The ball goes up. The ball comes down. The ball goes up. The ball comes down. This happens a million times before the bus gets here. I’m still waiting.

I like kool-aid but mom outlawed it. Mom’s funny. She always outlaws something but forgets before the end of the week and then we will have kool-aid again. Blue flavor and red flavor and lemon too. Ball goes up. Ball comes down.

I have on my favorite shirt. That’s what mom calls it. My favorite. She kisses my forehead in the mornings and leaves a smudge and I wipe it off with my face all scrunched but I don’t mind really as much as I pretend. She smells like apples. Apples in the morning. Cigarettes at night. Unless she’s outlawed them. Then she smells like gum and talks fast.

Mornings are the worst. Except Saturdays. Like sometimes? I wake up? And I start to get ready for school? And mom hasn’t gotten up? And then I remember that it’s Saturday. And that is the best, it really is!

The bus picks me up in the morning. Mom drops me at the corner to catch it then zips to work, which she wishes she could outlaw. But they give her money and money doesn’t grow on trees or fall from the sky. The ball goes up. The ball comes down.

I’m either early or just missed it because nobody else is here. Mommy says okay kiddo, I can’t wait, out you go, love you. It’ll be Christmas soon. I don’t know when but I see wrapping paper in store windows. I think what I really want is a baby brother.

Nobody’s here yet or everybody’s gone. I will sit on the bus with Mike. Mom says he’ll be here, don’t worry. My mom and Mike’s mom, they are best friends. Best friends like me and Mike. Mom says nuh-uh, you are my best friend. I scrunch my face and say yuck but I don’t really mind. I worry if I do get my Christmas present the baby will be her best friend but I don’t know. She likes me a lot. She won’t forget me. We can all be friends but I’ll be her best friend. Ball goes up. Ball comes down.

A car, a big car. Mom outlawed big cars but here comes one. The car stops. A pretty lady shouts. Me? You’re here for me? Mommy sent you to bring me back home? She says her name and I don’t remember it but I don’t even know the name of Mike’s mom. Those are grown up names. I’ll know them when I grow up. Right now I have to go with the pretty lady. She says mommy says.

I’m little and the car is big and my stomach hurts because mommy outlawed these cars and she hasn’t forgotten. The pretty lady pulls the seatbelt over me and drives. We are going fast. We pass a light, we pass a light. We pass the light that is my light, our light, mom’s and mine. I tell the pretty lady and she smiles and tells me that’s okay, we’re gonna miss a lot of lights.

Desiree Wilkins is the mother of Sam. She is married and works full-time and has been writing forever, whenever she gets a chance.

“You mean a complete internet suicide too?” I nodded agreeing with her. I have been on Facebook since I was thirteen. She told me she has too. And we yammered away then for almost two hours. I pulled out my phone and played her Mary J. Blige’s “Everything.” But after meeting her that night at the aunt’s house, I have only seen her a handful of other times, and these were brief, snippets of seeing. I’d catch her all dressed up in what looked like a flag core uniform, a shiny, polished baton at her side sitting in the bleachers during marching band practice, or I imagined I glimpsed a girl with her honey blonde hair near the woods outside of our neighborhood. But that girl had a wild look about her as she left the forest of trees, that girl smoothed her skirts and spat in her hands to fix her hair. (And that girl never waved back.)

When I asked Kimmie more about her sister, she grunted and said, “We’re twins, Emily’s the baton twirler.” I made up stories about who Emily was. But most of what I knew about Kimmie’s sister was that she seemed to listen to me ramble on about Mary J. Blige and then Stevie Ray Vaughan (that first time I met her at the aunt’s house) when most of the other girls wanted to talk about their icons. And she likes the country music that her aunt’s boyfriend plays in the house while Kimmie likes Blige. And Kimmie pushed my headphones deep into her ears the first time I played her “Everything” in the cafeteria line. (They both make me jittery as if I have drunk too many colas.) And all girls are not the same.

