Stammer

Stammer
John Hansen

He waited until his son went to bed and took his prescribed pill. Other than a general feeling of slowing down, he didn’t feel particularly different. He fell asleep and dreamed he was with his son, in a life raft floating in the waters of a marsh. He navigated their way through the bulrushes but they never found shore.

Earlier that day, he waited in the neurologist’s office. The doctor left, her  medical student in tow, to confer with her colleague. Her office overlooked the site of the new “super hospital” and, if he leaned to the right, he could see nine cranes busily completing its construction.

The medical centre was adjacent to a tony neighbourhood of high end boutiques, fair trade coffee, smug self-satisfaction, and nowhere to park. He chose a spot where parking was permitted for one hour, and hoped it would be enough.

He came because his family doctor referred his case when he saw him about a stutter he had recently developed right around his fortieth birthday. He never had one before and wondered if this was the beginning of the end of his mental facilities.

He found himself stuttering at work, in meetings when he was pressured for an answer, or when his toddler refused to get in the bath, or get out of the bath, or his wife would ask him a question and suddenly, all he could say was “p-p-p-p-pork chops.” This caused him to be more reticent than usual. He earned a reputation as someone who rarely spoke.

The neurologist administered an exam to determine if there were any issues and asked him several questions about his overall mental state.

As he answered, he remembered his father who, in the span of seven years, sired four children. That meant, at one point, they were all at once teenagers. He remembered him at the dinner table, trying to maintain control over his unruly, defiant brood. The words would catch on his lips, or at the back of his throat while his children would have a good giggle at their father’s troubles.

After she left, he noticed a small bust of a bearded man. He wondered if it was Sigmund Freud. He picked it up and saw that it was Hippocrates.

Right, he thought. Of course.

When the doctor returned, she was accompanied by her colleague, an older man with dark curly hair. He held a position of authority over her because his medical students numbered six to her one. The ratios clearly increased with tenure.

“We don’t think there is anything wrong with you, neurologically,” the doctor told him. “We think your stutter is anxiety related. I’m going to recommend a subscription to Rivotril. Try it at home first as it may cause drowsiness but it should help with what may be a generalized anxiety disorder.”

“Should I take it with scotch?” he asked the doctor.

“No.”

When he left, attached to his car, was a parking ticket.

_____________________________________________________

John Hansen lives with his wife and child in the suburbs of Montreal, Canada where he works spends his days looking at spreadsheets and evenings writing and obsessing over Coronation Street.
www.twitter.com/jduncanhansen 
shatnerian.wordpress.com 

Image: Stick in Sand, By Leigh-Anne Fraser

Pick-up-Charlie to Astronaut

Pick-up-Charlie to Astronaut
Tom Sheehan

This star reconnaissance began on the fourth of July, quick morning soft as a fresh bun, as warm, air floating up stairs and coming across my bed in the smell of burnt cork or punk as smoky as a compost pile rising upwards from lawn debris night had collected, spent rockets askew in gutters throughout the town, clutter of half-burnt paper and tail sticks themselves once afire in the night sky, signals that gave darkness a new dimension of light and sound and the explosion of circular flares too bright to look at, as if the sun had delayed departure for the heart of our celebration, as if stars had loosed their final demise amid the spatial junk they might encounter in outer reaches, friction of them in the measure as silent as Indians in the past on these fields and paths at flint and rock, even as children younger than I was went secretly about the ways and quiet roads and padded lawns collecting expended shafts of excitement, rolling them into fisted quivers of their hands, tightly against their noses smelling the residue of them, dross and dregs of sky-reaching powder that short fires had implanted on their thin shanks as black as the night was, so that when amassed in one child’s hand a match was re-applied in secret and the gut blaze of the celebration began anew for those without money to buy their own pyrotechnics, the blue-red and orange-green flames loosed by this competition excelling much I might have seen on the holiday eve, these young scavengers, that young army of excitement seekers like a fresh wind adrift on the dawn, younger brother Charlie one of the aimless searchers of ignited celebration goods; marked all the way across a vast lawn, where the flag was left hanging out all night, by his red hair and fiery eyes, even before the false dawn flashes, nimble legs in drive gear and nimble fingers at the bundle sticks awaiting new flame; young Charlie, long ago appointed to the same bedroom as I, who would decorate the walls with Neil Armstrong’s little dance down the ladder of time and across tempest tide of skies and blur of our black and white television set, this younger brother of mine who dreamed and reached the stilted aerodynamics of lads, who exaggerated his heart and his mind for the unseen, the unknown, that far pit of darkness the skies offer to imaginations leaping for the wonder of endless contact, sweet abrasions of the universe and all its parts, the coming global wanderer, aeronaut and astronaut and star traveler now out of the tight innards of the small bedroom Neil Armstrong carried on his back, the fiery-eyed, dreamy, celestial kid brother now in endless orbit and sending me these late signals from a far turn of the once-dark universe whose reception began in simple ignition beneath fisted hand like a wondrous booster for his tell-tale heart, who now makes no sudden moves.

