Issue 119, January 2023

Jersey Devil Press

October 2023, Issue 119

ISSN 2152-2162

Online Editor: Laura Garrison

Production Editor: Samuel Snoek-Brown

Associate Editor: Monica Rodriguez

Readers: Rebecca Vaccaro, Amanda Chiado

Founding Editor/Publisher: Eirik Gumeny

All stories and other contributions are copyrighted to their respective authors unless otherwise noted.

www.jerseydevilpress.com

This time of year always makes us feel a little bored. Red maple leaves are a distant memory, but crocuses are still a purple dream, and some days it feels as if the birds will never come back. To combat this tired-of-staring-at-old-man-winter’s-dreary-butt feeling, Issue 119 is full of surprises. Grab yourself a bowl of hot soup* and tuck in.

*Recommended soup pairings: “tyrannosaurus morning” by Rob Yates: bone broth (preferably made from dino fossils); “Waterloo” by Nikki Williams: creamy potato (thick as a “ghost-grey / fog”); “Independent Horror Movie: Post-Credit Scenes Explained,” by Jeanine Skowronski: classic tomato, naturally; “Mending” by Elizabeth Porter: split pea, green and gluey; haiku by Edward Cody Huddleston: fragrant miso with delicate nori stars; “Velma” by Micah Cozzens: carrot-ginger, as orange and cozy a turtleneck sweater.

Laura Garrison

tyrannosaurus morning

Rob Yates

put the orchids down there and watch out for the spine.

it came up in the night like that memory you hug far too tight

but when the singing cuts out there’ll be song, loud enough to cook with.

whitewater of the soul, fugue with scales and tongue, joke upon joke collapsing like an accordion.

prevention of sleep, steps in the wrong mud, the drip drip drop of manna on marshland.

you’ve disturbed the undergrowth again with your unclipped feet.

red clots left from the open sky burial even the kites won’t feed

to their monstrous young - prepared for life, wheeling for death, the flat music

of merry-go-rounds, dissonance as tonic, mistakes made with harmonic intent, a magazine no longer in print, a printed date, the inner stone, a thunder that precedes its maker, old train approaching long distance through the day before tunnels of smoke and the stamping of bulls

and leave the orchids on the side, right there, next to the rest of the morning.

we can always turn them into something else, soon as I get this reptilian bear back in its cage. don’t help me, I’ve got it.

ROB YATES has appeared as a bookseller, a bartender, a casual gardener, and a charity worker both at home and abroad. He originally hails from Essex but is currently journeying through New Zealand. Some of his work has appeared in Agenda, Bodega, Envoi and other literary magazines - he tries to keep everything under one roof as much as possible via www.rob-yates.co.uk.

Waterloo Nikki Williams

He swaggered along the lip of the pool she held her breath, knew what came next.

The noise that could destroy daylight, could shake you awake.

The walls watch her clear the breakfast things, never her thoughts. Her hopes hang like ghost-grey fog. Seasons cycle on.

She sits alone under berried limbs, her bare legs blanketed by blackness, the crickets’ ceaseless song spilling into dusk. Then, footsteps on gravel. One turn too many.

Sudden flurry of movement, black flash against the black night. Her red eyes swallow the perfect sluice of white. His voice booms unclear, unintelligible. Words that no longer matter.

NIKKI WILLIAMS is a copywriter and music critic. Her work appears in The Citron Review, Ellipsiszine, Sublunary Review, LEON Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, Literary Yard, PreeLit, Nymphs and New Pop Lit. She munches trail mix and takes stunning photos when not busy writing. She tweets: @ohsashalee / See more: linktr.ee/writenowrong

Independent Horror Movie: Post-Credit Scenes

Explained

Jeanine Skowronski

At the end of a too-long, two-lane highway that eventually turns into a one-way dirt road, there’s a gas station. You’ve seen it before, I’m sure, even though it’s all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere. Two skinny petrol pumps under a sad, square canopy. A flickering sign held up by a half-lit hut. A rundown trailer next to a makeshift garage: three wooden walls at least bound by a slab of steel. All rust-red and rot.

Inside the garage, an old man pokes at an old car’s engine. You’ll recognize him, too. Bony frame. Weathered skin. Blackened fingers. Brown overalls. His hunched back is turned toward the road, so he doesn’t see the girl, the one spilling out of the woods right now. Torn jeans. Matted hair. Split lip. Blood-stained shirt. Behind this girl (and the gas station), the house looms; you know, the one that exists at the end of every road in every outskirt or dark wood or backwood or boondock or bad part of town. This house, like many other houses just like it, sits on top of a very high hill, a cluster of serrated black stacks stabbing the soft blue sky. And I know, I know, you’re bored, maybe, because you’ve seen these things together, too, before (girl, house, man, way station), but listen, it’s not usually at this point of the story, when the sun is going up, not down, when the lights in the twin turrets of that house are blinking off, a pair of eyelids drifting asleep, not awake, its base a black mass, a belly satiated, not hungry.

