This story is like that movie where the two people who were in love break up and decide to erase each other from their minds. It is just like that movie except the end is different. No one tells them what they did, they do not meet again right after, they do not decide to give it another try. Instead they go about their lives, having forgotten each other completely. Then, one day, the man walks into a bakery that the two of them used to shop at. He sees this giant loaf of bread with a crust so dark and thick it is almost like leather. He doesn’t remember that this is a bread he used to pick up when the two of them made dinner, but it looks good, so he buys it. There are little tables in the bakery for sitting at and drinking coffee and maybe eating a cupcake. He sits at one a pulls a piece off the bread. It is hard to pull apart, with the crust so thick and formidable, but he does, and the crumb of the bread is soft like cumulus clouds that tear apart into cirrus clouds. He bites into the bread, but he does not remember, so he does not understand why he starts to cry. He sits there crying, with the people who work at the bakery staring at him, ripping piece after piece of bread off and stuffing it into his mouth. When he can’t eat any more, he stands up and walks out, leaving the rest of the loaf on the table. The whole incident is so strange that he tells his therapist later that week. She asks, “Did your mother ever bake bread?” The answer is yes, and they talk about that for a while. The mystery seems solved.

I guess that wouldn’t make a happy ending. But I like that kind of bread, almost as much as I like semolina with sesame seeds. I am also fond of olives, purple-black kalamatas and plump green Sicilian ones, and ones stuffed with garlic, ones that are hard and meaty and ones that squish as if they are giving up when you take the slightest bite from them. And cheeses: soft brie with its textured rind, stinky bleu cheese, harder cheeses that are smoked, anything tangy and made from the milk of goats, sharp provolone. I like them all piled together in cheese stores, in dim rooms where the air is thick with their smell and there are great wheels of every kind of cheese and silver scales and clever cashiers and no vegans to be found. I like to lay out these crusty breads and tart olives and smelly cheeses on a plate together, with maybe a strawberry or two, or some slices of Granny Smith apple. And perhaps a little cruet of honey for the brie.

I guess this story doesn’t make sense if you haven’t seen the movie. But there was bread and cheese and olives and fruit, so I hope you were at least able to enjoy those.

Pamela DiFrancesco studied writing at New School University. Her fiction has appeared in Cezanne’s Carrot and The Carolina Quarterly.

The Only Age-Defying Miracle is Death
Daniel Riddle Rodriguez

Anything else is product branding.

Acceptance Letter
Mary Jones

I know it’s for the best.

Keep It In Your Pants
Ted McLoof

My girlfriend wistfully tells me that, when she was fifteen, she blew a guy named Rick because he beat her at a game of rock, paper, scissors: “Don’t worry,” she says, off of my look, “I didn’t care about him or anything, he was just some guy I met one night and never saw again,” as if this is supposed to make me feel any better.

Yes, They Do
Nikita Gill

The last time we met, you left me with a sable painter’s brush, a thesaurus and morning-after grapes and a note that said; semicolons don’t work that way.

As If I Were Prank-Calling Her
Litsa Dremousis

“This is really a matter for the Coroner’s Office now,” the Sheriff said brusquely, then hung up.

The forest is the problem. The way the trees huddle in such close proximity and stretch so high towards the darkening clouds makes you feel inferior. Intimidated. Overwhelmed with possibility. Everything is just a blur of green and brown and black. All your hazel eyes can do is swallow the vast similarity in defeat. You don’t hear the thud of fists, the pitch of silent screams, the plastic tearing and the drawstring slipping.  
 
Your heart is hollow as you cup your hands around your mouth and yell a name you thought of yourself nine years ago on a bar stool. But, the wind conceals your urgency. A dead silence whispers back. Every nook is empty yet you continue through the thickets, snapping twigs as your boots stiffly stamp the dirt.
 
You wait to come across the little body you used to cradle in your arms sprawled across your path, loosely camouflaged beneath fallen leaves. You wait to step on a strand of matted hair, the hair you used to brush before your fingers fumbled with the request for a braid, seeping through the dirt. You wait to find a blood-crusted pinky, the pinky you promised to protect, peaking out from a makeshift, natural grave. You wait as branches reach for your face, slicing your cheeks with sameness as you descend deeper into the wooded blur.
 
The rustled frenzy of scampering rodents and the insistent flap of diligent wings mirror your determination as you peer around snarled tree trunks, tripping on their grasping roots. The chill bites the raised flesh beneath your sweat-stained shirt as you seemingly circle the same patch of woods. Your throat itches as your voice ricochets off the surrounding stillness. But, you won’t go home yet.
 
