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Dispatches from the King's Motel

War and War and War, October Style

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by Shep

“The One Where Derek Gives Up”

He never could handle two things at once. No one is surprised he couldn’t hack it. I am in desperate need of anonymity at the present time, for reasons legal and emotional. Derek has left his column to me. As for the byline, let’s stick with Shep for now. Everyone in New York knows who the fuck I am, and that’s all that matters. I need to stretch my legs a little, on the page, before I start signing my government name to any reportage. I have been out of the game, sent to the nuthouse and heavily sedated for fuck know’s how long and I need some months to get my sea legs back.

“The Autumn Everyone Posted Their William T. Vollmann four-volume BOX SET of Novel”

My president, Our Most Aggrieved Champion of the American Dream, SCRATCH GOLFER, regularly recurring secondary character in THE EPSTEIN FILES, certified pervert freak GENIUS MOST POWERFUL AND SEXY MAN ALIVE, Mr. Gravy Getter himself, the sometimes senile snoozer plus pants shitter, sent his Best Flim Flam Man, collaborator and recipient of vast sums of America’s treasure in this Historic Smash and Grab Job, Steve Witkoff, United States Special Envoy to the Middle East1, to Russia to negotiate a prisoner release, and Steve Witkoff, American Tycoon, sat across the desk and told President Putin he, like America’s President, is a humanitarian and he, Witkoff, commended Russian President Putin for that. The war with Ukraine is lost2. Allegiances are shifting, power is being negotiated. Ukraine will have to cede their lost territory and Crimea will forever belong to Mother Russia, elections will be held and a new, badly damaged and grieving Ukraine will begin the long process of recovery. A cooling of tensions. Government contracts for reconstruction and security will be awarded to the West, in the spirit of Baron Victor Rothschild, “When there is blood on the streets, I am buying.”

“You want it to be one way, but it’s the other.” Paraphrasing Marlo from The Wire.

The midterms are Tuesday. It’s Thursday, late, almost Friday. A blue wave, a blue tsunami. A rigged election. A ballot controversy. Who knows? Maybe all of it. Maybe that’s the point. My prediction: Democrats control the Senate, Democrats control the house. That is also my personal political preference at this precise moment in the history of American political affairs. A defensible position, I might add. We need to get the fuck out of Israel’s forever war with Iran with the strait operating at the very least 75% prer-war capacity. The madman sometimes needs someone to save him from himself. We the people. Likely it will be the other way. 

“This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened” – Don Draper3

Pardons will need to be issued, data deleted or manipulated. We will return, likely, to the chore of following palace intrigue (a hobby I abhor), and endless rounds of ultimately useless investigations and the empire will continue to slowly slink its slitherly self down further in the eyes of its people, its neighbors, its earthmates, and the Lord. 

“It’s dire times back home. Bankruptcies are up, suicides are up, but nevertheless we have hope in this President that he can take us to victory here,” Senator Roger Marshal (R, Kansas)

The downfall of the prestigious law firm, Weil, Gotshal & Manges, is a leading indicator. We are in for dire economic times. Firms are preparing their financial restructuring, private equity, and bankruptcy teams. Stay in cash and treasury bonds, kid.

The president is still filling arenas across the country selling his midterm messages. He has several new comedic bits. He is in his element. He imposed tariffs, a tax hike passed onto the people. When the Supreme Court ruled he had to give some of the tariff money back (billions4 of citizen’s dollars) he gave the cash back to the companies. He started an unwinnable war with even more billions5 of citizens’ money that raised the gas prices for everyone for the foreseeable future. Millions and millions and millions will proudly wave his flag, many many many millions and millions will silently walk into the voter’s booth and make sure this damn country isn’t taken over by a bunch of commie bastards. These are the patriots. This is the country and times we are living in. It is unmistakably funny. 

Have I reported on Sports yet? I have no idea what Derek’s column was actually supposed to be about. In Sports it is happening and teams are winning and losing and everyone is losing money gambling. Fashion? Kylie Kardashian wore the $50 million dollar diamond encrusted bra at the Victoria Secret6 fashion show.

Shep writes for farewell transmission 

  1. & new owner of the Los Angeles Lakers ↩︎
  2.  On October 31st, the United States sells $2.1 billion of Patriot interceptors, so perhaps my coda is premature. ↩︎
  3. Spoken to Peggy Olson in Season 2, Episode 5 of Mad Men in the hospital after Peggy gives birth. ↩︎
  4. $115 Billion ↩︎
  5.  $47.1 Billion, to date, reported. ↩︎
  6. Les Wexner’s lingerie company. Jeffrey Epstein was named as the trustee of Wexner estates (see SEC Schedule 13D, Amendment No. 26 [The Limited, Inc., signed March 27, 2002] and SEX Schedule 13D, Amendment No. 31 [Limited Brands, signed September 7, 2005]). On Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, Lex wrote Jeffrey Epstein a card, “Dear Jeffrey. I wanted to get you what you want, so here it is…” and then he drew an inartful picture of breasts. In the same birthday book, the current American president drew a crude sketch of a naked woman, writing, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday – – and may ever day be another wonderful secret,” signed as pubic hair on the President’s drawing. ↩︎
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Across The Wire Vol. 8

Two Poems

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by Damon Hubbs

Volcano 

My android supports the Habsburgs. 

When you appease the jealous god

I go skinny dipping with Deborah. 

There’s a double moon, 

a brass telescope on a cliff; 

my gently creeping 

hard-on is a 12-line poem. 

We’re into fantasy. 

Talking foxes.

Coxswains on a trip to nowhere.

I named her right breast 

Mervyn Peak. 

Nothing wrenches me out of a volcano

like a good drink.

My android exhales at midnight 

slow burn, yogic blood, 

veins like mosquito netting. 

The organ tightens like a castle 

and the classical folks find themselves 

on a planet strangely eroded,  

womb passport poorly portaged. 

I dog the hair,

I know. I eat the skiff.  

I part despair in broad outlines. 

The griffin and the minor canon

is worth a packet of potato meal. 

Do two worlds 

really occupy one space—

Heap 

O android, my android

The sea is here today 

And I can’t find the perfect book for the beach. 

I’m a man-made plague. 

Everyone is obsessed with Homer 

And sunflowers and data centers painted a perfect pitch 

Of white. I hear the vineyard sounds 

I sing the song 

Keep the old bills

Precious metals, communist playgrounds—

O android

The curse of the Dane isn’t real. 

I left my pain under the porch where the dog died.

They get it so hard

My untidy heap of love. 

Damon Hubbs is a poet from New England. Recent publications include Bullshit Lit, Version (9) Magazine, Virgo Venus Press, Revolution John, The Disappointed Housewife, Horror Sleaze Trash, and others. He is the author of the poetry collections Nighttime Logic and Venus at the Arms Fair. He serves as the editor of Ape House Magazine. 

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

Two Poems

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by Tim Frank

Fighting on TikTok

Mucus on the concrete, 

blood on leather boots, 

split lips, septic bruises,

shrouded by the rain.

Heave the fucking load 

on TikTok’s ocean floor,

it’s the grandeur of the damned.

The emo kid with painted nails 

and scars long-forgotten 

loves a poolside brawl.

Even grandma needs a fix

of headbutts by the sea

and knuckleduster nights—

it’s the measure of our times.

And when we hear

the grind of broken bones 

from across the darkest seas

it’s just a sun-splashed battle

settling in the void,

a screaming scroll away.

Club Culture 

So hurl me at the wall

and crawl inside my slipstream.

Everybody’s lying,

oozing on the dance floor,

jabbing at the dust.

The drugs are all in line,

clawing at my throat—

I can’t stop these viral sirens.

The lights are just 

horrific, 

my eyes are soft balloons

jolting with alarm.

Open all the windows 

let the tribal sounds escape,

the city’s one more maze

with a psychopathic glare.

Now, let’s seep into the streets 

under hypnagogic skies 

and find a lonely girl,

convulsing with the stars.

Tim Frank’s work has been published in Okay Donkey, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Hobart, The Forge Literary Magazine, New World Writing and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and 4x Best of the Net.

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

 Freedom and Medium-rare Steak

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by Jill Williams

Mama didn’t care what her boyfriends did to me as long as they weren’t throttling her. I was blonde, pretty, and compliant—the perfect chew toy for men who wanted a puppy instead of a dog. Easy to train, easier to break. I bounded right out of that cage with the first man who sugar-talked me into believing I was a precious child of God. He said I was like the woman at the well who’d been with many men: a whore that God desperately loved. He cried while slipping a zirconia ring onto my left hand, vowing to love me for eternity. I was eighteen and he was thirty-two, a young pastor just starting out.

“Baby,” he said the next morning, “I can’t wait to show my beautiful bride to the congregation. To protect you from gossip, I told everyone you’re twenty-five. Women are so jealous and petty, and I’d hate for them to treat you like you’re a conniving Lolita.”

He told me that God gave men wives to keep them from fornicating, since fornication was a sin. I wasn’t very smart. I didn’t know those big fancy Bible words or what forna-who meant. He patted my head.

“Baby, fornication is what you did with twelve different men. You spread your legs and said, ‘Come inside.’”

Tears stacked up in my eyes. I wiped ’em away real quick, as Jimmy hated whenever I cried. He claimed I manipulated him with feminine wiles to get my way. 

“You’re wrong, baby. I’m crying because you’re acting like I’m a slut. I didn’t ask those men to do what they did to me. I—”

He roadblocked my face with his hand.

“You might not have asked them with your mouth, but you certainly did with your body. Probably sticking out those titties or shoving your hiney in their faces! You gave signals. Just like you did with me. But fortunately for you, I’m no animal. I waited for marriage, God’s covenant, before I came inside you. You were my first and you’ll be my last. I was your thirteenth, and God’s keeping watch to make certain I’ll be the only one.”

I whimpered like a puppy scared of thunder. “I’m sorry, Jimmy, for not being the bride you wanted. I promise to never look at another man as long as I live.”

He hugged me, explaining with my past, his trust needed to be earned. I had to be patient because there was a lot for him to accept about me. I tried my darndest: reading the Bible, listening only to Christian music, respecting him and not talking back, keeping the house sparkling clean, and having sex six days a week and twice on Sunday.

Jimmy joked, calling me a “dead dick defibrillator” when this nasty old man asked me to crawl into bed and suck his weenie for a spell. I didn’t laugh. That old coot smelled like three-day-old shit baking in the sun. I about ripped the whiskers clean off that warthog’s chin.