“Probably she’ll go,” Kimmie had said. My palms started to sweat weeks ago when Kimmie told me her sister liked big parties. I gazed around at the clusters of girls and the few token guys, and I couldn’t decide where to join and whether the dim light in the large cavernous room that opened to the outside made us all prettier. When Emily stumbled on the patio, and tossed her head back and shook her hips, I moved in slow so I could watch for a few moments. She danced with another guy but this wouldn’t matter for long. My legs refused to move. I choked on my breath, and if I couldn’t breathe or move, I couldn’t break in. What would she say to me when I strolled up to her? Would she even remember my name?

There were some things that seemed to work out naturally, and after those few minutes hanging back, when I moved toward her, I wasn’t hearing Taylor Swift anymore. “Leave My Little Girl Alone,” echoed in my head, and Kimmie’s sister was everything. I tried sauntering smooth to where she danced, as if I was every bit as cool as the music playing in my mind, like this wasn’t any big deal I happened to be at the after prom party too. The guy she danced with and any guy in the room that stood within two feet of her, I noticed and instantly did not like. When I got up close enough to hear what she would say, it felt like breathing to slide up next to her and tap her arm. “Wanna dance?” I glanced around the giant patio and surveyed all of the other girls. I put Emily’s face on every one of them and pictured them all saying yes.

Lisa Wolfe is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. When she’s not working on a story, she enjoys bird watching with her husband and their two children. (She counts her blessings to have seen a great horned owl perched in a bushy magnolia tree take flight during a family walk this winter.) Her latest book, Leaving the Party, is a collection of short fiction available on Kindle Direct Publishing. She currently writes flash fiction and has a collection due out later this year. She blogs at “Character Talk,” http://charactertalk.wordpress.com/

It is the middle of the seventh inning when fans at Dodgers Stadium stand up to sing “God Bless America” and the baseball diamond below becomes only dirt and grass. Energy travels up, past rows of people stuffing popcorn bags and Pepsi bottles under their seats, biting the last bits of pretzel—in thirst—and as they reach for the notes to send “land of the free,” two young boys do not stand. Two teenage fans will not get up from their seats, even as their rehab counselor, Mr. Seismore, throws a peanut shell at them. They will not budge from their Dodger blue seats.

Miles Kim, rolling a shirt sleeve up and down, thinks to himself: Is there a God worth blessing? His best friend Bogdon dumps the rest of his Diet Coke on the concrete steps of Row 34, Section D, and the ice cubes quickly melt; and though it’s a brisk April night, the crystalline blocks turn to guitar pics: wedge slivers glistening from stadium lights—before getting crushed. A tan Timberland boot has arrived, and it kicks the base of Bogdon’s seat.

“Get up and sing, God dammit!” says the man in Tims.

Bogdon looks down; he looks back at the face; and he hears the fans singing around him; cat-eye-clocking the mild commotion are dozens of people with peripheral glares. All murmurs and head-bobs in the boys’ direction. They are singing: “From the mountains…to the prairies” and Bogdon wonders if a ravine is closer to a prarie or amountain; whether he should’ve paid more attention in geology. Is it too late to jump off a Chavez Ravine?

Bogdon stands up and removes his Dodgers hat—opens his mouth, in time to sing the last refrain: “My home… Sweet… home.”

The man in Tims nods and smacks his lips, cluck, and for a moment, he’s satisfied. Then he turns down to Miles, who is still sitting next to Bogdon, still fidgeting with his left sleeve, oblivious to the baseball diamond and the organ music.

“And you. What’s your excuse!?!” says the man.

Miles looks up.

Toilet brush bristles for hair, Miles thinks, and the man looming above does have spiky white hair, serrated forehead with wrinkles jagged toward the brow—encased in a stare. He’s an older man of 65, and his pinkish face has a fast steam rising.

“We died for your kind, boy. Now stand!”

“I was just pledging allegiance to the flag. Wanna see?” Miles unrolls his left sleeve. He stretches out his arm to reveal the cauterized letters he spent Innings One through Seven carving into his forearm: God Bless Am—the serrated end of his house-keys bloody.

“Jesus, fucking Christ! You sick little fuck!” the man squeals, shimmying past popcorn, past peanuts and cracker jacks. Dozens of stadium eyes agape at first, then turning away. It’s the top of the eighth inning, and the dirt and the grass have returned to a diamond.

And the Braves’ turn at bat.

