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B L A C K A U R A

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By Bill Whitten

A Georg Jorgenson retrospective is at the Whitney. Georg has been dead for almost twenty years. Among the two-dozen paintings on display is one called Disancorato – Georg’s only known portrait – wherein a pair of disheveled brunettes with brown eyes and insolent faces stare at the floor. I am (or was) the young man in the torn t-shirt and filthy blue-jeans while the young woman in tattered bra and panties was Georg’s sister-in-law, Carolina. The painting is valued at 3.5 million dollars. On the other side of death, Georg’s ambivalence about success has become irrelevant.

I was reading the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini on the F train when a man seated across from me remarked that Cellini, an embezzler, rapist and murderer, differed from contemporary artists only in the fact that he was honest.

At least, I’d responded, Cellini hadn’t collaborated with the Nazis like Picasso. We exited the train together at the Broadway-Lafayette stop and as if predetermined by fate, entered the nearby Bleeker St. Bar to drink beer.

We discussed the use of the camera obscura by Brunelleschi, the type of motorcycle Antonio Ligabue drove and a film I’d recently seen called Accion Mutante, about disabled terrorists bent on exterminating beauty from the world.

He nodded his head as he lifted a pint of Guinness. “Terrorists and governments despise beauty; it’s too destabilizing for a controlled society.”

Georg Jorgenson was a 6’5” redheaded Max von Sydow lookalike, a graduate of Yale, a boxer of some talent and a reckless alcoholic. A person to be feared in certain situations. He behaved like an aristocrat, like someone without problems or cares who’d grown up surrounded by servants, which as far as I knew wasn’t the case. Fifteen years older than me, he was not only a painter but had designed and fabricated the black shoes, shirt and pants he wore like a uniform.

I was a rock musician living in Soho amid the ruins of the ’80’s art bubble and had met enough of its former fantastically prosperous denizens – while plying the trade of art-handler/furniture mover – to have cultivated a genuine hatred for artists and the art-world. Georg, I discovered, was no different; he looked down on his fellow artists and considered his collectors – those who occupied the commanding heights of the capitalist class – to be among the worst people on the planet. He understood that the very same cohort who bought his art and kept him in whiskey and cocaine were responsible for despoiling the environment, mercilessly exploiting the working class and more or less destroying Western civilization. But Georg – an avowed hypocrite – needed to make a living.

I thought his technically masterful canvasses lacked the visceral punch of his personality; they seemed to turn a cool, blank face to the world. That was the influence of Georg’s hero, Lucien Freud. Unlike Freud, Georg’s interventions were devoid of anything resembling a human subject, instead they presented the ghostly interiors of abandoned, uninhabited mansions that were populated by obscure ’70’s architectural motifs and occult pop-culture references. Georg claimed the inspiration for his paintings derived from his drug-fueled career as a teenaged house-breaker in Ridgefield, Connecticut. As the leader of a circle of young friends inspired by Charles Manson’s ‘creepy crawling’ expeditions (in middle of the night the Family would enter a house, quietly rearrange the furniture and then leave) he’d become addicted to nocturnal breaking and entering. To Georg, the vacant structures in his paintings ultimately reflected the architecture of the cosmos, which according to his bleak, clinically depressed worldview, was empty. The Creator – deus absconditus – was long gone.

When Georg suddenly jetted off to Italy with a fellowship and teaching position at the American Academy – due in no small part to the influence of his new (third) wife, the daughter of an Italian diplomat – we carried on our friendship via airmail. He often sent me hastily scrawled, telegram-like notes – I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES – or pornographic sketches made on copies of the Coriere della Sera.

Returning to my apartment on Broome Street one evening after work, I found a postcard in my mailbox: I’M SICK OF ITALY. EVERYONE IS FIVE FOOT SIX IN THIS FUCKING COUNTRY. COME AS SOON AS YOU CAN.

I arrived at Georg’s doorstep in Monteverde Vecchio in a white taxicab. I carried a brown leather suitcase that had belonged to my grandfather. In the bright morning light the neighborhood looked forgotten, even abandoned. Its occupants were either still sleeping or at work. I rang the doorbell and five minutes elapsed before Georg finally opened the door.

Georg’s studio – scattered with requisite rags, canvasses stacked in piles or leaning against walls, sheets of paper covered with half finished charcoal sketches, stalagmite piles of newspapers and magazines, broken charcoal sticks, brown paper bags scribbled with words or images, overturned chairs and stools, rat and mouse droppings, hoghair paintbrushes, a photo of Gabriele D’Annunzio torn from a magazine and nailed to a wall, saucers full of pigment, empty coffee cups, unstretched canvasses – was formerly a bicycle factory.

“Look at me, I have Cushing’s Syndrome; I’m in the same frame of mind as Che Guevara when he went to Bolivia and got himself killed by the CIA. Have you ever seen pictures of him from that period? Moon-faced with a psychotic glint in his eyes? That’s me baby, that’s what I see whenever I look in the fucking mirror. A black aura is hanging over me.”

Shirtless and bearded in a paint-spattered, unzipped white boiler-suit with the arms tied around his waist, he took a step back from a canvas, paint brush dangling from his limp wrist, shoulders hunched, head bowed, looking like Bill Walton just after completing a free throw. The painting was of a chest X-ray. Instead of alveoli and bronchiole there were nebulae, white dwarfs and strands of sidereal light. Behind every image is another image that is more faithful to reality and behind that another image even more faithful.

‘Painter’, I’d come to understand, was a magnetic category. Painters were monks or criminals, eunuchs or satyrs. Paintings were a sacrificial offering that implied the inevitable destruction of their author or a non-stop celebration of the self from which there was no escape…

Georg looked as if he’d gained fifty pounds since I’d last seen him and his face had indeed taken on a moon-like countenance. Bruises, some yellowish, some blue were distributed across his torso like countries on a map. Ghastly pale with little splotches of red beneath each cheekbone he walked across the studio to a gigantic mahogany desk piled high with books, magazines and videotapes. He sat down behind the desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a mirror and then opened another drawer, removed a foil packet and dumped a pile of iridescent whitish powder on the mirror. Sighing, he rose from the desk and carried it to me.

“I get my drugs from a former member of the Brigate Rosse, a real fucking mensch. When I was in better health we used to shoot his machine-guns together.”

“What’s wrong with you Georg? What happened?” I held the mirror in my hand and looked around for somewhere to put it. I didn’t feel like snorting cocaine. Hungry and thirsty, I suddenly remembered that in Georg’s presence I became a lesser person, a sidekick, an underling. With any two friends, one is always the slave of the other.

Georg walked back to his easel, picked up his brush. “I have Sarcoidosis – something usually only blacks and Scandinavians get, I mean what a mindfuck – its in my lungs, it’s in my eyes and its even gone to my brain. The same disease killed Thomas Bernhard, maybe Gide too. Usually it’s a manageable chronic illness. My case is different. I’m supposed to be treating it with 50mgs of prednisone everyday single day…but it drives me mad, madder than I already am and it makes me violent. It was a rational choice on Alessandra’s part to leave me. Perhaps, when I eventually return to the hospital, after they’ve given me Last Rites, she might stop by…”

Nothing is so unbelievable as exact truth spoken in a calm voice.

“What a nightmare.”

I found it difficult to look into his bloodshot eyes. His personality seemed to have expanded along with his bloated body; he was somehow more Georg-like than he’d ever been before. What was the opposite of apotheosis?

“You must be seriously jet-lagged, Robert. Snort a line of the coke. It’ll sort you out, cheer you up.”

I looked down at the mirror. “When did she leave?”

Georg began to cough, a long series of dry sounding, lung-scraping coughs. Red-faced, out of breath, he spoke in short, halting bursts: “You don’t…understand…I am a prisoner here…like the man in the…iron mask…She’s waiting for me to die…Prays for it…You know…how… Italians…are…about…divorce.”

“Come back to New York with me. They have the best doctors in the world.”

Georg walked back to the desk and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, removed a silver Zippo from a pocket of his boilersuit, flicked it open and lit a cigarette. He exhaled smoke through his nose and smiled. He seemed to breathe easier. “I’m totally broke Robert. I have huge gambling debts. You can’t imagine how much money I’ve simply thrown away. I can’t stop working. And even then I can’t paint fast enough to cover my losses.”

“What can I do to help you Georg?”

“There’s a painting I need to make. It would be of you and my teenaged sister-in-law. The inspiration comes from a photo of Belmondo and Seberg. I don’t do portraits so this might be dicey but there is a dealer who has…who has…made a kind of bet with me that I can’t do it. A huge bet. Tomorrow, you and Carolina will sit for me.”

…Later that evening, we walked up Monte Testaccio, the eighth hill of Rome and one of the world’s most famous middens. Monte Testaccio was formed entirely from broken, discarded amphorae (something like 25,000,000 of them) between 50 and 270 AD. Georg wanted me to see the spectacle of Roma at night – the Pantheon, the Castel Sant’angelo, St. Peter’s, the San Carlo al Corso Church, Santa Maria Maggiore – from the vantage point of an ancient trash heap.

Cold winter wind blowing off the nearby Tiber, we crawled through a hole in a chain-link fence and followed an overgrown path up a slight incline. Above us, the bright machinery of the Roman sky. It seemed that the point of my trip to Italy was to reinforce my belief that things could go wrong at any moment and artists made their best work when they were on the brink of extinction.

Ancient pottery sherds crunching beneath our feet, nightbirds spreading their sound around us, Georg, his words punctuated by gasps, spoke of exile: “I don’t really miss New York, you understand, but I do miss my memories which were left behind in the subways, on the sidewalks, on the facades of tenements…”

“You can go back, Georg. You’re not going to die.”

Georg pulled a handkerchief from a pocket of his tweed jacket and wiped his mouth. “Exile must be accepted in the same way a terminal illness must be accepted; graciously, without defiance or shame.”

He stopped and coughed for forty seconds. Then he pointed his chin at the Eternal City: “If Emperor Julian had remembered to put on his breastplate that morning in Ctesiphon, the first moon landing would have taken place in 1342.”

A voice rang out. “You are trampling on the dust of empires!”

We turned toward the voice. It came from a wraithlike figure – a girl – backlit by the glowing city. Tall with brown hair that fell in straight lines from beneath a black felt beret, she wore a black cape and under that a man’s black suit and white shirt. Was she an apprentice waiter fired after her first day of work? A child refugee fleeing a war-zone?

When she smiled her sharp white teeth protruded slightly.

“Carolina, this is Robert.”

A new painting is like an animal glimpsed at the edge of the forest. Is the painter the hunter or the prey? If he has courage, the painter will dissolve into the painting, he will – in an act of faith – become it and live in the ecstasy of that trembling moment of dissolution.

And thus at dawn on a somber day in December, Georg positioned our bodies before his easel and painted us with paintbrushes as fine as eyelashes.

“Think of yourself as hostages not subjects.”

Carolina, who smelled – like all beautiful women – of cigarettes and dirty hair, sat on my lap. She wore tattered black underwear of unknown provenance that had been procured by Georg. They are clean was all Georg would divulge.

I wore a white tank top with slashes across the chest and ripped blue jeans that were stiff with black paint and automotive grease.

“I distrust anything that hasn’t been weathered or worn out.”

For most of the day Carolina and I barely spoke to each other which was what we both knew Georg wanted; any rapport or complicity would have excluded him or set us against his project which was to put onto canvas an image or shadow of a dream.

“Seeing is the paradise of the soul.”

Occasionally, Carolina would rise and pace around the studio. She’d pull on an old Russian greatcoat, walk over to Georg, take the cigarette from his hand and smoke it.

I’d wander over to Georg’s desk and try to read from a paperback copy of Borges’ The Aleph, in particular The Circular Ruins which seemed to be an allegory of exactly what was happening in Georg’s studio.

“Illness is servitude.”

After nine or ten hours Georg began coughing and cursing simultaneously then picked up a Ka-Bar knife and seemed ready to slash the canvas. Not long after, he announced that it was finished.

“We’ll go for drinks now. I have unlimited credit at The Tomb of Cestis. Come on.”

In The Tomb – the ceilings were so low we practically had to crouch – a man in a tracksuit and shaved head led us (come Giorgio) to a tiny, dirty room that was empty except for a round cafe table and four plain wooden saloon chairs. He left a bottle of Liquore Strega and three glasses.

A single dangling light bulb lit the space. On one wall was a poster of Maradonna, on the other a framed reproduction of Parmigianino’s Bardi Altarpiece.

The room smelled of bleach, sweat, shit, piss and Lysol.

Georg sat, chest heaving, gasping for air.

I was becoming smaller and smaller to the point of vanishing completely. Mingled with galloping fear, I felt a kind of ecstasy. The Rome I encountered was entirely made from this fear, this ecstasy. It was like a stage set. Everything meaningful had been undermined, destabilized. When I closed my eyes, images of earthquake, plague, riot, fire, mobs of people flickered before me.

Carolina drank two glasses of Strega and leaned her head against my shoulder. A woman – early sixties, five feet tall with black eyes, steel grey hair and the demeanor of someone resigned to face a firing squad at some point in the near future – entered the room and placed three bottles of Peroni on the table.

To know what something is, we need time to recognize it, thus we always miss when it happens. Conversely, if we want to know when something happens, there’s no time left to say what it was.

