1.   When I saw you tilting the Egyptian Pyramid Explorers Kit in the heel of your hand in Godleys, I was not only shocked it was you, and gently thrown by the hint of grey at the roots of your parting and your sensibly brown wool skirt when I associated you with tie-dye. Dread threatened to overwhelm me.

2.  To steady myself, I thought about the first time I placed my hand on your thigh. You were sat on my desk, swinging your legs and going on and on about mojitos. I couldn’t help it that time. I grabbed hold of your thigh and you stopped talking. One of your mules fell off and clattered on the floor.

3.   When I saw you holding the Egyptian Pyramid Explorers Kit I’d imagined your children and their unwavering father. If you had not dropped the box and said my name I would have skulked into another aisle.

4.   The client meeting I mentioned, the meeting I used as an excuse not to have coffee with you there and then, was a lie.

5.   Overnight I was convinced I shouldn’t see you.

6.   I had restaged certain scenes and edited certain situations in my head.

7.   I knew you were my end.

8.   The day after, in Cafe Pizzicato, I suspected you were sparing my feelings when you talked about yourself at such length without asking me anything. It took you about an hour to explain that you were on sabbatical from aid working. You were taking a break from the dust and the airstrips, the shuttling between compounds, the bureaucratic wrangles, the political fudges. Your mother was dead. You were sorting out her house. You might keep it, you said. Be home. You were getting too old to feel so helpless. You smirked as you started your second coffee – I’m not sure why you were smirking – and repeated you were fed up with feeling continually helpless.

9.   I could hardly contain my relief when you said the Egyptian Pyramid Explorers Kit was for your nephew.

10.   A week later, when we revisited the abandoned meander and sat face-to-face in the dip and you told me harrowing stories of Bosnia and Afghanistan, I did not tell you that those lunchtimes, when the weather was warm and when we were clear of the building and would hold hands openly and cross the woods and the field and end up here, and you would undress and the sunlight would slither about your bare shoulders and afterwards you would whisper the names of places you wanted to see – Zanzibar, Marrakech – these were the moments I’d brooded on most deeply during the years.

11.   I did tell you, on the night you cooked for me at your mother’s, that it unsettled me that the house seemed unchanged: the fifties décor; the diagonal smear of flying ducks above the mantelpiece with their chipped wings and goofy smiles; that faint smell of bleach, but I didn’t tell you, when we were full of gin and slow-dancing on the patio, that bleach always smelled like that night we left the Christmas bash shamelessly early, no longer caring if the others knew.

12.   When we kissed like teenagers under the burglar lights, it felt like us as teenagers kissing on your mother’s patio.

13.   When you left and for a long time afterwards this moment on the patio had ceased to be beautiful for me and contained only warnings.

14.   After you’d left work I could no longer come up with the straplines and copy.

15.   I started to enjoy, strangely, a cavalier attitude to time keeping even though I knew Collins was a pernickety little stickler. I slept off the nights in the washroom, then topped up at lunch like a real live advertising creative and soon started handing in all those joke ideas I used to share with you but then cross out.

16.   After that place I was turned down by the police force, and then the ambulance service and worked in the Housing Benefit office for a while.

17.   I was flitting and pausing for over a decade.

18.   I woke up in small rooms and wondered where I was.

19.   I once found myself on a bench, in a park, on a Sunday, it was sleeting and I had what I’d now call sloppy thoughts when I could hear an airliner roar overhead but couldn’t see it, the clouds were so thick.

20.   I’ve since kept a routine of TV and computer games, junk food and nightly beers that help me face forwards.

21.   I wrote rules. After the therapist explained the sloppiness of my thoughts, and the men’s group facilitator the self-indulgence and control-freakishness of taking things hard: never show, never give, never ask, never plead. Never care or make the first move. Never covet or look back. Never surrender to whining loneliness.

22.   If forever breathes the lonely word I covered my ears.

23.   At the end, when you came to me in a panic about your solicitor and your mother’s equity, how it had been released early, tranche by tranche, and spent on cruises and medical bills – I still didn’t tell you. You said kind things about me that couldn’t be true. They made me wince.

