The last time I saw him was also the first time I saw him. His eyes burning into mine as he tried to move his lips. 'His jaw is too big', I remember thinking, 'though at least he's good at making faces.'....but then I shrugged and changed the channel.

Sarah Ahmad lives in Pakistan. She likes to call herself a struggling poet and artist as in her world where life is so fragile,not knowing if you will return alive every time you step out of the house, getting someone to acknowledge your art is a real struggle. She hopes to do some good in the world,just don't know what yet.

      Mr. Adleman calls an assembly because he thinks it is some kind of prank. At nine a.m. in the big gym, he holds it up for everyone to see. It is a snakeskin, clearly. Even the students in the top row of the bleachers can see that. Even the ones with eyeglasses. Even the ones with borderline myopia who don't wear their eyeglasses because they don't like the way they look in them can see what it is.
     The snakeskin is huge, as snakeskins go. It is at least four feet long.  The students see the pattern of scales running across its back.  They see its slow taper into the tail.  There is a tattered opening where the head should be, but other than that it is in one exquisite piece. Both fluid and stiff, it waves a bit when Mr. Adleman gestures. It flops around beneath his hand as he says, "...not funny" and "...consequences of this behavior."  He vows to find the students responsible for bringing the snakeskin into his school and punish them severely.
     The thing is, though, a month goes by and nothing has been found out. No one claims responsibility. Mr. Adleman becomes increasingly frustrated. He calls another assembly in which he encourages students to do their own detective work. He says, "I know you all probably already know who did this. Your silence isn't helping anyone." The students look around at each other. Mr. Adleman offers a pair of free prom tickets to any student who comes forward with information about the snakeskin.
     Another month goes by and no information has come to light. There are meetings with Mr. Adleman, six students at a time, in which the students swear they haven't heard anyone take credit for the snakeskin being in their school. Mr. Adleman threatens to cancel the prom if no one speaks up, but no one does. The students begin to walk around nervously. The weather is turning warmer, but the girls forgo their strappy footwear in favor of closed sneakers. Female teachers switch to pants. Everyone wears socks, even the art teacher who sports a thick woolen pair under her Birkenstocks. "If you think about it," the students say, "that can't even be the size of the snake now. He was too big for that skin."
     In April, teachers find four more skins. They are smaller, but the scale patterns indicate that this is the same kind of snake. Mr. Adleman stops calling assemblies. He cancels interrogations. Students pile their schoolbooks under the legs of their desks to raise them off the ground. They stalk through the hallways with their eyes glued to the tile floor. The girls stick their feet straight out in front of them when they use the bathroom.  Many students claim to have seen a snake, but the descriptions are varied and largely discredited by the student body. Still, parents begin writing notes to accompany their children's dress code violations: "Due to the snakes, please allow Jeremy to wear his steel-toed boots during gym class."
     Senior prom is held in the big gym, which is transformed by balloons and colored lights. The students walk through a curtain of metallic streamers. Many of the girls shiver as the streamers rub their bare shoulders. The boys on the soccer team wear their shin guards over their tuxedos. The girls wear tennis shoes and leggings under their formal dresses. In the real couples, the ones whose romance will last well into June, the boys carry the girls in front of them like infants. But still, no one is relaxed. No one is having fun. Several students request the lights be turned up. In the end, they all climb up onto the bleachers and watch the floor. Periodically, someone jumps up and points to the painted foul line or rounded three-point line in fear. Then everyone laughs nervously.
     At the end of the night, the students ask Mr. Adleman to take down the streamers. He climbs onto a chair and peels the tape from above the doorframe. The students file out silently. Long after they are gone, Mr. Adleman stays on the chair in the dark gym watching the floor.


Aubrey Hirsch is a writer and teacher of writing in Pittsburgh,
PA. Her work has appeared in The Summerset Review, The Minnetonka
Review, Annalemma and others. Her recent honors include being chosen
as a finalist in Glimmer Train's spring Fiction Open and a nomination
for the upcoming Pushcart Prize. Aubrey currently teaches creative
writing in the MFA program at Chatham University and at Pittsburgh
CAPA, a creative and performing arts magnet school.

