Hassenlopf’s Stroke by Gary Cuba

In the early afternoon of his first day of work at Reliant Data Services Corporation, Henry Hassenlopf suffers a massive cerebral stroke. It happens as he sits in his newly assigned cubicle, in front of his PC workstation. No one in the cubes surrounding Henry’s notices what has happened to him.

Henry’s initial panic slowly gives way to a cooler internal assessment. That there is still something of a mind left to self-referentially consider his own plight, he takes as a positive starting point. Under the negative column, he notes that he is completely paralyzed–no, not quite so, he realizes. As he takes sequential stock of his body, bottom to top, Henry realizes that he can still twitch the big toe on his right foot, flex his right thigh muscle, and move the first two fingers on his right hand slightly. His eyes and facial muscles still function. But he cannot utter a sound, not even a grunt. And he can’t twist his neck; his head remains fixed in position, staring at his computer monitor. Its screen clock reads 2:09 P.M.

What a pisser, Henry thinks. Sixty-four years old. After having searched so desperately for decent work in my field for the last three years. And I blow it on my very first day!

Henry sits and waits. He figures someone will eventually notice his problem and get help. Surely they will notice, he thinks. Eventually, they will. *** Read on! ***

The Touchstone of Validity is My Own, Like, Experience by Anna Scotti

Editors’ Note: We accepted this story long before the tragic events of Sandy Hook, which occurred almost a week ago today. Yet the innocence and optimism conveyed in this YA short story seem especially poignant and much needed now. Our hearts will forever be with the families of Newtown. We wish all our readers and friends all the peace and joy that is possible this holiday season.

The first day Gianni waited for me at the corner, I didn’t realize he was waiting: I’d been hanging around, saying goodbye to Maribelle and Jazz, trying to explain to Jazz why a whole number divided by a fraction gets larger, instead of smaller, which was basically a lost cause without some cookies to demonstrate. Jazz is not the greatest on conceptual imaging. By the time I’d said goodbye and hoisted my backpack over one shoulder most of the kids were gone, picked up by moms or nannies or headed homeward, the few who lived close, on foot. I live only four blocks from school and am allowed to walk, but that’s mostly because my mother doesn’t actually realize that there’s no one walking with me, most days. Peggy imagines it as it must have been when she was a child, everybody leaving en masse at dismissal, packs of kids traveling in the safety of numbers, peeling off one by one along the way.

Gianni was leaning against a tree, just off school grounds, with his skateboard under his arm.

“Hey,” he said hoarsely, falling into step beside me, all casual, as if by accident, but I’d seen him waiting. Gianni has mostly ignored me since last year when I refused to let him copy off my paper during a history test. Painful choice, that: I was torn between duty and love, like Marcus Brutus, except that I definitely did not see Gianni as a father figure.

“Hey,” I answered back, suddenly feeling awkward.

“You want me to carry that?” Gianni offered.

I stared at him. “My backpack? Why?”

Gianni shrugged. “Just seems weird, the girl carrying this ninety pound bag of books, and the guy with just a board.”

The way he said it: the girl. The guy. We were that girl and that guy and I was overwhelmed, suddenly. I felt this strange stretching pain in my knees and a silliness rising in my chest: giggles. Knowing this was an entirely age-appropriate response to a flood of hormones from my endocrine glands did not help in the least. I stared at my shoes, fumbling for words. *** Read on! ***

Regarding Magic by David Bassano

I can’t remember the name of that damn club in Wildwood. The front was painted blue and there were no windows, and the blue looked grey in the lamplight. It had a pink neon sign over the door but I can’t remember what it said. I think it just said BAR. The place looked like all the other bars along the boardwalk. If someone pulled the door open in the early evening the music would blast out until the door swung shut with a bang. Every time we left there was no more music or anyone inside to open the door.

