REVOLUTION JOHN

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH

by MEG TUITE

Emmett had his savings in a tube sock he kept in a locked drawer in his home desk. Yes, every time a new construction site went up it was for a new bank, but his parents had been through the Great Depression and lost a bundle. After that, his Dad punched a hole through the back of his closet and set up his own savings deposit box.

Emmett’s was less dramatic, but served the purpose. Whenever there was a shortage of space, Emmett traded in the twenties for hundred-dollar bills. It wasn’t like he made a hellava lot of money as a teacher, but he tried to stash away at least twenty dollars from each paycheck. He didn’t share this information with his wife. Louise knew he was cheap.

“Did you know that a cookware salesman from Ohio, who disappeared on a fishing trip, was found alive eight years later working as a local TV personality with a whole new identity. He died from a brain tumor a year later leaving six children from two wives?” Louise asked.

Emmett was counting out pennies and slowly stacking them into sets of 50 to drop into their paper cylinders for the bank. The kitchen table was covered in coins as he sifted through them with a magnifying glass. Louise looked up from her book. “Really? It’s not enough that you lug them to the bank? You’ve got to check them one by one?”

“Hey, if I find just one 1943 copper it’s worth up to 60,000 bucks. Won’t hear you complaining then.”

Louise thought it might be a nice thing to share your husband with somebody else. Mrs. Rogers, down the block, was a widow and loved to drink.

“Well, will you look at that,” Emmett said holding up a coin. “A wheat penny from 1957. Just beautiful.” He kissed it.

“How much is that baby worth?” Louise asked.

“A nickel if it isn’t beat up. But, if it’s worn-down than a penny is worth a penny, but she is pretty, isn’t she?” His dirty finger slid it over to Louise.

Louise nodded her head. She would call Mrs. Rogers later and invite her over for cocktails.

MEG TUITE’S latest collection is White Van. She is author of five story collections and five chapbooks. She won the Twin Antlers Poetry award for her poetry collection Bare Bulbs Swinging and is included in Best of Small Press 2021. She teaches writing retreats and online classes hosted by Bending Genres. She is also the fiction editor of Bending Genres and associate editor at Narrative Magazine. http://megtuite.com

GHOST GUNS

by HOWIE GOOD

It was wartime. Cows in green gas masks stared at the sign outside one of the few churches still standing. Love Like Jesus, the sign said in changeable plastic letters. I scooped up a handful of parking lot gravel, thinking to drive the cows off. The cows just stared at the sign and snickered and smelled like fresh-turned earth.

Two soldiers were pushing along the road a parlor piano they had salvaged from the rubble. At the side of the road, an old woman was poking at a severed hand with her cane. It was spring. Birds whistled in the sun-dappled trees. The war made their happiness seem wrong.

Grandmothers, prodded by oaths and bayonets, were herded off the train and into wire pens. One frightened old woman looked through the fencing at a heavily armed guard. “I know why you’re here,” she said, “but why am I here?”

Machine-gunners are positioned behind sandbags and barbed wire at strategic intersections. The sky is regularly patrolled. Citizens have been ordered to surrender all writing devices at the police barracks nearest to their homes or face prosecution. The logic is simple: they’ll never remember their dreams if they don’t write them down upon awakening.

HOWIE GOOD is the author most recently of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022. His previous poetry collections include Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press) and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).

GO

by DAN CRAWLEY

I tell Liv about my new clothes. “If I was ready to go, I wouldn’t care about torn waistbands, am I right? Or holes in my socks?”

I tell Dove about the smaller size of my sweatpants and boxers. “But they fit much better. A wonderful comfort.”

I tell Bobby about my new tube socks. “We can go play tennis. Like we used to at the junior college after midnight. Remember the…,” I falter. “Remember the courts encircled by pines?”

Eternal evergreen fragrance? Bugs swarmed the tops of the bright poles? Bats swooped, climbed, vanished? Lamps clicked off every hour like clockwork? Button we searched for like blindfolded hostages in a dark cave?

I tell them all, “And how we brought back the light. That easy.”

DAN CRAWLEY is the author of Straight Down the Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019) and The Wind, It Swirls (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021). His writing appears or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Lost Balloon, New World Writing, Atticus Review, and elsewhere.

