We abhor disclaimers here at DSM. We look forward to them about as much as a kick in the nuts or, even worse, a taste of fried beer.  We’re well aware they’re necessary on PS3/Xbox manuals to safeguard against lawsuits by epileptics, for instance; or before Spike TV’s 1000 Ways to Die because, apparently, some of those who walk among us would actually contemplate copulation with a cow heart throbbing to 110v, knowing full well they are going to die.

Thus, the need for disclaimers. We don’t have one. That’s just how we roll, free and easy. But if we were pressed for one, this is all it would say:

WARNING:  You will not suck after reading our magazine.

You won’t. We promise. Have a great Labor Day weekend.

–Robert Paul Moreira

– It’s how he gets his rocks off, that’s how I look at it. He’d never say it so bluntly, but there it is. Henry, he’s a romantic. You give him hay and he spins it into gold; you show him an alley reeking of piss and horseshit from the last hansom cab stable in Chicago, with the el hammering the tracks so loud you can feel it in your teeth, and he makes it sound like some kind of special-effects Shangri-La. I’ve heard what he says. Showers of stars. Lights like an open-air disco. It’s fairyland, which I guess it is, if you want to be funny about it, but what does that make me? Some kind of chain-smoking Peter Pan? A big white rabbit stalking a sexed-up Alice? I’m the guy that tails him there night after night, and I stand on the corner and I wait for him to get what he needs and the whole time I’m praying this isn’t the night he gets busted by the cops or worked over by some bruiser or else jumped by kids so goddamn scared of their own need that they go and kick the shit out of some guy doing exactly what they want most. But this is what brothers do for brothers. — Brendan Mathews in The Manchester Review

– We had values. We had Le Creuset pots. We had fold-out couches in our living rooms, where we slept with our husbands at night. Beside these couches, we had books stacked on the floor: Modern Library editions of Kafka and James Joyce and Georges Sand. Beneath these high-minded selections, we had Lorna Doone and Anne of Green Gables, touchstones from a time when reading in bed was our guiltiest pleasure. — L.E. Miller in Ascent

– This man had a dog and his tail got run over by a car. Dog’s tail, not the man’s. Dog’s tail is bent and fucked up and it’s embarrassing. Man goes in, he gets a cleaver, he hacks the dog’s tail off right there on the curb. Neighbor kid throws up, tells his mom what happened. Mom beats the hell out of the kid for lying. Kid grows up to be President. Sometimes, that’s how this works. — Micah Dean Hicks in Tryst

– Thursday. Only twenty-four hours away. Who shall be next? Which direction will the lightning strike? If there was ever a time to be a nobody, this is the perfect epoch. Some wish they could simply change colour and blend into the dull shades of some of the dilapidated buildings on the outskirts of Mponela but alas their pigmentation is not as magical as the chameleons. Anyone who is conspicuous in any way could have the arrow of gossip pierce his neck. — Dango Mkandawire in StoryTime: Weekly New Fiction by African Writers

by Meg Pokrasss

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Meg Pokrass is a fiction writer who lives in San Francisco where truth is questionable. Her debut collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” will be published in 2011 by Press 53. Meg’s work was selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Flash Fiction 2009. She has published over one hundred stories and poems. You can see more of her animations here at http://pokrasstinations.com/

by Robin Underdahl

Boaz was a yellow he-goat, old as sin according to Grandma Gert. He stood just inside the barbed wire fence and aimed his gaze along the top of his nose as if it was a gun. When Joseph pointed him out to his mother, she said “Ish” without looking. The car bumped along the dirt road.

He liked to imagine catching the buck in a net and dragging him through the river till he came out white. Then you could walk near him and not have your stomach clutch from the stink. Nobody could figure out why Mr. Lurtz kept him. Sometimes he chucked rocks at his goat.

Grandma Gert kept Violet because she loved goat’s milk.

“You’ll have a really nice week,” his mom said.

“A nice week.” He could tell without looking that her mouth was tight now. His friends argued with their parents, but he didn’t see how that could work with his mom.

“Mr. Charles is going to be really amazing,” she said.

“I know.” Mr. Charles was a tennis pro who had offered lessons at the school auction and she bought them for thousands of dollars in order to help the school.

“Okay,” he had said when she told him. “But I hope it’s not in August.”

“It’s not going to make any difference, Joe, if this one year your visit’s a little shorter. Grandma Gert will understand.”

He brought it up another time, and she said, “Anyway you need to be in the real world. The world moves forward.”

The tires made a scraping sound as they turned into the gravel driveway. Grandma Gert came out to meet them in a big shirt that flapped in the breeze. She was barefoot.

After he hugged his grandma hello and his mom goodbye, they sent him away so they could talk about something. He carried his duffel bag into the cottage and walked straight out the back. The sun touched his face. On the way past the vegetable garden and up through the tall grasses, he could smell things. Something dusty, something minty.

