Joel Kopplin‘s stuff has appeared in places like Red Lightbulbs, HOUSEFIRE, Metazen, and The Quotable. He is from Minnesota.

Russ Woods is poetry editor and web designer for Red Lightbulbs and is currently trying to get Love Symbol Press off the ground. He is married to the writer Meghan Lamb and they live in Chicago with pets. He has work published or forthcoming in Mud Luscious Online, Pank, Spork and HTMLgiant.

“Murder the sun.” originally appeared in the second print issue of apt, available to purchase here.

Right now—there is this morning. Any choice could cause the flask to be shattered releasing death. But any choice could ensure that it remains intact. You really must clean the ceiling fan soon; there is what can only be described as dust monsters peeking over each blade.

In the shower, the warm water offers no comfort. There are so many little choices. You question everything. And, those questions lead to the question, how did you get here?

There is still time. If there is no answer—

In fact, you could step out of this shower, right now. Gather a few of your things. Get in your car. And, go. Just go. You could travel the country, picking up odd-jobs here and there to make enough money to get by. You imagine a horizon that is endless, and lonely, desert roads. But, that’s crazy, right?

You shut off the water. And lean your head against the wall. They forgot one of the steps in the five steps of grieving. They forgot fear. Just one more moment here. The showerhead drips—one drop. Two. Three.

It is quiet. Jeans, t-shirt. Socks and shoes. You sit, still, on the bed. The digital clock passes minutes. You once watched your grandfather, sitting in his chair, as he knocked over pill bottles, tumbling the orange plastic across the table, searching for one. “The important one, the important one,” he mumbled. He was a veteran of war, one of the greatest generation, felled and humbled by his body’s betrayal.

Time does not make any sound as it passes.

And well, breakfast sounds unappealing. Ugh—the thought of food. But, maybe this is one of those choices; food is nourishment. What could you force down? Toast? Toast and some orange juice. That’ll do.

As you eat with the grains of bread softly scratching your tongue and the roof of your mouth, you think of the cat. Tiny atoms, tiny little things that make up all of the world around us and, by their actions, as if they were living things themselves, seem to create and destroy.

At this moment, it seems that God does play dice. You just wish you weren’t sitting at the table.

Your plate is now empty, save for the small crumbs. It is time to go.

The next span of your time is filled with an array of choices. Twist the door handle to the left. Or should it be to the right, turn it to the right? Set the alarm, don’t set it. Take this street or take that one. Park here or find a better spot.

Which choice, or combination of choices, will cause the waveform to collapse in your favor? You need to roll a seven, or an eleven would be good too.

Is there anything more dreary than a waiting room? The clipboards and the paperwork. The muted tones, and why is the artwork always so bad in these places?

You can’t help yourself as you survey the people sitting around you, wondering what brings them here. What are they facing? You, like them, wait for your turn.

The nurse calls your name. Your body feels awkward. You walk toward her and the open door. Each thread of carpet bends beneath your shoe as you move heel to toe down the hallway.

And now you are in that chair. How are people supposed to act when they sit here? The doctor—the stickman, you think—begins very quickly revealing the roll of the dice.

You should have cleaned off the dust monsters. The cat is dead.

Michelle Hanlon is a copywriter by trade. She graduated from Texas Tech University with a Bachelor’s in Mass Communications and a minor in English. She writes from her home, home on the range (on the West Texas plains). She is doing the social media thing, blogging, tweeting, you know. Drop her a line on Twitter @MLHanlon or see some of her work at: www.mlhanlon.com and www.highfiveforhighfives.com.

The interview has just been posted and you can read our thoughts on reading, editing, writing, being married, and more.

Lindsey Coleman’s work has been published in Fairytale Review, H-NGM-N, Shampoo, Forklift:Ohio, Quarter after Eight, and Bateau, among others. She graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 2007 and received her BA from Harvard in 2004.

“Last Party” originally appeared in the second print issue of apt, available to purchase here.

“Understandable, with all the late night tiptoeing that went on around you in your little years,” said Welcome Tom while he chewed on meatball.