_____________________________________________________

Tom Sheehan served with the 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea, 1951. Books include Epic Cures: Brief, Cases,  Short Spans; A Collection of Friends; and From the Quickening. He has 18 Pushcart nominations, and included in Dzanc Best of the Web Anthology for 2009. He has 280 short stories on Rope and Wire, Magazine,  and print issues Rosebud (4) and Ocean Magazine (8) among others. Poetry collections, include This Rare Earth and Other Flights; Ah, Devon Unbowed; The Saugus Book; and Reflections from Vinegar Hill.

Image: Full Moon, By Leigh-Anne Fraser

Yazoo

Yazoo
Kevin Heaton

Before daddy left, he gave mama
a brand-new feed sack dress, and planted
one last crop; I was her, ‘God’s Perfect
Number,’ the seventh heavenly stair step
to kick at her backbone, breeched, then
brought by a poor white trash midwife.
That year, our windmill huffed the horse
trough full of mule dust, and the persimmon
cheeks hollowed in early September.
A field of bluebells captured an awol rebel
sun shower, then flanked a hackberry column
on the north fence line, and drank the rest
of the water. The old southern gentry had long
since vanished, but only rich white folks could
book space on the ‘Glory Train.’ Martin wasn’t
born yet, so the saints weren’t marchin’ in.
Daddy left us south of the Mason-Dixon Line
in a cottonwood sharecropper shanty, squat
over the scratch dirt where an overseer’s
pointer pup itched his worms. He’d hung
a Rainbow Bread sign on our screen door
to set it apart from the trees. I grew up along
the Yazoo, where roly polys pushed each
other across farmed out river bottom flatland,
and ebony ivories still harped on ‘Delta Blues.’

_____________________________________________________

Yazoo was previously published in Tidal Basin Review

Pushcart Prize nominee Kevin Heaton writes in South Carolina. His work has appeared in a number of publications including: Raleigh Review, Mason’s Road, Foundling Review, The Honey Land Review, and elimae. His fourth chapbook of poetry, Chronicles, has just been released by Finishing Line Press. He is a 2011 Best of the Net nominee.

Image: Mood of the Meadow, By Stephen Martin

Guy With The Aviator Glasses

Guy With The Aviator Glasses
Clara Brown

I heard him before I saw him, when he was checking in at the desk.  He had a booming voice. I knew he would be my patient.  He was disheveled wearing a Hampton beach baseball cap. His white hair was wispy and in need of a cut. He wore large metal aviator sun glasses. I never did see his eyes.

He was a large man, in a light blue t-shirt, neon royal blue polyester shorts and yellow socks. Sneakers on his feet.

There was something not quite right about him. He spoke slowly and deliberately with a drawl. He was having trouble hearing.

When I looked in his ears I saw something with ridges on the left. I thought it might be a piece of tubing of some sort. I grabbed it with a forceps. As I removed it, I realized it had legs.  A roach I suspected. It was stuck in some wax.

_____________________________________________________

This is Clara Brown’s second publication on Slice of Life.

Image: Bolt, By Leigh-Anne Fraser

Everything I Have Is Broken

Everything I Have Is Broken
Kyle Hemmings

I tell her that my pots and pans have scratches that never come out. My mother’s old china no longer reflects. Its value is now estimated as drywall. The coffee maker can’t process java. It doesn’t heat–just gurgles and dies. It dies each morning. The toilet needs some artful juggling. Yet, despite all of it, she likes me because of my smile that reminds her of HIM, who was yesterday. She says that whenever there is steel against sky there is the possibility of love. She loves the smell of old bridges after a rain. I remind her how the neighborhood is going downhill, how at night there is the sound of cockroaches imitating humans making sex sounds with clenched jaws. The cockroaches go and die somewhere else. Still she insists she won’t leave without a flag. You’re the one, she exclaims wordlessly. I can read it in her yesterday eyes that were once bluer. She still believes I could be HIM, if I could just polish my act. I keep telling her that I’m today with no future; my apartment is only walls and punched-in holes. I keep telling her that I’m a veteran of three wars and we’re still losing Avenue C to the bankers from gangrenous side-streets. I tell her I’m out of insecticide. I’m shaking an empty can. She doesn’t care about that.

