Stranger in Paradise

"Damn dark glass. I was convinced these were at least half full." Tom sighed and replaced the bottles carefully in his pack. He looked down at me, concern all over his face. "I'll go get a new one from the truck. I'll just..."

I could tell he was reluctant to leave; he sat next to me in the sand and tied and re-tied his Jamaican-flag bandanna over his beaded dreads until I punched him on the shoulder and said, "Go on, mate, I'll be fine."

"Yeah, that's what they all say in the movies - but the dude always winds up D-E-A-D!" He grinned, but I could see he was still uncertain.

"We're not in a horror movie, man." I glanced around at the tropical greenery that clicked and whirred with jewel-bright insects, at the tree-tops where birds of paradise darted to and fro, at the pool of crystalline water - its fabulous waterfall glittering with a million liquid diamonds.

I dredged up a smile for him. "This is quite possibly the least spooky place I've ever seen. I'll be right here when you get back."

"All right. But, Luke, you better be... You know. 'Kay?"

He took my thin hand in his powerful one. We interlaced our fingers the way we always used to when we were kids. Black on white. White on black. Just as it should be.

Swiftly and self-consciously (even after all these years), he leaned in to kiss me.

"I'll be back."

I listened to his footfalls growing fainter until all I could hear was the endless, organic hum of creatures going about their lives. I leaned against the nearest tree and closed my eyes.

I must have drifted off because I was woken by the sound of giggling and splashing close by.

As if in a dream, I walked until I could see the source of the disturbance: a young couple chasing one another around the edge of the oasis' pool. The man was making what he probably thought were tiger noises. The woman fled before him, shrieking. (I stifled a smile; she was taking care not to flee too fast.)

I tried hard not to stare, for neither wore a stitch of clothing.

The man spotted me first and stopped being a tiger in order to come and say hello.

He ambled up to me, quite unabashed. "Sorry about that, old thing," he said, extending a hand.

"Didn't spot you there what with...other things in view!" He waggled his eyebrows at me. "Sir Michael Smith. At your service."

I tried to pretend this was all perfectly normal. "Well! Another be-knighted Smith!" I beamed.

"Dad was ‘Sir Michael,’ too! I'm Luke, by the way. Doctor Luke Smith."

We shook hands as the woman - as unselfconscious as her companion - bounced up to us, shooting me curious glances from beneath her long fringe.

The erstwhile tiger introduced her with a flourish: "This beauty here is Julie Dempsey - my fiancée." Some deep emotion I couldn't fathom crossed his face. "I'm... really pleased you're the first to know."

I returned Julie's enthusiastic handshake. "Charmed, I'm sure."

"When did you find our little paradise, Doc?" she giggled.

"Oh, only a few minutes ago. The other half's around here somewhere."

"Aha! The more the merrier!" roared Sir Michael. (He put me in mind of one of those larger-than-life Victorian Major-Generals; I honestly couldn't tell whether he was hamming it up or not).

He continued: "So, what in Glory's name is a place like you doing in a man like this?" (Julie rolled her eyes - I supposed she'd heard this line many times before.)

I tried to explain. "This place has been on my bucket list for a while, now."

They looked blank.

"That's, like, a list of things you want to do or see before you die? I've...been stuck at the Minverabad hospital all year, but I've always wanted to visit the oasis because, well, I was curious. Dad was posted out here. After Mum died, that is. And local patients had some weird stories about this place..."

There was an awkward silence.

"Do you come here often?" I added, more cheerfully than I felt.

"Wouldn't be seen dead anywhere less classy!" winked Sir Michael, breaking the tension.

"You'd be seen naked pretty much anywhere, though," returned Julie, tartly. "We went to your hospital, I think, Doc." She turned to her fiancé again. "Is that where they took the bodies?"

Curiosity got the better of decorum. "Bodies? What happened? Um, if you don't mind my asking?"

Julie suddenly found the sky quite interesting, but Sir Michael was not lost for words: "We were on a day trip out here with some other tourists. Julie slipped on the rocks above the falls-" he pointed- "and broke something very important, didn't you, Silly Bean? As for me, I got bitten by one of those damned blunt-nosed mambas whilst trying to rescue her."

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "One minute we hadn't a care in the world, the next we were in some dreadful melodrama!"

I nodded. "Gosh! Brave of you to return!"

To my astonishment, Julie started to cry.

Her fiancé put a comforting arm around her. "Don't, darling... Just think...we're so lucky to be here! Together. In our youth..."

"But we can't leave!" She wailed. "Ever!"

I wanted to question them further. What DID they mean? Who had died? But it didn't seem to be the moment.

We were interrupted by a crashing in the undergrowth. I turned, scanning the bushes expectantly.

"I... had a little boy named Luke," murmured Sir Michael, behind me. "Never saw him, though. My biggest regret..."

"Quite the coincidence," I replied, distractedly. "But you're forty years too young to be my old man. Also, you're alive."

I waved. "Hey, Tom!" Help me out, here!

Tom sloped past us, eyes eerily blank. Thorn-torn. Ignored us all. Something very wrong.

"He can't hear you. Not anymore..." Whispered Julie.

"THOMA-A-S!" I yelled.

I rounded on the others. “What’s happened to him?!”

