men,
so small among the ruins,
minds now,
quake with fear,
empires of brick, paper and internet accounts,
gone,
destroyed in less than a day,
the thought “nothing lasts”,
races through the minds of men,
looking at home and businesses destroyed,
the young of heart and hope,
plan for the future,
and vow to rebuild,
while the old,
shake their heads,
mourning the dreams lost.
Caitlin Cauley – FLICKER
What happened was certainly not what Lilly had wanted. Nothing ever happened the right way. As she righted the black velvet hat on her head and pulled the swath of lace into a double-layered mask in front of her face, she paused in front of her mama’s old dresser mirror. She gripped the edge of the old walnut top until her knuckles showed white through the black lace gloves.
There in her grandma’s old widow’s weeds, in front of her mama’s old mirror, she felt like the ghost of the house. The only living ghost left to walk up and down the decrepit staircase. She backed away and let her mind lose itself in the fading picture, framed in scratched wood, of her near-unrecognizable specter finding the door out. When she tucked the key into her pocket it was for good.
The hushed chatter of the casserole-laden Junior League shuddered to a halt when Lilly emerged at the top of the stair. She froze, unsure of if she was supposed to say something. An unladylike cough cleared her throat. “Thank you,” she rasped, too quiet to have been heard if the ladies hadn’t gone silent out of respect for the picture of her grandma’s spirit.
It was an eternity before one of the ladies broke rank to ascend the steps and take Lilly’s hand. “Come on, sweetheart,” she said in a firm voice crusted with false sugar and sympathy. She squeezed Lilly’s palm and leaned closer. “Couldn’t you have taken off that unsightly nail varnish? Can still see it through those gloves, bless your heart, and it’s just vulgar.”
Lilly jerked her hand back like she’d been touched by something burning. “Don’t you dare,” she hissed. “Don’t you dare talk to me.”
The woman pressed the offending hand to her chest, a hideous thing, bulbously compressed in black polyester, and drew a breath that threatened her sacklike dress seams. “And you don’t have to take that tone!” She pursed her lips. “After all we did for your grandma, and your mama, just to make them feel part of this town, and this is what you have to say.”
Lilly drew her arms back and her mind was gone in a haze of bitter ash and searing red heat and she screwed her eyes shut against it all and heard nothing but the twisting metal and shattering glass and screaming siren and all she knew was that her hands pushed something and the wounded animal wailing in the distance could have been hers or not. She panted, eyes still shut, until she felt her balance give way and she stumbled and found the banister to steady herself with both hands and the wailing had stopped and she finally, finally looked out.
The offending old busybody had landed just a few stairs lower on her rump, black drugstore hose ripped up one leg and her coiffed hair coming loose from its hat. She stared up at Lilly, looking for all the world like a consternated sow toppled over in her pen, and her penciled-in lips still gaped open with the shadow of her theatrical, injured scream.
Lilly righted herself and her hat. “Thank you for your kindness,” she said, with a voice strong and still shaking. “If you could please leave your kindness on the kitchen table, get out.”
#
Lilly just didn’t want to feel.
She didn’t much care what it took to get to that point. Everyone liked to talk about the pain making happiness brighter, the reminder of living, the reality of life. Even the strongest drugs and drinks would cause bodily damage before truly erasing the feeling. They pleaded with her, shouted at her, mocked her. It couldn’t all just be magicked away.
That’s where they were wrong.
As she knocked on the back door of the closed-down dive, drawing the hood of her jacket up over her head to hide her face from any straggling passerby, she wanted to point and laugh at everyone who had doubted. Here it is, she thought, standing there triumphant in her mind’s eye over the adoring gaze of her once-proud detractors. We never have to feel again. I made the deal so you don’t have to, and even I am all right.
