Casey Jones and the Naked Hippie
By Newamba Flamingo


The hippie and I walked briskly out of the movie theater, into the moonlit parking lot. Sirens blared as a cavalcade of cop cars, ambulances, fire engines, and media vehicles descended onto the scene. A SWAT team rushed by us in single file.

We arrived to an empty parking space.

“Some sumbitch stole my van!” the hippie shouted, his Mississippi drawl barely audible over the sirens.

“What?” I shouted back, more out of surprise than not being able to hear him, because I did hear him.

“The van! It’s gone! I had all my gear in it!” the hippie screamed, this time even louder.

I realized by gear he didn’t just mean his favorite electric guitar. He meant more his book of acid sheets and tub of homegrown.

The hippie stared down at the ground in disbelief for a good few seconds. His long, curly red hair and bushy red beard blew around in the wind, which seemed to be picking up.

“Over there…” he pointed, across the street, to a dimly lit public park.

He slung the acoustic guitar he’d been carrying over his shoulder and ran across the intersection, through oncoming traffic, into the park’s direction. Cars honked and swerved out of his way. I waited for the stoplight and followed him. Off in the distance, from the movie theater’s parking lot, I could hear gunshots.

The hippie stopped and stood in the sidewalk in front of the park, put down his guitar, and tore off all his clothes.

His tall, obese frame was covered in red body hair. His skin was pale as a ghost, and he had a protruding beer belly that hung so low it obscured his privates. Nearby pedestrians who’d been rubbernecking at the scene across the street shrieked and scampered in terror upon sight of him.

Picking up his guitar, he strummed and sung “Casey Jones” horribly out of tune for about a minute, then took off running into the park. I again followed him.

I heard someone from the park yelling “fuck you!” over and over. The farther we ran into the park, the louder the yelling got.

We ran into a forested area. It was dark. I could barely see anything except the hippie’s red mane and pale flabby ass, between the trees, fading into the distance.

Finally we got to a steep hill and the “fuck you” yelling was now deafeningly loud. The hippie ran up the hill way faster than someone his size should, hurdled over a thicket of bushes, and disappeared into the night. Just after he disappeared, the yelling ceased.

I took a few steps back but stopped when I bumped into something large, warm, and hairy. It was the hippie. He was behind me and still naked and had a flashlight in one hand and his acoustic guitar in the other. He shined the flashlight into his face, under his chin, and stuck out his tongue. On it was several hits of acid. He then withdrew his tongue, shut his mouth, made a gulping sound and smiled.

Then he shined the flashlight to his left. Another hippie was there, who looked sort of like him, red hair, tall, obese, but with a shorter haircut and a goatee instead of a bushy beard.

The other hippie wore two garbage bags as clothes and had plastic shopping bags tied around his feet. The garbage bag hippie began to yell “fuck you” at the naked hippie. Then the naked hippie threw the flashlight at him and proceeded to beat him over the head with the acoustic guitar.

The guitar hummed as it broke over his head. After it completely split apart, the naked hippie bludgeoned him with the fretboard and stabbed him in the throat a couple times with it, too, and, soon enough, the garbage bag hippie looked pretty well dead.

Halting his murderous assault, he turned slowly to me.

“I know who stole my van…” he said, pointing to the hill, the top of which now appeared to be on fire.

“I know who stole my van…” he repeated and he ran back up the hill, into the spreading fire, singing “Casey Jones” and waving his bloody fretboard triumphantly in the air.


- - -
Newamba Flamingo likes dragon fruit, alien abductions, and trying to talk to John Cheever via Ouija board.

