Farewell TransmissionBy Red Danielson
Red Danielson is a self-taught painter and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Haiku Journal, The First Person, Haiku Presence, The Great River Review, Little Village Magazine, and River Styx, among others.
He has worked as a concrete mason, a framer, a heavy equipment operator, an arborist, and a grave digger. He lives in the English River Valley of Iowa.
By Dan Duffy
Painting houses in the Delta, the fumes like pale cancer. Whiskey sick in the morning yard, I slung a can of mint against the failing Deering clapboard. The slim bastard Rick wouldn’t shut up about Drew Brees. Mike found me and gave me a cigarette. Told me it happens. He liked me because I’d read a little Bukowski after Ole Miss and wasn’t racist.
“Take two weeks,” he laughed. He had the face of a good father. “No one’ll die if you ain’t a painter.”
I packed, and my dog Harry got in shotgun. We took my eight year old Impala down 61 to 49—Shaw to Indianola, Inverness to Belzoni, Yazoo City to Jackson—Gram Parsons and Emmylou—the King at Stax and Camel Blues—little rivers, creeks, flashing black and gold through the hardwoods on the edges of the cleared corn, the cotton, the soy. The casinos rose out of the sand at the end of everything, past where the world turns to pine.
My parents’ place backs up to the bayou in Ladnier, Mississippi. They built it back up on stilts after Katrina. I helped a little. They always welcome me back like some tarnished angel when things go south, and I head, likewise, to kneel at their brightened door. I drank beers on the back deck, watched the sky go dark over Pascagoula Bay, slept till noon, ate their food and waited for God to tell me whether or not to go back to work in Bolivar County in the fall.
One night my little brother Peter got sick after he got home from Ochsner. He was wretching in the bathroom. It sounded like a soul departure. Mom covered her eyes and tapped her foot by the door. Mamaw leaned against the crown molding. She was wearing a shirt with a painting of the pileated woodpecker on it. It said “Lord of the Forest.” Mom looked like a younger, darker headed Mamaw.
“Lord he’s sick” Mom said.
“Well, Joe,” Mamaw smiled, “I reckon it’s back to New Orleans we go.”
Peter drug his feet to his room and refused to get out of bed. He had the comforter pulled up over his bottom lip, his little blonde head sticking out like a thumb. My big brother and I stood on either side of him like disciples of Christ. We held his little damp hands and coaxed him out of bed.
“We love you Peter,” we said.
We walked him down the wraparound stairs to the van. We watched them fade into the dark of Graveline. We stood in a short silence until my big brother, Saul Diamond, asked if I wanted to get drunk.
We found a sixer of Dad’s good Kolsch. Saul’s buddy Johnny Miller called and asked us to come and pick him up. We drove north through Ladnier. We crossed Highway 90 to get to Johnny’s mom’s trailer up on Martin Bluff. It was dark in the trailer save for amber streetlight through the kitchenette window. My brother asked if I wanted to trip. I said sure. Johnny nodded. He was wearing a lotus flower shirt and fishing shorts. He disappeared and reemerged from the black hall. We each gave him five bucks. Saul put a little clear capsule in my palm. I held it up close. It was filled with tiny blister pellets. I washed it down with the Kolsch.
Our faces and hands were bathed in the calming sea green ceiling lights of my Impala. Johnny spoke of small town conspiracy: a drug detective beating a woman friend of his senseless, the mayor’s penchant for younger men, the plague of harms the Baptist Church had visited upon him and his friends as kids. We stopped under the royal blue canopy protecting the pumps of Keith’s Superstore. We got a case of Miller.
The Corn Moon rose over U.S. 90. Euphoria mainlined my face. I drove us back under the oaks at the mouth of the Singing River. Johnny turned the radio way up. Saul lit a joint he’d finished rolling. We were back south of town. The gravelled railroad out our window flashed grey, black through pines, skinny oaks, the occasional magnolia. Limbs interlaced like cloaked fingers over the blacktop. We banged over the tracks and passed the field of scrub bush and sand live oak the railroad company had bought and fenced in where the old creosote plant used to be. Dad told us the railroad company bought it back to cover their asses. Said the ground was rotten from the plant. Said it would be a long time before it ever came back. Said the company bought it from the Boatman for a million dollars. All the beat up old boats were gone from the field. The grass was growing long. The Stones sang Sway. My mind melted in the moonlight.
Back at the house, coming up the stairs, Saul stopped me and told me whatever I do, don’t offer Johnny any beer. He didn’t drink. He said he used to drink a case of Pabst a day. We sat on the fiberboard deck under the porch light. Johnny drank Cokes while me and my brother drank cheap gold tequila and Millers. Johnny spoke of the moon: how it symbolized death and birth in the same face. A friend of theirs named Jeff Avery showed up. Jeff was half Japanese: an American artist from Biloxi. He’d just returned from Los Angeles after winning an art contest to live in the compound of a famous Korean American muralist. He spoke of the game show environment and the spiritual experience of it all. He said the great artist had shown him special attention. Jeff brought a bag of drop biscuits from his job at the Green House with him. We ate them like cowboys on hardtack in a circle under the porch light. I looked up. The live oak limbs, digitized into millions of violet and lime traced particles, wavered at their edges.
I stumbled in the house keeping a hand on the railing. I looked in the bathroom and got lost in the mirror. I went to the bedroom and clicked back and forth between pictures of me on Facebook. I laughed a bright, mature laugh. The whole big picture show made sense. I could see South Carolina from where I sat. I could see my mother. I could see my father. I could see the masks I’d painted hanging from hooks on the wall of my father’s office. One was a dark, youthful clown. One, a stalwart normie. I wallowed in the universe rushing out to deep space from my fingertips. Infinity!
I sat in this inner light in the darkness on the back deck overlooking Bayou Pierre. The lights from the shipyard a white array in the black water on the horizon. I could feel the barrier islands like nodes of the earth’s nervous system out there in the dark. Harry curled at my foot.
The first light spread pink over the popcorn trees on the little peninsula below on the other side of the bayou. The first mullet launched headlong and hung angled in the air like a long jumping skier.
The gnats swarmed in balls in the sky over the yard. A pogie popped. Then ten thousand pogies popped. The shrimp kicked up in storms. Mud minnows ran in streams along the edges. The trout began to feed on the pogies. Two night herons emerged from the popcorn trees and began to strike the water with their daggermouths. The pink light covered everything. The water turned blood red brown. The water boiled to life. A mosquito hovered between my face and the lemon trees in cedar planters. Its clear wings laced oilsheen blue.