Violet watched him coming up the meadow. She bit off five or six quick bites from a bush and stretched her head forward as if she had to lengthen her neck in order to chew and swallow the leaves down. He ran his hand over the stiff white hair of her back to feel the ridge of her spine waving up and down.

Far below, the river seemed to jiggle in place, dark under the bright sky. Really, though, it was chugging its way down through all the middle states to the Gulf of Mexico.

His mom’s black car came back up the road and she honked and waved. When its puttering died away, he closed his eyes. Insects buzzed. Violet chewed leaves and her saliva made them squeak.

“Violet’s stream is beginning to thin,” Grandma Gert said when he went in. “I barely get a glassful now. We need to make a new goat, so I don’t have to buy one. Kidding improves the flow anyway.”

She was cheap, his parents said. He liked to make things, too, or borrow them, rather than asking for something and then being driven to a bunch of stores to find the best one. Making a goat, though, that was new.

“What I need,” she said, “is for you to take Violet wandering. Near Boaz.”

He waited, guessing at her meaning. “Will Mr. Lurtz mind?”

“Lurtz won’t know because you’ll be careful. He thinks Boaz’s seed is priceless. I was stupid even to ask him about it.”

He stared at the pan on the stove and tried to think about what food was in it.

She mentioned that they had to wait for Violet’s estrus, but it should be coming any day. In all the piles of books he had to keep stepping over, there was no dictionary except a German one.

The next day she reconsidered. “A week. Not much time for your learning curve. Let’s start today and just see if they notice each other.”

He was in his bathing suit looking down toward the dark finger of the dock that stuck out into the river and held its own against the current again this year. He pulled on his clothes and put raisins and peanuts in his pockets.

Violet was in the meadow and didn’t fuss as he hooked the rope collar around her. The rotting posts and barbed wire that marked the perimeter of Lurtz’s pasture were right across the road. The cows were there, as always, standing in a brown bunch, chewing. But when you wanted him Boaz was hard to find.

He led Violet higher up so they were across from Lurtz’s cornfield. The treats worked for luring her through his grandma’s split rail fence at the place where the bottom rail was down. They threaded through the corn until the pasture came in sight between the tall stalks.

Before they saw Boaz, he soured the air. Violet pranced and kicked up her legs, old as she was, and made whining noises like complaints. They looked at Boaz. That was all Grandma Gert said to do.

On the second day, just as they got close to the pasture, the tractor choked and roared to life and came straight toward them. Joseph turned back and loped deep into the corn, dragging the bleating Violet. After that he waited till he saw Lurtz go into his house at lunchtime and then led Violet across the road. On the stormy day, Boaz stood with his head bowed under the huge maple as if a rain-washing were the most depressing thing in the world.

One morning Grandma Gert heard Violet bleating, and she raised her hands out of the soapy dishwater and walked to the kitchen door, hanging her wet fingers in front of her. Violet was next to her stable. She jumped once, and then stood wagging her stumpy tail back and forth in the air like a dog greeting its owner except she wasn’t looking their way. His grandma wiped her hands on the dishtowel and hiked up the path to Violet. He followed.

“Well, look at that.” Some snot-like stuff had dribbled out under Violet’s stick-up tail, making her look shiny in that area. “I’d say you’ll be able to get somewhere now.”

Boaz was in the middle of Lurtz’s big wheat field, in plain sight from anywhere. All day that was where he was.

“I could go at night,” Joseph said over chicken and the beans he had picked and strung.

“I think your parents would sic some therapist on me if I sent you on an errand like that after dark.” She used her napkin to wipe the grease off her mouth. “It makes the whole enterprise look criminal.” She smiled behind the napkin.

At ten o’clock he changed into dark clothes.

“If she’s not in her stable, I’d try where those bushes grow closer to the shore,” Grandma Gert volunteered without looking up from the TV news.

The wind had come up, and he zipped his sweatshirt as he went down the path. The big cloud over the moon was in his favor, though millions of stars pricked the clear part of the sky.

On the steep slope, wooden steps had been built in two places. Rustling noises came from the bushes around the boat shed, where anything could be hiding. At the bottom was a stretch of sand.

Violet stood with her hoofs in water taking quick drinks and then jerking her head up. The river was rushing and noisy, and her whiteness glowed against it in the starlight. He held out a couple of peanuts so she would back out of the water and stretch her bony muzzle to his hand. He was used to the feel of her snappy lips tickling his palm, but this time they were wet. He attached the rope and led her along the beach. As he entered Lurtz’s trees, the stiff needles of the pines brushed against his sleeves.

This narrow band of forest separated Lurtz’s fenced-in pasture from the river. He owned the land right to the shore but didn’t use it for anything. In sunlight, you could see how the sand lay in fixed ripples under the shallow water where there used to be a beach. Grandma Gert said the current had taken it.

