It is the middle of the seventh inning when fans at Dodgers Stadium stand up to sing “God Bless America” and the baseball diamond below becomes only dirt and grass. Energy travels up, past rows of people stuffing popcorn bags and Pepsi bottles under their seats, biting the last bits of pretzel—in thirst—and as they reach for the notes to send “land of the free,” two young boys do not stand. Two teenage fans will not get up from their seats, even as their rehab counselor, Mr. Seismore, throws a peanut shell at them. They will not budge from their Dodger blue seats.

Miles Kim, rolling a shirt sleeve up and down, thinks to himself: Is there a God worth blessing? His best friend Bogdon dumps the rest of his Diet Coke on the concrete steps of Row 34, Section D, and the ice cubes quickly melt; and though it’s a brisk April night, the crystalline blocks turn to guitar pics: wedge slivers glistening from stadium lights—before getting crushed. A tan Timberland boot has arrived, and it kicks the base of Bogdon’s seat.

“Get up and sing, God dammit!” says the man in Tims.

Bogdon looks down; he looks back at the face; and he hears the fans singing around him; cat-eye-clocking the mild commotion are dozens of people with peripheral glares. All murmurs and head-bobs in the boys’ direction. They are singing: “From the mountains…to the prairies” and Bogdon wonders if a ravine is closer to a prarie or amountain; whether he should’ve paid more attention in geology. Is it too late to jump off a Chavez Ravine?

Bogdon stands up and removes his Dodgers hat—opens his mouth, in time to sing the last refrain: “My home… Sweet… home.”

The man in Tims nods and smacks his lips, cluck, and for a moment, he’s satisfied. Then he turns down to Miles, who is still sitting next to Bogdon, still fidgeting with his left sleeve, oblivious to the baseball diamond and the organ music.

“And you. What’s your excuse!?!” says the man.

Miles looks up.

Toilet brush bristles for hair, Miles thinks, and the man looming above does have spiky white hair, serrated forehead with wrinkles jagged toward the brow—encased in a stare. He’s an older man of 65, and his pinkish face has a fast steam rising.

“We died for your kind, boy. Now stand!”

“I was just pledging allegiance to the flag. Wanna see?” Miles unrolls his left sleeve. He stretches out his arm to reveal the cauterized letters he spent Innings One through Seven carving into his forearm: God Bless Am—the serrated end of his house-keys bloody.

“Jesus, fucking Christ! You sick little fuck!” the man squeals, shimmying past popcorn, past peanuts and cracker jacks. Dozens of stadium eyes agape at first, then turning away. It’s the top of the eighth inning, and the dirt and the grass have returned to a diamond.

And the Braves’ turn at bat.

Jamez Chang’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Underground Voices, Bartleby Snopes, FRiGG, Prime Number, Melusine, and Gone Lawn. After graduating from Bard College, Jamez went on to become the first Korean-American to release a hip-hop album,Z-Bonics (1998), in the United States. Visit: www.jamezchang.com

After the burial, walking with head bowed through the grove of tombstones, thinking on the eternal verities like ashes to ashes etc., I saw something on the ground that looked like rolled up paper money.

So many times I’ve bent down to pick up a quarter that turned into the foil from a medicine bottle. Still I bent over and picked it up. 32 dollars rolled up in a rubber band, 2 tens, 2 fives, 2 ones.

Was I smiling now? Yes. Could I have shucked my somber mood so easily? Yes again. I was a survivor on my way to a feast, a celebration of my friend’s life, and to top it off I had just received an unearned dividend, 32 bucks that I decided to spend on a wine suitable for the occasion to toast our departed friend.

We left him behind in his coffin, and went on to eat and drink, offer condolences, crack jokes, flirt with the women, and go on savoring life’s many pleasures. At the wake Old Farley got roaring drunk, fell off his stool and cracked his head on the corner of a table. As he rolled in pain someone joked that if he kept doing that there would soon be another wake, another chance for Old Farley’s friends to get drunk.

Next day I woke up with a hangover and a woman in my bed. I had known Marie for years, but we had never done this before. Do not think that we had forgotten about Bernard. He was in our thoughts and whispers the whole time. This was all about the fact that Bernard was dead and we were not.

Only then did I remember that I had forgotten to buy that 32 dollar bottle of wine.

I took Marie out for a sumptuous breakfast. She told me how she had met Bernard. She came into her chiropractor’s waiting room where Bernard sat weeping. “Have you heard?” he cried. “Someone shot John Lennon. He’s dead. Just like that. Blown away.” Marie burst into tears and put her arms around him. They stood there weeping in each other’s arms. After their spinal adjustments they went to his place and made love.

We clinked our coffee cups and toasted Bernard. I told Marie a Bernard story of my own. When we were high school students, all those years ago, drunken Bernard, who almost never drank, drove his friends straight into a tree, slamming shut their song and laughter. His girlfriend died on the spot. He vowed never to drink again, but this resolve morphed into a pledge never to drive when drunk, and this too slid over time into no driving on more than one drink. This much he held to along with his lifelong remorse and ever deepening melancholy. His off-road drinking grew to epic proportions.

