By Chris Cottom

It starts when my washing machine goes on the blink and Neville next door insists I use his. 

He looks my sad bundle. “Only half a load?”

“I struggle to fill it … nowadays.”

“Same here, mate.’”He touches his hand to my shoulder. “Aww, Helen will be looking down at you.”

“Yeah, telling me to sort my darks from my lights.”

“Talking of which, mind if I pop in some of mine?’”

“Sure. No skin complaints, then?”

“Well, I’d prefer buffed and bronzed to grey and saggy.”

“Ha ha. No social diseases?”

“It’s been a long time, mate. A very long time. Now, tea or coffee?”

Soon there are four of us, all widowers from the cul de sac, doing back-to-back loads while we put the world to rights. We don’t always have enough washing so we do a card for the village shop and next there are ten of us, starting early, making lunch together in one another’s houses.

Turns out Ken had been an electrician. We’ve nodded at each other for twenty years, never really spoken. 

He claps his hands. “Repair club on Saturdays? Toasters, dodgy bedside lamps?’”

“We could sharpen garden tools for people,’”Neville says. “Maybe do a bit of gardening.”

We get an A5 flyer printed, pop it through every letterbox, walking round in pairs. 

 

We get so busy we all chip in to fund a part-time administrator, an unemployed lad from the estate, teach him about workflow management. Being a whiz on computers, Isacc’s soon sorting out people’s apps and laptops, so we introduce a small charge, move him to full-time, hire his sister Chloe to do the admin. 

On a weekend in the Lake District, we build a raft which we paddle across Windermere, form our community interest company over dinner in The Lazy Trout. We take our muddy-streaked kit to our first board meeting at Neville’s, agree that laundry at every meeting will keep us rooted.

After a morning looking at KPIs for Quarter Two, we sit down for lunch while the washing machine shudders through its spin cycle. 

“Busy, busy,”I say.

“Too busy, really.”

“I miss the old days. Sitting around, jawing.”

“Me too.”

“Can’t stop now. People depend on us.”

We agree to ‘kick ourselves upstairs,’ call ourselves advisers, hand the business to Isacc and Chloe, help them recruit a string of apprentices. 

I follow Neville out to the kitchen, help him with the coffees. 

He laughs. “We’ll make sure we get priority washing machine repairs. Listen to the racket this one’s making.”

“Tell me about it, mate. Helen always used to say we could hear it from our house.”

            *   *   *

Chris Cottom is a recovering insurance copywriter with recent work in Banshee, Barrelhouse, Fictive Dream, matchbook, New Flash Fiction Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Orange Blossom Review, The Broadkill Review, The Good Life Review, and elsewhere. Catch him pedaling around Cheshire, UK, and at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom 

A Memoir by William Mann

I bought Maggie from a local breeder when she was eight weeks old. She was a German Shepherd, and for the first year she chewed through two leashes and a section of baseboard in the upstairs hallway. Then one evening a man came to the door selling something, and she stepped in front of me, head low, hackles raised, and stood there without making a sound. He left. After that I stopped worrying.

In 1982, we bought a small house, generously termed a “fixer-upper,” in Lakeport, New York on the east end of Oneida Lake. Close enough to the water that breeze from the lake moved the curtains. Max was eight and Tony was five, and they were a handful. The turtle had been my idea. Something low-maintenance, easy to care for. The boys pressed their faces to the glass of the aquarium for about a week before they lost interest entirely. So when a co-worker mentioned that someone at the warehouse was giving away a litter of kittens, I drove over on my lunch break. I came home with a cardboard box full of orange tabby, and the moment I set the box down on the kitchen floor, he came out snarling. A scrap of a thing, maybe two pounds, stripes down his sides and a white patch at his throat. Ears flat, mouth open, every claw he had flashing. He backed against the cabinet and hissed at the room and took a swipe at my hand. We named him Jake. Maggie was about two by then.

