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Across the Wire Vol. 7

The Islands

by Walker Rutter-Bowman

At parties we stood around the newest statue. The host described intent, the extraction of stone, the weather of genesis. This time it was Charles. His pants were new and stiff. When he lost his train of thought, he defaulted to saying, “Galala marble.” Those were important words, and he clung to them. The statue was almost beautiful. We tried not to look at its bent genital, its implausible balls. Or we tried to look closer. When Charles lost the train again, he spoke, with feeling, of his adopted son’s agoraphobia. It had been diagnosed by a real doctor via a videoconferencing portal. The fear came to light as a nightmare: the boy pinned against a wall as people backed up, the backs of their heads growing as large as balloons, black hairs coming into focus. The reason the boy gave for not coming downstairs was the poor health of his lizard. The vet sipped champagne and said, “The lizard is fine.” He shook his head sadly. “The lizard has never been finer.”

These people wore watches and rings. Their shirts looked like normal shirts but more assured. To them and their methods, wealth meant island. My money was new, and so were these friends. I had never been an island man. I was from an interior state shaped like a muffin. Islands have sun and sand. They crawl with things that kill. They have grooves and protrusions, inlets and sides. They sneer.

One night, while everyone was discussing island life, some people pulled out their new passports to the islands they owned. These were official-looking documents with pictures and dates. While others looked and laughed at the photos, I shook my glass with a landlocked vigor, making the ice bang together. 

Why no island? they asked me. They knew my net worth. They had read the profile of me in the lifestyle magazine. You can still find the profile online. The writer called me a transit magnate, and it’s true I’m in bridges. That’s how I made my money. Why no island? they asked. They doubted my holdings. They lacked a fiscal literacy when it came to the great bridge. But I had funds. I’d adopted a daughter despite the towering cost. I could afford an estranged wife who sometimes sent me cards, and from the handwriting, by the angle of the stamp, I could tell she came by her loathing honestly, like a farmer. Adopting a daughter had to do with a single office where you went to fill out forms. And then the fenced-in area where you met your daughter. But having a daughter won’t protect you from island pressure. She’ll love it, they said. In good weather your adopted daughter will sail around the coast, they said. As the sun sets, you’ll sit on the terrace and watch her boat go by, and she’ll look up at you and wave, and the wave will mean something to both of you. She’ll sail all around and make you a worthless map, and you’ll attach it to the refrigerator with a magnet, and every time you go in for ice cubes, you’ll tap the map with your finger, and you’ll think, Here I am.

Sometimes this is your house, your new statue, your adopted daughter. Sometimes, despite what you’ve been told, Shauna is not agoraphobic, she just likes to read. Sometimes a lizard is not the perfect pet, and it ends up being you who feeds it and rubs its crested head. I liked the lizard but not my new statue, which had a small and sneaky face. He looks like you, the people said, and they mimed kissing it. That was their notion of a joke. I described to the guests how the artist was eager to disprove traditional metrics of abundance. The statue was small and ugly because the artist aimed to desexualize, or was it sexualize?, the height of men. Smoochie smoochie, the guests responded. I left doors open so they could poke around, find proof of my money, like pictures of Shauna in various stages of the latest orthodonture. They studied the photos to see if we had skipped steps. We had. But we had also doctored photos to hide the fact that we’d prioritized certain teeth over others. Half-satisfied, they put down the pictures and studied my clocks. I turned away to signal I didn’t care if they pocketed some of my clocks.

It’s not nothing, they said, roughly handling my timepieces, tossing them back and forth like baseballs. Meaning: a clock is not an island. Two clocks is not an island. Three? 

I knew it wasn’t. A clock is much more than nothing, but even the rarest clock in the world is no island. And if, one day, there’s an island that’s also a great big clock, it won’t come cheap. I was rich but I wasn’t clock-island rich.

But I could buy the average island if I wanted one, I said. But do I want one?

Their embarrassment rose up.

They looked deep into the faces of my very own clocks to hide how stupid they thought it was, a man holding himself apart from island desire. Money can buy a lot, but it can’t buy you the sense to keep things to yourself. It can buy you a clock that looks like a coconut with a hinge hidden by soft, brown fibers. It can even buy you the service of a man who stands in front of you to block your words with his broad body, a man named Jim who was a respected member of the team. For years my words struck him and fell to the ground, and for this he was, in my view, well compensated. But he couldn’t always be there. Jim needed a day off from time to time. Jim had a family.

So I bought the island. I had another party. I bought another sculpture. I was in the red. The bridge business was sputtering. Shauna wouldn’t come down because her book was getting good. The vet came in the door and said he heard the lizard was ill. I said the lizard was fine, and he said, That’s a relief, and helped himself to a flute of champagne and some canapes. He shook hands with the members of the group. His daughter’s teeth were straight but not as white as Shauna’s. His daughter had a lizard, but she would never have a lizard and an island, a lizard on an island. I helped him help himself to another flute or two.

I walked the guests around the statue and pointed to the contours. You see them there, the contours? They looked, but they took them for granted.

But of course, this location is temporary, I yawned. I could see Jim scrambling towards me. Soon we’ll move the statue to the island.

You bought an island?

I didn’t mention it?

Which one? they asked. Their maps were open.

That one.

That’s the one Kurt wanted. 

They were impressed. I knew because they went quiet and still, like certain birds in the presence of larger birds. While Jim was in the cellar getting more champagne, I took advantage of his absence to quote a poet who loved to fish.

But now they wondered what was left of my holdings. Any liquid? Was I hurting? Island-rich is one thing. Island-poor is another. They said I had the stink of it on me, the smell of a man over-leveraged by his land. So I bought one more. Jim said I was only doing it to shut them up. He was grilling for us because I’d never mastered the art. From time to time he’d complain that grilling was not really his job. I said maybe he should shut up and focus on the burgers. But he burned them anyway. His mind was elsewhere. He had been playing piano at Petit Chapeau Rouge for ten nights in a row, and it was starting to take its toll. The subject was sensitive. I’d told him he could do both until one of the jobs suffered, and now they both suffered. He wasn’t blocking comments at a satisfying rate, or grilling with the precision of former days, and word from Petit Chapeau Rouge was his playing was plodding and lacked dynamism. He was overworked. Jazz piano was teaching him vindictiveness, and he was leaving me unprotected. This burger is burned, I said. It’s flame-broiled, he said, hanging his head.

If I bought the second island close to the first one, they would criticize me for making decisions based on convenience. Accuse me of intending to build bridges between the two islands. Say, Oh, he made his fortune from building little bridges, now watch him try to connect his islands with two or three little bridges. I fooled them all by buying a second island quite far from the first. No bridge in the world could connect them, and I should know. Part of working in bridges is knowing when you’re ahead and when you’re not, and another part of working in bridges is proving your point.