The back of the place, which few people ever saw, was bare concrete blocks and broken glass on the boardwalk. I helped the guys carry their gear out the back door of the club. Like most places, it had its own drum kit, so I usually just brought my own snare, cymbals, and sticks. Sometimes I’d just put my sticks in my back pocket and go. And I always kept spare sticks in the car.

That late summer night I came out the back door carrying Ray’s amp head and that sound techie for the club was running his mouth like he always did. So whatcha got at home? he asked. Lemme guess—a double bass. And like a fool I said, single-bass Yamaha. Oh, I figured you’d have a double-bass ’cause you drummers always play too much, he said. Always gotta be movin’. Can’t let the music breathe, know what I mean?

And I asked him for the time and he said It’s three. So I walked out the door with the head and he followed me. Hey, ya don’t like what I said about drummers? I’m just tryin’ ta help ya, he said. I carried the head down the sand-covered steps to Ray’s silver RX-7 in the parking lot behind the place. I never listened to anyone who didn’t play well. And the guys who played well rarely had anything to say. *** Read on! ***

Waiting to Be Thin by Seenat Thongdee

Waiting to Be Thin

By Seenat Thongdee

In my closet, there are three stacks of jeans. One stack for the “fit now” jeans. One for the “will fit if I lose ten pounds” jeans. And the last category—which, when I lay eyes upon it, sets my head into many fantastical journeys—is the “may someday fit after being stranded on an island for six months with only half a carrot and water each day” jeans.

I have struggled with my weight all my life. My mother breast fed me until I was four. Even as I drank my mother’s milk, I still liked to eat the powdered milk by the spoonful. By five years old, my relatives were already calling me “Baby Pig.” But at that age, it was endearing. They would squeeze my chubby cheeks and exclaim, “How precious!”, and afterward put little treats in my greedy palms. Childhood was the happiest period of my life. I was surrounded by the warmth of my family and relatives, and the goodness of sweets.

Then when I turned seven, my mother gave birth to my sister. Nothing really changed. I still had all the sweets I wanted, maybe even more than before. I ate while my parents tended to my sister. For many months, I thought she was the ugliest little thing—all red and wrinkly. But then she got better looking as she got bigger. I liked playing with her. I would tie her soft hair in little rubber bands of different colors and wrap her up in my mother’s colorful scarves. One day I gave her a piece of candy and she began choking. My parents said I shouldn’t give her sweets and told me to stay away from her from that day on. I was not to be alone in a room with her.

I am thirty-three now, and I never did lose that baby fat that my mother said I would lose. Instead, I’ve gained adult fat on top of my baby fat. And my sister’s wedding is in three months. There is still enough time left. I have my goals all written out week by week. Total weight loss desired is 30 pounds, which isn’t so bad. I’ve read somewhere that the first 5 to 10 pounds are water weight anyway. That leaves only 20 actual pounds that I need to lose. And then there’s SPANX, which gives the appearance of being 5 to 10 pounds slimmer. So the absolute number of pounds required to shed is 10. *** Read on! ***

Bro by Matt Hoffman

Will knew she was getting tired of him, as they usually did—tired of the repetitive, unimaginative movement of his jeans against hers, barely keeping in time with the rap beat bouncing off of the basement’s brick walls; tired of the way his hands hung limply on the front of her hips. She had accepted his invitation to dance with a shrug, and as far as he could tell, her interest hadn’t increased. He wasn’t surprised when, as the beat faded away to a second of interstitial crowd noise, she released herself from his grasp, turned, and said that she was going to go use the bathroom.

“Okay,” Will said.

The relative silence was broken by a new beat, distorted bass and snare over barely audible synths. She squeezed her way through the crowd of dancing couples, heading in the direction of the stairs, away from him. Will watched her go for a second, looked around at nothing in particular, and started making his way over to the bar, apologizing as he pushed dancers up against their partners in an attempt to clear a path.

Will waited behind a cluster of people until the bartender, a muscled guy in a frat T-shirt, handed him a half-empty red cup and turned away to the next customers. Some of Will’s beer sloshed onto his sleeves as he made his way to the wall, where he had a little space to stand.