The sharp screech of metal on rusted metal cut through her imagination and she clutched at her ears and squeezed her eyes shut against the sound. Another bolt was pushed, harsher even than the last, more resistant to sliding open. The door, once blue and now peeling gray, swung back, silent, with grace that belied its ostentatious bolts. A muddled, musty smell filtered out into the tepid afternoon, on wisps of smoke, barely visible in the last gasps of cold winter choked out by spring. Her feet felt rooted in place. She began to nervously tug at the jacket hood drawstring and had woven it twice through the fingers of her right hand before the voice came.
“You’ll let the old out,” it said. He said. The voice was a man’s, one who must’ve swallowed a mouthful of gravel every morning before his first cigarette of the daily pack. He. He really did exist, after all, this shadow with a voice like dried-up leaves and charcoal.
She felt as if she’d been pulled in by the voice. There was almost a tug, like a chain had been looped through her belly and winched in with a sharp turn. The door slammed behind her.
#
Lilly struck the match from the box the old man had given her. The sulfuric smoke made its wending way up through the branches of the live oak where she’d cradled herself in the split trunk. She pressed her spine against the rough bark and touched the match to the white candle that had accompanied the matches.
“You don’t have to say anything,” the man said. His face was lined deep and his fingertips were dull, yellowed, sprouting from impossible knots that might have been knuckles once. “You light it when there’s no moon and let it burn down.”
Lilly’d cradled the stubby white votive uncertainly. “No holder?”
The old man shook his head. “You hold it. Let it be part of your hand.” He’d given her a warning look from his stone eyes, still even in the flicker of his own collection of candles in the dark and damp room. “Even if it burns.”
When Lilly reached into her pocket for the wad of bills (savings account withdrawn bare, bank account closed, folded up into a sparse rectangle smaller than even the pack of Pall Malls in the other pocket) the old man shook his head. “I don’t charge money.”
In the curved arm of the oak Lilly watched the flame on the candle cast a barely-dancing shadow. Her heart still felt like it would shrivel up and wring all the blood out and plump back up just to do it all again. She rubbed her healed sternum and didn’t even wince at how it twinged.
When the first dribble of wax met her palm (still scarred from the shards of glass and still tender and still aching to touch her mama’s own palm again) she did wince, for a moment, just at the memory of the burning and inescapable plumes of smoke from the engine. She bent over to breathe in the wisps of the candle’s smoke. It may have been the smaller scale, or it might have been the candle just working the way it should, but the screaming memory pulsed out fainter from the back of her mind than it had just a minute before.
She leaned back and let her other arm hang loose, with her fingers curling slightly toward the ground. The bark didn’t even press into her back now, at least not like she thought it should have. The ridges and bumps felt like a comforting coat instead.
Her mind barely registered the wax pooling in her palm now.
Her breaths were longer, fuller, and her heartbeat slower.
That her bare arm had begun to look bumpy and knotted itself wasn’t even a surprise.
She closed her eyes and smiled and opened her mouth to exhale once more.
The lump of white wax had melted into the bark of the oak branch and the flame passed away with the breeze.
The Spanish moss on the oak fluttered and stilled again, breezes come and gone, and the oak sighed.
————————————————————————————————————-
“Caitlin Cauley is just your average twenty-something barista-slash-aspiring-writer, with a BA in creative writing from North Carolina State University and a serious obsession with all things Southern, gothic, and Southern Gothic. Her ultimate life goal is to write a novel that would then be adapted into a movie with Tom Waits in the starring role. Until then she’s just cooking up short stories.”
Jack Bristow – 2025
2025—the year humankind most drastically changed, for the worst. Day in, day out, I hunker down in this cave—with my skinny wife, Beth, obediently and faithfully by my side. There’s not a whole lot to do inside here these days—except to have sexual relations with one another, knit, and, when the nostalgia overtakes us so severely that we just can’t stand ignoring it any longer, discussion of The Good Old Days. The days before these oversized monsters had taken over and eaten most of us.