Jim, who was helping me with motive, said it’s all right to prove your point. He was proving one himself with his sad piano playing and his burned burgers. Now I’m in a position where I can comfortably say upon reflection that the second island didn’t measure up to the first. It was covered in ants—one kind of ant, special for its aggression and orange thorax. A man lived on the island, a scientist, who had stretched his research grant longer than anyone thought possible. He called them Hofmann ants. His name was Hofmann. Either it was a tremendous coincidence, or he had named them after himself. He was covered in bites, and when you thought of all the pieces of Hofmann the ants had bitten off, the name began to make sense. He lived in a brown, single-flap tent. His papers declared he was allowed to study the ants for two more years, but I think he had changed the dates. He held his papers up as if someone might read them. He clutched the documentation like someone might take it away. When he talked about the ants, Hofmann could really get going. His face would grow red, his newer bites would begin to glow. The bites looked like little islands themselves, volcanic chains of red craters surrounded by ashen crusts. He was very skinny. Jim and I wondered what he ate. There were no fruit trees. Very few fish in the surrounding waters. But there were ants. And his tongue, when it showed itself, was short, thick, and coated in an orange gel. Maybe it was love, maybe it was revenge, maybe it was as simple as a dependable source of protein.

Two islands impressed my new friends. They had to rethink the sources of my wealth. Little bridges, sure, but maybe little tolls, too? That’s right, that’s right, many streams. Bridges was big. The people who had once asked, Is bridges really a living, is bridges really wealth?—they were now rethinking what they knew about the revenue of the load-bearing causeway. Plus I had invented a dongle that changed people’s lives, turning one port into another. Because a dongle is a bridge, too. A dongle is a bridge, too.

I hated playing favorites, but one island had ants and the other didn’t. One island had an unwashed and righteous scientist and the other didn’t. I built an airfield and a road going all the way around the antless island. Jim said we could call it Island I—that’s the kind of creative thinker he was. I built a house on the cliff overlooking the bay where the sun set, splashing down into the ocean in a fine display of leaking reds and oranges, like it was the first or last day on earth. I pointed to the bay to show Shauna where she could sail her boat, but she wasn’t there, she was upstairs, reading her book and picking her blisters. But nothing could kill the mood. Jim popped a bottle, and our thoughts turned to God, the color and loneliness at the start of all things. 

We must have brought an ant or two over on the plane. Shauna showed up at breakfast covered in bites. Jim set out traps that might’ve worked on your ordinary ant. Instead, they began to chew on some foundational elements of the new house.

I was hurting a bit financially. People knew I was island-rich, and, like the Hofmann ant, sensed opportunity. The vet began to call and ask when was the best time to visit. He asked, How’s the lizard? and, Are you liquid? Then Jim realized he might be undervalued. He must have got to talking to the other men and women who stood in front of their employers, operating their grills, blocking their words. I think there’s a group. Maybe his long nights of stale smoke at Petit Chapeau Rouge gave him a taste of independence. He brought me some charts showing how much money he had saved me by blocking certain words. He handed me a pamphlet about the dangers of eating uncooked meats. It was hard to believe they were accurate, but they were compelling and certainly colorful. Under each bright bar was one of the stupid things I had tried to say, or a type of raw meat, and then the bar extended upward to a point of potential fiscal damage. And then the last bar, the total, extended off the page and he had to fold out some sections of the graph to show how far it went, and like a tongue of orange flame the bar unrolled and kept going: that bar was the financial damage I would’ve incurred from eating uncooked meat and then speaking about it in an honest but fiscally ruinous manner. Jim knows better than the average man that the meat lobby is a powerful force, and bridges must work with meat to reach the state of synergy we all crave in business and the American meal.

The bars had words on them. These words had hit Jim’s chest and fallen to the ground. We were safe, thanks to Jim. But now the words had returned, printed on a color-coded graph Jim used to shake me down. The words had come back, after all. I signed some papers, and Jim was rich. He had always been good to me, but now? With his bad attitude? What if all those stupid things I said didn’t actually hit Jim and clatter to the ground, but became embedded in his skull, his soul? I’m not saying he became dumber, in body, mind, or spirit. But uglier? I’m saying he remembered the words I thought we’d agreed to forget.

“Let’s say, for the sake of conversation, some of the ants made it off Island II and onto Island I. What would you do?” I cut Hofmann’s steak for him but encouraged him to hold the fork. We were broadening and deepening his diet via imported goods.

“I would worry about the survival of the habitat, as the Hofmann ant is one of the most destructive organisms in the world.”

I knew my builders would agree. My new house was sliding down the cliff before it could even be finished. I watched the workers move about, welts covering their bodies, and I thought, Is it too late to be someone else?

When asked about indigenous self-determination, I said I was all for it, on paper. A truly rich man? the advocates said, with two islands such as yours? One of which has had people living on it for centuries? Wouldn’t the truly rich man concede that the land was more theirs than his? and that they should be allowed to govern it as they see fit? Not only do you not have the right to own the island? but you don’t really have the right to be there at all? The fake passport you wave about raises a notion of nationhood? that is not yours to raise or really even listen in on? Before responding I locked eyes with Jim, who was not going to stop me, though it would pain him to see me step forward and shoot off my mouth, which is what I did, and I quoted a poet with a passion for fishing but also for fascism, and I regretted saying those words then and then regretted them even more once I saw them punctuated in the last surviving publications of print.

Sometimes, island-rich means being able to give up Island I. Sometimes, island-rich is a feeling you once had, not a life you get to live. At least that’s how Jim put it. I saw the logic, but I didn’t like it. I agreed to meet with the indigenous, and I can’t say I liked them either. I didn’t dislike them because they were indigenous. I disliked them because they disliked me. And because they killed Jim. There was a misunderstanding with Jim and the manner in which he opened his arms in a gesture of welcome. I thought it was a nice gesture, but they shot him with a very long arrow. Jim’s wife and son said after all the shielding Jim had done for me through the years, that perhaps I, for once, could have shielded, etc. They said Jim’s threats of further litigation led to my hesitance to step in front of that arrow, but it had very little to do with that. It had much more to do with the arrow, and the fear that filled my heart when I saw it flying through the sky. Even if Jim had survived the puncture, the arrow was poisoned, and the fever brought out a burst of language I had never heard from the man who took great care with his words. With some gasping and an agitated frothing at the lips, Jim died. The last thing he said was, “Is it blue? Is the body really blue?” No one knows what he meant. But from time to time, I find it useful to ask myself the same thing.

After Jim, I stopped responding to others. I went a bit mute. If I had to say anything, I wrote it on a scrap of paper and kept it in my pocket until I could gather more information on what kind of thing it was. It slowed me down. Sometimes I dropped a scrap of paper, a thought, and it blew away, and after a few moments I didn’t miss it. 

