REVOLUTION JOHN

A JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE AND POETIC CONCERNS

[revolution-john]

My Childhood Trauma PTSD as Triggered by the Following Movie Montage

by BENJAMIN DREVLOW

That scene in American History X. You know the one. Or maybe it was Higher Learning, I always get those confused. That curb stomp scene always reminding me of the time I tripped and face-planted in the barn while corralling bull calves, to get castrated, my two front teeth chomping down on all that jagged concrete and manure, it adds a different flavor to the recurring nightmare I have, though in my case, usually nothing to do with race relations. I wonder if everybody else who watched that movie also missed the whole point of it. Except the Curb Stomp. Everybody remembers where they were when their stoner friend with big ideas about ending racism across the world made them watch the movie with the Curb Stomp.

~

Mel Gibson getting drawn and quartered in Braveheart. You may take our lives, but you will never take… our… FREE-DOM!

~

Mel Gibson ripping his shoulder out of its socket in Lethal Weapon.

~

Mel Gibson torturing the shit out of Jesus, then blaming the women and Jews for everything, including his drunk-driving and plummeting career options.

~

Fuck pretty much any Mel Gibson movie. Except maybe that one with him and James Gardner and Jody Foster and all their comedy hijinks. It’s the gambler one but not The Gambler. But now that I think about it, isn’t Jody Foster a big Mel Gibson apologist? So I guess fuck that movie too.

~

Any movie where somebody gets shot or stabbed or thumbed in the eyeball or has one or both of their eyeballs squeezed or ripped out, which always reminds me of that time I got elbowed right below my eye but also on the eyeball and it literally pushed in my eyeball a millimeter and I still get double vision to this day whenever I line up a shot playing pool or line up a screw to hang a photo on the wall or sometimes re-hang the toilet paper dispenser next to the toilet. I’d been playing pickup basketball and my buddy who was like four inches taller than me elbowed me on a rebound and like I say I went down and lay there on my back and then all the blood started pooling in my eye socket and I couldn’t see anything and my friend couldn’t see my eyeball and he kept hissing through his teeth grossed out by it but then telling me it would okay and the whole time lying there thinking I’m thinking about my eyeball I’m thinking of the scene in Any Given Sunday where the guy’s eyeball is just lying there on the football field. I’m thinking of that closeup all the way to the hospital when they unwrap the mummy gauze from around my head and the ER doctor breathes a sigh of relief after peeling off all the dried blood to reveal that I needed fifteen stitches and I’d broken my orbital bone, but I still had my eye.

~

Any movie where somebody’s sitting there reading a book before bed, watching TV, gossiping with girlfriends, when the camera pulls back only to zoom back in on the dark night window behind them—cue the string section.

~

If I had to choose one, I’m thinking of that one zombie movie, something 28 Days something but not the one about Sandra Bullock finding love with Viggo in rehab. It’s not even about the zombies. It’s about the dark night window, not to be confused with the Dark Knight window, sorry that was a shitty pun for no good reason whatsoever, but also maybe not completely random with the guy from 28 Days also having played the scarecrow in Batman Begins where he sprays people with a drug and makes them see their worst fears, which never really did it for me, at least not like the secluded house with the zombies lurking around. I grew up in a big old farmhouse out in the barrens of northern Wisconsin. Lots of windows, no shades. In so many ways I grew up in the dark. It wasn’t the zombies I worried about. It was the methheads. Which, sure, I guess if you’re getting technical about it, same thing, fine, you win, I’m scared of zombies.

~

The Zapruder film, but as replayed by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s fever dream of a conspiracy theory. The magic bullet, back and to the left, back and to the left, back and to the left. How it gets stuck in my head, JFK’s exploding head replaced with my brother’s exploding head, sometimes my own, except unlike my brother and JFK, my head’s still mostly intact. Back and to the left, back and to the left. Sometimes I think about that too with that one Seinfeld episode with Keith Hernandez and the magic loogie, but usually the loogie gets replaced with a bullet and Kramer’s head gets replaced with my brother, mine, back and to the left.

~

The sound of the gun shots in the final scene of that Tom Hanks movie where he plays himself again, a good guy, a family guy, a sly sense of humor, but this time a mob hitman with a strained relationship with his oldest son. The look on Tom Hanks’ face walking back to the house from the ocean—having survived it all, the hit that his old mob boss Paul Newman had put out on him for putting a hit on his old mob boss’s son as played by James Bond who also played Ted Hughes in that movie about Sylvia Plath killing herself. But this is past all that, it’s the happy ending. They’re on beach somewhere, white sand, somebody’s house that Tom Hanks and his kid are going to live in now. The silence before and after. Jude Law! It’s Jude Law’s face, his eye all fucked up, how did it happen, I don’t really remember the specifics but I remember the specifics. Bang, bang, bang. I think it might’ve had something to do with Jude Law being a photographer, like one of those where you pose with your kid or something or say you get promoted to head CEO or godfather of the family. Smile. Click, click, except in this case with a gun.

~

The gunshot at the end of American Beauty, pretty much the same thing, different movie. Chris Cooper confusing Kevin Spacey as gay but before Kevin Spacey actually came out as gay and a sexual predator. Not that the latter necessarily had anything to do with the former. Neither in the movie nor real life, well not really, but sorta. You get the point.

~

Jared Leto as Angel Face getting his face smashed in by Ed Norton as Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden’s split personality in Fight Club. Not so much Jared Leto, but the wet mushy sounds of it. That part on the audio commentary where Chuck Palahniuk and David Fincher defend the violence of the movie, Fincher pointing out that he was not glorifying violence, he was making it realistic. That’s what it sounds like to punch your opponent into the concrete, Fincher says and Palahniuk laughs and agrees. Don’t worry I’m not going to make any puns about the first rule of fight club.

