With degrees in Physics and Chemistry, Andy Betz has tutored and taught in excess of 30 years. His novel, short stories, and poems are works still defining his style. He lives in 1974, has been married for 26 years, and collects occupations (the current tally is 95). 

Her House Our Home

I received the phone call. Her voice was weaker than I remember. She wanted to talk for a spell and poke through my life to see how I was getting along. She is my mother and she is nosy, manipulative, and rather selfish. I am her daughter and have tolerated her attributes my entire life. This call was an invitation to come home for the weekend. A simple math calculation verified she would turn 70 this year. She would also celebrate this birthday alone. Maybe it was out of pity, but I agreed. However, I had to return no later than 7pm on Sunday. Slowly, she agreed to my terms. Smiling, I had a small victory today.

When I arrived to her house and let myself in (she always made sure I knew it was her house), I found it a disaster. The entire house required cleaning, the laundry needed attending, and there was this smell of geriatrics permeating every room.

I walked upstairs and found my mother atop soiled sheets with the disheveled look of someone who gave up. Her eyes found me but her smile could not hide her current state. This was not my mother. This was not the woman who demanded an immaculate appearance in both self and state. This woman had one foot in the grave.

Then it hit me, her call to me was a cry for help. For years, she gave all to me and received only a nosy, manipulative, and selfish daughter in return. I turned my back on her house, her manners, and her. I am beginning the autumn of my life. My mother lives in the winter of hers. I held her hands and she understands that I understand. She has nothing left to give. At least she knew to call someone who did.

For the next two months (yes, I quit my job) I scrubbed her house back to its glory days. I forced my mother to exit that 4-poster tomb she calls her bed and rejoin the land of the living.

I opened windows, planted flowers, and took her for walks. She unearthed her recipe book and I began mastering the delicacies she cooked and baked for my (previously) unappreciative palate.

782 Sycamore Street evolved from an impending morgue to the regal elegance it once commanded from all who passed by. I elevated my mother back the Queen status she lorded over others. I could not live knowing my mother existed with any other title.

I planned a return trip when my mother asked me to sit at her kitchen table. She reached for a house key and gave it to me. Her next words, soft humble words, roared among the empty rooms of her house. I will never forget them.

“Take the key. Keep the key. I want you to live here. Permanently. Not in my house, but in our home.”

My mother grows older each day. That day, I just grew up.

J H Martin is from London, England but has no fixed abode. His writing has appeared in a number of places in Asia, Europe and the Americas. 

Website: A Coat for a Monkey 

Instagram: @acoatforamonkey

HOODED EAGLE

I put on my hat
And take the last shot
Then pull up my hood
And drain the last glass

After five sleepless nights
I know I need more

More than these rats
I pass on the landing
More than these mice
Who scurry back to their holes

This endless hunger
That not even I can satisfy

A circling bird of prey

I will take any opening
That these pinned eyes fix upon
To feast my way out of this cage
And unfurl these damp walls
And head back up to that China white sky
Where reality fades

With all of its stained corridors
Of twisted emotion
All its grey blocks of clouded reason
And all its memory lined streets
Littered with nothing but abused promises

A hooded eagle

All I need and all I can see
Is in this void
That opens now in front of me

A space that will
Never ask questions
As I pass through its door

A place I can feed
Until it all disappears

This land of the dead

Sweet carrion
More

Language lover, art enthusiast, and tea aficionado, Catherine Jones is a college professor and writer of novels, poetry, and non-fiction. You can follow her writing adventures on Twitter @catjanejones.

Slam

Father used to slam things. Beers, doors, people, if they happened to get in the way. I’d hide in the bathroom, sitting on the cold tile floor with my head in between my knees. All the doors in the house were smashed off their hinges. Locks exploded into useless metal pins.

Slam. And again for good measure.

I’m angry. I curse at the top of my lungs. I climb out and slam the door to the car as hard as I can. I stalk up the stairs to the muffled sounds of my son’s cries and slam the front door. I move to the bedroom and slam that door too, even though there is no one inside the house to hear me. I open the door and slam it again and again, so hard that the door pushes out past its frame, the wood warped over the doorframe. I beat the door with the palm of my open hand and then with my fist. I grab the knob and find I can’t open the door. I’m stuck inside.

Slam.  I have a lot of things to say to my husband.  About him not listening to me, making me angry, and forcing me to get to the point where I scare our son. He could see I was losing control and he did nothing to deescalate the situation.  And now my baby’s crying.

When he finally pushes the door back into its frame correctly so I can get out I don’t say any of those things; instead, my eyes fill with tears and I whisper I’m sorry I got so angry.

“I just don’t want our son to tell his wife stories like the ones you’ve told me about your father,” he says, holding me limply, looking away as he says it.

Slam. Right between the eyes.

Woman

When she was eleven she felt something slide out of her like diaphanous jelly. When she checked her underwear, it was spotted pink. You’re a woman now, her mother said with a touch of sadness, handing her a thick white pad the shape of the lake in their backyard, folded up in a cotton candy colored wrapper. You can have a baby. And the girl-woman wept because she didn’t fully understand what that meant.

When she was thirty-nine she felt the world slip out of her like muddled paint colors. When she checked her underwear, it was rusty red. You’re not a woman now, the voice in her head said with a touch of horror, handing her a future that looked like a blank piece of paper. You can’t have a baby. And the woman wept because she fully understood what that meant.

by Nina Armstrong

Nina Armstrong is a high school Junior in Southern California. She has been published in “Just Poetry National Poetry Quarterly,” “The Same Literary Magazine,” and “Genre: Urban Arts.” She hopes to continue with writing through college and life.

I, Confidant

With crooked teeth and a salmon smile
Clara Confessed of her rhinoplasty

People tell me their life stories sometimes
They say I have the face of a giver

Michael confessed his habit of cutting
That was under the bleachers at lunchtime

Jackie told me her friends left her alone
Michael uttered the name of his crush (June)

I’ve never made one of them feel better
Not even If I tried, so I listen
To Conner’s miseries and George’s swoons

They confide in me what I fear myself

by Anna Desourdy

Anna Desourdy is a pre-school teacher, wife, and mother to two boys and a miniature dachshund.  She and her family live on about ten acres in a small suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina. In addition to writing, Anna enjoys reading any and all genres, perusing Instagram and Litsy, contributing to the Wattpad community, cooking, gardening, traveling, and spending time with family and friends, particularly going out with her boys to explore the wonderful things their city has to offer.

Amanda Tumminaro lives in the U.S. She is a poet and short story writer and her work has been featured in Thrice Fiction, The Radvocate and Stickman Review, among others. Her first poetry chapbook, “The Flying Onion,” will be released through The Paragon Journal in the spring of 2018. 

Portrait of Emotions

Emotions are as important as organs,
and just as susceptible to danger.
They are a jury and victim to words,
target to rocks and dagger.

So, the country of what I feel
is based on belief and not fact.
It all comes down to if it’s logical,
and if you shall believe the logic.

They are not subject to x-ray,
and can be distorted by convenience,
and morphed by time or theme,
traveling with me like a third ear.

Mother at a Concession Stand

Before the showing of the film,
I stand at the counter with my brood.
Which candy would suit me best?

The stand is lit up like a bulb.
Okay! I choose our destiny:
A soda, popcorn and Milk Duds.

I’m a few dollars short,
and now it’s like Sophie’s Choice;
Which child to sacrifice?