(17) Amara George Parker: Heavenly Bodies
‘Welcome to another episode of Heavenly Bodies, the show where their end is our entertainment! Coming up on the show we have brand new residents of Heaven, Julie, and Moira, and we look back at our fondest contestant this year, Magnus!’
‘Ha! Ha! Julie! Great to have you on the show. So, let’s have a look at you trying to defend yourself from the intruder and…what is going on here, Julie, is that a… potato peeler you’re trying to fight the guy with?’
‘Ha! Yes, Ken, it is! I picked up the thing not having a clue what I was doing—I’m sure that much was obvious! But it was all I had to hand, and yes! Look! There he is with this gun!’
‘Haha! Now, Julie, Julie, none of us respect you less for that, I mean, not many of us can keep a cool head during our final moments. But, viewers, it’s what happens next that shames Julie about her choice of weapon! Play clip. Now, Julie…Julie, you know what? You tell this better.’
‘Aw, thanks, Ken. So, this guy looks at the peeler in my hand and says, Oh, sweetheart, you want me to show you how to actually do some harm with that thing? Now, of course, he has me tied up like a hog on the kitchen counter soon after that, so he has a little time to really get into the swing of things—'
‘Sensitive viewers may wish to look away now, folks.’
‘Yeah! Ha! Ha! So, he starts, yes, you can see there, god, he’s quite tentative at first, isn’t he? It’s almost sweet. And then, yes, there we go, he gets into it a bit more and pretty soon I look like I’m covered in some kind of grisly Christmas wrapping. Yes, see! My skin all curled up like ribbons!’
‘That’s quite a sight, Julie!’
‘It certainly is, Ken!’
‘And it must have taken quite a while to complete that masterpiece, wouldn’t you say? Or was your mind not on how long it was taking? Ha! Ha! Ha!’
‘Absolutely, Ken. All I could think about was—it’s so weird —how the colour of blood really suited my kitchen and how I should’ve had it painted red when I first moved in!’
‘Ha! Ha! Julie, that is hilarious. So then, tell us about what happens next.’
‘Yes. So… Things get a little bit more intense and, oh, Ken, do you mind? I might have to look away. No, no! I’m fine to carry on, it’s just the—ha! —dismembering makes me a little…squeamish. So glad they put you back together again at the Pearly Gates. Anyway, there I am in little pieces, and yes, that travel-sized smoothie of me in a blender! Nice of him to take something, makes it kinda special, you know? So that’s it I guess, and now here I am! Talking to you, and you fine folks at home!’
‘Wow. Wow. Just wow. Thanks, Julie. Thanks so much for opening up. Julie, everybody! Our third-ranking finalist in this week’s Heavenly Bodies, as voted for by you, the viewer. Now, who’s next? Ah, yes! I am so excited to introduce our next guest! Moira! Moira, darling, come here! Welcome to Heaven and Heavenly Bodies! We’re so excited to have you here as a guest tonight. Now, your story is quite unusual, wouldn’t you say? And we’re all dying to hear it! Ha! Ha! In your own words, tell us what happened. How did you die?’
‘Combine harvester.’
‘Moira, darling, speak up. You won’t even be heard by the angels with that voice.’
‘Uh, Accident. Combine harvester. Ran me over. Almost impossible.’
‘Ha! Ah…Kind of felt like that one could have been more amusing... Moira, stay away from Celestial Network, you hear? Your personality is crushingly dull. Let’s see who we’ve got next… Oh, oh! He’s one of a kind, he’s our guy, it’s Magnus! Now Magnus as you’ll recall got into a spot of bother while visiting a witch doctor in the south Pyrenees…’
Amara George Parker is a London-based writer, editor, and hedgewitch. Their short stories, poetry, and essays appear in or are forthcoming in such journals as Mslexia, Mooky Chick, Clover & White, Sufi Journal, Aeva, Daily Drunk, Sage Cigarettes, Prismatica, Earth Pathways, Human/Kind Press anthology, and as a regular contributor to A Writer in Morocco, where they write about the creative process.
To purchase their short fiction, read more of their poetry, and for editorial services, smudge sticks, tarot readings and much more, head over to their website: http://amaragparker.wixsite.com/agparker or follow them on Instagram and Twitter
(16) Danielle Van Meter: An Education
The whole New England town had gotten so cruel that Deon couldn’t go out alone anymore.
