Suburban Survival

By Myna Chang

 

My sleeping bag’s nestled in the drainage ditch where I used to play hide and seek. The new people living in our house don’t have any kids, so they don’t know the neighborhood’s good hiding places like I do.

I see them in our kitchen. Mom’s curtains are gone. The walls are blue now. They’ve painted over my height chart, too. Mom stood me against that door frame every birthday so she could mark my progress. She’d scratch the pencil into the soft wood and say, “Look how much you’ve grown, Timothy!”

– Age 6, 3 ½ feet

– Age 9, 4 ¼ feet

– Age 12, 5 feet

The door frame is clean white now.

I find my old foam football wedged in the holly bushes. Sun-bleached and ratty, it smells like mildew. I tuck it under my arm and saunter down Boxwood Lane like a kid who’s never had to sleep in an abandoned car. I toss the ball up, catch it, pretend to pass it downfield. I could be on the team, I could be the quarterback, I could be any boy heading to the park on a crackle-leafed fall afternoon.

“Timothy? Is that you?”

Mrs. Johnson sounds the same, all growly and sweet at the same time. My eyes blur.

The football was a birthday present, before Dad lost his job, before the bank took our house. Before I got lost in the crowd at the shelter.

Mrs. Johnson calls my name again. I hug the ball tight and run. Just like Dad taught me.

Our mailbox is filled with letters addressed to the new people. I take the envelopes, drop the boring ones in the gutter. I find one addressed to Mom, a form from my school asking if I’d be coming back this semester, if we had a forwarding address. I fold the paper with my name, keep it in my pocket.

A few days ago, I swiped a package from the mailbox. It had a wool scarf in it. Mom always tucked my old scarf into the collar of my coat, telling me, “Stay warm, sweetheart.” The new people’s scarf kinda itches, but it’s mine now.

•     •     •

The new man sits on the back porch tapping a laptop and scribbling on a pad of paper. His computer looks like the one I used to play games on. The woman calls for him. He sets his stuff by a computer bag and goes inside.

I duck under the loose board in the fence, race to the porch, shove his computer and pencil in the bag. I sling it over my shoulder and am about to run . . . but the door is open. There’s the kitchen. My kitchen.

I slip inside. Voices drift from upstairs. For a heartbeat, I imagine it’s Mom and Dad, that we’re still together, that we’re normal again.

I take the man’s pencil, step up to the door frame. Stand straight. Mark my height on the clean paint:

– TIMOTHY, AGE 14.

I can’t do the whole thing because I don’t know how tall I am now. “Happy birthday, anyway,” I whisper.

Then I run.

 


Myna Chang (she/her) is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books, 2023). Her writing has been selected for the Locus Recommended Reading List, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction. She hosts the Electric Sheep speculative fiction reading series. Find her at MynaChang.com, and on Twitter & Bluesky at @MynaChang.

Photo credit: Michael Coghlan via a Creative Commons license.


A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

 

No Vacancy

By Elizabeth Shack

 

The hermit crab outgrows his shell
and ranges across the ocean floor
searching for a better home
so he can grow a little more.

Imagine the crabby billionaire
hoarding the best and biggest shells
while other crabs roam, all exposed
without secure, protected cells.

One crab has an enormous home;
the less fortunate are easy prey.
With the rich crab’s extra shells,
will he build a wall to keep fish away?

 


Elizabeth Shack lives, writes, and follows the news in central Illinois. Her fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. Visit her site at elizabethshack.com.

Photo by Paul Needham via Snopes.com.

How to Eat a Soldier

By Matt Pasca

 

Lobsters mate for life—on menus they are called lobster.
And all’s fair in fowl: duck called duck, chicken chicken—the winged
as unrenamed as the sea.

But cow & pig & deer, stars of the big screen as Elsie & Babe & Bambi—
we unmammal their meat with abstraction:

Beef. Pork. Venison.

