Link to PDF: Screenland by Jacques Debrot

 

Jacques Debrot’s short stories have appeared in The Rupture, Hobart, the Fanzine, Maudlin House, Short Fiction, and elsewhere. He has also been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, and has won The Thorn Prize in Fiction and the Tusculum Review Fiction Prize.

Mama says real women bleed. Between their legs just as much as the blood being pushed through their veins. She says real women wear tampons. Pads for emergencies. Both when their allergies get bad and they gotta sneeze. Mama says real women get caught foolin’ but doesn’t say what “foolin’” means. Only that Aunt Tessa got caught and got the belt and, when she bends over, folks can still see grandad’s buckle stamped on her legs. Mama says real women work, like her and Aunt Tessa, before any foolin’ happens. That real women know how to treat a man so he’ll cover up, though she doesn’t say what that means either. Real women aren’t afraid of the pain and, mama says, there’ll be pain at first but I’ll get used to it. Some women like the pain while some, like Aunt Tessa, never learn to. I ask mama if that’s what foolin’ means and she says no. Says that foolin’ is what got me my cousins, Rochelle and Azriel. What she means is Aunt Tessa likes to love real women. Not like loving mama and me and her babies. But the women she takes to the back of our trailer, letting them trace grandad’s belt buckle brandings with their tongues. Mama says that, now I’m a real woman, I can ask them to do that to me too. I ask who “them” are. She says whoever I want. As long as, if they’re men, they cover up so no foolin’ happens. I ask if I have to see “them” like she does and she says no. Then she says yes. Just not as often. Real women make sacrifices and she tells me sacrifices are food and clothes and this trailer and these babies and, since I’m a real woman now, I have to help with all of that. Real women know how to keep quiet like Aunt Tessa leading another real woman to her room. Like mama holding hands with two men and leading them to her room. A man comes up behind me, rests his hand on my shoulder. He says something I guess real women like, but I can’t figure out what his words mean. He offers me money, like I’m a real woman. I listen for my mama, my Aunt Tessa, try to hear what real women sound like, then remember real women get real quiet behind closed doors. I unzip my pants, but I don’t pull them down. Peek inside my underwear, make sure the man can’t see. Check if I’m still bleeding, like real women do.

K.B. Carle lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her flash has been published in a variety of places, including Good River Review, HAD, Waxwing, Bending Genres, and No Contact and have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Her story, “Soba,” was included in the 2020 Best of the Net anthology and her story, “A Lethal Woman,” will be included in the 2022 Best Small Fictions anthology. She can be found online at kbcarle.com or on Twitter @kbcarle.

We were bout run ragged, sittin’ in the brick building on the side of 72 right before Cooter Creek but past the McDonalds. Getting a call, jumping up, hauling bodies mostly dead, runnin’ back and then sittin’ in the garage smoking pall malls talking shit bout so and so’s niece being strung out again while we was sittin’ next to the big engine or sittin’ outside on the lawn with burnt up grass till another call come in. Mikey’s brother failed outta scuba diving certification on account of claustrophobia. Mike’s daddy had paid for him to go all the way down to Florida for it. Mikey asked me what I thought his daddy bout done to his brother and I said to this man he oughta whooped him two tits from Tuesday and everyone nodded in agreement. Bobby Lee said they found a cop in an old outhouse yesterday or day before with a plastic bag filled bout yay high with gasoline and part of the bag over his head and he was damn near dead from huffing by the time they got to them. Bobby says it was the same damn cop they took out from the Funland not too far awhile back after the cop drank him a bunch of latex paint and it turned his whole mouth black. Bobby says that cop be selling cocaine around here too and knows them boys up in the hills who are runnin’ the gambling ring one county over. Ol’ Coolie chimes in about the paint and why people can’t just stick to sniffing glue like they used to cause now everyone drinking paint or runnin’ rubbing alcohol through a slice of white bread to drink and it’s making a whole lot of extra work for us and don’t they know we’re too tired for this mess. Jason come in even though it’s his day off cause he don’t wanna be at home with his wife cause he hates that fucking bitch and he remembers when him and Bobby were in high school. Jason says him and Bobby were damn near side ways one night at the Red Iguana cause they never carded anyone back then and started calling the escort services from the yellow pages and Jason says after they called bout five different ones the operator asked them if they realized it was the same lady they’d been talking to the whole time and Bobby asked if he’d worn her down yet.

