Portents abound! Shellie, Shelly, Stefani, and Steve. SSSS. What does that mean?? Four great reads, for sure. Five when you count my pick. And since I have an S in my last name, you can call me Spitz for this round and make it a Sweep. Happy reading!

P

Selected by Shellie Zacharia

Shellie Zacharia teaches in Florida, where she lives with her husband and two dogs. Her work has appeared in a number of print journals, including Hobart, Swivel, Backwards City Review, Opium, Washington Square, The Pinch, and Zone 3. Online stories can be found in Rumble, Verbsap, Ward 6 Review, Juked, and elsewhere.

“Five Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Read Your Mother’s Diary” by Cheryl Chambers
published by Per Contra

But you should read this!

Her handwriting is unintelligible in places and her spelling is atrocious. You notice this immediately after flipping open the black pleather cover (labeled Journal in gold to make it appear costly, though you know it’s cheap), but you’re hesitant to begin reading.

Q

Selected by Me

“The Kind That Doesn’t Budge” by Lisa Soland
published by Quay

Quay published their debut issue in May of this year, and if I were to place my bets, I’d say they have longevity. The editors have already published such writers as Myfanwy Collins, Bruce Holland Rogers, and a non-fiction piece by Matthew Quick, who also serves as fiction co-editor. Their next issue is due out in September, and I can’t wait to see what it holds.

In addition to publishing fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and interviews, the editors have a category called “Dramatic Writing.” These works are akin to plays, and this is where I found Lisa Soland’s “The Kind That Doesn’t Budge.” What I love most about this play is the tempo. Her interjection of beats, pauses, and moments of hesitation, lend an authenticity to this (one-sided) conversation. Check out how the author starts the play, after MAN’s friend asks him if he’s afraid of commitment:

MAN

No, No. It’s not the commitment thing. Come on, man. You know me. I’m committed in a lot of areas of my life. It’s not that. It’s just well…

(Hesitant.)

When I was in second grade I had this teacher—Mrs. Moore. I didn’t have a crush on her or anything. It wasn’t like that. She was just…amazing.

(Beat.)

She was plain but smart. Man, she never forgot a thing. And we all wanted to please her for some reason. Just make her happy somehow.

The ending is particularly wonderful, and it’s where the author drew her title from. Here it is:

It’s not that I want a woman like that, with long hair or anything. I just remember that kind of…commitment. That kind of love. The kind that doesn’t budge. That’s what I want. That’s what I’m waiting for.

BLACKOUT

The “kind that doesn’t budge.” That’s beautiful, isn’t it?

R

Selected by Shelly Rae Rich

Shelly Rae Rich lives in New York City. She’s co-editor of Tuesday Shorts and formerly an assistant editor for Opium. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including elimae, Juked, The Binnacle, Right Hand Pointing, Ghoti, Verbsap, The BluePrint Review, and others. Visit Shell’s blog. Contact Shelly.

“Love is a Marketing Tool” by Jeff Goldberg
published by Red China

Here’s a magazine I’d never seen before, and I’m glad I rummaged for an interesting “R.”

“Love is a Marketing Tool” is a clever indictment of politics and business commingled with absolution found through altruism.

It begins with our anti-hero about to jump from a ledge – and not out of despair.

“For our whole lives, from the moment we’re old enough to look at a stylized Tonka Truck Mobile spinning around our impressionable little heads, we’re in some company’s sights, being tracked and labeled, statisticized and demographed. It feels good, my one moment of freedom, the few minutes before I die, the only time they don’t expect or even want my business. This is my only conscious moment of being a wholly independent market of one single unsellable unit, unadvertised to, unmarketed to: free. Time to live it up.”

Randy MacAllaster, aka Xavier Young Zigfield, Jr., is an independent marketing consultant in Austin, TX, working with the tobacco companies’ youth-targeted anti-smoking campaigns, utilizing “…anti-marketing-marketing, breeding positive purchasing response from ostensibly anti-corporate press: the sort of reverse consumer psychology needed in a town that starts thinking it doesn’t need us.”

As the story unfolds during Randy’s final drink and cigarettes, he details recent events including espionage, a bomb, and an unexpected affair, unknowingly with his arch-nemesis.

Early on, Randy shares some of his philosophies, always smooth-talking and market-related, and mostly with a twinge that lets you know he doesn’t believe his own lies:

“Love is propaganda, engineered and artificial, manufactured by the selling machine. I am a man incapable of love.”

Finally, when events begin to gel as he’s designed, he realizes that getting what you want isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be:

“It’s hard for me to be mad when everyone acted towards me just like I’d act towards myself, when they did just the things I wanted them to do. I’m not the only one with layers; we could all use some washing away.”

And as for the relationship?

“What I don’t tell her is that love is a marketing tool designed by people like me to sucker people like her into buying more stuff. What I don’t tell her is that sometimes marketing is what I don’t tell her.”

This is a fun, intelligent adventurous story dosed with pragmatism and combined with a philanthropy taken to extremes. It was a quite enjoyable read and reminds me that at heart, sometimes things or people aren’t always what or who they seem.

S

Selected by Stefani Nellen


Stefani Nellen is a psychologist-turned-writer who lives in Pittsburgh and Groningen (the Netherlands) with her husband. She writes and reads both literary fiction and (hard) sci-fi, and wouldn’t want to miss either. Her short stories appear or are forthcoming at Hobart, Bound Off # 14 , SmokeLong Quarterly, FRiGG, Cezanne’s Carrot, VerbSap, and Apex Digest, among other places. She currently co-edits the Steel City Review.

