My parents named me Bruce Willis, but I don’t think they like his movies. I’m not sure they knew what they were doing. Bruce Willis, the star and hero. But I’m not even close to that.

The name does nothing to prevent bullies from jabbing sharpened pencils into my stomach or hawking loogies into my milk cartons. Bullies know nothing of the real Bruce Willis, the guy who saved his wife’s company from heavily armed thugs in his bare feet.

But my teachers know and laugh about it. Too bad my grades do not benefit from my association with a guy who won a couple Emmys and donates time and money to foster care programs.

Bruce Willis wasn’t held back a grade. Bruce Willis doesn’t have trouble saying three-syllable words. Bruce Willis didn’t get a detention when he wrote, “Now I have a machine gun, ho-ho-ho.” But I did. Me, the impostor Bruce Willis, scribbling it on a math test I barely passed.

My parents don’t watch movies, so they don’t understand. They wonder where I get this stuff, all these lines I hear Bruce Willis say and then repeat. They also wonder why I have no friends. Well, that’s easy to answer. I have mom’s cheeks and dad’s eyebrows and grandpa’s nose. But I have Bruce Willis’ name. It’s the one thing that matters.

I’ve seen all of his movies. When Bruce Willis saves the day, I am there along with him, the hero. When Bruce Willis kisses the girl, I kiss the girl, too, and feel it in my heart. When Bruce Willis saves earth from an asteroid, I share in his sacrifice and know warmth I never thought possible.

Last week I shaved my head like the real Bruce Willis, but no girls like me like they do the real Bruce Willis. Dad says I look like a sick boy, a boy who is about to die. Sometimes dad understands.

School holds a ceremony the day I pass the eighth grade and can finally move on to high school. I am older than all the students, but I’m still smaller and weaker. The principal announces my name in front of all the other students and their parents. For a second, I am like the real Bruce Willis, people I don’t know looking at me and clapping. But really I think the looking and clapping is for the real Bruce Willis, not for me, the fake one.

I spend the summer between eighth and ninth grade in the basement. The real Bruce Willis spends it with his family, probably in New York or Los Angeles. Maybe he cooks them lunch or listens to one of his kids play the piano. Bruce Willis, the singer and musician. Bruce Willis is many people all rolled into one, and I am nothing all rolled into nobody. But nothing lasts forever. One day they’ll forget about the real Bruce Willis. And I’ll be there, ready to take his spot.

__________________________________________________

Ryan P. Kennedy eats shit and dies.

Tardigrades could have taken over world, I thought. And we wouldn’t even know it.

I learned about tardigrades from the internet on a sad winter morning in my apartment. They were microscopic segmented animals with eight legs and tiny feet. Their feet were supposed to look like bear claws. That’s why they were also called water bears. Water bears were plump and they ambled like a bear too, which was why some scientists thought they were cute.

Sometimes when I felt lonely or disconnected, I needed to think about animals.  I felt like they knew something I didn’t and if I thought about them I could learn a piece of it. After awhile l would get distracted by the world and forget the other animals were even a part of it, much less keepers of life’s secrets.

I was admiring water bears on my computer. At first they were horrific photographed under the microscope, like space parasites. In fact, scientists have launched them into space. They lived. They were the only animals that have been able to do this, according to the internet. I wondered how many animals have been launched. Water bears were tough, the internet said, in extreme heat, cold or pressure. They could extend their life to over 120 years by hunkering down in a tiny shell-like a cuticle to reverse their metabolism. They would shut down all of their body’s processes and go into a hibernation that resembles death only to wake up later, under different circumstances. I had often wanted to do that. Sleep through the bad times and wake up to epiphany.

After awhile I understood why people found them cute, even if they didn’t have any eyes.

Water bears lived all over the world, even tall mountains and deep sea trenches. I put on clothes and went out to find some. I will take them home, I thought, and we will share my apartment. They won’t be my pets. We will just live together.

I didn’t have a microscope or slides. Out on the sidewalk, I realized I would probably need a microscope if I wanted to see anything but the hunt felt too important to just give up on because of a missing tool.  I wanted to keep feeling like something was important to me.

There was a park not far from my house, near the art museum. Water bears liked moss and other wet areas. I figured the park was a good place for moss.

Lately I had been walking everywhere in alleys, to avoid running into people. This time I walked on the street like a normal person.

It rained a little on my way to the park. I was cold but things were okay, better than normal in fact because I had a purpose.

