’ve got to get moving now.”

“No.”

You giggle. Your entire body goes clammy.

“I told you to stay put. Didn’t I say that?” He snorts sharply. “You never listen to me. It pisses me off. You hear me?”

“Um.”

“It always ends up like this. It’s always my emotions that are stronger. Don’t you know how I feel about you? Won’t you stay here with me?”

“I am here for you.”

“But you’ll leave someday?”

“No, never. I’m here for you, baby. Forever.” You scan desperately for a way out, but escape is impossible. “For as long as you want me.”

“I know why you came here,” repeats the minotaur.

Your blood runs cold.

“Your skin looks so soft. Succulent.”

“You promised. You weren’t going to eat me.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“But you promised.” You’re on the verge of panic—of tears.

“You knew I was here. I’m always here. And you came, didn’t you? You know what I am. Always a monster. Always hungry. Always depressed. Always in the darkness. Always waiting.”

“This time I just want to go home. Please.”

“You little bitch.”

“I’ll come back. I promise. I just want to go.” Your panic peaks. “Please.”

“You’re just trying to fuck with me.”

“Please let me go home.” Tears of terror wet your cheeks.

The minotaur towers over you, his eyes full of rage and hatred. “Fine. Whatever. Get out.”

“I’ll come back.”

“See if I care.”

“I promise.”

You back away and turn a corner. And another. The minotaur’s breath is on your neck—no, that’s an illusion. Turn right. Right. Left. Left again. You stumble into a run, searching for the way out.

But you can’t remember how you got in.

Dale Stromberg studied writing with the novelists Richard Bankowsky and Doug Rice in Sacramento, and lives in Malaysia now with his family.

The Martyr’s Palm

Paper-based billing, unlike automatic bank transfer,
compels one to decide whether to do what one must.

At the supermarket, only two cash registers are operating. After evaluating the customers and cashiers, trying to guess which line will move faster, Beatrix Sakakino tentatively chooses the one on the right.

Is the world mist? she wonders. Or am I the mist?

She remembers his hands. His elbows. His substantial shoulders.

If I’m only proud of myself when I’m quiet, why can I never stay quiet?

His skin smelled like tobacco. His breath when asleep was irregular and turbulent.

Am I doing the same old thing for a brand new reason?

She has come to buy milk—that’s her pretext, anyway. The walk from her apartment was refreshing. The year is just warming.

Does another person’s shame give me the right to behave shamefully?

She likes her neighborhood. It’s a quaint street, a mix of tiny shops and modest homes. It all has to end.

Should I hate him? Am I in love with being in love? Is self-destruction really so romantic?

The year will run out. Winter always comes back. And she’s going to leave this neighborhood. She wants to—it’s a great comfort to plan to leave.

Am I just a pocket of lukewarm air?

Sometimes the least painful way to leave somebody is for them to leave you.

Do people really mix their souls together?

A look at the other cashier’s line shows that it’s moving faster than hers. Which gives her a moment longer.

I never have.

Dale Stromberg studied writing with the novelists Richard Bankowsky and Doug Rice in Sacramento, and lives in Malaysia now with his family.

The mustangs closed the distance between us rapidly. Against the wind the tail of each was straight, pointing at the clods and dust behind. Manes were flagging wildly. In the short time I had I put my camera in its pack, checked to make sure the GPS was activated on my cell–my wife makes me do that–then placed it in the pack, zipped it up and tossed it to the side a few feet. What they say is true, about thinking about your life when death may be imminent. I thought of my family and my transgressions and the things I would change if I had a do-over. It was quick-fire thought and clear. I heard the approaching horses, but my mind had images of other life matters. I did not think about the good I have done. I don’t know if that is normal. I don’t know if a person is supposed to plead, to level the scales of good and bad, or tip it to the good. It did not matter, at the time. It seemed that in the wild there is no place for worrying about what comes next, after the end. There is only the current, the instant where you are bare before the universe. It had been a long day, full of hours that were unremarkable, no longer available. It was dusk when the mustangs came, galloping across a range that has been grazed nearly bare. The quake from their hooves stronger with each stride. I turned to stone, to granite, in hope they would pass, but they did not. The group stopped and sniffed and nuzzled me. They were tame. They liked the smell and licked my leather jacket to get a taste of it. I have no photo of the happening to download, only stiff, hot coffee from the thermos in my truck, the shame of fearing friendly beasts and the realization that my age is sprinting ahead of me. Faster than the gallop of the mustangs.

