By Chris McCreary
Chris McCreary‘s latest book of poems, awry, was published in 2024 by White Stag. He lives in South Philadelphia and on IG at @chris___mccreary.
Categories
DELUGE
Author:
Categories
THE QUEST
By Jimmy Cajoleas
I needed to talk to the redhead at the bar. The signs were clear. She had a nose ring and a tattoo of California. A roach perched on a bottle stared directly at her. I dropped some change on the counter, and it was a nickel and two pennies. That equals seven, the number of completion. I shredded a napkin and it spelled out my name. You ignore the natural world at your peril.
I came to Dutch Bar every night at exactly the same time in hopes of getting served. Otherwise I didn’t have a chance. When I was twelve I was hexed by my neighbor after I squished his pet bullfrog who had wandered into the street. I was on my bike. It was an accident, but the frog didn’t care. He said “Ribbet!” three times and no one has noticed me since.
I tapped Greg the bartender on the shoulder.
“Sorry, didn’t see you there.”
I’d heard that signs might lead somewhere terrible but you should follow them anyway. But tonight didn’t feel right. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a successful conversation with anyone but my mother in nearly a month. Or maybe it was the mild and constant nausea I felt since my father disappeared.
At that moment the jukebox played the song “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors, a song of great spiritual power, so I decided to follow the signs.
I said hello to the redhead but of course she didn’t notice. Finally I tapped her on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “ are you talking to me?”
Her name was Jo Anna. She smoked Kools and offered me one, said she liked my hairdo.
“My mother curls my hair once a month.”
“You shouldn’t tell people things like that.” Jo Anna pulled out a picture of a smiling woman in a short yellow dress. “Have you seen this girl?”
“Are you a bounty hunter or something?”
“No. This is my sister Marilyn. She ran away two years ago and I’ve been searching for her ever since. Got a lead she was down this way. Think you could help me find her?”
That felt like a quest. Quests are how curses are broken. I was getting pretty desperate out here.
“Well? Can you help me?” Her eyes were soft brown, the color of a newborn deer.
“I think I know a place where we could look.”
Jo Anna called a cab and I took her to the Slops.
The Slops were an old neighborhood where millionaires lived in the forties. A development company bought the Slops a decade ago and gutted all the buildings and then went bankrupt. Cops didn’t come to the Slops, but broke and lonely people did. Late at night, the Slops were overflowing with them.
A woman in a leopard-print leotard set up a snare drum on a street corner. A man beside her played the saxophone. I hate the saxophone.
I tapped Byron Knight on the shoulder. Byron ran the cee-lo game. He was a popular guy, knew everybody in the Slops, even the ones with the knives and missing fingers.
“What are you doing down here?” He slapped me on the back because I’d saved his pet albino rat from a dog once.
“We’re looking for this girl. Her name’s Marilyn.”
I handed him the picture of Jo Anna’s sister.
“It’s a couple of years old,” Jo Anna said. “I doubt she’s changed much.”
He took the photo and studied it.
“I know her. That’s Lord Chaney’s girl. Works at the Double Time.”
Jo Anna hugged me. She said to take her to Lord Chaney right now.
I told her it wasn’t that simple.
Lord Chaney was a wrathful man. He owned a bar called the Double Time near the outskirts of the Slops. They said he could read crow bones and lit black candles at midnight. They said he had concubines. They said he had killed so many men their ghosts lined up outside his door, weeping and wailing and waiting on their turn to haunt him.
I was scared, but this was a quest. You have to be scared for a quest, otherwise it’s impossible to be brave.
The Double Time was the last bar in the farthest reaches of the Slops, where men with guns rode slow down neighborhood streets and everyone was afraid. It was housed in an old clothing shop from the thirties. Half the mannequins were still there, defaced and painted up. Some looked like clowns and some looked like little girls.
There was a pool table with a blood spot in the middle of it. One guy didn’t have any hands. He held the cue between two nubs. A girl with a scar on her lip winked at Jo Anna. She had a tattoo on her shoulder of a broken heart. The mannequins stood among the people like quiet angels.
