​ 
Trail Blazer

Two thousand miles done.  The old man has dangled his legs over the ledge of McAfee Knob, feasted his clouded blue eyes on the flaming red sunset, clambered the Dragon’s Tooth pathway to the snowy peak of Cove Mount, looked down from Clingman’s Dome on a dizzying ocean of mountains, the treetops rolling beneath him like waves.  

He has camped in bunkhouses with skiers, hikers, hunters.  Slugged whiskey and traded tales with young men a quarter his age, of his lifelong adventures – trekking the Camino de Santiago, hiking the Te Araroa, scaling the Great Himalayas.  Now, with less than two hundred miles to go to vanquish the Appalachian Trail, the old man is tired. 

He has lost sight of the bright blue arrows painted on the bark of the luminous white pines.  A foolish thing to do at dusk, as any rambler knows, but so, so tired, the old man sits down to rest at the foot of a tree.  The pack of the trunk is comforting against his aching spine.  Before long, he drifts off.  

In a pool of moonlight, a family of black bears ambles by.  One by one, they sniff the old man - a streak of gristle, a gut full of indigestion - then pad on.  Silently, into the cold, clear night.

**
​
Spread Your Wings

Hilda flies over strings of grey washing.  Sweeps over factories, scrapyards, towers of twisted mangles and rusty stoves.  She swoops over buttercup meadows dotted with toy cows.  The breeze carries Hilda high over the white cliffs of Dover.  Below the English Channel churns and ploughs, brown as a field.  

She floats into Paris.  The Eiffel Tower a bracelet charm; the Sacré Coeur an iridescent pearl; the sparkling Seine a diamanté chain.  She flutters above a pavement café, where a pair of mademoiselle sip haughty green cocktails, name-drop authors Hilda has never heard of.  Colette, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir.  

The mademoiselle point and laugh at Hilda’s frizzy perm, cheap jewellery, nylon gown with hem come down.  

Hilda lands with a thud on the hard cold cobbles.  Dream wings battered.

**

Diving Platform
 
The dusk breeze ruffling the frill of my swimsuit, my fingers tingling around a rickety rail, all around the sky reeling and swirling like a cauldron, a murder of crows calling from the darkening trees, my mouth filling with damp roots and bracken, and down, down below the trembling black water, a tangle of reeds twisting and writhing like Medusa’s hair.
 
**

Moving 
 
All that is left are a few cardboard boxes.  

“Not a bad day’s work,” he says.  

From the pocket of his corduroy slacks, he pulls his Swiss Army knife.  Liver-spotted hands trembling, he slices an apple in two, hands the larger half to his wife.  She smiles but says nothing.  

They sit next to each other, beneath the ash tree, on their golden anniversary bench – a gift from the family.  Through the branches, the evening light mottles the lawn with amber splashes.  White cabbage butterflies flit like confetti over the neat herbaceous borders.  The garden has never looked so lovely, but it is too large for them to manage these days.  As is the house. 

She thinks of all those years ago, when they planted the saplings, seeded the lawn, the sweat and toil it took her husband to dig the ornamental pond.  How quickly time has passed.   The children grown up so rapidly.  The street now full of newlyweds, people they barely know, some expecting their first child.  

“Did you remember to cancel the boiler insurance?” he says.

She nods.  Recalls their coal fire; flames dancing.  How they’d sit in their dressing gowns, sipping wine and laughing.  She’ll miss their home.  All their wonderful memories.  The dreams and plans they shared when they first married.  That sense of embarking on an endless journey together.  

And yet, she can’t escape the feeling that over the years something elusive has drawn steadily away from her.  Why is it, she thinks, that we didn’t – that nothing had – that whatever we -?  

**

Urban Pest
 
When Xander was satisfied that no one was looking, he vacuumed up a plump mauve pigeon.  He watched with glee, as the bird’s glassy pink eyes, sleek plumage, red taloned feet, disappeared down the gaping gullet of the Glutton 3.

Xander began whistling The Children of Piraeus. It was a bright sunny morning on Syntagma Square.  Bustling commuters flew out from the Metro; tourists perched for selfies on the edge of the sparkling fountains; a busker warbled away on the steps of the Parliament.  
 
In the distance, high on its rocky hill stood the Parthenon.  Glowing pink.   Magnificent, Xander thought.  He took great pride in his city and in his work.  If only the marble slabs of the Square weren't splattered with globs of emerald shit.

He set off on his rounds, dragging behind him like a faithful hound, the Glutton 3.  This model was phenomenal: ultra-lightweight carbon fibre suction pipe; two hundred and forty litre storage space; steerable front wheel for optimum manoeuvrability.  Cigarette butts, tin cans, plastic bottles, biodegradable waste – everything consumed and contained odour-free within its voluminous belly.   A little man, with little to show for his life, master of the Glutton 3, Xander  felt like Zeus.
  
Man and machine sauntered towards the perimeter of the Square, sucking up Styrofoam coffee cups, half-eaten baklava, discarded newspapers.  On the way, Xander surreptitiously scattered a handful of birdseed.  “Here, pretty birdies,” he cooed.  Soon, a throng of blue-grey pigeons gathered, greedily pecking the ground. 
 
Wh...oosh thump. Wh...oosh thump. Wh...oosh thump.  Clunk! Clunk!   

Five foul vermin in one fell swoop.  The Glutton 3 was hungry!  A few stray feathers fluttered to the ground.

Between the leaves of a fragrant orange tree, came a rustle and flap. Without hesitation, Xander swung the suction pipe upwards into the branches and exterminated three more flying rats.  