When Georg finally slid from his chair to the floor, I could at last comprehend the situation.

The onset of horror has something fresh about it; it shines, it clarifies.

The ambulance arrived twenty minutes after Carolina ran screaming from the room. Then we were hurtling through the narrow, dark and beautiful streets of Roma.

On the Alitalia flight back to New York, I was seated in the rear of the plane, alone in the last row and the stewardesses were merciful and brought me drink after drink. I eventually slept, not waking until the plane taxied on the cinematically lit JFK runway. As I hoisted my bag, deplaned and walked towards customs I thought of Georg lying in a hospital bed in the Machiavelli Medical House, oxygen masked affixed to his face, an IV bag of antibiotics dripping into his arm, the last line of defense as pneumonia bacilli waged war on his lungs. His eyes had scanned the ceiling repeatedly, without pattern, as if guided by some faltering reflex action. Was Georg ‘gone’ or merely in hiding as his body tried desperately to repair itself? I had seen that look before, I’d seen the same eye movement in the days before my father’s death.

Carolina had been grim and preoccupied as she drove me, in her sister’s Fiat 124 Spider, to the airport, smoking cigarette after cigarette, fiddling with the radio, her eyes seemingly never on the road ahead. Death lurked everywhere as we careened along the A90 ring road. Eventually she pulled up to the departure terminal, kissed me on the cheek and handed me a bulging envelope with my name written on it.

“From Giorgio. Your salary for sitting for him.”

Neither of us was aware that Georg had written the word Disancorato in charcoal on the back of the canvas. Did Disancorato – which means unmoored, adrift – describe the painter, his subjects or a way of life?

It was twenty-two degrees when I landed in New York. After clearing customs I opened the envelope. One million Lire. I changed the money and bought a bottle of Strega at the duty free and still had seven hundred and twenty-five dollars. It would be just enough to cover my rent.

Bill Whitten is a rock musician, writer, reader….The singer and songwriter for St. Johnny (1989-1995), Grand Mal (1995-2010) and William Carlos Whitten (2018-?)…author of BRUTES, a collection of short fiction (2022)

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TAMALES

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by Elwood Weebs

Three of us in a one bedroom – Alaska, Vegas, Rust Belt. All living in the shadow of Humprey’s Peak.

Alaska brought like twenty pounds of salmon he caught himself. Frozen and carried three thousand miles.

He grilled our first night together. It was unlike any salmon I’d had.

Just gamey.

Gamey as fuck.

I struggled through three bites, Vegas never made it past a nibble.

We only had this small refrigerator, about the equivalent to the size of two minifridges.

The gamey salmon filled the freezer, spilled over to the fridge.

The entire apartment stunk, mild at first, but always building.

Alaska wouldn’t throw it out, and we wouldn’t eat it.

Alaska had a Mexican girlfriend who stayed over all the time and cooked tamales.

Vegas had a friend who didn’t do shit but sleep on our salvation army pull out sofa bed for five, six nights at a time. He always talked about how much weight he’d gained, and kept to a strict diet of canned tuna.

He didn’t like the salmon either.

Five of us – count em – one, two, three, four, five – in this four hundred square foot space that reeked of fresh(ish) salmon, tamales, canned tuna, and body odors from all over North America.

I’ll tell you, all those aromas will kill your morale.

It was inescapable.

It stuck to my clothes.

Formed a film coating my skin.

Seeped through my pores and into my nightmares.

And I caught everyone fucking, all in the same day.

Alaska and his girlfriend when I stopped home for lunch, Vegas and his friend when I got home that night.

Doggy-style, both times.

Alaska ignored/was ignorant of the smells, but Vegas couldn’t stand it.

It was walk-in-the-door-and-let-out-an-“Oooof” bad.

One day, Vegas and I came in together and let out identical “Oooofs” that said everything that needed to be said.

We filled paper bags with salmon and carried them to a dumpster down the block.

When Alaska came asking about his special Alaskan salmon, we both swore that it was not us, but his girlfriend that threw the fish away.

We said we’d witnessed the whole thing, that she swore us to secrecy.

Well, they got into a blowout fight.

Trust was broken.

And our apartment, in the shadow of Humprey’s Peak, no longer smelled.

Alaska moved out first, Vegas a few months later.

The only thing I missed were the tamales.

Elwood rambles through the rust belt hills with the fatboys. Some people call him Slim, some call him Automatic. No matter about names, he’s often in the middle of a sticky situation. You might find him on Twitter @dntcallmeelwood

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Three Prose Poems

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By Steve Gergley

1. Candied Pears

My wife and I eat dinner on the back deck of our rotting French colonial. It’s August. It’s ninety-six degrees out. It’s been nineteen months since we spoke to another human being. The sun bakes my hairless skull like a smooth stone stranded in a Texas scrubland. For the next forty-three minutes, I watch my wife devour the mound of candied pears sitting atop her spotless ceramic dining plate. As she eats, her lips shine sticky with sugary syrup. The shadows of the circling buzzards flicker across my mud-crusted fingerpads. A pond of silky blood kisses my gold-plated salad fork. Excusing myself from the table, I clomp into the overgrown backyard and begin digging the rectangular hole at the foot of the gnarled sugar maple.

2. No Names

There is a room with no door at the end of the upstairs hallway. My wife has been in there many times. At dinner she talks about the elderly man and his young trophy wife who have lived in that room for the past fifty-nine and one-sixth years. By my wife’s word, the couple spends their long days in the dark carving foot-sized blocks of yellow cedar into intricately-detailed sculptures of Tudor-style mansions. Sipping my sparkling water, I tell my wife that this is a beautiful and interesting story. I tell her that she leads a complex and thrilling life. I tell her that I am glad she regularly experiences these fascinating adventures. In response, she sips her sparkling water and agrees with a satisfied smile. We eat in comfortable silence for three minutes and forty-four seconds. The man across the street tries, and fails, to slam his front door. The ice cream truck with the unsettling robotic voice drives past the front of our house. I ask my wife to spell out the names of the married couple living in the sealed room upstairs, but she only surrenders the middle three letters of the old man’s first name.

3. My Greatest Ambitions

At 6:17 a.m., I wake up on my back in bed. My wife lays on her side beside me. We do not get up for many hours. A square of yellow sunlight crawls across the carpeted floor. Our cell phones buzz on the end table like ambulances dissolving into a humid summer night. Next door, the teenager with the coal black hair plays a riff on his electric bass for two hours and twenty-three minutes. At noon, a male goldcrest lands on the sill of the open window and stares at us through the thin mesh screen. I stare back at the small bird and yawn. A red Honda Civic parks in front of the Tudor-style mansion on the other side of the street. The teenager next door begins playing a new riff. The male goldcrest flies away. My wife rests a soft hand on the warm skin of my throbbing shoulder. The stabbing feeling in my stomach disappears for the first time in thirteen years. These are the days that supply the component parts of my greatest ambitions on earth.

Steve Gergley is the author of The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories (Malarkey Books ’24), There Are Some Floors Missing (Bullshit Lit ’24), Skyscraper (West Vine Press ’23), and A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair (Leftover Books ’22). His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Passages North, Hobart, Always Crashing, and others. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. In addition to his own writing, he is also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.

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Crayon Barn Chris

VI

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By Dylan Smith

When I woke again my left eye wouldn’t open and through the one that would I saw the spire of a cathedral through the sunroof of my car. It hung over me at an arced angle curving wobbly in the glass, its pitch a wave of vertigo and the whirling made me sick. The Arch. The Tarot Guy. The Square. My left knee ached badly and my face ached all around my left eye where something new and terrible had happened. A moon-colored cloud up high on the wind and water, I needed water. I tried to open both eyes again slowly this time and with intent but the left eye stayed caked shut and I winced because my busted rib. That piece of shit Chris. The spire was a towering swirl of sandstone and lime and it reeled, it lurched. I tried to stare it still by studying its stained glass dormers and the dark spaces between its salt-streaked shutters stained green from bird shit and rain—but on it spun, and I felt sick. Sunday bells soon to toll through the morning. I brought my hand up to my left eye and felt the swelling there and a cut and the dried blood below my brow from I still didn’t know what yet. Bereft. Barefoot. Bewildered. A train screeched somewhere down far below and tore along like underground thunder and a toy-sized plane full of real-sized people inched through the far away blue high above. I’d left the key to my Volvo in the ignition overnight and when I went to turn it, nothing. Dead. The Sunday bells started. A whirlpool of wounded pigeons. I opened the car door and vomited onto the street.

I wondered whether Chris would come looking for me before work and figured he probably would. His security shift started at nine. A stack of orange parking ticket paper fluttered beyond the bird shit covered glass and I cursed Chris and the spire bells tolled eight times after a long ominous song. I found an old water bottle on the floor and drank from it like something dead come alive again. My head ached. I needed to hurry. My duffle bag lay upturned on the passenger seat beside me and I dumped it out, emptied my pockets, took an inventory of what remained. I found eighty five dollars and my credit card and the bottle of Chris’s pills and one pair of socks. No driver’s license. Half of a red crayon. Art’s flask was missing. I found the telescope Chris gave me and the red unopened card and Sarah’s address scrawled on a scrap piece of napkin in red pen. I’d hidden my cell phone in the duffle bag but the screen had cracked bad and it was dead, and I found my passport in the glove box along with a pair of dark sunglasses and a toothbrush and a packet of blue gum. Thank God. I brushed my teeth while chewing on the gum and I put on the socks. I poured a little water on my head and pulled down the rear view mirror to take a first look at my eye—but that’s when I noticed the CitiBike behind me. The back seats had been pushed down and the bike lay back there like the body of a broken dead blue horse. Vaguely the features of the film guy’s face formed in a violent blurry fluorescent vision. I opened the car door again to spit out the whiskey colored red, and I had Calder’s wizard hat in my lap. His ring of mysterious keys. I had no time for wonder. I poured the last bit of water onto my dirty work shirt and brought it up to the dried blood below my eye. Objects in the mirror may appear closer than they appear. What? I hid Calder’s hat underneath my seat. I felt very paranoid.

With my duffle bag packed I limped barefoot and carefully toward the deli on the corner. I needed to quiet the hammering in my head. My left leg felt like a peg below my knee and now I’d probably need an eye patch. Shipwrecked. Seasick. Stuck. Sarah’s street crossed an avenue which had been torn up to be repaved and the glass doors to the deli were covered in a haze of construction dust. You could barely see inside. Across the street was a playground wherein children screamed constant bloody murder and parents stood around staring into cell phones and ignoring their leashed barking captive dogs—but inside the deli things were dirty and silent and perfect. An old woman behind the register gestured toward laminated pictures of Mexican breakfast specials and then down the long narrow linoleum tile toward the newspaper stands and the beer. I could have kissed her. A blue countertop with barstools against the window where another customer looked out drinking coffee. Curled on a stack of dusty boxes slept a deeply purring cat. I brought a tall cold yellow can of beer to the counter along with a coconut water and The Sunday Times to hide behind. The old deli owner smiled at me and blinked. She had understanding eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I pointed at the picture of Mexican eggs and coffee. The shop owner wrote down the price and put my beer in a paper bag and I took a stool hidden from the unpaved avenue by a pillar. I opened the beer and took a long important drink. The world arranged itself accordingly. Edges softened. The hammering stopped. Through the window dust I could see the cathedral and my car and according to Chris’s note, Sarah’s apartment was in the building right above me. The best place to hide is beneath your enemy’s bed. Or better yet—a church. I took another drink. The customer next to me stirred his coffee and looked me over. I watched him pull down on his mustache and notice my shoeless feet. He looked back out at my Volvo and nodded. I could have reached out and taken his hand. He smelled like old broken cowboy leather.

“Pay mind to your vehicle out there, son.”

I didn’t think I could talk correctly yet so I didn’t.

“They’ll tow ‘er today if you don’t wake up and move it.”

“Tow,” I said. My tongue felt strange against my teeth. “Tow.”

“That’s right. See you’re the only one out on the street? Think they won’t fuck you on a Sunday boy, but they will. Warning signs nailed up to all the trees. Like wanted posters in some old western.”

The shop owner rang a little bell to announce my eggs and the cat woke up and did a fluorescent downward dog. I came back to the window with a tray of steaming eggs and green peppers and then I limped to the fridge for another beer to go with my coffee.

When I sat down again the old man had risen to leave.

“What year is she?”

“What year is who?”

“The station wagon, son.”

“Oh, man—I mean. Shit.”

The guy pulled on his mustache again and looked out. A starry eyed look. He seemed from another time.

“I could really use a jump,” I told him.

“Can’t help you there, son. Been out here visiting my daughter. My grandson. Newborn just yesterday.”

“Right,” I said.

“You know, son. I recognize something in you.”

“In me?”

“You ever heard it said: from Danger grows what Saves?”

I thought about that for a while.

“I’ve got some friends in that church there. Good ones. Passengers of the same wrecked vessel as you. Why not make your way over with me after breakfast. Get you cleaned up. Find you that jump.”

Trees alive with birds and leaves waved like painted hands in the window.

Under the deli door, a low wind hissing Chrisssss.

Eventually I just didn’t respond.

“Well. Easy does it, son. You know where to find me. I’ll pray you get the help you need.”