“Listen here, old man, I don’t want what you’ve got. You stick your pecker back in your pants, ask Jesus to forgive your sins, and I’ll play you a pretty hymn. If you don’t, I’ll chop it off and shove it down your throat.”

Jimmy’s eyes popped wide. I was forced against my will to “give back to the Lord,” which meant tinkling the ivories every Tuesday at Colonial Haven Nursing Home. I played the piano, accompanying Jimmy’s  tone-deaf tenor. If I had a revolver in my hand when he screeched, “There’s power in the blood,” his brains and blood would go SPLAT all over the piss-stained walls, and I’d be halfway to Mexico with a bottle of tequila and a hairy hand on my knee. Instead, I smiled meekly and told the old coot I was sorry.

Jimmy gritted his teeth and added, “Yes, Pastor Stevens, I’m sorry for my wife’s outburst. She’s on her period and can be quite irrational at times.”

He raised the roof when we got in the car. “How dare you speak to an older man of God like that! I didn’t want to believe the Quilters for Christ when I overheard them whispering about your Jezebel spirit. I got in their faces, yelling, ‘Don’t you dare impugn my bride!’

“Sister Cindy wept, saying she spoke the truth in love and as an older woman of God, she didn’t think you gave her proper respect. She warned against running wild in tight yoga pants and snug crop tops. And then she saw you one week later, all glistened with sweat and shorts hiked clear up your butt. You got defensive, saying you’re not going to wear a prairie dress to satisfy her. Don’t you ever speak to her like that again! I’m cancelling your gym membership, and until it’s evident that you’ve repented, you’re not getting it back.”

Oh, I did a lot of repenting in that front seat. I repented for my weakness. For being too scared to flavor his morning coffee with ten drops of Visine until he dropped dead on the kitchen floor and I was a widowed woman weeping over his coffin—snot dripping from my nose while in reality I cried tears of joy, knowing I’d never have to feel his icy hands poking and prodding my body, ramming his penis into me dry and hard until I cried because I was the temple curtain ripped in two and he was Pontius Pilate hanging me on a cross.

Yup. I thought it. But I never said it.

On our fifth anniversary, we went to a fancy steakhouse. Jimmy ordered prime rib and I got filet mignon. Our waiter, Devon, presented a bottle of wine and “a red rose for the beautiful lady.” I blushed. He was around my age, with the prettiest green eyes I’d ever seen—a medical student busting his butt to pay off debt. I asked him what kind of doctor he wanted to be. His eyes crinkled, reminding me of paper roses and mood boards.

“Trauma surgeon. People have horrific accidents and I visualize myself cutting out their wounds, making them whole. I want to take the patients that everyone’s given up on, the ones who’ve been read their last rites by the priest, and heal them. Cheesy, but true.”

Devon and I locked eyes. Just a chaste moment of mutual admiration, nothing more.

Jimmy’s face flushed to medium-rare. “So, Dr. Devon. Know any fertility specialists? My wife can’t seem to get pregnant. I hate to ask a medical question, but could her excessive number of sexual partners prior to me have anything to do with that?”

Devon clenched his jaw. “Sir, I’m a third-year student. Obstetrics and gynecology isn’t a specialty I’ve delved into. But urology is right up my alley. Maybe you’ve got a low sperm count, some weak swimmers, or Low T. That seems more plausible than a high body count.”

As Devon walked away, Jimmy’s face flushed to rare. I stifled a laugh, my heart breaking simultaneously. I desperately wanted children, just not with Jimmy. It was okay for him to tear me down, but if he ever did the same to our child, I’d drug him with oxycodone and Ex-Lax, stuff him into frilly panties and a push-up bra, and shove his head under cold bathtub water until his eyes popped like a frog’s, his hands clawed at the air, his face flashed blue, and his bowels evacuated into floating brown soup, a dead, steaming pile of shit. And then I’d call the police, frantic and screaming that he was a cross-dressing, drug-using, suicidal pervert who lied through his teeth when he said I was twenty-five—that he was Jeffrey Epstein with a Bible and a ton cheaper.

Jimmy left a five-dollar tip and a Do You Know Where You’ll Spend Eternity? pamphlet. I wanted to crawl under the table, shave my head, and hightail it to a Buddhist monastery where I’d take a vow of silence and never lay eyes on Jimmy again. Fortunately, I had a hundred-dollar bill in my purse—something I’d been saving for a special occasion, and Devon was awfully special. I tossed the turn-or-burn pamphlet onto a table of Japanese businessmen and placed the hundred-dollar bill under the salt shaker.

The ride home felt like I was trapped inside a house on fire. Neither of us spoke. Jimmy’s hands coiled around the steering wheel like twin snakes: cold, hissing, and filled with poison. I dreaded the inevitable, obligatory anniversary sex and rehearsed the steps in my mind. 

1. Change into a black push-up bra and matching panties. Try not to cry during.

2. While having the deed done to you, make lists: favorite songs, favorite TV shows, favorite death fantasies about your husband. 

3. Fake it, scream like a banshee, call him Daddy, and yell that your lady parts are on fire, all while composing a shopping list in your mind.

4. When he asks for a glass of water after, smile real big. He never specifies where it comes from. Toilet bowl, undrained bathtub, dog dish—the possibilities are endless. 

5. Last but most important, dig to the bottom of your jewelry box and pop a Loestrin in your mouth.

Jimmy humped and pumped, a pneumatic drill busting concrete. But this time I wasn’t fantasizing about his violent death or nearly biting my tongue off to keep from sobbing. The unforgiving, harsh light of our bedroom transformed into an operating theater. A set of kind green eyes behind a surgical mask peered down at me. The man held a scalpel, gently—so very gently—whispering, “I’m not taking anything from you; I’m taking things out of you.”

He made a clean incision along my frontal lobe, and with whispering hands, he lifted away the toxic labels stuck to my brain: whore, cheap slut, cum guzzler, worthless, piss-poor excuse for a human being. Black, gangrenous, and twisted, they barely put up a fight as he dropped the poisonous parts into a stainless steel tray for incineration. He washed my wounds with cool saline and stitched me together, clean and unblemished.

Jimmy grunted and rolled over. Me? I stared at the ceiling, and for once, the speed bump snoring to my left didn’t matter crap to me.

The next morning, Jimmy and I planted flowers in the garden. He was in an especially foul mood, bitching and moaning about runny eggs, burnt toast, and too much salt. He scream-quoted Proverbs 31 about a woman of noble character, and how I was a disgraceful rottenness in his bones.

I didn’t tremble or blink back tears. Why would I? He was nothing but a five-year-old bully screeching that I was a big giant poopy-head. I knew the truth now, and no amount of name-calling could ever wash it away.

He shouted against a brick wall, spit flying with every insult. The words never found a landing place, and poor Jimmy was oblivious to the army of hornets buzzing around his flapping jaw. Lowly privates carrying out a fragging, the hornets revolted against their superior officer. By the time he felt the first sting, his face was already turning blue. I had plenty of time to race into the house and grab a bottle of Benadryl. Instead, I stood there and watched his eyes bulge like those dead frogs in my dream. He collapsed, clutching his throat and foaming at the mouth. As he convulsed one last time, surrounded by a muddy river of his own waste, I knew he was dead. Dead at last.

Three months later, flush with insurance money, I sat at the mahogany bar of the marble-tiled steakhouse downtown, wearing a red dress and drinking a martini cold enough to freeze time.

I looked for Devon—not hoping for romance, but maybe a smile, or a conversation about current events. Just two friends chatting, nothing more than that. Jimmy was rotting six feet under and couldn’t do a damn thing about it. And for the first time in my life, the air tasted like freedom and medium-rare steak.

Jill Williams is a writer from Georgia. Her work explores the intersection of the profane and holy. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in EXPAT PRESS, BULL, SOME WORDS, CITYWIDE LUNCH, REVOLUTION JOHN, URBAN PIGS, LITERARY GARAGE and elsewhere. Twitter @JillWillia85528

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Dispatches from the King's Motel

Hot, Motionless Summer

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by Derek Maine

“What was it like waiting for the bomb?”

Like this. It is like this.

I have failed my editors, failed my speculative readers. No column last month. The deadline came, passed. October is here and I left my post in June. Farewell Transmission has been understanding, but I did block my editor’s number sometime mid-August. Speaking of August, this is when things really go off the rails. I was good, really, until August. 

My notes for August and September are so sparse, most of them destroyed, there is no way I can stick to my signature, beloved style of reporting on the ground live as things happen. Filing my report on two months of war, mine and others, will test my abilities (and my editors). I have two months to recreate, two depressive, drug-addled months to remember where I spent two days at sea against my will, met an attache in Washington, D.C., returned to temporary office services work, and suffered several other indignities. The war beat on.

It was a hot, motionless summer.

August began with Dear Leader winning the Senior classic golf tournament at one of his country clubs. He shot 70. He also almost certainly shat in his adult diaper at Senator Graham’s funeral.

Our munitions law, and appetite for war waning, prices rising, Iran announced to the world it will not open the Strait of Hormuz until the American presidency changes hands. 

In mid-August I wrote my ex-wife, “There is an army between us,” only to learn my number had been blocked. The United States attorney general declared Dead Leader never has and never will do something unethical. The law has spoken.

In late August my financial situation soured, my debts piling up, and I was forced to go see Carol, once again, at the temp agency. She placed me in Office Services for an engineering firm where I ate, slept, made copies, collated, jogged, bound, had xanax for lunch and coffee and pie for breakfast. I spoke to no one. My notebook for the rest of August was indecipherable:

The middle managers want to steal my salt! They are but an army of tongues! The reports are due by end of day! A new quarter upon us. Stretch goal: $100 gift card to The Cheesecake Factory, non-transferable.

September came, and nothing improved.

9.8.26

He shit his pants in the oval house, again, today.

9.11.26

Today, the Houthi rebels captured an island and are choking off the bab el-Mandeb strait. Chokepoints everywhere. Twenty-five years ago today I remember exactly where I was. Hunter S. Thompson, in his column for Page 2 at ESPN, understood it perfectly, right away. We are at war and will be for the rest of most of our lives, he said. The party was over, he said. Hunter S. Thompson was a fine carrier of the flame, one of our greatest, and he was, unfortunately, right right away. And who am I to cover a war never ending?

The Red Sea islands control the strait. Ten percent of global trade goes through the strait. The Houthi’s have control over the strait, and the entire western coast of Yemen.