Shauna says it’s interesting that islands are places of exile and objects of desire. Shauna says it’s interesting what wealth does to men of a certain susceptibility. Shauna says it’s interesting how expensive her school is, though not even she knows the real figure. She wants to want to help others, but she wants other things too.

We listen to old recordings of Jim from Petit Chapeau Rouge. I can detect things I said to him that influenced his playing, as though the words found their way into his fingers. The playing is plodding, it lacks dynamism—and that’s exactly how I want it. Sometimes the last thing you want is dynamism. His grave is on the island. The island has a bird with a very recognizable call. Somehow Hofmann never noticed it. The bird drowns out what I’m about to say. I want Jim to be that bird. Jim didn’t believe in bridges, and neither do birds. Shauna puts flowers on his grave, and I sprinkle it with scraps of paper. She questions if the scraps of paper are a good way to honor Jim. I believe he would’ve valued it for its human comedy: the scraps of paper carried away by the wind, the way I chase after them and trip over my own two feet, the way Shauna sighs, the way they blow into the water and drift into the distance, the way I wade into the shallows without even rolling my pantlegs. The papers soak up the sea, the ink bleeds into the water. Hofmann makes an orange stew. I open my mouth to speak, but the Jim of a bird screams again. A bird is a bridge, but to what? To more birds?

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

two poems

by Conor Hultman

#000000

logical heart

precious hoped gentle wind

me finger I my

#029CBC

parallel so not

return grace silly trunk

livid sang ran

Conor Hultman lives in New York, New York.

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Dispatches from the King's Motel

January, 2026

Derek Maine

The United States military, in a brazen act, swooped into Venezuela under cover of night, and extracted the President and his wife, extraditing them by force to U.S. soil and upending the country’s political order.

Dear Leader speaks to the American people on the Venezuelan regime change, “we’re going to run the country.”

1.8.26

High end sex workers were stranded in St. Barth’s over New Years Eve after air travel was shut down with the Venezuelan invasion. Yesterday, in Minneapolis, in America, an ICE agent shot and killed a citizen. Three shots, all of them unnecessary. Videos from multiple angles released by citizens on social media immediately. Dear Leader tells us what we see is not what we see, and his army of mouthpieces denigrate the woman, a mother and poet. America has seized Russian and Venezuelan oil tankers and are in control of the country’s massive oil supply. Dear Leader says he is setting up an offshore fund to place the proceeds from the sale of oil and he will decide how to disperse. He also tells the New York Times the only limits to his power are his mortality. The President of Venezuela and his wife are housed in a jail in New York, along with Tekashi 6ix9ine, Puff Daddy, the CEO killer, and Sam Bankman Fried.

Our opinions are being scraped and collected, indexed and recorded.

Our facts are fed to us.

Dear Leader cedes Taiwan – “He (Xi) considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing,”

1.9.26

A fifth oil tanker out of Venezuela is seized by the United States. Protests in Iran. China, Russia, Iran, and South Africa conducting joint naval drills. More federal agents descend upon Minnesota to deal with the protestors.

1.10.26

What’s pathetic is a 43 year old man addicted to his phone. An embarrassing, weak mind. This is what I possess. It’s a long story but the short of it is I was hired to cover a war but too terrified to get on a plane, and so now I live in the King’s Motel at the edge of a downtown mid-Atlantic city where I drink non-alcoholic beers, smoke weed constantly, take a menagerie of pills to try and match the lighting, and follow a war, a global new world order forming, and a domestic stew of chaos and cruelty on a 5.8 inch screen which also monitors my every move and sends every word and phrase to a data center in Scottsdale, Arizona to feed to the large language models. 

Also, the screen affects my mood. The screen enrages me, delights me, bores me, all at its whim. I cede control to the digital muck and invisible forces. I order takeout. I order more nonalcoholic beers and two packs of Marlboro Lights to be delivered to room 26. I turn my screen onto a protest in Minnesota. I turn my screen to Iran.

But today I am making a change. I am buying stamps.

The editors at Farewell Transmission have agreed to accept my monthly column by post.

Yes, I will leave my room today for rolling papers and stamps. It must be done. I have labeled it an action item.

How I got here is irrelevant. My ex wife is in Baltimore. Irrelevant. I am here. This is what matters. I am here and this is the present. Very few of my old soldiers are left. I have alienated. Misfired. Spent myself. This is the present, tense.

I can count on my man in the statehouse. I can count on the courier. I can count on my editor. What’s left? Captain Jason and His Riches cannot set sail in international waters in these conditions. Likely he’s left drug running behind and is taking families out snorkeling in the Keys. Also, what else do I need? Three solid men are sufficient. Three solid men are more solid men than most have in their corner.

Dear Leader tells the world we back Iranian protestors, and warns Iran if they shoot innocent protesters then we will shoot. In Minnesota, meanwhile, protestors are deranged leftists who hate their country. We shoot them, “graveyard dead.”

1.11.26

America first but not Americans. Americans who do not side with Dear Leader are deranged, scum of the earth, ungrateful for all He and America has given them. America first. America is what I say it is, the adjunct professor and Dear Leader assure us. The television here at the motel is all fucked up and the night manager is a psychotic so I do allow myself ten minutes on the phone to peruse the war. Fifteen tops.

It’s my fucking job to bleed into the zeitgeist. It’s my fucking job to go insane.

I’m in every moment at once.

1.18.26

Because what the world needs is another stenographer of human atrocities.

Would be better to be a typist at the flower shop.

Would be if I had something revelatory to say then all of this would come together. We are not in an age of coming together. These are not coming together times. These are the days of resentment and isolation, obsession with self, and war. These are wartimes we are living in. Revelations in war are hard to come by, and I am existing while it is happening and I am existing right along with you and wondering what the fuck is going on myself. I have an opinion about how we got here. I have an idea. But it doesn’t mean shit, isn’t worth shit. My ideas got me here, renting a room for the foreseeable future at the King’s Motel.

I see the meanness every day. It stays with me, vibrational, unhealthy.

I don’t even know what a column is or how to do it. Probably this is not how.

Dear Leader initiated a trade war with Europe to try and take Greenland peacefully, through economic pressures. New geopolitical world orders, while they are remaking themselves, unfurl quickly and then all at once.

I am not in the best shape to cover it. I am likely not the man for the job. I see it through screens like so many others. It turns people into something else entirely, divorced from reality. Divorced from several things actually.

I allow myself fifteen minutes a day on the screens to ingest news of the wars, if I’m a good boy, and it takes me the rest of the day to swallow it.

I am in less control of where this goes than an author can usually stomach, and the events are out of even my man in the statehouse’s control.

