“Half of life is chance, son. You can’t win ‘em all.”
It seemed to David, that chance counted for a whole lot more than half in this world. Business was nothing more than a fickle and arbitrary construct that could change in an instant.
“Boys! The pizza is here!”
“Finally!” Kyle gave David a cheshire smile. “Loser has to clean up all the pieces. Don’t forget any of the houses or hotels or my mom will kill me.”
My Wife
Steve Koppman
Everyone loves my wife. Friends bring smiling coffee cups to “the world’s best listener.” Students scrawl her poignant, incomprehensible thank-you notes. Principals call her godsend. Burly men in barbershops and service stations look reverent, a hint of tears in their eyes, at the mention of her name. Once a guy held her up with a gun. He sent her wallet back via next-day certified mail.
Landlords love her most. They see her through the mob, holding our little girl’s hand, glowing with unearthly light. She’s already polishing the hardwood. She’s telling them they should be charging much more.
She was like that to me before our wedding. She wouldn’t let me out of her apartment. She’d look at me and start to cry. I was unready to marry. It seemed the only way to calm her down.
Everyone knows she’s the ideal human. What they don’t know is: I’m why. What she keeps from the world she saves for me, behind tastefully sealed windows and thick blinds that keep out the light. We never stop fighting. Marriage is war pursued by other means. She never gives in. I’m not made for it. She’s hardy as apples.
She used to call what we did making love, and liked it. She almost got evicted from the screaming. Her neighbors formed a committee. Now she calls it being used for sex, and wants no part. One day she kicked me out of the bedroom. Just piled my things in a corner. Two years later in therapy, she agreed that this may have been insensitive. We’ve always been in therapy. We used to go to dinner and therapy.
In therapy we talk freely. We express our feelings. We try to acknowledge each other’s feelings. Then we start screaming. Then it’s time to end the hour. We’re free to continue working on this at home. We’ve been featured in several prestigious journal articles. We’re the best example of something awful they can’t name.
Why won’t you listen?
What you’re saying’s too awful.
You won’t hear me.
You want me to agree with you.
I do not.
I can’t say what I want.
Say what you want to.
You’ll shout me down.
I WILL NOT.
I can’t stand the way you think of me.
Why don’t you change what you do to me then?
I can’t.
Try.
We both wait for the other to walk. Sooner or later she’ll saunter off, kid in her arms, music in the background, surrounded by adoring crowds of landlords, principals, grandparents, and other upholders of the community.
We’re skating on thin earth, she says, living pretty low on the shoestring, rubbing each others’ elbows the wrong way. See the natural lampposts of spring, she says, there’s a golden rainbow just around the corner, let’s buckle down the hatchets and strike while the lightning is hot. We’re still green behind the ears, she says, maybe we need to get out more and chew the flesh.
I had a dream last night. I was running up the highway, my wife driving alongside, pacing me at fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, us laughing together, proud of what good shape I’m in, how I can run fast as a car just like I used to when we met. I woke and felt how much part of me loved part of her and wished I had the space and time to figure it out.
Let’s try again—I catch her in the kitchen—work things out. I’ll do this, you’ll do that, let’s promise to be better, meet halfway, negotiate, compromise, deal like we never could before, talk to me, please.
She heads for the front door.
It’s hopeless, she says, how could we be happy? I’ve tried so hard so long, she says, I’m used up.
I still want a miracle, I say.
Her little white hand turns the doorknob. There’s no miracles, she says, and it falls off in her hand.
The Hamster
Tara Laskowski
Louie the hamster escaped from his fish tank cage two days ago, and I can hear him scratching behind the walls in the kitchen after everyone else has gone up to bed. It is a desperate grasping, tiny rodent paws against drywall, and I believe there are only a few more days before we will be unable to tell the kids he’s going to turn up.
