surely

 Liver

 

To be honest, I don't even want to taste the liver anymore.

To be honest, I don't even want to taste the liver anymore. ●

 

by Zeke Jarvis

Here it is on the menu again: liver. I’m flying down to this fucking guy just to have to rip out his liver like always. There’s no pleasure in the wind against my feathers, no thrill in the sudden dip to land on his body, chained helplessly to a rock as it is. It’s hard to remember even if, at some point, this was exciting. It seems like it must have been. Getting to rip out the liver of a titan, racing the other eagles and seeing who got to actually pierce the guy’s flesh, who got to swallow down the last chunks. It seems like it should have been fantastic. But however many days in, however many years in, I could go for a damn rat. Or a fish. Something that needs chasing and gives some variety in flavor.
     I know that I should be grateful. I’m a “chosen” one, I’m in stories. I try to tell myself that I’ll never have to worry about going hungry. But there’s no newness to it. No purpose. Sure, he screams and howls, but what does that get me? It makes me hate the guy, and I dig my talons in, but it’s not like there’s satisfaction in punishing someone who’s already beaten. And for what? He gave fire to some poor fuckers. That’s a big deal for some reason. Maybe the ability to fly makes me not get it. The poor fuckers are landbound, so I pity them.
     And here we go. I’m the second eagle today. To be honest, I don’t even want to taste the liver anymore. But I can’t not. I don’t have a viable alternative if I want to keep existing, so I open my beak, and I tear into it, choking it down. He screams and blah, blah, blah. Do you know what it’s like to be the instrument of someone else’s torture? It’s not fun.
     You’ll ask what the rest of my existence is like. If it’s so bad. The truth is, I don’t really remember most of it. He’s chained down with chains, I’m chained down with a mystic connection to this poor bastard. Think about that. He’s the one who stole fire; I’m the one who never gets a day off. I ask you: where is the fairness in that?

Zeke Jarvis (he/him/his) is a Professor of English at Eureka College. His work has appeared in Moon City Review, Posit, and KNOCK, among other places. His books include, So Anyway..., In A Family Way, The Three of Them, and Antisocial Norms. His website is zekedotjarvis.wordpress.com.


 Leverage

 

Your fingers clench as you pull—

Your fingers clench as you pull— ●

 

by Joseph Clegg

They keep turning the lights up. Four TV studio cameras are trained on your teenage face. Cradled in your right hand, slippery with sweat, is the handle of a yellow lever. Perched on an ejector seat, suspended over a swimming pool of gunge, is your maths teacher.
     The game show host repeats your name again. He’s said your name so many times today, it no longer even sounds like yours. The audience echoes his encouragement: dunk, dunk, dunk. Your teacher’s smirk wriggles into life. Can’t do it, can you, sonny? Course not, you can’t even bloody well count!
     You take the lever in both hands. Smile, the producer shouts. You’re on telly. Your fingers clench as you pull—

Mum has her lucky days, then she has these other days. So far you’ve mostly left her to her own devices. Sneaky peek at her bank balance now and then: once a month is okay, more than that is admitting you think she has a serious problem.
     But today you came down the arcade to collect her, because dinner’s been waiting near on an hour. Her eyes are captivated by glowing fruit, the one-armed bandit has her heart in his fist. Make her chuckle; that’s how you’ve always brought her back to earth. No matter what had happened, with her job, with Dad, you could draw one out.
     If we don’t get a move on, you tell her, that vindaloo will have grown up and moved to its own place. Mum does laugh, small and inside her mouth, but the lights keep swirling. You place a hand on top of hers as she nudges—

Work. That’s what you’re up to, whatever the weather. There’s a puddle on every tarpaulin, a frown on every face, and strong demand for the compactor. A queue backs out to the road, impatient folk with belongings to crush.
     You beckon the next customer into the layby, a frothing gammon in a Range Rover Sport who cries I didn’t have to wait this bloody long to see the Queen Mum’s coffin! As he hauls an ironing board from his boot, the new lad calls down to you, mousy panic on his drenched face. Hear that racket? And now he mentions it, you do. Metallic grinding, low but insistent. The lad winces like it’s hurting his ears.
     You climb the steps to the gantry, slippery steel under your feet. A coffee table has jammed the apparatus, ugly blighter with twirly-whirly legs. More cars are crawling into the yard, indicators ticking. No use dwelling, the compactor won’t stop by itself. Important we stay calm in minor situations like these, you remind the lad, as you lean past him to deactivate—