24.   When I saw you tilting the Egyptian Pyramid Explorers Kit in the heel of your hand, I was en route to the packing bay, where I worked supervising the dispatch of goods.

25.   I told you the first lie in Godleys, and then a series of lies in Cafe Pizzicato and Extremadura, on the towpath and on the way to the folly, because I had spent all day watching young people wrap things up and send them away.

26.   I told you I’d just nipped in to buy one of those Egyptian boxes for a friend’s kid but they were sold out: you must have had the last one.

We ended the second time in the street, if you remember, by the entrance to the covered market. It was raining and the first thing I said was something along the lines of the weather can be so clichéd on occasions like this. I thought you looked alarmed so I did you the service of not telling you any more lies.

I was married.

I was dying.

I was about to leave the country to avoid tax.

We each have only one chance with young love.

We’d had ours. We should leave it at that. It was over. I told myself I must never regret this. I stayed under the yellow hanging lights by the market entrance as you walked across the square. I did not go after you.

I was the person I should have been. I would wait for routine to kick back in. I would get back to normal. I would work and pack boxes and sit you out. I had rehearsed. I was sure. You must never know.

Rain glittered on the cobbles. The rain looked no longer real, like the rain in films never looks real. You were growing smaller as you walked away and I could feel the thud of you descending through my shins.

I came after you then, Rosa. I caught you up. I’d had a premonition back there as I watched you walk away. I told you everything then. You know it all. And you know everything you said.

_____________________________________________________________ Ashley Stokes won a Bridport Prize in 2002 and is the author of Touching the Starfish (Unthank, 2010). He wrote ‘A Popular Novelist Foresees His Death’ for Fleeting’s forthcoming fictional biography, i.e: The Life of India Emmott.

___________________________________________________________________________________ Adrian Slatcher writes fiction, poetry and music, and is the author of Playing Solitaire for Money (Salt Modern Voices, 2010). He keeps a website and blog, and lives in Manchester.

In the front yard the mastodon sat, looking grateful, denting the lawn. His trunk paddled the air in boredom. His tail curled up and then flattened out. His withers worked the surrounding gravity like a washerwoman at the shallows of a stream.

These men were mammoth rustlers. Big, crazy, four limbed men. The type you allow to cut in line at the supermarket. The type who insult your wife and you say: pay it no mind, it’s just the way these men are. They breathe like they are angry to take in or give out air, as if any motion on their part is a concession to a world that doesn’t deserve it. They hold their urine until the force of it slaps against the urinal.

I am an academic, one who looks lovingly at the world, with the world looking back and saying: I can eat you, you unnecessary product of cell division. I make no ripples. My magnetic field slips and slides about my body and has never fit right. My hands have open argument with utility. My wife has never had a climax when she was coiled with me, and hasn’t thought enough of our interventions to invent the sound of one. I stumble through any ordinary social event like the space bar on a typewriter. I can better tell you what I am doing than I can do it.

But every man, even that sneeze in blue cloth, has a moment when he has to reach down to see if his jingles jangle. He has to know that, for all his intelligence and charm and grace and sophistication, he has in his cluttered cellar what he needs to become bull faced terrifying. To raise his scorching hackles and draw from the options resident within him that atavistic solution that will blow bone splitting pride through its horn like steam from a thunder well.

I said, “But that’s a mastodon.”

And they looked at me with that hatred I have seen in the eyes of thousands of anti-intellectuals: hotdog venders, grocery store clerks, pizza eating lawyers, recumbent girls in string bikinis, wine drinking pet groomers. But this was something more. There was just a hint of an exhale, a hint of room being left in the balloon. The shoulders of one dropped, a crispness passed over his face like an atmosphere exhausted on the moon, and the corner of his mouth started just slightly to crack out of its frame.

They both looked over at the mastodon. The mastodon, unaware of its sudden nuance, was staring at the movement of the stars, the everlasting glide that makes people believe the sky is turning, and others believe, for a second, the earth is turning. His head alone was the size of the neighbor’s wheelbarrow.

