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/

You’re so lucky you’re not here right now. It’s worse than I could have imagined. Remember what happened to the clubhouse after the hillside flooded? We always said they should just tear the place down. There’s mold along the wall and ceiling corners the same size and color as the pâté over on the buffet table. Maybe something airborne, too; with each passing second I feel I’m acquiring some sort of respiratory disease. Especially when sandwiched among such a crowd. I mean really, everyone’s here but you: family from near and far; every neighbor we ever knew. We used to joke about Grandpa Syd going a bit nuts but now it’s no laughing matter. I saw him pour his Scotch and soda all over his checkered slacks while lecturing to a framed wall photo of a golf trophy presentation from generations ago. And Granny Phyllis is scarier than ever, a genuine bag of bones with liver spots grown big enough for a game of Twister. When I shook her hand she didn’t slip me a bill like she used to, just a cold creepy chill and her deepest condolences. At least she cares. I get the sense that most here are feigning grief and are actually enjoying the impromptu reunion, the free drinks and abundant hors d’oeuvres. Dad never should have invited them. The Coburns, the Salazars, the Diekroegers; old neighbors wherever I look. Even today Mr. Diekroeger glared at me through the shadows below those bushy eyebrows. That bastard will never forgive me for the night I crashed the Camaro through his hedgerow and tore up his lawn. This isn’t fun. I’m having a hard time dealing with this, of engaging in conversation and answering questions. Particularly the ones about you: inquiries about where you are and what you’re doing and why you’re not here. I explain that, unlike me, you were always driven by wanderlust and you’re ascending to new heights in Tibet or Nepal or maybe the Andes by now. They ask if you know about Melanie, about what happened. I tell them it’s been nearly two years since anyone’s heard from you and there’s no way to get in touch. As far as you know, nothing’s changed. Everything is as it was when you left. You’re so lucky. Wish I were you.

Roland Goity lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he writes in the shadows of planes coming and going from SFO. His stories can be found in Fiction International, The Raleigh Review, Word Riot, Compass Rose, PANK, and more recently in The MacGuffin, Bluestem, and Underground Voices.

Blue lightning whips the horizon. The man, on a Thursday night, sits alone smoking a cigarette, listens to the news. It’s the 8789th day of his life. He has spent the day waiting for a call he’s not expecting, an entire day. The phone rang earlier, but he didn’t move, just stared for two long minutes. Now he thinks about 9/11, that plane flying into the second tower. He felt something that day. Now someone on the news is talking about the flat tax. Or is it about being flat lined? It doesn’t matter. Does anything, ever, matter? The man lights another cigarette. At least there are cigarettes. They speed things and bring you closer to the end. Lightning strikes again, freezes the night sky like a camera flash, but it’s still not raining. It won’t rain, and perhaps it can’t rain, though it would be a relief from this rumbling, this constant threat of downpour. He brings the cigarette to his lips. Soon it’ll be the 8790th day of his life. The man rises, looks out the window while the television bounces azure images off the walls. No wonder the dead sleep. The man twists the cigarette out on the palm of his hand. It blisters but he doesn’t feel it. The phone rings again. He sets his hand on the black receiver. What has he left to lose? He picks up, but gets only a dial tone. The man lights another cigarette, inhales deeply. How can he explain this? he thinks, this dry cloud he has inside. The man returns to the open window. The television says the billionaire football owners won’t talk to the millionaire football players. Outside, more lightning, but there’s not a drop, not a drop of rain.

James Valvis is the author of HOW TO SAY GOODBYE (Aortic Books, 2011). His writing can be found in Arts & Letters, H_NGM_N, Juked, LA Review, Poetry East, River Styx, and UCity Review. His poetry has been featured at Verse Daily and the Best American Poetry website. His fiction has twice been a Million Writers Notable Story. He lives near Seattle.

Manuel rolled the mop bucket to the next office, careful not to slosh soapy water. With two entire floors to clean by midnight, he had no time for sloppiness.

Mister Scott was working late, as usual. Tonight he had someone in the office, a young man in an expensive suit just like his.

Manuel tapped on the door frame. “Should I come back?”