New fronts open.

9.19.26

Common People by Pulp is playing, we are riding in black cars at unsafe speeds.

Saudi Arabia is under attack. Riyadh airport, pipelines, fuel storage tanks, infrastructure.

9.21.26

En route to DC by train to meet with the Ambassador. I am traveling under a cloud of conditions. The roomettes are all taken by mean Russians making their way (slowly) to Chicago. I haven’t the heart to explain to them American geography. So I am sat in coach. I brought Nutella biscuits for my fellow passengers, cough drops, several medications, Helen DeWitt, two plant-based smoothies.

9.22.26

All the signals are jammed in DC this rainy morning, first day of fall.

9.24.26

When I travel south I feel wild and free, reckless. When I travel north I feel anxious, jittery, constantly aware of my own skin. When I travel west I feel untethered, an orphan, consumed with possibility, lonely. When I travel east I walk into the Atlantic Ocean.

9.26.26

At my friend the financier’s wedding in Darien, Connecticut. I am clad head to toe in powder blue and on several conflicting drugs at once. The shuttle arrives any moment. Something the train conductor called a ‘nor’easter’ is apparently bearing down on the Tokeneke Club and the rest of the Connecticut coast. We are not far from Greenwich, someone said in line at Windsor Street Coffee. I don’t know what that means. But I am wide awake and investigating.

9.28.26

They were out of creamed spinach at the private equity steakhouse and Linda was disappointed, already in a mood.

And the rest of the month, including excuses

I began this assignment with Farewell Transmission with selfish intent. I suppose it’s true all writers take on every assignment with selfish intent. Finding no publisher for my 500-page novel beginning with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, covering wars and failed literary movements, a grotesque sigh on our contemporary times, I set out to write a monthly war column with the idea a publisher (or agent, tastemaker, influencer, or critic) would stumble upon my project and immediately request the Wartime Author manuscript to take to auction. This did not happen.

A new war in Iran opened up, and my capacity to take on fresh horrors, while working with my editor polishing up the manuscript for my own war novel, began to seriously fade. I simply could not take on these two tasks at once. The choice was to continue following the wars and writing the column, or finishing my manuscript. I chose, sometime in August, perhaps foolishly, to turn my attention to the manuscript. 

Here I sit and type a failed columnist, with a homeless novel. I survey my options. I could enter my manuscript sometime in October in Fiction Collective 2’s annual novel contest. Evan Dara was a past winner. This would be excellent company. I could submit to Rose Press, who published Scott McLanahan and Matthew Gasda, during their open reading period in November. I could bribe Cash4Gold with cocaine to publish my war novel. I could send it along to Hesse Press, a house I am increasingly impressed with. But each option seemed impossible. The manuscript would likely not be “contest-ready” by the end of October (my own fault). Rose Press is lovely but all of their covers follow the same visual lineage and I did not like the idea of Wartime Author written in cursive font, plus I doubted I was cool enough for a hip press. I am too terrified of parties, New York, and Los Angeles to get in bed with Cash4Gold. I am too scared to blindly submit to Hesse Press and do not know how besides. I could, and likely will, self-publish. What another headache! And for what and for whom? To sing my sign into the void, perhaps. 

All of these things require my attention and an executive function I severely struggle with. And I am tired. Tired of writing a widening war, unceasing and stupid. Tired from my own poor choices, reckless lifestyle, and unpleasant personality. Afraid of my ex-wife, and Baltimore. I am, therefore, moving out of the King’s Motel at the edge of a faceless, motionless mid-Atlantic capital city and into a more suitable, responsible studio apartment. I am drying out for real this time, and I have deleted the phone numbers of all my drug dealers. If I am to give this novel a chance, I must be serious, sober. 

And with that, I bid you adieu. With apologies, this will be my last dispatch for Farewell Transmission, who have been nothing but the kindest souls and have agreed to pay me for the remainder of the year (a blessing I did not deserve, but am nevertheless grateful for). All of my focus belongs to Wartime Author, and making it the novel it deserves to be, and finding a home and (hopefully) a few readers along the way. 

With love,

D Money Maine

Derek Maine wrote about the war for Farewell Transmission.

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

TALKING TO GOD ON THE 4th OF JULY

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By Casey Jo

Lily was the first person I know to make money selling dirty underwear to strangers on Craigslist. She had social anxiety and would get diarrhea pangs around men she was attracted to. (To be clear, she was not selling underwear that had been crapped in.) She once told me that she loved the author Dean Koontz, not so much for his stories, but because she found holding Dean Koontz novels to be calming. “I keep a box of them upstairs,” she confessed. “And when I’m nervous I just visit the box.” So whenever I picture Lily, she’s doing one of these three activities: bolting for the bathroom, stuffing her underwear into envelopes, or stroking Dean Koontz paperbacks in a congested attic. 


Lily is about as nondescript of a person as I am: brown hair, Midwestern vibes, a fade into the crowd look. We used to work together in the operating room. Lily once curated a Van Halen playlist for her favorite surgeon and we spent an entire two hour knee replacement touring the David Lee Roth era. She included the “Eruption” guitar solo, which I remember hearing as the patient was waking up from surgery. Lily said if she ever came out of anesthesia to “Eruption” she’d probably have an orgasm. 

Lily and her ex-husband wore luchador masks when they had sex and gave the stink bugs that plagued their home human names. They had a roommate, John, that Lily ‘inherited’ after the divorce. I have no idea where or when John came into the picture, or why he ended up living with a married couple. He was just always there. Lily left the hospital a few years back, taking the life we all relished hearing about with her. I think when you’re surrounded by the strangeness of seeing limbs amputated and skulls cut open on the regular, you crave wild stories from everyday life in order to balance the scales. I don’t know. I’ve always appreciated Lily for being an N-of-1, a true original.

On the 4th of July, the 250th anniversary of America’s independence, a co-worker and I decide to check in with Lily to see how life is going. We’re at the hospital but all is quiet: shootings and stabbings and hands blown off by firecrackers have yet to trickle in. Somehow our conversation turns to selling feet pics, which naturally segues into conversations about Lily. My co-worker pulls up Lily’s number, dials, places the phone on speaker. We lean forward in anticipation when we hear her pick up. 

“You guys, I’m about to sell a pair of period underwear in exchange for the repair of my fence,” she responds when asked about feet pics. We screech with giddy laughter. God we’ve missed Lily.

“Wait, so what would the price tag on that be? You know, in cash,” I ask.

“Two grand!”

More howling from us. Good for Lily.

It turns out the buyer/repair person isn’t a random contractor, but actually Lily’s roommate, John. So not as impressive, but still. That’s two grand she doesn’t have to pay. Lily tells us she’s been promising John this underwear for various yard maintenance for awhile now. Of course we’re curious how it came to be that John was interested in Lily’s period underwear instead of cash in the first place. 

And Lily lays it on us. She says that back in October, she thinks John went through an episode of ‘spiritual psychosis.’ Became convinced that Lily was God. Begged Lily for her hand in marriage. 

“He said that Mary is God and all women are God and period blood is sacred,” she tells us.


If this were anyone else in my life, I would be seriously alarmed. I cannot emphasize enough that for Lily (and John) this sounds like an ordinary Saturday.  John was always into the more bizarre ends of the metaphysical spectrum, and because of her social anxiety, Lily was always game for staying home and indulging him. Lily says that John wanted to wear the underwear while making repairs on the fence, so she told him that was all he could wear. John expressed worries about someone seeing him pants-less and calling the police, but Lily told him not to worry, it will look like he’s wearing a Speedo, and it’s hot out, so people should understand. Lily could be joking or serious or both. We never knew which half of her stories were true.

While this ridiculous conversation carries on, the orthopedic trauma team places a nail in someone’s shattered hip and the stroke team attempts to repair an aneurysm in someone’s brain. Outside the hospital, dad’s grill hot dogs and kids itch for sunset, when they can careen through fiercely manicured lawns with sparklers in hand. And somewhere in the greater metro area, Lily tries to convince John to fix the fence in her period stained underwear. My country ’tis of thee.

Lily tells us that John considers them ‘spiritually married.’ She jokes that she’s not sure if she can get ‘spiritually divorced’ or how many times she can get spiritually married. I want to know more, like whether or not the spiritual marriage had to be consecrated in some manner, and whether or not there was some kind of ceremony, or, and most importantly, if at any point Lily thought John should receive professional help. Unfortunately, I don’t get a chance to ask because the trauma pager beeps and buzzes, a patient en route to the emergency department with some kind of thoracic injury. 

“Lily we have to go, there’s a red level!” we say.

She tells us that she misses us, promises to keep us posted on life. “It’s been pretty interesting, being God!” she says before ending the conversation and texting a picture of John, who at least appears to be very happy with life.

Lily’s experience as God is a different version of God than the role we’re used to playing, saving people’s life and limb. Agape seems to be the closest definition of John’s ‘love’ toward Lily, the unconditional love of man for God, though there’s a highly questionable mental health component to that. I can only imagine the interactions taking place on the regular between Lily and her roommate/ spiritual husband/ humble acolyte. Her life has always been a trip.

The thoracic injury gets downgraded from a red-level to blue-level to not much at all, meaning we will not be playing God today. Red to blue to white. Red, white and blue. Under the Declaration of Independence all Americans are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Even if that means selling used underwear, or buying it, or being the people that delight in hearing about these transgressive transactions. I love that in this country, Lily can shove a sweaty thong into a bubble mailer and ship it through the U.S. Postal Service, a proud Forever stamp ferrying the nondescript parcel from sea to shining sea.

Casey Jo talks with a lot of potential deities. Find some of her recent words in Hobart, HAD, trampset, JMWW, The Bulb Region and more, and at caseyjo.carrd.co

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

No shadows inside the Sun

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by David Luntz

Church bells blot memory. 

A typhoon glazes the sky. 

At the wake—incense, 

and walk-through saints.

I brush the dead man’s hand. 

“Don’t go,” he whispers. 

“Knit your dreams to mine—

my mind’s a forged empire.”