Earlier tonight after dinner my husband pushed back the stove from the wall, hoping to find the hole where Louie crawled through, but eventually he felt that was enough effort and went up to fall asleep to the Orioles game, leaving me to this guilt. Unlike him, I am afraid if I nod off I will have horrible dreams about the poor little guy meeting spiders and beetles and other lurking insects that built their own cities inside the walls and don’t want unexpected tourists. I pull out all of the cleaning bottles we’ve accumulated under the sink in the past thirteen years—three bottles of Windex, Drano, leather conditioner for an old chair from my husband’s bachelor days, Clorox, plant food, dried and twisted sponges, silver polish for a tray my mother bought us when we were married (a tray we never use), baby wipes, crusted superglue, inexplicably one of Samantha’s tiny pink flip-flops—and sweep a flashlight to the back panel where the sink pipe disappears through the wall, leaving enough space for a hamster to squeeze in, fall to the floor, and realize too late that he can’t clamber back up.
Now I find Samantha’s school ruler and Damien’s twine-and-popsicle-stick building set and I jury-rig a ramp worthy of Evel Knievel, all the while popping slivers of carrot down that hole as in the news story I read a few months ago where a little girl trapped in a mine survived for days eating scraps of food they were able to send down to her in a sawed-off plastic soda bottle. Louie scratches in rhythm to my breathing, reminding me he is there.
There are several moments after I maneuver the ramp down behind the sink that I believe I have failed; the hamster is chewing on his own escape route and I realize I am counting on the logic of an animal with a brain the size of a pea, and in these moments I think not of the hamster’s limitations but of my own, and that I must’ve failed as a parent, that this shoddy ramp would get a C at best in Mrs. Thomas’s arts and crafts, that I shouldn’t have let Louie escape, and that I should never, ever be the cause of such a crestfallen look on Damien’s face. Because Damien especially is a fragile kid—Samantha is more headstrong, confident, parading on stage in the fourth-grade winter play like a Broadway star with a paper crown—but Damien is more internal, more sensitive and thoughtful (more like me, I think, which comes with its own kind of guilt), and one day the both of them will grow up to be their own people, and I will have to let them scurry into their own dark spaces. And just about that time, the hamster stops eating his safety net and perches just at the bottom; I can feel his weight as he tests the ramp, imagine his pink nose quivering upward, and I hold my breath as we both wait, wondering if we can trust it.
Burn Baby Burn (The World’s Shortest Vampire Romance)
Jason Sanford
I’d never given much thought to how different Edward and I were—though I’d had reason enough in the last few months of our whirlwind romance. But now that we were finally on our honeymoon, the differences were becoming ever more evident.
I stared without breathing across the dark room as Edward stood in front of the closed drapes, which blocked the sun from our Acapulco hotel suite. On the wall beside Edward was a tall mirror, which didn’t reflect his image. Still, I didn’t need a mirror to tell me of the beauty I saw before me. Edward’s pale, chiseled body heaved as he smiled at me, and his taut buttocks tensed slightly, running an erotic flash between my thighs.
Edward’s gaze was mesmerizing. I felt like prey caught in the eyes of a powerful predator. A predator who
could rip me apart if he chose—rip me to pieces and drink my ever-so-vital fluids.
“You know I’d never harm you,” Edward said, reaching for my hand. He pulled me close and hugged me to his sweaty body. “Never forget,” he added. “I may be a monster, but I love you.”
“You’re no monster,” I said as I kissed him.
“Perhaps. But the vampire leaders won’t be happy that we’ve married.”
“Why should they care?”
Edward looked pained, as if I’d asked him to bare his soul for all the world to see. “There are things about my people we never show outsiders.”
“Like what? Do you glow in the sunlight or something?” I’d meant the comment only in jest, but Edward looked at me with his ages-old gaze and nodded.
“You are close,” he said. “It’s supposedly the most intense feeling any vampire can experience.”
“Better than sex?” I asked, wicked memories of last night flashing through my mind.
“Far better. Would you like to experience it with me?”