“This place doesn’t feel right,” said Jo Anna.
“That’s because it isn’t.”
Jo Anna spotted her sister first. She had long pigtails down to her waist. Her arms were covered in illustrations, redbirds and stars and a dead tree with roots that spread down into her shirt. She had a hunting knife in her back pocket and was pregnant, a tray of beers balanced on the top of her belly.
“Marilyn?” said Jo Anna.
Her sister’s eyes squinted then got real big. She dropped her tray and drinks went everywhere and I tried to clean up the mess. The sisters embraced.
Marilyn bent down, her face crinkled up all angry and whispered at me, “Get her out of here!”
“We’re not leaving without you. We’re on a quest.”
“Meet me out back,” said Marilyn, and ran behind a curtain to the back of the bar.
I took Jo Anna by the arm. She was trembling.
“We got to save her.”
Jo Anna and I went outside and waited. I thought Marilyn wasn’t going to come. I thought she’d bring Lord Chaney and bad men with guns. I thought we’d get carved up and dragged a mile down the blacktop.
But when Marilyn came out the back of the Double Time, she came alone. Marilyn and Jo Anna hugged each other. They cried. There was good in the world and I was a part of it.
I grabbed Jo Anna by the hand.
“Let’s hustle.”
It was slow-going with Marilyn’s belly and all. I kept looking around for Lord Chaney. A crow flew right by my head, perhaps a sign. Everywhere was a dark alley for someone to jump out of. All the lonesome people with their blankets watched us from behind dark windows. But we got back among the people. I thought we’d be safe there. I listened to Jo Anna and Marilyn become sisters again. I bought us corn dogs from 7-11.
Then I felt a pair of eyes on me. My left elbow hurt.
Up walked a stray orange cat. I knew what that meant. The music quieted down and everyone perked their ears. A man stepped into the light. He had long curly hair down to his shoulders. He had an earring made out of a finger. It was Lord Chaney. He grinned, four teeth left in his mouth.
“Marilyn, honey? I think you better be coming back with me.”
“She ain’t yours,” I said.
“That a fact?” Lord Chaney said to her. “You ain’t happy with me, here in the Slops? Living like a queen?”
“Feel more like a slave,” said Marilyn.
Lord Chaney doubled over laughing. “Oh Lord, she feels like a slave. I could’ve made her my slave but I didn’t. Hell no. I made her my wife. And she can’t leave me. You hear that?” He grabbed Marilyn by a pigtail. “You can’t leave me.” He bit her on the ear.
“It’s true.” Marilyn pulled up her pants leg and showed us the tattoo. It was a fishhook with a circle around it and an Egyptian eye in the middle. Done with a knife. It meant she was his. Those were the rules.
“Plus you got our son in your belly there. You got a piece of me living inside you for always. Only thing that can set you free is death,” said Lord Chaney. “I know you’re brave, but you ain’t brave enough for that.”
I wasn’t afraid of dying, only worried about my mother and her fish back in our apartment. I felt my pocketknife. It was green. I won it by throwing rings around a bottle at the fair.
“Fuck it,” I said.
I jumped at Lord Chaney. But Lord Chaney had the Twitchy Eye, and he noticed everything. Also he was quick, and his knife was bigger. He stuck it right in my belly.
“Too slow,” said Lord Chaney, while I bled on his shoes. It was like we had signed a contract. Byron Knight and an old man were watching us. They were witnesses. Byron bowed his head. Lord Chaney walked away, jingling the change in his pocket. Jo Anna cried.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Am I going to die?”
“I didn’t mean for you to.”
“When I’m gone, take me home to my mother.”
The band struck up a song. An old woman prayed to Jesus. I thought of my mom making grilled tilapia and talking to my dad’s empty chair. People gathered around me, shaking tambourines, singing. Looking right at me. The curse was broken. I was so happy. The blood was all over the pavement. Jo Anna cried and her tears fell in my mouth.
It was all for me.
Jimmy Cajoleas is from Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.