I found my editor at the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike. He had bits of fish sticks in his beard. He refuses payment and explains we will “tackle the copy editing on a Disney cruise – it’s how I do things”

1.21.26

And they will turn against their own people, and some people will cheer.

My grandfather was a farmer and a cattle man, fought the Germans in WWII. I am addicted to designer sunglasses and benzos.

The dark fleet of oil transfers, providing 1/5th of the world’s oil supply illicitly avoiding American sanctions against Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, has been decimated since Maduro’s arrest and the latest American asserted dominance over the western hemisphere. Back to the warm water ports. Ships registering in nations with friendly maritime laws. Flying under a false flag. Sometimes not registering at all. Stopping in the middle of the ocean to transfer the oil to a better painted ship.

More CS gas is released on American citizens in Minnesota by the occupying federal force. Indiana wins the college football championship. Adoption of AI is slowing, plateauing, and suddenly the Microsoft CEO is saying if usage doesn’t pick up then the energy required to run the machines will be a catastrophic waste, without purpose. He didn’t say that last part exactly. He said it, just not as well. Catastrophic, without purpose. Doesn’t this define the age? Although I suppose the purpose is always and everywhere the hoarding of resources. How long ago has it been since Microsoft bought Three Mile Island? The first year of the war I think, to power their ambitious, needy machines.

1.22.26

The widening gap between the wealthy and everyone else. The nihilistic death rattle. The feeling of no prospects, no future. The screen. The guns the dating pool the lack of human connection. The microplastics in our guts. The storms, floods, fires. The hoarding of wealth. The fear. The flippancy, the loss of respect for human life. The sitting ducks. The ice caps. The financialization of every difference of opinion. The divide. The tearing apart of community. The lack of faith. The godlessness of it all. The spiritual decay. The troops on the ground. The disrespect. The airing of grievances. The decommissionings. The revenge tour. 

“Revenge for what,” Wyatt Earp asks Doc Holliday at the Hooker Ranch.

“For being born.”

1.24.26

They’ve killed again. The regime has sent its soldiers into our cities to kill, capture, and contain.

What’s coming is coming, they used to say. It’s here.

Derek Maine writes about the war for Farewell Transmission

Editor’s note on the Venezuela job:

More details have emerged about the Cuban detachment, composed of 20 or so mid-to-senior level members of the Ministry of the Interior. Most notably, Col. Humberto Alfonso Roca (67), head of Fidel and Raul’s personal security in Havana. It is also reported that a small number of Maduro’s personal guards were from the Avispas Negras (Black Wasps), Cuba’s elite Special Forces unit.

Initial estimates were up to 100 dead in the operation, but unconfirmed numbers from Venezuelan and Cuban officials hint past the century mark: 83 Venezuelan and 32 Cuban (military personnel) dead, and an unknown number of casualties.

The remains of Cuba’s “fallen unit” were repatriated to Havana, where all 32 received full military honors. Raul Castro and current Pres. Miguel Diaz-Canel were said to have overseen the ceremony.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Nights That Don’t End

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by Huina Zheng

At eleven p.m., the baby is still awake, squirming in her mother’s arms. The mother rocks her, pats her back, hums lullabies, but she refuses to sleep. Her eyelids droop, yet she keeps fussing. The father has long since gone to bed, his snores rising and falling. At one-thirty a.m., the baby cries again. She wants her mother, not her father. The mother reaches for the bedside lamp. The father rolls over, muttering in his sleep. The mother carries the baby to the living room. Mixes formula, tests the temperature, feeds her. Still she won’t sleep. She wants to play. She wants books. The mother leans back on the sofa, the baby curled against her chest. Page by page, line by line, she reads. The little bear wet the bed. The little bear is hungry. The little bear has a fever. Two a.m., still reading. Two-thirty, they play peekaboo. The mother hides her face behind the book, then reveals it. The baby giggles. By three-thirty, the baby finally yawns. The mother paces, murmuring Tang poems, singing nursery rhymes, patting her back. Four a.m., at last she sleeps. The mother lays her in the crib. The father has sprawled into the middle of the bed; she nudges him back to his side. The mother lies down. Exhausted, she cannot fall asleep. Seven a.m., the alarm goes off. The mother wakes groggy. The father gets up, too. At seven-thirty, the mother kisses the baby’s forehead and closes the door. Grandma is already awake. The mother leaves, squeezing onto the subway before eight. The car is packed, shoulder to shoulder. She could fall asleep standing, but her heart stays home, with the baby still sleeping. The father, refreshed, boards another train.

Huina Zheng either writes as an admission coach at work or writes for fun after work.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Frying Pan

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By Erin Jamieson

Without asking, you dump confetti sprinkles in the pancake batter while I’m stirring. You smell like jasmine tea and anger, and we reach for the spatula at the same time. 

Your hand is smooth; mine is calloused. 

I just thought you could use some help, you say. 

I pull away, as I have been for over a year. Since the day you came home with a receipt for Starbucks: two vanilla chai lattes. The cheating bothered me less than you becoming the type of person who drank vanilla chai lattes, when, on our first date, you took me out to McDonald’s because you said all coffee tastes like dirt anyway. 

But today my stomach bubbles with the bubbles of the batter on the frying pan. The sprinkles fuse, as I knew they would. A rainbow pancake, a dream for our child. He’d be 5 years old today. 

Why don’t you get out some fruit, you say. Only I feel your words more than I hear them. I scrub the counters clean while you keep making more and more pancakes. Soon, your scent is overpowered by the saccharine batter. Soon, my scent is gone too, and it might be anyone’s home, a happy home, if one exists.

I set the table for one. I start back for my plate and fork and knife, but then I spot an open cabinet, just slightly ajar. The one where we keep the cookbooks we received as wedding gifts. The last time we used any, our son was still alive.

What are you doing? you ask. 

But before you can stop me, I swing open the cabinet, cookbooks, crammed haphazardly, spill out. I see the 100 Quick Meals cookbook my mother bought us, kick it aside. I reach for a slim paperback in the very back. Pale blue. 

Don’t, you say, and try to pull me away. 

The pancakes are going to burn.

Why are you looking at that?

But you know. We both know why. The reason this cabinet has been locked for a year is because I can’t look at the cookbook without seeing our son, milky blue skin and long eyelashes. Baby’s First Moments, crammed alongside recipes for gyros and baklava. 

Steam, then smoke. Our fire alarm sounds. 

Neither of us move.

You stand beside me, and for the first time in a year, I see it: the haunted, fearful look in your eyes. 

I don’t want to pretend like he didn’t exist. Like we didn’t exist.

I turn off the stove top. The pancakes are charred black. I pull up a seat- your seat- and eat one, chewing through the thickest parts, dousing it with syrup.

At least I can no longer see those damn sprinkles.