He was prepared to offer more peanuts if Violet balked, but she followed briskly behind him.

What he knew about this kind of thing was from what he had figured out with his friends, plus movies. It wasn’t from the plan his mom had made a few months ago. She got a hotel room near the amusement park, but she wasn’t going. When his dad was lifting their suitcase into the trunk, Joseph was in the front seat already with his window down. “You’ll see, Wy,” he heard her say. “He’ll feel free to ask questions. If you waited till even this summer he might not.” They were supposed to listen to some CDs.

The cars crawled on the highway, and his dad grunted when he had to change gears. The sun glinted on glass and chrome. The talking voices said that sex was a natural function. A man’s voice would say a few things and then a woman’s voice would chime in. He said sex was pleasurable and she said, boy is it ever.

Between Parts One and Two, he’d thought of a question. “Mom wanted us to go on rides too?”

His dad dropped one hand to his knee, giving up on changing lanes. “We’re lucky, Joe — we get to goof off for two days, and all we have to do is listen to some stuff on the way there and back.”

Part Two was about animals and evolution and lovers pairing off.

In the parking lot, he looked back to watch the locks click down as they walked away from the car.

Some parents sat on benches and watched, but his dad crunched down and strapped himself in for the rides. He was more than six feet tall and had straight gray hair that fell onto his forehead in spite of the hair spray. His mom had suggested a perm once, but his dad said, “Forget it.”

Later, in the hotel, he had pretended to watch TV while his dad called his mom to report. “Cynthia, hi. We’re just settling in for the night. Had a great day.” Then a short silence. “Yeah, the first two, no problem.” Then his dad’s eyes started wandering all over the room. His mom must be praising his dad. She was big on praising. Then his dad managed to steer the subject back to the new roller coaster, and obviously she would be bored by that so the conversation ended with the I love yous.

“Found anything for us to watch?”

“You pick, Dad.” He threw the remote across and they found a movie about a guy stealing raw diamonds off a truck that was leaving a diamond mine.

When Joseph reached the hollow where the creek splashed into the river, he turned and led Violet back up through the trees, over the lumpy ground, toward Lurtz’s pasture. He tried to see into the darkness at his feet, wondering what each step he took was disturbing. Snakes preferred sun, or anyway rattlesnakes did. Now he saw the lights of the house through the trees.

Violet’s hoofs crashed through the underbrush. But the creek bubbled and the wind rustled up in the trees, and maybe Violet’s hoofs would mix with all the other noises if Lurtz happened to be outside. The house was close now, and the windows laid rectangles of light on the pasture and even sent a little glow into the woods. Lurtz was always up late, Grandma Gert said.

And there was Boaz, drinking from the creek. Visible in the dim starlight because his yellow hair was brighter than the pasture grasses. He was only about thirty yards away, close enough that usually you’d want to pull your sleeve across your face. But the wind was blowing off the river, toward Boaz.

On the way home from the amusement park after the second day, his dad had put in the next CD. The man’s voice used the word “beautiful.” The woman said “gentle.” Right after something about “bringing the very best of themselves together!” Joseph had pushed the button and extinguished the woman’s voice. The sound of the car engine filled the space. His dad said, “Yeah.”

He tested the barbed wire of the fence. It was loose, both the upper and lower strands. Of course there was no manipulating Boaz. His hope was that Violet would go on her own. He pulled the wires apart to make an opening large enough for her, but she stood still, as if the distant light from the house blinded her. She was utterly uninterested. In fact, she spread her hind legs to pee, and he had to jump out of splashing range. So much for helping them bring the best of themselves together.

The wind did the work. It passed by Violet and arrived at Boaz, who raised his head from the creek, turned in their direction, grunted loud enough to hear at a distance, cleared the small bank with a jump, and trotted over to the fence. Instinctively, Joseph parted the barbed wire again and Boaz was through it, possibly with a bloody scratch on his back. The air that surrounded Boaz and traveled with him was sharp and closed over Joseph’s face like a sickness. His mouth and eyes clamped shut, and his nose pushed the air back out before he could get the good of it.

He remembered Violet and opened his eyes. She stood absolutely motionless. Boaz sniffed around her tail, curling his upper lip back and making nickering noises. He pawed the ground with one hard hoof and made another kind of noise, more like grumbling. She took a few steps ahead, but Boaz followed her and got himself next to her so he could rub against her side. Joseph was behind them, and he saw that Boaz had enormous balls, like two oranges. He was sniffing her backside again and running his tongue in and out of his mouth. Then all of a sudden he reared up and came down over the back half of Violet. She bleated anxiously and he expected her to bolt away, but no. She had turned her backside to Boaz with her messy estrus, and he began bashing into her, his forelegs jerking along her sides. He made loud noises like barks but somehow goaty. She stood her ground, raising her hind end and actually bracing her feet to withstand his force. When Boaz backed down and quieted to grumbling, she waited. Joseph began to breathe again, through a sleeve of his sweatshirt, and he realized he’d been getting dizzy from the lack of air.