Categories
WOO WOO
By Mike Nagel
My sister-in-law Molly grew up as a pastor’s daughter but at some point in her mid-thirties she became more of a witch. I thought that being a witch meant you invited the devil into your heart and learned how to cast fertility spells, but it turns out it mostly means you just get really into backyard gardening and start saying things like, “Happy winter solstice!” instead of “Merry Christmas!”
Early on, I let her do a few tarot readings on me, as practice. I’d never had a tarot reading done before, and I figured it was going to be complicated. So I was surprised when she just fanned the cards out like a magician and asked me to pick one.
“Whichever one feels like it wants to be picked,” she said.
Molly was still pretty new to all this witchy stuff back then — “woo woo shit,” she called it — and wasn’t always familiar with what some of the more obscure cards meant.
“Six of wands…” she’d say, tapping her upper lip. “Hmmmmmmm.”
“Sounds bad?” I’d say, trying to be helpful.
“It does sound kind of bad, doesn’t it?”
“Like maybe I should be extra careful or something?”
“You know what?” she’d say. “It wouldn’t hurt to proceed with caution.”
Around the time Molly became a witch, my friend Amy got really into something she called “Water Theory.” She’d watched a documentary about it on YouTube. “They put all these water molecules under a microscope,” she explained to me over lunch one day without me having asked any follow-up questions. “Then they said some very nice things to half the water molecules and some very mean things to the other half.”
I nodded and stirred my soup, which was a creamy tomato with a glop of sour cream slung into the middle.
“And the water molecules they were nice to, they turned into these crystal-looking structures that looked like I don’t know what. Cathedrals or something. And the water molecules they were mean to…they just turned into these cancer-looking blobs.”
“Yikes,” I said.
“And the human body is what? 90% water, right?” she said.
I blinked a few times.
“Right?!” she said.
More recently, my other sister-in-law, Marsha, became a devout believer in natural fabrics. She read an article about it online. It said that all our synthetic clothing is killing us. All those fake chemicals leeching into our skin. It’s causing all kinds of problems. Cancer. Heart disease. You name it. Now Marsha is on what basically amounts to a fashion diet. A wardrobe cleanse.
“I’m doing natural fabrics only,” she explained at a recent family get-together. “Wools. Linens. Silk if I want to get fancy. Hemp.”
“And that…does something?” I said.
She shrugged.
“Apparently.”
I like to think of myself as an open-minded person. Just not when it comes to things that will require me to change the way I live or shop or that otherwise strike me as being inconvenient. When it comes to those things, I can be pretty closed off, actually.
Which is why I was surprised to find myself spending a recent Sunday afternoon attending the type of group meditation session that involves yoga mats, essential oils, and a playlist featuring more than one contribution by Imogen Heap. I wondered if I was having some sort of crisis. It would make sense. For the past 18 months, my wife, J, and I had been living with my in-laws, helping out after her dad’s stroke. He was seventy-four years old and could no longer walk, talk, shower, or go to the bathroom without our help. After such a harsh reality check, it was only reasonable that I would go looking for consolation in other realms. If there was ever a time to be open to this woo woo shit, it was now.
“Sure,” I’d said when my sister-in-law Molly texted me the invitation. “Why not.”
Molly was running the session and was convinced that I, in particular, might get something out of it. I tend to trust her judgement about these sorts of things. In addition to dabbling with the occult, Molly also recently became a certified life coach. She took a class online.
“I want you to imagine a bright, beautiful star living between your eyes,” she instructed us as our guided meditation began, melting each word into the next like they were made of wax. “Now follow your bright, beautiful star…inward…into your inner space.”
There were six of us here today. Seven if you counted Molly. We were laying on yoga mats that had been arranged in a large rectangle in the middle of the room, on the second floor of an arts collective in Downtown Garland called Into the Well. The place had the worn-out wooden floors and large, dusty windows that I associate with old-timey New York factories. It looked like the kind of place where a couple hundred toddlers could have made an honest living a hundred years ago, hammering together lunch boxes and rubbing shoe polish onto their faces. It was me and six women, all of whom were wearing hot-colored yoga pants. I didn’t mind. I like being around women. I’ve been told I have a feminine energy myself.