_____________________________________________________

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and prose: Avenue C, Cat People, and Anime Junkie (Scars Publications). His latest e-books are You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press and The Truth about Onions from Good Samaritan. He lives and writes in New Jersey.
http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com

Image: Road, By Leigh-Anne Fraser

Not By The Hair

Not By The Hair
Natalie Parker-Lawrence

adrenaline gets me through.  and showing up.  and instinct.  and serendipity.   and t-shirts and comfortable clothes.  i need sacred space for me and my book bag in the corner across from everyone else.  every mother of every boy i dated or married offered the same criticism about me: not warm, not sweet.  Their sons would agree except for under the sheets.

white medicine makes my temperature rise and burns off cancer and my youth.  the ob-gyn doctor says my body still wants to have a baby, but the oncologist says no, let’s jettison that body right into menopause.  the last time i weighed this much I had a baby the next day. take tamoxifen for five years.   then the cancer won’t come back.  maybe.  now the hair falls out in clumps in the bathtub. not growing back in furrowed flesh-rows unless the curls come in metal-gray and wolf-white and pubic-coarse.

my hair curled velcro-brown since birth, matted with sweat and mildew from riding my tricycle up and down memphis streets when i wasn’t talking to elvis, mr. green jeans, or mighty manfred, my best friend, the upside-down table in the playroom, its legs, his four hairy legs swimming in the air.

black before i went to mexico one summer, my hair covered my shoulders, made me vanish into its darkness. before that i vanished into the eight-inch scar that runs from under my right armpit to my wide nipple:  four surgeries and thirty-three rounds of radiation.  if you think of me as lopsided you might be right.  you might be looking too close.  you might be looking at, as my husband says, the cute one.

this month i vanish into the hair on my head that makes me look, as my mother says, haggard.  like the hooded gnarled, but not wiser, crone. i beg the stylist to put the blonde streaks back into my hair, to put the caramel back into my unflavored life.  the black hair provides a mask, the blond hair provides a frame to compete with the young writers, the ones with the natural blond, brown, and red hair who might understand a rapunzel allusion one day or see star wars for the first time this year. the ones who have never had a mammogram.  the ones who do not fear the machines which invite me to hold my breath for two hours every six months so that I can hold my breath for the next six months.

hurry up gets me through, gets work out on time and finished no matter when i start.  yeah, i can manufacture honesty about other people–their hair and their needy excuses about their writing every day all day.  able to look straight ahead naked in the mirror without flinching at the hoary changes, myriad over time?  any day.

_____________________________________________________

Natalie Parker-Lawrence, a writer since 1994, earned her MFA in Creative Writing (creative nonfiction and playwriting) at the University of New Orleans in 2010. Natalie Parker-Lawrence’s new full-length play, a collection of nine true-story monologues about insomnia, I Bet They’re Sleeping All Over America, won a spot in the first Women’s Theatre Festival of Memphis in August 2012, and is the season opener for Our Own Voice Theatre Troupe at Theatreworks, September/October 2012. The Just Passing By Theatre Company in association with The Morris Theatre Guild (outside Chicago) produced Bob War in 2011. Adelphi University (New York) produced Earlybirds in 2009. The Women’s Playwright’s Initiative staged a regional reading in Orlando, Florida of Upright Position in October 2008. Her other plays have been produced in Memphis theatres. Her essays have been published in The Barefoot Review, Wildflower Magazine, The Literary Bohemian, Stone Highway Review, Tata Nacho, Knee-Jerk Magazine, Edible Memphis, The Commercial Appeal, World History Bulletin, and The Pinch. She is the religion/spirituality columnist for Wildflower Magazine.

Image: Dryad, By Stephen Martin

Spinning

Spinning
Jackie Carlson

Her hands are much smaller with mine clasped around them. Our bodies are stiff, arms stretched out to full extension as we spin, fast, in a lopsided circle. Mom’s dresser tangled in jewelry swirls by then the patchwork comforter covering the bed, then the pink couch, and the doorway to the kitchen, back to the dresser. My eyes focus on her, she’s wearing a Winnie the Pooh nighty, it used to be mine. The pink fabric has almost faded to a white and the characters to a whisper of color, but it’s her favorite. Squished up into our combined fist and woven through our fingers is her blanket–yellow with tattered silk trim, dripping off the edge, Nunny; her blanket’s name is Nunny. We keep spinning. The new movie Titanic’s theme song, My Heart Will Go On, drones on in the background. It’s my new favorite song because our babysitter went to go see it with her friends but Mom told me I was too young for that– maybe when I’m older. As we spin, I let go of her grasp causing her to lose footing and fall to the ground. She stays down for a minute, but then smiles and get’s back up. She’s only four, I’m six. She pulls herself up and grabs on to my hands again, leaning to the right to start spinning. My eyes fill with water and tears begin to pour down my exhausted cheeks. What would I do if she went down and never got back up?