“He’s just lost someone.” Replied Sir Michael, flatly. “That's morphine he's carrying. You were a patient, Doctor Smith?"

"Yes, but what did you mean earlier, when-"

"I mean we died that day. Hence, ‘not alive.’ Neither are you, by the look of it."

His eyes bored into mine. "...Son."

I watched in horror as Tom dropped the bottles in the sand and sank to his knees.

Written by: Alex Preece

Photo by: Blake Bronstad

The Dictator's Lemonade

The Dictator was exiled to a small island in the Pacific, somewhere between Hawaii and Australia. The parallels to a famous, short, French dictator were obvious. But The Dictator, Our Dictator, stopped reading that biography around the halfway point.

“Why’d you stop reading?” I asked him under a blistering South Pacific sun.

I was writing a magazine article - a human interest piece commissioned by a now-defunct periodical - designed, I guess, to humanize him, my editor thinking, surely, exile must have done him some good.

“He’d just won a great victory,” he told me. He took a drink of lemonade. He smoothed his beautiful hair with one, heavily-jeweled hand. “It was very well done. He did very, very well. And you know what? I’d learned all I needed to know about him.”

“I have a gift,” he continued. “I know people. I really do. And I knew when I read of his victory, his great victory, very well-earned, I knew it then, I knew…”

He trails off as a very beautiful woman, very tall, exceptionally tan, approaches and puts her hand on his shoulder.

“I found your sock,” she says in a heavy, foreign accent. “I didn’t think I would find it, but then I looked again and...wow! There it was.”

“Wow!” he says.

The Dictator shifts his focus to me. “Did you hear that? She found my sock!”

“Fantastic,” I say.

“I thought it might be lost,” the woman says to me. “But then I found it. Later. At a different time.”

“That’s very good,” he says. “Very, very good.”

He pats her backside and she slinks off down steps behind the infinity pool, so that it appears she’s disappeared into the ocean.

The Dictator and I sit on the back porch with the ocean and a sweating carafe of lemonade as our only distractions. The house is all open white doors that hope to corral what’s left of the breeze after the heavy humid air shakes it down. There’s a television the size of a wall playing old Scooby Doo cartoons in the living room, and through our conversation the bizarre patois of slobbering Scooby bookends any silence found in our conversation.

The Dictator has had work done on his hair, his face, his hands, but peculiarly not his body. His paunch is a personal TV dinner tray under his button up white shirt. The shirt is too small and has somehow collected crumbs, though we haven’t eaten anything since sitting down. He’s wearing white linen pants. His tan is fluorescent even under an afternoon sun. He once joked, with his counterpart of some vaguely European, nuclear-powered dynasty, that, “If they turn the lights out on me I’d glow like a fucking night light,” and even now, years later, when you look at him you believe it.

“That’s what they don’t understand,” he says unprompted. “That’s the thing about guys like me!”

I wait for him to supply some context to his outburst, but he waits for me to respond. He does this all the time. It’s like he’s been interrupted by silence and he holds it against you, and more importantly, he wants you to know that he holds it against you. In conversation with The Dictator, you are responsible for the uncouth interjections of silence, so get used to it.

“How has your life changed since you’ve been exiled?” I ask him.

“Oh, I love it,” he says. “Look around. I’ve done very, very well here. Did you see that woman earlier?”

“You know I did.”

“That woman,” he leans in to whisper, “that woman is a treasure. I found her here. She was buried in the holds of an old Spanish galleon, The Conquistador, that’s wrecked a few miles that way.”

He points towards the open ocean but locks his eyes on mine.

“Under lock and key,” he continues. “17th century. Hundreds...hundreds of years she’s been there waiting for a guy like me to dig her up. Centuries. I went down there myself. My good friend, Billy, the director - you’ve heard of him - he has a submersible. A submarine. It has claws, and I went down there myself. And I tell you what, pal, I saw her down there shining like a billion Spanish coins, and that’s what she does...she lights up my life.”

He leans back and takes another sip of lemonade. I know he’s joking but his eyes don’t seem to agree. It strikes me, seriously for the first time in years, that perhaps he’s had a break from reality. In the beginning, of course, it was easy to think that way. He made it easy. It was his greatest trick. The Devil and The Dictator...

“The finest trick of the devil,” he says to me, somehow (no... surely not) reading my mind, “is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

The Dictator sits back in his chair, satisfied. “Shakespeare.”

I grin. “I think it was Charles Baudelaire,” I say. “French. Nineteenth Century. He was a poet.”

“Listen, Charles…?”

“Baudelaire,” I say.

“Right,” he says. “He might have said it. Technically, he might have said it. But it was Shakespeare that came up with it. Will Shakespeare. Greatest writer the world has ever known. Smart guy. Very, very smart guy.”

In certain circles, particularly circles of The Revolution, there once floated tales of arguments and consequences; a word cloud of disappearance, strangulation, poison, torture - all orbiting The Dictator, sucked in by that gravity of Power.

I keep my mouth shut about Baudelaire and Shakespeare.

“You see those boats out there?” he asks me, pointing towards anchored yachts not far off the coast of his island. “I’ll let you in on a secret.”