“You remind me of my friend,” a woman had told me recently at a literary conference in Boise.
“Oh yeah?” I’d said. “What’s his name?”
“Her name is Sarah,” she’d said.
“I remind you of your friend Sarah?” I’d said.
She nodded.
“Same energy.”
I wasn’t offended to hear that I have the same energy as a woman named Sarah. It was better than the other energies I’ve been accused of having throughout my life. Nervous energy. Anxious energy. Weird energy.
“What’s with all the weird energy, Mister,” J had said a few days earlier. This after I’d just been sitting there on the couch, minding my own business, reading a Jonathan Franzen novel, the one where everybody is having a hard time.
“Don’t act like you know about energy,” I’d snapped. “You don’t know anything about energy. And you don’t know anything about me!”
She was right, of course. I was in a bad mood. I can’t remember why. Later, I apologized and asked how she could tell I was feeling off. “Are you kidding?” she said. “When you’re in a bad mood, I can feel it across the room. The whole house changes.”
So, I don’t know. Maybe there’s something to this energy stuff after all. Laying there on my yoga mat in the loft, I let Molly take me on a guided tour of all the energies hidden within my body, starting from the bottom and working our way up.
“I want you to notice the energy in your toes,” Molly droned in that same voice poets use at open mic nights, where every sentence curls up at the end like a water ski. “And now in your ankles… And now in your calves…”
She must have read an anatomy textbook or something because her instructions started getting pretty specific.
“And now in the medial meniscus of your right knee… And now in the articular cartilage of your left hip…”
I didn’t know what these parts of me were, what they did, or what they looked like, but I started to imagine myself as one of those skeletons that doctors always have hanging in their offices in movies and TV shows. Just a collection of parts and pieces. Proximal filanges. Mandibular notches. It was relaxing to see myself that way — as a hanging doctor’s office skeleton — and pretty soon, I started drifting off to sleep.
“And now the transverse cervical nerves in your neck… And now the sphenoid bone in your skull… And now your skull…”
I figured Molly would stop when she got to the tops of our heads, but then she kept going, out of our bodies and off into outer space.
“And now up past the clouds… And now up past the moon…”
One reason I think Molly makes a good witch — and now a good life coach — is that she has a great voice for this type of thing. It’s soothing and firm at the same time, like a waitress at a fancy restaurant telling you your credit card has been declined. She could tell me anything and I’d go along with it, if only because it sounds so pleasant coming from her.
“Your anal chakras are completely out of whack,” she could say, and I’d say, “You’re making a lot of sense to me right now.” She could read me the Ikea instruction booklet for a bedside table, and I would have an out of body experience.
Some people are just made for this type of thing, I think. You spend five seconds with them, and you can tell they have access to other realms. I’m thinking of this guy I saw the other day who was sitting in the middle of my favorite coffee shop, 1418 Coffee in Downtown Plano, eyes closed, transcendentally meditating. He was wearing the type of free-flowing outfit that cult members put on before walking into a live volcano. His necklace looked like it was made of billiard balls and horse tails. I was so distracted by his level of concentration that I couldn’t get anything done. I just stared at him for an hour. Then I got up and went home. Later, I described him to J as an asshole.
“So this asshole is sitting there meditating in the middle of the coffee shop,” I said, as if he’d been sipping a chai tea latte naked. “Full lotus pose. Eyes closed and everything.”
“What a showoff,” J said.
“Exactly,” I said. “Thank you. He was showing off. Shoving his mindfulness in all of our faces.”
“What was he trying to prove anyway?”
“Just what an asshole he is, I guess,” I said. “And boy did he succeed.”
One of the many things I love about J is that I can always count on her to back me up when it comes to thinking people are assholes. Especially people who believe in things. A few years ago, on a train to Downtown Dallas, J got in a fight with a woman wearing a t-shirt that said, “ASK ME ABOUT WATER BAPTISM.” The fight started innocently enough — just a friendly conversation between strangers, really — but ended with the woman informing J that she was going to hell and J yelling, “Great! I’ll save you a seat, bitch!”