Your teeth push against each other, gritting together, causing your jaw muscles to bulge at the corners. Your pupils vibrate as they quickly scan the perimeter back and forth as if imitating the rapidness of your breath as you inhale and exhale in increasing intervals. You feel you’re getting closer.
 
But, you’re too far to hear the thud of my fists, the pitch of my silent screams. My fingers fumble attempting to tear the plastic of the double-layered garbage bags I’m wrapped in. The drawstrings are slipping while your boots stiffly stamp the dirt but the knots catch my progress while you descend deeper into the wooded blur. Mangled roots tickle my eyelids as you peer around snarled tree trunks. The soil is caked to my teeth and sticking to the inside of my throat but you’re not listening for my stifled plea while you cup your hands around your mouth and yell my name.
 
You will come across the little body you used to tuck goodnight, still beneath your path, loosely camouflaged beneath fallen leaves. You will step on a strand of matted hair, the hair you used to hold back from the flu. You will find a blood-crusted pinky, the pinky you helped relieve of a splinter, peaking out from a makeshift, natural grave. And you will wait to find the man that did this to your daughter.
 
All you can hear is the thud of your heartbeat, the pitch of your screams as you tear the plastic and the drawstring finally snaps to reveal the oxygen I couldn’t breathe two feet too deep. And you bury yourself further into the thickness of the trees to escape the way I’m huddled in a ball in the ground unable to stretch or ever be overwhelmed with possibilities. Everything is just a blur of green and brown and black as your hazel eyes drip with defeat.

Megan Magers is a soon-to-be graduate from California State University, Northridge with a B.A. in English and an emphasis in Creative Writing. Her non-fiction piece titled, “The Little Things” won the Leseley Johnstone Memorial Award last Spring.

When I was eight, my parents’ fighting grew worse and everything changed. They were real original.

My father yelled, “What I’ve been through,” and, “Taken for granted.”

My mother said, “Your secretary,” and, “My friend.” I didn’t get her meaning.

My parents have since told me conflicting versions of what happened between them, and all the hearsay has muddled my memories. Thankfully, no one can alter what I remember of being alone. No one talked to me. I know that.

I stayed up and watched MTV and USA Up All Night. I liked Gilbert Gottfried, but his perfect teeth and disingenuousness made me uncomfortable. My favorite movie they played was Once Bitten. On the couch under the comforter with a pile of food-stained dishes in front of me, I went unnoticed. I felt best after eating Cap’n Crunch Berries and Kraft Mac and Cheese. I was inert, chubby.

I’m alone a lot lately, reverting to old habits. Up All Night has been cancelled, but there’s always something on.

I’m staying in my mother’s attic, between jobs, planning to move across the country for better opportunities. Big changes are coming.

My mother doesn’t come home after work, doesn’t call. It takes me a couple hours to give up waiting for her. Eating alone makes me feel invisible. Food pays attention. The TV knows I’m here.

My mother sits at restaurants alone and drinks vodka tonics, miming eating. She comes home drunk and emotes about one of the two men who have broken her heart: my father or his best friend. My father is hiding in the woods somewhere. Every year he goes deeper into the woods.

When I turn off the television to go to bed, with every intention of brushing my teeth, it’s almost like the television turns itself back on. The grilled cheese makes itself.

When my old friend Katie is coming to see me, it’s almost too close to her arrival for me to shower, deodorize, and put on jeans and a sweatshirt. I pose at the kitchen table with a crossword and a glass of water.

Katie looks like she did when we were in high school, but skeletal. She recognizes my wonder at her sunken cheeks. Her children take it out of her, she says, and I imagine them sucking yellow energy out of her stomach and into their mouths. In my head, they are little demons.

“Three weeks until I know you’re here,” she says. “You could’ve given me adult time. I need it.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I sip water.

When I tell her I’m regressing, Katie says, “You’re not a child anymore.”

She would know.

“I’m sleeping in the bed I slept in when I was 10,” I say. “But I’m moving soon.”

“Come over, see the kids,” she says.

She leaves, wearing an empty baby sling as if it were an overcoat.

Later, on a walk to get some air, I trip over a curb and scrape my knee. No one sees me fall. The street is empty of people. The maple trees rustle in the wind dropping seeds that float like helicopters. For blocks and blocks, there is no one but a man running into his house from his car, as if he is afraid of the sun.

I’m leaving my mother’s house soon. Things will get better.