He leans in and whispers, “One day. Soon. Someday soon. Very soon. Those boats are going to take me back home. Back to my people. Back to where I belong. And when I get there, I’m going to do very, very well. Because they love me. They really do. It’s easy to see.”

“This,” he gestures to everything - the lemonade, the house, the ocean - “It’s rigged. Really. They know it, you know it, I know it. Everyone knows it.”

He leans back in his chair, and takes a long drink of his lemonade. “Jesus, fuck.”

After I leave his island, but before this story goes to print, The Dictator is found dead in his bath. The official causes are au naturel, but the country whispers, “Poison,” and then, even softer, “Lemonade? Really?”

Written by: Logan Theissen

Photo by: Victoria Ostrzenski

Where the Wild Went

Flames lick at the leaves. Burning captured in photos. The pictures flash over the stage, stretched into obscurity, but Pike knows them. A forest eaten by fire, frame after frame. 

Light pools and melts over their guitars; Pike purchased his sister’s portfolio for this purpose.

He drinks in the darkness off stage, large lungfuls of dank air from the club. Tonight Helen and the Torches are the headliners and he is not Pike, but Flint. No longer labeled a Flynn Twin.

Beer on the shoe, in the mouth, alcohol slows…the…songs…down. Acoustics arc the soul into shape.

Pike wonders what’s happened to live shows. The painful beat in the ear, in the head. Understanding the lyrics like no one else. The beauty of lavender light from stage on skin. Hot kiss of melody sung just off-key enough to be endearing.

Now people want perfection.

Their filters are new and they are new and he wonders why they can’t trust their own memories.

He only trusts what he remembers.

Keeps the music his own.

* * *

Pike took a beer out past the tree line, walked until the bonfire burned like a lit match in the distance. He’d been led from town by the blaze; hot and thick and delicious.

“Thought you'd forget, Pember,” he said.

His sister joined after the beer was gone, sipped slow, can crushed in his hand.

“A promise is sacred,” she said, smiling through her discomfort.

Pike knew she didn’t like the past.

They unearthed the plastic Power Rangers thermos, which once fit into the matching lunchbox before Louis Alexander stole it during their third grade field trip to the Jell-O museum. Pemberley had kissed Pike’s forehead after, took him to bury the dead.

His thermos had lost its twin.

“You’ll do the same when I die,” she’d said.

They’d sworn with paper cuts pressed together: “To be opened again, before we become different.”

College was coming.

They knew the world would change them.

Pike popped the lid, revealed old things inside. Their dad’s favorite matchbox car. Papers and pens.

Their secrets.

“Ever think, maybe, we were never the people we were supposed to be?” Pike asked.

“You think you’re so much smarter,” Pemberley said. The words arrived soft and sure, and they sounded raw. Too real. And it hurt Pike to hear this from his twin.

“Belongs to you,” he said, handing a piece of paper with her small, seven-year-old print on the lines.

“One secret for another,” she said, using her phone’s light. “Always Remember: Never trust dreams. They’re not real. Don’t show your emotions until night. Kids ruin you. Don’t fall. Always be strong.”

“That’s—Pember, do you—”

“Just give me your secret.”

“I don’t hate him,” he said, spinning the wheels of the matchbox between his fingers. He scrunched up his nose to keep himself from crying.

He knew, even as he said it, that the words weren’t the same for his sister. She’d needed their dad, and he hadn’t been there. Their father had left once when they were six, again when they were nine. He’d returned broken, and maybe Pemberley still blamed him for being weak, but he would never ask. And the silent way she still hurt had always been enough to keep him quiet, too.

“God, Pike. He’s not a parent. Not the way he should be.”

“Dad will miss us,” Pike said. “He loves us.”

He needed the words to mean something.

“Used to think that, too. But maybe he just loves the parts of us that belong to him. Your name, like some fucked up fishing trophy. My eyes. The way we fight. Whatever. But that’s not love.”

He wanted to write her a poem then about love being the wild within them, how he only felt it around her. But they walked back to the bonfire without words. Pike first, Pemberley a few steps behind.

* * *

Too often, he sees her in trees, the way leaves flutter. Pike uses her pictures throughout the set, his own paramnesia. The destruction. The death of it all. He believes this is his sister.

There are nights when he tries to find the only girl really watching. Other times, he searches for the one staring at anything but them. He can’t know how she’d watch, feel his music. But he hopes she wouldn’t want to sway with strangers who only see the show through phone screens. She might read about his band while openers calibrate voices and instruments to octaves she couldn’t care about. She’d still need him to sing some sense into her.

They’d parted ways; separate colleges on separate coasts where they’d needed to become separate people. The distance never meant anything. He knew they’d come back together for the important things.

After their dad died, she didn’t come home. She sent him a postcard, featuring a picture she’d taken on assignment. It was hers, words her own, too. But none of it was his sister. None of those things were real. Pemberley promised: see you soon. but not now. not for this.

The image of her first forest fire in Wyoming is obliterated by those words, projected on his face, in the song. He plays the opening chords of “Heart Attack,” croaks the first line: “She was obsessed with time.” But he doesn’t finish it, because he can’t. His father’s death is still too real.

He knows he could’ve been the one to go to her after.

But he is here now with music and words and the past trapped somewhere between them; the betwixt formed and fossilized from too many months of not speaking.

