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.