Crowndown Town
by
Paige Johnson
Winning Miss Juggallette requires dexterity, determination. Havta be a patient princess, twirling raver braids and grinding cottoncandy-cornered teeth. Means cackling in the face of ridicule while smoothing your soda-splashed sash.
I’m huntress of this Gathering: juggling swords, working the splits, singing, “Everybody Rize!” On stage, I’m Stickii Sweet like the “Redpop” splattering my stripped tights.
Dark Carnival beats pump, my heart thumps louder.
Launching into a handstand, I’m unphased by bottle-throwing campers. Plunk, plip. It’s rowdy reunion tradition. We ain’t the Insane Clown Posse over grilled, greasepaint smiles.
Felt worse when Sissy screamed my routine’s a “cringe fest,” “waste of time for the freak feast.”
Focused on footwork. Skipping in an’ outta cartwheels. Dodging dead GloFish, Matrix-mode.
Win a few over.
Click my monster boot heels, flash aside bikini bottoms.
“Whoop, whoop!”
I pull out the bat that made a similar swinging sound. Something I learned from Violent J’s verses?
Tonya Harding a hater, make ’em cry Sarah Bernhardt-style. Sister or not.
Stick it where the sun don’t shine. How’s that for talent?
Whistles. A flurry of Faygo fizz, nitrous balloons.
Cash, chain, a backstage pass.
Who’s the loser now?
“Fam-i-ly, fam-i-ly!” I cheer with the crowd closer than chromosomes.
Paige Johnson is EIC of Outcast Press. They have published transgressive titles such as Shadows Slow-Dancing in Derelict Rooms by Stephen J. Golds and The Edge of Nowhere by BF Jones. Johnson herself has two illustrated poetry books out: Percocet Summer and Citrus Springs. They are slangy to sweet, psychedelic to psychotic, and another seasonal installment will be titled Cracked Leaves & Autumn Lines. She also put together and featured in both short story collections called Slut Vomit: An Anthology of Sexwork.
Cheap Shot
by
Phil Robbins
Fifty cents a shot, the sign read. Three for a dollar. A line had formed out the alley and across the tracks, where cardboard palaces provided flimsy shelter from the cold. I’d stood for two hours, hoping to earn enough for a double high pastrami, slathered with mustard, and if I could hold on, maybe one of them knishes, fat with potato and peas. I’d last eaten yesterday. Some scraps of lettuce and cabbage—all that was left after the dumpster was picked over by the others. I’d already cleared twelve dollars, but I was still standing, so why not work overtime?
I wiped the blood that poured off my lips, smearing my face, and looked at the line, my blackened eyes half shut.
“Next up,” I said, my tongue filling my mouth.
It was a little boy, maybe ten. Billy’s age, I thought. His father lifted him up.
“Go ahead, son. Take your best shot.”
The boy looked at me and smiled. “Your nose is all red. Like a clown.”
The father dropped two quarters in my jar. The boy reared back, across his body, and slammed his fist in my face. “Can I do another Daddy?”
Phil Robbins is a clinical psychologist who began writing in earnest during the pandemic. He is currently completing his MFA in fiction from the Mountainview program at SNHU. His stories have appeared in Rock and a Hard Place, Bristol Noir, Assignment Literary Magazine, Passengers, Military Arts and Press: As You Were, and The Wilderness House Literary Review. His first novel is expected out–oh, wait. He needs an agent and a publisher first.