Posts from the ‘Fiction’ Category

Rendezvous in Rockefeller Center

by Neal Gillen

After lunch with an investment banker, Jack Clark walked for almost two hours around midtown Manhattan stopping at Brooks Brothers and Paul Stuart where he purchased a few shirts and ties to be shipped home to Charleston. As he made his way up Madison Avenue, he discovered that Crouch & Fitzgerald, the venerable leather goods store, had closed. He always had enjoyed looking over their latest line of luggage. Leather luggage has gone the way of the typewriter, he thought. He looked at his watch as he continued up the avenue — he still had another hour before his rendezvous with Emily Janis.

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Things You’ll Never Know

by Michelle Malinovsky

You’ll never know that I close my eyes at night while lying on my side, and I convince myself that your body lies behind me. I imagine the warmth of your skin heating up the air underneath the blankets, and pretend that if I want to touch you, all I have to do is reach back and you’ll be there. I won’t ever let myself reach back though, I don’t want to feel the cold sheets and empty space where you should be.

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Colors

by Travis Klempan

Black and white photos don’t do it justice.

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Never Come Home

by Tom Sheehan

The cold, not a storm loaded with snow, but the cold in burrowing waves, came sweeping down the valley just north of the Yalu River. Vatcher Sexton McKee, sergeant of infantry, as cold as he’d ever been in his life, could not hold the pencil in his hand. He’d already broken the lead point three times, but only worried about handling the rifle, managing the trigger when called upon, his latest letter home to be finished at an hour less demanding.

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Grades Matter (Redoux)

by Martin Lindauer

The Professor had long ago stopped expecting students to be junior versions of himself. Nonetheless, he hoped to open the minds of a few–except Wojesky, standing in front of the door to his classroom, easily recognizable: he’s the one who slept through his lectures. “Not a good place or time for a conference, Wojesky,” the Professor said. “As I announced in class at our last meeting–if you were awake–I’m going over the exam today. Make an appointment during office hours.”

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The Pool

by Eddie Jeffrey

The Pool

​Richard Aldinger and his family used to go to the pool. His father dove off the high dive, pikes and can-openers one right after the other. His mother reclined on a deck chair well away from the edge. Pools terrified her. She had been pushed into one from behind as a child and had almost drowned.

Richard Aldinger’s father tricked him into jumping in that first time. He said he would catch him like he caught him when he jumped out of the tree in their backyard. But, Richard Aldinger’s father pulled away at the last possible second and he broke through the pool’s surface like missing that last step of the stairs in the dark. Looking up through his torrent of bubbles, he saw his father smiling. Richard Aldinger was four.

He had seen the pictures of his father and his diving buddies on R & R in the South China Sea. His father wore a utility belt, white shorts, and deck shoes with no socks. His legs and chest were bare and pale, the pattern breaking at the neckline and halfway down his arms where he was tanned almost black. He had a moustache, then. SCUBA gear lay strewn about the deck before him. The boat’s wake frothed away into the distance behind to an empty, washed out horizon.

Eddie Jeffrey’s father retired from the Army in 1987 and served two tours in Vietnam with the 18th Engineer Brigade. Eddie earned an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University in 2009 and lives near Baltimore, MD with his wife, daughter, and two dogs. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming with Copaiba Press, Thrice Fiction, Chaffey Review, Murky Depths, JazzTimes, and The Alexandria Times, and he is a reader for Baltimore Review.

Mortal Wounds

by Eddie Jeffrey

One night, at the age of nine and nearly three quarters, with the covers pulled over his head, reading by flashlight the dirty book that had been making the rounds at school, Richard Aldinger, quite to his astonishment, experienced his first orgasm. A few months later, when he was ten going on twenty, playing Army with some friends, he fell out of his sniper’s lookout, a crabapple tree he had climbed countless times before. It being a crabapple tree, he did not have far to fall, and he did not suffer any broken bones, merely a tiny scratch on his head just above his right ear. It bled so profusely, however, that it sent first his friends into shock and then Richard Aldinger into hysterics. “I’m too young to die!” he yelled, and took off running for home. “I’m too young to die! I’m too young to die!” His mother heard him and came through the kitchen door and into the backyard to see what all the commotion was about. She saw the right side of his head, his neck, and his shoulder covered in blood. She ran to him and caught him and screamed for Richard Aldinger’s father to call an ambulance, but Richard Aldinger’s father, who had served two tours in Vietnam, laughed and said it was probably just a scratch, there was nothing to get bent out of shape about, that the boy would be fine. Upon hearing this, Richard Aldinger, who idolized his father, made a brief, though valiant, attempt at transforming what he had perceived only a millisecond previously as a mortal wound into a mere toddler’s boo-boo unworthy even of the tiniest of band aids. He failed miserably by fainting. When he came to, his mother was cradling his head in her lap in the back seat of their station wagon. Richard Aldinger saw his father’s face reflected in the rearview mirror as he drove, a half-smoked cigarette protruding from the corner of his mouth. His eyes never left the road.