But then, there was a splutter, whir, loss of suction.  The smell of burning.  Xander pressed the Glutton 3’s emergency stop button; opened up its heaving drum to investigate.  A ginormous pigeon emerged.  It beat its golden wings, opened its massive beak and with a triumphant gulp, devoured Xander whole.
 
**

Dracula Attends the Whitby Goth Weekend

For a joke, he checked in to the Stoker Hotel as Count Wampyr.  He smoothed his paunch, swished his cloak, flashed a fangy grin at the ravishing redheaded receptionist.  She looked bored.  Slightly repulsed, he thought.  Perhaps he’d some spinach lodged between his teeth?  Lately he’d lost his appetite for meat and turned vegan.  He spent a miserable afternoon at the Bizarre Bazaar, drifting between stalls selling boot chains, studded codpieces, steampunk goggles.  He felt so passé.  Invisible.  At dusk, he floated past the Pavilion, where hordes of Goths queued for headliners, Inkubus Sukkubus.  Alone, he lay down in the Abbey ruins.  Communed with the bats.  

**

Moonbeam and Lightning
 
By the time we are cruising at thirty thousand feet, towards the Strait of Gibraltar, our new flight attendant, Cathy, has told me her entire life story.  

I’m Nelly Dean, by the way.  Longest serving cabin crew at Go Lucky Air.  I like to take newbies under my wing because I’m easy to talk to, folk say.  

Cathy tells me that like me, she grew up on the Yorkshire Moors.  That after her parents died, her brother was left in charge.  “Hindley’s a reet bastard,” she says.  “He likes a drink.  Got worse, after ‘is missus died.”  Dark grey eyes glinting like flint, her hobbies, she says, are outdoorsy things.  Bareback horse riding.  Wild camping.  Geocaching, whatever that is.  

Apparently, she’s engaged to a fella called Ed.  “Steady Eddy, I call ‘im,” she says, grimacing.   She shoves her phone under my nose and shows me a photo.  Yellow hair, pale face, waxed jacket and cravat.  Stood with a chocolate Labrador in front of a Range Rover. Bit of a numpty, I think, but say nowt.  I’m not the type to judge.   

Cathy says, “I want to see the world, shake things up, get some ‘eadspace, like.”
It’s on our descent, when we’re flogging Duty Free, that I notice the sprig of mauve heather pinned to her scarf, the hare’s foot gripped in her hand, her look of wild glee, as we hit a pocket of turbulence, and the trolley goes flying.

Captain Heathcliff comes over the tannoy.  “Passengers and cabin crew, return to your seats.  And fasten your safety belts.”  

Flights are never boring, when ‘Hothead’ Heathcliff is piloting.  None of us cabin crew will forget the time, when for a bet, he landed a Boeing 747 on the M60 motorway.   He paid hell for that. 

Cathy refuses to buckle up her seatbelt.  Instead, as if in prayer, she sinks to her knees, presses her face to the porthole, where outside the wind howls, clouds swirl, pebble-sized hailstones pelt against pane.  We tailspin and dive.  Men, women, children shriek like monkeys, as we plummet at breakneck speed towards the jagged peaks of the Rock of Gibraltar.  

“Oh Lord. This is it,” I think, but then, incredibly, the plane banks, turns sharp left and soars.

“Just a bit of bumpy air,” Captain Heathcliff says, a note of hysteria in his voice.“We’ll be arriving in Gibraltar in a few minutes.”

Cathy turns from the window.  Her face is glowing.  “Ee, Nelly,” she says.  “Tha’ Captain Heathcliff’s something else.”  And with a laugh, she unfurls her hand.  In her palm is a bloodied squish of tiny bones, broken claws, tangled fur. 

**
Note:  The title is from Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, 1847

**

Jane Salmons lives in Shropshire in the UK.  Her poetry collection The Quiet Spy about Holocaust hero Frank Foley, was published by Pindrop Press in 2022.  Her poetry pamphlet The Bridge is forthcoming with Offa's Press.  A recipient of Arts Council England funding, Jane also writes flash and microfiction.  After teaching for nearly thirty years, she now works part time as an international teacher trainer.  Read more at janesalmonspoetry.co.uk
 

We are over the moon to have prose poems from The Mackinaw honoured in Best Small Fictions and two honoured in Best Microfictions!!!!

Congratulations to Mikki Aronoff and Cassandra Atherton for the inclusion of their works in Best Small Fictions, to follow below.

Congratulations to Alexis Rhone Fancher and Francine Witte for the inclusion of their works in Best Microfiction, to follow below.

We encourage everyone to purchase each of these anthologies to support the small presses that publish them and the writers inside.

Best Microfictions
Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke, guest editor Dawn Raffel
Pelekinesis Books

https://www.bestmicrofiction.com/

**

Best Small Fictions
Michelle Elvy and Nathan Leslie, guest editor Robert Shapard
Alternating Current Press

https://altcurrentpress.com/best-small-fictions/

​**

Thread 
 
1. Thread has no memory, thread has no mercy. Mercy is something you bestow. There is no bestowing with thread. Thread is dispassionate even though it is usually blamed for problems. Take tangling, for instance. You couldn’t tangle thread unless it was there to be tangled, so its presence makes it look guilty. Same for tethering. You could tie your dog or your uncle to a pole and they wouldn’t like it, especially if there’s no shade, but is it the tether’s fault? 
 
2. Cotton gin? Not what you think.
 
3. Playtime weaves jet and crimson dreams, takes her to the edge of the woods. A cowbell clangs her home. Her father is out back with the hose. He grows cotton plants, a dozen or so. It’s just a hobby. Her mother sits on the porch and waits for the bolls to open so she can spin and weave the fluffy fibers they encase.  Later, they’ll eat a dinner of leftovers off plastic placemats with scenes from Yellowstone and The Appalachian Trail, and then it’s early to bed.
 