And this is a specific man. He’s got greasy gray hair, but kind green eyes. And that is a special girl. After all, she made it out of that house, down its hill and through this forest. And now she’s crossing the road, limping a little, but mostly because she’s missing one of her high-heeled boots and there’s a coffin-handled bowie knife with obsidian rivets (more on this later) sheathed in the other one.

The man let’s call him Edgar, because that’s what it says on the gas station’s flickering sign: EDGAR’S Edgar still doesn’t see the girl, but he is thinking about her. He’s been thinking about her for hours, really, ever since the screams started drifting down the hill and nipping at his shriveled ears. No, no, to be honest, he’s been thinking about her for the last two days. Because, two days ago, the girl and her four friends pulled up to his station in their dusty, white Ford Taurus. And the scene went the way it always goes:

“Fill ‘er up?”

“Mhmm.”

“Hull House?”

“Straight ahead.”

Except, at the very end, that girl smiled at him as she climbed back into the passenger seat. And it was a small smile, a sad smile; one corner of her full mouth reaching up, the other twitching out before drooping back down to earth. Mostly, though, it was a familiar smile, one that Edgar swore he had seen somewhere before he had gotten stuck beneath a big house’s black shadow, though he couldn’t quite be sure. His memories of that time are hazy, illdefined shapes and figures trapped in the middle of a sandstorm. But for a second, just a second, he had made out a face. And maybe

it looked like his mother. Or his estranged daughter. No, definitely his mother. And his daughter. Yes, certainly, both. And so, before the Taurus’ door could close, for the first time in ages and ages (and ages), Edgar’s dry lips parted.

Beware.

The girl let’s call her Alice, because, well, that’s her name Alice, of course, is not smiling now. She’s scowling, the edge of each lip pulled in, so her mouth is balled up, like a fist, as she nears the open garage. Her black boot clicks against the slab of uneven concrete. Tick, tick, tick.

Edgar, old Edgar, finally looks up.

“You!” He gasps.

“You,” Alice replies. She wastes no time; she pounces. The man manages to catch her by the wrists. They wrestle. With each other, sure, but mostly with their own demons, and so Alice quickly overpowers Edgar. You see, after years and years of gassing up cars so they could get to the top of that hill, his demons are drained. They’re just some shriveled shells hiding in his many, many pockets and creases, while Alice’s demons have pooled in the center of her chest. And they’re full of rage. She’s full of rage. She’s been full of rage, to be honest, pretty much her whole life, ever since her dear old dad left and her once-loving mother (and her aunt and her sister) turned to the drink. It’s just now she has an excuse not to hide it, given an evil old house just ate all her friends.

The girl’s demons join hands; they push. Our pair falls to floor. Alice rolls and mounts Edgar. She pulls the coffin-handled bowie knife from her boot, wraps her fingers around its obsidian rivets and presses the blade to his neck.

“You knew,” she hisses.

“I didn’t,” the old man lies.

“Of course, you did.”

Edgar struggles, but weakly, meekly, so he succeeds only in inching closer to the coffin-handled bowie knife. A drop of blood appears on its curved tip. He stops twisting; he stops turning. He exhales. “I told you.”

“You didn’t,” Alice says, but now she’s thinking about two days earlier when she and her friends pulled up to this gas station and she noticed the old man’s kind green eyes and how they kept drifting up that hill, how they seemed drawn to that house; how she watched him sneak glances over her friends’ shoulders until eventually he glanced at her and she sad-smiled at him because, sometimes, just sometimes that was the quickest way to placate a stranger. And she remembers that she heard something, maybe, a bit later, as their car chugged up that hill; over the crows’ caws and the wind’s whistle, there was a whisper: Beware. But it was faint and more of a feeling, a shiver up her spine, a cold breath on the back of her neck. And since her friends all said she had a bad habit of looking for omens, Alice had shrugged off the signs.

Alice shakes her head now. “No,” she tells Edgar, who’s gone stiff, motionless, but straight, like a tree trunk. “You let us go.”

Edgar looks up at the rusty steel ceiling before closing his eyes. “If that house doesn’t eat, something will come for me,” he confesses.

