A Solitary Tree

After thirty years in the newspaper business, Al finally had an office with floor-to-ceiling windows. He stood with his nose pressed to the glass, staring wearily at the outside world. He was tired. He was almost sixty. He thought he would be a rock star when he grew up, not editor-in-chief of the World Daily Gazette.

Ted, entertainment editor and Al's closest friend, sat at Al's desk, flipping through yesterday's copy of the Gazette. “Spelling mistake,” he said, reading. “Unnecessary comma. The word 'the' printed twice in a row.”

Al sighed. The outside world was bits of blue sky and white clouds barely visible behind a wall of downtown skyscrapers. He said, “You ever wonder why we're here?”

“No,” Ted said, scratching the area between his short and long horns.

“How did we end up on top of the food chain? How did rhinos end up being the smartest animal on the planet? What if things had gone differently?”

Ted rolled his eyes. “We aren't the smartest, dolphins are.”

Al watched the congested, slow-moving traffic on the street ten storeys below. “Sometimes I feel like I should be somewhere else, living a completely different life. A simple life.” He imagined a solitary tree growing in an African field.

Ted folded the newspaper and threw it on the desk. “You want to know why we're here?” he said. “I'm here to do a job. You're here because of nepotism.”

-Kevin Hartford

Rhino / Things I forgot

Rhino looked back as me as if to say, Buddy you can’t get anything right and I’m all defensive even though he doesn’t know a thing.

“You don’t know anything!” I had yelled at him, could still feel the vibration of the words in my throat, the after effect of sound on waves ‘cause he had turned away and I wasn’t finished with him yet.

“You need to let me finish,” I held my hands out desperate and he just grimaced the best he could, hiding the words he held underneath, feeling special with his literary skin, stories written all over his body.

And  I had gotten so far reading him, head tilted to the side, fascinating stories of police car chases and lottery winners and the story of a woman who fell down a well and lived for eight days singing songs to herself in the dark. And I wanted more, more, I wanted to get under him, lick my finger and hold it to the words he had written on his underside, the soft spot, the belly.

I wanted to know how it ends.

He looked at me as though to say, hey Buddy that story’s just for me, but I know it’s not ‘cause he can’t read it, being so high and upright and I know the birds have read it (they talk amongst themselves now) after pretending to dig for worms in the rain.

They looked up.

Things my mother taught me and I forgot.

by Martha Tuff

My Very Sad Day

They screamed, yelled and cried all night. I could hear gun shooting and disturbing screeching sounds of dragged metal. Stupid people. Stupid war. At dawn it became quiet and I fell asleep. I woke up when the sun was high in the sky. I felt thirsty and went to the river for water, which is my regular morning routine.

The bank of the river was full of dead bodies. Soldiers, little boys and girls, old men and women, pigs and cows were in the messy pile. Throats were cut, eyes stabbed. Open stomachs were showing guts. The soil was wet with blood. It was soaking through the sand into the river. The water had the nauseating red color. I was shocked.

I was slowly walking up the hill when I saw a man, badly wounded but alive. If they found him, they’d shoot him. I decided to hide him. I was covering his body with twigs when he opened his eyes. He was horrified to see me.

Don’t be scared. I know I am an ugly-looking horned buffalo, but I am harmless. They call us beasts. I haven’t seen beasts crueller than human beings. Last night they killed everyone in the village and burnt it to ashes. Tomorrow newspapers all over the world will write about this massacre.

Good luck, man. I’m heading to a place where I can drink clear water. I am not sure how far up the river I have to go.

by Farida Samerkhanova

“Breakfast.”

Breakfast with the old man was always my favorite time. He was weakest in those
early morning moments. Soon enough the rush of the day would seize him and his Cold War
libels would flutter about to well manicured, middle aged applause: tree hugger, liberal,
bleeding heart. Antiquated terms that can no longer do anything but signify the pesky
existence of someone like me, someone he deems too weak to be regarded seriously, but who
refuses to be quietly ignored. Moments where his former, youthful self returned to inhabit the
crumbling edifice it used to call home.

But not yet: to breakfast with the old man was to see him before his conquests. The
emperor of the printed page, the commander of mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers
would arrive later. First, foremost, and for my eyes only was his withering husk, forced to
fumble with a spoon and a grapefruit; those hands made too rigid over the years, too
unyielding to bend for even so simple a task; brittle teeth that had torn through such red meat.
He said we were in his crosshairs, almost extinct: but here I sit, his progeny, waiting.

To move forward, you have to turn your back on what you’re leaving behind. I don’t need to
wait for him to say it is okay, to tell me to go ahead, to say it’s my turn. The world he has
conquered will swallow him up, and my bleeding heart will go on beating.

I eat quietly.

by Sukhi Fitzpatrick