      He was burnt toast with cataracts. She was a coffee stained napkin with arthritis. They met at Bingo when they both had a false alarm. The winner was some kid from Ohio or Oklahoma--one of those states that begins with an "O" and ends with a yawn.
     She liked the fuzz on his kiwi-skull. He liked the sound of her polyester pantlegs rubbing together like hands trying to keep warm.
     He got so distracted by the friction, he turned off his hearing aids. She thought he was deaf or disinterested, but he read her lips and caught the fireflies in her smile with his bifocals.
     Neither one of them was looking for a mate--they just wanted a glimpse of unloneliness: a hand-me-down sweater with a tiny hole under one arm and an extra button sewn to the underside of the waistband.
     He said his name was Tom, short for Tomorrow, may I call you?
     She thought he was lying and it was for Tom-Cat--pawing fishbones.
     She wrote her name on the back of a losing Bingo card.
     He said her name, Myra, under his breath. It was as quiet and warm as oatmeal in his mouth on a cold morning and he hadn't eaten in days.
     He said it aloud and her cheeks filled with cinnamon.

Paula Ray is a musician from North Carolina with a knack for fixing broken instruments while humming songs she's yet to write. She pens poetry and fiction in the margin of her life. Currently, her work can be found in elimae, Word Riot, Pequin, among other literary zines.

Visit her blog at: http//:www.musicalpencil.blogspot.com.

            Aunt Margot God.  God, how she loved God.  God was her rock.  I was her favorite nephew and I had no rock--I built my house on the sand of Top 40 radio.  I became a d.j., a life that has bounced me from place to place.  I envied her having a rock.  The trouble is, she’d throw that rock at my head.  Anybody’s head.  Except other people who loved her rock as she did.  Even then, she thought those people were usually “ungrates” and “the most lie-acious liars.”
            A large woman, she had a powerful aim.  Her rock left bruises, but at least she would scrap with me.  Our family doesn’t fight.  The views most hold are “moderate.”  We love moderately.  My dad’s favorite play? Tartuffe. 
            “See what happens when people go off the deep end?” he still says.
            “Yes dad, but I’m attracted to the edges, not the middles.”
            “It’ll cost you.  Dearly.”
            It has.  When I fall in love, which is too often, I go gung ho.  I smother guys.  They back off and say, “Ritchie’s too intense.”
            They want moderation and a carpenter who comes when he says he will.
            Aunt Margot wasn’t moderate.  I’d watch her in our magenta-padded rocking chair.  While family members clucked about TV stars and the price of milk, she went quiet, a hermetically sealed quiet, as if a fire were burning in a Baggie but couldn’t consume it.  She’d look at her daughter (my mom) and her two sisters and their husbands as if they were complete oafs.  She held her tongue, like a wood block in a vise.
            Later, I’d talk to her.  The fire would be smaller.  She’d laugh about anything, sometimes to the point of tears. 
            At 21, I told her I was gay.  She saved some big rocks for me over that, but I learned how to dodge most of them.  Sometimes I’d bury my head in my own sand.  It hurt my ears but saved the skin.  My parents didn’t like it but they stiff upper lipped through it.
            Mom proclaimed her funeral “nice.”  She meant people didn’t wail and carry on.  Up at her the coffin (Aunt M insisted it be open) I thought she looked small in the blue dress I remember from many a birthday.
            She had asked Pastor Clompus to have us sing “Rock of Ages.”  Eeew, I hate that dirge, but I sang, mumbling words I thought I had forgotten.  Those many places where her rocks had hit me still hurt, always would I figured.  Then again, without her, I knew what to expect at family parties—flat-lined chatter, a rocking chair with no one rocking, just sitting like a Christmas cactus out of season.  


Kenneth Pobo won the 2009 poetry chapbook contest from Main Street Rag for his manuscript Trina and the Sky.  It was published in 2009.  In 2008, WordTech Press published his book called Glass Garden.

 

      She always figured her husband for a spectacular death—a drop from 80 stories, still clutching a sandwich or a bucket of bolts—his face contorted, arms flailing.  The closed casket later.
     Mentally, she planned for it.  A single misstep, even though the other high steel workers called him Glue Feet, or a sudden gust of wind coming at him like a boulder down a mountain.  Shrinking each time the phone rang, holding her breath.  His brave Mohawk blood, their tradition, keeping him high above Manhattan, no matter what she said.
     Imagined the wake, the tall tales.  Those steel-spined men remembering: that dropped wrench which nearly split a man in half—those crazy naps on girders, slender as thread—never spilling from a dream.  The other wives consoling her—seeing them through a black veil, swallowing their dread, shaky but proud.
      But never this:  Standing by the kitchen window watching a ruby-throated hummingbird by the feeder he put up days earlier.  The garbage disposal going—a glass with a spoon in it ringing in the metal sink.  The TV on in the next room.  His only fall—from the easy chair to the floor, flopping about like a goldfish on the rug, clutching his chest, gasping for air.  His mouth still open when she found him, wordless and twisted.  The football fans cheering from the TV.  A common death, like any other man.

