In my house there’s no door at the top of the stairs. There is only a wall, ending. There are tiny yellow flowers on the wallpaper.

At first I pushed my fingers against the wall. I knocked. I peeled the wallpaper.

I yelled so the landlady would hear, “Why do you have a staircase with no door?”

“There were only stairs to build with,” she called back from the ground floor.

“I don’t believe you,” I said, “you’re hiding something.”

“There isn’t any door,” she said.

“I’m hungry,” I said. “Climbing is difficult work.”

“Come on down,” she said.

Shea Newton lives in Idaho. He has been told there are wolves but all he’s seen are coyotes.

Her father was the last person she expected to be knocking on her dorm room door at 8:30 on Sunday morning, but there he was, propped against the doorframe, the neck of a Jack Daniels bottle clutched in his left fist, her yellow fleece in his right.

“It’s snowing,” he slurred. “Thought you might be cold, so I brought something to keep you warm.” He held up both the bottle and her fleece and laughed, but it wasn’t a laugh she recognized.

It wasn’t the laugh of the man who had taken her jogging in the park whenever her mother had a migraine, she four-years-old and bouncing on his shoulders, he weaving from side to side on the bike path and making airplane noises while she giggled and grabbed fistfuls of his then-thick brown hair to keep her balance. It wasn’t the laugh of the man who’d taught her to ice skate on the pond in that same park and worked overtime for seven years to keep her in new skates and $800 sequined outfits so she could compete on the junior circuit. Or the laugh of the man who’d told her she could go to any college she wanted if she worked hard enough and threw her a surprise party at Outback Steakhouse when she got into Yale; who’d single-handedly moved all of her boxes, her TV, her suitcases, up to the fourth floor of Trumbull College when she broke her arm and her mother was far too sick to make the forty-five minute trip to New Haven. It wasn’t the laugh of the man who’d sobbed uncontrollably into her shoulder after her mother passed, the years of chemo and catheters and blood-soaked sheets and sleepless nights finally over.

No, this was the laugh of the man who’d shown up ten minutes before her statistics midterm with two non-refundable air tickets to Las Vegas and joked that she should put all that “book-learnin’” to practical use. The man who’d asked her to dinner one Friday night to tell her he had quit his job of twenty-five years at the paper company and decided to take a film directing class at the community center; who’d drunk-dialed her at three a.m. two weeks later and admitted that he hadn’t really quit, he’d been laid off in a company overhaul, but he hadn’t wanted his Pickle to be disappointed in her old man.

This was the man she had gone to for advice for nineteen years, and she had no advice to give him, only to tell him to stop. To stop behaving like a drunken frat guy. To stop trying to be her friend. And before she realized it, she’d said that last part aloud, I don’t want to be your friend, Dad, and she watched lines of confusion wrinkle his forehead as he tried to interpret the what and the why of her words.

The bottle of Jack slipped from his fingers and landed on her bare pinky toe. It didn’t shatter, but it hurt worse than if it had. Her eyes watered instantly, and she wanted to tell him how much pain he had caused her, emotionally and now physically, and that she wouldn’t see him anymore as long as he acted this way. But instead she yanked her yellow fleece from his extended hand, backed inside her room, and shut the door. And only then did she realize that, without opening her mouth, she had said it after all.

Lacy Marschalk is a PhD candidate in English at Auburn University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Crow Magazine, The Citron Review, Thoughtsmith, and The Prose-Poem Project. You can find her online at lacymarschalk.blogspot.com.

“You sure you want to do this?” he asked.

She sat her fork on the table. “Get married?”

“No,” he said. “Have the picnic afterward.”

The day after the wedding they had decided to hold a going away party. They’d be moving across the country to North Carolina at the end of the month and didn’t know when they’d be back in Indiana to see everyone.

“We can afford it,” she said. She’d had to convince him along the way to spend the extra dollar here and there. She wondered if this wasn’t really about the chocolate fountain again.

“But all those people in one place…what if I get stuck in a conversation with your Uncle Buck?”

“I’ll come to the rescue,” she said. “I’ll even write it into my vows.” She swatted his butt, while he scrubbed at a greasy pan. She hated doing the dishes, couldn’t stand to touch someone else’s discarded food. Though it took him longer than she would like—he waited until both sinks were full and the smell of souring food wafted around the apartment—she loved that he did it for her.

“The food…” he started.

“You’re the only guy I know,” she said, “who would care about this.”

“Come on. She deserves to eat,” he said. He swished his hand around in the water rattling plates and glasses. He picked up a fork, raked the rag across its tines and tossed it with too much force into the other side of the sink.

“I’m not making special considerations for one person. It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“She’s my friend,” he said, his voice low over the sound of colliding dishes.

