Layla’s Disappointment

Ahmad Al-khatat

Layla, I do not laugh effortlessly
Layla, I do not weep skillfully
Layla does not your name mean
-the night, or blues?

We no longer have the possibilities
Our story made the entire universe
-rain, as well as the students in the
classroom, I weep as I read it today

When I visit your tomb in the graveyard
I remember how the war forced the
-survivors, to transform our memories
into gray clouds of ash

Layla’s disappointment is everyone tale
It is touching and sad to realize she
got married at a young age, then she
became widow, before she died in the refugee
camps.

Rest

When will I rest well from overthinking
I have blinded the daylight in my sights
I even paralyzed all steps to my objective
because I have been the blues in my deafness

When will I rest in peace from awful mouths
I ceased to exist between everyone I know it
I started to support the fight against poverty
unexpected death, and money with bloodstains

When will I learn myself to nothing but to rest
My wordless spirit is an immensely tragic story
It made my heart wonder what I would’ve done
-if I will have the strength to ignore my longing to

Before everywhere I go, I hear continuous outcries
But presently I see the sunshine with birds singing
This quarantine makes me think as we are all given
another bet, to heal what we have ruined before…

Choose Your Own Poem

Choose your own poem
If you can’t reach the moon
Regulate your life journey
and never say that ”You can’t.”

Many things to write about
Just always read more books
Never lose hope on your ink
Just adopt an optimistic effect

Study hard and work fairly
Be smarter than you think
Don’t expend your time in
an unethical background

Choose your own poem
and find the honest lady
to share her scent, eyes,
and her desire for your poem.

My Bio

Ahmad Al-Khatat was born in Baghdad, Iraq. His work has appeared in print and online journals globally and has poems translated into several languages. He has been nominated for Best of the Net 2018. He is the author of The Bleeding Heart Poet, Love On The War’s Frontline, Gas Chamber, Wounds from Iraq, Roofs of Dreams, The Grey Revolution, and Noemi & Lips of Sweetness.  He lives in Montreal, Canada.

The relationship between mother and gifted child

By Abigail George

Vertigo inside of me. Burnt oats. Mother burnt the oats again. The bottom of the pot burnt. The oats tasted like ash, smelled like coals on the fire. Oats like cinders. “Eat. Eat everything.” She said. “Go on with yourself. That’s your food. That’s your breakfast.” I have often blamed Christ God for my unique set of circumstances, but I don’t anymore. My father’s sad that I lost the plot. Nobody understands. Nobody understands me. I’m alone, all alone in this world. Nobody to call my own. And the entire house smells like marijuana. My brother smokes his weed in the house now. The parental units don’t care. I’m ripe for the taking. It’s asking for the taking. I’m slave, and cook. I clean the house like a madwoman. Richard, my father’s close friend, speaks of ‘mental wellness’. Going on holiday. Listening to music. Being happy is a choice, he says. You can be happy. But I feel like Heidi in the Swiss mountains with her grandfather, blissfully unaware of the outside world, how dangerous it is to be a woman on your own.

I think of the Duchess of Sussex, how elated, how happy she looks with her prince, how beautiful she looks every time she’s photographed. Her skin is flawless. Radiant. There are pools of grandeur, and admirers wherever she walks. She walks tall. Head above water. Surfing London, England’s ‘swampland’. Compared to her, I’m nobody. Nobody special. And the day is like cocaine. And the night is marked by sadness, and after winter, comes winning, winning spring. It’s beautiful supposedly, but I am not impressed by the wonders of the flora around me, by the environment marked by pollution, and global warming.

And the economic downturn of the recession, and climate change. We’re normal people. Their eyes tell me that. Tell me that I don’t belong. What’s normal anyway? I’m anti-normal. Smiling when I look at this photograph of you, from memory and desire. Oh, how I desired you. Still desire you, but you belong to someone else. Other people, who are kinder, and more understanding than my own people. They say that I’m mad, and call me mental patient. Oh, I was in high care. Oh, I was in a locked-up ward. Oh, I did try to take my own life, but could I be the most beautiful woman in the world, on your arm at a social function, or a family gathering just for a few hours, please, please. There’s a wasteland for you. Wasted potential. Wasted youth. To live normally, that means exactly what. The only goal that I have in my life is to write.

