My inertia so rudely and violently interrupted, I tried a couple of salons. All scissors and styling and girl talk, they too did not satisfy, and in the bargain were north of twice the price. My wife had spied a shop on a side street in the city and had spun her feminine intuition into a complete scenario featuring a perfect old-fashioned barber shop. She was in fact right. You wouldn’t think a big red, white, and blue gingerbread Victorian house could be so discreet as to escape my notice, but the dozens of times I’d passed by I never noticed it. Cheryl thought I should give it a shot. I resisted her suggestion, but sometimes good sense gets the better of me, and I went in.

During my long odyssey in the desolation of unisex salons I learned from my grandson that it was possible to specify a haircut using only the integers which designate the clipper’s guide comb size. In the new shop I risked everything and said, “Two on the sides and three on top, please.” As the barber set to work I felt a slight whoosh as the TARDIS took us back fifty years. I had just read National Geographic rather than Sgt. Rock and Superman, and it would cost me more than 75 cents, but the experience was otherwise totally authentic. Businesslike clipper work, minimal fussing with scissors (but including a bonus sortie against the geezer eyebrows), hot lather ear-to-ear along my dorsal hairline, and straight-razor enforcement of the proper stark boundary between hair and naked skin. I’m not forgetting the tissue-paper collar, which even in league with the vacuum and powdered whisk broom always allowed a few itchy clippings to work their way beneath my undershirt, nor the astringent-slathering finale.

Surprise is of the essence in time travel. It no more avails to plan a trip back to childhood than to try to tickle yourself. During subsequent haircuts I have to deal with the here and now. My barber is another gentleman of the hard-working Portuguese persuasion—surely a coincidence—and we bemoan taxes, the nanny state, the pitiful condition of the general run of men, and still, no sports. I catch and catalog tantalizing glimpses of Azorean culture. Who knew there’s an Azores channel on cable? And who knew that it broadcasts, in season, the running of the bulls in the Azores? This is as far out of my bubble as I dare to go.

Ray Scanlon. Massachusetts boy. Has grandchildren. Extraordinarily lucky. No MFA. No novel. No extrovert. His work has been published in more than one place. On the web: http://read.oldmanscanlon.com/.

Of course they’ll have wanted to be there in person, to kiss your forehead, hold your taped hand. What happened to you, it’s a tragedy (“How could he?”). But the spirit will have to suffice: some distances just can’t be covered by plane. We’re so sorry. So this flood of get well gifts—the starry Christmas fleece, the Hefner-esque bathrobe, “For when you’re getting around again, on all three legs” (cue big brother #1: Brian’s lame porno-sleaze grin)—these will be their sympathy, their hope: that in absence of the flesh and the blood, these will be the love that smothers you warm, the joy-tinged bleach that kills out the room’s quiet and sterility, so you don’t have to feel so alone.

Because we’re here for you, Jo(h)n.

Anything you need.

And when it’s just you and Mom, as it is so often, she’ll pick a card and read aloud, cooing the words as if you were still her pink baby, now middle-aged. She’ll lift your surrendered hand, let fingertips graze the velvety hearts, play over the penned sentiments. You’ll want to say the words, too, but somewhere in passing from your lips to her they’ll smear into nonsense. Funny, considering they used to obey. For years they’d arrange themselves into your written reflection so easily you barely had to try. Now they’ll rebel, ridicule and turn against you—now the words will fight every time.

An unexpected weekend visit will produce big brother #2—Fire Captain Rob—and his four kids. Another happy party time—more celebration and cards. Kisses and hugs and words from Mom, endless gushing words, about how long it’s been and how we’ve missed you (“You should visit more often. Why don’t you visit more often?”), and how’s Texas? Clustered around the bed, the little ones will stare at your fluids and IV stand, your wires and chirping monitors, reverent, suspicious. And then a flurry of whispers, an innocent curiosity rustling the dead air like so many fragile, untested wings: “Can he hear us? Dad, what’s wrong with him why can’t he talk?” Inwardly, from distances greater than just the bed, you’ll wave hello and urge them close, as if trying to flag down ships that have already set sail. “I can talk,”—again the words oozing out as stupid moans, undefined, acquiring the shape of the room.