Harry was a brown and tan lab mutt I’d rescued from a friend’s garage. He stood between my knees with his chest bowed out. He stared up at me, still as a monk. He had one lavender eye and one black eye. There were flecks of gold in his irises. The light cleared the shadows from our faces. His coat bright, his old man whiskers. His eyes went all the way back to heaven. I swam through them and found he knew my name, my history.
I wrote poems and read a little of Saul’s Brecht. The one book I could find. I laughed a short, unbelieving laugh. A beer held loose in my hand at my side. I squinted across the water to the green islands ambered in the dawnlight. I lost count on the beers. I took my beer into the bedroom and lay down. I heard Dad’s footsteps in the hall.
I woke after sunset, well rested, without a hangover. I showered and put on a clean shirt. I listened to my parents and Peter quietly eat dinner. I sat and thought about things. I felt warm, complete. I noticed I never wanted to smoke again. Everything still made sense.
I thought of Serenity. Two years older than me from Biloxi. A volleyball prodigy from high school. I saw my sins against her as a perfect list. I messaged her on Facebook telling her what a coward I’d always been. It was like the message was writing itself. She messaged back and asked what I was doing. I told her I was sitting on my bed at home. She asked if I’d moved back home. I told her no, I was just back for the end of the summer, but I was thinking about it. She told me to meet her in Biloxi.
I drifted under the gold and red lights of the casinos, past the ragged men and their carts, the businessmen and their women. I pulled into the parking lot of Big Play. The blacktop was new. A go cart track wrapped up in the air around a fake red barn and aluminum water tower. The doorman, somewhere north of six four, curly headed, in a black polo, with the acned face of a pilgrim, checked my age and put a black light smiley on my hand. I walked in under the black and neon lights. A rainbow of stuffed bears and cartoon snakes hung from nets on the walls.
She was standing in front of the gameroom bar in a black dress. The green and blue neon flashed from the games. Electronic dings, whirls, beeps sounded on loops. Skynyrd played over the PA. She looked through me. She sipped her drink from the straw. Her freckled arms were covered in color tattoos: a sea snake choking a broken sailship, an orange octopus, a topless mermaid in repose, dogwood blossoms for some long dead East Texas uncle, I remembered. Her pin straight hair was dyed black down her shoulders.
Her hand was warm. She pulled me in, putting her forehead to mine. She kissed me. It was like being born. She gripped my face and smiled. Her copper eyes, her vodka, licorice breath. She took my chin in her hand and shook my head. She studied my eyes. She sucked her teeth. She kissed me hard before leading me by the hand to the bar.
She leaned over the bar and pulled me up against her from behind. She turned her head and pulled my face into hers, scraping her nails across my scalp. She turned and looked down the bar.
“Jerry!” she hollered.
A pole thin man in a black Saints tee looked up from shooting Coke into a cup. He served it and wandered our way with a whimpering, jaundiced smile. Serenity ordered two RBVs and two Jägerbombs. She pushed back deeper into me. She turned and put the little dentist’s cup of Jäger to my lips. I shot it and felt good. The room pulsed.
We took her key-scratched Mazda down 90 with our arms out the windows. I lit a Camel and she stole it. Levon plumbed Old Dixie from the plastic radio. A grey wave of lust rose up from my testicles and met the love sweeping through my blood. I remembered the beach as a kid. I watched her face wash in and out of the streetlights. The first lines had begun to form around her eyes. Faint auburn freckles in the creases of her nose and on her high cheeks. She looked listless at me. She drew her shades down. She put Mazzy Star on with her phone with one hand and smoked out the window with the other—driving with her pale, slim knees under the simple line of her black dress riding high on her thighs.
We parked and made out in front of a restaurant called the Reef. Four stories tall, leatherbacks, pompano, dolphin, a blacktip in pursuit of a massive strawberry grouper, were captured midswim around kelp and coral on a giant mural on its northern wall. The wind blew through my shirt and kicked up her dress on the walk through the parking lot. She pulled my arm around her shoulder. Past the parking lot was the beach. Past the beach, the dark waves of the Sound married a gunmetal sky.
We took the outside stairs. We looked through big windows into a dining hall flooded with light and wood-covered with retirees, young military, running children. The stairs led to a roof top Tiki bar. The wind buffeted us on and off. We took our liquor out to the rail overlooking the water. Thunderstorms popped silent in the distance.
“You never apologized,” she said. “When you messaged me, you said you were goin to apologize.”
I rattled the ice in my cup before I looked at her. I remembered us being the last ones up in P.C.B. senior year. I could see flashes of her topless on the rough boards. My hands pushing everywhere for what I figured was love. I’d tried for years and won. The slurred voice as she dressed and faded back into the beach house. I was too hungover to appreciate Petty on the beach the next night. A thousand miles back from the stage. Dully smoking a cigarette, I batted away her hand when she tried to touch me, ignored her the rest of the weekend. I left her and called only when drunk, horny. Ready to turn it back on in North Mississippi at college when she reappeared. In the postglow of the trip the deck haunted me as evil. Sitting in front of me, up in the night air, her presence confirmed the bedroom intuition. I saw she was beautiful. I saw the tattoos and the GED as the rationale for my own fear which had left me so far in life with my own kind of loneliness. I could see the gentle creases around her eyes. There was a warmness, a wholeness, to her eminence. She seemed noble, full in her dress.
“Hey look, I appreciate you writing me back. This’ll probably sound crazy, but I just see how awful I’ve been to you over the years, and, I can’t explain it, but I knew I had to write you and let you know. I couldn’t see it before but I can see it now. I’ve been a bastard to you. I’ve used you for sex. I’ve treated you like shit. The night in Panama City. The day after I didn’t talk to you. I am so sorry. All these years I’ve used you and treated you like shit. And sitting here in front of you I think I love you. I know this is crazy but I’ve never felt so clear.”
Her face was relaxed as she took me in.
“Wow,” she laughed, looked Gulfward. “I never thought I’d hear you say those words. Was not on my fuckin bingo card tonight I can tell you that much.”
She shook her head, took a long draw off her straw.
“You were a fuckin asshole. You did break my fuckin heart. You know, after my car wreck, after I flipped the Tundra, you tried to fuck me the very next day? Like called and called man. You called and wouldn’t stop calling that next night. Next time I saw you in Oxford it was like nothing ever happened.” She finished her drink.