Scott glanced over. A smile split his tanned face. “No, Manuel. Go ahead. I won’t hold you up.”

“Thank you, sir.” Manuel rolled the square yellow bucket into Mr. Scott’s office, and pulled the dust cloth from his back pocket.

“I’m sorry,” Scott said to the other man. “What can I tell you? The numbers just aren’t there. In lean times, you have to buckle down and work harder.”

“But we have a new baby,” the man said, spreading his hands.

“Your wife has a new baby,” Scott said. “You have a job.”

“I can’t believe you said that.”

“I didn’t,” Scott said. “Just be sure that you heard it. If you want to remain with this firm, you’ve got to get those sales numbers up, even if it takes eighty hour weeks, twenty hour days. That’s called the American Dream. Right, Manuel?”

“Si, Sir.”

“How many jobs to you have, Manuel?”

“Three. I will go from here to the WalMart at midnight.” Manuel swiped the rag across filing cabinets. Clean from the top down, was his mantra.

“And how many children?” Scott said.

“Six.”

The young man flinched. “But it’s not the same, Mr. Scott.” He looked morose. “This weekend’s our anniversary. Things are touchy right now with Sandra.”

“Success comes from hard work,” Scott said. “There’s no substitute.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll do better.” The young man stood.

“I’ll be watching,” Scott said. “I expect to see your car when I arrive in the morning, and see it again when I leave at night.”

The young man left. Scott yawned and packed up his briefcase. Manuel slapped the wet mop onto the floor.

“Will you lock the door when you leave?” Scott said.

“Of course, Mr. Scott.”

“Thank you, Manuel.” He smiled encouragingly. “I wish we had a hundred employees like you.”

Manuel swabbed in broad strokes until he no longer heard Mr. Scott’s footsteps. He wrung the mop, and swabbed again.

Stephen V. Ramey lives in New Castle, Pennsylvania, home to not one, but two international pyrotechnics manufacturers. His work has appeared in various places, most recently Spilling Ink Review, Pure Slush, and Every Day Fiction. He edits the annual Triangulation anthology from Parsec Ink, and the twitterzine, trapeze.

My father taught Supachai English, every Tuesday. Supachai stood outside our door till someone opened it for him because he believed that ringing the doorbell was not an act of politeness. He managed to pass his B.A. exams two years after everyone in his class graduated – he was slow and he took his time getting anywhere.

He gifted my father a set of carved knives before he left. ‘Made in Thailand’, he said, ‘Good knives. Thank you for helping.’

For years, my mother kept the knives in the bottom drawer of the kitchen cupboard, claiming they were useless and rather impractical.

Supachai died during the Thailand 2010 floods, he refused to leave his house in Songkhla till it was too late – apparently, he was still slow and he still took his time getting anywhere.

My mother found the knives during a spring clean a few months after that. We now use them on special occasions like birthdays. Every time, we slice through frosted cakes with those knives, my mother looks at my father and says ‘Remember that boy from Thailand? Supachai?’

We pause our toasting then and think of the dead Supachai for a moment while wishing the birthday person another happy year ahead.

Vaiju Joshi’s fiction has appeared in Bartleby Snopes, Untoward, The Waterhouse Review, Vegemite Whiskers (an anthology of new Australian writing), Adelaide Review, Global Short Story competition, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Six Sentences and the Five Stop Story Project amongst others. Her fiction also was short-listed for the Best Australian Short Stories 2010 and 2011 anthologies. She is an engineer by profession and is currently editing her first novel. She lives in Adelaide, Australia.

I hope my brother doesn’t come by to vote today. If he does, I can’t promise I’ll be nice and good like I’ve been so far. People have to pay the consequences of what they do. If he comes in today, you can be sure I’ll make him face his. We only live down the road. Real close to the school. It’d be easy for him just to walk down the street like I did this morning. No need to drive a car or nothing. He’s older so he thinks he can boss me around. But I’m an adult now. Can’t see why he should think that way. If he comes in today he’ll act real nice around me. Don’t you be fooled. He’s a bad, bad person. Real mean. He hits me when nobody is looking.

