Death, ghosts, demons, spells, death, dystopia, magic blankets, ultracapitalism, journalistic supervillainy, class warfare, death: FLAPPERHOUSE XX.
coming
DECEMBER 21, 2018
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The grand finale of our Fall 2018 issue is Jeremy Schnee‘s marvelously meteorological short story “Animate Atmosphere: A Basic Guide to Changing Clouds in a Changing Sky.”
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YOUNGER READERS MAY FIND IT SURPRISING that there was a time when clouds were largely ignored. They were mostly harmless, bearing shapely resemblances to other things, or adding background to photos, or shading out sun on hot days. Sure, they could be foreboding, like when you’d turn toward thunderclaps and see an anvil-shaped cumulonimbus barreling through the sky. Only small and specialized groups paid them much attention. Most of us learned and forgot their names in school. Our primary concern with clouds was how they affected our outdoor plans. Simply put, we took them for granted. Then the clouds demanded we take greater notice.
For millennia, clouds were made of water droplets, ice, and mostly simple air. They formed from the blending of warm and cold fronts, from fluxes in moisture, or from disruptions of terrain. We categorized them as cirrus, stratus, cumulus, nimbus, and various hybrids. We had some anomalies too: banner clouds sat like crowns upon mountains; noctilucent clouds looked like scratches on a sunset sky. To common folk they were high or low, rain or not, and sometimes just grouped into the generic description of “overcast.”
Some say these new clouds are due to the changing climate. Some say it is a side effect of humans trying to change nature. Some say the world has simply gotten out of whack, like a record needle drifting a fraction off course. But whatever the causes, and despite the dangers, these are exciting times. The scientific community is abuzz, media ever busy, and much that we once understood about the world is up for debate. Logging is dangerous and paper scarce. Distribution is interrupted. Roads and railroads are no longer interconnected. Pilots now have the world’s most dangerous job. A basic guide must, however, be shared.
Further studies will garner greater scientific understanding, but for the time being this guide is an attempt, a simple attempt to understand.
Ice Blotch (Pagosastrape)
The patter of rain and dot-by-dot darkening of sidewalks was once so straightforward. Perhaps a businessman walking to an appointment would use a newspaper to stay dry. A mother would slap rubber boots on her kids and walk them to school. A summer night stroll through rain might even be considered romantic.
We’ve all heard the urban legend regarding one such summer night’s walk: in a small Midwest town, a woman and her boyfriend were holding hands, until she stopped to tie her shoe. She let go of his hand and kneeled. A blue flicker filled the sky. When she stood and reached for his hand again, his fingers shattered. Their frozen crystals numbed her hand, she never regained nerve function in it. Of course, as this phenomenon has followed many a rainstorm for years now, we know this story to be implausible. If ice-lightning struck within such proximity, she would have been frozen solid as well.
Like its electrical cousin, ice-lightning accompanies nimbus (rain) clouds. The strike comes not from the nimbus, but from a sort of symbiotic relationship. The changing atmosphere sometimes pushes clouds further upward. Nimbus clouds thus occasionally scrape the top of the troposphere (the lowest level of atmosphere and place where 98% of all weather used to occur). Three forces then combine: coalescing water droplets, escaping electrons, and freezing pressure that fuses molecules in a wart-like secondary cloud which forms atop the nimbus.
Though wart-like, the Ice Blotch cloud glows a beautiful radiant blue. When charge separation begins in the nimbus, instead of merely getting lightning, ice discharges too. Strikes are unpredictable. The lightning ripples over wet surface areas. The safest place to be is inside. Roofs and sides of buildings can thaw with no lasting damage. Giant oaks have been encapsulated in ice. A blimp once survived intact, though was grounded by the ice’s extra weight. The situation is rarely so ideal.
People don’t often take proper precautions for Ice Blotches. They huddle under canopies or overhangs. Worse, they hide in small spaces. Cars are often sealed in foot-thick ice sheets. Doors and windows get stuck, vents clogged. Roadways become instant hazards. Ice sheets have caused fender-benders in the triple digits. In a city like Los Angeles, where experience driving on ice is lacking, traffic delays have lasted for days.
On the bright side, the aftermaths can be rather beautiful. Tales of whole towns turning out to skate and sled mid-summer are bountiful. So are acts of heroism from kindly neighbors: if one is unlucky enough to be sealed in a car, sitting inside an ice bubble, looking through the din and savoring breath, there is no greater sight than a mob of people armed with crowbars and pickaxes charging in your direction.
“Head Tree,” “Life On Mars,” and “Fitting” are three psychedelically surreal prose poems by Satoshi Iwai from our Fall 2018 issue.