I don’t know why we’re not more open to these spiritual sorts of things. I don’t know why we resist them so strongly. Wouldn’t it be nicer to see the world the way Molly does? As a series of energy fields we can hop between like lily pads? Wouldn’t it be more pleasant to see people the way Amy does? As human-sized water bottles just waiting to be transformed into Disney-style cathedrals by a kind word or gesture? Wouldn’t it be more comfortable to dress like Marsha? In natural fabrics that are not only breathable and self-cleaning but may prevent cancer?
Realists, J and I call ourselves. But what’s so great about reality, anyway? What’s so appealing about it? In reality, people have strokes and never bounce back from them. In reality, people die for no reason and nothing interesting happens next. In reality, we’re all nothing but doctor’s office skeletons, just hanging there in the corner, hoping someone will come along and give us a poke every now and then.
It’s enough to keep you up at night, if you think about it too much. Which is maybe why, laying there on my yoga mat up there in the artists’ loft, I never did fully drift off to sleep. I just laid there, hovering somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, right there on the edge of reality, as Molly led us out past the moon, and then out past the planets, and then out among the stars where she made a U-turn somewhere out there in the cosmic black and led us all slowly and gently back into our bodies — and then even more slowly and more gently back into the room — where she dusted us off, spun us around a few times, and kissed us all on the cheeks before sending us, blinking and stumbling, back into the real world.
Mike Nagel is the author of Duplex and Culdesac, both from Autofocus Books. Find selected nonsense at www.beefham.com.
Categories
SILVER HANDS
By Guy Cramer
Guy Cramer is a medical worker and writer from the Ark-La-Tex region. He has been published in a number of online journals, including Vestal Review, JAKE, Citywide Lunch, and elsewhere. He is on IG: @guy.cramer
Categories
OLD FRIENDS
By Craig Rodgers
The postcard comes first. Basic cardstock, a tourist find. Photo of a beach somewhere. Old, coverall swimsuits decades out of fashion. A single boat sails in the distance.
Bertrum holds it up. He holds it out. Maybe the image will bring a memory but it does not. He turns the card over. Writing. A neat, precise hand.
Hi Bert. It’s been too long.
– Perry
He turns it back again. The swimmers scattered there. Girls in their wraps. Some vague familiarity, like a still from a movie. The fog memory of a dream.
He lays the card down on the counter. He thinks back, back. Reaching. Perry. Perry?
***
It’s an outdoor place. Tables strewn in the road. Wait staff prowl among, pouring drinks, bringing sides. A hundred kinds of salad.
His drink comes, her drink comes. A local beer for him, a milky booze for her. They each take sips and nod. Small talk now, the bullshit of friends. More sipping, more talking. Then.
“Something weird came. Can I show you?”
“I love weird.”
He lays the card between them on the table. She puts out a hand and nudges. The beach girls tolerate. Then she turns it over and reads. She looks up.
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay what’s weird?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do YOU mean?”
“Perry. Who is Perry?”
She snorts and sits back.
“What? Perry. From school.”
“What school?”
“High school. All school. Perry.”
“Jen, I don’t remember any Perry. I mean. Ever.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Bert, come on. Perry.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well clearly he remembers you.”
She taps the card with a finger.
“You really don’t remember?”
He shakes his head no. She slides the card away.
***
He looks it up everywhere. Social media. High school pages. There’s no Perry. The reunion, those attending. Invites. Nothing. He pours himself a drink. He goes to the local paper. Searching, scrolling. There is no Perry. He pours himself a drink. He searches births, he searches deaths. There is no Perry. He pours himself a drink.
***
The committee meets each Wednesday in the weeks leading up. Planning and the like. Catering, decorations. What kind of banner will go where. They’re renting a ferry out on the lake. One of those big numbers. The whole class will fit. Room for more still.
Bertrum sits in the back. Just like the old days. Spacing out, nodding when he must. Their talk circles and some accord is reached and people begin standing and he stands too. He shakes hands, he smiles. Small talk. We’re all well. Then the crowd filters out, then only stragglers remain.
The committee chair is there at the table. She flips through pages in a phone. Leslie something. Bertrum steps near.