~

That part of that one weird depressing Robin Williams’s movie where Robin Williams’s kids get killed in a car accident while backing out of the driveway on the way to school. The one where Robin Williams later on gets plowed over by a truck going the wrong way while Robin Williams is out trying to help another couple who’d been injured in a different car accident, but before all that his wife kills herself because she can’t take it and then Robin Williams goes to the suicide afterlife to save her. But then there’s fucking Cuba Gooding Jr. who—spoiler alert—turns out to be the ghost/angel of his dead son who then explains to Robin Williams that his wife/Cuba’s mother can’t be saved because she killed herself. It doesn’t matter that she had a pretty fucking good reason too, she’s still stuck face down floating around in that black swamp of bodies of everybody else’s killed themselves and nobody’s getting to heaven. That shit really messed me up—not the car accidents, but the afterlife for selfish losers like me who kill themselves. And/or my brother.

~

The bulging vein in Tom Cruise’s head from Magnolia. Respect the Cock and Tame the Pussy, Respect the Cock and Tame the Pussy. I think probably my therapist would have some thoughts about all this, and some questions. Questions and thoughts.

~

That one version of A Christmas Carol where the Ghost of Christmas Past undoes his robe to show off the alien children living under his robe.

~

I got the worst set of blue balls you could imagine while taking my best friend’s girlfriend to Baz Lurman’s remake of Romeo and Juliet. That Romeo and Juliet. I missed most of it, I kept having to go to the bathroom to masturbate in agony and to no avail. Leo and Claire Danes are hot and heavy on an acid trip, and every time my best friend’s girlfriend reaches for a handful of popcorn she makes sure to wipe the butter off on the inside of my upper thigh. This is what I get for being the good guy of falling on the grenade for my best friend, the grenade in this case being Shakespeare and my best friend’s hatred of literature.

~

Mark Wahlberg’s flaccid rotten dick in Boogie Nights.

~

The Secret of the Crying Game but not in a transphobic way. No, it’s the smallness of it what got me back when I watched it as a teenager. The tenderness. The growing tent in my pants at its sudden appearance on the screen. Maybe you don’t believe me but I was a naïve podunk kid from off the farm. I didn’t have cable. I didn’t have access to the internet. His/her (now their) secret opened up a lot of questions for me. I often dream of dressing up in drag and someone sucking my little bitty dick and if that makes me a little bit gay or maybe bi or what’s it called, body dysmorphic. I mean I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, it’s the new millennium, we’re all a bit sexually confused aren’t we?

~

This one porno my friends and I watched at somebody’s uncle’s cabin up in the U.P. for a three-on-three basketball tournament. The Snapping Pussy. The sound her vagina made, like somebody really dramatic at clicking their tongue and slurping a half-empty malt the same time. The scene of us boys all sitting there with our boners watching a porn and wanting to masturbate but not because we were all boys and we were afraid we’d be gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a little bit gay.

~

There was this made-for-TV movie, me six years old and home alone while my big brother, supposed who’d to’ve been baby-sitting me, the only time he ever babysat me that I can remember, maybe because his one time—that time—he didn’t actually babysit me. He went out to a party, while I watched the made-for-tv movie about some kid who’d watched his mother get murdered, and then goes mute, keeps drawing these pictures of Peter Pan and Captain Hook. The kid’s grandfather, one of those big hooks, like the one in I Know What You Did Last Summer, but this was long before that, though I’m not sure it was before the book. Did you know that there was a book I Know What You Did Last Summer? I mean this isn’t about the book or the movie, this is about that kid whose grandfather had molested his daughter for years and then as an adult gutted her with a fishhook and then how he’d then come back to finish the job with his mute grandkid, I don’t know how this movie ever got green-lighted (green-lit?) for TV, but then it’s weird to even think about those made-for-tv movies and if they actually existed or if I’m just making this whole thing up, but then my brother, we had a walk-in basement at the time, this being before I’d accidently burned that house down with two space heaters stolen from the barn, before my brother’d killed himself, he’d come back late, or probably it was only eight or nine, but I was young and alone out in the woods where we lived, and he’d come back through the basement, which was attached to the family room, where I’d been watching and then all of a sudden that kid on TV was being stocked by his granddad with a fish hook and the door to the basement was opening, and for god knows why I’d turned off all the lights to watch the scary movie by myself, and it turns out it was just my brother who’d go on to kill himself in like a year, maybe six months, and he was just playing a little prank on me, or maybe he’d just come through the basement for some reason, he was always hanging out down there and tinkering around with things, but in my mind, I can remember that exact look on his face, that smirk, even in the dark, the light from the television in a blacked-out room, a blacked out house, reflecting off those pop-bottle glasses of his, the shiny too-big-for-his-face silver frames. My mother always tells me I should try to remember the happy times I had with my brother, and honestly, I can’t, I can only remember that smirk, those glasses, the handle turning a moment before he appeared.

~

Any and all sequels where it turns out that the dead character didn’t actually die at all, or maybe it’s magic, or maybe there’s time travel.

~

Any happy ending ever.

~

Every ending in my worst nightmares involves everyone I’ve ever loved or hated, their faces turning to snake faces. Snakeheads, snake arms, snake butts. Snakes snakes snakes. They slip out of their clothes and come up from under my bed, slither under my covers. They bite me, they kiss me, poison me, they consume me whole and regurgitate my bones. That’s how they always end. Me dead and abandoned.

~

That scene in the first Indiana Jones with Indiana Jones and getting trapped in the cave with all the snakes. I hate snakes. All my worst nightmares turn to snakes. Fuck snakes. This all might have something to do with my undersized penis. If you want to go down that path. The Secret of My Crying Game.

~

Has Mel Gibson ever made a movie with snakes? I don’t know, you tell me, but fuck that movie if he did. Mel Gibson is snakey enough on his own.