Will sipped his beer and looked around. A few colored lights flashed intermittently over the makeshift dance floor, turning the dancers’ skin and clothes red, blue, yellow. A few strobe lights were blinking, indistinguishable from the occasional flash of a digital camera. At the far side of the room, it looked like some stragglers were still being let in, two or three at a time. Were Will’s floormates around? He scanned the crowd and spotted Ed from the quad, who was standing on the calmer side of the room talking with a short
girl in a red blouse. Will decided not to bother him.

Will sighed, leaned back against the rough brick, and decided he might as well wait around for—had she told him her name? Whoever. Bathroom girl. There was a chance she might actually return. Will glanced over at the dance floor to see if she had found a new partner yet.

That was when Will saw him: The guy was moderately tall, dressed in crisp off-white khakis and a neon orange polo, the collar popped to his jaw, aviator glasses gleaming beneath his brow. He was grinding authoritatively with a pretty girl who had a tight pink T-shirt, a denim skirt, and long, dark hair. Her eyes remained shut as she danced, her face set serenely into an expression of entranced satisfaction. The guy held a red cup in one hand and bore the hint of an apathetic half-smile.

But he was Will. ** Read On! **

Gibraltar by Mark Sutz

Gibraltar
By Mark Sutz

Like most identical twins, my brother Oscar and I were indistinguishable from one another to most people. We weren’t the kinds of twins who harbored any unique moles or tics or cowlicks that would, to the discerning eye, separate us one from the other. On every square inch of our bodies, we were exactly alike, two people walking the earth who seemed in every hop, slurp, action or speech, to be the same. Even when we got into trouble, the harsh punishments were meted out in doubled, equal chunks. Our bar mitzvahs were even held in unison, our passage from boys to men held side-by-side, firmly cementing in our minds that we were going to travel through our lives closer to one another than most could imagine or desire.

The only thing different about us was the titanium rod that had been inserted into Oscar’s ankle when we were twelve. He’d sustained a nearly identical injury to me during a particularly vicious skiing accident, an impromptu downhill race we’d engaged in during a ski trip in Zermatt.

Even the scar left visible on his ankle we shared, but when the doctors had gone into my ankle they’d determined I wouldn’t need the permanent assistance of a metal rod to help strengthen my joint. The scar on the insides of our left ankles was shaped like a fingernail moon. Try as we might, we couldn’t ditch our identicalness.

That is, until we were eighteen and Oscar met Luisa. ** Read on! **

The Spider in the Sink by Jean Ryan

The Spider in the Sink

by Jean Ryan

 Ants are easy. Their very numbers make them expendable. They goad you into it, the way they march across the kitchen and besiege your sugar bowl in broad daylight. Who wouldn’t pick up a sponge and decimate them? 

But what to do about the spider in the sink?  No bigger than an aspirin, it shrinks in terror when your hand approaches. Somewhere the little fellow made a wrong turn; it does not want to be in your sink and now it can’t get out. With a splash of water you could send it down the dark hell of your plumbing; you wouldn’t even have to look. There is a chance the wee bug would never cross your mind again. 

You don’t take that chance. You tear off a piece of toilet paper and nudge it beneath the creature, and in your nightgown you walk through the house and out the back door and you shake the tissue over a bush. One day perhaps this spider will eat the aphids off your rosebuds. But that is not why you save it. 

#

 Your husband did not wave before he pulled out of the driveway and your thoughts keep snagging on this. Every morning you wait for that gesture, his hand arcing out the window, and today he simply drove off. Now as you push his clothes into the washer, you try to recall what color shirt he was wearing, which pair of boots, and your mind draws a blank. Not much was said over toast and coffee. Your heart did not melt at the sight of his thinning blonde hair and you can’t say if his gaze lingered on you. It would be on a day like this, without clues, without touchstones, that he would leave and never come back.  ** Read on! **

Snapped by Bob Shar

Snapped
By Bob Shar

“Tell us a story, Uncle Dingus,” seven-year-old Reginald suggested. “Make it scary.”

