I watched Petra from the bottom of Lake Saiko, though she did not know I was there. It was the fourth winter of my death.

She stood on the icy surface of the lake, shivering. Frosty winds blew the snow fall in great diagonal angles across Petra’s face. I could see her shoe prints as she tip-toed across the lake. She did a quick, shuffling dance then dropped her jacket to the ice.

The deep currents flowed soft most of the time, like a coddling mother, and my body moved very little throughout the years. I watched much. A small boy’s toy boat, its blue and red paint peeling from grains of sand rasping against it for the past year once fell into the lake. I watched it make rhythmic, gyrating turns before resting at my side. There were other things. A pair of swimming goggles with a missing lens. Soda bottles. Dead trout, its remains eaten by its brothers and sisters. There were the occasional rotting tree trunks, termite eaten and hollow. A large husk of a thing that moved through the waters like shadowy sentinels. They morphed into hungry monsters of my imagination that hung waiting in the murky depths of my vision, waiting for the moment when my consciousness finally blinked out of existence, and only my corpse remained.

Earlier in the year a storm had rained debris down into the lake. Leaves and twigs were cast around me, and I felt my body begin to slip down into the pulpy lake bottom. It frightened me. Would the darkness swallow me? Would I cease to think? It made me wonder how much of my body was left. If I could look down upon myself, would I see only bones? Or had the cold and ice preserved me? I pushed away the thoughts.

Petra made her way to a small ice fishing hole. The fishing hole was made by two drunken fishermen who I came to know, or watch I suppose, through their yearly fishing trips. I came to enjoy watching as visitors came and went. In those first few years, after the immediate guilt of my actions had begun to dull, it was watching these families and friends playing on the lake that kept me going.

The sadness in her eyes startled me, and her expression that was such a stark contrast to what I had come to love. Her eyes were glassy and dead, stony. Her mouth was slack with grief and disappointment. I had always been quiet, reserved. Petra’s calling in life was to fill these silences with bits of nonsense that would make us both laugh. Her eyes always danced with a spark, as if she knew something that no one else did.

“Did you know that Lake Saiko was the original birthplace of the Loch-Ness Monster?” she asked once, as we sat at the edge of the water. We hiked often in the trails surrounding Mount Fuji, back when Petra still had a job teaching English in one of the many colleges in Tokyo. Lake Saiko, the smallest of the Five Lakes, was away from the bigger, bustling crowds surrounding Lake Kawaguchiko.

“They decided that the creature was too large for such a small lake, so they transported it to Scotland.”

I smiled.

When a few moments passed, she carried on. “Japan was pissed. You can’t imagine how much in tourism proceeds they–”

“That’s ridiculous.” I said, laughing.

When Petra reached the fishing hole she sat at the edge for a moment, hugging her knees close to her chest and then slipping her boots off. With a calm, almost beatific ease she swayed herself over the edge and dropped into the icy water.

My whole being reacted immediately. My will lurched forward toward her, to pull her down with me, but trapped in my body, I was restrained to watch. But oh, how I wanted her.

With me.

Her body contorted, and her face shriveled up in an unmistakable mask of agony. She opened her mouth to scream, but only air bubbles came out. She pulled her arms in, wrapping them around her slender body.

Petra’s face jerked up toward the hole above her and she kicked her feet, rising toward the surface. She missed the hole and, instead, beat clenched fists against the ice. It was useless. I saw the fishermen struggle for an hour to carve the hole, slurring curses at one another, as they beat against the ice with picks and knives. Petra’s fists bled but she pounded on, her hands undoubtedly numb from the cold.

A dark weight began settling on my chest, and the guilt that I had bled out long ago trickled in. Petra, whom I had loved since our first date. At that moment it was my greatest desire to have her body next to mine. The strain in my chest, my heart, disintegrated. My desire was appalling, disgusting. I wanted her with me. Even if it meant her death.

Petra found the hole then. Her frenzied hands pawed frantically for the edge. She pulled herself up over the surface, but the ice crumbled under her hurried hands and the ice collapsed sinking her down again. I thought she would be finished then, and for a moment I could not look at her. I caused this, I thought. Her feet kicked out and this time she gained the momentum she needed to drag herself out. She laid on her side for a few minutes, shivering and sobbing. I could feel the deep heaving of her sobs from the pit of my stomach. Eventually she stood, collected her jacket, and left.

I do not know what became of her.

