by Mindela Ruby



Thanks to my pygmy bladder, I wake before sunrise and stumble to the bathroom where, under sixty fresh watts of a light bulb bummed off my neighbor, a sluggish, inch-long cockroach hunkers in the sink.

“Vamoose!” I tell it and sit to do my business. Instead of pushing the toilet handle, I mind Ma’s water conservation byword: Flush down the brown/ Let the yellow mellow. The reassurance of sour piss – the piddling extent of my family legacy. I pull up my shot-elastic briefs.

The stink that irked me as a pre-teen was the loose wino turd in Ma’s undies. Hippie Bob, her precious husband, never changed her dooked BVDs or helped lift her off the floor. He’d step over her prostrated body and say he’s the only one in the family with self-respect. According to him, we were trashy losers who ought to kiss his ass.

Kick his ass is what we should have done. I flush and look at the cockroach. It hasn’t moved and doesn’t skedaddle when I tap his shell. Aren’t these pesks supposed to be indestructible? This one’s a limp-antenna goner. I flip his pellet body over, not on purpose, into some basin muck. Stuck in mire – familiar feeling. This roach deserves a proper burial. Least I can do for a fellow inhabitant of earth.

Beneath the purple sky outdoors, alley cats screech a fucky-fighty duet as I kneel in the plant bed near the lobby door. Waterlogged and missing a leg, the insect waits on a square of toilet paper on the sidewalk. I dig a grave with a teaspoon I’ve brought out. Goosebumps smear down my bare legs as I sing a line of a song by The Damned:

No living thing has lasted here
Yet we shall both survive…

Or “shall” we survive? I wonder. A car slants out of the dark and comes alongside the curb. Oakland Police have a knack for showing up unwanted.

Daryl Prettyman, a night patrolman who booked me on a Drunk and Disorderly last year, opens his window. His ears ride so low they’re on his neck, not his head.

“Everything alright, ma’am?” his drab soldier voice says over the dogged thrum of his motor.

I scratch my behind. This chauvinist let the lunkhead I was carousing with off the hook last year and arrested just me.

“What’re you up to?” he says.

“Burying a dead pet.”

“At this hour?” he says, as if the sanctioned pet burial portion of night has passed. He glances around for a beloved feline or gerbil and doesn’t notice the deceased waiting on the sidewalk to take its dirtnap. “You have permission to place remains in this yard?”

“Yes, sir,” I lie, feeling jurisdictional eyes considering me. I spade a thorny berry shoot with the spoon.

Prettyman’s arm drapes down the cruiser door.

“How ‘bout you stop that?”

“Who’s it bothering?” I lick my knuckles and taste blood. “Bacon-brain.”

The car door opens, and out steps “Oakland’s finest” in full regalia. As if my current fate wasn’t demoralizing enough to begin with.

“Now, see,” he says, fingering his puppety ear, “it bothers me when a citizen disses the police force.”

“Sorry.” I wriggle into a squat, ligaments burning.

Pretty Badge peers around for a critter or incriminating evidence to bust me for.

“It’s my job to keep my beat safe.”

“What’s everyone’s fixation on staying safe?” I mutter. My bestest friend, who called me out on some recent nasty sexcapades, is a big safety advocate. She believes I’m endangering myself. I can’t say she’s wrong for wanting no part in it. Oh, how I miss her company, though.

“You better go indoors,” the cop says.

Above the East Bay hills, first dawn gleams, the color of just-forged steel, as if this new day might hammer itself out less tarnished than previous ones.

When I stab a chokehold of dandelion, the spoon handle buckles into candy cane shape.

“You ever see that TV magician that bent spoons with the power of his mind?” I say.

“Don’t think I have.”

“My step-dad, the expert spirit-crusher, claimed it was a trick.”

Pretty’s face holds its official blank expression.

“No magic here.” I fling the spoon away. It gyres through the air, strikes the police car fender and plonks to the asphalt.

“Step forward, ma’am,” the officer says.