It all gets twisted around in your head eventually, you know. It’s what happens when you can’t turn off. The get well gestures will cut so deep you won’t even feel them anymore. They’ll want the best for you, Fire Captain Rob and the kids, but you’ll just wish they’d never come. Better if there’d been no reason to visit. Better if you weren’t so full of the dumb, maybe researched this plan of attack like you researched your fiction: how many loras before even the heart dreams? Maybe instead of guessing you could have played a game out of it, counted up the milligrams like some kind of personal high score, your all-time best—just once cared enough not to phone it in.

“That was nice. Wasn’t that nice?” Mom will ask later, after they’re gone. “Gia’s so pretty. They all are.” You’ll ponder your inclusion in this notion of pretty, and if so, if you are, which version: pre-vegetable or post. “They’ve grown so fast—can you believe it? Only yesterday it seems ….”

And still more days will escape from you, all of them locked on fast-forward: Mom and the nurses and occasionally a doctor teleporting around the room in random, furious blips while the sun cartwheels in the window and the four walls hum all shades of day and night. We’re out of place, Mom will want to say. She’ll read more of the cards, helping when you struggle to follow, smiling toward your slack expression, but the words won’t cooperate with her, either. All they’ll want to say is how we’re out of place.

Jon Mcgill lives and writes from Omaha, Nebraska, where he is pursuing a degree in Radiology. This is his first publication.

“It’s called ‘heat death,’ I believe.”  There’s a creaking quality to my speech, which is fitting.  It has just occurred to me that we’ve spent most of the stroll in silence.  I probably don’t talk to you enough.  When I do talk, not much of note is said.  Emboldened, I decide on earnest discourse.  It’s tilting at windmills, I imagine, but I have at it anyway.

“It’s the sun, you see.”  I point at it, in case you haven’t noticed its presence or you don’t know its handle.  You blink.  “It’s the key to everything, really.  You, me, Greta.”  I point at the dog.  “Our food, our happiness.  Seriously, everything.”

I pause for a moment to think about this.  Some thoughts simply won’t rise to the surface until said aloud.  I stand in the street at the foot of our yard and stare at the sky.  My shoulders are sore from the weight.  When I look back down, I see you leaning your head back, your sensitive eyes closed tight against the direct daylight.  You’re already so much more sensible than me.

“Anyhow, it’s going to go out one day.  The sun, that is.  But not just the sun.  All of it.  The whole universe is going to get colder.”  I release Greta’s leash.  One cue, she bounds up the walk and the steps to the front porch.  Once atop, she pivots and sits on the edge of the stoop, waiting for her charges.  She’s a good girl.  I follow her lead.

I open the front door and we all clatter into the house.  “You see, energy is a one-way street, so to speak.  That equation only runs in a single direction and the last stop is cold, inert, lifeless.  Sure, sure; some things will get warmer before they die out, but it all dies out eventually.”

I release the topmost clamps on the left and right side of your harness and you totter backward slightly.  I release another from the left-hand side and extract your wriggling form.  Laying you down on the couch, I stop being a beast of burden for a few moments.  I sit down on the edge of the coffee table and lean over you.  While Greta clambers across the house to her water bowl, dragging her leash as she goes, I unzip your coat.  You smile.

“Don’t get me wrong.  This isn’t really something for you to worry about too much.  I mean, don’t hold me to this or anything, but I’m pretty goddamn certain the sun’ll be burning when you’re an old man.”

We sit there for a while, the only sound Greta’s cacophonous lapping.  “I don’t know, man.  It’s just a heavy thing to know, so I wanted to knock it out now.  This life is a very beautiful example of very cruel chemistry.  You’ll be better off just coming to terms with it and moving on.”

C. E. Garrett has spent the last decade working as an editor.  He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.  When he is not wandering aimlessly around the neighborhood, he can usually be found somewhere between the couch and the refrigerator.