Your neighbour perches sideways at the well, winching. You’re in the field behind the social club. Her bucket swings under the weight of water, rising up with each turn she makes. Cool air and tick-tock of droplets. She won’t let you do it for her, never mind you’ve still got one good weight-bearing arm. If you want to help, you could always—she slows to a stop.
     When the project was announced you thought it was barmy. Village well restoration? Some politically correct madness the council dreamt up. You went and signed a petition against it. Accidental falls, anyone? Now you’ve sacked off quiz night to come down here and you don’t care who sees you, hanging round like a lemon.
     Your neighbour flip-flops across the road, her soles dusty, on a late summer evening when her garden is just clinging to life. With loving care she aims her watering can and drowns the lot. You tap the well bucket with a knuckle, wobble it on its chain, reach idly for the crank and rotate—

This is the one you want to stay in. Not only is it Christmas time but you’re living the dream. Throwing the switch on the town square light display. In the crowd beneath the stage is your glowing family. Wife, twins, new baby who has your mum’s eyes. Spots of wet snow on your toecaps.
     After the compactor accident, your mates nicknamed you the one-armed bandit. Well that’s fucking Werther’s Original, lads, you told them. Ten years on, here you are, a captain of industry in a season free of worries. Those don’t come round so often.
     When the countdown hits five, you smile, for real and for the local paper. GENEROUS DEPOT BOSS ILLUMINATES SPIRITS. Double-page spread, maybe? Four. Three. You remember maths lessons. Two. Easy once you know how, sir, this counting lark! One. You grab the handle and—

You hear the runaway train before you see it. Signal passed at danger, couple of miles up the line. Your twins play hopscotch on the tracks. The points flip back and forth, back and forth. You try to yank the lever to safety, but your youngest daughter clutches it, holds it stiff. Sweety, you shout, this ain’t a game. There’s no time to teach her what that means. You groan and strain, sweaty palm stinging. How did this little girl get so strong? All the sway you once had now dwells in her.
     She laughs, mineshaft deep, then releases. You stumble back. Cogs whirr, points pull straight. Train carriages growl past. A floodlight beams. Your children are chanting something too loudly for you to hear. One word, one single syllable, over and over. A trapdoor opens and you plunge.

Joseph Clegg writes stories, poetry, some things that might be both and some that are probably neither. He is an enthusiastic co-organiser of two literary critique groups in Amsterdam and a regular contributor to BRICK music magazine. His published pieces can be found at www.cleggjjg.com.


 The Scratch

 

...infinitesimal harbingers of doom were already coursing through her blood.

...infinitesimal harbingers of doom were already coursing through her blood. ●

 