 

Rebekah Morgan is a writer living in good ole Eastern Tennessee. Previous work can be found with Bull Magazine, Fence, Joyland Magazine, Maudlin House, and New York Tyrant, among others places.

Before: I see grief speeding past my black Toyota Camry on the 29th intersection in the funny, stupid little town called Poppy. I have been living in Poppy for the past twenty-five years—this is where I met my chickens. There are twelve of them—all so ripe—I like them so much that I always want to adorn them. Neat. Put glitter under their eyes, pierce their strong hands (you’re supposed to pierce your hands, and not the softies on your body, left wasted like an ugly Christmas sweater, driven out of existence, lost into the cabaret.) The wolves in my backyard are in love with my chickens. I guess, everyone in Poppy is in love with my chickens—it’s as if their bodies are a magnet. It’s natural for anyone to fall in love with them. When I turn my neck back once again, I don’t see grief disappearing like a cloud of smoke, I don’t see it running in the opposite way anymore—not jolting itself into a corner. I see it turning back. When it’s eighty meters away, I sigh. My first thought is chickens. Perhaps grief is in love with them, too.

After: I come back home, and drop to my knees. The chickens are gone. All twelve of them. Not even a trace. I ask the wolves. I call the cops. I thought grief wouldn’t do anything. But it did. It took my chickens away, I say to Mr. Brad, the detective. A year goes by, I wait, wait, wait. I am so hungry… and they were so ripe. I wonder if they wouldn’t have disappeared without a trace if I fed them to the wolves in the backyard. At least I would have gotten something out of them—a ribcage, for example. A void in my living room—the ribcage. I am so sad. I wish they would come back to me. I would cut them into pieces. They were so ripe. They were like chemtrails over a country club. So present. I really would have eaten them—made them a part of me I would have always adored.

 

Harsimran Kaur (she/her) is a recent high school grad from Punjab, India. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, BULL, Big Windows Review, Milk Candy Review, JMWW, and elsewhere. An alumna of The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, her work has been recognized by The New York Times. She loves clementines and Lana Del Rey, and works as an editor-in-chief for The Creative Zine. She tweets @harsimranwrites.

The doctor says I should spend the night nearby, just in case, and now I think I’m crazy for doing this so far from home. I find a cheap motel with free TV. It looks better at night when sunlight can’t get to it. Or in a fog when the edges are blurry. But by the light of day, it’s the kind of place I’d drive by without turning my head.

The sign says Dar-Ron Motel and I know a couple named Darla and Ron run it without even asking. Or maybe Darren and Ronda—without an H, because her mother wanted her to be special, the kind of person who wouldn’t grow up to own a rundown motel. Either way, Dar and Ron probably aren’t even together anymore. Maybe it’s just one of them—Darla with a new man who now helps her keep up the place, even though the sign still says some other guy’s name. Maybe the new man resents Ron. Maybe he’s grateful. Or maybe it’s just Darla because no man will stick around long enough to make changing the sign worthwhile.

The night clerk’s a gum chewing teen with red lipstick and hair that’s black on one side, white on the other. I wonder how much thought went into deciding which color would look best on which side. That’s the sort of thing that would prevent me from doing that sort of thing. I envy her. She’s probably the kind of person who’d never change herself for some guy making promises he’ll never keep just to get in her pants, eventually saddling her with a smaller, needier version of himself, unless she’s the one who finds a doctor far from home.

If I owned the motel, I’d name it The Francine because it’d be all mine. I wouldn’t cut up my name and share it with some guy, because that only leads to heartache and dead unicorns. At Halloween, I’d go all out decorating the place, and people would come from all over to see it. Halloween makes everyone equal—visible and invisible at the same time. I’m safe because I can see the masks. It’s easy to tell who’s pretending.

My motel would have a lounge where the lonely people who are missing persons from their own lives could feel like they’re part of something and like they have a home. Maybe they’d rent a room and maybe they’d even meet someone. And they wouldn’t care if the room came with free TV, at least not right away.