RUN MY RACE

by MARK REEP

My grandfather said when he got up mornings he could hear his alarm clock ticking. By noon you had to yell at him. I’d skip school, stop by, drag a hassock over to his rocker by the window. Sit close enough he could hear me if I spoke up. He’d watch the chickadees at the feeder, rap his cane on the glass at a red squirrel. Sometimes he’d tell stories. You think you’ll remember. I wish I’d written more down. He’d run off, joined the Navy at thirteen. The recruiter said you got you any papers? Well, you’re big enough. Sign here, son. If you can’t write your name, make an X. One day he said I believe I’ve run my race. I loved him and I didn’t want to hear that and I said something young and dumb and useless. You’re the toughest guy I know, you’ll get through this. Spring’s right around the corner. I’ll get the garden tilled. He looked out the window. I saw his disappointment. He knew. He’d only wanted to tell me. A bluejay landed on the sill, looked in.

MARK REEP is an artist and writer based in Northern Pennsylvania and New York’s Finger Lakes region. For over twenty years, Reep has shown and sold graphite, charcoal, and ink drawings in galleries, juried exhibitions, and museums. His work has appeared in American Art Collector, Endicott Journal, Bluecanvas and many other publications.

Blow to the Heart

by HOWIE GOOD

I dreamed the other night that dreaming had been outlawed. Anyone under suspicion was promptly visited by special police. In my dream, an officer woke me with a blow to the heart. I saw to my horror that a traveling guillotine had already been assembled. Then, with the officer providing a running commentary, a technician made a hole in the top of my skull using an off-the-shelf cordless power drill. Something cold and cloudy floated up from the hole. “Only a memory,” the officer said, sounding disappointed. When the police left, they took the memory with them in a cage.

HOWIE GOOD is the author of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022. His other books include Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press) and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).

That Always Sounds Funny to Me

by JEFFREY HERMANN

The mayor doesn’t live in the mayor’s mansion. I think because it’s too close to the river which is loud and full of waste. Statistically, it always contains a corpse or two, which are not waste. They are people and deserve better. They deserve a clear sky. They deserve a big house and someone to bring them a meal at the ring of a bell. Their loved ones are banging on pots and pans trying to call them home. They will not wake up. They are floating and dreaming of their breakfast.

Rainwater is becoming river water all day long and I like this new way I have of living. No one is in charge of trash pickup or vehicle stops. There are fewer rules to follow every day. I think the mayor lives uptown but they don’t call it the mayor’s uptown house.

Don’t think about the bodies. Now that the pavement’s as clean as it can get go buy a magazine or bring something new into the world. Create a better container for the immortal soul. A fresh approach to crying for help. A more reliable floatation device, something we can honestly point to and say, “life raft.”

JEFFREY HERMANN poetry and prose has appeared in Hobart, Rejection Lit, UCity Review, trampset, JMWW, and other publications. Though less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding beyond measure.

When Girls Had Wings

by AMY BARNES

It makes me mad I can’t fly. I feel feathers under my skin, tingling reminders of long-forgotten flight. I tried when I was six and ended up with a broken leg and a mother that had to come home from work early to scoop me up off the ground like a broken baby bird. I get close to flight when I’m eight and am allowed to navigate a TWA plane when kids can still go in cockpits and sit on Captain’s laps. The captain pins metal wings on my shirt as the stewardess passes out Colorforms with black sticky backdrops, planes and trees and buildings and sticky people. I place planes and children in collision courses, pull them away before they crash. The outside birds fly in a V, hovering like I’m their mother.

When my wings don’t come in when I turn thirteen, I fly obediently in my family triangle, flapping my arms as instructed, waiting for solo flight. At sixteen, I migrate alone to Bobby Smith’s house, huddling under his feather blankets and letter jacket. My mother wants a full nest and clips my invisible wings with invisible scissors while I sleep. I wake lighter and more mad that I still can’t fly.

Left-behind feather DNA is unactivated and vestigial. I learn that word in biology class from my flightless dodo bird of a teacher, Mrs. Anderson. An appendix is also vestigial. Tailbone, same. A tail might be nice too. Since I’m wishing for feathers, maybe I’ll look for a tail as well. I stretch my shoulder wing muscles, waiting for evolution to be flipped on even though I know that’s the devil’s work according to Mrs. Anderson and my Sunday school teachers. I trace the feathers only I can see with an eraser during AP biology, burning a tattoo of feathers.

My daughter tells me about divergent evolution, lost birds and migrating monarch butterflies, geese flying upside down, animals shape-shifting. Each species eventually moves into separate paths, forever divided in an evolutionary storm. I read about penguins that return to the same spot year after year. I feel my missing wings fluttering, trapped under my skin. They pull me back in a new V of me, my husband and my daughter. I return to where my parents and sister live even as we’ve migrated apart. No one comes to my side for a meet-cute National Geographic photograph gone viral. I leave my skeletal feathers behind, fossils in a small town for someone to discover some day. They’ll brush the red clay off and wonder about flightless girls with wasted wings.