by Jennifer Walker

With shock she noticed the scratch at lunch when she happened to look left while her arm was propped against the counter. It was two inches above her elbow and slashed straight across. Already it had scabbed, but badly, the scab puckered and raised, a jagged mass of ugly brown teeth. It hurt when she drew her finger across it, chips breaking off in pinches and stabs. Around it the skin pulled together rudely, swollen and inflamed, trapping underneath who knew what filth and horror.
     How could she have missed it? She tried to keep eating the schav she ate every Wednesday at one, but the soup turned to slime in her mouth. No one could eat at a time like this! Right before her eyes her own arm was starting to putrefy. Wait any longer and who knows how far it would spread. It was likely even now, as she rapped her fingers against the counter in uncontained anguish while the waiter doddered at her bill, infinitesimal harbingers of doom were already coursing through her blood.
     It wouldn’t do to stop at a hospital or urgent care. She couldn’t waste all that time waiting to be seen and she’d been thrown out of so many already. No, all she could do was run the three blocks back to her apartment and then take the stairs two at a time until she was gasping in front of her medicine cabinet, her reflection shuddering with every breath.
     “Now Myra,” she said to the quaking image, “slow is steady and steady is fast.”
     The image nodded. Isn’t this exactly why she’d taken all those first aid and CPR and crisis management classes? Wasn’t she the one in high school voted most likely to survive a pandemic? Hadn’t she devoted her life to the exhaustive study of caution? She always looked both ways and crossed on the green and not in between. She held the handrails going downstairs, put the bathmat down in the shower, washed her hands for at least twenty seconds, never talked to strangers, didn’t lean over wells, or out windows, or over ledges, or venture into caves or abandoned mine shafts. She never played in the trunks of cars, or large boxes, or old refrigerators, or piles of leaves. She never climbed trees, or forded rivers, or swam alone, or shared a drink or a snack. She never dived into a wave, or jumped off a dock, or swam under a waterfall. She never sky-dived or bungee-jumped or hang-glided or tried to do a backflip on a trampoline. She never even went on a trampoline. And she never, ever, ever walked by herself at night. She took a cab! So how could she have let something so simple as a scratch become her undoing?
     It must have happened the day before, on the train. There had been that woman with her dog. Myra always saw her on the train after lunch, the snarling beast in a kind of sling across her chest. She’d made a mistake that day, one of those asinine errors that are so stupidly inconceivable their discovery is like finding half a worm in your just bitten apple. Disorientingly appalling. She’d forgotten her hand sanitizer. So instead of palming the microbes of millions on the train car poles she tried to steady herself with a wide stance and slightly bent knees. It was not effective. Twice the train threw her back into the public radio tote the woman behind her clutched at her stomach, once it jolted her sideways into the tattooed bicep of the man on her right, and once the car twisted her around, lurching and turning at the same time, so that, despite her best bracing efforts, she slid up against the dog woman, the creature yapping and snapping the whole time, the woman throwing her free arm around the animal like it was a newborn baby.
     The whole experience had been so humiliating, and the amount of germ exposure so paralyzing, that all Myra could do was bolt off the train at the next stop and walk in a muttering daze until she found a drugstore with an entire aisle devoted to hand sanitizer. Even after she washed every exposed part of her body in the drug store bathroom, thrice, and bought two large and five mini hand sanitizers, it took another two hours of inspecting all the various soaps, and cleansers, and antiseptic washes before Myra had the fortitude to get back on the train and go home. No wonder she never found the scratch—she’d been wearing long sleeves!
     It had to be that dog. What else? She gave a last longing glance at her disinfectants, antimicrobial creams, and bandages of every size and shape, then closed the medicine cabinet. Before any of that she would have to find out about the dog. Did it have its shots? Could she have rabies? Or brucellosis? Or campylobacteriosis? Or leptospirosis? Or any number of named and unnamed infectious diseases with varying potentials for treatment? How much time did she actually have left?
     She burst out of her apartment and down the stairs, each jolt of her foot against the dingy concrete sending a warning throb through the scab so by the time she was back on the sidewalk speeding toward the subway her arm steadily ached. But only once she was on the platform, waiting for the post lunch crowd, did she allow herself a look. The scab was now dark, almost a greenish-black, and the skin around it bubbled red. She spun about, paced the platform, peered in every direction. And then there she was, just coming down the subway steps, light brown hair pulled back in a casual ponytail, leggings, smart sneakers, and a neutral top with long, flowing lines. The carrier was across her chest, sagging with its weight. Myra squeezed through the people around her, holding her scab to ease the pain.
     When she was just a few feet away, only one impervious commuter between them, she yelled, “Does your dog have all his shots? Did he get his rabies vaccine?”