“Pardon me, Welcome Tom, but you don’t know a mole from a jetty, a mollusk from a mountain oyster, a switch from a blade about me when my feet were a size two,” I said.

Welcome Tom had been counting stars and rolling in sheets with Mom for two years, which means he’s known me for little more than one – a small fraction of most lives.  Mom gave me the wonder look with why so spiteful?  She knew why, so she was joke telling me with her wonder eyes that she’s the only one that can say destructive things.  Like, Welcome Tom loves it when Mom tells him she hates the way he thinks.  It’s a relief for them.  As if the worst has already happened.  The world has already ended and fear has taken its last breath.

Sitting next to me, Sister Margaret laughed when I asked her to pass the peas, please.  She’d laugh at a dying horse, so it was less like everything was funny to her, more like everything was serious.  Plus, she smoked way too much hash way too many times while watching Walter Huston laugh in the movie, Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  If only her rapist therapist knew that, he would have made a more accurate diagnosis.  But she doesn’t see rapist therapist once a week anymore.  Instead, going on three years, she receives unconditional love from the invisible J-man who’s with her all the time.  Accordingly, he’s with her while we’re eating peas and mash. “Was the J-man with you when you just smelled your feet?” I asked her.  “Is he with you when you put a tampon in, or take it from Pete from behind? Where was the J-man when Dad fell off the wagon?”

She laughed peas out her nose.  “That’s when the J-man’s with me the most,” she said.

“Whatever floats your boat,” I said.  “Just because you’re not afraid to die doesn’t make you a better person.”

“Yes it does,” she said.  Sister Margaret’s my least favorite sister, but she’s my favorite Margaret.  I’d already known a few rash Marges throughout my twelve years, but this Margaret of Margarets sure knew how to make an older brother weep and a younger sister silent.  Across the table Tristan wiped away tears from his absent girlfriend’s plate.  Tristan saved Sister Margaret from blame by begging Mom to condemn peas and the willful nature of bodily fluids instead of Sister Margaret.

Silence.  Silence.  Keep your silence.  Don’t scuttle this one, I told myself.  Even if what Sister Margaret said made sense under dinner table context, it’s not always the case.  Like that boy who shot up Bur Oak High, he wasn’t afraid to die.  Well, he seemed unafraid.  Then again, we do things everyday despite the fears we have about doing them. Copy that.  Maybe he was afraid, but it was secondary, and maybe Sister Margaret’s afraid sometimes.  Regardless, keep your silence.  Silence is your answer for what she said was bullshit.

Then Sister Margaret laughed so hard the dog barked back and Tristan stopped sobbing like how you scare a boy and his hiccups go away.

There was a rumor going around the social net that Tristan made all his girlfriends mad-sick, but Tristan wouldn’t hurt a lamp if it meant his life.  Tristan was the most honest, steadfast, funny guy a girl could ever lay on hay with.  His devotion was unbelievable, convincing girl after girl that there were other girls out there that had more dye in their wool than them.  Little did they know this foolish idea of betrayal would never make its ill-fated way into Tristan’s thick, unwavering heart.  Alas, symptoms manifested, attitudes changed, anxiety overcame, the weight slipped away, and depressions of a teenage girl couldn’t be more commonplace.

Tristan’s girlfriend Miriam returned to the dinner table from the bathroom, and Tristan needed something to say to make Miriam’s presence less of a statement. He gets embarrassed for everyone about anything.

“Have you been high today?” Tristan sang.

“I like you inside me!” Sister Margaret sang back, louder.

“Holla!” Tristan shouted.

“-Lujah!” Sister Margaret shouted back.

Tristan took Miriam’s hand in his right and touched her forehead with his left.  Her face was flushed.  I had to give Tristan the benefit of doubt that he had no idea Miriam just puked out three of Mom’s homemade meatballs.  She was starting to show signs of mad Miriam.  I would have offered her Tums or a napkin to go with that bib, but I was soft crust from what Sister Margaret said about being a better person and the fact that my sweet brother touched Miriam’s hand.  He always touched her hand before any other part of her.

