Welcome to issue twenty-two of Fiction Weekly. This Sunday, we're excited to showcase “Damaged Goods ” by Ryan Crider.

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Damaged Goods by Ryan Crider

       Kale took the Department of Corrections up on its offer of one month’s stay in a St. Louis treatment center, an alternative to sixty days in jail for violating his probation.  And then after he’d survived that month and was as cured as they could get him, he came back into Clofton and found his apartment as dirty and under-furnished as he’d left it.  The electricity was still off, as it had been most of the summer, and now the phone was dead, too.  Devon wasn’t there waiting for him.  She’d lost her game of chicken with a Burlington Northern train at the downtown crossing one bright July morning and now was tucked safely away in a shady plot at the back of the Odd Fellows Cemetery.  She wouldn’t have been waiting for him, anyway, not only because she wasn’t the waiting type, but also because she’d turned her attention towards first one of their old friends and then another.  And so far as Kale knew she’d never even heard he was gone or where he’d gone to.  Everything else was the same, though – spiders on the walls, no power, nothing in the cupboards.

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One Tough Cookie by Emily Spreng Lowery

     “This is your final warning,” Aunt Bethany told my mother. “Next time I find a stranger passed out on your bed, naked as a jaybird, Cory’s moving in with me. And that’s that.”

Mom and I were silent. My stomach lurched.

Aunt Bethany had been telling my mother for months to shape up: that when you had a fifth-grade boy at home, a weekly schedule that consisted of one night of heavy drinking, two days of recovery, and four overnight shifts as a mini-mart manager was not acceptable. I argued that mom usually called to make sure I brushed my teeth and did my homework – and she always kept us well stocked with Twix bars – but Aunt Bethany dismissed my protests with a frustrated sigh....

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Things of All Sizes by Max Fisher-Cohen

          I live with my mother.  My older brother is here too, but only since Thanksgiving, which was about three weeks ago. He was supposed to head back to D.C. a few days after the funeral. Mom won’t stop talking about how he should have gone back, he’s going to lose his job, on and on.  Me, I only work part-time, and I spend some time with my girlfriend, Ellen, but I also spend a lot of time at home watching TV, or with my mom....

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The Hardest Science by Michelle Reed

     I met Drew at an art show I catered for the students he taught at the university.  He asked me out, and I said yes because he seemed grounded, which I assumed made him a terrible artist, and because it had been a long time between offers.  I said yes because I was over thirty in a town that recycled 19-year-olds.  I was single with a café and no children, and so I said yes to breakfast in the afternoon.  We met at my café, and he drank black coffee and didn’t salt his eggs....

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Gavin & Gwen by Theo Patterson

     If the baby's a boy, I think I'll name him Gavin. It's kind of lame since I never heard that name before I listened to Bush. They’re a band. The lead singer's name is Gavin, Gavin Rossdale. He's a great singer, and he's really cute. He's married to Gwen Stefani. She’s a singer, too. They're both beautiful and rich, and they write great songs. I listened to this one song, "Glycerine," like ten thousand times. I used to listen to it every night. I'd put it on repeat and go to bed with my headphones on so I wouldn’t bother my mom. And don't get me started about "I'm just a girl." That's a Gwen Stefani song, a No Doubt song. It's like my anthem. I guess I’m just really into music. So, who knows? Maybe my baby will be a rock star. If it’s a girl, maybe I’ll name her Gwen, but I don’t really like that name. I think I might buy one of those baby naming books, just to see what other names there are.

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Memorial Day by Michael Bible

       A girl in a yellow dress twirled a small baton then blew her whistle and the parade began. Two black fire trucks followed the girl, sirens moaning. Next, on horseback rode twelve men with curling waxed mustaches dressed in stiff crimson robes and blue powdered wigs. Arabian satin with silver tassels draped the men’s calico horses. Behind them a drill team in wedding dresses started a maneuver, spinning rifles with fixed bayonets high into the sun, moving their veils aside to catch them. Behind the drill team nude chamber musicians played the 1812 overture. Then a long flatbed truck passed with schoolgirls reenacting Normandy. The front hatch of their duck boat squeaked up and down as the schoolgirls fell limp onto the sand, fake guns rattling, their pigtails flapping out beneath their helmets. Then came the animals. A small heard of buffalo painted white, lions and tigers pulling empty Amish buggies, black children riding drugged elephants, a dozen peacocks in full plumage roaming free.

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The Long Answer by Josh Canipe  

      I pulled that trigger on principle.  And that’s what I’ve been trying to tell everybody, but they don’t want to hear it.  Even Alyssa and Cynthia look at me with their eyebrows all arched, that heart-breaking look in their eyes, when I try to explain this.  Still, it’s true: sometimes a man has to fight to keep things from creeping into his life, from pecking at it until it’s nothing, even if those things are his neighbor’s chickens, which were trespassing on his property, and even if the cops show up twenty minutes later, guns drawn and bodies safely behind the doors of their cars, to confiscate his rifle.  That’s the image everyone in the world seems to have of me right now, thanks to Channel 6, Tabitha Adams reporting.  They see me as a man with a rifle, picking off chickens one by one out of fear....