I think of Charlie Chaplin’s mother in the asylum, a young Anne Sexton full of brio, and bold life modelling her Bostonian-heart out, (I don’t have that kind verve, don’t live according to that velocity). Oh, I’m sad, and lonely, but don’t worry for me. I’m proud to be a ghost nation. I’m governed by patience and virtue, patients and their psychological framework. Their philosophy of life in hospital, shielded away from the gaze of the world. I’m poet. I’m John Updike’s Bulgarian poetess. I must have courage. A woman’s guide to courage, but can someone help with the survival-kit. Men have always laughed at my sexual inexperience, and inadequacy. It was like a storm inside my head, you know. There’s a tangled web for you.

A spider’s web of deceit and lies, deception and self-sabotage, the pattern of self-destructive behaviour, and because of you, as if you didn’t know, I will never marry another. I don’t want to be anywhere near you. You are dead to me like stimulus, capacity, and impulse. Once, your hands were my hands. Once, your heart belonged to me. All I see now is your silhouette. You’re showman, I’m interloper in your relationships. You’ve travelled, made sense of the world around you, and now that you have a wife, you want nothing to do me with me. You don’t want to love me anymore. And I know it would have made a difference if I could have given you a child, to live and to breathe, but all I seem to get out of the day is meditative haiku this,  and you have the shadow of a fisherman in my bedroom in the early hours of the morning. Just like, for the rest of my life I will remain childlike.

You gave me up. The spark, the love, the beautiful reflection of me, was there for the taking. You refused. You refused me. Walked away from me in a parking garage. In childhood, it will always be childhood for me, nothing is beyond reach. Everything is within limits. I wait. I’m left waiting. The poor girl, waiting in poverty, living in poverty, spiritual-poverty, the green dragons of men say. No man’s hands will write on my body now. My body is no longer a canvas. The youth is gone. Oh, youth is fleeting, but not the homesick feeling. Growing up, I always sought out introverts like myself, only finding that aspect of personality in older males. And as soon as I got older, they all faded away into the background. Excitement is like a store for me.

I go in there, anxiety and fear disappear, the anguish of not having a man. The ache is still there, but I’m too old for that life, that kind of time, to spend hours, or an entire afternoon in the company of a man, too tired for the games of the sexual transaction. You’re a parenthesis. I’m beginner, on repeat. With the thin needle of desire on repeat. Blood gives, blood takes. You have your career, your wife has her household and family to take care of, you’re both inter-dependants, take care of each other, wife and husband (you each have your duties), taking care to take care of each other in the good times, and sad times. There’s nobody to take care of my heartbreak. All I have is eccentric. My fondness for rubbish television, and J.M. Coetzee novels, (the greatest writer alive today).

Films that only cost about a million to make. I remember when I stopped running. I mean running away. It was about the time you left me, and we said our goodbyes. There was finality for you. There was closure for you. You closed the door on the past, on our past. But it wasn’t completely over for me. Nowhere is the longest distance to traverse, and often there is no end in sight on that pilgrimage. Our end meant the rare appearance of a new world for me. Sickness came and went in my life. You were a non-supportive prop. It wasn’t over by a longshot for me. Not for me. Not for me. Awake, I am tidal, and pure. I feel the cold. Nobody feels the cold like I do. I’m dying. I’m dying to belong to a world, this planet, but you see, I could never fit, adjust, meet expectations high, or, low, justify. My relationships were always scandalous.