~

BENJAMIN DREVLOW is the author of Bend With the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father, which won the 2006 Many Voices Project, and the author of Ina-Baby: A Love Story in Reverse, which was  released by Cowboy Jamboree Books in 2019.  Buy his books here. He is currently at work on a novel, a novella, and a collection of story-poems. He serves as the Managing Editor of BULL Magazine (@BULL_magazine_) and is a lecturer at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia.

[revolution-john]

Three Prose Poems

by LEIGH CHADWICK 

The Autobiography of Leigh Chadwick, Pt. 6

According to the NRA, if you drink a Colt 45 while shooting a .45 Colt you will become 90% superhero. When did the world get so scary? I used to be scared of the simple things: snakes, the devil crawling up my leg, aspartame, UTIs. Now, it’s bullets and the cost of health. It’s keeping my daughter’s heart my daughter’s heart. It’s feeling to feel. I can’t remember when I stopped dreaming in black and white. What is a 401K and where is it buried? For foreplay, my husband and I pretend it’s our anniversary. I dress up as a misunderstanding. I handcuff him to the bed and go drink dirty martinis in a hotel bar. When I get home, I crawl into my husband’s mouth. I stay there for a week. He doesn’t charge me rent. If scientology was real, I wouldn’t have a high enough credit score to go clear. If the earth was flat, would Kyrie Irving still be able to make all of Philly flip with one crossover? I tell my husband, Let’s watch The Truman Show and kiss under the covers. He tells me I look best dressed as shade. I say, Like that one weekend in late May? He says, Like the daffodils in the yard. Like a gun buried beneath snow, lost and forgotten. 

Regarding the Sheets We Bought at the Store That Sells Sheets

I change the sheets after each time we touch between them. My favorite hobby is watching you watch me get dressed for work. What I’m trying to say is that I’m always changing the sheets.

Donner Parties in the Mountains

The oxen and horses go first. There are some leftover legs—sharp edges of bone never boiled into gelatin, barely worth a mention, really—but that’s about it. After the oxen and horses, it’s the dogs. Everything but the paws. Then, it’s pinecones and bark before the daughters cry as they kneel over their father, mouths open, bright with flame.

LEIGH CHADWICK’S poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Milk Candy Review, Olney Magazine, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Bear Creek Gazette, among others. Her debut poetry collection, Wound Channels, will be published by ELJ Editions in February of 2022. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.

[revolution-john]

Madam Dixon

by STEVE LAMBERT

What set the whole thing off was Sam Heintzman leaving a vase of long-stem roses on her front step. It was early still, around seven, and she heard something outside the front door. She peeked out the window and saw Sam waddling back towards his place across the street.  They were beautiful, the roses, and the ring in the middle of the vase were all open and singing, and the ones around the lip, for some reason, huddled in on themselves like little old ladies wrapped in shawls.  A tiny card taped to the vase read, “Let me know if you need anything.  My deepest sympathy.  –Sam.” She leaned in, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

Sam, who had been an engineer at the Cape, was recently retired.  His job had been something to do with making the tiles on the front of the space shuttles.  But now he alternated between working in his yard and sitting in a lawn chair in his driveway, drinking canned beer and admiring his landscaping while the sprinklers ran. He had almost no fingernails, and his fingers were nubby at the ends.  Nubbiness, she’d often thought, was his defining feature. On more than one occasion, she’d seen him pop a beer tab with his house key. She couldn’t imagine “needing” anything from him.

Rich and Sam hadn’t exactly been friends, but living so close to each other for so many years, they’d became steady acquaintances, treated each other in that excessively cordial way that people do who don’t know each other intimately; all those handshakes and nods and winks and courteous chuckles—affirming gestures, like two salesmen.  Plus they both spoke the dull Latin of lawn care.  She recalled how on late afternoons the two of them would walk slowly around their or Sam’s yard, each with a can of beer in hand, pointing at various imposters, pulling them up and naming them: tickseed, dollar weed, chick weed, etc., etc.  She didn’t know the language.  It was an easy way for them to be, but she saw the way Sam looked at her sometimes.  She thought Rich noticed, too, but he was not the jealous type.  Never was one to get territorial.  

              She didn’t really feel like visiting, but probably should, she thought, go thank him for the roses before it got too late.  For some reason, she thought about how hard she’d found it to be alone at night, especially not being a sound sleeper. That was the most pronounced absence she felt in the wake of Rich’s death—his not being there, next to her, when she lay in bed at night.  It was just her now when she’d wake up at two or three in the morning; her and the intermittent sounds of the night settled down around the house, gently crushing it into the dirt, like a child slowly pressing its soft, fat hand down on a toy it has decided is no longer fun to play with.

She glanced over at the vase of roses on the bar, where she’d put them, and decided to walk over to Sam’s and invite him for lunch.  Why not? She thought. It’s a neighborly gesture. It would be an imposition for me, to go to lunch, but it would probably mean a lot to him. Anyway, it’s the right thing to do.  

 He answered the door in his usual attire: plaid shorts, white V-neck and flip-flops—big grin on his round face.  “Madam Dixon,” he said in a voice like a retired boxer’s, and bowed, his rubber flip-flops squealing under the strain.  

“Sam,” she said, “the flowers are lovely.  Thank you for them—and the card.  It was very nice of you.” She didn’t mean to sound dismissive but thought maybe she had. She hoped he hadn’t noticed.

“Come in, come in,” he said, moving to the side, and she reluctantly stepped into the dark living room. She found herself wondering if was her first time inside his house. A couch hunkered to her immediate right, and a small hallway stretched out beyond it.  Light funneled in from the back of the house. Particles floated and swirled around in the rays of light like nebulae.

“Thank you,” she said.  No, I must have been in here before, she thought, but couldn’t think of a single time she had.