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“Head Tree”
AFTER A LONG AND INSULAR COMA, sitting up in the half-melted bed, I find an apple tree has grown on my head. Each wall of the room is covered with the fun house mirrors which reflect the tapestry of deformed leaves. Thirteen years have passed while I had been sleeping.
The tree has a dozen branches which bear a hundred fruits. The shadow of the trunk tells me an eternal noon. Hiding behind the leaves, a wise snake tells me the sweet pain of molting. When a cool breeze comes I find that I have already gotten my ex-wife out of my head.
I wonder how many apples have grown to birds on my head until I die. Fishes die in the sea, but birds don’t die in the sky. Still, all I can do is forget every summer that has gone. When the warm rain stops falling, the first cloned passenger pigeon will fly away from my tree.
“Life on Mars”
YOU DON’T NEED TO WONDER why that old man can paint pictures so quickly, or why he and every old man appeared in his pictures look so alike. He doesn’t care about how his pictures look like, because he has lost his sight entirely since he was a little child.
The passersby don’t care about his blindness. They admire him just because he paints his self portraits without any photograph. At the abandoned bus stop, sitting on the half-broken bench, he depicts hundreds of his own faces under the sun, even under the new moon.
He is homeless, and he believes that he is homeless on Mars. Martians have three eyes, so he is confused every time when he can’t touch the third eye on his forehead. He is always in the dusk. Dusk is called mirrors on Mars. He always feels blue. Blue is called infinity on Mars.
“Fitting”
DON’T STAY TOO LONG IN THIS FITTING ROOM. The mirror in front of you reflects you wearing a white sweater and the mirror behind you that reflects you wearing a white sweater and the mirror in front of you that reflects the mirror behind you that reflects you wearing a white sweater and the mirror in front of you that reflects the mirror behind you that reflects you wearing a black sweater. If you answer your cell phone, someone tells you in a very, very hoarse voice. You are what you wear. Then, there is no one in this fitting room. The mirror in front of your absence reflects your absence and the mirror behind your absence that reflects your absence and the mirror in front of your absence that reflects your absence behind your absence that reflects your absence and the mirror in front of your absence that reflects a crumpled white sweater on the floor.
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SATOSHI IWAI was born and lives in Kanagawa, Japan. He writes poems in English and in Japanese. His English work has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Small Po[r]tions, Hotel Amerika, Poetry Is Dead, and elsewhere.
A young girl approaches Catholic confirmation while remembering her Haitian roots in “New Names,” Khaholi Bailey‘s haunting & spiritual short story from our Fall 2018 issue.
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“WAKE UP, GIRL!” Lilith screeched. “Time to make the doughnuts!”
The Girl opened her eyes to a crescendo of light peeking between the pink comforter and the twin mattress, both soft with overuse.
With no response from her cousin, Lilith continued: “What did you say back home? ‘Time to plant the cassava?’ ‘Time to put on an Eagles Super Bowl Champion shirt and sandals made out of an old tire?’”
Lilith half smiled and folded her arms across her body.
“You know, time to get up, or something like that.” Lilith sighed loudly. “You Haitians have no sense of humor.”
The Girl prepared to leave the bed. She moved her head forward, closed her eyes, and slowly moved her knees away from her chest. The warmth that encased her was malleable and comforting, and for a few more seconds she luxuriated in this dreamy state between the world and her barely conscious mind. She likes this twilight of wakefulness more than any other state because it is before she realizes where she is and all that has happened. She felt for a second that she was once again on her mother’s lap where she used to lie. Before she could remember that that part of her life had gone away, she felt a gathering of wiry fingers pulling at the top of her head.
Lilith guided her up to a sitting position, first by lifting the top of her head then grabbing her shoulders. The Girl looked up at Lilith and was startled by the layer of makeup between Lilith’s face and the rest of the room. The Girl did her best to stifle a yawn, as to not inspire her cousin into another quip about foreigners and their odors.
