Into The Well

INTO THE WELL Shoots &Vines Fiction 2009

www.shootsandvines.com Shoots and Vines PO Box 489 Poseyville, IN 47633 submissions@shootsandvines.com Online and print submissions welcome.

Editor: Crystal Folz

Cover Art: Ray Timmins www.raytimmins.blogspot.com

Editor’s Note – Many thanks to all of the writers in this zine for letting me hang on to the pieces for a few months before publishing. The idea for this zine first hit me when I read Robert’s ‘The Slaughtered Elephant’. Up until then, I had focused on flash and poetry, forgetting how much I love to be lured into piece of fiction that insists on building momentum over a series of pages, not lines.

Always, Crystal

The Slaughtered Elephant by Robert Dolles Each time his bare feet hit the hard earth of the open savanna, the boy’s ankles are covered with swirling, rust-colored dust. Sweat pours off his face, thick hot air bolts through his lungs. He races against gusts strong enough to pluck small animals. Here, whether stampeding across baked earth alongside the wildebeests, or bounding with the antelope, the boy is free from expectation.

There are no difficult choices to make, just the simplicity of basic survival. He would rather be faced with being taken down by a pride of lions than to have to choose again.

But the moment the boy spots his mother just beyond a swale of high dry grass, his bliss shatters. The truth of what must happen sends his spirits pummeling. Always it comes to this end, him having to choose, having to make a decision, having to lose one important faction of his world in order to save another. Some nights he finds himself traveling the galaxies, other times swimming the dark depths of the ocean. But it happens also on elevators, bridges, anywhere at all. No matter where he runs to, though, he cannot hide.

His fears and insecurities find him and force him to make a choice.

Today, when he sees his mother, she is sitting at a wooden table with three men. The table is shaded under a rustling canvas canopy. Taut ropes secure the canopy to two dead acacia trees. The boy, still running, cannot help but feel hatred as he watches one of the men lean over his mother’s shoulder. The other two men, one on either side of her, are close beside her as well.

Against the drone of the wind, the boy hears his mother’s clear laughter and a haunting chill vibrates through his entire body. He focuses on the silk ribbon of her hat, snapping in the wind, and then the hem of her regal gown, whipping near the earth. Each time his mother raises her hand to sip her tea, faint rays of sunlight reflect off her dainty teacup.

She laughs again, loudly. The men with her laugh, too. Their teacups clink, the sound simultaneously distant and extremely clear.

As he nears the wooden table where his mother sits, the stench of rotting flesh carried by the wind invades boy’s nostrils. Despite this stink of death, the savanna teems with life: African Crown cranes strut boldly through dry flowing grass, honking at one another.

Antelopes, paused from their grazing, lean from their high cover to study their surroundings.

Out of breath, he must stop running. Breathing hard, he cup his knees with his hands. The sound of wing beats causes him to raise his face skyward. Vultures soar overhead, circling the root of the rotting smell -- an elephant carcass. Distorted by the heat shimmer, the grotesque birds swoop from the sky to rip apart the flesh of the slaughtered elephant.

He does not understand what he is seeing. Or does he?

Standing motionless on the savanna soil, the boy feels the grit of earth against his curled toes. Once again he hears laughter carry from the wooden table where his mother sits.

Soon after, as always, a long shadow to slips over him. The boy whirls, stares through the glare and sees his father.

A familiar sense of foreboding tingles through the boy. How many times has this happened before?

The wind passes over the boy’s father’s old-man weathered face, a film of glistening sweat covers his naked body. He adjusts his grip on the spear he carries. His dove-gray eyes plead for his son’s understanding.

The boy closes his eyes and draws long, deep breaths. He does not want to choose today.

He wants to remain wild, like the hyenas and the big cats, running free on the savanna, where all life ends meaningful.

His father’s cold hand stretches across the space between them and falls on the boy’s right shoulder. “It is because I am from one world,” his father says, “and your mother is from another.”

Fear. The boy remembers his mother’s fears - the nights long ago when he and his mother roamed the dark streets together; he, clinging to her long swishing gown. Long nights spent either searching for his father, or trying to escape him. Recalling the pain and confusion, the boy remains motionless on the savanna until he feels the smooth wooden handle of his father’s spear being pressed against his palms. Sweat drips off his hair and runs down the side of his face. He hears his father say, “Like this, like this.” He feels his father’s hand take hold his fingers and guide them around the wooden handle of the spear.

There was a time when he would have done anything for the sound of that voice; a time when he would have given his life for the touch of his father’s hand. And there was a time when he did take a life for his father’s affection.

Now his father crouches beside him and turns the boy so that his left shoulder juts in the direction of the table where his mother laughs with her men. The men she is with are always different, yet always there. Always. The boy allows his father to raise his limp arms, position them rigid, and lock them at the elbows.

“Remember that day, don‘t you?” his father says. “I came home, found you alone.

Remember what we found out, together? Remember what we had to do?”

The boy opens his eyes and sees a clothesline tied between two trees. Damp clothes pinned to the line flap and writhe in the wind. Like vibrant ghosts, the deep colors of the fabric rise and fall, rise and fall. Two sheets part and the boy’s mother appears between

them. Behind her, a faceless man.

Now his mother raises her face from the table and scans the savanna. She knows they are here again. The men with her move away from the table. She stands, leaving her teacup on the table, and begins to trudge through the wavering hot air toward the boy and his father. Halfway across the grass, she stops to mourn the slaughtered elephant.

The boy tightens his grip on his father’s spear. He lunges forward without moving his feet, thrusting the spear, hearing the stone spearhead slice the air. He knows what he must do. He knows the instant the spearhead pierces his mother's flesh the elephant will rise again.

Bio: Robert Aquino Dollesin was still a kid when he left the Philippines. He now resides in Sacramento, where he manages to jot a few words down not and again. He sometimes blogs here: http://robertaquinodollesin.blogspot.com/

If You Were by Will Pewitt

I became infatuated with Lacie Bauer as soon as I found out she had genital herpes. It wasn’t commiseration and it wasn’t any sort of sympathy; my feeling for her was more than simply pity. Infatuation seems an apt word. Also, the attraction wasn’t sexual. Don’t get me wrong, I understand what the disease is; I would like to think I’m fairly aware of the strange level of allure I felt toward Lacie. After I found out, I of course researched genital herpes to no end to know the general effects, the risks of infection, the tendencies of outbreaks. I needed to know the details of one’s danger to oneself.

Lacie’s plight was not the cause of poor luck or of being lied to. Lacie’s issue was simply the result of incorrigible sensical slippage. She was dumb: she had dated Rob O’Connor—a boy whose STD had been quite publicly outed when other members of the football team noticed something in the locker room. Gossip spread. We had sympathy for him. To find out that Lacie Bauer had contracted the disease from him after knowing of his condition did not draw compassion; it only drew shaking heads and rolling eyes. After all, what sympathy can you have for someone who does something that ignorant?

I did not have sympathy. I was obsessed. *

*

*

The first time I looked into Lacie’s room, the tree branches in her backyard were slippery. She only shut the blinds on the right side of her bay window which looks out over a small but well-gardened backyard. Through the left side of the window, I could see several other things contributing to my infatuation for her: she turned on the television with her left hand though she was right-handed; she used only two fingers to type on her laptop though at school I had seen her type with all ten in a computer science class; she often crossed and recrossed her legs in varying ways, as if she knew she was being studied and wanted to look most presentable.

The reason I know I’m not crazy is that I’m aware this is very unusual behavior.