Now, when they open with “Of Embers and Pyres,” he understands her obsession with fire, bones breaking into dust; their father’s cremation too much like a Viking ritual.

Pike’s lyrics take the crowd to distant places: “Soon you’ll hear this song, and remember the fire. They will know your name. Sing of embers and pyres. Pemberley, Pember. All of us, liars…”

And they sing with him, voices in unison. Each of them calls her out instead of him, sets Pike free.

The blame should burn.

When Pike sings about her now, he gives her to empty people waiting to be filled, and they take her. He wonders if the crowd understands she’d burn down an entire town if given the chance. Watch it disappear.

Written by: Kayla King
Photograph by: Justin Maher

Bench Warmers

Tony met Miguel on a bridge about two years ago when he heard crying as he was packing up his fishing gear. He followed the sobbing to the top of the bridge and found Miguel about to jump. He was counting.

“...7….8…..9….”

“Hey,” squeaked Tony. “Wanna fish?”

“Fish?”

“Yeah … fish,” Tony said matter-of-factly. Luckily, it worked.

They fished together every Sunday after that and formed an unlikely friendship. Tony was a divorcee in his mid 40’s and Miguel was a widower in his late 60’s.

Miguel was a creature of habit, but after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, he evolved into a creature of ritual. The number nine controlled everything Miguel did like a ruthless dictator. Instead of bowing to it, he counted to it.

He would turn lights on and off nine times. He’d lock his front door nine times, and before eating, he’d wash his hands nine times. If something interrupted him or it didn’t feel right, he’d start over again.

Sundays fishing with Tony helped Miguel free himself from the shackles of his OCD. He’d dip his lure into the water and watch his anxiety disappear into the river like rainwater.

Tony noticed his friend’s declining memory and chalked it up to old age. He didn’t mind Miguel starting a story he had just finished minutes earlier, but recently, things had gotten worse. Miguel would go through periods where he’d forget Tony’s name and treat him like a stranger.

On this Sunday, however, Tony marveled at Miguel. His memory was sharp and his banter was as witty as ever. They laughed and told stories. They even reminisced about Miguel’s fishing technique before Tony taught him the basics.

When they started getting ready to leave, Miguel began the conversation he had planned on having.

“I’m wasting away, Tony,” he said softly.

“What’s that?” Tony asked. He had been rummaging through his tackle box.

“I’m dying, man.”

Tony sat up and looked over at Miguel only to find him staring at the bridge.

“Did you go to the doctor or something? What’s wrong, Migs?”

“Remember that day on the bridge?” asked Miguel. “That’s the day I found out I had Alzheimer’s. I forget a lot, but I’ll never forget that day.”

Tony became angry.

“All this time and you didn’t tell me!? I thought you were just having a bad day.”

“I WAS having a bad day, Tony,” snapped Miguel. “I just found out that my mind was slowly wasting away, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it.”

“Do you remember what number I was on when you stopped me from jumping?” asked Miguel. Tony shook his head. He didn’t want Miguel to talk about that day anymore. He was afraid it’d make him walk back up there again.

Miguel answered his own question, “Nine. The number was nine.”

Tony tried to bite his tongue and let his friend talk, no matter how aimless it seemed.

Miguel continued, “And ever since then, that number has been my only hope. I counted to nine for everything. It was a superstition thing. I thought if I did it just right, I could keep the Alzheimer’s at bay. But now, now I can’t even remember most of my rituals. I can’t remember anything.”

Miguel, who hadn’t set foot in a hospital since his diagnosis, had been struggling with his Alzheimer’s like never before during the past few weeks. He could’ve gone to his doctor, but he had read the literature and seen other people suffering through his affliction. He already knew his fate.

“I never thanked you,” said Miguel. “Not only did you save my life, but you gave me something else to focus on. You gave me hope.”

Tony didn’t like to see Miguel give in. “There still IS hope, Migs,” said Tony. “You can fight this thing. They have treatments and ways to slow it down.”

Miguel hadn’t taken his eyes off of the bridge.

“I need you to do me one more favor, Tony,” said Miguel.

“Anything you need, bud. What is it?” asked Tony.

Miguel turned to look at Tony for the first time. “I need you to help me kill myself.”

Tony scrambled to his feet and looked down at his friend. Miguel slowly looked up and explained.

“I don’t want to be some guy who can’t recognize his friend, Tony. You saved my life before, now I need you to help me end my life.”

Tony, shaking, was hunting for words to describe what was whirling around inside his head. A loud “NO!” was all he could muster.

Miguel tried to calm his friend down. “I know this is hard to hear. But I need this, Tony. What kind of future do I have to look forward to? I’m going to die, can you please help me do it on my terms?” asked Miguel.

“How am I supposed to do something like that, Migs?” asked Tony.

Miguel decided to answer his question literally. “I want you count for me. I stop at nine so much, I don’t trust myself to get all the way to 10,” Miguel explained.

“And then?” asked Tony.

“I jump.” answered Miguel. “I jump to my freedom.”

With that, Miguel started walking towards the top of the bridge. Tony looked on, confused and horrified.

“Get back here!” he screamed. “You’re crazy, man! Let’s talk about this!”

