Fredric Sinclair

It will be written that there was blood and horrible gashes through the head. They will say that he kicked wildly, like a horse pricked in the side, that he let loose such a scream as to send shivers down the most hardened butcher’s back. It will be said that tears ran down his face, that he sobbed such as a grown father sobs for the loss of a child to some unnatural breach of nature — just so they will say he wept, deep in the chest, with full, manly guttural groans.

They will say this and so much more. But they will be wrong. He was like a babe in my arms. Had I been his mother, he would have given suck. Who knew that reason could so overrule the old man? No sooner had he hardened to my touch did he soften, like a blister to balm. And as a blister needs a lance, in his very hands he clutched it, bright and shiny. I worked it out, his hold firm at first, but in time he gave willingly, like child releasing some forbidden token, hesitantly, until he knows he’s lost it, till no more. I coddled the hand. It shook from the cold. Some will say it was fear. It will be written that he shook from fear.

I ask those who wish to embolden truth: why should he fear a boy from down the street who had come once a month since he was six and had never once in all that time given him but the slightest cause to frown, let alone tremble — tremble as a man might tremble if he saw his own shadow rise up and take form and lurk for days with sullen, abject insipidness? Why should the sight of a child, a local boy, one of his many usual customers, cause him to tremble so? What does it matter that he didn’t recognize me? It feels like yesterday, when I first swung up on his leather chair like a cowboy mounting a horse. Just so, I kicked and hollered and cried Whoa, there, big fella! How the old man would tremble then with laughter. Wasn’t I the hero then, with my full, flaxen mane for his fingers to plumb?

Damn his whistling! Damn it to hell! He swept and swept. All that sweeping when the deed was done. The whistling and sweeping and how he winked at me when it was all over and said Giddy-up, now, chap. The bristles of the broom and the sweeping and all that scratching on linoleum, all that scratching, scratching, with those wonderful, thick bushels of blond and bronze catching in those bristles.

When he was finished, I’d give him my five dollars, and he’d bend down and pat me on the head and stick out a lollipop. Even? he’d always say with a wink. Out I’d go and the door would make its jolly jingle and not once would I think (as I think now, horribly, wakefully, tossing in the night, turning on the light to inspect the pillow cover and dab it with a piece of tape to count in the morning) — no, not once would I think of what he had taken. Stolen! Not once did I notice (but how I notice now, how I notice every day) how he, in his old age — when in the natural course of life one enters a perpetual drought and the fields go barren and the crops go lacking — not once did I notice how in need of lacking was he! Such a full, thick tassel. Downy waves of black. Lustrous strands of metallic sheen. So much overflowing at such an age, he still daubed it with greasy palms of Vitalis. Either he had not paid in full the taxes of a life long-lived or nature’s great auditor, time, had been fooled, burgled, hoodwinked. While I — who has now but barely reached my prime, who has only but timidly sampled the sweet nectar of youth, let alone thrown himself wantonly into the battering storm — show the visible scars and haggard visage of a thousand noisome inquiries.

Stop your prying. Will you stop? It was time. He was overdue. I tried to explain it to him, but he didn’t understand. He only shook his head. Shook it and kept on shaking it. So I took it in my hands, only to stop the shaking. But then I had it in my hands. That head. That hair. I took a handful. Oh, that hair. I tugged it. And tugged some more. And even more still till I heard the slightest rip. Then I eased my hold and steadied his head between my knees before I grasped again with renewed resolve. I got a handful, roots and all, though by now I was getting a taste of how much spunk the old man still had in him. He kicked like a stallion and wailed like a babe in the crib, but I kept him down and assured him that the steadier he stayed, the quicker and easier it would be for the both of us, for now I took out those glittering beauties he’d surrendered when I’d grasped him by the hands and stared into those wide, dark eyes that quivered like polished stones in a riverbed. Now they rolled . . . and rolled, and when I thought they would roll right out of his head, I set the blade flush to his scalp, lowered my mouth to his ear and whispered — Even.

FREDRIC SINCLAIR is a New York-based author. His plays have been produced at The Players, The Director’s Studio, Richmond Shepard Theatre, Manhattan Repertory Theatre, and the Midtown International Theatre Festival. His writing and co-production credits include Provincetown, Bluff Head, Lethe, The Friend, and Aiken in Cyberspace. He also has written two novels, Preemption and American Sampler, and numerous poems. www.fredricsinclair.com

Anna Lea Jancewicz

(for David (not Lee Roth))

Finally, one afternoon, in a fit of desperation, you fish one of Husband’s plain white undershirts out of the Semi-Clean Pile and with a Sharpie make a custom maternity shirt.

