Every Age We’ve Ever Been

by Renee Reynolds 

We’d plowed deep into another night of beer, whiskey and chatter. It was two or three or four when the others had gone. There we sat, B and me, the last peopled table, swaying like child-sailors in dread of our imminent docking.
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Frayed

by Lindsay Redifer

I have a new zit. It’s wedged just under my nose, right on the skin of my upper lip, so it hurts when I talk. I want to pop it, but I know this zit. It will rip through my skin fiber by tiny fiber, and the pain will last for days. The smart thing to do is leave it alone, but I know I’ll attack it before too long.

I try not to think about the growing blemish on my face and focus on baby brother asleep in his crib. I can almost see him from my hiding place in my closet, but I can’t open the closet doors too much or else everything packed into the small space will tumble out. Before he was born my step-mother bought everything she could think of for a new baby boy and then bought it all again in a bigger size, claiming “he’ll grow so fast!” She spent Father’s money faster than ever while she was pregnant.

I put my hand in my pocket to feel the small objects floating around inside. A dried cherry, a small button, a balled up piece of napkin and a silver candy ball. I’m not sure which one will work; I’ll have to try each, but I need to be careful. This must look like an accident. Continue reading…

Le Coq Sportif

by David Foote

I am Dusautoir.  That is my name.  It is my considerable dishonor that before today I didn’t know I needed one.  If I thought of myself as anything it was as Dàshī, the maestro, king of a disputed kingdom.  I sat in my box at the market, enduring the wall eyed, frenetic squabbling of my neighbours, and watched as one by one they were removed.  Where were they taken?  Tiān ā, I knew little and cared less!

Soon only one other was left, and him I called duìshǒu, the rival.  Across from us we could see our guīfáng, the broody courtesans we both knew to be our birthright.  How I longed to cover them all, batter them with my wings, and crow my triumph to the heavens.  Only the bars between us kept me from scratching out my rivals eyes with my spurs.  My hour would come though, and during those long hot nights towards the end of summer, as the sleepy murmuring of my harem drifted across the narrow gap between my cage and theirs (exciting in me a fever I thought could never be quenched) the image of my duìshǒu’s bloody comeuppance is all that sustained me.

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Alpha

by Fei Wu

Henry crushes the remainder of his still-burning cigarette into the plush floral patterned carpet with his scuffed Italian leather shoes. He takes a deep breath in front of door number 666, and lets himself in. The door whirrs and clicks open, and Henry finds himself face to face with a topless teenager. She’s young, probably younger than both his daughters. There is cocaine residue beneath her nose. Her eyes are unfocused, her tits are small. She raises her bird-bone hand toward his face, and Henry flinches backward.

They’ve destroyed the suite. The yellow wallpaper has been torn into Plathian shreds, the air smells of blood and alcohol, the walls are pulsating with bass, and his boss – the treasury secretary of the Shanghai Train Bureau is sitting, draped in a sleek, brown, bear’s pelt amidst a pile of writhing young women, empty Mou Tai bottles, and 100 RMB notes. Henry tries to sneak into his room, the smallest room, unnoticed, but his boss is uncannily alert. He calls to him. Continue reading…

Lao Song’s Turtles

By Nicole Stanton

Lao Song lived in a small cottage by the Yangtze River where the crickets sing all day and night. It was a tiny cottage big enough for the old woman, her three turtles, and an orange her cat which she kept only because to send the cat away would be the same as sending away her fortune.

Lao was a very superstitious woman. She always ate her fish from the head to tail. She never cut her toenails at night out of fear of falling over the next day. Once she woke her husband after a dream, saying, “Wang, I dreamed of salmon. We are going to have baby boy.” Nine months later Lao brought their only son into the world. But that was all long ago. Long before the war took the boy’s life, long before the woman moved to the river with her turtles. Because Lao believed her turtles kept away evil spirits she was sure to always consult with them before making any decisions.

One day the old woman was picking tomatoes in her garden when a hen came to her gate. “That’s strange,” Lao thought, watching the hen, “who could be coming to visit me?” But when Lao looked to the small dirt road a girl appeared from behind a bend. She was a too old to be a girl but too young to be a woman. The girl’s skinny legs and feet were bare and her head was covered by a big straw worn by the village farmers. Continue reading…

Nine Ways to Eat a Watermelon

By Robin Silver

Cut in half, with a spoon, immersed in a wartime movie. The Great War is best, followed by Vietnam, but any will do. Hopefully, there will be at least one passionate kiss before you hit the rind.