When Miguel didn’t respond, Tony raced up to the bridge and found Miguel standing in the same spot where he first asked him if he wanted to fish. Only this time, Miguel wasn’t sobbing, he was smiling.

Tony had never seen Miguel so alive. He looked up to the sky and took a deep breath. He was calm now. Miguel’s tranquility seemed to be contagious.

“Please.” asked Miguel.

With tears starting to stream down his cheeks, Tony nodded and began counting, “1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 … 6 … 7 … 8 ….9 ….10.”

Written by: Justin Grady

Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

Training

Clark bent down and gripped the rail with his right hand. The vibrations surging through his callused palms indicated the train was just beyond the horizon. He traced the length of steel beams and wooden slats with his eyes until they became an indecipherable speck where the sky and the earth converged.

“This is it,” he reminded himself, suppressing any doubt that was stirring inside.

Clark had been contemplating this moment since pimples started forming mountain ranges across his chin and the sight of cheerleaders made strange things happen behind his zipper. Puberty transformed every fiber of Clark’s being, including his brain.

As his limbs, blemishes and cerebellum grew, so did the distance between Clark and the rest of humanity. While boys and girls timidly flirted in the lunchroom, Clark isolated himself in the library behind a fortress of comic books. When his family gathered around the TV for supper, Clark excused himself and retired to the basement, where he spent the rest of the evening lifting the rusty weights his father had been neglecting since his college days.

Clark outgrew the home gym within a month of his first bicep curl. Even the heaviest dumbbell on the rack – the 50-pounder – failed to challenge his rapidly developing arms. He peddled to a nearby gym in search of a heftier test, only to be turned away on account of his age. He pleaded with the owner to make an exception, but he wouldn’t look past the business-destroying lawsuit that would ensue if an unsupervised minor were to get injured in his facility.

Clark channeled his rage to his fists and slammed them into the counter like a sledgehammer, sending shards of glass scattering to the ground like a shattered basketball goal. As amazed as the owner was by the feat of strength, he was even more taken aback by Clark’s injury-free hands.

Clark fled the scene before the owner snapped out of his daze. When he rounded the corner he found a malnourished man hovering over his bike. He followed the track marks down the man’s arms to the pair of bolt cutters he was positioning around Clark’s bike chain.

Rage reignited, Clark bent down, grabbed a stone and chucked it at the junkie before he could bear down on his tool. The stone disappeared the moment it left Clark’s hand, reappearing in an explosion of blood, cotton and flesh as it tore through the thief’s right shoulder. The skittish man fell to the ground, clutching his bolt cutters until he became one with the parking lot.

“YOU SHOT ME,” the criminal yelled, gripping his shoulder as he squirmed on the concrete. “YOU FUCKING SHOT ME?”

Clark didn’t respond. He sprinted to the rack, unlocked his bike and lifted it from the bar one-handed as if it were a children’s tricycle.

“Where do you think YOU’RE going, you fucking PUNK,” screamed the injured crook.

Clark straddled the seat and turned the bike away from the criminal. He placed his left foot on the pedal and pressed down like a motorcyclist starting his engine. The wave of flexed muscles surging from his glute to his foot sent his shoe and the pedal crashing to the pavement. The metal square beneath his forefoot embedded in the asphalt like a cookie cutter. He wiggled his foot free from the strap and dismounted the bike.

“Take it,” he said, pushing the damaged goods towards the speechless drug addict.

The bike remained upright until the front tire collided with the thief’s knee, bending his joint with a deafening crack of bones and ligaments. He ran home as fast as his legs could carry him, which, according to the speed detector in front of his old middle school, was 38 miles per hour. Clark looked back to see what car triggered the radar, but he was the only object in motion at the moment.

Clark took a small hop and turned his sneakers sideways, attempting to stop on a dime like a professional hockey player, but the physics didn’t add up. As the soles of his shoes dug into the weathered sidewalk, the seams that held his footwear together exploded, sending fabric particles, and Clark, flying through the air.

Clark was ejected from his shoes like a driver without a seatbelt. He landed in a bush almost 30 yards from where his soles remained, once again, without the slightest hint of injury. Clark continued to sit in the heap of broken twigs and crumbled leaves.

“What. The. FUCK?” he asked.

As unlikely as it seemed, he could only reach one conclusion.

“I’M THE HULLLLLLLK.”

Clark sprung from the rubble as if floating on a cloud of indestructible joy. Fueled by adrenaline, he began putting his supernatural strength to the test. He knocked down a 30-year-old pine tree with a single punch. He lifted a car by it’s back bumper and pushed it around a parking lot like a wheelbarrow. And then, he saw the train track.

Clark returned the car to its parking spot and sprinted through the field. Fearing someone would mistake his actions for a suicide attempt, Clark ran along the locomotive road until civilization was out of sight.

When the train finally appeared in the distance, Clark got down in a three-point stance and prepared for the ultimate game of chicken. The morning fog cloaked him from the conductor’s unsuspecting view until they were too close for brakes. The conductor pulled down on the train horn, hoping to force some sense through Clark’s ears, but his mind was as one-tracked as his steel opponent.

At the point of no return, Clark reared up like an angry grizzly bear and flexed every muscle in his body. 

--

The librarian bent down and removed Clark’s headphones.

“Class or detention, Clark? Your choice.”