You’re still standing by the cookbooks. I’m sorry. 

It’s what I’ve been waiting for, since that day. Maybe for five years.

I stack the dishes in the sink, and walk out the front door, leaving you and the pancakes.

Erin Jamieson’s writing has been published in over 100 literary magazines and nominated twice for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Fairytales (Bottle Cap Press, 2023) and a forthcoming collection, and a historical novel, Sky of Ashes, Land of Dreams (Type Eighteen Books, 2023). 

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

DEAF

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by John Grey

staggering down 

the middle of Main Street

red-eyed

dress torn

one arm tattooed

the other bleeding

not holy 

not clean  

just another ghost  

from the dead side of town

in the courthouse square  

screaming out a name

and what he did to her

no stars out

moon hiding 

behind a cloud

and the whole damn town  

pretending not to hear

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, River And South and Flights. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, Writer’s Block and Trampoline.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

This Is Not The Story Of The Hurricane

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by Casey Jo Graham Welmers

I think it starts with Dylan, and it will probably end with Dylan. I have to turn back the clock a bit here, go back to when God and me were born. I have to let the song titles do most of the talking, because copyright laws around lyrics get murky. I can’t repeat quotations so you’ll just have to draw conclusions on the page. The words are still Dylan. Mine are still me. There’ve been other musicians along the way: a Rhodes scholar and a mailman and a kid from Asbury park. A Jamaican messiah, some shoegaze Stars and a Canadian brunette that once moonlit as God. A few kids from Seattle that reinvented the wheel and a skeleton crew from Haight-Asbury that claim this is all a dream we dreamed, but I’m in this dream, and Dylan is central to it, so here we are. This is my life according to Bob.

I have it on good cosmic authority that when my mom’s ’75 AMC Gremlin is smashed from behind “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” is on the radio. She careens across the slick of Michigan’s winter roads like a hockey puck, her water breaking across the chilly driver’s seat. It is all over for me in that moment— my life in utero, anyways. I’m born blue, umbilical cord around my neck, face up. A stargazer. Yonder stands your infant with her strangled tongue. The doctor frees the umbilical cord without difficulty and I pull air, fill my tiny lungs, shriek to confirm my existence. I’m tiny and pink and premature, jolted into the world courtesy of ice and snow and the poor maintenance of rural roads.

*

I have a habit of playing with the carpet in our living room. I run my hands one way and then the other, against the grain, with the grain. This is my usual TV watching ritual, but one day in 1992 my hands sit frozen in my lap, the rug fibers momentarily undisturbed. I’m having a music related awakening. Richie Havens is covering “Just Like A Woman” for Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary special, performed at Madison Square Garden and aired on local PBS affiliate WCMU. My dad, seated nearby, just keeps saying oh my God, and in my mind Richie Havens is God—his voice is reaching inside me and his guitar is my heart, his fingers conjuring magic on the strings. I watch the entire concert, each and every performer. I don’t break like a little girl, but I do break—a visceral, ecstatic sort of cracking. The next day I ask my dad if we can watch it again. We watch so many times over the years that the VHS tape wears out and unravels from the cassette.

*

My mom has a vascular connective tissue disorder. We don’t know about the disorder until her carotid artery dissects, blood pools into her brain and she suffers a massive hemorrhagic stroke. I’m barely 20 and she’s 42. She tried to raise us Catholic, and because I feel like it’s what she would want, I pray nightly for her soul. I’m out of practice and winging the words, playing it fast and loose with ‘Hail Mary’s’ and ‘Our Fathers.’ I stuff her rosary under my pillow, squeeze my eyes shut, listen to “Knockin’ on Heavens Door” and “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” back to back. Mama take this tragedy off of me. I have recurring dreams where she is trapped, some kind of ghost; dreams where we buried her alive in the backyard next to the family dog and she unearths herself, walks around the house covered in earthworms and dirt. I’m not clear on the specifics of purgatory, the status of Heaven’s doors. My mom once told me she wasn’t afraid to die, but I’m stuck on the terror of her in some kind of limbo. I don’t imagine she’d be okay having to knock or wait, caught between this life and the next.

*

I’m half asleep when my dad peeks his head into my bedroom, says an airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center. In my groggy state I assume it’s a tiny prop plane, spiraling, the pilot drunk. I picture it like a toy, something with a shiny red propeller. When the second plane hits he starts yelling in the living room. We spend the rest of the day lifeless, glued to Dan Rather. A month later my English professor assigns an essay on a song of our choice. I stay up all night listening to “Masters of War” and “License to Kill” worrying sour Skittles until my tongue is a shredded rainbow horror show. I write about death planes decapitating the Twin Towers and cowards hiding behind desks but mostly I write about this woman on my block who is homeless and mute; who I’m convinced is some kind of incarnation of the woman in the refrain to “License To Kill.”  She just sits there, and if she had a voice I imagine her fixing her cataract eyes on my own, asking me, who will take away their license to kill? She is so clearly collateral damage to man’s destruction that I can’t help but project this ‘blind seer’ trope on her. My classmates stick to our era: “Heart Shaped Box”, “Fade Into You,” “Last Goodbye,” all artists I admire but trace back though some convoluted family tree to Dylan. Kurt to Neil to Bob. Hope to the Paisley Underground to The Byrds to Bob. When I try to connect Jeff Buckley there are no meandering arrows, just a solid line that runs through his father, through Dylan, straight to the edge of God.

*

I’m sliding off the tattoo table, covered in sweat. My ribcage buzzes under the needle and I verge on the point of passing out. I’d heard this about rib tattoos, thought stupidly that my high pain tolerance would protect me. Fool me once. My husband is getting tattooed on the ribcage as well, a chunk of lyrics in old English from “Shelter From The Storm.” We’re 6 days into married life, still riding the high of our wedding. We referenced it in our vows and played it at our reception and now we’re cementing the song on our skin in blue-black ink. I’ve never worn flowers in my hair, but I have worn silver bracelets, paraded around like some kind of bohemian deity. My husband has likely sheltered me from more storms than I’ve sheltered him, it’s honestly hard to say. We promise always to do our best by each other. We give our word. We slather A+D ointment to our sides and steal constant peaks at our oozing, sacred pact.

*

I cover my palms in chalk and my arms in tacky goo, haul atlas stones onto platforms and carry heavy awkward objects specific distances. I ask the promoter of one particular Strongman contest if they can order a t-shirt for me in XS. They laugh and tell me that’s a first, but are happy to oblige. I deadlift a car but skip the squat event, knowing I can’t hit the weight. The following summer I honor my Scottish heritage, don a kilt with the family tartan and walk-on to compete in a farmer’s carry event at the local Highland Games. The audience titters, they think it’s a joke, like get a load of this chick, no way she can lift 100 pounds in each hand, let alone walk anywhere with it. In my head I hear “The Mighty Quinn.” 