David Luntz. Work in Post Road, X-R-A-Y Lit, and Bruiser. Twitter: @luntz_david 

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

God is in the Cuck Chair

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by Jon Doughboy

Feeling low, a silverfish in life’s basement feeding on crumbs and the dander of the successful and anointed who pound the boards above in heritage footwear, low and sinking lower still, slumped in front of a snifter of Arrogant Bastard Ale at the Stone Brewing bar in the San Diego airport, watching the bustle and the hustle and the exhausted, bedraggled concourse shuffle while nursing the dwindling nostalgia I have for my twenties. Hopes aplenty I had then, along with every other hipster schmo in the thrall of Craft and Local and Artisanal. I was going to found a little brewery with my fellow beer bros laboring under the same malt and hop delusion, ready to ferment in the carboy known as the Great Recession and to pour forth triumphantly, when the time was right, with an ABV as high and intoxicating as our young hopes.

I work in sales now. I’m in San Diego on a beverage sales work trip, a work trip when you’re in the bottom percentile for sales this quarter and last quarter and the top distributors have blocked your number and the major retailers hang an “out to lunch” sign when they see you skulking around the corner and next quarter is a plummeting guillotine coming for your underperforming head and it’s 102 degrees and your wife back in Tempe hates you and herself for choosing to marry you and thus joining you as you descend the socioeconomic ladder rung by miserable rung and you wake up most mornings plotting in unsettlingly precise and actionable detail how to slaughter everyone who has ever wronged you—such a work trip is no holiday which is what I say to the man who’s probably my age—37—but could pass for 22 and looks like a cat burglar, a wiry white guy dressed head to toe in black—cap, shirt, slacks, shoes—and sidles up beside me on his stealthy cat feet, orders pulled pork nachos and whatever I’m having, and asks me: “On Holiday?”

No, I say. Work trip. He asks me what I do. I hate this question as much as the next failure but I tell him. He nods enthusiastically, sees me cheapskate-baby-sipping my beer and orders me another. I take this as advance payment for humoring him, the noblesse oblige of the well-to-do, extroverted traveler, so I ask him what he does. 

“Department of Defense stuff. Security. I used to be in the military. Now I’m a contractor. Sort of. I wanted to be a lawyer growing up. I wanted to be Clarence Darrow.”

I tell him I wanted to be Ken Grossman. Wanted to make a fortune getting people drunk on well-made beer. People on first dates would see my logo on a tap handle, swig my brew, and let its bubbles tickle their noses as they tumbled gently into inebriated but no less enduring love.

“But I enlisted. I thought about law school, of course. Took the LSATs. Got a 178. But I really love my country, you know?” Here he taps my new full glass with his half empty own. The gargoyles etched on them kiss. “And I was in Afghanistan—this is off the record—and we were sweeping this village and this little kid came out with an AK so I opened fire and I’m a good shot, a lethal shot, the highest lethality in my platoon, you don’t get a 178 on the LSATs without having a precise mind, without being able to manage—hell, thrive—under pressure. Needless to say, the child was dead. The insurgent. But I checked his weapon and the clip was empty. I love my country but, in that moment—and the Moment is all there is, all these little moments chained together to make a Life—in those blood-drenched Silk Road mountains, I thought: what the hell am I doing? I kept thinking that for years. But I kept doing too. Dum spiro spero. Did what needed doing. Loading and firing. Plodding along. Then I met my guru.” He notices me raising my eyebrows and looking at my suddenly empty beer and orders me a refill. “And I’m not talking about some swami walking barefoot over coals or some Burning Man doofus with sloppy face tattoos of fake Chinese pictograms. My guru was a stout little Guatemalan guy dressed business casual who worked quality control for a big jelly and jam company. He traveled the country examining different jam factories, testing the flow of the jam, making sure the texture was consistent. And I said how do you do it? Find meaning in it? Year after year? And you know what he said?” I shake my head and spot the server bringing out the nachos. They look like hardened diarrhea. Little brown mounds of moss growing off a mountain of jagged tortilla chips. “He said I had to find my dharma. Had to find my capital W Way. He said Krishna told Arjun to fight. To kill. That quality control is his Way. Some Ways involve ensuring the jelly flows. Some involve bombs and suicide vests and bullets. Inveniam viam. So, there I was, sitting in the Atlanta airport after coming back from some particularly harrowing contract work in the Gulf dealing with those Houthi fuckers and really doubting myself despite all my success in the military and my even more lucrative career as a contractor saving American lives all across the world. Still weighed down by these doubts. By that little Afghani insurgent with his empty clip. Then, boom. This guy and his truth explode on to the scene of my life like an RPG of enlightenment. This random Guatemalan guy. Or not so random. Not random at all, really. Because he works with quality. Works to ensure things flow. Boom. Synchronicity. Boom, boom. It all explodes inside me, my doubts, my fears and useless pity. This is my Way, I realized. Ergo, I flow on over to Mali. I flow to Libya. To the Sudan. To Ukraine. Walking my Way, armed with my Truth, fortes in fide, doing my Work while God watches over me as I Fuck the World He Made for Us.” He pokes his middle finger into the largest pile of pork on the platter like he’s checking its temperature and sucks the sauce off his fingers with evident approval, with the tooth-licking relish of zealous faith.

“Like God is in the Cuck Chair,” I whisper.

He stares at me, into me. “God is in the Cuck Chair,” he says. “Exactly. He’s enjoying himself. Telling us to dig in.” He sucks his finger again. “It’s tangy,” he says. “It’s delicious.”

Tangee, tangeeeee, tangeeee—the last syllable reverberates in my mind. My Mind. Yes, I think. This state-sanctioned murderer, this Latin-squawking child-killer, might be off his rocker, Rocker, but he might be onto something too, Some Thing, because I’m Lost, in desperate need of a Way. I grab a handful of nachos and shove them in my mouth. A mouth which never took the LSATs or countered insurgents, never earned money or glory or infamy or even a second glance from anyone—except, perhaps, my wife in those early days of suggestive half-smiles across empty growlers and held hands where my whole world, World, turned on her second glance, in anticipation of that Glance—but a human mouth nonetheless. Human.

Above and behind this humanity, I feel the presence of the Divine, perched in His Chair, pleasuring Himself, watching.

The Prophet beside me nods watching me eat like he understands what I’m going through, this Conversion, knows it in his bones. We eat the nachos in silence, the sacred Nachos, shoveling them into our mouths by the messy handful like neither of us has eaten in weeks or months or ever. Baby wolves tearing into their first kill. Catholics at their First Communion. Devour the sumptuous, soul-nourishing airport bar Pulled Pork of Life.

The plate is empty. The beers too. He checks his watch, says “Got a date with some warlords in the Philippines. Where the Way leads, one must follow.” He hoists his black, tactical backpack on and rests his hand on my shoulder, conferring a blessing, performing a rite acknowledging me as an acolyte, pouring his energy into me to propel Me on my Way, before disappearing into the concourse throng. 

My wife texts me about her steering wheel shuddering at high speeds and the mechanic telling her the rotors are shot. Brakes too. My boss texts a reminder to compile a full report tomorrow morning but I have no idea about what. I can’t walk their Ways for them. I google assault rifles. The Bhagavad Gita. The screen of the phone is slick, sticky. My fingers too, tangy. But how do you know your way, the way you’ve been shambling along your entire life or the new way forward, is in fact your Way? I forgot to ask the Prophet. My mind feels fuzzy from the high alcohol ales and the overstimulating buzz of the airport. I google migraines and nursing programs in Tempe and the average cost of new rotors and are MBAs worth it and the gun show loophole. Google whether 37-year-olds can enlist. How to keep your home after declaring bankruptcy. Are hollow point bullets legal in Arizona. Couples counseling in Tempe. Converting to Hinduism. Assisted suicide for people in sales.

New travelers descend on the bar. Soon, my flight will board. My phone feels heavy in my hand, so heavy I can barely lift it. God’s Eyes are on me. On us all. He’s waiting out there, up there, everywhere. Waiting and Watching. We’re just little specks of light dancing on His infinite retina, miniscule signals sent to His omniscient optic nerve. 

I stand and look for my gate but the crowd refuses to part for me. No way presents itself. All I feel, ahead and above, without and within, is the engulfing presence of God’s Chair in the dark corner of the cosmos. The divinity of His rhythmic Stroke. The enormity of His Terrible, Terrible Smile.

Jon Doughboy is just one little scribbler dancing on Literature’s infinite retina @doughboywrites

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

two poems

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by Sean G. Meggeson

spaceship earth

a rag 

or another

cleaning thing 

under the sink 

a contextual truth 

nah

giving up is 

giving up 

no one asked 

which way is up 

no one sussed out 

a bodega

and look 

sis puts out 

her smoke on 

her tongue and 

the whole block 

losses it’s axis 

for a minute 

that’s a lot 

that’s all we got

The Theory of the Richer Fool

The bad name of the rat is a synthesis 

of one retrograde fantasy after another. 

Today’s post-hallucinogenic time zones, 

tomorrow’s flash-backs of a buggy cottage. 

We drink all day on the patio. Stubbies 

of Dragon, a dialogue of dressing down   

repressed as muted rage: Harold Searles 

wrote through pyromania and ballroom 78s. 

And the paper he wrote: 

“The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy—An Element 

in the Aetiology and Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia.”  

So let’s get to work. The word purposive forms

in the lower intestines. Could be popcorn. Could 

be cobalt. Regardless, I demand that you to consume me 

at the cherry blossom festival. A would-be act of repair.  

Sean G. Meggeson is a poet and audio/spoken word artist, living in Toronto. He has been published in a range of journals and magazines, including 100subtexts, Bruiser, and the Journal of Experimental Practice . Forthcoming album, Liminal Animal. His audio work can be found on Bandcamp and Spotify. Sean’s blog: https://seangmeggesonpoetry.blogspot.com/

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

UNITED CRUSHERS

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by P.G. McNabb

I.

           Tufts of prairie 

Surround a driftless industrial

Cathedral, with elephant skin

And stained glass pox of spray paint.

The volume of grain demanded

Enormous gear to grind the silage

Which one time made the air breathe thick 

As batter; it’s heavy, still, but with different

Refinement: dust, asbestos, the grist of time

Inhaled by young persons in search

Of palliatives for boredom. “Abandoned”

Could not describe those buildings: they capture

Attention. Everything is interesting

When it’s out of order, out of the order

Obscuring a dream – a petty misdemeanor

Graffiti can’t wake from. It’s hard to imagine

The last days the mill was operational,

That there ever was any purpose beside 

The curiosity served as a ruin of our own.

Barbarous children must also have trashed

The Acropolis before the couple

Hundred necessary years had passed

To make it a monument of something

We will always be too young to remember.

Flour built a temple, too, for people need

To eat some bread and earn some dough and 

Spray some paint, so there might be an ornament.