Anthony Jacobson is a 2013 graduate of the Creative Writing program at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida. During Anthony’s academic career he has extensively studied the crafts of Fiction, Non-Fiction, Literary Journalism, Personal Essay and Poetry under the tutelage of John King, Lisa Roney, Peter Ives, Peter Telep, Blake Scott, and Russ Kesler, as well as many other esteemed authors and educators. He has attended and covered the Miami International Book Fair as a media guest, conducting and aiding interviews with Irvine Welsh and Martin Amis, who are two of his biggest influences in literature. Eschewing traditional forms of narrative and poetry, Jacobson prefers to experiment with style and convention, believing that form is best appreciated when it is teased to a fever pitch and jeered at. He is currently researching MFA programs in Creative Writing both in and out of his home state.

Thinking about the phone conversation with her daughter she’d had not twenty minutes before, wondering if her advice had been taken onboard, even though she already knew the answer, there came a sound like a reversing truck.

A moving ‘disintegration’ if such a thing were possible. A noise to charge her veins with adrenalin that had no comparison in her seventy six years.

Before she could cross to the stream of daylight through the window in search of answers and possible escape, she was rising from the floor as the roof twisted and the walls crumbled.

Gravity shifted and she was carried sideways and something hit her so hard that she almost didn’t feel it, an overwhelming numbness that left her with the knowledge that the right side of her body was now useless.

The light was shut out and she felt wet, soaking, as though having emerged from a pool, though she had not been in one for over a dozen years because of a child who had stared at her in her hair cap and goggles and at the lumps in her costume from age and the reminders of her four children that had been left on her body and the boy’s stare was intrusive as though she were not a real person and just a thing of curiosity and more than likely repulsion but it was not his fault really as he was just a little one but it was enough to guarantee that she never went back to that pool or any other one as it was not a pleasant thing to have your body betray you even though you know it’s inevitable for all and is one of the more disappointing things in life as it’s the same body that was once universally adored and doesn’t that feel like a lifetime ago.

Yet she knows that it’s not water that swirls around her but the debris of her shattered home and the wetness must be coming from her and it can only be the fluid of her life and she closes her mouth and her eyes to protect them and that’s all that she can do even though this is not real, cannot be real, and if it is, then perhaps this is what death feels like. A pain like piercing blades shoots through her chest and surely something has hit her in the dark and the reality of being so vulnerable scares her coupled with the roar of a jet plane hovering above and perhaps one has crashed into her home or more than likely it is the worst of nature or the finger of God as her punishment for having left her children’s father years before despite his consistent emotional cruelty and this is a mistake of sorts, a fatal one and she coughs and splutters and is rolling or flying and if that be true then whatever may come in the next few seconds will surely be the next thing, whatever it may be.

Anthony J. Langford lives in Sydney Australia. He is a father and step-father. He writes stories, poetry and makes video poems. His story The Long Jetty featured in the Verandah 25th Anniversary Edition. Some of his recent publications include Ink, Sweat & Tears, Mused, Citizens for Decent Literature, Mused, The Rusty Nail and Eunoia Review. He works in television and has made short films, some of which have screened internationally. His novella, Bottomless River is out now through Ginninderra Press. A poetry collection, Caged without Walls will be released in 2013.

A wide selection of his work can be found at www.anthonyjlangford.com

Or I told myself he was not unlike his younger brother, the first Davis I knew, who seemed to come and go for a couple of years until one spring morning, to my surprise, he showed up all decked out in robes and mortarboard to collect a diploma. And that was that.

So I try to remember how bad Robert Davis looked when he caught me on my way out of the library.

“Professor Wynn,” he said.

That was when I saw him again, for the first time. He was the most damaged looking person I’d ever seen outside of a hospital. He wore a contraption that I’d only ever seen once, on a professional football player named Steve Grogan, in fact.

This is true. I actually saw it on the man, at the movies, in Foxboro, Massachusetts.

“What the devil happened to you?” I asked.

He barely moved his swollen lips, but I understood from him that he had rolled his truck, and done some damage to his head and spine.

Something about his matter -of- factness made me want to shake his hand, or I don’t know, shout hosannas for him. Then it occurred to me that he’d probably answered the question a thousand times and was giving me a précis of the narrative, just the way I’d taught him.

“Are you going to be all right?” I asked.

