Jim survived decades as a creative director and writer at two renowned U.S. advertising agencies. He’s now enjoying life as a freelance writer and has a special on Tuesdays, where he offers 50% off on nouns and all words beginning with “Q.”

Riding the Rolling Rain Forest

Riding Chicago’s elevated commuter train (the “el”) back in the ‘60s was more than a ride to work and home again. Back in the Primeval Era, you had to be made of special stuff to survive this rolling rain forest.

Riding the el on a sweltering August day was a near claustrophobic experience. And the further you rode in this heat-encased steel chamber, the hotter and more humid it became. Before long, an entire weather system formed inside. Low-lying clouds stretched from one end to the other. Once, I thought I saw a flamboyance of flamingoes pass through. But I may have been suffering from heat delusions.

At each stop, new people crowded aboard and soon the aisles filled and the windows steamed up, further enhancing that closed-in feeling. Right on cue, the summer rainstorm would begin and each new arrival boarded drenched. One gentleman stood before me in his stylish Burberry raincoat and jaunty brimmed hat. I was reading a newspaper, trying to avoid eye contact with these apparent flood survivors. As the gentleman leaned down to see the Cubs score in my paper, a river of rain streamed from his brim, formed a tributary that ran down me, onto my paper, down my leg, onto my Gold Toe socks and ultimately created a small lagoon in my Florsheims.

The el that ran through my hometown of Evanston had a special kind of torture. The woven straw seats had seen better days. Perhaps first woven from Nile reeds by Egyptian basket makers, the cane on these seats was breaking apart and had many sharp ends. Slide onto a seat and you could find yourself suddenly lanced by an angry cane end. To remove it, you had to slowly slide back the way you came. In today’s terms, this movement was kind of a slow motion seated twerk. To suddenly stand meant that your pants got ripped, the pain intensified and you were left with an unwanted cane implant.

I always felt sorry for out of town visitors or first-time riders listening carefully for their stop to be announced. The speakers for the train’s public address system were so ancient, it became an aural impossibility to correctly hear a simple announcement about an upcoming stop. “Loyola and Sheridan” became “Royalaaaa and Chadwinnnn.” “Howard, end of the line” was garbled into “Allward, Bend Your Mind.” Whoever was on the mike sounded as though he’d been chloroformed and the rag stuffed in his mouth for safekeeping.

Today’s el riders probably ride in cushy comfort with Wi-Fi access, a special designer coffee car and Bluetooth announcements you can actually understand. They’ll never know what we endured back in the day.

And they’ll never know about the survival skills and adroit moves once needed to successfully step through all those flamingo droppings.

R.C. Weissenberg is a writer and artist who spends most of his time in the Southwestern United States. He enjoys sketching, playing guitar, and, most of all, reading obsessively.

Matter

            She stood on the upraised platform in the crowded room, wearing a yellow dress. On a table before her lay a frightening lump of flesh, squirming left and right, but unable to shift its position.

            “A garish color,” someone in the crowd said.

            She pulled a knife from somewhere behind her and held it up to catch and radiate the single focused light.

            “You’d think she’d have an advisor,” another person commented.

            She held the knife still.

            “Or at least a mirror.”

            She plunged the knife into the sudden writhing mass. Blood sprayed onto her dress, but little of it reached the audience.

            “Red on yellow’s even worse.”

            She held the mass down with her left hand and plucked out the knife. The glob squirmed pathetically. Then she stabbed it once more.

            “Complete lack of taste.”

            She stabbed it again.

            “Vulgar.”

            Again.

            “It’s discouraging,” somebody said.

            She stabbed the mass until its slightest twitching ceased. Without cleaning her hands, she picked up the hunk of flesh and tossed it into the crowd, where somebody caught it.

            “I hope the next one’s better dressed,” someone said.

She left the stage to mix with the crowd.

            “That’s what matters,” came a faint reply.

Lacey Mercer is 40 years old and lives in Buckeye, Arizona.

