..............................................Flowers for Everyone

Faith Wally

The Summer I Stopped Drinking Grape Juice

I was laid up that summer. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t sleep without pain. The visiting nurse people had dropped off a single bed that rolled up and down with a mechanical crank on the right side. I learned to type that summer. God, I was bored. I got my vicadin prescription refilled over the phone on the bed. My life was lived on the single visiting nurse bed in my mother’s living room. It was the summer I learned how to sleep on my back. I got a lot of phone calls that summer. On a particularly hot day the assistant district attorney called as I typed the brown fox jumps over the big moon. My boyfriend, if you could call him that, broke up with me that same day. I popped vicadin. The second time I called in my prescription they wouldn’t fill it. I think I whined and cried all day over the phone. I couldn’t toss and turn that night; I had to fall asleep on my back.

I wasn’t supposed to walk without crutches for two months; I was stumbling around without them in four weeks. Friends came over and we hung out in the backyard on the bench. We argued politics, film; they kept me in the loop. One of them was a republican. One of them was Goth-industrial. The Goth’s girlfriend had a jeep. She was blonde and plump and boring, but she had a jeep. Sometimes at night, I would spend hours on the phone with the Goth. Bill was his name. He had been in a car accident a year before that summer. We bonded.

I drank a lot of grape juice that summer, I thought it would make me live forever. I really did. I read that somewhere. On the night I threw up all the grape juice I was delirious. I threw up in the shower about ten times that night, and after each violent purple spew, hot water rolling off my head, I went back to the visiting nurse bed with the metal crank on the right side. In the morning I awoke with an anvil on my chest, a fucking hammer driving into my lungs. I tried to smoke a Marlboro light in the taxi on the way to the hospital. It was the first car I’d been in since…dawn.

Dawn on Trexel Road, two bottles of red wine in the back. My best friend is driving and her boyfriend in the passenger seat is trying to change the radio station. I sit in the back with the other guy, a funny guy from South Carolina. Trexal Road is a windy road, and we are on our way to the ledges at Virginia Kendle. There is laughter and commotion and then there is the car pulling to the left. I look calmly at incoming trees and I think for what seems like a flying spark in the face of eternity, ‘Oh. A car accident’. After that there are no thoughts, just tumbling, like the inside of a stuffed washing machine. Tumbling and darkness. I awake in a river, and the stereo is still on. It’s "She Says" by Jane’s Addiction. No one else is awake. I climb out the back, through the garbled hatchback, and when I land in the cold water that is up to my waist, I feel my legs hurt. It doesn’t matter, I am trying to pull open the driver’s side door, then the passenger’s side door. The radio is still playing. A bottle of red wine, completely intact, slowly floats down the steel blue river beside me. I stop moving and watch it bob and float. My legs hurt.

My chest hurts, and trying to inhale the Marlboro light in the taxi makes me laugh, and that hurts too. I am in the back of a cab and the world is floating by and I am scared to be in this car. My bp drops in the waiting room and this causes massive excitement, I feel like I am in a movie, very exciting. It is my second time here over the summer, and this time I stay even longer. One doctor doesn’t believe I fractured my hip, I tell him to fuck off and check the x-rays. He never comes back. The hypothermia caused the pneumonia, but that doesn’t stop the barrage of smoking lectures that week. I drag my iv out on the patio to smoke. I cry the full seven days I am there. My friends visit and give me music to listen to, but I am horribly lonely at night here.

The next week I am back in my living room, on the couch. The visiting nurse people take back the bed with the metal crank on the right. I no longer believe I will live forever; I find grape juice disgusting. I talk to the guy from South Carolina on the phone. I remember him most from the accident. He kept telling me to stop shivering as we watched our friends get cut out of the car. I can’t, I tell him. And really I can’t, it’s dawn in July and the temperature is below fifty and to this day I have no idea how long I was in the water. He tells me over the phone that his best friend will never walk again. I tell him that my best friend is going to prison.

My new friends resume their visits and we sit on the bench outside as the leaves begin to tumble down. We talk about film and politics and the republican rants about how awful Leaving LasVegas was. The pain on my left side is constant for awhile, I am conscious of walking for awhile, I am conscious of sleeping on my side. I no longer believe I will live forever. I walk now wherever I go.

Katherine Schweitzer

Her Son, His Boy

He decided he would be the morning person since she was not inclined to fall out of bed easily. “He may be your son, but he’s my boy,” he said.

It wasn’t a light decision for her to move in together with him, but it had been less easy for her to raise a child for the past five years by herself.. The child’s father had left after seeing the test strip read: “pregnant.”

“I would have taken care of you when he was born. It wouldn’t have mattered that he wasn’t mine,” he said. “I wouldn’t have left you.”

“He is your boy,” she said.

