Our Fall 2017 issue, FLAPPERHOUSE #15, won’t fly until Friday, 9/22, but today we’re offering a taste of all the menacing weirdness we have in store with “Drought,” an eerily surreal & fable-like work of flash prose by Kim Coleman Foote.
THIS YEAR, BEFORE NIGHT RUSHES IN, WE AWAIT THE RIGHT MOMENT. When sky turns cyan and a breeze chants in the air, against our ears. When sky turns grey, erasing sun rays and hinting at rain, which hasn’t appeared in months.
Everyone in the area tenses upon their chairs, hoping to be agents in a new rite, begging Mother Nature to grant us those liquid grains from her atmosphere. We cant and cry, hoping she’ll hear us, when a gay gent strolls amongst us, stroking the cat on his shoulder. He lifts his thin legs like a crane then breaks into a canter. Some gather their young in fright. He tears off his hat, exposing a halo of hair, rants about how in this age, it is our hate that keeps Her from cooperating.
When an old hag jumps from her seat, we grit our teeth. She rages at the man, spittle staining her chin like tinea, her breath stinking of gin. She claims that the gates of the moon shall open to anyone who hasn’t tired of life’s mysteries.
The man grins the whole time. The cat has changed to a hare eating hay (some say it never was a pet but a rat disguised in rags).
Aside: don’t attempt to tag this as fiction; reality, in actuality, is fraught with much more strangeness.
Do you have any idea how great of a time it is to subscribe to FLAPPERHOUSE right now? Next week our Fall 2017 issue flies, and boy, is it a monster…the kind of monster that will scare the pants off you at first, but then once you get closer & get to know it you’ll realize that deep down this monster simply needs to be loved, just like everybody else. And while our Winter 2018 issue won’t fly for over 3 months, it’s already got some brain-tingling mind games & other scintillating surreality hidden in its attic, waiting to be unwrapped for the holiday season…
So if one were to subscribe to FLAPPERHOUSE at this time, one would be treating oneself to a cornucopia of marvelous literary weirdness for the rest of 2017, as well as helping ensure that we can continue our pursuit of flappiness well into 2018…
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“John Wick Pumps Gas,” “Superhero,” and
“So, The Portal To Another Dimension Is Not In The Hudson” –Chris Antzoulis
“The Ribcage Creates the Sound of Settling,” “The Ribcage Explains (Again) Why It Never Votes,” “The Ribcage Dreams of Dancing On a Grave (Or Two),” “The Ribcage Tries to Make a Sextape,” and “The Ribcage Tries to Find a Cure For Catching Feelings” – J. Bradley
“My language is so dead & undead” – Kristen Brida
“Drenched Mold” and “Which Alter Ego Will Drown You?” – Juliet Cook & Michael Bernstein
“Drought” – Kim Coleman Foote
“Existential Ketchup” – James Croal Jackson
“Transformulation” – Serena Johe
“Shinrin-yoku” – Amanda Krupman
“Phantoms” and “Vanity” – Ashley Mares
“Hades in Single Malt” and “Ares Inebriated” – Bernadette McComish
“No More I Love You’s” and “Douchko” – Juan Parra
“Big Game Hunter” – Matt Patrick
“A Bullet for Mr. Sweet” – E.L. Siegelstein
“Ecotone” – Chelsea Laine Wells
“Scent” – Cooper Wilhelm
We have submitted our nominations for the 2017 Best of the Net anthology, which honors literary work that originally appeared on the internet between 7/1/2016 & 6/30/2017, and they are:
MY WIFE AND I HAVE BEEN DREAMING THE SAME DREAM; we wake up at the same time these days, thirsty, sweat-drenched, frightened. In the dream, we are walking the streets of the town where we grew up—different towns but the same feeling. We are walking the streets alone. We go into a bar we have never seen before, always the same bar, dimly lit, with red glass lanterns on the walls. A person opens up a hidden door in the back which leads down down down down down down down down down down.
