Crusading, by Thea Zimmer

Find one, a reckless blond, glamorous, by antiquated standards, somewhere in-between the old south, the 1950′s

Sit in two to three joints worth of haze, a cabin’s roll-out bed, watch Beavis & Butt-head, your giggles, his grunts

Reach over, finger it: the blondish-gray hair, curling damply round his neck, uncannily familiar

Catch the winks, the slight wheeze, the absent-minded groin-scratching, the leer, off-kilter, testosterone kicking in on its own

Take his pill, designed for forgetting…

Metaphysical, you swirl and warp, rushing in on the waves, on top of him, exposed, a rhythm, a sensation, never never before, his moans, inseparable, his eyes roll around, his words way too soon

Get the fuck off!

Walk for miles toward the sea, the dying sun, lie on sand, falling prey to crabs and other crawlies, creep through bramble, bloodied up to the knees

Wander lost, the empty highway, a city girl, in a see-through gown

*

Thea Zimmer’s fiction has appeared in several online and print publications.  Most recently, she’s been promoting her all-digital interactive narrative “Cake it!” found on both on the Fringe and Infinity’s Kitchen sites.  She lives in Hollywood, FL, and works as a freelance writer/editor/translator.  She very frequently finds her more “traditional” linear fiction placed in the “outsider” category, which is both intriguing and maddening to her.

The Scent of My Dreams, by Holly Day

I spend my day in front of the phone, pretending I’m not waiting for
your call. The phone is close enough to the refrigerator, and the
television, that I can play this game for hours and no one would suspect a
thing. The phone is a looming angry instrument of pain in the living room
and I’m only in the same room with it because I may want a sandwich or watch
TV sometime today.

I spend my day sitting by the window, watching for your car through
the thin lace drapes. There are things in my apartment that belong to you,
and you may want to drop by unexpectedly to retrieve them. A blue-handled
toothbrush. Two pairs of socks. The underwear that you looked around for but
couldn’t find because they were wrapped up in the sheets at the bottom of
the bed. The cheap novel you picked up at the airport to read while you
waited for my plane to come in. These things all mean something to me, so
surely they must mean something to you.

I sit by the phone and the window and wait, the sun sinks below the
horizon, comes up again, no, it’s just a dream of solitude. I check the
clock and it’s been only a few hours, so it’s okay that I’m still sitting
here. I’ve only been sitting here for a few hours of one day, so I’m not
sad, pathetic, delusional, crazy. Anybody sitting in the same room with me
would probably think me meditative, contemplative, but not pitiful. I turn
the television on so that if anyone was to come in here, they’d think I was
just watching TV.

I close my eyes and wish desperately I was an insect, some tiny dust
mite that lived in your hair, your scalp, your ear. I could be with you all
the time, and you would never know it.  I would be so innocuous that you
wouldn’t even know I was there, in your head, tucked under your waistband,
in your ear. I think about what it would be like be responsible for giving
you Lyme disease, bubonic plague, a bad case of crabs. These are the things
I dream about now, the thoughts I find comfort in.  I look out the window
for your car and wonder if you’re thinking about me.

*

Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her poetry has recently appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review, The Oxford American, and Slipstream. Her book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar-All-in-One for Dummies, and Music Theory for Dummies, which has recently been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese.

** Check out the audio version of The Scent of My Dreams, at MyAudioUniverse.com **