Late at night, a little girl sits down next to me on the couch and tells me to turn off the TV. I don’t.

“You already let the rabbit’s hair get matted. You already killed the goldfish, and remember the bird hanging upside down?” the little girl says. “I’m alone all the time.”

The little girl has a boy’s haircut. She wears dated clothes, high-waisted pink shorts and a patterned turquoise blouse. Looking at my legs next to her little girl legs, I see I’ve gotten chubby again.

“What will we do in a new place?” she says.

Her hair looks soft and I touch it.

“I have to try something,” I tell her, pulling at a curl, testing.

“We’ll take care of each other,” she says, and pats my hand as if I need comforting.

“I don’t think you should come,” I tell her.

“We’ll make sandwiches,” she says.

Laura Lampton Scott is a writer and editor. She lives in Seattle, WA.

She Said Yes
Amy Locke

There was no fanciful scavenger hunt, no skywriter puffing out a trail of letters, no carpet of curling rose petals, no poem pushed through quivering lips, not even a ring—just the two of them at their wobbly kitchen table, with an order of chicken fried rice between them, and four words, and then one more.

A Short Note Concerning Our Stay at a Bed and Breakfast in German Village, Columbus, Ohio.
Michael Credico

The eggs and bagels were fine, though I believe we were charged extra for a coffee refill which I feel should be complimentary considering cost of board, and Elizabeth thought she saw a ghost on the third floor; we stayed on the first.

Not Very Zen
Christine Tierney

Even though she sits by the grimy window as the sunlight filters in from the tops of the shit brown trees and chants and chants and chants, the disease is still spreading like wildfire through her sobbing, sodding kidneys.

Not Right Now
Vallie Lynn Watson

Their only disagreement had been over “Bolero.”

Recovery
Brian Duke

Since the accident where he‘d actually cut the woman with a saw, the magician Vincenzi felt a lot better about himself and had been able put things in perspective, for he’d finally done something that didn‘t rely on illusion.

Lauren, my new wife of four hundred and seventeen days and counting, is not eating her dinner. She is relating yet another tale of a gruesome departmental meeting when Danica, my dead ex-wife, appears to the right of Lauren’s shoulder and grimaces like she has a nasty abscess. Danica died three years ago on March sixth. She rolls her eyes and sticks a finger up her nose. I spit Shiraz over my shirtfront. It is funny, in a Mr. Bean sort of way. Lauren barks that being demeaned by her boss is not a funny story. She never tells funny stories.

When I tell her that my dead ex-wife is behind her, she doesn’t look around. Her doctoral thesis was on the Invariance of Laws of Physics Under Different Transformations. Her brows knit and she spreads the last bit of goose liver pate on her fermente. Her little finger quivers and her look measures me as a splattered bug on a newly-cleaned windshield. She speaks more to herself than to me, muttering that my Naproxen dosage needs an adjustment.

Danica flutters her own little finger, totally Comtesse de Lafayette, flips into a headstand, balancing in midair on that finger, brushes the chandelier with her feet. Her skirt flops onto her chest, revealing red panties. She winks and I laugh again. Lauren stalks off, leaving her canard a l’orange untouched. Fool is the loudest word in her tirade.

I sleep on the couch without any discussion. Danica waves good-night, sends an air-kiss, dissipates. In the morning I half-expect to wake with hairy bug-legs and a hard shell, or perhaps to hear thumps and screams from under the floorboards.

In the shower I call Looks it not like the King? Mark it, Horatio, but neither woman responds. Lauren is still sleeping. Danica fails to appear. Is it bells in my belfry? Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee, I declaim and reduce myself to hysterics.

Lauren does not refer to the incident again. Why is Danica back now when she never appeared during my year’s grieving? The last four dinners, as Lauren is at her most tedious, Danica makes an entrance: creaks doors, scrapes pans, clinks wineglasses. Lauren, not hearing, raises her voice.

I am invigorated, clobber George, my lawyer and best friend, at squash. He asks if I am thinking of a divorce and when I snort that he’s been talking to Lauren, sidesteps. I tell him it’s a marathon I just signed up for, not a divorce.

I know a crash is inevitable but I look forward to the appearances. Every night another step closer to explosion. It might be fireworks tonight or perhaps she’ll visit once the lights are out. My breath quickens as I wait.

Some of Andrew Stancek’s recent publications include The Linnet’s Wings, River Poets Journal, Thunderclap Magazine, Orion Headless, A Twist of Noir and many others. THIS Literary Magazine nominated him for a Pushcart.