The man put his hand on my shoulder and left. I watched him cross the street and walk into the basement of the cathedral. I took a couple bites of the eggs, covered my head with the front page of the paper, and when I woke again the cathedral bells clanged out their thunderous song. Somebody had drawn a little heart deep in the dust on the window by my beer and my eye bled brand new blood. The vision in it looked all fucked up and cloudy. Smeared. I counted ten tolls of the bell and the eggs and coffee were cold. I wolfed down the eggs and drank up the coffee and I stuffed the beer into my bag with the Times. People poured out of the cathedral and I felt alright knowing Chris was at work. I stood outside the Volvo holding jumper cables. Like the soft roar of some far off surf, those kids on the corner howled from within the wind and my puke stunk. Nobody stopped. I needed to get cleaned up. The bathroom was in the basement of the cathedral. I checked under the stall for cowboy boots and locked the door. My eye looked bad. Black hole in my visions. Like I’d stared too deep into the sun. The lid flapped like the belly of a gutted fish and I marveled at the miracle of running water. Gently I cleaned the cut and ran wet fingers through my hair and then I snuck back up through the barn-like dark to a space in the back where I wouldn’t be spotted without shoes. I admired the cathedral’s hammer beam roof and the pillars of the nave were ancient hand carved wood. People were still leaving. I needed a shower and some shoes and I needed to get back on the road before Chris got off of work. The panes of a rose shaped window sparkled like a kaleidoscope of crayon-colored pixels and others showed scenes from the Bible. Like giant stained glass figures from the Tarot, I thought—and then I remembered the door in the west side of the Arch. Calder sitting there crosslegged and shirtless, showing me his keys. Oh God. I remembered entering the Arch through that little door and a staircase spiraled up into the dark brick dirt-floored room where Calder kept his things and slept. Squatted. A long wooden table full of broken cups and dried flowers, candelabras, skulls and swords and mirrors. In the corner a loud cage of doves and a cot and a bottle of whiskey shining red. I must’ve eaten mushrooms or something. Leaky skylights. A snake. I remembered the way Calder fanned his cards before he tabled them. It felt like a bad dark dream. The Devil. Lovers. The Tower. Strength. The sun blasted through the stained glass walls of the cathedral and I felt alive again. I opened a Bible. Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. What a word, I thought. Firmament. I read a page or two from Judges. Delilah and the lion. Soon the bells tolled once for ten thirty and Chris had my poems, my secrets, that snake, but so what. I’d rewrite them. Rewrite them better than ever, I thought, for I knew them all by heart—and I knew that somewhere deep down within my life’s unholy mountain of fears and wounds and lies I’d kept alive a little cave of light, a little candle on an altar luminous and alive with my heartbeat and breath still burning fire for Alma, Alma, Alma. I closed the Book. Put it back in the pew. The cathedral was empty now. Silently I opened my beer, took a drink, and I wondered what it would take for me to change.

Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.

Tags crayon barn chris, dylan smith, farewell transmission

Across The Wire Vol. 3

THE GREAT COMPETITION

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By Nathan Bogart

Artie sat in his old beat up puke green Grand Marquis outside his father’s house, still wearing his Bagel Boy work apron, doing his best to compose himself before heading inside. He looked out at the dirty snow that lined the sidewalk to his father’s front porch. Winter had washed the sky of color and the trees stood leafless against the cold wind.

The house looked like all the other pre-war houses in suburban Detroit. Except his father’s house was in shambles: the roof was beginning to cave in, the porch steps were missing, and there were holes in all the window screens that let mosquitoes and wasps in during summer.

Artie’s cell phone rang. He hesitated for a moment.

“Hey, Laurie. I’m outside his house right now.”

“I just wanted to remind you…”

“I know.”

Artie stared up at the house, he could make out the electric glow of a television through the front window.

“Stop hesitating and just do it. Just tell him already. If you don’t do it, I’m going to.”

“He’s a difficult man.”

“That’s not an excuse, Arthur. Tell him. Jamie needed help with math homework and you weren’t here. Yesterday it was science. Enough is enough.”

“You know it’s complicated.”

“Tell him.”

“Okay, I’ll see you at home.”

He hung up the phone and sighed. Artie felt every night he visited his dad was like crossing a threshold into a different world, like landing on an unknown planet and realizing that not everything operated according to the laws of earth: there were places even gravity could not touch.

The porch creaked beneath him as he made his way to the front door.

“Pop, it’s me,” he called through the door.

“Who?”

“Me, Pop. Your son.”

“Well, come on in already.”

Artie opened the door. The floors were covered in empty whiskey bottles and unwashed clothes. The smell of cigarettes hit his nostrils. His father sat on a mustard-colored recliner, his feet up on a coffee table, eyes fixed on the television screen. A half empty pint of whiskey sat between his legs.

“Hey, Pop.”

He held up a yellow finger, cuing Artie to shut up.

“Look, kid,” his dad said and gestured at the television.

A line of muscular men flexed on a stage, their veins popping and their skin glistening with oil. Artie knew all of them by name.

“See him? On the left?”

“Yeah, Pop. I see him.”

“That’s Frank Zane. The man was a living statue. That’s art. Look at his posing. Beautiful front-double. See that?”

“Yeah, I see it, Pop.”

His dad lit a cigarette, handed it to Artie.

“That’s the art of bodybuilding right there,” his dad said, “not the bullshit you see nowadays. True bodybuilding is sculpture. Proportions, symmetry, flow. That’s what it’s all about.”

“Definitely, Pop,” Artie said and took a drag of his cigarette and tried not to cough. He made his way quietly to the couch, making sure he didn’t walk in front of the television.

“So, Pop. I’ve been talking to Laurie.”

“Please, son. Not now.”

“Well, it’s just that—”

“Your ears okay? I swear you can’t hear sometimes.”

Artie’s father leaned closer to the television:

“And there’s the man of the hour. You see who that is?”

A familiar man with a barrel chest and large arms made his way to center stage. The hair, the chiseled jaw, the mountains of muscle; he resembled Superman. Or at least that’s what Artie thought every time he saw him. He flexed his biceps, puffed out his chest. The crowd cheered and the judges marveled.

“Yeah, I see who it is. It’s you, Pop.”

“Damn right,” he said. A wide smile smothered his face. “This is the year I almost won the Mr. Universe competition. That’s what a real man looks like.” His eyes turned to Artie for a moment, then back to the television.

“Look at my transitions. People don’t know this, but it’s not just the poses, but how you move from one to the other. It’s like dancing. Look at that front-lat spread! I’m unstoppable.”

Artie looked from the television to his dad. His bloated stomach hung out from under his shirt and his legs were swollen and red. A once chiseled jaw was hidden beneath puffy cheeks and a scraggly gray beard.

“You know, Joe Wieder told me I would be the next big thing. That if I wanted I could become an action star, a real celebrity, a somebody. Maybe even get my name etched in one of those sidewalk stars. Everywhere I went, I kid you not, people stared. I felt like a god.”

Artie tried to muster the courage to break the bad news. He’d spent many late nights recently in front of the bathroom mirror, splashing cold water in his face and practicing what to say:

“Pop, we’ve got to put you in a home.”

“We’ve got to place you in an elderly care facility, Pop.”

“I can’t take care of you like this anymore. Your health is declining. You’ve fallen twice. You broke a rib last month. I no longer spend quality time with my children. I’m becoming an absent father like you were.”

“You’re fucking going away, Pop. That’s that. I’m tired of this shit. I’m not you’re fucking servant. I’m your son. I deserve better. Why don’t you respect me?”

Admittedly, he hated to think about his father at an elderly facility. Perfectly manicured lawns, soft-spoken orderlies, tiny paper cups filled with pills: all hiding the fact that it was a house of death. He wondered if he struggled to tell his dad for his own sake, his own fear of seeing Superman tumble from the sky.

“You know, bodybuilding used to be a circus act,” his father suddenly started. “Strong men were freaks, like bearded ladies or wolfmen. But Eugen Sandow changed that. He held the world’s first bodybuilding show, called it ‘The Great Competition.’ What we call bodybuilding now was born from this great man’s vision. Great men, Artie, shape the world.”

His father’s monologues still had the ability to move him. When he was a kid there was nothing he aspired to be more than one of the great men his father talked about.

“Well,” his father said, “I’ve got to hit the shitter. Don’t touch the remote.”

He went to sit up and failed. And then tried again.

Artie rushed to his dad’s side and grabbed his arm. His dad slapped his hand away.

“I don’t need your help. I’m perfectly capable of getting up on my own.”

He slowly pushed himself up out of the chair and then grabbed his cane and marched off to the bathroom.

Artie sat alone in the living room. The silver screen flashing with images of past muscle men, some long dead. He wondered where those still living were now. He closed his eyes and imagined all of them clambering onto stage in their old age, including his dad, barely able to make it up the steps. Gray hair, wrinkled flesh, hanging jowls. Each standing almost naked in their posing trunks, greased and tanned and not long for the world.

On the screen, he watched their former selves pose. He knew all the moves, all the various postures: front lat-spread, most muscular, side chest, crucifix, ab and thigh, etc. He was an expert in a subject he didn’t care about.

He studied his father’s face on the television. He looked exactly how he remembered him as a kid, when he was only ever a visitor in his life, always coming and going, always on the road competing, posing for magazines, running around with women that weren’t his mom.

The walls of the living room were filled with pictures from magazines of his father in the seventies, at the height of his career. Plus, any clippings from newspapers that happened to mention his name. In the center of it all, right above the television, was a picture of him holding up Artie as a baby on stage like a trophy, his father’s handsome face beaming. Artie was too young to remember the moment and his dad never talked about it, but it was the first picture his dad put up when he moved into the house.

Artie started to pick up some of the dirty clothes and empty bottles on the floor when he heard a crash come from the bathroom.

He ran towards the noise.

“Pop, you okay? Everything okay?”

“Everything is fine God damn it. I just slipped, that’s all.”

Artie threw open the door. His father was sitting next to the toilet with blood running down his face.

“I said I’m fine, God damn it.”

“Pop, you’re bleeding.”

Artie stared down at him. His dad suddenly looked small, frail.

He thought about all of the stories of great men his dad told him. Eugen Sandow, Frank Zane, Brian Buchanan, Lee Priest. ‘A great man takes no shit from anybody,’ his dad told him once. ‘He does what he must, he looks fear in the face and says fuck you.’ Artie slumped down on the floor next to his dad and handed him a rag.

“Pop, I’ve got to put you in a home.”

His dad looked over at him in silence, blood running from his forehead to his chin. For a moment nobody said anything. The only sounds were his father’s heavy breathing and the bodybuilders posing in the living room.

“Fine, but I’m taking my tapes.”

Nathan Bogart is a Pushcart-nominated writer from Detroit, Michigan. He’s been published with Flash Fiction Magazine and Macrina Magazine. He’s currently an MFA student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Eyes in a Jar

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By JD Clapp

When Titus tired of seeing his life, he plucked his left eyeball from his head with a grapefruit spoon and put it in a mason jar filled with moonshine. He put the jar in a burlap sack he carried everywhere. When he needed escape from the struggles of life, he’d pull the jar from its sack and close his right eye to view his life through a drunken haze.

He began to favor this drunkard’s view, and one day plucked his right eye out and added it to the jar. For a while, Titus carried his eye jar of ‘shine around, happily seeing the world through drunken, pickled, martini olive eyes.

With time his eyes became tolerant to the ‘shine. It was then that Titus came to understand the world was as he’d seen it before, made worse from being hungover. So, Titus ventured to the edge of the sea and opened his jar and drank the ‘shine, leaving his eyes at the bottom, staring dully up at him. He filled the jar with sand and put it in his sack and tossed it into the waves.

Unable to see and stone sober, a good man came by, took Titus by the hand, and led him to his home, where he fed and cared for him. And together knowing the joy of friendship and compassion, they ventured out each morning and spread the good word, and the inherent kindness untapped in all people, Titus not seeing their words held little sway on the drunken, deaf masses.

JD Clapp lives in San Diego, CA. His work has appeared in Cowboy Jamboree, Bristol Noir, Roi Fainéant Press, Trampset, Punk Noir and numerous others. In 2023, he was a Pushcart nominee in nonfiction, and had a fictional story selected as a finalist in the Hemingway Shorts, Short Story competition. He is a regular contributor to Poverty House.

Tags across the wire, eyes in a jar, farewell transmission

Across The Wire Vol. 3

Blinds

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By Alexander Fredman

The deer out there will still be eating when we finish. (We’re eating tomatoes on toast.) The fence of the garden is for rabbits, for show. Anything that wants can hop it. It’s a foot of chicken wire taut between wooden posts.

There are four of them. A buck and two does, one fawn. It is natural to wonder what happened to the other fawn. (There must have been another.)

Green stalks turned in, trampled. The buck’s antlers haven’t yet come to point. We’ve watched him for years. You’ve said Get the gun and meant it. So what if that was another. In crepuscular light on a cool morning, hungry. I picked the ripe tomatoes this morning. I prepared these plates for us both. It’s silly, I know.

It’s still too early to shoot, even if—let them have at it. See the pale juice bead their elastic lips. So happy they are to have a mealy tomato, undone. What would go well with venison? Recollection is sparse. When I last had it deer were still rare here, it was a task to hunt them, it was a succession of failures. Childhood was spare and sketched in places to hide. Or ways to see the world and forget you’re in it. You know it wasn’t hate, that ancient thing, perched on a platform on a tree, watching for something to break the stillness. Gun in hand. It was love, of what? You taught me, but I let the years crawl on.