I know from experience that stern-voiced cops expect to be obeyed. But no giddy-up’s in me. My knees are stiff as padlocks. I’m rooted to the ground.

“That was accidental,” I say.

His hand twitches near his gun belt.

“You’ve been instructed to stand.”

Though Daryl probably won’t shoot, he might be gunning to put hurt on me, more than I’m prepared to bear. I limp out of the flower bed, arms POW high. The surrender pose excites me. But my right foot’s pins and needles, frozen like a clubfoot. I have to stomp feeling back into it.

“Miss?” Pretty says.

Wagging my boot victoriously, I notice a paper scrap wedged in its cleats.

“My bug!” I pluck out the shred and turn it over in my hands. Search and rescue’s hopeless. The cucaracha is a smear at best, and I’m woe-is-mea-culpa crushed, too. The small things in life are what break us.

My arms flail like let-loose water hoses. Pretty vises me in a body lock. I hang half naked in his police custody arms, cursing, “Fucker! Ass-wipe!”

His service revolver is holstered inches from my face. I’ve never touched a real-life pistol. Soon as I do, he tackles me to the pavement, locks my wrists into metal cuffs, frisks me from the waist up, and, before the thrill of that wears off, hoists me by the sweater with excessive force into the backseat of his car.

Thick wire mesh separates the front seat from the back. The Gestapo dispatches a radio report I decipher only “10-50” out of. I rub my snotty palms on the plastic seat cover, look out the window and wonder if my sick neighbor is watching me get in trouble out here. I hope she’s sleeping and missing all this.

“Five-O,” I say, “What you got on me?”

He re-clips the mike to its mount and twists around. “Say what?”

“Say wuh?”

“Ma’am, what’s your beef?”

“You wrecked my attempt at a good deed!”

“What’s your name?”

“Park.”

“Park what?”

“Born Under a Dark Star Park. MacArthur Park.”

He turns and starts the car.

Eventually I’ll have to tell him my full name, Dickinson Park. “Did someone from my building call the cops?” I say. “Or was you showing up my crummy luck? I wasn’t trying anything funny with the weapon.”

The cop turns again with a searching glance I feel the need to explain away.

“It’s just that my whole groove’s gone bust in one swell foop.”

“Fell swoop?” he says.

“Not even that fast. My life’s been going steadily downhill for months.”

“Happens to the best of us.”

There’s this about cops: you can bare your heart, and they sit you out and protect and serve. With my undies clumped in my butt crack, the plastic seat’s perforations are scratching my exposed buns.

“Getting busted doesn’t help, you know.”

The police radio fuzzes on and fizzles off. “Simmer down,” he says.

The sash of sunrise widens. I sigh.

“Got a right to know what you’re charging me with.”

“314, probably.”

“What-what-four?”

“Misdemeanor lewd exposure.”

I rub my knees together. He thinks this is lewd?

“Animal carcass violation,” he mumbles. “Another possibility.”

I bat tears off my cheek and think of more lyrics from “Wait for the Blackout”:

The darkness holds a power that you won’t find in the day

“Probably transfer you from the stationhouse to the psych facility in San Leandro,” the cop says.

“John George? Please, no. I’d rather cool my heels in the slammer than go the heebie-jeebie bin again.”

“A clinician should evaluate you. You could be a danger to yourself.”

Not this old story again.

“I’m no psycho! Swear on my mother’s grave.”

He smiles, not knowing Ma’s still alive and kicking.

“Alright, then,” he says.

I smile back. There might be a way out of getting arrested.

“You know how cops put the moves on girls sometimes?”

“No, I do not.”

“Sure, you do. It’s common knowledge that copsicles use the badge and their vested authority to get girls to do them.” I lean on the screen and blow on Pretty’s neck. “Some girls are up for a little copophilia if it keeps ‘em out of trouble.”

“I stopped listening five minutes ago,” he says, shoving his gear-shifter. My building drops from sight.

“Rear entrance, some playful spanky-spank,” I say. “You can get it here, Daryl baby.”

He brakes so hard my forehead bonks the screen.

