Tag: Fiction

The Invention of the High Five by Joshua Trent Brown

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I ask my mom if she remembers the days before the high five and she looks at me as if I just walked into her hospital room with a monkey on my shoulder and he’s wearing a diaper and playing his way through Kenny G’s Greatest Hits. She asks me why I’m asking her about high fives on a day like today. But she can hardly ask this question with the tubes out of her nose and arms and legs and wherever else. I ask her if she knew that the high five wasn’t invented until the late 70s, by a baseball player. She says no one thinks about the implications of the moment they’re in when they’re in it, but no, she didn’t watch baseball. I ask her what they did before high fives then. She says they just did things; they didn’t worry about what they should do after. A doctor comes in and tells us it’s time to prep my mom for surgery. I ask the doctor if she remembers when the high five was invented. She stops pushing my mom out of the room and says that everything will be okay, my mother is in capable hands. The monkey on my shoulder plays on, despite the tiny tremors from my hands’ trembling. He’s made his way through the track list to The Moment now. My mom turns back to me as they push her down the hall and shakes her head at the little guy, as if to say that’s too on the nose. But he just keeps on jamming.

Joshua Trent Brown is a writer from Raleigh, NC, and a fiction editor at JAKE. He has been published in a dozen cool lit mags like HAD and The Dead Mule. He also has a novella that he hopes you’ll want to publish after reading this <3. Find him on Twitter @TrentBWrites.

Worst Neighbor in Town by Alan ten-Hoeve

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Our first VCR was a big deal and weekend mornings were for mom’s tapes. She’d kick me out so I couldn’t interrupt the cop shows she recorded that week over the cop shows she recorded the week before. With no friends and nowhere to go I’d wander over to the vacant lot next door and play Star Wars or something. During spring and summer Mr. Calabrese used the lot to grow vegetables, herbs, and fruit he shared with neighbors, leaving bags of fresh food on doorsteps like an agrarian Santa Claus. Sometimes I’d climb the tree in our yard, sit in a cupped fork that rose above the fence, and spy on Mr. C through the leaves as he worked. If he saw me he’d hobble over, pipe clamped in a notched grin, and pass me a handful of berries. One time I asked why he smoked a pipe. “To keep my nose warm,” he said, tapping the side of the pocked rutabaga in the middle of his face.

In winter I had the lot to myself. One cold day in late February a fresh layer of snow covered last year’s garden rows. A good enough day to battle a Wampa on Hoth. But I didn’t feel like playing Star Wars. After dragging my heels back and forth between rows I pried a board from a stack of pallets Mr. C used for trellising, then kicked through the pile of rocks he tilled up over the years. I selected the roundest one I could find. Hefted its weight. Stepped up to an imaginary plate, and got into a batting stance. I never played baseball before. Didn’t really know the rules. The only thing my dad showed me how to swing was his belt. But I’d seen it portrayed in enough TV shows and movies to have an idea. I imagined the classic scenario: bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, two outs. My team down by three runs.

Sunlight hit the salted cars parked along the curb. Reflected off the cloudy panels of the beater Mr. Calabrese used to deliver crops to neighbors. The block looked deserted. Everyone was at church or nestled inside their warm houses. I was alone. It felt good. I looked out as if I was the center of attention in a packed stadium.

I tossed the rock up, swung. Strike one. Strike two. Strike two and a half. “Fuck.” I stepped back from the plate. Spit. Took a few deep breaths. I tapped my sneakers with the board like I’d seen on TV. Spit again. Twice. Three times in a row for good luck. Stepped back up to the plate. Eyed the pitcher. Tossed the rock. This time I felt it connect. The crack of rock on wood popped my ears and a shockwave ran down the board, through my wrists, up my arms. The crowd came unglued. I dropped the board. Heard the announcer say, “Go-ing . . . Go-ing . . . GONE! HOME RUN!”

I followed my teammates around the bases at an easy jog. Took off my baseball cap and waved. A muted crunch stopped me before reaching home plate. I turned toward the sound with a primal knowing that drew my eyes to the rock resting in a crater of spiderwebbed glass that had once been the windshield of Mr. Calabrese’s truck. The stadium full of cheering fans disintegrated and John Street stood naked and cold. I forgot all about home plate and ran home. Went straight to the bathroom, the only room with a window that looked out over the vacant lot. I could feel my heart beating in my ears. Certainly someone must have seen me or heard the crunch. But no one appeared. The block was silent. Still, I knew it was only a matter of time. All day I waited for that knock on the door. When the waiting was too much I closed myself in the bathroom to watch the scene. Each time I had this absurd hope that I’d look out and see that the windshield was fine. That I’d imagined the whole thing. When I saw it wasn’t fine I played with the idea that some other event had brought the rock down into the windshield before I got there. I simply hadn’t noticed. By my sixth or seventh trip to the bathroom Mom paused her tape and eyed me through the cigarette smoke and told me to stop slamming the door.