 Yeah you ain’t seen nothing. 

I haul up the handles and gain distance and the laughter turns to screams. They’re on their feet, going wild for the scrawny underdog. This is, by far, my favorite party trick. 

*

I don’t want to work on the farm no more. I don’t really work on a farm, I work in a hospital. Patients throw prosthetic limbs at me and reach out to pet my hair after their hands have explored the warmth of their bare and unwashed nether regions. So I hum it, “Maggie’s Farm.” I don’t want to work for the physicians no more, the managers, the administrators in the C-suite that come to the floors in designer suits, looking starchy and crooked next to the staff in their scrubs. One executive wears heels that we can hear clicking down the hall well before she manifests at the nurses station, a spiky haired haint. She brings us pizza, would probably prefer that we sing while we slave. I don’t eat any but I stay at the farm. I transfer to the operating room. No one can hurl fake feet while propofol runs through their veins. 

*

I pull over my car because the sobs racking through my chest are uncontrollable, tears choking my vision. I’m a hazard to myself and others, collapsed on the steering wheel, “Forever Young” blaring through the speakers. My 40 year old sister is dying from cancer and I want her to stay forever growing older, with me, but she won’t be. Everything about her will remain arrested and unchanged, and I’m not sure how I’ll navigate my years ahead without her. I would build a ladder to the stars to reach her. I’d climb the rungs ‘til my hands failed, my fingers bled, a million splinters embedded in my desperate, tortured palms.

*

Is this Dylan? There’s no way, there’s no way this is Dylan! I’m sputtering in the passenger seat next to my dad, dialing up the knob on his car stereo to better hear the song coming through the public radio station. It is Dylan, singing “Death Is Not The End.” My sister has just died, not even a full day earlier. This is a Dylan song we have never heard. This is a Dylan song we will never hear again, at least not at random like this. I am shook at how literal this sign is, how crazy. My sister is spelling it out for us as easily as she can, knowing my dad, in his full blown atheism, will be the hardest to convince. She hits him over the head with the message. She hits hard. I’m agnostic, but there’s no way this isn’t her. I believe in synchronicity. I believe in this.

*

One day I will die, too. I don’t know where or when or how, but it’s inevitable. In between will be all the crushing and brilliant intricacies of life, hundreds of Dylan songs sung by Dylan and hundreds of other performers one hundred different ways. But when I am gone, and the people I leave behind are forced to pull themselves together and throw a banger of a death party, they will play “I Shall Be Released.” I want the Chrissie Hynde cover, the one she played in Madison Square garden at the concert with Richie Havens that pulled me into this whole world. 

I’ll see my light come shining.

It’s hard to say what direction it will come from—could be the east onto the west. I have no way of divining the particulars. I like to think that I’ll know who the light will be, who’s blinding spirit will be arcing toward my own.

Casey Jo Graham Welmers was named after a Grateful Dead song, so maybe this IS all a dream we dreamed. Find her most recent words in Stanchion, BULL and Pool Party, and more at https://caseyjo.carrd.co

X: @ca5eyj0

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Walking On It

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by J S Khan

Here’s some saliva for a blind eye:

on Christmas Day, 1560, Peruvian natives

invented El Dorado, the City of Gold,

die Fabel vom Goldland El Dorado,

(as Herzog has it, or to quote precisely),

and Aguirre went mad on the river as a caravel

crucified itself, a jungle came unfleshed,

and monkeys invaded the Spanish flotilla,

overrunning the last refuge of white men

and their daughters, laughing, or else,

seeming to laugh, which is just as bad.

Despite this, sperm banks still seek 

a few good men, only check the ads.

Powerful—but in the wrong context.

On the other hand, flattery is nice.

These days, no sharp delineation of void

and land remains, thanks to the cunning

of resentful savages, but educated idiots

chatter on my stairwell too. Can you believe

blurb is a word? The coffee pots breathe

like Darth Vader in my kitchen, and I ponder

ancient moralities carved in their usual

binary codes. Lexicon is not even in my

lexicon. Wake me up on Judgment Day.

J S Khan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in MQR, Fourteen Hills, Post Road Magazine, BRUISER MAG, BULL, and Burial Magazine.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Whiteout

by Sheldon Birnie

You could hardly see the road the way the snow was coming down. If that wasn’t enough, the wind kept blowing it up and about and all over so that you could hardly see a thing past the hood of my old Dodge Ram. Not a goddamn thing. Just a pure king hell white knuckle whiteout the whole goddamn way home.

It was Boxing Day, and we’d been up the Interlake to visit the inlaws — my wife’s folks, brother, sisters, a couple cousins. The whole deal. Christmas had been great, lotsa laughs, great food from sunup to sundown. No fights. Nothing serious, anyway. Kids got spoiled and the adults got into the holiday spirit. Everybody stayed up late, and before everyone went to bed, grandpa pulled on his Sorels and shot off some fireworks down by the lake. Red, green, and white explosions battling the cosmos for attention, lighting up the moonless night above the snow covered hard water. 

Everybody slept in. Then we all ate a big old brunch, full of leftovers and fresh bacon and sausage and cheeses and fruit we forgot to put out the day before. Clouds had rolled in overnight, forecast calling for a big old dump of snow. I didn’t pay it too much mind, wanting to get back into the city before dark anyhow. But we dilly-dallied a wee bit too long, and sure enough, before we’re even packed up to go, she was blowing something fierce.

Normally, she’s about a two hour drive south back to our place from the inlaws lakehouse, door-to-door, but I knew that given the conditions we’d be looking at a considerably longer trek. Guaranteed. Even though she was already drifting pretty good by the time we left, the old Dodge trucked along the farm roads to the highway without trouble. Once we hit that hardtop two lane, though, things slowed right down. I thanked my lucky stars the kids had their videogames and headphones on in back and I wasn’t too hungover. Otherwise I mighta just turned right the hell around then and there.

The wife, she kept chatting away as we drove on down the road, about the festivities and the gossip from her sisters and what all we were gonna get up to between then and New Year’s and the shows her cousin told her we totally had to watch already. Meanwhile, the wipers are shovelling the snow around on the windshield but not really helping much. I was able to get the truck up to about 60, but any more than that and she started drifting, even with all the weight in her and the winter tires and all. So I kept going at that decent little clip, doing the math on how it’d take us maybe an extra hour at that rate. Not so bad, I figured. 

Of course, conditions just got worse and worse from there. 

Wasn’t long before I’d slowed down to 50, then 40, visibility dropping so as driving through this blizzard was akin to barreling through TV static, back when that was a thing. Couldn’t see shit. Occasionally, I’d catch a flash of the shoulder markers as we whizzed on by, confirming we were still pointed in the right direction. I’m hunched over the wheel, barely grunting a reply when the wife asks me anything until finally she realizes we’re in the thick of a bad one here. Then she goes, You want me to leave you alone, hun? 