After breakfast Marie and I went to a florist shop. I snapped the rubber band off my 32 dollar roll and laid the money on the counter, telling the florist, “We want a 32 dollar bouquet.” We selected flowers till the florist told us we had reached our limit. Then Marie said, “I want Bernard to have these roses too,” and chipped in another 15 dollars.

We took our bouquet to the cemetery to place on the grave. Bernard’s widow, Helen, was there with Bernard’s brother, Ashton, spreading flowers on the grave. She was moved to tears by our gesture and took turns hugging us. I had never hugged her before. I was surprised how her firm slender body and sweet aroma aroused me. I felt a stirring in my groin and broke off the hug before it could become noticeable.

As I watched the two women hug, I flashed on the idea that we could take her home and make love to her. You know, the old tradition of consoling the widow. Custom assigns that role to the dead man’s brother. That would be Ashton, not me, and anyway it was way too soon.

It was a much discussed fact that the wife and the brother had visited Bernard every day in the hospital. It made me wonder if she had been receiving consolation even before she was widowed. It seemed altogether possible that Bernard, aware of his approaching demise, had encouraged them.

I gave Marie a lift home. She invited me in and we went straight to bed. Three months later we were married. As for Helen and Ashton, they waited a decent interval, more than a year, before they married.

Bob Brill is a retired computer programmer and digital artist. He is now devoting his energies to writing fiction and poetry. His novellas, short stories and and more than 100 poems have appeared in more than two dozen online magazines, print journals, and anthologies.

John Patrick sat on his sofa and contemplated the tusk. He massaged his kneecaps, sucked his knuckle. The tusk was long, white, and curved. The tusk stabbed straight through his coffee table. Previously, John Patrick learned of how manatees are gaining tusks by means of evolution. Elephants of the sea. There could be no mistake, he thought, this tusk had been sent from the future, a manifestation of evil deeds not yet committed.

Pete Stevens is the Fiction Editor at Squalorly. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cardinal Sins, The Legendary, 101 Fiction, Eunoia Review, Prime Number, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere. He lives in Bay City, Michigan.

Andy was supposed to write an essay on ending world hunger. He went to the library to do some preliminary research.

For the past few days, he had sat around hating all the hungry people of the world.

“I hate hungry people,” he grumbled. “Adapt to eating dirt or just die already. There’s plenty of dirt. There’s nothing wrong with dying. Either way.”

At the library, he found the most obese books available on the topic; he didn’t put them in his backpack, but carried them in his arms so that he wouldn’t have to hold any doors open for any of those gross anorexic chicks with the hollow cheeks and flat asses.

It’s such bad timing when someone is walking just at the right distance behind you so that it’s impossible to get away with not holding the door open for them.

And of course it’s nearly always an anorexic chick.

Andy stopped by a coffeehouse. He asked the barista for the most fattening thing available.

“Um, that would probably be, like, a mocha made with half-and-half with whipped cream on top,” she answered.

“Is that good?”

“I don’t know,” she said, making a sour face, “I’ve never tried it.”

“Why not?”

She laughed. “Because…that’s kind of disgusting.”

“Well, that’s what I want,” said Andy, belligerently.

“Okay. Is that everything?”

“And a big chocolate muffin.”

Andy found a table in the corner and spread his books out all over; that way no one would be tempted to join him.

He ate his muffin and drank his mocha slowly, keeping an eye on the pretty barista, scrutinizing her seemingly healthy breasts and backside.

Peter Clarke is a recent law school graduate currently living in Sacramento, California. His short fiction has appeared in Pif Magazine, Curbside Splendor, Hobart, Elimae, Locus Novus, Denver Syntax, Pure Francis, The Legendary, Zygote in My Coffee, and elsewhere.

Aunt Bianca treated her nails as though she were a typist, as though the sound of her nails against the keyboard was important to the harmony of the world, but she didn’t work. She kept her nails filed perfectly and painted them the same red color every Sunday morning before church, taking the previous coat off first before applying the paint again. When she looked at them, each nail aligned with the other, they used to scare me.

If I wanted to be close to Aunt Bianca, I had to be close to those bread knives at the end of her hands. When I held her hand, they dug in, creating half-circles in my skin. When I laid my head on her lap while she watched TV, they’d pop my pimples during the commercials, inspecting my pores. When she did my hair, they scraped the scalp as she wove the locks into braids.

They were sharp and precise, and I don’t ever remember them breaking except for one time when Aunt Bianca picked me up from school.

I was in middle school and had decided Chase Murphy was the boy I was going to marry, even though he didn’t know my name yet. He was tall and had red hair that he spiked up. He always wore button-up shirts with ties and his brother’s old letterman jacket. Chase was a part of the football team, honor society, and debate team. He never spoke up in class, but teachers left him alone because he always got straight A’s. He was perfect.

I had joined the debate team just to be near him, though I wasn’t very good at it. We met after school every Thursday, and often Chase and I were the only ones left waiting for our parents in the afternoon. We’d sit on the grass on the side of the building and do our homework in silence. I’d count the spikes in his hair when he wasn’t looking.

One afternoon he caught me. “You want to touch them?” he asked, pointing to the spikes.