“Keep it zipped,” he says.

I slide back on the seat and snort down more snot as we drive past the boarded-shut grocery I used to buy Doritos and cigarettes at, before Mom and Pop got deported. “You’re on duty; I get it,” I say. “Rules and regs, respecting my rights. I was just foolin’ with ya. Onward to the clink.”

My cuffed hands pull my sweater over my thighs.

“Can I get a blanket at the station? And this time can you not call my parents? Don’t want my ma paying for bail or my step-dad blow-harding advice. I’d rather freezate at Boy George than take more wrong-rub from him.”

We pass renovated buildings a century old, full of nice clean men, outside my shady little orbit. No cockroaches, no disappointment.

“If you change your mind, pull over here.” I point to a massive stucco house with white shutters, circa 1930. “’Cause you’re the man. And I’m just a half-naked skank with bound hands and a juicy –”

“Shut that filthy mouth!” He stops the car, throws off his seatbelt, throws his door open, throws my door open, and throws me to the curb. He unlocks my nippers and throws them down near me.

“I thought you were carting me to the loony farm?” I say.

“Don’t want to deal with you.”

I rub my wrists. “What if I wanna deal with you?”

“Go home.”

He slams my door shut. I crawl to his shoes.

“Drag me half-undressed blocks from home and abandon me? Police brutality!” I grab his legs to pull myself up, one hand accidentally slithering over his wiener.

He pulls his gun. This time I’m not so sure he won’t shoot.

“Easy,” I say, backing away. It’s one thing to act smutty, another to get capped for it. I flap my arms like a moth. “See? I’m flying home, like you said.”

He gets in his car and is off to harass other small fry in the ‘hood, leaving me across the street from the wall I smashed my toe on three weeks ago, when my ex-friend Bridgit got mad about my fiendish sex antics and dumped me off without a toodle-ooh. I hear a garbage truck clanging down the block.

On this side of the street is a strip of grass all springy green from the recent rains. I lie down and let dew penetrate my sweater. At the sidewalk’s edge my fingers hook onto something hard and cold. I pull it toward my face.

Handcuffs. The discombobulated po-po forgot that he threw them down. I flip to my stomach and inhale the brawny sweetness of the ground through the unlatched loop of one handcuff ring.

“Too bright out here,” I say through the bracelet, thinking of “Wait for the Blackout.” I hum a few notes and lay my head down. Under this grass live relatives of my cockroach: worms, earwigs, millipedes.

“Can’t even get myself arrested,” I tell them, conspiratorially.

But there’s no indication they hear.






MINDELA RUBY has been a nanny, motel maid, tutor and punk radio deejay. She currently works as a community college professor. Some of her recent fiction has appeared in Boundoff, The Medulla Review, Emprise Review, The Binnacle and Literary Mama.

by Henry Sane



The world ended one night as I was sitting on the toilet.  At the time, I remember I was peacefully reading Amerika by Franz Kafka, having just finished the very last word of the second-to-last chapter.  Chapter six, I think.  Maybe seven.

And then the world ended.

Naturally, being that it was the end of the world, it was one of those times when you remember everything about the moment—what you were doing, who you were with, what was in the air, and so on.  Like where you were when you heard a beloved celebrity was shot, or what color tie your father was wearing when he came out of the closet.  Sensory recognition.  You can’t forget these kinds of moments, short of suffering amnesia or some other memory-blanking trauma.  And you can’t forget the details either.  Me, I was half-naked, sitting on my toilet, reading Kafka when the world ended.  I could hear the monotonous buzz of the overhead air vent and the trickling of water from my faulty sink faucet.  I tasted nothing, felt nothing particularly memorable in the line of the physical or the emotional.  The lingering stench of shit was perhaps the most unforgettable.  All in all, everything, internally and externally, was very peaceful.  Both before and after the world ended, very peaceful.