Mom asked Miriam to walk the dog with me, under the impression creeps would leave the two of us alone as opposed to one.  I carry Mace, Miriam assured Mom.  Miriam was from the city, so she didn’t know anything about suburban creeps and she didn’t have a lot of experience walking along lightless streets and dewy lawns.  Miriam slipped on acorns and Cleo dragged her into peed-on bushes.  While Cleo sniffed and squatted, I felt like I should make Miriam feel more at ease, so I mentioned that I was the normal one in the family, like, I can keep a job and have no problem sending out Christmas cards on time every year.

“You’re twelve years old. That’s not normal,” she said.

I compromised, “Okay, Tristan first, then me.  You know, you shouldn’t worry about Tristan,” I said.

“But you said it yourself at dinner you wouldn’t trust anyone,” she said.

“Yeah, but Tristan’s a lion.  So it’s not his job to bite your face off, but it is your job to protect him, to love him,” I said. “That’s the problem.”

Drew Dingle dropped onto the sidewalk out of nowhere.  He had been dropping in on me a lot lately, but managed to say only a few words and was always hiding his hands behind his back.  He used to never act weird around me despite the pitiful moniker he had to carry around school.  “Why are you acting weird around me like you feel shame like one moonless night you thought of touching my hair while you rubbed and tugged down there,” I jabbed.  I was waiting for him to call me a Jabberwocky or say something like all that glitters is not gold.  Instead, he held my hand and said, “Your Dad’s been drawing circles around your house.” I looked behind Drew Dingle’s shoulder and there was Dad’s truck sitting near the curb blocking Mom’s garage.  I took my hand away from Drew’s and told him, “I hate the way you think.”  He said, “I think you’re great.”  “Should I Mace this kid?” Miriam asked, and Drew ran.

Everyone around the block knew my Dad sold his Jaguar four years ago and left us and a mortgage for a nudist colony.  A bunch of naked hippies, I thought, over us.  He told Mom it was his way of finding peace, to meditate all day and ride the waves of breath.  A bunch of naked hippies, I thought, their breath probably smelled bad.  For all I knew, he could have left us for a vaudeville mother carrying a fatherless child.

I didn’t know what to expect when Miriam and I stepped into the house but I felt betrayed for not knowing why Welcome Tom had a shotgun in his hands.  I always knew that Mom having a thing for war veterans would turn out bad, which might have something to do with this massacre of a situation.  Cleo peed on the carpet.  Maybe it wasn’t for me to understand why Mom and Dad were lying uncomfortably on the living room floor, more silent than I’d ever seen them together.  The same feeling came to me late at night when I was eight and I walked in on them, Mom on Dad.  Really, I wasn’t supposed to see what I was seeing.

Tristan told Welcome Tom that he was no longer welcome in our house.  Tom aimed at the lion’s heart and Tristan jumped on Miriam and then it stupidly occurred to me that fear was secondary to love and I shielded them both.  Tom knelt down, barrel between his knees and pointed at his face.  Sister Margaret laughed harder than ever she choked herself to oblivion and Cleo barked and Tom shot and I would have thought, the J-man really was there for Sister Margaret, and I would have said, Dad, whatever just happened, you did a good job.

Felicia Ferrara is a writer and filmmaker living in Chicago. She is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Notably, she has survived unrequited love for a Hungarian, a plane crash, and seven years of boarding school in Southern Africa. Felicia is a very popular first name for women (#283 out of 4276) and a slightly less popular surname or last name for all people (#73045 out of 88799).

I’ll watch porn and construct elaborate relationship histories between the two (or three or seven). Every time their knuckles brush it gives me a shiver. I’ll freeze-frame the moment when their eyes accidentally meet, briefly, while he is fist-deep and flipping her over on the pool table and just go fucking wild with it, you know?

Yeah baby, that’s what’s in my spank-bank. Hair brushed gently from the eyes. Fingers tracing cheek and jawline. Our shoes in a disheveled mess together, discarded on the floor.

Delaney Nolan‘s work has been published or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters PRIME, Gargoyle, Grist, Housefire, Post Road, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New Orleans.