Maggie met Jake later that day. She walked straight over to him and got a swipe at her nose. Jake had left four little trails of red blood, easily recognized against her black nose. She didn’t even flinch. She just lowered herself down and wrapped both front paws around  him, ignoring his struggles, and pulled him to her chest. He went after her with everything he had, clawing at her face, biting her ears, hissing. She tucked her chin over the top of his head and licked him. I stood there with my hand on her collar in case. After a while, the hissing stopped. Then the clawing. Then there was just Maggie, licking the top of Jake’s orange head, and Jake, purring. I let go.

After that, Jake slept curled against Maggie’s chest every night, and she cleaned behind his ears the same way she would have cleaned a puppy. If he wandered to another room, she’d get up and follow.

He figured out the household on his own terms. He’d ambush the boys from the top of the refrigerator. He’d wind between Chris’s ankles while she stood near the stove. At night, he’d jump up onto the back of the couch while I watched TV and set his chin on my shoulder. I’d feel the slight vibration of his purring against my neck. I never changed the channel without wondering if I was interrupting something for him.

As Jake got older, he started marking the furniture. I scheduled him to be neutered and didn’t think much more about it. The night before the appointment, I let him out before bed. An hour passed. I checked the door. Maggie was already there, sitting next to it as she always did when he was outside. I told myself he’d found a female somewhere, or gotten into it with another tom. I went to bed. In the morning I came downstairs and Maggie hadn’t moved. I called the vet and told them we wouldn’t be coming in.

Later that afternoon, a neighbor came to the door. She said she’d found a cat on the side of the road. Orange tabby. I walked the road twice, calling his name. The second time I came back, Max was standing on the front porch watching me come up the driveway. I shook my head and he went inside. I could hear Chris in there, and then Tony starting to cry.

When I went in, Maggie was at the door. Not lying down, not pacing—just sitting there square on her haunches, ears up, nose an inch from the gap at the bottom. I put my hand on her back and she leaned into the door a little harder. I stayed there with her for a minute, then went and sat down in the kitchen. Around midnight, I moved her blanket over from the living room and set it next to her. She didn’t look at it. I turned off the lights and went upstairs. At three in the morning I came back down for a glass of water. She hadn’t moved an inch. 

She stayed like that through the next morning, then the next. When I came downstairs she’d turn and look at me, then turn back. I filled her bowl and set it next to her. I put fresh water down. Neither moved. One morning I fried bacon and stood at the stove waiting. She didn’t come. I walked the plate past her on my way to the table. She didn’t lift her nose. Chris watched me scrape the extra strips into the trash and said to give her time. 

By day four, Max rolled a tennis ball across the kitchen floor toward her. It bumped against her front paw and stopped there. She didn’t look down. That evening, I clipped her leash on. I tried to do our usual loop around the block, but she kept pulling back toward the house, checking over her shoulder the whole way. When I unclipped her at the door she went straight back to her spot. I moved her food bowl next to her before bed. In the morning it was right where I’d left it. 

I fried chicken thighs and held one close enough that the grease left a mark on her snout. She turned her head. I cupped water in my palm and held it under her mouth. She licked my hand once, then looked back at the door. The next day I drove to the grocery store and bought sirloin tips. I cut one into cubes at the kitchen counter and carried the cutting board over to her. She turned away, flattened her ears and looked at the floor.

That night after Chris and the kids went to bed, I sat down next to her on the rug with the bowl between us. I picked up a cube and ate it. She looked at me, then back at the door. I ate another one. The clock over the stove moved. Her ribcage rose and fell. I sat there until my back stiffened and the kitchen got cold.

On the seventh morning I sat down next to her and didn’t say anything. I picked up a cube and ate it. Then I picked up another one and held it out. She looked at my hand. She looked at the door. She looked at my hand again. Then she leaned forward and took it off my fingers, so carefully I barely felt it go. I held out another one, and she took that too. I kept my hand low and steady. She kept eating until the bowl was empty. When it was gone she stood, drank from her water bowl in long slow pulls, then walked a few feet from the door and lay down. Not at the door. I didn’t move for a while. Eventually I reached over and put my hand on her side and felt her breathing slow.

After that, when someone came to the door, Maggie would stand up and walk over, but she’d stop a few feet short and just look at them. She’d hold still while they reached down to pet her. Her tail hung.

