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Dad was silent, which was all you could do when mom said ‘So’ like that. You knew that anything you say could and would be used against you. He looked the way my brother David did when mom caught him peeing in the garden because he didn’t want to come inside from playing. She had been angry then, but a week later she told Mrs. Baron, and they were both laughing about it.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” I said, trying to let him know that it would be all right. She might be vengeful now, but she was also forgiving after awhile.

“Go play with your brother, Tom,” Mom said with the cold softness of fresh snow, “We’re having a grown up talk now.”

I looked to Dad.

“Go on, Tom,” he said.

I grabbed my glass of fruit punch and resigned myself to being exiled to the living room where David was happily scribbling away in his Transformers colouring book. I found another of the books,

this one GI Joe. I was too good at colouring for it to really be much fun, but at least this way I could still hear what they said.

“So,” Mom started again, “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“No,” Dad said.

“Look Frank, you’re in a lot of trouble here,” Mom warned, “So don’t give me that attitude. You know I found it in the car. And I sure as hell didn’t use it.”

“Gina, please, the kids.”

“The kids,” Mom repeated calmly. She never yelled, even when she was furious. Instead, all of the emotion went out of her voice. “Were you thinking of the kids when you were out playing with your little friend?”

I didn’t know what was so wrong with Dad having a new friend, or what we had to do with it. They were always telling me to go out and make friends. Maybe he was a bad guy. Maybe he stole things. I used to have a friend, Tyler, who stole the remote control for our television once. His parents made him bring it back, and Mom wouldn’t let me play with him anymore.

“What’s her name?” Mom demanded to know.

Her name? Dad was playing with girls? I wondered why anyone would want to play with girls. They were so boring and stupid. Only nancy-boys played with girls, and they always got picked on at school. I didn’t think dad was a nancy-boy. I always thought of him like a man, like GI Joe. I pictured him having a tea party with one of the Francis girls down the street, and giggled to myself.

“What’s so funny?” David asked me, looking at me with his little brother curiosity. I was seven and he was only five-and-a-half.

“Nothing,” I said. I put my finger to my lips. David returned his attention to trying to remember what colour Optimus Prime was. He picked up an orange crayon.

“It’s no one you know,” Dad explained.

“Just tell me her name,” Mom insisted.

“What does it matter?” Dad said. He was getting angry now too. He didn’t want to say, but I knew Mom would win. She always had ways of getting information out of you. I didn’t know how she did it, though. It was some secret Mom power of hers.

“It doesn’t matter. So just tell me what her name is.” Mom’s voice was like glass polished so clean you couldn’t even tell it was there.

There was silence for a minute. I imagined they were having a staring contest in there. But instead of laughing, like either David or I did when we looked into each other’s eyes too long, Dad burst out, “Kevin! His name is Kevin, Okay?”

Mom was silent.

I felt relieved that my Dad didn’t play with girls after all. I knew he wasn’t a nancy-boy. He was a Man. I picked up an olive green and began to shade GI Joe’s helmet.

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Paul Maxfield was born in Toronto, Canada. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Windsor in Ontario. Currently, he is pursuing an MFA degree from the University of Memphis.

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First Sight

By Ginger B. Collins

She remembers exactly. It was love at first sight. He was very tall—a head above the rest of the crowd. She locked onto his mane of silver hair and homed in. While navigating through the sea of dancers she smoothed down her skin-tight skirt, and just before snugging up to his side, she rubbed her wrists to release the last gasp of the morning’s perfume.

“This seat taken?” She did her sales job with an alluring gaze, locking her browns onto eyes as rich a blue as his denim shirt.

He pulled out the barstool with his left hand. She saw the wedding ring, a thick gold band well suited to his wide, weathered paws. She ignored it.

From chance meetings at the gas station to random appearances at his favorite diner, she began to turn up, offering a stolen afternoon or a quick morning wrestle between his satin sheets. She was one degree away from stalking, but he was caught up in the tangle of smooth skin and hungry willingness and didn’t notice. It took three years of dogged pursuit and unwavering patience to chase him out of his marriage and permanently into her bed.

When his memory started to slip, he laughed. “You’ve got that effect on me, darlin’. Being married to you makes me forget who I am and what day it is.” Time passed and proved it was more than just the relationship.

Now every sighting is a first for him, seen through faded orbs that are a pale nod to their former brilliance. Now she’s the one who is caught.

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Ginger B. Collins publishes sailing tales and travel stories in Cruising World, Living Aboard, and The Cincinnati Inquirer. Her short fiction has appeared in LunchHour Stories and SilverBoomer Anthology. The essay, “Reason To Believe” appears in Voices of Alcoholism published by LaChance.

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On-Air Stripper

By Linda Weiford

My senior year in college, I worked as a news intern for a small television station in northern Idaho. I wrote fluff stories. One featured an elderly couple’s cat that fetched newspapers from their driveway. Another was about a car-sized rock resembling Elvis’ face.  I yearned for greater challenges. When the weatherman needed a night off and my boss asked me to fill in, I said yes, absolutely yes.

The day of my debut, Mount St. Helens began rumbling and spewing smoke. I was assigned to monitor volcano updates in the newsroom. I scurried back and forth between my cubbyhole and the news director’s office, slapping notes on his desk.  At 3:30, the mountain was still percolating. At 4:30, I panicked. When do I rehearse my weathercast?  A secretary agreed to take over my volcano-monitoring duties and I darted into the studio.

