Falling

by Alan Lawless

            It's about eight thirty on Friday night and my need for a serious amount of alcohol has reached critical mass, yet my boss doesn’t seem to notice. He keeps heaping more and more work on the pile. I've been here 80 hours so far this week and eaten more meals with him than my girlfriend, but he would never notice that.           

            "Can you print out a copy of the latest script for Lana? She's gonna be by in about half an hour,” my boss yells from his bed where he’s talking on the phone, as always.

            "Sure. No prob."

            Lana is the most depressing person in the world. After talking to her you want to shoot yourself in the head. And she will talk until you physically remove her from the premises.

            The printer is about halfway done with the third page of our one-hundred page script when it jams. It’s one of those cheap, small, desktop printers-meaning that to get to the paper jam I basically have to rip the whole thing apart.  I do so and manage to fit my fingers inside of the tiny hole where the offending sheet of white paper is and yank it free. The sides and front of the machine are slammed back on, print is hit again and then I hope that it continues on uninterrupted.

            I manage to get across the apartment, light up a cigarette and make a phone call before another death rattle is emitted from the machine. My head begins to pound and suddenly the room is twenty-degrees hotter as my patience is reduced to absolutely zero. When I reach the printer, the red light blinks at me, mocking my attempt at productivity smugly. It not being possible to argue with a piece of hardware, I extinguish my cigarette, put my phone call on speaker and attempt to continue my conversation as I repeat the earlier operation. Plastic parts lie everywhere and paper is once again removed.

I get about halfway through another cigarette and wrap up my phone call when again I’m beckoned to the other side of the room by a screeching sound. That’s it. This is a war of attrition and I’m only left with one move. “Phillip, come with me for a minute,” I tell my friend and co-worker as I sprint through the office; the printer in my arms.

We run up two flights of stairs and arrive atop our six story building. A police car sits at ground level warning me not to do it, but at this point a fine is a small price to pay for revenge.

I look to Philip one time in hopes that he’ll talk me out of this, but instead he encourages me with his mischevous smile.           

The printer dives across the narrow alley, makes contact with a window, then falls to the pavement with a satisfying crunch. That feels much better. Now I can get back to work.

Secret Keepers

by Anonymous 

The sickness. The revelation that the subconscious mind can bury your secrets so well that even your conscious mind can’t find them. The stomach turning. The imminent anxiety. Douse it. Lose it all in the three dollar bottle of chardonnay from the gas station. No good, the tears have loosened themselves up and have convinced your eyes to set them free. No such thing as crying before tonight, now you have to punch yourself in the gut as hard as you can to dry up.

That song. That evil, melodic song. Which one? Flames. It’s all that song’s fault. Relistened to it for the first time in years tonight and it flooded my brain with our handful of memories. Been sitting in a trance-like state since its advent. It’s on repeat. You were the only one I knew that loved that song as much as I did. You are the only one that I’ve ever fallen in love with and couldn’t admit it to myself.

That time next to the river, our second time ever being together. We lay in the grass next to each other. I invited you to my wedding and you said you wouldn’t go because you didn’t want to cry. I laughed it off and playfully punched you. Why did I never give that simple sentence one iota of thought? You loved me too, didn’t you? Why didn’t you say anything? God damn you. Why did you say nothing?

Those times we talked on the phone? I’d never met anyone that made me laugh as much as you. We clicked from the very beginning. And now? Now you ignore me. I don’t even get the satisfaction of staying in contact with you.

We’re married now. To dim shadows of what we loved about each other. The vomit rises up in my throat. My heart races my boiling hot blood through my body now.  It could have been you. It could have been. It would have been. If only we both weren’t so good at keeping secrets.

God, Strung Out

by Christopher Stella

To a fragile mind’s tidal-wave eyes a stained-glass horizon peeled out
of Los Angeles, a bastion of bleach-jeaned beauty, a mental cold turned
of heat mania, blathering her flagellated Christian intangible doubt
of intuition. Dread-locked and sweet, petite-stout, desolate and drained
of light, Reformation ,and black-barley wine poured from her lips
of tightened rebar towards hips of linen-night gossiped silence.
We basked in the sun for days and neon-eves of blissful horror, nips
we would take of cheap malt liquor and the unique mental, menial violence
we, she mostly, induced from blood-libel, stillborn ideas of morality. Broken,
we strolled through sand and stick-poked tattoo seas on tired-eyes.
We, being groggy and blear-faced at dawn, would struggle, barely woken,
to trek Oxnard and Long Beach for record stores of crust and crucifix’d commie-                           

                                                                       -oilslick’d-wax

Pawning fillings from coffee-stained teeth to drag ourselves from squat-to-squat,
we learned quickly of aged consent alive, decaying, in romanticized urban rot.