4. To mercerize is to chemically treat fibres to impart strength and luster and reduce fabric shrinkage. Shrinkage is what happens when penis meets pool.
 
5. Break down a cotton plant and you get lint, seeds, seed hulls, stalks, stems or canes, roots, leaves, bolls, and flowers. Break down a flower and you get tears. When she (see #3) started to flower, someone stalked her. She was afraid to turn around and see who it was, but she was able to sense his shadow. She quickened her steps the closer she got to home.
 
6. Her grandmother took an old sheet, cut and sewed it and embroidered her a Russian peasant blouse for her birthday. She cross-stitched it red and black to mark the knots of their lives. The stain of revolution, of iron, weigh heavy. She is thirteen and wants a t-shirt.
 
7. Linters are the short fuzz on cotton plants. They provide cellulose for making plastics, explosives and other products, perhaps the tugging strings of tampons.
 
8. Ariadne’s Thread is a method for solving a problem with multiple apparent means of proceeding. Take our flowering stalkee (see #5). How can she evade that person? She could disguise herself, but for her scent. The stalker’s nostrils expand to take her in. Okay, let’s get real. Throw that guy in the clinker. Do you really want to lock up a budding young girl? No, you’d sit her down and talk to her. A lot. Until, years later, tired of her sulking, you send her away to college, where she has a crush on her physics professor. She fastens her eyes on his thighs, invents theories about cotton thread and crucibles. Her heat is need, is threat. Later, a real lover leaves her for another. Miffed, she stitches his photo between two pages of her sketchbook. Trapped, airless. Empath that she is, she starts gasping for air, runs to the bathroom in a panic. Where are her pills? Arachne scuds across the shower stall floor. Thin limbs, fire on the belly. Black widow. She nearly slips on the tile floors escaping to the bedroom. She opens the window, sticks her head out over the fire escape. She cannot read the stars, as the city lights are too bright in the muggy heat. She unravels some, then some more, then rewinds her way back to bed. Problem solved.
 
9. A Harlequin Dane lugs his tonnage past her and a Vietnam vet in the coffee line, gets them talking of their fondness for oversized dogs. Both of them now too old to manage. Their thirst knits them till they get to the counter. She drives home, not recognizing the flesh and fur that flanked her that morning. Someone’s walking little dogs just like mine. Her dog-walker on his phone. All sense spooling from her head. 
 
10. Cotton belongs to the genus Gossypium but learned early to keep its mouth shut. It knows what kind of trouble telling tales out of school can bring (see #1-9). 
 
11. She careens between the moistness of stream banks. 
 
Blessed thread, holy filament, 
tie my heat to my wanting, 
flame my dread,
make safe my travels.  
 
Skeins of copper wire bird-nesting the dark. 

Mikki Aronoff

**

Tokyo Panorama Suite
 
1.         Century Southern Tower
At 5am the sky wraps the bottom of our king size bed in a thick lavender stripe. Your hand is resting on your cheek, fingers fluttering against your eyebrow, as light from Docomo clocktower tints your pillow lemon and lilac. I have grown into a deep silence, and into the cramped voicelessness of morning. Time presses, but I’m the only one who feels its weight. I smooth out crinkles in the bottom sheet with the balls of my feet and you turn toward me—too early to rise, too late to dream, you fill the space between my arms and thighs in a tight enfolding of skin and bone. Later, we wait for the sound of the trains, imagine their coloured stripes snaking through the mazes beneath us. Just above the tip of my toe, Mount Fuji is a tiny white triangle.
 
2.         Kama-Asa
In an intimate handshake, the saleswoman fits the knife’s thick green handle into the crease of my palm. It nestles there as my fingers encircle it. I chop the air in rocking motions, imaging onions, heads of garlic, habaneros; and the rhythm builds in my hobbyhorse wrist. When I hold up the blade, my face is a bisected, matte rectangle. The woman places the steel in a vice, hammering my name, before I trace the hiragana’s indentations like reverse braille, learning its inflections and gradients. At the airport, as the exit doors slide open, the customs officer asks if the knife is for cooking. My fingers curl again into my palm.
 
3.         Yomiuri Land
On the ferris wheel, you pop a button on my long coat as you press your knee between my thighs. I hear the clink on the bottom of the carriage as the disc spins off the edge. We’re a third of the way to the top and the shadows of spokes and struts snag on our bodies. With your olive coat pulled up to your waist and my stockings binding my ankles, I free fall in your arms. Turning my head, I see the roller coaster climbing its track before catapulting into a cloudy sky.
 
4.         Narita Shrine
Your arm is a question mark around my waist, a curve that begins at one hip and ends at the other with the round of your elbow. We walk from the hotel lobby into the lucent morning as darkness lies between your arm and the small of my back. It’s a sort of beginning—squeezing down sloping paths as our footsteps count the years like a series of stretched ellipses. When an ending nags at my collarbone, I sweep it under my hair and touch the back of your neck. At Narita-san Shinsho-ji temple I perform misogi, rinsing my hands and mouth. You feed the gosanke koi in Ryuchi pond and I watch mottled sunrise bloom on their cycloid scales.
 