I was naïve, too young; he was old enough to be my father. You’re living your best life now. Yes, I want a connection, to this society, link up with likeminded people, who, like me, find living in poverty disabled disagreeable. I still have goals, plans, and this dream. I will speak at Harvard, Brown, Duke, Smith, Yale, and Princeton. I will attend an ivy league university like a Kennedy- heir. I will attend Columbia. Think with clarity and creativity. Then the world will love me, and that will be enough. I do pray. I pray for happiness for myself (but what is that without a man), and for personal success in all the spheres of my life. I’m forever home for the holidays now, glimpsing taverns in my neighbourhood from the safety of my mother’s car, the life-worlds therein, and I don’t know whether bitterness, or, resentment on the part of my aunt, that relationship, the year I spent at a mental institution, was responsible for the estrangement on my father’s side of the family. The ache is sharp. The knowledge of it was always mysteriously invisible to you.

There’s Missionvale. It is not suburbia. I think of Cobra polish, Sunlight soap, Colgate egg shampoo, and the rich who know, who think nothing of sub-economic housing, families of ten people or more who have to fit into two rooms. A matchbox house is far beyond their understanding. They do not know of the kind of pressures, and stress, and hurting when a man can’t provide for his family. Can’t put food on the table. Can’t be caretaker, his wife, and mother-in-law nurturers to the children in the house, in matchbox housing. All the children are, are orphans anyway.

The absent parents who only have their own neglect into the life of addiction on their minds. Addiction to gun violence, addiction to a heinous promiscuous lifestyle, domestic violence, shocking physical, and sexual assault. They know nothing of the filth and stench of poverty, the stain, the organic language of menstrual blood, of blood, of blood spilled. I think of the prosperous with their Swiss chocolate, bouquets of flowers, gifts wrapped in tissue paper on birthdays. There’s Bethelsdorp. There’s Korsten. There’s Timothy Valley. There’s Schauderville. People there do not live the kind of sheltered paradise life that I live. People shoot in the streets. They shoot to kill. I feel like Krotoa. Only good enough for one man. Called out of native darkness into Dutch light.

Come over the threshold, Krotoa. I give my name, my nationality, my life to you. Death is important. Death is king, for without this earth of things, all of our material possessions how can there be life. We need faith to receive the blessing, in order to obtain Christ’s reward, but without it we can still live, just without the guidebook (to salvation). Lazarus is still sleeping. I want to be the next Antjie Krog, not the next Ingrid Jonker. Arthur Nortje, the poet who won a scholarship to Oxford, he speaks. Arthur Nortje, the poet speaks to me. I feel to live vicariously through him. Through his Oxford. Through his romantic life, if he ever had one. This non-European, who looked like a pale king version of a European. Arthur Nortje, speaks with anticipatory nostalgia to me. He is walking alone; I am walking alone. He has a testimony; I have a testimony.

This is not the end for me. There is still the storytelling to be told of Hitler, Mussolini, Smuts and the Cape Corps. I have this map, you see. A map of the world, my mixed-race world. No telling where I still have to go. But I am Krotoa, relying on the spirit of giving from older Dutch males. There is a mother, or rather was the lack of one n my life. The tomcat is inspiration, magic spell, imagination to me. There is a mother, tarnished like seed, that carries with it, Sunday gravy, pork belly and roast potatoes. Wait a minute. There’s a thaw in the air. Just. Just. In the kitchen there she stands, a Jennifer making my life hell. There she goes again. On fire, this injustice, she screams at the top of her lungs of just how inadequate I am. I’m mute. I’m a mute. I think of the needle. The thin needle of desire from memory. How it left a mosquito bite on my arm playing a seduction game on my arm

. How the words, “you’ll be okay, we’ve given you something to sedate you”, were given to me like communion wine, and the wafer of Jesus Christ’s body. And I think of Dennis Brutus, Arthur Nortje, Brian Walter, Harold Wilson, these men of genius. I think of Calvary. My cross, my cross. My cross. I’m glad I couldn’t see into their, my future. You never grew up in our house. Never smiled for the camera the way that we did. Hiding our grief in our interpersonal relationships in the way that we did. I ask myself all the time am I walking on a dream in being a poet, is he really, this great South African writer who lives in France and Spain in awe in of me, are people really talking about me, or, are they laughing at me.

The First Sign of Embarking

Let’s take a journey. 

So, they drove through the night

to strange oceans and dens, past monsters

of present and future, past warnings

and talismans.