A water bear could survive in any temperature. I thought the rain would make them more active. I imagined living with a tiny animal that had been asleep since before I was born.  I pictured myself talking to him beneath the lamp next to my bed. Nodding as if he had said something very intelligent in response.

The park was a popular place to walk dogs. I didn’t go there very often because I didn’t have a dog.  I lived alone. My ex-girlfriend used to live with me and she had always wanted a dog. I thought we weren’t responsible enough. Whenever we walked anywhere, she had to stop and pet every dog we passed.  I didn’t understand it then, but now I realize it was just her way of trying to feel connected. It was her version of thinking about animals.

I wonder why I have not mentioned my girlfriend earlier. It is maybe because she was no longer my girlfriend, but I doubt that is why. It has never stopped me before. I had been trying not to think about her. I had been trying to think about bigger things, smaller things, life, things like tardigrades.

I was thinking about all these things and not about where I was walking, not about where my feet were hitting the earth, when I stepped in dogshit. I didn’t know that I had stepped in dogshit at first, but I had stepped in a fresh pile of wet green muck. I just walked around with the odor in my nostrils, looking for water bears, and thinking the world smelled like shit. Trying to pretend it was beautiful.

I was at the bottom of a stone staircase, near the outhouses and the fence behind the museum’s sculpture garden. I was scooping moss into a plastic bag. There was dogshit on my shoe and smeared up my dirty white sock, but I still didn’t know it. There was dogshit on the cuff of my pants, too. When I squatted down to scoop up the moss (and hopefully water bears), my thigh touched my heal and it spread up the back of my pants. I was marked with shit and scooping wet moss into a plastic bag. In my head, I imagined people that walked past might think I am a scientist, or at least an artist collecting materials. I would have settle for being an artist.

The tardigrades were waking up in there, I thought. I was holding a bag full of tiny resurrections.

I headed back toward the house. As I walked past the sculpture garden, I saw a girl in blue puff-ball hat. She looked like my ex-girlfriend and was walking a dog. At first I thought it was her and I panicked because she was right in front of me and there was no escape. Then we made eye contact for a second and I saw it was not her, but a stranger. I had already started to wave though, I guess in an attempt to seem natural. The girl’s dog pulled ahead of her. He was thrilled to see me and began licking my leg like it was covered in honey.  The girl made a face like I was a giant boil that had just exploded and her dog was now feasting on.  She pulled the dog off me and hurried away, kind of squeaking. That was when I looked down and realized I had gotten myself covered in shit. I sniffed the air for some reason, like I was trying to make sure I had the right odor. The shit was dark green and wet and didn’t look all that different from the moss I was carrying around with me in a plastic bag. I put my head down and made for the alleys.

As I was walking, almost scurrying, with my sack of moss and tardigrades held close, I began to think about soil, dirt, the earth itself. I wondered how much of it was made of excrement. A lot of it, I imagined. Maybe all of it contains some kind of excrement, I thought, from some bug or bird or bacteria. I decided to look this up online after I got home and cleaned myself up.  I thought about all the possible pieces of earth my foot could have landed on. How many of those pieces contained water bears? How many contained excrement particles? How much was just gravel or rock? And how many were piles of hot green sludge at the end of a recent pass through the body of dog? The whole world felt unlikely. Why should I step anywhere, let alone in this one place where a dog just relieved itself? Somehow it was this thought that did it, not the microscopic animals in my baggy or anything I learned on the internet that day. It was this thought about landing in fresh shit instead of landing in nothing that made me feel reconnected. I considered getting a dog.

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Hunting Water Bears first appeared in the collection, Tell God I Don’t Exist, released in May 2013 from Underrated Animals Press.

Timmy Reed is a writer from Baltimore, MD. He has recently published or has stories forthcoming from a number of places including Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Everyday Genius, The Chaffey Review, and Sadcore Dadwave. He edits the What Lit section for What Weekly magazine and recently published a book of short stories called Tell God I Don’t Exist. Learn more at: http://underratedanimals.wordpress.com/tell-god-i-dont-exist/

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Alyssa Berg was raised in the Great Northwest and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her comics have appeared in Smoke Signal, Comics Workbook and are updated regularly at alyssa-berg.tumblr.com

seeing as I am here 
I can explain the little noise 
from my legspaces 
 
but he didn’t explain
and my father didn’t care
lifted him out of the box
mailed by the government
said he was happy
a hero for the family 
even if he couldn’t remember
his son’s original name

a lot of soldiers lost their names
like my brother

our mother went screaming
painted the house red
the neighbors let her
the five that remained
during the foreclosure wave
blood houses were misunderstood
a photographer with a blog said
something about quiet canaries
and took pictures of my mother
with red paint on the grass
then sidewalk
then grass until curb

I said, I guess I have a brother now 
he lost his name then limbs 
because of insurgents  
he said, I hear that story a lot now 
 
wanna take a picture of him? 
nah, just the house, the paint 
 
cool, I’ll check out your blog sometime 
nice, I’m on twitter too 
cool, 

my father inside our blood house
with my brother in a box
watched highlights on SportsCenter
I thought they would have made
a beautiful advertisement

__________________________________________________

Chad Redden can be found at lablablabs.net.