My First Memory

It was my first memory. I am sure I’ve had many more before it, but this is the first one I can recall. This memory shines vividly in my mind and it was of him.  I was about 4 or 5 years old in my Grandma’s backyard. I always went to stay with my grandma in the summer. She had an amazing house – the kind you see when you’re driving and turn to the person next to you and say, “Wow, it would be nice to live there!” It was white, two-stories, with a wrap-around porch, and balcony on the second floor. It was a farmhouse and although looked picturesque from the road, up close, you could see the small imperfections and wear left by many generations of use and love. My family didn’t have money, but they had that house. My grandmother used to tell me, “Someday this house will be yours, and you will raise your family here.” I would smile and run through the halls, into the backyard playing and laughing like any child, not knowing how precious those moments really were.

The backyard was big, with flowers lining the house and a large oak tree on the side. In my memory was swinging on a tire swing that hung from the oak tree, being pushed by Ethan Myers. He was one year older than I was and tall for his age. He lived a few houses away and would walk the quarter mile down the dirt road almost every day to play. Ethan lived with his mother, father, and three much older brothers. By the time Ethan was born, his parents were done raising children and let him roam free, which was fine with me. I loved playing with Ethan. He was kind and patient. I think his reason for coming over was as much to play, as it was to stay for supper. His family was poor, so going without a meal was a normal occurrence. My Grandmother didn’t mind though. She was the kind of woman that would feed the entire neighborhood if they came over. While Ethan pushed me on the swing, I laughed and yelled, “Higher, higher!” On the back swing, the tire hit the trunk of the large oak tree. The jolt sent me flying. I landed on my shoulder and could feel the tears starting to come. Ethan was instantly by my side, “Beth, are you okay, are you okay?”

I winced in pain, “My shoulder.”  I reached up clutching it tightly as the tears began to leave my eyes. Ethan pushed my sleeve up to examine the damage. There was no blood, but it was a little red. The next thing he did is what is burned into my memory – He gently brought his face down, closed his eyes, and softly kissed my shoulder. He pulled his head up and looked at me wiping away one of my tears, “Is that better?”  His words asked with the innocence only a child could have. I nodded, and it was better. I should have known then to hold on to him tightly, to not let him slip through my fingers as life can do to us with so many people we hold dear.

Years later, here I stand; an old woman looking over over Ethan’s grave not knowing him past my childhood. My life was my own fault, a string of unfortunate decisions only compounded by the one not to choose him. I stand here feeling sorry for myself, sorry for the life that could have been, and all the missed happiness that my mind wonders with. The scenarios built up in my head about the life I could have had with him, but that was not the path I chose. In our youth, we do not recognize how the smallest decision we make on a whim can shape the outcome of our short time. How some people who could bring us so much happiness are put in our path and we let them float away like bubbles in the air. So here I stand, remembering my first memory, and at my age, I am sure very close to my last one. Now I realize that true regret is not something you can fix; it is something you hold onto. It feels like a hollow place in your chest, constantly reminding you of the wasted years and the foolish choices made in the arrogance of youth.

For years, Jim was a creative director (copywriter) at two top advertising agencies. He wrote a variety of national TV commercials and ads and is on a first name basis with the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Green Giant and several Keebler Elves.

Florida on My Mind

I had no idea she was a sword swallower.

How was I to know? Watching her delicately drizzle a dollop of honey onto her biscuit, take a delicate bite and slowly swallow it revealed nothing about her unusual profession.

Hearing her backstory in a Sarasota, Florida coffee shop was an eye-opener. Once the winter headquarters for the Ringling Brothers Circus, Sarasota became the forever home of trapeze artists, clowns and stone deaf human cannonballs.

My next Florida encounter was with a roofer and serial biter named Harley. He recently moved into his 308-lb. girlfriend’s tiny home where he shares any remaining space with her two out-of-wedlock kids. Recently, he and his girlfriend got into a fight and he took a chunk out of her upper arm.

The girlfriend isn’t without her issues, either. Having that 308-lb. “canvas” to work on, she has covered herself with tattoos that appear to tell the history of the world, with very little space left over for next year.

I met twin sisters who have been battling for the past 30 years. One has an eating disorder of such magnitude, she eats only small amounts of salmon and shrimp, then cleanses daily. While she and her husband are at work, their dog is locked in his cage and forced to listen to Christian music for 10 hours. The dog is not pleased.