Jamez Chang’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Underground Voices, Bartleby Snopes, FRiGG, Prime Number, Melusine, and Gone Lawn. After graduating from Bard College, Jamez went on to become the first Korean-American to release a hip-hop album,Z-Bonics (1998), in the United States. Visit: www.jamezchang.com

After the burial, walking with head bowed through the grove of tombstones, thinking on the eternal verities like ashes to ashes etc., I saw something on the ground that looked like rolled up paper money.

So many times I’ve bent down to pick up a quarter that turned into the foil from a medicine bottle. Still I bent over and picked it up. 32 dollars rolled up in a rubber band, 2 tens, 2 fives, 2 ones.

Was I smiling now? Yes. Could I have shucked my somber mood so easily? Yes again. I was a survivor on my way to a feast, a celebration of my friend’s life, and to top it off I had just received an unearned dividend, 32 bucks that I decided to spend on a wine suitable for the occasion to toast our departed friend.

We left him behind in his coffin, and went on to eat and drink, offer condolences, crack jokes, flirt with the women, and go on savoring life’s many pleasures. At the wake Old Farley got roaring drunk, fell off his stool and cracked his head on the corner of a table. As he rolled in pain someone joked that if he kept doing that there would soon be another wake, another chance for Old Farley’s friends to get drunk.

Next day I woke up with a hangover and a woman in my bed. I had known Marie for years, but we had never done this before. Do not think that we had forgotten about Bernard. He was in our thoughts and whispers the whole time. This was all about the fact that Bernard was dead and we were not.

Only then did I remember that I had forgotten to buy that 32 dollar bottle of wine.

I took Marie out for a sumptuous breakfast. She told me how she had met Bernard. She came into her chiropractor’s waiting room where Bernard sat weeping. “Have you heard?” he cried. “Someone shot John Lennon. He’s dead. Just like that. Blown away.” Marie burst into tears and put her arms around him. They stood there weeping in each other’s arms. After their spinal adjustments they went to his place and made love.

We clinked our coffee cups and toasted Bernard. I told Marie a Bernard story of my own. When we were high school students, all those years ago, drunken Bernard, who almost never drank, drove his friends straight into a tree, slamming shut their song and laughter. His girlfriend died on the spot. He vowed never to drink again, but this resolve morphed into a pledge never to drive when drunk, and this too slid over time into no driving on more than one drink. This much he held to along with his lifelong remorse and ever deepening melancholy. His off-road drinking grew to epic proportions.

After breakfast Marie and I went to a florist shop. I snapped the rubber band off my 32 dollar roll and laid the money on the counter, telling the florist, “We want a 32 dollar bouquet.” We selected flowers till the florist told us we had reached our limit. Then Marie said, “I want Bernard to have these roses too,” and chipped in another 15 dollars.

We took our bouquet to the cemetery to place on the grave. Bernard’s widow, Helen, was there with Bernard’s brother, Ashton, spreading flowers on the grave. She was moved to tears by our gesture and took turns hugging us. I had never hugged her before. I was surprised how her firm slender body and sweet aroma aroused me. I felt a stirring in my groin and broke off the hug before it could become noticeable.

As I watched the two women hug, I flashed on the idea that we could take her home and make love to her. You know, the old tradition of consoling the widow. Custom assigns that role to the dead man’s brother. That would be Ashton, not me, and anyway it was way too soon.

It was a much discussed fact that the wife and the brother had visited Bernard every day in the hospital. It made me wonder if she had been receiving consolation even before she was widowed. It seemed altogether possible that Bernard, aware of his approaching demise, had encouraged them.

I gave Marie a lift home. She invited me in and we went straight to bed. Three months later we were married. As for Helen and Ashton, they waited a decent interval, more than a year, before they married.

Bob Brill is a retired computer programmer and digital artist. He is now devoting his energies to writing fiction and poetry. His novellas, short stories and and more than 100 poems have appeared in more than two dozen online magazines, print journals, and anthologies.

John Patrick sat on his sofa and contemplated the tusk. He massaged his kneecaps, sucked his knuckle. The tusk was long, white, and curved. The tusk stabbed straight through his coffee table. Previously, John Patrick learned of how manatees are gaining tusks by means of evolution. Elephants of the sea. There could be no mistake, he thought, this tusk had been sent from the future, a manifestation of evil deeds not yet committed.