“But you know, babe, I knew exactly what the fuck I was doin. I’ve been fucked up since I was a kid. I do fucked up shit with men. I am about ass backwards to hell with this oil man right now. He hits me and tells me I’m ugly when he spends too much money. That’s violence, Joe. That’s evil. You never made it big. You were always chicken shit. And a liar.”
“You’re right,” I said.
The beach disappeared west towards New Orleans. It began to sprinkle. We went under the roof and lights. They played Boat Drinks. A pod of blonde K.D.’s down from Oxford pooled their money to buy a round for the bar. They danced with their hands over their heads. They shouted with their faces. They all wore green.
I was drunk when she noticed the retired man from Thibodaux at the end of the bar. He’d entered the place, loud and full of the insane joie de vivre we’d all come to expect from the Cajuns. He wore his hair in a salt and pepper buzz which sparkled like formica under the bar lights. He was barefoot in a barely buttoned white linen shirt and short shorts. His laugh was that of a snake charmer, a rogue shrimper, when he reared his head back. His voice full of crawling stars. Mary hung gold at the center of his chest. He slapped on the bar and poured more red from his charger. Serenity gripped my thigh, turned away from him, kissed me.
“I’m gonna get that guy to buy our drinks,” she said.
I had $17.48 left in my Cadence account and twenty dollars in my pocket. I feared the worst. She kissed me, brushed her hair behind her ear and took her drink. She shook his hand, laughed. He grinned. She pointed at me. He gathered his bottles.
“Terry,” he said midlaugh. I noticed a molar missing. He did not offer a handshake. He didn’t sit down. He hopped from one barefoot to the other. He swished his wine around in his glass.
“I retired three months ago,” he said. “Moved over here from New Orleans. From Tibbadoe. 28 years in the construction business, 25 years of marriage. She ended up bein a lesbian if you can fuckin beleeve it,” he laughed.
“I said, ‘baby, you go head.’ See,” he put his finger in my chest, “I had a spiritual experience. It brought it’all to light. I started takin mushrooms after my retie’ahment—right before actually—an’ awl of this felt right to me. Dinn’t even necessarily feel like news. I knew before I knew if you noe-what-I-mean?”
I nodded and sipped my beer and lit a cigarette. Serenity was leaned back on the bar with her legs uncrossed.
“So I said, ‘you take it, baby. You take the house, the keys, the cars, the kids,’” his face a sharp, bright, silver and dark tan dance.
“I said, ‘I’m gonna take some of this fuckin money I been makin the past thirty fuckin years, and I’m gonna go be happy.’ So-awn the way back from Mo-beel to look at houses, I stopped at this ver-ee fuckin restaurant right here, and come up here to this fuckin bar, and had me some fuckin bang bang shrimp, and one of the best fuckin nights of my life.”
He swung an arm around the bar. “These people here? These are good fuckin people, true people.” He drained his red.
“Come back down here the next day, bought the con-doe. Come here every fuckin day.. I live the good life.”
I nodded. “Welcome,” I said.
He kept having us drink his wine. When I came back from the bathroom, Serenity smiled big, rubbed her nose against mine and tapped it with her finger. She told me he’d invited us back to his place. She grabbed me in her hand. She bit my ear.
“It’ll be fun baby,” she said. “Please.”
A beggar, I smiled.
We followed him, this insane, rhapsodic shrew. The three of us in a line across the beach to the condo tower. He took us to the penthouse. He kept the lights off. It was clean, quiet, white. I ran my hand across the quartz countertop. He put on Buffet, Living and Dying in ¾ Time and started chopping the trinity. He grabbed her by the hand, spun her around. They laughed like they were free. I took my wine out to the little deck and watched the waves fade.
There was a darkness to those mornings. Biloxi settled over our brains like an ash. In black satin sheets, I came to, spooned to the point of sticking, some giant brown dog roaming the foot of the bed, slobbered. I was surprised she snored. It smelled faintly of iron. I pulled on my jeans, my shirt, my boots. The dog barked. She rolled over, opened her eyes, listless. Strings of her black hair stuck to her forehead. A vodka pallor about her eyes.
I squinted in the sun stepping out of the house at the end of the cul de sac. A man in blue coveralls trimmed the hedges with a chainsaw across the street. He stopped to look at me and then fired it back up. A white Yukon passed. North Biloxi. Down the street, a teenager made a grid on a zero turn. I tried to flatten my hair. I drove the 20 miles down 90 back to Ladnier. Turkey vultures kettling languidly in the sky over the pines. Two men draped in khaki and powder blue fishing shirts at Keith’s Superstore. One dumped ice into a big cooler. The other pumped gas into the boat. Over the railroad tracks, the blown-off top of a thunderstorm hung over Chevron across the river like a mothership.
I drug limbs out of the yard into a pile on the street for Dad. There was a dead baby green heron he shoveled into the water by the bulkhead. The thunderstorms rolled over the yard. Dad gave me a hundred bucks. In the morning I left for New Orleans. On the way into the city, I saw the head of a deer glowing in the air over a billboard on I-10. I wore an old camo hat with a deer on it from an annual game banquet held at the gas plant where Dad worked. The deer was a sign from God. I searched for an hour for a good parking spot. I felt amazing. I met a couple of the guys from Ole Miss in the Quarter. Charles and Richardson. Charles rolled blunts. Richardson was in graduate school at Delta State. We stayed at his ceramics professor’s Chartres pied a terre.
I danced with a Baltimore woman in a country western club on Bourbon. Her dark hands on my face, around promises made to call. I woke and sat under the banana trees in the courtyard. I ate THC monkey bread Charles brought back from a family reunion in Oakland. I wrote three poems and emailed them to Serenity. We drank through the day into the night. I cursed out Richardson at B Mac’s and cried. I ran and got lost in the Quarter. My phone died. An acquaintance from Ladnier High emerged out of the Quarter mist. I ended up at a party in a judge’s house thrown by his daughter while he was out of town. They let me charge my phone and told me Irish Channel drama. Richardson wouldn’t look at me in the morning. Charles shook his head.
Feeling undead, Serenity texted me as I passed north of Waveland on I-10. I pivoted on my promise to myself to not go and see her again. Feeling dirty, ashen, poor, I put in the coordinates for her bar.
It was her brother’s old place on Pass Road. She was up on a ladder painting the walls a deep navy. She wore a sports bra and Nike shorts. She smelled like oranges. I kissed her neck. I noticed there was an old, sickly fat man at the corner bar watching minor golf on a silent television.
