Patrick G. Roland

I had a hankering for some Big K Watermelon Kiwi soda. I told Angela you can only find it at Kroger. The grocery store. Angela said she’d try anything once. I agreed with her. We hopped into my gray ’99 Grand Am. On the way there, I told her about my history with Big K Watermelon Kiwi soda. How it didn’t taste like watermelon or kiwi. It was melokwi. I found it by itself on the bottom shelf. How the mutated fluorescent green of the liquid inside the clear bottle made the bottom shelf look futuristic. The pink label gave it a retro look, even though retro was out of style at the time. She said retro was never in style. We agreed to disagree, but I agreed, retro is always current until later. But today is not a day for philosophical musings I said. This is a Big K Watermelon Kiwi soda day. The day Angela’s buds will transcend their current form. I slammed the door of my Grand Am and said I’ll race you. I took off, left her in the dust. She called for me, but when you got Big K Watermelon Kiwi soda on the brain, it’s hard to concentrate on chivalry. I usually let her win our races. She doesn’t know we race, but I always let her get to doors first and then hop in front of her to grab the handle and ease it open with a slight curtsy. Because the first one to touch the handle always wins. I walked up to the light switch near aisle 23 and turned it off. Angela followed me to the bottom shelf. I took out my flashlight and aimed it at the row of Big K Watermelon Kiwi sodas. The whole aisle glowed in a green slime light. Angela was impressed. She said wow. Someone in a Kroger vest turned the lights back on and Angela and I carried two 2 liters to the self-checkout. I put the bottles under my shirt so the sunlight wouldn’t prematurely marry the flavors. An old soda-slinger trick. Angela said soda-slingers never had tricks. As we walked between the sliding glass doors a lady in front of us said, hey, what’s under your shirt? Big K Watermelon Kiwi soda, I said. Angela is going to try it for the first time. Oh, it’s a big day for Angela the lady said. Get ready for your piss to turn green. It is a whole body experience I agreed. Angela and I carried the sodas to the car. I buckled both bottles into the back seat. She said that was unnecessary. I said safety is never unnecessary. At a red light she asked if melokwi was really a word. I said it was now. She said neologisms are cheap. I said so is Big K but that doesn’t make them undefinable. She didn’t laugh. We pulled into my lot. I carried one bottle under my shirt up the stairs. It felt warm against my stomach. Angela followed with the other, but didn’t press it against her skin. We sat on the couch. I twisted the cap. It hissed like a bathtub full of beetles. I poured two glasses. She said it smelled like antifreeze. I said don’t think of it like that. Think of it like antifreeze that went to college. She said that didn’t help. She took a sip anyway. She made a face. Said it didn’t taste like watermelon or kiwi. I said exactly. It’s melokwi. She said melokwi tastes like window cleaner. I nodded. I said sometimes you have to clean the windows to see what’s really there. She put the glass down. I kept drinking. Later that night I woke up thirsty. I opened the fridge. The soda glowed in the dark like a reactor. The sun must have wedded the flavors too early. Angela was gone. The half-empty pack of toilet paper under the sink was gone too. Survival rations. I checked outside. A Pepsi truck idled near the stoop. I sat the Big K Watermelon Kiwi soda in her spot on the couch. Buckled it in beside me. We were two now. I stared at it until everything went dim and I was sucked backward into the green glow, a whole body of liquid around me, flavorless, drifting, retro, futuristic, infinite. I saw Angela in the passenger seat of the truck as I drifted upward into a future already retro.

PATRICK G. ROLAND is a writer and educator living with cystic fibrosis. He enjoys exploring other people’s attics and basements, where most of his writing ideas are created and sometimes lost. He lives near Pittsburgh. His work appears or is forthcoming in Hobart,Not One of Us,3Elements, scaffold, Maudlin House, Literary Garage, and others.

Matthew Bruce

I am the millipede Mars. 
They colonized monuments 
of me before I dropped 
in skin. They crawl when 
I climb. I am millipede 
Giza. Artful in a sunset. 
Worthy of airbrushed shirts 
at my convention. A labia-
pink dusk, priceless. I sleep 
and legions of thread legs 
sew my mythos. I will never 
get the meaning. Brush it off. 
I am the giant buried in all
beds. Nested, pinched, I wait 
for excavation. Wait with me, 
bored with human stories
of has-been constellations.

MATTHEW BRUCE‘s writing can be found in West Branch, Nashville Review, Sixth Finch, The Adroit Journal, and The Common, among others. Originally from Atlanta, he now lives in LA, where he works as a contract editor for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and teaches online courses for Arizona State.