My body shivered in excitement as Edward again pulled me close and we kissed, a kiss that reached into the depths of my soul and caressed my very being. As we kissed, Edward reached out with his free hand and flung open the drapes, revealing the morning sunlight angling across the beach and the waves. In the sunlight, Edward sparkled, light jumping around his body as our kiss grew even more passionate, our emotions crashing like the waves outside our hotel room. I felt like I was on fire.
Except I wasn’t on fire—Edward was on fire!
He looked at me in panic as I stepped back. His skin smoked and his sexy hair flared. His wondrous, taut buttocks charred black. “Aw crap,” he said. “They always told me we sparkled in the sunlight.”
As he said this his body exploded in flames, knocking me against the window. When I stood up, ash rained across the hotel room.
I guess Acapulco wasn’t a good choice for a vampire honeymoon.
Succession: A Facebook Parable
John M. Solensten
Mr. Sammler did not care much for computers and all that tech business. It all seemed too detached from real life—real life in his woody back yard and in the hills down the road. During their infrequent and (he guessed) forced appearances, his grandchildren seemed strangely remote to him as they sat about silently caressing the faces of their I-Pods or whatever they were.
Mrs. Sammler had another notion regarding connecting with the world. She was a very social being and could hardly bear spending an evening in the tired old house they shared. She belonged to things and found her husband’s hanging about the yard and woods all alone boring and antisocial. “Who in the world do you talk to out there in the elms?” she asked him when he came back in the house smelling of moss and damp leaves. “Don’t you get lonely out there?” she asked, and he would smile a limp smile and reply, “As Thoreau said, ‘Being alone is not necesarily being lonely.’”
When he said that, she waved him away, picked up her purse, and hurtled her Lincoln toward a meeting of some sort.
Mr. Sammler’s Korean War buddy, Eric Jensen, would often come over when he saw the car whirling away past his front door and down the road past his front yard.
“I wonder how you two manage to keep it together, you’re so different,” he would say to Mr. Sammler over a Bud.
“But we do,” Sammler would reply. “We raised our children, and they have moved on to good lives.”
Jensen often reviewed his PSA with Sammler. “The hormone shots keep it just about zero,” he would say, and Sammler, knowing the reference, would reply, “I know.” He did not like to review his health issues with Jensen, or anyone else for that matter.
“Where does she go when she goes?” Jensen asked. “She always seems to be going somewhere night and day.”
“Oh, somewhere to meet with people—sometimes at the capital—political stuff!”
“At seven p.m.?”
“Yes, of course!” Sammler would usually reply, and then turn to work on his Norwegian fly rods or Browning auto.
“I don’t know about that,” Jensen said. “How old is she now?”
“I told you—sixty-eight.” Sammler hated to recite her age. He was twelve years older.
“Sixty-eight,” Jensen replied like a dull echo in the room before he finished his Bud and went home to watch the Hunt Channel on TV.
One morning Jensen walked in and saw Irene Sammler’s office door was open, revealing a computer, a giant printer, and a scanner.
“My God!” Jensen exlcaimed. “Your wife is a tech, a real tech.”
“She’s on Facebook,” Sammler said. “She’s on it for hours.”
“A social network.”
“She’s very social.”
“You ever look at it with her?”
“No.”
“You should.”
“Why?”
“A social network—socializing with all kinds of people.”
“All kinds?”
“All kinds.”
“Ask her nicely to share it with you so you can learn it.”
“I don’t get the connection.”
“People get quite chummy on these things.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
“Do it. Go on patrol, old buddy. See what’s on there and out there!”
“Maybe. By the way, when’s Charlie Goodthunder’s funeral?”
“Tuesday next. First the WWII vets go, then us Korean vets. A kind of succession, somebody said.”
“I suppose,” Sammler said. He could see Goodthunder’s young face in the obit section of the Times. It was a vague face on a vague uniform.