“If they spit at me when I walk by, just think what they’d do to you.” He had said to his mother, every time that she insisted on doing his outside chores; going to the grocer, filing paperwork, or taking his clothes to the Laundromat. Laundry. Just saying that word in the house was like invoking a ghost- the Laundromat might as well have been the boneyard. Deon would sit with his shoulders hunched in, hands coiled close on the opposite elbow, making himself as small as he could while the washing machine spun. He was hostage to the disinterested cycle. Soak, wash, rinse, spin. Anything he did while he waited was wrong. If he read, the book would be knocked out of his hands by someone walking by.
“My my, what a professor. Deon Morten. Pity the community college doesn’t even want criminals.”
The last time he had tried to leave his laundry as it washed, he had come back to find his clothes slashed to rags. And if he looked straight ahead, sitting still, someone would squat in front of him, mocking loud.
And all of this while the machine soaked, washed, rinsed, watching Deon through its bored and singular eye.
His mom always said, “Chin up, son. It’ll get better”. It had been months since he had been released, and nothing had gotten any better. His college scholarship was gone. His friends had startled and left. Deon’s hearing had fallen on a Thursday, two days short of six months since the day he’d been falsely arrested.
“You’d better hope you don’t get stuck with those charges, Deon.” His cellmate was old enough to be his father and advised him as such. “If they send you upstate, you’ll never get out. If you do, you’ll be a different man from what you see there. It’s the seventh circle of hell.”
Deon knew the reference. His eleventh-grade teacher—“I’m Mr. Baldwin, like James”—had taken the class through Dante’s works even though it wasn’t required reading. Mr. Baldwin, now retired in Florida with his wife, had sent Deon a letter every week while he was incarcerated. Mr. Baldwin seemed never to have even considered that Deon might have committed the murders, and Mr. Baldwin railed against the system in every letter. He always ended with an instructive quote, something about not losing oneself, or remembering one’s humanity.
But if Deon had narrowly escaped hell, wasn’t this supposed to be heaven?
“Dismissed. Charges dropped.” The judge, large enough to make his black robe look ill-fitting, had banged the gavel without even looking Deon in the eye. Deon wanted him to, wanted to remind the judge that he was a human too.
Serial Lady-killer Arrested as Former Suspect, Deon Morten, is Exonerated.
Former suspect of a murder charge. Deon thought a lot about journalists in those days. They were doing their jobs, clocking in and out, writing titles at their desks that would hang around him for all his days in this town. Each word, a tightening of the noose. Mr. Baldwin had sent Deon a book about a man facing the death penalty for something he didn’t do, with an inscription.
Deon, keep on the path to goodness. In the end, you will find peace. He had escaped the death penalty, but there has been no peace.
Deon had written every pro bono lawyer in this town until he found someone who would sue the state for what they had done to him. He didn’t need much, just something that would make the justice system look him in the eye, admit “we made a mistake”; something that sounded like the truth. The state’s attorney and Deon’s attorney had whittled the number down to something they could both agree on-- $14,000 and a legal name change. There had been no relief when the lawyer handed Deon the check, a new passport, and a new driving license. The lawyer had patted him on the back in congratulations. Instead, it had jeered at Deon.
“This,” it seemed to say, “is how much your reputation is worth. And now we’re square.” There was no righteousness to that.
So Deon had made a plan. If he had escaped the inner circles of hell, maybe he could still climb his way to paradise. Maybe heaven was still out there, one concentric circle away.
Deon’s mother dropped him off at the bus stop and cried on his shoulder.
“My baby. I am so proud.” What she meant was that her heart was breaking, but like any good mother, she thrust plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches into his arms and patted his cheek. “You go on now, you don’t want to be late for orientation.”
Twenty hours later, Deon walked through the doors of Northwestern University and sat down in front of a man at the registrar’s office. They shot the breeze and talked about fall, then began the paperwork for classwork. “And do you have a down payment for tuition?”
Deon unfolded a piece of paper and the registrar did a double-take at the number on the check.
“Great. And what are you in under the system?” “Deon”. He replied. “Deon…Baldwin.”
He kept climbing.
Danielle Van Meter is a freelance proofreader by day and writer by night. Danielle, an American by birth, grew up in South Africa where she now lives with her husband. She has an English degree, a love of coffee, and an insatiable appetite for Romanticism. You can find her posting about literature at @engaginglit on Instagram.