AMY BARNES has words at a variety of sites including The New Southern Fugitives, FlashBack Fiction, Popshot Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, X-Ray Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Museum of Americana, Penny Fiction, Elephants Never, Ice Floe Press, JMWW Journal, Stymie Lit, No Contact Mag, The Molotov Cocktail, Lucent Dreaming, Lunate Fiction, Rejection Lit, Perhappened, Cabinet of Heed, Spartan Lit, National Flash Flood Day and others. Her work has been long-listed at Reflex Press, Bath Flash Fiction, Retreat West and TSS Publishing. She volunteers at Fractured Lit, CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, NFFD and Narratively. She longisted for 2020 Wigleaf50 and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction and Best of the Net. Her flash collection will be published in May, 2021 by ELJ Editions, Ltd. A full length collection is forthcoming from word west in March, 2022.

Anomalies

by KAPKA NILAN

Remember that year when the apple trees did not bear any fruit, and the rose did not flower, then suddenly blossomed in December. When they came to prune the trees in spring and asked for you, I could not bring myself to say you’d been gone so I lied that you went on holiday.

KAPKA NILAN is a bilingual writer of short fiction and poetry and the creator of the first online zone for flash fiction, micro fiction and poetry in Bulgarian and English http://www.flashzonebg.wordpress.com . She writes and lives in Nottingham, UK.

The Zen of Inosculation

by AMY BARNES

My veins turn wooden one day in October. The doctor that cuts them out of my legs to make me look prettier for my husband, gives them to me on a napkin to take home to show the husband of the root leg wife as I am known to our curious neighbors. Are they for display purposes I wonder. Am I for display purposes? Do I put them on our medical oddities shelf next to my fetuses in formaldehyde or toenail clippings or the tooth DNA we hide from the CIA or the ear wax glob they pulled out of our son’s third ear or my appendix from third grade when it ruptured and I could have died at the soccer tournament we lost because my legs were wooden then too? It’s a souvenir that puzzles and fascinates me, tiny puzzle stick twigs and empty slots in my forest legs where they used to be, like someone has deforested me and logged my legs in a chart that grows in a different filing cabinet forest. In the moment, I put the wood-vein-filled napkin in my pocket and occasionally run my fingers down it until it splinters into my hand and I grow roots back up my arms and down my belly, varicose bellicose reminders that my legs look like gophers have dug holes in them and burrowed in to store food for the winter. I walk to the parking lot hand in pocket, root veins under my fingers. Twelve birds land on me like I’m Tippi Hedren or a telephone pole and I stand there screaming at them to go away but they don’t listen. They fly at my eyes and land on my shoulders but not like Disney bluebirds, more like I’m destined to be a stone statue in a southern state, a martyred woman loved by birds because her skin smells of wood and patchouli and nature and nurture and chestnuts roasting on an open mother. However, the doctor hasn’t addressed all my health issues. There are so many acorns in my gut that they come spilling out of my mouth one day in November. Look at them, I tell my husband. This one is you and this one is me. You can see it in the tops and the bottoms and the roundness and their rooty legs and rooting mouths. The babies scratch me on the way up because they aren’t wearing those little baby mitts yet. I clutch my throat at dinner parties and PTA meetings because I can’t quite breathe but I’m still able to talk and volunteer for committees so no one tries to help me. Instead, they offer me Girl Scout cookies encrusted with nuts like they are Faberge eggs, on a styrofoam platter. I spit my acorn babies at them through knot holes in fences and the not hole of my mouth until the babies splinter and shatter on the concrete sidewalks, breaking their backs instead of mine, even though they all chant the sing-song rhyme as they fall drop skip down the sidewalk.

The Music of Dirt

by TIM FRANK

I have a power that means images of taste and colour swirl through my mind. Colours in sound, music in perfume. The alphabet glowing. Numbers singing. But then there’s the pain that follows, because I’m alone with this strange force, and as I feel more, I hurt more.

I have never known how to articulate my gift to my schoolmates or my boyfriends or anyone who catches me lost in the fog of my own imagination – where I am struck by one of my weird visions.

I’ve had the power as far back as I can remember. As a baby, my mother’s chest sounded like a choral choir and her lullabies were smeared with lilac hues. My dad abandoned us when I was ten. His colour was red, and his sound was a violent stroke of a violin. He left my mum and I for a neurotic au pair with eczema and mild cerebral palsy. I later learned she microdosed LSD to soothe her mind, but tail-spinned into psychosis instead. She ended up on the streets, combing the sidewalks for cigarette butts as her teeth fell out one by one. I saw her in my dreams and she sounded like a hammer breaking glass.

TIM FRANK’S short have been published in Bourbon Penn, Eunoia Review, Menacing Hedge, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.