I’ve read books and seen films about people who do such things as this—stalk—yes, I can say the word. In these fictional tales, the characters always seem to think what they are doing is not morally wrong or that it is normal or that it is only a justification of their obsession with said person. Really, all their stalking ever turns out to be is a conviction of their own obvious delusion. I will not sit here and try to excuse you from the honesty that I was carefully stalking a girl. I have no good reason. I won’t bore you by trying to justify it. That would not be very interesting.

*

*

*

On Saturday mornings her family goes to the farmer’s market, and because she began losing interest in her social circles—or perhaps because they had lost interest in her—Lacie started accompanying her parents. When they go, they leave the door unlocked.

Her diary said that she hated being alone through this. It said that the worst part was having to think she would have to meet someone new and discuss the issue from the start. There would be no joy in the first dates—only the anxiety of having to unveil such personal information to someone she barely knew. It was a paradox (she used the word correctly; she really was a very astute young girl), and she wrote that she could not afford to not have that talk early in a relationship, but that having the talk would keep any development in said courtship from occurring.

This is where I got the courage to do what I did.

I thought putting a note in a girl’s locker was a little cliché. Anybody can do that.

In fact, quite a few people do it even when they have only lukewarm feelings for a person. After the third period gym class it is unlocked and unoccupied. And so instead of a hallway locker I put my letter into her locker in the girl’s changing room. It said, “You are loved. And if you are interested in knowing by whom, then wear your hair parted on the right side tomorrow.”

Lacie always parted her hair on the left—and always with either a black or red fine-tooth comb before blow-drying and straightening it for roughly twelve minutes. And because I knew that, I thought this was a simple request.

The next day her hair was parted on the left. I won’t try and pretend I wasn’t hurt.

I also can’t say that I was surprised. You see, my mind was functioning perfectly all the time.

However, one day later, Lacie’s hair was parted to the right. I don’t care why she parted her hair that way, just that she did it.

The next note I put in her gym locker said I was someone she saw every day but never spoke to. I gave small details about myself: that I had three grey hairs on the back left portion of my hair, that I was four inches shorter than my father, that I had exactly ten freckles on my right arm as opposed to only two on my left. And the final clue I gave was that I could not keep from looking at her.

To see her look toward me in our common classes was an excitement I have never known. To be able to ignore her glances or to meet her eyes—and look at her as if she were the strange one—carried a weighty power I indulged in. But upon seeing that mousey retreat into herself I felt more pleasure than guilt in seeing her isolation increase.

Next, I sent a series of notes all requesting she meet at certain locales. The first of which asked for her simply to stand in front of her house at eight o’clock at night. I felt eight was a reasonable time between dinner (usually conducted in the Bauer residence at six-thirty and concluded by seven-thirty) and when her parents went to sleep (ten o’clock at the latest if they were not making love which, I noticed from the tree in their backyard, occurred sporadically less than once a week).

She came out until eight thirty-two—standing with perfect posture the entire time.

The desperation resonated on her cheeks gorgeously as I watched with binoculars from behind bushes down the street. I never showed.

The next note I left was placed into her hallway locker, not her gym locker. It stated that I was sorry that I had been unable to arrive as I meant to. I told her how pitifully upset at myself I was, of how I would never again leave her wanting me without being there for her.

The note begged for her to meet me in the parking lot of our school the next day at midnight. If she could get out of the house it would truly be a sign of commitment.

She showed. I hid.

Perhaps if she had remained confident and dignified through the process—held her head high in school and kept her chin up, as they say—then she would have maintained a veneer which wouldn’t have allowed honesty. But she walked with her condemned gait nonetheless, scooting down the hallways with a very purposeless walk, and you could read pain in her chapped lips when she slept, in the way she put on the same dull pink nail polish, or the way she applied the ointment to treat her mistake of sleeping with Rob O’Connor, in the way she knelt into tears in the middle of rearranging the posters on the wall, and in the way her handwriting became more stilted, more rigid in the dates after she found out. In her diary she still dotted her Is and Js with hearts, which I saw as the saddest thing of all. *

*

*

My next note held no apology, but requested that she meet me in a park which was roughly an eighteen minute walk from her house (when taking into account the fact that her steps tended to be short, and her walk was unrushed, that she is five feet and four inches tall and that she weighed one hundred and seventeen pounds according to her last physical checkup, a copy of which was stashed in her desk in what might have been an attempt to keep the news of her disease from her parents).

She not only came but was nine minutes early. I watched her stand there with her loneliness and desperation, checking her watch just seven times in slightly over an hour (sixty-eight minutes)—averaging, respectively, a mere .206 looks per minute. She stood for the bulk of the time, sitting once, but only briefly and drawing a few designs in gravel by the swing-set. Her posture was no longer perfect.

From afar I looked at her features, not admiring them so much as taking them into consideration: her light hands in front of her holding her small purse, her twice pierced ears, her running nose causing her to sniffle every so often, a lower lip redder than the upper, a stance that made her shoulders uneven. I suppose she was pretty but that’s not why I was there. It made me think, If you were anyone less damaged I’d have no interest in you.

I would like to say I regret putting her through more emotional pain—rejection and desertion—but the only thing I regretted was that I could not see exactly what shapes she had drawn in the gravel and whether or not she had written both our names. Perhaps she had written them with a heart over i. Of course she did not know mine, making such a hope impossible. But hopes are rarely based on facts.

I left one more note the next day. There was no apology. It stated only, “Do it again.”

Bio: Will Pewitt’s stories have been published in several journals including Pindeldyboz, Avery, The Claremont Review, and Word Riot.

Spilled Milk by Charlie Rose Tommy saved Sheila's life that night, right there on the train tracks. His best friend, Mathew, begged him to stay at the bar for one more drink but Tommy smiled his careless smile and shook his head. Then he went off into the cold and the rain. As he was walking home his head felt light, like it might just float away from his shoulders. A flash of lightning took a photograph of someone sitting on the tracks.

Sheila began to shiver as the drops of rain soaked through her sweatshirt and jeans. She sat on the tracks facing the direction she knew a train would soon be heading. It was always her way to turn her back on everything she was forced to encounter.

She could feel the tracks begin to shake before she heard the rumble. She thought back to being a child living on Long Island, just a quick drive from the City. It was her sixteenth birthday the day the Towers fell. How dare anyone turn her birthday - the most important one of her life - into a grotesque day of wailing and mourning? Of course she felt sorrow for those who were lost and their family members - how could she not? - but her personal tragedy on that day was that her birthday party was cancelled. There would be no friends meeting at Tino's Pizza Shop for dinner and then spending the night at her house. In fact, one of her friends, Brenda Sizemore, lost three cousins in Tower A. How could she even think about complaining about her own misfortune when that had happened to one of her dearest friends?

Sheila knew she was selfish. But that was okay. People excused selfishness if the person was beautiful enough. It was like she had an excuse for being that way. Look at how pretty she is, they would whisper behind her back, why shouldn't she be selfish? You're only criticizing her because you're jealous.

Her parents made it up to her. They took her and three friends to see Rent on Broadway and then they gave them each two hundred dollars to spend in Manhattan. (They gave Sheila six hundred dollars but that was a little secret kept between parents and an only daughter). Sheila and her friends had a wonderful time. It was awesome. But it didn't make up for the birthday that was lost. Nothing would ever make up for that.

And so it was with Sheila Collins. If something went wrong there was nothing that could ever make it right. Not in her mind. Not deep inside of her. She was beautiful. She was born into a wealthy family. But the world was out to get her and she was out to prove it.