It began over again. It happened four or five times. With his arms latched around the fencepost, he watched because it was impossible not to. In any case, he could not have left Violet alone. Whimpering sounds came from his throat, but they were lost in the goat racket.

There was another noise. Cracking of twigs. And a sense of something dark passing close to him. His butt tightened against the urge of sudden diarrhea. When the shape was past him, it took human form and moved in on the goats to grab Boaz by a horn and ram something hard against Violet’s side making her bleat in pain—the butt of a gun. Lurtz. He kept ramming Violet, breathing heavily with the effort, until she skittered ahead, and the rearing Boaz was prevented from following her by the firm hand on his horn. Then Lurtz used the gun to prod Boaz to turn around and step toward the fence.

“Pull the wires up.”

Joseph found himself able to move his shaking arms. He kept his face down, his breath involuntarily suspended as Boaz hopped through the fence.

Lurtz stood in front of him in undershorts and a dark work shirt. His fleshless legs rose out of boots without socks. In the faint light, they looked like bones.

“You little pisser.” The gun had been angled in front of Lurtz, at rest in his two hands. Now he let go with one hand and the butt swung free by his boots.

“It’s not what you think.” Joseph’s voice came out high.

“I think what I think.” The butt of the gun stopped on the toe of one boot, and the toe energetically bounced it up and down. “Tell her a hundred bucks, you pissing little asshole. Go tell her that.”

Lurtz parted the barbed wire and climbed through, and Joseph shot away through the trees, stumbling once painfully and pushing himself on by leading with the good foot. The woods were darker. The rushing sound of the river was in the air, but he couldn’t tell which side it was on. He had lost the stream that led to it.

And his grandma wouldn’t pay, not that much.

When twigs crunched behind him, not in a sneaky, scared way but in the bold, rhythmic way of someone fearless, he only kept from wetting his pants by grabbing hold of himself and squeezing. He couldn’t turn to look back.

It was just Violet, all clean and white and trotting along with her head held up. Anyone would think she’d just gone somewhere on purpose, not been violently attacked. She passed him by as if his guidance were a thing she couldn’t possibly need. Then her crunching footfalls were beyond his hearing.

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Robin Underdahl’s fiction and nonfiction appears in Notre Dame Review, Short Story, upstreet, and Stirring. She lives in Dallas, but her blood is Minnesotan.

I don’t eat birthday cake unless it’s my birthday. I’ve never tied another person’s shoelaces. Once upon a time there was a cat and a field and a mouse. The cat put its teeth through the mouse and then the field burned fire. Please don’t ask to try my french fries. You will only want more. The sky’s not yellow it’s chicken. Tonight the devil will wrack the sky with thunder. Tonight you will dream of people you have never met, fret about an operation you will never need. All is well, friend. Wear your feet bare. Except in public. Nobody likes people who don’t wear shoes in public. Unless it’s your birthday. Happy birthday. Now let’s eat some fiction. — Oliver Kancamagus

– Your neighbor is a very reliable describer of things. For instance, he or she once described life as the long slide into the box. You’ve been thinking about this lately. The box doesn’t bother you—it might even be cozy in there—but the lid freaks you way the hell out. Not much room, once that lid is in place. You’ve been sliding a long time now; better hurry up and get Thing A while you can still enjoy it. — Douglas Watson in Fifty-Two Stories

– My Piper will break your heart with her new gap-toothed smile, and her flapper haircut, and her tiny bitten fingernails. When you see my Piper in front of the Toasted Oats, spindly-legged beneath her summer dress and her red rubber boots, her brow crinkled in concentration as she runs her nimble fingers up and down the grocery list, you will want to gather her up in your arms. You will marvel at the care and attention with which she guides Jodi (whom she’s dressed in a striped shirt and checkered pants) hand in hand, step after wobbly step, down the aisle, past the Grape Nuts and the Lucky Charms. She will shame you with her patience as she bends down in the shadow of Tony the Tiger and endeavors for two minutes to interpret her baby brother’s earnest and unintelligible garblings, while her daddy waves her on impatiently from the head of the aisle. And when she succeeds in understanding baby brother, and you see his little face light up in recognition, you will understand why he clings to her so. — Jonathan Evison in TriQuarterly Online

– She made a face that was neither a frown nor a smile, walked passed him without another word and a few minutes later he heard the shower running and her singing something at the top of her voice. The song she was singing seemed to be about a fox that had lost its tail but he had never heard it before and wasn’t sure she was not making it up as she went along. It seemed vaguely familiar. Had he read a story about a tailless fox before, or was it a something she had told him before about some favorite book when she was a child? They had been together long enough now that he could not always keep straight which memories were his and which were hers. — Grant Bailie in RICK Magazine