“Have a seat.” He pointed to the couch, and then touched a stout finger to his nose, as if nudging it into place.

“It’s rather dark in here, don’t you think, Sam.”

“I guess it is if you’re coming in from outside,” he said, and he opened the blinds. Light slanted in in thin layers. He winced a bit.

“How’s that, madam?”

“You don’t have to call me that, you know,” she said.  Now that Rich is gone, she thought, it seems silly somehow.  She had been “madam” to his “Colonel.”  

“Oh, it’s just for fun,” he said.  “Would you like something to drink?  A cold adult beverage, perhaps?  I have some Busch in the fridge.”

“No, thank you, Sam. I just stopped by—”

“I believe I’ll have one, if you don’t mind.”

While he was gone she noticed a very large framed photograph on the wall, opposite the couch, of a space shuttle blasting off of a launch pad.  She pointed it out when he returned with his beer.

“Oh, her.  She’s the Columbia. A real beautiful craft.  The first to go to space.…April twelve, nineteen eighty-one.” He clicked his tongue then sipped his beer.  She found it mildly irritating that he referred to it as “her,” but didn’t dwell on it because she realized something.

“Rich took me to that launch, Sam.  We were there, at the—what do you call it—where the bleachers are? Where everyone watches?”

“The Causeway?” He slightly tipped the beer can and slurped, like he was trying to be extra careful not to spill any.

“That’s it. The NASA Causeway.  That’s where we were. We’d been transferred to Patrick about, I don’t know, a month prior—from Barksdale, in Louisiana.  He was so excited about that—getting to see that first shuttle launch.”

She remembered: on the way to the Cape, Rich driving huddled up close to the steering wheel, pointing up at the sky, and her just sitting there listening. “Folks who’ve been to rocket launches say you can watch it the whole way up. You can see everything: the glint of sunlight on the metal, the tower of smoke, like a string of popcorn, like on a Christmas tree—everything.  Takes maybe an hour to disappear, to dissipate.  Course, this’ll be a little different.”  Neither of them knew exactly what a shuttle was, but he made it sound much more interesting than she would have found it all by herself. The car swerved a little under the strain of Rich’s excitement.

And it was something. And crowded with people—people with binoculars and telescopes and wearing sunglasses and wide-brimmed hats and men in shorts and Hawaiian-print shirts, open at the front.  One woman chased a little boy, who was about three, in circles.  She was short, but pretty, and had on a black one-piece bathing suit.  The little boy chuckled as his young mother chased after him, one hand keeping her sun hat on her head. And they all watched it lift off and go up and it all seemed so slow, but it wasn’t slow, it was fast, hundreds of miles per hour, but from where they stood everything was happening in slow motion, beautiful and vivid and big.

“It was a big deal, Madam. Very exciting.”  Sam walked closer to the photo, swigging as he moved, like a kid with a glass of milk. She half expected him to start blowing bubbles in his beer. “Who knows,” he said, “the guy or gal who took this picture might have been standing right next to you.” He looked away from the photo. “Barksdale,” he said, and scratched at the top of his blotchy bald head. “Seems like I’ve been there…”

She watched him and wait for more, but nothing followed.

“Sam,” she said, “I was wondering.  Do you have any lunch plans?” It seemed absurd the second she said it. Of course he didn’t. She imagined him opening a can of tuna and eating straight out of it with a fork.

“Oh, well,” he said.  He put the beer can down on the coffee table and scratched at his head again.  He moved closer to the wall with the photo of the shuttle on it. He put a hand on the wall, like he was bracing himself for a dizzy spell.

This can’t be happening, she thought.  He isn’t even attractive. He’s an old troll. I don’t like him a bit, to be honest. Drinking beer this early in the day.  She got a flush feeling and her face felt warm.  He thinks I’m a sad, pathetic old widow.

“I do, as a matter of fact, Marie.  I’m going out to the—” He looked at his watch.  “And won’t be back till—Maybe we can—”

“Oh, that’s fine,” she said.  She stood up, shook her head.  “Really. It’s fine.”  She thought she might start crying, which was completely out of the question.  This is not a rejection, she told herself. It’s just bad timing.

“Well,” he said, and he smoothed the palms of his hands across his shirt front.

“No need to explain, Sam.  It’s fine,” she said, smiling. She found that she was pressing on her hair with one hand. She made herself stop. “Rain check,” she added, without having thought about it beforehand.

“Yes!” he said, happy to have a word for the awkwardness he felt.  “Rain check, indeed, madam.”

 She watched from her living room window as Sam got into his burgundy Chrysler and pulled out and sped off down the road and out of sight.  Where is he going so fast? She thought.  She picked one of the roses from the center of the bouquet and smelled of it.  Its scent was so faint that she couldn’t think of a word to describe it.  He’d said he wouldn’t be back till late.

 She’d loved Rich, she often thought, because he made her feel like somebody. In the beginning, when they were dating, she’d felt unfamiliar to herself when she was with him. Later, after they were married, the wife of an Air Force officer, she felt confident and important. Initially, anyway. She loved him for that, for that gift he probably didn’t even consider a gift.  She loved it better than any jewelry or flowers or exotic getaway. It felt almost permanent, and it was real. But things always change. Things didn’t get better or worse—they just changed.  They were two people in a habituation together. She continued to love him, and she supposed he still loved her.  But towards the end it wasn’t a gift so much as an ill-fitting pair of jeans you can’t bring yourself to give away because you are sure you’ll fit back into them some day.

 She waited till dusk.  She put on dark clothes and her old running sneakers and grabbed the flashlight out of the catchall drawer in the kitchen. She preemptively took two Ibuprofen. If I have to do any climbing or crawling or anything I’ll be sore tomorrow, she thought. It was very quiet outside.  