Eddie Jeffrey’s father retired from the Army in 1987 and served two tours in Vietnam with the 18th Engineer Brigade. Eddie earned an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University in 2009 and lives near Baltimore, MD with his wife, daughter, and two dogs. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming with Copaiba Press, Thrice Fiction, Chaffey Review, Murky Depths, JazzTimes, and The Alexandria Times, and he is a reader for Baltimore Review.

Later

by Kevin Neirbo

​Jake reached up and pulled his headphones off. The flight stewardess was walking down the aisle, waking everyone.

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Radio Chatter

by Timothy Redmond

January 10, 2002

My second year in law school, I dated a classmate, Connie. Connie was sweet and attractive, with beautiful, long, brown hair. At school she was all Ann Taylor, but on the weekends she could rock the Bebe. I used to sing to her rare, old Irish songs:

Her eyes they shone like diamonds
You’d think she was queen of the land
And her hair hung over her shou-ou-der
Tied up with a black velvet band

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Spring Fever in Memory Care (Palm Bay Veterans’ Home)

by T. G. Hardy

The tall Masai princess of a nurse always makes me smile.

That’s the only constant in my life.

Comes from the heart, this smiling, she says, not from the brain. My brain is not reliable, but my heart seems to be.

But my brain has its moments, like right now, when I can at least follow myself.

I’m naked and alone with this juicy woman, and she has me strapped to a plastic seat, which she will lower into this vat full of warm salt water. I forget my beef jerky limbs — I’ve got a trophy hard-on going and D’Arcy is kind enough to take note.

She makes big eyes, “My maman liked to say a man’s brains were in the head of his pickle. Your brain’s acting lively this morning. You should maybe exercise it, give it some physical therapy.”

“Hot damn. Let’s get started.”

“No, you — on your own. Can you?”

“I was in the Navy. Thirteen years.”

“See, you’re making sense already.”

I start touching myself, real self-conscious at first. I close my eyes and after a stroke or two, I’m dancing — as they say — like nobody’s watching.

She whispers, “What are you thinking of, A-B? An image from the past?”

“No. I’m picturing you and me all soaped up in that shower over there.” I switch to baritone. “On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin’-fishes play, An’ the dawn comes up like thunder —”

“Lovely, your poem. Took me back to Haiti, the dawn coming that way, like thunder.”

The seat moves down the rail and my ass floats off the seat bottom and I’m weightless, held in suspension by the harness straps. This triggers something.

“I got one — an image from the past,” I say, grateful for the diversion. I was getting too close to thunder, too quickly.

“Take me there,” she says.

“The floating, it makes me think of dogfighting, going zero-g to unweight and accelerate, looking for 350, my ass cheeks floating just off the ejection seat.”

“Must have been exciting, this type of flying.”

“Actually, D’Arcy, the coolest part was just taxiing the F-4.”

“Really now?”

“Oui. From the cockpit, sitting clear out on the beak of the beast, you can’t see the wings behind you and you feel like you’re bareback clear out on the tip of a huge throbbing phallus and, shit, it’s your own . . . actually more like you’re its, rather that it’s yours —”

I lose my place, that taste of rust again in my mouth, and I start to cry.

She bends, this woman, to kiss my forehead.

T.G. Hardy served as a naval aviator with Fighter Squadron 33, flying F-4 Phantoms off the USS Independence. After the service he pursued a career in consumer marketing. Six years ago he quit Manhattan and repotted himself in Colorado, where he began learning the craft of writing at Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Boulder Writing Studio. He is working on a short novel, and two of his short stories have recently appeared in SpringGun Press and the Faircloth Review.