Pete Stevens is the Fiction Editor at Squalorly. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cardinal Sins, The Legendary, 101 Fiction, Eunoia Review, Prime Number, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere. He lives in Bay City, Michigan.

Andy was supposed to write an essay on ending world hunger. He went to the library to do some preliminary research.

For the past few days, he had sat around hating all the hungry people of the world.

“I hate hungry people,” he grumbled. “Adapt to eating dirt or just die already. There’s plenty of dirt. There’s nothing wrong with dying. Either way.”

At the library, he found the most obese books available on the topic; he didn’t put them in his backpack, but carried them in his arms so that he wouldn’t have to hold any doors open for any of those gross anorexic chicks with the hollow cheeks and flat asses.

It’s such bad timing when someone is walking just at the right distance behind you so that it’s impossible to get away with not holding the door open for them.

And of course it’s nearly always an anorexic chick.

Andy stopped by a coffeehouse. He asked the barista for the most fattening thing available.

“Um, that would probably be, like, a mocha made with half-and-half with whipped cream on top,” she answered.

“Is that good?”

“I don’t know,” she said, making a sour face, “I’ve never tried it.”

“Why not?”

She laughed. “Because…that’s kind of disgusting.”

“Well, that’s what I want,” said Andy, belligerently.

“Okay. Is that everything?”

“And a big chocolate muffin.”

Andy found a table in the corner and spread his books out all over; that way no one would be tempted to join him.

He ate his muffin and drank his mocha slowly, keeping an eye on the pretty barista, scrutinizing her seemingly healthy breasts and backside.

Peter Clarke is a recent law school graduate currently living in Sacramento, California. His short fiction has appeared in Pif Magazine, Curbside Splendor, Hobart, Elimae, Locus Novus, Denver Syntax, Pure Francis, The Legendary, Zygote in My Coffee, and elsewhere.

Aunt Bianca treated her nails as though she were a typist, as though the sound of her nails against the keyboard was important to the harmony of the world, but she didn’t work. She kept her nails filed perfectly and painted them the same red color every Sunday morning before church, taking the previous coat off first before applying the paint again. When she looked at them, each nail aligned with the other, they used to scare me.

If I wanted to be close to Aunt Bianca, I had to be close to those bread knives at the end of her hands. When I held her hand, they dug in, creating half-circles in my skin. When I laid my head on her lap while she watched TV, they’d pop my pimples during the commercials, inspecting my pores. When she did my hair, they scraped the scalp as she wove the locks into braids.

They were sharp and precise, and I don’t ever remember them breaking except for one time when Aunt Bianca picked me up from school.

I was in middle school and had decided Chase Murphy was the boy I was going to marry, even though he didn’t know my name yet. He was tall and had red hair that he spiked up. He always wore button-up shirts with ties and his brother’s old letterman jacket. Chase was a part of the football team, honor society, and debate team. He never spoke up in class, but teachers left him alone because he always got straight A’s. He was perfect.

I had joined the debate team just to be near him, though I wasn’t very good at it. We met after school every Thursday, and often Chase and I were the only ones left waiting for our parents in the afternoon. We’d sit on the grass on the side of the building and do our homework in silence. I’d count the spikes in his hair when he wasn’t looking.

One afternoon he caught me. “You want to touch them?” he asked, pointing to the spikes.

I nodded.

He stood up and walked over.

I stood up too and touched the spikes. They weren’t as soft as I had thought but hard from too much hair gel. I pulled my hands away and looked at the sticky substance on my fingers.

“My turn,” he said. He pushed me into the brick wall, and I felt his erection against my legs. His whole body covered me up in shadow so no one could see me from the street. His hands went up my blouse. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. His hands moved lower.

Aunt Bianca’s cutlass nails dug into Chase’s shoulders and collarbone, and she threw him with momma grizzly force onto the ground.

“You ever touch her again, and I will kill you,” she said calmly.

She put an arm around me and practically pushed me to the car. I looked at my fingers. Gel stuck under a fingernail.

Aunt Bianca sat in the front seat and drove us home. Turning the steering wheel, she noticed her hands. “Damn it,” she said. “Damn bastard broke my nail.”