Sometime before dark I looked out the bathroom window and felt all the tiny hairs on my body buzz. Mr. Calabrese stood by his truck with a policeman. He was shrugging and gesturing at the broken windshield with his pipe as the cop wrote something on a pad. I couldn’t make out what they were saying over the idling cruiser.

In the following days and weeks I waited for a knock on the door. For a policeman to cuff me and take me away. But no one ever came. No one ever said anything. I’d gotten away with it. I felt like the worst neighbor in town. But that was easy. My conscience I could deal with. What worried me was what my mom would do if she found out what I’d done to Mr. C. I decided right then and there not to tell a soul. And I never will.

Alan ten-Hoeve wrote a book called Notes from a Wood-Paneled Basement (Gob Pile Press). He is a decent neighbor.

3 Flashes by Juls Macdonell

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big 1

been familiarizing myself with the tops of elevators lately, cause you never know, and I’m an optimist; always imagined disasters in daylight. my husband started knocking on wood each night when I forget. I keep moving the heavy houseplants further in to their shelves so they might not drop on the cat. I didn’t water them for 2 months, didn’t deposit $800 worth of cheques for 2 months either, but I went to the dentist cause my jaw aches like a fault line. when I moved here I wrote a poem about the city tipping sideways and never finished it. sometimes I fall asleep with my heart racing. sometimes I organize my wishes like they’re not a secret, and to stay humble I put at the bottom, “die while the sun is up,” if I can’t die old or accomplish what I want before then. below that is “under a full moon,” “on a clear sky,” and barring all of those, “fast.” I tell the stars no worries if not

I never know how to talk to kids

I ask them if their school has any mysteries: do the barred courtyards have any monsters? what ghost stories do you have for that one weird bathroom with the showers? have you been to the basement? does the janitor creep you out and do you feel bad about that? how often are you scratched by the inside of a bush? do strangers stare at you (do you stare at them)? do you sometimes smell a candle burning out? do you have to sleep against a wall? have you ever woken up looking at yourself?

my cat watches the computer monitor

Hello maia I love you very much you are such a good little kitty see? I love you I love you I love you 

Juls studies English and writing at University of Victoria. You can find her work in HAD magazine so far.

You Go Get Her! by Brittany Deitch

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I tried going to the aquarium to make it up to myself. But I just ended up there crying to get out, and thinking about how none of the living things there had a choice. I ended up drowning myself in the tank with all the pink ones, hoping they’d give me my color back and blend. But worst of all, I never even went. I couldn’t. I really wanted to but I just couldn’t. We were supposed to go after our dinner the night before Valentine’s Day, but we fought and fought and I think we would’ve gotten there and it would’ve been closed. I checked the times (you said you had checked the times). It closes at 4 pm on Tuesday. Dinner was at 4:15. We were fighting until 10:35. I did think that I could love you into being yourself or being here or being with me. I always knew but I really didn’t want to, so I just stopped knowing. I think that all the pink fish swam inside and entered me through my mouth, making me as large as the tank and stretching my skin thin against the glass like a shield, like a covering, like protection. For the fishes. Wait, but what did you see? If it was a different sort of image, or a dream, I can let myself be wrong. A second opinion doesn’t hurt. I know you’re not even seeing this, here, at the Camden Aquarium, but I know that you wish you were so I’d be willing to bend my reality a little. So you can feel INCLUDED. Nobody saw when they were walking by– it was like I was invisible. All you need is an alibi. Where were you at 10:35 pm, February 13th, when the Camden Aquarium fish tank exploded with pieces of a real girl’s FLESH? Could you identify this body? Do you even recognize her stuffed full of FISH who STRETCHED through her SKIN? They were only trying to help her get her aura back. They went in through her mouth like food, they went through her veins and inside every inch like YOU, they covered her in scales. Each prickly octagon INGRAINED IN THE SKIN, PINCHING SKIN, ELEVATED AN INCH ABOVE, had words. She ended up with writing all over her body. She left notes. All of these things she wanted to do, how she thought of you. If only you’d come by and read it all. She knew you’d like that, to be TALKED ABOUT. FOR HOURS. BY EVERYONE. For it to all be so ROMANTIC and TREACHEROUS. And about you! But you couldn’t make it. The aquarium closed, and you had do what was best for you.