“That’s right,” I remember telling Beth one day inside the cave, right after we’d made love. “We sure took things for granted then. Hell, if we’d only known.” Indeed. And who was it that was to blame for this entire ordeal, this ungodly disaster? You see, we’d spent so many hours of our day obsessing over nuclear war, and wars with other nations, when we should have been worrying about the other evil threatening our society, too.
These monster-enabling establishments are now known as The Monster Breeders—now-defunct business chains like McDonald’s, Domino’s Pizza, and In-and-Out Burger. They created these fat human monsters who are now roaming around outside, and devouring our family and friends. After the fatties had consumed all the non-fatties in Texas, the fatties all across the nation followed suit—mercilessly and greedily feasting upon any non-fatty.
One night, inside the cave, Beth had asked me: “What’s that sound?” Immediately, I shushed her. And then, I blew the votive candles out, lest a fatty see where we were hiding. Gently, discreetly I walked toward the front of the cave and glimpsed out. As I peeked out I beheld the image of an older gentleman—fifty five years old, perhaps; a non-fatty. The non-fatty had looked very gaunt, and he was desperately screaming for some help.
“Please,” he pleaded, by screaming at the air, at nobody and nothing in particular. “I’m all alone, and starving. The fatties have eaten my family—my wife Julianne, and my son, Bobby. Now, I have nothing, nobody. I have not consumed a real meal in thirty days, and I fear that I will die soon, if I do not eat. Already, I am becoming more and more woozy, and lightheaded. Please,” he shouted once more: “Anybody”? Beth looked up at me, wide-eyed. “Oh, George,” she was completely heartbroken. “Let’s help this poor fellow.” I thought it over for a few seconds. We did not have a whole lot to subsist on—mostly scant droppings, from the fatties. However, their refuse was very nutritional, and fulfilling.
I agreed with Beth to help the poor, wandering soul. But before I could shout out to him from the cave, Beth and I heard a loud, rumbling sound, which had felt like an earthquake, and sounding like some prehistoric lizard, walking on its own hind legs. “We can do nothing more for this man,” I whispered to Beth gravely. Beth protested, but ultimately, she decided I’d made the right decision. “Well,” said she, “It was still a horrible thing to happen.”
We looked out of the cave and the old man was still yelling helplessly, beseechingly. “Please, somebody—I’m an old man. All I want is some food. If you’re living in one of these caves, please, just provide me one meal. I promise I will not give your location away to the fatties. Not even under extreme torture. I swear to God Almighty. Please, somebody?” the old man resumed. Not eating for a month must have made the poor soul oblivious—for it didn’t even seem to register to him that two huge salivating fatties were standing right behind him. One was a man, with short blonde hair, six foot tall. Four hundred and fifty pounds I swear to you. The other was a humongous woman, larger than even the man. She had hair curlers on her head and she was wearing a large T-shirt, which had the words “Hometown Buffet” written on it.
The male fatty stuck the poor non-fatty’s body, feet-first, inside his mouth. The woman did the exact same thing, except she placed the poor man’s head in her trap. By now, the man had most certainly known something was amiss, for his body had started shaking wildly. It was obviously a romantic gesture between both fatties. They peered into one another’s eyes and then they commenced munching on the unfortunate goner viciously, simultaneously. Within seconds, the man was nothing but bones. The female fatty removed him from her mouth and then began to pick her teeth with the skeletal remains. The obese man burped a hearty belch. Seconds later, they were gone; as quickly as they had snuck up on the now-deceased bastard….
“Oh my God,” Beth exclaimed, tears streaking down her cheek. “I can’t believe it. I simply cannot believe it. Oh, George. Couldn’t we have done something?”
I gazed up at Beth somberly, and I shook my head. “No, and in hindsight, it probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway,” I explained to my beloved wife, pointing at our stored food. We had even less droppings than I’d originally estimated. Hell, there wasn’t even enough there to keep us fed for the night. Suddenly, Beth broke down, crying hysterically. It was terrible enough that that old man had to die in such a horrific fashion but, from the looks of it, we too would eventually be accompanying him in the hereafter. And starvation wasn’t a very fun way to go, either.