Mathew Allen Garcia lives in Hesperia, California. He has four dogs, as well as countless demons that he has yet to exorcise onto paper. His stories can be found mostly in his head, and sometimes in the webpages of Litreactor, where they are dismembered by his peers and then reassembled by him in the quiet of his home.

Many people struggle with small talk, especially on a city bus. To Mark Hallman, the bus was like a family reunion where you can’t remember the name of your gap-toothed cousin, or that of the drunk uncle in the Chicago Bears jersey. Every weekday he left the quiet of the Lynwood Mall Park ‘n Ride and, with the apprehension of a visit to the proctologist, climbed into the echoing anonymity of the 13E. From there he rode twenty-five minutes to his job at the credit union, silent and uncomfortable among familiar strangers. Today, Mark would change all that.

To his left sat the young man with the sailor tattoo—Mark called him Popeye (never to his face, of course). Three seats back, the noisy couple who stepped off every day at Murdock Street argued again about who would cook dinner that night. In the very rear of the bus was a plump but not unattractive girl in a tartan knee-length dress and thick Harry Potter glasses. She was staring at him, again. And two seats before Mark was the woman he would someday marry.

She didn’t know it yet. Except for the time he’d accidentally bumped her elbow with his battered briefcase, she’d never looked at him. But the scent of her perfume, mixed as it was among the complex reek of diesel fumes and sweaty human beings, intoxicated Mark. The sunlight through her wheaten hair, the delicate tracery of her ears; these were things of beauty. He would make her his wife, if only he could screw up the courage to talk to her.

Her name was Melanie. M-E-L-A-N-I-E Stellwick—he’d overheard her once on her cell phone, arguing with the bank about an overdraft fee. Mark had a lot in common with Melanie (whose name he’d secretly shortened to Mel). Even though he worked for one, he too disliked banks, and frequently suffered overdrafts. In addition, he and Mel each wore brown shoes. And obviously, they shared the same mode of transportation. Judging by the book in her hands, he knew they both loved famous authors. He started their first conversation with that.

“Ms. Stellwick?” His voice was a whisper above the rumble of the engine. She licked her index finger, then turned the page. His heart pounding, he spoke louder. “I just finished McTeague last month.”

She turned her head and stared at Mark. “What did you say?”

“Your book? I just love Frank Norris.”

She lifted the paperback like a shield. “This is Kathleen Norris. Not Frank. And I hate McTeague.”

“Oh…oh,” he laughed nervously. “I’m sorry, Mel—”

She turned her page, then abruptly rounded on him. “What did you call me?” she said. “How do you know my name?”

“I…nothing.” His face burned. “Never mind. I’m sorry.” The bus slowed—it was Melanie’s stop. Mark bowed his head—someone had dropped a blueberry muffin into the aisle. He watched silently as it tumbled towards her. As she got to her feet, she crushed it beneath the heel of her Easy Spirits. Blue crumbs flew everywhere. “You stay away from me,” she hissed. “Creep.”

Mark pressed his forehead to the window as the love of his life joined a handsome man at a sidewalk café. He’d lost her.

“Fucking women, am I right?” said Popeye with a grin.

Mark nodded. Blueberry footprints smeared the aisle. He stood and moved towards the door—he would get off at the next stop and walk to work.

“Mark?” It was the Harry Potter girl from the back of the bus. She proffered his briefcase. “You forgot this.”

“Thank you.” He was near tears.

She smiled, raising her eyebrows. “Getting off early today?”

“Yes,” he said glumly. “I’m going to walk.” Bits of blueberry still clung to the girl’s loafers.

“I’m Sarah,” she said, and stuck out a hand. “Want some company?”

Kip lives in sunny Phoenix, where he chronicles the life of an exiled Nordic Warrior King. You can find him at Bartleby Snopes, Absinthe Revival, Foundling Review, Every Day Fiction, Waterhouse Review, and a few other places. He writes to keep the flying monkeys away.

Do you remember the night we went out to the old asylum? We were sixteen; it was September. The leaves crunched with the gravel under our Keds as we used Maglites to chase shadows off the gray windowpanes of the dormitories. The asylum had been shut down years ago and left abandoned. Everyone said it was haunted. Skitting between the white buildings that crumbled asbestos, trampling through overwrought weeds, we were ghost hunting. When you see one, you told me, just say, “Boogey, be gone,” as if these really were the ghosts of our sad childhoods, harmless spirits that could be dispelled with a bit of courage and disbelief.