Outside, he ran into Victor who managed to drive a two-story Colonial into the CVS parking lot.  Victor assured the woman blocked by the house that he’d be out in two shakes.  “Where you off to with that one?” said Kale.  “Ashtabula,” said Victor.  “Mind if I tag along?”  Kale had always wanted to ride in the cab of a truck with a house behind it.  On trips to Ft. Wayne with his second wife, he’d marveled at the sight of a house cruising Interstate 80 at sixty miles per hour.  He once wrote a song about a man who moved the entire town of Toothbay Harbor to a place called Salvation.  Kale gave a title to the song:  “What’s Wrong With Salvation?”  He promised Victor to sing it for him on the way to Ashtabula.  Victor shrugged and waved to the blocked woman.  “Be out in two shakes,” he said.

On the interstate, Kale asked Victor if he’d delivered many houses since the Victorian he hauled from Poughkeepsie to Macon.  Victor said he moved a downscaled Greek Revival from Stamford to Decatur and a barn from Bellows Falls to Brattleboro, but that was about it.  “Plus,” he said, “most folks forget their old place as soon as they get all their stuff in a new place.”  Kale agreed.  He’d moved eleven times with his three wives and couldn’t remember one place from another.  Plus, each of his wives got his stuff when they divorced.  After the third wife, he bought new stuff and decided not to remarry.

Kale asked Victor how soon before they’d stop for fuel, said he’d like to buy a roll of Mentos.  Victor said they had enough fuel to go another three hundred miles.  Kale lit a cigarette and watched the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation fence weave in and out of the forest’s edge.  They passed a sign that marked the highest point on Interstate 80 east of the Mississippi.  This is what it read:  ‘Highest Point on Interstate 80 East of the Mississippi.  Elevation 2250 Ft.’  Victor said a small country in the Middle East had plans to build the tallest structure in the world.  “Doesn’t seem right,” he said, “a small country like that with the tallest building in the world.”  Kale agreed, but to himself he applauded the small country for such ambition.  From that point, it was all downhill to the Ohio border.

Victor maneuvered the Colonial into a Flying J Travel Plaza in Hubbard, Ohio.  Heads turned as the house inched along a triple-wide aisle in the oversized truck section.  Kale told Victor they were the king and queen of the Flying J Travel Plaza.  He said the rows of tractor-trailers were commoners blessed by their presence.  Victor said England’s king and queen had no power.  He said they were nothing but figureheads.  Kale agreed.  “But they got a lot of great stuff,” he said, “and the commoners can’t touch it.”

They arrived in Ashtabula the same time as the moving van.  The side of the van read this:  Mayflower Movers.  It was named for the vessel that carried pilgrims across the Atlantic to a rock at the tip of Cape Cod.  The ship Mayflower missed the intended destination by three hundred miles.  Most people didn’t know this.  Kale figured this bit of information would not be good for the business Mayflower Movers.  Victor placed a call to the North Shore Rigging Company.  Onlookers gathered, amazed that a house from Litchfield could be transported to the shore of Lake Erie.  The crew moved the house onto a poured concrete foundation by a series of timbers and pulleys.  “House has a new home,” said Victor.

Kale and Victor stacked the timbers and coiled ropes onto the empty flatbed.  They followed Route 11 south to Youngstown and to eastbound Interstate 80.  They would be one among hundreds of similar trucks hauling cars or computers or livestock or any such thing that gets thrown out after use or when something new comes along.  Kale lit a cigarette and told Victor he liked moving houses.  “It won’t be the same driving back,” he said.

Richard Osgood lives in a city on a river where the north meets the south. He administers a flash fiction workshop called The Flash Factory on American Zoetrope. Publication credits include Tin House, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Hobart, Dogzplot, Night Train, Mudluscious, Los Angeles Review, among others, to include two Pushcart Prize nominations.  He continues to mourn the deaths of Steve Marriott and Syd Barrett.