     Myra had already thought about how she’d make the woman show her the rabies tag, as proof, or find out the dog’s name and its vet to verify at the source. She’d even removed her hand and lifted up her arm, twisting it so the scab was mostly pointed in the woman’s direction. There would be no escape from the specter of her dog’s crime. But the woman just looked over her shoulder, clutching her carrier protectively as if there was another vicious lady with a dog behind her.
     “No you! I’m talking to you.” Myra jabbed in the air toward the carrier, just missing the ear of the person between them.
     The woman hunched forward, stuck her chin out and mouthed, “Me?”
     That was when Myra saw the baby inside the carrier.
     She melted back into the post-lunch swell, let it carry her along the platform until she was lost in the push and press of dispassionate, bustling bodies, the roar of the emerging train erasing the shame of her mistake. So she was wrong. The woman looked just like the lady. Anybody could have confused the two. Myra stared at the thinned-out crowd, the woman blessedly gone, and even, actually, everyone else who had been there, just seconds before, gone, with new people slowly filling in their places. And there, just over by the graffitied advertisement for an antifungal ointment Myra new, for a fact, did not work, was the lady! The right lady. Dark blond ponytail, loose fitting top with light grey leggings, orange carrier slung across her front like a pageant sash. How had she mistaken her before? She raised her arm again, waving the scab like a battle flag.
     “Hey! Your dog scratched my arm. Or bit it. Does he have his—” But she stopped, still several yards away, when the woman lifted up a little baby, brought it to her shoulder, and started to bounce.
     Now people were looking at her, closing in, shaking their heads.
     “Back off lady,” one muttered.
     “Go home and take your meds,” said another.
     All Myra wanted to do was go home and take her meds, lots of them. She wanted her antiseptics and antibacterials and antifungals—that worked—and her vitamins C, D, E, and zinc. She wanted her warm compresses and epsom salt soaks, her magnesium and turmeric, her salves and tinctures and ointments and creams. Her arm felt full of gravel, dense and heavy, and when she looked at the scab, even in the dismal orange fluorescence of the station, it turned darker still and the skin around it pulsed purple and split. But she couldn’t treat it until she knew what to treat. Rabies changed everything! They’d have to see her right away in the ER then. They couldn’t kick her out.
     Now she moved through the packed platform, the low tremor underfoot confirming the soon arriving next train. There was barely any time left to find the lady before the horde would be sucked inside the cars and spirited away. She thought she saw her over there, and then there, and then around there, each permutation of long ponytail, decorous leggings, and colorful carrier a perfect match. But all they turned out to be carrying were kids.
     It wasn’t until she threw herself aboard the train in the last second, even as the doors were closing with their sinister sigh, that she realized she might have gotten it all wrong. The weight of her arm pulled at her neck and she began to feel dizzy. She looked around the train car, holding onto a pole with her good hand because she had a mini hand sanitizer in each of her pants pockets. Her vision blurred but it looked like there were two, maybe three women in the car who could be the one. She knew now none of them had dogs, knew every carrier like that in the world only carried babies, knew no dog ever had nor would be carried in a carrier like that. That’s why it must have been a baby that bit her. Could babies give you rabies? Why not? Especially if they hadn’t had their shots.
     She stumbled a little getting to the first woman, almost crashing into the sleeping baby curled up against her chest like a mealworm. The woman yelped and quickly backed away as Myra, in as decent a voice she could manage, asked the woman if the baby had had its rabies shot.
     “I have to know,” she said and tried to lift her bad arm so it could be seen. “Your baby bit me.” She didn’t waste time trying to chase the woman but spun around and leaned over the next one seated closest to her. “What about you? Did you get it its shots?”
     Embarrassingly Myra heard she was starting to slur her words. She was so dizzy now it was hard to stay standing on the swaying train and sweat was making it impossible to keep hold of the poles. The seated woman was suddenly gone and Myra dropped into her seat, exhausted. She tried to see where the women went but the car was very dark, like they had just entered a tunnel, and her eyes kept involuntarily closing.
     “Hey, hey,” said a woman close to her and Myra struggled to see. She had a long brown ponytail and a red and white striped carrier across her chest. She reached into it and took out a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff. “That arm looks pretty bad. I’m an ER doctor. Is it okay if I check you out?”
     “Is it rabies?” Myra managed. “I was bit by a baby.”
     “No,” the doctor said in a quiet, beatific voice. She gently laughed. “Not rabies. But I think it might be sepsis.”
     There were some gasps now, perhaps Myra passed out, or the train swung around and she fell off the seat, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t fazed by how her arm had gone numb or how she finally couldn’t see anything at all. Even the sudden sounds of scuffling and shouts, or the whine of a nearby defibrillator, didn’t raise concern. She was still stuck on the wonder of her new diagnosis. Sepsis. It had to be the most beautiful word she’d ever heard.