“The Perfume Eater” by R.J. Astruc
published by Strange Horizons

Strange Horizons routinely publishes excellent fantasy, science-fiction, and “splipstream.” Stories published in SH can be found in the various “The Year’s Best in Fantasy/ Science Fiction” anthologies. In “The Perfume Eater,” a perfume-eating fairy named Kazeem tries to live a normal life in the Wickley Street West tenements, but he is hunted down by an old foe, a deev — a “huge horned dead demon.” This is a hilarious tale about neighborhood solidarity and…the magic of scent. Think Terry Pratchett with the satire cranked up just a notch. Almost every paragraph made me laugh out loud, but here’s the one that introduces the cast of characters:

“As we’ve been talking, our crowd of spectators has grown. Chu (Chung?) has put in an appearance, despite the fact I know her major thesis is due in a week. There’s Emma Copple from 27C, the seventeen year-old high school dropout Johnny bets will become a crazy cat lady before she’s thirty. Jim and Bob, the middle-aged ex-hippie homosexuals from 5A, are standing next to Sally and Bernard Soo, the fundamentalist Christians from 9B, who are in turn rubbing shoulders with Mr. and Mrs. Singh, the Hindu couple who sell soft-porn Kama Sutra-inspired magazines on the internet. And there’s Jack Garfield from 1B, the plumber, and Hannah Lithgow from 14B, the widow who has a crush on him, and Klaus Sladhoven from 15B, who writes Hannah the love letters she believes are from Jack. And there’s others too—all my friends, the people I’ve lived amongst quietly for years, all of them silently watching me.”

T

Selected by Steve McDermott

Steven J. McDermott is the author of the short story collection Winter of Different Directions, the bibliographer for the International Raymond Carver Society, and the editor of the literary journal STORYGLOSSIA, which was named best online publication for 2006 by the Million Writers Award. A multiple-time Pushcart nominee, his stories have appeared in numerous online and print journals, including Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, Carve, Passages North, Red Wheelbarrow, Word Riot, Thieves Jargon, elimae, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. Contact Steve at: editor AT storyglossia.com.

After checking out the other T’s I returned to one of my favorite zines - Thieves Jargon - for my selection: Stoning Four-Eyes Harrison by James Maloney.

This story grabbed me right at the start and not simply because stoning is a great hook:

You are in the bathroom, sitting quietly in darkness on the edge of the cold white bath behind the shower curtain, and you are listening on the radio, quietly, to the stoning of Four-Eyes Harrison. You know your Dad will give you the strap if he catches you . . .

That’s how you front-load tension into a piece: misbehaving despite the threat of punishment. Still, stoning! “Harrison’s got a weak neck, thin shoulders, and they don’t expect he’ll stand more than eight rocks.” It’s hard to read that without thinking about Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery“. (Do they still teach that story in school?) Not a parallel, of course, but such intertext with other works can deepen the meaning for some readers and it scored with me.

The story’s second paragraph ups the ante: “Anyhow, it’s worth the risk; you can’t go to school in the morning and say you didn’t at least hear it.” I love this dilemma. He gets beat up at school if he doesn’t listen and if he gets caught listening at home it’s a whipping, too.

As the story moves into its middle section it features another clever play on a rite of childhood, listening to sports on the radio:

They’re marching Harrison out - you wish the announcer would slow down, he’s talking a thousand words a minute, and you want the image - the blue robes, the shackles, the sandy pit awaiting him and the rock throwers above, loosening up, stretching lean muscle . . . They’re ready, the announcer says. Harrison on his feet, bouncing slowly, waiting for the first throw - surely no chance against these twelve all-state champions.

Except it’s not baseball, basketball, or even boxing - it’s a stoning!

Let us pause for a moment and enjoy Maloney’s use of sensory details to describe:

With the radio down, you hear the sizzle of burning meat on the barbecue outside, the heavy smoke blown in on the autumn breeze, and every so often your Dad says something like “That goddamn mother fucker,” and there’s the musical crunch of a beer can being crushed in his fist. Every so often he belches, loudly, his head raised to the stars you can see like pricks of light through the glass, and every so often you crouch back down behind the shower curtain and hold your breath, radio pinned to your ear so hard you can feel parts of your skin being forced through the holes in the speaker cover.

Next we have a close call as the would be strapper - the father - comes in for a piss before the stoning begins. And then a beautiful and unexpected shift occurs as the “you” (yes, this is a second-person story) sneaks down the stairs to watch the event with his uncle. Ah, we have the uncle vs. father theme in this one, too.

As the stoning starts, Maloney does another neat trick, going for empathy with the stoned Harrison via a remembered strapping: “In the rage of the cheer, you can hear the strap, the sound it makes through the air, that whistle before the white heat and the burn and the pain rising to your choked-up throat.” Which is followed by uncle-bonding and another sweet bit of intertext:

You find yourself at your uncle’s side, and he’s got his arm around you. Harrison is lying prone, his face bloody. His spectacles are mangled as though twisted. His left eye is missing, and the rocks rain down. Your uncle’s crying. “Get to bed, son,” he says, shaking as he holds you. “I didn’t see you, you didn’t see me. Got it?”

Remember Piggy (and his glasses) getting crushed under the boulder in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies? Here the intertext is also a sly call back to the threat of getting beaten at school in the story’s second paragraph.

I’ll leave you to the ending . . . Great story!


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