Review by Randolph Pfaff

In his second chapbook (following Your Name is the Only Freedom), Janaka Stucky presents twenty-four brief ruminations on loss, longing, and the memories we keep long after the memory makers have gone. The World Will Deny It For You, winner of the first Ahsahta Press chapbook contest, gracefully addresses the ways in which we fail each other—and ourselves, in turn—and speaks self-consciously of our need to create tangible representations of those we have lost. Take this passage from The Opposite of Dreams:

Every lover is a home and what is architecture
A place which is nothing and indistinguishable
From all the other nothing until we place it
By placing something in it       and thus experience time

The yearning in these poems is awash in dense, spiritual sexuality buffeted by time and the mishandling of promises and breakable bonds. Stucky paints the hollowness of pain clearly and succinctly, and makes the movements of the natural world a mirror for our own actions, as in Jennifer. Blood.:

Beneath the olive tree
Your tongue     interrogating blade
Slips across my skin

In the grass

There are reminders here of the imagery of Paul Celan and Mina Loy, certainly, but Stucky’s consistency of thought creates a throughline of loss and reconciliation—and more than anything else, the vast space in between the two—that is all his own. The emotion here is raw as a fresh cut and Stucky’s thoughtfulness and lucid diction give The World Will Deny It For You a resonance that is often absent from contemporary poetry. This book will force you to acknowledge the fluidity of stasis, the permanence of the in-between, and the realization that when our lives seem most ambiguous, we are perhaps, most clearly our true selves.

Janaka Stucky is practicing the perfection of effort. He is the Publisher of Black Ocean and the author of The World Will Deny It For You (Ahsahta Press 2012) and Your Name Is The Only Freedom (Brave Men Press 2009).

Randolph Pfaff is one of the founding editors of apt.

fruit

1.

The fruit of our mating is an infant whose head is an orange, mouth a marionberry, eyes two salal berries, nose a salmonberry, body a slender watermelon, arms and legs four petite bananas, hands two tiny apricots, fingers a line of gooseberries, fingernails ten pomegranate pearls, feet two plums, and toes ten champagne grapes. And we love this tender and perfect fruit more than we could ever imagine loving.

2.

Each afternoon when I had finished teaching English, I walked out the door of the American English Club in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I strolled past the cathedral and the Palacio Cortés to arrive at the Zócalo—Cuernavaca’s central plaza. I waved at the shoeshine boys and skirted the bandstand to arrive at my beloved licuado stand. The señora—a short energetic woman—greeted me with the fruit report: Hay muy buena piña y plátano. I have very good pineapple and banana. Or mamey and mango. Or starfruit and strawberry. The señora tossed chunks of the chosen fruit—the sweetest, ripest, most recommended fruit—into her blender along with a splash of milk and a sprinkle of sugar. She whirred it all up and poured it into a glass. I sat on a bench and sipped. The sky turned magenta, and swallows chattered as if electricity buzzed right through them. I felt as suspended as the fruit in my licuado, very temporarily perfect.

3.

David calls himself an old fruit. “On a scale of one to ten, I am a ten,” he tells me. “I was never bi, never had a girlfriend, never had a doubt.” David’s face is round and his beliefs are solid. As we walk through my place, he fingers the edge of a pillowcase. “I hate your sheets. Even if you ironed them, they would look terrible. Thread count does not mean a thing. It’s the quality of the cotton that counts.” David sighs. “I miss the old percale sheets.” David was born wealthy. His mother ordered their things from Nieman Marcus. Now, at sixty-six, David lives in a one-room apartment, puts wax in the space where a tooth is missing, and gets by on air, opinions, and dog walking. But he celebrates the grand opening of the Bravern Shops in Bellevue where he spends a day visiting Hermes—which he correctly pronounces “air may”—Louis Vuitton, Salvatore Ferragamo, and of course Nieman’s. David gushes as he speaks of supple leather, of feathery cashmere, of the drape of silk twill. The sales help see instantly that David knows more than any of their high-tech, high-end clientele. They serve him wine and buttery shortbread, chat him up. They give him samples of fragrance and color swatches—the lagniappe reserved for a favored customer—and catalogs, which they place in brand-name shopping bags. David is giddy.

4.