– Kita and I are walking beneath the twist and tangle of ancient pecan trees on the neighborhood horse path. Dogs bark and snarl behind their fences. One black and white Border Collie sprints across his pasture. He watches Kita with his blue eyes, braces himself, and barks. Kita holds her head and bushy gray tail high, ignores the collie and the other dogs’ pedestrian insults. Morgan and Arabian horses stick their necks over the fences and shoo the flies away while chickens crow. Behind another fence, smelly emus tromp around between palm trees in mud, their chests beating like drums. — Alexandra Isacson in Metazen

– Six months ago, I spent my Friday night like this: I made some gooey macaroni and cheese, drank whiskey out of a little juice glass, and then experimented with drinking whiskey stirred into a mug of hot peach tea. I scrolled through my phone and left messages for friends I thought might be going out to bars. I watched the documentary Helvetica—about the typeface, Helvetica. I smiled at the attractive Swedish men arguing over the politics signified by a particular typeface, but I was discomfited by the slippery Ouroboros arguments around Modernism. I took my trusty vibrator for a ride. Then it dawned on me that I needed to finally decorate my apartment. — Carolyn Silveira in anderbo

Video: Farley French Fries

by Thomas Mundt

I tried to warn you, Rachel. I thought I made it perfectly clear that Mamaw isn’t fucking around this time.

You should’ve appreciated the gravity of the situation when I told you she was heading out to the garage to get that folding chair. You know she’s serious when she gets that folding chair. Remember that whole episode with the halfway house? How everything was perfectly cool, how we were all in the living room watching the LSU-Ole Miss game until Mamaw read something in the West Memphis Evening Times about an apartment complex on the corner of Poplar and Pine Bluff being converted into a halfway house? How she cussed and threw the paper down and told us she was going out to the garage for a spell? How she emerged an hour later with that tattered lime-green folding chair, only to load it up in her LeBaron and drive the half hour into Arkansas so she could camp out in front of the halfway house in protest? How there wasn’t anything to protest but a leveled apartment complex? How the cops came and. . .

Point is, I called you as soon as Mamaw told us she was heading out to the garage to get that folding chair. That should’ve been your cue to make up whatever excuse you needed to make up for the hospital, so you could get your ass down here. Stat. Sorry, that’s bad. No more doctor jokes.

But now it’s too late. Mamaw set up that folding chair in the middle of the acreage and has been anchored there for about two hours. Did I mention she has her rifle? Yeah. She’s got it, all right. She’s been shooting at the crop dusters flying overhead. She read a USA Today article about the detection of trace amounts of pesticides in drinking water. In California. But of course it set her off. Everything does these days.

The cops are here. Three squad cars full. They’re all useless. Uncle Mike’s been handling the negotiations, if you can call them that. He’s told the cops about a dozen times now that they just need to bum rush her, that she can’t hear shit and with her back turned to all of us Mamaw’ll never hear them coming. The cops keep saying it’s too risky, that they’ll have to take her out if she points the rifle at them. Just following protocol, they say. So, they do nothing. They lean back against the sides of the squad cars and drink the coffee Aunt Debbie made for them. Even the Crisis Negotiator. He’s the worst of the lot. Every fifteen minutes or so he’ll pick up his megaphone and say some sappy shit about how we all love Mamaw, how we all just want all of this to be over so we can talk and be a family again. And every time Mamaw just flips him the bird without turning to look at him.

I know there’s been a bad accident on I-55 and that’s why you’re not here yet. I did listen to your voicemail, Rach. And I’m not trying to lay some kind of guilt trip on you here, but you’re the only one that can talk to her. Me, Uncle Mike, Cousin Nolan? You think she gives a shit about anything we have to say? Uncle Mike and Cousin Nolan still owe her for that tire shop start-up money she floated them years ago, and every time they try to talk some sense into her she responds with some really mean shit about how they can’t even run a tire shop. Everyone needs tires, and they can’t even sell a dollar for fifteen cents. Mean shit like that. You’d think tires was a synonym for water in the desert, the way she says it all condescending-like. And me? She hasn’t listened to a word I’ve said since I told her I’m a registered Democrat. And that was four years ago.

You’re The Doctor. Dr. Rachel McAllister. Dr. Lifesaver. Dr. The Only One of Us That’s Actually Done Something With Her Life. My apologies. I’m starting to sound like Mamaw. Real condescending-like. I’m sorry, but none of us know how this will end. We don’t see a box of shells at her feet but she could’ve stashed some extras in her apron. Her next shot could be her last, just a harmless warning to the pesticide industry, or she could keep going. She could shoot a cop, Rachel. Then you’ll really be able to play doctor.

I’m sorry. That was mean. Could you just get here, please?

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Thomas Mundt lives in Chicago.  His new(ish) words can be read now or soon in places like Annalemma, Acreage, Wigleaf, and Thieves Jargon.  The whole megillah’s at www.dontdissthewizard.blogspot.com.