I wanted to say I was sorry, that I didn’t mean for that to happen, that the nail would grow back. But I didn’t. I looked at the back of her seat and thought about the rough spikes, working to get the gel out from under my fingernail. I reached too far, and my finger bled under the nail.

When we got home, Aunt Bianca sat me at the table and gave me some orange juice. I choked. “What is this?”

“Knox gelatin powder and orange juice.” She put her nail file, buffer, and nail polish on the table next to me. “It’s time you got yourself some claws,” she said.

Mandy Alyss Brown earned her BA in English at Texas State University. Her poetry and fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Bartleby Snopes, 4’33”, The Stray Branch, Extract(s), and more. Mandy is the Managing Editor for eSteampunk and loves being a work-at-home mother. Follow her progress at mandyalyssbrown.weebly.com.

Simon browses sawgrass. Cricket snorts the bank. Then, Flipper! Cricket rushes. Then, Zoe! poodling hysterical. Tension from Flipper’s mother stains the air. Danger syrup. Simon nods to Zoe’s mother. Elderly stalk of wild cotton. Flipper whimpers as Zoe circles away and back. Neck hairs electrify. “Zoe No!” snaps Flipper’s mother. Zoe’s mother surveys trees. Rotting broccoli mountains. Flipper yelps when Zoe bites her hard on the haunch. Simon imagines a Gaullish plain, a trip of wizened goats herded by a sepia version of Zoe. But the unofficial dogpark has no time for history. “Goddamnit, Brenda! How many times have I told you to train your dog?” Circling, Zoe bites Flipper hard again on the leg. “No! Stop, damnit!” Flipper curls supine as his mother kicks the poodle whose mother shrieks. Simon steps back. “How dare you kick my dog.” “Brenda! For the last goddamn time, train your animal.” “I’m never coming here again.” Zoe’s mother storms. Simon drifts to the last time a woman that age cried so public rough: the home before his mother passed. Homeward, memory burns a hole in his pocket. He flips it with a biscuit chip. Both disappear into Cricket’s maw. Aerial velocity. Common at the unofficial dogpark.

Michael Chaney is a native Clevelander, an academic in New Hampshire, a writer in Vermont, and a walker of a dog named Vegas. When less spatially confused, he works diligently on a novel about the absurdities of the pharmaceutical industry.

Nathalie came home and they kissed, and it was that kind of a kiss. He had been horny: it was the AIDS test’s and peeing in cup’s fault. But what had she been doing, thinking? He didn’t ask. He got off one of her gloves. She walked over to the closet. He stopped working. He stood and said: I want to fuck you. She smiled and hung up her coat. He got onto their bed and started to undress. She lit a candle and turned off the other lights, leaving only the candle and the blue of his computer’s screen. He touched her; she pressed herself into him, moaned. They took off the rest of their clothes and what was amazing him, what he was thinking about was this: Not ten minutes ago she wasn’t here, wasn’t in this room, in their bed, naked. They had lived their ten hours of respective day and then bang, now, he’s naked too and on top of her and under her and inside of her, having sex with her after all those hours and all those thoughts and all that life of solitary, womanless time. In forty minutes, give or take, he’ll be back at his desk and she’ll be napping, stealing glances at him from beneath their blanket, a little smile on her lips, wondering when he’s going to start to make their dinner.

Kevin Tosca’s stories have been or will be published in Midwestern Gothic, Thrice Fiction, Fleeting, Umbrella Factory and elsewhere. He lives in France. Read more at www[dot]kevintosca[dot]com

Because the kitchen is underground, reception is spotty. If she wedges her phone between the dill and coriander she can get two, maybe three bars.

I don’t speak much Spanish, but I think “Me gusta cheesesteak” roughly translates to “I’m hungover.”

For a brief moment, when I go down to grab table 6’s order and I see the way she glances between the dill and coriander, Yolani and I transcend language to form a sisterhood.

The man I slept with last night also has yet to call or text me.

Roth is an advertising assistant in Midtown and writes most of her fiction on a bus inside the Holland Tunnel. Her work has previously appeared in Full of Crow Quarterly Fiction and The WiFiles.