At 19, a man folded his civilian hopes like a flag & placed it
in a box, wrote ME in sharpie across the top. America cheered, called him

Soldier. Corporal. Hero.

At 23, he returned, his flanks braised & mind ground to chuck—
a nightmare pureed so he’d be easier to digest, his potential inconvenient

as a stain, hunkered down between Starbucks, bank vents
& voices in narcotic wind. He’s been renamed:

Veteran. Homeless. Bum.

They spit at his best cardboard sharpie, his camouflage curbside
dolor, another self severed overseas, tranquility amputee

because terror’s meat is never done, named or
broken with bread around family tables, break-time or

ballgames, not at the PTA or Field Day where kids don’t
flinch at fireworks. War clamps down, becomes blood’s

quantity, sight’s tightrope, the cat on 22nd Street—eyeless &
still—taxis swerving politely now its dead, like the gun

salute he’ll get when they find him one morning, hard as a tank
on 54th & Lexington. War rapes the “home” inside, America,

so forget the 8,000 beds for your 200,000 bullet-holed, fire-eyed
unstrung children—follow them instead into taverns &

clinics, churches & kitchens filled with humans
waiting for you to remember what they are.

 


MATT PASCA is a poet, teacher and traveler who believes in art’s ability to foster discovery, empathy and justice. He has authored two poetry collections—A Thousand Doors (2011 Pushcart nominee) and Raven Wire (2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist)—and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of 2 Bridges Review. In his corner of New York, Matt facilitates The Sunday Grind, a bi-weekly writing workshop; curates Second Saturdays @Cyrus, a popular poetry series; and spreads his unwavering faith in critical thought and word magic to his Poetry, Mythology and Literature students at Bay Shore High School, where he has taught for 22 years and been named a New York State Teacher of Excellence. Read more at follow him at www.mattpasca.com, @mrpasca (IG), and @Matt_Pasca (T).

Photo credit: Julian Tysoe via a Creative Commons license.

Street Folk

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

 

Disembodied. Disenfranchised. Disconnected. Disassociated. Disowned. Disliked.

Distained. Disrespected. Disregarded. Disparaged. Disgraced. Dismissed.

Discarded. Disavowed. Disqualified. Disappointed. Disheartened. Distanced. Disbarred.

Dislocated to:

Dis City,

The Inferno,

Sixth Circle of Hell,

Not in My Backyard,

Planet Earth 00000

(Do not forward. Do not return.) Disappeared.

 


Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s first book, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and received honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. She posts a daily haiku and photo “anti-selfie” on Instagram @placepoet, you can follow her on Twitter @goodnewsmuse, and she publishes a newsletter called Tiny Letters.

Photo credit: Photo by Fred Pixlab on Unsplash.

Almost Visible

By Laura Gail Grohe

 

When you see me, if you see me,
I am your worst fears found form.

“Pardon me sir,
but could I have a dollar for food?”

You rush by me studying your cuticles
so you don’t have to see me.

“Excuse me miss,
do you have any spare change?”

When I used to rush from subway to office
I never noticed the dust.
Squatting on sidewalk’s edge
fishing for your eye and quarters
the city’s dandruff covers me.

I didn’t start here, few of us do.
It was when I still had a private place
to sleep, to shower, to read,
that I was overcome by almosts.

Almost enough money to pay bills.
Almost poor enough for help.
Almost good enough for promotion.
Almost sick enough for hospital care.
Almost together enough to find a way out.
Almost.

Between the crushing weight of invisibility
and the slippery slide of not quite enough
I am just another dusty almost.

…………………………………………….

Laura Gail Grohe’s work has appeared in journals such as Paterson Review, and has been used in public rituals by the Green Mountain Druid Order and in church services. Her exhibit, “The Linens Project,” is a collection of antique linens with Laura Gail’s poetry hand embroidered on them. To learn more about “The Linens Project” go to linensproject.wordpress.com.