That was the same year you swallowed pills, though they weren’t enough to get you to the other side. You always looked like you didn’t quite believe in it: yourself, the world, me. You put two fingers to your jugular when you thought no one was looking, testing the pulses. It was few years later that you finally did make it over, having choked down the bitter capsules of your sadness.

But before that, at the asylum we shone our flashlights into the dark night and watched our breaths take shape in the brisk air. You told me you had lived eight years with a father and now eight years without. It was seeming to you like a long time. It was seeming to you like an emptiness that wouldn’t be filled. I asked if you had ever seen one, a ghost. “No,” you said. Then through gritted teeth: “Not once.”

I was away when you finally did it. I didn’t hear until later. My mother told me over breakfast, the day after Thanksgiving when I was home. I just nodded and poked at my eggs with the edge of my knife. What else was there? We’d grown apart. It had been a long time.

But what I remember most about the night at the old asylum was that you wandered off. Probably, you just wanted to have a cigarette where my condescending eyes couldn’t find you. Our friendship was already fading. But that’s when I saw one, a ghost. Walking steadily toward me, looking sallow and pale and so hollow.

And I stood there, helpless, alone, whispering your stupid magic words and trembling because, deep down, I knew they wouldn’t work.

Colleen Fullin is a student in the MFA program at Emerson College. Her work has appeared in Northwind, 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, Mouse Tales Press, and Bellow Literary Journal. She lives in Boston, where she teaches in Emerson’s First-Year Writing Program.

“Caroline Benton was a pointy woman; tall, all elbows and knees. Even her lips appeared to be crisp at the edges. Her tongue was a skewer you’d want to avoid.” Albert often fantasized himself reciting these words as part of her eulogy. He smiled. It was his truth after all. But his mother remained stubbornly alive and breathing fire in a posh region of Cleveland Heights.

“It’s a tragedy to lose a child,” said Caroline at his funeral, “even a viper like Albert.”

Recently retired, Marian Brooks is just beginning to write short fiction. She graduated from the U of P (BA English Lit) and Villanova University (MS Counseling). Marian worked as a psychotherapist for twenty years and as a research assistant for the past fifteen.

Larry was the leading anthropologist at the Museum of Natural History. He was also the chief designer of dioramas at the Neanderthal exhibit that depicted them preparing to kill a wild boar, tending a fire, or painting on a cave wall. He was highly regarded as the principal authority on how Neanderthals lived. His colleagues marveled at his unique insight and that he seemed so connected to Neanderthal society.

Larry, a private and unassuming man, preferred his meat rare, collected art by Picasso, and used a woodstove to keep warm in the winter. Whenever a thunderstorm rumbled down the valley where he lived, he would disconnect the power to his home and strip to his underwear. Then he would sit, curled into a ball in a corner of his bedroom, and quietly wait for the storm to pass.

Jon Beight lives and works in Western New York. He has been published in Red Fez, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Spilling Ink Review, Feathertale, and elsewhere.

After reading Demian by Hermann Hesse he became obsessed with the idea of controlling his teachers’ behavior. He decided to start with the weakest one, his math teacher, Miss Lovekey. She was new. New, young and nervous. She was so young a few guys had even asked for her phone number. They dubbed her “Miss Love Me.”

He had her for sixth period and liked her short skirts, especially the red one. He stared at the back of her head when she wrote math problems on the dry erase board, silently willing her to call on certain students. Day after day nothing happened. He began to doubt the merit of the exercise. Maybe Hesse was full of it.

One afternoon, he kept repeating Shelby-Shelby-Shelby inside his head, willing Miss Lovekey to call on Shelby Pope. He was startled when Miss Lovekey turned around and loudly asked Shelby to come to the board and find the equation of a line.

Shelby was pissed. She quit texting Katie and shoved her phone in her pocket. She loped to the front of the room, scowling.

It worked. He now had power and must decide what to do with it.

Sara Jacobelli lives in New Orleans.

In the shower one morning, against his will, the husband finds himself humming “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.” Through most of his marriage, he’s thought the guy singer was Michael Bolton, but when he heard it in the car the other day, when he really heard the song, he knew it had to be a Righteous Brother, the tall one. Now he’s stuck with that song.

He squirts a glob of shampoo into his hand, trying to sing Bill Medley low, and begins to suds up his head. In the seventh grade, long before Michael Bolton, when both Righteous Brothers sang “You’ve Lost That Lovin Feeling,” he slow-danced with Susan Scheiswahl to that song at lunch time. Since then, there’s been a lot of lovin’ feeling lost and gained.