(15) Linda McMullen: Going Up to Heaven, Fundamentally
In college, I knew a girl of surpassing beauty and fiery faith, and I hated her a little. Christina (of course) treated her good looks like an ugly and oversized Christmas sweater, one she might return to the great department store above, in exchange for life everlasting. She succeeded only in looking like the “before” image in one of those movies where the awkward nerd-duckling takes off her glasses to reveal the dazzling swan princess. Pedestrian jealousy aside – Heaven had had my share of looks on backorder for nearly two decades—she fooled no one.
And I admired her faith, unabashedly. Although she felt it insufficient to move mountains, it blazed within her, igniting the inner glow usually reserved for bonafide saints or the recently engaged. I judged that she could have, at least, passed a gift receipt through the eye of a needle. I didn’t share it; belief and I had a cursory acquaintance at best, but at my most disinterested I could admire the intensity of her conviction. Personally, I couldn’t even bring myself to accept any specific rites; my cosmos was confined to a general appreciation for the platinum rule and the strictures of Mrs. Patrick Campbell (who merely cautioned against doing things in public that might frighten the horses).
We might have gotten on well together—she liked classic fiction and Trivial Pursuit and she offered the occasional dry observation on college life that tickled my desiccated funny bone—but she declared, quite matter-of-factly, that I was destined for a one-way ticket to the Fire & Brimstone Inn. And I had a hell of a time talking pleasantly with her after that.
* * *
Ten years later, preoccupied with my hedonistic disemboweling of an Amazon package, I hadn’t yet bothered looking at the alumni newsletter I received in the mail. My phone chimed with a text from my friend Anne.
“Did you see about Christina?”
“See what?” I wrote back.
“She’s dead.”
I shivered, picked up the newsletter. In Memoriam. Gone, at the age of twenty-eight. She had gone as (I presume) she would have wanted to, pushing a negligent and innocent small child out of the way of an oncoming car.
She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to lament her certain reunion with her Savior up in Heaven. But I never could accept her precepts and felt my eyes sting.
Linda McMullen is a wife, mother, diplomat, and homesick Wisconsinite. Her short stories and the occasional poem have appeared in over sixty literary magazines, including Drunk Monkeys, Storgy, and Newfound.
(14) Elizabeth Weissberg: Seven Limes
The entire pie is balanced in the crook of my right arm. I’m using my left hand and some Hail-Mary muscle tension in my legs to keep climbing up my high-rise’s fire escape. Even ground-level, I always believe a pie in-transit will fall and splatter before I eat it.
Kara is behind me. She made the pie and is shouting up to me how the recipe is simple — condensed milk and the juice from seven limes, mostly. I don’t know whether Kara is a good cook. We’ve known each other maybe a week.
That’s probably why she’s slung a bag over her shoulder with silverware and two ceramic plates, instead of us just eating slices off paper towels while standing in my kitchen. With a new person, it’s so easy to do a little bit of work.
After I watch Kara put both feet on the roof and we’re sitting comfortably away from the edge, she cuts a piece for me. She lifts it from the tin and the wedge remains perfectly straight-edged, something I haven’t known was possible with a first slice.
My fork hovers towards the pie before I notice and drop my arm. She’s noticed too, and she laughs.
After I cut a piece for her, I wait to take a bite until she does, because I want us to have the same taste in our mouths at the same time. When I do, the flavor is the way merengue diner-pie looks, before you bite into it and the ornamental topping tastes like an industrial refrigerator and stale air.
The sky is blue. Kara’s hair is backlit and the frizz is silver in the sun. I do not know what will become of us, but at this moment, there’s nothing more I could ask for.
Elizabeth Weissberg is a student in NYU's Literary Reportage MFA program. She writes fiction and narrative non-fiction. Currently, she is working on a memoir about travel and grief.
(13) Dog Cavanaugh: Like Good Luck and Love
In his last days, my father asked sometimes about the cat — where was it now, who would feed it, that kind of thing. At first, we didn’t understand. The cat had died years before, just after I’d finished college. When I reminded him, he dropped my hand, then slapped it away from the side of the bed and rolled over.
A few days later, as I wiped a splodge of cherry Jello from his cheek, he grabbed at my wrist and said, “We gave the right name in the end. He knew we were waiting for him.”
