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War Most Gruesome

12/27/2015

BY BRETT WILLIS

The burner ignited beneath the stew of conflict when, during lunch, the boys chewed with their mouths open. The girls broadcast their disgust by sticking their tongues out. This ugly stalemate continued until the attending adult, Miss Pfafferkorn, intervened.

Though volatile, tensions would have relaxed by recess were it not for the note delivered during snack time by Sarai Bungtower—chief female liaison to icky boys through Darren Wilkerson (whose t-shirt Sarai had kissed during field day 2003).

Boys, read the note. It continued,

sniff poop.

~ Girls

Sweat prickled Darren’s palms as he absorbed the note’s import. Despite its undetermined meaning—was it a command for the boys to smell feces or a statement of purported fact?—the message’s aggressive tone could not be mistaken. Hey, thought Darren, I don’t sniff poop! He looked to Sarai and asked, with eyes alone, if he must deliver this cruel message. Sarai nodded. Such a simple thing, a nod. Yet with it—a dip of one freckled chin—the entire 5th grade class of room 3E embarked in earnest upon the path to battle.

Circling

12/20/2015

BY JENNIFER FLISS

“You just have to turn it a little,” Deirdre is saying. I have a wire hanger dug deep into some muck in the bathroom sink.

“We should’ve used Drano,” I say, tugging the wire toward me. It seems to be stuck.

“That stuff’ll kill you. Poison.”

“But it works,” I point out. “This isn’t working.”

“If you can get the angle right, you can just…” and something comes loose, sending me backwards into the shower door. I’m on the floor with a mildewy towel on my head, still wet from the previous night’s shower. The wire is beside me and at the end of it is a goldfish, mouth still gasping for air. The fish’s mouth keeps working the oxygen, not even noticing that its guts are pouring out of it like a cream sauce, where the wire stabbed.

“Uh,” I say. Except she is unfolding another hanger. One eye closed, she peers down the drain like it’s a periscope.

“I don’t think that was the problem,” she says.

Kenny's Nickel

12/13/2015

BY A.S. COOMER

The clouds rolled in thick and boiling. Black as the night. We were out there on the tracks with our bikes, waiting on a freight to move through so we could squash some pennies. Kenny had a nickel he wanted to try out too. We all thought that was stupid.

I don’t know where he came from. Somewhere down the line, I guess, but we didn’t see or hear him come up. One minute we were cussing and carrying on like kids do when they’re out of their parents’ earshot, the next he was standing there.

Scared the shit out of me. I can admit that now. None of us could then, of course.

I think Dave saw him first. I could be wrong though. “Who’re you?” he blurted out.

We all jumped and spun around to see who Dave was speaking to.

“What’re you all doing out here?” the man asked.

He had this snaggletooth that hung out onto his bottom lip, even when his mouth was shut.

Chicken Arms

12/6/2015

BY JANE EDEY WOOD

Tanned, leathery neck and scrawny little chicken arms. I know chickens don’t have arms, but if they did, they would look like hers.

The way she keeps arching her back and lifting her hair, elbows facing the ceiling. All I can think about is uncooked chicken wings. In her sleeveless top, her hollow but thankfully fresh-shaven armpits are constantly exposed to Robert, my lawyer, and me, since I am sitting beside him. She looks like a flapping, preening chicken, strutting in front of her ex-husband.

They used to be married but are long-since divorced; he has remarried and divorced a second time, I don’t know about her. He is calm and almost snide except he is too well-mannered and in-control for a display of any kind. “What time is it?” he asks benignly. “Let me make a note of how long Brenda insisted we ‘discuss’ this clause.”

The mediation lawyer, an older grey-haired woman who favors natural fibers and chunky wooden necklaces, smiles into her yellow legal pad.

War Most Gruesome

Circling﻿

Kenny's Nickel

Chicken Arms﻿

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Circling

Chicken Arms