Nicole E. Beck has worked various stints as a bank teller, an office drudge, and a retail bookseller, while completing a bachelor’s in filmmaking and art history. She likes history, museums, and long poems.

Interval

     His motel room overlooked a patch of grass, a dumpster and the divided highway, seen from the second floor. He heard the bathroom faucet drip. Propping himself up, he noticed a pair of loafers on the other side of the bed. Dirty socks stuffed inside them. His toes wiggled in his own sneakers, and he got up carefully. Under the armchair he discovered sunglasses. On the seat was a plastic grocery bag containing three red shirts, men’s button-downs, neatly folded. In the bathroom, he turned off the faucet and stumbled against an orange cooler. He took a breath and opened it. The inside was dry and empty.

     He lay on his stomach but sleep evaded him. He aspired to be tenuous, ignored, unreal. It was a puzzle to him why anyone bothered speaking.  He got up and tried on one of the shirts. It fit too tight across his chest. His wrists stuck out beyond the cuff. Looking at his reflection in the window, with his t-shirt sagging under the red button-up, he noticed the stitching on the hem was unraveling. And the red shirt, though fine in all other respects, had one broken button. As he plucked and worried the rough plastic edge a laugh escaped him.

     Someone rapped on the door, three light furtive taps. He checked the lock and chain and then for good measure pulled closed the musty curtains.  At this point seeing the other face was unthinkable, not even a possibility. In a fit of perversity he pulled on the sweat-stiffened socks. A barrage of louder knocks spurred him to slip on the loafers instead of his own shoes. He had been granted this and he was ready to assume ownership of the orange cooler.

     The knocking increased to pounding as he stepped in front of the bathroom mirror. He thought this time he’d find out how long his solitude could stretch. The battering continued as he polished the sunglasses on his shirt, and after twelve hours silence conquered, winning back the room. He took a celebratory trip down the hall, passed the closed blank faces of doors.

Julia Gaughan writes from Lawrence, Kansas, where she lives with her family and books and cats and dog and from which she travels as much as possible. She can be found online through Medium and @julia_gaughan on Twitter. 

The Greater Good

You know that saying about if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day but if you teach a man to fish, he’ll feed himself until the corporations kill all the fish through pollution or unsustainable farming practices and he’ll die because of the lack of universal healthcare to treat his mercury-poisoned blood?

It doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

You know that saying about how a penny saved is a penny earned even though that penny saved doesn’t feed your crying children or pay for your prescription or put the gas in your car to get to your job that only gives you a raise when the minimum wage goes up and can’t earn any interest when it’s just helping stem the tide of overdrafts?

But has anyone tried professional football?

After listening to long long tales of woe all day at her job, Karen Walker comes home and writes short short fiction.

Lonely Lou

Standing in Lou’s smoky, sweltering apartment, Officer Berg fanned his face with his notebook as his partner Munroe tried a new approach.   

“How are you feeling? Anything going on that’d make you hear sounds?” Munroe asked.  

Berg rolled his eyes, mumbling about the psychobabble being taught to recruits these days. 

Bubbles of saliva popped at the corners of Lou’s mouth. “I’m telling you there’s a wailing coming from next door. The sound gets loud, and then it stops. Like right now.” 

“And the three other times we’ve been here this week,” Berg said.

The old man dropped into his chair, jostling a little table. A remote fell to the floor. “I’m not nuts!”

“Sure it isn’t your TV? Some crime show?” Berg smirked. 

“No! Someone’s in agony in there. Maybe being held hostage. You have to investigate!”

Munroe spoke slowly. “Lou, we told you yesterday we found nothing next door. The place is empty. We don’t want to come back again.”

As the officers stepped into the dim hallway—“Wait! Wait!” Lou calling after them—Berg pointed to Munroe. “Take one more look that way. I’ll go this way past the ‘wailing door.’” Leaning in, his ear almost touching the door’s peeling red paint, he grumbled: “There. I’m investigating.”  

A long, ripping, tormented cry pierced the door. 

“Hello. Police. Open the door!” Berg yelled, pounding.  

The wailing rose to a scream. “Open it now. Police!” 

As Munroe sprinted back, calling for back-up on his radio, Lou peeked into the hallway. “You hear it!”  

Berg kicked and kicked the door. Crack by splinter, it weakened until, with two last booming hits by Munroe, the lock snapped. Guns drawn, they stormed into the apartment.  

Lou chuckled as he sat down with a tea. He listened to the wail and smiled. Then, picking up the remote, he pushed the device’s volume button and faded the sound away. Next door, Berg and Munroe were shouting. Outside, tires were screeching and sirens blaring as strobe lights whipped the building. Lonely Lou settled back. His show had finally begun.    

Kristen Langereis is a Dutch-American writer living in Amsterdam. With no pets or children, she still finds ample time to fall behind on daily tasks. She is of the opinion that a sandwich tastes better when made for her by someone else.

  Anatomy of a Cover Up

   I knew a lot about death, even then, including what a dead body smelled like. It’s a fun way to open a conversation. I could tell you what embalmed flesh looked like. It’s flaked skipjack.