I nodded.

He stood up and walked over.

I stood up too and touched the spikes. They weren’t as soft as I had thought but hard from too much hair gel. I pulled my hands away and looked at the sticky substance on my fingers.

“My turn,” he said. He pushed me into the brick wall, and I felt his erection against my legs. His whole body covered me up in shadow so no one could see me from the street. His hands went up my blouse. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. His hands moved lower.

Aunt Bianca’s cutlass nails dug into Chase’s shoulders and collarbone, and she threw him with momma grizzly force onto the ground.

“You ever touch her again, and I will kill you,” she said calmly.

She put an arm around me and practically pushed me to the car. I looked at my fingers. Gel stuck under a fingernail.

Aunt Bianca sat in the front seat and drove us home. Turning the steering wheel, she noticed her hands. “Damn it,” she said. “Damn bastard broke my nail.”

I wanted to say I was sorry, that I didn’t mean for that to happen, that the nail would grow back. But I didn’t. I looked at the back of her seat and thought about the rough spikes, working to get the gel out from under my fingernail. I reached too far, and my finger bled under the nail.

When we got home, Aunt Bianca sat me at the table and gave me some orange juice. I choked. “What is this?”

“Knox gelatin powder and orange juice.” She put her nail file, buffer, and nail polish on the table next to me. “It’s time you got yourself some claws,” she said.

Mandy Alyss Brown earned her BA in English at Texas State University. Her poetry and fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Bartleby Snopes, 4’33″, The Stray Branch, Extract(s), and more. Mandy is the Managing Editor for eSteampunk and loves being a work-at-home mother. Follow her progress at mandyalyssbrown.weebly.com.

Simon browses sawgrass. Cricket snorts the bank. Then, Flipper! Cricket rushes. Then, Zoe! poodling hysterical. Tension from Flipper’s mother stains the air. Danger syrup. Simon nods to Zoe’s mother. Elderly stalk of wild cotton. Flipper whimpers as Zoe circles away and back. Neck hairs electrify. “Zoe No!” snaps Flipper’s mother. Zoe’s mother surveys trees. Rotting broccoli mountains. Flipper yelps when Zoe bites her hard on the haunch. Simon imagines a Gaullish plain, a trip of wizened goats herded by a sepia version of Zoe. But the unofficial dogpark has no time for history. “Goddamnit, Brenda! How many times have I told you to train your dog?” Circling, Zoe bites Flipper hard again on the leg. “No! Stop, damnit!” Flipper curls supine as his mother kicks the poodle whose mother shrieks. Simon steps back. “How dare you kick my dog.” “Brenda! For the last goddamn time, train your animal.” “I’m never coming here again.” Zoe’s mother storms. Simon drifts to the last time a woman that age cried so public rough: the home before his mother passed. Homeward, memory burns a hole in his pocket. He flips it with a biscuit chip. Both disappear into Cricket’s maw. Aerial velocity. Common at the unofficial dogpark.

Michael Chaney is a native Clevelander, an academic in New Hampshire, a writer in Vermont, and a walker of a dog named Vegas. When less spatially confused, he works diligently on a novel about the absurdities of the pharmaceutical industry.

Nathalie came home and they kissed, and it was that kind of a kiss. He had been horny: it was the AIDS test’s and peeing in cup’s fault. But what had she been doing, thinking? He didn’t ask. He got off one of her gloves. She walked over to the closet. He stopped working. He stood and said: I want to fuck you. She smiled and hung up her coat. He got onto their bed and started to undress. She lit a candle and turned off the other lights, leaving only the candle and the blue of his computer’s screen. He touched her; she pressed herself into him, moaned. They took off the rest of their clothes and what was amazing him, what he was thinking about was this: Not ten minutes ago she wasn’t here, wasn’t in this room, in their bed, naked. They had lived their ten hours of respective day and then bang, now, he’s naked too and on top of her and under her and inside of her, having sex with her after all those hours and all those thoughts and all that life of solitary, womanless time. In forty minutes, give or take, he’ll be back at his desk and she’ll be napping, stealing glances at him from beneath their blanket, a little smile on her lips, wondering when he’s going to start to make their dinner.

Kevin Tosca’s stories have been or will be published in Midwestern Gothic, Thrice Fiction, Fleeting, Umbrella Factory and elsewhere. He lives in France. Read more at www[dot]kevintosca[dot]com

Because the kitchen is underground, reception is spotty. If she wedges her phone between the dill and coriander she can get two, maybe three bars.

I don’t speak much Spanish, but I think “Me gusta cheesesteak” roughly translates to “I’m hungover.”

For a brief moment, when I go down to grab table 6’s order and I see the way she glances between the dill and coriander, Yolani and I transcend language to form a sisterhood.

The man I slept with last night also has yet to call or text me.

Roth is an advertising assistant in Midtown and writes most of her fiction on a bus inside the Holland Tunnel. Her work has previously appeared in Full of Crow Quarterly Fiction and The WiFiles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I smiled.

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

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

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

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

With me.

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

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

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

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

I do not know what became of her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your book? I just love Frank Norris.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you.” He was near tears.

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

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

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

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