5 Years

by Momar Van Der Camp

5 years

5 years. He keeps telling himself 5 years. It’s been 5 years. Since it all started. Since it all vanished. Since the last heavy rains washed away his sins.

5 years.

He stood outside the home of the victim once more, retracing his steps again. Rain was heavy. Rain was pelting down all around him. Washing away the sins once more.

But they stayed in his eyes. Desperation and glee that the case had never been solved. A family sat behind sheer drapes discussing how their day would go, only a member was missing.

He had taken her from them. And he had vanished. But 5 years is a long time. A lot of people get nostalgic. A lot of people want to rehash the past and recreate the same scene again so the exhilaration comes back.

And he knows the rain will wash his sins away once more. Just like they always do. He rifles through his pockets and begins his ascent up the stairs to their front entrance.

Chickens

by Garret Tufte

A long, long time ago, I worked at a chicken factory. We pumped out chickens by the crate-full. Incredible work of engineering, really. They worked on it for years, and it got done, I was first in line. They said you had to have a degree, the tiniest bit of science understandin’ to show you were more than a bum off the street. Course I barely finished high school, as it was called in them days. Still, they took me in, cleaned me up, trained me down, and put me in the driver’s seat of that darn factory.

Work was exciting, not because I really had anything to do, but ‘cuz I got to watch the magic, every day. The factory was split into input, manufact, and output. I was right in the middle. I took watch over the processor. The chick-e-mater, we called it. Standin’ fifty-foot high and a football field long. I could see the damn thing one side to the other. Course I had screens to give me a good look at the specifics. The sludge comin’ in from the input line, scooped out of the trains bringin’ it in. Anythin’ organic, scraped off the bottom barrel. Water tubes comin’ alongside. It all spilled into the vat, a funnel-lookin’ thing, takin’ it all in.

Then, well, I don’t know what. Two-hundred foot of black machinery, steam pots, tubes pumpin’ jelly, whirly-birds, and god-knows. It all ended with a spit chute pointin’ up, and guess what come out: chickens! Every two seconds a chicken would come poppin’ out, cluckin’ and flappin’ to beat hell. He’d shoot ‘em to a big steel cage, openin’ when the time was right, and crashin’ back together. Them birds would sometimes try flyin’ out at the last minute, but that gate would come squashin’ down on ‘em. Ha, me and the boys would laugh: them chickens was born sooner than yesterday, and they try to outsmart us! Damn dumb birds.

I watched that sludge and them chickens for fifteen years. Didn’t get no pension though. Factory closed when they came in with talk of how “people don’t wanna eat chicken no more” and “too much chicken out there already”. Bunch of Ivy-league bullcock if you ask me.

Now? Well I been doin’ pretty well for myself. Wife and kids took off to do whatever they’re doin’. Ain’t seen ‘em in few years now. But I been takin’ to these new incentives they got for them surveys. And get this, all I gotta do is watch the tee-vee here and tell ‘em what I think. Easiest job a bro ever did know...

Wormrobinsquirrel

by Garret Tufte, who has a degree in Creative Writing (and traditional literature as well, but apparently the jackasses won’t let you get 2 English degrees) and minor in Film. Likes: Eatin’, drinkin’, smokin’, and lookin’ pretty. Dislikes: anything that gets in the way of Likes.

A worm creeps. He stops for a second, lifts his unmistakable head, peers sightless, then creeps further. The ground feels mushy and moist; it is perfectly suited to his homely needs. Not to say that his needs are homely, they are merely needs of the home variety. So he finds his place and excavates a tunnel. So the happy worm did this and did that and la-dee-da all the fuckin’ way home.

You know what happens next? He gets his liver ripped out by a happy little robin, going on his merry way. He brings the liver back to his squawking birdlings, feeds them disgusting regurgitation, feels pride that he’s done his part to perpetuate the species, and gives thanks to holy hell that he ain’t a fuckin’ worm.

