Christopher Allen

Why would anyone really experiencing a matter of life or death call the 911 center — where we save the world one call at a time — and say “We’re experiencing a matter of life or death”? These people scream something like “Oh fuck! My baby!” and “Blood! Blood! Everywhere!” Not “We’re experiencing a matter of ya-dee-ya”. The caller didn’t even request assistance or give me an address. It popped up on the screen; that’s how they found this matter of life or death, which by the time they got there was only the latter.

If the caller had screamed for dear life or screamed in the throes of death — if she’d screamed — I’d be able to file this one away, but her calm alto dogs me, like a serial killer after she’s taken selfies with the splattered walls and placed the polished cleaver back into the knife drawer.

My dreams are all matters of life or death now, which, according to the company psychologist, are unresolved matters of life or death: when life becomes more dying than living, whether the release of dying is worth all this trouble. That kind of stuff. The company psychologist has a reputation for being a whiny existentialist. How, I ask him, can the dreams of a 911 operator be about anything but death? I don’t call death; death calls me. Every night now.

I’m manning an old-fashioned operator’s board. It’s lit up like Christmas in Alabama. I can’t reach the cables. My hands are tiny and blue. I’m a mouse. A blue one. One by one, the lights fade, the board ices over. A woman whispers, “We’re experiencing a matter of life or death.”

Someone’s dying and dying and dying. I’m needed. Four hundred tiny mouse claws crawl over my body. The mice scream-squeak “We are experiencing a matter of life or death!” I can’t move, but my mind wheezes for help as the air thins and the mice fall dead, their hands limp but claws protracted, keening like mourning mothers.

I have the honor of giving the eulogy for each mouse who sacrificed its life in last night’s dream. Colonies have died trying to wake me, to save the world one call at a time. My task tonight is to try to express, in hundreds of individually intimate ways, why life matters.

I cower, overshadowed by a statue of a blue mouse in some Old World square. The mouse is portly, made of hard plastic. His nose is cast to twitch, sniffing for the food he can’t possibly have: he’s bolted to the ground. He’s not a warrior or a king; he’s a gaudy eyesore still-life, a monument to the ridiculous absurdity of life. My life. And because no one is paying attention to anything I say or do, I climb onto his fat blue hard-plastic back and proclaim this big blue mouse to be everything that matters in life. And death.

CHRISTOPHER ALLEN is the author of Conversations with S. Teri O’Type (a Satire). His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Eclectica Magazine’s 20^th-Anniversary Best of Speculative Anthology, Night Train, Indiana Review and others. Allen is the managing editor of SmokeLong Quarterly and lives in Germany.

Eleanor Gallagher

We plotted the shape of our rebellion in the back of the bus on the last day of Billy’s suspension.

“We could put packs of gum in all their desks.” This was my brilliant idea.

“Shut up, Tattle-tale.”

It had been my nickname since kindergarten. I couldn’t help it; I thought lying to the nuns was the same as lying to God. When they pinned me with that look — and they had learned pretty quickly that I was the weak link — I blurted it out, whatever it was.

What the other kids didn’t know that day was that a crack had already appeared for me between God and the nuns. I no longer trusted their infallibility, those wives of Christ. I was starting to think their marriage might be more like my parents’, where my dad punished me for doing things that only made my mom laugh. How could Jesus have agreed with what they did to Billy?

At St. Ambrose, the rule against chewing gum was enforced as if the stuff were the Devil’s own invention. Violators were made to clean all the bathrooms in the school; it’d take you a whole day and at the end of it, you’d be wet, smelly, and quite sure you never needed to chew gum at school again. I could buy that God didn’t want us to leave it under the desks, making work for the janitors, dirtying up His Creation. And of course he didn’t want us to be distracted from our lessons. But why would He care about gum that wasn’t being chewed?

Last week, Billy Flynn had tested the letter of the law by keeping an unopened pack in his desk, and he got away with it for a week until Sister Elizabeth found it and dragged him by his ear to the Mother Superior. He protested that he wasn’t actually chewing gum, but Mother Superior caught him on a grammatical technicality, explaining that chewing was a participle and an adjective, not a verb, and did he need to repeat Sister John the Baptist’s English class? Billy was suspended for a week, which to us was a crime given what Billy faced at home. Whether the nuns didn’t know or thought a few beatings would do him good we never knew. All we knew was that such injustice made rebellion requisite.

