By wayne scheer

I’ve lived in this house since I was a pup, which is a hell of a lot longer than that cat’s been here. Francine, the woman who lives here with me, is getting old and strange, smelling like the stuff in her bathroom that she rubs all over herself. She spends a lot of time with that feline on her lap and thinks it’s the funniest thing to call her PJ, “because she’s the cat’s pajamas.”

Freaking cat. Francine treats her like she’s some kind of princess, but I know PJ’s just running a con. A year ago, she was scrounging in open dumpsters, getting screwed by whatever came her way. But Francine “saved” her, and now she has full run of this place.

Her food is on the counter by the sink, so I can’t get at it, but she steals my chow. She doesn’t even eat it. She licks it and gets her cat stench all over it. And when I growl at her, Francine treats me like I’m the bad guy.

“Curly,” she says. “You mustn’t growl at PJ.”

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By Suzanne Verrall

I do not love my dog.

She is weak-limbed, arthritic, and has a mucus-blue eye. She is disagreeable. She hates riding in the car. She won’t chase a stick. She ignores Frisbees and tennis balls and other stock attempts at human-canine interaction. She eats grass. Even slimy grass. Which she then pukes. In front of everyone else in the park. As if the pedigree-brand dog food I buy is beneath her. As if gravy bones give her a pain.

She smells.

I come home from work to a new level of odour. She has made a mess and left it. In the guest room. On the freshly steam-cleaned carpet.

Again.

I press my lips and feel the familiar surge of resistance that comes when action seems called for. What to do?

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By Lis Anna-Langston

She whips me cause I need it. My mother. She does. Keeps the devil out. Skinned knees, shrill voice. Dope calms her nerves. Like vitamins, she says. Sometimes what you need ain’t inside you yet. She says go down easy, but what she really means is get the hell out of her way. Winter is long. No money for heat. Wood burning stove glows in the back of the house. One of her friends stole a truck that turned out to be filled with Hostess snack cakes. We eat good. Garbage bags full of snack cakes. Church bags full of hominy, sauerkraut, field peas, baked beans. Bootleg cable. We are so far out in the sticks that no one checks. A French composer, a plumber, a paramedic. The men come and go. None are Michelangelo.

In school, I pretend to be okay. I’ve got enough problems. Besides, I’m smart. Teachers like me. They think I’m weird, but they like me. At home it’s all dodge the needles, the pregnancies, the abortions, the pot, the booze, the rage tossed around like underwear on the floor. Never an extra dime for anything. It’s not okay to hate. I know this from the preacher and church ladies.

How do I love thee? I devour the classics, that’s how. One teacher asks me if I even understand what I’m reading. Clearly she’s lost her durn mind. I tell her what the poems mean to me, and she stands there slack jawed, staring.

Slack jawed. Funny term.

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By Donald Hubbard

“Poys, take some more hot dogs,” hollered out Mr. Kleinschaefer, “You’ll be hungry on your camp-out, you can never have enough to eat!”

“Okay, Mr. K, give us a half-dozen more.”

“And sauerkraut, take a half pound of sauerkraut.”

“I don’t think so. There might be girls showing up at our camp-out, it might kind of cramp our style.”

Mr. Kleinschaefer winked and pulled back the tin of sauerkraut. “$5.89 poys, and have a good time.”

“We will Mr. K.”  And we did, we drank beer all night. The girls showed up, and we ate all of the hot dogs up.

Kleinschaefer and his wife, Ute, ran the butcher shop in Hale, Connecticut, since just before Christmas in 1930. The Yankee and Polish farmers alike loved the guy; he slaughtered their animals and gave them a good price, better than anywhere else in Central Connecticut. Though some residual prejudice trailed him because of the two world wars, only drunk teens ever broke one of his windows or spray-painted graffiti on this store front. Lacking a town policeman, invariably a group of men formed after each such incident and located the perpetrators and beat the crap out of them.

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By J. C. Lin

The apples were rancid in the water. They had formed on the tree in June, smaller and yellower than the year before, and now, in August, they were dropping steadily into the brackish water. There was no longer birdsong at daybreak nor the unearthly shrieks of raccoons at night—only lapping water and the sudden splashes of sick apples letting go, one at a time.

She swam out to the tree, sweeping the floating apples aside with her arms. Continue Reading This Story

By Lou Graves

Prudence was stood in front of her bedroom mirror. She knew she was pretty (she supposed she was; some days it took a little convincing before she thought so). But if she was pretty it was in a plain, bookwormish kind of way. She wasn’t pretty like the other girls; she was pretty like a younger sister or cousin; pretty like a well groomed and looked after pet. She was, she decided, pretty in an entirely intellectual way; intellectually pretty but not emotionally so. And without emotion (emotion being both base and carnal), there was no sexual desire. This, she reasoned, was why nobody desired her sexually. She hadn’t kissed anybody (as the other girls had) nor had she even held hands with anybody other than her mother. Even her father, it seemed, regarded her simply as intellect with eyelashes. Should a father not sit his daughter on his knee and kiss her on the cheek? In an innocent way, of course; but given her mature intellect, she could reason that even a father’s love had base and carnal roots. She was thought pretty by most but desired by none. She often suspected that she looked prettier without her glasses, beautiful even, however without them, she was almost blind and could never know for sure. Often, she would stare into the mirror without her glasses, seeing nothing but blurry and mercurial smudges and waiting, as though they would come into focus and she would see herself, on the other side of the mirror, at last looking beautifully base and carnal.

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