She checked his side door, the one that goes into the garage, and it was unlocked, of course. No one locked up in their neighborhood. There was no need to. It smelled like gasoline and fertilizer in the garage, and the smell made her feel lightheaded.  She lifted the mat at the foot of the door that led from the garage into the house, but didn’t find a key. she shone the flashlight around until she saw a little metal hook on the wall, to the left of the door, with a ring of keys hanging on it. She tried five before she found the right one. Before she turned the key in the lock she took a moment to consider what Rich would think of this.  Presumably, she thought, he could be watching me at this very moment.  What do you think, Rich? she whispered. It gave her the creeps to hear her voice in the dark, stinky garage.  She heard something scurry and thought rat or possum and inserted the key and quickly entered the house.

In the yellow glow of the flashlight bulb the photograph looked mythic. She immediately had an urge to cry, standing there looking at it with what amounted to a spotlight on it.  For the first time in a month she was feeling the full weight of her grief. Before she knew it she was sitting on Sam’s couch looking up at the photograph, sobbing—like a proper widow, she thought.  What an odd place for mourning?  But the photo captured something, and not just the shuttle launch—that was secondary—but the color and feel of that day, that point in time.  The quality of light.  A small bit of her life, as it had been once, paused—a crystalized memory she’d forgotten she had.

She got up and walked over to the picture and put the flashlight right on it. Maybe if I look long enough I’ll find us, she thought, me and Rich, with our hands shielding the sun from our eyes, watching the shuttle climb up towards space.  Maybe I’ll find the petite young mother and her little boy. She looked and squinted and searched the photograph.  But she needed more time with it.  Most of the onlookers were blurry. It was too dark now. The shuttle, lifting off, and the dense exhaust, were the most vivid things. She stared so hard that things got distorted and she started to zone out. She imagined Sam ripping his nubby fingernails off and sticking them to the black nose of the spacecraft.  He ripped one off and stuck it on and went for another one.  Then he took a sip of beer. Disgusting old troll, she thought. Who drinks beer in the middle of the day, anyway?  

A few minutes passed and she pulled herself together. She sat and stared at the huge thing hanging there on the wall until a light from outside grew and intensified and she realized that it was the headlights from Sam’s car, shining in through the window as he pulled into the driveway.

She wasn’t sure what to do. She heard the car door slam. She turned off the flashlight and put it in her back pocket and carefully hoisted the photograph off the wall and crept, bent over, to the door that let out to the garage. From inside the garage, she heard the key in the front door, heard it turn and the door open. Sam sighed as he closed it. She slowly put the keys back on the hook by the door in the garage. She paused and heard an interior door, a bedroom door. She left the garage and stole quickly across the street, tip-toed home in the dark, the picture under her arm, like a cat burglar.  But what I’ve done doesn’t feel like stealing, she thought, as she sat the photograph against the wall in her bedroom. She took the flashlight out of her pocket and sat on the edge of her bed. It feels like something else. Feels like a resurrection.

()

Steve Lambert’s writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Saw Palm, Chiron Review, New Contrast (South Africa), The Pinch, Broad River Review, Longleaf Review, Emrys Journal, BULL Fiction, Into the Void, Cowboy Jamboree, Cortland Review, and many other places. In 2015 he won third place in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest and in 2018 he won Emrys Journal’s Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations and was a Rash Award in Fiction finalist. He is the author of the poetry collection Heat Seekers (CW Books, 2017), the chapbook In Eynsham (CW Books, 2020) and the fiction collection The Patron Saint of Birds (Cowboy Jamboree, 2020). His novel, Philisteens, will be out May 2021, and his second full-length poetry collection, The Shamble, will be out in October, both with Close to The Bone Publishing. He lives in Northeast Florida, with his wife and daughter, where he teaches part-time at the University of North Florida.  

[revolution-john]

Brother Learns to Sew

by TOBI ALFIER

Brother learned to sew during the summers he couldn’t go out and play. Granny came by and said “boy? It’s cooking or sewing, you can’t sit around and do nothing”, and sewing it was.

We lived on a town street, but the whole backyard was woods and water. All us kids played out back every day until someone’s’ mama yelled to hightail it in for supper. There was always plenty, so you never knew where you’d be saying grace; it was whoever made chili and spaghetti. Hand-cranked ice cream for dessert if we were lucky.

Brother—he weren’t never lucky. Couldn’t even get to the tire-swing over the creek before doubling over to catch his breath. The state of him caused many a whispered discussion after we were supposed to be in bed. We eavesdropped on the stairs, worried about him just as much as the grown-ups did.

One day Doc Henson swung by. They lay Brother on his stomach on the kitchen table and Doc drew all over his back—looked like a hundred checkerboards all put together with numbers in the corners. I don’t know what Doc did, but Brother whimpered like a dog wound up round a pole and stuck there. Mama sat next to him and gently blew on his back. She blew on his arms and legs too.

After about as long as it takes to drink a cocktail in polite company, Doc Henson put on his glasses looked at Brother for a long time. He made a lot of notes. “Nothing to worry about”, he said, “Brother has allergies. Just about everything that grows or floats through the air in summer, the sheep and barn cats too” and he said Brother would need allergy shots for a few years but then he’d be good as new. He waited till mama’d gently sponged off Brother’s back and sat him up, handed him an inhaler-thingy and showed him how to use it, then made appointments for allergy shots three times a week until New Year’s Eve cause that’s when our wall calendar stopped.

And that’s how Granny came to teach Brother to sew. He couldn’t use wool but everything else was fair game. He could thread a bobbin faster than anyone, measure, lay out a pattern and make something just as professional as Granny, and that was sayin’ somethin’! He always watched people when they went into town for his shots. The freeing way men crossed their legs. How a dress moved when ladies lifted way high to reach a basket of apples, how they wore belts to help ease their backs—always hurting from work or hauling little ones around. How the skirts needed to stay put and not show off their panties when they bent over to pick up crayons and what not.

