She gave her love away like jelly tots to sticky fingered boys with sugar smiles. Her parents had told her it was good to share though they hadn't meant like that. I watched as other boys grabbed a handful to fill their appetite and were gone as soon as they swallowed. Stood outside the youth club, her nail chewed fingers squeezed the once-more empty plastic wrapper of her heart.

I told her my Dad owned the kiosk in town and I promised her cola cubes and sherbet and pear drops and whatever else she chose to fill the space her love had left behind. We walked along the canal to the high street and from there across to the market, empty this late in the evening, stalls vacant as extractions in a sweet toothed mouth.

Dad's keys, lifted from his jacket pocket, unfastened the locks and bolts and I opened the kiosk for her like a gift, like the lid of a jewelry box. The strip light flickered on, bouncing off the glass jarred shelves of peppermint humbugs, cola cubes, licorice and pastel shaded sherbet. Holding hands we stepped inside.

She sat on the counter and I measured out a quarter of rainbow drops, of white mice, of strawberry laces and rang them up on the till. For each bag she paid with a kiss so much sweeter than anything my father stocked, her eyes screwed shut, holding tightly to something. She upended a paper bag glittering with space dust, pouring what remained into her mouth like people do their last few crisps. Space dust flickered, lost between mouth and bag, and fell to the skin revealed by her low cut top, sparkling on the swell of her chest. She licked a finger, ran the tip across the dusting on her skin and offered it to me.

Underneath the sweetness a sourness found my tongue as I sucked the dust from her finger. I saw her see it in my eyes, saw her see that I knew just how it felt to be her.

'How?' she asked.

'I can taste emotion,' I said, which sounds so much more pretentious now than when I said it there, in the cramp of the kiosk, surrounded by so much sweetness trapped behind glass. She smiled and kissed me again, this time her eyes open and gazing into mine, watching me show her exactly how she felt. I kissed her back and prayed that I would taste her love me.

Dan Powell writes fiction of all shapes and sizes. He can be found at www.danpowellfiction.com

  Barun led the caravan into the encampment as the sun folded into the horizon. Soon the stars would light up the sky and the night would chill their baking bones. At least a hundred other traders had already settled for the evening. A group of strangers stared at them as they passed. Barun noticed three shovels laying on the ground of their campsite.

            He stopped in front of a clearing and dismounted from his camel. He dipped his fingers into a small pouch hanging from his waist and dusted the camel’s tongue with salt. He nodded to Daiwik, who ordered the men to begin setting up camp.

            One of the strangers approached Barun and nodded. “What goods are you transporting?”

            Barun unwrapped his turban and held it in his hands. A breeze ruffled his matted hair. His eyes shone a deep blue. “Incense.”

            “And what else?”

            “Just incense.”

            “It’s a wonder you even bother to make the journey at all!”

            “The monasteries are waiting for us.”

            “Are you a religious man?”

            “Yes, of course.”

            “Which monastery will you be stopping at?”

            “We are expected at Bamyan.”

            “I see your men take an interest in our conversation. You see, I am an adventurer. Me and my men have heard of a great treasure buried near the monastery. We will be traveling in the same direction. Perhaps we can provide you protection.”

            “No one will rob us. We only carry incense.”

            “Incense is still a vital good of the road. It can be resold elsewhere.”

            “These are donations.”

            “Donations? You travel so far just to deliver donations? But how will you afford to return home?”

            “The monasteries will help us. We have done this route for many years and have never faced adversity. Even the bandits know us.”

            “The bandits are fools. Stealing donations would be more of a boon to them. When you are all settled, please join us by the fire. We have much to discuss.”

            Barun nodded and watched him rejoin his comrades.

            “Who was that man?” Daiwik asked, appearing by his side.

            “An adventurer. He has invited us to dinner.”

            “He must be looking for the treasure.”

            “Maybe it would serve him well to look for it.”

            “Why? We spent years searching. We became half-starved fools and shamed our families into poverty. We found nothing.”