“They tell me I might not get it all back.”

“You will,” I said.

“Well, I got a lot of time on my hands is all. I wanted to ask you, can you recommend some books?”

I noticed his right hand was wrapped in a wad of bandages. His fingertips bruised and bundled.

“Sure,” I said. “But what interests you, Robert?”

“I was asking you about literature,” he said.

“In literature, then?”

“I feel,” he paused, “I don’t know the classics at all. The myths and tragedies.”

So we talked like that for a few minutes more. I made my suggestions and walked away, moved that someone in such obvious pain and just as obviously riding the swells of whatever painkillers he was taking, would want to recuperate with books.

I try to remember that scene now when Robert tells the other students, most of them a decade younger and worlds of experience apart, to shut the “ef “up while I’m lecturing.

I tell him it’s not a problem for me so it shouldn’t be a problem for him.

I force myself to remember that scene when he asks me questions that I’ve already answered or confuses ideology with idolizing, or lets everyone know that he would have picked better books to read and better films to watch, or draws analogies between fictional scenarios and his military service where none exist.

Finally, I must force myself to remember that scene, how battered Robert looked, how shattered he sounded, when while viewing a film called The Fallen Idol, for which the class has to write a review, the lights go down and Robert takes out a corncob pipe, taps his finger over the bowl, raises the unlit pipe to his mouth and leans back to take in the movie. Occasionally, he removes and replaces it.

Tyler in the back row gives me a look. What the hell? He mouths.

The two dancers sitting to Robert’s left giggle, while doe-eyed Gretchen, who sits to his right and writes like a poet, begins to cry.

Wayne Cresser’s fiction has been nominated for awards and prizes at New Letters, the Tennessee Writer’s Alliance and the Newport Review, published in the print anthologies Motif 1: Writing by Ear, Motif 2: Come What May and Motif 3: All the Livelong Day, (Motes Books), online at Wandering Army, The Written Wardrobe (@ModCloth), and The Oklahoma Review, and in such print journals as the Ocean State Review and the Sound and Literary Art Book (SLAB).

“You know why there’s pain in the world don’t you its quite simple really god is a sadist but not just any kind of sadist you know he’s and I do mean he he is male god that is he’s the kind of god who wears leather jackets and has hair that comes down over his eyes he has to blow away and he’s 9 years old yeah god is a 9 year old sadist who wears leather jackets and has hair that comes down over his eyes he has to blow away so he can see just like this you see -phew- see just like that he has a switch knife too he likes to flip it out and show it to scared older ladies yeah that’s god alright such an artist that’s why theirs pain in in in in the world god is an artist yeah artist sadist what’s the difference…”

And so on.

I couldn’t really be bothered to pay attention to what she was saying as my own consciousness was beginning to glaze over. The wallpaper seemed to be coming at me like a freight train as I put another pill into my mouth. It was a green this time; I had already had a red and a blue. I didn’t really know what any of the pills were or did or if eating one or the other in any particular combination would kill me all I knew was that the girl-with-the-blue-hair had pulled them out from under her bed and told me to try some as she fiddled with her laptop to get some music on. The laptop was a MacBook probably bought with what I assumed was the same trust fund money that bought the drugs but I didn’t care about that now or anything at all really. My brain started to feel cooked like a tangerine put in the oven for far too long, yes far too long.

I looked at the girl-with-the-blue-hair’s hair that seemed to spiral out onto the floor in a blue mystic ocean of forever. I loved that hair and how the light fell in through the windows onto it and made the blackness underneath shine and glisten like black obsidian vomited up from the Earth’s core a trillion years ago. I wanted to bite and suck that hair, I don’t really know why, I was never fond of hair on my tongue and I had never had a particular hair fetish.

I got off of my chair and crawled slowly across the floor. My crawl slowly descended into a wiggle until I was flopping like a fish over to where the girl-with-the-blue-hair was laying and still babbling away about this and that and whatever who cares. The carpet was shag and seemed slightly dingy but I didn’t care I had a sea of hair to swim through. When I reached her I began to slowly move my hands through her hair, but she didn’t seem to notice. I put one of the long locks into my mouth and began to arrange the rest of her hair into more mystic patterns and symbols, trying to turn her hair into a zodiac of the mystic inner workings of the universe multiverse nihilverse. When I got her hair into just the right positions I stopped and sat in the lotus position still chewing on a lock of the girls hair as she babbled off one divine prophecy after another and began to wiggle her arms around like a Hindu goddess in a Bollywood movie.