Steve Meador has three books of poetry published, the full length “Throwing Percy from the Cherry Tree” and two chapbooks, A Good Sharp Knife and Pack Your Bags. His work appears regularly in print or online journals, resulting in numerous nominations for awards. However, he has yet to see his name at or near the top of any list, so, he continues to sell homes, in the Tampa area, for a living.

She handed it to me then, I dunno, how I did it—knew I shouldn’t, but I just sliced me a slice of fruit with the ol’ Barlow knife while I was looking at a coiled up snake, who’d been talking to my woman.

Yes, damnit, I know I should have been suspect of a talking snake. Howsoever, first thing I know, I was making moonshine, skip  and go naked foolin’ round til waay after midnight, every-night, everything seemed clear for a while, but trouble was I ended up havin’-to-get-a-job, plus plow the farm  and then the woman left, I guess I blamed her for everything and that was wrong,  and I had to take care of the kids too,  and keeping’ the house from fall’n apart..  No more hunting’ and fishing’ just making mortgage payments for a farm I had been given free and clear long ago. Before the bank was even a notion, and it seems like there was a time when there was just plants and animals and clear blue sky, white clouds and the low and high blue flint hills and the woman had really just been a part of me, that couldn’t no more leave than I could say anything bad about anything, and having kids didn’t involve them growing up and killing each other. Back then I don’t ever remember screaming in the middle of the night either.

James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don’t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA) and Flash Fiction and Rue Scribe have all featured one or more of his stories.

James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don’t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA) and Flash Fiction and Rue Scribe have all featured one or more of his stories.

A Woman’s Voice

Well realize—he’d already named the animals!

I didn’t really have anything to do. Yes, we did walk in the garden every evening. So, I must admit maybe I was bored, but the serpent was an intellectual and he made me laugh, and I was laughing when I tasted it. I wanted to change the names of some of the animals; I must admit I never asked if I could, neither of them said I couldn’t.  It just seemed like it was a bargain already made. Oh, he would do anything for me!  And well, I didn’t even know that he hadn’t named all the animals. Didn’t find that out until, well, after we were outside and some of these other animals seemed to be intent on eating us.

Oh, this surprised me! This thing called fear, but now I like eating meat!  But now the earth is hard.

Though now, I’m not bored with him any more I must admit. He protects and takes care of me, but these children, oh if I didn’t have him, as much as I love them, it would be impossible because he guides them into a place they can find as their own. Yet you know, I think someday one of them may kill the other and I cannot imagine this. 

I do miss those walks when it was the presence of His love, was as constant as breathing. Now there are only times when I look at him and vaguely remember. Still he can be bad. Now he growls from time to time, and once after drinking he hit me. And this was not like him, and I bled, and now I bleed regularly and what have we done?

I killed the snake last week and afterwards I heard him laugh from the grove in the garden. We can’t go there anymore, but then again maybe it was from the forest beyond. I’m afraid of that place. Anyway, I saw the snake again the next day, I know, I should’ve known there was something wrong with a talking snake—but then don’t you know, I had no idea what wrong was?

Now I still know where there are flowers by a quiet pool. Perhaps I could go there and come back? If I leave him it will be dangerous. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll go there for a short while and then come back. Oh, my heart breaks when he screams in the middle of the night!”

Mr. Quarrell was born in 1946, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He has so far survived public schools, community college, and university (his baccalaureate degree is in English but written in Latin), the US Air Force, and various employment. His work has appeared in such outlets as Dark Ink Magazine, Rue Scribe, and Coffin Bell. He lives and writes in New Hampshire.

Bigger Than a Ferret-Polecat

Hugh gazed out through the French doors that opened onto the garden. “It’s still there,” he said, pointing with his pipe.

“What’s still where?” Hester replied, without looking up from her crossword.

“Can’t tell what, exactly” he said, “it’s biggish though, and dark.”

“Really?” She put down the Times. “How big? Where?”

“It’s a lot bigger than a ferret-polecat,” he said, smiling. “Just beyond the pergola. Slunk out of the potting shed and climbed up the grape arbor this morning while I was watering the hibiscus.”