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Where There is Rain  by  Anne Valente   

     A light rain pelts the bar-room windows, the glassy panes reflecting pairs of headlights as they cut through the evening fog outside.  The bar is dank, near-deserted save for two guys shooting pool in the corner, their FedEx uniforms still on after a long day of work.  Adrian and Nick sit at the bar, the only other two patrons in the entire place, and the 9 o’clock news hums on a television screen above their heads.  Adrian can hear the hollow clinking of billiard balls as Nick rambles on, waving a Miller Lite in one hand and an unfiltered Pall Mall in the other.  Adrian hates the smell of smoke, but he nods and listens anyway as Nick’s cigarette carves trails of white in the air, the tendrils escaping toward the ceiling.... 

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The Cigarette by Ajani Burrell

      A cloud blotted out the full moon. Across the courtyard the neighbor’s apartment one floor lower glowed like the crimson eye of a hearth oven. The pervasive damp-earth scent of Frankfurt in spring had disappeared. I was sure I could smell violets from the adjacent garden, vaguely resembling her perfume. She moved from room to room, long ebony hair dancing in her wake. I took a deep breath.

          “So,” my wife said. “How was the cigarette?”

“What?”

          Her fingertip caught a page’s edge in her book. “Real smooth, Charles.”

          “Oh,” I said. “It was fine.”

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The Bad Thing That Happens to Good People by Ellen Herbert

       It was the summer of the red eye pulsing from my dashboard. Whenever it appeared I had two minutes to pick up the long tube attached to the ignition, put its end in my mouth, and blow. Hard. Or else Arlington County would cause my Honda Civic to come to a stop and a probation officer named Chuck Corleone- yes, like the godfather- would give me a not so godly or fatherly summons to appear at the courthouse, the courthouse attached to the jailhouse.

            “Bing,” the eye announced itself one rainy afternoon just after we merged onto the beltway. We were coming from the sports camp on Braddock Road where we’d picked up seven year old Penny, who was riding shotgun....

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The Evolution of Tulips  by  Lauren Yaffe

   I start walking and my mind is blank, calm.  Suddenly I'm furious.  I remember an incident:  a woman holding the door as I entered a museum.  As I passed through and thanked her, she hissed, "I wasn't holding the door for you!"  I saw, then, another woman behind me, the person for whom the door was being held.  I continued in to the exhibit--oversized canvasses of complex flowers--but for me they were all a blur.  Minutes later, the woman who had hissed tapped me.  "Your rudeness is beyond belief," she said, and walked off.  This all happened a while ago, several years....

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Not Sally by Jen Gann

     Before we could begin the drive south to Dan’s mother’s funeral, before I mixed three homemade gin and tonics for myself, before I jutted my hips alone, in my dorm room, and packed, red-faced and frenzied, for a week of mourning with a family that wasn’t mine, Dan took his Greek exam.  He was studying Greek to translate the Bible.  He wanted to go to Divinity School after college.  He was, he said, interested in religion in an academic manner, one that made him talk about Christianity in a looming, abstract way—as though it was something distant and unfelt.  In his practicing life, he drank as much as any of us, lied when he had to, and did what he wanted.  We went to the same small, liberal arts college and we were friends, unexplainably, from nearly the start.  When his mother died, he didn’t mention God at all....

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Present Imperfect by Suzanne Samples

   Even though I knew how badly she had wanted to go, contacting the universities is not the most difficult of my duties. Using the past perfect tense is more difficult, especially because our past was far from perfect.

    Each story I make different, each excuse a bit more creative; present perfect makes more sense to me, even if it’s a lie. I bet that she would have never expected this level of creativity from me, her scientific-minded roommate who had never written anything other than lab reports....

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MONSTERS & VIRGINS by Chris Kammerud

      Bobby felt sure if Cindy caught him staring again that there’d be no going back, that she’d forever see him as a kind of mutant.  A giant, mucus-covered eyeball stuffed into a jacket and jeans, absurdly trying to pass himself off as a thirteen year-old boy.

      It was hard for Bobby to avoid her though, and therefore hard to avoid what he considered a shameful amount of staring.  They lived on the same street, rode the same bus, and shared three of the same classes: science, history, and gym.  Cindy was in the habit of wearing small, bright pieces of clothing – peach camisoles on top of sparkling cut-off khakis - and at school year’s start Bobby had made the mistake of watching her too closely, becoming mesmerized by some glitter on her thigh or shadow between her breasts.  Inevitably there were times she caught him, days in science when he stared too long at her bouncing foot and bared calf, days when she would roll her eyes and turn away with a frustrated, almost musical, sigh that brought Bobby a terrible delight all its own.  He suffered through a month of Cindy’s bittersweet reactions before adopting the art of teenage espionage, reducing himself to sideways glances over his shoulder or quick peeks from behind his locker door....

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Skin Fold by Alex Myers

     They never rested during rest hour.  Naps were for the junior campers, the little girls who cried with homesickness, who wore frilly pink suits to swim lessons, who adorned their arms with the lumpy macramé bracelets they made in arts and crafts. 