Days later, I met someone who works for a Port-a-Potty company. Her job is to dispatch drivers to pick up and deliver these plastic palaces to alligator and snake-infested building sites. There are no words to describe the state of these potties that have been used all week at an insanely hot, humid Florida building site.

One day, I met a chain-smoking, overweight middle-aged woman who was about to have a “Pirate” wedding. Guests were going to be encouraged to dress accordingly and to bring a bottle of rum. Wooden legs and eye patches were to be optional.

Meanwhile, trying to eat healthy in Florida is a lost cause. Bacon finds its way into virtually everything on the menu. All fish seems to be fried. Salads are seemingly nonexistent. Looking around a strip mall breakfast joint, you see folks with massive guts, and chowing down on biscuits and gravy. They just don’t seem right in the head.

A trip to a Dairy Queen exposes you to people who look like they’ve either just robbed a mini-mart, are thinking of robbing a mini-mart or have just been released from prison for robbing a mini-mart. How else to explain the conversation that stopped as I walked by or the lingering, smoldering assessment of me (Cop? Detective? Snitch?) as I got my Blizzard Blast and made quickly for the door?

For family fun, adventure, lasting memories and eye-popping experiences, who needs Disney World? It’s all right there for free as you wander around Florida.

Carly E. Husick is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. Her favorite activities include watching Queer Eye on Netflix, binge reading YA novels, and playing with her new baby nephew. She has most recently been published in Gravel Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and FlashFiction Magazine.

Catching

           In the bathroom she blacks out sitting on the toilet and when she comes back to the room, doing the one-two-three-triple-I’m-not-an-RA-knock she says she dreamed she was Lady Gaga playing a sold out concert at Madison Square Garden. She tips more Vlad into my solo cup half-filled with fizzing peach fresca and when I take a sip the cheap vodka goes down with an after-taste like what nail polish remover mixed with rubbing alcohol smells like. Nina is spiked up black hair and a heart that she’s carved into her own chest where her right breast peaks out under her navy-blue camisole. I’d thought it was a drawing at first, something she could wipe off in the shower down the hall, but then she told me. It’s a tattoo, she said and showed me how she used a razor blade to etch the edges and a balled-up tissue to blot the blood. I reached out and ran my fingers across the surface, it was pebbled and puckered against my skin, a scab forming on soft tissue.

           Nina goes to the gym every day after breakfast. Once I went with her, climbed on the treadmill by hers, and walked while I watched TV on the horizontal screen of my smart phone, cheap earbuds crammed in my ears. Nina set the incline high so she climbed a mountain and dabbed at sweat with a dandelion yellow towel in her black converse high tops and she started to run so she was climbing and running and sweating and I could almost see the bones in her chest and that scar pushing out through her skin. A skeleton running.

            She used to have problems with eating, she told me when we met the first week of classes. She would come over to my room and raid the care packages my grandmother sent – dried sugared strawberries and Nutella and my roommate’s cartons of goldfish disappearing between her chapped lips while I sat on my bed and practiced the poem I had to perform for my English class. Give it more umph, she said between finger licks to free her skin of chocolate, say it like you mean it.

            When she started sleeping with my friend Jared he turned down a dark corner and I found him one night on the quad sitting with his backpack in his lap, hands buried beneath the zippers, winding around the knotted neck of a noose contemplating the worth of his own life against hers. Nina’s. And I saw how he watched her at meals counting the bites she took from her plate, her fork dancing through angel hair pasta and crunching against frozen lettuce leaves as if the cacophony of silverware against pottery would distract her captive audience from the food that did not travel past her lips. I watched Jared watch Nina shrink to cellophane wrapped around bones and I watched as the heart on her chest sunk down and the blistered hardened goose flesh of its healing scar remained an open wound.

            And when I went to my professor about it I said, I’m worried. I sat in a chair across from his desk and said, I think her issues are catching, spreading. And my professor just looked at me like – what do you want me to do about it?

Azaria Brown is a freelance writer and illustrator. Soon, she will be moving to Indiana from the Applachian area of Virginia. When she isn’t writing or drawing she’s crying while reading someone else’s written work, listening to a podcast or pretending that America isn’t in a state of disarray.