_____________________________________________________

Jackie Carlson is a student at SUNY Cortland. She loves reading, eating, writing, and laughing.

Image: Rose, By Leigh-Anne Fraser

Guesswork

Guesswork
Benjamin Bouvet-Boisclair

My pen was quivering before I started to write. It may have been the Four Loko from last night that seems to carry a hangover of trembling hands; or, maybe it was my own plain shakiness when writing in public, at a desk, in class; or, it may have been my system being nervous about writing about a place I’ve never been to– her place. She called it her ‘loft.’ I bet it looked like her wardrobe– that worn forest green color she wore too often; it probably looked like music, like John Brown’s Body. It probably looked disorderly with a tint of clean. She probably draped some curtains over the window–curtains her mother probably made. I imagine, they might have been an ugly maroon no one but I would have liked. Her nightstand was probably stacked with borrowed books. She might have had an ashtray, but probably for things other than ash. Things like fortune cookie papers, pretty marbles, or change. It probably smells like her back does in the mornings. Blankets seem to peel our skin for their own. Every night I sleep alone I am reminded of how she and I smelled together: like a live acoustic band, something raw and ready and clawing for nothing but stillness about it. I still haven’t washed my bed sheets; I think it’s because I like to hold onto things that are already gone. I still have that bottle of shitty wine, two glasses stained from cold hot chocolate, and her tea mug. I haven’t washed it– sometimes, I drink water from it. It still clings to an after taste of vanilla chai.Then again, I don’t listen to Bon Iver or Mumford and Sons anymore, because I can’t. I bet that’s what she plays on her CD player. It probably sits on a bookshelf, near her bed. And yes, I’m guessing she has a CD player. But, this is all guesswork anyways; I don’t have any real answers.

_____________________________________________________

Benjamin Bouvet-Boisclair is currently a SUNY Cortland undergrad student working towards a Professional Writing degree. When not writing he is playing board games with enemies, shooting hoops, or doing magic tricks for invisible crowds. He lives in Cortland, New York, inside of a small room with a big couch.

Image: Unfolded Wing, By Leigh-Anne Fraser

Blue Dress

 

Blue Dress
Clara Brown

She looks like superwoman. She could be wearing a tight blue and red spandex outfit, black painted on boots, blue cape blowing in the wind like her hair. I see her posing, looking off to the horizon. She just might be superwoman.

She is wearing a turquoise dress, a wrap around that hugs her breasts and buttocks. The kind of dress that Fred likes. The kind he wishes I would wear but that I wouldn’t fill out quite as well. Maybe her upper arms are just a tad bit flabby. A tiny—okay barely there—roll around her waist line. Her heels are high and spikey, another plus on Fred’s list. She is tall or maybe it is her shoes that make her look tall. She has good posture.

Her hair is long and black, probably dyed. It flows down to her shoulders perfectly. It is parted on the side. She has a salon tan, maybe two or three weeks’ worth. Her teeth are bleached white. Her eyes are large and white and bright. She has a botox forehead and although her face has no wrinkles, I don’t think she has gone the surgery route. Maybe something but not that. Her neck looks a few years older than her face. She doesn’t have a lot of expression other than a perpetual smile.

Fred describes her to a friend. You know, the woman in the blue dress. Like everyone will know exactly who that is.

I’m finishing my salmon when the MC tells everyone to find that special someone for the next song. She must have been his special someone at that moment, or maybe he didn’t hear the instructions. When I look up they’re both on the dance floor. I see him put the flat of his hand on her back, leading her towards the dance floor. She looks reluctant. They don’t dance long.

The flat of his hand on her back.

_____________________________________________________

This is Clara Brown’s first publication.

Image: Deconstructing Vogue,  By Leigh-Anne  Fraser

Epitaph

Epitaph
Robyn Macy

She found the unsent letters, browned, worn. They were entries from a time she only knew from textbooks. Broken script described years in quarantined barracks, now evacuated and immortalized in museums. She tried to trace the numbers, the ones etched in his notebooks, in his papers, on his skin; she tried to trace them back to where they came from. Nothing prepared her for the ghosts behind the gates, for the deafening silent cries of children only visible by the abandoned shoes left in the dirt. Standing where the letters were written, right where lovers and family were torn from each other, she cried. From the ruins she found gravestones. The numbers tattooed on their arms, that had become their identity, she realized, were nowhere found on their epitaphs.

_____________________________________________________

Robyn Macy, a Professional Writing Major at SUNY Cortland, is currently working at Time Out New York. She co-writes her school’s newly founded satire magazine, The Potato (http://cortlandpotato.tumblr.com/) and runs the Cortland’s radio station. She hopes you enjoy her very first (out of school) published piece.

Image: What Dreams May Come, By Stephen Martin