All of the fast food places were closed,

so they snacked in the car, listening to the hum

of music from long ago.

They passed political markers

and signs of the times, warnings ahead,

and people holding up cries for help.

These were the days before

a soothing electronic voice, so they

traced the journey by hand, making

marks they hardly knew on a map

they knew even less.

There were sunburns and sharks,

as assembly of photographs, pausing

and posing, lots of candy wrappers.

Small monuments.

She was both giddy and delighted,

rare words in her job of filing documents

and teeth.

At the end, they would remember in pieces,

wondering where the time went, and

if that’s where all of their travels really

began,

revisiting and revisiting again

through shoeboxes of photographs, some

with labels and some devoid of context. 

I Wrap

myself in the magic

of quiet. Why do words find

such fury?

These are voices

that have no faces. I make them

up as I go.

Now, I will silence them for

the moment, a temporary relinquishment

of verbal prerogative.

I will wrap this moment

around myself, my blanket,

throwing off all of the pain

that traces along my heart

like a child coloring inside 

and outside the lines.

I will not worry about tomorrow,

even though I often do.

Giving myself a new name,

I wrap myself in metaphor

so I don’t have to tell the truth

in all its blatant forms.

A Review of Many-Storied House (in Poetry)

Thank you, Ms. George Ella Lyon, for another

fine collection. I relish this floor plan of your memories

and dreams.

I love its beams and edges.

In you I find a voice not far-removed from

many of my experiences, a song that sounds much

like the ones I’ve heard for decades, but recast

in your lyrical cadence.

In the miner’s hat, post hole diggers,

junk drawers, river rising,

alongside so many other elements, figments,

recollections, and voices, I find a poetic voice,

titles I will read over and again,

reminding me of who I am.

Found Poem from People Magazine (May 25, 2020)

After struggling,

First Birthday at Home in Los Angeles,

Families in central Florida

and beyond are getting TP’d.

There’s so many avenues

to success.

Their first Christmas card.

We wanted to

write a road map, a rabbit

named Rue.

I mean, who didn’t watch Tiger King?

She sets out on a righteous

revenge quest to save them, answered

an open casting call, unflinchingly

stares down modern political

and social ills.

satirical romp, vividly absurd,

The Story of Soaps,

Exclude Yourself, Loving

the Way I Am Today.

Love Like This

like two trucks flirting

with disaster,

like the honk of horns,

like pandemic living.

Like a hazy morning where

thoughts are collected

at the kitchen table.

Learning to groom dogs

yourself, and keeping up with the daily

total of cases.

Like slowing your scroll

for a Simon and Garfunkel lyric

that speaks to you now

as it did years ago.

Like making plans to not

plan much.

The Price: Found Poem from the News

More lives

a pandemic now appears

            ready to pay.

A grim plateau

            despite projections.

Shift blame.

Death toll.

You have to be

            careful.

Infections and forecasts,

escalating the push.

Optimistic take

            challenged, point

fingers.

See how your state

            stands.

Travel Liar

Our first day out, on the streets, the loudspeaker call

to prayer did not draw attention, like the first voice

ears ever heard must have — we did not stop,

stare at the minaret.

Those faceless, gown-covered women that walk 

behind a husband, their trailing line, are expected —

that they should bow their heads, be suddenly struck

by a cane for some unpardonable liberty, obvious.

Sudden explosions on roadways do not cause panic,

burn from shrapnel finding an unarmored place

does not hurt, scar the skin — the dead still see life,

their eyes reflecting our unbelieving image.

Entering, weapons drawn, dark of night, the house

of a bomb-maker, we have no feeling of self-loathing

as the collateral shrieks, crying of children sound —

through the rooms, into the legs of mothers.

Walking the souq along a dirty river, gibber of animals,

dusty stacks of carpets, baskets of vegetables, hanging,

half-carved goats of smiling vendor, his legs crossed over 

slaughterhouse sand — just like our muzak-tranced malls.

The simulacra distortions of Skype are the same as being

in the living room at home.