Robert Scotellaro's flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in:  Fast Forward (A Collection of Flash Fiction, Volume 2), Willows Wept Review, Fiction at Work Anthology, Dogzplot, mud luscious, Ghoti, 971 Menu, Storyscape, Battered Suitcase, Bent Pin, and others.  He is the author of several literary chapbooks, two books of poetry, and the recipient of Zone 3’s Rainmaker Award in Poetry.  Raised in Manhattan, he currently lives with his wife in California.

    Now that Teddy’s gone and I’m a merry widow, I’ve learned to use his camera. You won’t believe my shots from my tour Down Under! Did you know New Zealand is called Kiwi Land? Those pear-shaped flightless birds are the national bird, I think. They’re nearly extinct. I went on this tour to a sulphur-stinky place called Rotorua to see the kiwis—well,  you don’t see them, they’re night creatures. The guide told us no flash photos, no photos of any kind, because they scare so easily and they might not come back. We’re on this boardwalk, and if you’re really quiet and you hang your fingers over the edge, sometimes they’ll come up and nuzzle you with that long bill thing they have. I thought, what’s the harm in taking one picture? Nobody else was. So I took just the one—and it was true, they did all vanish. But it didn’t matter; I’d had one nuzzling my finger. Strange little creatures, half rat, half bird. The guide came rushing up. She was furious but she didn’t take Teddy’s camera. Just as well: if Teddy had still been around he would have slapped a lawsuit on her so fast…I would have, too; I’ve done it before.
      And then we flew to Australia, and I wanted to see the fairy penguins outside Port Philip Bay. Again it’s night, and we get this long speech about No Photos Whatsoever, but I’ve got the camera in my bag. I mean what’s the point if you can’t get at least one shot to bring home, show your friends? There was a half moon and you could see them all coming ashore. They’re skinny penguins, not like the Antarctic ones, but some were really fat, and the guide whispered, “They’re the mothers.” They’ve been out at sea for weeks, months, fattening up so they can take over feeding the chicks.
      Careful you don’t scare them, she’d told us, over and over. No shouting, no photos, because sometimes the mothers regurgitate all that fish and go back into the sea. I can’t believe they don’t come back though, soon as we’ve left. So I took three flash shots, one of all their babies looking up at me, and then a bunch of them scuttling back into the ocean and hopping in. They’re so funny when they’re in a hurry! And the fishy stink! Ugh! Everybody hissed and the guide grabbed my camera, but all she did was put it into a plastic bag, zip it up—and hand it back to me! “They’ll come back,” I told her, but she wouldn’t speak to me. Nobody would.
      They printed out really well, and you won’t believe it, the next ones I took were even better! I got paid for them; they were printed in a magazine! Little old me, a paid—what do they call it?-- photojournalist.
      It was a ballet at the Sydney Opera House. I’d taken tons of shots of the outside but I wanted one inside, during a performance. That’s me in my new Christian Dior, and yes, the pearls are real. The earrings are new. I  got my perfume duty-free. They make this big announcement first: please turn your off cell phones, no photography of any kind, as it can disorient the dancers. I don’t see how; they must be used to being photographed by now.  Anyway, it was one of those modern ballets, dark and gloomy, so I’d need the flash, and just as one of the big burly dancers did a jump straight towards me I got my shot. But he sort of half-twisted in the air, and when he landed he shouted, “Crack!” It was so strange, “Crack!”
      So I held my finger on the button and kept shooting high-speed. He’d landed at an angle and his leg had snapped. You could see the white bone sticking out. But he kept trying to keep dancing, and I kept shooting away. Then I got a final shot of him dragging himself off the stage with his arms, backwards.     
     The show went on. Nobody said anything to me, but I knew I had award-winning shots. I was right.

Simon Leigh is an Aussie-born novelist and poet living in Toronto.