Maybe that's why she turned to alcohol and weed when she was seventeen. Maybe that's why she became hooked on cocaine when she was eighteen. And maybe that was why she sat on the train tracks that night, waiting for her savior to arrive. Waiting for her savior to sweep her up and make everything better.

And maybe Tommy was just waiting to save someone. He was always the one to go out of his way to be nice to people. There was nothing he feared more than being disliked.

And it was the worst thing in the world if he did something wrong to someone. He

couldn't handle that. He was no hero - God knew that was true - but he was waiting and hoping that maybe sometime he would become one.

His waiting was about to end.

"Hello?" Tommy called out. His words were lost in the wind. He advanced a couple steps, rocked back on his heals pushed by the breeze, and then he called again, "Someone there?"

"Not really." It was a voice of a young woman.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"I'm fine."

A train whistle sounded. Tommy waited.

"You know you're sitting on the train tracks right?"

"Yup," the voice replied.

Tommy paused again. The train grew nearer.

"And you know there's a train coming‌ right?" he said.

"Yup." "And you're not moving because‌?"

No reply. Tommy took another couple steps. The train's headlight came swinging around the curve about an eighth of a mile away. The shaking turned into bouncing. Tommy had the weird sensation that he was a kernel of popcorn bouncing in a frying pan.

"You might want to move," he said, his voice growing louder with each word.

No reply.

He took three more steps. The train drew within fifty yards. Tommy was less than six feet from the woman on the tracks. He took two giant strides, tripped on the rail of the track and fell in front of the girl. Pain exploded in his knees and sent stinging tentacles into his thighs. He studied her face for a second: cheeks streaked with mascara, lips smudged with lipstick, hair matted to her head. Another whistle, it felt like glass breaking in the deepest caverns of his ears. The train's headlight splashed across both of them. Tommy scrambled to his feet and hooked the girl under her arms. He slipped and they both fell.

They bounced with the rhythm of the approaching locomotive. Tommy rolled and

pressed her hard to his body. The warm wind from the train took their breath away as it went speeding past.

"I'm Sheila," she whispered when all the cars finally disappeared into the night. She was still on top of him.

"I'm Tommy." he said, his nose and eyes still burning from the heat of the train.

Back at Tommy's apartment, she undressed in his bathroom and wrapped herself in a blue Chenille blanket. She walked out and sat on a couch with stained cushions and tears in the fabric. She was still shivering from the cold.

"You want something to eat or drink?" Tommy asked. "I can brew some coffee.�

"That would be nice."

Tommy walked into the kitchen. He was thinking of her eyes. They were a hazy shade of blue. They gave the appearance of being blurry. They reminded Tommy of a sky painted with watercolors.

Why would such a beautiful woman try to kill herself?

After shoveling four scoops of coffee grounds into the filter and pouring six cups of water into the back of the maker, Tommy closed the lid and turned the switch on. He leaned against the counter for a minute. It had been a long time since he had a girl in his apartment. It had been since he and Angela broke up nearly a year ago. But he had never had a girl in his place as appealing as the one who now sat in his living room. What should he say to her? Should he ask why she was on the tracks as a train bared down on her? He didn't know anything else to talk about.

"Thanks," Sheila said, taking the cup of coffee and holding it on her lap with two hands.

Tommy nodded. He took a sip of his own coffee. He sat in the faded blue recliner across from Sheila. "Do you need anything else?"

"I'm fine," she whispered. She studied his face. It was full of kindness. He wasn't a goodlooking man - his chin was too pointed, his eyes were too close together - but he had saved her life. That meant more than anything else could ever mean. He now owned her heart and she liked to believe that he always would.

"Is there anyone you want to call? Let them know you're okay?"

"No," she whispered as her blanket slid down her right shoulder and revealed the top half of her breast.

Tommy felt dirty for thinking it but he wished the entire blanket would drop off of Sheila. He longed to see what she looked like. The sight had to be glorious.

They talked for over an hour that night. Before they went to bed Tommy was granted his wish. They made love until the sun started to throw slivers of light into the living room.

Sheila gave him everything. This man had saved her life. This man truly cared about her.

And Tommy felt like a god to be next to such a beautiful woman and to be touched and stroked in ways he had never before imagined. *

*

*

Sometimes when Tommy looked at Sheila he wondered why he put himself through it all.

Why did he put up with her shit - the complaining, the self-mutilation, everything. If he were stronger he would walk away. He'd leave her and her issues behind. But the only problem was that he loved her. If he had learned anything in the past two years it was that. And as miserable as he sometimes was with her, things would only be worse without her.

"Why do you hate me?' Sheila asked again.

"I don't hate you," he said rolling his eyes.

"Don't do that with your eyes, it makes you look like a girl."

He sat on the bed. She sat beside him. She twirled her hair around her index finger and then let it fall back across her shoulder. Tommy leaned in and kissed her cheek. "What were we fighting about again?" he asked.

Sheila smiled. "I don't remember."

"Neither do I," Tommy said looking at the carpet between his bare feet. "But I'm sorry.

What do you say I make you some warm milk?" He hoped she wouldn't refuse his offer she liked and only drank warm milk after they made love.

Her smile grew wider. She crossed her arms in front of herself and pulled her sweater off.

Then as she unfastened her bra and knelt down between Tommy's legs, he just kept repeating one phrase inside his head: God I love this woman. *

*

*

Larry Meisner snuck through the back door of Natalie's house. He could smell bacon frying. He heard his girlfriend humming as she moved about in the kitchen. He knelt on one knee and petted Natalie's old hound dog, Max. Then he stood and reached into his pocket. The ring was still there. Before he entered the kitchen, he stopped and savored the moment.

Without warning, Larry’s thoughts turned to Rick. The same sharp pain still exploded in Larry’s chest when he thought of his little brother hanging from the back of the bailer. He had come so far since Rick's death but still not far enough to stop all the hurt. That was over seventeen years ago and this was the first time he had been truly happy since the accident. Larry could still smell the barn - shit mixed with the scent of wet hay and silage. He was sitting on a bale of hay eating beef jerky while his little brother jumped on the tractor and pulled out of the barn, pulling the bailer and the hay wagon behind him.

Rick was going to the field across the street to get started on second cutting.

Rick stopped the tractor just before he exited the barn. "Can you milk for me tonight?"

He was sixteen and full of life. His eyes were so goddamn wild. They matched his personality.

"Why?" Larry asked. "You got another date with Brenda Wilder?"

"Something like that."

"You better hope her daddy doesn't find out. He'll string you up in his hay barn by your balls."

Rick only grinned. He winked at Larry. "It would be worth it."

"Worth it? How do you figure?"

"If you ever saw her naked, you'd think so too."

Larry gazed at his younger brother. There was no roping in him. Not anymore. The kid always seemed to have a knack for walking through a valley of shit and coming out smelling like apple blossoms anyway. "I'll do it," Larry said. "But you owe me."

Another wink from Rick. "Thanks. I'll pay you back if you ever find someone of your own."

Larry never would have believed it would take him another seventeen years to find someone he could truly call his own.

Rick shoved the tractor into gear and pulled out of the barn. A few minutes later Larry heard a high-pitched scream. There was another odd noise - gears grinding, something snapping. He walked to the end of the barn and peered across the road. He saw the tractor slowly veering into the woods. Rick's legs - at least part of them - were hanging from the back of the bailer. They were bouncing up and down like two shoe laces. Larry ran toward the wayward tractor hearing someone screaming, not realizing the voice was his own.

