Jeffrey S. Callico hails from Atlanta. Someday he plans to live somewhere in Maine but until then keeps driving around town looking for a place to park. His most recent poetry chapbook, Rough Travel, was published by Graffiti Kolkata Press in July 2010.

Dishes (August 20, 2010. Issue 20.)

What is it you can’t handle, she says, her hands in the dishwater. I mean really, she says, how hard can it be, she says.

I sit there saying nothing.  

She says, Do you think I’m an idiot or something? Do you think I have the brain of a mole or something? Do you?

Say something, she says, don’t just sit there, she says.

I just sit there. I don’t say anything.

She doesn’t say anything for a bit then she says, taking her hands out of the soapy dishwater, she says, You’re pathetic, you know that? I mean really, you are. You’re a pathetic excuse for a—

I jump in. I say, Wait a minute, now, just wait a minute.

She flings some of the soapy dishwater at me. I feel some of the soap start to sting my right eye. She keeps flinging it then she starts laughing as she flings it but she isn’t really laughing, she just has her mouth shaped like laughter and her teeth show through her lips.

I rise up and turn the table over. I grab it by the edge and slam the other edge to the floor. My cup spills then falls, cracking the handle off, the table overturned in the middle of the kitchen. It’s somewhere close to the middle of the night.

She stops the pseudo laughter and everything falls silent.

Well now look what you’ve done, she says, those hands returning to the dishes. My eye still hurts, I say, and she just laughs again then cleans the dishes until she’s done.

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Green Dust (August 20, 2009. Issue 8.)

When he woke that morning he knew anyone could kill anyone and that dead things were living in his head. His bedroom wall was a bleak yellow and the bed was full of insects he couldn’t see but knew were there because his skin could feel them in the sleep of night. In a room downstairs people were talking in voices he knew existed in their throats but the names refused to materialize.

He threw off a soiled sheet and made his way to the left. After drippage he clothed himself and looked at himself in a smeared mirror. He said nothing then left the room. The downstairs voices had stopped.

Someone looked up and he was standing before everyone. No one said anything to anyone else. He grabbed a box of stale cereal and sat at the dingy table. The window above the sink was shattered and flies were buzzing in and out. The flies looked the same as the ones he had seen the day before and he knew that either they were the same flies or different ones but in essence they were all the same.

The cereal tasted not like soggy cardboard but drenched re-dried kelp. He ate it anyway and faces looked on with voices muted by his presence. He was a killer but they didn’t know anything about him. Nothing specific. Not that he was a killer and that anyone could kill anyone else if anyone thought about it long enough.

He took the emptied bowl and dropped it into the sink. The flies swarmed around the bowl which still had straggling bits of milk-sopped kelp-flakes in it. He knew that behind him the faces were still looking and that a couple of them were staring and that those who were just looking were the ones he wanted to kill the most.

He turned and faced them.

The flies were buzzing.

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