Cassandra Atherton

**


​Cruel Choices
 
When my husband’s two grown daughters are in town, the three of them go to the movies, or play pool. Share dinner every night. Stay out late. I haven’t seen my stepdaughters since my son’s funeral in 2007. When people ask, I say nice things about the girls, as if we had a relationship. When people ask if I have children I change the subject. Or I lie, and say no. Or sometimes I put them on the spot and tell them yes, but he died. They look aghast and want to know what happened. Then I have to tell them about the cancer. Sometimes, when the older daughter, his favourite, is in town, and she and my husband are out together night after night, I wonder what it would be like if that was me, and my boy, if life was fair, and, rather than my husband having two children and I, none, we each had one living child. His choice which one to keep. Lately when people ask, I want to lie and say yes, my son is a basketball coach; he married a beautiful Iranian model with kind eyes, and they live in London with their twin girls who visit every summer; the same twins his girlfriend aborted with my blessing when my son was eighteen, deemed too young for fatherhood, and everyone said there would be all the time in the world.
 
Alexis Rhone Fancher

This was also published in Askew, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

**

Where Did You Go?

I went thin as pears, all sliced-up and see-through. I went halfway to happy. I went to a place where I don’t have to answer. I went sniff in the air. I went to the arms of another. I went bent as bones. I went to a job without a computer. Where I stand in a field and the sun wets my back. I went behind the numbers on a wristwatch. I went hundreds of miles from your eyes. I went all unmarriage and you cannot stop me. I went where your questions stop smack in the air and long before they can get to my ears. I went to before I even know you. That spot in the morning about to begin, that curl of a mouth turning into a smile, that moment a flower opens up like a hand.

Francine Witte

This poem was first published at Unbroken Journal.

The Onset
 
The first moment screams crippled. Hurt ovals its small, cramped mouth. Previous health vanishes, an unleashed dog, the owner with his sack of cheap candy, a silhouette at a Halloween door. Winter’s end is a season of shots. Memory yammers while he shuffles to the elevator that rises to where syringes grow like the green onions his father salted like hard-boiled eggs. March withers until its shadow goes out. Each night the grins of animals enter his room like memorized prayers.  They rhyme their breath with his, reciting. His mother, dead before his age, unclasps her beaded purse as if entering his house requires a ticket.  For twenty-one years, she says, she’s carried the proper ID for pain, waiting to hand it over.  She’s dreamed his body crippled in yesterday’s underwear, his breath caught in phlegm’s thick web. In a doubled brown paper sack, she’s brought twelve pounds of pennies gathered from sidewalks and carpets. She asks him to arrange them in rolls for the teller she knows by name, the woman who lost her husband in Korea.  She shakes his clipped hair and nails from her purse, spelling his name with her finger in the thin dust.  Only after she knows the exact sum of her savings does she allow him to moan his symptoms.  Lie down, she says, so I can love you.  In two places, she ties her green gown behind him. There, she says, now finish undressing. And yes, she examines him, saying, “Relax now, close your eyes. This is where the past ends.”
 
**

Subsidence

It’s not the end of the world, the eclipse shifting foundations, the cinderblock cracked where corners of houses keel over like drunks. It’s not the atomic bomb. It’s not fallout, the despair that covers homeowners in the helpless housing plan built over the long-closed, anthracite mines.  It’s not a firestorm that ruins these roads, not a shock-wave that creates refugees. It’s not my father inside the fire hall huddled with his neighbours.  It’s not his hands that straighten the map where his modest street shows so large he believes it’s a river. It’s not cancer in every family. It’s not decades of dying, nobody returning, not ever, not even to the half-life that they endured, measuring themselves by mortgages that outlive them. It’s not the apocalypse.  It’s not news, watching while my father walks his hallway, measuring slope with his body, leaning.

**

This was previously published in a different form at 100 Word Story.

**

During the Plague Years

For his appointments, two years and counting, the woman who cut his hair was always masked when she unlocked the door and recorded his temperature like a dedicated nurse. She opened early on Thursdays to accommodate his fear, the salon empty, her partner not due for half an hour, his hair self-washed just minutes before. Her mask was always leopard-spot print, his black, the radio flush with current pop songs. With what he often felt was tenderness, she lifted the loops of his mask from his ears to trim. Years before, like his daughter, she had failed algebra, the two of them miserable, but together in summer school. For six weeks, they had been friends, a coincidence that made conversation easy. “Solve for x,” she said. “Solve for y,” and they laughed about no longer remembering which function came first among addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. In late spring, the third year begun, she said, “It’s been crazy” before murmuring the details of how her former husband had been shot and killed while outdoor-eating chicken wings, the gun home-made by the jealous shooter. He did not interrupt her. Most of all, he did not admit that he had no idea the dead man had been her husband. That he knew her only by her high school name, the one brought home by his daughter more than twenty years before. Before she brushed his loose hair to the floor, she showed him a photograph of her two daughters, their father no longer absent, but gone. This daughter, she says, drives her dead father’s car to work and washes it by hand each week. That daughter wears his shirts to bed. To solve for three unknowns, he thought, use simultaneous equations. Something he kept to himself like a terrible perversion as she allowed him a moment with the hand-held mirror. And though her ex had been with a woman who was also dead, the first to be shot, she confessed she had been sleepless since. That she was thinking she could live without cutting and styling hair. His spoken sympathy, he knew, did not comfort her. He paid, in cash, the tip, as always, pre-calculated to minimize the chance of contact. Already, he was telling himself never to speak of this and yet, weeks before she vanished and his hair was cut by a young, beautiful stranger, he betrayed her.
 