A few years later we sold the house and moved to Cicero, on the other end of Oneida Lake. The new place had a fenced yard. I picked up a beagle puppy from a hunting buddy and brought him home. We named him Jake. No one in the house asked why and no one explained it.

Maggie wanted nothing to do with him at first. He’d bite at her back legs when he wanted her attention, or grab her tail and pull until she learned to sit on it when he was nearby. But after a few weeks she started following him around the yard. In the afternoons, when he’d finally worn himself out and gone still, she’d put her head down on his side. She was gentle with him the same way she’d been gentle with her Jake.

When he was asleep she’d get up and go to the back door. She’d stand there with her nose to the glass until her breath fogged it over.

                                                            *   *   *

William is a novelist and essayist whose work explores memory, landscape, and the quiet bonds that shape a life. Born in upstate New York, he now travels full‐time with his wife and their dogs, writing from the road and gathering the stories that become his work.

By Craig Loomis

He ripped his favorite shirt today.  He didn’t mean to but for some reason the once reliable buttons refused to unbutton kindly and when he gave them what he thought was nothing more than a mild tug, it ripped from collar to sleeve.  When he held it up to the window, the light, seeing if it were as bad as it sounded, he saw that it was.  Thinking that was that, he grimaced and tossed it in the garbage container, but then, as he started to step away, heading back to the closet in search of a substitute-favorite shirt—at least for the time being—he suddenly changed his mind and returned to the garbage container, lifting the broken shirt up by his fingertips.  He didn’t know what he had in mind, except that it was still his favorite shirt, mangled or not.  Although fixing it was out of the question, he couldn’t help but smooth it flat on the bed to see. . . to see, . . just to see.  

Ever since he could remember it had been his favorite long-sleeved blue-green shirt that had never once needed ironing, that fit him just right around the shoulders, that could go for days, even weeks, without a washing. Still, favorite or not, she had been relentless: “You still wearing that old thing? You’ve got dozens of shirts that are just as good, if not better.  Just last Christmas I bought you that bright red cotton special that you’ve worn, what? once?  How about that?  And what’s so wrong with what your Aunt Sally bought you on Father’s Day?  A crisp white short-sleeved that you could button up all the way…” and so on.

Meanwhile, he left his favorite shirt just like that on the bed, ragged and torn, wondering if anyone would really care, let alone notice, if he wore it just like that; after all, who cares about someone else’s shirt? Who?  

Half-heartedly, he stepped to the closet and flipped through the many other shirts hanging up: some kind of collarless, zebra-like affair, a short-sleeved beachy orange, something all black (he had never worn black, ever).  His half-hearted attempt over, he returned to the bed, bending down to get a closer look-see, thinking, in some sort of fantastically way that if he looked long and hard enough he’d find a solution, a magical fix.  But it wasn’t long before it all went the other direction: the closer he looked, squinted, turned his head this way and that, the more terrible the tear. “No way,” he whispered.  That’s when he moved it from the bed to the laundry room downstairs, thinking, he needed just a little more time to consider.

In the end, and two days later, he turned to the 18-year-old who was, like always, on her way out the door, asking, “By the way, didn’t happen to see a blue shirt that I left in the laundry room, did you?  It was just there the other day.”

She hesitated, one hand on the doorknob, looking up at the ceiling to remember, “Oh yeah.  I sure did.  All torn and ratty, right?  That blue one you’re always wearing?”

She waited for him to nod, at the very least, but he didn’t.

Hand still on the doorknob, the door now open. “The cat did it again,” she continued.

“Again?”

“She did it again, missed the litter box.  Second or third time this week.  I thought she’d grown out of that?”

He waited, rubbing his hands together. “And?”

“And, I needed to clean up her mess and so there was that old torn shirt of yours.  Mess cleaned.”

He wanted to say more, ask more but by then she was out the door.  For the rest of the day and part of the night he was angry, but then, by the next day, once his anger had become weaker, lacking any meaningful direction, he gave it up and eventually returned to his closet. After much looking and relooking, he eventually found a worn, gray shirt with its pocket stitching coming undone. It was nothing like his long-sleeved favorite but there was something about it that reminded him of his college days, and he tried it on and walked around the bedroom.  He looked in the mirror, sat on the bed, went to the window.  Back to the mirror. Nodding.  Turning this way and that.  And so began the making of a new favorite shirt—at least for the time being. 