I closed my eyes and began to focus on the texture of the hair in my mouth. It must have been a rather cheap dye job or one of those spray can deals because the hair tasted quite grainy and I could feel particles of the dye coming off and sticking to my tongue. I loved it. I wanted to sit here in this spot lit up by the sun coming through the window warming our bodies forever chewing on this hair while the girl-with-the-blue-hair prophesized and enunciated and invoked. I felt engulfed by the universe and by love itself and I knew I wanted to stay with this girl whose name I hadn’t bothered to remember forever and for a brief certainly soon-to-be-shattered moment I felt happy and I didn’t feel alone.

Lucas Burris is a young writer who has been previously published in the online publication Spry Literary Journal. He is currently studying English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, OH.

They were sitting on the plush white seats of rechargeable Security Staff golf carts, two men on two devices parked each night in the cool dark of the parking garage, beyond long rows of empty spaces, all the college’s other and better paid employees having gone home for the day. It wasn’t easy to be surrounded by students and teachers. Neither golf cart had any room for storage, so Edward and Robert each had backpacks, in which they stored their plastic thermoses of cooling coffee, college-issued walkie talkies that ran out of battery power, official gold badges, sacks of lunch, breath mints, extra socks if it rained and were required to run through the wet grass to tackle a drunk coed who was assaulting some innocent girl, and — on this strange Wednesday on the last day of the winter break — a heavy silver handgun purchased by Robert for $450 from a thin black man behind the Rush and Go gas station on the 400th block of Kennedy Boulevard.

“Hey Bud,” Robert said to Edward, as he was universally known as Bud.

“Yeah, Ricky,” Edward said to Robert, as he was pretty much known only to Edward. The two men had been friendly since high school, when Robert moved to Tampa from New Jersey after his dad went to jail for giving bad checks to all the pizza distributors in the Tri-Country area. Robert, inheritor of so little of actual value from his dad, was particularly annoyed that he got the old man’s giant pizza hands. His mom tried to cheer him up, calling him sweetie pie.

For a moment, they sat quietly in the sun, Florida rays glinting on wet grass — threatening dry socks — and each had mustaches and windbreakers, which they would remove later today when it grew warmer, and again that night, when they were in the bathroom in Plant Hall.

“We should kill that bastard for this,” Robert said. Robert lived in an old trailer. His mom was dead.

“Nah,” Edward said. Edward had a small apartment by the railroad tracks. His elderly parents paid the modest rent.

Sitting in their carts, masters, in a way, of something you might call a domain, the two friends watched a car slowly crunch over the cobblestones in front of Vaughn Center — sadly, for them, it was what might be their last day on the job. There’d be a review when school was back in session. Why so dire? A professor caught them stealing wine from the writing program and — as nice as he was — it was this professor’s natural instinct to do the right thing and say a few words to the authorities about what had happened. He wasn’t a tall man, this director, but with he had a strength that was hard to measure, under all those checkered shirts and denim and European sneakers. Robert thought they could take him.

“You really wanna?” Edward said, squinting. “We probably could.”

“It is something we could do,” Robert said, working his hands together, as if there was dough.

That night, the carpet was thick and the men approached without a sound. The director thoughtfully tapped out a message on his phone. Was it a nice line of dialog, perhaps? Or a question about procuring more wine? There was an important reading upcoming — plain to see from the marquee on Kennedy — and writers like to drink, because they are writers.

So preoccupied by wine and writing was the director that he barely noticed Robert reaching out with his big pizza hands, ready to muffle cries and head to the swamp for some killing. But having spent too much time on the cart — rarely, it should be said, were Robert or Edward ever required to save a girl in distress — Robert fell and, spooked, the two would-be killers ran like old men toward the bowels of Plant Hall.