“That’s just George,” she said. “He works for me. We worked together in New Orleans. We’re partners. He ran this special on shrimp at the John we are going to run here. We’re gonna use the same model.”
I nodded.
“I want to show you my room,” she said.
We went up the old stairs into a little apartment. There was the same iron smell from the room at her house. A flat ochre light from the windows beamed across the otherwise maroon dark room. Bras and t-shirts on the floor. A tie dye bowl resin blackened on a Mexican tiled end table. She sat on my lap with my jeans around my ankles. The legs on the chair kicked back and forth. I had to push down to keep it from kicking over. The broken, snakewrapped ship kept pushing against my face. Her glossy eyes filled my world with cosmic dust. She kissed my forehead.
George was pouring himself a tonic water and doing calf raises when we came down the stairs.
“So you’re the lover boy huh?” he said. “The poet.”
I grinned and looked at my shoes.
“Some kind of poet.”
“I read the stuff you emailed her. It’s pretty good. Not all bad.”
“Do you write?”
“Not anymore. I used to. Screenplays mostly. Tried to break into the castle.”
“Would like to read those sometime.”
“No you wouldn’t,” he said, belching. “They weren’t worth the fuckin paper they were printed on. Total dogshit. But they were fun. It’s what you do when you’re young. You try and be rich and famous.”
I watched her paint the walls and promised to bring her some driftwood for decor. George left and we napped. I woke up in the last pale light of the day. I sat up in her bed for a moment and listened to the cars.
We showered, I put on the same clothes, and we went out to the Filling Station for dinner. Her mother and brother met us there. After dinner they left and it was just us picking at a plate of debris fries. We moved to the bar and she put my hand under her dress while she ordered for us. We drank until she called us a cab to the Hard Rock. She kept grabbing my hand and putting it there and I kept pulling it away.
A Bowie cover band was playing in the Hard Rock. The front man had a light contact in a poor imitation of Bowie’s heterochromia. He whined over the peaks of Life on Mars?
“We’re going to meet my friend Sissy” Serenity yelled in my ear. “She just got off from the IP. We’re going to go meet her at Treasure Bay.” We finished our drinks and left under the wash of Changes.
Treasure Bay was a squat brutalist pug on the beach. Sissy sat at the video poker bar. Her hair was fixed in a messy bun. She dragged on a Juul and blew it in Serenity’s face as we walked up. I felt nervous and dumb and like there was a galactic pull emanating from Sissy.
“This is my husband, Joe,” Serenity said, placing a hand on my chest.
“Joe, Sissy, Sissy, Joe.”
We sat around the roulette table. The two of them kept disappearing from the table to go to the bathroom. I sat dully smoking, barely warmed by the liquor, too broke and dumb to bet, watching them place chips.
We left from there and smoked in Sissy’s Civic on the way to Project. Serenity yelled fuck you to a homeless guy on a bike as we drove past. I turned and looked through the back window and saw him raise a hand over his head before he faded.
In the Project Lounge, construction helmets and dollar bills hung over the bar. Sissy’s twin sister Lisa worked the bar with another older woman I didn’t know the name of. There was a group of men in suits down at the other end of the bar away from the front door and they smoked Black & Milds. The jukebox played George Strait. A velvet print of Elvis in Vegas hung next to a silver leopard printed on a mirror. The bar was dark except for fake plastic candles in red jars on the round tables on maroon carpet and the bright halogen which flooded the kitchen. A variety of cigarettes hung in rows behind the bar. Serenity ordered whiskey sours. We perpetuated the fog of smoke. The man at the end of the bar drifted down and spoke with me about the shipping industry in Pascagoula whose interests he’d represented in court earlier in the morning. I stumbled on the way to the bathroom, my legs almost giving out from under me, threw up in the parking lot and faded to black in the cab near the railroad to the sound of Serenity’s laughter.
The next night we went back to Big Play and ate burgers. Her uncle was there. He was a big gambler down from Baton Rouge for the Mayweather McGregor fight. It cost fifty bucks for a wristband. I went around the bar to the short line to get us drinks.
“Excuse me,” I said to the man blocking my path to the stool next to Serenity. He shouldered me out. I tried to squeeze back in next to her with the drinks. She watched me. I stepped on a boot. He turned and faced me. He was mean, wide and red. A forty something with coon eyes and blonde stubble in a PFG shirt. I figured him for an operator.
“Six hunnerd dollar awstritches, asshole.”
“You fuck your mother with that mouth?” I laughed.
Serenity grabbed one of the cups from my hand and poured it over his head. I felt the rush of the old days. He brushed her to the ground with a gentle sweep of his hand. I didn’t feel the punch so much as hear it crack my head. I looked up and saw his R-Toe swoop in at my face. I felt my nose break and my face go dull. I sat up laughing. The kicks busted the back of my head with the regularity of a sledgehammer. Serenity screamed. She sounded wounded.
He kicked my ribs and I went over. Mule kicks. The pain shot through my groin. I heard men yell. I felt one more big one before it stopped. I lay there with my eyes jammed shut. Country music. Men hollering in the black.
The bouncer got me on my feet and walked me out. He sat me on a bench outside. I needed a cigarette. Serenity gave me one of her menthols. She paced and chewed her nails. I asked the bouncer if my eyes looked okay.
“You eyes are fine, but your head is fucked.”
I shook my head. Curled over and threw up next to the bench.
I sat up. He was standing, shaking his head, looking across the highway to the beach. The wind shifted the part in his hair.
“You remind me of my brother,” he said.
“Come on baby, let’s go,” she said.
“Can’t come back here anymore,” he said.
I leaned my head against the glass. We passed Waffle House and the pawn shop. It started to rain heavy. I watched it run under the oaks and stream into the street. It blurred the lights into gold trails. I looked over at her. Her makeup was running and she was shaking her head.
“What a fuckin faggot. What a little piece of fuckin shit,” she said.
Her smoke filled the cab. I got sick but my abs just ripped. I was empty. She pulled under the dim green lights of the Bayview Inn. Her uncle was asleep. She kept trying to get me to do it with her with him sleeping there on the other bed. A rib felt broken and the beer was fading. She was out of weed. She kept grabbing me and I curled up deeper. She gave up and I lay there the whole night sick. I watched her uncle as he packed and left and let some of the blue dawn into the room.
