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The Big Game, by Krystyna Fedosejevs

19/3/2022

“How would you like to go to a charity event?” Brynn asked Cheryl, his girlfriend.

She lifted her head from reading. “Okay, when is it and what is it?”

“A game two weeks from now. Proceeds go to summer camp for underprivileged children.”

Cheryl winced. “What kind of game?”

“Baseball!”

Cheryl’s over-the-moon disposition turned cloudy in an instant. “I don’t like baseball,” she huffed.

“Have you ever gone to a baseball game?”

“No.”

“Bet you’ll like it when you know the rules. I can give you a play-by-play at the game.”

“Great,” Cheryl managed without overly wrinkling her nose.

The day of the event, Brynn picked Cheryl up from her apartment. He grinned observing her walk to his car.

“No one wears high heels to a baseball game.”

“I do.”

They sat down in a crowd of highly animated fans. A popcorn vendor yelled out his offering climbing upstairs. A young woman did the same heading downwards with a tray of canned pop.

The game started. Spectators screeched at the top of their lungs, cheering on their favourite teams.

“Way to go, Steve!” Brynn yelled out, digging into his popcorn bag. “Man, can he run. Got home base.”

“Is Steve the guy with the cute smile?” Cheryl asked.

“They’re well into the first inning,” Brynn said. “My team’s winning.”

“What’s an inning?”

Brynn glanced down at her pulling a book out of her purse. “You really need to read? Game’s getting crazy exciting.”

“If you say,” Cheryl replied, opening her book. “You didn’t answer. Is an inning opposite to an outing?”

Brynn didn’t respond. His eyes were glued to the scene on the field. His mouth opened to let out more outbursts towards his favourite players.

“Why is the infield called a diamond when it is shaped square?”

“Shhhhhh!” Brynn scolded. “Oh-h-h-h, NO-O-O-O!”

Someone sitting behind them yelled out: “Not another foul ball!”

The game went on amid loud boos.

“Why is the ball foul?” Cheryl asked, tugging Brynn’s arm. “Shouldn’t they get a substitute?”

“What is it?” he snapped. “Can’t you see I’m watching? We’re almost at the 7th inning break.”

“Good.”

Brynn turned his head to the side “You want to take a short walk about before the game starts again?”

To his amazement, Cheryl was no longer sitting beside him on the bleacher.

The book ‘Baseball for Dummies’ took her seat instead.

Kick-Off, by James A. Tweedie

19/3/2022

The prison Warden stood up faster than a rocket leaving a launchpad, and if it weren’t for the law of gravity, he might well have shot himself into orbit.

“You can’t be serious!” he shouted as his jaw dropped in disbelief at what the Prison Commissioner had just proposed.

The Commissioner remained calm as he replied to the Warden’s outburst with a slight nod of his head.

“Football jerseys?” the Warden continued. “You want the prisoners to wear football jerseys?”

“Yes,” the Commissioner said calmly. “That’s what the Commission has decided.”

“But why?”

“We feel the current prison uniforms are demeaning and strip the prisoners of whatever dignity they have left. Football jerseys will give them a sense of purpose and make them feel as if they are on a team.”

“But the inmates will use the different team jerseys to mark each other as belonging to different gangs. There will be fights.”

“That won’t happen because all the jerseys will be the same color and represent the same team. This will promote a sense of unity—of actually being on the same team. Their prisoner number will be on the back.”

“And I suppose,” the Warden said—with his head slowly shaking back and forth and his eyes dripping with sarcasm and disdain—“that the prison guard will wear striped black and white shirts and be referees.”

“Yes, exactly,” the Commissioner answered, missing the sarcasm completely. “You will, of course, be the Head Referee and since there’s only one team, you’ll also be the Head Coach. Your administrative support staff will be designated as Assistant Coaches and your Case Managers and Counselors will be Umpires.”