“I’m telling you, she’ll eat before she even gets there,” she said, moving over to the table and sitting down. She played with the solitaire that had sat on her hand since March, the weight now becoming familiar as it crept closer and closer to the end of summer.

“If this was Emily or Rachel, you’d already be bent over backwards,” he said.

“My friends are different and you know it,” she said.

“How?” He turned his back on the dishes and faced her, putting his soapy hands on his hips.

“You know why.”

“No, I don’t think I do. Come on, let’s get this out in the open,” he said.

“Listen, baby,” she said. Neither of them understood why people used that word as an endearment. “She’ll just have to take care of herself, she really will.”

“But she shouldn’t have to. My only friend and we can’t even do this small thing,” he said, turning back to the dishes.

“She’ll make do, because you promised you wouldn’t invite her.”

“Jesus,” he said. “I thought you were past that. It was two years ago.”

“Two years ago or not, I’d rather not have to compete with her on my wedding day.”

“I can’t just not invite a friend,” he said.

“No you could, but you won’t and the worst part is you don’t see anything wrong with it,” she said.

“One kiss,” he said, and stopped, the silence hanging between like the first time he’d told her, except now they weren’t holding hands, weren’t half drunk on that red wine that came from the box.

“It was a small thing,” he said.

“Not as small as this.”

Bio: Tommy Dean is a supplanted Mid-Westerner living in the heart of North Carolina. A graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program, he has been previously published in Pens on Fire, Tuesday Shorts, Apollo’s Lyre, and Pindeldyboz.

I’d just gone through the security rigamarole – only half an hour in line that afternoon – and was sitting in the bar near the departure gate having a couple of stiff ones. The guy next to me looked like he had to fly a lot, too. He glanced at me and shook his head. “It isn’t really new,” he said.

“No,” I agreed. The body scans and pat-downs were just the latest, and if you wanted to make your flight – which is to say, if you didn’t want to get fired for not showing up at the client on time – you went along. And it wasn’t just security. You went along with everything, from the airline, too.

“Once I almost got thrown off a flight ,” I told him, “because, in the check-in line, I complained that the flight was obviously going to be hours late, and the crew didn’t seem to care. One of the gate people pulled me out of line and told me to shut up.”

“Or ComfortJet,” said the other guy. “Their gate attendants can decide you’re too fat to fly. It has nothing to do with security. They seem to think they have a mission to put everyone on a diet.”

“Oh, god, yes. I knew a guy – he had a few extra pounds, but then 60 percent of us have a few extra pounds. He said something the person checking his bag didn’t like, and all of a sudden she decided he was too fat to fly. He asked for the supervisor; showed the supe his frequent-flyer card, explained he flew on ComfortJet all the time, and nobody’d ever said he was too fat before. She backed the agent up. He had to buy another seat to get on the plane. No appeal. The agent had full discretion.”

“Well,” the guy said, “earlier this week I was on a flight. It was almost full. Right behind me there was a family, the parents and a bunch of kids. They took up that row, and also the one across the aisle. The kids were some of the worst screamers I’d ever seen.

“And the parents were the enlightened kind, the ones who won’t tell the kids what to do – instead, they negotiate. The little bastards wouldn’t sit down and fasten their seat belts, so the mother called a flight attendant.

“‘Would you please explain to my children why they need to sit down and fasten their seat belts?’ she asked. She wouldn’t even take the responsibility to tell them that.

“So the little girl behind me, once she finally sat down, started kicking the back of my seat. I turned around and looked at her hard; then I looked at her mother. Nothing. Then I spoke up. ‘Do you think you could ask your daughter to stop kicking the back of my seat?’ I asked.

“‘Jennifer,’ she said, ‘try to stop kicking the back of that man’s seat.’

“‘Not try,’ I told her. ‘Just stop.’ But it was a long flight, Logan to SFO, and those kids wouldn’t stay quiet or sit still. And the parents just didn’t care. They were plugged into their earphones. I was trying to get some sleep, but it was no good. The kids were zooming up and down the aisle, knocking into me and everyone else, grabbing my arm as they went by.

“Finally I’d had it. I turned around again, looked over the back of my seat, and caught the attention of both the parents. ‘I just want to say,’ I told them, ‘how much I admire you and sympathize with your struggles in dealing with the tragedy of autism.’

“You wouldn’t believe how shocked they were. All of a sudden, they started shushing their kids. It was probably the first time they’d been shushed in their miserable little lives. The mother actually made the kids sit down, covered them with blankets, and told them to go to sleep. You could see how embarrassed she was. But even more than embarrassed, she was mad.

“She got up, went to the back of the plane, and started talking to a flight attendant. She was waving her arms and pointing back at me. Then the flight attendant came my way. She was very stern. ‘Sir,’ she said. ‘We have an extra seat in the back of the plane if you’d care to move.’ It was plain that I’d done something unspeakable. If she could have, she’d have declared me too fat to fly or something.

