TWINKIES
by Cortney Phillips

The sign the man outside the grocery store was holding said, Down on Luck.
No Family. No Job. I picked up an extra rotisserie chicken without much
thought and asked the cashier to put it in a separate bag. It cost $6.99, but I
figured he could eat off of it for a few meals. When I handed it to him, he said
thank you and god bless; I told him to take care and started to walk away.

“Hey,” he called after me. “Did you hear about Twinkies?”

I’d seen the headline—Hostess Brands to Shut Down—so I said yes, I’d heard.

“Someone gave me a knock off brand today. It wasn’t bad,” he said.

Oh yeah? I said.

“So we’re all going to be okay,” he said, and nodded.

 

 

 

 

MINIMUM WAGE
by Barbara Boches
Photograph by Meg Eubank
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Barbara-Boches-reads-Minimum-Wage.mp3]

If tiny chrysanthemums
with their slender stalks and pistils
could manage to wage a war,
then they might rage against the lack
of a living wage and stem the cut
of management – so that all the bouquets
of narcissus and allium, daffodil and delphinium
would no longer go to men of dominion
loathe to pay the mini-
mum.

 

 

 

 THE EYE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA
by Steven D. Stark

My wife is an eye doctor but wishes she were a pair of eyeglasses instead.
But then you couldn’t take weekends off I told her. But someone could take
me off, she said. What difference would that make, I asked. What about
contacts, she argued. That wouldn’t make any difference either, I replied,
you’d still have to work weekends.  What if I told the person who bought me
I wanted weekends off, she said. That wouldn’t be your decision, I said.
It isn’t my decision now, she replied. It never is.

 

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Cortney Phillips received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University and is the Assistant Editor of Flash Fiction for Bartleby Snopes. For more about Cortney, please visit her blog: cortneyphillips.com.

Barbara Boches lives in Massachusetts. When motherhood allows, she translates poetry from Chinese and writes her own. Her work has been previously published in Solstice.

Steven D. Stark is the author of a several books of nonfiction. His fiction and poetry have recently been published in 3 AM, Litn’Image, Mudlark, McSweeney’s, Otoliths, and Clapboard House, where he won the short story prize.

Meg Eubank is an artist/writer who has been published in Quail Bell Magazine, The Allegheny Review, Photographer’s Forum Anthologies, The Original Magazine, and Marathon Literary Review. Her artwork has been exhibited in various galleries in PA and NJ, and is on permanent exhibit at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

 

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