Brittany Deitch is a Philadelphia college grad, music scene denier, and stream-of-consciousness writer. She currently writes for Paste Magazine, runs/edits Ratpie Friends, and has words in Rejections Letters, Maudlin House, and Bottlecap Press. She writes on Substack at https://theworstpersonintheworld.substack.com/

The F*cking Birds by Jenn Salcido

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Oprah Winfrey can tell you about the great bowerbird; the queen of all media seems impressed, for what it’s worth.

I once had this nature documentary on DVD, is how she was talking to me. I heard her narrating its courtship rituals, watching while it built its sex tent. Beautiful twigs, fine beans, pearlescent berries dot the floor of its woven house, waiting for some ladybird to pass by. Oprah calls it a common bird, and I don’t know how she can say that with a straight face. It’s like a diabolical realtor, selling dreams to its many mates. This could be yours, the bird whispers. No money down.

When birds fuck, they hover, kind of.

It’s not like rutting, not like banging until the bedsprings break. It’s gentle and dignified and over in a flash. That part isn’t fun for anyone, sure, but it’s better than watching a frog laboring through the murk of a pond, carrying another angry frog on its back. It’s better than watching a tomcat rape a tabby. Like all things with birds, there’s only a suggestion of movement – a shadow of lovemaking.

You wonder whether you actually saw it happen, or if you were misunderstanding. If you blinked, you could still convince yourself that you’d seen it. Have you ever seen a hummingbird, or thought you saw a bug, only to realize it’s a hummingbird? That’s one of their greatest tricks – we’re never sure what they’re up to; they’re not as vulgar as we are, not all about airing their dirty laundry.

Jenn Salcido is a writer based in Los Angeles, CA.

2 Smallies by Lamb

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THE FRIDGE MAN

At the end of the day, all I want to do is beam from Alexa to Alexa, going through the fridges of Americans. I want to taste their days and guess the strength of their relationships based on what’s in there. My good spoon and I would sample every half-gone fruit spread in the country, straight from the jar, learning by experience the difference between jellies, jams, preserves, whatever. You couldn’t tell me anything. I’d guess the items inside before opening the door, picturing the shelves, the sauce racks, the hinging plastic shell. I’d eventually get lucky and guess every product in the Hotpoint of a performance marketer while he slept on the couch in the other room. He’d hear me celebrating, making eggy ramen in his kitchen. He’d flick the light on and rub his small eyes. “Fwidge Man? Is that weally you?”

HELP ME OUT HERE

I’m at the urinal in the WeWork men’s room when a guy rests his chin on my shoulder and sighs. He has a gelled part in his black hair and the ideal suggestion of cologne. I tuck away my member, but I don’t push him off or leave just yet. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this needed.

Lamb is an American writer // web: lamb.onl , twitter: @read_lamb, insta: @lmbonl

Update by Rick Claypool

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My phone downloaded an update and now it shoots lasers. I noticed after I heard people talking about it at the bus stop. A guy on a bench in a hat like an oversized inside-out sock said, “Check out this shit.” Then he accidentally lasered off this old guy’s leg. He crouched over him and kept saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” as the old guy convulsed in the patch of grass where people let their dogs shit.

The bus was emptier than usual. An unusual number of buildings we passed were on fire. I saw some kids run down a side street carrying severed heads by their hair.

At work, nobody had turned on the coffee pot yet. Some of my co-workers were always saying the company should spluge on one of those machines that brews coffee instantly out of little disposable pods. Seeing the empty pot and realizing I didn’t know where the filters were kept or if the pot needed washed, I understood.

I found my colleagues in the conference room crowded around the flat-screen TV. Onscreen, an expensive car wound over mountains and past rock formations and disappeared into the desert. Then: live coverage of laser chaos in schools, airports, grocery stores, movie theaters, hair salons, and Congress.

The boss never showed up. No one got anything done.

That night in the middle of dinner, our kid pulled out his phone.

We said, “No phones at the table.” He acted like he didn’t hear us.

Instead of him putting his phone away, my wife and I suddenly discovered we had our phones out too.

Then the doorbell rang and we all jumped. It’s a loud doorbell.

It was the lady from next door. We never talk to her. There’s no good reason we never talk to her. She handed me a plateful of pie. “Try it,” she said.

“Mmmm,” I said. “Delicious.”

“I sliced the apples with the new app,” she said.

“Wow,” I said.

“Can you help me dial an ambulance?” she said, holding her fingerless hand up between us. “I lasered them off.”

Inside, I discovered that my wife and child had lasered each other into piles of laser-sliced meat.