But guess what? The robin gets popped in the head by a hypocrite because he done took the worm that’s supposed to aerate the dirt for his fuckin’ azaleas. So the robin drops like a rock, a disgusting mess of a rock, to the bituminous asphalt of a cul-de-sac at the end of Red Bud Lane.

The happy squirrel surveys his winter nut-stash: plenty of black walnuts, obscene amounts of acorns, but only a few pecans. He’s got to have more pecans. I mean, once he gets sick of walnuts, and then sick of acorns, what’s he gonna eat? More walnuts? I don’t fuckin’ think so! So the happy squirrel, after much deliberation, finally decides to head out for more nuts. He pokes his head out of his tree-cranny, checks both ways, and zeeiip!

The happy squirrel deftly maneuvers his body through branches and leaves, crotches and knobs, utilizing the tail-paw coordination perfected over eons. He makes no sound and does not sway the tree. A stone’s throw away, a rabbit farts. They exchange glances and a nod. The happy squirrel hops onto a picket fence and sits up for a cursory survey. Bing! Pecan tree at 10 o’clock. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! he thinks, but he does not lose his head. He keeps an eye out… Man with rifle, 9 o’clock! He panics and bolts. Pow! The gun fires, the squirrel runs, the bloody mess plops, the squirrel slips… and the UPS truck flattens him like a rolling pin.

Silly squirrel, you should have known: a convoluted set of circumstances could lead to your destruction through no fault of your own.

Maternity Mayhem

By Patrick McCormack (Bio on "Choices")

DR. JERRI MACKLIN HAD A DECISION TO MAKE: BEHIND ONE DOOR, A MOTHER GIVING BIRTH; BEHIND THE OTHER, A TICKING TIME BOMB.

Jerri sprang into action with no time to spare. The hospital was evacuated after Dr. Chaos’ bomb was discovered. Who made that maniac Head of Maternity? Jerri wondered. There was no time to lose – that baby was coming, and quick.

“I need you to push,” Jerri said calmly.

“I can’t!” she replied in agony.

“Either you push or we all die!” Jerri shouted.

Painfully the mother pushed, popping the gooey infant into Jerri’s arms in one push.

“He’s out!” Jerri shouted. “Now let’s get outta here!”

Jerri threw a stuffed bunny, Mr. Fluffy, at the window, shattering it. She jumped out, pulling the mother and screaming infant with her. Suddenly the entire hospital erupted into flames.

Lying on the ground Jerri sighed. “Now that’s what I call a distressed birth,” she said grinning.

Drive

by Hannibal Tabu

His foot stayed steady on the criss-cross pattern of the accelerator pedal as his silver Chevrolet Lumina glided purposefully down stretches of pockmarked asphalt. He felt oddly comfortable in the glow of sparse streetlights, the angular surfaces of his face illuminated and darkened like a strobelit wall in some sultry dance hall. The night held him close, like a long lost love.

Where was he going? After 4AM, only illegal speakeasies and private gatherings were still going. Plus, it was Tuesday night, and most of the workaday world had retreated into slumber. Still he drove on in silence, considering.

For the third time he drove past the left turn which would have taken him home, where the spectres of arguments and his wife's indifferent back turned towards him loomed as the most likely scenarios. He'd find his way there before the sun peeked over the edges of palm trees and the normals emerged from their tedium and complicity.

For now, he had the night to hold him like she wouldn't, and the road to keep them company.

Check out the website www.hundredandfour.com to learn something so secret, it has been driving me crazy for a month. Thanks Hannibal. Just gotta wait til Monday now.

