Artwork © Robert Fleming
Monsters
Mack and Millie across the street have once again turned into our driveway with their huge Monster Truck rather than making a U-turn in the street. I know this is a deliberate hostile action. Each time, another big stone from my wall gets dislodged. Once I screamed at them through the window when it was summer and the screens were in. Now it’s winter. They can’t hear my screaming through the closed windows.
“What the hell is going on?” yells my husband, who will remain nameless.
I am also disliking him very much at this time. A pity being it’s nearly Christmas, a time of peace and goodwill.
Mack and Millie are also not their real names. I can’t remember their real names. They have lived across from us a long time. It has never been pleasant. Once, coming back on the train from the city, after my root canal, I mentioned my pain to Mack since we both got off at the same train stop. I showed him my bloody gauze pad for proof. He sort of laughed it all off in a disparaging way. Who the fuck laughs about a root canal!
Placing the gauze pad back against my mouth (because in one split second some blood had run down my chin) I gurgled out a comeback:
“I saw your wife the other day and almost didn’t recognize her with her new face lift.”
He squinted hard at me and speeded up his walking to get away. After that incident my mind chucked their real names into the trash; rather than the recycle bin.
I told my husband that hate has to be brought into the open. He has no idea what I’m talking about.
Susan Isla Tepper has a new novel just released from Spuyten Duyvil Books, NYC, titled Hair of a Fallen Angel. A twenty-year writer, she is the author of twelve published books of fiction and poetry and 5 stage plays. Tepper has been nominated 21 times for the Pushcart Prize in both fiction and poetry. Her play Crooked Heart concerning artist Jackson Pollock premiered on October 25, 2022 at the Irish Repertory Theatre in NYC. Adapted from an earlier novel, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A YouTube music video for her new novel was made by Tim Young and Paula Parente.
Robert Fleming is a gay-man, word-artist, and scientist born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada who emigrated to Lewes, Delaware, United States. Robert follows his mother as a visual artist and his grandfather as a poet. In 1986 he published the second psychological research study on gay men’s response to AIDS in United States. Then, in the 1990s he was a contributing member of the District of Columbia’s Triangle Artist group. Now Robert is a founding member and contributing editor of Devil’s Party Press’ Old Scratch Press.