We wake up at the same time, ashamed, confused, sick, unable to fall back to sleep. Sometimes, after the dream, we watch internet TV until dawn; sometimes we lie in the darkness, pretending to sleep, not talking. Sometimes we curl up together silently, like snakes. This is a metaphor for our relationship. We are both plunging into darkness equally, privately, even as we fall more in love. We sleep together, we wake up together, we share everything, and still the dark is rising.
When we die, we want to die together. We want to be in bed when a hurricane strikes our small coastal town; our room will collapse around us, crushing our bodies in equal measure. We are terrified that this will not happen, that one of us will be unlucky and somehow survive, that one of us will be left behind in our ruined house.
At our dinner party tonight, my wife sits between her two friends, one arm over each friend; she puts her feet on our coffee table and leans back. I pour the women more tequila because that’s what they have been drinking.
I take the men into the kitchen with me, and two of us smoke cigarettes out the window. My friend Max washes a few dishes. Everything in the kitchen is covered in a thin layer of grease because of the pork belly from dinner. Max has a joint in his hand for some reason, and we are smoking it, and we open some more beers.
I sit on the floor of the living room for a long time. The women on the couch finish off the bottle of tequila. The pipes rattle wildly in the corner as if they are about to explode. It is winter. Someone puts a Slayer record on, and it is brutal and it is lonesome; everything is moving too quickly.
Soon my wife is asleep on her friend’s lap, and I’ve had enough. I say it’s time to go. When everyone is gone, I carry my wife to our bedroom, and I fall asleep as quickly as I can. I do my best, but by the time I wake up, half drunk, covered in sweat, my wife has been awake for nearly an hour, alone in the darkness, crying. When you die, she says, when you die—I tell her I am sorry. It’s because of the party, I whisper in the darkness—you went ahead of me, and I wasn’t able to follow you.
The lives of a father-and-son clairvoyant act are turned upside-down by the arrival of a mysterious woman in “Sudden Sight,” Edna McNamara‘s seductive short story from our Summer 2017 issue.
{ X }
I WATCHED MY SON MAKE A FOOL OF HIMSELF IN THE WET HEAT of a June night somewhere outside of Lewes. Under the wings of a drooping tent, Billy larked about on the stage pretending to be talented. Pretending to be a first-class mind reader. Pretending to be me—though at 17, he’d set himself an impossible task. Unlike my performance, his routine lacked style and refinement, despite having followed me up and down the East Coast as the lesser half of The Clairvoyant William Asgard & Son. He’d been listening to my patter since his birth at the end of ‘14 but still hadn’t cottoned on. That evening I’d offered him a golden opportunity, yet there he was, the buffoon. People laughing in his face.
“La-Dees and Gen-Tel-Men.” In his spit-shined boots, Billy swayed, one tetchy foot to the other. He gawped, plucked at his third-hand suit. “I will now read the mind of a member of this audience. Someone come on up here next to me.” Like a bad waiter, he flapped at a chair on the stage while mumbles rolled through the crowd. “I promise it don’t hurt, folks.”
Maybe thirty or so lounged on their small-town backsides in the tent we’d rented from an evangelist with a sore throat. A good deal for a rainy night. Trapped under the canvas, I saw shadows quiver with bugs killing time, waiting for an opportunity. The Lord only knew what infections and fevers these folks’d carry home as souvenirs. Like the preacher man said, He moved in mysterious ways.
And there was Billy, working himself up. “You, sir?” He pointed to a man stuffed into a yellow shirt and red suspenders. “No? How about the pretty girl on the side there?” His hand swept the tent. “I guarantee you’ll be amazed.”
No one looked put out by his low-class tricks. We charged little, enough to cover room and board in a cut-rate hotel. Times were hard here along the Delaware coast. Hell, times were tough all over. Almost two years since the market crash in ‘29, folks were just trying to keep their families together. Feed them. Find jobs. Have a good time, laugh. And Billy pulled them in. My son’s a nice boy, easy on the eye. Shorter than most but no noticeable defects. Blond and blue-eyed, he took after his mother.
“Come on, folks,” Billy tried again. Like kids at Sunday school, the crowd giggled and poked each other, but no one volunteered. Sweat bowled down my spine as I bore the heat of the godforsaken tent, and even the yellowed grass below my feet had given up the Holy Ghost. The air oozed with the stench of farmers fresh from the barn. Housewives in dull cottons smelling as sharp and bitter as their dung-spattered men. Why in the hell had I chosen this place?