Waterman Men

All the Waterman-men gather for their monthly card game on the back porch of the Saint James’s, as long as the air aint too thick with humidity or chill or the smell of blood bleeding through black skin. A Gaines gathering of folding chairs and a tacky card table where hands of spades and Gin get dealt in quick succession. They chat and laugh quietly, so not to wake up Mr. Saint James’s six children, who sleep soundly, packed into the four-bedroom house with the dishes tucked in the cabinets and the laundry folded and in drawers, but the house will be in shambles come 9am. Taking turns marveling at the garden in the backyard and the trinkets Mr. St. James scoured from construction jobs they see through the window, the Waterman-men mumble and smile and enjoy freedom, whatever it mean to them.

They drink cups of moonshine, reveling in the burn that slides down their throats. Take this time to forget the group of Waterman-young men whose bodies were found at the ends of ropes; their skin gray, their faces bloated, their shoes taken off of their feet. They heard that the young men went out to a party, dressed in their good slacks and loose shirts, prepared to sweat in a room packed wall to wall. They were stopped by a group of Main Street-men while the rest of Waterman allowed their brains to sleep, but their spirits to feel conflicted. The young men were beaten and hoisted up, all from the same broad oak tree, all controlled by the same puppeteer, each branch a finger luring the young men to bitter release and forcing it into their hands when they did not reach out.

The Waterman-men tote the line between keeping their heads down and wondering if they next; working for Waterman-whites just hoping not to turn up Waterman-dead. Paying at the front and walking in the back and they don’t know what’s worse, having their own entrance or not being able to get in at all.

Different shades of brown and black faces unshell peanuts and mumble about the weather, avoiding what they already know. A neat row of shoes lines the St. James porch, as the Waterman-men rest their feet on the soft wood, feeling the cool air on the corn ridden toes all touched by gout. The wind blow past the peach tree and they stick their noses in the air in an attempt to smell the cobbler that they know will come when the fruit is firm with juice and the St. James boys pluck them from the trees, filling baskets, tossing some aside for deer to stumble upon.

“What you gonna do?” Mr. Young asks, staring at a losing hand like it aint so bad.

Mr. St. James don’t know, but he make a quick decision so that he look like he do. He listen to the buzzing that ring through the air from the bugs that lure in the St. James garden and slap down a card that he know wont win the game, but it’ll make sure he stick around to play a little bit longer.

Mark Miller is a librarian who splits time between Minneapolis and Tuscaloosa. He has published dozens of poems, short stories, and essays under his three pseudonyms.  His novel, The Librarian at the End of the World, is forthcoming from Montag Press in 2019.

Sleepwalking 

She regretted that he knew her secrets. But it felt good to write him things she would disclose to no one else. She was attracted to him, yes, but also repulsed by him. Two magnets is what we are, she thought. She was sleepy and didn’t trust him, didn’t even like him, in fact, and thought she should stop typing.  Yet here she was, driven more by bored inertia than excited energy, more even than her need for sleep. Okay, what do you want to know?

Anything you want to tell me, he wrote. She didn’t, at the moment, but could, if she wished, tell him everything. All the things. The sounds and shapes and colors of her childhood, the lover whose sweat she drank off his skin in ecstasy, the hole in the middle of her where god once resided. She wrote, when I face north I will tell you everything. South, nothing. Her mind was fuzzy.  Is there a reason why magnets exist? They do, obviously. But why?  I don’t even care what we are. Why are we, is what I want to know. Then she fell asleep and dreamed of window washers skimming the sky and cleaning glass. But there was nothing to see, inside or out. Emptiness on both sides.

She also dreamed of a man with no face, following her from car to car on a never-ending train.  No sooner would she enter a car and push halfway through its loitering commuters than would the door behind her open, revealing his presence. She hurried to the next door, crossed through to the next car, and pushed through the next crowd, only to look behind her again, and see his featureless countenance.

When she woke it was still night. The lump next to her rose and fell with her husband’s breathing. She tiptoed across the cold floor into the kitchen. She looked out the back window and traced the familiar tree limbs lit by the bulb poled in the backyard. She shivered.

