No-Name Bingo Club by Marissa Rose Named for want of anonymity or lack of creativity, it’s anyone’s guess— dead nights and a vacant parking lot both transformed by that institution setting up snap-leg folding tables in an old store-front, Sunday nights in town. Not holy enough for night church? Pay your looseleaf dollars and unfold your chair among the long, brown rows. It was not a brotherhood— the prizes were canned peas or a bus pass— but a queer girl could do worse, stamping daubers the color of road vests over a grid that looked the same each time you played. You could feel lucky when luck was doled out evenly between you and the octogenarians, and if the numbers didn’t jag in stair-steps toward your favor, at least they never tried to save your soul. It went the way most places went: there, and then not. The town did not spin off its axis, or even, after a time, recall what the paneled walls once held....
Flying Island is the Online Literary Journal of the Indiana Writers Center, accepting submissions from Midwest residents and those with significant ties to the Midwest.