Different people come for different things

But all enthralled by the broken casements 

On bygone work of hidden generations 

Who built our world and left 

Some wasted castles behind haphazard.

II.

Efforts were made by sealing entrances

To reduce the risks for personal injury.

Getting inside was never the same way 

Twice. Once, an open window granted

Passage to the ground-floor level. 

Generators rusted in the damp – depressed

And inutile – like a third-rate

Duchamp gathering vacant fuel

In an ancient lot. A sepia shroud dressed

The dead room, stagnant water glittered. 

By keeping tight to the wall, you could creep

Around, reach the stairs, and make your way

To successive galleries of babbling graffiti. 

Across that concrete canvas, talent 

Was interrupted and often crowded 

By amateurism – as in any museum. 

III.

But vandals only deface what’s valueless

To them; so when style was in the room,

Rules were observed: like no one fucked with

The really good graffiti, and if they did,

Their tag would suffer a thousand imprecations

From connoisseurs who saw it the same way 

Modernists see the activists 

Throwing motor oil on Vincent Van Gogh. 

There are many among us who hear 

Only half the music. 

          But one sterling

Mural in black & white remained

Unchallenged by the recursive tags of

Disparate crews that dripped from the wall 

Like bukkake. Depicted was a cartoon city

Alight with black flame: humanoid wolves

Bore cyclops eyes, stalked the streets,

And cracked civilians with ebony clubs. 

A simple lyric, maybe title, hung at

The left in capital letters: RATIONAL

ANIMAL. But there wasn’t a tag

To take the credit. 

       Danger increased

With every elevation. Aluminum stairs

Moved from story to story. Machinery,

Shoots, and gothic levers stood patiently

Waiting to resume the work that kept on

Somewhere else – a protestant sense 

Of wakefulness. But there were signs

Of someone resting – mattress, empties,

Orange caps, panties, jackknife, bloody.

Darker forms of life had filled the vacuum:

A process paralleled in shipwreck.

The diver must fear what he finds

Plucked from land and plunged through fathoms

Of time tearing apart the matter, returning

Each object to prima materia. 

            A sense of being

Underwater was also felt at three hundred

Feet in the air – the top of the mill

Awarded surveillance over the city

To the morbidly curious who cleared 

The top unseen. Unknown is how the

Eponymous tag was rolled on fourteen

Consecutive grain elevators – a silo

For every letter in UNITED CRUSHERS.

Everyone authors the story: anecdotes

Circulate – a friend of a friend

Of a friend will know a guy in the

Crew, but still they can’t clarify

The obvious technical challenges

That marvel the metro audience. 

IV.

It happened at night. 

Were grappling hooks used? Or

Did they paint it upside-down? 

How many hours – start to finish?

Mu-dog said they were drunk and dangled

Each other by ankles to roll on the piece.

The work’s placement upset a losing

Proposition, challenging gallery standards. 

V.

Breadth of triumph widens in relation

To its means and their concealment from 

Our understanding. Nobody understands

Exactly how the painting was completed,

And even if they could, they couldn’t comprehend

The risk involved in pulling it off and why

Anyone would want to take it. 

 Enigma

Enfolded on enigma bind to suggest an 

Achievement. Life was staked against

The mark and cultic fame flourished.

It’s for these reasons, UNITED CRUSHERS

Must be considered a MAJOR WORK. The 

City claims it for its landmark, another

Aesthetic insurrection absorbed by 

An institution – vandalism canonized

As infrastructure. And shadows 

Cast round its stature: chronicles of

Death, assault, and drug manufacture

Inspired the total foreclosure of egress:

Immovable mass of concrete placed

In front of doors and ground-level windows.

The palimpsestic gallery of graffiti is

Entombed and inaccessible for further

Consideration – murals borne on fugitive

Minds cast back to their hollows and pulled 

From the audience, practically nonexistent.

But nothing forgotten ever is lost,

And minor work gets cut off the line.

The highest point was reached by spry drunks

With white paint – and there they left 

Their mark on the wintering imagination 

Of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

P.G. McNabb lives and writes in Minneapolis. His work also appears in The Metropolitan Review, Reap Thrill, and SPECTRA.

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

Ingestion II

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by Steve Gergley

Ronald was the first human to eat a ripe plum. Sixteen of his nineteen living siblings have no visible eyebrows. He lived in Weehawken, New Jersey for 337 and 8/9ths years. At 5:13 a.m. every morning, he does 445 pushups amid the sharp and chilly dust of the attic. On March 19th, 1983, Ronald told his great-great-great-great-granddaughter that the key to immortal life is lying awake in bed from four to one each day, and reciting from memory the totality of the New York City Subway System.

Steve Gergley is the author of a bunch of books and a lot of weird writings of an indeterminate nature. His new novel, Stone Cells, will be published by Translucent Eyes Press on August 28th, 2026. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. He’s also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

Being a Cock at Odd’s Cafe

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by Spencer Eckart

I got into an argument with an erudite priest over whether Socrates was Christian. I told him nah man Socrates was effing BC! And he was like anyone who communes w/ spirit at the level he did is in the Holy Spirit and is Christian by proxy. I told him that’s cool but also fuck you. He said so you agree? I said no that Christ is a sex symbol. He said fuck you sir. I said Walt Whitman said argue not concerning God. He said I’m not arguing I’m just spreading the gospel which is ultimately true so there really is no debate. I said OK that’s fine I love you bro. He said I love you bro. But also fuck you I said. He said fuck you as well. Neither of us said anything for a while. Then he and I and everything else began to dissolve into infinite mind. And I started vocalizing involuntary. He said I’m dead over and over again. He and I are one guy. All my shit ends like this because I don’t know how to write an ending. Really that was just an explanation of smoking 5-MeO-DMT. I make fun of writing MFAs but if any of yous want to teach me how to write a proper ending please click the little envelope button on my website. And we can belong to each other forever.

Spencer Eckart lives in the Great Smoky Mountains. His debut collection, Blue Heron Inn, is forthcoming.

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Saturday Morning II

BEACH SPECIMENS, PROVINCETOWN

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by Beina Xu

with a note from Liza St. James

Shortly after the Fourth of July, I received a message via WhatsApp from my friend Beina Xu, a Berlin-based writer and filmmaker. She was sharing photos with me from her trip to P-town earlier that week. I replied with an update-photo of my own, as well as some questions. “Speculations re the tooth-comb specimen?” I asked. “Some kind of ray-like thing??” Beina texted back. “Or massive fish? The rest of the carcass was nearby but so pulverized I couldn’t tell even a shape.” 

The photos had an uncanny quality, especially in light of the much-advertized U.S. semiquincentennial. Curious, I looked up the tee shirt pictured in front of the Pilgrim Monument in the last image—merch for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, proceeds from which go toward preventing gun violence. Mysterious and more compelling the more I considered the suite as a whole, I asked Beina’s permission to share her triptych with Farewell Transmission so that this image-story might reach screens beyond my own. 

—Liza St. James

Beina Xu is a writer, editor and filmmaker based in Berlin.

Liza St. James is a writer, editor, and translator from San Francisco. 

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PETS ISSUE

The Bouncing Donut

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by Christopher Wral

My dog likes to curl up into a donut shape on the softest surface nearest me. His preferred surface is a human bed but a couch or rug will do. My at-home workspace has a guest bed next to my desk and this is often where the dog’s naps will take place. This guest bed is where he spends the most time as a donut.

My dog will occasionally kick his leg in a thumping motion while he sleeps. This causes his whole body to bounce up and down and up to a higher plane. For brief periods of time on this earth, my dog transforms into the bouncing donut.

I recently became immobile. Bad health and surgical wounds that won’t resolve. I’m a long distance runner, but now I’m not that. So I sit and watch my increasingly energetic dog hoping he can tire himself out. Knowing he can’t. 

In the past, I tried taking my dog on runs with me but he gets bored too easily. He’ll seemingly enjoy the run for about 5 minutes and then want to do something else. He’s had a similar issue on walks as he doesn’t want to repeat any route in exactly the same way. In a city using a grid system, I can weave him through different blocks to explore more of the local neighborhood.

A run along a trail offers little variation. I relate to the boredom and desire for novelty. Unfortunately, his version of novelty sometimes means pulling down an alley with a strong trash bin scent.

In many ways, I respect his refusal to accept anything less. I often wonder where he’d go without me if I didn’t keep him on a leash. How far he would go. And if he’d return.

Pompeii has a famous mosaic of a dog in a building called the House of the Tragic Poet. The mosaic says, “CAVE CANEM,” or, essentially, “Beware of the Dog.”

As much as my dog would like to think differently, generations from now won’t beware of him. Not because he won’t live forever, but because he isn’t that ferocious.

He looks to me for protection from other dogs and takes quite a while to warm up in a new dog park. Half an hour can pass with him standing at my feet before he finally finds the courage to run around. With this found courage, he’ll quietly orbit the other dogs with as little interaction as possible.

Dog parks are fine, but my dog never looks happier than when he’s sprinting at top speed.

If he reaches top speed I’m a bit more confident he’s had a good day. My apartment is too small for top speed. He tries carpet to couch to carpet to couch. But we both know it’s not top speed.

I dream of making it up to him. I want to take him to a dog store in the city.

George, a local chain, stands out with its designer choices, setting out to bring artisanal aesthetics to the realm of dog toys, and Le Marcel Bakery has a giant windowed-counter of baked goods for dogs while the owners make the treats behind the display.

If we’re ever close to one of these locations, my dog will pull inside no matter how tired he is from his running.

In my bad health I’ve felt like a monster. In this shrinking I’ve overcompensated with adorning myself with new clothes. Perhaps with enough clothes people won’t tell I’m repulsive. I bought a new striped shirt, American-made chinos, a vintage herringbone sport jacket, a raglan overcoat, and a cashmere scarf in just the right blue.

With all of my layers I essentially became a better bed for my dog. He can now donut even closer.

I recently came across a hand-painted ceramic from the Isle of Man that features an aging shepherd in a tweed green outfit sitting with a walking stick resting against his shoulder and his black-and-white dog sitting in between his legs.

As my black-and-white dog is going to live forever, he will be there to sit with me in old age. As he does now.

Regardless of the years that pass, there’s something about taking a rest from all the running around out in the world, and just sitting together. We can guard each other… one sleeps while the other keeps an eye on things.

