Posts

Fiction, Josh Dale

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Taking Care of Business

So, I go to Aisle 3 to grab whatever my wife instructed me to get. What was it? The, uh…organic canned beans? Some paprika spice medley? 5 pounds of pork loin? Maybe not in that order, but she’s the boss of the kitchen, and I’ve mastered pattern recognition. But look! A bumbling imbecile of a husband needs some entertainment. I turn the corner and see this badass display. Cans of Monster are stacked as tall as the shelves. Bundles of Doritos and Lays chips fill the area around the base of Coke and Dr. Pepper 12-packs. Two young men are wearing the company’s drab attire, plus an older gentleman in a button-up shirt and a clipboard. I reckon the store manager. In my experience, they can be austere assholes! So, get this. The one employee is up on a 6-foot ladder, and the other is handing him cans, right? This manager, with his graying combover, cracks some loose Monsters and launches them into the air. Both catch; neither spills a drop. They cheer. Crazy! 


This all happens at 10:00 AM, which is important to the story. A certain song was playing on the speakers. “Takin’ Care of Business.” Big with the Boomers, but it’s a bop, not going to lie to you. Anyway, the manager starts to boogie. He’s dancing around, flipping the clipboard over his head, and smacking the boxes of cans. Metallic thuds galore. What a performer! “Hey, boss,” the ladder guy says. “Why do you always play this song at 10 AM?” The manager exhales and wipes some sweat off his brow. “Devote one hour a day to taking care of business, and it can change your life. My ex-wife remembers this song well. No cucumbers were harmed!” The employees laugh so hard. They look barely out of high school. I take it they haven’t a clue what marriage is like. The moment passes, shoppers move along, and the trio stays. The titular song overhead ends, and the weekly sales advertisement rings out. The employees and their manager survey their creation, much like artists do. From my perspective, it looks like a fireball. Hell yeah, I can see it. Taking care of business, fellas! 


I finish up my shopping and visit the sole cashier. An older woman sits on a stool with a fancy badge. 10 years? Wow, that’s dedication! She coughs and shakes when the belt moves with my food. She was nodding off. Oops! I asked her about the music at 10 AM. She looks past me to a faraway place and giggles. Her forehead wrinkles like she’s recounting memories. The blip of the scanner keeps a steady beat. “His wife was the produce manager when he hired me. Ah, how he took a liking to me. They were arguing, and she called out, so I covered the produce department. One thing led to another, and we made love in the prep room. The goosebumps when that chorus kicked in…” She leans close to me. I’m bewildered, hearing this story frothing out of this woman’s mouth. “I regret nothing. This badge on my shirt outlasted their marriage. I still dream of his eggplant every so often.” I make that awkward smile where your eyes squint and your lips look like a worm. “Keep your business to yourself, now, ya hear? Have a lovely day.” She hands me the receipt, and I go on my way. The pictures in my head start flooding in. How many pieces of vegetables did they use in that affair? My groceries felt heavy in my arms, in the car, and in the house.


I open the door and wowzah, it smells so damn good! My wife is in a blitz preparing for the family reunion. Pots bubbling. Skillets sizzling. Emeril and Gordon: start blushing. She’s so good. She skirts around my lumbering ass, and I plop the bags on the island. I can smell the sweat on the back of her neck. Yummy. “Hey, babe, eyes up,” she commands me. A spatula in hand, she rattles off directions. “Dump the beans on the top right pot. 2 tablespoons of paprika. Get the pork on foil. Light oil. My auntie is coming in thirty minutes to help.” Now, the jester appears. I unpack the groceries and goddammit! Nothing she asked for is there! I look ready for a Super Bowl party instead of a curated family event. I start stammering, and it makes my wife pause. Among the chaos, she surveys the incorrect groceries. Her thick, black eyebrows narrow. She inhales deeply, sighs. “Ah, honey. It happened again?” I don’t know what to say, so I crack a Monster and guzzle some down. Liquid courage! “I was distracted by the fireball display, the guys building it, the taking care of business song, and the manager’s tryst with the cashier, the produce manager divorced him, and—” She struts toward me and puts a buttery finger to my lips. Zesty. Her chestnut eyes are stabbing me. “It’s alright. You may be a village idiot, but you’re my village idiot.” She removes her finger from my lips, and I salivate. I see that vein in her neck, just millimeters below her olive skin. It’s pulsing with anger. I want to lift her on the counter and suck on her neck like a hungry baby. I bet she tastes like rosemary. But yo, I’m a big dumb mutt in a man’s body and I’m on the clock! My wife, without skipping a beat, unsheathes a knife from the scabbard with one hand and hurls a tomato in the air with the other. She slices the thing in half in the blink of an eye. The two halves plop onto the cutting board, all gory. She’s a ninja, I swear! She smirks as I backpedal. “Good boy. You finish the job now, you hear?” I nod my head like a metalhead at a concert and bolt out the fucking door…

Josh Dale is a native Pennsylvanian. Introduce your cats to death metal. Read more at www.joshdale.co and most social media @jdalewrites

Micro, Colin James

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Pork butt salad

Thought about stealing Amazon packages off doorsteps  to generate some extra income, but all of my generous neighborshave cameras with speakers, sometimes having long conversations with me from across the street. A bit nerve wracking what with all the questions they ask. Amazing what one normalizes. I haven’t reconsidered attending the Abominable Absurdism Reunion, still pretty firm on that. Then there are the watchdog animals behind electric fences that run at me aggressively and suddenly stop. Pretty sure their vocal chords have been removed cause when I stop for a little chat they just groan. The stabled horses are doing much better. The arses that sit atop them call to me imaginatively in various degrees of missionary undress. I have a beat-up but clean van that might pass for an emergency vehicle, inclusive or exclusive at a moments notice. Uniforms I don’t aspire to but then again, if they could help get me in why not? I’m game.

