What little he decided to keep was lined up neatly in bags by the front door.  Dad was running the vacuum cleaner around the upstairs rooms.  I kept looking out the freshly polished windows. 
        Dad’s eyes were bloodshot.  He blamed it all on the dust.
“It’s brought up a lot of stuff.” He said, pushing the vacuum cleaner faster around the old, now empty room. 
        The paint was darker in places.  I could see where the bookshelf used to be.  The sofa had left dents in the carpet too.  Dad kept going over those bits with the vacuum cleaner, hoping it would suck the carpet back into its old shape. 
“Just leave it Dad,” I said, “It’ll never be like it was.”
        Dad kicked the vacuum cleaner off and pushed past me mumbling.
        I followed him downstairs and into the kitchen.  All the appliances were lined up against one wall.  A coffee maker, toaster and blender sat on the floor like a breakfast-making production line.  They used to sit that way on the side.
        Dad pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, struggling to get his fingers all the way to the end.  I leant against the doorframe and watched him scrub the sides with disinfectant.   He held the bottle up to the light, read the label and then poured the emerald chemical neat, directly onto the sponge. 
The smell was unbearable, abrasive, erasing.
“You could help.” Dad said like he used to when I was a kid.
“I can’t do that Dad.”
“Then you can go.” He said without looking up from the sponge.
“I can’t do that either.”
        Dad sighed and stopped scrubbing.  I thought I saw a tear well up in his eye.  He’d blame it on the chemical if I mentioned it.  I didn’t.  I took in the moment, a silent testimonial and evidence to the fact that despite his behaviour, he wasn’t all right. 
He knew that all the disinfectant in the house wouldn’t erase her from these walls. 
        Seeing that he knew, made me start to believe it too.  I walked over to the sink and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. 
I stood next to my Dad.  He looked at me, without saying anything, for what felt like an entire minute. It was as close to a hug as he could manage.
Dad pulled off one of the gloves and rubbed his eyes.
“God Damn chemicals.” He said.

It was reading an unexpected article about him in my local newspaper that made me conceive of how similar Austin Brigg and I might really be.

It wasn’t the relevance of the article, mind you, more the fact that it got me thinking. This was my father they were describing, albeit ‘father’ in name only. The author was waxing-lyrical about Brigg’s once-great business acumen, really laying it on. He had gone through a stage of mild philanthropy, before he blew all his money after my mother died, and this apparently makes him a huge and worthy man.

It’s a shame his generosity never extended this far. Dad had shunned me as soon as I started making choices that didn’t correspond with his worldview. I was young and naïve, not bad, but when I made mistakes he showed me nothing but his cold shoulder. Whether my mother would have been any more understanding it’s hard to tell because his influence over her was so great that his opinions also became hers.

It wasn’t through lack of trying but life seemed to be dealing me bad-hand after bad-hand in those days. I wanted to be free and by hell did I achieve that. At my lowest point I slept outside in the cold rain and my shoes were never dry. My father only lived three counties away and I bet he wished it was further. I know what it’s like to be alone.

Desperation leads you to some funny places and I made it out eventually. I hauled myself bleeding through ten miles of metaphorical shit to get where I am today; I wouldn’t change a thing about it but that doesn’t mean I forgive him.

The article that lay before me was lamenting the demise of Austin Brigg. How could it be fair, the writer wondered, for such wretched circumstances to befall this big-hearted man, who had done so much in his life to help others? Here he is today, penniless, etching out a copy of life in a world that is no longer his.

Poor father. Now you are old and I am rich and it is my time to return what you gave me.


Gemma Meek’s writing has appeared in the Linnet’s Wings and the Cynic Magazine, among other places. Following a peripatetic previous life, she now lives and works in London, England.

His eyes lost interest when she entered the kitchen, her wistful expression a reminder of an indiscretion, a mistake she'd called it. She began to speak, just his name. Joe. He raised a hand. Her grin evaporated. In silence, she placed a scarf over her head, knotted it under her chin, and quietly left. His heart winced.

***

She winced when he caught her staring at him from across the cafe. Her face reddened. An expression of guilt? Hands in her lap, she wistfully rotated the diamond. She wondered which was the mistake, thinking about being with a stranger, or remaining in a loveless marriage. She paid the bill, flipped her scarf around her neck, and left without a word. Her husband would be worried.

.***

She had loved him since before she knew him. In the motel, lying next to his spent body, a satisfied smile on his face, his wrists captured by silk scarves, she opened the drawer and reached inside. His mistake was to take her for granted. She raised up and placed a wistful kiss on his lips. He winced at the touch of the knife's point. His expression changed as the blade pierced his chest. So did hers.