This house has been patched on with fresh space in the time since. Sometimes I sit where the old floorboards give way to new. Smooth wood, lacking the gaps that grew with time. The gun is gone but what could be done there, there there, your voice–there are such things as laws in this country. Damn what I could do about it.

Outside a deer kicks at a post. The wood is soft and rotting, but it doesn’t give way. After the tomatoes, they move on to the zucchini. Our largesse. In the pall of a thicket just beyond the garden a fifth stands, its body slight and shadowy. The other fawn, but as a cloud ducks the sun and a young light comes I can see that it’s not, it is an old one, the early markings of this year’s larger antlers. A blanched face, he emerges shy for the feast. He stands on the edge of the dark overgrowth and in the white light he is particulated, smoke in the air. He watches his progeny gorge themselves. Get fat to get through the winter, if they get there. Season starts October 1. Licenses cost twenty-two dollars for state residents. He knows this, the old one. He is cautious, from a different time. Like you, I think. Eat your toast, I think, and look to where you would be, the seat that still wears the indentation of your body. The oak chair with a memory of you in relief.

By hunting season, the gourds will be in. Orange flesh melting on black dirt brings the memory of what you once loved. That pie that I made just for you. You did love it, I tell myself, insecure even in absence. With the shifting wind comes the smell of cardamom and ginger.

No gun, but there are still some unspent shells in a drawer. Somewhere. I could throw them on the ground and hope for a pop. At a campfire as a kid—I smile at that thought. No carcasses that day but bullets tossed like bullets. We were happy without. Even in lean times you laughed at that. The fire made the woods dark. Faces in weird clarity. The day was stripped bare. We tossed bullets like bullets, through the fog. Off to a good start but they hit without a bang. We threw and gathered them, us kids. Later I slept against your leg. You kept your hand on the gun. Your age then is now young. It has been longer without you than with.

The curtains feint in slack air. I push them aside. The deer eat on. I pick a fleck of black on the window, shut one eye, and aim. Get the old one right in my sightline. Cock my head, pop my tongue. Then I laugh. As long as I watch the deer they can’t leave. That was my trouble with you. I let my sight slip, then and now. My eyelids soften here on the leather chair facing the window. Dreaming, the man of the house waits patiently for the past to arrive.

Alexander Fredman lives in New York. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Post Road, Heavy Feather Review, and Hobart.

Tags across the wire, blinds, farewell transmission

Across The Wire Vol. 3

It Wouldn’t Hurt You

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By Claire Hopple

They are burying him in a red nose and overlarge shoes and a rainbow wig, all of which they found inside the chest up in his attic. His mistress is the first to scream at the big reveal. Then some kids who look like they’ve been playing in the mud even though they’re wearing their dressy clothes reserved for special occasions. I consider joining them. Screaming has a certain allure to it, and nobody knows what to make of this configuration in front of us. A good release is in order.

He would’ve hated this final act. They did it because they all wholeheartedly agreed he deserved it. These are his children, mind you. Grown children. They felt Jackson deserved this treatment because he was not a very nice person. Joe, the firstborn, said it was okay. Joe gave them the all-clear, and that was all they needed. They thought he’d never looked more appropriate, more himself, in this getup. They had to tuck in the wig at the sides before they closed his cardboard coffin for good.

Now here we are, incurably witnessing them hoist the coffin up, over, and down into a freshly dug hole for a somewhat un-fresh body.

We don’t really concentrate on Mikey, the youngest son, drinking one of his kid’s unnaturally hued beverages from a plastic container in the shape of a barrel, strips of foil lingering around the top’s circumference.

Their dad found himself at a safe distance from safety one too many times. Jackson was struck by lightning while opening the garage door of his mistress’s house, we’re told. Everybody tried not to read into it. You could say the man had a death wish long before that, but that’s the one that did the trick.

I stare Mikey and his plastic barrel down a little too hard and he gives me this look like: What? It’s not as if I went looking for this drink. I don’t know about you, but it’s easy for me to picture Mikey rummaging through his father’s valuables. We met in front of the dunk tank at our town’s carnival. His wife had left years earlier. Our relationship is not of great importance to you, and I’d like to keep it that way.

These exploits might sound rather morbid––maybe even cruel and unusual, to use the government’s phrasing––but I am accustomed to morbid.

A teacher of mine once recited a famous quote that went something like: Every time an old person dies, it’s like a small library is burning down. And that quote really stuck with me. So I moved to an apartment beside a crematorium in case their ashes of wisdom would float over and stick with me too. Plus I’ve been waiting my whole life to become an old woman. Imagine living long enough that everything becomes nostalgia. Nostalgia is magic because we know we make it through what’s already happened. We’re safe. The phrase “your whole life is ahead of you” means you should be overwhelmed if not frightened, whereas “your whole life is behind you” means you’ve worked hard and you can rest now. You can be your best and worst self––sometimes simultaneously––without having to make excuses anymore. Every day, I’m one step closer. We all have our rituals. We’ve entangled ourselves with violent affection. And these rituals will lead to our downfall.

We live in a town that’s famous for its number of Arby’s restaurants per capita, if that tells you anything.

Mikey says we’ll get an inheritance sometime in the near future. The overdue bills tell me it’s already the near future. Arguing with paper gets you nowhere. There is ample evidence.

Tim, the middle brother, decides right then and there to interrupt the minister––who’s actually a friend of theirs that got some kind of religious certificate from the internet and won’t let anyone forget about it––to speak his peace.

“Our subject was loaded. And we were, we are, his blood relatives. That has to mean something,” Tim says.

“A shopping spree,” Mikey says.

“Something else,” I say.

Joe approaches the grave and throws his phone into the hole beside his father’s body. “There will be little to no consequences for these actions,” he says, inching back to his place in the crowd.

“I never put much stock in communication,” Mikey agrees.

“I’m sorry, I have to leave early. My cat is sick,” says a distant relative.

“But you don’t have a cat,” says another relative.

“It wouldn’t hurt you to at least pretend,” says the first relative.

Jackson’s wife clears her throat. Here comes.

“He was a wonderful husband. I don’t care what anyone says,” she slurs.

We’re unsure whether she said too little or too much. Some of us were expecting a showdown, albeit a one-directional showdown.

A reporter peeks his head above the crowd for a few seconds, scribbling notes.

“Get a good look,” she says. Then she whispers to the coffin, “I know you’re in there.”

You will notice we’re all here for different reasons, and these reasons have shackled themselves to each of us. We’re losing patience with these very reasons as we speak.

“And that’s how you host a burial. Piece of cake,” says the fake minister.

Jackson’s wife, Joe’s and Tim’s and Mikey’s mother––she was a person before any of them came along, and her name is Cassie––will disappear after this. What they’ll find is a used box of hair dye, some rusty scissors, and a pile of old clothes in the single-seater bathroom at one of the (almost) innumerable Arby’s locations.

You can call this guy, Terry, and he’ll make you a new life just like that. Or so Mikey will say to me after his mom’s gone missing. It will be too soon to tell whether she will ever come back. It will always be too soon to tell, just like it will always be the near future.

In the meantime, Mikey will keep a copy of his father’s will and testament under his pillow right next to his high school soccer trophy. He will say sleeping atop these objects doesn’t hurt one bit.

Claire Hopple is the author of six books and the fiction editor at XRAY. Her stories have appeared in Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Forever Mag, and others. She grew up in the woods of Pennsylvania and currently lives in Asheville, NC. More at clairehopple.com.

Tags across the wire, claire hopplr, farewell transmission, hurt, prose

Issue 2 Issue 2 Fiction

STUMBLER

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By Alan Good

Jes was on the front porch picking. Playing always made it better, even when it didn’t. An uptempo version of “Shady Grove,” faster than his fingers would really go. The mosquitoes were bad, which they had in common with everything else, and dad always said if you picked fast enough the vibrations would shoo the mosquitoes away. Back then it seemed like it was true. A lot of things still seemed true then. Things were more in tune.

There was no one there to clap when he was done, or tell him that someone who didn’t play would not have even noticed how he’d flubbed that change. He drank on his beer and sort of casually looked around the neighborhood, not trying to make eye contact with anyone but still signaling that any and all players, regardless of ability, were welcome to drop in. He thought maybe Sammy or Little t or one of the boys might stop by, even though they hadn’t replied to his texts. There was a time this porch was like a nightclub. Dad would step out with his old Martin and by the time he had it tuned up (by ear) there’d be guys showing up with guitars, banjos, fiddles. There’d always be different players, and strangers driving by would stop and listen. If they had an instrument they’d park and drop in for a session. They’d play into the night and it was so beautiful you never wanted it to stop.

But it did stop.

He finished his beer and wiped the sweat from the can off on his jeans before touching the neck of his guitar, which was really his dad’s guitar. His dad’s Martin. His dad’s house. Nothing had ever really been his, aside from his mistakes.

He settled on a slower tune, something his less dexterous fingers could keep up with. “No Deal.” Old Townes Van Zandt song. A good song to play when you’re drunk, or just not a great player, just three chords, D, G, and A7, and you can pick it sloppy and you don’t have to sing good to be able to pull it off. If you did sing good it would come off inauthentic.

On the verses you just talked the lyrics, Woody Guthrie-style, but he really put his heart into it on the chorus. Let his voice crack on the long “Nooooo.” He skipped the third verse, where the speaker is in love with a girl who’s underage. Sometimes he’d just change “fifteen” to “eighteen” but that still felt a little pervy. If the neighbors were actually listening he didn’t want them to get that impression of him, even though it was just a song. The last verse was about him. He really had come through life a stumbler. He really could expect to die that way. These were the facts. This was his biography.

From “No Deal” he went straight into a couple of his own songs. They weren’t any good, and he knew it, but he liked to play them anyway, mumbling the lyrics so he didn’t have to hear how bad they were. They were songs about drinking too much and loving someone who doesn’t love you anymore. Also one about bigfoot, just for fun, because he liked bigfoot. Country songs trying too hard to sound country.

His phone lit up, his heart along with it, until he saw it was just a spam message about ED pills, not Little t heading over with his harmonica. That would make a good song though—“Spam Is My Only Friend.” He played some more songs. He played them loud, with more heart than skill. He didn’t have any embarrassment or sense of shame, the way he once would, singing. Didn’t matter if he was any good or not, singing was better than crying. It drowned out the voice inside him, the one that says life would be so much easier if you were dead. He thought maybe he’d play all night. He had nowhere to be, nowhere to go, didn’t want to go inside that empty house. It’d be more fun if there was someone else to sing harmony or pick out a line while he played rhythm. Used to be all you needed for a party was a guitar and someone who at least sort of knew how to play it.

He drank more beer. He played more songs. He checked his phone and there was always nothing. He couldn’t blame the boys for not coming over. He couldn’t blame her for leaving. The lightning bugs were out now, asking for an encore.

Little while later a police car rolled up. Jes held up his guitar as the cop walked up. He said, “You play?” The cop just told him to take his concert in the house. It was late and this was his one and only warning. Jes wanted to say no deal, but he just said, “Oh. Yeah. Okay.” Sure felt dumb. He’d really expected that cop to walk up and want to do “Pancho and Lefty” or something.

You couldn’t have a concert in that house. Bad acoustics and it smelled like death. The party was over. It wasn’t like the old days. A guy and a guitar, they didn’t mean nothing.

Alan Good is a writer from southwest Missouri.

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Issue 2 Issue 2 Fiction

DROP ZONE

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By Brendan Gillen

“I feel nothing of the sort,” Alaina said.

We had just ridden the Drop Zone, a two-hundred-eighty-foot asshole tightener. It was her idea. I went along because that’s what you do on the third date. Now we were in some low-ceilinged back room with aching white walls and fluorescence so bright you could hear it rattle.

“Your blood pressure is extremely low,” said the EMT. She was heavy-set and sweet and smelled like baked bread. Her name tag said SCARLET.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” Alaina said. “I’m fine.” Her curly hair was matted to her cheek. She had sweat stains rimming her tank top. She was embarrassed. I hardly knew her. If our roles had been reversed, I would have run away. At least her puke didn’t hit anyone.

“Take a few slow sips at least,” Scarlet said. She handed Alaina a bottle of Aquafina. Alaina did as she was told. Scarlet then produced a cold compress and applied it to the small of Alaina’s back. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she sighed with pleasure.

“God in heaven.”

It was the same thing she said after tasting good food. I had taken her to an Italian place on Prince that specialized in Arancini. Crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside. Perfectly salty. An umami bomb, as the Food Network psychos would say. Alaina invited me back to her place and we got undressed almost immediately. I’m no mattress hero; she told me exactly what to do with my tongue.

“You already look better,” I said.

Alaina opened her eyes and looked at me. She smiled. “You screamed like a girl the whole time.”

Scarlet laughed. “You couldn’t pay me to get on that thing.”

“From the top you can see clear to Newark,” I said.

“Yeah, no thank you,” said Scarlet.

“Maybe we should have just waited longer,” I said.

“What did you eat?”

“We split funnel cake and a milkshake,” I said.