Later, when he comes downstairs, he asks his wife which Righteous Brother she liked best, the big one or the little one.

She’s reading Umberto Eco at the breakfast table. After all these years of marriage, she’s learned to ignore such questions.

“He’s talking about the casting of Perseus,” she says without looking up. “It’s Cellini, isn’t it?”

He fills a coffee cup for himself. “Is there a Donatello Perseus?”

She shakes her head. “You’re thinking of Judith and Holofernes,” she says. “A different beheading altogether.”

Actually, he’s still thinking about the Righteous Brothers.

She reads, he fixes himself cereal, sits across the table from her, opens his notebook and Googles western civilization. Donatello, Perseus. She’s right, of course.

“So which one?” he asks her again. He stares across the table at her until she has to stop reading and has look up. He’s having the time of his life.

“Cellini’s the Perseus,” she says. “Eco says so right here. But I knew it.”

“Big or little?”

She closes the book, takes a drink of coffee, and looks at him. “What are you talking about?”

“The Righteous Brothers,” he says.

“Neither,” she says. “You knew that.”

“One of them died,” he says.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. And that settles it.

She returns to her book, turns a page. Says quietly that she loves Eco. Just loves him. When she asks, the husband pours her another cup of coffee. Later he’ll make her breakfast, thinking about a Righteous Brother lost.

Rick Bailey’s work has been published in Bartleby Snopes, Toasted Cheese, and The Writer’s Workshop Review.

A cold night in Vermont. I pick up the phone, hear her say my name, and I’m back in a Las Cruces cantina almost a decade ago.

She leans over, sets a Dos Equis in front of me, her warmth against my skin. I’m a little drunk. Her hair brushes my neck. I look into her eyes and soon we’re careening down lost years: A broken fist in Colorado. Explaining to armed men why the Chevy sits halfway inside a San Salvador kitchen. Lemons rotting in a Lodi backyard, wisteria vines wild on the porch. The smell of sex, her salty taste. Someone else’s tomatillos on the stove. Blood, shattered glass. She straddles me, slams my head against the wall, bites my cheek. I close my eyes. She climbs off, growling, goes for something to make this worse. Up and out the door, astride the Road Star, running through the gears, wind in my face, the long ride to here,

where I start to hang up, hesitate, bring the phone back to my ear. Silence. Through a frosted windowpane I can see darkness. Then she says my name again.

Barry Basden lives in Texas and edits Camroc Press Review. His writing has appeared elsewhere.

In bed with the laptop once again. The parents are asleep. My brother is asleep. I don’t have work tomorrow. It is 1:26am. I go onto a webcam model site, the name of which I care not to disclose. Around a thousand user names are disclosed to me, along with profile pictures, so I can weed out the desirables and the undesirables. I go window shopping. When I click on the Menu hyperlink, I can see basic information: where they are from, what their age is (I bet some of them lie, they have to lie), what their occupation is (they definitely lie—I see one as the Queen of France and another with a B.S. in Accounting and I believe neither). I say no to the Romanian girls, and other foreign girls. If they can’t speak to me in a language I can’t understand, it somehow feels dirtier. I can also see a snapshot of the current show. If they are sitting in their bed bored, I skip them. They have a job to do, they signed up so they could have a job. What do these girls put on employment surveys, anyway? I bet they don’t fill them out. That’s the way I like them. Since I can pick the girls out according to, well, whatever I want, I ignore the bored ones and I ignore the fat ones. They don’t have personalities until I, the customer, decide they do. If they wanted more from me, they should have gotten a different job. I am faceless, after all, an invisible window shopper. If Tao Lin was invisible when shoplifting from American Apparel, he would have gotten away with it. However, I am taking nothing, only glances. My lazy hands remove themselves from my underwear so I can graze my cursor over more buttocks, more willing flesh. I eventually find one I like. She’s Romanian, but so beautiful I take a chance on her. Is this prostitution? I don’t have an account—I’m not paying her, I’m not complicit in this anomaly, this oasis of unlawful desire.