“Oh. Oh hello.”
Her face is blank and then a glow. Filled again with spirit. She puts out a hand and he shakes it and she pats his. Then.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I have a question about the reunion.”
“That’s fine.”
“It’s an odd one.”
“Okay.”
“Was there someone named Perry who got invited?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Anyone. Anyone named Perry.”
She touches the papers in front of her but her eyes never leave Bertrum.
“Hey. Don’t you worry. Of course Perry will be there.”
***
The lot is vast and full. Stars shine above like a mirror shattered in the black. Bertrum sits parked and watching. The boat tied bobbing to the pier. Faces come and go. He tugs at a flask and still watches.
The passenger door pops open. A bell is pinging. She slides in beside.
“Is there more of that?”
“Whole bottle behind the seat.”
She laughs in great whooping sounds. He reaches back, he hands the bottle over. She unscrews the top and sniffs and wrinkles her nose. She gives him a look and she takes a drink. Cheap but smooth. She takes another.
“You gonna go in?”
“It feels like another life.”
“Yeah,” she says. “It is.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you going in?”
“Bert. I’m here now. What choice do I have?”
***
The line trails. Down the ramp and around. How could there ever have been so many. They make their slow way up.
Music thumps ahead. A song familiar. Something old now, something from all the way back. People chat in line. This way, that way. The vaguest familiarities from another life. Inching on. Up. The song ends, another starts. Louder now. A memory of a song. He turns in place. The noise everywhere. The line moves on. Nearing. Another song now. He knows this one too but it’s wrong somehow. Off key maybe. Jarring. Louder still. The line moves. The door is close. A foyer, tables. The ballroom beyond. The line moves.
“Hi.”
He says hi too. She asks for his name and he says Bertrum and she scans a table of names. She looks up again as if he might be mistaken.
“Bert.”
She nods and looks again. She looks for so long. He puts a hand down and he says okay but still she looks. He says it’s okay but she goes on looking.
***
At the edge of the pier the land drops. Stairs lead down carved into the cliff. He swings the bottle as he walks. One hand pressed against wet rock. Ground now. Each step sinks into soft beach sand. He walks along and he stops to push off shoes one and then the other and he moves on. Soon he finds himself sitting. Drinking pulls from the bottle. The water right there. Shore’s gentle lapping. The ferry’s lights trail off as the long distance swallows the boat away. He goes on drinking. Toes squeeze the wet sand. Hot night air runs along skin. He drinks again. Somewhere laughter comes. Gentle tittering. He turns and watches. Friends in the sand down the way. Just in the reach of lake’s wash. They play. A few and a few more. Pushing, running around. The sound of their laughter carries. Bertrum watches. He admires. He takes a drink and remembers. What it was like. He smiles and they play in the sand, their swimsuits of a sort decades out of fashion.
Craig Rodgers is the author of several books, dozens of stories, countless notes, and one convoluted plan to fake his own death.
Categories
CHICAGO IN WINTER
By Mitchell Galloway
Mitchell Galloway lives in Gainesville, Florida. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Forever Magazine, The Panacea Review, R&R (Relegation Books), and Subtropics. He can be found on Instagram @mitchellgalloways and on X @mitchgalloways.
Categories
BIG DEAL
By Claire Hopple
Brandy is a fine girl. She does not, however, make a good wife.
And then she dies. She suffers. She doesn’t go quickly. It cannot be helped.
She’d been married to a drug lord for a number of years, which everybody made a big deal out of. But it was same-as-usual for Brandy.
She divorced him until he agreed to host a pool party, remarried him at the pool party, and then divorced him again that afternoon when he acted like a hotshot with a pool noodle.
There were times when they only lived on the moonlight and their mutual determination to build the perfect sandwich. They were responsible for the highly regarded sandwich determination quotient, or SDQ.
The drug lord––we’ll call him Rob now––hosted a metal plate in his head. Some claimed he was torpedoed. Others insisted it was due to a hunting accident. And then there were a select handful who stated he had the plate for no reason other than he wanted one. Regardless, Brandy was once entranced by it. This was back when they were inventing aliases for themselves in the wilderness. And it was truly all it was cracked up to be. Until it wasn’t.