The dreams meant something or nothing. The man meant nothing or something. Magnets attracted or repelled. Regardless of the science, there was no reason for it unless there was. Perhaps we are not magnets, she thought. That was too easy.

Outside she climbed the grey-brown branches with her eyes. She tried to imagine what color they would be if she painted them. What the eye sees and the mind knows are rarely the same. She couldn’t remember what he looked like. She would recognize him if she saw him, but now, alone in the dark, she tried to picture his face but could not. She was aware that for some time she had been willing herself not to feel the cold.  The sensation had registered on her skin, but she had refused to recognize its effect. Now she was shaking.

She crawled back into bed and realized her life was both truth and lie. It was profound in its discord of want and circumstance, alive with need and dead of hope, mundane in its routines. The things that gave meaning were the opposite of the things that gave joy, and she worked to maintain a grasp of both, much as it stretched her into odd contortions of self. In this way she was both true to herself and a lie to the world, and vice versa. No one would know what to do with her, nor could she figure out the puzzle of the world. The space between the pieces was the only place she felt honest.

She lay in bed as her husband snored. She thought of the man again for the last time that night. No, we are not magnets. We are nothing. But I tell him everything because he doesn’t judge me. He is the void I hurl myself into knowing there will never be a ground to break my fall. He can love me because he doesn’t have to depend on me. I can love him, and he will still not know me.  If I throw myself into him, he cannot hurt me. He is nothing at all. She closed her eyes to the dark room and, as always, could not remember what he looked like. Yet she knew when she woke she would imagine him again.

Carly E. Husick is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. Her favorite activities include watching Queer Eye on Netflix, binge reading YA novels, and playing with her new baby nephew. She has most recently been published in Gravel Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and FlashFiction Magazine.

Mail Order Fruit

            At seven her favorite food was apricots. She liked the way the tiny fruit fit in the curve of her hand, even then. There was something about the lightness of the fruit, the juicy gush and sticky rush of that first bite that made her grin, as if the tart aftertaste were lifting up the edges of her lips. Her mother kept them in a glass bowl that looked like curving translucent palm fronds supported the mountain of apricots, their fuzzed backs rolling against one another like the hills of the valley they lived in.

            At twelve her mother packed plastic baggies of dried apricots for her to bring in her lunch bag to school. She’d tried bringing the fresh fruit but it often got bruised by lunch time, a soft brown spot mushing against her teeth when she bit in before hitting the gnarled walnut of a pit at its center. The dried apricots looked, to her, like shriveled tongues and their insides tasted of velvet, soft against her mouth, smooth and rich as though filled with preserves. Her mother kept the dried apricots in a glass jar by the stove, the wrinkled flesh of the fruit piled high next to the Kosher salt.

            At fourteen her mother met a new man and on the weekends she was shipped a town over to stay with her grandmother who had a floral wallpapered kitchen and a cuckoo clock that looked like a black cat. On the hour the cat’s tongue would dart out of its mouth and its tail would sway with the seconds. It bellowed like a ship’s horn instead of dinging and sometimes, on Sunday afternoons before her mother came to pick her up, she would follow the tail’s trajectory and nearly fall out of her seat at the blaring of the hour. Her grandmother made fresh apricot jam, slicing the fruit and boiling it down in a grey pot on the old gas stove, adding sugar by the cupful. She ate the jam, pale orange and quaveringly gelatinous, on scones her grandmother baked fresh every Friday. It sat rich and tart and sweet all at once on her tongue and the cat wagged its tail and stuck out its own tongue as though asking for jam.

            At twenty-one on a trip with some girls from her college she tasted apricot-wine. They were deep in the valley surrounded by vineyards, grape vines crawling up the hills around them. There were four of them, all taking the same history course at the local university, and they stood leaning against the butcher block bar while men in white button downs served them quarter cups of wine to taste. The apricot-wine was a pale blush color with little bubbles of carbonation floating through it like clouds. When she took her first sip of it she swore that she’d been blasted back to seven when she bit into her first apricot and was met with an explosion of sweet unexpected flavor married with the smooth furred texture of the apricot’s skin.