I know there may come a time when this dynamic will run its course. When he has to look out for himself. When he’ll be forced to go into the world and befriend other dogs to survive. Perhaps the dog stores he used to go to will take pity on him and slip him a bone but I know he won’t have the cash to make that an everyday thing. He’ll have to find himself in this new freedom. And this will be a new version of himself that doesn’t involve separation anxiety from me.

I imagine he’d remain a city dog instead of heading for the woods. He can only change so much.

There’s an interpretation of the CAVE CANEM mosaic that it was meant as a joke… the dog in the mosaic is featured in a play bow and doesn’t look all that ferocious itself. I’d like to commission a mosaic called Beware of the Bouncing Donut.

The runs may have been the happiest, but resting near each other brings us both to a higher plane.

Christopher Wral is a writer in San Francisco. His website is christopherwral.com.

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PETS ISSUE

After Lindsey

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by Katie Haley

The therapist I saw after the breakup with Lindsey fixated on my teen years, talking to me about them in present tense instead of past. I couldn’t tell if this was because she’s a shit therapist or if my development was so obviously arrested the therapist couldn’t imagine there was anything more to talk about then the things that happened to me before I was twenty years old. 

Those years don’t do me any favors though. There’s a lot to talk about. Enough to fill a quarter of the pages in her yellow legal pad. There was the bulimia, which she seemed determined to blame on my mother’s habit of reading the nutrition labels on things like gum packets and toothpaste. The abortion I let Matty Parks pay for with money swiped from his dad’s nightstand that I haven’t thought about since it happened. And plenty of benzos in exchange for quickies behind the high school’s baseball dugout. 

I think the therapist latched on to the worst stuff, the most obvious struggles, not understanding what I needed help with most was the mildly unpleasant. An empty pill bottle in the back of the bathroom drawer with Moonie, the name of Lindsey’s cat, written in faded black ink on the label. The street I have to pass on my way to work that she lived on when we first met. My roommate’s dirty dishes in the sink. Lately, anything small consumes me. 

“How does it feel when your dad calls you a whore?” 

We stared at each other in silence while she waited for my answer, which I knew was expected to be insightful. I shook my head, reminding her I needed to talk about Lindsey and my dad hasn’t called me a whore in years. 

“Don’t you think your dad’s treatment of you will impact your relationships going forward?” 

Greta asks why I’m still making appointments with the therapist. I think I’m too ashamed to admit it’s because the appointments are something to do. Somewhere to go. An air-conditioned room to sit in. Greta says she has something she’s been told not to tell me yet but that she can’t help but tell me anyway. I get my hopes up thinking it will be about Lindsey. That she’s dating someone we both know, whose social media presence I can hunt for glimpses of her. That she isn’t dating anyone because our relationship was so significant she needs to be single for a while to rid her system of me. That I can shop at Saltzman’s again because she’s moved to a different neighborhood. But no. None of that was said. Nothing was said. Greta touched her palms to her stomach and smiled wide enough I could see most of her teeth. 

The baby shower was after a session where the bullshit therapist suggested I never got over the wound of my older sister leaving for college. I told the therapist my sister went to Sarah Lawerence so she didn’t exactly abandon me. At the shower, Greta assured me Lindsey wouldn’t be there. That the two of us were closer than the two of them. If only one of us could be invited, it was me. I did my best to hide my disappointment that the run-in I’d staged in my head was not happening. Her husband’s mother said the baby would be born with a full head of hair like her son, whose hairline hadn’t receded an inch all his life. She held up the sonogram and said a skull shaped like that is meant for thick hair. We ate cold cucumber sandwiches and were barred from wearing pink or blue or any kind of color that suggests gender. I went with a light green dress. Greta cried at her sister’s gift of a rattle engraved with their late brother’s initials under a small pair of angel wings. As much as I wanted the attention to be on Greta and the baby, all of mine was on Lindsey. I hadn’t found a way to casually bring her up in small talk I’d been making with the guests who knew her. It was my goal, to ask about her in a way that denoted I’d forgotten to until that moment. The hard part was picking the right friend to ask, someone close enough to have information but maybe not close enough to immediately message Lindsey to tell her I’d asked about her. Jess was out of the question as she and Lindsey saw each other almost every weekend and texted throughout the week. RJ couldn’t be trusted either as they did Lindsey’s hair, and from what I remember, she was due for a cut and color any day now. Liza would have to do. She liked to gossip but really only saw Lindsey a couple times a month. Although if one of those times should be the next day or sometime soon, if it was too close to the baby shower, one of the first things Lindsey would be told is that I wanted to know how she was doing. I took the risk. 

“Lindsey’s alright, she’s getting another cat I think.” It was all I could manage to get. 

It made me sad enough to spend the train ride back to the city crying. I’d begged Lindsey to add another cat to our mix, to give Moonie and I a friend, but she wouldn’t on account of our work schedules. What change had been made to her schedule that couldn’t have happened when we were together? 

The second therapy session following the shower was spent assessing if the pass my science teacher made at me in the eleventh grade was the catalyst for my sorry attempt at college. At least we’d moved up in the timeline of my life. 

At a dive bar I saw someone who looked like Lindsey walk out to the smoking patio with someone who didn’t look anything like me. When I had finally pushed my way through enough people to end up outside I didn’t see them but saw a girl who did look like me standing by herself, smoking the kind of cigarettes I’d just run out of. She let me bum one then took a book out of her purse to ask if I’d read it. It was her new thing, recommending it to strangers. 

“It’s just that good,” she said. 

A copy of a self-help book about dreams was in her right hand, the sticker promising a price that ended in ninety-nine cents was half picked off the front cover. She let me read the blurb before reading me a passage. 

“Your past flies overhead in the shape of a vulture and your future is at the end of the pavement before you. Don’t get distracted by the sounds of the vulture’s wings that you fail to look at what’s waiting for you.” 

She looked into my eyes like she was impressed to not see tears. I asked her what if the past isn’t a vulture flying above with the intent to maul you but a park pigeon whose begging for bread crumbs stresses you out so much you want to run as if it were a vulture? 

“It hasn’t said anything like that yet. But I bet it will. At least something similar,” she said. 

I put the cigarette out under the toe of my boot and thanked her. She said, “No need,” then went back to who I assumed, by the barely there brown eyeliner and the soft wave of her hair, was a date. I made a mental note that a book about dreams is a good thing to have on hand for a date in case the conversation dulls. Though I don’t know when I’ll be on a date next. After Lindsey, how little I am attracted to anyone else just makes me cry. 

Staying up late, thinking of the cat I wanted that Lindsey probably now has, I decided to adopt my own. A cat I could name anything I wanted. Anything but the name I wanted to call the cat I wanted with Lindsey because she’s probably using it now. Before falling asleep I decided to come up with a new name once I had the thing in my hands and could see it. There wasn’t any particular breed on my mind, just that it had to be a girl because boy pets came with a dick and a pair of balls. She’d get arm & hammer litter and eat out of a ceramic bowl. If she could tolerate it she’d wear a purple collar. 

The next morning I went to the shelter up the block and picked the only cat that didn’t come with a ‘but’ from the kid working. 

“She’s really smart but… she sent two previous owners to the hospital with bites.” 

“She’s sweet sometimes but… she swats at blondes.” 

“She’s great but… she has chronic worms.” 

We got to the cat I finally picked and I waited for the “but” for a long time. There wasn’t one. There wasn’t anything to say about her other than she’s smart, sweet, and great. Her gray fur had a patch missing on her leg from something that happened during her birth. It was the one part of her body she didn’t like touched. While wiping up her first shit I wondered if Lindsey was doing the same with her new cat that could’ve been ours and then wondered if, on the off chance that she was doing that, if she was thinking of me. Thinking about the little I asked for and when it became too much. 

At the next therapy appointment I mentioned the new cat, who I thought made a good Margie, and how Lindsey’s cat was my idea. The therapist asked if Margie reminded me of Cookie, the cat I had in my teen years. I said no because Cookie was a slow stray I lurred into the house with cookie dough and kissing sounds. 

“Cookie was with you after the abortion right? You said she laid on your stomach. Have you always felt connected to cats?” 

I didn’t want to talk about the abortion again so I ignored that part. 

“Always. Moonie, Lindsey’s first cat, was slow to warm up but she’d sleep on my chest sometimes.” 

“Did Lindsey like that?” 

It was the first time she’d asked me anything about Lindsey. Or spoke about the present. 

“I think so.” 

“Did she like you?” 

“I hope.” 

Katie Haley is a writer and gossip from California with honest work in/on Hobart, Vlad Mag, Somewords, and elsewhere. 

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PETS ISSUE

LOST AND FOUND

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by Suzy Eynon

My cat escaped in Colorado. We lived in three different states together, Kyle the cat and I. Colorado was the pit-stop between two other places that felt more like home. We stayed with my friend Larry, Kyle’s former owner. We had worked together at a grocery store back in Arizona. Larry and I, not the cat. Kyle was his cat in Arizona, but when he moved to Colorado six months ahead of me, Larry gave Kyle to me. He was going to stay with his mother, and she had a cat already. I was always falling in love with a friend’s cat, accepting other people’s strays.

I stayed Friday nights on Larry’s couch after my shift at the grocery store in Arizona because my roommate had a new girlfriend who had walked into my bedroom completely naked to ask to “borrow” lotion, then lubed up with her leg hiked on the side of my bed. Larry and I would get nachos from Aliberto’s drive-thru and watch movies with Kyle circling the periphery until I passed out. Kyle would wake me the next morning as desert sunshine seared my eyes through the miniblinds. He would jump off the window ledge above the couch and onto my head, and I would say good morning. It was the best sleep I got at the time even with Kyle’s greeting. I watched as the cat knocked Larry’s mugs off the kitchen counter to the linoleum floor.

“Since you like him so much,” Larry said, “do you want him?” 

I moved into my own small apartment. This was still in Arizona. I did want the cat. He was a beautiful Siamese tabby mix with startling blue eyes the color of shallow tropical waters. Pizza delivery drivers commented on his attractiveness. Larry didn’t have a cat carrier, so I bought one at the pet store on my way to retrieve him, then drove across town to my new apartment while the cat screamed at a high pitch. I took backroads because I was afraid of driving on the highway, and of making left turns. I was living alone for the first time in my life. Kyle and I became roommates. I had no couch or cable to receive any TV channels as reception was blocked by proximity to a mountain, but we had a tidy quiet place, just a couple of single youths.