She is in the middle of her show. So and so many tokens until she removes her panties. She talks to the crowd in her broken English. She pushes a hand through her dyed blonde hair. Her tits are unparalleled in their perkiness. They almost look fake, like a life-sized doll’s. She shakes around in her pink panties and slaps her own ass for me. I imagine my hand instead and feel guilty over the lack of context. If this were my hand it would make no sense. I don’t know her, I would never meet a Romanian, I wouldn’t date her. She probably wouldn’t want to date me. My erection goes from 78% to 37%. I force myself to get hard again, because I’m on a mission, I can’t do these things when the rest of the house is awake. I get hard again thinking about freedom. Freedom to do what I want on my own little island of happiness. Would it be tropical? Of course, but there would also be Wi-Fi, and no authority figures, and this little slender Romanian doll, except the context would make sense. She would speak English and our relationship would be context appropriate—a real dream indeed.

I’m getting distracted again, like my brain knows I should be asleep. Her panties are still on. The tipping has slowed and I get frustrated, thinking the stream of gold highlighted text telling the room that “so and so tipped so and so much” would not pick up again on this occasion, that I should just give up on masturbation, maybe entirely, or go to some traditional porn. But I have sworn off things that are not in real-time, except things that are art. This is not art. This is undulation. I have argued with friends about the merits of pornography before and the verdict went as follows. “Some porn can be art, but this is probably not it.” And on real-time art, very similar. “Some real-time art can be art, but this probably not it.” Little Romanian Vanessa is built like art, but is not it. Not with those pink panties still on. Remove them, then we’ll see.

But she doesn’t, not this time. She expresses her boredom by putting her t-shirt back on. I can still see her nipples. Even she has to eat, despite looking skeletal. If she didn’t eat, she’d die, and there are thousands of men looking to prevent that on the merits of her body alone. She won the body lottery. If she was ugly, would she starve? My boner goes down to 15%. When I catch myself moralizing, I know the act is done. It is almost futile to proceed—I would not enjoy the climax now. She keeps getting dressed, like that fallacy of the external environment matching the internal mood. She tells the room in broken English that she is going to sleep because no one is tipping. A few diehards plead for her to stay but she ignores them. If they cared for her to stay, they would give her money, and that’s just how it is. She provides a service and they provide sustenance. And an audience. Only I care about the latter—she just wants to get fed.

I shut my laptop and force myself to finish in the bathroom, as a form of resistance. Viva la resistance. They will judge me, high above, but let them judge me. It is society’s fault that I am like this. But deep down I know that’s wrong. Deep down I know that my own apathy sunk into my soul like a seed and now I can’t get up. I can’t fight against what I know is wrong.

Good Samantha was on her way to the church hall to help distribute food to the poor. Bad Samantha saw a dress in a shop window and said to Good Samantha,

“Get off the bus and try on the dress.”

Good Samantha replied, “No, I’ve got to help people, and not think of myself all the time.”

Bad Samantha said, “If you don’t think of yourself occasionally you won’t be happy and if you’re not happy you can’t be a role model. because the people you help won’t want to be miserable like you, but if you’re happy then others will want to join you and the work you do will expand and you will be able to help more people.”

Good Samantha thought about this, then she got off the bus and went into the shop. She tried on the dress but thought it too revealing, too sexy, not her at all, but Bad Samantha said, “Don’t just think what you like all the time, think what your husband will like, think of the pleasure he will get from your soft body in the silky smooth dress.” But Good Samantha was sure Bad Samantha had once told her to buy a dress and all that had happened was that she’d had a one night stand with a stranger.

“What about the little black dress over there,” said Bad Samantha.

“I’ve got a little black dress.”

“Not as nice as that one.”

Good Samantha tried on the dress. It felt good against her skin. Showed off her curves, didn’t make her look a tart, just sexy. She bought the dress. But then realised she needed shoes to go with it. So she went shoe shopping. By the time she’d found the shoes she liked it was too late to go to the church hall. She phoned and apologised, said she was ill. They said, Don’t worry, get well soon, and she felt guilty for lying. She went home and Bad Samantha put on the dress and shoes and lazed on the sofa with a magazine. Good Samantha, full of remorse, didn’t object.

Her husband came home, liked what his wife was wearing, said, “Ooh, that’s sexy,” and husband and wife did what husbands and wives have always done, right there on the sofa, and then on the floor.

Bad Samantha was happy and smiled inside and said, I’ve won.

Good Samantha thought about the nice conversations she could have had with the other helpers, and the sense of satisfaction she always got from helping others. Her husband looked at her and asked, “What’s wrong?” She smiled and kissed him.

“Nothing,” she said, “Are you happy?”

He smiled.

At least she’d done someone some good, and that pleased her.

Samantha Memi is a patisserie chef in London. Her recipes for a happy life can be found at http://samanthamemi.weebly.com/