            At twenty-three her mother had signed her up for a mail order fruit delivery service that sent a carton of apricots to her door at the beginning of every week. At first she kept pace with the fruit. She ate it fresh, she boiled it down into jam, baked it into muffins. But when her mother got sick and she was called away from her small home, on the edge of the valley, to spend stretches of time in the hospital fetching ice chips, she fell behind. A neighbor, who’d been given a key for just such circumstances, brought the apricots into the house every week and set them on the kitchen counter to rest. These apricots never seemed to go bad as they had in her lunch bag as a child, they instead stayed perfectly round and sunset-colored, piling in the corners of the kitchen, spilling from what had once been the utensil drawer.

            When her mother died she brought home the glass bowl shaped of palm fronds and filled it with the fruit. She set the glass jar that had once held the dried apricots next to her own Kosher salt and filled it with the peach-colored globes. The fruit spilled from her cabinets, filled the entirety of her dishwasher, and carpeted the floor like a round-topped shag rug, soft against her feet. She tried calling the mail order company, tried telling them that her mother was dead, there would be no more payments, no more fruit, but the apricots continued to arrive. Each week a new carton of them appeared on her doorstep and she’d carry them inside. If they’d gone rotten she might have considered getting rid of them, but they stayed tart and sweet and tense at first bite the way they should, and she couldn’t bring herself to throw out the fruit that stayed, somehow, just as she liked it – on the cusp of ripeness.

            At twenty-four the apricots began to taste sour. It wasn’t just the ones that filled her kitchen, and now dining and living rooms. She’d thought of that as she brought the fresh ones into her home and bit into them to find the fruit’s flesh gravelly and sour and so she’d gone to the market and bought a singular apricot. She’d wrapped it in the cellophane bags that were kept on a thick roll by the fruit displays and paid thirty-five cents for it. She hadn’t even waited until she got home to sink her teeth into the soft flesh. It tasted rotten. Cloying and muddy. It tasted almost of death, the way her mother had smelled in her last hours – musky and rank and yet somehow unbearably sweet.

            At home there was another carton of apricots waiting on her door step. She kicked it away instead of scooping it up, as she normally did. When she opened her door she had to put her weight behind it and with a great heave she cleared a path in the maw of her home, a wedge devoid of apricots. When the door closed behind her with a creak and click that reminded her of the bellow of her grandmother’s cuckoo clock, she squinted against the dark to see the distorted shadows of her home cast onto the bumpy surface of thousands of apricots. They were everywhere. They coated her walls now, climbed her kitchen counters in pyramidic piles, they peered out of the crevices between her couch cushions and filled the gaps between her books. They sat in her kitchen chairs and lodged themselves in drawers and cabinets and appliances. They filled her sink. Still holding the cellophane bag from the market she first sat and then laid down on her kitchen floor. The fruits popped and burst beneath her weight and she felt the front of her shirt grow wet as they bled. She pressed her face into the rounded tops of the apricots and, closing her eyes, pretended she was skin to skin with her mother, feeling the soft fur of the apricots as the silken down that had once coated her mother’s cheeks.

Phebe Jewell lives in the Pacific Northwest. When she’s not writing, she can be found walking her dog in the woods.

Crosswalk

“I’ve always wanted to meet an angel,” she helps me to my feet.

One hand in hers, I stand and look down at broken glass littering the street. I must get a broom. No one should be hurt because of me. Her hands are small, but strong. Her eyes meet mine. I could stand on this crosswalk forever, holding her hand. She found me. Knows me. 

“Cmon, Gabriel,” tugging me toward the sidewalk. “The light’s gonna change any second now.”

“But the glass,” I point to the shards at our feet. Even angels drop things when they’re in a hurry.

Pulling at my tee shirt, “Cmon.”

I can’t move. The glass is teeth knocked out of the mouth of the sky. I must stay with the pieces until I can put them back together. The sidewalk is crowded with people looking down. I want to tell them the sky is blue, the earth is round, that we are air, but my voice is broken.
            “Move, asshole!” a large man shouts from his truck, hand on the horn as he slows into a right turn. Speeding uphill, he leans out the window and gives me the finger.  Bits of glass caught in his tire treads catch sun and wink at me.

I reach for her, but she’s gone.