After noon I followed her to her dealer’s place in Fountainbleau. I waited across the street failing not to think. I followed her south out of the neighborhood down a gravel pine road. It opened to an overgrown lot. An abandoned Delco home stood on concrete pillars on the river bayou.
“We always used to come here. The Ghost House,” she said.
We went up the outside steps and sat on the Virginia creeper subsumed balcony. The tide was way low. Saltwater puddles lay in craters of the dark sand a couple hundred yards out. Past this, the dark olive water snaked through the channels in the grass islands before pouring out into the Sound on the horizon. We smoked. My ribs felt healed. One side of my face was swollen shut. I laughed, dumbfounded.
“What?”
“I feel like shit,” I said.
“Get used to it,” she said. “It’s all there is.”
A light rain fell. We pushed back under the eave to protect ourselves. Trout popped in the water and deer flies stung our ankles, forcing us to leave.
Dan Duffy was born and raised in Jackson County, Mississippi. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Farewell Transmission, Afternoon Visitor, Dunce Codex, Juked, Nat. Brut, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and B.A. from Ole Miss. He’s worked as an usher, a delivery driver, an auto parts puller and an English professor. He lives in Mississippi with his dog.
By R. Gerry Fabian
3:45 am and I am finally home.
Four trailer loads and a bonus
leave me flush for a while.
I am on Red Bull overcharge
and three steps beyond hungry.
The hall light is off. Odd.
I call your name.
At this hour of the morning,
I recognize my error immediately
and tip-toe to the kitchen.
Opening the fridge, I take out
the egg carton with three eggs.
I check the bread for possible toast.
Each slice is green with mold.
Grabbing a non-stick pan
I break the eggs and scramble them.
There’s beer in the fridge.
I open it hoping to dull the Red Bull.
Sliding the eggs onto a plate
I take a small swallow of beer
and begins to eat the eggs.
The carton is on the table
and the expiration date
confirms the obvious.
R. Gerry Fabian is a published writer and poet from Doylestown, PA. He has published seven books of poetry: Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts, Wildflower Women, Pilfered Circadian Rhythm, Hidden Danger, including his poetry baseball book, Ball On The Mound. Web Page | X | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook | BlueSky
By Saba Zahoor
It rained in Kashmir again
and I dreamed once more
of turning into its soil,
waiting to receive the diaphanous, fertile rains–
ripe with the smell of bulbous fruit pulp
that coax the rivers awake.
I would weave myself
roots and rain’s silver threads
into lush green carpets.
How I long to be the earth sodden with rain–
to hold close every drop of goodness offered.
I have moved far from home
dwelling in fossil aquifers.
Here, rain falls obliquely, fitfully—
flash floods, ephemeral streams
drowning the sinful dust devils.
Each sudden downpour weighs
heavy on the soul like a debt.
And every attempt to repay
falls short of the favor.
The realization is a callous bone
wedged between my teeth:
For all my intentions to receive
like my home soil–
I am the baked sand that cannot hold–
yet there are rocks through which springs gush forth.
*The final line is adapted from Qur’an 2:74.
Saba Zahoor is an engineer, born in Kashmir and currently living in Saudi Arabia. She is a self-styled peasant poet who views poetry as a portal to alternate realities.
By Anthony Ikeh
Anthony Ikeh is a Nigerian writer & self-acclaimed cinephile. When he’s not writing or reading, he spends his time searching for bliss that exists between numbers, particularly between zero and one. His work are on or forthcoming on Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, The Shallow Tales Review, Yugen Quest Review, Metaworker Literary, Eunoia Review, The B’k Magazine, Afrohill Press, African Writer Magazine, The Mixtape Review & elsewhere. He tweets @lanalovesbooks0
By Paul Smith
In physical therapy
we learned the difference
between pain and discomfort
Jessica spread my legs apart
like I’m a rotisserie chicken
and I felt it in my hip
the one they redid
but I said ‘No’
when she asked if it hurt
I liked saying ‘No’ to whatever
that burning was
then I cancelled then rest of
my sessions with her
because at some point someone
said
stop when there is discomfort
and I thought it and pain
were one and the same
we are expected to know
the difference
like we are supposed to know
the difference between
lots of things
but between all the things
we can choose is us
we are a pivot point
a fulcrum
that can go one way
or the other
especially when Jessica’s eyes implied
I should push through the pain
and just call it discomfort
because pain is just a thing in my head
and it gets murky
Dad said there wasn’t
much black and white
out there but a whole lot of gray
and Dad said
he could always beat a zone defense
Paul Smith is a civil engineer who has worked in the construction racket for many years. He has travelled all over the place and met lots of people from all walks of life. Some have enriched his life. Others made him wish he or they were all dead. He likes writing poetry and fiction. He also likes Newcastle Brown Ale. If you see him, buy him one. He is a featured poet at Mad Swirl.
By Liz Falco
Liz Falco is a poet and high school English teacher from Provincetown, MA. Recent and forthcoming work can be found in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (as Liz Bergman), antiphony, Cape Cod Compass, Do Not Submit, bethh, GROTTO, and Looky Here Magazine. Her chapbook, NO WAKE, came out in December 2025. She co-hosts Morning Shift at Looky Here in Greenfield, MA, where she now lives.
By Andrea Georges Dolan
I moved to Weehawken on the evening of my 23rd birthday, celebrating in an unfurnished apartment with shitty boxed wine and a dozen stale donuts from Dunkin’. My roommate and I lived on the second floor of a triplex on 49th Street. The man who lived below us was a bassist who would play the same twangy seven notes on a bass that looked like it was fashioned out of plywood and scrap metal. Sometimes his girlfriend would be there, but they definitely hated each other. I once caught him kissing his girlfriend’s sister in the driveway and he glared at me as I quickly turned away from them and dashed to my car. It wasn’t my business, but at the same time I wasn’t going to plug my ears when I heard his girlfriend hiss you’re a FUCKING embarrassment before slamming the door behind her.
Above us lived a Tisch professor who would bring home his much younger female students. Most of them were obvious overperformers but all I could focus on was his silence while the bed squeaked loudly. I wondered if he really felt anything, but now I understand that it sometimes just feels nice to be next to a warm body, especially if she’s 21. On the nights during which he was alone, he would restlessly watch reruns of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on full blast in his living room. I can still hear his heavy footsteps pacing above me. I can still feel the loud DUNDUN rattling through my skull in the late hours of the night.