Somehow, those piles of laser-sliced meat were still capable of operating their phone lasers well enough to laser me into a pile of laser-sliced meat too.

Somehow, even as a pile of laser-sliced meat, I was able to call an ambulance for our fingerless neighbor.

Somehow, when the ambulance arrived, sirens blaring, there was a moment when it seemed like everything might be ok.

And in that moment, I looked at my laser-sliced wife and my laser-sliced child with my laser-sliced eyes. I thought, future, here we come.

Then an EMT dragged our screaming fingerless neighbor through the piles of us.

Rick Claypool is the author of SKULL SLIME TENTACLE WITCH WAR (Anxiety Press, 2024), THE MOLD FARMER (Six Gallery Press, 2020), and LEECH GIRL LIVES (Spaceboy Books, 2017). He lives in Rhode Island.

Nobody told me about Sisyphus until just now by Rebecca Grace Cyr

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My very own personal puppy is the size of a teacup. She will stay that size forever. I hold her in one hand and hold her purse in the other and everyone is so jealous of me. I keep telling them back off. I keep telling them don’t touch. I keep telling them some day the puppy will be full grown and she will come and kill them. But the puppy will never be fully grown. My very own personal puppy is the size of a teacup and she will never be full grown. When I go to bed at night, the puppy curls up on a pillow above my pillow. She watches over me and the apartment because the puppy never sleeps. Sometimes I wonder if the puppy still gets tired or maybe even wants to sleep, but can’t, and so is stuck in this endless state of being that is like rolling that rock up that hill. Then I stop wondering about her and I go back to sleep. She gets cold because she’s so tiny, so I took up knitting little scarves for her. She doesn’t like sweaters but she will do a scarf. It drapes over her body hamburger style and she lets the bottoms drag as she walks from room to room. When I put her on a leash and she pulls in one direction and I pull in the other, she levitates. She lifts off the ground from the tension of the leash and for a second, you can see so much air beneath her. In those times, the scarf no longer drags on the floor. They both float. I try to imagine what it would be like to be her and have the world so big, but I can’t do it. I try to imagine what her food tastes like when she crunches down with her tiny tiny teeth and what kind of flavors she’s experiencing if they aren’t the ones I’m having, but I can’t do it. I can’t imagine the world so big, or those flavors I’ve never tasted; I have always had a hard time getting outside of myself. Before she tucks me in at night, I look into the puppy’s eyes and try to imagine her happy, but I can’t do that either.

Rebecca Grace Cyr’s writing has appeared on Maudlin House and Muumuu House. She has a substack (urban germ) and a twitter (@madamepsycho_)

Tip of the Spear 1 by David Gladfelter

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there are three gas stations : the chips gas station, the candy gas station, and the brains gas station. a four block cut of westbound grand blvd the stations rook line, between them a high school, the towering vacant Lee Plaza, the two motels, the diaper lot, walled to the south by the interstates deep drop and north by thicks of residential zones reclaimed in plant, shrub, clotted up tick grasses and trash of unclear age and origin – northern neighborhoods abandoned and occupied alike until joy rd splits it with blooms of fast food and mechanic garages and shells of outlet strips boarded up years now. the brains gas station is the last thing due west before the forked knot of access ramps and pedestrian overpasses, then the section 8 housing projects down further still.


across from the halfway houses on the downtown end, the chips gas station has the most chips and so is called the chips gas station, but the candy gas station has the best chips. the candy station has the best candy as well, two for a dollar king sizes of rotating stock that im watchful for though their ebt reader rarely works. not only the king sizes but several dedicated endcaps and a half aisle to gummies –national standards greatly outnumbered by regional brands, locally made worms and bears and other shapes and no difference beyond visible form and density and coating, because here converges the factories of greater michigan, vast corn fields scoured then milled with abstracted manufacture until a viscous syrup not unlike blood plasma, something of shellac and nectar and of some guise of primordial retching so something stirs like of miracle at first impressed, and then kilned to foods to grow fat on but that yet still starve; some temporal provender that only fills – a horrible wonder to be sure, these and other flinty wonders, the atrocity of man. and the candy station sits almost a cordon, a trapezoid of west grand and grand river and dexter and lothrop, half the candy station and its bright floods spreading the flat hanging awning over the fuel pumps and lot and of course the green eye of the siren winking in turns, and the other half the bunker-like building of freds store and the takeout only seafood chicken place – which are not connected except by joined wall and back parking lot thats bordered in daisy chained chainlink appearing patchwork as sections veer to undecided biases and lean twisted and bent ridiculous and rust worked and like new interchangeably because sheaves of fencing are replaced as needed and its tops all lined in hinky dull rounded razorwire and all the windows of the building itself have iron plates welded into place letting in no natural light save for the windows on the doors and the doorways all have garage doors installed overhead coiled like snails and padlocks shunted into immovable charms hang and they rattle and come crashing down at closing time, and the hideous sound an imitation of a great jailer acting detention writs, but then the night goes on.