Clark scoffed, saved his progress and shoved his laptop into his book bag. He rolled back from the table and wheeled off to class as fast as his hands could push him.



Photograph by: Emily Blincoe
Written by: Mark Killian

The Thing About Flying

So where are you going? Are you going to New York? California? Asia? Africa? Are you going to float down the Seine? Did you just see Before Sunset and now you simply have to take a trip to the old world?

Are you ready for the food? Airplane food is awful unless you’re first class. Are you first class? If so, what’s it like up there? You can recline all the way back, right? Seriously? All the way? I heard they give you an iPad to watch movies on? Any movie you want? You’re not stuck watching the latest Channing Tatum movie with the rest of us?

Now be honest, are you nervous when you see someone of Arab descent on your plane? What does this say about you? Do you go out of your way to NOT feel anything about it? Is that even possible? Do you judge people that DO admit to being nervous about it? Do you think they’re close-minded, or racist, or hillbilly? All of the above? Do other Arab people get nervous when THEY see Arab people boarding their plane? Is it only the white person guilt? Or is it guilt at all? Maybe it’s just being cognizant of the situation. Maybe it’s just being aware. Maybe we can’t stop it even if we try because we watch CNN or MSNBC or FOX NEWS (But never all three) and we’ve all watched that footage, the footage you don’t talk about, footage that is the hardest footage to watch in the whole world. Every single time you see a plane you think about it. The two things are forever linked, stuck together by the cement glue of mankind’s wickedness.

But what are you going to do, right? You can’t drive to the Bahamas. Be realistic. You’re going to have to get on that plane. You’re going to have to get up around 3:30AM and sit through security and then you’ll probably be selected at one time or another and then you’ll be embarrassed and nervous as TSA Brenda gropes you and tells you to take off your belt. Nervous? Why? I don’t know! It’s not like you have anything to hide, right? But what about that little bit of weed you once carried in your backpack during a camping trip? The backpack Brenda is currently digging through. What if a little of that weed fell out of that shitty Tupperware container and it’s sitting in the bottom of your backpack, mixed among lint, a few coins and a broken pen? Goddamnit, they’re really digging through your bag. They’ve taken out your book. They’ve taken out your notebook. THEY’RE LEAFING THROUGH YOUR NOTEBOOK?!?! You make a joke that the only thing they’re going to find in there is poorly constructed short stories, but they look at you like you’re not supposed to speak and you just broke the golden goddamn rule, so they search more frantically and somehow through this whole thing you’ve decided that you do in fact have something to hide. They’ve turned you guilty.

So finally you put your shoes and belt and jacket and hat back on and you promise yourself you’ll never again wear cowboy boots to the airport regardless of how cool you think it makes you look. You take a deep breath and you find the departures board and you need food but FUCK ME THE PLANE IS DELAYED.

FUCK. ME. THE. PLANE. IS. THREE. FUCKING. HOURS. LATE.

You take another deep breath and tell yourself you’re going to get through this. Not for one moment do you forget that you’ve paid $500 for this experience. This is like riding the world’s worst and most expensive rollercoaster. You find your gate and then you learn your fate. You ask Rhonda at the desk why the plane is three hours behind. She tells you it’s actually five hours behind, they just haven’t updated the big board. So you ask why the flight is five hours late. Rhonda curtly tells you that the plane you’re flying on is coming from Seattle. From Seattle it will land here and then from here it will go to Miami and then of course down to the Bahamas. Then she says that the plane has not yet arrived in Seattle. Your face must be doing something strange because Rhonda kind of grimaces and then the bitch actually smiles. So Rhonda, you ask, when does the plane get to Seattle? She says she doesn’t know, the system doesn’t tell her that much. There’s a big fat fucking blind spot in the system and your plane is somewhere in that grey area, like the goddamn Bermuda triangle. You literally say the words, “This is not fair,” and of course there’s a tone because Rhonda looks at you like you’re a fucking child and that phrase means absolutely nothing in the adult English language. That phrase lost its power after your tenth birthday party at putt-putt. You try to remember the last time you had a good cry, just really let it out.

So after three hours and two ten-dollar tacos that are so bad you have to throw the second one out after one bite, you head to the bookstore. You end up buying the new Dan Brown book for a small fortune even though you loathe Dan Brown AND his buddy Robert Langdon. Something has happened to you in this airport, you’ve turned into this walking, crying, bearded baby that spends too much money and gives zero fucks. You believe you dodged a bullet by not walking out with 50 Shades of Grey. You’ve lost total control.

Finally, you’re up and waiting. Group 2. You foolishly think this means you’re the second group to board, however you quickly learn it’s actually eighth to board after first class, rewards members, military people, old people, disabled people, people with babies, people with only one bag, and then finally, Group 2. You have to beast through the loitering Group 3 and Group 4 people, bumping into them, and they look at you with angry eyes because they know and you know that you’re going to take their space in the overhead bins. You smile.

