Month: November 2017

I ran into a family acquaintance on a whale tour. She was wearing binoculars around her neck.

She said: what happened to you? I heard you became a homeless junkie in the city or something, that you’re a prostitute at the side of the road – someone even told me you OD’d.

And I said: yes, it’s all true.

She pouted. Well, you don’t have to be rude, I was just kidding. People your age have no sense of humor. Your parents, they were funny.

We had just left the harbor in Cabo San Lucas. The rules were simple: no swimming, no feeding, no touching. The whales needed space.

She continued. Seriously now, I heard you gave birth to a stillborn and that’s why you went crazy, got addicted to painkillers, stopped eating. And I’m not one to judge, OK? People have stories, even though I was never a junkie person, but you never know, I still have time. She laughed, almost snortled.

I fiddled with my life jacket.

She said: you don’t talk much now, I can tell. You used to smile a lot, remember? You and the Kirshner boy, like dolphins in love. Are you on vacation? With him? She looked around.

There were no whales in sight.

She brushed my shoulder with her fingertips. Well anyway, that’s nice. A bit of sun. You look so pale and skinny. Hey Isaac! Isaac! Come meet someone special! That’s my bar mitzvah boy, the youngest; you’ve never met him, it was after you left town. He wanted to go whale watching for his birthday, and now I meet you here, what a surprise—Isaac, come!

Nobody came.

She rolled her eyes as if a tornado passed through her brain. Well, he’s probably busy watching whales, he’s obsessed with them, wants to be a whale vet – can you imagine that? A Jewish whale vet? I’m not one to judge, but Abe and I hoped he’ll be a bit more—more—Oh my god, here’s a whale!

She cemented the binoculars to her face. You have to see this.

I didn’t turn around. Instead, I went to the other side of the vessel and took off my life jacket. Then I heard a splash. It was a boy. A perfect redhead boy. Floating on his back alongside the whales. Happy.

Noa Sivan was born and raised in Israel and is currently living in Granada, Spain. She is a graphic designer and a writer. Her stories have been published in Jellyfish Review, (b)OINK zine, Ellipsis Magazine, FRiGG, and others.

Timmy T. puked into the toilet bowl and saw carrots. “Huh,” he said, pushing his fingers through his hair. He never ate carrots. Never once.

In the bar, Maude was ready to kill him or kiss him. “You’re a twat,” she said. “A complete and utter…” 

She pulled him up close by the scruff of his Lacoste. “Go.”

Timmy T. went, lifting a finger. Funny, because Timmy T. adored Maude.

That night was a big kebab. Oily. With uncalled for hard bits. The hard bits you pull from your teeth.

Timmy T. loved the smell of exhaust fumes. He loved the way it made him feel: lightheaded and queasy. He loved Maude more than anything, but he loved fucking cars, too, which was the roadblock.

 “You fuck another car, Timmy T….”

 He did. He fucked another one. A Volkswagen Beetle, the new kind. Pulled down his pants and put his dick in the exhaust pipe. Kneeled because the pipe was so low.

The night was a big, wet, sloppy portion of curry with chips. It was the carrots in the puke, slimy and orange. Painted onto the sky, under his eyelids. He loved Maude. He loved the slight heat of the pipe. He loved the rocking of the car frame, the give of the wheels, the way Maude used to flick her nails on the soft skin between his balls and bum hole.

He would grasp the car lights and rest his face on the rear window.

Sexual intercourse.

 Timmy T. stomped back to the bar.

Maude was sucking a toothpick. She had a Mai Tai and a bag of crisps, spilled on the bar. She had half-crossed eyes, and knees so skinny and shiny, it broke his heart all over.

“Avoid random spaces,” she said, looking at his left ear or beyond his left ear, concentrating.

Everything about her was concentrating.

“What do you mean?” said Timmy T., sliding in next to her.

He was thankful, therefore his question was soft.

“You heard me,” said Maude.

Jonathan Cardew’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, Superstition
Review, JMWW, Smokelong Quarterly, People Holding, and Atticus Review, among others. He’s the fiction editor for Connotation Press, contributing books reviewer for Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and interviews editor for (b)OINK. He’s been a finalist in the Best Small Fictions, the Wigleaf Top 50, the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and he won a travel toothbrush once at a boules competition in northern Brittany. Originally from the UK, he lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

His body was especially beautiful naked: lean, hard curves of muscle along his shoulders, the taut slope of his back, sprawled limbs across tangled sheets. She studied the way the squares of light from her bedroom window illuminated the red undertones of his hair. He was perfect, even with his neck broken.

She hadn’t meant to. Hadn’t known she was capable of it, even on accident. But she also hadn’t realized, until an hour ago, that she really was the woman of her husband’s accusations, the kind of woman who’d let her new neighbor corner her into bed. She’d spotted him across the dim-bulbed hallway, pushing a bookshelf through his front doorway, and let him catch her eye. Thinking: her husband would notice the neighbor soon enough, would build his own theories around the square of the man’s jaw and the quickness of his smile, and would take his jealousy out on her, using his imagination as evidence and his hands as judge and jury. It wouldn’t hurt her any worse to look a little. To admire the newcomer as he crossed the hall and leaned against her doorframe. To let him breathe flirtations in her ear. Gentle. Different.

