Month: January 2024

Rod by Whitney Collins

On By okaydonkey7In flash fiction1 Comment

It was during their slow dancing that Rod saw the jaguar. He and Billie were twirling in the trailer to Kenny Rogers when Rod reached out and flipped the lights off for romance. That was when the kitchen went from bright to dark, and the outside went from black to blue, and out past the picture window he saw Priscilla the Peruvian jaguar crouching under the honeysuckle.

Rod grabbed Billie by the shoulders and stopped their waltz: “Don’t you leave,” he whispered. “You understand me?” Then he went and got his firearm from an old Ritz cracker tin under the loveseat and walked toward the front door. When he opened it, the hot night hit him in the face like his stepfather once had.

*  * * 

Last summer, when Priscilla had escaped the zoo, Rod had gone out and bought the handgun. The idea of killing a jaguar and becoming the city hero had lifted his depressed ass right off the sagging trailer couch and smack into the Cabella’s showroom, where he put the Ruger Super Redhawk Alaskan on his nearly maxed-out Discover card. 

In the truck, he held the gun’s barrel to his nose; it smelled like what he thought a real man would smell like. Like metal and blood, which honestly, smelled the same. Rod knew: out past his windshield, the whole town was falling apart. Playgrounds and parks were closed. Local police were outfitted with tranquilizer guns. There was so much collective tension, the wind seemed to sing like a musical saw. For a brief while, Mount Cherry residents had tolerated the ransacked chicken coops, a Jack Russell here, a feral cat there. But the baby was the back-breaking straw.

Three weeks after Priscilla had outsmarted her mesh enclosure, an infant boy was snatched from a backyard quilt while his mother went inside for the cordless phone. Authorities found jaguar tracks in the mud near the driveway, the boy’s discarded diaper near a stream, one perfect little forearm under a Norway spruce two doors down. After that, townspeople no longer hoped to see Priscilla caged and rehabilitated. They hoped to see her spotted corpse laid out over the hood of the sheriff’s cruiser. They wanted someone to shoot her right between her lemony eyes, and that someone, Rod decided, was going to be him.

After Cabella’s, Rod went back to his and Billie’s trailer. It hung on the side of a wooded incline, like an Appalachian barnacle. Rod perched himself on the wood deck and held the gun out in front of him and squinted out at all the places Priscilla could be until the trees were a smear of chartreuse. Rod was fully aware that had never known himself. Sometimes he looked into the bathroom mirror and jumped, startled. The face he looked at was his own, but he never recognized himself. 

But on that first day with the gun, on the porch, looking out into the forest, Rod felt like he was close to self discovery. He held the empty gun out at the trees and aimed. Bam! He killed a deer for dinner. Bam! He killed Priscilla for Mount Cherry. Bam! He killed his stepfather for himself. Bam! He killed himself for his stepfather.

*  *  *

Billie turned off Kenny Rogers while Rod let the door close behind him with a hush. Rod stood motionless on the concrete blocks he’d stacked for stairs and listened. He wondered: how could he climb down from the porch without spooking the cat, how could he cock the hammer without the cat’s big ears twitching all around, how could he hit the cat between its big yellow eyes before the cat could hit him first. Rod moved slow and quiet. He peered around the corner of the trailer as mild as a breeze. He squinted in the dark toward the shadow under the honeysuckle. He wondered how much Priscilla weighed. He wondered if it would be a struggle to lift her, to drape her over his back. He hoped not. He hoped he could make it look easy. He wanted to lay that cat over his shoulders and walk straight into the trailer and have Billie say, “My word, Rod. What have you done gone and brought me?” so he could say: “Myself, Billie. I brought you me.”

Whitney Collins is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Pushcart Special Mention, a Best American Short Stories Distinguished Story, and winner of the 2020 American Short(er) Fiction Prize and the 2021 ProForma Contest. Her stories have appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2022, Fractured Literary Anthology 3, Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror, as well as AGNI, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, and The Idaho Review, among others. Whitney’s previous story collection, BIG BAD, won the Mary McCarthy Prize, a Gold Medal IPPY, and a Bronze Medal INDIES. Her second collection, RICKY & OTHER LOVE STORIES, is forthcoming June 2024

The Man with the Third Ear by Ann Weil

On By okaydonkey7In poetry1 Comment

The man with the third ear lives on Canal Street and is used to curious stares, children pointing, and the occasional rude remark. He isn’t bothered in the least. He understands the blessings of a third ear, and his is a highly skilled worker. His third ear hears only truth. Growing up, he heard the truth of his mother’s love in that ear as she sent him off to school with a reminder—kindness above all else. He heard the bark of his best friend, Dog, who waited on the front lawn for his return. He heard his father’s late-night apology to his mother—another missed dinner—and he knew his dad was truly sorry. As the boy grew into a man, he still heard truth in his third ear, only less of it. He heard nothing in that ear when he watched the news, or when he traded fishing tales with his pals. He heard nothing from his wife, and while that saddened him, it made the divorce easier. She left him for a two-eared bartender. Now, the man with the third ear takes long walks in the jack pine forest and knows to stop and listen when he hears a Kirtland’s Warbler sing. A rare bird is worth waiting for.