     But they were the senior campers, fourteen years old, and they never rested.  Their counselor, Beth, herded them back to the bunk after lunch – the heat of the day – waited until all twelve of them had lain down on their beds, grown quiet, before she left them, easing the screen door shut behind her.  A moment of stillness, heat, in which one of the girls, genuinely tired, might drift asleep, slipping instantly into a dream of home or flying, the brief twitch of eyelids before Michelle’s footsteps woke her....

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When I Saw Jimmy Coulston by Joseph Scott Celizic

   Before Anne and I broke up, before we took a thirty day break to pray about our future, and before I dreaded her phone calls that flowed like rain runoff into a gutter, her father got us tickets to a boxing match.  It was our first, and neither of us knew what to expect.  I had pictured a mob of Indianapolis’s upper class in a big arena, something similar to the Philadelphia ring in Rocky, but when we pulled up to the one-story Farm Bureau Building at the State Fairgrounds, I knew it would be something completely different....

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   In the beginning all I wanted was a normal life.

   Not that I had any experience in this matter. The only kind of life I knew how to lead was the twitchy, angst-ridden life of the overeducated. I'd had a revelation of sorts: the revelation that another year of sifting through art-history arcana, prowling the library archives and living on vending-machine food, would vault me straight past twitchy and into spasmodic. I wanted a change. I wanted a regular old job; I wanted to lay down my burden at 5:01 and say, perhaps aloud, “Another day, another dollar”; I wanted to move out of the intellectual ghetto. So that spring, I took an indefinite leave of absence from my doctoral program and moved into what seemed like a nice apartment on York Avenue...

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The Onion Was Me by Paul Michel  

     Not for the life of him would Elliott consider beginning a story like this:

     A man walked into the tavern where I was drinking and set a life-sized bust of John Wayne on the bar. 

     It’s not his style.  He’s come to accept that, for better or worse, he’s a straight-up domestic fiction guy; stories of hospital vigils and turgid summers at the lake house, coming of age conundrums and the jangling triangles of middle-aged romance.  He learned how to write these stories in graduate school, nearly twenty years ago.  He writes them still, late into the night, deep in his basement study, while his wife and two sons sleep in the house above... 

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SNIPPINGS by Dawn Abeita

          When the phone rang early on Christmas morning,  Calvin knew it would wake Kathryn.  He picked up the phone in the kitchen.  “That was Joelle,” he said a few minutes later when he appeared in the bedroom doorway.  “I thought you were still asleep.” 

“Well, she’s up early,” said Kathryn. 

“It’s not early there,” he said.  “Remember?”  Their daughter had moved to New York nearly a year ago and Kathryn was not adjusting to the time difference very well...

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   There is electricity in the city tonight and we fly through like two bats out of hell, breaking free.  We’re hyenas and vipers.  We laugh and snake and throw our weight around, and now as the Cadillac hits 85 and we’re rounding the turn, I can feel my balls drop.  This is what being a man feels like.

Tony screams, “Fuck yeah, Mikey, we’re flying.”  I keep my eyes on the road.  I want to see it as it disappears.  Night time, and the headlights cut two holes on the pavement and the dark in front of us.  The Caddy was just sitting there, in front of the Circle K, engine running.  I remembered what my older brother Freddy had said to me after his birthday before he left for college.  He said, “Hey Mikey, the one thing I regret is I didn’t do enough crazy shit when I was young.  Now that I’m 18, fuck, I have too much fun, it goes on my permanent record.”  I didn’t know what exactly he meant, so he laid it out to me as he smoked a cigarette and I watched on the back porch.  He said he’d never spray painted his name on any wall.  He said he’d never really gotten into a fight, or done something real crazy like stolen a car...            

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Torch Song  by  Dan Webre

          It’s coming up on three o’clock and I’m thinking about who’s got the best price on beer when Irv walks over to where I’m weeding the water garden.  I look up from my crouched position, one hand holding a dripping mass of hydrilla.

         “Jerry, I need you to make one more delivery today,” Irv says in his thick, Mediterranean accent.

I don’t actually know where Irv’s from.  We’ve never discussed it.  But then, he never asked me about a four-year gap in my employment history when I was applying for this job, so I don’t get too personal with him.

         Irv reaches out with two folded slips of paper as I dry my hands.  I read the address on the smaller piece of paper, 513 Clarence Rumpe Ave.  I couldn’t tell you where that is, but I recognize the name – the Rumpes were once very prominent in this area.  I look at Irv for a moment hoping for more information.  When he doesn’t offer any, I decide not to push him.  Irv’s got kind of a short fuse, and besides, I can check the map of Springdale I keep hidden in the truck once I get out of sight of the nursery – Irv considers maps a sign of weakness...

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A PATTERN OF CHAOS  by  Christopher Lowe

The ducks had come to eat his grass again, but this time Barrow was ready.  Squat little things, all brown, they made loud retching noises when their brown beaks weren’t filled with tufts of his perfect Malaysian Summer Grass.  Barrow, who sat behind his row of hedges, hose in hand, could see the Phillips boy leaving for school, a huge backpack hoisted up on his narrow shoulders. It seemed to Barrow to be too much weight for such a young boy...                                                         Click here for full text