No one could remember at what point the offensive material first appeared in the faculty lounge. As far as Mrs. Trent could tell, it had always been there, and had always looked ancient too, deeply incised in the wall and clogged with oil and dust. It certainly appeared that way thirty-two years ago, when Mrs. Trent—hard to imagine, a young woman—entered the dingy room and took a brisk look around. She approached the material with a curiosity only afforded youth, and ran her finger down the length of it. She was uncommonly nearsighted back then, and when she detected a microscopic smattering of lavender eggs nestled among the grime, she thought it best to keep her yet supple mouth shut. She’d heard of the strange discomfiture that school boards could get, a panic that spread like pâté, and Mrs. Trent valued above all else the security of knowing one can fly before taking sudden leaps.

In the years following, as Mrs. Trent established her classroom and went through the rapid hardening all teachers do, she continued to keep tabs on the offensive material, and having willed herself into a casual awareness, was the first to notice the glow that occurred in the wake of the tiny hatchlings, the bright rivulets that began to maunder along the material’s canals. Before long, drapes of meadowish molds appeared. Slightly more mobile than typical flora, they trembled, and soon turned a vernal shade of pink that was hard for the rest of the faculty to ignore. None of the other teachers, though, was any more wont to stir the pot than Mrs. Trent, and as the school board was loath to enter the lounge, the growths flourished unhindered for years.

Mrs. Trent, intent now on her cigarette, grimaces as the lush cascades swing in the wake of her breath. Roused by the nicotine, they heighten, slightly, the volume of their hum.

A muddled knock at the door makes Mrs. Trent glad to have invested in a sturdy lock. Ever since last week’s shooting, the school board has been encroaching, dazedly persistent, like a neutered hound around a bitch in heat. The air in the school at large has shifted, congealing in a chalky way, the salt coming forth from the sulfur, the way an egg reacts upon being dropped into a boil. It’s such a strange place now in which to watch the adolescents stew, their hormones calcifying prematurely, their tension becoming electric, their cynicism taking oversoon root. Fear has made them old—and stimulated—in a way that strikes a startling chord with Mrs. Trent.

Meanwhile, their parents, lurking about the school’s osmotic borders, have been on a somewhat more sluggish track. By the time the bodies were being carted away, half the faculty had resigned, but rather than shame these deserters, the board was sending them off with supportive notes. It wasn’t until yesterday that any sort of witch-hunt was undertaken, and even yet, it’s been a languorous sort of affair, dead on its feet, as when one wakes the morning after a good binge. So much for the torch-bearing school boards of yore.

A knock again, indolent and arrhythmic. Mrs. Trent’s exhale bears an underlying rasp of disgust. If they really wanted in, they’d have raised an ax, wouldn’t they? Such a trite epiphany they must be having, one they’re so much slower to realize than their young: the colors they once thought to throb have all along been painted by rote.

She imagines pulling the bucolic molds out by their offensive roots. She imagines taking a bullet for one of her students. What, after all, is a teacher’s duty? To prevent violence? Or simply to present it as it is? It’s webbed so deep and so thoroughly, and though the students have arrived at its very edge, they’ve taken on the full weight of its rotted core. Some, of late, have even complained of the taste of blood at the tips of their teeth—their own blood, not that of others. They are innocent. We all are, but innocence just isn’t enough anymore.

If it were another time, Mrs. Trent thinks, she would be a virgin. She would commit herself to God. Her work would be to tend the convent’s poultry yard, and she would feel the sun on her face and the seeds in her hand, and would be so free of demands she could close her eyes and become cloth.

Bylaws
Brian Ross
 
As I till the garden and my husband’s mistress passes in her foreign sedan, I remember that the English hung the severed heads of traitors on the gate of London Bridge and I wonder if our condo association would object to a similar measure.

Dick Move
Anthony Marshall
  
When I say I’m proud of you for giving up smoking for 91 days I mean the same kind of proud feeling I get when I come home from work and the dog hasn’t pissed on the carpet.

Warning
Dan Lundin

Alcohol impairs my ability to suffer fools.
 
 

Junior
Sarah Clay
 
He spent most of first grade extracting color from his red notebook, erasing the letters carefully onto the cover, immortalizing them on the side of the family Volkswagen with a chalk rock, and pissing them large and loopy into the backyard snow knowing, even then, his wasn’t the kind of name you should give to someone else for safekeeping.
 