the brains gas station used to be called the drinks gas station because it has the best and the most drinks but now its called the brains gas station because two halloweens back a kid blew a guys brains all across the store. we didnt hear the shot or even really the screams of the crowd. days later, pressured and pulled into the western union office, i saw freds security footage and saw what fred had seen : opposite over grand river, the tops of heads, like the tops of matchsticks, crowns and crowns cast in so many shin high headlight beams and head crowns brightened by canopy lamps from above so to pure white dots in the greyscale cctv and the shadows beneath complicated blankets of roiling outlines and murked geometry, the partying crowd right as the sun is gone and the city glows itself, clotted eighty or so they ripple when the gun is fired within the station and they pull closer to the storefronts plate windows like drawstringed for a moment while those in the gas station proper puncture through the throng in straying and quick beams like comets or ghostly orbs dinging from the cameras sight, motherfuckers hustling and not looking back and the kid among them, and the front ranks of the horde see the gore up the walls and the body with the head like a wrung out rag and the pumping pool of blood, and like bellringers subject to automatic and prime duty they turn behind to their number – neighbors and cousins and coworkers and friends brothers and their aunts and celebrators and collaborators and more and more and nearly every costumed and every open to the parties across the city to come, but now each face blank from shock or from some instinct internal being dug out, perhaps an intuition immutable and shared by all beings – and whatever that vanguard reports to the crowd sends the mass outward toward the closest shelter, right there across grand river to freds store where fred watches from a swann bullet cam mounted to the sheet metal roof skirts hovering the fanlight and westfaced door, the mob rushing and cars skate to sideways stops on all sides throwing brilliant bluepale light streaks from headlights onto the flanks of the fleeing giving the scene the appearance of photographs continuing on with their timelines but trapped in the harsh burst of flash and the mob routs briefly at obstacles – telephone poles, the bus stop enclosure, traffic signs and parked traffic, hydrants and metal transformer boxes, people – and they move as a raft being ripped to driftwood before rapids and they all coming disappear below the images frame, placing them short of ten meters from crashing into freds store.

David Gladfelter lives with his husband and their five cats in a very damaged house in detroit. He has no job or other prospects.

Alley Cat by Erin

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I am going to fucking kill myself. Wait no nevermind I’m fine. Last night I had sex in the most 2009 way possible (I was wearing tube socks). It was with an old flame that I had met five months prior. He was my second rebound after my devastating break up with my musician boyfriend. It’s hard to get over someone that keeps getting recommended to you on Spotify.

Now I walk into the night swinging my hips like an alley cat. I cry out for the boys and they come running. I do not eat, I do not sleep, I barely breathe. I get a cold once a month. I get fleas twice a month. I twirl under disco lights. Sometimes when I think about the future I only see darkness. I lift my arms up to the disco heaven lights. Sometimes it reaches back to me. I twirl around the dance floor. I keep twirling, twirling and twirling and every time I think I am about to fall, someone grabs me and takes me home.

Last night, Ben fell for my old charm and he took me in for the night.

“This feels so porn coded,” I laughed while laying in just my tube socks, “should we roleplay?”

“Sure,” he said hovering his body over mine.

“Oh I’m the cheer captain and I can’t believe I’m about to fuck….” I looked at him up and down, “the school janitor”

“What the fuck?” he said.

“You’re the one wearing Carhartt!” I responded defensively.

He proceed to fuck me in a way that prevented me from telling anymore jokes. After sex, the cuddling is usually sweet and tender. Part of me wonders if that’s the trade off. I remember what it is like to be in love and I am so good at being in love. The kisses on the cheek in the morning and running my hands through his hair. I am better at being in love than I am at being a person.

While laying there in our sweet sweat, mimicking love I realized that I considered us more like longtime old pals than passionate lovers. Like we were two young boys who once shared a homosexual experience at summer camp and went on to marry other women and never speak of it again. But one day I call him on the phone 20 years later and it’s the same as old times. “How the hell are you David…You haven’t changed a bit Robert…” I told Ben all of this and he really did not like it. He dropped me off. The car ride was silent.

Erin is a writer based in Los Angeles. She co-hosts a monthly reading series in Los Angeles called Car Crash Collective. Her work can be found in Forever Magazine and Spectra Poets. Twitter: @blatherwhick , Instagram: @Suburban_cutie_