Julia Strayer has stories in Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review Online, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Jellyfish Review, Wigleaf, and Atticus Review, among others, including the Best Small Fictions anthology. She teaches creative writing at New York University.

Down at the port where the ribbons flow on a Friday night the pubs are crowded at five, the old skippers congregate, drifting greedily into their odd banter: who caught the most frightening fish, who came face to face with the deep in the eye of a giant squid, or barely escaped that battering from an angry blue whale. Imagine what else they go on about. Long time coming, storm cloud on the horizon, beneath the weather, then above it. Here come the mackerel, the herring, the scores of transatlantic cod. Once this place was loaded with sardines in wooden barrels and sailed from here across the world. The fish could be scooped up by almost any hand—they came from as far as Siberia followed by all the seagulls and one hundred years of frostbite. Take this very can, over one hundred years old, dented and rusted, the metals seep in, but the oil (imported from the Cretan islands) is still a thick emulsion and when you bite in, the salt crystals crackle on your tongue; and the sardines are soft yet firm, their skins have quietly braised in history, touched by cosmic background radiation.

All’s well with you, you say. I would hand you some fragments, some cold evidence, how they were herded onto the boats, searing in pain from cable burns, or those who died with a wire across their eyes, or the cut and scrape of their gills against cold steel; how they came from the other side of the planet to mate and spawn and breed where the most vital and vibrant river finds its source.

 

Marc Vincenz is an American-Swiss poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, and musician. He has published 20 collections of poetry, including more recently, The Little Book of Earthly Delights, A Brief Conversation with Consciousness, There Might Be a Moon or a Dog, and forthcoming in 2022, The Pearl Diver of Irunami (White Pine Press). His work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, 3 AM, and World Literature Today. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing.

Take care

After the cicadas stop humming, after the moon flushes the sky clean of stars, we hear it. A thrashing, a clanging, a hurtling, is whirling towards us from below the campground. You pace on the pulsing soil. “Don’t worry,” you call. “I’ll take care of it.” The earth is loud. Insects gather at my feet. Then I notice it: the ground has seams. Stick your finger in and up it rips, soil and roots and worms, concrete foundations, wooden beams, gravestones. “Don’t!” you say. But my fingers are hungry. I pull back the earth beneath your feet. I take care.

No vacancy

Night falls over Crater Lake, that blue gully with its mouth open to the heavens. The man and woman approach the summit as the rain drops like marbles. The campgrounds are full, as are the chalets; there aren’t any hotel rooms this close to the crater’s rim. What if we could make it to the island? she says. It’s probably vacant. When he doesn’t answer, she puts the car in reverse, aims for the rim’s biggest lip. Floor it, he says. Rain steers them down, down. The sky has never been more vacant. They push the stars aside. They land.

Ways to fall in love

One bought me glucose tablets. Another held my hand while we biked. Another took me to see the seals in the snow. One left a birthday gift outside my parents’ gate, close to midnight on a day I thought he’d forgotten. These are all the ways I’ve fallen in love. But this one unrolled the country and we hiked right through it. He vacuums. He lets me drive his ATV. This one woke me that night I’d fallen off the bed, wet and shaking, and didn’t mind that I’d broken his glasses. This one is afraid of the right things.

Transit

We park my bike next to yours in the shed overnight. The next morning, three small tricycles lurk under my back wheel. The tricycles have my curvy handlebars and your racer stripes. My bike looks tired, her tires deflated. Your bike’s pedals spin midair. You reach for a trike, but it rolls out of view. Someday these might come in handy, you say, patting my belly. You reach for the door but I stop you, saying, Let’s leave it open. We’re not gone long, but when we come back, the bikes are gone, a trail of grease staining the floor.

Bean counter

It’s a tireless game, all this imagining. You want a universe and so you must invent it. You want a popsicle and so you must make it drip down your chin. You want a man with a Frisbee for a head, so you draw him. Etcetera. Other people—PhDs, MBAs, MDs, JDs, CFOs, UFOs—other people perform real services, create real goods. Other people can weigh what they’ve created in two hands. Other people chat you up at cocktail parties, say, What you do sounds so fun. You smile, but inside you know. Your hands are dirty from counting words.