“Nooooo,” whined four-year-old Wilford. “You’ll give us a nightmare.”

“Wuss,” scoffed the girl, Tilapia, age six. “Make it bloody, Uncle Dingus. I aint scared.”

“Nooooo,” blubbered Wilford.

* * *

William “Dingus” McClintock was no childcare specialist. He was a thirty-nine-year-old plumber. He didn’t trust children, could barely tolerate his own nieces and nephews, didn’t own a TV, computer, guest bedroom or futon. This didn’t stop his identical twin brother—District Attorney Frederick McClintock—and sister-in-law Michelle from entrusting their three snotdribblers to Dingus’ care this dreary Saturday evening.

“Thanks for doing this, William,” Michelle said, jerking the hem of her skirt free from the clutches of Wilford, who was not enthusiastic about the sleepover.

“Yeah, Ding. You’re a lifesaver,” said Fred.

It was the couple’s tenth anniversary, and the D.A. had failed to line up a legitimate sitter for the evening. He’d had to offer his brother five times the going rate to take the kids on at the last minute.

“They eat dinner at five-thirty,” Michelle informed him, and Dingus glanced at the clock over the stove: three forty-five. “The boys eat peanut butter and jelly. Tilapia likes hot dogs. Don’t make yourself crazy trying to feed them vegetables. Bedtime’s seven-thirty for Wilford, eight-thirty for the big kids. They’ve had baths already and their jammies are under their play clothes. Just peel off the top layers and pop ’em into bed…”

“Nothing to it,” Fred interjected. “Don’t serve them alcohol, try not to stuff more than one kid in the oven at a time, discourage them from killing each other, and you’ll be golden. If you have any questions, ask Reggie. That boy’s smart like his daddy.”

“If you have any problems, William,” corrected Michelle, gripping her brother-in-law’s wrist and glaring at Fred, “call me. I’m keeping my cell phone on.”

“They’ll be fine, Meesh,” said the DA. “Have faith in the Dinger. You know,” he expounded, puffing his chest out with pride, “my brother’s not as stupid as he looks. And he’s no child molester.” He winked. “No matter what Mom’s been telling the Grand Jury.”

With Dingus scrambling for a rejoinder, the couple stepped out of the apartment, the door closed behind them, and the evening began in earnest. ** Read on! **

A Safe Deposit by Mark Charney

A Safe Deposit

By Mark Charney

Lena welcomes Barry home from the memorial service around two o’clock, his gray eyes moist and dulled behind the tortoise shell frames. He removes his jacket, loosens his tie, unbuttons his collar, and sits in the chair before the bay window where he scans the bookshelves, desk, and the fireplace mantel with a photograph of three men: Meier, Goldman, and himself. It’s a photograph that she would have preferred taking off the mantel years ago. Barry insisted, “No, leave it.”

She had not gone with him this morning, had decided not to. It had been years since she’d set foot on campus and it would have been too difficult, too many memories there. She’d been an active faculty wife in those years, contributing her share to the school’s fundraising and campus causes, but had stopped after what happened, happened. She had stopped attending events related to the university after Barry had become persona non grata because by extension, she too had suffered the same.

Goldman’s death and today’s service might have been a special occasion, but she didn’t care to put up a front. Barry could. It was his choice and he could or would not stay away. He’d flown in from his consulting work in Florida to attend the service because it was his last chance to say goodbye to an old friend and mentor, pay his respects to someone he cared about and admired. He’d asked her to come along too, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t, and after she met his second request with a hard stare and a steady head shake, he didn’t ask again.

She joins him in the den now because she’s making a grocery list, and she wants his input. Setting her pad on the end table, she turns to him quickly. Her motions are rapid but fluid, elegant. She keeps her hair pulled back with a black scarf, exposing a high forehead, coppery skin, delicate features. Her body is petite and the limbs angular, attenuated like those of a ballerina. “May I bring you anything from the store?” she asks.