 

Casablanca
Karen Gilmore
 
You fell asleep during Casablanca, so when I said that you were my Rick as we left the theatre hand-in-hand, you didn’t realize I would soon leave you for my Victor Laszlo.
 
 

We were connected from birth at the ankle and hip. The scars on our flesh where we were separated were the only easily identifiable difference between us: his on the left, mine on the right. Beyond that, one had to study the arrangement of our freckles, look for tell-tale fingernail grime, (me), or listen for a slight upward lilt at the end of declarative sentences, (Walter). Our father, out of desperation, would stare into our eyes to search out patterns in our irises.

We dressed alike when we were very young, a phase every set of twins since Essau and Jacob has passed through for a time. Or we dressed differently and switched clothes, and thus identities, to suit our various purposes. Our mother indulged our deceptions. She laughed along with us when we pulled one over on our teachers, our friends, our father. That she was the only person on Earth who could tell us apart made her a part of our circle, as close to being one of us as it was possible to be. No one else we knew loved their mother as openly and fiercely as Walter and I did. She left notes for us in our respective Six Million Dollar Man and A-Team lunch boxes, each with some private encouragement that identified us as separate entities she knew and understood.

Walter discovered magic on a local-access TV show called The Witching Hour with Rick Diamond, a magician who wore a silver lamé jumpsuit and rings on every finger. He asked for and received a magic set for our eleventh birthday and quickly mastered its tricks. He performed as Walter the Wizard at our twelfth birthday party, pulling pencils from girl’s ears and phantom flowers from their hair. I plainly could not compete. By our fourteenth birthday he’d made a name for himself on the local circuit, and even Dad could tell us apart. I was a burden to Walter, artless, clumsy, and without magic. His greatest trick, he said, would be to make me disappear.

Our house in Galveston was less than a quarter-mile inland from the sea. Sitting cross-legged on our patch of weed-riddled lawn for fifteen minutes, you’d be soaked in the smell of brine blowing in off the Gulf. Walking in a straight line from our front door toward the sea, you would come to a clutch of palms that stood like sentinels at the base of the seawall. Walter climbed and sat atop the wall, fifteen feet up, hung his bare feet over the edge and looked out over the water while he cut and shuffled a deck of cards in his lap over and over with one hand.

“Mom wants you for supper,” I shouted up at him, and he turned and looked at me and smiled, then stood up on the wall. He spread his arms dramatically with the deck of cards in his left hand, lifted his eyes heavenward, closed them, sent the cards spraying from his fingers in a high arch over his head, then fell backwards off the wall and disappeared.

I shook my head, made my way up the slope to the lip of the wall and peeked over the edge to the steep concrete drop on the other side.

“Hey, Dickweed!,” he shouted from behind me, halfway up the beach. “What’re you doin’ up there? You’re gonna break your damn neck!” I’d grown accustomed to his tricks, and tried as a rule to remain aloof and unimpressed, but this was all too much and I let my guard down. “How did you do that?” I shouted, forgetting myself, lost to abandon, running back up the beach to meet him.

“Because I am fucking magic,” he said, “and I will fucking vanish you.” When he said it, he waved his plastic wand and threw a fistful of sand in the air, and I felt myself grow weightless as I ran, unmoor from the Earth, and disappear.

Her rage is deafening. A silence so loud he perceives only the letters comprising her rant. Words cast from her trembling lips encompass a ballistic scatter of consonants and vowels. Letters spin toward him, projectiles in Arial Black. A volley of smooth curves and harsh straight lines strike him. The L in LIAR nicks his cheek and draws blood. The C in CHEATER twirls toward his neck–barely missing his jugular only through quick reflexes honed over time. His name, once spoken tenderly in Lucida Handwriting when they made love or in Comic Sans when he made her laugh, is spit out with vile between heavy sobs in Impact font. Thick stroked and tightly spaced letters slam him in rapid succession; burying him under the weight of typeface.

Mark Rosenblum–a New York native who now lives in Southern California–misses the taste of real pizza and good deli food. His work has been featured in Tiferet, Boston Literary Magazine, Everyday Fiction, Flashes in the Dark, Six Sentences, Nailpolish Stories, Yellow Mama, Six Minute Magazine, Short, Fast & Deadly Sleet Magazine and upcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions. He has also appeared in the anthologies: It All Changed in an Instant, Thinking Ten—A Writer’s Playground, The Best of Eclectic Flash 2010, Pure Slush Volume I, Daily Flash 2012, Six Words about Work and Six-Word Memoirs on Jewish Life.