Weehawken is where I started running. I still can’t definitively say why, for I was cursed with flat feet and even walking has always been somewhat painful. I never quite got the runner’s high, but there was something profound in the struggle. A body can really push through anything. Perhaps it was boredom. Perhaps it was a way for me to outrun my thoughts.
There are two levels to Weehawken: the upper cliffside along JFK Boulevard East and the lower Waterfront along the Hudson River. To get from one end to the other, one must traverse what is locally called The Steps of Doom. Covered in chewed gum and graffiti, the rickety steps zigzag their way down from The Boulevard to the light-rail station at The Waterfront, where I would take the train to The City. Sometimes I would purposely torture myself and run up and down The Steps—not for any particular reason, just to say that I could do it. Just to say that I could run through anything, even pain. Especially pain.
The rusted steel squeaked and rattled with each step, and looking down gave me such intense vertigo that I vomited hard against the top railing, but descending was far better than its counter. The pointed heels that I often insisted on wearing on nights out got stuck in the janky slats of The Steps, so sometimes I would run up barefoot and pray I didn’t get tetanus. Sleazy men could get a good peek at my ass if they looked up. A slicked-back guido might menacingly wink at me as I breathlessly trudged my way up the twenty flights of Hell. Touch me, I dare you, I’d think. I’ll stomp your fucking brains in.
Sometimes when I’d run along The Boulevard, I’d think about how the luxury condominiums that lined The Waterfront would be the first to go in a climate catastrophe. I was thankful to live up top along the cliffside; I could see the entire expanse of Manhattan from there. If I looked close enough, I could see the hideous H&M advertisements flashing from Times Square. Sometimes I’d wonder if The City could agree on the irony, but I soon realized that Manhattan is far too self-absorbed for introspection. Narcissus beholds his dazzling reflection in the Hudson.
Upside: Weehawken has the best view of The City.
Downside: Weehawken has the best view of The City.
Every evening around seven or eight, two E-EXPRESS TOUR charter buses would pull up along The Boulevard and out would pour dozens of tourists, cameras in hand, all ready to snap away at the perfect view of The City. Didn’t they know this path was mine? Didn’t they know they were in my way? I’d grunt at them as I shoved my way between excited conversations in foreign languages. They stood tall with their arms outstretched to mimic the great and glowing island behind them. I wonder how many photographs of their smiling faces feature my blurry, heaving, and sweaty body running just out of the frame, like a ghost. I liked to think of myself that way anyway—invisible, fleeting, haunting.
On longer jogs I concentrated on the sound of my breath. When my thoughts would travel, I could bring myself back to focus by listening to my breath. Grad school got ya down? Just return to your breath. Heartbroken, again? Just return to your breath. About to jump off The Palisades Bluffs and hope the Hudson River swallows you whole? Just return to your breath. Sometimes I’d run until I couldn’t feel my limbs. My feet thumped hard on the concrete, a stubborn skeleton crumpling with every burdensome step. A nightly cold compress held close to swollen ankles felt more empowering than painful. Just breathe through it, I’d tell myself as I rubbed Tiger Balm on my splinted shins.
Sometimes on my jogs I’d think about all the bodies that have been scraped from the bottom of the Hudson. Sometimes I’d think about my friend’s older brother who jumped off the George Washington Bridge just a few years prior, and would wonder why he left his shoes behind. The police said that was common. He was a runner, too. A track star, really. I remember him running backwards with perfect form on our high school’s track, as if he had pressed rewind on himself. I’d stare in awe in my dirt-caked Converse as his knees drove higher into perfect 90 degree angles. We all thought he’d be an Olympian one day. Now he’s just a name on a banner hanging in the school’s gymnasium. Immortalized at 22.
I remember when he would walk his sister and me to Blockbuster when we were kids and buy us a bucket of Butter Lovers microwaveable popcorn. He was always so quiet and focused. Sometimes I’d think about how his mom didn’t initially believe he was dead and maintained that he was only missing, even though the last inquiries he searched on the internet were how tall is the George Washington Bridge and how many suicides on GWB. “Not my son,” I imagine her saying to the police knocking at her front door. “He wouldn’t do something like that.” I remember the look of denial in her eyes during his wake.
On one weekend morning jog, I saw a dead body washed ashore by the condos at The Waterfront. I remember the horrified screams of the wealthy middle-aged woman wrapped in a light gray robe, her phone in hand to call the police. She hovered over the pier where the feet of the body could be seen underneath her. It was a cold morning, too cold for spring. I listened for my breath.
“Don’t come over here!” she warned, but I was curious. This certainly was not the first dead person I’d seen, but I had never seen one quite like this. Bloated and blue, face down. The dead bodies I’ve seen lay peacefully in lacquered coffins, their arms posed gently over their chests, their faces caked with costume make-up. I wondered what had happened. Suicide? Murder? A drunken casualty from the ferry? I tried again to listen for my breath but all I could hear were her screams. I kept running until I got to Hoboken.
Once after a long night of drinking far too much free wine at an office party in The City, I opted to take a cab home. It was significantly quicker and more convenient than my usual MTA to NJ PATH to Steps of Doom running route. The cab driver was an older man, maybe mid-to-late fifties, with a thick gray mustache and even thicker bifocals. I had been particularly conversational this evening, asking him about his job, his life. He told me he had buried his granddaughter a week prior, and that life was unnecessarily cruel. I couldn’t muster anything to say other than a meek I’m sorry.
What I wanted to say was that grief is an unpredictable monster, and that sometimes its giant fist wraps itself around your body, constricting your blood flow. Grief takes your oxygen and replaces it with lead. Grief will demand that you punish yourself, for it should be the only thing you feel. Grief pulls at the loose ends and unravels you.
But I didn’t say any of that. I only looked at his eyes fixed to the road in the rearview mirror.
On the other end of the Lincoln Tunnel we took the first exit toward JFK Boulevard. Around the curve, The City skyline came into view. Bright, expansive, and silent.
“Do you mind if we stop for a minute?” the driver asked. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”
Andrea Georges Dolan is a writer from New Jersey, currently living in Los Angeles. You can read some of their other work at agdolan.com
By Dmitriy Kogan
Me and Rob and a couple of our friends were renting a house on Seneca Lake for the weekend. We needed an escape from city life. I was not fond of fishing or hiking or most nature activities, but it was nice to sleep in a house near the lake instead of a one-bedroom apartment near the subway.
Rob had a new girlfriend, Marion, who was sunbathing on the deck when I stepped outside for a cigarette. The sun was just about to go down. Marion was in a two-piece polkadot bikini and sunglasses. I could see the shape of her cleavage. She was reading a book.