Alaina puffed out her cheeks. Scarlet flinched.

“Are you—”

She retched but nothing came and there was a moment of tension, as though we’d just disarmed an explosive.

Alaina looked at me again. Then she began to cry.

“Oh no,” said Scarlet. “Hey, hey. It happens!”

But I knew she wasn’t crying because she spewed at the apex of the Drop Zone. She was crying because her fiancé was dead. Colon cancer. Boom. Just like that. A year ago, she told me, but sometimes, out of the blue, the pain blindsided her as though it was seconds old. She was crying because this was the kind of moment you needed a partner, someone who knew you inside and out, not just the blurry birthmark on your inner thigh. I had a feeling there would be no fourth date, that this would be a tale we’d tell friends over eggs benedict and Bloody Marys, laugh about with our future spouses on a lazy morning in bed.

“I’m so fucking stupid,” Alaina said, and my heart broke. She sniffed and wiped her tears with the back of her wrist, so I made a show of hustling for the box of tissues that sat next to the industrial sink.

“Thanks,” she said, and blew her nose with a little honk.

“I’m going to grab you a Powerade,” Scarlet said. She patted Alaina on the knee then ducked out of the room.

We were alone. We were lonely. I tried to offer a smile and Alaina did the same.

“Who knows,” she said. “Maybe this is the spark we need.”

I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

“I’m still having fun,” I said.

“Makes one of us.”

“Your aim was impressive. Not a splash on anyone.”

“You should see me on the cornhole field. Field? Pitch?”

“Sounds like a threat,” I said, and Alaina laughed.

Scarlet came back with an orange Powerade.

“How’d you know my flavor?” Alaina said. She took the bottle and tipped it back for a long glug. “You want a taste, cowboy?”

I took the bottle and drank. It was room temperature and way too sweet.

“Tastes like Little League.”

“You never told me you were an athlete,” Alaina said in her sultriest voice.

“How’s that tummy?” Scarlet said.

I was dying to know what she thought of our relationship. If the awkwardness hung about us in a way we could never see, or if we were just another couple doing our best to hold on.

“Tummy no longer mad,” Alaina said. “And I bet the line for El Toro has died down by now.”

Scarlet and I shared a glance.

“Kidding,” Alaina said. “Jesus, guys. Half my intestines are baking in the sun out there. All I want right now is my bed and a J Lo flick.”

We were quiet on the drive back to the city. Alaina leaned her head against the seat as I drove. Tom Petty warbled low on the stereo. Occasionally, I glanced over to see if she had fallen asleep. Part of me wished she would so I could be alone with my thoughts. Not that they were worth much. It’s just when someone has experienced as much pain as Alaina has, it gets heavy resting in the knowledge that nothing you can ever do will make it better.

“Our fair city,” Alaina said. “Majestic. Bold.”

The skyline materialized in the haze as I sped north on the turnpike. Summer was dying, but the heat didn’t get the message.

“Guess it’s your turn,” Alaina said.

“My turn…”

“To spill your guts.”

She arched her brows in a dare, then read my confusion and laughed, deep and easy.

“I’m kidding, dude. It’s your turn to pick our next activity. Have some confidence.”

“I’ll think on it,” I said. It took everything I had not to grin like an idiot.

She patted my hand on the gear shift. “Don’t hurt yourself. There’s already enough pain to go around.”

I drifted over to our exit. It was impossible to know if things would last. But if there was going to be pain, wasn’t it worth taking a chance on a balm?

“I’ll drop you off?” I said.

“If you want,” Alaina said. “But I wouldn’t say no to company.” She closed her eyes as we entered the tunnel. “At least for a little while.”

Brendan Gillen is a writer in Brooklyn, NY. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions and appear in the Florida Review, Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, Maudlin House, Taco Bell Quarterly, New Delta Review, X-R-A-Y and elsewhere. His first novel, STATIC, is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press (July ’24). You can find him online at bgillen.com and on Twitter/IG @beegillen.

Tags Brendan Gillen, Drop Zone, Issue 2, Issue 2 Fiction

Issue 2 Issue 2 Fiction

2 STORIES BY RILEY QUINN SCOTT

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By Riley Quinn Scott

Simone has very little will to do anything but contemplate life’s progression

Simone has a lot to do, a lot on her mind, a lot of caffeine in her system, and very little will to do anything but contemplate life’s progression. She wonders if the stories she writes are worth reading, and if maintaining a friendship with her ex-lover Aldo is retarding her development. Aldo is the coolest man Simone ever met. Aldo has a sublime sense for aesthetics. Aldo wears unisex perfume and fucks so well it is an art. Simone fell in love with Aldo in the span of a month. She has not stopped weeping since. He says they share an artistic sensibility and therefore must stay friends. Simone texts Aldo about literature. Simone is 12 years his junior. Aldo believes she is too young to be his lover any longer but a good age to be his assistant. Simone acts older than she is but knows she has a long way to go. In life. In love. In ways of being. Simone can’t stop writing about Aldo. Two weeks ago Aldo moved to Paris. He texts Simone he is having an existential crisis. He wonders if he’ll ever achieve anything to demonstrate his specialness. He says he knows he is very special. Simone once felt she was destined for great things but Simone doesn’t know anything anymore. Simone feels sad when she sits still so she won’t let herself sit still. If Simone sits for too long she will inevitably wish for a man’s tongue to slip up her legs and flutter at her concentrated center. But it is Aldo she visualizes when she touches herself before bed, and Aldo told Simone today he has a new French girlfriend. Aldo cannot be alone. Aldo does not think about Simone romantically anymore. Simone works overtime at the coffee shop, bookstore, and art gallery. Simone skips meals and drinks excessive cups of matcha tea. Simone starves herself to avoid feeling. Simone is scared of regression. Aldo lives off of cigarettes, bread and black coffee. Aldo makes friends with therapists and Balenciaga goths. Aldo doesn’t think twice about having sex with strangers on cliffs. Aldo is looking for that missing thing. Aldo wants a baby. Aldo wants to make $200,000 in passive income. Simone doesn’t sing in the shower. Simone makes it through one more hour. Simone doesn’t know if she is a writer anymore because she only writes about interiority. Simone knows a story should move. Towards what? Simone picks up the phone when Aldo calls. Simone wants to end it there. Simone laughs like she likes being his friend. Simone cries at the end. Simone pushes 100 on the freeway asking Aldo about his day. Aldo says he is well, very well, maybe he has never been better. Simone says good. Simone switches lanes. Simone doesn’t tell Aldo about her day because he doesn’t ask.

The Pleasures of Drawing

May I have that?

The little boy stares at her from behind embarrassing glasses. His eyes puppy-dog her, an effective strategy in his experience. He and her don’t often speak the same language. He speaks her language when he wants something from her. Otherwise, the little boy sticks to his mother tongue. She considers his miniature hand, its pink completeness as it points at the sheet of paper in front of her. She is in the process of drawing a heart, or her idea of one. She is not thinking too much about what her hands are creating. The heart in her drawing has many jagged lines spreading out from its center. She realizes she has drawn a heart of broken glass. Some shards of the heart have been coloured in so they are full of red. Other shards have been left white and alone.

You want my drawing?

The little boy’s careful race car blinks upside-down at her from his side of the dining room table.

Yes. I like it. I want it. Can I have it?

The boy speaks her language politely. She thinks his face looks cute asking her for things she doesn’t have to give. She, as his au-pair, feels indebted to him for giving her a place in his life. She slides her drawing over to him with curled fingers, hiding her bitten, raw fingertips. The little boy pulls the paper towards him. He is excited to leave his mark, and begins using a green crayon to fill in the shards she left alone.

The au-pair takes another sheet of white printer paper from the stack she left on the table. Paper is the same weight, size, and shape in most countries. She enjoys how when they draw, they sit in silence. This is a time to feel happy and not like they are pretending. When they draw, they agree without words on the pleasures of drawing, of clean sheets of paper, of sharpened crayons and pencils. Drawing protects them from language.

She places her phone in the middle of the table and presses play. Minimalist synth music quietly seeps from its speakers. The little boy doesn’t react to the music, too engrossed in coloring the shards of her heart green. Under his hands, her broken heart grows to resemble a Christmas ornament. It is the middle of May. When she first became his au-pair, she would ask the boy what music he liked to listen to, and he would pretend he couldn’t understand her question. She understood. She also wouldn’t like to have a stranger living in her home. In her time with him, she learned the things that matter to the boy most are yoghurt, where his mother and father are, and activities demanding intelligence. This little boy is different from her brothers back home. Those little boys spent their days running and filling the air with foul language.

Taking in the bug-eyed boy in front of her, the au-pair decides he will emerge from childhood a stoic man. She imagines him seeking a quiet partner to live with in a place populated by trees instead of people. She pictures him taking the train into the city, where he loosely makes use of his creativity working at a profitable business. He could be an architect, she thinks, as the little boy looks up, not at her, but to stare at the ceiling for a moment, before reaching for a different color, blue this time, to shade in around the edges of her broken heart.

Blue, she thinks. Interesting. I wouldn’t have chosen that.

Riley Quinn Scott is a writer from Los Angeles. @stuff3d_rabb1t

Tags Issue 2, Issue 2 Fiction, Riley Quinn Scott, Simone has very little will to do anything but contemplate life's progression, The Pleasures of Drawing

Issue 2 Issue 2 Fiction

INTRODUCTION TO A BOOK OF ART

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By Mather Schneider

I had been following Shawn on Facebook for a while when one day he blocked me. If I remember right, it was because I admitted to never having watched the television show “The Wire.” I might have also posted a George Strait video on Shawn’s page, while drunk. And I might have called him a punk-ass punk.

A couple days later he unblocked me and asked me if I would write an introduction to his art book. You see, he often posted his watercolor paintings on Facebook. He walked to St. Pete’s beach and he painted these watercolors. They were childlike. There wasn’t much evidence of skill and his self-portraits looked nothing like him, but I liked them. It seemed strange that he would paint so many self-portraits but that was Shawn for you, that’s artists for you. When he stopped talking about television dramas and conspiracy theories and how the world was out to get him and stopped being a punk-ass punk and just posted a painting, it was like another side of him, a better side. The paintings seemed alive. They probably didn’t look as good in real life as they did on the computer screen and I don’t know if you could call them “art,” but they always brightened my day.

I told him I’d think about it. With this on my mind, I went to work at 4 the next morning, climbed into that stinking taxi cab in the pitch blackness. It was a long day at work, 12 hours, not a monumentally shitty day but an average shitty one. At the end of the day, I still had no idea what to say about art in general or Shawn’s art in particular. After I waited in line to wash my cab, I waited in line so the yard monkey could inspect it to make sure I didn’t damage it. Then I went inside the dingy office to hand in my daily paperwork. It was Friday and there was a crowd in there, maybe 20 cabbies, another line. It was hot and the office was only about 15 feet by 15 feet, the size of a jail cell. The cabbies were lined up at the cashier window where the cashier sat in her cage. The line reached to the wall and then bent and followed the other wall to the corner. I didn’t feel like squeezing in behind that last person, a rare female cabby, so I just leaned against the far counter to wait. All the cabbies were bragging about how much money they made and I knew it was all bullcrap and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I didn’t make much money and I was in a foul mood and maybe that was clear from my body language and the way I didn’t say anything to anybody.

While we were waiting for the cashier to do her interminably slow ritual, another cabby came in the door. The female cabby at the end of line pointed at me and said: “He’s after me.”

The cabby looked at me with a red scowling face and said, “Are you in line?”

“Yes.”

“You just like standing over THERE, or what?”

The biting hatred in his voice startled me, though it shouldn’t have, it’s common enough.

I said, “Yeah, I like it here.”

This was a lame thing to say, not even close to a witty retort but, like I said, I was taken off guard. My mind was elsewhere. My mind was occupied with art and all the insightful things that could be said about it.

He was pissed because I was standing 4 feet from the proper place where I should have been, like some kind of corrections officer. Our society is about rules, and the art world is just as indoctrinated and full of that philosophy as anyplace else. And yet, I often heard artists talking about freedom, as if they were the freest robins in the forest, as if they knew something the rest of us did not. Their art set them free, set their spirits free, they sang that constantly. But most of them didn’t seem very free to me. They certainly seemed untroubled and smug. Is that the same as free? There was nothing free about their university degrees where they learned to talk about their art, to explain to dumb people how great their art was, what was hidden in it and how meaningful and valuable it was. There was nothing free about their horse hair brushes, their canvases and beautiful frames, their “studios,” their “retreats.” Not that they made any money from their art. They didn’t make money, they spent money, and where that money came from was often a mystery. They guarded that secret like a golden chalice. They seemed like a gaggle of egomaniacs in love with the fantasy that they were rebel geniuses. At the same time, they dressed fashionably, thought fashionably, lived fashionably, drove fashionable vehicles. They were as well adjusted as your ordinary hairdresser. Many of them had skill, there was skill galore, no denying that. But there wasn’t much light. Or maybe I was blind to it.

“The line’s HERE, buddy!” the cabby said to me.

Everyone in the room tensed.

“Go ahead of me, then,” I said. “If that will make you happy.”

He didn’t say anything else. The room stayed quiet. The line moved up and I waited, leaning against the counter. When it was finally my turn, I stepped in front of him and did my business with the cashier and got my reward. I bumped his shoulder when I walked past him and waited for the swing of the fist that never came. It was all gross and surreal and it burned in my stomach for the next couple of hours.