The Girl placed her feet into slippers that were indented with Lilith’s footprints and headed to the bathroom. Without asking, Lilith followed and stood right behind her as she faced the mirror. Lilith took a handful of water from the faucet and poured it over The Girl’s hair. The Girl didn’t stop her. Lilith’s studious glare made her feel like she probably needed whatever help she was going to offer. She took a comb and secured it on The Girl’s hairline and pulled; the comb didn’t budge. Lilith leveraged her right foot on the toilet and leaned back with the left. The Girl’s head was pulled back, farther and farther until the plastic comb snapped. She raked The Girl’s hair with her nails until she could gather enough hair into her fist. Lilith bent to look at her work. Sweat beaded on her nose, which wrinkled with dissatisfaction. She spat on her palm and smoothed it over The Girl’s rough hair. She took a rubber band and twisted her hair into a ball behind her head. She stepped back to look at her hard work, sighed and smiled at The Girl’s face. “All better,” she said, counting this as one of her good deeds for her otherwise hopeless immigrant cousin. “Maybe we break out the hot comb tomorrow.” She scanned The Girl’s hair triumphantly. “We’ll have to wake up extra early.”
The Girl’s hairline throbbed as she walked to Saint Angela Merici School for Girls, repeating in her mind a list of saints. She would have to choose one as her namesake for tomorrow’s Confirmation, but she still had no idea what she wanted to be called. So, she silently asked Saint Anthony for help: Help in remembering the names of the other saints; remembering why any of this was important; remembering which memories were real. She named her loa, her father, before Saint Diana and reminded herself that Catholic schools here did not honor her deceased father as her personal deity as they did in Haiti. She found herself closing her eyes and trying to picture his face more often lately, though the only reference she had was through pictures, stories from her mother, and her dreams. She was grateful that her loa kept her close by showing up in her mind as she slept, as she was too embarrassed to give him offerings once she moved to the States. She felt disconnected from him, but connecting to him through offerings isolated her from Lilith and her classmates. She figured it more practical to try and fit in here with the living and not with a man who has been dead for most of her life.
“The Jazz Man” is Harley Claes‘s sensual & musical short fiction from our Fall 2018 issue.
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THE TALKING SHOP MONASTERY FOR TROUBLED SOULS was located within the inconceivable stretch of land in between Sunn and Elliot avenue, a hep spot for any lost bloke who finds himself awed by the remnants of the garden that once was, most many disregard. But behind the stacks of meaningless junk there is sentiment.
It takes the form of a vomit stain on the pavement.
There’s a manor behind it. You’d ought to think you’re seeing the bowels of the Earth. It’s all sodden with spirit speech & revolutionary manner. All of its inhabitants barely inhabited the body half the time. They were all too busy soul-searching.
But then came The Jazz Man, the most present of the local presence. He knew the tune, the vibe that set the joint in motion. His language was the music and the music his mantra.
He was a conspicuous character from the start. Could sit so undisturbed in a busy room. All the old folks had a kind word to say as he sat unspoken. No one else spoke his language.
During group meditation their only means of communication to him was a sitar loop that seemed to speak volumes. The circle of madhouse babble and artspeak made quite the revolutionary backdrop. Each melodic ragging soothed the bellied long-haired monks, that it was only a matter of ease that brought them to the light of jazz.
He hung his petticoat on the altar. They all hoorahed.
It was here they deemed each art a god, a holy practice.
The shell they shed like cicadas, all those bodies piled round on the burlap mat. Each passerby who heard that jazz spat obscenities like origins of the character were an offense to their tradition.
The lot of lucids was now ground for protest.
“No free thinking in my civil city! Enlightenment is a cult act!” They claimed, but not so wisely.
It was Bluebird that twisted the tables. She was bilingual. And knew each art naturally, had a hand for the harp and horn. Even wrote a few manifestos in her youth. The cat made a drag of her entrance. Clung to the poor pillared column that was at its end, already on tilt.
She kicked a saddle shoe to the ceiling and feigned speaking. Her bottom sat on the plum colored cushion where the Bobbies and the Rays served tinctured waters and teas. Mind you this was no ordinary establishment.
For one, it was rudimentary that they sit cross-legged when cushioned.
There was no leaving the premises without a piece to your name. And she, Bluebird of the talented gene, enticed each beneficiary with a tribute of her talent.
“Rosewine, Rosewine. You got Rosewine?”
“Straight with rainwater from the basin. That old barrel out back. Petals all garden grown. A soluble of white wine- you’ll adore it.”
And made so intrinsically with palms molded so thoughtfully around a moon mug, the drink was brought to her with bowed head.
She shifted in form of a painting, one elbow bracing the pavement. Tile disheveled with dirt stain, she was inviting every social strain with the flutter of a lash.
And the Jazz Man, The Jazz Man did what the Jazz Man can. He walked his way with the snap of his fingers down the great degraded avenue. Right into the premise of the great big bird blue.
To take a seat next to her– slightly slouched as she was sprawled. He rung up a Dharma Bum, one of their best beverages, a tea tincture. Milk-riddled. He sat in patience, a meditative state where he studied sheet music and one upped an octave.