Perhaps I should clarify—the world didn’t properly end, as one might expect of such a thing.  After all, I still existed.  As did my bathroom.  And the Earth was obviously still there.  There was no explosion, or implosion, or redirection or derailment of our orbit around the Sun.  No noticeable increase or decrease in temperature or breathable air.  No chaos, no hideous mutations, no cannibalism.  There was just me. And my bathroom.  And an empty void that encompassed everything else.

I’d just finished the very last word of Amerika’s second-to-last chapter when the violent rattling began.  Something like an earthquake, but far more jarring and profound.  Much quicker also.  And whereas an earthquake is like a ten-second upheaval of mountainous wobbling, during which certainty is abruptly discarded like yesterday’s garbage, this was like having your mind separated from body and time, sucked through a black hole, and instantly replaced.  And also unlike an earthquake, you knew from the very moment of the tumultuous onset exactly what was happening.  But in that fraction-of-a-second moment of intensity, you also realize it’s already come and gone.

So don’t ask me how—but I knew without a doubt I’d just survived the end of the world.

I’d already begun dealing with it—emotionally speaking—before my mind had returned to my body.

The internal conversation went smoothly enough:

It’s the end of the world, said one side.

That’s right, replied the other.  So?

So what?

So what will you do?

What will I do?  Huh?  What are you getting at?

It’s the end of the world… Surely you’ve got a plan, yes?

Yes.  But it’s the end of the world, and we both know that.

Right.

(Pause)

So at the end of the world, you throw out your plans and start over.

Right.

So what’s the use in formulating a plan now?

But you said you already had a plan—

That’s right, I did.  My plan is to forget about plans.  How can we possibly be expected to formulate a proper plan at a time like this, beyond the plan of non-planning, of course?  We haven’t even reconnected yet!  Once everything internally gets back into place, we’ll sort out the external accordingly.  Sound?

Sound.

Then I chimed in:

The end of the world is a plan all in itself, forced upon us all.  There’s no use fighting one Godzilla of a plan with one little BB gun of a plan.  We’ll scope out the end of the world, pretend it’s a blueprint for the future of mankind and go from there.

That sounds like a plan, replied the first side.

So it does, agreed the other.

Instinctively, I knew it was the end of the world.  I didn’t learn it from the voices and they didn’t learn it from me; we all just figured it out at the same time.  I knew it before the cave-in of the bathroom door, the landing point of some weighty debris.  I knew it before that faint hint of sulfur hit the air.  And I knew it before the air returned to the familiar smell of shit.

Without the need to test it, I was sure I was trapped—trapped in the bathroom at the end of the world.  I could have easily cleaned up and tried to shuffle through the tiny crack between the large debris and the doorframe; but the debris was so massive and so obviously cumbersome that even the thought of moving it was completely pointless.

So there I sat.  On my toilet at the end of the world.  No one, no thing, existed beyond the walls surrounding.  And I was sure of it.  Still, I wanted to remain positive.  Instead of thinking about what I knew there wasn’t, I tried to think of what perhaps there was, if anything, left beyond my bathroom walls.  But it was useless.  I just couldn’t conjure the thought.  Maybe in that split second, when the world ended, I formed a mental block, whereby some fragment of my subconscious refused to pass hopeful information through the necessary channels to reach my conscious mind.  Actually, my way of thinking was rather odd in this respect.  Assorted words and phrases came frequently to mind, as they normally might after any tragic occurrence, but no pictures or meaning came attached to them.  Words like fire, death, misery, desolation, obliteration, re-population, fear, rubble, bodies, loss, nothingness—

It all just bounced right off as if I’d reverted to infancy.  The words could have just as easily been hamburger, astronomy, condom and Pileated Woodpecker.

After about thirty minutes of very calm acceptance—it was almost meditation, minus the specific intent to find calmness—I decided to continue reading Kafka.  I never knew before I began the final chapter that Kafka had never properly finished the novel.  The final chapter comes out of nowhere, after leaving a mostly unresolved second-to-last chapter, and essentially the story finishes nowhere.  All in all though, an enjoyable read.  I would highly recommend this novel to anyone who’s just survived the end of the world.