Now you’re in the plane, in your seat. You think you’re all set. You’ve got a phone that’s dead, you’ve got a computer that you can’t open, you’ve got a Dan Brown book that you’re going to have to hate-read to get through. Eventually, you’ll get to the Bahamas and the beach and the fruity drinks and the sunburn. But first, a woman sits next to you. A big woman. A woman that looks at you and smiles and then says exactly what you thought she was going to say. She tells you that you remind her of her son. You smile, put on your headphones that are connected to your dead cell, and lean back and close your eyes. You think you’re safe until she taps on you on the shoulder and kind of leans in and asks the stupidest fucking question anyone has ever asked on a plane, and it’s worse because you knew it was coming.

She smiles, she leans, and she asks, “So… where are you going?”

Photograph By: Emily Blincoe
Written By: Logan Theissen

Rosamund Parker

“I heard there are alligators in these swamps.”

“Bullshit,” I reply. “Maybe further east but not here. Someone would know if they were here.”

Like royalty, Big Jonny and I sit surveying our kingdom, drinking beer we are too young to buy. This is Texas and we are celebrating our country’s independence. There are parties scattered around the lake, pods of the American semi-nude, and as the sun goes down the water acts like a mirror reflecting the sky. The image is of twin suns stacked like bunk beds, one on top of the other. In this twilight, I am dreaming of Rosamund Parker.

“Fuck alligators,” I mutter. “I’ve got more important shit to deal with. She doesn’t even know my name.”

She doesn’t even know my name, Jonny sings. He sounds like a fine country singer. I love her, and she doesn’t even know my name.

“I’m serious,” I say, “It’s pathetic.”

Big Jonny nods and chugs his beer. He finishes and leans back in his orange lawn chair that’s worn out like blue jeans, and casually crushes the empty can between his big sausage fingers. Jesus, I think, those fucking hands could crush a skull.

As for Rosamund Parker, her beauty is refreshing like an oasis in the desert. She wears big, rangy glasses, and has brown eyes, and looks very serious until she smiles. She seems to have this Miles Davis cool about her, though to be honest I don’t know anything you can’t observe from a distance. I study Rosamund Parker like one would study a Great White shark. She is mildly popular at school and moves graciously among the groups that bunch the hallways. She smokes with the freaks, lunches with the nerds, and parties with the jocks. She’s the consummate lead in school plays and in third grade she punched Sally Jenkins in Social Studies, letting everyone know, even then, she was not to be trifled with. For whatever reason, she does this all with siren-like blue hair. Troll Doll hair. She has freckles that go great with anything and if I were a different person leading a different life she would be my girlfriend.

Big Jonny smashes another beer can, this time with his cowboy boot. The cicadas soundtrack the night and there are teenage shouts from the party nearby.

“Best get on with it,” Big Jonny drawls. “I suppose she will be here, big party and all.” And here he begins to sing again, passionately and embarrassingly.

I can feel it cu-ming in the air tonight…hold on!

“Nice, Phil Collins,” I mumble.

I’m nervous at the party, drinking too much and stealing glances at Rosamund Parker. I know this is my last chance as she’s soon leaving for college. The stage is set and now the requisite fright is setting in. To soothe the nerves, Big Jonny suggests a keg stand, and it’s fresh off this keg stand that I find myself surrounded like a press conference, offering explanations.

“I just kept drinking,” I say. “Nothing else to it.”

“That was the longest I’ve seen,” says a cute blonde girl, and then from the back of the crowd a muffled, “That’s what she said.”

And finally, between the laughs, “Your name is Stan, right?”

I turn to find Rosamund Parker. She’s grasped my arm. I panic.

“What?”

Slowly, she replies, “Stan. Right?”

“Right,” I say. “Stan.”

She doesn’t smile at me, but she doesn’t take her eyes from mine either. Instead, she squints at me as if I’m far away. I think she is the most beautiful, most drunk creature I’ve ever seen.

“Rosamund,” she says. “Rosamund Parker.”

That night we slept together. It was my first time, and as it turned out, her last.

As time has taken an eraser to my memories, I’ve lost many of the details. Perhaps the incredible nature of the morning that followed somehow dulled the preceding night – like trying to see in the dark after turning off the light. As it is, I remember snapshots of the nocturnal tryst that even when pieced together reveal only the corners of a puzzle.

I remember her pink bra crumpled on the ground, the feel of her hipbones to my fingers, and how she attacked my ear with her teeth. I remember the sound of sticks breaking as we rolled in the dirt, and her sweaty palms as she led me through the darkness of the woods to seclusion. Most of all, I remember her blue hair.

In the morning I’m awakened by screams. The sound leaves no time for a fuzzy adjustment period but even standing and awake I can’t believe my eyes.

Rosamund Parker is being dragged. Only her torso is visible. She is wearing my pearl snap shirt and the look on her face, years later, will keep me staring at ceilings for nights on end. There is a grating sound, like something being crunched and torn at the same time, and the sound sparks one excruciatingly obvious thought.

This is Rosamund Parker being eaten by an alligator.

Before I’ve taken a step, the gator has her in the water. There is thrashing, screaming, choking, crying, and ripping. The last I see of her is the hair, but really it’s over before it even began.

In the moments following, there is an eerie calm as I take in my surroundings. I am on the shore of a swamp and the water is low and muddy. Surprisingly there is no blood, as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. In the coming days I know there will be questions and newspaper stories, national interviews, and a Jaws-like hunt for the killer beast. They’ll eventually find bits of her in the animal’s stomach, and remnants of a toenail will acquit me of murder.

