They began on the porch.  My daughter saw them first and she said they came in all sizes and they were goats, but my son said no they were deer, perfectly formed deer who had come in from the forests and their coats were immaculately clean pelts of Irish setters but they were certainly not dogs, and I wondered what happened to my son’s and daughter’s eyes, because I could see they were horses, and possibly Egyptian animal deities of revenge and resurrection, and I wondered why these live statues had settled here on our porch in days and nights of dark war in far continents, live gods in our house in 1942 when our people were also contending; and while we were descending the porch the animals we just spotted vanished yet we were all now in the sloping fields, family and many more animals or maybe deities, and we were walking slowly up these meadows of grass and wildflowers, and I was frightened, not of the still horses who were certainly figures of grace but of my own body, because suddenly they took all the juice out of me...

a story from the milennial Chronicles of Decatur

The seizures I'd been having wore down my neck muscles with stretching.  I was inside a living room, somewhere in an apartment I didn’t recognize other than smell, and my roommate, again alive, next to me on a couch.  Across from us another couch with an anorexic woman petting a large black dog.  The dog was over a hundred pounds and had gray hairs along its mouth.  Its hands resembled human hands, with long claw nails, them clear and gripping the side of the couch.  

The anorexic woman stared at us.

She said—I am an anorexic bitch.  Which one of you will fuck me—She said.

My roommate said—We didn’t come to fuck we came to watch you die.

She petted her dog, staring.

I want to show you what he can do—The anorexic bitch said.

She reached into the couch and retrieved a tennis ball and then threw the tennis ball on the ground, and the ground was see through, to the sidewalk below, eyeless fish swimming over and around dying plant life.  The large black dog got off the couch and lay by the tennis ball, chewing it.  

The anorexic bitch said—He does that for hours, it hypnotizes him.

Wise tales from this unparalleled chronicler of California's psyche, and ours.

            .........an excerpt from Memphis by Mike Golden

“There’s something about Memphis. . .” Wild Billy Hicks often said to Stein. “Something…after spending over half my life here, I understand, but have never been able to figure out how to explain.  I mean, what can you say about a city that refuses to take the confession of the man who claims he hired someone other than James Earl Ray to kill MLK, because – and They say this with a straight face -- They don’t want to give him credibility! ”

Paranoia bubbling, the two middle-aged men cautiously moved one step at a time across the unstable tar paper roof of the fabled rooming house that Ray supposedly shot Dr. King from 30-years earlier. A friend of Hicks had a store above the new addition to The Civil Rights Museum – a space that was once Jim’s Grill, the low rent dive where the assassination plot had been hatched -- so they climbed up a shaky handmade ladder through a homemade opening he had cut in his ceiling, and the next thing they knew they were looking down on the Lorraine Motel from a hundred times better angle than the alleged-assassin would've had from the bathroom two floors below them.

Hicks took a deep breath and looked at his old friend like he was trying to summon up explanations of their spent youth, then blurted, "What would you say, Jake, if I told you a reliable source claims Jack Ruby didn't die of cancer in 1967, like the government told us, and that he recently contacted her?”

The Banjo Man, standing at the bus stop, dyspeptic, sweet wine on his breath, growls and shakes his head from side to side, lamenting that his banjo has been stolen.  "It was my means of livelihood man," he says, unsentimentally, "it was more or less like when my mother died," and shrugs his shoulders, the rancid odor of sweet wine saturating the soft imprecations he breathes as he fumbles to roll a cigarette and the breeze keeps lifting up the dried tobacco flakes and carrying them off swirling away like the dead leaves in Dante, blowing down Shattuck.  The Banjo Man just shakes his head and appears sad and foolish. 

Don't worry/ Be happy: now there's an old standard we haven't heard for a while. The Fool on the Hill: now there's another.  The happy fool concept.  Does it still apply?

Garmentos

“Zev fucked everybody,” Ellen says. Our parents are dead, and my sister is the keeper of the family lore, the juicier the better. We like being Jews who lack propriety, the kind you would want to ban from your society. You want a Jew to back away from? We’ll be your Jews. So when Ellen evokes Zev’s exploits, we feel a sense of family pride.

Uncle Zev had a gleaming smile and wavy black hair, and when I was a little girl, a little temptress, he said, “You will drive boys wild.” He was the Bill Clinton of furriers, an equal opportunity womanizer.

“Zev fucked Bell,” Ellen says. She means our mother’s younger sister. My sister and I are in Starbucks, and Ellen leans close. Aunt Bell was tan and wiry, thinner than our mother. In the Long Beach years, Toby packed on a little padding, but never Bell. She was a stringy, tendony thing you’d have to pull from your teeth if you ate her. Her mouth must have watered when Zev flashed his Clark Gable smile.

Read Sharon Mesmer's stories A Promise of Carapace and Ruin

Excerpt from "A Promise of Caprice"

From the undifferentiated chaos of his bottom drawer porn collection came “Total Babe.”  No real woman had all the things he required, so from the tinsels of tits, cunts, clits, and tongues cut from Penthouse  he’d constructed a kind of human Christmas tree, his beacon through the cold winter woods of Ordinary Girlhood. 

    The average man is not what he used to be.  At first, he thinks this is normal.  The average is a function of time and one can reasonably expect to remain average only for so long.  In history’s current predicament the average man is slightly past his prime.  He is fully aware of it.  There is age and decay to consider.  Yet when the average man wakes on a spring morning in a wet season his thought is this: I am not what I used to be.

It was past two o’clock in the morning. The letters on the keyboard were blurred. Her carpal tunnel was aching. Monkey-mind gone wild.

I gently held Angie's wrist while she tied a lavender, paisley neck tie around her upper arm, slapping and waiting for a vein to emerge.  Our eyes never left each other's, and when that vein bulged she found my soul with her gaze…then I stuck that needle in, soft and slow, pressing the plunger full of Mexican Mud into her irises.

9:11 AM

The two cleaning ladies describe,

    You workers, nasty.  Uh huh, take a dump at the drop of a
    dime.  Now I bag the little turds up.  I put them on my
    boss’s desk so he knows I’m not bullshitting.  I get ten
    dollars a bag.