That day and the picture of Rick's blood spread throughout the field, and the wagon, and everywhere, haunted Larry for years and stopped him from granting himself permission

to be happy. He felt responsible for his brother's death. He should have been the one bailing the hay. He should have been there to help his brother do whatever it was he was trying to do when he fell from the tractor. He should have been the one to die. And because he failed to do anything to save his brother, he didn't feel as if he had the right to be happy. Until he met Natalie.

She was wearing her pajamas. She couldn't wait until Larry quit his job and she no longer had to spend these nights (or early mornings) cooking and waiting to see him. Three a.m. was no time to be waiting for a man to come home. But he was her man. And she loved him dearly. She always had, ever since she saw him singing karaoke in Finnegan's Pub over two years ago. But still, she wished he'd stop playing with the trains and get a nine to five job.

Natalie was flipping a piece of bacon when he grabbed her from behind. She jumped and splattered bacon grease on the back of hand. She turned and punched him in the chest.

"You burned me," Natalie said as she moved to the sink and ran cold water over her hand.

She glared at him.

"I'm sorry."

"You're an asshole. Here I am cooking you breakfast in the middle of the goddamn night and you come up to me and -."

He interrupted her with a kiss. They both began to laugh. He pulled the ring from his pocket and held it in the small space between them. She looked at it and gasped. Her eyes grew wide. Larry dropped to one knee.

Natalie tried to keep her wits about her. But here she was, a thirty-eight year old woman, feeling like a school girl. She didn't ever hear him ask the question, the pounding in her ears was too loud.

The bacon burned on the stove. Natalie and Larry forgot all about it after she said "yes".

But Natalie fried more and they both enjoyed bacon, eggs, and toast as the sun started to peak over the tree line in the east.

"So how was your night at work?' she asked.

"Almost hit somebody."

Natalie's eyebrows rose. "What? How?" Larry shook his head. He swallowed a mouth full of egg and toast and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. "I don't know. I came around the bend and there was someone sitting in the middle of the tracks. I didn't think it was a person at first but the closer I got the more I could see. It was some young girl."

"Did you almost derail?"

"Nah. I wasn't about to throw on the brakes. It woulda been too late anyway."

"So she moved."

"Somebody moved her. Saved her life." He knew it saved his life too. He could never live with the knowledge that he took anyone's life, speak nothing of a person around the same age as Rick. If he had more strength, Rick's death would've killed him. His thoughts brushed lightly against the nights he sat atop the silo looking across the darkened fields of corn and hay, praying he would find the courage to jump. Larry shook the thoughts from his head. "Damnedest thing," he said forking another mouthful between his lips.

He looked at the ring on her finger. He liked the way the light danced off of it. He looked up and she was smiling at him, unbuttoning her night gown. Larry figured it was no longer important to finish eating. He had better things to do. *

*

*

Tommy lay in bed with his right hand on his chest. Shelia lay beside him pretending to be sleeping. Tommy knew she wasn't. They were fighting again. About exactly what he didn't care. For the past two months they were always fighting. He wished he could just get up out of bed and walk away from her and their supposed relationship. But they had been together for nearly three years and he couldn't imagine life without her. As much as she infuriated him, he still loved her with all his heart and he knew he always would.

"When are you going to realize how blessed you are?" he whispered.

No response. She continued to pretend.

"You have everything, Sheila. Your beautiful, your smart, your funny, everything. Why do you insist on playing the role of the victim?"

"Maybe because I'm sick of being everything that I am. I am nothing but what I see.

Don't you understand that? What makes you think you're so right? You think you're a better judge of me than I am?" She sat up and looked down on him. "I would never presume to know more about you than you do yourself. Yet everyone - you, my parents, everyone - thinks they have a right to tell me how great I am because they think I'm smart and pretty. Who are you? Who are they?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Tommy asked. He was angry and confused.

She threw her head down on the pillow. "Sometimes I wish I never met you."

"What?" He felt a sharp pain in his mind.

"Sometimes I wish I died on those tracks. I wish you had decided to drink one more drink." She rolled over away from him.

Her words disturbed him but he was sick of being troubled and he was tired of trying to make sense out of chaos. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. *

*

*

The dog upstairs was barking again. It never seemed to stop. Larry sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes. The early morning light was beginning to push its way through the blinds into his bedroom. He had been dreaming about something wonderful. Something he couldn't remember exactly. But he knew it involved Natalie and their nameless children. Such dreams wove their way into his sleep every night. He found it strange that he would dream of such impossibilities. He found himself looking forward to the dreams as the day wore thin. But he hated the knowledge that stabbed him in the back when he rose from his bed every morning: Natalie was gone and she would never return to him.

He poured himself a glass of milk and carried it with him out onto the third floor balcony.

He sat in a worn wicker chair that faced the courtyard. He imagined he was on top of a silo as he sipped at the milk and watched three black birds pecking at the earth. The wind brought in a vision of Natalie's black hair blowing around her face with her dimples on each side of her mouth. He could feel the softness of her belly as it pressed against him.

He could smell the scent of her perfume; he even remembered her taste on his tongue.

"Where are you now?" he whispered to Natalie. She wasn't there to answer his question, but that wasn't important. She was with someone else. He saw the wedding announcement in the paper the night before. He didn't blame her. She deserved to be with someone. Someone that didn't strike and kill a woman the very night he and Natalie were set to be engaged.

"It wasn't your fault," Natalie said to him. She told him that at least a thousand times.

"I know," he replied. He was thinking of the girl's blood that was splattered across the front of the train like she was some worthless insect. He was remembering how her head was nearly curled completely beneath her own back. How did it not rip completely off?

Thank God for small miracles.

"Then why do you keep beating yourself up? Why can't you just let it go?"

He didn't know how to answer that. Just like he didn't know why that made him unable to make love to Natalie, nearly unable to even touch her "I don't know," he said. He was also thinking of Rick and the way his body was all twisted and broken at the end of the bailer.

"Please just let it go."

"I can't."

"For me. For us. Please."

"I'm sorry."

Eventually she left him and he never tried to get her back. Deep down he knew she deserved more than him. He could never allow himself to feel good and that wasn't fair to her or anyone else. How could he ever allow himself to drag down Natalie? Even he wasn't that evil.

The milk glass slipped from his hand and shattered on the wooden planks below him. He jumped as the cold milk washed over his toes. He studied the way the sun danced off the shards of glass. It looked beautiful. An idea bumped against his mind.

He couldn't.

But he knew he could.

Others would wonder where the sense in it was but he didn't care. As far as he knew, there was no sense to anything and besides he was sick of caring what others thought and he was sick of being scared. So he bent down, chose the largest piece of glass, and picked it up. Milk clung to it as he pressed it into his wrist and drew a deep, nearly perfect line up to his inner elbow. The pain wasn't nearly as bad as he would've imagined. He looked at the blood pooling below him with a mild fascination. It reminded him of Natalie. He thought of her skin and her dimples and then, just before he fell forward, he heard the barking of the dog upstairs and he wondered where Natalie was at that very moment. *

*

*

Sheila could feel the coolness of the tracks through her jeans. But she wasn't sure if they were cold or just wet. God knew she was wet. The rain poured down on her and mixed with her tears. She looked to the sky and wished the clouds would part and show her the stars one last time. How she loved the stars. She almost loved them enough to stand up and walk off the train tracks. Almost. But then she realized the stars were all that was left that she considered good. A world with only stars to love was not a world worth living in any longer. So she sat.