They said nothing and I stood in my home’s simple doorway, the light behind me, the two men in the dark, and held my ground. I could see them thinking, flash cards rising in the hardware of their brains: this is a mammoth, this is a mastodon, this is a mastodon, this is a mammoth. And they turned. They turned and started to walk slowly down my curved patio walkway, moving their feet in short frizzy glides, their hands hanging in wire ball fists, their heads bobbing like whales’ heads: unsure, but moving, moving.

I watched my shadow lay comfortably behind them as they moved out of its way. The light flooded out from around me and I counted their steps as they neared the public sidewalk, turned to head back up the street, and began to move faster, their decision reached, their purpose exchanged.

I watched them go for four houses and then lost them in the yard growth. In this neighborhood, people grow things in their front yards: roses, trellises, ornamental trees, a second or third car, gnomes, mint. I had to lean forward for a last glimpse, the two of them sliding into their next task.

In the meantime, the mastodon had moved. In slow, muted steps he had crossed the recently planted six inch hedge between my place and the pharmacist’s place next door. Leaning half in my yard and half beyond it, the mastodon was nosing my neighbor’s statue of a boy, almost the size of a real boy, standing in a fake clam shell, giving from his limp penis a stammering arc of processed water for any bird that happened by.

___________________________________________________________________________ Ken Poyner has most recently appeared in Full of Crow, Menacing Hedge and The Medulla Review. He lives in Virginia with his wife, a world-class powerlifter.

Silent, like a handkerchief settling on their faces,
its wings outline the angles of their cheekbones
and absorb the salted moisture trembling between their lashes.

Sated, it will take its sadness eastwards,
and beat itself against the glass of my window
and I will trace the dusty imprinture of its effort left there
against the woven fibers of the morning.

___________________________________________________________________ Robert Masterson is the author of Garnish Trouble (Finishing Line, 2012) and Artificial Rats & Electric Cats (Camber, 2008). His poem ‘The Distance Between These Things’ won Fleeting’s Best Short Writing in the World 2011 and is nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Robert is an English professor at the City University of New York.

discuss concept and artistic merit
with graduate committee supervisor (who I adore)
“a loaded image” she laughs at her own pun
“I think you should show the film”
patient approval to undress myself
in class I warn of graphic sexual content
lights dim
VHS of my uninhibited flesh embodying joy delighted to be exposed without shame
without fear
cock much larger on the big screen so strange to see
wondering if classmates will hate me or be inspired
movie ends
applause
a man shakes his head “genius”
shakes my hand
Dore, my teacher, is smiling
her brown eyes a witness
my erection and the drop of joyful dew at the tip

____________________________________________________________________________ Brett Bevell is author of the illustrated poetry books America Needs a Buddhist President (White Cloud, 2004) and America Needs a Woman President (Monkfish, 2007) which aired US-wide on NPR. Brett is a former winner of the Paul Laurence Dunbar Poetry Prize.

The whole fuselage shook. Ray’s seat shook. The girl next to him shook. Her elbows and her book shook. The tips of her hair shook as they had with every jolt since Nova Scotia [1].

Did she actually shake, though, Ray wondered, or did she quiver? Did she quiver, or did she quake? It didn’t matter. He was certain now that next time she quivered and/or shook her head would end up on his shoulder. She would like her head resting on his steep shoulder so much that she would keep it nestled there. She would then, each time the plane quivered and/or quaked, rub her lovely head into his steep shoulder that was as hard as plate armour. The skies above Greenland might be empty but later tonight fireworks would spread over London, drizzling rosy and indigo. She would quiver and she would quake.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

[1] This short story by India Emmott arrived in the post. She’d clipped a postcard of an Egon Schiele nude to the title page. There was a note written on the back.

Dear Ashley,

Please find here a story I’ve written in case you’re disappointed with me after our night with Ray.