Lines, lines, lines. A whole world of assholes standing in lines, even to the point of feeling righteous about it. And then there was Shawn, that motherfucker, he couldn’t even paint within the lines. He couldn’t even draw a palm tree. His chimneys were crooked, his people malformed, his dogs looked like rabbits. I smiled thinking about it and realized once again why I liked Shawn and why I liked his art. He didn’t use the expensive materials. He didn’t get a degree. I don’t think the moron even graduated from high school. He simply walked down to St. Pete’s beach with his Dollar Store watercolors and made these goofy paintings full of innocence and feeling.

When I got home I went on Facebook but there were no new posts from Shawn. No watercolors, no rants, nothing, which was strange because he usually made several posts a day.

For the next few weeks there was more silence on his page. I hate to admit it but I felt an emptiness in my life. That’s how pathetic I was. I still hadn’t written the introduction to his book and I didn’t know how to tell him.

Then one day there was a post from someone else on his page. The post informed us that Shawn had been arrested and found guilty of statutory rape. He had been given a prison sentence of ten years. The person told us Shawn would appreciate any mail correspondence and put the address of the Florida prison, cellblock D-2. I wrote the address down and the next day his entire page was deleted.

I thought about writing him for a long time and then one day I did. It was a short letter, mainly platitudes and weather talk. I didn’t know what to say. In 3 weeks, his response came in the mail with the big red prison stamp on the envelope. He thanked me many times for writing him and told me my letter was the only one he’d received. He told me he was depressed and had lost weight and now looked like those stick figures he drew. He insisted that he was innocent and that he missed the beach and his watercolors and that he was only allowed a pencil and a few pieces of paper. The paper was lined and his handwriting was tiny. He compressed two lines of script between each line on the page. At the end he wrote, “Have you written the introduction to my art book yet?”

I started to write the introduction about a hundred times but never got far and eventually gave up. All I could think about was how transitory everything is, how it all goes away, and the darkness in my soul. Stupid shit like that. I simply could not see the point. I kept driving the cab and paying the bills and fighting the demons. I bought some watercolors and tried my hand at it. He’d inspired me. My paintings were bad and seemed dead on the paper. I thought about sending one to Shawn but I didn’t. The paints dried up and I threw them away. Even though I felt guilty, even though I was guilty, and still am, I never wrote him again.

A few years later I saw a post on Facebook about him. It showed up on my feed like a lizard on the windowsill. The post was a brief statement informing us that Shawn was “deceased.” It gave no details and was posted under an assumed name with zero followers or friends. That’s the way life is. Art struggles against it, maybe. The post got 3 likes and several comments about how he deserved it and good riddance and may he burn in hell and stuff like that. Like these people had been waiting in line for years for this moment. Most of them were artists, free spirits feeding on divine radiance. Hard to feel sorry for a guy who raped a girl, I understand that. But I didn’t know what was true or what was false and doubted any of them knew either. Kind of like nobody really knows what art is or what it’s for. In any case, the post was soon deleted, and I didn’t have to think about it anymore.

END

Mather Schneider’s poetry and prose have been published in many places since 1995. He has several books of poetry, one book of stories and his first novel, The Bacanora Notebooks, was recently released by Anxiety Press. He lives in Tucson and works as an exterminator.

The Bacanora Notebooks: Schneider, Mather: 9798858639787: Amazon.com: Books

Tags Introduction to a Book of Art, Issue 2, Issue 2 Fiction, Mather Schneider

Issue 2 Issue 2 Fiction

4 MICROS

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By Cletus Crow

Playthings

I’m thinking about if we were action figures. Your action figure would include a smaller action figure of me. As a boy, I knew boys who strapped bottle rockets onto their sisters’ Barbies. Let’s hold each other, quickly, before something explodes us. I don’t know what tomorrow holds but itself.

Writing

Darwin says we were lizards. Three thousand dollars later my cat’s alive. She swallowed a needle. I almost compare the needle to self-harm or depression. Not that long ago we were fucking in mud, trying to find bugs to eat.

Thursday Night

I play Call of Duty online with my brother. It’s easier to talk when we’re not face to face. My cat kneads my stomach. There’s so much love on me I sink through the couch, through the earth’s crust and into its core. I live where, in science textbook cross sections, the planet has a bullet wound.

Butterfly Effect

Last night I dreamed of another world where humans had square nipples. This changed our lives for the better in surprising and numerous ways.

Cletus Crow is a writer. His poetry collection, Phallic Symbols, is forthcoming from Pig Roast Publishing.

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Issue 2 Issue 2 Non-Fiction

@MEGAFAUNA.TAT2

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By Crow Jonah Norlander

I made it into my thirties with too few rash decisions and regrets. I was tired of being measured and playing it safe. I wanted a tattoo. I’d had permission from my mom since age 14 so long as I wanted the same thing for a full year beforehand, and even when I had an idea that stuck, I balked. That, and I’m a fainter.

Then came endless vaccinations and suddenly needles weren’t so scary. I still felt intimidated by the macho shops, so my friend Mary Alice had a tip. Go stick and poke. Sit in someone’s homey living room, admire their fiddleleaf fig, listen to records. She said Frances is the best: clean, profesh, friendly. A few IG DMs and a short sitting later, I had my first tattoo: a tiny molcajete on my forearm. Frances’ easy presence and calm conversation kept me conscious, and I was hooked.

For my ~seventh, Frances spent half a day poking my hero Mark Baumer peeking out from a flowering bush semi-permanently by hand and needle onto my shoulder, and what follows is a condensation of our conversation as we were each half-distracted by intense task focus and moderate physical discomfort.

Were you ever in a bike gang?
I grew up on Vinalhaven up in Midcoast, and me and my summer friends would totally ride around on our bikes. First thing in the morning, you wake up, you have breakfast and then you ride all around the island and look for where the pile of bikes is, because there was no cell phone connection out there until two years ago. I also didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was maybe 12.

Was it just not presented to you as an opportunity to learn?
I have a weird phobia of things with wheels. I don’t trust them. I don’t have a driver’s license, I had a really hard time with bikes, I have a really hard time with skateboards, I don’t know. I don’t trust them. They don’t stay still. They roll everywhere.

So you lived on the island?

Yeah, yeah, so I went to kindergarten, first, second grade in Los Angeles, and then moved from there to Vinalhaven for third, fourth, and fifth grade. It’s an hour and a half ferry ride from the mainland, so not living on the island and going to school there is pretty impossible. I was out there for three years. Probably left the island like three times in that whole stretch.

How big was your class?

Nine people.

Are any of them doing anything interesting now?

It’s a mixed bag. Most of them are still on the island. I think one of them went away to college. One of them is starting some kind of cool homestead situation, where she’s rescuing and rehabilitating wild animals, so she has three raccoons just in her house. But yeah, they all graduated. I think for the most part they’re fishin’ and working at the school or the post office or whatever. There’s very much a culture of like, if you leave, you’ve sort of given up on the island, or you aren’t in the inner circle anymore. It’s not malicious, it’s not people being mean. When you grow up somewhere, it’s good for a lot of people to stay.

Did you finish college?

I did not. I went one year, and then COVID happened. I’m twenty-one, so I would be in my senior year right now. I finished my first year, and that summer, I started tattooing and was like, “hey, this is the best.” If I decide I want to do something else, I’ll go back to school, but for now I’m pretty happy. So I did not finish school. Thank you for coming in a little bit later than we said, by the way.

Absolutely, no problem.

We have lots of bats living in our attic.

Bats?

Yeah. (laughter) Some dudes had to come and check out the attic and the door is right there, so I was like alright, we need to delay a little bit, unless you wanted people climbing over you to get to the attic.

What were they trying to do? Get them out, or just assess the situation?

Maine’s laws on bat infestations in houses are really strict because it’s a protected species, which, awesome, I’m all for that, so basically when you have a bat problem, what you do is seal all of the little microholes that bats could be coming through, and then the population slowly leaves or dies. It’s been three years of them checking up on the attic. But it’s worked, we’ve only had two bats in our apartment this summer, which is awesome. Last summer it was one or more per night.

Wow. You hear them flapping and bouncing around?

No, they get in the house. Flying through the house and everything. Sometimes they get into our downstairs neighbors’, and they have lots of pets so it’s a scary rabies risk for them. When it was just me and my dad living in this building, we didn’t really care. We didn’t really do anything about it. We were like, yeah, we don’t mind having some roommates.

So you’re really moving to California in a couple of weeks?

Allegedly. We don’t have our housing situation figured out at all, so it still feels super abstract, but that is the plan. I’ll probably have to get a real-person job.

Really?

Honestly, spending a little time back in the workforce might be good for me.

What kind of normal job are you going to get?

I don’t know. Anything that pays the bills. I really want to do landscaping, but I don’t drive. You usually need a car for those jobs.

Do you feel like you’ve made a deliberate decision to not drive?

No, I really want to, but I find it difficult to motivate myself to learn. Back to the bike conversation, it’s very similar. There are a lot of things about driving that I do want, like being able to get to nature, get out of the city, just bop around and do my own thing. But those wheels, man, I just don’t trust ’em.

Do you think your nervousness about wheels is your own ability to control them, or other people?

It’s a mixture of everything. Definitely the speed and everything. I dissociate a lot. People say, “I zoned out and I’d gone 40 miles.” I could see that freaking me out a lot. Finding it hard to stay present all the time. It’s a lot of responsibility. You’re responsible for yourself and whoever’s in your car, but also whoever’s around you in their cars. The amount of trust you have to place in other people. I’m a nervous passenger as well. Just something about going real fast is not my normal state.

How do you think about getting to be old?

There’s nothing I’m more excited for in life than being a tattooed grandma. I’m very very excited to be an elderly person. My idea of everything in between is very abstract. How do you say what happens in between being young and being old old? There’s varying degrees to small old to medium old to slightly older old to most old. I don’t know. I guess all that time just fills itself up. I think if there’s one thing in life I’m looking forward to most it’s being really old and hopefully still being able to do tattoos.

What about it appeals to you?

I feel like being young is so unstable, you’re just trying to figure everything out. I guess there is an idea of having things more figured out when you’re older. That’s definitely a nice idea. I don’t know how realistic it is. I have a feeling most people don’t have everything figured out. Just a certain peace with self that is harder to get to when you’re a young person. Less expectation. Less eyes on you.

What’s it like being in your 20s?

Everyone hypes up being in your 20s as the most fun ever. The reasons they give are not reasons that appeal to me or seem like good things to me necessarily. The freedom is definitely real. I feel that, and I value that, but it’s just that they value youth a lot. That is like, an ideal, and I think that that is silly. It just sets everyone up for long-term maybe not being super satisfied. I’m supposed to do all the fun things in my life in these ten years. I’ve been really inspired by my parents. My mom was on one career path her whole life, and then four years ago, decided to go back to school for nursing. My dad is taking a class in film production right now. So just the fact that they were like, okay, we’re not restricted to doing this thing that we said we were going to do, we can always try things out and change, that was really inspiring.

There are always opportunities to explore and try new things, and there is no fixed window for when you can and can’t do certain things.

I think that has to do with responsibility. You’re still quite low on responsibilities when you’re younger, even if you’re working and supporting yourself before you’re responsible for supporting others. There’s definitely a bit of a window for very certain things.

What kinds of things do you feel are projected onto you as far as what you should want to do right now?

I don’t know, partying, being super social, going out on the town. I really like making dinner at home and hanging out quietly. The one exception would be going to see music. I love going to see music, but I don’t know. I don’t really like drinking. I’m not a super social person. I have a hard time with more than, like, four people. And then I think as a tattooer, people have this perception of you as being super cool and there’s a certain amount of social currency that comes with it. I definitely noticed a change in how people treated me when I started tattooing versus before, but I don’t know. I don’t identify as being cool. I think I’m lucky in that it’s pretty normal for people not to be doing a full, complete four years at college these days. I think I would have a lot more complicated feelings about not going back to school if that was different.

When the bats would fly through your house did you ever have to catch them, or chauffer them outside?

Yeah, you get really good at it when you do it every single night. They’re essentially blind, but they echolocate. So all you need to do is have a really big piece of paper on hand, or cardboard or whatever. Doesn’t matter if it’s thin, it just has to be big. You start at the wall and herd it out because it’ll think that the big piece of paper is a wall that it can’t fly into. So you corral it out the door. Or if you don’t feel like dealing with it, you just get it into a room and open all the windows in there. I would put on my full snowsuit so that I wouldn’t have to worry about walking around with the bat flying around. People have really different reactions when I tell them about the bats. Some people are like, “Whoa, cool.” Some people are like, “Disgusting.” Some people are like, “Why don’t you just kill them?” Which we wouldn’t do even if there were no laws restricting it.

What’s the first thing you wanted to be?

Either a geologist or a hypnotist. There was a long list that I wanted to be all at the same time. I wanted to be a professional archer. I wanted to be a survival instructor. I wanted to be a forensic anthropologist. I wanted to do autopsies and shit. A lot of natural sciences. I wanted to be a paleontologist because I loved dinosaurs. I was like, these are all careers that complement each other, yeah? Why are you going to limit yourself to wanting to be one thing?