Suddenly, we heard a loud noise outside—like a garbage truck dumping a million tons of mud onto the ground. Then, there was an ensuing whoopee-cushion type sound, followed by a relieved, monstrous groan. Beth looked at me optimistically. And I looked back at her, hopeful. We’d understood: We would live on, thank God. But we weren’t proud of it—the lengths we’d have to go, just to stay alive.
Cannibalism is not an act any decent human being should ever be proud of engaging in.
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Jack Bristow is a writer residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Currently, he is working on his magnum opus — a non-fiction book, which vividly details his numerous love affairs with extraterrestrial beings. Follow him, @RealJackBristow
Ian Sherman – PROMISING NOTHING
Light. Off. On. Off. On. The single bulb flickers while a broken chain lays untouched on the floor. A young girl takes small steps through the darkened room, using the moonlight to guide her. She moves to slowly for the warm glass of milk to spill. Her hands are pressed firmly on the glass. Sniffling, she passes the milk to her younger brother’s free hand, his other has a bear cuddled to his chest. The girl begins to back away but her brother beckons her, as if she is his “servant.” She shakes her head. He blinks.
No response, but he breaks the silence, “Please.” She purses her lips, but Cassie gives in. She pulls Ben out of bed, and together they shuffle into the kitchen. Then she hushes him, hoping not to wake Mama who only just settled into bed after a long work day.
“I want Mommy,” he whispers. Cassie drags him nearer to the apartment balcony.
“Sit down,” she replies. She holds her breath for a moment as her toes touch the tiled floor of the balcony. A chill rolls up her spine; luckily she brought a blanket, folded over her shoulder. It’s not only cold, but deadly silent too. Then, a sigh. A T-shirt is wrinkled on the floor; she rests it on the railing. Under the horizon is a dark navy blue line that meets a pitch-black sky, where the sun should be resting but instead is working its magic warmth somewhere else. Somewhere. Cassie stays quiet though, sitting Ben gently on her lap so the two can rest easily on the rocking chair. She unfolds the patched blanket and lays it on top of them.
“You know, mommy, she works real hard,” she says. Ben nods his head.
“What about Papa?” he asks.
“He worked real hard too, but he isn’t around right now,” she replies.
“Where is he?”
“Somewhere. Don’t really know though. Just somewhere,” Cassie rocks the chair.
“Is he up there?” he jerks his head up to the sky. Cassie bites her lip.
“Yeah.”
“When’s he coming home?”
“I…I don’t think he’s coming home,” Cassie told him, “But you’ll see him one day”
“Tomorrow?”
“No, not tomorrow.” She watches his grip tighten on the glass of milk, as if its slipping, as if he’s afraid it will slip out of his hands and shatter to the floor. Nothing happens though.
“What’s it like having a home in the stars?” Cassie blushes— then smiles.
“And what exactly do you think’s living up there?”
“Papa,” he cuts in, “with animals I bet.”
“The ones from the zoo?” Cassie asks.
“Yep,” he says proudly, “Probably Nana too. Maybe gummy bears? I’m not sure.”
“…Heaven doesn’t have stars.”
“How do you know?” He shoots back. For a minute or so there is quiet.
“I don’t,” Cassie squeezes the blanket, looking down, “it just doesn’t, buddy. Sorry.”
“Why there stars then?” She bites her lip, opens her mouth, but then decides its not worth it; better off killing the conversation with silence.” Cassie hears Ben muttering, however, says nothing. Then he gets off her lap, sets the milk down, and waves up at the sky.
“What are you doing?” she asks, pulling his hand to his side.
“Saying goodnight,” he says, pointing to the sole star beside he moon. Then he shuffles back inside, his teddy bear dangling from his hand. Cassie sighs, and then rests her head on the back of the chair, closing her eyes for a moment.