My Heart

after Kim Addonizio

That backhoe digging up an abandoned burial ground.

That anchor skittering along the ocean floor.

That clock on the dusty mantle five minutes too slow.

That cupcake with all the icing licked off.

That telephone in the empty cubicle that will not stop ringing.

The ice in your glass, already melted. The raccoon rooting through

your garbage can every night for a week.

That run in your stockings.  That chip in your front tooth.

The intermittent WiFi signal at Starbucks.

That waitress with the bouffant hairdo always calling you “hon.”

That library book you keep forgetting to return.

The dirty welcome mat you wipe your feet on every time you come home.

Coming Home

I.

My father accuses me of cutting the daffodils

horizontally, yet another demonstration of my

inability to accept criticism. This fear of loss

is completely warranted: never once in my life

did he bring my mother flowers.

II.

The need to be right is constantly called into account:

the silverware drawer is always arranged just so -

in other words, not conscious.

III.

Like any daughter, I look for what is true:

a wooden swing set in the back yard, finger

paint masterpieces on the refrigerator. Their

wedding portrait is face down on my nightstand.

__________________________________________________

Alexandra Smyth lives in Brooklyn, NY. She is a MFA in Creative Writing candidate at the City College of New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in District Lines, Miposesias, Scapegoat Review, and Word Riot, among others. She is the recipient of the 2013 Jerome Lowell Dejur Prize in Poetry.

__________________________________________________

Leanne Benson is a  a freelance photographer in London, England. Documentary and environmental portraiture are her favourite types of photography to shoot and to admire. Her blog is here: http://binskyphotography.tumblr.com/

After their birthday party finally ended, Timmy and Tammy flopped down on their respective beds in the room they shared, totally wiped out. Today, they turned ten.

“I wish we had different birthdays,” said Tammy. “Then one of us could sneak off for a nap if we needed to.”

Timmy exhaled, a long, burdened breath. “Yeah,” he said. “Being twins is a lot of work.”

Tammy slipped off her bed. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she sifted through their collective gifts, putting his in one pile and hers in another. Timmy looked on blankly. After she’d finished, she stared at the piles with careful consideration. Timmy’s pile was, color-wise, mostly greys and blues. He’d gotten blocks, action figures, some sports stuff. Her pile was rosy, all pinks and yellows. It consisted largely of fabrics and cheap, fake jewelry.

“I don’t see why I always have to be the girl,” said Tammy.

Timmy frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I always have to be the girl, and I don’t see why. As long as one of us is a girl and one is a boy, everyone should be happy. Why can’t you be the girl sometimes and I can be the boy?”

Timmy looked confused. “I don’t want your silly dresses to play with.”

“But wouldn’t it be nice to have mom and dad treat you like they treat me?”

“What way is that?” Timmy sounded defensive.

“Like you’re not a lot of trouble just waiting to happen.”

Timmy frowned.

“Well, I suppose there’s no harm in it.”

*

The next day after school, Tammy and Timmy sat in their room, silently untangling the day. Timmy had felt uncomfortable as a girl when the day began, and he still did; but there were also some things about it he enjoyed. He’d never noticed, for instance, the way he’d been expected to seem uninterested as a boy. He’d gone in today with the same blank expression he’d learned to wear, but it didn’t work. The teachers looked at him worriedly, asked him questions, tried to make him laugh. Eventually, he did, and once the smile broke over his face, he kept it there. If he giggled or said “aw” at a picture of a cat – which he always wanted to do – no one laughed or called him a sissy. It was freeing, being able to act happy.

Tammy, still a boy, sat where she had sat the day before. Again she sorted the toys. She was methodical, careful. This time, she sorted them by size, then by usefulness, then by hue and tone, from light yellow to dark blue. She found sitting a bit more difficult – cumbersome, bulky. But her hair was cropped short, and she didn’t have to worry about it falling in her face constantly.