Thirty minutes until news time.

I scuttled to the weather set and started memorizing my lines. A cameraman entered the room. “You’re too short,” he said, peering through his viewfinder. “You need to stand on a box so I can fit you and the weather map into one shot.” He fetched a milk-carton crate and set it upside down. I stood on it and we did a practice shot.  The crate wobbled slightly but I tried to ignore it.

Three minutes to airtime.

Technicians scrambled on the studio floor. An anchorman plopped down and speed-read his news copy out loud.  Then he faced a camera, said “Good evening,” and the newscast was underway.  He talked about the still-rumbling volcano. Then the camera lights switched off and we went to a commercial.

Up next, the weather.

My palms were sweaty, my heart hammering in my chest. I walked to the weather map, forgot about the milk crate and tripped over it. As I caught my balance, by notes scattered to the floor.  I gathered them with shaking hands; there was no time to put them back in order. I stepped onto the crate and the cameraman raised his hand. He showed five fingers, four fingers, three, two, one. He pointed at me and the light on the studio camera flashed red.

Airtime, folks.

I blathered about sunshine in the Northwest and rain in the South. The cameraman was acting bizarre, looking at me all wide-eyed and frantically pointing to his shirt. A cold draft grazed my chest. Lowering my head, I saw my dress zipper was down. The wire on the microphone clipped to my collar yanked it when I tripped.  In all the commotion, I hadn’t noticed. 

Thousands of viewers could see my hot-pink bra. Though it was cool in the studio, heat seared my cheeks, which, a viewer told me later, were the same color as my bra.  I covered my chest by holding my arm across it while pointing to the weather map. Even so, I was so rattled that I forget my lines and called cities by wrong names. Pointing to Las Vegas, I called it Los Angeles. I rested my index finger on Spokane but called it Seattle. I considered walking off the set but feared I’d be blacklisted from journalism for life. Worse, I’d trip again.

Without my dress zipped, my notes organized, or my memory intact, I couldn’t continue.  I gazed out at the bright lights, struggling to say something.  I drew in a deep, shaky breath.

“Oh, shit.”

From the control room, I heard the technical director shout, “Fade to black! Fade to black, NOW!” Then he ordered a series of unscheduled commercials. My boss entered the studio and marched toward me, fist in the air. “You can’t fucking swear on the air!” Tears streaked down my cheeks. He sent me home.

That night, I didn’t sleep. I’m fired, I thought. They hate me!

The next morning, I showed up at work early and cowered at my boss’s desk. “I’ll resign if you want me to,” I said.

“Are you kidding? Viewers saw that your zipper was down. They felt sorry for you. Our phones haven’t stopped ringing.”

He asked me to do the weather that night.

"Um, OK," was all I could muster.

At lunch I drove to my apartment to change my clothes.

I put on a turtleneck.

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Freelance writer Linda Weiford is living proof that one can screw up and still find success. She is an award-winning newspaper journalist and also published a major investigative story in Redbook. She is pursuing her master’s degree in writing and completing a memoir.

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The Downer

By J.D. Blair

The heifer went down on its knees, bellowing. Foam ringed her muzzle, she shuddered, her hind quarters collapsed and she rolled onto her side. Her bowels let go and she heaved twice and sent a final, hallow belch of breath into the ryegrass. She was now a corpse alone on eight acres, baking in a three-digit heat wave in July. Two days passed before she was found when the ranch foreman skirted the small pasture in his pickup and spotted the cow's imprint dark against the tawny landscape, its' remains melting into the soil. Not much to do. The foreman made an entry in a battered notebook he kept in the glove box..."Downer, heifer, east pasture"...and the date.

Several days passed and twice the foreman and another man stopped by the carcass but didn't get out of the truck. They just looked at it and drove on. The rest of the herd moved on to another pasture and was feeding on high grass and drinking constantly in the scorching heat. The heifer’s hide was shrinking and as time passed the framework of her once plump body began to show through, signs of carrion eaters too. One eye was gone and her flank was torn. The sum and substance of what was once the cow was discoloring the surrounding grass, enlarging her space on the earth.

Days later a young girl toyed with barbed wire along the fence line separating the pasture and the road. Her mother picked wild berries and her father changed a flat tire. The heifer was just a shadow on the landscape about fifty yards or so from the fence and large birds were feeding. The girl pointed to where the cow was down.

"It's a dead deer," said the mother, explaining to the child that the "deer" probably died of old age and didn't suffer and was certainly feeding at that very moment on the green pastures of heaven. Meanwhile, the carrion eaters were sharpening their beaks on the hooves of the downed heifer.

One cool morning as daylight broke over the hill and threw a shaft of hot sunlight over the diminished carcass of the dead heifer a coyote's yap echoed across the pasture. What the elements did not take and the birds had not savaged, the coyote had stripped in the pre-dawn. The bitch had a full belly and loped over the ridge toward her den of pups. Throughout the morning and afternoon the shadows shortened and the spot where the heifer fell was now little more than a dark depression in the parched grass.

Toward the end of September the herd moved again and roamed along the crest of the hill and down to the pasture floor where the heifer's skull remained, partially hidden by new grass. The cattle ate around it.

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J.D. Blair writes short fiction and poetry. His story “Charlotta’s Wake” appeared in Homestead Review. A poem “One More Day” won the Fog City Writers competition. His poem “The Sap” appeared recently in Writer’s Journal. Blair lives in Walnut Creek.

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