Jul 29, 2016
You call yourselves the most successful animal in the ocean. At the top of the food chain for millions of years, despite your small brain. You say, who needs intellect? Or empathy, compassion—your offspring learn young all that’s for weaklings and losers. You tell them, win at any cost. You’re under no illusion that it’s nice at the top; no it’s straight up competition for all you’ve got. But you get to cruise the oceans enjoying the view and never worry about what’s coming for you.
There’s no prey shape to our posture, no surface marking to signal our lower strata. Some of us are stupid, some of us are smart. We have beauty, color, and art. Some of our bodies are wildly bizarre, others are shaped much like yours, rounded and tapered at the ends to reduce drag in the water. But underneath all our flesh is bone, while you are constructed entirely of cartilage. So you swim faster, and turn more tightly. Your jaw holds many rows of teeth that freshly regenerate every few weeks. Some of us don’t even have teeth. Some of us can’t smell or hear while you can scent a single drop of our blood from hundreds of feet and hear us coming for miles. Over millions of years we’ve evolved through every possible social organization. You evolved into the perfect killing machine.
You tell yourselves you keep us in check. You say, without us their numbers would explode and then they’d all die of starvation anyway. You call it the law of nature. As if it’s the only one. But in fact it turns out that following a mathematical pattern called a power law, the speed of growth declines with size. That’s why a shrimp grows faster than a whale, and that’s why we naturally breed more slowly in places where there are a lot of us already. (Think about it, if you can, how you feel when we outnumber you. Hungry, aren’t you?) And that’s why you do so well when there are many of you and just enough of us—an inverted pyramid top heavy with you. It seems like a paradox how you could survive unless you understand (can you?) how fast in those places everything under you cycles through, growing and dying but before we do reproducing as much as we can to survive you. You tell yourselves it’s a super-productive system, you tell yourselves it’s better for us too—all that sex, plenty of food—but you wouldn’t change it even if you knew we didn’t feel the same way as you. Your skin is an interlocking web of ridged diamonds, a structure that by its very design resists drag or attachment.
About the Author:
Katherine Forbes Riley is a computational linguist and writer in Vermont. A Dartmouth College graduate with a PhD from University of Pennsylvania, her academic writing appears in many places. Her creative writing appears in Halfway Down The Stairs, Noö, Spartan, Crack the Spine, Storyscape, Whiskey Island, Lunch Ticket, Eunoia Review, Literary Orphans, Eclectica, BlazeVOX, McNeese Review, Akashic Books, and Buffalo Almanack, from whom she received the Inkslinger’s Award.
Image Credit: © Morphart – stock.adobe.com
Jul 15, 2016
Matt Tompkins’s new book, Souvenirs and Other Stories, officially launched last month in paperback format. Today, the ebook version officially goes live. Get the Kindle edition of Souvenirs here.
Matt’s book is a bizarre and surreal collection of stories. Beth Gilstrap, author of I Am Barbarella, says it’s “reminiscent of a quirky, yet lovable mixture of the likes of Harvey Pekar and Aimee Bender,” and Christopher Kennedy, author of Ennui Prophet, says this book is “a pleasure to read from cover to cover.”
To celebrate the ebook launch, we’re also unveiling the “Dis/appearances” theme, guest edited by Matt Tompkins. The “Dis/appearances” pieces will appear (pun intended) throughout the weekend. We’ll be posting one story per day beginning later today! Check back this evening to read the first piece.
Jul 15, 2016
When Gala and I try to leave the hardware store, we cannot find an exit.
“I swear the doors were right here,” she says after we’ve paid, pointing at a long, creamy brown wall of concrete just past the cash registers. “This is where we came in. It should be where we leave.”
We sit down on some lawn chairs on clearance, oversized price tags dangling from the wicker like flattened Christmas ornaments. Other customers start to grumble about the missing doors, their arms weighed down by straining plastic bags filled with hammers and outlet covers and watering cans. One man wields a pair of fluorescent bulbs like nunchakus. A crowd begins to mass. Carts bump into one another. A woman holding birdseed sets the bag down, letting go too early. The bag splits, a mound of pellets tumbling across the slick floor like a field of flat marbles. She begins to cry, so another woman rifles through a leather purse and hands her a travel pack of Kleenex.
Gala holds up the small clay pot we have bought. We are going to start growing our own catnip. “What about home and garden? The outdoor section?”
