Old School Book Printing

Clint climbs out his bedroom window and walks to town. It isn’t far. It’s probably an easy walk. He goes to the police station and shows them the welts, explains what happened, but the police take him home anyway.

At night Clint does his homework and Lester checks it. It’s wrong again and again and sometimes Lester laughs. The laugh is a mean laugh. Lester laughs without smiling and he stares with his eyes open wide as possible.

The way Clint looks at things changes. The way he stares at the wall or the ground or the television. He is staring the way Lester stares when he’s laughing.

Objects turn black. First, it’s small things like pens and loose change. They fade darker and darker until they are 3D shadows of themselves. Then the television screen blacks out. It doesn’t blow, doesn’t turn gray as though it were off. It blacks out. A wall turns onyx. One day the wall is pale green and the next morning it is black. Haze fills the air and sometimes no one can see around them.

Lester notices a blackening around his nails. He thinks it is a vitamin deficiency. He takes a multi-vitamin and drinks orange juice. Long black lines run down his neck, around his torso and trickle down his legs, like spindly roots. The blackening shades his groin. It occurs to him to blame Clint and he does. Lester sends him into the yard to pick his own beating instrument. Clint knows not to pick the little ones or the flimsy ones. He comes back with lead pipes, thorny bushes and an old set of bicycle handlebars.

The blackening doesn’t cease with the beatings. Of course it doesn’t cease. Of course. Instead the shapes blacken Lester’s skin. Shapes of pipes and sticks and other sharp objects. When Lester grabs Clint by the throat and chokes him, the image is branded into Lester’s flesh. Branded on his forearms, his cheeks and his stomach. There’s no hiding it when Clint loses consciousness, when he no longer gasps for air, when his body lies still.

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Brandi Wells has fiction in McSweeney’s, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, Smokelong Quarterly and Hobart. She has a chapbook forthcoming as part the chapbook collective Fox Force 5, which is being released by Paper Hero Press. She blogs at http://brandiwells.blogspot.com/

Everything was green.

I thought I knew what I liked, who I liked.

She couldn’t have been more different.

My girlfriend was Asian, under five feet and under a hundred pounds.

This girl, the one across from me, was six-two, maybe taller. She was barefoot and bleach-blonde.

The bar was green — at least the light was.

We were in Hong Kong. I speak Chinese. Apparently our dialects differ — I had no one to talk to.

“I want you really badly,” I said to her.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

I didn’t expect that answer.

I hesitated and became confused.

I tried to think of a quote — Horace or Seneca or Cicero.

I came up short.

“Arma virumque cano” did not seem to fit the situation.

I stopped searching for the right thing to say.

Instead I said the same thing over.

“I want you really badly.”

I was still not sure she understood.

I ordered another drink.

She reached over. She had long fingernails. She scratched my hand. I kissed her. She kissed me back. We kissed again and again. I told her again how badly I wanted her.

She left to go to the bathroom. She excused herself politely. She never came back.

I stayed until last call. I had another drink. When the lights came on, I went back up to my room.

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Larry Fondation is the author of four books of fiction, all set in inner city Los Angeles. His most recent, a collaboration with artist Kate Ruth, is called Unintended Consequences, a collection of short stories.

Sue had a boyfriend who lived in a room on the East side. She wanted me to meet him. She put on her mother’s bra with the lace all over it and a tight shirt and we ducked out the back door. We rented a tandem bicycle from the Sinclair station and pedaled across the Cedar River on the 4th Street Bridge a long ways past the downtown and the library and the jail and the courthouse, the old neighborhoods zooming past us like a filmstrip. Sue sat in front, steering, her hair flipping back into my mouth.

A staircase on the outside of the house led to the boyfriend’s room. He came to the door in a pair of jeans and no shirt. Chest all skinny and white. Sue and I sat on his bed and he sat on a beanbag chair, chomping on an apple under a black light poster of Elton John wearing those great big shoes.

The boyfriend said he wished he could get a job at Deere and make some real money. Just give me a chance is all I ask. Sue and I looked at each other. Sue’d told me he had a mustache and I guess I could see it.

I pulled off my sneaker.

The boyfriend said gross.

I have a pebble, I said, shaking it. The hair on your stomach is gross, too. It curled like a vine from his belly button down into the top of his jeans. The boyfriend was twenty years old. Sue said he might join the Army. She said he might get a car. Sometimes, she said, he called her baby.

The boyfriend motioned with his fingers and Sue got up and sat on his lap. I fiddled with the knob on the radio and found a station playing “Brandy.” I turned up the volume and closed my eyes and danced, imagining I was a fine girl.

Sue’s voice over the music. Jesus, how about some privacy. The boyfriend’s eyes half-closed. The apple lay tipped on its side on the floor, turning brown.

Do you know people make dolls out of dried apples? I said. But all the dolls end up looking like old people. I was still kind of dancing.

Sue said are you going to cry about it?

They went back to squirming around on the beanbag chair and I was wiping my face, thinking of night crawlers when you put them in a can of dirt.

A little kid was sitting in the grass, twirling the tandem’s wheels. He said do you need this lady and I said yeah, but I was a kid like him and he should not call people ladies who are kids. I got on the bike and rode it back across the bridge. The back kept going its own way, tipping me over. I had to stand on the pedals to make it go.

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Kathy Fish’s stories can be found at Indiana Review, Mississippi Review online, Denver Quarterly, Keyhole Magazine, Everyday Genius, Quick Fiction and elsewhere. A collection of her work is available from Rose Metal Press in a book entitled A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women.

It may pain a writer and confirmed word-nerd to say so, but reading English — as opposed to hearing it, say on TV — will sometimes put a beginning ESL student at a disadvantage, at least when it comes to pronunciation. If it is read more often than it is heard, the word juice might be pronounced “joo-ees,” the word Tuesday might be pronounced “twes-day”; the word built, “bwilt”; the word team, “tee-ahm.” These are honest mistakes. (They may even recall the mnemonic devices you used for spelling tests in grade school.) The student is simply pronouncing the word according to the way it looks.

Just the reverse used to happen in Freshman Comp back home. In Freshman Comp my students would frequently spell words according to how they had heard them. To offer just a few memorable examples from a batch of Othello essays:

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