With nothing better to do, I decided to start reading Amerika again from the beginning, optimistic that this time it would turn out better.  Maybe in my first read-through, I thought, I’d approached it in the wrong frame of mind.  I don’t usually read novels twice.  Too many on the “to read” pile.  But I wanted to catch something new that would unite this novel’s broken pieces.  I just can’t stand a story that ends like that.

So there I sat, on my toilet, trapped in the bathroom at the end of the world, opening Amerika for one more read-through.

Chapter one.






HENRY SANE is a 26-year old enthusiast of literature. He reads it, writes it and, at Columbus State University, studies it. He plans to earn his degree in English Literature in the Fall of 2011. His favorite activities include cemetery war dances, hopscotch, and bumping into random people so as to fulfill the void for human contact. On occasion, he reports the uncanny ability to eat an entire bag of pretzels. His writing varies in style, ranging from the frightening to the absurd, from the grotesque to the whimsical, and from the readable to sheer wiping material.

by Mike Sweeney

On stage, Dave Bielanko is propagating the myth.

“You never know who’s going to show at the Stone Pony,” he taunts, tongue firmly in cheek.

Christine, the band’s keyboardist, says, “Bruce’s hair looks great tonight.”

The crowd murmurs.  Springsteen did a guest spot on one of Marah’s albums so there’s more reason than usual to hope for an appearance.

Next to me, James explains: “Their guitarist is named Bruce.  His hair.”

I nod and laugh like I was in on the joke the whole time.

James and I spent most of our teens chasing phantom Springsteen appearances.  We’d cover the Pony, the Fast Lane, even the Trade Winds.  After a while you just get a feel: the size of the crowd, the way security has the side of the stage blocked off.  It’s not going to happen tonight.

Honestly, it doesn’t happen that much at all any more.

Marah’s the main reason we’re here.  James is a long-time follower and Marah fans are a bit like evangelical Christians: they’re not content just to be saved, they need to convert.  I’m not yet ready to profess belief, but I am enjoying them more than any band I’ve seen in a long time.

I’m enjoying the Pony too.  The new owners have taken out the pillars that obstructed the stage view.  It feels like they’ve raised the ceiling.  You can actually breathe in here now.  Best of all, they leave the heating system off.  It’s December but the body heat does a nice job of keeping the place warm without being oppressive.

I remember coming home on winter break from college and going to Southside Johnny shows.  It’d be eighteen degrees outside and one-hundred-five inside the Pony.  Instant pneumonia when you hit the parking lot.  Except back then I was twenty and never got sick.

The crowd at the Pony is exactly how I remember it.  About half are young people, the kids you actually expect to be here.  About half are Springsteen’s contemporaries, fifty- and sixty-year olds reliving their glory days without any sense of irony.

James and I inhabit a late-thirties netherworld between the two groups.  I look around at silver-haired men with pot-bellies poking out from the folds of their Levi’s trucker jackets.  I watch the twenty-year old brunette in black jeans grind her ass against the security barrier and wonder if I already look that way to her.

Aging sucks, as my bladder reminds me.

I tell James I’ll be back and make my way to the men’s room.  People still move out of my way without me asking.  It’s nice to be big and strong.  I think of my dad at the end, how terribly small he seemed.

The bathroom’s been renovated too and I give the facilities a cursory exam.  As I expected, they won’t do.  First of all, the urinals are packed too tightly together.  You can’t stand at them without rubbing shoulders.  Second, there’s an attendant handing out towels.  He’ll be staring at my back.  Third, and most damning, there’s not a proper door, just an over-sized hinged one that swings as you go through and only blocks half the doorway.  You’re practically standing in the crowd.  Under the best of circumstances, I have a shy bladder.  No urination will happen in this space.

If getting old has one advantage it’s that you learn to embrace your limitations.