He was true to his predawn commitment. When little boy feet touched down in the adjacent room, he’d roll out from under blankets and tuck them around her. She listened to the two talking in the kitchen and smelled bacon and eggs cooking. She’d stretch, roll over and wonder why he and his ex-wife never had children. Why he had gotten .a vasectomy. They never even owned a dog, he had told her when they first started dating.

He brought the boy’s mother a tray in bed on Sunday mornings. Toast. Coffee. The other finished products of their cooking. The boy always dove on the bed and he always told him to settle down, so as not to spill his mother’s food. There would be a few seconds of silence before the tray was set on the nightstand rather than her lap. The child squirmed close to his mother and he attacked them both. Out of breath laughter took hold of all three.

Sometimes, he took the boy fishing, or to the hardware store, or out for French fries. The two of them chopped down a pine tree once. He did the cutting. The boy yelled, “Timber!” And both carried the branches to be burned later for a marshmallow roast. They built a scarecrow, fixed the vacuum, and hung Christmas lights.

He kissed the boy’s splintered fingers and bandaged his scraped knees. He made the boy a club house. He bought the boy a puppy. He put cool mud on bee stings and cuddled him on his lap until the child fell asleep, then would carry him to his bed.

“I always knew I’d have me a boy,” he told her one night. The child was asleep and they were soon to follow. He tucked his head under her arm and draped his own across her waist.

“How come you never had any kids when you were married before?”

“The ex didn’t want them.” His bristled chin scratched her shoulder.

“You were cheated,” she said. A tear slid down her temple. She pretended she had an itch.

“I know.”

“So, that’s why the vasectomy?”

“No. I got myself fixed because my wife had an abortion.”

The mother wiped her face with a corner of the sheet, but it didn’t matter.

Matt Gamertsfelder

A Good Start

When the Mclellan Dam burst, the decades of strain from holding back Lake Dopler finally proving too much for the Depression era construct, it happened over the course of perhaps fifteen minutes. The flood waters enveloped all the houses in Millersburg to their first story before anyone had a chance to utter the word ‘evacuation.’ Even so, half of the townsfolk managed to escape with their lives and impending insurance claims. God was thanked, although curiously not blamed for allowing the dam to self-destruct in the first place. The sight of the bloated and discolored corpses of drowned fathers, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, wives and neighbors, birds perching on their abdomens and feasting on their cloudy eyes, severely dampened feelings of relief at having survived, images that would writhe wretchedly behind closed eyes for years to come. Amidst the chaos, a small incident took place involving two middle aged divorced men, Pete Dow, an accountant and Artie Palowski, a sheriff’s deputy, both lifelong residents of Millersburg.

Hanging drywall in the master bedroom of the fixer-upper the men had purchased on the east end of town when the flood hit, Pete and Artie were spared death from the initial rush of loosened water that filled the lungs of virtually everyone on the first floor of any building in Millersburg. To save money, the men lived in the houses they repaired to flip for profit, and so were fortunate to have Pete’s camping gear, which included a high quality inflatable rowboat and a battery operated air pump, in the house’s attic. In the time between the initial rush and the waters rising to immerse the house’s second floor, Pete and Artie got the raft inflated and out the attic window, with them in it, before the water reached much higher than their ankles. Past sunset by this time, and the flood waters having rendered the town void of artificial light, the men spent a long and cold night sandwiched between abyssal blackness above and icy waters below.

By daybreak, Pete and Artie found themselves drifting through what had once been downtown Millersburg, which they recognized by the marble pig statue that stood atop the corporate offices of the Cornfed Meat Company, the tallest building in town, and the only one with its roof still exposed. As they drifted nearer, they heard a faint yelling and saw a man on that roof hopping frantically up and down and waving his arms. Drifting still nearer, they saw him clearly: bald and weighing easily over three hundred pounds, his fine gray Italian suit sopping wet, the man was none other than Lawrence St. Pierre, Millersburg’s most successful divorce attorney, whose services each of their respective ex-wives had retained in their divorce proceedings, leaving Pete and Artie with virtually nothing except each other. As soon as they recognized him, each knew what had to be done. They paddled to the roof’s edge.

“Thank God,” burbled Lawrence, waddling over to them. “I thought no one would---” Artie stood up. “This is called karmic retribution, you fat piece of shit,” he said, removing his standard issue Taser from his duffel bag. He aimed and fired, sending one hundred fifty thousand volts coursing through St. Pierre’s corpulent body, allowing the pulses to continue one after the other until the fat lawyer lay unconscious. They pulled on the cable until his body rested at the roof’s edge then yanked the barbs from his flesh. Arties handcuffed Lawrence’s hands behind him. “Just in case he wakes up before he’s drowned all the way,” Artie said, and Pete nodded solemnly. Artie pushed off with the paddle while Pete grasped the lawyer’s suit jacket, all three hundred plus pounds of unmitigated malice plunging into the flood waters to drown along with so many of his clients and victims alike.