And with that, Alice’s brown eyes go black, and, for a moment, she’s back in that house, un-ignoring all the signs she had continued to ignore as the girls explored its halls, because, sometimes, just sometimes lying is the quickest way to placate your friends. Stains in the ruby-red carpets. Scuff marks across the

cobwebbed ceilings. Thick zombie bars on the bedroom doors. Strange off-white walls with thin squiggly lines sprouting from their baseboards, here and then there, a leafless tree or an inverted pair of lungs. And in between those trees (or body parts), there were a few circular mirrors that seemed to blur the girls’ faces, except, perhaps, for Alice’s, whose face appeared clear, somehow, with all its edges, though maybe it was just what Kate said: a trick of the light.

But then the floorboards were creaking. And the hallways were shrieking. And Dora was screaming. And Laura was bleeding. And Ames was flying off the second-story balcony and crashing to, then through the foyer’s tiled floor. And Kate was holding Alice’s hand as they raced to the front doors, at least until the leafless trees came to life and wound their branches around Kate’s wrists and dragged her, kicking and screaming, into a wall. Alice felt something wrap around her ankle as her fingers found the doorknob.

“No, no, no,” she says.

Now Edgar shakes his head. And he’s back, too, not in the house, of course, because he can’t remember ever entering it, but at the gas station, two days earlier again, when he had whispered to that girl not once, but twice beware, before the car door slammed. Beware, as the car pulled away beware, beware, beware, really, again and again, with his fingers crossed, not because he was lying, but because he was thinking, hoping that if screeches could roll down that hill, maybe, just maybe, warnings would float up it.

But he’s back further, too, to all those times that he hadn’t whispered because he had been too busy listening to the steady growl, that beating hum that always permeated the station. Fill ‘er up. With the co-eds in the RV. Fill ‘er up with the couple in the

orange sedan. Fill ‘er up with the boys in the Jeep Cherokee. Fill ‘er up, fill ‘er up, fill ‘er up when the road went untraveled for weeks and weeks and that big black house started to bleed into the horizon, turrets turning to tendrils that started reaching, wafting further and further down the hill each night. And Edgar had tried to ignore them, tried tinkering with that old car in his old garage, over and over, only somewhat aware that there was nothing he could do to get it to turn on and take him back to civilization. And so, when the next car neared a 1999 Toyota Corolla carrying a feast of teenagers things went the same, just with a little more urgency.

“Fill ‘er up?”

“Please, yes, please!”

“Hull House?”

“Straight ahead. Floor it.”

Beneath the girl, Edgar re-opens his eyes, which go wide. Fill ‘er up, fill ‘er up, fill ‘er up. “I had to,” he realizes. “I’m sorry.”

And so maybe Alice thrusts out or maybe Edgar leans in, but either way, the blade of that coffin-handled bowie knife disappears into his neck and blood appears on her palms, and, for a moment, just a moment, he, she, you, me we are at peace. But, of course, that’s not the end of our story, because Alice is still here, and while she’s no longer full of rage, she’s also not quite empty. Inside her, the demons disperse. They claw toward her extremities, her fingers, her toes, her throat. And she’s not sure what to do with them or herself, really, so she simply shoves off Edgar, slides into a corner and stares.

Alice stares at that coffin handle with the obsidian rivets, but, more importantly, she remembers staring at it. After that black

tendril lost its grip on her ankle as she lost her boot, after the front doors gave way oh-so-suddenly, after she tumbled down the driveway and sat up in a pile of dead grass and dirt. After the house spit her out, I mean, she had found herself looking at that curved-tip knife, splayed across her palm, and she hadn’t known where it had come from or, more accurately, she hadn’t cared, because she knew somehow exactly where it was supposed to go; no, where it needed to be, which is where it was now, in the old man’s chest. And so, Alice suddenly understands.

“Something came for you,” she tells poor, dead Edgar

Deadgar, let’s say (What? Too soon?) before stealing a look, finally, at that large, looming house on the horizon. The light in the left turret blinks, winks at her just once. And now, yes, she can hear the growl, no, a hum permeating the gas station. You hear it, too: Fill ‘er up, fill ‘er up, fill er’ up.

At the end of a too-long, two-lane highway that eventually turns into a one-way dirt road, there’s a gas station. You’ve seen it before, I’m sure. The girl, too, though now she looks a bit different. Greasy hair. Scarred lip. Beige overalls. Sludge-stains over her bloodstained shirt. She sits in front of two skinny petrol pumps, chewing on a long piece of straw. She doesn’t tinker with the old car in the old garage; she doesn’t sleep in the rundown trailer. She just waits and waits (and waits) until the next shiny, white car pulls into the station. And it goes the way it always goes.