Ann Weil is the author of Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2023). Her work has been nominated for a Best of the Net and appears in Pedestal Magazine, New World Writing, Crab Creek Review, 3Elements Review, and elsewhere. A former special education teacher and professor, Ann writes at her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat off a sand bar in Key West, Florida. She is part fish, but won’t tell you which part. Visit www.annweilpoetry.com to read more of her work.

Two Stories by Hedgie Choi

On By okaydonkey7In flash fictionLeave a comment

Volunteering

At the nursing home, the soft and brittle were flipped twice a day to keep their skin from melding to the bedsheets. As I passed one of the cots, a papery hand grabbed mine and pressed something sticky into it. It’s candy, the old woman said. I opened my hand to look. Some were oozing from their wrappers, some had teeth marks. Some were whole and new. They were from a brand that had gone out of business in my childhood. It’s dementia, a passing nurse explained. No, it’s candy, the old woman said. No, the nurse said, carrying a bucket of human waste out of the room, it’s dementia.

In Some Ways I Have Changed

As a mature and gifted child, I did not often play with my sister, because she was five years younger than me and thus unwaveringly stupider and worse. But when we got a catalogue in the mail—Sears, the local grocery store, American Girl Dolls, any catalogue—I made an exception. I would play with my sister for hours at a game we invented, a game that brought us together, a special game we loved. The game would go like this: we’d hover over the catalogue, each holding a marker. On the count of three, I’d flip open a page and we’d scan the glossy spread for the best thing, the one item we wanted most, and circle it with our markers as quickly as possible. This meant we “got” the item. Each item could only be circled once—we could not, for instance, co-own the Truly Me Western Horse and Saddle Set. Twice, I attacked my sister because she was quicker to circle the thing we both wanted. The things she took from me, or, more accurately, the pictures of things she circled that I wanted to circle, for which I attacked her physically, were a 2002 Toyota Camry and Premium Shredded Turkey Breast.

Hedgie Choi received her MFA in Poetry from The Michener Center for Writers and her MFA in Fiction from The Writing Seminars. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Noon, American Short Fiction, Poetry Magazine, The Hopkins Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.

A House on Two Legs by Kendra Marie Pintor

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

How long will I be cleaning that house out of my ears? Picking it’s floorboards from between my teeth with the prong of a hammer, plucking my father’s collection of crushed Miller Lite cans like gunk wedged between my toes, wiping away the hardened chunks like the husk of my mother’s heart from the inner corners of my eyes. How long will it take to fully disentangle myself from that place? Is it insane for me to shop online for “ear swabs made of steel,” or “nail picks that shoot fire,” in an effort to eviscerate that house from my body? I don’t know what else to do. Every time I argue with my husband, the house comes out. I spit up lamp cords strung with crystal ornaments, Thermoses full of warm wine, My Little Pony’s with glittery manes, chlorine and barbeque smoke, ammunition covered in backyard soil, a first communion dress that smells like a dusty attic, photographs where we’re all smiling but no one is happy. It’s like scrubbing at hardened grease with a soft sponge. It’s like trying to clean whites without bleach. It’s like trying to keep hair from slipping down the drain, to keep it from knotting into a wad that will clog and cause the water to overflow, spill out onto the floor, wetting my husband’s feet, and always right as he’s leaving for work. No matter how hard I try, I keep finding that house, and all its memories, burrowed and hibernating in my belly button like a brown bear in a cave, stuffed up my nasal passageways making it hard to breathe, under my fingernails, under my skin, which I pick and scratch whenever I need to distract myself. And that house, it is heavy. And it is hard work. And it is a load I would like very much to put down. And I am the load. And I am the house, on two legs. I carry it with me everywhere I go, and while I try so hard to keep it all to myself some of it falls out and god my husband, my friends, even strangers off the street, they ask, “do you need some help with that?” And they reach down and pick up the belt, the quarters my sister and I used to hold against the wall with our noses, kneeling on the hardwood floor, the orange pill bottles that filled every drawer, the VHS tape of Toy Story recorded over with porn, cradling it in their hands as if it is a precious piece of me, and it’s the way they all look at me that makes me want so badly, so, so badly, to drop the whole thing. To leave that house condemned wherever I am, and watch as wrecking crews raze it to the ground.

Kendra Marie Pintor (she/her) is a rising author of speculative horror from Southern California, with work appearing in Lunch Ticket, Fast Flesh Literary Journal, CRAFT Literary, FOLIO LIT, and LEVITATE Magazine. Her story “The Sluagh” has been nominated for Best American Science Fiction/Fantasy and was selected by Alternating Current Press for the 2023 Best Small Fictions Anthology. Kendra is a graduate of the University of La Verne’s creative writing program and the 2022 UMass Amherst Juniper Summer Writing Institute.