“Let me guess,” the Warden said after letting the Commissioner’s words sink in. “The prison guards will be Field Judges and make sure the rules are enforced.”

“That’s the idea. They’ll be the only ones required to wear striped uniforms on a daily basis and will be the ones to call the penalties. But you and the Umpires will make the final decisions on each call.”

“Will there be red flags and whistles?”

“You already have whistles,” the Commissioner pointed out. “But I can’t say the Commission discussed the use of red flags. That’s an interesting idea. What do you think?”

“I think that you and all the rest of the Commission should be kicked through the goalposts from fifty yards.”

For the second time the Commissioner missed the sarcasm and answered with a smile.

“I’m glad to see you’re on board with the plan,” he said. “And a three-point field goal could make all the difference in the final score. We may be the Commissioners, but we’re all on the same team, right?”

For a moment there was silence as the Commissioner reconsidered the Warden’s comment about kicking the Commissioners off the field.

“You think it’s funny, don’t you?” he said.

“No,” the Warden replied. “I think it’s a riot.”

2022 Andrew Siderius Competition Open to Entries Now

19/3/2022

Sally, by Phyllis Souza

18/3/2022

Sally was forty-two, ten months older than me. She was my favorite cousin, my pal.

"Sorry, but I need to hang up the phone. I'm waiting for a call back from the funeral home," Sally said.

"Why?" I asked. "Who's dying?"

"I am."

"That's not funny."

"I'm not joking. The doctor said there's nothing more they can do."

"There must be a mistake." I felt a lump form in my throat.

"No mistake. I have a bad heart."

"I... I can't believe it." I wept.

After Sally died, I sat alone in my living room. Then, because I felt a sudden chill, I grabbed a throw off the couch and wrapped it around my shoulders.

The floor lamp dimmed. The next thing I knew, I heard Sally. "It's not so bad here. There is no fire, a little windy-- butterflies, beautiful colors, especially the blues. But, laughter, oh my goodness, you wouldn't believe, there's a lot of it here. I'm so happy!"

Was it all in my imagination?

The Abyss, by Don Tassone

18/3/2022

I grew up in a row house on the edge of an old town covered in soot. Our neighborhood bordered woods so dark and deep that they were called The Abyss. Our parents wouldn’t let us go in. Rumor had it that a boy who had gone in was never seen again.

By the time I was 10, though, I’d grown tired of playing games in the street. I wanted to explore The Abyss. My friend Mackenzie did too.

One summer morning, we stole into the woods. It was overcast, and under the thick canopy of trees, our eyes strained to see. We followed an overgrown trail and stuck together.

A mile or so in, we came to a big ravine. The trail stopped there. The ravine was wide, and the terrain ascended steeply on both ends.

“What should we do?” Mackenzie said.

“Want to keep going?” I said, hoping she wanted to turn back.

“I guess,” she said, peering over the edge.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go first.”

I was scared, but I wasn’t about to show it. I got down on my belly and scooted back toward the edge.

“Be careful,” Mackenzie said, as I began to lower myself down.

The descent was so steep, the ground so loose that I had to hang onto roots. I struggled to find footholds. My arms shook. I had to constantly wipe dirt from my face.

When I was almost down to ground level, I spotted something wedged into a crevasse. The light was quite dim, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I leaned in for a closer look.

Now inches from the object, finally realizing what I was looking at, no longer feeling brave, I screamed.

“Cole?” Mackenzie shouted. “What’s wrong?”

“Go back!”

“What is it?”

“Go back!” I cried, clambering back up.

I used to love Halloween, but I don’t go out anymore. I’m afraid I might see a kid dressed like a skeleton.

A Tribute to Carly, by Greg Vander-Haeghen

11/3/2022

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is. –Angelina Jolie

She was a unique woman who lives on in the hearts and minds of countless individuals. Indeed, people respect and appreciate this exquisite, soft soul, one who not only walked the walk, but gave so much.