Rob started saying things Brandy thought he really meant, being fully honest with her, and it seemed uncalled for, unsavory even. She set his glockenspiel on fire in response. It had the desired dramatic effect.
Oh. Now everyone is staring at him. The town is holding an assembly. There’s a projector and everything, just like grade school.
Rob wedges into the crowd until it froths up, spilling over into an outcry. Then he distances himself, holds a rolled-up flyer to his ear to check whether he can hear the ocean. Echoes of the pool noodle return, so he stops.
Crying doesn’t matter at an assembly. Who’s he kidding? He’s pure embarrassment smashed into the earth by gravity.
Rob scans the room to decipher which one of these citizens he’s so cleverly avoided up until this moment deserves to be bribed. Perhaps any citizen will do.
There’s a college kid draping himself over a chair just to get noticed. Rob approaches, but the kid speaks first.
“What brings you here?”
“Business transactions,” Rob says.
“I will tell you everything I told––” the kid starts.
“Nah. Whatever you’re about to say isn’t what I’m after. I’m trying to find myself,” Rob says.
“That’s nice.”
“I mean I made a voodoo doll of myself. And I lost it. Now I’m trying to find it.”
Rob had already faked his own death before. If the worst happens he’s already warmed up.
“Why, uh, why…I’ll keep my eye out for it, chief,” the kid says, saluting him.
He tries his luck with the snack vendor. But they fall into an argument surrounding mathematics. Rob doesn’t believe her when she says she can do her times tables. Rob briefly considers assigning her a times test so he can observe her claims. She falls asleep at the snack table while he’s deciding. What can he do but dwell on all her unguessable thoughts. This is what happens when you talk to people at regular intervals, expelling the determination typically reserved for sandwiches.
He leans over and whispers to the sleeping vendor, “Brandy always listened to me.”
He washes his hands of the search. Someone will find the doll version of him under a rose bush, and she’ll have the privilege of deciding which version is the dummy.
There’s nothing wrong with vanishing from society, even if it doesn’t amount to much. Which is exactly what Rob does, never to be seen again and feeling the same way he always had, now and forever. At least his metal plate is there for him. The metal plate has been there all along.
Claire Hopple is the author of six books. Her stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Forever Mag, Wigleaf, Cleveland Review of Books, and others. More at clairehopple.com.
by Alan ten-Hoeve with illustrations from Adam Soldofsky
Torrington | Ledge Dr (Lakeridge Maintenance) | Boss states he terminated an employee, employee was refusing to leave, but did eventually leave | 3:57PM – 9/11/2025
Watertown | 380 block of Plungis Rd | EnCon dispatched for a bear that took a goat | 8:19PM – 6/7/2025
Woodbury | Route 6 just north of Big Daddy’s | Report of an injured goat under or near a guardrail | 6:07PM – 6/15/2025
Torrington | 70 block of Wolcott Ave | Caller reports a bear broke into the chicken coop and is currently laying down and devouring a chicken | 4:30PM – 9/6/2025
Torrington | THE GOOD OLD SOUTH END CUMBY’S YEEAAAHHH BUDDY!!! | Report of a male lying down, possibly intoxicated | 5:58PM – 9/5/2025
•
Torrington | Concord Rd | Report of two sisters verbally arguing | 11:54AM – 9/2/2025
•
Torrington | 29 Main St (Crossroads) | Caller reports a tent setup on the sidewalk, states the people manning the tent are not letting people use the sidewalk and are also mocking people as they walk by | 1:08PM – 6/15/2025
Alan ten-Hoeve is the managing editor of Farewell Transmission and the author of Notes From A Wood-Paneled Basement. He lives in Connecticut.
Adam Soldofsky is the author of the poetry collection Memory Foam, recipient of an American Book Award and Telepaphone, a novella. His latest collection, Three Short Novellas, is available here.
Categories
Magic 8snail
by Conor Demmett
Conor Demmett is a writer/filmmaker/educator from Long Island, NY.