**
 
The Everlasting
 
If he used a rotary phone, a man believes he could dial the long nines to his mother’s voice, breathless from her downstairs hurry and failing heart.  He’s years alone, three weeks sleepless with waiting that whirrs like locusts.  His house has learned a language he cannot translate.  All morning its strange monologue chants the vowels of threat and fear. By noon the rooms darken for rain. The windows seal like lids on lungs.  Light flees to where everlasting breathes promises without people. Already he is months older than the dead he wishes to heal with his hands.  The familiar moans its daylong emergency song. On the kitchen table, papers and books, the small, reusable place setting.  The heart of a king, he’s read, was mummified with mint and myrtle, frankincense, daisy. After centuries, it’s a thing that travels like a campaigner. In each room the unbearable waits like a woman he’s paid for.
 
**
 
The Martyr in our Town
 
The martyr in our town is scouting the public places where we gather in great numbers.  He enters our malls and notes the busiest stores; he scans the food court’s longest lines.  Fridays, he watches football at the high school; Saturdays, a blockbuster film. Sundays, there are churches to attend, sitting with families on wooden pews. He studies prophecies and commandments.  He reads only the holy translations. At last, when winter justifies his knee-length coat, he thickens his waist with dynamite, develops a nails and ball-bearings paunch, and enters our one restaurant where every diner has three forks, two spoons, and wine on ice. He is ticking as he gives his reservation name, deciding that the tables nearby are perfect with capacity use. All this, he prays, will spread and go airborne like a pandemic’s contagion. Before he steps forward, the hostess displays a complimentary hangar for his heavy coat. She begins with the word the word “sir” just as he triggers himself, ascending.
 
**
 
Robbing the Pillars
 
In the Pioneer Tunnel, the tourists learn about robbing the pillars, how those seams of anthracite were blasted and stripped, how pillars of coal, left thick as support, would tempt the owners to send miners back down to shave them. How there, in those caves, men decided to take one more inch, then daring one more, the last thing the guide says before turning out the lights to make them eyeball the dread such darkness conjures. Think what's overhead as unstable, the guide says. Think of thinking that when you're blind. He listens for crying. For whispering between couples. Near the end of the minute, he reminds them where they are and what was done to the pillars among them. Often, he hears a scream. Always, someone applauds when he restores the light, the group more compact, appearing to be thicker than before.
 
**
 
In the Attic                                                                                       
 
My father, the magician, rose, without alarm, at five-fifteen to ready himself for night shift. My mother, his accomplice, materialized from work of her own at six-thirty. And I, seven years-old, mastered the tricks of straight-home, relock, and silent play. Before he descended to the brief privacy of water, my father, overhead, was a marvel who made the ceiling speak with his feet, his stage forbidden as matches, one more commandment I kept until the afternoon when stillness stayed sprawled above me, his performance so late I freed myself from fear’s handcuffs and climbed, sweat soaking my school shirt as dark as each corner of that barren room. I kept myself quiet while my father’s breath stuttered. I coughed and heard something snag in his sleep-drugged throat. My mother floated three miles away. She carried our phone. I might have called out to wake him, but that attic wheezed with prophecy, my father’s slack mouth suggesting death, nothing in that room but his body and the unkempt bed, not a book, not his flour-dusted clothes left downstairs as laundry, my terror a secret shame, its cry stifled by the heavy, mote-filled air.
 
**
 
Bloodletting
 
Missionaries came to my door this morning, speaking through the screen about the end times that are running, one said, on fumes, grinning like the bright dot on my Celica’s fuel gauge when I am fifteen minutes from stalling. Those preachers hoped to stir the fear I’ve stored since a thousand Sunday sermons rooted it so deeply I could imagine a soul. They spoke with the fervor of plague year priests, the certainty of bloodletters draining two pints to cure diseases embedded by a chronic imbalance of humors, the four I studied once, remembering the barber, past seventy, who had cut my schoolboy hair, how thirteen years later, he had stood with me outside his long-closed shop and recited the contours of my head, the way the strands nearest the crown needed special tending, and I, at twenty, confessed how much he’d frightened me with his story about the symbolism of barber poles, how his father and his grandfather had cut the blue veins of customers who believed their sicknesses could be emptied with their blood, that even boys like me had a pint to spare. The street was becoming a plain of absence for an approaching thruway. My hair curled over my collar, something to cut; the veins in my arms seemed swollen the way they felt when I watched those two terrorists enter the house of the woman across the street, admitted by the daughter who cuts herself daily, drawing a blade across her limbs as if she were lancing the boils of fear, squandering herself on anticipation.
 
**
​
The Biblical Epic, with Intermission 
​
Some Sunday evenings, while he sat between his parents like a prisoner, God was the deep voice that shook trees and billowed the cloaks of bearded men. Jesus was always the back of a head, a spotless hem of robe, or a lifted hand. The Old Testament women were full of lust, the men overcome by violence. The New Testament women were never blonde. But whether Old or New, the stories were so long that his parents watched them, during the waning days of the double feature era, one by one, those films turning epic, an intermission included at a cliffhanger moment. His parents never spoke; they never used the rest rooms. They contemplated. They considered. They turned introspective and thoughtful. At last, the rest of the movie-goers took their seats and shut up for the last halves of the holy films. Suffer the little children, Christ said, but soon he was suffering, too. The boy’s mother passed him a ham sandwich and a cup of milk from her blue thermos. When Jesus turned, his white robe fluttered at his top-of-the-screen cut throat. When he spoke, his back was turned, his face, in those films, never shown, his voice issuing soft sermons toward a void beyond the crowd. Sometimes, when the heathen women leaned forward and their loose clothes opened to a hint of breasts, the boy wished for a glimpse of the face of Christ, a way of knowing whether his eyes shifted down despite the tilt of his holy, upturned head.
 
