freddie blooms

to-do list

by: freddie blooms

season the cast irons. scrub the bathtub. file my taxes. everything to avoid counting down the days. fantasies of gasps escaped from your throat. we were nothing before we were everything.

expectations are different than hopes, but both lead to disappointment. i kick booze and cigarettes and sugar but can’t stop chasing the highs of desire. i picture you rolling your eyes at my dazzling dramatics, declare, hello, i am ready to love and to be loved! it’s the end until it’s the beginning again. but we’re never ready when we think we are, are we. i grasp and clutch. love finds me only when i finally let go. i am a flailing, wailing child, face flushed and wet with desperation, all wild holler and clenched fists. sooner or later the collapse arrives. i open my eyes to find the transformed sky. it’s there until it isn’t. you paint pictures from meditations. softness exposed in a ray of sun, pen balanced between your fingers, yearnings of your body risen to the surface. i try to be satisfied with what we settled for. it was enough until it wasn’t. when we meet i ride the wave of presence, the tug of war, the balance beam. the spring comes, the waters rise, whether or not we are ready to get wet.

Fortune Cookies

by: Emily Rose Schanowski

Fortune cookies do not have cosmic powers. They don’t affect my life. I know they don’t. They can’t. A few years ago I opened one that said, “Promote literacy—buy a box of fortune cookies!” Even the cookies themselves aren’t trying to fool anyone.

Last week I opened a fortune cookie and it was empty. Half of me thought, “oh well, no fortune.” The other half thought, “I am doomed now.”

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When it Comes to the Crunch

by: Mike Hickman

The situation. A car. A Volkswagen, say. They’re funny. I’d suggested a bubble car, but Graham thought a Volkswagen would be more recognisable and it was his computer, so who was I to argue? So.

A Volkswagen on a bridge. A bridge? A bridge.

Graham shrugged. He wasn’t too bothered about the bridge thing. We could have the bridge as long as we were agreed on the Volkswagen. We were agreed on the Volkswagen. It’s yellow, he told me, and I didn’t feel anything either way about that. He’s in the trunk, though, I mused. Doesn’t a Volkswagen – yellow or not – have the trunk at the front?

Yeah, Graham said, at the front, yeah. We can make something of that. We can?

We can. If he’s in the front of the car – if that’s where they’ve put him – They? Him. The dopey one. Frank, wasn’t it? Frank, yeah, that’s dopey enough. If that’s where they’ve put him, Graham mused, doing the thing with his fingernails that I couldn’t watch, then Frank’ll forget the following morning when he gets up, gets into the car, goes to drive to work. He’ll have the shunt – we’re still having that, aren’t we? – and he’ll forget that the best man is in the trunk up front and he’ll stand there – get this, get this – when they come out to assess the damage – the RAC, yeah? – and

it’ll come back to him, in flashback. In flashback? Is that funny? It’ll be funny. Because he’ll have glimpses of the night before. He’ll remember what they did to the best man. He’ll remember trussing him up and then he’ll remember packing him into the trunk of the car. And we’ll see it on his face. The camera’ll come right into his face and his eyes they’ll be all wide and, believe me, Mark, believe me, the audience will roar.

I thought about this. Through the window, down below, Graham’s mum was attending to her son’s own car. It was a Ka. Yellow, of course. He’d got it for his birthday. It was washed every Sunday. It’s his car? I didn’t want to ask. Graham seemed so up for it. And when he was up for it like this, that was great. That was to be encouraged. Had to be. But the logic, I thought, the logic.

Graham finished picking at his fingernail, moved to change the Queen CD he put on every time I came over. Whose car?

His, I remind him. This Frank guy. Fat Bottomed Girls on Bicycles went round again. Graham wandered over to the window and closed the curtains.

Yeah, yeah, it’s his. So, right, wouldn’t he know where the trunk in his own car was? Wouldn’t he know that a prang from behind wouldn’t end up with his best man mate squashed to death? Graham rubbed his eyes, mussed his hair, twirled his dad’s swivel chair, played again with the lid of the cow gum. Sniffed it, too. If he was hung-over, he suggested. Maybe it was the cow gum talking. He’d forget where the trunk is in his own car? Okay. Maybe it’s not his car. Maybe he’s borrowed the car. Maybe he’s driving it back for a friend. Whatever. The best man is in his trunk and he only remembers this when the RAC are out preparing to tow it – or maybe they’re on the way and he’s standing there and we get the flashback and we realise what’s happened and… The audience will roar?

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They’ll roar.

Fat Bottomed Girls on Bicycles finished again and Graham went off into his bedroom to get the next Queen CD. Before putting the same one on again.

They’ll roar.

A poor bloke gets tied up, shoved into the trunk of a car, and is then crushed to death in an early morning shunt the next day. Having very likely asphyxiated overnight. The perfect set-up for a comedy script, said Graham, and I could have disagreed but then he was on to how our dopey Frank would dispose of the car. It’s got to get more extreme. He’ll try to push it off the bridge and he can’t. So.

So.

He’ll try to get it started again. So he can get it out of the way. So it won’t be found.

He’s now deliberately trying to cover up the death of his mate? The same mate who was meant to be married in the morning? Have we forgotten that, too? No, no, no, seriously, it’ll be funny, it will. Because… What about setting fire to it? If it’s not his car.

So he sets fire to a friend’s car to get himself out of it? He was going to work. Won’t they expect him at work? Perhaps they hear of the accident? Or they fear there’s been an accident? Or there’s been a fog – there’s been a fog – and loads of people have had accidents that morning, so they’re worried he’s been caught up in it and they send people out to find him. A search party? A search party.

In the fog? Lots of scope for people lost in the fog.

We’re probably quite a way from the last big laugh by now.

No. Yes. No.

Graham swirled the cow gum and rotated a bit on his dad’s chair.

No?

No. Because – get this – this is the punchline, right? He’s not in the trunk.

Frank?

No. The best man. He’s not in the trunk. He fell out or got out or whatever.

He’s done a Houdini?

He’s done a Houdini. And he’s wandering about in the fog and that’s where we leave it at the end, after Frank’s tried to set fire to the car – after he’s had it crushed. He’s had it crushed into a cube.

Thinking the best man bloke is still in there? But it’s alright. It’s alright, Mark. Because he’s not. And we see him at the end. There he is. Still dressed in stockings and suspenders from the stag do and he’s alright. You see? They’ll laugh. How can they not? How can they not?

They rejected the script, of course. The BBC. ITV. Anyone else we could think of. They said it was too unreal; said we’d need “life experience” to really rock the comedy thing like we wanted to. Did you write anything else with him, then? This Graham? I can’t remember. Awful, isn’t it? I can’t remember whether there was anything else. I remember that one day, with the cow gum and the Ka out there he wouldn’t get to drive being washed by his mum. And I remember thinking – because I did, the whole time – that this wasn’t going to go anywhere. And, of course, it didn’t. Especially for him. And that’s it.

That’s it?

It was a long time ago. But, you know, perhaps we shouldn’t regret so much what we forget; that we’re only left with so much. Because, you know, sometimes it’s just the funnies we’re left with, even when we’re not so sure whether they ever were.

When it comes to the crunch.

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Desert Mother

by: Mara Panich

you’ve always found beauty in a tumbleweed but never in yourself. a ridiculous notion of rambling free form and distracted