1. 
I am awakened by a picture dream. 

It's a black and white photograph of a beautiful Scandinavian woman and her blond children, a boy and a girl. They are posed Leibovitz-style, standing in a bathtub in a worn white bathroom. The mother has one hand on each child's shoulder. All three are dressed in pristine tennis whites and stare straight ahead, smiling and looking genuinely happy. The picture stays this way—still, so still—for a long time, its subjects looking flawless, immaculate, loved. Then the image begins to fade very, very slowly until it's gone.

I do not know this woman. I am not her; she is not anyone I have ever aspired to be. Yet the dream grieves me. The sadness presses down on me until it forces me awake, leaving behind a physical ache that lasts for hours. 

2. 

A shocking image forms, fading up quickly out of the dark. It's a one-light art gallery video, showing the head of an angry, mean-looking woman with ugly glasses and stringy, greasy, bowl-cut dark hair. 

The woman is trying to bite at a disembodied hand. The very real index finger darts at her and the hand flies about her head as if were animated. Unable to catch or stop the finger, she grows more and more enraged.

Finally, the woman snatches the finger with her teeth and bites the end off. She chews the finger stub heartily. The bloody disembodied hand flutters about in a panic and flies away. She almost smiles, chewing and swallowing, her expression sickening yet satisfied. The image goes grain before it disappears. I wake discomfited. 


3. 

A light pops on to illuminate a folk art painting, a flattened image with colors too bright and lines too bold. The painting illustrates a street corner, one leading into the town where I grew up, the corner at the top of the one-and-only hill where the railroad tracks lead to the roundhouse. It's not my neighborhood, or even a part of town where I spent time. The image doesn't move, but a lonely car, a rounded, garish mid-century sedan that appears to have escaped from the pages of a storybook, travels through it.

The image is so vivid and distorted that it takes me a long time to recognize it as somewhere familiar. I've never seen my hometown that way; I've always looked at it as a rather dreary Dickensian sort of place. This time, the image cheerfully flips and rolls and finally sails away into the darkness, which makes me feel good, but I don't know why. 

4. 

It starts with a moving picture, an image that floats slowly down an ornate paneled hallway. The image moves through a doorway with a row of carved pegs on the top, like one in an English country house. Beyond the door is a library, its carved shelving reaching floor to ceiling. The stacked shelves are stand close to see around the corner, and too tall to see the top, but there is a sense of immensity, endlessness.

There is a desk at the corner of the main aisle, near the middle of the room. Standing next to the desk is an elf, dressed in a blue satin robe and a tall, pointed sorcerer's hat. On the desk, a quill waits. He is joyous, jubilant as a child, as he takes off his hat and bows deeply to the sacrosanctity that surrounds him.  

This dream makes me smile.

Kim Hutchinson is a writer and a filmmaker. She loves writing, humor, Twitter and Klondike bars.  

AND THE SNACKIES GO TO. . .

STORY:  “The Thing About Magical Thinking” by Katrina Gray
Appearance Date:  May 20, 2010

This is a tender, moving story about loss, love, and the lengths to which we will go to support our closest friends in their time of need that also happens to have a blow-up sex toy doll in it. 

Favorite line: "She's fake, Carl." 

Say these things don't matter and I would (mostly) agree with you, and call me a sexist if you will (and I wouldn't agree with you), but I also think it adds a layer of resonance that this story was written by a woman. 

Katrina agreed, by the way. Bravo, Ms. Gray!

POEM:  “Third Post Card from Iraq” by Sandra Benitez
Appearance Date:  August 4, 2010

As I discussed with Sandra during her acceptance process, what I love about this poem isn't another poem about war that happens to have some birds in it, but a poem about birds that happens to have some war in it.

Congratulations, Katrina and Sandra.  Your pieces were evidence that the grace and power of words can touch people and move hearts. 

I will be contacting you to see where you would like me to send your gift card.

THE SNACKIES are a non-prestigious award given by the chief court jester and dishwasher here at LITSNACK.  Based solely on his highly-subjective tastes, THE SNACKIES will be awarded roughly every six months, with one poem and one story being chosen for the preceding time period.  Recipients will receive one $5 gift card to Starbucks in recognition of their fine skill and finesse with the English language in their chosen genre. 

It's an organic thing, the BJ.  Such as a cucumber or a zucchini.  Some like those added to salad and some do not.   It's strictly a matter of personal taste.  One woman I know cannot eat any vegetables with seeds.  Even tomatoes are a problem for her.  I believe it all boils down to love.  When you're in love you can eat anything, food becomes a joyous event.  One woman I know ate bird nest soup in a Chinese restaurant downtown.  Before love, she couldn't get past an egg roll.  In love, she slurped that soup with gusto and scarfed down the bird's nest.  Her lover was overjoyed and bragged to all his guy friends that she was an adventurous eater. 

Susan Tepper is author of Deer & Other Stories  (Wilderness House Press, 2009) and the epistolary novel What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G (co-written with Gary Pecesepe) to be published this September by Cervena Barva Press. www.susantepper.com