“‘What?’ I asked her. ‘I just told these parents how much I admired them. What’s the problem?’

“‘The problem doesn’t seem to be with them,’ she said. ‘The problem seems to be with you. You seem to be having a difficulty with being seated near that family. If you’ll come with me, I’ll place you in a different seat.’

The lady had gone and tattle-taled to mommy, of course. The hell if I was going to let mommy order me around because I’d actually found a way to deal with the screaming kids. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘it seems to me that this admirable couple has found a way to minimize any difficulties that may exist.’ The kids were, in fact, finally asleep. ‘I’m not sure why I should move if there’s no real problem here.’ The flight attendant didn’t like that, but she couldn’t push it at that point. I stayed where I was for the rest of the flight, and the parents kept their damn kids quiet.

“‘Daddy needs a latte,’ the father said to his wife on the way out of the plane at SFO. ‘Daddy needs a cigarette and a latte.’”

John Bruce’s writing has appeared in numerous literary zines, and he’s received a Pushcart nomination. He has degrees in English from Dartmouth College and USC and lives in Los Angeles.

My grandfather’s hands were still thick from his days delivering ice. He taught me math. There was a number tattooed on his arm and we did all kinds of math problems with it.

“May I check your hat?” The coat-check girl was young.

My grandfather liked to sit in his chair and worry.  That’s what he did. He wore a newsboy cap to keep warm. I never saw him without it. A bottle of Slivovitz on the table next to his chair also provided armor against the cold and the shivers. His skin was wrinkled and cracked. So was the chair’s leather. He chained smoked Chesterfields while he sat and worried. I’d see cigarette butts at all angles, their tops twisted and black forming a mound in the stand-up silver ashtray. It was as if the ashtray and the worry chair were one. I’d stare at the design that reminded me of plastic palm trees. The ashtray had a place for a lighter near one of the drooping branches. He didn’t use the lighter much. He preferred lighting a new cigarette with the one he had just finished. He was systematic. He’d lower his hand, his index finger acted as a noose, and with a quick back and forth twist of his wrist crushed out the doomed Chesterfield’s 4-minute life against the silver stand. The cigarette butts eventually disappeared. I loved that magic, until I once saw him push down on the bulbous sterling knob and the butts tumbled into a newly created abyss in the ashtray and I knew the secret. It reminded me of the coins on a bus that piled up until the bus driver decided it was time to depress a lever and the coins spun and fell into oblivion, all the while making a strange whirring metallic sound that played over and over. My grandfather liked watching wrestling. One of the wrestlers wore black trunks and was completely bald. My grandfather worried about them, including the bad ones. He wouldn’t believe it was faked. He even thought the blood was real.

“How many have gone unclaimed?”

Bruce Harris is the author of SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DOCTOR WATSON: ABOUT TYPE, published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box (www.batteredbox.com).

He was my first archivist, my father.  Tossing editions of dark and light into our piles of ember.  He made our backs broad throwing us headlong into pools to splash in rectangles beneath summer sun, stretching our wings to pin us to walls, release us to flutter under water.  We became swimmers, athletes dreaming of wet feathers and fire.

In dreams he harvests my skin with each rising of anger, not meanness but a soft rage.  It bending inside him like the warped wood he tortured in the tool shed making benches to structure corners into something tangible.  I record his human apparatus in pages and years.  I have his rage, and he writes my existence in his eyes.  Revives my desire for the strings of our family, attching always at the backs of pews and the bindings of bibles.  I have fixed my body into stuttering rage as still and threatening as television static.  It creeps like summer storms, like underground rivers rising out of the hip of a continent.

These fingers we print with each others’ stories.

Jordan Okumura is a recent graduate from the CSUS MA program in Creative Writing.  She has been published in Calaveras Station Literary Journal, Gargoyle #55 and later this year will be included in Jaded Ibis Press’ Dirty Fabulous. She loves writing on her body and being underwater.

I placed my left hand on the Holy Bible. Her hands flew forward in frustration, like she might choke me, or wanted to throw a hot iron at me.

I took her hand. She gave me a soft look, ran her free hand through my hair, and twisted. She yanked my face close to hers. Another tug, and she held a chunk of my hair. I let go of her hand, and wiped the moisture from my eyes. She stuck the hair inside her lip like a wad of Skoal. I kissed the left side of her nose. I kissed the right side of her nose.

“Your majesty,” I curtsied, and climbed into bed to watch her leave.

Robert Louis Henry writes poetry, prose, and songs in Tennessee. He’s editor-in-chief at Leaf Garden Press (http://leafgardenpress.com). He’s working on a few limited edition multimedia projects, and his first collection of poetry, God loves rich kids and we smoke off the same cigarette, is currently available as a free download from Bygawd Books. Find more at his blog: http://njaim.blogspot.com.