Did the geologist thing come from just, like, smashing rocks?

Yeah. Bringing the hammer and the bucket to the beach. For some reason, rocks were always a big thing. Whenever my dad would go somewhere new for work, he would bring a rock back for me. I was a very downward-focused kid. I was always looking at the ground, on the ground, eating stuff off the ground, rolling on the ground. Very much just chilling with the bugs and the grass. And that led to finding a lot of cool rocks and being interested in finding rocks and knowing where they came from and how they got there and what they were made out of. I was a big collector as a kid. I always had a collection of natural artifacts, like bones and shells and rocks and preserved plants and bits of snakeskin and whatever else. And when I would have people over as a kid, the first thing I would do is I had to show them my entire collection, and I had to explain in detail exactly what everything was and where it came from and what it does.

Did you ever give things from your collection away as gifts?

Only for the most special occasions. It was really a big deal if I gave anything away. I was a bit of a hoarder, but not in volume. My dad had a talk with me the other day because I had this box of seal bones that were putrefying on top of the fridge for a while, and he was like, “Yeah, dude, you got to move these. I know they’re doing their thing, and it’s going to take a while, but I can’t have rotting bones on top of the fridge. Sorry.” I was like, you know what? That’s fair. So I just put them outside.

Can they still do their thing out there?

Yep. So basically when you putrefy bones, you’re soaking them to remove any soft tissue because the soft tissue will rot off in the water or get to a point where you can scrub it off really easily. Then the next phase is degreasing, which is you soak it for another week or two in just a water dish soap solution, and that removes all the grease and stinkiness and dark discoloration stuff. And then the third step is a soak in industrial-grade peroxide, which is hard to find. You can also use hair dye remover.

What are you going to do with them after all that?

I was going to give a few, because they’re really beautiful bones, I was going to give some to some of my tattooer friends here when I leave. Just like, “Bye, here’s some bones,” because they’re all weird like me, and they like bones.

Where did you find them?

On the beach. There was a dead seal that washed up and I grabbed some stuff. It was horrifying, disgusting, turning into liquid. It was awful. Something had carried its skull off, which I was really sad about. But I got almost a full set of ribs and a few interesting vertebrae. A part of a pelvis.

How’s the jewelry making going?

Oh, it’s great. I’m really loving making chain mail. It’s a really good outlet. It’s just super repetitive and meticulous and you don’t have to think too hard. It’s been good. I still haven’t decided if I want to actually do anything with my jewelry. It doesn’t necessarily feel right to be selling it because it’s more of an exercise than anything else. I’ve not had as much time as I’d like to work on certain projects, but it sneaks in where it wants to. Something that I’ve learned is because the materials are expensive, you have to make sort of a troubleshooting version, like a prototype out of a cheap metal, and then make the real thing out of the real metal that you’re using. And that is hard for me because I don’t really plan. I just sort of wing it with a lot of my pieces. And when I do plan, I have a hard time keeping track of what I’ve done and remembering how I pulled something off. So if I make a prototype, I have a hard time replicating it. Unless it’s super simple.

Seems like it would be hard to retrace your steps.

Yeah, you can sort of look at your piece and figure it out. But a lot of people are very good about writing down all the stuff, keeping track of everything, writing down a recipe. Recipes are not really my thing.

What’s on your Vinalhaven tour?

Well, there’s really not much. Main Street is a single block of stores, and then it goes into the woods and it doesn’t come out until it loops all the way back around to Main Street again after circling the island. But as far as nature spots, I’ve got a couple of little secret beach spots. Vinalhaven has these great defunct granite quarries that are all filled with water, so they’re great for swimming. They’re really clean and awesome. There is, like, one place to eat on the island. There’s a few, but there’s one that’s worth it. It’s a little food truck that has really good crab rolls and burgers and simple stuff. But yeah, I mean, mostly it’s nature spots out there. I spend my days bopping between my aunt’s place, which is sort of like a second home, and my place. Having people over.

Do you know how to juggle?

No, I am not a very coordinated person. Like, fine motor skills are strong, but larger scale coordination is not strong. A horrible dancer. Could never figure out juggling. Not even, like, jump roping or hula hooping. Last picked in gym class kind of person. I came in last in a hundred-person cross country race in middle school once. It was horrible. It was mortifying.

Do you like paddling?

I do like paddling a lot. anything in the water is cool for me. I love kayaking, canoeing, paddleboarding, what have you. Sailing, swimming. The land is too unforgiving, though. Too solid. I’m going to have you sit up so I can get a proper look at this guy.

I remember how to sit.

How do we be a person again?

Always forgetting.

I remember every morning.

It’s fun to get excited about tattoos that fewer people will see.

I would never wear tank tops before I got my arm tattoos. And now I’m like, hell yeah. Flirty and grandpa all the way. Tattooed grandma, here I come. Cool. Yeah. Take a look at that. Let me know what you see as far as inconsistencies go. I can do anything.

It’s great. I love it. I don’t see anything in need of anything.

Awesome. Cool. Great. So how have you been liking that Saniderm stuff?

Good. Great.

Cool. Some people have a bit of a reaction to it. I just went camping with my dad up in Baxter and had just done this tattoo on my leg two days before and I was like, shit. Living in the woods. Super dirty. The Saniderm kind of saved my butt.

Yeah, I bet.

All right, awesome. So yeah, you know the drill. We’ll take photos and it’ll be good.

Crow Jonah Norlander lives in Maine with his family of humans and hounds.

Frances Eder is an artist specializing in handpoke tattoos and handmade jewelry, and can be found on Instagram @megafauna.tat2.

Tags @megafauna.tat2, crow jonah norlander, frances eder, Issue 2, Issue 2 Non-Fiction

Issue 2 Issue 2 Non-Fiction

YOU FIND YOURSELF AT TWO LAKES IN JUNE

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By Kirsti MacKenzie

Lilac rot and dirt roads

Knew you were an afterthought because the text came late. Your apartment building is built like a bunker, made of concrete. Frozen in winter, baking in summer. Top floor. June heat rises shimmering on the road below and it’s not even noon. Every window open in the place, hoping for a breeze heavy with rotting lilacs. Lazy church bells across the street. You lay in bed til noon on weekends because you’re lazy, too. Sometimes hungover. Sometimes nursing rotten guts.

L—’s name on the iPhone.

My birthday. D—’s camp. Come party?

Nothing else to do.

Sure what’s the address

Freedom is beating down a dirt road in summer time. Bikini strings tickling your skin. Towel and a bottle of rye in the back seat. Barefoot on the gas, sliding just a little where the road curves. Gravel pinging under your shitty old car. Blaring Because of the Times on your blown-out factory speakers because it’s summer and you’re bored and there are boys at the lake. Boys that stuck together since grade school. Boys that throw parties. Boys that keep girls in their orbit like gently rotating moons. Sweet, stupid boys whose heads turn when you roll down the drive toward camp.

You hear them when you kill the engine.

“Shit,” D— says. “Is that K—?”

Keg stands and sour patch kids

Somewhere in the middle of the keg stand you realize. Fingers wrapped on cold metal, two of the guys on either side. C— and G—. Their hands grip your thighs, your calves. When they lift you, your shirt falls down, revealing the soft skin of your stomach, your bikini top. B— jams the spray nozzle in your mouth and the boys holler, shouts bouncing off the garage walls while you suck back as much shitty Molson as you can, trying to focus, focus, holy shit are my tits gonna fall right out here, holy shit this beer is bad, holy shit why this song of all songs, holy shit stop looking at my stomach, holy shit this beer is bad, holy shit keep going, don’t pussy out, holy shit I’m drunk, holy shit that means I’m gonna end up in someone’s bed, holy shit you wouldn’t be here unless that was the plan, you absolute dumb ass—

“Jesus,” B— says. “She’s still going.”

You push the nozzle from your mouth and gasp. Roaring, the guys let you down. G—’s hand lingers a second or two on your thigh. They hold you steady while the blood rushes down and the booze rushes up.

“You okay?” C— asks.

“Why the fuck,” you say, staggering, “am I chugging to SOFI Needs a Ladder.”

Cedar sap and bad tattoos

They rot you because you have a Finnish last name and you can’t handle top bench. Maybe eight in the sauna. Six guys, two girls. You and G—’s girlfriend. Sweating like hell but you can’t smell it, the sweat. Smells of spruce, instead. Maybe cedar. Something sweet and woodsy, sap bubbling from cracks in the wood. Window on the right, full of a sunset bleeding into the lake. D— tosses water on the stones. Breathe deep, exhale.

“What’s that,” says D—.

He traces your lower back with the ladle. You jump.

“That,” he says.

“Got it when I was eighteen,” you say. “I forget it’s there.”

“I can tell,” he said. “It’s contrived.”

D— doesn’t have any tattoos, far as you can tell. Has a dad body at twenty-six, though. His family is rich, they own the camp. Most of us grew up on lakes. The ones that couldn’t afford to own, rented, or visited friends and family. Yours visited family, then rented, then owned. Sauna and three bedrooms and a wraparound porch. Things you took for granted til you were old enough. Things you still take for granted.

“Enough,” C— says from the top bench. “I’m headed in.”

Everyone tumbles after him to the lake. Soft sand, shallow surf. You can run a ways before you have to dive in. Little weedy, in parts. The guys shout as the cold meets their hips. You and G—’s girlfriend stretch your hands, dip below the surface. Almost lose your bikini bottom. Stand and re-tie the strings at the curve of your hip.

“She looks good,” you overhear someone say. L— maybe, or D—.

When you peek at them you see G— staring at you. Hungry, kind of.

G—’s girlfriend surfaces next to you with a gasp.

Your hands at your hip. His eyes on them, just a beat too long.

Prednisone and warm Coke

You look good because your guts were rotten. Autoimmune thing. Lost twenty pounds. Sick maybe fifteen times a day, not sleeping. Prednisone and warm Coke cured you. Last weekend you were at another camp, the lake you grew up on, the lake that felt like home. Nana wouldn’t let you rot alone in town. Five-foot-nothing and stubborn as hell.

“I’ve got a bed made,” she said. “You’re coming.”

East Loon is a half-hour west on the 11/17. Before you get there you’ll pass the Terry Fox lookout and the KOA campground and Crystal Beach Variety and the fish shop and the amethyst shop and the fish-and-amethyst shop and the power lines and the power lines and the power lines and the truck stop across from Sleeping Giant Provincial Park. If you’d been driving you’d have stopped for penny candy, but you weren’t driving. Great Uncle Jer drove you to camp in his old green Ford. 90km/hr on the nose. Transports and pickups screaming by when the opposite lane was clear enough to pass.

“New highway’s gonna be divided,” he said. “Saves lives.”

Cross the tracks and a mile down the road. Lupines blooming, birch trees with shimmering leaves. Lazy monarch butterflies baking in the dirt. He went slow so they had time to flee his tires. Over the bridge. First glimpse of the lake, blinding in the midday sun. Turned across from the ball park, across from the tennis courts. Rolled to stop at the stone path leading to the camp. First stone said DR. STITT, GYNECOLOGIST; old joke. Great Uncle Jer was a dentist. Nana greeted you on the deck.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, pinching your shrunken waist. “Look at you.”

“They gave me pills,” you said.

“Good,” she said.

They left for a poker tournament so you had the place to yourself. Nana left soup and warm Coke because, she said, warm Coca-Cola is the only thing that fixes tummies. You got sick and laid on the floor of the bathroom for a while. When you felt better you got up and wandered around the camp, taking pictures of everything like it was the last time. Fishbowl full of jelly beans. Ancient piano keys. Dusty knickknacks lining the sunroom window sills. Pegs on the cribbage board. Foot stool held up by two stuffed feet in white tennis shoes. Canoe paddles with smiley faces spray painted onto them. Old tennis rackets nailed to a fence.

Washed your pill down with warm Coke.

Fell asleep on a deck chair, index finger jammed midway through Keith Richards’ Life. Woke up as though you’d never been sick. Fucking miracle, that.

By the time you made it to D—’s you’d been cured for a week. Stupid to do keg stands, with guts that rotten. But who isn’t stupid at twenty-five.

Cold pizza and assholes

Empty keg and the boys chase the girls from the garage down to the shore. Everyone barrels into the inky black, screaming. Beer fucking with your head. L— grabs your waist and dunks you under the water, tumbling over you. When you surface G— gives you a pointed look over his girlfriend’s shoulder.

In and out the sauna. In and out the lake.

Thumping baselines from the garage.

You didn’t bring a change of clothes. Towel off, toss your cutoffs and shirt back on. Feast on chips and cold pizza and rye. Cards scatter across the dining room table. Wet bodies, shouting and dancing in the living room. Someone rapping badly to old Jay-Z. People falling down laughing. Everyone tossing cards. Raise. Raise. Raise. Fold. Different game. Who’s the president? You’re the asshole. I’m the asshole? Dif erent game. Go fish. Go fish. Fuckssake I said go fish. Hands on the neck of your forty, passing it around the table. Shot after shot. Wincing, gagging.

“Who are you here for?” whispers G—’s girlfriend.

“L—’s birthday,” you say.

“No,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

Gatorade and lemongrass shampoo

Four a.m. People drifting off to bed.