It was a little black-and-white tuxedo-style kitten trying to escape cold and windy December weather. We’d been imprisoned in the house all day, all three of us. My brother Milo left a voice mail for our mother that there was a dangerous cat on our porch. It kept attacking us when we went outside and tried to talk to it. My brothers and I were on Christmas break. By mid-afternoon, all three of us were afraid to go outside.
Our parents came home from work on the train. We heard them out on the porch talking. When we opened the door, my father stood to the side in his khaki trench coat, maroon scarf draped across his neck, tie loosened, the cat nuzzling his neck. Our mother was stroking its black and white fur, sort of cooing at it with a very stupid look on her face.
“It’s basically a kitten,” our mother said.
“Are you sure you should be touching that thing?” I asked.
“It’s hungry.”
“It’s scary.”
They laughed at us. “It’s been abandoned,” my father said. “Look at its paw.” He showed me a pad, oozing some sort of cat substance.
“How did it know to show up here?” my mother asked. Then she laughed strangely.
“We’ll feed it tuna fish,” my father said, “until we can get to the store.”
“Wait! What? We’re keeping it?” I don’t think we said anything, we just stood there and looked like we wanted to say that.
My father said, “We kept all three of you.”
That was more than thirty years ago. On his last day, my father told all of us in the room, “Cats can come from the future. Just like children.”
We tried to laugh.
“Like good luck and love,” he said.
Maybe an hour later he was gone. We had originally named the cat Snuffy until that first spring when my father changed its name to Tommy Tomorrow. Tommy lived to be seventeen, ate only canned tuna, and drank out of the third-floor toilet exclusively in order to satisfy his thirst.
Dog Cavanaugh is a mixed-race Afro-Irish Quaker American author. Most recently, he has published fiction with New World Writing, Bull magazine, and Philadelphia Stories. You can track him down at https://dogcavanaugh.com
(12) Josh Dale: Trees Scarred With Love
I drive her to the trail with tree carvings. It is a special place for a lot of people, and I hope it will be for us, too.
We trudge through some mud and our sneakers bury themselves. The smell of wet leaves is exchanged with the roasted coffee from the morning. Many notched tree roots roll under our dirty soles. I kick some mud off my Nike’s and it gets on an uprooted tree. Its roots skyward and bark chipping away with every scrape. It feels like a massage on my weary tendons. Like the day we ran a 5k. She beat me.
We ascend and wind up the hill that overlooks the creek, raised high and sloshing with beige. There’s a tree wedged into another like a beam and fulcrum. She sits on the one side and I reach high to slam the other end down. Her enthralled gasps fly up with her, nearly ten feet up and my muscles tense. Yet, she comes back down to earth with the grace of an angel. Like the day we went rock climbing with my friends. My heart throbs.
I made a playlist last night. It is twelve songs for every month of the year we’ve been together, starting with the most recent month all the way back to our first date. We listen to it with one Airpod, leaving the other ear to take in the snaps and crackles and chirps of birds. It was an hour long. I timed the trial a week before on my own for 48 minutes. It was bound to work. It had to work.
I know the clearing is in sight when we tiptoe over the tiny stream. The 11th song ends and the final one begins, Hall & Oates’s “Maneater”. I jog ahead, feeling the padded earth that’s been airdried by the wind. Our hoodies do little to keep the yowling wind. Goosebumps are forming. I bet she’s smiling. This song played in the restaurant when we had our first kiss.
There’re four trees scarred by immortalized love that overlooks a cliff. Hawks can be seen diving into the woods below. But not today. She gazes at the trunks, awed by the designs and dates. I pull the pocketknife from my backpack. It’s cold, dead steel feels even deader in my hand. My eyes find a blank canvas for my carving of Z&A. I capture us both in a jagged heart forever. She kisses me and follows up with a swig of water.
I stand with my back to her and gaze at the wilderness, the abyss. Where the green meets gray and everything between. I time the seconds of the final chorus and dig into my pocket. I wait for the song to end, a few moments of silence. The blood aches as it hits my fingertips. I feel the velvet in my khakis pants and wrap my love around it. I close my eyes and ask her what is better, love, or eternity. She stands there, the wind blowing from the trees. Her auburn hair flies forward masking her answer. I inhale some of nature, some of her. I take her hand and take a step.