I used to have the bruises to prove it but they went away. The sheriff came and I showed him all my marks. My brother told him I was just clumsy. He claimed the door hit me, right on the chin. Can you believe it? The sheriff did nothing. Even when I tried to show him all the collecting my brother was doing in the basement, he said to leave him alone. My brother is one of those people, what are they called? Hoarders. He never throws anything out or away and it piles up. I try and get him to throw his junk out but he just yells at me and starts with the hitting again. All I want is a clean house, like this gym. White walls all around me. The house is on life support anyway. If you took an axe to the frame under the window, it would go snap. You could even use a hammer. Crack!

Maybe he should come vote. Then you can see him get angry with me. He hardly leaves the house though. Not me. I like to go out. I got a dog and I take him walking. When I get my money from this I’ll get him a little stone, about that big. I cut stone on the side. It’s my part time job, mostly tombstones. I got a stack of checks and when I get the check for this job I’m going to get that stone. I think I’ll get a new cell phone too. This one just died on me. I thought it was the battery and I called the company. The lady said the phone’s what’s wrong and I had to replace it. How do you like that? I told them I had a five year contract with them and they still didn’t care. I had to give them money for a new phone. I guess that’s what I’m going to have to do unless I can get it working again.

You think I can get one in a pawnshop? I know they sell all kinds of things there. They sell guns. I think after I get the stone and the phone I’m going to get me a gun. I’ll be rocking and rolling then! My father taught me a little shooting. Mostly I learned how to fight. I can throw a real mean hook. One day when my brother isn’t looking, wham! Then I’ll tell the sheriff about how clumsy my brother is. I bet I could hit the frame around the house and knock it down. We don’t have strong walls like in here. I think this is where my daughters went to school. I’m not really sure where they go now. My brother has a daughter and a son, but I have all girls. None of them live with us, which is good. You know how my brother is.

No more messing with the sheriff. I have to get myself a new attorney. I think I should be able to find one by the courthouse. I hear they have a whole nest of them up there. I got to get rid of the one I have now, he owes me money. About a quarter of a million by my count, not his. I heard him talking with my brother about the house in Maine. It’s a conflict of interest, is what it is. Check the rolls, has John Pomeroy come in yet? Is he even registered in this precinct? You will have to hold me down or else I am going to run him up against these walls and they won’t be white any more. Nope. They’re going to be dark red and he’ll be going away in a hearse. I guess I could cut him and then cut his gravestone for him too!

Friday I’ll definitely look into getting a new attorney. I can do that in the morning after I’ve done everything else. You got to make a plan if you want anything done right. My attorney thinks he can do without a plan and that’s why he owes me half a million dollars. He’s got three daughters. They used to go here for school. I’m going to find out where they go now, maybe kidnap them and get my money that way. I figure I can grab at least one of them and leave the others to tell. Somebody has to know there’s been a kidnapping in order for it to work. Looks like I’ll have the time now to plan it out, too. You
hear that ringing? Seems the battery’s come back on line.

Ben Nardolilli currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, One Ghana One Voice, Caper Literary Journal, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, fwriction, THEMA, Pear Noir, The Minetta Review, and Yes Poetry. His chapbook Common Symptoms of an Enduring Chill Explained, has been published by Folded Word Press. He maintains a blog at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is looking to publish his first novel.

Constance was a doting, single mother of an infant. One night there was a fire in the baby’s room, a result of faulty wiring. She tried to save her baby, but the baby perished.
Constance’s brain dealt with the horror by convincing itself that the baby was a puppy. Constance dealt with the loss of her puppy by volunteering at the local animal shelter. She never understood why this gave her no sense of fulfillment.

Jon Beight lives and works in Western New York . He has been published in Red Fez, The Cynic Online Magazine, Apocrypha and Abstractions, and Feathertale.

Knock knock.

Through the peephole, I saw a woman in a Hawaiian caftan. I hoped she wasn’t from the office because I didn’t have the rent. “Who’s there?”

“Your new mother.”

She must be one of my neighbors. “Your new mother who?”

“Open this door, missy.”

Ha ha. She could have said, “Your new mother who, unlike your old mother, actually wants to have you around.” Except it wasn’t funny, on Mother’s Day.