Yes please, I say, knuckles gripping that wheel tight. She shuts off the radio, pulls her earbuds outta her purse and plugs ‘em into her phone, dialling up one of her podcasts. Thanks, dear, I go, even though by now she can’t hear me. Or pretends she can’t. Either way, that’s OK. The road is all that matters, the goddamn road and the goddamn snow and getting the four of us off of it and out of it and home safe and sound.

This wasn’t the first whiteout I’d been behind the wheel for, mind. Hell no. You live up here, you get used to ‘em. But that don’t mean they’re ever any fun. Even as a kid, my dad driving us across the prairies for a hockey tourney or to visit grandparents or aunts and uncles in one small town or other, that wind would whip the snow up into an impenetrable veil. More than once, sitting in the backseat, I’d just scrunch up my eyes, tuck my head into the corner, and hope we made it out the other side alive. This one here was turning out to be doozy, let me tell ya, and it wasn’t getting any easier, what with the light draining from the sky by the minute. No sir.

Tense shoulders hunched over the wheel, I kept my foot steady on the gas. Not only did I need to keep us on the road, but also avoid slamming into anyone who might be pulled over on the shoulder, trying to wait out the worst of it — or else just got themselves plain old stuck. The animals, at least, had the good sense to hunker down where they could and let the storm blow itself out before bothering to forage for food or whatever it is that draws them to the roadways and, like as not, a grisly demise.

Good weather or bad, it makes no difference — the highway takes plenty of lives. Everybody’s lost someone to the road. Driving through the shit, the faces of those I’ve known who died on the road flashed through my mind. Brendan. Olivia. Phile. A buddy’s puppy that had run off out of his hands, no leash, crushed and tossed in the ditch like a candy wrapper by a passing semi on a truck route just outside of town. I try and shut those images out. But it ain’t easy.

We’d only passed a couple trucks heading north, and hadn’t seen another set of lights headed our way since we left the little hamlet the inlaws call home, now that they’re retired. That was good, less chance of a collision. Then again, if we slid off the road, there might not be anyone by to help for some time. Sure, I had an emergency kit under the passenger seat, and we had blankets and more in the box, but it was cold out and growing colder and the prospect of the four of us spending a night shivering together did not sound appealing in the least.

So we kept on, slower and steadier as the day drained from the sky, that faint dimelike outline of the sun finally disappearing behind the aspen and the pine that lined the road, black filling in around everything but the white blur the headlights cut through the darkness.

Anyone who’s ever driven the highway this far north knows that things can get squirrely at night when the snow is blowing. Your eyes play tricks on you, the swirling snow making faces that disappear just as quick, or beckoning tendrils flickering out from the depths beyond the cone of illumination cast before you as you plow along the road. There’s no telling what the mind will conjure, what your subconscious has been itching to push up to the surface, once you’re locked into that driver’s seat, snow pouring down, tracing innumerable patterns across your tired retinas.

Same goes for sound. Unless you’ve got the radio blasting something loud and insistent, which in and of itself can be distracting, the sound of the wipers, the wind howling over the cab and through any crack or hole you might have in the seal can sound like someone calling to you from beyond the grave. Someone just out of sight whispering, shrieking, moaning your name.

So it was this evening. Only this time, I had the holidays on my mind. I’d been thinking of those who were no longer with us. Grandparents, friends, my own father. Seasonal spectres come to shake and startle my spirit towards some sort of reckoning. At one point or other during that long stretch coming down from the Interlake until we hit the lights of the city, they were all talking at me, cajoling, needling, making pleas. I knew their words were ones I’d stored away in a back closet of my mind, suppressed during waking hours, but come waltzing back into my mind now that the snow had beat down that barrier with its insistent battering of my windshield.

I’d blink my eyes, shake my head. The visions, the whispers would clear, only to come creeping back in again. 

My grandmother, tsk tsking through the kitchen; grandfather laughing from his chair in the corner. An old hockey buddy, dead these many years, smiling, his blue eyes twinkling as he asks, How she goin’, pal? Been missin’ ya bud. Big time. The many words I’d never get to share with my father, whisked away on the breeze, white frozen fingers calling to me to follow.

Now and then I’d crank the window open beside me, to let a blast of frigid air into the cab, to keep me from falling into the lull of sleep that can threaten under such circumstances. Snow would come flying in, too, but I paid it no mind. Trapped, it would melt in short order, each crystalline form never to be repeated. I had a large cup of coffee within reach, which I helped myself to when I could spare the hand on the wheel. But caffeine can only do so much against the hypnotic sway of a blizzard at night on the highway, waiting until it was time finally for me to lay my down to rest to make itself known, pumping that blood through its circuit, to keep the thoughts swirling through my weary mind.

Honey, I went, more than once, hoping she’d humour me with some more stories, or at least find some suitable distraction on the radio dial. But she was fast asleep, face pressed into a balled up sweater against the passenger side window. The kids, in back, both sawing logs, too. I hoped all their dreams were sweet ones, if they dreamt at all. I’d have to suffer through the bad ones, the waking ones, on my own and hope to make it out the other side. 

We all do in the end, though, don’t we? 

The worst stretch, after already being on the road three godawful long hours, came just after the double-lane spread out into four separated lanes as we started closing in on the city. Usually, by that point, we’re 20 minutes out, half an hour if the Sunday night traffic’s bad and construction’s bottle necking everything up further in. But we had to crawl through the snow for another hour before we passed the perimeter. Plus, with the added empty space between woods on either side of the road, the whiteout only worsened, punctuated only ever so often by a ghost of a green highway sign noting or a skeletal light-pole illuminating a drifted over exit to the right. 

We passed first one truck in the ditch, a big boy, flagged for safety, the driver no doubt up in his cab, waiting out the weather, then another and another, then a car and a pickup and another. I didn’t even think of stopping to lend a hand, figuring I might not get going again for a good while if I did.

Despite the chill I kept inviting into the cab to keep my wits about me, I was sweating something fierce, what with the effort it took to keep the truck between the ditches and my mind from running completely off the rails. I kept myself half-sane by imagining how I’d fire the hot tub off the back deck up, once we’d gotten home, and how I’d soak the chills away once the kids were tucked into bed, breathing in and out real slow all the while, hammering my left heel against the floorboards insistently. As though it all depended on that steady rhythm remaining uninterrupted. As though such actions had any true impact at all in that big, empty world beyond the cab.

