Dani Sandal
(dis) Connect

Dani Sandal - (dis) Connect

Fiction
Lately (2012 or forthcoming), you can read Dani Sandal in the Raleigh Review, Adirondack Review, New Orleans Review, Puerto del Sol, Monkeybicycle, Camroc Press, Mad Hatter's Review, PANK, Doctor T.J.… Read more »
Bill Snyder
Beep

Bill Snyder - Beep

Contest - 2nd Place
Bill Snyder has published in Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, Folio, Cottonwood, and Southern Humanities Review among others. He was the co-winner of the 2001 Grolier Poetry Prize, and the winner of the… Read more »
Mark Pritchard
Bullet in the Back

Mark Pritchard - Bullet in the Back

Contest - 3rd Place
Mark Pritchard is the author of two books of short stories, How I Adore You and Too Beautiful and Other Stories. His short fiction has been published by Crony, New Lit Salon, Fiction Attic, and… Read more »
Michelle Bracken
Eating Together

Michelle Bracken - Eating Together

Creative Nonfiction
Michelle Bracken is a fiction candidate in the MFA program at California State University, San Bernardino. Her work has appeared in Litro Magazine. Read more »
Mark Mitchell
Foreign Hand

Mark Mitchell - Foreign Hand

Poetry
Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock, and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty-five years as well as the… Read more »
Kate Wheeler
Hate It Here

Kate Wheeler - Hate It Here

Fiction
Kate Wheeler grew up in North Carolina among green things. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and her work has appeared in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading and The Westchester… Read more »
Daniel Enjay Wong
Heart of Glass

Daniel Enjay Wong - Heart of Glass

Fiction
Daniel Enjay Wong received his BA from Stanford University and plans to attend medical school. His stories have appeared in Tin House, PANK, Spork Press, Monkeybicycle, JMWW, and elsewhere. He lives… Read more »
Jane O. Wayne
If Mourning

Jane O. Wayne - If Mourning

Poetry
Jane O. Wayne is the author of four books of poetry, the latest of which is The Other Place You Live (Mayapple Press, 2010). A poem of hers along with an interview appeared in Catherine Rankovic’s… Read more »
Mitchell Untch
It’s Summer This Dream

Mitchell Untch - It’s Summer This Dream

Poetry
Mitchell Untch has been published in The Los Angeles Review, New Millennium Writers Contest, The Monadnock Anthology, Nimrod Intl., The Wisconsin Review, Out of Ours, Aurorean, The Unrorean… Read more »
Vickie Fang
My Last Chance

Vickie Fang - My Last Chance

Fiction
Vickie Fang is a reformed trial lawyer with a recent MFA degree. She is now writing full time and has completed a literary thriller about two antagonists from the Chinese Cultural Revolution who meet… Read more »
J.R. Tappenden
R is for Rhoda Consumed by a Fire

J.R. Tappenden - R is for Rhoda Consumed by a Fire

Poetry
J.R. Tappenden is the founding editor of Architrave Press. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Missouri – St. Louis where she also served as the university’s first Poet Laureate.… Read more »
Colleen Abel
Remake: The Kiss

Colleen Abel - Remake: The Kiss

Poetry
Colleen Abel is the author of Housewifery, a chapbook (dancing girl press, 2013). A former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow, her work has appeared in numerous venues including The Southern Review,… Read more »
Jennifer Givhan
Ritual With Fish Water

Jennifer Givhan - Ritual With Fish Water

Poetry
Jennifer Givhan was a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship recipient, as well as the 2013 DASH Literary Journal Poetry Prize winner, an… Read more »
Paige Towers
The Cooldown

Paige Towers - The Cooldown

Creative Nonfiction
Paige Towers earned her B.A. from the University of Iowa and her MFA from Emerson College, where she also taught Creative Writing and Composition. She currently lives in New York City, teaches in the… Read more »
William Black
The Pleasure Dome

William Black - The Pleasure Dome

Fiction
William Black's fiction and critical essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, Threepenny Review, Southern Review, The Sun, World Literature Today, Boulevard, and elsewhere. Read more »
Joanne M. Clarkson
The Stone Masons

Joanne M. Clarkson - The Stone Masons

Contest - 1st Place
Joanne M. Clarkson’s fourth poetry collection, Believing the Body, was published in 2014 by Gribble Press. She was awarded a 2014 GAP grant from Artist Trust to complete her next full-length volume.… Read more »
Stephanie Lenox
The Take This Job and Shove It Ode

Stephanie Lenox - The Take This Job and Shove It Ode

Poetry
Stephanie Lenox is the author of the poetry collection Congress of Strange People (Airlie Press) and the poetry chapbook The Heart That Lies Outside the Body (Slapering Hol Press). Poems from a… Read more »

The Pleasure Dome

William Black

Our father came home grumbling and smelling of motor oil, axle grease, and beer. He pushed past my brother and me as we tried to fit our fingers through his belt loops and wrap ourselves around his legs. We followed him to the bedroom, where he fell back onto the bed like a timber, and we each took a boot, unlaced it, and struggled to pull it off, our father saying, “Come on now, boys. Come on and pull like a couple of mules.” When we finally yanked them off, stumbling backward from the sudden release, there were his toes, dirty and unclipped, peeking through the holes in his socks, and we jumped on him, crashing down on his arms and chest, pinning him with everything we had, only to find ourselves somehow aloft, balanced in his huge hands, and then brought down on our backs, forefingers pressed fast to our sternums, both of us immobilized at once, held helpless and ticklish beyond belief. We half-laughed and half-screamed for our lives.