Hester hoisted herself to her feet on the second try and shuffled to the vantage point that had captivated her husband. “Another of your little forest friends?” She looked toward the lawn perfunctorily. “Where?” she demanded, squinting. “I don’t see anything. What’s a ferret-polecat?”

“Never mind, just a joke,” said Hugh, shaking his head. He fastened his hands on her shoulders and turned her a bit to the right. He pointed alongside her head with his pipe in the direction of the pergola and grape arbor.

“There,” he said. “You’ll have to wait ‘til it moves to see it, it’s perfectly camouflaged.”

Hester peered for a few seconds, then turned away from the door. “It’s your brain that’s camouflaged,” she said, pouring a refill from her breakfast pitcher of Bloody Marys. “You probably saw a skunk.”

As she set the pitcher down, a noise that blended a shriek and a growl floated in from the garden through the open window. Hester’s face went ashen; her hand froze on the pitcher handle.

“Some skunk,” said Hugh, grinning around the bit of his pipe.

“What a hideous racket,” she said. “Close the damned door!” She downed her Bloody Mary and returned to the couch and the crossword.

Hugh took his vintage side-by-side Chekhov shotgun down from its rack near the mantle. “Off for my walk, Muffin,” he said, laying it over his arm. “Back by lunch, I expect.” He went out, with the French doors left ajar.

At lunchtime there was no sign of Hugh. Hester made her own sandwich, accompanied by grumbling and muttering and dollops of mayonnaise splupping onto the floor.

She was snoring on the sofa when the sun went down. She never saw the big dark form flow down from the pergola and skulk across the lawn. If the French doors had been closed, it might not have got in at all. Or at least the noise of something trying to open them might have wakened her in time. As it was, she never heard the next shrieking growl, this time with a snarl embroidered on, from the lawn just beyond the French doors. And well after dark, she never heard Hugh’s jaunty, “Back again, Old Thing, sorry to be so long,” wafting in through the open doors.

Rachel T. Smith is an American creative writer and physical therapist living in Germany, temporarily.

Future Surgeons

The smell doesn’t seem to bother me, dries out my sinuses and burns my throat at first. Her face doesn’t seem to bother me like I thought it would, like it does my partner. The body, Her, has no name; an age and cause of death, but no name. There is a clear rule about not nicknaming them, but we all do, give them nicknames. And we all get attached, possessive even.

Of the fifteen bodies, I dissect one half of Her body with my partner. When we leave two more students share the same side of Her. Between the four us, in the first few weeks, we make a real mess. Occasionally, I get to cross to Her other side for organs like the spleen and descending colon but for the most part this one half of a person is mostly mine for two semesters.

I feel bad that I am not good at dissection. I severe Her cephalic vein before I can trace it down the arm.  I apologize for it, a soft whisper under my breath I hope my partner doesn’t hear. I take a needle and thread and sew the vein. My first surgery.

My partner cuts too deep with the bone saw, damages her right lung. Another first surgery. I apologize for this too. The needle and thread are not going to fix Her mutilated tissue.

We trudge on, following the instructions, pacing ourselves but not rushing.

The more I slice and scrape, the more accurate I become, the less apologies I make to Her. I learn I can grasp the edge of Her skin with my tweezers, pulling, while sliding my gloved finger through her spider-web of fascia. No need to cut.

I don’t always rush to use the scalpel. I feel things before I move them, recognize the slimy worm of a nerve, the coagulated pebble of blood trapped in an artery and I begin to say, thank-you.

The pearlescent sheen of Her iliotibial band brings tears to my eyes and I thank Her again.  I keep thanking Her at every new discovery, every new realization that I have read in a textbook but never really appreciated until she came along. Reciting the instructions aloud, I perform.

My partner says she just can’t when we arrive at the face. Her face. A towel my partner never worked without has been there since we rolled her supine. It is time I remove the shroud and expose Her beauty and Her boldness at allowing us our lessons. Her thin white hair is matted against Her cheek and I brush it aside. My partner, my friend, is pale and shaking whispering, “Why must we do this?”

 I tell her to get the guide, start reading. I stay focused knowing once we’ve started, our deconstruction will be easier. Her face will become muscles, nerves, landmarks to identify and be tested on.

If this part had been in the beginning, we would have mangled Her, made Her unidentifiable by bumbling fingers and careless use of the blade. But this is the end, we are all better, skilled even, in our abilities to flay Her without destruction.