The very next evening Sammler asked Irene if she would show him how to use Facebook. She seemed irked at first, then looked at Sammler’s face for something, touched his hand gently, sat him down where he could see her computer screen and showed him her “friends.”
In her photo at the upper left Irene looked quite young and beautiful and ready to face people—all kinds of people…
It all looked quite sweet and chummy to him at first, but then he asked her if there was any pattern in placing photo images.
“I put the ones I know best near the top.”
“How’s it?”
“I’ll show you.”
Ah, there on the top were her two sisters, two sorority pals, and—and two men friends from college, Robert Holm and Caesar Lopez—both looking young and joyful, both with not a bit of gray, both (he remembered from her class reunion) widowers, quite rich…
“What about this Holm?” he asked bending down to look more closely.
“Oh, we chat a lot—just college remembrances, et cetera!”
Sammler wondered what the et cetera was.
“It’s all kind of harmless and social,” she said, patting his hand again and making the computer screen dark.
Dark. Darkly.
No matter. The succession was there. First the WWII vets and then the Korean…
A matter of sequence, succession, time.
Dr. Lookingood’s Extreme Miracle Weight Loss Powder™
Andrea Brill
It’s Friday and I’m fat. Well maybe not technically fat, but just kind of fat. Maybe I’m plump. I like to think of myself as curvy—sensual if you will. Truthfully, I have forty-three pounds to lose by next Thursday. My husband, my eat-all-day-and-night-and-still-not-gain-a-pound-husband and I are vacationing in Costa Rica next week.
It is no surprise to me that I need to lose forty-three pounds. It’s not as if I woke up one morning and was suddenly forty-three pounds heavier. “Horace, Horace, wake up! I think I ate Sparkey last night!”
In an attempt to lose my flab, I’ve given it the ugliest name I can think of—Hulga. I thought this might somehow inspire me to misplace her. I apologize in advance to the Hulgas of the world whom I may, and then again, perhaps may not, offend. (It concerns me that Hulga is a fine name for a nice Icelandic woman and yet so fitting for forty
-three pounds of lard.)
I’ve tried ditching Hulga in fitness centers across our nation and even in a few foreign lands. She clings to me like peanut butter and jelly, like coffee and donuts, like bacon and eggs, like…well…you get the point and now understand why my favorite clothing hut is Miss Mable’s Fit Ums.
Two weeks ago, while dining at one of my favorite trans-fat-free cafés, I spied a brochure proclaiming the extraordinary reducing powers of Dr. Lookingood’s Extreme Miracle Weight Loss Powder™. An omen, I thought, a sign. Why there was even a likeness of Dr. Lookingood himself—white lab coat and all—guaranteeing that I had the potential to shed forty-four pounds in seven days. How fortuitous, I thought, for I only had to lose forty-three!
I promptly called the overseas exchange and express-shipped my metamorphosing elixir.
My panacea was short-lived and soon replaced by propagations of doubt after the oily parcel arrived. Dr. Lookingood’s Extreme Miracle Weight Loss Powder™ smelled like feet. I even detected the tell-tale bouquet of sewer gas.
My uncertainties were confirmed upon reading the FAQs.
DR. LOOKINGOOD’S EXTREME MIRACLE WEIGHT LOSS POWDER™ FAQS
Question: Dr. Lookingood,
I have used your weight loss powder for six weeks and have yet to lose any weight. What am I doing wrong?
Answer: Dear Madam,
Stay the course. Your body is in the initial stages of dramatic weight loss. I suggest you immediately order another shipment.
Question: Dr. Lookingood,
I have lost 58 pounds using your product but now have an Elvis-shaped fungus growing on my back. What did I do wrong?
Answer: Dear Madam,
This is a typical response. Your body is only now becoming adjusted to the key ingredients in Dr. Lookingood’s Extreme Miracle Weight Loss Powder™. Personally, fungi and Elvis arouse me. Please send photos.
Question: Dr. Lookingood,
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction Page 20