“So,” he said, his beery breath warm and close. “Have I earned a moment’s peace and quiet?”

“Yes yes yes!” Though we would have said anything to win our release.

He let us go and we stood. Our clothes, the bedspread, all smeared with his sweat and black grease, and our mother appeared in the doorway to usher us out, redirecting our attention to our chores.

I took the meat scraps our mother had set aside and fed the hound dogs in their chain-linked pen. My brother laid out clean clothes for our father when he was finished with his shower. Together we set the table and then took our seats to wait quietly, as we had been taught, for supper to be served.

When our father reappeared, he was clean-shaven and changed into the t-shirt and shorts my brother had laid out for him. His hair was wet and combed back off his face. He looked relaxed and restless at once, inspecting the table. When he saw no beer by his plate, he got one from the fridge. Our mother said she could not stop him from drinking, but she would not serve him either.

After supper, when our plates had been scraped clean and set in the dishwasher, our father poured bourbon over ice, and we were sent to our room. There, we could do anything we wanted until lights out. Mostly, we turned on the TV and waited for dark, and as it came, we leaned on our windowsill, looking out on the backyard, where our father sat in his folding chair, parked in the middle of the lawn, with a long view across the wooded valley and distant hills. Our father surveying the land. What would have been his land. Once his grandfather’s land, bought because someone someday would want the anthracite still buried under the valley floor. Then his father’s land, parceled out and sold before he left our father’s mother, cash being easier to hide from her lawyers.

Darkfall obliterated the view, and the lights of the Pleasure Dome came up. From the deepest spot in the valley, a pastel glow that lit the hazy air, coral pink, aquamarine, otherworldly colors hanging like aurora borealis above the black trees. Spotlights cut through the colors, sending white beams into the sky, illuminating the undersides of clouds, swiveling, crossing each other, separating again.

“The fall of man,” our father had told us about the Pleasure Dome, because he knew how we loved the lights. “The beginning of the end of things,” he said. Or in a different kind of mood, “The end of the end of things,” and the hound dogs started up, like warning sirens. Sending their mournful sounds across the nighttime valley to come back as echoes. Soon it would be lights out.

Once, our father took us there. “Want to see what those lights are all about?” he asked. We were all three crammed across the bench seat of his truck, and my brother and I bounced up and down with joy. Our father nodded and turned off the road home. He drove down the steep hills, along narrow two-lane roads we’d never seen before, all of it crowded by tall trees. The air smelled of the paper mill nearby. The river came into view, and along it, a stretch of three or four abandoned houses. Then woods again.

When we got there, the building was cinderblock, painted midnight blue and speckled with glittery stars. Across the front wall, THE PLEASURE DOME was written at an upward angle; behind the words, a comet-like tail stretching away into the cosmos. The door was huge and metal and red. And then we were inside. Five or six men sitting alone at their tables, wet-looking bottles of beer before them. Cigarette smoke hanging in the air. We knew what kind of men these were. Men who used to work in the mines, now men without jobs. We saw them everywhere in those days. Their hands were hard and heavy as stones and useless. They watched the woman doing her slow, sad dance. Above and below her, colored lights pulsed. Red, yellow, blue. Until someone told my father we weren’t allowed.

We waited outside, stretching ourselves to make human rocket ships that launched along the trajectory of THE PLEASURE DOME, traveling among the painted stars, making the sonic noises of spaceflight. Then growing bored and throwing pebbles from the driveway at the parking lot lights. Then throwing them at each other. Until our father appeared, ruddy-faced and a little unsteady.

We climbed into his truck. He asked, “Are you happy you saw it?”

“Yes!” we said, with enthusiasm, as though we hadn’t seen what we’d seen.

Back up the switchbacking roads, watching for glimpses of The Pleasure Dome through the trees, until we couldn’t see it anymore, and then it was dark and the lights came on. From here, they were even more awe-inspiring than from our bedroom window, the fuzzy pastel glow reaching through trees, until we were above it looking down, a spaceship landed in our valley. The spotlights like laser beams piercing the sky. We leaned our heads all the way back to see how high they went.

We pulled in the driveway at home, and the dogs went crazy with barking, their sounds urgent rather than mournful. Watch out, watch out! they cried. Danger is near!

Our mother was furious. She had fixed supper but had no one to feed the dogs or set the table or eat what she had made, and now it was ruined.

“Where have you been?” she wanted to know. “Where the hell have you been?”

We told her what our father had instructed us to tell her. “We have been to the end of the universe,” we said. “We have seen the end of everything.”

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