I don’t sleep with the window open anymore.  I can’t listen to it again.  Sometimes I wonder if it would be a mercy to use all those plastic Walmart bags and drown them, a litter at a time.

I feed them: all the feral cats who live around the abandoned farm.  I made the mistake once of rushing out after I heard the sound, half yelp, half scream, and then the screech of the car rounding the bend too quickly.

I wish I’d had the courage to get the .22.  Instead, I sat still as he dragged himself half into my lap and rumbled a purr.  I petted him until morning, when I shooed away the flies and took his corpse out to the garden to bury.

Story Boyle is a graduate of New College of Florida, and is Executive Director of the Peace River Center for Writers.  She freelances for local publications, and counts among her passions coffee, cats, and abandoned buildings.  She keeps a blog full of odd narratives at http://livetta.blogspot.com/.

After examining the facts for eight-odd years, in which both his wife and his job fell away like a second, unnecessary skin he’d never even known he had, Rick finally decided that it had been obvious, really, and, being not just rational but bound by the smallest of indicators, he had no choice but to admit that that day he’d taken his four-year old son to the beach it had, yes, been almost solely to have him dragged out by a shark. If there had been a painting of that day, he knew, then he and Danny would have been at the center of it, every brushstroke radiating out from them. But there had been no painting, and he hadn’t even known then to be looking for the brushstrokes—the way the car only started on the third try, the way the red light at the second intersection had buzzed. The hundreds of reflections of themselves smearing by in all the windows they passed. How Danny had asked if his friend down the street could come, and Rick had said no. It was like, at some level, a Rick inside of Rick—the one who had to keep living, maybe—had been able to read all this, but had gone ahead to the beach anyway. Had made the decision to go ahead to the beach. Because of stubborness, Rick thought. Because it felt cavalier to buck fate, and win. To risk Danny’s life. What he’d had for breakfast that morning was two slices of bread around some leftover meatloaf, still cold in the middle. That alone, he was pretty sure, should have been enough to keep him away from the water that day. It was like the world was warning him. Wouldn’t the snooze on his alarm have worked better if he’d really been meant to take Danny to the beach? But it went back farther, too, to the day before, the way his creamer had hung in his afternoon coffee instead of mixing in, and the week before, a cloud he remembered seeing on the way home from work, and, before that, January, when he’d been flipping through the channels and seen the ocean for about five seconds. And it even went back to when Danny was born—maybe Rick had been planning the shark then, in his fatherly way. He didn’t doubt it. He was capable of anything, he knew, even eight more years of studying what he’d started calling The Prelude, teasing apart the facts layer after layer to get to the real truth of what had happened. Maybe even somewhere in there he would find the time to visit the empty grave, and say goodbye. But not today. When he was done, he told himself. When he’d figured it all out, when he understood why, and could explain it to Danny, and apologize for not having paid proper attention to the way the rearview mirror that morning had been angled down at the passenger seat. In the reflection, just for a moment, Danny had been looking away, out his window. Rick, though, killer that he was, just creaked it back to see behind him instead, like that was more important.

Stephen Graham Jones has seven novels and two collections on the shelves, with two more novels coming (from Dzanc). The most recent two books are “It Came from Del Rio” and “The Ones that Got Away,” each horror. Stephen teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More at http://demontheory.net.

This is what I don’t remember: bluebonnet Sundays under Southern elm, girls whistling through tall grass, a frog, a simple cobbler, a street the width of a song. My mother in a sundress, her skin smooth as a shaved peach, a kid’s vague theory about the alignment of stars. Then the nights grew cold and other moon-ly. The door opened a creak. A man as big as a space ship. The tall shadows interrogated my father and took him to a world without cables. By morning, they returned for me and my mother. They were Green men or men with Green ideas. Green being the color of what wasn’t the temper of my blood. Then weeks stuck in the waiting rooms of the Green People. Is this how they play games? I thought. Mine were simpler and more fun. And at least you could win something. What I don’t remember: My mother filling out forms, scratching out answers, asking questions, a Green Man telling her in Broken Green what to write. In our language, my mother whispered into my good ear, “Why don’t you try to sleep. Just close your eyes and pretend you’re home.” But I never saw home again. I cursed that Green Planet of Tall Shadows. My father calling to me from some crater, from some cell at the bottom of it. Growing up, I cheated the Green Men of lifelines, I taxed whatever could be declared as Green, I rolled from one Green Woman’s bed to another until I couldn’t recognize my true color anymore in their mirrors. This is what I don’t remember: Why some colors fade to grey.

Kyle Hemmings lives in New Jersey. His work has been featured in Elimae, Thunderclap Press, Nano Fiction, Used Furniture and elsewhere. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), Avenue C (Scars Publications), and Amsterdam and Other Broken Love Songs (Flutter Press).