Finding a title has been hard. I’ve toyed with A Stranger Comes to Reclaim Baggage, The Long Lick Goodnight and Kensington Gore but settled on Not for Publication. This means that you are not, should your paths ever cross again, to show this to Ray. Please help me find a better title.

Should you find yourself in London, do try to make me have coffee with you.

You do know what I mean by this, don’t you?

                India xx

I’d like to say that I’d forgotten her, but you can’t really forget India. I took her manuscript to a café, ordered mushrooms on toast, found myself a window seat and started to read.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Since JFK, though, they had only exchanged the briefest of smiles. She’d been engrossed in a book. The book looked poncey, too, with its milksop-white jacket and inserts that kept falling from between the pages every time the plane jolted [2].

It came to him in a flash, suddenly.

On a flight from New York to London, a tall, mysterious, capable man meets a pretty girl with a problem. He sorts out her problem. He suffers a few grazes. She shows her appreciation. He moves on.

Several of the other passengers, Ray had noticed, were reading his books, mainly the new one, The Slaying Depot, but also some of the backlist titles: Shot From Both Sides, Bloodbath Autobahn, a couple of Pump and Grind. He’d even signed a few copies for fans in the departure lounge. Ray Gorse couldn’t go anywhere without seeing his Jock Stretch novels piled up in supermarkets and airport bookshops. Jock Stretch and he had come a long way. Their story was like something out of The Iliad or The Bible.

He’d been talking Jock all week. He’d been in LA, holed up in hotel bars, checking out the girls and signing their Jocks while his US agent, Shuff Howse, hammered out a film deal. Ray Gorse (not his real name, of course, his real name is Miles Templeton [3] but he wasn’t going to tell this to the girl with the quivers even though Miles had been the toughest dude at Marlborough College until Batson-Byers rocked up in the sixth form) was returning to his roost in Monaco via a stopover in London with considerably more change in his pocket than when he’d flown out. Ahead of him were six weeks of sheer hell while he pounded out this year’s Jock.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

[2] I’d met India at Saltsell Farm in Norfolk. A programme of weeklong writing courses had been set-up by Howard Devereaux, the farm’s owner. His original tutor, Emma Hummus, had suffered a nervous breakdown after The Engorged Coypu Review said her novel That’s Why Mum’s Gone to Rehab was “relentlessly purposeful”, and thus Howard, in desperation, employed me: locally respected creative writing tutor always available at very short notice. The farm was set in beautiful countryside. There were newly built chalets dotted around that accommodated the guests and acted as writing rooms (‘scriptboriums,’ India called them). Howard had even arranged for a big name writer, Ray Gorse, an old school friend of his, to come and read in the barn on the final night.

[3] It is as well. Howard told us when he was pissed.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

The new Jock now came to him in a flash during this turbulent storm over the north Atlantic. He would call it North Atlantic Storm Turbulence: A Jock Stretch Novel: on a flight from New York to London, tall, mysterious, capable Jock Stretch meets a pretty girl with a problem. He sorts out her problem. He suffers a few grazes. She shows her appreciation. He moves on. He just keeps moving on.

She wasn’t reading a Jock, though. She was reading something called The Pictorial Jackson Review [4].

The plane shook again. A few respirator masks tumbled from their overhead compartments. Ray Gorse wasn’t fazed, not for a millisecond, but the girl beside him let out a sigh when The Pictorial Jackson Review slid across her knees. Her bookmark, which was slate-grey and embossed with a yellow clarinet, dropped onto the floor between Ray’s shoes.

He reached down to pick it up. He made sure that he looked not at her but into her, but as he looked into her not at her he experienced a terrible bump inside. Until now he hadn’t yet managed a full frontal examination.

Dusky, he thought.

She was dusky.

The word ‘dusky’ struck him like a pile driver  [5].

Fine, she said, as long as you plan it.

I reminded her about the poppy festival. I wanted to say, This has been the plan for weeks. Instead I said, Let’s take them to the poppy festival on Sunday.

She mentioned something about the crowds on Sundays.

I said, It’s either Saturday or Sunday, and won’t church keep some people away on Sunday?

