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Walking in Rectangles

I walked in rectangles, city blocks. Not that you were in reach. I knew not only that I would not find you, but that you did not want to be found. With each lap I extended the size of my rectangle, a block farther in every direction. I would find you and you would reject me and I would try to work my way past that, as I had done every time before.

I looked for you in bars, but I did not stop for a drink. I was never much good at stopping. When I stopped it would mean I had found you or I had given up. Then I would start drinking, and I’ve never been good at stopping that either.

It was early evening when my walk began, not quite dark. I’d gotten home from work and you weren’t there. Nor were your things. I saw the bathroom cabinet emptied of everything but toothpaste and shaving cream and I knew you had left me. I checked the closet for your clothes anyway, but I knew that if your skin lotions were gone you were as well.

If I locked the door when I left the house I did it automatically. I barely remembered to put my shoes back on. I walked into the dusk then. Now, perimeters broadened, I walked into the dark. If I do not find you I will walk into the dawn, but the dark will never leave. The night will grow colder, and I will find myself farther and farther from home. Without you that is all I will ever find.

 

Rob Pierce is the Editor-in-Chief of Swill, and for nine years was one of the editors of Monday Night. His prose has been published or accepted for publication by Swill, Monday Night, Zygote in My Coffee, Five Star Literary Stories, Strange Tales of an Unreal West, and the forthcoming album release by The Ancients.

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Turn

by Leon Geist

Wake. Rotate hand then arm. Stop. Reach for side table with stretched fingertips, touch the gold metal lamp base and turn on the light bulb that flickers, lights, flickers. Bad bulb, or maybe it’s not bad at all. It only behaves badly.

Lay flat again. Coil springs push through a much worn mattress curved low in the middle with a faint yellow-orange stain outlined in brown, scented in Clorox. Nurse had tried to clean the urine away while discussing cost effectiveness and new mattresses.

Springs push at ribs, thigh backs, shoulders, heads. Two heads are helpful on days when waking requires two minds—one to choose to get out of bed, the other to plead for staying, though the option is not up to either head. The legs and the heads do not talk properly anymore. It’s the nerves. They flicker sometimes.

Nurse comes for me and I hate her though I wish she would wash me more thoroughly down there where I can’t feel anymore. She’s an ugly nurse, old and stocky, and I hate her because she can make me hard just by washing me.

The chair sits, waiting for me today as it does every day and I hate it, too, the chair. Nurse pulls my legs to the side of the bed, lifts me, turns us like dancing so that she can sit me properly in my chair. She lets go before touching, so that I drop a few inches, rattle, shake from the jar of it. She does it on purpose. The straps are uncomfortable on my chest, the neck brace rubs at the back, below my hairline and I imagine that little men hold me there with stick pins and screws. I think a blister has started where the skin is raw.

The bulb flickers again and I think to turn, observe what I can already see reflected off walls and the white of nurse’s uniform. I think to turn because the habit has not forced itself out of me yet and in my mind, I turn, rise up from the chair and yell at that bulb to stop its fucking flickering, but the brace holds my head straight forward as nurse feeds me runny scrambled eggs on a spoon, sips of orange juice through a straw. She never gives me coffee. I hate her.

Before nurse leaves, she places me in front of the window covered in slats of horizontal gray metal and it is as if slats on my cage though they go the wrong way for a cage. The bulb flickers again. I can see it in the window glass between metal slats like glowing about my flickering body that, in the glass, appears to be dancing in strobe lights.

After nurse puts me back in bed then turns out the light, I wait for morning and the chair and my slatted window, hoping for a sponge bath.

 

Leon Geist lives in North Carolina with a cat. This is his first published story.

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Camera Obscura

Camera Oscura

by Foust

Just for a split second, this moment was important. You held the camera at waist-level and peered down into the box’s glass window. Later, you pressed the viewfinder up to your face. Squint. Hold still. Click. You had to wait a while to see what you had done. Early on, you mailed the whole camera off to Rochester. They would return it loaded with new film when they sent your photos to you. Eventually, you took the film to the drugstore, or drove up to a little kiosk in the middle of a parking lot.

When you opened up the envelope, were you surprised?

Why didn’t anyone warn you there would be an ambush when you stepped out of the privy?

Aunt Emma has really aged, hasn’t she?

That Floyd can sleep through anything.

Whose dog was that? No one remembers a dog being there.

After you passed the pictures around, after everyone saw them, where did you put them? In a drawer in the guest room. In a shoebox in the attic. On the black paper pages of a leather-bound album. Maybe you threw out the unflattering ones—like the one where the sun paved lemon rectangles across your face, or the one that made you finally throw away that horrible pair of slacks that always rode up in the back. Maybe you sent some to friends. Or pressed the good ones into a hinged desktop frame—their subjects forever forced to look at each other out of the corners of their eyes.

At any rate, this moment was important, wasn’t it? Even though no one remembers why.

 

Foust received an MFA in creative writing from Spalding University in Louisville in 2008, and a BFA in Illustration from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1985. Her stories have appeared in places like Minnetonka Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Word Riot, and Wrong Tree Review.  She lives with Melvyn, her wonderful husband, and Mia, Honey, and Grace, her three spoiled dogs, in the Forest Hill Park section of Richmond, Virginia.