            Barun turned to watch the sun stretch its arms in a final farewell.

            “We found our faith.”

Michelle Ong’s writing has appeared in Arabesques Review, Oriental Tales Magazine, and JustSayGo. 

It wasn't hidden, exactly, but kept in a place where she wouldn't be expected to look: a photograph of Roger, naked and supine, looking at the camera without surprise. Who is this young man, displayed with a head full of thick hair? His body is almost hairless, save for the pubic area, where rough hair embeds his penis (neither soft, nor erect). His untrimmed beard and his eyes, framed with horn rimmed glasses, contrasted sharply with the pale, hairless skin of his chest and arms. He's not round yet—doesn't have that pouch that Roger pats every time he bares it—but she can see it forming.

Holding this picture, she realizes that someone else not only snapped it, but she or he took it to be developed. This is before digital cameras! The person who developed this had to see Roger, too, with his one knee bent towards the sky, the other flat against the rug, in someone's house she did not know. His penis was not hard, but appeared to be getting there. Did the idea of the picture being took arouse him? Of it being developed?

Holding the picture slightly away from her face, because her eyes were aging, she noted that it was rare for her to see Roger fully nude. Sometimes, she'd catch him in the shower, but those moment were brief. Roger always wore something. But here he was, reading comfortably without clothes, eating a Danish from a saucer.

She put the picture back.


DeMisty Bellinger, a Milwaukee native, is a graduate student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  Her most recent fiction was published in the journal Diverse Voices Quarterly.

1.
Lila looked out the window, her eyes glancing up, her neck curving, revealing smooth vanilla skin. 'Looks like it's gonna rain', she said in a flat voice.

Stroman looked up from his newspaper - the sky was an unremarkable blue, scratched by a solitary, nondescript white gash of a cloud.  There was no rain around, not for a few months.

'Uh-uh', he replied.

'Why don't you buy me presents any more?' She was still looking up at the sky, her vanilla skin melting in a layer of perspiration.

He knew that when she used more formal words - presents for gifts, soul-mate for husband, children for kids - he was in trouble.

2.
'It's not that I think he's having an affair. It's just that he has lost - maybe misplaced - his love for me. I keep trying to evoke the atmosphere of our romance, and I keep failing. I am miserable, J. What should I do?' Lila was not quite sobbing but her words were bubbling in the ferment of some deep melancholy. When she said 'romance', it sounded like she was cussing. 

J. looked down at the paper he'd been grading. The essay on it was a wreck - a lot of words jostling and grasping for meaning. J. had lost three fingers in his right hand in an accident; he stared at the space they'd have occupied.

'Lila, what can I say? Marriages are difficult. Sometimes, you keep pecking at it till all the crumbs are exhausted. Then you leave.'

Lila looked at the shapes his mouth made when he said this. She wanted to eat those shapes and she knew J. knew. It was this knowledge that came in between. When you are forty, instincts wear gloves.

3.
J. was exhausted from the sex. It had been an unsatisfactory climax. He'd never asked Rouge her real name. The reason he always picked her out from all the other women who worked the street was that she didn't wear any make-up. He disliked the idea of tasting lip-stick. She didn't even use a perfume. Her scent was all her own, and sometimes it smothered his lust till it choked.

'You have someone on your mind tonight. Should I be jealous?' The playfulness in her tone was dangerous. It hinted at intelligence. J. didn't come to Rouge for intelligence. He came here so he could lose himself in flesh.

4.
Stroman was Rouge's favourite customer. He tipped her well, he was gentle, and when he snored, he visited peace upon her shabby dwelling.

'I need to stop doing this.'

'What?' she asked, her voice sifting through the debris of his decision, not really asking a question.

'Look at me. An overweight physicist with a taste for road-side delicacies.' He cackled at the absence of subtlety in his observation. When you lose the capacity to feel hurt, you lose the sensitivity to understand when you hurt someone.

Stroman reached over and stroked the perimeter of Rouge's chin with his thumb. 'I am just joking. You are my soul-mate, you know that?'