It was the new girl, April, who told us it wasn’t open revolt that we wanted, but to get away with something right under their noses.

“That way you can look at them every day and know that they don’t know.”

April was exotic, with a name from the calendar instead of the Bible, and she had lived in Hawaii, a place we thought was only for vacations. Her hair stuck out from her head like spun sugar. I sat behind her on the bus and reported eight distinct shades, from silver to copper to ash to something like sparkly dust.

“I’ll be the first,” she said. We listened as she outlined the three steps. First, the size had to be impressive. Anyone could blow a tiny bubble and suck it back in before someone noticed. That was not going to give us the thrill we were looking for. “It must obscure the eyes,” said April. We held our fingers in front of our faces, to see how big the bubble would have to be. We said we didn’t believe a bubble could get that big, so she showed us the meaty chunks of gum she would use, like bites of flesh.

“And it can’t pop in your face, you have to suck it back in all the way.” A lot of us didn’t know this could be done either. She said it would help prevent us getting caught, which was the most important step of all. “No one can tell, and if they do, they’ll have to be the next one to try it.” I could feel all their eyes on me.

“Tomorrow at lunch,” she said. “Be sure Billy saves me a seat.”

We sat at our usual tables in the sea of the lunchroom. The nuns stayed on the edges, only wading in if there was trouble. Ten minutes before the bell, April said “Ready?” to Billy, who was her lookout. The frozen look he’d returned to school with had vanished when we’d told him about our revenge. April had been chewing the gum all lunch to get it ready, pretending to eat her sandwich while slipping me pinched-off pieces under the table.

Faster than we would have believed, the bubble was huge. It grew past her nose. Her dirty blonde curls splayed out like a degenerate halo, looking more unruly than usual against this fat forbidden thing she was making for us.

“Blow, blow, blow,” rose up softly from the surrounding tables and we all heard the hiss of her breath inside the bubble, echoed by our own intakes and sighs. We were one with that bubble and the girl behind it. I fought the urge to check if any nuns were coming; the effort cramped my stomach.

Another hiss and Billy said, “One down. Do it. Now.” We’d all seen the thin places that could spell doom. April’s mouth opened and she began reversing course, the trickiest part of all. At the edges of our eyes we felt the nuns converging. Had they seen or did their preternatural sense for trouble draw them?

“Hurry, April,” someone whispered but she was too good or too wicked to panic. We saw her unwavering focus when her eyes came back into view crossed and pinned to the orb as she tipped her head back to keep it from catching on her nose. How did she not run out of breath? I held mine so tight, it hurt when I let go, so relieved to hear the soft pops like a muffled gun and see it suddenly gone behind her pursed lips. “Got Two,” whispered Billy, and some of us saw her throat move just before Sister Patrick’s black presence drew all our attention.

Our attention, but not our eyes, because Sister Patrick was the best of all of them — she could see a lie before it formed on your lips. She said nothing, which told us she hadn’t seen. She was waiting for a confession. We fell silent, finishing our lunches, crumpling our trash. April picked up her apple and ate it bite by bite as if she had all day to enjoy it.

By now the tables around us had fallen into the same trap with their respective nuns and it was a game of chicken or hide-and-seek between equally determined competitors. My heart was thudding — we had not talked about how to accomplish Step 3; we had been too enthralled with April’s part: how she would do it, if she could do it, what the nuns would do to her if she didn’t. I knew I had to keep my mouth shut, and even though my blood rushed, my lips didn’t twitch. Someone surely would have broken open but God bless Mary O’Malley for knowing what to do.

She grabbed the apple from her brother Peter’s hand and took a huge bite. He yelled HEY and slugged her in the arm, and then Mary kicked Rachel Wiggens under the table and Rachel emitted her signature siren wail — and with this familiar signal of chaos, we knew how we could win. Violence was officially punishable, but the nuns generally ignored it as long as there wasn’t too much blood. I’ll give them that: they seemed to recognize the hypocrisy of punishing us for what they did in the name of God every day.