He learned about when stripes were wicked and when they were good, colors, patterns, and how women were beautiful if they felt beautiful, even if they weren’t the same size as the picture on the pattern. I might’ve learned how to climb trees those summers; Brother learned so much more. And both of us had our first kisses to talk about when we were supposed to be asleep.

By the time Doc Henson pronounced Brother “cured”, he’d made quite a name for himself. Daddy had a charcoal gray pinstriped suit for church that was so handsome, his buddies thought he’d bought it special on an out-of-town business trip. Mama had two new dresses that she loved—the most important thing to make a woman feel beautiful. Her friends had dresses. My friends and I all had special dresses for the Sadie Hawkins Day Dance, and Brother not only went to the dance with a girl he adored, but he drove us in the Mustang he bought with some of his savings.

Granny walked tall and grinned herself proud. She deserved it. Doc Henson retired. He and his wife of fifty years renewed their vows and invited the whole town. Brother made the wedding dress, and even though the reception was in a huge tent outside the church, he didn’t need to use his inhaler, not once.

Tobi Alfier is a multiple Pushcart nominee and multiple Best of the Net nominee. “Symmetry: earth and sky” was published by Main Street Rag. Her chapbook “Grit & Grace” was published by Orchard Street Press (March, 2021). She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).

[revolution-john]

An Appointment with Transit Authority

by CODY SEXTON

We have so much time together still. It can't end now, not like this. I'll kill myself if she doesn't make it. If they come out and tell me she's gone, I'll end it. I won't go on without her. I can't be expected to stumble alone through the darkness, not without a light.

I'll wait for the bus and as its passing, I'll just step out. Should be pretty painless.

We were supposed to live forever, that's what we thought, that's what it felt like, that's what everyone believes. And I'll be damned if I'll just pick up the pieces and move on. It’s a sin to be comfortable with loss. I won't do it.

The ER doctor came out and spoke to Mr. Conroy for a few moments before returning to attend to his other patients. At which point the old man stood up, put on his overcoat and walked to the exit.

Outside he stood on the corner and waited.

[revolution-john]

Two Prose Poems

by HOWIE GOOD

Movies Made Me

He played himself, Pvt. Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II. On the screen, he single-handedly stormed Axis pillboxes and machine-gun nests as lesser men got blown up or cringed in foxholes or screamed and then clutched their stomachs and crumpled to the ground. I was only a kid when I saw the movie at a Saturday matinee with some friends, but I remember it was in black and white, and he had a typically boyish American face and the cold, lonely soul of a killer, and more than anything I wanted to be unafraid like him.

Red in Tooth and Claw

On the birthing table, the Red Queen, knees up, legs spread far apart, pushes and pushes and pushes again. Snatches of Beethoven – or maybe it’s Mozart, something classical anyway – float out of her. And the royal physician is like “OK, why not?” Meanwhile, red ants the size of delivery wagons are rampaging through the countryside in what a palace spokesman characterizes as a glitch of nature. Even if true, the explanation is of no use to the defenseless peasants who die in their thousands with wounds that resemble the velvety red petals of roses.

[melchoirmacabre]

𝐻𝑜𝓌𝓁𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒶𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓂𝑜𝑜𝓃

[revolution-john]

Dysphoria lands on the Goodreads Appalachian Horror list

So I forget how I found it, but my novel Dysphoria is 14th on the Goodreads list for Appalachian Horror.

Now that I'm here and writing about it I realize there's nothing else to say about this news. I'm happy about it. There's that.

I don't know who added it, but likely it was Adam Van Winkle, mastermind of Cowboy Jamboree Press, the press that published it last year.

[revolution-john]

[revolution-john]

ROLE MODELS sheldon lee compton Halloween, 1982. An aunt applied the makeup, various tubes and fliptop mirrors taken from the bottom of ...

[revolution-john]

Music Note - free CSS template provided by templatemo.com

[revolution-john]

Ouroboros By Sheldon Lee Compton You told me what the dentist told me. Don’t eat anything for at least three hours after you leave here. Except when you said it, you said it with your head do…

[revolution-john]

How to Get to Destin

Downtown Hillsong crawled with potential felons on Fridays. The Hillsong County courthouse was a four-story beige brick building where motion hour for criminal cases was held every Friday. That’s where Maddie planned to meet Bone Sommers. Bone practiced law, but everyone knew he didn’t try at it much. He made a run for commonwealth’s attorney about five years ago and lost. After dropping that race to a known liar and embezzler, he went back to his dad’s old scrap yard and had been living there in a trailer ever since. He was smart and under the radar enough that Maddie wanted him for their lawyer if anything started flying from Dollar Bill’s trial and landing on her.

In the past year she had made a dozen or more runs along what the local cops called the The Flamingo Pipeline. A straight shot into Florida and back, two-day turnaround. There were a scary number of doctors in Florida prescribing without care oxycodone, hydrocodone, and Oxycontin. Prescribing any and all kinds of painkillers. Then, like all the rest, Maddie didn’t take long to get greedy. After her Pipeline runs she made regular monthly rounds at four local doctors and two pain clinics in nearby Inez. A side investment. There were a lot of loose ends, loose lips. Any of this could come out during Dollar Bill’s trial and Bone was at least some hope, if he would show up.

It was early afternoon before Maddie saw Bone’s truck pull into the courthouse parking lot. It looked put together with random pieces from his scrapyard, a gray fender wall, a tomato-red tailgate, and Bone looked as poorly thrown together when he popped out from the driver’s side. A short man, his jeans were too long and the heels of his boots had ridden the cuffs frayed against the ground. He was forty-seven and looked sixty, except in the eyes. His eyes were sharp blue under mostly oil-black hair. Wrinkling his face against a shaft of sunlight, he walked slowly, and Maddie seemed to remember he usually moved faster.