She heard the approaching train before she saw its headlight appear from around the bend. She turned back around as it closed in on her. As it did she looked from the sky to the street beside her. Strange, she expected to see someone - a man - standing there. But there was no one. And as the train bore down she thought of puppies and beaches and hot cups of coffee and warm glasses of milk. She thought of a life that almost seemed perfect sometimes but could quickly turn into nothing but sorrow and pain. She thought of her father and her mother. What would they think about this? The train drew so near that she

could feel its hot, steaming breath. It burned in her nostrils. And then with a painful explosion, there was nothing. *

*

*

Tommy lay in bed staring at the ceiling and listening to the rain. In the distance he heard a train whistle. His mind jumped back to that night walking home from the bar when he came upon the accident. He had stayed at the bar longer than he wanted. But that was Mathew's fault. He was the one that convinced Tommy to stay for one more beer. What if Tommy had left when he wanted to? Maybe he could have saved that woman that was hit by a train. That was crazy - he was no hero - but somehow, for some reason, he still couldn't stop himself from thinking he just might have it in him.

He hated the thought. He wanted to shake loose from memories of that night. It saddened him in a way he was unable to understand. To get past it all he reached down and began to pleasure himself. When he was finished, he lay in bed and wished for someone to hold onto. For a brief second he thought to get up and make some warm milk. Strange, he hadn't drunk warm milk since he was a small child. But he didn't want to drink it anyway; he only wanted to make it. And as the rain began to fall harder outside, he tried to remember the name of the woman that was hit by that train, but he fell asleep before it came to him.

Bio: Charlie Rose is a former English teacher turned freelance writer. He currently has one "How to" book on the market, Inspect before You Buy.

Fixed As Fate by Donnie Cox --- “…the sky is silent/hard as granite and as fixed as fate…” – Philip Larkin

Henry is jolted from sleep by a frantic scream. It’s coming from the street below his second-floor bedroom window. Heart drumming, he gets out of bed, walks over, and pulls back the corner of the shade. By the yellow glow of the street lamp, he sees a man in a dark beret holding a screaming woman by the shoulders, pushing her back against a parked car. Even though it’s dark out, the assailant is wearing sunglasses.

As Henry looks on, the man slams the woman hard in the face with his fist. She slides straight down along the car door to the pavement. The street goes silent. The attacker bends down, grabs the unconscious woman by the ankles, and drags her into an alleyway.

Her arms bounce limply along behind her head, on and off the cobblestone pavement.

Henry Turner is terrified. He makes no move to help or call the police. He returns to his bed and pulls the sheet tightly under his chin.

His bed has become a box. The night is suddenly full of nameless threats. Henry rolls over and over, flinching at every imagined sound. _____ Henry Turner is a 57-year-old bachelor—a Vietnam veteran. There was a time when he could handle himself in tight situations. As a young man, he had enjoyed fistfights, or a good free-for-all. He had also earned the respect of his peers in some intense jungle firefights. But last night, for the first time, he had come face to face with the paralyzing fear that accompanies the helplessness of getting old.

Henry runs a pawnshop just off Canal Street in New Orleans—a street lined with failing, or already defunct businesses. Every morning he takes a cab to work. He spends the day in a cage, looking through a tiny window, bantering with down and out characters over the pawn value of every type of item imaginable: cheap watches, wedding rings, knives, firearms of every gauge and caliber. And then there’s the personal junk that’s almost impossible to sell: old war medals, engraved cigarette lighters, even framed pictures of the family.

But this morning, business is the farthest thing from his mind. He can only reflect on last night, and mentally hammer himself over his total lack of nerve. He has heard stories about people who have failed to act when another person was in trouble, and he had always assumed that he would step up and do the right thing.

Now, there’s no way to justify his failure as a man. He laughs aloud at himself, in derision. He is overwhelmed with self-loathing and shame, muttering over and over, “If only I’d had a gun, things would have been different.”

When the cab driver turns and asks if he’s okay, Henry goes silent and stares down at his empty hands. He is thinking, making up his mind. He can almost hear the sound of

something cracking inside his head. Tonight, he will take a pistol from the shop, and set out on a crusade of redemption. _____ Posing as a likely victim, Henry goes on the hunt. Like Charles Bronson in “Death Wish”, he wanders through late-night New Orleans trying to bait muggers, thugs, and punks—“Big Easy” low-lifers who will kill you for whatever is in your wallet—take you out, for anything you’re carrying or wearing they can sell for a few bucks.

He chooses the most likely areas in the city: public parks, subways, seedy bars, and the most notorious streets. For six months, Henry fishes, casting out line after line, in relentless pursuit of a bite. But all his days and nights are the same. There is no reprieve from his misery.

Everyday Henry becomes a little more unbalanced, moving more and more into his own private fantasy world. The newspapers are filled with the usual crime reports: robberies, killings, and rapes—most happening in places Henry has worked many times with no luck.

Trying to draw attention to himself, he plays the drunk, giving away money to strangers on the street, and in the subway. He knocks on the doors of known crack houses and drug dealers, trying to provoke some sort of reprisal. Nothing. There are no takers. For Henry, the world has become a confusion of thingless names and nameless things.

He talks to himself in public. People are frightened and move away from him. Henry Turner moves through the streets of New Orleans like a leper.

Tired and frustrated, Henry begins to believe he is wasting his time hunting for just any animal. He should be looking for one man, a lone wolf that roams his own territory. He convinces himself that he can just go home and wait. Sooner or later the predator will return to the familiar circle of his own hunting grounds. _____ As he waits, Henry tries to focus. He attempts to organize his thoughts, and stop the voices in his brain that wag on, accusing, laughing, and then falling silent—leaving echoes that ring and rattle around his head. He has crept to edge of the abyss, and is unable to move forward or back. Fate had opened the break, and Henry is powerless to seal it. The possibility of salvation has become a fading image of despair.

But he cannot allow this disorder to break his concentration. Driven by some inner compulsion, he goes without food, as if waging some kind of inner war against his own body. He will not give himself permission to eat or sleep. Henry Turner will be the sole spectator and witness to his victory over human frailty.

He sits naked on the floor of his bedroom, cheek resting on the stock of a high-power rifle. Bloodshot eyes peer into the semi-darkness. The barrel of the rifle is propped on a stack of cardboard boxes that have been pushed up against the windowsill.

The air conditioner is broken, and it’s already muggy as hell in the apartment. Debris is scattered across the floor. Ammunition and firearms are strewn everywhere: pistols, rifles, and shotguns. The telephone has been torn from the wall, and the television screen is shattered. A claw hammer is lodged in the fracture.

Henry talks quietly to himself as he aims, dry-fires the rifle, operates the bolt, and then repeats the sequence—over and over. He is coaxing himself to hold out a little longer. All he has to do is wait. He has been patient for almost a year. He can wait a little longer.

He wonders how he has managed to muddle through his life for so long—every empty day, the same as the one before. He tells himself that this is the way it has to be, or else how can a man become better—make a move from weak to strong, from pointlessness toward some meaningful goal. But is it enough just to be a man? Maybe a man must also struggle toward sainthood—be willing to risk everything for nothing.

He rocks back and forth singing softly as he takes aim, and pulls the trigger—“Oh, when the saints - go marching in – when the saints go marching in…”

It’s early morning, and the sun is fighting to push its way through a mass of gray clouds.

But the sun will not break through on this morning. Outside the wind begins to kick rain across the cobblestone pavement. _____ If Henry Turner’s television had been in working order, or if he had left his stronghold long enough to pick up a newspaper, he would have known the hurricane was coming. He may even have had enough sanity left to get the hell out of town. But he was caught totally unaware when Katrina’s eye made landfall at 6:10am on Monday, August 29th.