“Looks like you finally got the kiddo to sleep,” a voice says to Cassie who rises, shyly looking down. “Don’t know how you do it.” Mama steps out onto the balcony and kisses Cassie on the forehead. “But I can betchya Papa’d be proud.”
“I guess.” Cassie tips her head up, so that their eyes meet. There is a moment between the two, and then Mama slips away after whispering Cassie goodnight.
The figure of a young woman stands under the moon. She pulls her hair back and leans over the railing. The wind brushes past her. Lifting her head, she whispers, “goodnight, Papa,” up into the sky. “Goodnight, Cassie girl,” she mutters back to herself, smiling because of her imagination. She continues to stand on the balcony. The quiet travels through the night until suddenly the sound of a taxicab zips through the silence, bring reality back— along with the exhaustion of a long day and the readiness to tackle the nearing one.
————————————————————————————————————-
Ian Sherman is co-editor-in-chief of the Trevor Day School’s literary magazine, founder of the Psychology Club, and column editor of the newspaper. He has been recognized on national and regional levels by Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for over 5 years in genres from humor and dramatic scripts to short stories. In 2012, Ian had his one-act play “Standing Voiceless in the Choir” produced Off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters in New York City as a part of Writopia Lab’s Playwright Festival. His play was also put on as a dramatic reading by the TACT (The Actors Company Theatre) in New York. Most recently, two of his poems have been accepted by Teen Art Gallery and are being featured in their 2013 July exhibition at Chashama. Overall, Ian is an enthusiastic and accomplished writer, who hopes to impact others with insightful and heart-warming works.
Doug Polk – CAVES
dark caverns of the mind,
entered on tip toes,
afraid to make a sound,
this is where,
the jungle beasts hide,
in darkness,
away from the light,
the cave entered only out of need,
to converse with a beast or two,
and face the past,
so the future not so bleak,
a growl from the depths,
my heart fails,
and I head back to the light,
to hell with the future. . . .
Divya Subramanian – SLEEP PARALYSIS
Another scream choked back
Within my throat,
As I struggle to move my arms
Or flail my legs.
But my muscles won’t obey,
As if bound with rope,
Or crushed down
By a heave weight.
There’s someone watching me,
I can feel it.
The terror pulses through
Once more,
And I know I’m going to die.
But I try to convince myself,
It is another illusion
That will fade away soon.
The bed shakes,
A dizzying vibration.
Which can’t be real.
I must still be dreaming.
I try to break out
Of my own mind’s lies.
But there’s nowhere to run to
And I can’t even scream.
Adam Henry Carriere – IL TRITTICO ON TOUR
I The Grey
Where white blossoms labor
against the concrete dolor,
a grey unlike any other blooms,
like frost tickling under the tree bark.
The intricacy of the local pagoda
belies faith-invested monuments,
unrequited bodies rolling, dead-ish,
from one corner of the sky to the next.
In your colorless green eyes, accepting
the pitiless season in one stare, the steel
lamp post melts with heaving breath.
II The Turtle
Inside the comfortable verdant
and ornate wood,
with a strange stone phallus
balanced on his shell,
the turtle’s grinning
at the gloom-hung poet
who can’t find the words
to simply say ‘hello’.
III The Garden
At the base of a senile battlement,
in plain sight of miniature flowers
and toy shrubbery, a man lies in dirt
a gravel of moans, thinking
in rice vodka spittles
why he hadn’t the strength
to catnap in the garden, instead.
The other stone men just watched
as you wrote without a sound,
equally, energetically ignored.
————————————————————————————————————-
Our esteemed Editor and Publisher-in-Chief is also an accomplished fiction writer, and a poet of renown. His latest collection is available here http://www.amazon.com/Zigeunert%C3%A4nze-ebook/dp/B00BFCHVFY/ref=sr_1_15?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1368255787&sr=1-15&keywords=adam+henry+carriere