What you’ve just been subjected to is what our niece used to try and school us in popular music this weekend.

We’re seriously contemplating scratching her name off our family will now.

While we give our lawyers a call, please, do what we did: take a few deep breaths, purge your mind of what you’ve just seen, think of your favorite Eagles, Zeppelin, or Rush song, and relax.

Better? Good. Now you’re ready to sing to the tune of these.

– Robert Paul Moreira

– He beat on the screen door. “Will somebody open this?!” Unlike most men, he didn’t leave his hard hat in his truck, took it inside his home, and he had it in his hand. His body was dry now, at least it wasn’t like it was two hours ago at work, when he wrung his T-shirt of sweat, made it drool between the fingers of his fist, he and his partner making as much of a joke out of it as they could. That’s how hot it was, how humid, and it’d been like this, in the nineties and hundreds, for two weeks, and it’d been hot enough before that. All he could think about was unlacing his dirty boots, then peeling off those stinky socks, then the rest. He’d take a cold one into the shower. The second one. He’d down the first one right at the refrigerator. “Come on!” Three and four were to be appreciated, five was mellow, and six let him nap before bed. — Dagoberto Gilb in The Barcelona Review

– Henry and Alice, each reading. Every few seconds Henry looks up, as if a conversation is about to begin. Alice is flipping pages in a novel, looking for the plot. The wall-clock hums. Every :59:59 one hand twitches, leaps toward :00:00. — Terence Kuch in The Ante Review

– Here’s a picture of Janice Baker sitting on a wooden bench at the park holding her exposed left breast. This might be my favorite picture. I’ve looked at it so many times. Janice won’t care that I’m showing you this, at least not in this realm because she’s dead. Her parents won’t care either because they’re also dead. Janice was my first real girlfriend and she was wild and when I was fifteen she did things to me that I never thought could be done between man and woman. I loved the heck right out of her. Now, because she was a first love and we were fifteen and I didn’t know a thing about women, I shit the bed on the whole relating part of the relationship. Janice left me for a guy named Mark who was an actor in a local commercial and who had dreams to be a real big-time film actor and who was tall and muscular and had a beard. He looked like a cross between a young Brando and a young Frederik Engles. Fuck Mark and his beard and the fact that he saw and touched and kissed a lot more of this breast here than I ever did. Janice Baker and I both grew up and apart and then one day I heard she’d gone off to get married on some Caribbean island. Her whole family: mother, father, brothers and new husband were found bobbing in the water after some failed catamaran voyage. It was a freak storm, I think. Janice’s skin was apparently the color of elephant. Mark and I both went to the funeral. He cried like an actor up in the front pew. — Frank Hinton in Necessary Fiction

– We’d lately been buying old puzzles from the flea market. Any picture was fine as long as the seller guaranteed no missing pieces, which they always did. Of course, most of the puzzles were incomplete. The boxes were full of mismatches and deficit. People will say anything to make a buck. I knew this disappointed my son, but I never hid it from him. We’d just finished working on a pair of whales floating in a square of ocean. Jigsaw-shapes of our brown carpet showed through the blue. “People can be greedy and dishonest,” I told him. “You should get used to that about us.” — Jensen Beach in BULL: Men’s Fiction

by Z.Z. Boone

When I was eleven, my mother told me my father was never coming home. It was September, shortly after school had started, a few weeks before my birthday.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Now go do your homework.”

I never questioned what I was told by an adult. Not the existence of God, not the claim that the ancient Clovis culture once roamed the very ground on which we lived, not the fact that our tiny house was built on a swamp which might decide to swallow us all while we slept.

My dad was never a huge presence, so I can’t honestly say I missed him. But for the first few nights he was gone, I could hear my mother crying through the common wall between their bedroom and mine. Usually it was drowned out by the radio on her nightstand where some deep-throated bigot would rant about welfare and crime and Affirmative Action. After about a week, though, the radio went silent and so did Mom.

Kenny Pontillo lived directly across the street from us in an identical house painted one shade grayer. He was twenty-years old, mentally retarded, and sat staring out his front window most of the time.

“Where’s your dad?” he’d ask practically every day.

“Not around,” I’d tell him, and Kenny’d be satisfied with that answer, at least for awhile.

One Saturday in early October I came home from playing Tetris at Kenny’s and found an envelope, addressed to me and postmarked from Largo, Florida, on my bed. Inside was a birthday card — one week late — with a five-dollar bill. It was signed, “Dad.” I threw the card into the trash and gave the money to my mother who was in the living room vacuuming.

Halloween day our school got dismissed early, the idea being to let the kids trick-or-treat before darkness set in. My mom was at her job as a teller at Richmond County Savings Bank, so I decided to make a dummy.