Fate?

by Ross Levere

Had John known what was being asked of him on that lonely evening in September 3 years ago he would have run a mile without stopping.
Three years ago John was miserable, sat answering a phone that never stopped ringing from 9 to 5 with only a weekends salvation to recuperate. A weekend spent shopping, paying bills, cleaning, washing, gardening and masturbating, this wasn’t what the brochure had promised him after university. The life we desire, so often gathered from images in the media, is a pale comparison to the one offered by those who allegedly care for our well being. Early aspirations are met with the stark realisation that we have to accept work in a ‘similar’ field to our chosen profession. Being an artist John had once held an ambition to work on graphic novels, to see his art bring to life a world that existed only in those pages. Reality however took away this dream with relish when his mother told him to stop drawing silly pictures and work somewhere with a decent pension. That day saw his favourite dream die as he could no longer envisage himself being questioned by fans eager to bemoan the Hollywood version of his work. He was no longer an artist, no longer destined to marry Milla Jovovich and no longer living with hope in his heart.
It was here that John found himself at the leaving party for a work colleague he barely knew. The inevitable oversized card had been around the office filled with vague and impersonal sentiments scratched into it by people who would struggle to recall him the moment he left that Friday afternoon. A faceless drone in a nest of brainwashed individuals. The drinks after work little more than an excuse to try and make sense of it all by intoxicating the senses with something created in a lab rather than a distillery. For John there was not even the primeval urge of other men eager to try their luck at sleeping with a co-worker on a boozy night out.
Except … Except the woman looking at him from across the room, her green eyes piercing straight though him. That moment frozen in time, impossible to describe but infinitely resonating in his heart. A stranger in which he felt no fear or disgust in imagining a future with - love, sex, even marriage. Everything and nothing making itself clear in an instant.
What was asked of John on that night 3 years ago was never ascertained, whether or not he even spoke to the woman with the green eyes remains a mystery. Some of us run a mile because we’re running from something, it is also true that in running we reach a destination. We see the world through our own eyes make our own decisions and live with the consequences. John made his decision 3 years ago.

Paperwork

by Hannibal Tabu (bio on Chores)

Clearly, there had been some kind of clerical error.

The list was very thorough, and was audited on a monthly basis to make sure that just this sort of thing never happened. There were literally thousands of criteria that got people of every stripe and strata on the list, which had been maintained since before the very first human fingers scrawled crude images on blank surfaces.

But the last department head had gone through a really emotional breakup, and there was that thing that happened at the solstice party, which all left room for errors to be made. That was clearly what had happened, leading to all of the screaming and rubble and ambulances.

Glenn ran his fingers through his thinning blond hair, looked over the file and tried to figure out how to fix things. Rayvon "Lil' Ray" Carver was a self-hating nihilist of the highest order, a seventeen-year-old junior high dropout filled with enough hate and suffering contained in his neurons and dendrites to blot out entire galaxies. The monitor kept chiming with updates and complaints from other departments, looking at probably hundreds of years of cleaning up this mess.

Rayvon Carver had been on the list since the day he saw his elder brother Alvin gunned down in their front yard, Rayvon's sibling's blood splashed across his favorite white Bugle Boy sweatshirt. That was clearly the event that led him to his teenaged pattern of driving around in a dented Oldsmobile Cutlass with his neighbors K-Dog and Voodoo Child, a sawed-off shotgun on his lap and murder dancing in his eyes.

As Glenn reviewed the photos from what was being called "the January event," he remembered the very first and most important directive of the department:

"Some people can never, ever get their wish."

Again

by Hannibal Tabu (Bio on Chores)

Their footsteps stopped suddenly, leaving them staring at one another across the bleak expanse of playground at south Los Angeles' Gompers Middle School. His uniform's white polo shirt felt too restrictive as he watched her budding solar plexus rise and fall anxiously. A kickball fell from her finespun fingers, bouncing disinterestedly away at an oblique angle, a distant shadow from a 767 drifting across its path. One thought held court in each of their minds: "I know you ..."

Carefully, as if they each feared the cracked surface of the ground were incapable of withstanding the weight of their connection, they walked towards one another. He didn't notice the razor thin canvas of his Eastsport backpack fall from his left shoulder, his olive green science book bursting free of the half-closed zipper to land open to the section on geology.