I lit my cigarette and looked up at the sky. She noticed me behind her and set down her novel.
“Are they starting to make the food?” she asked.
“Yeah, just about.”
She looked up at me. “Remind me again what you do in insurance?”
“I’m a claims adjuster.”
“Oh, yeah. You and Rob met at work, right?”
“Yeah. We were at the same company for a bit before I got canned.”
I doused my cigarette in the ashtray on the round table near Marion.
***
Rob, Marion, Bill, Gator and I sat at the table ready to eat the salmon we picked up at a nearby supermarket.
“How long have you been married, Bill?” asked Marion.
“Two years now,” said Bill.
“He didn’t bring his wife because she drives him crazy,” said Rob. “Married life will do that to you.”
Rob laughed. I felt like I needed another cigarette. Gator was silently munching his peas.
“And Gator, Rob told me you’re looking for acting work?” asked Marion. “That’s great. I always wanted to try acting.”
“Yeah, it’s hard,” said Gator. “I mostly do commercials, but you know how that fucks up your soul when you have an MFA in theater.”
“Why not do theater, then?” asked Marion.
“Because try telling your landlord that you do theater,” said Gator.
***
It was late. Gator and I were having a couple of beers on the deck. The stars were shining bright and Gator was pretty hammered.
“You think this one will last?” asked Gator.
“Rob’s new girl?”
“Yeah.”
“Who knows. He gets a new one every three months. Then when he’s sick of banging her, he switches to the next.”
“I was with this hooker in Vegas last month. Man, her tits were huge. I sucked on them for ten whole minutes.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Yeah, I need to get laid. I could use a hooker.”
“Come with me to Paris. I heard those French girls fuck like animals.”
***
I was still half-drunk when I stumbled into bed. I could hear Rob and Marion going at it. They sounded like they were in bed with me because their room was right next door to mine. I reached down to my crotch but couldn’t get it hard. Her moans sounded sweet, though. I heard Rob finish shortly before I fell asleep.
***
The next morning, Marion was making eggs in the kitchen.
“Sleep well?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “This house is lovely.”
Her ass was plump and I could see it through her nightgown. I still had some morning wood and I felt like brushing it up against her. Just then, Rob came downstairs, still in his underwear. He walked past me and smacked Marion on the ass. Then they began making out.
***
I stepped out onto the deck. Rob was in his chair, shirtless, smoking a cigarette and having a beer. I sat down next to him and asked him for a light.
“She has a nice ass, doesn’t she?” asked Rob.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Really nice.”
“I saw you checking her out. If you wanna fuck her, you can. I don’t mind.”
“What?”
“I’m practically done with her. We did it in every kind of position imaginable, and she’ll definitely remember me as one of her best.”
I shifted in my chair and took a drag on my cigarette.
“I mean, the thing is, this Latina secretary who I’m working with now? Holy crap. She’s married, but she’s got ass and tits for days. Marion’s ass, it’s a boulder. This Latina chick’s ass? It’s a mountain.”
“Did you already fuck her? The Latina, I mean.”
“You bet I did,” said Rob. “I don’t care if she’s married. With that ass? It’s worth the risk. There are too many women out there, man. Why settle down?”
I looked up at the sky and watched the clouds as they met each other, embraced, and then merged.
Dmitriy Kogan is a short story writer, poet, and essayist from Staten Island, New York. His work has appeared in The Beatnik Cowboy, The Rye Whiskey Review, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and is forthcoming in Straylight Magazine and Some Words.
By J.D. Hosemann
I never managed to unpack my things. My apartment was lined with stacks of cardboard boxes and picture frames propped against walls where they might have been hung. I drank unknown quantities of Line 39 Pinot Grigio ($11.38/bottle). Even lesser-known quantities of time passed without my noticing. Faceless tenants slammed doors and stomped across the ceiling. Their muffled voices reverberated in the walls while I scrolled on my phone watching countless street interviews with drunken college students, reaction videos, trick shots, thirst traps. I can say very little about my arrival. There was the recently laid sod, a freshly painted sign (The Mark III: A Place for Living). But I do remember how it ended. I remember the jarring knock on my apartment door.
The neighbor introduced himself as Charles and claimed he’d been living across the breezeway for several months. He wore a baseball cap, an enormous Green Bay Packers Starter jacket, and he held in his hand a small, padded envelope. “This you?” he asked, extending the package toward me. Charles showed little interest in chatting. I accepted the package, offered my thanks, and retreated immediately leaving no time for pleasantries. Once inside my unit, I opened the padded envelope and discovered a digital meat thermometer ($17.89), which I vaguely remembered ordering from TEMU. Fair enough, I thought. I ripped it from its plastic encasing and placed it among other miscellaneous items in a small kitchen drawer, which, to my bemusement, already held an identical device still in its original packaging.
It was around the time of this encounter that I began scouring online real estate listings. Night after night I stared into my laptop screen. I zoomed-in on the map and hovered my cursor over properties marked by little blue pins ($180k, $246k, $557K). I clicked through images of open-concept living rooms, galley kitchens, carpeted bedrooms and white-tiled bathrooms, not to mention backyard patios and oil-stained garages. Each home was newly renovated and updated. Stainless steel covered every appliance; granite, every countertop. The effect of wide-angle lenses made even a tiny nook seem like a great hall. I often saw myself in the images of these various rooms. I was preparing a nice meal in the kitchen. I was playing a musical instrument or watering a plant. I was reading a book in the den. Writing a book in the study. Doing pushups in the garage. I was learning to paint. Entertaining guests. Sometimes another person was there, a co-habitant, a woman without a face. I don’t know who the faceless woman was, but she was often doing what I was doing: reading or cooking or taking a nap. I thought I could almost see her face, but that would’ve been impossible because she didn’t have one.
I exhausted all listings in my surrounding area. It was late at night and I found myself zooming out, highlighting the little dots, expanding pictures of each house. Each one I’d already visited. I looked for something new, something overlooked, but nothing presented itself. I closed my laptop and left my apartment.
The concrete paths and nascent shrubbery led me to the center of The Mark III, to the emerald waters of the communal pool. I’d yet to discover a single bather in the pool, which, despite its recent construction, had already succumbed to severe neglect. A thin film of debris and dead bugs floated perpetually across its surface. But I found the pool to be soothing, especially at night when the underwater lamp illuminated the whole common area and projected ripples of green and yellow against the poolside units. I reclined on a pool chair and watched patterns of light casting shadows of floating debris. I lit a cigarette.
