http://www.carvezine.com Carve Magazine - featuring the finest short fiction online en-us http://www.carvezine.com/issue/2010/fall/gill.htm "Yesterday, a mother and daughter arrived," Lavender whispers in my ear, waking me. "At the same time." I feel her breath, warm and wet on my face, but I don't open my eyes. For just a moment, I want to pretend I'm still sleeping. "At the same time." she says again. If you lived here, if you woke up in our community beside the same women every day, you would know how peculiar that is. Lavender stood at the west end, yesterday. She must have been watching the path when it happened. But I chose to paint. Just a stick figure. A woman with an empty basket. I finished my painting before most of the other women had bit the core of their morning apricots. At a complete loss of inspiration to create anything else, I retreated to the Belly, didn't emerge until nightfall. Maybe that's why I was unaware of the unusual series of events. http://www.carvezine.com/issue/2010/fall/levy.htm She knew they called her Dirty Darlene, and it bothered her. She kept no mirrors in her apartment or in her purse—in fact, she kept no purse, preferring to carry only her wallet, like a man, because what good would a purse do? What could she carry with her that would change anything about her appearance for the good? No lipstick could hide the lips so thin and cracked they barely masked her missing teeth, no powder could cover the lines and veins in her face or minimize that nose, crooked at birth but made more so by the man she'd known back in Tucson. So she kept no mirrors, avoiding even the glass in the driver's side visor in her station-wagon taxicab, so that when one winter afternoon it fell onto her lap, the glue cracked with cold, she stuffed it in the glove compartment. http://www.carvezine.com/issue/2010/fall/gridley.htm The MG, I call it, the mental gate—the most important quality of mind. Without it, even a genius becomes a cowering idiot or a crazed compulsive. It's like one of those metal grilles that shopkeepers pull down when they lock up a store. You can see through it, of course, but if you're on the inside you know the world is safely blocked out, at least for the time being, and you can enjoy the game on TV, a cold beer and a few laughs as if there were no dark street outside, no creepy types peering in the window, no homeless person sleeping under a flattened cardboard box in the doorway. http://www.carvezine.com/issue/2009/summer/walker.htm 1st place winner of the 2009 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest: "Explain it to me," she says. "Explain it to me so it makes sense." It’s Rita, my brother’s wife, and we’re sitting at a booth at The Flamingo, a club east of Millington, away from Navy row as they call it, where strip clubs and night houses line both sides of Highway 51. Rita is across from me with a box of Kleenex, and this is the third time she’s called me and we’ve met, the third time since my brother Del spilled his guts to her about a woman in Singapore named Sashi or Shasha. He was in the Navy then, two years ago, lonely, apparently. "It had been a passing thing,"amp;quot; Rita had told me the first time we met. "But still," she had said. Del has never said a word to me about the matter, and from what I figure, he has no idea Rita has ever talked to me about it. My wife Cas doesn’t know about my meetings with Rita either. Rita and I decided that might be best. Rita just needed someone to talk to, someone who understood, who knew Del. http://www.carvezine.com/issue/2009/summer/miller.htm 2nd place winner of the 2009 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest: Dyed yellow, powdered cheeks, and a red kewpie doll mouth—I’m betting she’s in her late sixties. Ironic. This nurse who brings the critical information looks like a clown. She scans the cold, windowless, waiting room. She hasn’t seen me yet, and I want to hide—to just close my eyes and let her pass me by. In three days, two others have died. The nurses must take turns because a different messenger has come each time. http://www.carvezine.com/issue/2009/summer/frazier.htm 3rd place winner of the 2009 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest: Sickle cell is not just a black disease. Though this fact has been public for decades, people still startle when they find out that I have it. It’s like the year is 1983 and I’ve just introduced myself as Gaëtan Dugas, the promiscuous gay flight attendant who was North America’s first known AIDS carrier. Sometimes they lean away, or wipe their palms against their slacks if we’ve shaken hands. http://www.carvezine.com/issue/2009/summer/hogg.htm We were driving back from San Diego, through one of those spectacular Pacific sunsets where the emblazoned clouds streak above the highway, like a fire to end the world so beautiful that you might be happy to be consumed by such gilded flames. http://www.carvezine.com/issue/2009/spring/fusco.htm You were the girl with the good head on her shoulders, the good sport, the good pal. You spent entire classes chewing the ends of your hair, tasting styling gel while recalling chorus practice, the quaver in your voice on that final high note. http://www.carvezine.com/issue/2009/spring/irving.htm In high school get pissed off at everyone and everything. Stay pissed off. This is what makes you a poet. Know that good poetry, the best poetry, comes from being angry. Write poems about violence, sex and death. Read lots of Nietzsche. God is dead. Cut your hair short and spiky in the front, keep it long in the back, and keep it stiff with a combination of Dippity-do and toothpaste. Ignore your parents when they ask you what you’re trying to prove.