Still, no one moved. I pondered yelling fire until a woman stood up.
“Thank you, miss, step right up.” With a grin like he’d been saved, Billy slapped his palms together. “Let’s give this lovely lady a hand.”
My first glimpse of her, she was dainty. Skirt gathered in a gloved hand, she climbed to the stage with an eye-catching waggle. Older than Billy, maybe ten years younger than me, but within kissing distance of 30. Some might have thought her pretty with her satiny dress, her neat little hat and purse, but I was partial to a certain type. I decided to watch and see.
Billy stepped forward. “May I have your name?” A tough breeze hustled through the flapping tent and chewed up her words. To hear better, I strolled to the side of the stage where her perfume sugared me like a twirl of cotton candy. She cocked her head and repeated her name. “Miss Eliza Reynolds.” I swear she batted her painted eyes.
“Your hand, Miss Reynolds.” Billy led her to the chair in the center of the stage. “Now, close your eyes. I promise it won’t hurt.”
That’s when I saw him look at the woman. Look at her as if sudden sight’d galvanized a blind man. Like he’d realized that there, her hand clutching his, sat an honest-to-God real live woman. Despite my help, Billy’d always been a bit backward in picking things up. Or so I’d thought.
AFTER THE END, I’LL JUST KEEP FLINGING my musings into the void.
I don’t watch the news—well, I sort of do. More accurately, I don’t listen to the news, I just keep it on TV, on mute, in case of apocalypse.
My love’s a $10 bill you forgot to take out of your pants before you ran it through the laundry; it’s all stiff & crinkly now but it’ll still buy you a drink.
My soul’s a dreaming dachshund napping in the sun, twitching its paws & chomping at ephemeral squirrels.
My moral compass led me to a treasure map hidden behind a Sugar Ray poster in the Tulsa Hard Rock Café.
Thoughts collide & scrape inside me
like a rusty clusterfuck,
they twitch & blister as they spread their pox across Long Island Sound.
Sighs of anguish, howls of glee
are chiming through my lighthouse home,
they somersault like feisty leprechauns
across Long Island Sound.
Shit, I just remembered a field trip’s coming to tour my lighthouse tomorrow—gotta Febreze everything & hide all my Egon Schiele paintings!
Gonna spend the weekend booby-trapping the windmills of my mind, scrubbing all the Zinfandel stains out of my Metallica T-shirts, and constructing elaborate dioramas based on my most memorable childhood humiliations.
Tonight I’ll be hanging my silky new hammock in the toasty sliver between honest mistake & reckless abandon. I’ll build a fortress from coarse, lint-spangled pillows in the slender valley between false hope & unconditional surrender. I’ll be twitching atop the border of judicious heightened sensitivity & insufferable over-sensitivity.
NO CHECKERED FLAG FOR ME as carsick I cross the divide the
closest there is on this side of town to a demilitarized
zone between the living & the dead I watch an obese
woman lean over a gravestone drawing thru straw unmarked cup stomach
turns liver face up kidneys & jelly knees I’m not sure if we’re
even related in the chapel outrageously symmetrical floors a big brave
fuck you to disorder take that death/ now I need to learn real fast how
to hug a man you know the type strong concrete beer-gut good humor
lives at the race track fresh oil change eyes
bends left in grief we’re all of us staring at the body burping up
lies how beautiful the blouse is & happy but she looks
terrible I mean what sick roughshod imitation of life is this/ well, case:
roadblock anatomy weird ditches around lips those teeth
pushing eager like I did my time let me out Dali
clock ears & nose in eternal flux of smelling obscene
smell (that’s formaldehyde baby & it’s gonna
cost you) it just doesn’t add up, face erasure the glasses
for everyone else’s sake & you’d be kidding
yourself to think otherwise/ old man
shoulders quivering now saying how he
fell asleep by the casket & dreamt I thought she & I’d just hop right up & get out of here. & it hits me then
the flowers shitty carpets canned flute music CD & pickled
grief repeating void whistling closed inside the straw why even
pretend/ I’m no iron stomach is the woman at
the gravestone dead yet am I a fucking mannequin how will
death animate me fuck all the post-haste posthumous let’s just
go for a joyride you & me/ get younger while the time is ripe
{ X }
IAN KAPPOSwas born and raised in Northern California. To date, over thirty of his works of short fiction, nonfiction and poetry have been published online and in print. He plays in the hardcore punk band Cross Class and co-edits Milkfist, and is an MFA candidate in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. He maintains a website at www.iankappos.net.