When Larry left Arizona, I felt adrift. I was from the place everyone else left, permanent when everyone else was passing through. Then I left too. I picked Colorado since Larry was already there and it wasn’t too many states away. That, and I was probably in love with him. I told myself that I would visit my family every month on the Greyhound, since my fear of driving had expanded into a fear of flying. Larry wanted to move out of his mother’s place, so we could be roommates and he’d be reunited with Kyle.

The morning in Colorado when Kyle escaped, I’d woken up early to go to a breast cancer walk. Did you know you have to pay to participate in those? I didn’t. In those days, Kyle didn’t always want to sleep with me because he wanted to hang out with Larry, his former owner, who always had a clique over, carrying on in a raucous manner late into the night. Kyle would cry to be let out of my room where I hid and watched The Office DVDs and ate curry takeout, which I’d picked up on my walk home from the college where I was a thirty-year-old undergrad. My closest friends during this time, my first time moving away from home, were the cat and Pam Beesly. That morning I opened my bedroom door and the quality of light in the hallway was wrong, too bright for the early hour. It felt surreal, like entering a portal. 

I sleep-shuffled to the kitchen and poured cat kibble into a dish. It was drafty inside. I’d had trouble adjusting to the cold in Colorado, wearing the wrong type of coat and boots, soaked and slipping through that winter. As I went to grab a sweater, I saw that the front door was wide open to the landing outside our second-floor apartment. 

Larry was asleep in his room with the door closed. Our front door had an unfortunate quirk where if you didn’t slam and lock it, it wouldn’t always latch. It slowly swung back open over time. I glanced in the bathroom to make sure there wasn’t anyone hiding in there. Since this was Boulder in 2008, no one was in the apartment while we slept with the door wide open, keys left on the kitchen counter for the taking. Kyle didn’t come running from his spot in the living room. The dish was untouched.

I started out the door without the sweater, without shoes, calling for Kyle. He’d never been outside before. He was an inside cat. I wasn’t even sure he’d encountered stairs before. I stood on the landing, frozen for a moment against my rising panic. I turned to run down the stairs and there was Kyle, light on his feet, jogging up and then past me right into the apartment, as if we were pals passing in the hallway. He let out a chirp as I hurried in behind him and slammed the door before he could change his mind. He purred loudly as he ate.

“Sorry I almost lost the cat,” Larry said when he came out of his room.

 I felt lucky that Kyle was smart enough to return for food after a brief adventure. It horrified me that I came so close to losing him that day, that I had been asleep while he was running down the landing outside to frolic in the night or galloping down Arapahoe alongside cars in the dark. He’d been lost and found without my knowledge while I slept dumbly. I was young then and carried less anticipation of loss. I wouldn’t lose him for another 13 years, after we’d moved together one more time, to another state and finally to a house where he had more space to play, and he was my cat again. I let Larry know when the cat wasn’t doing well, gave him health updates along the way, until the final day.

After Kyle died, I wanted to find a piece of him previously unknown to me, a secret final message from the other realm he’d moved to. I’m not a religious person but I still looked to him for guidance as I did for years. We’d traveled through phases of life together. I picked up an old digital camera in hopes of finding forgotten photos of him but there were none I hadn’t seen before. I scoured the house for hidden memories and was frustrated to realize I couldn’t find the stuffed red monkey he’d once loved, the one that made a too-long shriek when its tummy was poked. I feared I’d given it away years earlier, before I fathomed losing him, when it was just an annoying monkey doll. 

Now that grief has dulled, my aging mind and the passing of time occasionally provide memories new to me, a photo I’d forgotten or a memory like the time he got out. I hope he had fun that night. Now I tell the story to friends like one might share the tale of a lost night in youth, reminiscing about a cool friend who disappeared for hours only to return wearing nothing but a cape, embellishing the story with each telling. It’s part of his lore. Maybe there was snow on the ground into which he sunk his striped legs. Maybe he met the raccoon that lingered in the strip mall behind the apartment complex and they ran free together through the field. Like a close friend, some parts of him remained unknowable, unreachable, even after spending 15 years together. I’ll never know what he saw or did that night. Kyle, my old friend.

Suzy Eynon is the author of Terrestrial and the chapbook Being Seen. She lives near Seattle with 3 cats.

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PETS ISSUE

Speaking Terms

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by Alexei Raymond

We’re no longer on speaking terms. 

We’re still close, but she’s stopped talking, or responding at all. A whisper-quiet treatment. I look at her in the mornings, how she serenely sleeps, sometimes twitches in dreams. I get the urge to kiss, caress, hold her to my chest. On weekends I watch her walk beside me, or run ahead. I, of course, cannot help myself and call out her name, trying to say whatever remains. She acts as if she doesn’t hear and refuses to stay near. Maybe she really doesn’t hear, or my voice is no longer dear. I cannot know for sure, but perhaps it’s depression that mars us so. I see the way she lounges on the couch before the TV, her gaze downturned to some sad corner of the room, away from me. I’m sure anyone else, had they seen her, would tell me I’m simply overthinking, projecting, she just looks tired, looks peaceful to me, but trust me, I know what I see. And this depression—no mere seasonal thing or vague distaste. She feels abandoned by me, hurt immeasurably. Sometimes it’s as if she’s finally looking at me, but I know that cannot be, for her mind is elsewhere, far from me. It’s why even on sunny days when the weather is godly and the wind flutters against her face, her sweetly shut eyes—a sight the very picture of animal contentment—my heart remains pinched. I know those moments, to her, are alternative grace. There are, also, nights when I am struck by fear, that by now we are simply strangers to one another, in this new configuration, no longer near. How they wound me, these moments in which she seems wholly new, materially immaterial, as if never before have I laid eyes nor planted kisses nor palmed caresses unto her. Never before held close. Are we through? No recourse? I do still believe in her soft spot for me, somewhere in her distant heart—should luck do its part. And yes, memories of better days do keep me afloat, but as we drift further away, as on separate boats, what good are they? Yesterday I felt as if our eyes finally locked; she could see me; I her. I wished she’d see into my very core and I’d peer into her, praying we’d overcome whatever drives her secretly sorrowing, avoidant heart. But the moment was a far cry from cinema and its minute facial nuances, last-minute reconciliations.
My face was frozen, matching hers, across all these photos and videos.

Alexei Raymond offers his heart, shaped by life and love in the Middle East. He chases visions of unspeakable loveliness. Find pieces of him in a variety of publications. https://x.com/enemyofcruelty

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PETS ISSUE

The two pets that I want most

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by Mariya Kurbatova

The two pets I want most are a fish or a rat but I live with two roommates and one has a cat and if I understand right, fish and rats are a cat’s favorite meals (though this particular cat is too old and fat to hunt but maybe orange enough to try) and our landlord used chatgpt to write the lease and she’d asked chatgpt to specify that the lease allows only one (1) cat, and though my hypothetical fish and my hypothetical rat would be contained (aquarium or cage respectively), I don’t know if she’d consider additional pets to be a violation of our chatgpt lease, and by the way our landlord apologized for using chatgpt to write our lease (she knows we’re all writers and it’s probably destroying our jobs but she still used it to write to the lease) and anyway, I don’t think I’m in a good place right now to be taking care of something living, something that needs my money for pellets and gravel and little calcium-fortified blueberry rat treats because I don’t have a lot of spare money right now and I don’t have a lot of spare space right now in this house I share with two roommates and a cat, and I don’t have a lot of spare space right now in this heart, because I’m used to hoarding all my love inside myself like a hamster bubbling its cheeks with grain because even though it (the hypothetical hamster) lives inside a cage inside a house with a human who has a paycheck to spend on grain for a hamster, the hamster doesn’t understand that it’s safe from starvation forever and so its survival instincts make it still hoard, but I’m slowly becoming less hamster and more human because you are so kind to me and my heart and maybe one day we’ll have enough money for our own house and we can fill our house with all the pets we want, and did I ever tell you that when I was little, I had a pet betta fish in a one gallon fish tank that I put on top of my bookshelf one day and just kinda forgot about until the fish slowly starved in its own slime, and also when I was little I begged my parents for a pink hairless rat, a rat hot dog creature that we took home in a petsmart cardboard box, and it died weeks later under my care because our house was kept so air-conditioned that my hairless rat got hypothermia, but you make me want to try again in the future to take care of something small and precious.

Mariya Kurbatova (she/her) is a fiction MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. She’s the Book Reviews Editor for The Arkansas International literary magazine. Her work has previously appeared in HAD and the Tightwires Anthology. Please send her pictures of your dog via Instagram @dogenthusiast.

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PETS ISSUE

Billy with a Y 

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by A.T.

Driving Route 5 West Side I overheard a regular rider named Elena talking to another passenger about her cat. “Oh, Luna does this . . . Oh, Luna does that . . . It’s the cutest thing . . . Luna is thee best cat.”

Bus drivers are not supposed to talk to passengers. There’s a DOT safety poster in the break room stating “unnecessary conversation is not only distracting, it’s PROHIBITED.” But Elena had crossed a line. 

“I  think you’re exaggerating.”

Elena glared at me in the overhead mirror. “Excuse me?”

”There’s no way Luna can be thee best cat. Maybe a distant second. I know this because I have the best cat. Her name is Billy, Billy with a Y.”

We adopted Billy ten years ago. I’d been the one hold out in the family when it came to having a pet. The kids wanted a cat. My wife wanted a cat. “But cats puke everywhere, and I’d be the one cleaning the litter box,” I’d say.

When I finally did go to the shelter it was under duress. The wife drove. I had agreed to go only if it was while the kids were in school so they didn’t beg for every cat they saw and whine when we left empty-handed. I got out of the car with my mind made up but prepared to pretend. The miasma punched me as I walked through the door. A thick, dank, disrespectful concentration of both pre and post-processed animal chow, wet dog, cat piss, and disinfectant. Dozens of dogs incessantly barked in some back area I would not venture. 

A lady with bloody scratches on her arms told us to look around. I followed my wife into an enclosure with scattered condos and scratching posts where cats could mingle and lounge, and hope to con their way out of an overcrowded nightmare of shared litter boxes and donated food and into a new home. Use their big eyes, head tilts, and rollover playfulness to prey on lonely, affection-starved saps looking to buy a friend because they didn’t have any.

I watched them all with a cold heart, arms close to my sides. I couldn’t be fooled. I didn’t need friends. And they all seemed to know it. 

All except one. 

A solid female Tabby came out of nowhere and jumped atop a cat condo I was standing next to. She stared into my eyes, ready and willing to be petted. When I didn’t give in, she leaned forward and rubbed against my sternum with her full body weight, as if we were old buds. Nice try. 

