DECEMBER 2014 - APRIL 2015BENJAMIN WAChS6

P rofessor dusek he pre-ferred the title to Dr. Dusek because professor was a higher title than Doctor back at the Czech universitieshad trouble pro-nouncing the names of the chemical elements in ways that were clear to his American students. He rolled the r on carbon, and he stressed the second syllable on oxygen, so that it came out ox-Y-gen, and they laughed behind his back and he knew it. He was a joke.

They asked themselves, what else can you expect from a crappy community college but a burnt out chemistry professor who got his degree in the Soviet fucking Union? And he told himself: what else can you expect from the cast-off kids of the Kentucky educational system, who didnt have the parental guidance you need to make it to a real college? Of course they were this way.

He needed to pay his bills and they needed to pretend they had a future,

and during the year there was nothing else to say. This, he told himself, is how great countries fall: letting kids like this grow up with heads full of dreams. He was not an unkind man, but he heard how they laughed.

He had a better pedigree than he needed to be here, but not one so good that he could have found a job this secure in the better universities of the east coast, or the west coast, and when hed realized what Kentucky was, hed taken the offer.

The Water of Life

BenjaminWachs

BENJAMIN WAChS 7

During the summer he drove through the hills and hollows, collecting peat from the ground and tasting the wheat and the barley and the rye the small farmers made. He bought the old bourbon barrels, too, off the families whose whiskey he particularly liked. They usually sold in bulk to the Scottish distillers, but he paid well for just a few barrels off the top. His needs were small.

None of the farmers or the bootleggers laughed at him. They could tell the kind of man he was by what he knew about their land after he tasted their grain.

At the end of each summer vacation, when the leaves were just beginning to turn, he finished his mash and set it in the barrels, just like he had done in the old country behind the fake wall at the chemical plant. In those days hed had more equipmentwhole machines had been ordered and then lost in exchange for the promise of a barrel

of the good stuffbut the ingredients here were so much better. America was truly blessed to have soil like this, and people who know how to use it, he thought. What he would have given to be one of them, to have come from one of those Kentucky families who had passed the secrets of liquid fire down through the generations. They were poor, it was true, but so was he: and they had family and clan while he had escaped his homeland to be a stranger in theirs.

Each fall, as the leaves turned, he set new barrels aside. They would age 20 years. They would be ready long after he retiredif he ever did. He hoped he would live long enough to taste it. But this was the life hed chosen, and he reminded himself of that each year as winter set in, and the laughter of the children to whom he was trying to teach the secrets of the universe started anew.

This story first appeared inf ict ion365 .com

Cal Tab

uena-Frolli, p

en and

ink, 2015

DECEMBER 2014 - APRIL 2015BENJAMIN WAChS8

I light an unfiltered cigarette. She lights a black herbal cigarette. Hers smells better but will kill her faster. We both know it.Maybe, i say, my parents withheld affection from me when i was little, and now im an emotional black hole.

Maybe, she says, i was molested by the first man i really trusted, and ive been trying to get a do-over ever since.

Maybe, i say, i had a grandmother who picked on me mercilessly until i hated my own body.

Maybe, she says, i had somebody close to me die when i was too young to process it right.

Maybe, i say, taking a long drag, i was ostracized as a kid, and got more angry than somebody that young should.

Maybe, she says, blowing smoke in my face, i was labeled the school slut for 6 years.

Maybe, i say, i got screwed by the first person who fucked me.

Maybe, she says, that was me.

We stare at each other, hard. im all out of excuses.

Not me, she says, her voice scratchy. ive got dozens. You can spend the night again, but tomorrow im kicking you out for good, and if anybody ever asks ill say you hit me.

i move in and pin her against the wall. i think shes lying. But either way, my list is getting bigger.

This story first appeared in f ict ion365 .com

I'll Show You Mine

Kenneth Srivijittakar, graphite & digital

BENJAMIN WAChS 9Kenneth Srivijittakar, graphite & digital

I f you mix roses and cinnamon in with the blood of a woman thinking about her first kiss, heat in an iron pot over an open flame, and add spring water, the result is a love potion.

The other ingredients are constants, but if you change the flowers to lilies, the potion inspires platonic love: someone who wishes to be near, but never to touch.

If you change the flowers to tulips, the potion creates a love that cannot last, burning itself out in unbearable bursts of passion, eventually leaving the lover exhausted, broken, and alone.

If you change the flowers to lilacs, the potion will inspire intense daydreams of the beloved, the kind that most of us never act on.

If you change the flowers to orchids, the potion will create a love that does not last beyond a single kiss.

My grandmother would whisper these recipes to me as i lay in my crib. One day she told me that my mother had used chrysanthemums in a potion to catch my father, and that he in turn had brewed her a potion using carnations and this is why they live in two very different marriages, never coming together but loving the only way they know how.

i learned the lesson, and brew my potions with sunflowers and drink them each time i give my heart away. i wake up in the morning clean and innocent, as though i had never loved at all.

This story first appeared inf ict ion365 .com

Bouquet

Benjamin Wachs is the author of the short story collection A Guide to Bars and Nightlife in the Sacred City, and editor of The Book of The Is. He tweets as @BenjaminWachs and archives his work (eventually) at

theWachsGallery.com