But then he’d put his weight behind that old expression, being forward, each kiss a nudge in the bedroom’s direction, her retreating half-steps as small as she could make them, staying faithful until she’d felt the mattress hit the backs of her thighs. She imagined how it had looked from above: the knight’s angled pursuit, the queen’s slow gambit through the grid of the apartment, allowing herself to topple. Afterward, after they’d climbed back out of bed, she’d twisted her ring around her finger—a thin, cheap band, easy to miss except when it was the only adornment on her body—and felt the alarm hammer of her heart clanging at the edges of her rib cage. She’d lied to herself, let things go too far. She’d told him he had to leave. Now, she’d told him, and kept twisting that wedding band. He’d lunged at her. Not so different, after all, from the men she’d spent a lifetime loving and hating in turn.

She hadn’t flinched or cowered, the way she did with her husband. As if, after so many years, her body had lost the capacity to move backward and forward. Instead, diagonal: a sidestep, her fingers gripping his hair and his temples pulsing between her palms and the heels of her hands against the edges of his eye sockets, and then a desperate, twisting motion as she’d flung him toward the bed, away from her. The crack as his skull collided with the headboard at the wrong angle. The odd, painful L-shape of his neck. And now she leaned against the nightstand, her body as naked as his, though far less beautiful, her hands clasped behind her back, no longer trustworthy.

She heard, too soon, the front door open and shut. Heard the jangle of her husband’s keys as he tossed them into the dish. Heard his whistle—jaunty, quick-tempoed—and knew how quickly those notes would sour as soon as he bulled his way into the bedroom.

Her hands found the nightstand drawer, opened it, fumbled until they grasped the scissors she kept there. The window’s light dappled across the bedsheets. In the other room, her husband’s movements were as slow and deliberate as a king’s: one step at a time, in any direction. He paused, called her name. Started whistling again, took a step toward the bedroom. Thirty more seconds before his tune would change. Half a minute. She clenched the angled blades against her spine and waited.

Rachael Warecki’s fiction has previously appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Masters Review, Midwestern Gothic, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere, and she received a 2014 Best of the Net nomination for flash fiction. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Antioch University Los Angeles, has previously attended the Tin House Writers Workshop, and was selected as a 2017 Emerging Voices Fellow at the Wellstone Center. She is currently (perpetually) at work on a novel. More information is available on her website.

His voice went sing-song when he threatened me. “Don’t you mess with those horses, now. Those horses are wild. They’ll stomp you into jelly.” He was on the porch and I was in the yard, squatting in the hot dirt. His whiskey smelled like burnt wood, so I scuttled back underneath the house through the crawl space.

I wasn’t messing with the horses. Never did. I was prospecting, my knees bent for hours underneath the groaning floorboards of the house we lived in that summer. Below the house was sand and buried in the sand was gold. Gemstones. Precious things buried long ago by someone who needed to hide her jewels. I knew what it was like to hide.

I used a pie tin poked through with holes to sift the sand and find the treasure. Bracelets, necklaces, brooches, rings. Each new trinket I would spit-shine, rubbing my dirty fingers in circles over each gritty piece until I could judge what I had. Some of it was plastic. Some of it wasn’t. I hid all of it, stuffed in my pockets so that he wouldn’t see, so no one could see.

I imagined where the jewelry had come from. From a belle, newly married. She could hear the drumming of the march, the beat of disciplined bootsteps. The sound of men approaching. It was just her there, her husband off fighting the war. She knew there would be gunshots, fire. Worse. She ran into the yard while it was still dark and buried her jewels, hoping she’d make it back for them but she never did.

Sometimes girls disappear.

Back out in the sun, I turned away from the empty porch and surveyed my haul. Black beads, plastic. A necklace, silver with a reddish gemstone. Carnelian, the color of dried blood.

I wasn’t doing anything bad when the horses jumped their fence. It wasn’t my fault they were wild, that their splintered fence needed patching, that they could easily escape into our yard lined with apricot trees. The air was sick with fruit, heavy with sweet.

I heard them before I saw them, two dozen hooves pounding on the sandy soil, a rumbling train coming up behind me. And then they were there, around me, and it was calm again. There was a mockingbird drilling, the shimmying of leaves in the breeze. The horses nickered and swished their tails as they pulled the apricots off the snapping branches.

It felt like magic. Like a blessing. Why shouldn’t they eat the fruit? Why shouldn’t they flee the men who meant to break them?

He was already coming down the steps when I heard him.

“Don’t you move,” he said. He looked at the horses and he looked at me. He stopped on the bottom step and crossed his arms. “What have you got in your pockets?”

Kristin Bonilla’s fiction appears in Cleaver Magazine, NPR: Three Minute Fiction, NANO Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, online at Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She’s an associate flash fiction editor at jmww. Read more at http://www.kristinbonilla.com and @kbonilla.

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