It was my sixteenth summer. A summer of firsts. The shade fought the heat, the bugs stretched their wings, and nature laid Rosamund Parker to rest.

Photograph by: Jaemin Riley
Written by: Logan Theissen

Don't Look Up

Phil stole cautious glances beneath the desk of his boss’ secretary as he waited to see what this impromptu morning meeting was all about. She rearranged her legs, briefly exposing a floral pattern that reminded Phil of his daughter’s childhood bathing suit. Then he realized the secretary was probably the same age as his daughter. This epiphany stunned him like a cockroach caught under a kitchen light.

Phil immediately lost interest in the secretary’s undergarments, but not before she traced his gaze to her nether regions. He snapped out of his trance to find a look of disgust on her face. He did what any man would do in that situation. He stared down at his dark-leather dress shoes.

For the record, Phil has never let his bouts of lust spill into the real world. He always felt the effort was greater than the pleasure, so he satisfied his sexual needs through monthly rendezvous with his wife and the privacy of his evening shower.

Phil ran all of life’s little decisions through a similar cost-benefit analysis; affairs, meals, children, you name it, he crunched the numbers and came to a logical conclusion. This created a complacent life for he and his family. At least it did, until Pam, his wife, found Facebook.

Their marriage was quite comfortable before Pam discovered that “God-damn-mother-fuckin website,” as Phil referred to it. They had sex at least twelve times a year. They slept in the same bed. They ate breakfast together every morning. Compared to their circle of friends, they were John and Yoko. Then Pam began her virtual high school reunion.

Their nightly dinner conversation shifted from discussing current events to Pam rambling on about her long-lost friends. It was a barrage of pointless information and dangerous comparisons.

“Becky married a lawyer,” Pam would say.

“Good for her,” Phil would respond.

“The Johnstons went to Paris last Christmas,” she would say.

“Good for them.” he would respond.

It went on like that until Pam’s dissatisfaction grew too large for Phil to ignore. He ran the figures and decided it’d be better to give Pam a more enviable life than face their impending divorce. Unfortunately, he wasn’t fit to climb the corporate ladder, and that is exactly why he was summoned for the impromptu morning meeting.

--

Pam scoffed as she scrolled through Samantha, her high-school nemesis’, vacation photos. She spent last Christmas in Paris, the previous summer in Peru and the spring before that in Jerusalem. God had been good to her, and Pam hated him for it.

“How does a preacher’s wife get to travel the world like Carmen Sandiego?” Pam would ask herself, completely overlooking the fact that Samantha and her husband were doing more evangelizing than vacationing.

When she failed to gain a sense of superiority from her former frenemy, she decided to find the boys who brought her into womanhood. The first who came to mind was the captor of her virginity. His name was Ed Redfield and he checked every box of the high school heartthrob stereotype. He was athletic, charismatic and classically handsome. He embodied everything Pam had stopped looking for by the time she agreed to marry Phil, and judging by his profile picture, he still had “it.” What he didn’t have was a wife.

“Single!? That’s shocking,” Pam wrote in her first private message to Ed.

It became the first of many once Ed responded, “I know, RIGHT!? I used to be irresistible!”

Pam conveniently left out Ed when she relayed her Facebook findings to Phil. She stuck with pitting Samantha’s family against her own. She could tell by the tension in Phil’s shoulders that these passive suggestions were getting through to him, but his attempts to improve their family’s financial and social status couldn’t keep up with Pam’s Facebook Feed.

As the weeks progressed, so did Pam and Ed’s virtual flirtations. Their distance made it as harmless as Phil’s panty peeks, until a fortuitous business trip brought Ed within a $20 cab ride of Phil and Pam’s doorstep.

--

The cockroach emerged from the kitchen drain and sought shelter beneath an overturned cereal bowl. It gave a ten count before sticking its antennas out to survey the terrain. Satisfied with the noise level and lack of lighting, it began its ascent to the kitchen counter.

The roach was on a standard reconnaissance mission. Its objective, find a food source and leave a trail of pheromones for the rest of the colony to follow. Like all members of the animal kingdom, aside from humans, survival was its only concern.

The roach bounded from ceramic dish to metal utensil until it successfully breached the rim of the sink. Without a moment of hesitation, it scurried perpendicularly to the floor along the stained-wood cabinet doors.

The kitchen became illuminated by fluorescent light once the roach landed on the faux-mahogany gel mat, as if it had tripped an alarm. It remained motionless as articles of clothing began sailing through the air, sporadically covering the ceramic tiles below.

The roach darted between the shirts, pants and delicates, attempting to reach the living room undetected. It stopped beneath the thin veil of a satin thong after a pair of dark-leather dress shoes appeared in the entryway.

The roach stayed completely still until a nude middle-age woman flung herself off the equally unclothed male she was straddling. Her force sent the man and his chair crashing to the ground in front of the roach.

The roach made a final break for the carpet-lined room. It saw one of the dress shoes lift high out of sight as it passed the fallen man’s head. The roach kept its eyes down and sprinted towards its destination as fast as its legs could carry it.

The roach was lucky to be in motion after the dress shoe returned to Earth. As for the man on the floor, well, he looked up.



Photograph by: Jaemin Riley
Written by: Mark Killian