Nobody has contributed more poems to our weird little zine over the years than Jessie Janeshek, and it’s not even close. It’s because her poetry so perfectly captures that easily-recognizable-yet-hard-to-define quality known as “flappiness” that we look for in the work we publish. (One of her recent contributions, “Delicate / Cheap,” was posted here last week.) Jessie has had poetry appear in other excellent publications like Potluck, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among dozens of others. She’s also the author of numerous chapbooks & collections, including The Shaky Phase, published earlier this year by Stalking Horse Press.
Jessie recently exchanged emails with our managing editor Joseph P. O’Brien about her poetry, as well as the sorrow of nostalgia, the allure of Golden Age Hollywood, and the ghosts of our own creation…
{ X }
JO’B: To me, your poems feel both spontaneously, almost subconsciously crafted, and yet also meticulously assembled from vintage / antique parts. How much subconscious spontaneity and how much meticulous assemblage would you say plays a part in your writing process?
JJ: I really like this description of my work, so thank you! It’s both lyrical and accurate. I would say that many of the phrases and images used are subconsciously generated. I take a lot from dreams and memories, and I jot down random phrases that come into my head, often while I’m exercising or just ostensibly focused on something else. I also use lines from films, articles, songs, etc. Putting these parts together on the page is where the “meticulous assemblage” comes in. I’m very deliberate about how the parts come together to make the whole. I recall reading an interview with Kim Addonizio quite a few years ago where she referred to her revision process as a “comb-over,” a need to go back through her work and fill in the sparse parts. I do something similar in subsequent drafts of my poems; my writing process often feels like a layering process.
JO’B: Do you practice any particular rituals or traditions to write, or to otherwise activate the more creative / intuitive realms of your mind?
JJ: Nothing too interesting or magical. It is usually a little hard for me to get started, if only in the sense that writing is harder than reading news articles on my phone or watching TV or petting a cat or listening to music or just existing. So, I usually put my phone in another room; otherwise, I’m tempted to mess with it any time I get stuck for a second. I usually sit on my couch. I have a journal of on-going notes, as well as a clipboard and a stack of typing paper with notes like more than an inch high. Sometimes I look at them; sometimes I don’t.
I usually have a glass of ice water and something caffeinated. Eighty-five percent of the time it’s strong coffee with a bit of cream and one sweet and low; the other 15% of the time it’s diet pop. (I was told the other day that my use of the word “pop” to describe a carbonated beverage is “so colloquial.”) Sometimes I light a candle or three, but not always.
I will say that even though it can be hard to get started, I’m much happier and saner if I’m writing for a bit every day or at least every other day. If I don’t write for like a week, my brain really starts to feel out of whack.
I write in the afternoon. I hate the morning, and I like to do my reading at night.
JO’B: In your recent interview with Kailey Tedesco for Rag Queen Periodical, you said of your poems’ speakers that “most of the time they’re just nostalgic and sad.” What are your personal feelings about nostalgia? Do you generally see it as a sad thing?
JJ: Yes. As I learned in a college course on Greek and Roman literature, nostalgia literally translates to “a longing for home.” Looking at a past, a home, that I know I can never get back to, is sad to me. The rational part of me is well aware that I’m seeing things from the past in soft focus, both on and off the screen, and that the past has its flaws, just as the present does. The irrational part of me thinks the pasts—and I make it plural, whether it’s my adolescence in the 90s or the 1920s of a film I’m watching—are so much better. And I can never get back to them. And the irrational part of me is where the poetry comes from.
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