“I like being a boy,” she said. She’d had a clearer sense of what it was she wanted out of the arrangement, and she’d gotten it in spades that day. She slouched. She joked. She rolled her eyes. When she raised her hand, the teachers listened.

“Well, I’m glad you like it,” said Timmy, “But I want to be the boy tomorrow.”

“Don’t you like it? Being a girl?”

“Sort of. I’m not sure I guess. I mean, it’s OK, but maybe not all the time.”

For all its perks, being a girl was still tough for Timmy. He didn’t like having to sit properly, and sometimes he wished he could just look bored without someone being worried. But more than that, he was afraid he might forget what was OK to do and when if he spent too much time like this. If he cooed at a kitten as a boy, he’d never live it down.

“Well, alright then. Tomorrow you can be the boy,” said Tammy, relenting.

“Thanks, sis.”

Tammy wiped her nose on her arm.

*

It was the evening of their fifteenth birthday, and the twins sat out on the porch, sneaking a cigarette.

“I don’t see why I have to be Timmy just because I’m a boy.”

Timmy frowned.

“Well, Timmy is the boy,” said Timmy, pushing her hair from her eyes. “There’s a boy, Timmy, and a girl, Tammy. At least to everyone else.”

“No. Timmy is you,” said Tammy. “I was born Tammy, and I’m Tammy now. Why should I have to pretend to be you just because I’m being a boy?”

“I thought I was born Tammy.”

“Shut up, Timmy.”

“I’m fairly sure of it, actually.”

Tammy was silent.

“You were born a girl too,” said Timmy. “But you didn’t want to be stuck with it. Why should your name be any different?”

“Because it’s my identity. Being a girl isn’t.”

“Your name isn’t your identity either,” said Timmy.

“Than what is?”

Timmy put the cigarette out in the can, and they sat together in silence for a long while.

That night, while Timmy slept, Tammy sat on the floor of her room, sorting her gifts from her brother’s. In one pile, she put the things she liked best: a blue sundress, a video game, a set of free weights. She liked the clutch her aunt had gotten her, but she saved it for Timmy, having seen his eyes light up when he opened it.

__________________________________________________

Nathaniel K. Miller is a writer based in Philadelphia. His work has been published in Theurgy Magazine, Mad Scientist Journal, and the IEET. He is co-editor of Pravic magazine.

UNTITLED ONE

I’m looking in the wrong places again.

The creek was perfect today

ice sheets held above running waters six inches below,

the pond’s surface melted green clear to brown.

And now the slanted earth pulsing up ever

so slowly into heavy clouds not caring,

and a fog thin sunlight amidst them

caring even less. Trees tipped white,

being on this borrowed earth with

a body of windows, everywhere.

UNTITLED TWO

Striking happiness. The stars

after midnight mid winter

saving everything. Stumbling

through ordinary brokenness

planes so low overhead

sometimes the earth is trembling.

Days where nothing matters

and then finally

days where nothing matters,

the clouds extending perfectly.

UNTITLED THREE

Working on yet another dog house,

another puppy, sun’s up after a fog filled morning.

I could ask the big questions, make my confessions,

or I could clasp the handcuffs of normal things tighter to me-

the truck’s still not fixed, when I called finally

the mechanic said this week he’d be busy

getting a vasectomy. I don’t know anymore

if I care, this talent hounding me. Turning on soft music

and letting words say simple things. The chickens pecking,

my hair still not cut, the man chopping with an ax

at the ice. Ice surrounding our cabin pushing at the foundation.

From places that stay always in the shade.

And then the mud everywhere else

sinking each step by small degrees, such a revelation

to have abundant moisture, and deep down

the ground’s still freezing.

__________________________________________________

Liat Mayer lives on a mountain in Colorado. Her poetry has appeared in Gangs Love You and Molochide Templon, and will appear in the forthcoming Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry.

Hood: Index 3 

“Damn, I need a minute/Aight, let go/She fell in love/It fell apart/Aight, let go”- Chance The Rapper, “Lost”, Acid Rap

Sometimes you just wanted to be the baddest bitch in a two dollar pair of Beauty Mart chancletas, rocking a fresh tip set and a perfectly combed doobie. You wanted to fit into the hood easy: no designer nothing, all Conway everything, with attitude that could sail your ass back to the island your family ran from. Sometimes, after trying to buy the right kind of hip hugging pants but always ended up with your ass-crack out, you wished that your hips would spread like those coke bottle women. Instead, you are straight like a fucking pencil and your family calls you mauger and blaaaaack and you wonder why they hang on to the a so long. What does that a mean?