“Bone,” she said and nodded. “I’ve seen you move faster. What you been up to, besides making me wait outside a courthouse for two hours?”

“Maddie. Well, honey, I’ve been having a heart attack and not giving two shits, lately. I guess I won’t ask how you been. Not so good, considering you need a lawyer.”

“A heart attack?”  Maddie asked. She was looking in particular at the cigarette pinched in the fingers of his free hand. In the other was a cup of coffee. “When was that?”

“Been just about two weeks now. On my birthday, if you can believe that.”

Maddie pointed to the cigarette.

“Yeah,” Bone said in a way of acknowledgment. “You think it counts as suicide?”  He pulled a four long, hard draws and flicked the stub against the side of the courthouse.

“Not really sure, but late happy birthday.”

 “Ah, to hell with happy birthday,” he said, but was surprised she remembered. That was something.

He lit another cigarette.

“Okay then,” Maddie said. They had moved to the side of the entrance and Bone sat with his legs swinging off the side of the brick wall that lined the sidewalk.

 “I hope it counts as suicide, cause that’s my intention.”  He might have been talking to himself, eyes fixed across the street to a man selling green and red crosses made from beads. “You see that guy? His name’s Simon and he’s deaf and dumb. He hocks them bead crosses for seven bucks. I went by the Dollar General store and bought the same stuff and turns out it only costs about fifty cents to make one, when you figure it all up.”

The man, Simon, always smiled. She had seen him out here a few times. He smiled more in a day than Maddie had smiled in the last ten years. She looked again at Bone’s cigarette. “How many of them you going to smoke before we go in and get this started?”

Bone nodded, took a last drag from his cigarette, and caught up with Maggie. He hadn’t been in a courtroom in twelve years.

 Maddie married badly. Her husband, Shane Younce, was a no count, quick-tempered, spoiled mama’s boy who convinced himself he was a real man by beating Maddie into the hospital about three or four times a year.. Less than three months into the marriage, It was a hard thing to handle sober and so Maddie started buying weed from the car garage just below Hillsong’s public swimming pool. And for a time the weed and the liquor and beer kept her mind just numb enough to deal with Shane and all the hell he brought. But the Younce’s were connected in the little town, and for the very same reason she couldn’t even consider a divorce, she also found it wasn’t difficult to get stronger drugs riding on their good name.

In the first week at the garage, dropping Shane’s name, she connected with Dollar Bill, a mid-level drug dealer who sold in bulk from the back of the garage. He fixed her up with whatever she needed, and for the right price, too. From there it happened fast. One buy led to others and within two months Maddie was driving the Pipeline.

The set up was a good one until an undercover fed got Dollar Bill on audio and hidden camera selling him a Ziplock bag stuffed with pills. First thing Maddie thought to do was call Bone, who was okay with getting some work. She had a few thousand saved back from buy money for her last run that never happened. It really wasn’t her money. Fact of business, she didn’t really know whose money it was, but that wasn’t going to matter if she got sent to prison when Dollar Bill started singing.

The catastrophic possibility of Dollar Bill singing to the feds was what Maddie outlined for Bone outside courtroom B on the second floor, the circuit court level. She waited for what he would say while he shuffled around the water fountain.

“Can’t for the life of me see why they never put chairs or benches or something in the hallways,” he said, squatting beside the fountain.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What about all of this, Bone?  I’ve done handed you a wad of money. What are we going to do?”

“Not much to do while the judge still has court going on.”

She cracked the double doors to the courtroom and saw Judge John Carter Henley up in his high seat. He moved papers back and forth in front of him. Some blonde woman in a power suit was leaning up to talk to him so her calf muscles were nice and round and smooth. It made Maddie sad all over again thinking about her own stick legs and her belly pooch from drinking too much beer. Made her want something to drink right that second.

“I’ll have to sit down with him in chambers,” Bone said. He said his last word as if he were spitting something foul from his mouth.

“I need a drink or something,” Maddie said.

“You and me both.”

Maddie thought back to Bone talking about suicide when he first got there. “And what’s all this stuff about suicide?” she asked. “What the hell, Bone.”

He straightened up against the wall and slid to his feet. The wind escaped his lungs in a gush of air like it had been held captive, a secret from the rest of his body.

“I don’t know, Maddie, honey. I’m just tired is all. It drives me crazy that you probably wouldn’t be dealing with any of this if it wasn’t for that husband you got.”

“You might be right,” Maddie said. “But nobody twisted my arm, either.”

“Well, least you got something to get your blood going, even if it is worrying Dollar Bill Damron’s going to point his finger at you.” Bone’s face went still and serious. “The worse kind of life is one where they just ain’t nothing happening. It’d be nice to just strike out and head to the beach somewhere. Not Myrtle Beach. I mean a real beach. Some place like Destin, that town in Florida. You may even went past it or something on your trips down there.”

“Sonofabitch, I’m dead in the water,” Maddie hissed, more at the wall than to Bone.

The courtroom doors came open and three men tucked sideways past them. Maddie peeked in and saw a lot of movement near the bench. Bone asked the men before they rounded the corner if court was breaking and they told him the judge ordered a fifteen minute recess. He took Maddie’s elbow and leaned into her. When they were clear of the doors into the courtroom, Bone gave out a loud grunt.

“Maddie, honey, I just can’t do this for you. You already paid me, but I have to tell you that going up to the judge before Dollar Bill or whoever even mentions you is pretty much insane, no offense. You’re implicating yourself, understand?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I should’ve told you before now, but I’m in a rough place,” he said.

“You think?” She ran her fingers through her hair. “Jesus, Bone. So what am I supposed to do?”

“Go home,” he said. “I’ll keep my ear to the ground and give you a call tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to go home,” she admitted. “Let’s get something to eat or whatever.”