IED

I halt suddenly, the dust of its movement blowing now

past my armored carrier: a dead dog lies in the road

20 meters ahead.  Stopped in the road noise, I tell Sergeant Lewis

over the quiet of the headset that talks to the whole convoy, too,

“I don’t like it.  I don’t see any wires, but I just don’t like it” –

any object in this land can be cover for a bomb.  No wires, then

no criteria to call it up – no three hour wait for EOD — and we hope

to set up our observation position outside of Husseinia before

dark anyway.  The voice of the convoy commander says,

“Go around.”  I pull on the steering levers, with a boat-like motion

climb the berm that separates north and south-bound MSR Tampa.

The line of oncoming traffic swerves way off the road, slams brakes –

we’ve skipped so many warning shots over these roads,

shot into so many cars that with bad intention or inattention

would not stop, this is the instant reaction to us, to US,

all over Baghdad.  Later, in the dusk of the Husseinia suburb –

while we unload our infantry to point rifles into the darkness,

killing whatever comes too fast – the major says “our dog”

is on the brigade frequency: it just struck an Army MP convoy — 

with a Vonnegut character’s feeling of guilt, I ask him,

“How many dead?”

Beauty Moves Away the Pall

The clear, intense blue sky through a square

of bulletproof glass in this iron Humvee door, I am not

in the gun turret today – its vigilance, its instant return

of fire on aggressors, is the soldier standing up beside me

through the open turret above our four seats.  I am not the driver,

today, on these crowded, dangerous Iraqi roads.  Today

I am a passenger free to think beyond this protective iron

of the world I knew before.  My eye catches a young woman’s

arms move by the road, lifting her blue headscarf

as we pass.  I wonder at her hair’s dark beauty.

Ghost Walk

On a last walk of the neighborhood, I turn into

the Little League ballpark I pass every day,

because I want to see everything now.  Staring

at each tree I’ve slowly walked evening streets.

Through the chain-link, young basemen crouch

to the aluminum clinks of a coach’s bat, and I want

to stay, hang from the fence and smell the clay,

new-cut grass, wait for popcorn and hot dogs

to float invisible in the air of dusk as warm-ups end,

bleachers fill, banks of lights on the high poles

blink on, erase growing shadows, just stay and feel

each inning crawl, on its cheers and moans, further

into the warm night.

But the dryer is off by now.  Time to turn back,

stuff newly washed clothes into a duffel, say

a soldier’s goodbyes, head to Fort Stewart

for a midnight formation.  Tomorrow we stand

in the parade field’s sun for a Senator’s send-off,

feel the last embraces of family as we board

buses for the airfield, for Afghanistan.

I long to stay here with headlights, streetlights

that buzz and power up.  At the corner, the Lutheran

Church, my breathing is a muttered regret of leaving.

In the Christ window, lit by a ground light, Jesus,

among heaven’s clouds, blesses my longing

with scarred hands.

Those Who Will Save the World

At fifteen I watched a man drown

off a Marseille beach, drawn to sit up

from a spread out towel by yells at the sea,

finding the blue Mediterranean day distorted

by a swimmer’s flailing arms, seeing the two-seater

pedal boat that rode up to him pedal back

from his violent but weakening panic.

We, the crowded beach, caught in a momentary

apraxia, some tortured by what to do, I want

the elderly couple to pedal forward, the only

chance — until a man in a business suit races

across the beach, throwing tie, shirt, leaving

his pants, diving into the sea, swimming

like an arrow.  Minutes later he carries

the limp swimmer out, starting mouth

to mouth, his confident actions reaching

in to grasp the loss of everything, pull it

to the surface.  Only when the body convulses,

coughs water, does he allow the hands

of the men with yellow vests, who have

carried up a gurney, in to take over.

This courage was not a sudden manic surge

in an unwitting savior.  I watch him step

into sandy slacks, collect brown dress shoes,

and walk away shirtless, not looking back

and wanting nothing in return.

