Horseback Riding in the Jungle

In the incandescent madness of an organic grocer

a figure shadows over the threshold.

Cloister of red kuri squash in penitent rows.

Pine nuts & brown rice. Swiss chard & white

fish under halos of fluorescent palm trees, bamboo

baskets, sesame crickets. He rubs himself

clean of three days beard & the sincere hope

that he’ll be doing something better

come winter. The next round of Jeopardy is Fun

& Games & 3 Is seem too many. You’ll have to buy

a shrimp tempura taco, spin instead of guessing

consonants in the arid wake of vowels,

couples episode – she claps & spins & hands

her cerulean section labeled Vera Beach & under

her breath she thinks the reason we weren’t good

is three parts sympathy, one piece I wouldn’t eat

well in front of her, unless I was drunk & crushing tacos.

The guy at the sushi counter’s a dead-ringer

for the bald boyfriend of that girl who’s friends with

the thick blonde in Divas, a reality show I’ve seen

more than once & I’m sorry. I want to go.

I’m sorry to have this wayward moustache, limp

like I’m just bucked from an Andean pack horse. Raw

from peeling off the shoes I wouldn’t wear to save

a crocus from a blade for my lapel. Now’s the time to say

I’ve never been to the private institution on the hill.

But there’s a cot & a cup of soup there waiting. White

apron spotted with soy sauce. I’ll sell my leather belt.

Else find me purple, moon-eyed in the morning,

swallowed by the incandescent madness of the jungle.

Giraffe on fire, go to sleep, we’ve happenstance in the morning.

Jim Davis

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THE SOUND OF LOATHING

Evan Almon

Curling his fingers into his palm in a limp fist, the son examined his fingernails.

The son had a bad habit of cutting his nails a bit too short so they were pink and sensitive; he fell into this habit because his father did the same. A real manifestation of hereditary OCD if ever there was one.

His fingernails had grown out an off-white opaque about the length of the bend in a staple. He would know, for at his age, he thought it brilliant to use a staple to just try and dig out the dirty brownish-bluish streaks which were probably ink and the other crud of life all wedged underneath, like dust bunnies in their dens. Time to trim. Things grow, and you cut them down to a suitable size, so it goes.

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The Gauntlet

Evan Almon

We were assigned a uniform to be worn at all times which was of the cost that it wasn’t a loss if the clothes were to somehow end up completely destroyed.

The dress code entailed: a cheap polo shirt, wrangler jeans (no substitutes), and ranch work boots that had to be one size too small, all tied off with a branded leather belt.

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Novelist and software developer Joe Klingler, in conversation with Synchronized Chaos Magazine:

What makes RATS and Mash Up unique? Why should someone read them when there are so many sci-fi and thriller books out there? 

Writers essentially have a sort of living fingerprint that they bring to their work based on their personal experiences, insights and attitudes constructed over years of seeing the world from their unique perspective. This they share with us when putting pen to paper.

My own work tends to be layered; not because I plan it that way, but because I see life to be interconnected in that way. In Lean Manufacturing (sometimes called The Toyota Way) there is the Five Whys that require asking Why five times in order to reach the root cause of a problem. The Whys is one method for digging down through those layers of interconnectedness.

For example, in RATS Claire Ferreti is a young sniper trying to do her job. When her mission goes sideways, she is faced not only with the physical challenge of staying alive, but also with challenges to her core beliefs. At the same time, her prey is on his own mission based on events that took place decades ago, and his personal conclusions about what needs to be done about them. Fine so far. But these two exist in a world of RATS (multiple kinds, but none with four legs), where a hawk versus dove political battle rages for the Presidency, with the 600 billion-dollar United States defense budget at stake, while a young boy’s curiosity pulls him into this larger world. While following the action and wondering what will become of Claire, a reader who is interested in such things might think to themselves: this isn’t about the past, it’s describing a possible future—this could really happen. So RATS can be read, and I hope enjoyed, on several levels.

Mash Up has at least as many layers, though the players are college music students, Silicon Valley executives who think greed is a sacrament, software engineers, YouTube, and computer viruses in a world that shifts between cyber and physical reality. There is a horrible crime, its aftermath, a new crime, and two detectives: Qigiq (the Alaskan detective from RATS) and his new partner Kandy Dreeson (who strikes fast and takes no prisoners) on their first case together trying to sort it all out.

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“A Life After Bungee”

At some point in everyone’s life, they must ask themselves the question: what would Batman do? I did so when conferring within as to decide whether or not to bungee-jump over the Zambezi River, and the obvious answer brought with it a brave determination I had never felt before. I was not a risk-taker, and felt out of my element. My mom insistently discouraged the idea, my younger brother said he would if his arm hadn’t been broken while skiing two weeks prior to our African excursion, and my Dad said it would probably be a hell of an experience but that you could count him out.

The constant baritone rush and roar of the mighty Victoria Falls was ubiquitous when standing on the Great Victoria Bridge that connected Zimbabwe to Zambia.It was Christmas day, but it was technically late Christmas Eve still in America.

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