Mere feet from one another, they couldn't find anything to say. The drape of her braids somehow reminded him of oppressively sticky hot air and thick bunches of trees everywhere. His lips, held open as if his mouth couldn't hold in everything he wanted to say, inexplicably brought her lurching thoughts of seasickness and cries of anguish, and fear of never seeing him again.

They stood there, saying nothing, almost shaking with not knowing. This wasn't like the time they bumped into each other on the corner of Lennox and 123rd, him on the way to play at some smoky jazz place with Cab Calloway, her following her husband home after failing to make the landlord see reason, her every possession grasped in one hand. It wasn't even like the time he'd looked up from his Shaolin texts to thank the warlord's daughter for bringing water and staring into these same bright eyes.

Maybe this time they wouldn't run.

Strike

by Ross Levere, a scriptwriter who has had a series of deeply unsatisfying jobs and is currently working for the shoe department in Burtons. He graduated with a degree in Film History and writes because he has to, with a burning desire that won't ever be quenched until his goal has been reached.


Love, it seems, can strike any one of us in the most unlikely of situations. Everyday activities such as shopping, driving or socializing present us with a unique opportunity for that mischievous little sprite known to many as Cupid to strike our emotions with the rather alien emotion of love. Before such an affliction we have only ourselves to think for, our own actions to answer to and the love of our families to strive for. Yet when that perilous archer targets us we lose all sense of direction, life is thrown into disarray and before long we are enamored with someone whom only the year previous had been little more than a stranger. Now it is possible to see the future, marriage, children and old age coupled with a responsibility to long distant grandchildren whose youthful antics remind us both of years then past. In such a state it is common for promises to be made that are rather whimsical, for one does not assertively state that love lasts only until death when it is preferable to imagine a blissful afterlife spent forever in the company of our beloved. The predictions made in times of hardship designed only to calm our imaginations when fortune appears to have left us cold are taken as poison by those impatiently awaiting for this proposed golden age to arrive. Faith, it appears, is everything and nothing when in love and should be eradicated rather than embraced for it is always better to live in a warm house than dreaming of one whilst shivering.

As pure as love can be, whether it be platonic, emotional or with your very soul, there remains always the threat of other people. Those around us who do not understand the love you feel and judge only from outward appearances the actions of those involved. Too often do our friends, families and colleagues inquire as to our very personal relationships before passing comment after hearing but one side of an argument, dispute or proposal. Advice is all too often generic in its intentions, designed to apply to all who seek it rather than the individuals who ask of it. Mothers are tarred with the gifts of flowers, chocolates or bath salts whilst fathers are blessed with tools, alcohol or music popular during their youth. Loved ones are rarely fortunate enough to receive a gift from the heart, a present that will directly pierce their soul and affirm their assertions that you are their one true love.

My advice, when love takes you, accept the inevitable, embrace the future and revel in the present for it is here that we live and breathe. The past serves only to remind us of lessons learned, days well spent and hopes long abandoned. The future is something none of us can know and we must all venture into blindly, even the richest man can become poor and the loneliest man popular, we make it what it is.

Chores

by Hannibal Tabu, urban journalist, jackass, dot-com refugee, ex-husband, karaoke host, film aficionado, Macintosh zealot, published poet and novelist. He is a writer of African descent living in south Los Angeles county and you can find more than you ever wanted to know about him at his website, www.operative.net


We normally blamed clumsiness. The slipperiness of 99-cent-store dishwashing liquid, or fatigue in hands fresh from twelve hour shifts.

Honestly, the dishes were just tired. Too few in number and washed too often, they dreamed of an escape -- any escape, really -- from the endless cycle of hot water and being racked together to dry. The dishes hated the endless chatter about money that wasn't there, the slow singing of mournful songs over wash water, hoping for love that never came.

So we thought that they'd been dropped. They never needed the notoriety of the act, but it was suicide all the same.