**
 
Gary Fincke's two latest collections of poetry have just been published: For Now, We Have Been Spared (Slant Books), his fifteenth collection, and The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025 (Press 53). His latest flash fiction collection is The History of the Baker's Dozen (Pelekinesis, 2024). His full-length story collections have won the Flannery O'Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.
 

She lives next door and                    

when she opened the door to his curious  knock in shorts with sleeveless blouse, wide  gumdrop blue eyes and moist tulip lips, his mouth dropped in freefall while she stood undisturbed by his discomfiture -but how could she not hear the thumping heart, the sizzling blood, expanding veins, and when he sputtered, muttered excuses to prolong their exchange of prattle she played along and worse  she smiled.
 
**

Innuendo   

a ripe atmosphere of denigration, insinuation as they insist that they are being persecuted by Them, those Others who are hell-bent. A hush as the air swirls with hints, a cloud of cinders drifting as if wood is burning, the air turning dark with spite in spite of declarations of peace of unity. Listen. Echoes of cursing, loud, harsh reverberate as if the clouds are amplifiers, reflecting back our words, our taunts, our sly derogations. It is deafening yet we listen to the repetition, dulled, our ears flooded, the wax melted and dripping with accusation. Is it too late for an insertion of ear plugs, for an intervention-source unknown-but surely it must come. Perhaps those unknown fliers, those unworldly saucers that observe us, and perhaps pity us will help, will cleanse the air with an acoustic device or maybe not. Listen, the voices grow louder, bickering-it’s sickening.

**

Tears     

There is a rent in the sky and the rain pours down relentless, unrelenting. Are those rips from the claws of a humongous dragon escaped from some online streaming series or are those beasts creatures from the other side of the sky streaming in through the ripped curtain that separated our world from hell? And those drops that touch us scald like acid rain, not the torrent that made Noah build his ark but water made toxic by us. We shiver as the liquid turns cold and hear a voice crying. Looking up we see two enormous blue sky eyes, round, vaporous, moist, looking at us and weeping.

**
 
The end of science  
 
Its terminus began centuries ago with Banaji. Opining logically, he revealed our brains are inherently narcissistic; we’re cognitively subject to implicit bias.  Unconsciously all humans are not objective. Therefore, there are no hard and fast facts only subjective sentences uttered or iterated by speakers either real or artificial booming from the Internet.  Since science prided itself on non-subjectivity, the establishment along with the populace decided it did not exist. This allowed folks to engage in as much
unhealthy behavior as they pleased. Plague followed.

**
 
Choice Point   

Frost’s frosty roads had no apparent terminus so to decide which path to pursue, which meandering gravel strewn roadway to traverse in hope of finding a  paradisical world was as arbitrary as a coin toss in the absence of change. And this absence of change results in the absence of change-immobility. This causes mental conflict and anxiety. Either this fork in the road is a Freudian approach- approach conflict where two equally good alternatives present or avoidance- avoidance where two equally objectionable possibilities present. The outcome: resentment. In this there is a presentiment of disaster as, frozen, indecisive, and resentful, there is paralysis, ultimately self-punitive with progress halted. Hmm. Are we at such a choice point now?

**

Author writes in New York City USA under the pen name Jan Cronos. The New York Metropolitan area provides a vast resource for creative writing, including backdrops, prose poetry, rhyming poetry, hybrid or experimental forms of poetry. The  author also writes flash fiction, short fiction and science fiction as well as various uncategorizable forms of writing.

​Not Only Wolves

I’ve heard tell there are shape shifters in the forest preying on men and women alike. Sometimes they are cunning foxes who lure with their sharp wit and quick tongues, charming their victims into submission, holding even passing acquaintances in silvery thrall. Or they can be lazy cats who never change their shape, sitting on laps and feeding on morsels of fish freely given, as a respite from their usually wild and vagrant ways to which they soon return. They only temporarily use human bodies to accomplish a task or catch a free ride, abandoning the husks, still warm and alive, wiped clear of memories. These hapless souls are often found on a garden bench, mumbling and confused, but with blissful smiles emblazoned on their blank faces. These stories emerge from the melting snow or are carried on the summer wind. Perhaps mothers want to warn their daughters, or fathers their sons to be wary of handsome or beautiful strangers because you never know if the body paying such close attention on the bar stool next to yours or on the yoga mat inches from your heart, eyes and teeth unnaturally bright, has secrets and tastes you could never imagine.
 
**

The Wisdom of Naming Meteors after the God of Destruction
 
Theoretically, a large meteor could strike earth probably near Japan or China in 2027: Tsunami’s, earthquakes could affect everyone. But just like in the movie Don’t Look Up, Washington  will probably just hem and haw congressing about how to avoid this or that and come up with a dozen useless solutions destined to fail, while the Asians will be busy marketing their T-shirts and go-karts, and insulated cups and blankets emblazoned with the comet, little toy laser beams that aim to shoot it out of the sky before the imminent land disaster and all the while, NASA is busily planning for the real-life event of Apophis, a huge asteroid which will actually be close enough for us to see without a telescope in 2029, and hoping to land some little planetary explorers on it just to gather some data, like the composition of the thing itself, where it came from, when it was born and from what, so they can further study the whole universe and all its mysteries, and then . . . well, then, everyone on the planet will be busily making T-shirts, and wind-up astronauts with fake laser rockets, while the doomsayers will be marching across the land, once again, carrying their heavy placards, searching the skies for a sign.  

**

Gabapentin Dreamin'
 
Toy trains wind their way across my bed. Little black cats jump and chase the monarch butterflies fluttering by. I reach to grab them, wondering why, knowing nothing is there, try to pluck a raisin passing by. Later, the nearly full bag of straight-cathed urine comforts my leg with its heat as it forcibly leaves my bruised and rebellious body. Two hundred fine, four hundred fine, eight hundred cc’s “no bueno” as they say on the block. The nighttime dose kicks in and would someone please catch the iguana chomping my flowers up there on the corner of the bed pushed hard against the wall? And yes, the skies are grey.