But that doesn’t matter yet. You just want to be bad. You want to be sexy despite not knowing what sex is and when it is explained to you, in detail in a middle school bathroom, you begin to retreat into your own sadness that you don’t yet know will be something you may never be able to escape.

Badness is hard. Like concrete hard. Like believing you have supernatural powers you slammed into a brick wall hard*. Like never having full access to your mother because her silence is too loud hard. Like losing your love in a man who promises to stay but doesn’t know how to keep his feet still hard.  Like the floor is never too far for a fall hard. Like every stone of life hard and you do not know how those who achieve the best levels of badness are all glass carafes with hairline cracks.

At night, when all grows quiet, even the hood sleeps. You are able to sit outside with your feet bare and your ass-crack slitting the bottom half of your body into two distinct parts. And you cuss out all the motherfuckers who laughed at you when your glasses slipped down your nose and off your face because, after reading a particularly resonant chapter of a Richard Wright book, you began to cry at the fact that the only people who understood you, who understood the complexities of being internal/external/visible/invisible were dead ones. You were still learning and it hurt the same way having learned does. And you cussed and cussed. Didn’t know curse words could descend on your heart like obeah. Didn’t know the island was in you enough to know what obeah was. But there you were, alone in the hood, growing up ugly, unable to perceive your own hurt as beauty, buying into a bunch of bullshit of how you should look that you’d wear long sleeved shirts on your head letting the sleeves dangle by your ears just so that you could be that Pantene girl once. Just once. Just once you wanted to have someone look at your spaced and bucked teeth and say, “Girl, them gaps tell stories. Will you share them?”

Let’s just say that throughout the universe there are innumerable versions of you. Let’s just say that you can be you can be you can be you can be you. All of those yous are ever so slightly different. And let’s say that in one universe, Hood: Index 3, there is a version of you that popped the chicken pill and your ass is thick and your hair is laid and Conway is fortunately the only store with polyester pants stretchy enough to fit over your curves. Let’s say, in Hood: Index 3, your family did not break into the lower middle class and the braces you got here, in Universe Prime, were not even a consideration. So you, version Hood: Index 3, had those gaps in your teeth and no chance to bridge them with cement and wires. Buck toothed and ashamed, still, even though you out there are so much more of what you here wants to be. But you both are essentially the same person: your hands are clumsy, your hearts beat broken, your expanse of emotions red circle around words like ashamed and embarrassed and fearful. Same person: you. Anyway, with all them gaps, you, in Hood: Index 3, smile even less than Universe Prime you does. Them gaps are so wide when you part your lips your friends say the distance between your two front teeth is long enough to require an airplane. Diaspora teeth. That’s what it is: diaspora gaps, teeth of travel.

The thing is, in Hood: Index 3, when your glasses slipped down your nose and off of your face because, after reading a particularly resonant chapter of a Richard Wright book, someone had their hand outstretched under your face. They caught your glasses and your tears slipped between the spaces of their fingers. And when you realized that you hadn’t heard your glasses hit the floor of the school bus, you looked up to see that someone looking at you with a smile. Their teeth? Diaspora gaps just like yours. You smiled too and said, “Where did your family run from for you to get gaps like that?”

*Listen to Gumboots. Yeah, Paul Simon.

__________________________________________________

Ann Hackett lives in New York.

Joselia Hughes is a writer, MFA candidate, feeble internet presence at twitter.com/joselia_hughes, Leo sun with an Aquarius rising, and cross borough extraordinaire.

In 1999, millions of people were numbly freaked out about how many people liked their Facebook status. No one was.

More than half of the people alive today grew up without the Internet. In twenty years, that number will have crumbled to a third of people alive. In another twenty years, they’ll be ebbing out of existence.

Human minds are different than they used to be. A little more digital, a little more uniform. Conditioned by digital progress.

Maybe it was easier for those before to learn how to listen to a record – listen to it. Sit down with back against your bed’s side and listen because it is what you are doing. No tweeting shit. No “friend” comments on your current Spotify selection. Boredom, maybe, but no sharing.

You had to experience your picnic as your moment. Not the Internet’s. Or let that moment experience you. Or at least think about such things. You almost had no choice. Maybe you completely had no choice. I wasn’t there.

No one thought boredom is missable. But it is.

Enduring nature a mere subject for smartphonetography. You may not live-tweet but you live-text. You can be a sentient profile if you aren’t careful.

Have you forgotten that you’re forgetting?

__________________________________________________

Ben Sherman is a writer, political blogger, New Yorker, and Texan.