The handicapped stall was a preposterous contrivance, because it was reached via a set of steep stairs, guaranteeing no handicapped person would ever use this stall, so under flickering lights Robert and Edward could be assured of a modicum of privacy. Huffing and puffing, both took off their windbreakers, bent at the waist, and put hands on shiny, polyester-swaddled knees.

Then Robert had an idea.

“Give me the gun, Bud,” he said.

“You already have it, Ricky,” Edward said.

Annoyed, Robert swatted at Edward, allowing himself the kind of masculine slappiness he never would have in front of all those students, always watching them.

What emerged from the backpack was bigger than either of them remembered, glinting in the light of a bathroom stall, and as the automatic toilet flushed — a powerful flush, bigger than seemed possible — the friends jumped and water kicked up into their faces, and it occurred to Edward that this was not an ideal thing to have happened.

They stared at each other, gun in one of four hands. Edward’s mind, if it was capable, would have thought this: “I have a pet theory that there is always an ambient level of misery/suffering and joy/beauty in the world, but I always wish for a larger share of the sun to shine on my side of the grass.”

Robert lifted his paw — a slab of cold pizza come to life — and as he pointed the metal at his only friend, all the other man could say was the first thing that occurred to him.

“Bud, you silly bastard,” Edward said. And Robert worked the gun.

Nathan Deuel lives in Beirut and is an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Tampa. He has written essays for The New York Times, GQ, Salon, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Previously, he was an editor at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.

I met Kumra at a party in Bloomsbury thrown by friends from Africa. She was one of a gaggle of high school girls from Sarajevo. She was delicate as a new idea, her face was pale and oval amid a flock of crow-black curls. I asked her to dance. Her girlfriends watched. After a while one of them took Kumra aside and whispered urgently but something was happening between us that felt like the first warm day after a long winter. She was eighteen, I was twenty, neither of us was going to get in the way of spring. Kamanzi loaned us his room and we spent most of the week in bed. I could do that because Chris was up north visiting her family. I felt no guilt—there’s no point feeling guilty about spring, though it is a hard season, as Eliot implied, it crushes in order to grow. We made love and talked and took walks in Russell Square and went back to bed. The girls stopped lecturing her. Kumra’s dad was president of Montenegro, her uncle was mayor of Belgrade, the family was buddies with Tito. She taught me how to say volim-te—”I love you”—in Serbian. I called her malaika, which means angel in Swahili. We made plans to meet in Paris that summer. After she left London I wrote her every week but got no reply. Then, months later, a letter came. Her father had found out about us. She couldn’t come to Paris, couldn’t even leave Sarajevo. Yugoslavia was a police state then, not as bad as Bulgaria but still. Her group must have been lousy with informers.

So I sweated in the cool guardhouse as my train mumbled in the sun. Finally the officer came back. “You don’t stay in Yugoslavia socialist republic,” he said. It was not a question. “No,” I replied, “no way.” He handed me my passport and pointed to the train. The other passengers hooted as I walked back to my coach. “What happened?” Chris asked, “I was so worried.” “Some problem with my passport,” I said, and lit a cigarette. I had a little trouble with the match. “It turned out to be a mistake.” The train lurched, and rolled slowly toward Austria.

George Michelsen Foy (aka GF Michelsen) is the author of twelve published novels and two non-fiction books. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction. His articles and stories have been published by Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Times, among others. He was educated at the University of Paris, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Bennington College. He teaches creative writing at New York University.

The teenage kid rolled up the metal door. He looked hot in his black shirt. They all looked hot.

The sofa was fine. Alice started to make an offer. But before she got a word out, one of the women wailed.

“Mi abuela!” Everyone looked down. “Mi abuelita muerta. Eee, she loved that sofa!” They all looked at Alice.

Alice paid the full price for the sofa.

The next car drove up, probably for the desk.

This is what they do.

Adam Eisman is originally from Brooklyn and Haverstraw, NY. He has published work in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine and Boston Literary Magazine (Chester, England). He is working on a collection of short stories dealing with free-range kids and their grown-ups. He now lives in Santa Fe, NM, where he is an Artist-in-Residence at El Zaguan compound.