I’m not just getting fatter, ok? There’s another human in here.

Husband says you shouldn’t count your chicken before it’s hatched. And in fact, when folks begin to ask What are you hoping for? You find yourself replying A human. Husband prefers We’re hoping it’ll be Asian. Asian babies are really hip now. He also lets them know, in a confidential tone, that werewolf does run in his family. On my father’s side he whispers, sotto voce. You think this may be true.

Husband proposes naming the baby David Lee Roth, Jr. You make a counter offer. Only if we can go with Anna Lita Ford, should it be a girl. Stalemate.

You love Fern. Also, Opal. Husband decrees: No naming babies after plants or rocks. Why beat around the bush? You may as well name the kid Bongwater. You scowl.

Ulcer Hellhammer, Husband says, beaming. That’s gender neutral. You agree to disagree. What about Agony Hellhammer? he asks. Is that more girly?

This baby will be Irish and Jewish, he says, You know that means it’ll have a tail and horns. You add to the gift registry: lots of little kilts, lots of little hats.

You attend childbirth classes, the kind where the instructor wears a large pendant around her neck that resembles the Venus of Willendorf. She plays tranquil New Age flute music at the end of each session, and urges you to visualize rainbows and waterfalls. Husband elbows you as you both sit cross-legged on the floor and whispers I think I have dog crap on the bottom of my boot. You smell this to be true. You both agree you are out of your element.

You decide to just have the baby in your own bathtub. Your birth plan goes something like: “Play Whole Lotta Love on repeat, very loudly, and yell fuck a lot at the top of my lungs until we see a head.” Amazingly, this works really well, and none of the neighbors call the cops. Husband says Led Zeppelin is for queers and losers. You’re the one who is shitting a broadsword, so he can eat it. But you love him so much more now, somehow.

The baby has no Asian features, of course. And surprisingly, no horns or tail. You do note upon waking, after the first postnatal full moon, that your wee darling is spattered with a fair amount of blood, chicken feathers stuck to rosy cheeks. Ulcer Hellhammer is still the cutest baby you’ve ever seen. It’s true. She really is.

ANNA LEA JANCEWICZ lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she homeschools her children and haunts the public libraries. If she could fistfight any historical figure, it’d probably be Martin Luther or Herman Melville. Also, she has no familial feelings toward her dog. Her writing has recently appeared at Bartleby Snopes, The Citron Review, Rawboned, Squalorly, and elsewhere. Yes, you CAN say Jancewicz: Yahnt-SEV-ich. More at annajancewicz.wordpress.com

Devin Strauch

She’s in the shower and washing away her old apartment when she finds the first strand of angel hair. It slumps from her scalp, pretending to belong. She rolls it between her fingers and then traces it up, feeling where it connects with her skin. By the time she finds the courage to pluck it from herself, the water is cold and she’s shaking and the pain doesn’t surprise her, but she isn’t quite ready for it. She chews on the soft noodle and wonders if her new boyfriend has a magic apartment or if maybe her body is just changing realities, to one where hair is spaghetti and spaghetti is hair. She worries that maybe she got so lost in her old head and old apartment and old boyfriend that even old lunches have fused to her skin. Mainly though, she wonders if her new boyfriend likes pasta.

Months pass and soon she finds her fingers sneaking through her regular hair to feel the growing mass underneath, like a bowl of brains on Halloween. She worries her boyfriend will find out, so she started cutting it off every morning after he leaves for the day. She slices the thin pasta off, naked and alone in the bathroom. She watches it drop into the toilet and down the drain. Their pipes are starting to clog from the wheat, but her boyfriend already asked why their trash was always full of the odd noodles, so she has no where else to dump the angel hair.

It’s not until she cuts her finger with the blade and instinctively sucks on the wound that she notices her blood is starting to taste less like copper and more like tomatoes. By then their toilet has stopped working, so she’s been cutting her noodles into plastic bowls and hiding them deep in the fridge, past the rotting lettuce and forgotten strawberries.

Her boyfriend loses his job and she’s already lost hers, forever ago before her nail clippings would turn into parmesan cheese.

“We’re fucked,” he says, coming home and opening a beer and slouching on the couch.

“We’ll be okay,” she says.

“How are you going to live? How are we going to eat?”

She wants them both to eat the pasta, her pasta, but she feels it’s something he has to ask of her first, something she can’t offer without him recognizing it, wanting it, demanding it.

“I guess you’re right,” she says, wishing he would bite into her. “We’re fucked.”

DEVIN STRAUCH is a writing undergrad at Metro State University in Denver, graduating Fall ’14. He likes to take apart computers and get lost in rivers.