**

Moving Backwards​

The earth’s core has reversed its magnetic pull, backtracking (like politics the world over) and slowly, the days are getting longer (it doesn’t just feel that way, what with news cycles endlessly repeating—it’s really happening), ticking extra seconds into our standard 24, which eventually will add up, though by then, we’ll have been smashed by the next asteroid that will hit this planet, and then poof! Snuffed out like a bad bulb, up in nothing but fizzle and pop and darkness. The pundits are all warning us already, about how dire this backward spin into our own futures will be but it seems the slap happy Kool-Aid drinkers have not enough imagination left to face the truth, so largely, like the lightbulb, have been left in the dark, where they fumble their own machinations toward the death spiral that is our beloved democracy, going extinct. 

**

Little White Lies Should be a Plant

Just sitting in the sun, actually not sitting, but exercising in the pool, the sun on my face, the only sitting done after the pool to drip dry the suit, which reluctantly, I must wear due to other people walking around my house, and even then it’s a lie because I don’t just sit, I go about the yard, clipping this errant branch or pulling that noxious weed, leaving the flowery ones, because even though they’re weeds, there are these little yellow flowers which look at least colourful in the area I call a garden, which is really just a set-back, grass-less strip against the fence where I have pots of various blooming plants whose names I can never remember, even though I wrote them down, but misplaced the paper, and anyhow I wouldn’t know which name belonged to which plant, which come to think of it, is a lie, too, because I do know the Impatiens, and the Dianthus, and especially the Marigolds which are supposed to ward off white flies and other pests that lay eggs all along the leaves wilting them right off the jalapeno peppers and micro cherry tomatoes, remembering the Ginger plants which have some long, odd name I do not remember, which surprise blooms every summer right through the other plants I invariably place over the bulbs each Fall when all the Ginger stalks have wilted, and of course my herbs, Rosemary, Thyme, Basil and the Sweet Mint I cut daily for my water, contemplating the skies before I drag out the hoses and water all these adornments that brighten my spirits every time I walk outside.

**

Oxygen Hunger

​I can’t help but picture those giant koi piled one on top of the other as they fight for the crumbs we’re throwing off the bridge. They stay up so long we can hear their gasping for breath, the watery kind, the kind that goes into their gills, back out as bubbles. We watch with macabre fascination as they choose first food, then life, then food again, not certain which will bring them more joy if fish are ever joyous. With humans, joy is—was—evident, a widespread smile, a giggle of mirth, but not this open-mouthed gasping when nothing is working right, too much water inside the body, not enough oxygen coming in, CO2 going out. They tell us these are end stages, code words for all the cliches we imagine: at death’s door, leaving this world, going to the other side. Perhaps you are only transitioning from man to fish, back to the waters you came from, long, long ago.

**

Something Wicked This Way Comes


Like death. Not always the cloaked and sexless figure holding a scythe; sometimes a white-winged angel with a mournful harp. Not always unwelcome, but always wicked, snatching what it wants, who it chooses ready or not, willing, or not, always a battle. See the crow on the windowsill? Death. The dark and angry sky? Death. The leaves shriveling off the trees? Death. Hear the long, low then high-pitched wails? Death is singing its final song to those left behind, for those it’s taken hear nothing ever again. Death is the mother of sleep, the father of eternal dreams, death is agony, release, comfort and affliction. Death never looks both ways before crossing over, it plunges ahead, sharpens its senses, instinct all it knows, all that matters in the long and the short of it all, until finally, it disappears, taking everything you loved leaving nothing but dust.

**

Barbra Nightingale’s poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Rattle Narrative Magazine (Poem of the Week, nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Gargoyle, Barrow Street, The Georgetown Review, CRIT Journal, The Apalachee Review, Calyx, Kalliope, Many Mountains Moving, Birmingham Review, Chatahoochee Review, The Comstock Review, Poetrybay.com,  The Mississippi Review.com, The MacGuffin, Crosscurrents, The Kansas Quarterly, Cumberlands Poetry Journal, Passages North, The Florida Review, Swimm.

​The Visitor 
 
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Hebrews 13:2 (KJV)
  
The sharp shot of brass knocker searches room to room—not an echo but a bullet. As I leave my chair, it ricochets again with unsettling vehemence, a swearing. And opening the door, there, in blinding sunlight, is a face with the familiarity of the actress to whom I’m sexually attracted.  I hesitate to invite a scammer or proselytizer into my home, but that is exactly what I do. We sit in the living room just off the entry, but she declines my offer of tea with a women’s-college graciousness. A satchel of business gray disguises its spiritual contents. She talks in aphorisms while retrieving coloured folders from its darkness. I am ready for her spiel, but she pleasantly chastises me for my many failings. She seems bitter. Pleading ignorance, I squirm, ask questions to tie connotation to her words like bundling insurance to save money. She handles my cleverness with ease, countering with a few metaphors I don’t quite catch. Only a few minutes later, she rises to go like a retired school teacher. The air between us glows. We are un-bullied friends by now and we shake hands to prove it. She says that I owe her with a measure of meaning, a compelling art, and leaves one sample on the coffee table. It is a collection of poems I could have written; covers frayed, marginalia smudged. After she has smiled, the door closes; I flip through the pages with a thumb. A love-letter flutters to the floor. I can’t recall her name now, but my signature wrote itself neatly in the space provided like an alcoholic unaware he’s in a liquor store buying death for himself and others.
 