It was slightly after 11:00am, when several sections of the levee system in New Orleans collapsed, and the city was completely flooded by the fast-moving waters of Lake Pontchartrain. _____ Henry Turner’s wasted body is found in early September by a boat-team of National Guardsmen, searching for survivors. He is lying in a pool of dried blood, naked except for a pair of sunglasses that have slipped down to the tip of his nose. He has a bullet hole just above his right ear. There is a .45 automatic on the floor next to his right hand.

The search team is baffled by the bizarre scene in the second floor apartment—something right out of Baghdad—a one-man bunker with an arsenal of firearms and ammo. There is no sign of a firefight, no empty shell casings on the floor, or bullet holes in the walls. A bolt-action rifle is lying across some boxes in front of the open bedroom window.

They leave the body where it is, and mark the side of the building for the dead-body recovery team. _____ In an interview in November, executive director of the Center for Society, Law and Justice said, “This is one of the most interesting experiments in crime we’ve ever seen.

Without effective courts, corrections, or rehabilitation, the crime rate has been reduced 100 percent. Hurricane Katrina has been the greatest crime-control tool ever deployed in a high-crime city. Before the storm, New Orleans was reeling with a daily round of killings, as bad as any in the city’s history. In the three months since the storm hit, the city’s murder count has stood at zero.”

Some statisticians are inclined to break it down into a formula that goes like this: There are a certain number of folks inclined towards crime. Call it p. There are a certain number of victims in the wrong place at the wrong time. Call that q. Crimes require the intersection of the p criminals and the q victims, leading to a number of crimes of p times q. What has happened in New Orleans is that the number of criminals has been reduced say to p/10, and the number of potential victims to q/10. Now the number of intersections of those two groups is smaller by an order of magnitude at pq/100.

A well-known television holy man responds to this analysis by saying: “It is not so complicated, or hard to understand. It is a simple matter of God, once more, taking matters into his own hands.” _____ Meanwhile, American refugees wade across the six o’clock newsreel, thrashing around like dark birds tangled in an invisible net. A thousand arms reach toward the sky, begging for a little mercy.

All, except for one man sporting a black beret, and wearing dark glasses who stands apart from the rest of the crowd in his own muddy space. Looking up and laughing, he jerks an arm toward the circling TV helicopter—an obscene middle finger thrust toward analysts, statisticians, politicians, judges, courts of law, and any impotent gods, who might be looking on from beyond the clouds.

Bio: DB Cox is a blues musician/writer from South Carolina. He can often be found in

the early-morning hours bent over a Fender Stratocaster guitar in roadhouses, honky tonks, and juke joints throughout the south. His poems and short stories have been published extensively in the small press in the US and abroad. He has published five books of poetry. His first chapbook, entitled “Passing For Blue”, was published by Rank Stranger Press. Two other chapbooks, “Lowdown” and “Ordinary Sorrows”, were published by Pudding House Publications. Main Street Rag published his first full-length collection, entitled “Empty Frames.” A new chapbook called “Nightwatch” has just been released by Pudding House Publications.

The Disappearing Artist by Nathaniel Tower Coal Ivory dug his fork slowly into a triangle of chocolate chip cheesecake.

Slowly he brought the fork from the white China through that air to his mouth with a steady hand, balancing the delicious morsel of dessert on the three prongs of nickelplated silver. The color was silver, not the substance. And the plate was certainly not fine China. Ivory had acquired it used. Garage sale. For some reason items are always cheaper when sold out of a garage. And for some reason the sales are still often called garage sales even when they occur outside. Ivory had never actually seen a garage for sale. He preferred to call it a used goods sale. He liked to include the word goods. It ensured that what he was getting was quality.

But he was not having any of these thoughts at the time. His only thoughts, if you could call them thoughts, were of getting that cheesecake into his mouth unharmed. And he did it with ease. Hardly a noise was created as he chewed the soft bite, preparing it for a smooth ride through the digestive system. The bite was delicious, just as he had predicted. Two hundred fifty calories and eight grams of fat per two square centimeter bite, but it was worth every one. He would have eaten it had those numbers been doubled, possibly even tripled. This experience was bliss. Had Ivory believed in God, this would have been evidence of the deity’s existence. But Ivory did not, and he knew a man had made this cake, so this experience only furthered his belief that there was no God. According to Ivory, it wasn’t a belief. You believe in things that you like to think are true even though you have no proof. Everything else you know. Just as he knew the cheesecake was deliciously unhealthy, he knew that there was no god, and therefore it made to sense to him to capitalize the g. That would be like capitalizing the n in nothing.

He hated it when people accused him of believing in nothing. Gulp, his throat said as it accepted the cheesecake. How can you believe in nothing? He didn’t think that nothing was true without proof. His fork, lead by the hand, descended from the mouth to the plate, captured a second piece, and returned in approximately the same symmetrical line. Nor did he believe in something. What did it mean to believe in these vague things?

Rather, as he chewed, he simply had no beliefs, which is much different than believing in nothing. Why would anyone want nothing to be true? If nothing were true, than this cheesecake wouldn’t actually taste so damn good, and thus it would be a waste a calories and fat. And that would just be depressing.

Coal Ivory was twenty-three years old. After a failed professional baseball career, two years in the minors, a career that had cost him a college degree, he became a young man who didn’t like to be identified by his work, which was certainly no profession.

Coal bagged groceries. That’s how he earned his money, the money that bought this nosilver silverware, this used China, this scrumptious cheesecake that was now half eaten.

It wasn’t who he was. He never introduced himself as Bagger Ivory. No, he was Coal, a young man who had been spelled as a fuel source instead of as a name. There were many other ways to define him other than with that two-syllable title of shame. It was a stigma

to be called a bagger, yet the man never recalled a customer saying they would rather have their groceries unbagged. Paper or plastic? He asked it all day. Most chose plastic, but inevitably they all chose. No one considered a third option. His job was much more important than the eight dollars an hour his paycheck indicated. But because of that eight-dollar tag, his job was embarrassing. Had they paid him thirty dollars an hour to do the same job, well beautiful women would be lining up at his door, which wouldn’t have been the door to a small studio apartment, and Bagger Ivory would become a prestigious title rather than a scornful nickname.

Three-fourths now swallowed, one-fourth remaining on the plate. His paycheck hadn’t actually paid for this slice, which was now no longer a triangle. He had merely left the store with it in hand. The way he saw it, there was no difference between his taking food and his friends taking paper clips and pens from the offices where they earned far more than he did for doing jobs that didn’t even have clear descriptions, jobs that weren’t essential to society. These were merely tools of the trade. He felt entitled to this cheesecake just as he felt entitled to the glass of chocolate milk, which he had mixed himself using the milk, 2% of course, and the syrup he had also taken without reducing his funds. But he had paid for the glass.

Setting down the fork, he took a glug of milk, draining at least half the glass with one opening of the throat. When he set the glass back on the table, he felt proud of himself for emptying so much of its contents. The mostly eaten cheesecake also was a source of pride. He possessed the ability, the power, to make things disappear. At work, he made things disappear into bags. Sometimes, he did this simply to make things more convenient to carry. But oftentimes, he did it to make things unseen. Pregnancy tests, condoms, lubricant, cigarettes, alcohol purchased with fake IDs, pornographic magazines, magazines that depicted scantily clad women but weren’t quite pornographic, alcohol purchased with real IDs by “recovered” alcoholics. These were some of the things he made disappear at work. Oftentimes he did it without the customer asking. He could generally tell by someone’s posture and mannerisms if the items needed hiding. Many of these things required the use of paper bags, bags that prevented the world from seeing your business as you strolled out to the parking lot, or even as you strolled into your home around your spouse, your kids, your pets, your parents. You didn’t want them to know about these things, and luckily there were people like Coal Ivory to place them in locations where they would not be visible. And still people judged his job. And still people judged his lack of belief. He never judged them in spite of what he knew about them, in spite of what he hid.