In my parent’s closet I found my father’s left-behind work clothes in a plastic laundry basket. I stuffed a pair of chinos and a flannel shirt with newspaper, and stapled them together. On our front lawn, I positioned the dummy in a seated position, its back leaning against a tree. I tucked the shirt cuffs into winter gloves, arranged rubber boots at the ends of the legs. I stuffed an old pillowcase and added a face with a black Magic Marker. I tied it with clothesline, hoping it looked like a hangman’s noose. It hardly seemed scary enough, so I drove a screwdriver through the chest and decorated the wound with catsup. I filled an empty Coke bottle with water, added a label reading POISON! and placed it on the ground by one of the hands.

“What’s that?!” I heard Kenny shout from his doorway.

“It’s my dad!” I yelled back. “He’s home!”

_______________________________________

Z.Z. Boone’s fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Web, and storySouth’s Million Writers Award. Work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Annalemma, The MacGuffin, Third Wednesday, Swill, FRiGG, Wigleaf, decomP, Word Riot, Pank, LITnIMAGE, Monkeybicycle, and other terrific places.

TO: Dr. Stephen Hawking, Ph.D.

FROM: Your Buds at DSM

We’re with you in thinking we need to get off this planet. Like you, we’re well aware of the impact our prolonged wars and famines and global warming and uncapped, deep-sea oil wells are having on this imperfect sphere we call home.

We get it, Stephen. Because of us, the Earth is going to shit. The human race needs a new planet to abuse.

So here’s a cluster of yarns as bright as the Pleiades meant to help you persuade, each one with a galactic curiosity similar to your own. Show these to your colleagues and bigwig friends. They’ll be staring up into the heavens in no time.

Pulsars and quasars to the wife and kids, Stephen. Hope your voice synthesizer is running smooth.

Cheers.

– Robert Paul Moreira

– In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was a high-density pre-baryogenesis singularity. Darkness lay over the deep and God moved upon the face of the hyperspatial matrix. He separated the firmament from the quark-gluon plasma and said: let there be particle/anti-particle pairs, and there was light. He created the fish of the sea and the fruits of the trees, the moon and the stars and the beasts of the earth, and to these he said: Go forth, be fruitful and mutate. And on the seventh day, the rest mass of the universe came to gravitationally dominate the photon radiation, hallow it, and keep it. — Catherynne M. Valente in Clarkesworld

– The rarefied air of Coprahaagendas swirled and separated into zones, like vinegar whisked into milk—an acrid miasma that puffed and seeped from the great building atop the hill. — Anna Tambour in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine

– We knew they were on their way long before they got here. Several years ago we saw the speck moving toward us. We said, Oh, no, not more smart people . . . if people they are . . . if smart . . . (but they do have to be fairly intelligent to get here in the first place) . . . but we’re already full up. There are limits to how big a population a world can hold comfortably, and so that everybody has fun. — Carol Emshwiller in Asimov’s Science Fiction

– My journey begins. I’m released into the stars. As I fly through a maze of shimmering silver dust, I think of you. I will save you. The path I travel narrows and swells, through dark velvet—punctured and beautiful. My flesh crackles in blisters of delight. My heart soars beneath my chest. — Lydia Kurnia in Everyday Weirdness

– Today I held my newborn daughter. I sat by Dulat’s side for an hour and held her hand, wanting more than anything to be a good husband. I encouraged her, told her to keep going, inquired about pain relief on her behalf, but she didn’t need my input. Our child slipped from the inflamed birthing sac and into my arms with no duress on Dulat’s part. Two scientists took her from me, gave her the contracted examination and then left us alone. — Lyn Battersby in Electric Velocipede

by Gregory Sherl

Terrible Love

I smoke a hand rolled cigarette and cough. I have to relight it before every hit. Girl #4 doesn’t wear her pink wig at night. She wears nothing at night. She is pale and I am grateful for my small bed, her slim wrists. Tonight my bed is empty. Too many pills left my heart dull. Girl #5 says Pick. She looks at the prescription, her thighs, the dirty bed sheets. There is Vicodin in everything if you look hard enough. Like Girl #6’s tongue, almost as red as her hair.

Poem as Leaving

Girl #7 paints me eating snow. Then there are wings and everything looks like pepper. She says This is the sound I hear while you’re in the shower. She helicopters around the room so fast her hands look like burned out glow sticks. Seven days later I don’t smell her on my pillow. Here I am missing Girl #1 and the fake lumps in her breasts, the laugh track between her thighs. Between her teeth: Big Red. The flavor went out so quickly but I never cared. I think about smiling and what that would mean for the rest of my body, what that might mean for this poem. Listening to Elliott Smith makes me sad. I have dated tall girls and not tall girls. I have dated pretty and prettier. Girl #2 is married but she still sends me e-mails. She writes Remember when you came on my chest? Her fingers were so bent they hurt. Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. I make a cameo in the second act, right after she throws up in a garbage can, her hair too short to get in the way. Girl #6 doesn’t call and I don’t care.