**
 
 Mischief
 
Somebody has taken the fork in the road— the stainless steel one noticed on my walk two days ago, lying brash between yellow lines dividing northbound from southbound, ignored by the coming and going of eastern promise and western regret. Yet, not meant to confuse by its accident, but amuse I suppose, the ordinary thing made special by odd context. Now in an absent choice, the sense of loss is profound. Someone saw no humor in leaving it: trash is trash and took it.
 
**
  
Images in Aggregate
 
Sabbe samkāra dukkha. (All conditioned things are unsatisfactory/suffering.) 
The Dhammapada  #278
  
Unweathered replacement boards in the junkyard’s grungy gray fence read like a bar-code for the sun to scan—parallels that will never meet. White Thanksgiving turkeys crammed four to a cage, stacked onto tractor-trailers litter feathers for many miles— sacrificed to tradition. Dozens of pelts or fish hang in old black and white photographs, buffalo bones piled saloon high—abundance bragged to extinction. Behind vinyl siding, houses rot the way politicians barter their integrity— secrets reside in black redactions. Cynicism cannot be our only hope. Coffee-soaked, layered with mascarpone, lady fingers are placed side by side for the tiramisu of our hunger—decadence divorced from suffering. Discarded Christmas trees are laid at the landfill’s edge like stacked bodies of a genocide, alternated stumps to stars— innocence drying out. 
 
**
 
No Boots for Arizona
 
but I must go. She called me near midnight, EST. I packed some heavy consequence a few lessons in grief. The internet has unbelievable pics of gold-pink and lonesome cumulous. She is a destination which needs no map, no GPS required. I could tell by her voice it was all westward horizons after blue mountains, blue grass. The only blue is the ink that rambles the contours. It all seems the same except for the cacti begging. I recall she said there would be three dusty arroyos on the left: Go far enough. Don’t question where you are, the men in those crusty towns wont know. I started early; it took too long. My anticipation felt guilty; in every mirage I saw a body to die for. The roads become less complicated, a few curves like nearing the end of an I-pad brain-teaser. A wand of second sunrise zipped through the slot canyon of hotel curtains, lit a Curtis photograph of Walpi, a Hopi village. I arrived in Flagstaff, unusually warm for evening, ponderosa, aspen, the train had come and gone, its bullion of history unloaded tar-smelling sleepers; gamblers with six shots at scoring. I hardly recognized her but I was her prayers answered like spirits down from the San Francisco Peaks, a vision perhaps, a cowboy smile Buddha could put on. The stars could not have been brighter, the moon was rolling on the tracks pissing itself out. We played poker and drank our joy sneaking into pockets of dark alleys. She showed me her art, gave me her penciled doodles: we’d buy boots tomorrow so I could kick them off before bed.
 
**
 
Stealing Away 
 
She sews patches on argument, places buttons along the edges like hubcaps, highway found and hung from barbed wire fences: a vengeance only the passing of miles can soften. He burns evening fields as if in anger, splashing flares across the cold winter sky. Starlings congregate, recite a subversive homily. Man and wife recede into complicated sleeps. At dream-break, he sneaks through night-fallen snow to let out the smell-spooked dogs, to free the chickens into the genius of their fox; goats that believe in a garden of delights somewhere else: she will not need the bother of them. Inside, she fabricates a pungent-hissing breakfast, hashes leftovers, bakes butter-soaked biscuits. Her monologue is peppered, with small forgivenesses, but apologies, like sheds, collapse now in storm. He ventures into no man’s land where tracks vanish without trace. Unchained, she slips back into the dust of a farmhouse hell; his last sigh escapes from the envelope she opens at the kitchen table.
 
**
 
Appearance at Everson’s Creek
 
Brian, the neighbour’s boy, found the body lounging by the swimming hole—no sign of struggle, no mark of pain, as peaceful as a stranger could be. Sheriff and deputy showed up with guns  and a betting humour, reluctantly poking the man as if there were danger in his lifelessness. No one admitted seeing the man around town though the boy’s mother turned her face to sob, fearing he would have nightmares for the rest of his life. The ambulance brought coloured carnival lights, the urgency of crackling radios, and the state police to make death official. The boy wanted the man to have a son who didn’t need him anymore: the zip of the body bag lengthening his spine.
 
**
 
Neighbours
 
One has sunken to his comfort level with wife number four, fifteen years younger. Across the street, Mr. Hernandez has filled-in his swimming pool to tend tomatoes and morning glories. Two doors down, dogs bark at the kids coming home from church as if at strangers. On Dogwood Lane, Mrs. Jane Dough bakes Jesus into every pastry, pie, every prayer. Her husband, Jack, of laughing stock, is proud to be a redneck in the post-pejorative sense. His sport is a cock-fighting humour. Over triple garages of the corner house, a copy-center banner droops--Don’t dump your damage on us--in snide black and white. Mr. Leo Nardo is offended, roars constantly, writes vituperative letters to the editor. Miss Jones, of woman’s college degree, talks in thread count using sterling vowels, maintains her green roof immaculately, but is horrified that trees suck her up each spring in their rebirth, sweet as she may be. Twyford James plays horseshoes with himself on moonless nights, his pitch lit by halogens that pollute the heavens. He forgets for a moment his son, a suicide. It’s a wonder that angels don’t hang out with us much anymore, giggling like silly teenagers, harmonizing with snippets of song, openly talking about sex. They don’t decorate urns or obelisks, advocate for remembrance much anymore.
 
**
 
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps.  His work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Lyric, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah. He is co-editor of poetry for Streetlight Magazine.