“Fill ‘er up?”

“Mhmm.”

And Alice that’s what it says on the gas station’s flickering sign: ALICE’S Alice smiles a sinister smile, a sly smile, a familiar smile, both corners of her mouth reaching up without her lips spreading out, pointing, like her half-crooked fingers, to that old black house on the hill, which has, once again, grown hungry.

JEANINE SKOWRONSKI is a writer based in N.J. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Lit, Lost Balloon, Five on the Fifth, (mac)ro(mic), Complete Sentence, Crow & Cross Keys, and Tiny Molecules.

“Hull House?”

“Straight ahead.”

Mending

Elizabeth Porter

As brittle shale pops against the fire

The ghost of an ancient hemlock splinters slowly

A wet and hissing peel. Bark from marrow

Every night breaks gently. Headlights

Split the passenger seat where she holds two halves. A cracked tortoiseshell, twin lens.

What is cohesion without adhesive? Even books Require intention and glue. Sinew to hold Hairs, feathers, and assumptions in place.

But every Spring, the creeper vines re-knit Themselves. An osprey returns to an impatient mate. A concert of green and sharp milky sap.

You press your face back into mine, and I Accept the mending. Bone needle and waxed thread. Our torn leaves sutured. Green wood.

ELIZABETH PORTER lives and writes in south-central Pennsylvania. She earned her degree in English from Shippensburg University in 2007 and has been an educator since 2020.

five haiku

Edward Cody Huddleston

your voice the deepest part of the sky

summer silence

one fly webbed between two stars

wolf moon

above and beyond the pale deep sea

every sound becomes Cthulhu’s call lone crow

we hover between mythologies

EDWARD CODY HUDDLESTON was born in New Jersey, raised in Georgia, and now occupies various liminal spaces. He's thought to be either a deepfake or a radio DJ, but he's definitely a haiku poet. His debut collection, Wildflowers in a Vase, is available now from Red Moon Press.

Velma

Micah Cozzens

That’s my last trophy dripping on the wall, from when we last unmasked the Dread Undead the claws protruding through are such wet red, but blood here is never real, not at all My friends are I solve mysteries for kicks, and always outrun what zombies we find, because death is evitable and kind, and there are never problems I can’t fix. I see you eyeing the picture on the stand they’re my friends: Shaggy, whom I used to date; Scooby, his dog who talks; Fred, a dumb blonde both handsome and ambiguously chaste; his Daphne; and there’s me, of course, beyond my too-dark eyes, as if drawn in marker. You wonder: why do they look just the same as they did back in 1969? Because we solve mysteries like a game, our chasing and unmasking all benign, and there is charm in insularity that cannot hurt while remaining contained without consequence, what’s morality? I will never change, grow old, or give life and neither, for that matter, will my friends, and we don’t mind, if our lives never end. I never expected to be a wife.

But sometimes as I buckle into place in my seat of the Mystery Machine, I wonder if my life has been a waste. What deeper truth, after all, can I glean, chasing after pranksters in werewolf masks? What difference can I make without change? While Daphne, in her beauty, sometimes asks the observer to want adult exchange, though this suggestion always goes unsaid, I am mute femininity cooked dry but always possessing freckled pertness, that glasses-clad and book-balancing brand of innocence that suggests alertness, a rationality that is unmanned and unmanning, because people prefer naivete in theory, not right now accompanied by spread legs, not the work of answering the questions disallowed When will you let me grow up? Will Shaggy ever venture to start a family? I am so sick of being childish and perky. Give me gravitas. Give me a child, or blood, or something vital. Shaggy is content to smoke unnamed leaves forever, happily unburdened, free to enjoy his life without committing, preferring to search for someone missing than change a diaper or talk of feelings. I guess being a Dad is worse than murder.

I wait, hoping to make something brand new, but the days, they grow longer. How is it I’ve solved so many mysteries without stumbling across anything really true? Yes, we should be getting back to the van. Forgive my rambling you understand how it is, when someone gets you talking. Feel free to take the picture. I don’t need it to know what they look like. In our world, me and my friends are always smiling.

MICAH COZZENS is a North Carolina native. She graduated with an MFA in Fiction from Brigham Young University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing/Poetry at Ohio University. She loves the work of William Faulkner, Jill Allyn Rosser, and Derek Walcott.

On the cover :

“Jersey Devil Soup”

SAMUEL SNOEK-BROWN is the production editor for Jersey Devil Press. Sometimes he plays around in GIMP because he can’t afford Photoshop. So it goes.