Josh Dale is a graduate student, publisher, and subservient vassal to his Siamese cat. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Breadcrumbs Mag, Maudlin House, The Daily Drunk, and a book, Duality Lies Beneath (Thirty West Publishing, 2016). He blogs occasionally at joshdale.co and posts average-ish content on IG & Twitter @jdalewrites. He lives in Pennsylvania.
(11) Mari Kornhauser: Heaven
My dog’s farts are delicious, but heaven is eating a bag of Fritos after a murder. I came to this conclusion after doing a post on social media: “Heaven is…”. Some of my ‘friends’ wrote about a religious version, which I immediately discounted and said but what about here, on earth, while you’re alive? After all, what the fuck, religion? Afterlife?
Snort
Other responses were more on point:
-Heaven is a moment you wished was an eternity.
-Heaven is timeless. A place where nothing happens.
-When I see a smile. When I see nature. When I look at my children. Yes, that’s heaven.
-A moment where I wouldn’t change a thing. Heaven.
-Dogs.
-Heaven is no longer having to worry about tomorrow or the day after. And being able to facilitate that in the lives of others. As far as time will hold.
-Breathing in the ocean air while laughing over a glass of wine with a friend. Heavenly.
-Clean sheets.
Clean sheets? The fun is in dirtying them up. Hell is clean sheets. Staining them because it means I’ve done something nasty and that is heaven. It was at that moment I realized that, perhaps, my greatest normalcy with humanity was projecting an inaccurate portrayal of myself on social media. Meaning: of course, I enthusiastically answered each response with a, “Yes!” or, “There’s a good one!” or, “Ye old chestnut. I never thought of it that way.”
Snort
Who was I fooling? You all on social media.
Snort
You'll make it so easy, it’s heavenly. Basically, I stalk. Online, I mean. That’s how I pick my target(s). To be honest, there are two definitions of targets. Definition one, the slime I only stalk online and definition two, the slime I’m going to wash off the planet. To be honest, again, I’ve only succeeded in doing definition two once. Which put me on the path to heaven.
Or is the path to heaven made of little bits of heaven until you reach the big heaven? For instance, little bits of heaven are stalking slime and downloading their photos and making a collage of them—altered of course. But I’m not going to tell you how I altered them. And not telling you is another little bit of heaven. Then hacking into their accounts and posting them.
Question for you. Do you really believe I’m a reliable narrator?
I am. Pinky swear. Anyway, back to the slime. How did I pick the one, you’re wondering? Hint: accidents happen more frequently close to home. Falling off ladders, cutting the tip of your finger off while slicing a bagel, and more. I’m graceful as a gazelle but my better half is accident-prone. My better half is also cheating on me when walking the dog. The farting dog. So, when they were out, I went to Facebook and checked the page. Hacked the page. Found a secret folder of people I did not recognize. I was even in some of them. What? I know the doctor has me on these scripts that fuck with my head—a turducken of drugs during turducken times of plague, flood, and riots. Therefore, the possibility of me not remembering was a possibility.
Still.
A confrontation was called for. Right? I asked, in reasonable tones, what was up with the folder of secrets and what came back at me? Nothing. Complete silence. Okay, I’m done. That does it. The end. As I said, it’s already a turducken out there, I don’t need gravy on top of it, although that does sound heavenly, I digest. I followed that asshole into the bathroom, kept pressing, and still nothing. Silence is not golden, it’s blacking redrum maddening. I shouted exactly that, finishing with a Say something! But the motherfucker didn’t back down.
“Motherfucker”, I shouted, punching my fist at the ugly face staring at me. Right into the kisser. Blood spurted everywhere, the mirror above the sink shattered. And my better half was gone. I murdered my better half. I’m a beast. A ravenously hungry one.
Hence the Fritos. Except I lied. Heaven isn’t eating a bag of Fritos after a murder. Heaven is eating bloody Fritos after a murder.
Snort
Mari Kornhauser has taught in the English Department’s Creative Writing Program at Louisiana State University and on assignment for various motion picture studios, producers, directors, and actors in Los Angeles. She’s written and co-produced two features which led her to make her directorial debut in 2000 with an award-winning independent feature, as well as the HBO series, TREME. She is a member of The Writer’s Guild of America, West, Louisiana Women in Film and Television, and The University Film and Video Association.