G— comes out of the bathroom, finds you in the kitchen. Waiting your turn. Arms behind your back, bracing yourself against the counter. You cut the neck of your shirt out on a hot day after you saw the band in Winnipeg. It hangs off your shoulder now, exposing your bikini strap. His eyes land on it. Holding his gaze, you untie the strings behind your neck. He inhales slowly, frowning.

Brush your hair out of the way.

Re-tie the strings slowly.

Fold your arms under your tits.

“Done?” he asks.

“That’s my line,” you say.

L— rounds the corner, grabs your hand. Tugs you toward a bedroom, into a creaky old bed with a frayed quilt and musty sheets. Your bikini is still damp, soaked through your cutoff shorts and shirt. His hands wander a bit, then stop.

“What’s wrong,” you say.

“Dizzy,” he mutters. “Who brought the rye.”

“Me.”

“Fuck,” he says.

He runs a hand back and forth over your belly, just above your bikini line. Nobody knows you had rotten guts just a week ago.

“That feels nice,” you whisper.

When you wake he still has his arm slung across your waist. You stare at the ceiling. Think about G— next to his girlfriend in another bedroom. Think about G—’s gaze licking your collarbone. Sunlight slices through dusty old curtains. Faded sailboats printed on the fabric. Room heavy with sweat and sour rye breath but no sex smell. He stirs. Takes a deep whiff of your hair.

“Oh my god,” he says. “What is that.”

“Lemongrass,” you say. “Maybe mint, too.”

He moans.

After a few minutes he asks could you do him a favour. You get up and pull a Gatorade from a pack in the fridge. Sit on the edge of the bed while he chugs. Footsteps outside the door. Hungover mumbling. Someone retching in the bathroom. Screen door slamming. Smell of weed beyond the sailboat curtains. He burps, then groans.

“You should try warm Coke,” you say. “It’ll fix you right up.”

Kirsti MacKenzie (@KeersteeMack) is a writer and editor in chief of Major 7th Magazine. Her work has been published in HAD, Rejection Letters, trampset, Autofocus, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.

Tags Issue 2, Issue 2 Non-Fiction, Kirsti MacKenzie, Non-Fiction, You Find Yourself At Two Lakes in June

Issue 2 Issue 2 Non-Fiction

NÜ METAL GOSPEL

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By Caleb Bethea

The world record book was full of nü metal bands. I wouldn’t know that term for another twenty to twenty-five years, but I knew the bleached spiked hair, the goatees, the lip and eyebrow piercings, the feeling that God was disappointed in me. I couldn’t tell you what their records were but I can tell you they played on 93.3 The Planet in our room as we read the world record book. There was a man with the world’s longest fingernails and another with something like seven hundred cigarettes in his mouth. There was a bald man wearing sunglasses with his arms crossed hanging from hooks in his flesh. Linkin Park and Deftones made the audio equivalent of smoke in the room. A radio voice promoted a club, “18 to party. 21 to really party.” Those were the years I vaguely learned about sex.

Putting the pieces together from what I heard from summer camp, my brother, some of the movies my parents let us watch when they forgot about a few scenes, I developed a sense of dramatic irony with the grown world. Knowing that sex existed when they didn’t know that I knew. It could’ve been fun, but it really just made me feel like I was cobwebbed with dried sweat. And that’s how I felt in the years after, not sleeping, thinking about God and how it would make more sense if he sent me to hell but thanking God he made his son bleed for me instead, piece of shit that I was. World record sinner. I was eleven or twelve by then and the radio was replaced with a short-lived MP3 player made by Dell, 512mb of mostly Linkin Park songs—the MTV mash-up tracks with Jay-Z too—and I’d listen to the screaming in my ear about becoming nümb and think about how Jesus had to be executed for me.

Hell, I even took that Jay-Z line, “Look what you made me do/ look what I made for you…” and imagined God saying that I made him kill Jesus even though he made a whole world for me. And just like I would eventually piece together that these lyrics referred to Jay-Z’s dominance in the record industry and were not to be used as a parallel to the voice of God, I would learn that I wasn’t such a piece of shit after all. The ones who taught me that should have been reading the world record book instead. I recommend the largest tidal wave ever surfed or the smallest frog on the planet.

The nü metal plays out of my phone now. I mostly don’t like it. I listen to it all the time. It puts me back in a room with a kid who’s learning to loathe himself. And I’ve got some headphones we could share.

Caleb Bethea is a writer from the Southeast. They earned an MFA at UofSC and now spend the best of their time with their wife and three goblins by the ocean. You can read their work in HAD, Tenebrous, Ice Breakers, Maudlin House, hex, Twin Pies, autofocus, and elsewhere. They tweet at @caleb_bethea_

Tags Caleb Bethea, Issue 2, Issue 2 Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction, NÜ Metal Gospel

Issue 2 Issue 2 Non-Fiction

RESPONSES TO BOOKMARKED TWEETS FROM MASTERPIECES OF JAPAN

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By Jon Doughboy

Responses to Bookmarked Tweets from Masterpieces of Japan

Jon Doughboy

Sailing Boats Forenoon, by Yoshida Hiroshi, 1926

My friend told me junk rigs were easy to repair and therefore the superior sailboat set-up. He told me a lot of things. Had me read up on all sorts of boats, on maritime law and aerodynamics, devouring memoirs from solo-sailors adventuring across the world. Off Craigslist we bought a twenty-two-foot Tanzer, a sloop rig, its sail blown out. We happened upon another old sail crammed into a dumpster by the marina and cut strips from it to reinforce our own. I remember my friend’s bald head turning red in the sun as we sat there sewing in the cockpit, eating cold empanadas, taking sips of rum, and talking about our first trip to the San Juan Islands. We sold the boat a year later and we’re no longer friends. Owning a boat is hard. So is keeping a friend.

Hinuma, Hiroura, Mito, by Kawase Hasui, 1946

I ran through a marsh like this in Sterling Forest, stomping on skunk cabbage, boots soggy with Superfund slush. My myopic sister mistook a black bear cub for a Labrador and bolted past me. We had Labs as kids. Street scroungers. I watched them tear a racoon in half once, its guts raining brown-red across the backward on a gray Jersey summer day. Hasui’s marsh is green, cool and clean in the bright moonlight.

Fowls, by Ito Jakuchu, 1794

Black ink like the Berkshire woods the night I decapitated my first duck for dinner. A clean cut with a hatchet deep in the log we set up as an improvised butchering table. The duck’s bill kept opening and closing even after I’d beheaded it. The old farmhand took pity on me and hurled the head into the woods then helped me pluck the body. But I thought about that head in the woods all night. How long it kept going. Opening and closing in the dark.

Morning at Aonuma Pond in Urabandai, by Kawase Hasui, 1949

The rule of thirds: the mountain reflected in the pond, a traditional Japanese house in the trees, mountains and sky behind it. Rainbow Lake in the Adirondacks. French-Algerian ex-soldiers turned chefs making a venison stew in the 50s for my father, my father as a kid, so just a kid because he wasn’t yet my father. He said he went to a Halloween party once near there and the host had somehow mounted giant jack-o’-lanterns in the trees to guide the guests. The guest list for his memorial was short. Immediate family, estranged, dumping ashes in the lake.

Shore of Lake Chuzenji, by Takahashi Shotei, late 19^th– early 20^th century

Light shining through rice paper windows. A boat resting on the shore. A full moon reflecting enough light for the people to walk by like when I was camping and I turned off my headlamp and the night came into dim focus and from the shore I saw my friend’s wife bathing nude in Waptus Lake. She was beautiful, is beautiful. But stiff, too. Arrogant. Occasionally, even mean. My friend asked me to help him build her a flamenco platform in their basement so she could dance at home but we couldn’t get it level so she shot us a dirty look and left. We sat on the new plywood floor, unlevel but sturdy, and watched the making of Top Gun on YouTube, huddled around an ancient laptop and drinking cheap beers. Her legs looked like they were made of pearl in the water that night. Via LinkedIn I found out they got divorced. I never did get to see her dance.

Sunset by Kasamatsu Shiro, 1919

The roofs are half in shadow, half in sun, like the roofs of Nice from the tiny balcony where I sat with a girlfriend after we spent the whole morning fucking on an old squeaky twin bed and eating fruit and cheese and looking through a fat used copy of the Lonely Planet. It was hard to feel lonely then, at that age, with her, in the sun. Hard to imagine what loneliness could be.

Hori River, Obama, by Kawase Hasui, early autumn 1920

The river is low where it meets the sea and two black birds soar low above it. My uncle hated Obama. He’s in Florida, I think. Outside of Jacksonville. No one’s heard from him. He went blind in one eye from some sort of blockage. Coupled with his drinking, he’s caused a car accident or two. When my parents kicked me out, he bought me my first tv in my first apartment and helped me set it up. It had a built-in VHS player. We watched Red Dawn and ate Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Sandwiches and cried when Charlie Sheen died. I miss him. My uncle, that is. I have no strong feelings about Charlie Sheen or Obama.

Night Scene of Mabashi, near Tokyo, by Takahashi Shotei, ca. 1936

A child with a low-hanging lantern leads a woman along the shore in a blue night. Your parents lead you then you lead them but I don’t have any kids so I hope the underpaid nurse’s aide is gentle when she leads me to the piss and bleach-scented senility waiting out there for me. I visited Tokyo once. It was big, busy but lonely.

Great Lantern at Asakusa Temple, by Tsuchiya Koitsu, 1934

A woman and a child beneath a great lantern. My older sister and I beneath the giant whale at the Museum of Natural History. She was and is a good big sister. A social worker in a mountain town. Last year I visited her and we did hikes and took pictures at different summits and went out for ice cream afterwards. An obese woman in an idling Suburban yelled after her kids to get her the biggest one they had and my sister said, “disgusting.” And I said, “I think you’re a bit fatphobic.” She said, firmly, “yes, I am. I don’t like fat people.” When we went inside, I ordered a small not because I’m fat or I don’t like ice cream. But I could tell my sister was suffering from something and though I don’t believe in happiness, I’m in no rush to make anyone’s life less bearable, especially someone I love.

Seta Bridge, by Yoshida Hiroshi, 1933

As a kid I was scared of bridges, the Tappan Zee in particular. The height, maybe, or the movement. I walked across the Bear Mountain Bridge after not having eaten for two days because I miscalculated my food supplies while hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail. The last thing I had was a can of smoked oysters. I didn’t like canned fish then and could still taste the briny stink of them when I called my father from a payphone and asked him to pick me up. In a park on the Hudson, we ate Italian heroes he’d brought along. It’s been a long time since I was scared of bridges but I’m not sure who I’d call now if I wound up starving and exhausted stranded on one. Maybe it was the reflections beneath them that frightened me in the first place? The trembling inversion of the world. I don’t hike much anymore. And the Tappan Zee is called the Cuomo Bridge now, for what it’s worth.

Hayama of Iyo, by Kawase Hasui, 1934

The sun sets on two men in the cockpit of a docked sailboat. An island in the distance rises like a camel’s hump out of a pink-gray sea. When I took the ferry from Spain to Morocco, I watched Muslim men pray five times facing Mecca, bowing, pressing their heads to the deck. I’m fascinated by this faith—by any faith—and the big black stone there, the black blood beneath it which makes the region so important to the world. The pirates in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. I want to pray to someone for something but don’t have the words, don’t know which way to face. A series of narrow boards connect the sailboat, and the men on it, to the obscured shore.

Jon Doughboy is a cosmetologist at the Wing Biddlebaum Salon in Winesburg, Ohio. Stop in for a grotesque manicure @doughboywrites

Tags Issue 2, Issue 2 Non-Fiction, jon doughboy, Responses to Bookmarked Tweets from Masterpieces of Japan

Issue 2 Issue 2 Poetry

FOR MY UNCLE

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By Berin Aptoula

Berin Aptoula is a writer, cartoonist, and devout practitioner of the word “Sehnsucht.” They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Adelphi University, where they also teach. Some of their other reveries appear in dreamscapes like Passengers Journal, Barzakh Magazine, Red Ogre Review, and elsewhere. If you’re ever looking for them, check your local discotheque for an androgyne grooving under the alias BALKAN VILLAIN.

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Issue 2 Issue 2 Poetry

CONFLICT RESOLUTION

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By Jordan Ranft

Jordan Ranft is a Best of the Net and Pushcart-nominated writer. His chapbook, Said The Worms (Wrong Publishing), was published in 2023. He has individual pieces published in Cleaver, Carve, Beaver, Eclectica, Bodega, and other outlets. He lives in Northern California where he works as a therapist.

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Issue 2 Issue 2 Poetry

BEST BUDS

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By Devin Sams

it’s really nice

to sit near death

and not have to

say anything

to each other.

we’ve got an

understanding

that sucks water

up the roots.

death doesn’t like

my cooking.

I don’t like

the way

death smells.

death laughs

when I say,

“my back hurts”

and

I laugh

when death says,

“whatever happened to Beethoven?”

but tonight

we sit at the table

like corners

of a smile.

a muffled television

crawls through

the air ducts.

death gets up

for a piss

and there’s no need

to ask

where it’s going.

Devin Sams is the author of Climb Out Your Window And Run With It/Songs For The Doorknobs Who Missed Their Turn from Gob Pile Press (2021).

Tags Best Buds, devin sams, Issue 2, Issue 2 Poetry