Toxic Nostalgia
By Kyle Yadlosky


I have to wear a mask to make sure the present doesn’t kill me. I’m sitting in my apartment, and a grey haze drifts through the window. I’d shut the window, but what’s the point of getting up?
I don’t have cable, so I’m staring off into nothing-at-all. It’s not too bad. My mind keeps me busy. My memories keep me occupied.
Life used to be so good.
I remember I was one of the last kids wearing bellbottoms. Everyone at school called me gay for it. It was eighth grade. Melisa, a school slut, liked the bellbottoms a lot, though. She whispered it in my ear during gym: “I’d like to see what’s underneath them.” It was a victory over every bully in the world that day.
She blew me.
I have those pants in my closet. They hang on the inside of the door, so I can look at them while I get dressed. They don’t fit, anymore.
Industrial equipment sounds from outside. It’s a construction site out there—all around, really. The grey mist is from the wrecking ball wrecking everything. It swings, and there’s a deafening SHATTER. Then, more grey haze wafts in. It’s the mist of what-once-was soaring up into eternity.
I wonder if the workers remember I’m here.
Grey mist—I had a grey mutt. His name was Scout; I named him, myself. That made him mine, even if my mom fed and walked him. We were always together. He’d bark and roll around, and we’d play. I was seven. I lived in a town where no one was afraid to let their kids play alone outside.
Now, it’s dangerous to leave your apartment.
There’s a WHOMP of the top couple floors of a building near mine being wrecked. I’m on the sixth story of an eight story building. The WHOMP is drifting closer. I can hear its steady fall closing in. My eyes go to the ceiling. The visor to my mask fogs up with my every exhale. The WHOMP hits, turning to a CRASH, SHATTER, and BOOM. The light falls from my ceiling and smashes on the top of my blank television. I can see myself, hunched over on the couch and clad in gasmask, reflected in the screen.
There’s a steady sifting sound above. Then, there’s a CREAK, and my ceiling tears back and cracked concrete rubble plummets through, exploding my television to sparks, glass, and plastic.
Now, I live on the top floor.
My television was an old fat-back. I bought it when I was seventeen. It was my first purchase with my first paycheck slinging burgers. I remember I stayed up three nights straight trying to get porn to show on it. I eventually unscrambled the end of a sex scene, saw a nipple, and then the movie had ten minutes of dialogue and ended. The station scrambled again, before anything else came on. I was still excited by the little I saw.
There’s a banging on my door. It’s locked. Workers are calling through, “Are you still in there?” “You have to get out!” “The building’s gonna cave in!” There’s a pause, then, “We can hear you fucking breathing!”
They can. I breathe in that serial killer way through the mask, making sure the fumes of now don’t seep through and change me.
I rented this apartment three years ago. I pulled together all the cash I had working day-and-night as a manager of a burger joint to make the first month’s rent. I’d see this apartment complex driving to work every day, and I’d tell myself I’d live here. It was an exciting day. I felt like my future was opening. That night, for the first time since eighth grade, I found a woman and made love to her. I did it in this apartment.
We made love in my train-shaped bed. She thought it was strange, but it’s a big bed. I got it for Christmas when I was six. This was before my parents were divorced. It was the last time I saw them smile together.
I sleep in it every night, completely at piece.
There’s a yell of, “Shit, we gotta go!” then they’re stomping down the stairs. The CREAK presses the ceiling down; it strains further. I inhale, exhale, and my eyes fog over.
The manager told me four months ago that the complex was being torn down, changed into a retirement village. He told me I’d have to find somewhere else to live. I remember how I stared at him; my eyes shook. I pushed him against a wall and told him, “No.” It was simple and direct, and I marched away.
It was the bravest thing I’ve ever done.
The fact is that a cut on girl’s tongue transmits herpes, men in baseball caps will shoot your dog in the woods, televisions shatter, parents divorce, and hookers charge extra for fucking in weird beds. The place you spent your life working to live will get torn down no matter what you do.
The fact is that the past is and always will be better than the future, because you can forget the parts of the past you don’t like. In the future, the parts you don’t like are all you have to look forward to. I had four months to think about the end of my past, and I couldn’t deal with it. I fought against it.
I breathe in and out more quickly, beginning to hyperventilate. The CREAK turns to a steady RIP. The ceiling is tearing under the heavy slab of concrete property. I stare, and I stop breathing. My vision clears.
For a second it’s silent.
Then, there’s a CRACK and a THUMP and a CRASH. I SCREAM, and the rubble of what-once-was buries me alive.
The fact is that the future will always move on without you.


- - -
Voodoo, sideshows, and a good ghost story—if it’s outside of the everyday, Kyle Yadlosky revels in it. He lives in-between corn fields in Pennsylvania and has been published on Dorkly.com and in Shoofly and Essence literary magazines.

Heart Hunting
By Michael Dwayne Smith


Her name was Emma. She asked if I was from the south, and I wished I was. The way you wish the prettiest girl in high school secretly longed for someone shy, sweet, chivalrous. I was just in from the city, putting down for the night, square to drive out first thing and meet up with old friends, and she was a full surprise.

Emma’s long blonde hair made me tell the truth. She said we’d get along just fine and dandy.

I felt oblong sitting at the table, my sister-in-law Karla angling around the kitchen, half-circling around her three-legged lab. The honey-color down on Emma’s arm captured sunlight from the breakfast nook window. Her teeth were so white, so perfectly sculpted she could’ve been on TV.

When Emma said she was on TV, Karla snorted one of her snorty laughs at the dumb face my raised eyebrows and O! mouth made. They had a confederacy.

Karla knew Emma from college. Emma stole her boyfriend, but they became BFF after Emma dropped out to model, leaving my loser jailbird brother to Karla and her frizzy black hair.

