Man Like That

Summer 2011 Prosetry Contest Winner

I have stories to tell, he says, his diamond eye sparkling in the bright sun. I can hardly believe I would get in a car with a man like that man. Blasting along, wind whipping hair, he’s saying words as fast as he can spit them out, I’m looking with some wonder at the flower growing out of his ear and the blue fire dancing on his tongue and thinking, you’re just crazy as a shit house rat aren’t you baby?  He takes both hands off the wheel and presses ten fingertips into his skull, screaming, My brain! My brain! That’s right baby, that’s right. It’s about 102 degrees and looking for more, dry lighting snaps in the air, a lizard atomizes on the hood, twang factor everywhere. He’s easing down on the brake now, gliding to a silky stop. He turns his dove eye to me and says very sweetly, have you eaten anything yet I haven’t eaten yet what shall I get what would you like what sounds good? I say, yes.

 

Sally Reno is a writer, producer and newscaster for Pacifica-KGNU Radio in Denver-Boulder and the CFO of Shining Mountains Press. Her flash fiction and short stories have appeared in print and online journals, including Fast Forward, Indigo, Lady Jane’s Miscellany, Used Furniture Review and flashparty.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Guest-edited by Molly Gaudry, author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart and founder of The Lit Pub. Read an excerpt of her novella, We Take Me Apart, in Moon Milk Review.

Issue No. 14 | Summer 2011


MMR ANTHOLOGY 2011 — Fiction, Poetry, Art

SUBSCRIBE for free online issues of MMR


GALLERY | B. J. Lloyd

COMEDY SPOTLIGHT | Funny or Die: Dear Woman Will Ferrell & Friends

SUMMER 2011 ECLECTIC GROOVE MIX | Featured Indie Rock | Red Directors

Sublime, Sheryl Crow, Sugar Ray

BOOK GALLERY | Cynthia Atkins, Kristina Marie Darling, Meg Tuite, Mel Bosworth, Michael Kimball, Paul Dickey, J. A. Tyler, John Minichillo

FICTION |

Lotería Lisa Marie Basile

Buy Nothing Day Mickey Hess

Emails from the Staybridge Suites Anaheim Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

Permanent Marjorie Maddox

Or Do You Love It? Meg Pokrass

Honey Melissa Ross

The Soul Shoppe Nathaniel Tower

POETRY |

Pork Salt Kay Cosgrove

Echolalia Leslee Rene Wright

PROSETRY |

Spring 2011 Winner | Prophecy as a Reducing Mathematical Certainty Carl James Grindley (Guest-Edited by Laura Ellen Scott)

Summer 2011 Contest | For Your Eyes Only (Guest-edited by Molly Gaudry)

Or Do You Love It?

The darkness was in early now, and she said she looked like a Holstein with her black and white jacket. Men walked by and smiled at me, not her.

Her jacket was playful and spotted and she was overweight so yes, I suppose she looked a bit bovine – but in a nice way. She spoke often of her double chin. I didn’t give a crap, we were friends. We always walked around the lake, every day toward evening we did, rain or shine.

I could smell Kahlua in the air, maybe just the holidays nearing.

A scribble of rain came down and skittered the walkway, pimpled the man-made lake – the mile loop around would soon be slick with silvery leaves from the young trees.

“Are you afraid of lightening? Or do you love it?” she asked.

She was jealous of me because I had a man. I never talked about him or about anything that had changed for the better. Secretly, my bed had become a home again. A place to live.

My man friend didn’t like her, said, “She sounds cruel, and anyone who hurts you is a redneck asshole.”

“No, you don’t know her,” I told him. I should not tell him anything about her, but I was starting to tell him everything about everything.

On our walk, she stopped right at the place where a huge oak had fallen. The huge roots, she said, had smelled just exactly like her husband. She said “I smelled him, just before they hauled it away .”

Her husband died in a car, and after that she had gotten heavy. But she was not a redneck. Yes she could be stupidly mean. A woman who had become a mottled thing. I thought about men, how many there were and how none of them would likely thrive with her, or keep her upright.

Night herons hunched like old men around the shallows. Usually I didn’t say anything, but I hoped to live in the water happy just like them, a driven love-hunting fool, gleaming in the wet.

 

 

Meg Pokrass is the author of Damn Sure Right, a debut collection of flash fiction stories from Press 53. Meg is Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review) and curates the Fictionaut Five author interview series. Her work appears in Mississippi Review, Wigleaf, and PedestalKeyhole, among other journals. Her work has been nominated for Dzanc’s Best of the Web, the Pushcart Prize, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 Flash Stories. Meg lives in San Francisco with her daughter, Molly, and husband, Doug Bond.

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