Blacksburg, VA

Girl #7 paints me building a sailboat. She is liberal with my muscles, which I am grateful for. I say I can’t take this down 460, there’s no water on concrete. She paints wheels to the bottom of the boat. I’ve been sleeping better alone. Girl #6 wears a green apron when she works. In bed, she smells like roasted coffee. She followed me to Blacksburg from Tallahassee even though I said Really don’t and now my neck hurts because I’ve been sleeping on the couch. She lays in bed all day watching TV shows on Hulu. She used to roll sushi, now she cries when I make too much noise. Girl #3 made a documentary about her heart. It’s playing at the Lyric sometime after the sun falls below the dirt. I sit in the balcony. The soundtrack is someone slapping a rubber band against an empty plastic bottle. A voiceover goes There are days when we only know what we know. In the opening scene Girl #3 wears a polka dot dress I remember touching her in, but here, in this scene, there’s someone else touching her. I have a headache but no Tylenol, only cough syrup. I drink it anyway. The timeline is fucked up, I am agitated I didn’t buy popcorn. 47 minutes into the film Girl #3 and I smoke cigarettes on my patio. I say If I were a TV show I would change my title every year. We only fuck twice. Each time I lick the beads of sweat off her upper lip. I have never left Virginia and missed it.

__________________________

Gregory Sherl is the author of THE OREGON TRAIL IS THE OREGON TRAIL (Mud Luscious Press, 2012) and SWALLOW (Mud Luscious Press, 2013). He has recently dropped out of the MFA program at Virginia Tech. He blogs at http://gregorysherl.com/.

“You can’t trust anybody or anything nowadays.” We hear people say that all the time, and we look around, and it’s hard not to agree with them. You need proof? Just ask the bass fishermen ready to hook and hang this guy by the balls. More? Go talk to these fans about that thorny asterisk decorating A-Rod’s six-hundred career homeruns. Still not convinced? OK, then did you know Ricky Martin was light in the loafers (OK, OK. We had our doubts)? Anyways, it’s hard. Hell, you can’t even trust Greta Van Susteren anymore.

But here at DSM, we’re committed to keeping our heads up, no matter what. We’re eternal optimists of the written word, and we wake up every day knowing damn well that there is something you can confide in.

Hear us say it: “In Fiction We Trust.”

Now you. Say it with conviction. Let the words churn your soul.

In this day and age, this phrase is our mantra. Don’t be afraid to make it yours.

– Robert Paul Moreira

– I never asked what happened. It was gone before I was born, so I never missed it. I didn’t give it another thought until I was in school and mentioned it to Jerry Wallace. The look on his face was a gift. Then I told everybody. Kids I didn’t know asked, “Does your daddy really have a wooden leg?” I was their hero. I didn’t know your story, so I fashioned my own. I told them you lost your leg in a war, a tornado, a prison fight. I said you fell asleep on the railroad tracks, you got it caught in a trap, you had to cut it off or die. They asked, “What does it look like?” I told them it had holes from knife wounds received in bar room brawls. I told them it was full of splinters, that the toes were made from steel for kicking, that it’d been autographed by Elvis Presley. — Cyn Kitchen in You Must Be This Tall To Ride

– This is the story of how I became omniscient, and what happened when I did. I wouldn’t have become all-knowing in the first place if not for a nonverbal understanding that led to an oral fixation, and adultery that led to a haircut that influenced another haircut. Without the cat dander or the conference in Boston, the kiss would never have happened, the most important pimple would not have burst, Sophocles would not have stood naked in my kitchen, and I wouldn’t have confronted the paradox of my omniscience. — Allison Kade in 322 Review

– Camilla Garcia. Like the cherry ice cream. She took me into the bathroom and shaved off my eyebrows. She dyed my hair grey-green and gave herself chestnut highlights. Peaches and cream. She exfoliated her skin every day until it was pink. — Alice Erskine in Cadaverine

– The sensation of her cotton glove along the length of my leg, and up my back lingers between gusts of midnight breeze. She’s been wearing the gloves for weeks now; they never feel like her actual hands. This doesn’t mean she keeps her distance. I’m not icy to the touch. She doesn’t experiment though. We haven’t tried one glove on, one glove off sex. I still wipe the blonde ringlets from her face, she continues looking me in the eyes. — Douglas Sullivan in Xenith

– She ran. That’s what I learned from my friends. She saw them and ran. Spotted them sitting in the corner, these dudes all the way down in San Bernardino having a few beers in the dark with the music thumping around them and the cocktail waitress showing up every set with her own set of boobs sticking out of the sequined bra, bending over for the drinks on the tray she set on the table opposite with a little smile on her face she flashed over her shoulder. — Stephen D. Gutierrez in LITnIMAGE