Though something was an unusual distraction– a low-lite voice that screamed of vixen– and this had him interested.
“You’re a cat. Voice like an angel.” He says under his breath, hiding behind his dark skin as his voice boomed.
His big fumbling hands press against the oriental end tables that were used to snack upon.
Regulars were seen smoking hashish from hookahs, all gathered around in a rotating centerfold, fiendish for that muse. But big Jazzy only smoked from a pipe– puffing ground tobacco to entice the curious. And baby Bluebird had an itch. A song to sing, a tale to belt out all at once in soprano.
“Love is a beautiful thing,
Don’t you know it babe?
I love the Blues that I sing-”
“Hit the juke won’t you?”
She snapped and the religious fanatics came kicking to act on that beat. They did not understand the music, but they wished to. And the Jazz Man longed to convey the shock and bewilderment he’d faced from the voice.
“Self-Adulation as a Note Accompanied with a Bouquet of Feathers” is one of two surreal & spiritual poems by Wale Ayinla in our Fall 2018 issue.
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TODAY, MY BODY FLOATS IN MAGENTA AIR;
and everything around me is falling
like the words rolled under mother’s sleeves.
Imagine that I am returning to a fever;
of green grass soaked in typhoid bedspread.
My sight tightens mother’s lips
as music. Frail fingers squeeze
her palms into a collage of dark hooks
and sirens, while the syringe buries itself.
Sometimes I feel like I might fold the night
into my armpit and run the length of the
city as a ghost, nevertheless, something draws me
back to my mother’s words like a magnet;
like an oath. (Never leave a widow opened
as a window.) A chimney of old wears
sewn on skin made with footprints.
I hold this memory firmly the same way
God tucks his secrets above the sky
under His soles. One day I will
hold a country and name it dreams.
Look at me the way you look a river
traveling with your face with words
holding you to a grudge. Do you see me
holding the hands of a father who is a heaven
away? Come, as a river paddling the body
into a shipwreck. I live here.
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WALE AYINLA writes from the ancient city of Abeokuta in Nigeria. His work appears or is forthcoming in Takahe, Kalahari Review, Vagabond City, The Rising Phoenix, Expound, and Dwarts. He is @Wale_Ayinla on Twitter and the founding editor of Dwarts Magazine.
“Beyond Love” is J. David‘s macabre yet moving poem from our Fall 2018 issue.
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— After Emma Bolden
IF THE SAINTS ARE TO BE BELIEVED then this body is a thin line
we walk between dead children stacked like xylophones
across a sad and lonely street. I am the only throat in this town.
The lights have been out for years, whole blocks are built from paper-
weights— the kind of city you keep with an envelope and mangoes
on the dresser. Through the broken of the glass I can see the body
as a wire, tapped between two lighting poles I am always looking past
in the dark. I look at you and whisper fuck me till the sky turns blue.
Isn’t it magical how the dead can still celebrate? How I can still believe
in this body as the space I take up between you and what I lose
next. I do not regard myself beyond love, but we all imagine death
to be a kinder bed than grief. We all lack proof enough
to make us stay.
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J. DAVID is from Cleveland, Ohio and serves as poetry editor for Flypaper Magazine.
“Dear Anybody” is one of two uniquely romantic poems by Denise Jarrott in our Fall 2018 issue.
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I CAN FIND ANYTHING ABOUT YOU BEAUTIFUL, even the things that other lovers told
you were grotesque. You don’t even have to ask. It isn’t that
I am incapable of endurance. If anything, I can go for miles trailing that part of
you behind me, that part which cannot be contained.
I am here with
you at your window. The things it faces will appear as
I see them: the dirty sparrows, the iron fence with the grapevine motif, the mailbox
you painted to appear more friendly to the mail carriers listening to podcasts
or gossiping about who was cheating on whom. Woe to
your landlord who glued the sills shut, so that no one can hear me when
I scream. And how I’d scream, uncontained.
Dear Anybody,
I cannot say anything about me is pure, except how like bread dough my love for
you expands with each punch, each indentation, stupidly it fills itself in, to the shape.
I take my shape based on the container. I will love
you, Anybody, the same way I’ve loved everyone else, as if
I am rich in time, in patience, if only to exist with
you in the transparent blue window in which no one else exists. If only
I could prove to you how deep the water is through the glass bottom boat
you agreed to board with me, scraping along the latest reef. This is to say
I am about to capsize, and the red of this coral breaks my heart only to have it mend to
your specifications, a different shape.