That night I dreamed Emma’s sassy, southern-belle cooter was with me at the triplex. We were sitting on the café patio, a geometry of stars overhead, some constellation I kept trying to recall from school—Orion, I decided, and we were chatting about movies, Chasing Amy, I think. “She” had the same sugar and molasses drawl as Emma, deliriously pink lips, and would call demurely to couples walking by, “How ya’ll doin’?”

Emma’s vulva wanted to know about hearts.

None of the passing lovers thought this was odd. They smiled or said, “Fine, thanks for asking,” holding hands.

In the morning Emma was lying next to me, golden locks curled around the pillow, like silky storybook ribbon.

When she opened her lids, emeralds fell out, but I couldn’t look. I’d stolen away with her vestibule last night while she slept. After we’d made love, Emma, her vagina, and I, I had cheated on Emma by running off and wild with her Eden-naked sugar truffle, without even leaving the guestroom bed. I’d kissed those delicate labia, made those tender promises under the stars—about a future I didn’t really see Emma’s cooter and I could share.

Karla appeared in the doorway, pink robe half-open, carrying a tray of black coffee and burnt toast, sat down between Emma and me. Karla slathered butter with a gleaming knife. Wanted to know, How did I like the heart position?

I rubbed my eyes, asked if this was love.


- - -
As Michael Dwayne Smith, I did not invent the English language, but I have messed it pretty well. Mastermind behind stories, poems, hybrid works found at Word Riot, BLIP, Monkeybicycle, >kill author, Orion headless, Northville Review, Phantom Kangaroo, Right Hand Pointing, Short Fast & Deadly, and wow just so many rock candy stores or stereophonic outlets near you. Lastly, rumor of my being abducted by aliens untrue, though I am a meat Popsicle.

. . . and Void
By T. Fox Dunham

Epidemiology
By Alina Yudkevich


There must have been a surge in piano thievery, and now
the pianos and pump organs are all chained to the wall,
huddled in solidarity against their captor, Ramona -
of Ramona’s Antiques N’ Things,
where I’ve returned
to stare
death in the face.

I run my hand over the peeling whites,
woodgrains that look like they were licked
and dunked in dry, red, Georgia dirt.
I hear Ramona rasp me a greeting
every word out of her mouth creeps along the air
like smoke from a crushed cigarette
She drags her yellowed fingers on the counter,
iron wool on rust. I dread
handing her my money.

The faint scent of brush fire
extinguished summers ago
hangs over the aged books
they’re the shade of shipwreck wood
hidden under desert sands, with skin 
sure to disintegrate under my touch,
and I hate very much when my touch
robs the world of old wisdoms.

Once I was 6 years old here
and I ran my fingers along
everything.
bloodstained lunch tins
from the Korean war,
haunted grandfather clocks
from lightning-struck manors,
and chalky cracked-porcelain dolls,
their sinister, uncalibrated eyes
watched me count how many dark secrets
could be hidden under such tiny petticoats.

My mom slapped my hand away
knowing I was six, and therefore had
an inferior understanding of microbiology.
She told me that all the treasures before me
came from one big house – as I suspected.
“Everybody in that house had small pox,”
she said, inspecting a framed cross-stitch cat
“And you’ll get it too, if you keep touching.”

Remembering this,
I note
that some of these books
appear to be ill. Suddenly,
I want to be the clergyman
at an old book’s deathbed.
to be pulled closer by his frail pages
tickled by their slow, yellow flutter,
to say, “Yes, my child?” and inhale
the letters spiraling off his pages
as he gives one last mighty stretch
ripping his spine, liberating pages
to spin and ebb with fan-blown air,
and finally out the window,
free of meaning at last.

I’d feel my new letters dance,
like little spiders on my bones,
and learn to slap my forearm
as though to kill a mosquito,
when the words that formed
under my skin - were misspelled.

bottoms of S’s would join tops of N’s,
making me shiver with oooh’s
V’s flip over, halves of I’s in hand –
the ahhh’s – first, the visceral noises
of overdue consonant combination,
vowels writhe, indecent.
“Time and place!” I’d say,
knowing they lack the letters
to craft a catty response

disenchanting books must have
been banished to this very shelf.
shoved between ripped-spine, tea-stain strangers,
whose spurned sentences peel off their pages
like sunburnt skin - chapter headings wiggle out
like the last baby tooth - faded illustrations
smearing like henna caught in a monsoon -

or so I’d imagine. heeding the warning
and leaving dying books unopened, I just-

stopped touching.  An era of no splinters,
and a debilitating phobia of ancient microbes.

And here I am.

“You don’t know where that’s been, baby,”
creaks Ramona.

“Time and place” spells my kneecap
 and I pull my face out of the 1953 Reader’s Digest


- - -
Alina Yudkevich is a 17th grader at the University of Georgia, studying English and Film Studies and working part-time at a particle accelerator lab. She enjoys pugs, video editing, running, b-horror, and exploring the unknown via Google street view.