 

Julia Halprin Jackson’s work has appeared in Cutleaf, West Branch Wired, Oracle Fine Arts Review, Fourteen Hills, California Northern, and elsewhere. A graduate of U.C. Davis’s Master’s in Creative Writing program, Julia is the co-founder and publicity director of Play On Words, San Jose’s collaborative literary performance series, and a 2021-2023 Lighthouse Book Projecteer.

It’s murky, but at the bottom of Sadpond I think I see streaks of green and yellow. Mabel watches me from the window with worry winnowing across her face, so I cut my staring short and go inside. She asks if there’s something wrong with Sadpond. I don’t know, I tell her. Something’s growing in it. She looks at me, serious as she was as a little business-like infant. Ponds are habitats, she tells me. Okay, I say. Things will grow, she tells me. She walks away from me to let that sink in. I haven’t had it in me to tell her about the sunflowers, but she’s putting the pieces together quicker than I can stop her. I don’t go back out to Sadpond for the rest of the day, but I don’t talk to her either, not until she comes out of her bedroom red in the face and sweating. I have a fever, she says in a long yodel. My fingers are ice against her head. She sinks against me and I toss her to the couch. My daughter, I say. We are so easily taken out. Soon enough, her throat is crawling. She hacks up green and asks me to look at her throat so I get the tongue depressors, even though she’s too old for them. We both like the woody taste. I press down. Inside her: swaths of bright red patched with yellow and green, just like at the bottom of Sadpond. Did you drink the pond water, I say, and she pulls away from me in disgust. I’m not fucking stupid mom, she says. I roll my eyes. There isn’t time for this. She hacks again and something comes out like a silken petal. I made a mistake, I say all choked up, and hurt flashes across her face. For some reason, I think she assumes I meant having her. Obviously, that isn’t it. My mistake: thinking I could protect her alone. My mistake: thinking the sunflowers wouldn’t come for her.

 

Emily Behnke is a graduate of The New School’s MFA program. Her work has been published in trampset, Bear Creek Gazette, Tiny Molecules, and other venues. She’s currently at work on a novel.

For fun, we make a dating profile and start talking to girls from other cities, words shooting like a script, Hi, what are you wearing?

Pink blouse, ripped denim shorts.

Underneath?

Raspberry colored bra, a purple thong.

Show me? A little lower, yes, right there.

It’s adventurous to sync up on Twitter, push stories on Insta, location enabled, our fingers swiping the apps as if it’s each other’s skin. We ask each other, Will you let me touch you tonight, our tongues circling inside our mouths like thirsty leeches. We rub ourselves to those topless pictures taken in dimly lit bathroom stalls, until our lids go heavy.

Did you cum?

Not yet, did you?

Yes, of course. Heart emojis, a hot-pink smooch. You have an amazing body, we text before we birth a lake on our bedsheets, smother each other’s names into our pillows.

We want to visit the girls, we want to bring them home. We want to untangle each other’s hair. We want to bitch about the size-zero waists and the shrill voices of our exes, show how we dope in the vape-sucked restrooms at school, how we sneak out of the labs to avoid dissecting a dead cat. How we plan to push and prod on the kitchen floor with each other someday, stretch our skin in imaginative designs and bake cupcakes, stick tight, glistening cherries into the fleshy sponge.

When we get bored of sex, we fight without fists, our words screwing the airwaves. To cool down, we watch the same ASMR session, the drowsy wavelengths like eyes blinking in a dark cave until the video runs out and we wait for each other to hang up.

What we have won’t be fixed without touch, though the difference in our time zones makes us safe and complicated. For a while, it’s just, Hi, thought of you.

Me, too.

We cling to, Are you wearing something interesting today?

No, are you? OK, gtg. We give up calling each other, Amazing, Gorgeous, our fingers sore from softening the knot between our legs. Our skin goes cold for a while, until we swipe through profiles, text another name, the exposed ink on cleavage warming through the screen, our torsos bent, our eyes drunk with expectation as we gaze deeply, Closer, Yes, Can you come closer?

 

Tara Isabel Zambrano is a writer of color and the author of a full-length flash collection Death, Desire, and Other Destinations from Okay Donkey Press. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Copper Nickel, West Branch, and Post Road. She lives in Texas and is the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.