*   *   *

For twenty years (2004-2024) Craig Loomis taught English (literature and writing) at the American University of Kuwait in Kuwait City.  He has had his short fiction published in such literary journals as The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, The Prague Revue, The Prairie Schooner, Fiction International, Critical Pass Review, Mid-American Review, The Owen Wister Review, Cumberland River Review, Consequence Magazine, SAND, and others.

A Memoir by Beth Ruggiero Bell

The best and worst job I ever had was cutting my Italian grandfather’s toenails when he could no longer do it himself.

Nonno called me to his house one day and said he had a deal for me. He kept it simple: “You cut,” he said, pointing to his feet. “I pay.” I had never seen his bare feet before. I felt strangely honored.

It wasn’t an easy job. His toenails were tough and mean like him, and I had to spend my first paycheck on a pair of professional clippers from our local Sally Beauty Supply. Even then, shards of toenail would fling through the air, occasionally hitting me in the face or getting caught in my hair.

He paid me $20 a session. I was a hard-up college kid at the time, so I accepted it. But truthfully, I would have done it for free. Before then, when I thought of him, I mostly recalled how he would explode at my Nonna at family meals, his fists banging on the table, spilling our drinks and rattling our silverware and nerves. Now when I think of him, I remember how delicate his ankle felt resting across my knee and the surprising softness of his heels. 

“You do good job,” he told me once.

About two years into our partnership, he fell and broke his ankle. The injury turned into gangrene, and the doctor had to amputate his leg from the knee down.

“Good news,” Nonno told me the first time I saw him after the surgery. “One less foot to cut.” And he reduced my pay to ten bucks.

*   *   *

Beth Ruggiero Bell is a veteran English teacher and married mother of two boys who aims to write candidly and vulnerably about the complexities of modern parenting and relationships. Her personal essays and flash nonfiction have been published most recently in Newsweek US, Newsweek Japan, and The New York Times (Tiny Love Stories).

By Don Tassone

The old woman slowly stepped over to a desk in her bedroom.  She sat down and closed her eyes.  

About a minute later, she opened her eyes, pulled several sheets of paper and a pen out of the top drawer and began writing a letter — to her 20-year-old self.

My Dearest Young Katherine,

What a life you will have. I’ve lived it now for 65 years longer than you have, and I thought I’d share a few thoughts and maybe a little advice based on what I’ve learned and what I’m still learning.

First, your life will be filled with both joys and sorrows. The sorrows will shape you the most. They will hollow you out. They’ll allow you to hold all the more joy and to feel every moment of joy more deeply.

Second, your life will be filled with love, but that love will not always be easy. You will be betrayed by some of those closest to you, those you love the most.  But their betrayal will not be out of any ill will towards you. It will come from their flaws, their moments of weakness. We are all flawed. You too will hurt those you love, but you will never stop loving them. Please know every sin can be redeemed, and you can be the redeemer.

Third, you will eventually find yourself but not for many years because you will be looking with your eyes and not your heart.  Looking around is important because, by seeing how others live, you can better know how you want to live. But you are not others. You have a voice inside yourself that is unlike anyone else’s. That voice is true. Listen to it.  Trust it.

You will live a long life.  Enjoy every moment. Remember what Mom used to say: “Every day is a good day.”

I love you so very much,

Katherine

The woman folded the letter in thirds, opened her top desk drawer and pulled out an envelope.  She slipped the letter into the envelope, which she placed over her heart.

She closed her eyes and smiled, a serene smile, and a few tears ran down her cheeks.  She wiped them away with her fingertips, drew a deep breath and opened her eyes.  She placed the envelope on the desktop, picked up her pen and wrote “Katherine” on it.

Then she got up and slowly made her way to her kitchen, where she made herself a cup of camomile tea.

*   *   *

Don Tassone is the author of two novels, one novella, 11 short story collections and one children’s book.  He lives in Loveland, Ohio.