There were other things that he made disappear. Flowers, candy, cards, little treats for the little ones. These he made disappear so they could be surprises later. The other things were to prevent unwanted surprise. Coal possessed quite a bit of power, a lot more power than one should have for a measly eight dollars.

So he compensated. He made things disappear off shelves. These things, like the now vanished cheesecake save for five or six crumbs, would then disappear into his stomach only to reappear later, but there was little evidence in their new form. He knew

better than to make things disappear from the register, except for on the few occasions when he actually scanned groceries. Money adds up quickly even in small quantities.

When Coal knew a customer would pay in cash, he would scan an item more than once, usually picking an item that the customer was purchasing in multiple quantities. Or he would put a couple extra pounds on the scale when weighing fruits or vegetables. After he gave the total, he would slyly remove those items from the registry and pocket the extra cash they had given him. No one ever complained because even if they did notice on the way out to the parking lot, it wasn’t worth it to complain for just a dollar or two.

Yet comically these same people would dig piles of coupons out of pockets and purses.

Why anyone would waste their time saving ten cents was beyond Coal. But he would reserve his judgments. He knew that these people judged themselves enough already.

Or, rather, he knew that they believed god would judge them, but since god was nothing more than a belief, they were really judging themselves, and thus they were sinning. But these weren’t really sins except in their eyes, and they didn’t think that they were committing sins because they thought god was the one judging them. They were hypocrites without even knowing. But Coal knew.

When only the crumbs remained on the plate and the droplets in the glass, Coal rose from his seat without offering any meditation, scraped his plate clean of the crumbs, rinsed the plate, fork and glass with warm soapy water, placed the items haphazardly in the drying rack, and proceeded to enter the only thing in his apartment that could be considered a separate room to get ready for an evening of work, a process that he began by making reappear what had just disappeared, albeit in a much less appealing form. *

*

*

Khaki pants. Blue button-down shirt. Red vest. These were the signs of the stigmatic nickname Bagger. As he sat on that public bus, also a stigma, he knew the others seated did not judge his position. It was the world outside, the world that could see so clearly into the bus, as if Coal and his fellow bus patrons were on display. Look world. Here are the people that you are better than. Judge them for their lowly positions in life. They can’t even afford their own transportation. At times while sitting on the bus, feeling those in their cars staring in and casting judgment upon what they believed was his soul, Coal Ivory just wished he could blend his juxtaposed names together and make himself disappear. *

*

*

When the bus pulled into the grocery store lot, Coal unboarded alone, the few other patrons remaining on awaiting the mobile cage to take them to their unappreciated jobs or modest homes. Quickly without making any eye contact with the car owners in the parking lot, Coal traversed nearly the entire length of the asphalt. Why the bus dropped him off in the back rather than the front always confused him, but at least he could pretend as he neared the building that he had arrived to his workplace on his own terms.

The doors opened automatically as he approached, parting ways for him as if he were royalty, as if he were an essential component here. This perhaps was the finest moment of his workday, this moment where everything seemed to revolve around him.

He liked to pretend that these doors opened for him alone, that the judgmental customers that approached behind him would have to move the heavy doors through their own physical power.

After clocking in, Coal took his place behind aisle twelve, his nametag pinned to his apron gently above his left nipple. In block letters, the tag simple announced his name as COAL. Inevitably someone would tell him his name was unusual, as if anyone’s name was a usual thing. He heard it at least once per work session. “That’s an unusual name” or “That’s an unusual spelling”. How could these idiots find the word coal, one of the most common words in the English language, to be unusual? And they were the ones that judged Coal for being stupid. He puts food in bags. He must be stupid. Then bag it yourself assholes.

Time ticked by at the same rate it always ticked by while Coal stood by aisle twelve. To Coal, time moved no differently at work than any other moment of the day.

He hated it when people said that time moved slowly. Even worse, he hated when people spoke in hyperbole about how long something was taken. This shift is taking forever was just an asinine thing to say. He never noticed any variation in the amount of time the shift took. Yes, sometimes it was less bearable than other times, but the duration remained constant. How arrogant for these people to think that time adjusted itself according to what they were doing. Time didn’t care about any of them.

Coal had been bagging for three hours when the woman approached the register.

She was a tall slender woman, probably seven or eight inches taller than five foot.

Although she had obviously given birth recently, her body was tight, and Coal may not have noticed she had just recently given birth had she not had a cart full of baby formula.

As he eyed the woman’s overflowing breasts, breasts that desired escape from the tight tank top that showed the cleave between the two snowy mountains, he felt sorry for the baby for not having access to such fine specimens. Sucking from those teats would be like drinking fresh mountain spring water straight from the spring. Coal wished at that moment that she had not worn that ring on her finger, that he had not been a bagger, that he and she could depart together freely through the automatic doors into their own private mode of transportation. There he would not wait for them to arrive home, but rather he would immediately suffocate himself at those superb breasts, those snow-covered ski slopes, those life sources. Never at work had Coal desired a woman so much, and in his transfixed state, he noticed not the bottles of formula that rolled unceasingly at the edge of the conveyor belt just below his hands. Paper or plastic slipped not from his mouth.

He simply stared at the woman’s bountiful chest until she calmly stated, “Let’s do the paper today.” It took but a moment before he realized she wanted him to place the bottles in paper bags, and he managed to pull his eyes away from the bosom long enough to place the first four bottles in the paper bag that he had delicately flicked open in one fluid gesture, as if a woman of this bustline could possibly be impressed by such a performance.

When Coal determined the first bag had been packed to a weight just beyond the woman’s capabilities, he began packing the second bag, again full of baby formula. It occurred to Coal at this moment that this woman was purchasing an excessive amount of the instant milk, and at this moment he braved small talk. “You sure are buying a lot of formula. How old is your baby?” Coal asked, trying to look at the woman’s face rather than the perfectly rounded heaps in her shirt.

“What business is that of yours?” she responded, not even taking the effort to look up at what she surely thought was a grotesquely shaped man, a figure shaped by frequent lonely sessions of cheesecake consumption.

Coal was stunned by her words, but the intensity of her peaks made him persist.

“Sorry ma’m. I’ve just never seen someone purchase so much formula at once before.

Especially not someone of such an impressive physique.”

The cashier looked at Coal, offered no help to the stammering fool, and told the woman her total, three hundred seventy-six dollars and twenty-four cents. All spent solely on formula.

The woman stared blankly at the cashier, then spitefully at Coal. “My physique is not your concern, nor is the age of my child.” She turned back to the cashier. “I would like to file a complaint against this obese bagger,” she said to him. “And I’m not paying three hundred seventy whatever dollars. Not after the treatment I have received. Where is your manager?”

The cashier attempted an apology, told Coal to find a different aisle, and assured the busty woman that the manager would take care of the bagger’s inappropriate actions.

As if powered by the plenteous piles protruding from her torso, she turned back and forth from the cashier to Coal, insulting both for their intellectual incapacity. With each turn, her breasts rotated so seductively that neither man could pay attention to the words she said. The woman became enraged by their gawking eyes and began to power her cart through the checkout, but Coal blocked her path.

“Please ma’m, don’t leave so upset. Let me pay for your formula for you,” Coal cracked trying desperately not to let this woman walk out of his life just yet.

“I’m perfectly capable of paying myself, certainly more than a low-life like yourself,” the woman responded spitefully. “What’s your name so I can report you?”