The Preceding is True, while the Following is Not:

For purposes of anonymity, let’s name her “Carly.”
“Carly” was born in a megalopolis and has always adored massive-sized crowds.

In fact, when given multiple opportunities to immerse herself in either performance art, assemblage, sculpture, painting or drawing, she’d instead opt to go to either Disneyland or the Department of Motor Vehicles. For this thoroughly-conventional woman, the more time waiting in lines, the better. Color her “pedestrian.”

But “Carly,” was much more than a wait-in-line individual. She was a fervent supporter of “Group Think.” Her favorite quote was from Nikola Tesla, “Always follow the herd.” Or was that from Emily Dickinson? Or Maya Angelou?

Other notable favorite quotes include “Supersize it!” by Henry David Thoreau and “School’s out for Summer,” by Horace Mann.

From The Half True Department:

“Carly,” was a “Human Swiss Army Knife,” in the sense that she was a versatile artist, with an impressive skillset, and one who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from two of the worst art schools in the country.

Her works are owned internationally, while her heart remains in the big city. She dislikes the desert due to its lack of
skyscrapers.

With that said, the desert is oddly where she was an apprentice for Nigel Puma, a world-renowned sculptor who created a ten-acre, sculpture park made exclusively from found objects.

During the apprenticeship, Carly learned how to work with a variety of materials, and most importantly, how to connect the objects, be they through welding, cementing, wiring, plastering, sewing, Gorilla Gluing—etc.

As a performance artist, I intuit two words related to her work: honest and profound. That’s what I’d imagine a Carly performance would be. Lots of singing, storytelling, dancing and pounding of a Native American drum around a bon fire. If someone knew how to create a “Happening” it was Carly.

She was an activist for the Arts—and as an educator, had the dishonorable distinction of being awarded as an Emeritus Professor of Art. She taught everything from art history to sculpture to Zen Lawn Bowling to Claymation. She taught outside of the box, but had little interest from her students.

Now for the Truth:

The Little People, by Tom Baldwin

11/3/2022

‘You’re fired! Get out!’ Everyone in hearing flinched, wondering who had annoyed her this time.

Melanie Flugel, like her billionaire husband, Daniel, had impossible standards and drove her employees to distraction with her ever-changing demands. The staff of her mansion changed frequently, sometimes because she fired them, but mostly because few could stand her unpredictable temper and demeaning language, all so different from her cool public persona.

Then one day the staff syndicate won the biggest prize the lottery had ever awarded. They told no-one. When the money was safely in their accounts, and Daniel was abroad, they left the mansion silently at dawn, each leaving a formal resignation letter on the hall table.

Cameron, the head of security, switched off the alarms and the power, then locked all the doors and windows, just leaving the front door open. The butler, James, took Melanie’s phones, laptops and tablets, switched them off and put them all around the mansion in places she probably didn’t know existed, like the laundry in the basement.

Cameron locked the front door, then he and James walked down the steps together. ‘Shall I?’ said Cameron.

‘Yes, do it.’ said James. And the big bunch of keys landed in the middle of the lake.

Reckonings, by David Milner

11/3/2022

Many came out of doors that day. Even old Mrs Carey, helped by Duncan, her middle-aged son, who had the pinched face of a mongoose and a penchant for bow ties. It was the beginning of Lent, as I recall, the first stirring of Spring in the air…

“Serves them right.” Someone said. A sentiment shared by all it seemed.

“Yeah, serves them bloody well right.”

It was 1977. The year of our Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee. Celebrations would take place in the summer.

This was a different kind of participatory activity. A day of reckoning.

The Morgans were a married couple in their thirties with three children. They lived at the bottom end of the road. In ‘rented accommodation’, which, by all manner of standards, was akin to a mortal sin. From the get-go the Morgans were classified a ‘problem family’.