The Last Radio Image of Voyager 1

Our idée fixe among the planets for so many years,

its 22 watt signal, slow but reliable as the camel

Marco Polo rode across the Gobi, reporting back —

Jupiter’s red eye roiling like the Devil’s iris, razor-sharp

spinning of Saturn’s rings — a final portrait, February 21,

2013, from the National Radio Observatory: tiny electron

blue fingernail piercing, opening, the farthest

fingerprint ever, a single point

in the vast black grotto

of interstellar space.

Should Have Known You Could Call Me

Sheila Braden and I never dated. We never had any type of relationship but just our friendship haunts me.

In the 11^th grade, we were both standing with the people in our circle outside in the courtyard. Everyone was laughing telling jokes when Sheila just happened to catch my eye.

Strands of her long, straight, dyed jet-black hair hung down in her face where a smile couldn’t crack through that sad expression.

Lightly, I jabbed her in the arm, “What the fuck is wrong?” I asked. “Why do you look so down?”

Blue eyes focused on mine searching for my intentions. She spoke lightly telling me she was fine and just didn’t get enough sleep.

In the following months she and one of my boys started going out. Timothy was the son of a corrupt sheriff. So, needless to say, he could get away with anything.

One day, in the locker room after gym class, I heard Timothy and the guys talking about paying a bum to go in the ABC store and buy them a few bottles of liquor. The plan was to get all the chicks smashed at a house party he was throwing.

For weeks I heard how Sheila was a stuck-up prude who wouldn’t put out. Timothy figured her inhibitions would lower when she got drunk. Shaking my head, I told Timothy what he was doing was fucked up.

That Friday night, I didn’t even go to the party. The next day my phone was blowing up!

“Did you hear what happened?”

As planned Timothy got Sheila sloppy drunk. So drunk she accidently vomited inside an open cooler, full of beer on ice. Timothy took her up to his bedroom, the next part well…I heard different versions of that event.

One person told me Sheila ran downstairs wearing nothing but her bra yelling that Timothy tried to rape her. Someone else said the two were screaming and destroying Timothy’s room. I learned the first story was true from a reliable source.

Timothy’s mother and father were called. Forced to leave the fancy restaurant they were eating at pissed them off. When they showed up, his old man was livid asking, “Who bought the alcohol?”

Timothy wasted no time telling on the guy who bought it for them. He even told his father where to find him.

 Sheila was long gone by then, back at her parent’s house alone in her room. She knew it was useless to say anything.

Timothy, in nothing but checkered boxer shorts, made sure to remind Sheila who his father was. “Go to the law if you want,” he said, “Just remember we are the law.”

Not once had I thought of Sheila as anything more than a friend. That was enough, and so that Monday I told Timothy to meet me somewhere after school. “Better bring your daddy and the whole force cause I’m gonna fuck you up!”

When the time came, he didn’t show up to the local country store where kids would meet up to fight after school.

The following weekend I sat around reading graphic novels. Sheila had never contacted me outside of school, but late that Saturday night she hit me up on Messenger. “I’m having a really hard time right now and need someone to talk to.”

This had to be urgent, so I got up and got dressed in jeans and a hoodie. My parents were both sound asleep and wouldn’t care if I borrowed their car as long as they didn’t wake up.

Sheila’s parents were spending the weekend at the beach, so we had the whole house to ourselves. Instead of coming on to her, I asked what was wrong, she looked down and didn’t answer. I told her that I hadn’t let it go and would still hurt Timothy badly if I caught him away from school.

Sheila had been crying yet showed me a warm smile. “Don’t give those bastards a chance to get you in trouble,” she said, “Plus, I’m over that.”

Apparently, Timothy had an itty-bitty weasel dick.

Taking a deep breath, “I don’t know where to begin, I’m just depressed about everything,” she said.

Her lips quivered when she asked if I’d ever thought about killing myself. I thought about telling her how I wanted to take my life many times and that I found joy in the thought of my parents walking in to find their walls painted with my blood. But instead, I tried to drive the exact opposite into Sheila’s skull.

“You’re smart, you’re beautiful don’t let whatever’s bringing you down win,” I said. “You’ve got to fight it and just stay alive. You’ve got to want to live.”