Upon asking this question, she stared at the neatly pinned tag upon Coal’s breast. As if the single syllable of COAL triggered some terrible memory, her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “You!” she screamed. “Stay away from my baby you bastard!”

Coal knew not what the woman spoke of, looking around the store, pleading with his eyes to the rest of the patrons and employees. He had never seen this woman before,

although he wished that he could behold her every moment of his life even if she did seem hysterical and chemically imbalanced.

“Ma’m, I’ve never met you or your baby before. This is just a misunderstanding,” Coal protested.

The woman looked into his pleading eyes, and even though she detested everything about the man she saw, his eyes held a vague appearance of innocence.

“I’m sorry,” she said gently. “I don’t know what came over me.” Coal and the checker looked on at the woman, their gazes now focused on her wrinkleless visage.

“Do you want to speak with the manager?” the checker asked soothingly.

“No, no, I’ll just pay for this.” The woman handed her credit card to the checker. He swiped it quickly on the machine, not bothering to verify the signature on the back.

“Will you please help me take these bags to the car?” the woman asked Coal in a near beg after she had signed the receipt and he had finished placing the cans in the deep paper bags.

“Absolutely, m’am. I’m sorry for any misunderstanding that may have occurred earlier.” Coal spoke with a newfound hopefulness, hoping that maybe her sudden change of heart would be accompanied by an invitation to dinner.

Coal pushed the cart slowly, the woman sauntering at his side in a bit of a daze.

He tried to strike up some casual conversation to avert any awkwardness, but he was not apt at such a skill.

“How old is your baby?” Coal asked again, hoping this time the question would not elicit the same negative response.

“Fine,” she replied tersely, not seeming to fully understand the question.

“No, m’am, how old is your baby?” Coal persisted, not catching the bewilderment in her voice.

“He’d be a year old today,” she replied, a great distance in her voice. The two came to a stop in the middle of the parking lot.

“How do you mean?” Coal asked politely, wondering if maybe he misheard her.

Coal looked deeply at the woman, realizing for the first time that she appeared in deep distress. Her eyes began to fill with tears that hung ominously above the mountains.

“M’am, are you okay?”

“My baby.”

“What about your baby?”

“My baby is dead. My baby is dead,” she repeated in an eternal whisper.

“I’m so sorry, m’am, but if you don’t mind my asking, if your baby is dead, what’s with all the formula?”

“My baby is dead. My baby is dead. Formula killed my baby.” The tears had all evaporated, giving way to a deep blackness.

“M’am, I think you need some help.”

A blue car honked at them.

“M’am, we need to get out of the road. Let me help you.”

The woman remained frozen, her eyes wide and empty.

“M’am?” Coal asked, touching her arm gently.

The woman allowed Coal to guide her out of the way of the impatient car, the driver honking and whistling at her as he drove slowly by. This second honk seemed to break her from her hypnotic trance.

“M’am, if you need any help, I can help you,” Coal said, not knowing how he could possibly help her. After all, he was just a bagger, capable of nothing more than making things momentarily disappear inside of a bag.

“Get your hands off me,” she snapped, his hands recoiling automatically at her request.

“What is your name anyway?” She stared again at the name tag that dangled from his torso.

“Coal? What the hell kind of name is that?”

“It’s just a name, m’am, no offense meant. I’m just a humble bagger here at your service,” Coal replied, hating that he called himself such a demeaning thing.

“Yes, that’s right,” she replied. “You’re nothing more than a bagger. A bagger killed my baby,” she said suddenly, her eyes wide and filled again, but this time with something other than tears, something Coal couldn’t quite place.

Coal stepped away from the woman, holding his arms up innocently, his nametag now flopping in the freedom of the breeze.

“M’am, I assure you that I have never seen your baby before,” Coal pleaded again just as he had earlier in the store, but the woman had already made up her mind about the single syllable that dangled from Coal’s chest. With one sweeping motion, she reached her hand into her oversized purse, removed a small silver handgun and pointed it directly at the nametag that rested so close to Coal’s heart.

For a moment that had no bounds, Coal stood motionless, his mind turning as he wondered how he had gotten himself into such a mistake. He contemplated whether he had ever met this woman before, whether there could possibly be any connection, whether her words were the truth. He wondered why he had wasted his life as a bagger, making things disappear for people who gave him no respect. He wished he could start his life over from scratch, but he knew the futility of such a wish. In this moment, he could have continued to plea for mercy, but instead he just thought silently, no great truth coming into his mind.

The woman with the gun looked at Coal without mercy, wondering why this ogre of a man had killed her baby. While looking at him, it occurred to her that perhaps he hadn’t killed her baby, but it didn’t matter much anyway. Her baby was dead, and a life had to be taken as recompense. This bumbling buffoon represented everything she despised about the world, the world that had shown her no mercy. Without further contemplation, she pulled the trigger, the resounding explosion from the gun echoing her hatred. And with the simple pull of the trigger, she had spilled the blood of Coal and made life disappear from his eyes. As his body crumpled to the asphalt, he waved his hand uncontrollably, desperately reaching for something that was not there, and thus perhaps began the eternally unfortunate afterlife in which the bagger had not believed.

Bio: Nathaniel Tower writes fiction and teaches English. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Cantaraville, Mud Luscious, Bottom of theWorld, Inscribed, Skive and others. He is also the founding editor of the online literary magazine, Bartleby Snopes. He currently lives in St. Louis, MO with his wife.

Samsara by Jason Michel Outside.

You don’t really want to go outside.

Not really.

Only if you have to.

If you really have to.

The day is a balmy sweat soup of clouds blanketing all else out but the heat and the humidity. The heat is hot. Hot is the heat. Hot. Heat. Humidity.

You have absolutely no idea what this country smells like in summer. Be thankful for that small mercy. Praise the fucking Lord for that one. That you never have to smell the Paris Metro Line 13 in the summer. Who cares if the bloody walls are damn near dripping and I’m fucking melting here in this room like a raspberry ripple fallen down a matron’s cleavage.

That dwarf hamster in the corner goes round and around on that wheel and work looms in the morning.

Never trust a rodent.

Goes without saying, surely?

They’ll break your heart and laugh as they’re doing it.

They’ll break your heart by sinking their shit-eating poisoned fangs into your finger and diving at any opportunity under the one bookshelf that is screwed down, the one that only allows the first two knuckles of your hands to be wedged under it as you scrabble around on the floor. You’ll wait there pleading, whispering and cajoling for the furry bastard.

You’ll panic and knock those glass heirlooms over, smashing them. Those glass heirlooms, the ones you’ve never used. And then he’ll somehow make his own way out.

In the meantime, your foot’s all cut up from the glass smashed on the floor but you don’t care because the cute little critter is out. And we do so love our animals.

Rodents.

Nothing more than a domesticated breed of rats.

Remember that.

Rats.

You’ll be sorry.

I can see them all walking to and fro outside my apartment window.

The heat is hot and humidly harassing us humans but my windows are not open.

No way.

They’re locked fast and tight.

What do you think I am?

Stupid?

I can see them but they aren’t rats. Not really. They aren’t anything but what they’re told to be and through this heat there’s wee breeze building up and that hamster's spinning around faster and faster and there’s a storm a-brewing and if only I could rig up that hamster’s wheel to the electricity and it’s going to be here very soon as every step they take’ll be tightrope walking, on the edge, when I finally open those windows let it be in a hail of bullets and that squeak squeak of the wheel is getting more and more frenetic and something is coming, just there, on the horizon.

It’s gonna be here soon.

Something.