No news today - Guest Post - David McLendon

You did what you did.

You drank short blindful drinks and held your body too close to the world.

You lost your sleeves and showed up with wounds.

You cropped what you could of the sun's unappeasable light.

You grappled with nothing.

You made no revisions.

You addressed the battered odors of others by inhaling them as your own.

You pleaded the Fifth.

You pleaded no contest.

You repeated the names of American outskirts for any number of irretrievable reasons.

You leaned against the chotch.

You watched the other daily irregulars choke without song on what they imbibed.

You imbibed.

You found the flimsiest of heights insurmountable.

You felt on the verge of something climactical whenever entering a public stall.

You found the difference between "eventual" and "occasional" nothing less than bewildering.

You were devastated by women with crooked teeth.

You were beaten as a child.

You were beaten as an adolescent.

You were beaten as an adult.

You bruised easily.

You accepted most beatings with an ambiguous sort of cheer.

You took little comfort from the tidal mechanics of the moon.

You did what you did.

You were less fearless than indifferent to fear.

You crumbed years into minutes.

You preferred chin music over bullfighting.

You grew tired most days and veered headlong into seasonal fevers.

Your body was aggrieved by hearsay.

All you coveted of the world was a small Victorian toy.

David McLendon is a Fellow of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. He is founder and editor of Unsaid.

No news today - Guest Post - Alexandra Leggat

On the television a clean shaven man with a yellow tie rattles on about devastation. Behind him a film of black water and floating homes. He changes his tone. An airplane drops a bomb on a dirt street. People in headdresses run. His smile lights up. The prince is to marry his princess. The man on the television's up and down. Sombre,. gleeful. A yellow tie. I make tea and eat an Arrowroot biscuit, think my hair could use a trim and outside the street is quiet. The sun moves west, taking the heat with it. The phone rings, my mother says, not much to report, just wanted to say hello. Dad thinks he sees a snake on the living room floor. She heard on the television a cobra escaped from the Bronx Zoo. She lives by the Niagara Falls/Buffalo border. The snake only escaped yesterday, Mom. It wouldn’t have made it that far yet. The man on the television says there is radiation in the water. With the phone in one hand, I head to the kitchen and turn on the tap. I don’t know what I'm hoping for but there’s nothing visibly new in the water. My husband says it’s coming from Japan. It won’t have made it this far yet. I nod and fill my glass. My mother asks if I know anything about cobras. She wants to know what to do if it reaches the house. Do you think dad had a premonition? I ask. She says she hopes it’s a premonition then they can prepare themselves. When I was young I remember overhearing a man on the television say that Charles Manson had escaped from prison. I had no clue who ran the new country we'd moved to, what the provinces were or the words to the national anthem but I was aware of the serial killer Charles Manson. I couldn't sleep because I was convinced he was hiding in my town, that he was coming to my house. Mom said, don’t worry dear. California is a long way from here. He won’t have made it this far yet. My Mother says if she doesn’t tell Dad that the snake he thinks he sees on the living room floor is the one that escaped from the Bronx Zoo then he won’t go to bed. He won't sleep. Then just tell him it is. Well, she says, he wants the reward. There's a reward? The man on the television says a snow squall warning is in effect. That's all, my mother says, not much to report. I put down the phone. Head to the closet and take out my boots and my hat and my down coat and mitts that I had put away for the season – it’s spring. My husband says, don’t worry, it's coming from the East, it won’t make here. It’s already gone down from a storm warning to flurries, by the time it hits the lake it will have dissipated. I turn off the television and say to him, God, we’re so lucky nothing ever happens here.

Alexandra Leggat is the author of the short story collections Animal (nominated for the 2010 Trillium Book Award), Meet Me in the Parking Lot and Pull Gently, Tear Here. She teaches writing classes at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies.

No news today - Guest Post - Laura van den Berg

Nine Ways Not to Start a Novel: Discarded First Lines

1. We were lying in the dark.

2. We were lying in the dark—it wasn’t like city darkness, softened by streetlights and houselights and headlights, but like the bottom layer of the ocean, where nothing lives and nothing grows.

3. We were lying in the dark—it wasn’t like city darkness, softened by streetlights and houselights and headlights, but thick and black as paint.

4. Lights Out was at ten o’clock and it brought the darkest night I’d ever seen.

5. It was dark.

6. Today the Hospital was going to look inside our minds.

7. After the pilgrims, life in the Hospital changed.

8. We never understood what they could have wanted from us.

9. Everything was a story.

Laura van den Berg’s first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc, 2009), was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, longlisted for The Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award. She lives in Baltimore and is revising a novel, which, thankfully, no longer begins with any of these lines.

No news today - Guest Post - Meg Pokrass

Cow Chewing

On our walk, when he asks, I say, "Sure, I like burgers sometimes." Well hell -- I do sometimes. I don't say how I think too often about why we humans like to eat cows. The fact is that I feel excited about the idea of an organically raised one-pound beef burger on a baguette with cheddar, and that he is paying. The warm, mouth-filling popping experience of protein and carbohydrates and a place to sit and rest and talk to my friend who has no news. My friend and de-caf and cow chewing -- what could be better really? That means someone is cooking for me, not hating me or mad at me at all... in fact the person cooking may be wearing an adorable look on his mouth, as though he just smooched a womanly cow instead of frying one up. If they made a scene in a movie of this cute (let's make him cute) Berkeley cook doing up a burger he may have a long, velvet smile. Movies lie. Nobody cute cooks burgers for a living, but if they made a movie about it, there would be a bottle of cheap brandy underneath the steam table, the cook obsessed with a waitress called "Fizz" and really just wanting to fuck her. Fizz would be played by an actress with a baby face and huge, fake tits. The actor playing this cook would be striking if not tall (most actors aren't) and heavy-lidded thinking about Fizz's tits while frying up my one-pound burger, his gentle eyes moving from rare to medium-rare.


Meg Pokrass is the author of "Damn Sure Right" (Press 53) a recently released debut collection of 88 flash fiction stories. Frederick Barthelme says "Meg Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body. Wonderful, dark, unforgiving". Meg’s flash fiction, poems and animations have appeared in Gigantic, The Rumpus, Wigleaf, PANK, Smokelong, FRIGG, Big Muddy, Gargoyle, The Pedestal, Keyhole, Moon Milk Review, Annalemma, Mississippi Review, elimae, Monkeybicycle, Everyday Genius, Keyhole, 3AM, and other places. More about Meg here: http://www.megpokrass.com/

No news today - Guest Post - Gina Frangello

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