For a moment, electricity filled the air as we almost made a connection. I could have taken her, drunk off nothing but sadness. Instead, I hugged her tightly.

Wiping her eyes, Sheila asked, “If I show you something will you promise not to tell anyone?”

Nodding my head, I watched as she unfastened her jeans. Once she pulled them down, I stared at all the cuts stripped across her thighs.

“Jesus fucking Christ, you’ve got to stop hurting yourself like that!”

Shaking her head Sheila told me that pain and blood were the only things that made her want to go on.

My parents called; I hadn’t realized it was 6 in the morning. My father told me to bring the car home right then or he was calling the cops and report that I stole it.

Before walking out, I told Sheila to hang in there. “Everything will work out somehow,” I said, “You’ll be fine. In the meantime, if you ever need someone to talk to just call me.”

I gave her my number so we wouldn’t have to talk on Messenger.

Summer came then senior year. We both got involved in relationships. Sheila dated a jealous insecure dickhead, who wouldn’t allow her to talk to anyone. A loyal friend, she told him that I was her homie, and no one would keep her from talking to me.

Once we graduated, Sheila dropped this loser and got a job as a waitress at a seafood restaurant. I saw her one day when I stopped by to get a shrimp plate. She was busy with customers but stopped long enough to wave at me and say hi.

Months later I saw an old friend outside a convenience store. We both stopped, shook hands, and shared a little small talk.

My heart sank when he asked if I heard what happened to that girl we used to hang out with. He asked, “What was her name, Shelley?”

Not stopping to correct this friend, I asked, “What happened to her?”

He said, “Oh, you didn’t hear about it?’

Jumping to conclusions, I asked, “What was it, a car accident?”

“No,” he said, “She got off work one day, drove back to the neighborhood where her parents live. She pulled in and drove passed their house, parked in the cul-de-sac and shot herself inside the car.”

In my head it all came flooding, the blood all over the window and chunks of her brain stuck to the passenger seat.

This buddy of mine said, “No one ever figured out where she got the gun.”

I’d heard enough. Damn, this hit me hard. Immediately, I’m thinking back to the night I talked her through her problems. How could she do this? Why didn’t she at least call me?

I’m sure Sheila was so far gone there would have been nothing I could have said. But damn, I wish she’d have given me a fucking chance. This is something I’ll never forget!

I’ll take this guilt with me to the grave. Then again, I tried to help Sheila. With no hope to my name, I tried to look on a brightside that didn’t exist. I did everything I could to get her out of my head, but nothing worked.

In my bathroom I cut my chest with a brand-new razor blade, wondering if the pain and blood would help me want to go on.

Robert Ragan, from Lillington North Carolina, has had short fiction published online at Vext Magazine, Punk Noir Magazine, Yellow Mama Webzine, Synchronized Chaos, and Terror House Magazine. In January 2020, he had his second short story collection, It’s Only Art, published by Alien Buddha Press.

J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know better. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Duane’s PoeTree, Yellow Mama, Mad Swirl, The Beatnik Cowboy and Heroin Love Songs v2.0. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com) truth on a cold day in november  i never fell for the belief that social security would be there for me when i’m old my father left me nothing but his debts my mother swears she’ll leave me something  i won’t be around to know usually never ends  grief is a cycle that usually never ends  think of it like a river that you think you know where you are going   but a few twists and turns and you will suddenly realize the end is mythical at best you’ll be done when you are done died on the table  i told my mother it would be best for everyone if i died on the table  that a scan becomes an oh shit moment for the doctor and i’m hurriedly rushed into a different portion of the hospital  she told me she doesn’t think of it as funny  i didn’t say it would be funny  just a relief to everyone involved pissed away in the wind  it’s been years since a beautiful woman has smiled at me apparently, all my chances have been pissed away in the wind  you have to be so weird to accept this as reality and continue to embrace the chance that forever isn’t as tragic as the present currently is of course, insanity is a fine line- islands in the stream  i always wondered when i was a kid if kenny rogers ever fucked dolly parton on one of those islands in the stream  i’d like to think he at least fucking tried