“My aunt has tumor in her abdomen the size of a lemon,” my friend says, cupping her hands around an imaginary lemon. We measure malignancies in fruit: a tumor the size of a grape, a plum, an orange, a grapefruit, maybe—God forbid—a melon.

veg

1.

I hated carrots when I was a baby. A neighbor—an as-yet-childless Hanford scientist—got a new movie camera and came over to film Mom feeding me. Mom got out a jar of applesauce. “No,” the man said, “It’s color film. Feed her carrots. They’ll show up.” “But she doesn’t like carrots,” Mom said. “Just for the movie,” the man insisted. So Mom opened a jar of Gerber carrots and spooned some into my baby mouth. I promptly spit a bright glob of carrot onto my bib, and the camera captured it all in living color. I have this film in my possession. I like carrots now, proof that palettes change.

2.

The Vegetable Orchestra of Vienna is a group of up to eleven musicians and one cook. Before each Vegetable Orchestra concert—and they do twenty to thirty concerts per year—these musicians first go to the Naschmarkt. At this 16th century farmer’s market in Vienna, the musicians select the raw materials for their orchestra: carrots, celery, peppers, leeks, radish, cucumber, or—as any shopper will choose—whatever looks fresh. The musicians arrive at the concert venue and begin cutting and drilling, turning vegetables into musical instruments: a carrot recorder, a red pepper horn with carrot mouthpiece, a long white radish flute, a cucumberphone (think xylophone), a leek violin played with a leek bow, and a pumpkin drum. The musicians test their vegetable instruments, then use a paring knife to adjust tone and pitch. The cook gathers the leftover veg and begins simmering a soup that the audience will eat after listening to the Vegetable Orchestra play everything from hip-hop to Philip Glass to jazz on veg.

3.

Some of us are tense, tight, wound up, stressed. We are told we must learn to veg out. We close our eyes, breathe deeply, and imagine we are a limp stick of celery, a lumpish radish, a slothful asparagus, sluggish spinach, mellow mâche, a laggardly eggplant, a drowsy zucchini, a torpid turnip, a somnolent shallot, a snoring parsnip, a yawny yam, a slouchy chard, an indolent cardoon, a lethargic leek, a listless lettuce, a languid arugula, or a cool, cool cucumber.

starch

1.

My grandma’s ringer washer sat on the back porch of her house in McPherson, Kansas. She cranked shirts, sheets, dresses, pants, and tablecloths through the ringer, then hung them to dry on a clothesline near the honeysuckle. Once the laundry was dry, she set up her ironing board. She mixed cornstarch with water and poured the mixture into a squirt bottle. She squirted starch onto khaki shirts and khaki pants, then pressed that khaki to perfection. The starch held that perfection for the first couple of hours of my grandpa’s workday in the gas field.

2.

Skagit tribal elder, Vi Hilbert, treats us to a week on Maui. One evening we decide to eat a traditional Hawaiian meal. Not a luau. Just a simple meal of fish steamed in banana leaves and a wooden bowl of poi, the Hawaiian carb made from taro root. The poi is a glistening purple. You are supposed to eat poi with your fingers. I take a spoon and scoop some into my mouth. The poi is thick. It tastes like sour, slick paste. I mush the poi in my mouth, hoping to break it down so it won’t plug up my esophagus. Finally, I swallow, relieved to be done with this Hawaiian tradition. Vi puts her spoon down in a way that says she, too, is done with poi. We order coconut shrimp and Mai Tais.

3.

My piano teacher, Mr. McRae, had perfect posture. He was tall and thin and could easily have become curved. But he sat straight at the piano on a bench that he lowered to accommodate his long torso. Mr. McRae taught me the precision of Bach, the two-part inventions that start simply, then grow, two voices lapping over each other in mathematical and musical perfection. It was as if Bach required us to play from that place of the strong, starched spine.

meat

1.