'Don't be vulgar', Rouge replied, her chest clenching in some pain she didn't fully understand.

5.
'I am glad we didn't have kids. This would have been tougher.' Lila picked up her last bag and started walking out the bedroom.

'I don't know about that. Maybe what we needed was someone to fill the spaces between us. You know, kids would have done that'.

Lila looked back at him and saw numbness. Stroman was in love with his words and ideas. He should have been a writer. He didn't really mean what he said about kids. He only liked the sound of what he said, the idea of what he said.

The last thing Stroman saw of the departing Lila was the back of her heel. He wondered what equation could describe its curve. He heard the first drops of rain patter the windows and the roof. He listened for the silences between the drops.



Ajay Nair lives and works in Mumbai. He is an entrepreneur at a live music events firm, having been a private equity investor, an investment banker and a business consultant in the past. He believes that Tendulkar is god, which regrettably is a notion his wife Anita disagrees with. He has been previously published at BULL. More of his writing is up at http://www.fictionaut.com/users/ajay-nair.

I find it noteworthy that God—at this stage in the game—has begun to
move steadily away from any kind of proper noun and has simply come to
be known by the category of being that he (surely male) is.  No longer
is he Zeus, or Thor, Or Yahweh, or Allah, or Amon-re or any of those
other permutations of God that everyone is an atheist about that
Richard Dawkins frequently enjoys rattling off in public forums before
arriving gleefully at the punch line that he ‘just goes one god
further’. God, graying at the temples and perhaps wearing a sweater
vest is now just God. Noun.

Maybe it is liberating. It must’ve been tiring to be mistaken for so
many separate beings across such a span of time, just because you’re a
little moody. It would be as if everyone called you Christina when you
were angry, or Samantha when you were horny.  In reality, you’ve been
Paul this whole time, good-old Paul, and people are always giving you
new names, and ascribing different features to you based on the
culture in which you were viewed. It’s better to just be Paul. Much
less pressure.

But let’s go farther: God, who is still occasionally called Allah or
Yahweh here and there (but only casually), is no longer really either
of those names. God is God. When people call God Allah or Yahweh, it's
more akin to the way your dad calls you 'Chief', or the way other
drivers on the highway call you 'ass-dick' when they talk to you on
the highway, even though you're still just Paul. No, calling God 'God'
is more akin to the way it would be if people stopped calling you Paul
all together, and simply started calling you Human. Could you imagine?
Talk about having the weight of the world on your shoulders. Talk
about gross over generalizations.

But whatever the case, God--the executive being--is taking it easy
these days. There is less and less for him (of course he’s a man!) to
do. We’ve all realized how unfair it is to give him kudos for the good
things that happen in our lives (because otherwise we’d have to also
give him credit for all the bad things that happen to us, and what
kind of god would allow bad things to happen to us basically decent
folk?), so he doesn’t have to worry about that stuff anymore.
Advances in the sciences have shown us that God really hasn’t had much
of a hand in our design, or too much of the material stuff that goes
on down here on Earth. Some will still say that he ‘guided’ evolution,
but really, that’s just like a director that giving a producing credit
on her movie to a friend or some detached but insecure financier. God
appreciates the gesture, but he realizes that it’s mostly empty.

And since we know that god doesn’t intervene in our lives, prayer has
become more of a self-help enterprise. A way for folks to visualize
goals. A form of meditation. With all the silence, God has a lot of
time to do the things he really cares about. Like watching sports.
That’s right. God may not do as much as we may have once thought he
did, but he does watch sports, and he does intervene. He has a method
for determining which team it is that he wants to win which
competition. It has something to do with the number of hot dogs sold
in the stadium multiplied by the thickness of black paint smeared
under a randomly chosen player’s eyes, divided by the square root of
Gatorade. I’ve never been very good at the maths, but watching God at
his chalkboard is something to behold, even if his knees do pop
sometimes when he stands up from a crouching position.