But something was different about this one. She didn’t vibe like the other idiot cats shucking and jiving for an easier life. Maybe she was just a better con. Or maybe she felt the same way I did about this whole ridiculous process and saw that in me. They say animals can tell what’s inside a person. I reached up, paused, then scratched her head, stroked her back. Her spine arched and she purred, headbutting me. I hung out with her for a few more minutes. Just to make it look like I’d made an effort. She seemed nice and I wished her well. On the way out I found her picture and information on the wall. A four-year-old stray someone at the shelter had named Millie.

My wife was wearing a big ass grin as we turned out of the lot. “So? Did you see any cats you liked?”

I almost mentioned Millie. Instead I folded my arms, looked out the passenger window like a petulant child. “No.”

Within a week I was back at the shelter. Alone. I hadn’t told my wife I was going. Just in case I came to my senses and turned around before getting there. A different lady with deep scratches on her arms had me fill out a questionnaire, so they could determine if our home was safe for Millie.

“Will the cat have an emergency savings fund of at least $2,000?”

“What specific brand of organic, free-range, grain-free holistic food do you plan to feed?”

“If you move, break up with a partner, or have a baby, how will you prove the cat is still your primary priority?”

“Are you willing to surrender your entire couch set to structural compromise?”

“What is your philosophy on feline behavioral discipline?”

I didn’t have two-grand for myself, let alone for a cat, hadn’t considered pet food yet, and I was for sure, without a doubt, never getting a divorce. I adjusted the truth and was handed a clipboard with adoption paperwork. 

As a staff member slipped away to do whatever they do with paperwork I called my wife, who was surprised to hear where I was. “The kids are gonna be so happy!” She didn’t like the name Millie because she’d had a dog named Millie and was against the idea of using it again. But I was reluctant to change an animal’s given name. She might hate it and decide to ignore us whenever we called her. When people claim their pet doesn’t know their own name I want to say maybe they just don’t like it. As a compromise, the wife suggested Billy, because it sounded similar. I looked into the enclosure and saw Millie, now Billy, sitting atop the same cat condo as when we first met, looking at me through the glass. I waved like an idiot. The staff member went in, grabbed her by the scruff, and stuffed her in a cardboard carrier with “I’M GOING HOME” printed on the side in big, red bubble letters. Billy yowled and yawped the whole ride. 

When I got back to the house I brought the carrier down into the basement and opened the top, expecting Billy to leap out. But she just stayed there, looking up at me like What the fuck is happening? I tried to coax her out by going psss, psss, psss, and then with treats, but nothing worked. I considered turning the carrier over and shaking her out like pruned limbs from a trash can but decided that might be taken as a poor welcome by an already scared cat. I thought about how friendly she was during my first visit to the shelter and briefly wondered if I’d been given the wrong cat. I checked the time, saw I had to pick Holly up from preschool and bolted out the door. Holly burst with excitement when I told her about our new cat. 

I figured Billy would have taken advantage of her alone time to explore. But she was still in the box. Staring up at us with that same look on her face. I told the kid we would just have to be patient. We set up a litter box, put out a bowl of water and a bowl of food, but several hours later Billy was still in the box. So I poured her out. She scrambled across the fake wood flooring, and found a place to hide. And that was the last any of us saw of her that day. My wife and Sam came home, looked everywhere and couldn’t find the cat. The following day, Sam caught a glimpse of green-yellow eyes reflecting light from under a piece of furniture. By the time anyone else got there they were gone. This is how it went for a couple months. It was almost like we didn’t have a cat. The only reason we knew she was there, somewhere, was because food and water would disappear, and there’d be something for me to scoop from the litter box.

I felt like a moron. Billy had conned me afterall, which I kind of respected. But my kids had wanted a cat and I managed to adopt one that didn’t want anything to do with us. 

One night, Holly said, “What ever happened to the cat we had that day?”

I hate to admit it, but I considered seeing if I could take Billy back to the shelter and exchange her for a different cat. My wife had enough. She enacted a strict daily program of exposure therapy that became known as “Billy Time.” After dinner was cleaned up she’d drag the cat out by the scruff from whatever piece of furniture she was hiding under and bring her to the couch where we could all pet her. At first the forced integration sessions only lasted a minute or so before Billy dug her claws into someone’s lap and escaped to one of her hiding places. But the time she tolerated this gradually increased. A couple minutes became ten, ten became twenty. She stopped digging her claws into our laps. Her body relaxed. She began to purr with the attention we gave her. By six months Billy was voluntarily coming out to hang with us, appearing in the living room at “Billy Time” all on her own, pausing to look at us like, You forgot to drag me out from under the dresser. She even began begging for food. Loudly and insistently. She was still skittish with Holly because little kids are full of energy and like to dress cats up and carry them around like a baby, which Billy usually tolerated with nothing more than an indignant expression. And when she simply had enough of being forced to wear a tutu, Billy would lightly scratch H, who would then cry and claim to have done nothing to deserve it.

Over a short period of time even that changed. Holly and Billy were becoming best friends. Billy even seemed to enjoy being dressed up and smothered with hugs and carried like a baby. As Holly grew and calmed down they spent more and more time together. Holly became her favorite person in the house. Billy didn’t sleep in anyone else’s bed. She would perk up when Holly got home from school, lay across her math homework, and no longer bothered shaking off the hair ties Holly draped over her ears, wearing them with purring, slit-eyed regal satisfaction and pride. As if she’d been crowned.

Billy also became my writing companion. There was never a time she wouldn’t curl up next to me as I typed or scribbled in my notebooks. 

The kids discovered the box containing Billy’s adoption papers and saw her name had been changed from Millie. It was a major scandal. 

“Changing someone’s name is mean!”

“You should have asked us first!”

My wife explained the decision behind the name change. The kids weren’t swayed. They were angry we would do such a thing, angry we hadn’t consulted them. There was a revolt. In protest, they started calling her Millie. If I called her Billy, Sam would say, “You mean Millie.” But their attention spans were short. Millie became Billy once again. Peace returned to the valley. But only for a time.

In the divorce my ex-wife got the house. I got the cat. Billy didn’t appreciate being stuffed into a carrier and emerging into a strange new place with strange new sounds and smells. She expressed her displeasure the only way cats seem able to: puking. But, like she did with the family all those years ago, Billy warmed up to the new situation and even seemed to enjoy having a new home. My ex-wife had added a puppy to the mix, a development Billy and I did not care for. In no time she was strutting around as if my new apartment had been her territory forever. At this time, so early in the breakup of the family, there was no love lost between me and the ex, but I remained grateful to her for three things. Two of those things being our kids. The third was forcing me to go to the animal shelter the day I first met Billy.

Sharing custody of my kids, who I’d seen every day of their lives up until then, was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. Having Billy snuggled next to me as I read or watched tv in my sad, depressive state helped a lot. I suppose I did need a friend.

Time went on. Scar tissue covered old wounds. People adjusted. Billy got old. She was nearing eighty in cat years. Meds for a thyroid condition made her weight go up and down. Then only down. She went from twelve pounds to six, then four. She started to look like skin and bones. One weekend she began to have trouble breathing, then lost the ability to meow. Her not being able to meow was possibly the most heartbreaking part to me. She could no longer perform a cat’s sworn duty to annoy their owner with incessant cries for food. She didn’t ask for food at all. 

The vet said it was heart failure. After having fluid drained from her lungs, Billy started eating and meowing again, but I was warned that is temporary. That she will get worse again. It lasted fifteen days.

Billy rode in the back of my car. I’d placed the towel containing her body inside a cardboard box. I thought about the cardboard cat carrier from the shelter with “I’M GOING HOME” printed on the side in big, red bubble letters. Billy was leaving us the way she had arrived. 

The pet crematory was in a dark building atop a hill. In a reverse procession, I carried Billy to the door behind my ex-wife and kids. A man with a big mustache let us in. The main room had shelves and shelves of urns and keepsakes, such as necklaces and bracelets one could put their pet’s ashes in. The mustache directed us to a small room to lay Billy out on a cushioned counter. The little room had dark walls and was dimly lit. There was a bench to sit on while we said our goodbyes. On one side of Billy’s cushion there was a statue of a frog sitting in the lotus position. On the other side were a couple of children’s books about death. On the wall above, a framed image of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet holding hands and walking away below the phrase “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” And goddammit I cried even more. Sam wanted a hug, then didn’t want a hug. I don’t know how long we were there. We said a difficult final goodbye to our Billy, walked out of the room and then the building. It was the first time we had left her with someone who was not one of us. 

At home, afterimages of Billy haunted my peripheral vision in the form of a couch cushion, a shadow, a hoodie left crumpled in a corner. I was careful to watch my step in places she had always been underfoot. Drying tears left a salty film on my glasses.

That day when I told Elena that her cat couldn’t possibly be the best cat in the world, that Luna could only be a distant second best cat at best, she took playful exception to this hard truth. From then on, whenever she got on my bus, Elena would greet me with, “How’s the second best cat doing?” And I would dutifully reply, “I don’t know, you tell me.”

The first time I saw Elena after Billy’s passing she was waiting at her usual stop in a downpour. I knew telling her what happened was going to require everything I had not to cry. And it still wouldn’t be enough. I briefly considered sailing past, pretending I didn’t see her.

But I hit the four-ways, eased to the curb, pulled the E-brake, and the bus kneeled down before her. I opened the door. Elen boarded, closing her umbrella, and looked at me with a mischievous smile. “How’s the second best cat in the world?”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

A.T.

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PETS ISSUE Uncategorized

Animal Control Blotter, Northwest, CT

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A.T. and Adam Soldofsky

Torrington | 290 block of Church St | Report of a dead muskrat on the sidewalk, unknown if Muskrat Suzie or Muskrat Sam | 2:31PM – 03/29/2026

Torrington | 970 Torringford St (Walmart) | Report of a dog that jumped out of a vehicle and engaged in the art of fisticuffs with another dog and the dog’s owner | 20:32 – 04/18

Torrington | Highland Ave @ Ford Ln | Report of a pig crossing the road, unknown if it made it to the other side but the caller is wrestling the pig in an attempt to keep it safe | 18:20 –

UPDATE 18:24: The owner of the pig is on scene with cage

Adam Soldofsky is the author of the poetry collection Memory Foam, recipient of an American Book Award and Telepaphone, a novella. His latest collection, Three Short Novellas, is available here.

A.T. writes captions, among other things