She said, What about Monday?

I had to remind her that they have school. Had she forgotten? Again I didn’t say anything, but I pinched the back pocket of my jeans. We were in her bedroom. Our bedroom. Soon to be her bedroom, or someone else’s altogether.

We have two children, a boy and a girl. Luke is nine, and Jessica is seven. The last time we went to the poppy festival, Jessica was still a part of my wife. Baby Luke had his face painted by a clown with blue eyes. I volunteered Luke from a crowd of parents and children. The clown asked us, No brothers or sisters for this little guy? And I said, Funny you should ask, and went to put my hand on her stomach. The clown said, What a blessing. It took every piece of her not to flinch at the sight of him. I could see it. Since she was a girl in Lancaster she’d been afraid of clowns. Nothing is scarier than artificial happiness. But up close this clown seemed softer, and she allowed him to put face-paint on her stomach, for our baby Jessica, whom I can’t remember not knowing. She let the clown paint her stomach, and the mothers in the crowd made sounds that sounded like love and community.

This time, of course, will be different. Not just for my family, but for everyone. I can remember the day I realized things were changing. I walked alongside Luke and Jessica as they rode their bicycles. Jessica’s training wheels made a certain noise. Sometimes we’d take these midday trips to the Stater Bros., and I’d let them choose a DVD or video game to rent. Other times we’d stop at the Thrifty’s and take scoops of ice cream back to their parked bikes. But on this day we came back to discover that Luke’s bike had been stolen. I was naïve then. I ate a beautiful cone of green pistachio ice cream. We waited there hopeful that the person who’d taken the bicycle, sluggish with conscience, might come back. Eventually Luke asked, Why my bike and not hers. What could I tell him? We walked home, and I asked Jessica privately not to ride her bike. When I told my wife, she said, And you’re surprised because why, exactly? Have you seen the people moving in around here? Sometimes you could almost see the italics when she spoke.

Last year’s poppy festival, according to those who attended, went off without a hitch, so I’m hopeful that for at least one aspect of our community culture, order has been retained. I have friends – Martha from the bank, for instance – who are, I’m not afraid to say, socially backward people. Martha refused to open a Mexican’s account because his English wasn’t up to her standards. She went on her lunch break and left me to work with him. Meanwhile she misspelled the word bureaucrat on her rally sign. I’m different, I hope. I’m not afraid of change. I’m afraid of the disintegration of a good thing. Update: Nothing is scarier than the disintegration of a good thing.

Or maybe that’s her excuse, too. Update: Nothing is scarier than seeing your reasonable excuse used unreasonably.

Sunday’s come. We pack the car with blankets we haven’t used in years. My wife drives, maybe for the last time, and I turn in the passenger seat so that I can look at my children in the back. I ask Luke, Do you remember the last time you went to the poppy festival? Luke’s getting to an age where he’s not afraid to disappoint me. He says, How can I remember? I was just a baby. Jessica says, I remember. They’ve heard the story about the clown a thousand times. Jessica says, It’s my very first memory. Luke gives her a hard time about it, using the word logical, which he’s just begun to use everywhere. My wife says some quiet would be nice. She’s in a bad mood and it’ll only get worse. I don’t care. Soon we’ll be at the poppy festival and the orange flowers will turn the day into a color-coded memory, and the color will give that memory a smell, and a flavor, a chocolate orange, peeled away in layers, and the flavor will turn into a feeling low in my chest when I think about it, and – scariest of all – when I don’t think about it.

______________________________________________________________ Chris McCormick has been published in Eleven Eleven Journal and Fiddleblack, and was nominated for the Best New American Voices anthology. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2009, and earned a merit scholarship to the New York State Writers’ Institute.

We never knew Kacey’s family (though we’ve seen them crying on TV) or Kacey herself. But we know enough—how Kacey’s body washed up on the rocks of the Bay, the fish having eaten her arms and legs, and then the unborn baby a few days later, in about the same condition; how Pete was making concrete anchors in the weeks leading up to her disappearance; how he was fishing on the Bay that very day and still proclaims his innocence; how he was cheating on Kacey and planning a new life with his mistress, a nervous-looking blonde whore career girl, who says she thought he was single. And Kacey’s photo on TV, turning a big smile on us, body profile fully pregnant, beautiful. So, we know.