The wind picked up about then, too, unbuffered as it was on either side of the highway, rocking the truck in waves, the road beneath the snow slick with ice. My mind kept running that loop of personal failures on repeat. Times I’d been needlessly harsh with the children. Times I’d failed to stick up for a friend. Or worse yet, myself. Still, those thoughts were almost welcome, compared to what was playing out before my eyes 

The view through the windshield had become a theatre of the absurd, as more strange visions emerged from the negative space between the snowflakes and my subconscious. A rabbit ripped apart by some beastly bird, an ancient carrion crow of monstrous proportions, before training its black eye on my own. Wriggling bone white tentacles, or worms, or snakes, or whatever they were, roiling over and around each other, pushing ever inward. Pushing towards me. Shadow creatures pulsing, massing and dispersing, out from the void to swarm the windshield, retreating at the last second only to regroup and do it all over again.

Nameless spectres of horrors yet to come. 

All these and more fired past my eyeballs upon that dismal stretch of road, only to fade away and reappear yet again as an image fades in and out from an old TV screen struggling to pull in reception. 

You and I both know these things you see when you’re in it, they aren’t there. Never were, never will be. All that’s there is you, the wheel clutched beneath your cold, sweaty hands, your ride, the snow and the road. There is nowhere then, only the need to keep moving forward. The voices, the sounds from the void, they aren’t there either. Not really — not that knowing so makes them any easier to plow through. It doesn’t matter, though. What matters is to keep moving. To stay on the road, to keep moving through it, to push right past it, inching towards your destination.  Otherwise, you’re a goner, bud.

Sure enough, we made it home fine that evening, four hours and some change after we set out from the in-laws place by the lake there. The kids didn’t even notice the harried state I was in when we pulled into the driveway, just grabbed their stuff and tumbled into their bedrooms to fire up bigger screens than the ones they’d been glued to over the past couple days. My wife, she knew it had been a hard drive, that I was beat and then some. But she was tired and groggy herself from the long ride, and kept telling herself she had the house to set back in order.

True to the promise I’d made myself, I rolled a little number, poured a couple fingers of good scotch over ice and pulled on a pair of swim trunks after clearing off and firing up the hot tub. When she was good and steaming, the kids safely tucked away in their rooms, I soaked myself good and proper. It felt good, I won’t lie. But still, when I’d lay my head back and look up at the sky, there was still snow pouring down without end. It was beautiful, sure. But all it did was bring me back, again and again, to that harrowing drive. 

As though it had never ended. As though I were driving still.

When I closed my eyes, it was worse. Gone was the snow, the beautiful fluffy flakes, each unique and only once for this world. Instead, the space between my eyes and eyelids filled with the darkness between the puffy white snowflakes. The negative space of the void, and all that came with it. Tired, beat as I was, I knew I’d have a hell of time sleeping that night. Just a hell of a time. 

Buddy, I wasn’t wrong.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, dad, and beer league hockey player in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and the author of Where the Pavement Turns to Sand.

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Fast-Forward, Rewind, Fast-Forward, Static

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By Caleb Bethea

Bruce Springsteen knows something about quantum physics. The way he sets up a dichotomy in a song, a divide between squalor and salvation. Then he hits the last chord before you ever hear the end of the story—the hero’s foot on the gas of his ‘54 but you have no way of knowing if he’ll really make it out of New Jersey or not. A Schrödinger’s Cat on the Boardwalk. 

One of the best examples is “I’m on Fire.” An earnestly horny track just two and half minutes long. The protagonist wants nothing more than to have this woman, but she’s married, and all we end the song with is that he’s up all night thinking about her. A dull knife cutting a valley through his skull.

I saw the music video the same year three of my grandparents died. I was seven-turning-eight, and we had a VHS of all his music videos that we watched at my great-grandmother’s house, rewinding, fast-forwarding to our favorite performances. Among my siblings, the segment of the tape most crystallized as an example of his cool, late-American demeanor was the video for “I’m on Fire.” It kicks off with a busy garage. Bruce’s legs are dangling out from under a car and he’s cranking something into place when the woman walks her heels over toward his boots to ask if he can fix her perfectly functional car and have it ready by tomorrow. 

He’s covered in grease. He smiles, a little timid, saying he can bring it by her place—but he sees the diamond on her finger and she explains they live way the hell out in the hills. 

He was so goddamn cool. A working-man rockstar in the face of death all around me. A cowboy sort of masculinity that had something to do with worker’s unions and gambling debts. So I kept rewinding, fast-forwarding to that video, believing that on the other side of all this death was me as a man who was so goddamn cool. Adulthood would find me behind the wheel of a ‘54 with an Atlantic City sign in the sky.

But now I’m thirty-two, and instead of grease on my hands, it’s seething under my skin and it slides the anxiety from one side of my body to the other, and someone along the way has knifed a valley between me and masculinity. I’m in there somewhere, just trying to keep a lid on the feral cat under the boardwalk. 

It’s fine. No one really thinks one thing or another about my masculinity, that I can tell, but I’m not real into the idea of being a man. Still, I tell myself I haven’t earned the non-binary title, not enough motor oil sliding through my veins instead of blood. And Jesus fucking Christ, I kinda hate that about myself. My looking less like Bruce and more like the person in the Iron Maiden shirt holding the boom over Bruce’s head behind the scenes for the “I’m on Fire” video shoot. But, I like that about myself, too. Still, I fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, static.

It’s fine. 

As an adult, I watch YouTube videos about gender identity and then I watch the “I’m on Fire” video, and then I read the comments underneath. Half of them sound like “This song always makes me think of my first girlfriend, who became my wife of forty years, and died last week.” And it only takes three or four of these comments before you realize this song about a little sex is a lot about death. And not in a metaphorical way. There’s a gravity to work like this, bringing us back to the first time we wanted someone as we listen after losing them.

And gender might be something like that, a dense, rumbling fucking mystery, a space—or a lack of space—where we lose the shit that once made us who we were. All of us in our high heels rolling under the heavy machinery of a car with a supernova swirling above us. We don’t know whose car it is. We don’t care. We just want to feel so goddamn cool.

It’s fine. 

My grandfather, who was the last to go the year I turned eight, had hands strong as hell, his own pre-Springsteen brand of cool—of being a man. And I think of all my grandparents and all the pictures they took of me, the woodworking they gifted me, the souvenirs they brought me from their travels across the country, and I wonder what they would think about their grandkid’s gender confusion. I wonder how we view people from the other side of this death trap. If we get it. If it matters. 

I like to think we call our grandchildren non-binary after we die. I like to think it matters.

 

Caleb Bethea is a writer from the Southeast. They’re the author of DISCO MURDER CITY (Maudlin House ‘25). You can also find their work in HAD, X-R-A-Y, hex, Bruiser, ergot, Modern Alchemy, and elsewhere. But, mostly, they’re just a family ghoul with a wife and four goblins by the ocean. You can say hi on most platforms: @caleb_bethea_