     You see, Dad could only eat white meat tuna – albacore packed in water. He took it with bread and butter pickles and too much mayonnaise. He wouldn’t touch skipjack, nor would my mother. She wouldn’t even buy it because it’s poor people food. Dad said skipjack reminded him of the cadavers he worked on in school. He mentioned it every time she made him his tuna sandwich, which was every Friday, and he only finished about half before he’d get that look which said the good tuna had turned from safe to dead in his imagination. So, I always ate that extra half sandwich – thinking it would be a shame to waste it when my mother took such pains to open both a can and a jar.

     I was nine when I thought for sure I would know how a decomposed body might smell. When pilfering a third, or fourth popsicle from the back freezer I had left the door ajar. The majority contents, stuffed every which way next to Lean Cuisines, bags of party ice and popsicles of every flavor were the individually-wrapped remnants of a butchered whole cow. Dad had traded the cow for oral surgery more than five years prior. I remember thinking we were going to pick up an actual, living breathing cow when Mother drove us to the ranch south of the city. I should have been tipped off by the two big coolers she brought, I suppose. But I was young, and happy to be allowed in the front seat next to the air-conditioning. The cow traveled home with us disassembled.

     The steaks, tenderloin, and roasts had been eaten first and the remnants, garbage-meat as Mother called it, lived in our utility room freezer. My carelessness caused everything in the freezer to defrost and dozens of cherry-mottled white butcher paper packages, some visibly stamped Heart/Short-Ribs/Tripe, mingled their bloody juices with a corn syrup rainbow. Mom screamed and shut the door. She said we must to wait until nightfall, while Dad slept, to bring everything to the big black garbage can in the alley.

     When he started to snore she grabbed my hand and a roll of black garbage bags. We snuck out back to clean and dump it all. I think we both knew that even though there was slim chance our family would eat tripe, especially cooked by her, that he still wanted to hang on to it, just in case. I was sworn to silence. But, as it goes with crime, eventually someone finds out. Weekly garbage collection had just happened a few days prior. Everything we hoisted that night into big black garbage bags festered, cooked, and decomposed further within the big black garbage can. Our across-the-alley neighbor called 911 because he thought someone had dumped a dead body. Since he was a cop, I figured he should know. I figured that a dead body smelled like old, dead cow parts, cherry popsicle frostbite and panic.

     I tell that story to this day, never mentioning that now I really know what is the real smell of death, and adding that Dad never thought that the huge amount of dumped meat which had caused a minor neighborhood ruckus was indeed his. Even at the end, we kept that from him too.

James Barr is a freelance writer who created TV commercials, radio spots and ads for a variety of clients. He now loves writing these stories without a client peering over his shoulder or trying to fit 60 seconds of copy into a 30-second spot.

Another Star is Born

All Andy wanted was a quiet night at the movies. But you don’t always get what you want. Instead, what Andy got was a starring role in an acrobatic drama played out in front of a packed house. Andy also had no idea that the lady with the long blond hair seated in front of him, a complete stranger, would become his unwilling co-star.

On that fateful night after work, Andy stopped into the local cinema to see the latest hit. The theater was packed. With a long movie ahead of him, Andy hit the men’s room, and then stopped for the requisite tub of popcorn. All this made him late to the darkened, crowded auditorium. Crawling slowly down the main aisle toward the silver screen, Andy was almost to the very first row before he spotted a seat. Of course, it was inconveniently located in the middle of a very long row.

So Andy began doing the familiar stooped, slow motion sideways crablike shuffle to his seat. Along the way, juggling the overfilled tub, Andy dribbled fresh, hot buttered popcorn down the backs of people in the first row. Finally reaching his seat and just before he sat, Andy realized his fly was open. Somehow, with the tub now under his arm, Andy did a quick zip and began to sit, spilling even more popcorn.

Just then, the woman in front of him screamed and jerked her head back. It seems a long strand of her hair had become entangled in Andy’s zipper as he tried to zip it shut. The plot thickened.

Trapped in this frozen moment, the two unwilling co-stars paused in what appeared to be a very bad yoga pose. The woman’s head was tilted toward the ceiling. Andy was locked in a half seated position, not wanting to actually sit and risk pulling out half of his co-star’s hair. The house lights came on. Ushers rushed from every possible door. The audience stood and for a tiny moment, the whole world stopped.

Seeing the problem, one of the ushers arrived with scissors, but the woman was adamant. She was not having any of her hair cut by an usher. Therefore, a slow motion sideways limbo began. In perfect unison, Andy and the entrapped woman slowly shuffled step by step to the aisle, the hair being passed over the lowered heads of a row of seated moviegoers. With each step, the film stars maintained their frozen poses on their way to the aisle.

Then, they continued their easygoing limbo shuffle up the main aisle, out to the lobby and into the manager’s office. There, someone with adroit fingers and arcane zipper knowledge forced the zipper to release most of its captured hair. A perfect Hollywood ending.

After the police were convinced that there was nothing criminal about this event, the woman returned to her seat while receiving a standing ovation from her loving fans.

Andy, on the other hand, has never been heard from again.