She says it loud enough for those around us to hear, and we start an exodus for the other side of the store, Gala leading the way. When we arrive, she slumps down on a palette of fertilizer when she sees that those doors, too, have vanished. “We’re trapped,” she says.
“There are some vending machines by the not-doors. We won’t starve,” I say. “Or go thirsty. They have Coke products.” I reach into my pocket and jingle some change. “Let’s go get a Snickers bar to share.”
“How are you so optimistic?”
I shrug and look up at the high ceiling, the far away light glimmering against the chocolate-colored walls like the edges of a runway. “Why are you so worried?”
“Because there are no doors.”
An older couple is poring over garden hoses, seemingly unaware that we are trapped. I sidle up next to them and suggest the scrunchy kind because it saves so much time on rewinding. The woman smiles and thanks me for the advice, and the man tosses one in their cart.
“We just bought a house together,” he says. His hair is white and wavy, thin on the crown so I can see his mottled scalp.
“First time for both of us.” She squeezes his slouchy bicep and smiles, the wattled skin on her neck trampolining up and down. I nod and return the smile, and they continue their shopping, heading off toward the appliances, perhaps to look for a toaster or microwave oven.
“You don’t know anything about hoses,” Gala says. “But that was nice of you.”
“They were cute,” I say. “And those hoses never kink or knot. You want that Snickers?”
Gala sighs and hops off the fertilizer bags. “I guess so.”
When we reach the vending machine, I pump in the quarters but let Gala press the buttons; she’s always mesmerized by the metal coils as they turn and release candy and chips and dehydrated fruit in wrinkly bags, pressing her forehead to the glass while the machine churns. It’s a fiery momentary panic, she says, when you wonder if you’ll be one of the unlucky ones where the machinery doesn’t work and your snack is suspended in front of you, mocking you.
But our candy bar thunks down with no problem.
We start a long, lazy counterclockwise lap around the store, passing the bored toilets and blazoned rows of lamps and ceiling fans. The flooring section is abandoned.
“I could use something salty now,” Gala says when we finish the candy bar.
“It had peanuts in it.”
“Let’s get some chips.”
Past the checkout lines where cashiers avert their eyes and count their cash drawers over and over, an assistant manager is trying to calm the crowd, whose rising panic is tangible, voices mingled in a grumbling, harsh wave. The store has grown humid and sweaty-sticky, peoples’ voices throatier and gnarled, the air tinged with the sour, rank smell of body odor and anxiety. Someone is yelling about their rights being violated.
“We’re working on it,” the manager says, his bright red shirt stained with sweat under his arms, his fuzzy army-cut blond hair matted and slick. “We’ve called the police and the fire department. They’ll get this figured out.”
“See?” I say, popping open our bag of chips and holding it out to her. She pulls out a handful of flaky crisps, shaking her head all the while.
“Shoot,” she says after she swallows. “The flower pot.” She holds out her hands, upturned palms shiny with chip oil, as if to prove that she doesn’t have it. I press mine to hers and feel the slick salt on her finger tips.
“That’s okay,” I say. “Let’s go find it.”
“What if the lights go out?”
“Why would that happen?”
“Why would the doors disappear?”
“Well, we can just get another one. Or maybe we could get a gardening hose. I could find those again, I bet, even in the dark.”
“Or maybe none of it will matter because we’re going to die in here.”
“We can always eat potting soil,” I say. “Or worms from the fishing department.”
“You’re disgusting,” Gala says, but she gives my hand a squeeze, and we march back to the home and garden section, the sounds of shouting, scared customers fading into a burble like a far off waterfall. I grab a cart that someone has abandoned in the paint supply aisle, filled with a pack of lightbulbs and a screwdriver and a brass bedside lamp. I wonder where its owner has gone, and what they had planned. Given enough time, I think to myself, I could use these things to turn that lamp on, push back the darkness, and brighten up our path, light our way.
About the Author:
Joe Baumann possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His work has appeared in many journals, including Jelly Bucket, Cleaver Magazine, Tulane Review, Hawai’i Review, and others. He is the editor-in-chief of The Gateway Review.
Special Note:
This piece was selected as part of the “Dis/appearances” theme, guest edited by Matt Tompkins, author of Souvenirs and Other Stories and Studies in Hybrid Morphology.
Image Credit: © Perysty – stock.adobe.com
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