Because of Pete, we know that our daughter’s thirty year-old good-looking husband can kill her and dispose of her body just like that, no remorse. But we say our daughter like we say our kids or our boys about soldiers overseas when none of us knows, or even knows someone who knows, a soldier overseas.

We arrive early. Every once in a while, as we wait, looking across at the brick facade of the now-silent courthouse, to disrupt conversations of refinancing mortgages or gas prices or local high school sports, someone says something like, He’ll be quivering when he’s in the chair (although we know statistics lean toward lethal injection, if the jury does suggest death), and someone else says, Yeah they’re all cowards when it’s their turn; rising taxes or reconfiguring sprinkler systems or food and beer prices at baseball games, and someone says, They’ll plug his ass like Bundy till he cries, and someone else says, I think they plug everyone’s ass so they don’t shit themselves, and someone else says, they’re always, always cowards when it’s their turn.

But no one knows for hours yet. And even then we only know gradually.

In unison, a slight stir of voices and movement across the street and here, in the Municipal Building parking lot, one of us looks up from a portable TV and says, “Death!”

“Death?” another of us, a man wearing an L.A. Lakers hat, says.

A chain of mumbles begins: Death Death? Death. Holy…Yeah, death. Just said it death Death! Death?

Watching ourselves on the news later, we will notice a woman, mid-thirties, in a tight white tank top and short beige shorts, gazing across at the courthouse with a blank smiling expression, say, at the end of the mumbling, “Ohh, wow. Oh my God…”

And we will wonder: Has the sudden reality of death, whatever the circumstances, caused her momentary stupor, or has this woman, one of us, suddenly fallen in love with Pete Britton?

___________________________________________________________ Michael McCloskey graduated with a BA in English Literature from Monmouth University in central New Jersey, where he lives. His work is forthcoming in Red Lightbulbs and Eunoia Review.

your clippings and albums
smelling of nguh eh nongs and mooncakes,
smelling of a girl who escaped habitual snuffing,
smelling of your Shanghai—

you, rubbing your temples,
blushing in the black-and-whiteness of Russian jazz bands
at a table full of latecomers from the international settlements,
somewhere between life and marriage.

You, in high heels and anti-New Life Movement hair,
purse under your arm, ceremonial rope in your hand,
guiding the Hirzai horse and jockey through a mass of sweating Chinese,
half in cheung-sams, half in fedoras and Irish tweed.

You, slender and oriental in front of the nongtang on Jaffe Road
with a pink-skinned husband and a solemn-eyed daughter.
Eyes turned towards a land of perfumed harbours,
where the Japanese will force you to go.

You, in tight white gown and elbow-high gloves,
walking down a catwalk in your yellow beauty,
in a room of tight-lipped, ex-pat servicemen’s wives,
looking at anything but you.

You, frowning at melons and ginger,
yelled away by hawkers, tripping in your steps.
Wondering where the ingredients are to knup-knup,
a dish that makes sense to no-one.

You, watching The Young and Restless in your phony opium den,
squatting on a bed of pillows, puffing your Dunhill lights,
remembering Portuguese boys,
waiting for buried friends to call you for mahjong.

And you, staring into a Yoksang handmirror,
fussing with your frizzled hair,
whitening your yellow-white face
and smiling at something behind you.

________________________________________________________________________________________ Dean A. F. Gui teaches English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His poetry has been featured in Mascara Literary Review, Transnational Literature and Blackmail Press.

__________________________________________________________ Ricky Garni is a writer and graphic designer. His work has appeared in Unlikely Stories, >kill author, Artocratic and Red River Review. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, near the fire station. ‘With Brown Sugar and Amaretti Cookie’ is nominated by Fleeting for the Pushcart Prize 2012.