Soon, slanderous barbs passed from lip to pursed lip. In those days adults talked quite freely within earshot of children – as though the youngsters didn’t matter. The Morgans were a feckless lot. Not to be trusted. The father (Jeff) couldn’t hold down a job. And his wife (Brenda) was a ‘maneater’, wore her skirts too short, her heels too high, was a ‘walking cleavage’ and, allegedly, had men round on the days her husband was at work.

The Morgans were scumbags. Kim was the eldest daughter. Ergo, Kim was…

I’ve avoided syllogisms ever since.

Granted Kim’s clothes carried a musty smell, as though they’d never been properly dried and aired. Didn’t stop me walking to and back from school with her. (Lingering kisses in bus shelters). Or nipping into the town centre for a spot of shoplifting. Using a sewing needle, Kim pierced my left ear; she gave me an ice cube to numb the pain. My parents went spare, told me to stop hanging around with “that Morgan girl”. Fat chance. Kim was the best thing that had happened to me. Just turned 14 – two months my senior – she was blossoming into young womanhood. Her androgynous beauty had me spellbound. We were a British Bonnie and Clyde for a while.

Burly bailiffs came that day and loaded up a small van with the Morgans’ meagre belongings. Jeff Morgan pushed a rickety handcart piled precariously high with clothing. His wife, Brenda – for some reason barefoot – at his side. The younger boys waddled like little pigs behind them. Kim had her head bowed in shame.

And, as the good neighbours – my mum included – cheered and jeered the poor family’s piteous departure, a cloud drift massed, as if from a mountain-top where a ceaseless god gazed.

I never saw Kim again.

It was, for me, an initiation into the grown-up world of opprobrium, tacit understanding, reasonable judgement. The real stuff.

It had been brewing for months.

Was I complicit? Partly to blame?

I could have wrenched my teeth out.

International Women’s Day, 2022, by Sankar Chatterjee

11/3/2022

In the winter of 2020, Ms. Rebecca Smith arrived in Phonm Penh, the capital of Cambodia en route to visiting the famous Angkor Wat temple complex in Siem Riep. While there, she decided to spend a few days in the capital to learn more about the country’s history, going to museums and cultural institutions. Soon she learned about a former state-sponsored torture site, now converted into an educational museum. Rebecca knew that Cambodia had witnessed a dark political era under Late Pol Pot, the ruthless Khmer Rouge dictator.

One morning she journeyed there. Thousands of innocent political prisoners were brutally tortured inside a housing complex initially built for local schools. Rebecca roamed through various torture chambers in various buildings, now adorned with the pictures of victims. Various instruments of torture were displayed in the final room of the last building along with the paintings of horrific torture scenes. They were created by a fortunate surviving artist, based on his memory. The painting that froze Rebecca was the torture scene of a young naked woman who was an intellectual leader of the youth movement. Both her arms and legs were tied in ropes attached to rotating pulleys at four corners of a room and the ropes were getting rolled toward the pulleys by four different torturers. Next to the woman, two men were standing with some rudimentary mechanical devices, attempting to pull out her nipples by force from the bare upper torso, blood running down on both sides.

Two days ago, on International Women’s Day, Rebecca had a plan to meet with her friends in the evening to celebrate the day. In the morning, while drinking her coffee, she opened her laptop to read the day’s news online from the New York Times. Two weeks ago, a war had broken out in Europe where a superpower mercilessly bombing a smaller nation to occupy it. Overnight, the fighter jets of the super power bombed a metropolitan city, especially targeting its main hospital that in turn destroyed the maternity ward. Several pregnant women and new mothers with their just-born babies perished in the aftermath. The news article carried a semi-dark picture, taken by a brave photographer, of a wounded pregnant lady being carted off to a safety zone by medical personnel. Her eyes were closed, while her both hands covering the belly as if to save her unborn child from any evil. But what caught Rebecca’s eyes, a red spot on her bare left thigh. She magnified the picture 10-times, when the nature of the red spot became apparent. It was a bleeding deep wound created by a fragment of shrapnel from the dropped bomb. The picture also revealed the blood flowing from the wound toward the ground.