Sluggings erupted around the tables and the nuns flew into a tizzy trying to figure out what was going on. What a relief to let out some of our energy, to make noises which weren’t confessions but which loosened our throats. The power of our majority filled us. Maybe this thrill was proof they had been right about gum all along.

I snuck a peek at Sister Patrick and her eyes were waiting for me as they always were. Instead of seeing God, though, I saw inside that nun to the ordinary woman she was. She crunched her eyebrows in a renewed effort to nail me, but I held our stare just long enough to let her know she would never again penetrate me. When I looked away, I slammed my open palm on the table to punctuate the point. “Three,” I said.

April, who had seen it all between Sister Patrick and me, held her half-eaten apple across the table and I took it like it was communion. I saw a tiny string of bright bubble pink caught in the chapped skin of her lip, which stretched to the breaking point as she grinned at me like the sun.

ELEANOR GALLAGHER writes and quilts in Tucson, Arizona. She reads fiction for Atticus Review. This is her first professional publication.

James Wade

It wouldn’t have been our national pastime if I didn’t get to eat some peanuts and see an octopus throw a whirly-wowzer. That’s all I could think about. I had taken care of the peanuts early on. I’m a good planner. “Always thinking ahead,” that’s what my birth mother probably could have said once.

While the fellas and the redfish were taking turns swinging the sticks and getting loose, I dodged a few soul-suckers who were prowling around above the mezzanine on my way to buy somewhere between one and thirty-seven pounds of peanuts — unshelled.

I was pretty happy with myself when I made it back to my seat with at least one shoe and a foam finger that said “we’re #4.” Problem was, the baby on the pitcher’s mound was fooling all the batters on the home team with his dribble ball, and I was getting worried the octopus wouldn’t be needed.

After twenty-four innings, it looked like the tables might turn. Slammin’ Sammy Magoo drew a walk on eight straight pitches, and I thought maybe the baby needed a nap or his bah-bah.

Turned out it was a con job.

As soon as Sammy took his lead off the first-base beanbag chair, the horned-monster playing second opened its jowls and swallowed him whole. I was outraged, but fair is fair. Although, I’m pretty sure I saw that cocky fucking baby wink at the girl that would’ve been my girlfriend if a lot of things had happened differently or at all.

I don’t bite my nails anymore, maybe you’ve heard. Instead, nervous as I was, I freed the peanuts from their casing and gnawed on the shells. I couldn’t breathe, and I wasn’t sure if it was because the peanut pile was moving past my neck, or because the corporation that sponsored the seats in the left field had gone belly up and demolished the grandstand in the thirty-second inning with those poor bastards still sitting there. I was down the third-base line, obviously, but now the whole ballpark was filled with dust and screams.

People were losing their shit. The Commissioner himself had to bring out the nine-fingered glove worn by Digits Donaldson during the epic Series to End All Series. That pretty much restored order.

My father passed away sometime before the thirty-seventh-inning-stretch, which was a disappointment because I can’t drive stick and we were in his truck. We had a small funeral near the cotton-candy machine. Many of the people in our section came for a minute or two, but they left again after they got their cotton candy.

The crowd roared when the baby turned two-years-old and was thereby ineligible to continue pitching. We were all thinking the same thing: octopus time, and are those the good Russians or the bad ones?

They were the good ones, so the teams put their broken bats away and continued the game.

Unfortunately, the octopus didn’t crawl in from the bullpen.

Instead, the hot dog vendor changed uniforms and became the new ace. It was a true rags-to-riches story, played out in about twelve minutes, so the crowd cheered and someone made a movie that won all the awards a few innings later.

I didn’t pay to see it on the jumbotron. I was here for two things and two things only: peanut shells and the octopus. And it looked like I was running low on shells.

JAMES WADE lives in Austin, Texas, where he writes fiction for his wife and two dogs. His wife is encouraging, but the dogs remain unimpressed. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Skylark Review, Bartleby Snopes, After the Pause, Potluck Magazine, Through the Gaps, Yellow Chair Review, Typehouse Magazine, and The J.J. Outré Review. Visit him at www.jameswadewriter.com