“No,” he says, staring absently at her pad and pencil. The back of her hand brushes a statue of Ganeshu that rests atop an arts and crafts writing table. The carved lava Ganeshu swings his trunk, holds a broken tusk in one hand and a stony sweet treat in the other. It isn’t an antique but she likes quirky objects as much as she likes antiques, and this one didn’t come cheap.

“Lena?” he asks, chin lowered into his chest, eyes ignoring Ganeshu but not her.

“Yes.”

“Was there ever a letter?” ** Read on! **

Strike by Andy Bailey

Strike

By Andy Bailey

“We’ll give you twenty-four hours to think about it,” Mom said as she handed me the sheet of demands. Her skin was dark, having absorbed three weeks worth of thick July sunlight, and she looked five years younger. She walked back across the yard and began fiddling with the awning of the pup tent. Dad lay on the overgrown grass, tongue running across his mustache as he dragged a paintbrush over a new sign. He saw me looking, gave a cocky smirk, and held it up: PARENTS LOCAL #0001 ON STRIKE!

It was their third week on strike and life in the house had gotten rough. Dirty clothes piled up in the hallways and an obnoxious smell emanated from the dishwasher. The eighty dollars a week Aunt Lynn gave Emmie and me for food limited our grocery shopping to the 7-11, and the consistent meals of chiquitos, taquitos, and burritos left us bloated and half-nauseous. Mom and Dad had taken the keys to the car, leaving us to bike or walk our way across town on the few nights we wanted to hang out with friends; we couldn’t invite anyone over, not after the two-person human chain they had formed to block the front door had sufficiently weirded out my friend Chuck enough to keep him from coming back. They had even managed to scare away Grandma, yelling “Scab! Scab!” when she tried to walk up the front path with a few plates of fried chicken.

The mood inside the house almost matched the smell. I blamed Emmie for pushing Mom too far with the constant whining about the mushy avocados in her homemade Cobb salads or the complaints when Mom bought honeysuckle-scented shampoo instead of summer peach. She accused me, correctly, of not helping matters when I allowed the grass to grow to an untamable length after Dad’s repeated requests to cut it. This all came after the Orlando vacation we had to end early after my verbal harassment of Mickey and Goofy got us kicked out of Disney World. In retrospect, the morning we awoke to find them marching across the lawn, brandishing signs that read UNGRATEFUL CHILDREN = HATEFUL CHILDREN and NO RESPECT, NO PARENTS/KNOW RESPECT, KNOW PARENTS was much more surprising than it should have been. It took us until that night to realize it wasn’t a joke.

I read their demands, scribbled on the back of a Publisher’s Clearinghouse envelope and signed by both of them. Two car uses per day with a maximum of ten per week. Set allowance at one dollar per year of age per week with an optional good behavior clause at ten percent a year. Chore negligence resulting in an immediate twenty-five percent allowance reduction. Zero tolerance whining policy. I crumpled up the envelope and tossed it into the overflowing trash basket.

That night, after Emmie returned from the Goodwill store, we discussed it. “That means I’d only get thirteen dollars a week!” she said, digging into her bare arm with her fingernails. “That’s not even enough to go to a movie.”

“Yeah, and I’d only get seventeen.” Couldn’t fill a car up with gas, if I’d had one. “Listen, though. They have to start teaching again in early August. No way they can stay outside then. They can’t work without showers or computers or a comfortable bed.”

She threw me a desperate look. Her lime green eyes peeked out from behind her puffy cheeks. “Two more weeks?” she asked, biting the inside of her lip.

I nodded as I looked onto the lawn. A solitary light shone in their tent, casting an orange halo onto the driveway within which their blurry silhouettes danced. I could hear their laughter from inside. Two more weeks, I thought. Two more weeks.

# # #

Andy Bailey is an English teacher in Los Angeles and has had work published in Pindeldyboz, Raleigh Quarterly, and Buffalo Carp, among others.