I have a plan.  Out the front door and across the street is the Silver Ball Museum, a genuine, old-fashioned pinball parlor.  It’s open till one on the weekends.  I spent some Saturday nights there when things weren’t going well, nights when I knew I didn’t want to be alone but when bars seemed like a bad idea.  The place is nice, well lit.  You can get lost in the old games.  Best of all, the men’s room is a single-person job, with the foaming kind of disinfectant soap in the dispenser.  Admission is five bucks for half an hour, but I’ll happily pay it to pee in peace.

James won’t miss me.  He probably knows where I’m going.  Even back in grade school I’d use the stall instead of a urinal.  That’s the great thing about old friends: they’re completely inured to your insanity.

I hold my wrist band up to the Pony’s doorman to make sure I can get back in.  Then I’m outside, the cold momentarily refreshing.  Ocean Avenue is deserted, but that’s only because of the temperature.  After spending two decades as a ghost town, Asbury Park’s resurgence finally took hold in the Aughts.  The New York Times compares it to South Beach now.

I look down the avenue to where the Palace used to stand, the one beyond which hemi-powered drones once famously screamed.  I had my first date there.  We played skee ball.  Her name was even Wendy.

The cold has shifted from refreshing to biting and my bladder reminds me why I’m out here.  I put my back to the Palace and start walking towards the Silver Ball Museum.

The new restaurants and shops block the view of the Temple of Knowledge, the boardwalk shack where Madame Marie once told fortunes.  I had my palm read by her when I was nineteen; she said I’d live to be ninety-two.

“She was wrong.”

Her voice alarms me.  Not the words, so much as the simple fact of it being.  I swore I was alone out here.

She’s standing on the corner of Second Avenue.  She’s small.  Pretty, I think.  The street lights shadow her face.  She turns and walks north towards Kingsley.

Figurin’ I’ll get a drink.

My alarm fades.  It’s more amusement now.  After all, I’m big and strong.

Her gait is light, easy.  It’s practically a skip.

I walk behind her and my eyes memorize her curves.  She pulls her leather jacket tight against the cold and it goes taught against her backside.  I think of black jeans.

We’re walking hand-in-hand down wide, amber-lit sidewalks in Greenwich Village.  We sit at a table to the side of the stage and watch a woman with an impossibly sallow face rail against Patty Hearst.  There’s so goddamn much smoke in here.

Horses, now.  Horses.

We reach Kingsley and stand in the middle of the empty intersection.

I’ve forgotten about Marah, about James, even about my bladder.

I watch my breath cloud the night.  I don’t see hers.

Her eyes are like crystals, ice blue and deep.  I look into them and we dance along rooftops overlooking Central Park.  She’s looking for that one ledge and when she finds it she shrieks with glee and pulls me down.  Inside the window, the room is blinding.  On the couch, a white man cuddles an Asian woman.  She gets up to walk to the kitchen and when he calls after her his voice is the most wonderful sing-song.

I don’t know how long her teeth have been in my shoulder.

I drop to my knees and her feet return to the ground.

I look at her and my mind conjures a picture of my sister as a baby: she’s eating tomatoes.

“Will I live forever?”

She shakes her head and her crystal blue eyes seem genuinely sad.

She kisses crimson down my throat.  I cough and we laugh together.

Her fangs crush my Adam’s apple.

Bruce has finally shown but he has a beard and looks like he weighs ninety pounds soaking wet.  He removes his oversized newsboy hat and lays down on the stage as just the piano plays.  His hair looks great.

Dry you eyes…

I’m at the Palace and Wendy looks at me in horror.  She doesn’t want to kiss.

Spotlight on supine Bruce.

Baby, dry your eyes…

I’m seventeen and hovering at the bottom of the deep end of my family’s pool.  I want to open my mouth and breathe deep because someone won’t kiss me.

For just one kiss…

I make for the surface but someone’s moved the air.  The water’s so very warm.

I swore I’d drive all night…

I taste pennies and hear a last gurgle.

It’s December 1992 and for the first and last time I see Springsteen at the Pony.  He and Southside Johnny harmonize: We were never gonna get old.

I fall like loose bricks onto the frozen street.






MIKE SWEENEY lives in Central New Jersey where he writes constantly but never quite enough.