Open the door? My apartment was trashed. But, it was something to do. I’d just open it a crack—

The woman barged in, lugging a suitcase. “Oh, God,” she said, at the dirty dishes and pizza boxes. “Oh, Lord.”

She pulled a vacuum cleaner out of the suitcase. After snapping on plastic gloves, she tossed two trash bags at me. “One’s for garbage, one’s for Goodwill. And bring me an ashtray.”

“Would you mind smoking on the balcony?” I was probably really napping on the couch and this was a weird dream.

“Smoke kills roaches. And don’t talk back.”

I guess I was bored. I found the ashtray, snitched from my old gay boyfriend. A little glass goldfish was trapped inside the clear crystal.

She looked me up and down, like I was not the type to rightfully own something that nice. She flicked her ash into it.

The woman took a CD out of her case and popped it into my computer. Like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind… She crooned along, and windexed.

I filled bags with magazines, cheeseburger wrappers, lone socks, old cosmetics, expired canned goods. She vacuumed, cleaned the bathroom, and Febreezed the couch.

Finally, hands on hips, she inspected the place. We’d scrubbed it pure as an angel’s lair. I felt light and hopeful, myself.

“Here’s a twenty,” she said. “Go to the store and get bologna, and chips, hear? Git you a pop, too. And bring me a Schlitz malt liquor.”

After our meal and doing the laundry at the washateria, she sent me back to the store, with a list.
Back home, she handed me the okra. “Slice it, like so. You ever made gumbo before?”

“No.”

“No, who?”

“Is this a knock-knock joke?” I said.

She rapped my knuckles with her wooden spoon. “It’s ‘No, ma’am.’”

The smack hurt, she smacked me back to reality. “Thanks for helping me today. Really. But who are you, what are you doing?”

“I told you, I’m your new mother.” Her lower lip trembled.

“Ma’am, honestly? I’m an adult. I don’t need a mother.”

She took over slicing the okra. “Everybody needs a mother.”

My eyes stung. But it had been a long day, with lots of cleaning chemicals.

She tugged my crackling dry hair. “Hmmph. I’ma give you a trim and a hot oil treatment tomorrow.”

I guess I’d just be bored tomorrow anyway.

Carly Berg’s fiction has appeared in PANK, Dogzplot, Defenestration, and elsewhere. She always minds her mother.

AllyGator

Allison set her bulky laptop on top of the blanket next to her and fell asleep. In her dream koala bears pointed the bow of an inflatable boat towards a garbage island and paddled with their paws. She prayed they wouldn’t make it there.

islanders_suck

“Fuck! I’m getting manhandled this week,” said Pete as he turned off the monitor and grabbed a beer from the fridge, the choir of condiments rattling as he slammed the door.
“I need a goalie,” he yelled down the hallway, to whatever roommate was listening.
“Do you really think that will save you?” one of them shouted back.
Pete walked back into his room, wondering whose voice it was, tapping the wood on each side of the doorway for good luck.

Tiff&Cyn

Tiffany bopped Cynthia on the head just hard enough to sink her posture.
“Ouch you wench,” Cynthia squealed.
“Get up! You’ve had your forty minutes. It’s my turn.”
“Forty-five minutes Mom said.”
“She also said she beat me in wii bowling, Mom is full of shit,” said Tiffany.
“I’m telling her you swore again.”
“I’ll give you ten extra minutes if you don’t.”
“Ok. Deal.”

hardpretzels!

Jamie attached his resume to the email, clicked send and turned the computer off. He looked out the window and noticed the snow had stopped. The crunchy scrapes of a shovel spoke from somewhere he couldn’t see. He remembered today was the day to bring the recyclables to the curb, it was almost garbage day again already.

129WestCommerce

Mike and Joe sat at their computers on opposite ends of the same table in their living room. They had been playing Call of Duty and passing the bong back and forth for nearly five hours. Occasionally, one of them would lean to the side of their giant monitor and say something. The other would also lean over, making eye contact, sometimes laughing. The bong steamed and bubbled like a blowhole, the smoke disappearing before it reached the ceiling.

Tom Luckie lives in Buffalo, New York. His fiction has appeared in Broken Pencil.