Suddenly Rebecca remembered the painting of the tortured woman from Cambodia’s torture chamber. She froze. Her mind began to ponder why the world celebrates International Women’ Day in the first place, when the powers-to-be are not willing to offer the women respect and dignity?

Memory in a Goldfish Bowl, by Jennifer Kim

4/3/2022

Hic, hic, hic...
You're upset, but you can't remember why. As soon as the memory begins to form in the three-second container of your bright mind, it slips away. Passerbys stop to point and laugh at the little stream of bubbles leaving your lips.
Hic, hic, hic...
You're hyperventilating. You stare wide-eyed at the people pointing at you. Don't they know they're laughing at your grief?
Scales glimmering, you flit about uncertainly, plagued by that haunting feeling of having lost something important, yet unnamed. It starts to occur to you that you could be forgetting an entire life - an entire life that you had once lived and lost before you were put into this tiny goldfish bowl - only now you've gone and lost it again.
All progress escaping through the bubbles, with only a numbed-down heartache to sustain any sense of coherence, of a narrative, of the remains of a meaningful grief...
Hic, hic, hic...
If only you were in a whale's mighty blue bowl - what memories might inspire your spirit there, in that vast blue world? But there, too, all of you would only amount to the tiniest speck of glimmering gold, floating in an endless blue universe full of glorious, greater creatures that all carry more time in their hearts than you. Honestly, would your three-second crusade be anymore meaningful there?
Perhaps it's best to stay at home, after all, and to take up the hobby of examining the curious eyes staring down at you; curiosity staring back at curiosity, transmitting through the curved glass sheet, but only for a brief moment. Yes, this is the perfect pastime, the perfect life, keeping you occupied for precisely three seconds at a time.

Fact Check with the Man Who Has a Fast Car, by Todd Mercer

4/3/2022

Tracy can be a lot of fun, but watch out. If you make her angry, she’ll flat-out write a song about you.

You’ll be in your Mustang, making the road blur by without hardly touching the gas pedal, then boom, there’s Tracy on the radio, telling every citizen with ears that she’s paying all our bills from her night shift job at the 7-11.

All our bills?? C’mon, Tracy. Maybe she covered like 55%, 60% when I had a bad month, tops. Who paid for that long weekend at the motor lodge in the goddamn Catskills? Somehow that highlight didn’t make it into the song. Who bought your phone, Tracy? Riddle me that.

I’m not going to lie—people are digging her music. She may be able to quit the convenience store if the hits keep coming. Am I worried she’ll fall in love with someone else while she’s out on tour? Hell no. I’ve got this Mustang in my favor. Who’s going to let that go?

People I don’t even know are shaming me on the streets about seeing more of my friends than I see of my kids. It’s infuriating. Are you following me around with a stop-watch and a clipboard, nosy stranger?

Been trying to prevent this from turning ugly, but if I hear any more fancy smack-talkin’ songs about me, God as my witness I will tell everyone and their Grandma exactly why you spent two weeks in a Virginia jail. You’re throwing bricks in a glass house, girl.

Now life is changing. Somebody won’t return phone calls because they’re the next big thing. Somebody would do well to think back to what they said was the best time of their lives.

I coaxed the Mustang up to 110 on the freeway at night. My hand was on Tracy’s knee. Her arm hung out the window. She was laughing at everything I said. We’d drank quite a bit of wine.

That day the 7-11 bosses were talking about making her Assistant Store Manager. She wanted us to get married. We could move away if we wanted to. Anything seemed possible.

She said, “You and me, Eddie.”

I said, “Forever, Baby.”

I flattened the accelerator, almost 115. She howled like a wolf out the window.

We were really in love. Now I’m a famous villain and she’s playing shows across Europe. As long as I have this quick-ass Mustang though, the possibilities are practically unlimited.

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