“Shane makes home not such a great place to be, I guess,” Bone said. “We’ll figure something out. We will.”

He turned the corner and left. The bailiff for courtroom B closed the suite doors and a quiet dropped all around Maddie.

“I don’t want to go home,” she said again in the empty hallway.

 The diagnosis was exactly the same as a month ago. The heart meds weren’t doing what they were supposed to be doing and the right coronary artery had experienced too much trauma from the heart attack. It didn’t help, the doc said, that Bone hadn’t stopped eating red meat, had continued smoking, and drank more now than he had before.

“There’s something else,” Doc Bradley said just before the appointment was over. “Your blood results showed cocaine in your system, Bone. Cocaine. Are you seriously telling me you’re using cocaine?”

“Um, yeah. I snorted a little to see what it was like. Trust me Doc, you don’t really want anything to do with coke. The results are undesirable.” Bone stopped. The look on Doc Bradley’s face was too much. He had forgotten that they blood tested him every appointment. Now the whole visit was going to be about cocaine. “Let’s chalk that one up as post-traumatic stress, what’s say, Doc? I’m just trying to get my head around this thing.”

“You are not terminal, you jack ass,” Doc said. “You’re not the walking dead. It ain’t good, I’ll say that. I won’t bullshit you. But you’re not dead.”

Bone nodded his way out of the appointment, took some ass-chewing, and left the office without having changed his views on anything. He lit a cigarette and reached under the seat and found the pint of vodka. He chased three drinks with some flat Pepsi and left the parking lot driving slow and careful.

The pay lake sat like a shined plate fifty yards or so from Route 670. Bone knew Shane would be there only a short time, fishing for bluegill to rig for bait if his net gave out fishing for cat down at the spillway. There was a window of opportunity, though, and Bone knew how to make the most of a window.

He had borrowed Casey Osborne’s truck, because Casey Osborne didn’t really give two shits if he got deep into anything. He was too far gone on meth and knew eventually he would end up in prison sooner or later. Deep tint, green-maybe-blue-maybe-black paint job, easy to forget with all the other trucks at the lake. Bone parked at the edge of the dirt parking lot and took a quick inventory of who was there. Other than Shane, only three other guys were fishing the lake. He could make that work. Tucking a row of quarters into his palm, Bone made a fist, pulled the ski mask down to his chin, and got out of the truck. Soon as his feet hit dirt, he took a dead run toward Shane. His figured if the three guys noticed who he was, it really didn’t matter. Two reasons: one, he was dying and, two, about everybody sort of wanted to see somebody beat the lights out of Shane Younce’s eyes for how he always treated Maddie.

Shane hardly had time to realize he was in something deep before Bone started popping him in the chest and shoulders and then the thighs. Hooks, jabs, a lot of punches landing everywhere except his head and face. Shane wasn’t a small guy, so he fought back some, but after about five hits to the torso he mostly lay on the ground and took the beating. Bone didn’t stop until Shane threw up, a bright yellow puddle that covered his tackle box. Once that happened, Bone took off in a sprint back to the truck. In the rearview he could see the other guys making their way over to Shane. They were smiling.

 Bone got a phone call from Maddie two days after tracking Shane down at the pay lake. She wanted to talk to him and asked that he come to her mom’s house on Rolling Branch. He saw Maddie first thing when he made it to the end of the long dirt driveway leading to the house. She waved from the porch steps and didn’t move when Bone got out of the car.

“You look more ragged than the last time I saw you,” Maggie said.

Bone sat down beside her. “Well, everything’s still making sense then.”

Maggie laughed, but it was weak and forced. She picked up his right hand and turned it over. His knuckles were skinned and raw.

“Destin,” she said.

“What?”

“Destin. Remember you were talking about heading out for a beach somewhere? Somewhere like Destin. Not Myrtle Beach.”

Bone took a pint bottle of vodka from his jacket pocket and took a long pull. “Absolutely I remember.”

“Be nice wouldn’t it?” Maggie said.

“That’s a fact.” He offered her the bottle. “So Destin. That’s what you called me about?

Maggie took his hand again and pulled him to his feet. “Come on, let me show you something before you finally finish the world’s longest ever suicide.”

Behind the house, the yard fell off in a long grassy slope. When they made it to the edge of that slope, there was another smaller one, soft and sandy, that ran straight to the river. Maggie took small steps down the sand bank and helped Bone until they both stood on flat land at the river’s edge.  

The water was usually a muddy brown, but the full afternoon sun sent flashes of white light across the surface. Maggie sat down, pulled her shoes off, and put her bare feet in the water. Bone watched the dancing light for a few more seconds and then did the same, closing his eyes so the only thing he could hear was a strong, steady current moving farther and farther and farther away.

[revolution-john]

We Hungry Gods And Our Universe - Atticus Review

It hadn’t happened since I first died, but now hunger ripped me open. The hunger was a thing deep inside me, pushing upward from my stomach and wrapping around my heart, moving farther into my brain like a splinter pushing through flesh and blooming out in a wild, ravenous agony. I couldn’t remember food fromRead More

[revolution-john]

Cowboy Jamboree nominates excerpt of DYSPHORIA for a Pushcart Prize

Well, it's nearing year end and my beard is growing in nicely and the Pushcart news is at my doorstep once again. This time coming from t...

[revolution-john]

by Shel Compton I tell everyone all the time, but they don’t listen. Ever since they increased our drugs and started getting rid of us. Since they don’t listen, I don’t feel as sorry for them as I …

My second short story to be published at Fish Bowl. 

[revolution-john]

REAL DEAL HILLBILLY by SHELDON LEE COMPTON

After the suicide and after the stories themselves there is usually the same conversation about Breece D’J Pancake. This revolves around a general question: Was he the real deal? It’s been stated i…