Categories
Anton Newcombe
Retsoor asks: can people change?
Anton Newcombe: A person can change, however, it can be difficult for a person to change people.
RS: Is the belief in God a choice?
AN: Who am I to ponder the mind of god?
RS: Is everything singular or plural?
AN: It can be either, but it’s definitely singular.
RS: What percentage of the world is evil?
AN: 33.356397%
RS: Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
AN: To pee.
RS: What % of your personality can you choose?
AN: The answer is maths.
RS: How has mental health affected your creative life?
AN: Half crazy in a totally insane world is stronger than a pint of Guinness.
RS: Which parent do you sound like when you’re angry?
AN: My parents are both dead, so neither, but if I had to guess, I would say it’s my mother.
RS: What % of your unhappiness do you have control over?
AN: Who attempts to reduce emotions to mathematical equations? Oh, evidently you do.
RS: What % of utility have we lost or gained from the internet?
AN: I think if monopoly taught us anything, it’s that deregulation of public utilities is a huge mistake.
RS: Do you do what you do so you don’t get sad or because you are?
AN: I do what I do and I do it well, I do it for you sugar baby honey can’t you tell.
RS: Does answering questions in a public forum worry you or inspire you?
AN: I find it helpful to imagine that everyone is naked, for instance, you right now sitting there naked, reading this… it’s like magic, and instantly I am in your mind, as you imagine yourself naked…
RS: Which list is longer: a list of everything that is wrong, or a list of everything that isn’t?
AN: Lists are stupid, I prefer to leave post it notes everywhere, i tilt to the aggressive end of the passive aggressive spectrum.
RS: Would you choose to live again, without knowing you were given a choice, if you had the choice?
AN: I focus on the carnate as in incarnate, from the latin carne or in flesh, the now, be here now. Why waste energy on answering hypothetical questions only to forget them.
RS: Bonus question: Drugs?
AN: Yes.
RS: Bonus Jeopardy: one small regret I have is: (no big regrets allowed, please).
AN: Not kissing you enough.
My memories of meeting Anton are a handful of scenes from my very first tour out west, probably in my late teens or early twenties, when The Brian Jonestown Massacre played with Mercury Rev at San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill, circa 199—? In a pattern I’ve recognized since, he was preceded by emissaries, most memorably Jeffrey Davies in a house frock, beehive hairdo, and ascetically long finger nails, with which he played guitar as deftly as he picked through a constellation of tiny, multicolored balloons to make sure I got “the second fattest one.” It was my first encounter with the “dark side of the 60s” and the underbelly of Summer of Love idealism that the band cultivated and it changed my idea of what our generation could do with the failed art form we’d inherited from our parents. I credit them with starting the initially ironic trend of poaching motifs from our Boomer forebears, before it became a requirement when bands like the Strokes, the White Stripes and Interpol took it to its commercial extremes. All of which set the stage for the layered irony of online discourse and memes, a.k.a. our species’ gradual transition to communicating with already existing bits of culture.
Our friendship gathered anecdotes without any real effort, we rarely met under “normal” circumstances. I manned the floppy camera hat Ondi Timoner used to capture the more salacious moments of DIG!, for example, a documentary widely cited as the “Disney version” of the band’s story, on a week long Japanese tour during which the filmmaker crashed on our hotel room floor. We played an historically-flooded-out Truck Festival in England with Garth & Maude Hudson that included Oxford music luminaries like Mark Gardener and Andy Bell—both of whom Anton sat onstage in enormous stuffed arm chairs from the lobby so they could watch his set. He routinely cooked me dinner during a particularly impoverished NYC period, gifting me vinyl to sell on eBay for groceries, and on and on. Generation X enjoyed the last moments of rock & roll being a career option for working and middle class musicians, before Napster rendered it a plaything of the privileged class, and Anton and I continue to look out for one another as the internet kicks the roll of “artist” around at the mercy of commerce. Thank God for the Brian Jonestown Massacre, thank God for mental illness, thank God that “danger” still has a representative in an art form originally designed to include it and us. – Retsoor