Jennifer Walker is a short story writer who grew up in a strange and unsettling place called the suburbs. Her stories can be read in recent issues of Eclectica Magazine, Five on the Fifth, and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine. She now lives in the Virgin Islands with her girlfriend, two dogs, and an untold number of increasingly suspicious roosters.


 Five Frequently Asked Questions About My Teeth

 

I never thought a dentist could keep them.

I never thought a dentist could keep them. ●

 

by Nora Ray

What do you do with them?

       You think I’m doing something gross. You assume I’m constructing a sort of Frankenstein or just put them in the unexpected holes of my body. Believe me, I do not.
     Every tooth I’ve collected is glued to a piece of paperboard, hanging on the wall. I look at them. I observe them the way people with aquariums observe fish. There is almost no difference. It helps me think. Some people sew. Some knit. I watch the teeth.

     Why do you collect them?

     My answers are never satisfying. I just like the way they look. I like teeth.
     Have you ever seen dozens of different people’s teeth on a piece of paperboard? They look like precious stones.
     You don’t know how amazing teeth are. They are unique, like fingerprints or snowflakes. The teeth I collect are abnormal, consumed by cavities, cracked. It makes them even more unique. Sometimes I spend hours staring at a tooth, thinking about the person who once had it in their mouth. What are they doing right now? Do they remember their tooth?

     When did you start collecting them?

     I love this question. It’s clear and thoughtful.
     Seven years ago. I was working as an intern in a dental clinic. I remember it was raining when I was extracting that girl’s wisdom tooth.
     After the girl left, the nurse asked me if I was going to keep the tooth. I never thought a dentist could keep them. I thought I had to incinerate it. I was so happy carrying it home.
     It fascinates me that a part of someone’s body—a stranger’s body—can belong to me, and everyone’s okay with that.

    What does your spouse think about your collection?

     She doesn’t think about the collection, I suppose.
     She thinks it’s odd I spend so much time around that piece of paperboard. Watching, thinking, touching.

     Don’t you think your hobby is weird?

     Not really. But…
     Sometimes I want to lick the teeth. Sometimes I want to put some under my pillow.
     These thoughts become obtrusive. But I don’t find them dangerous.

Nora Ray wanted to be a teacher, a doctor, an entrepreneur, a waiter, an astronaut, and, at some point, even an ichthyologist. So she became a writer to be everything at once. You can find her on X: @noraraywrites.


 Purgatorio Redux

 

Rejected from Heaven. Rejected from Hell.

Rejected from Heaven. Rejected from Hell. ●

 

by Suzanne Miller

Rosa stares down blankly from the shelf. She can only stare blankly, because Rosa has no eyes. The kitten she cradles lies stone still, never purring or pawing at the buttons on her dress. “Who am I?” she asks herself continuously, as if on repeat. “Where am I? Why am I here?
     “I believe I was once a bitter old woman, living alone with my tabby. Then somehow I was being unwrapped, exclaimed over, and set on display in this dismal hallway. Oh, that I could make sense of it all!” She silently despairs of her numberless days, unnoticed on the shelf. She can only despair silently, because Rosa has no mouth.

“Hmm…what makes up the essence of this one?” Cato studies his latest subject for any vestiges of her former humanity. He scratches his head, then, “Ah, a corpulent old birdwatcher! Pity, you’ve never done an honest day’s work. You must reflect on that, my dear.” Holding aloft a nectar-filled hummingbird feeder would really suit. “There, Lydia. Done. Into the box.”
     Rejected from Heaven. Rejected from Hell. Assessing these unrepentant venial sinners is all there is, all there will ever be for Cato the Younger now. He considers the endless procession of souls, earnestly analyzing each with great care. He is meticulous, sorely aware of the magnitude of the task he has been assigned. He unconsciously holds the self-inflicted wound that ended his days, as he remakes these once-mortals into tiny versions of their best selves. Cato imagines his pithy incarnations will pave the way to their eventual salvation, and possibly his own. It is satisfying work in its way, and he hopes his Creator might someday be moved by this ingenious work as They behold what he has wrought.

Rosa has sat upon this distressed pine platform for so very long. She is aware of a fine sheen of dust settled over her, growing ever-woolier as time drags on. She struggles to recall what came before. “Did I not once have the power of locomotion? Of speech? Think, Rosa. I fear there is something more I should know. Something I must do.”
     Interrupting her somber meditation on the true meaning of eternity, a faceless girl clutching a bird-feeder is carelessly deposited beside her. Startled, she strains to glean more about her shiny new shelf-mate. A fleck of tissue paper still clings to a strand of twine, a “Willow Tree” sales tag dangling from her upraised arm. That brand name, it jogs a distant memory. Rosa goes back in time, remembering the solemn gaze of a man with a blood-soaked hole gaping open in his abdomen. She shudders imperceptibly as she hears his words, as if he was before her now.
     “Rosa, Rosa. So much pride and envy. And to what end? Your sins are so much smaller than mine—had you but felt remorse enough to repent, you would be enjoying eternal glory. Ahh, but here we are. Perhaps it is still not too late. I can see your devotion to felines at least, was quite commendable.” And just like that, she lands immobile in a bed of decorative wrap, a blank-faced cat on her lap and a “Willow Tree” tag tied to her neck with twine.

Suzanne Miller is a retired attorney, and flash fiction/essay writer who aspires to move beyond her spare style and someday pen a full-length novel. She has most recently published pieces in CafeLit, The Rumen, and Krazines/Moss Piglet.