Dear Anybody, this is to say that
you will break me in a very specific way, as all bodies do. Once,
I asked someone, in the space of a poem such as this one, to let me sleep in
your bed and feed me seeds and let me drink bitter tea, to tie up my hair so that
I can exist only as a body. Once, I gave a whole book to someone wholly different from
you but it is like handing them a snake that sits so still on the wrist.
I gave over my whole life like handing over a jar of buttons, expecting devotion.
Dear Anybody,
I can tell you this, if you let me, I will give
you the strange objects I have made of my life, but
I cannot tell you what to do with them.
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DENISE JARROTT is the author of NYMPH(Vegetarian Alcoholic Press) and a chapbook, Nine Elegies (dancing girl press). She grew up in Iowa and currently lives in Brooklyn.
A frustrated husband and his paranoid wife try to cope with their realities in “Chemtrail Mist of the New World,” C.D. Frelinghuysen‘s paranoid & poignant flash fiction from our Fall 2018 issue.
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MORNINGS BERNADINE HAUNTS THE PORCH. She glides back and forth, white hair untethered, clutching the egg timer, glaring at the sky. “I dare you,” she tells it, as if we don’t live under the Atlanta flightpath. Right on time, Delta 49 appears from the northwest, slicing the sky with a white wake. Bernadine mutters and winds the timer to five. Ever since the Doctor cut her to half time for unprofessionalism she’s been able to perfect the details of her delusions. And after Bernadine squandered our savings I’ve had to unretire from my fine decade of alcohol abuse and represent morons at traffic court, but business is slow and so most mornings I’m stuck here with her.
Last summer at a minor league game Bernadine got beaned by a foul ball, knocking her into the next seat. She was out for a full minute, but when she came to she waved off the paramedics and pushed through the crowd to the parking lot. She grabbed the car keys and drove home, but took a strange route, and kept looking in the rearview. When we got in the house she had a whiskey and a Tylenol and went to sleep. At three a.m. she suddenly woke and shuffled into Tricia’s vacant bedroom, which we’d turned into storage, and booted up the dusty computer. She spends most of each day in there now. I’d heard of a man who dove headfirst into the shallow end and could play piano afterwards. Bernadine, during her brief time in the void, had mastered keyboard and mouse. I caught the ball off the rebound, by the way. Bernadine called it the instrument of her trepanation, and had it mounted above the fireplace. But the baseball was only the final straw that broke her. Lightning ignites dead woods, not the living.
It’s her fault I know every plane by its name, how many engines move it, every federal poison it belches, and why five minutes of linger tells you what sort of smoke is coming out.
Yesterday I had to coax her down from a box in front of Chase Bank, where she was denouncing the fraud of fiat currency. The police officer didn’t scold me, or laugh. He just wrote down the phone number for Braxbury Convalescent.
The timer erupts. Bernadine measures the sky, clicks her tongue, goes inside and shuts all the windows, despite the heat. She clomps down the basement steps and I hurl my spent smoke into the yard. She comes out wearing her gas mask, no longer a ghost but an olive drab and dumpy elephant. “Looks like arsenic today,” she gasps. The Brauns are watching from their window.
Continue reading “Chemtrail Mist of the New World” – Fiction by C.D. Frelinghuysen
“Thirteen Reasons” is one of three trenchant yet tender poems by Matthew Meriwether in our Fall 2018 issue.
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BECAUSE ALL MY MONEY IS MADE OF MY DEAD SKIN
Because I am still trying to tell a long story to the dinner guests with a fly buzzing around my hair
Because I run toward the mirror every time I think I might look like a person
Because I’m still making eggs then throwing them in the trash, their bright yellow like daffodils or a girl in a dress laughing in a closet
Because it’s fun to pretend to have courage
Because it’s fun to pretend to die
Because I prefer spinning around an empty house
Because I wear a dress in the summer to trick all the dirty boys
Because my bucket of treats for the boys is a pile of my dead skin
Because I have sewn my skin into dresses, for tricks and for spinning around as if I were dumb
Because it’s fun to pretend you’re an unknown genius then vomit in the champagne bottle you brought with you
Because it’s fun to think of yourself as already dead, or as not having a body
Because I run to your house every time I think I know my name
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MATTHEW MERIWETHER is a writer and performer living in Fort Wayne, IN. He writes and performs music under the name Fresh Tar, and hosts events in cities across the country, including the reading series ‘Life is Sad, Here is Someone,’ and ‘A Party for All of Our Questions,’ an experimental social gathering. Matthew is recently the author of Knock Knock, a chapbook of narrative prose (Dandelion Review, 2018).
FLAPPERHOUSE 