Colin James has a couple of chapbooks of poetry published. Dreams Of The Really Annoying from Writing Knights Press and A Thoroughness Not Deprived of Absurdity from Piski’s Porch Press and a book of poems, Resisting Probability, from Sagging Meniscus Press. He lives in Massachusetts.

Poetry, Todd Matson

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Author/Artist Todd Matson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in North Carolina, United States.  His poetry has been published Feminine Collective, San Antonio Review, The Brussels Review, and featured in Poetry for Mental Health.  He has also written lyrics for songs recorded by several contemporary Christian music artists, including Brent Lamb, Connie Scott and The Gaither Vocal Band.

Flash fiction, Denise Bayes

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Goddess

Before she came, there was only darkness. Unremitting night surrounded, moonless. Their limbs shrank, conserving energy within their bodies like bulbs sheltering in winter soil.

And then she dropped into their midst. One of them caught sight of her in the woods, a bright sphere of light, illuminating the world. They stared at her from the grey shadows. They watched the warmth of her smile that radiated light into dank corners of the forest. Her fingers stretched wide, leaking flashes of brightness into their world. 
They turned to each other, shaking their heads in puzzlement.

Could they trust her lightness?
A few of the braver ones began to move towards her. As they tiptoed closer, their bodies shivered as brightness began to pulse through their limbs. An unfamiliar energy photosynthesised their veins. As their pinprick pupils began to adjust to the glare, they shrugged off the frowns of the dark years. Etiolated limbs began to stretch and lengthen in her powerful rays.
Then she began to speak and her maple-syrup sweet voice reached them. She spoke of love and happiness, filling the woods with the beauty of words. Soon the reluctant ones drew closer, taking slow steps towards the new world, she had revealed. There was joy in their faces. They formed songs with their new vocabulary and smiled in her presence, shrugged off the old world.
One morning, she was gone.

The people halted, fearful of the past returning as they gazed into the void she had left. They waited in silence for the darkness to return.
But as they turned towards each other, they saw light throbbing through each of them.

Denise Bayes has been published in NZ Micro Madness, Free Flash Fiction, Oxford Flash,100 Word Story, Ellipsis Zine, Firewords ,Roi Fainéant press and the recent NFFD Anthology. Originally from Sunderland, Denise lives in Barcelona, Spain where she lives with her husband and a lively cavalier puppy called Rory. Bluesky @deniseb.bsky.social

Poetry, Peter Gutierrez

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Afterparty

There were tides inside, lap-rolling and full of swimmings with and

Against the waves, lagoons of shifting plastic, and seabirds fighting

With the shore birds fighting with the waterfowl, intarsial contrails

Of diving, flying over, falling into. Nearly every morning she awakens

Only partly, the slosh of dreams and the chilled saltiness of reality

Staggering her back into jumbled half-action.

The clear light and the unclear, and how the two of them liked to switch

Between the two.

The clear undercuts the unclear, which is fun in a jungle

Sort of way—you never knew what phenomena you’d encounter in the fog.

Focus on breath in, hate out.

Breath in, hate out.

Janus felt the negative leave his core, or

At least decided that’s how he’d describe it

Later.

Breath in, hate out.

Or should that be breathe? He hated those online

folks who didn’t grasp the difference. (Spells & spellings.)

In any case: in through the twins, observing thoughts

As they froth and ferment. Then: out through the lips,

Fumigating the caverns of contempt in the digestive knowledge

Management system.

Distantly, a jet plane quiet-thundering through the clouds;

On the next block, a Sonata slides by, its tread smooth and humming.

He could sit here and listen to the dawn-sounds, the sound-

Makers afar and invisible, and be happified for the rest of his

Life, he mused.

His wife, Eleanor, enjoyed a different pathway into the light:

Influenced by an influencer, she went out each dawning before

Anything else. Barely dressed, barefoot or flip-flopping along, 

Ellie followed the notion of forcing undesired action into being,

Doing that which she didn’t want to do to skill her mind into

Facing the unknown; specifically, the rest of the unraveling day.

As a strategy, this swelled and broke like an egg. Those summer

Mornings in Maryland, inches past daybreak, and she could feel 

The hint of heat, the tingly precursors of rain, the immediate world

Still coated in night’s silences. This emergent love of the pale,

Creeping minutes in a pale and creeping hour derailed the project

(As happens sometimes). Later, a post she drafted explained it,  

How what she’d avoided became what she desired, and undid all

The wisdom of the shift. Yet also brought the amor fati peace that

Newsreel chatter, sparkly cocktails, party favors, and elbow-brushings

Had failed to.    

Her husband, whose name is likely Janus, was, is, and will be

Ever unaware of the sutured joinings of her Buddha nature. 

Peter Gutierrez is a poet and writer with work in Bruiser, Exist Otherwise, Not One of Us, and Lxminxl; his books include the story collection From Bad to Worse and the novella The Trees Melt Like Candles. You can find him online @suddenlyquiet.

Poetry, Ben Nardolilli

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Waiting behind

Tonight’s stars are a bunch of people pleasers

Shining brighter than ever

And bringing out all the favorite constellations in a row

I stay inside with my lights on, blocking it out

I have no desire for their show

We do not deserve to look away from earth, not now

Ben Nardolilli is a theoretical MFA candidate at Long Island University. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Door Is a Jar, The Delmarva Review, Red Fez, The Oklahoma Review, Quail Bell Magazine, and Slab. Follow his publishing journey at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com.