Off a paper plate, sliced in triangles, fingers of your writing hand grasped around the green, the other hand under the table, to hide the discreet reserve of seeds.

Sucked through a straw placed in a hole carved with a penknife and spit into the trash can. Carefully, so as not to ruin the integrity of the rind. It is the best bong you’ve ever smoked.

In the fifth grade, on a class picnic. Jeremy, who everyone calls Germy, who sits across from you in math, tells you that if you swallow the black seeds a watermelon tree will grow inside your belly. You tell him that watermelons don’t grow on trees. It is years before you drunkenly make the connection between “seed” and something else, quite similar in size to a watermelon, growing inside your belly. Continue reading…

Mary

By Fei Wu

It has been six months since my epiphany.

On the morning of my conversion, I was staring at the sterile white linoleum that lines the floor of the underground lab where I spend my days, indolent in artificial light.

Mary, the peroxide-blonde office slut had ensnared me in a tiresome flirtation. She slid up to me that morning wearing too much lipstick and much more eye-shadow. She purred a greeting, and brushed her arm casually against mine. The smell of her overwhelmed me, it was rosy and rotten. Her scent distracted me from my work with its fetid desperation. I stared at her through my glasses; making sure the glare obscured my disgust, and forced a smirk that I knew would make her thighs twitch. Mary was puppyish in her devotion to me, convinced I was a genius, that my aloof exterior was a shell for a lonely, suffering soul. This was partly due to a bored manipulation on my part, I’d casually left some scribbled lines of maniac poetry on my desk for her to see, and she’d eaten it up. The rest of her delusion stemmed from a deep, almost dogmatic faith in clichés. Her cubicle was covered with inspirational quotes, some of which she had written out in painstakingly cramped calligraphy — because a personal touch is never too much!

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PROFIT

By David Foote

I am… that is, I was, a broker with Dalian Futures in Shanghai. I had a gorgeous 3 bedroom apartment in Century Park with wood floors through-out, views of the river and a hot tub in the ensuite bathroom. Bay windows like you wouldn’t believe and a pretty but boring, blue eyed bitch of a girlfriend. She wrote “Celebrity Image Consultant” under profession on her visa forms, and didn’t give a tupenny fuck how many kids in Guangzhou she’d sent blind hand-stitching her new gucci pumps. The jungle is no place for bleeding hearts after all.

If that all sounds like some gutless middle manager’s twisted wank fantasy… if indeed you should experience jealousy, do not panic. That is the reaction my lifestyle was intended to provoke. Every empire has it’s Nero after all. In the sage words of Axyl Rose, “nothing lasts forever not even cold November rain”. Continue reading…

A Story that Kills Dreams

By Ryan Carter

We were riding beside one another, cutting off traffic. He said, “I want to cut off a piece of your cheek and keep it in my pocket. I can carry it with me.”

He said, “I want to cut off one of your lips and keep it with me.”

I said, “Would you pull out my eyelashes?” He said, “What is the meaning of eyelash?”

I said, “After you pulled out all my eyelashes, you could blow dust in my face? You could tie me up in a chair, and throw dust through a fan, into my face?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Would you enjoy pulling out my fingernails with pliers?”

He said, “Yes, of course.”

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Serene: The Green Eyed Monster

By Darcy Fisher

The monster hides in the closet waiting for my lights to turn off because, at that time, it is not seen. Only felt in the winds of darkness, its green eyes peak through the slats defending its status and staring at me when I sleep.  Its big teeth bearing, sharp, as it rubs its bloated Buddha belly growling for my attention.

The monster was first sighted at the market hiding in the aisles of oranges in peak season. The apples stared violently, while customers picked the oranges over them.  “I was always chosen!” said the apples.  “We were chosen over any other since the beginning of man!” the apples muttered.  “Now I am the apple of their eye,” the oranges said with condescension and winked at the apples. The apples pouted, thick-skinned, wakened and bruised. The monster hid in the dark corner of the mom and pop fruit stand on Fu Min Lu laughing, and then vanished in the misty air of morning.

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