“One hundred ninety-nine short or not, I’ll call that a good start,” Pete said.

Dane Esposito

My son Dane, age 8, recently entered the world of horror fiction. It's a snappy little number he wrote just before Halloween.

--Frank Esposito

THE WICKED GHOST OF THE WEST

In the old west there was a ghost named Eric. He was wicked, and he would suck the souls out of people. He puts them in a soul jar. A boy named Geek Am I was playing with a yo-yo. Little did he know he would die in 13 seconds! Today was Friday the 13th. SWOOP! Eric was taking Geek Am I's soul!

THE END

Marcia Stamer

THE ANNIE STORIES

Annie's Morning
Annie Observes
Play Date

Annie’s Morning

“Got your backpack, Annie?” Dad asks as he walks into Annie’s bedroom. “Time for us to go.”

“But how come you’re taking me to school instead of Mom?”

“Annie, we’ve been over this. Over and over.” Annie’s Dad pushes his hand through the top of his hair and messes it all up. Then he has to smooth it down again. “We are going to see Mr. Wills in his office. He has to talk to us before you can go back into Miss Evers’ class.”

“Well, what will he ask us about?”

“Annie, you know what he wants to know. And for that matter, so do I. Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Annie! Why did you bite Miss Evers’ bottom at school yesterday?”

Annie only frowns and clumps down the stairs in her cowgirl boots. She had decided to wear these boots when she saw rain outside her window while she was getting dressed. She picks up her backpack by the door that leads into the garage and says, “Bye, Mom! See ya later.” She doesn’t wait for her mother to respond. She thinks that’s best.

In Mr. Wills’ office, Annie sees her teacher, Miss Evers, sitting on a blue chair that looks like a square. Mr. Wills, the principal, sits behind his big brown desk, and Annie can’t even see over the top of it. But Mr. Wills stands up when Annie and her dad come in after they knock and he shakes Dad’s hand. Dad sits down and Annie climbs onto his lap. Dad gently picks Annie up and sets her into another square chair. This one’s red. Annie slumps into a corner of the chair, her cowgirl boots with the red stitching poking up straight in front of her. Annie moves her feet in front of Mr. Wills, who sit directly across from her, so that she can’t see him.

Mr. Wills sighs as he looks at Miss Evers and Dad. Then he looks at Annie.

“Well, Annie, it is time for you to tell Miss Evers why you bit her yesterday. Then you must apologize too. I am sure you know it was not right to bite her.”

Annie looks down at her feet and wiggles them back and forth like the windshield wipers on Dad’s car this morning. The room is very quiet, and Annie sees her father scooting a little in his chair before he finally says, “Annie, you must tell us what on Earth made you do this.”

“Lottie told me to.”

“There’s no Lottie my class,” says Miss Evers. She looks at Annie, and Annie thinks that her whole face has changed into another face. It’s red and stretched tight like a rubber band.

“Lottie is Annie’s pretend friend, and Annie, you cannot use Lottie as an excuse again. We have talked about this,” Dad says.

Annie thinks about telling her dad that Lottie is real and is her sing along friend, but she decides not to.

“Annie, we are waiting for you to tell us the truth,” says Mr. Wills.

Annie notices that Mr. Wills looks very angry. She slides down in her chair, stiffens her legs and crosses one leg over the other. She opens her mouth wide and looks at the ceiling.

“Annie, stop it!” yells Dad. “She does this when she doesn’t want to cooperate,” Dad tells Mr. Wills. “She tries to pretend she can’t talk and makes her body look like her sister’s. I think you know our older daughter who has cerebral palsy.”

“Umm, yes,” says Mr. Wills. “Annie, please, right now…”

Annie sits up suddenly and says, “I’ll show you.” She reaches in her backpack and takes out a DVD. She puts it on Mr. Wills’ desk. It’s a DVD of the 101 Dalmatians movie, showing one of the puppies biting Cruella DeVil’s butt as she is bent over reaching for another puppy, an ugly sneer on her face.

It looks as if Mr. Wills’ face might change into another face too, but he swipes one hand across his mouth to stop the change, then says, “Annie, you go with Miss Evers to class now. Your dad and I will talk about a punishment for you after you leave.”

Annie looks at Miss Evers and says, “I really am sorry I bit you. The puppies were the good guys, and even though you aren’t a bad guy or a cartoon, I just thought I should bite you when you bent over to help Claire with her numbers.”

Miss Evers looks a little dazed and tells Annie that they will talk some more about this later. She shakes her head and sighs, and as they walk together to Miss Evers’ kindergarten class, Annie just hopes that there won’t be any scissors there that tell her to cut her hair today.