Robert “Zip” Zuber opened Zip’s—a homegrown, hometown burger joint—on Avenue C at the edge of downtown Kennewick, Washington, in 1953. My family moved to Kennewick a year later when I was three years old. I can’t say for sure that I remember going to Zip’s when I was three, but I don’t remember when we did not go to Zip’s—at the end of a Sunday drive, when Mom was too tired to cook, or when summer heat overcame us. We ordered the basic Zip’s hamburger, a single beef patty on a toasted bun with ketchup, mustard, dill pickles, and chopped onion. Later a McDonald’s opened on Kennewick Avenue up near Angus Village. McDonald’s was closer to our house. McDonald’s was cheaper and we were a frugal people. But a hamburger at Zip’s tasted of meat.

2.

Dad bought a side of beef from a cattleman who raised and butchered his cattle. We drove out to the cattleman’s cold storage and loaded boxes into the back of our white Rambler station wagon. At home we pulled out packages wrapped in white paper and taped with white tape. And each package was labeled: T-bone steak, stew meat, roast, ribs, and hamburger. Enough hamburger for a year. Dad was tolerant when all four of his daughters, for various lengths of time, stopped eating meat. He waited out our vegetarianism as one waits for the cows to come home. That is, as one who believes that cows do come home.

3.

Feminists protested the 1968 Miss America Pageant with a poster of a nude woman. Seen from behind, the woman sits on her heels. She wears a cowboy hat and turns to look over her shoulder at the photographer. Her body is a butcher’s diagram with the cuts of meat labeled in black ink: shoulder, loin, rib, rump, round.

sweet

1.

Burnt sugar fills the air at the Benton County Fair, sugar spun into fluffy pink clouds, sugar a sweet bouffant. I carry my cotton candy torch aloft as if guiding Dante Alghieri past the ring toss, duck shoots, and the Tilt-A-Whirl. But when I pinch a tuft of the cloud and put it in my mouth, I discover that cotton candy is fiberglass insulation with a fruit aftertaste. In the end I wish I had selected the candied apple.

2.

Dogabetics in Tacoma, Washington, trains dogs to detect changes in the blood sugar of their diabetic dog owners. Dog and owner are matched up and train together. For life. The dog’s keen sense of smell detects a dangerous drop or rise in blood sugar with an accuracy that surpasses glucose tests. When sugar becomes a danger, the dog urgently and unignorably licks his owner’s hands and face with a life-saving alert.

3.

When I have a migraine, sugar—along with coffee—is my friend. Sugar fuels the migraine drugs. Sugar shifts my brain. So I keep ginger cookies in the freezer for head emergencies. But sugar is addictive. The next day I want sugar again—just a biscotto. The following day, I study the pastries on display at the French bakery a block from my office; I point to a blueberry tart. I deserve pastry for working on business taxes or clearing out our very messy workshop or shredding documents or balancing accounts. Soon I am giving myself a sugar treat just for washing the dishes or walking the dog.

4.

At bedtime, we tuck in our children and wish them sweet dreams, dreams of red velvet cupcakes with sprinkles, dreams of Grandma’s Christmas kitchen full of cookies: peanut butter, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, and snickerdoodles rolled in cinnamon sugar. We wish sweet dreams on our sweetheart, maybe sharing a mousse au chocolat at the end of a perfect date where love aligns to the moon. Or, as the years pass, when we have simply made it through another dinner platter day, eaten our Häagen Dazs rocky road, crawled into bed, pulled the covers over our tired bodies, and turned out the light, we still say, “Sweet dreams.”

At the end, sweetness settles over our memories and eases our slide off the platter.

Janet Yoder writing has appeared in the books, Enchanted Companions: Stories of Dolls in Our Lives, ed. by Carolyn Michael, published by Andrews McMeel, 2003, and Sunday Ink: Works by the Uptown Writers, published by Tasseomancy Press, 2010. I was awarded first prize for my story “Four Hands” in Crucible 2006. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chautauqua Literary Journal, River Teeth, Tusculum Review, Passages North, American Literary Review, The Baltimore Review, Evansville Review, Passager, The Massachusetts Review, Ellipsis…, The Texas Review, Raven Chronicles, Bayou, Fugue, Left Curve, Porcupine, Forge, Rio Grande Review, The Binnacle, StringTown, HistoryLink.org, The MacGuffin, North Dakota Quarterly, and Pilgrimage. I was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2008.