Flying Island

    Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 1.22 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! We have two contributors in poetry. We hope you enjoy this issue. Get your submissions ready! February is a fee-free submissions month for Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Fiction. Looking forward to reading your work! Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors & Readers POETRY Shari Wagner, "The House of Juliet" Norbert Krapf,  "Sidewalk Cracks" Follow us! Twitter: @JournalFlying Instagram: @flyingislandjournal Are you a writer who is from the Midwest or has close ties to the Midwest? We'd love to read your work. Submissions info in the tab above.  Support the Indiana Writers Center!

TW: suicide           Here's the thing you need to know. It’s a blistering cold night in January and my daddy is dead. I know it must be true because Brother Sixteen-Ounces told us. His real name is Brother Ernest Pound and he’s our preacher. When he arrived at church last year Larry laughed and said, “That’s sixteen ounces. You know, sixteen ounces in a pound? Get it?” So, all the church kids call him “Sixteen-Ounces.” Anyway, he wouldn’t lie. *** We had just finished eating the hamburgers Mommy made for her first boyfriend since the  D-I-V-O-R-C-E.  Jim said he’d help clear the table if Larry, my brother, would find the deck of cards. He taught us gin rummy a couple weeks before, and now the four of us play almost every night. Tonight, I think I hear a soft knock at the door. “Hey Emmie, how about I shuffle, and you can deal,” Jim says.  I agree because I like his handsome smile. “Me and Mommy are a team and you and Lar...

When Mitch texted Gabe that he was flying into New York on business, and that he was bringing along an enthusiastic companion who’d never been east of Lake Tahoe, and that the only night he was free was tomorrow night, it felt to Gabe like they were once again in cahoots. “Door’s always open,” Gabe wrote in his return text, along with his address, to which Mitch responded with a photo of the Stanley Cup, held aloft by an ecstatic player with the shit-eating grin of none other than Mitch. Gina came home and peed and Gabe told her about Mitch. Gina on the bowl said, “You did that?” Was it failure, he thought, to remain loyal when it was so much easier to let time and distance silently dissolve their bond? It was not, he should have said. If Mitch transformed into an orange hazard cone after dark, that was his right. Shocking it wasn’t that a man of Mitch’s rakishness was predisposed to collect women for whom his atavistic drunken boastfulness was like the beckoning of a king for his hare...

Drink #1 — Moscow Mule   The bartender at the Downstairs Pub appeared automatically, the way bartenders, it would seem, are wont to do.   Edward McGuire—Eddie for short, if you want to start keeping score (although by the end of the night there isn’t a scorebook in the world that’s going to be worth half as much as the ink and paper it’s printed on)—draped his waxed lambskin leather jacket over the barstool seatback, ordered a Moscow Mule, and settled in for the long haul.   The polyurethane on the plank stool was reduced to a paper-thin coat. The raw plank was rough on his backside. The smooth bolts in each corner of the chair weren’t so smooth without the varnish, as it turned out, and it was the little things about this day—like the worn barstools at the Downstairs Pub—that slowly gnawed at Eddie’s usually cool resolve.   And it was the big things too. It’s just that, without all these little things peppered throughout the day, the big ones might be let off the ho...