“What was the package?”
The voice came from my right. I turned to find Charles embedded in a nearby pool chair, a big G across his chest. He gestured to my pack of Parliaments with forked fingers. I flipped him the pack, offered the lighter.
“A digital meat thermometer. From TEMU.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. Need to watch my spending though.”
“What for?”
“I’m buying a house.” I shuddered at the thought of this admission.
Charles was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You don’t buy a house with money.”
“Well, you need a little money.”
“You got credit?”
I nodded.
“You don’t need money. You just need credit.”
Charles tucked the cigarette behind his ear and produced a bulbous glass pipe from his jacket pocket. He lit the bowl and drew it deeply. For a moment, the features of Charles’ face were illuminated by the orange embers. His eyes were closed. He had freckles. When he exhaled, plumes of smoke billowed from his nostrils. Then he leaned back and extended the pipe in my direction, less of an offer than an assumption. I took the pipe, put it to my lips, and drew until I saw orange. I exhaled a stream of smoke that floated into the darkness above.
“I’ve never bought a house.”
“You won’t do the buying.”
“The buying?”
“The bank, the lawyers, the realtors. They do all the buying. You do the wanting.”
“The wanting?”
“Find yourself a realtor. She’ll put you in a house.” Charles stared forward, almost as if talking to some invisible person several yards from us.
I stared forward, too. I looked directly into the pool and watched as a spider made its way across the debris and then, miraculously, across water. Its spindly legs made tiny impressions on the water’s surface. My own feet felt far from me. My arms became lanky things. I leaned back in the chair. Charles continued saying things, something about realtors, mortgages, escrow. My eyes felt glassy. I had many eyes, like a spider. Weed smoke hovered in the night air and I could see each particle reflect the green light of the pool. I could see water molecules, stainless steel, kitchen gadgets, a crowded drawer. Storage space. Open concept. Find yourself a realtor. Unbroken chains of molecules. The pool chair dissolved into water but the surface tension held my weight. I lay there doing the wanting.
I awoke to a loud splash and sunlight hissing against my forehead. Charles was gone. A maintenance man combed the depths of the pool with an underwater vacuum. The pool was pristine. Not a leaf or bug in sight.
My phone vibrated and I sat up to check it. A Gmail notification: Prospective Client—Blue/Williams Realty Group. I touched the banner:
Hi, John! We got your message! I think I found your house! Call me asap!
–Marianne
601-423-XXXX
2
From the street, the house appeared small: a tiny one-story frame with a front porch swing and a sagging roof. At first it didn’t seem big enough to hold more than one person. But I walked the length of the property line and found the house was built on a sloping hill. As I descended the hill into the backyard, the house grew larger and larger. I turned and looked up. Two dark windows loomed some twenty-five feet overhead. Their height was disorienting. I felt a spell of dizziness. Then I heard a car, the sound of brakes.
A silver Mercedes was parked on the street and Marianne was waving to me from the front doorway of the house. She wore a light blue floral blouse and matching heels. Her face bore a thick layer of foundation, and her red hair had been recently dyed. She looked perfect, objectively so.
“Such a charming neighborhood,” she said. I looked around. The house was nestled between a law office and a fourplex. I saw some trees, architectural variety. A car with no muffler sped past us down the street. “And it’s designated historic,” Marianne added.
In the living room, I eagerly awaited Marianne’s instructions, but she said nothing. Instead, she extended her right hand in which she held a golf ball. She leaned forward and placed the ball on the floor, where it rested quietly for a brief moment before suddenly coming to life. The golf ball began rolling, slowly at first but gradually picking up speed until it rumbled noisily against the natural wood flooring. We both watched as the ball careened toward the baseboard on the farthest wall. But then, as if possessed, it slowed and curved back toward the center of the room, barely missing the wall.
“Is that bad?” I asked.
“Not necessarily. It just depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you can see yourself living here.”
We walked around. Our voices reverberated in the empty spaces of the vacant house. The wooden floors were newly polished and a thick coat of paint had been applied to every wall. Even the fireplace was slathered with multiple layers of heavy white paint. It reminded me of a white, layered cake. In fact, the entire house had been painted in a style I could only describe as frosted. It made me want to go out and buy a gigantic knife, an absurdly large knife, to slice into this house and find out whether or not it was cake.
“Go on,” Marianne said. Take a walk around. I’ll let you be.
The house was built in such a way that one room led into another. Each room had at least two points of entry, forming a kind of circle or spiral. The spacious front room led into a cozy dining room, which was connected to the kitchen. I walked through the kitchen and into a bedroom. Then I walked through the bedroom and into a large white tiled bathroom. Jack and Jill, I remembered from my research. Then I walked from the bathroom into another room, a dark room with no windows. I was in the center of the house somehow. I wondered what purpose such a room could serve. Was it a bedroom? An office?
When I passed through the darkened room, I found myself back in the living room, back where I’d begun. It felt surprisingly spacious and airy. Natural light poured in through windows on the front facing wall of the house. I was just about to ask my realtor about the darkened middle room when, there in the light, I saw myself. I was reclined in a reading chair, a book hiding my face and a black cat curled in my lap. Finally, a chance to do a little reading, I thought. Then I saw myself in the kitchen donning an apron and making poulet chasseur. And then I was outside mowing the front lawn. I watched through the front window as I pushed an old-fashioned rotary mower. I was sweaty. My shirt was off. My arms were chiseled from all the pushups I’d been doing.
“Well, do you see yourself living here?” Marianne asked.
I turned from the window and looked at my realtor. She was also looking out into the yard. Then she turned, smiled, and awaited my response.
3
The house visit, the loan-approval, the contract: I had very little to do with any of it beyond applying my initials in the designated blanks. But once my offer was accepted, once a closing date was determined, my online habit only intensified. I took special pleasure in watching the status of the listing flip from “for sale” to “under contract.” I combed through the page over and over again. I committed every detail to memory. Built 1938; 1617 sqft; .98-acre lot. I thought of new questions to ask Marianne. Were the bedroom outlets grounded or two-pronged? Was the entire roof replaced after the hailstorm of 2013 or just the shingles? I relentlessly clicked through each of the twenty-six images on the realtor.com slide deck. Crown molding, glass doorknobs, all the little bits of charm and character I’d missed or already forgotten about.
One night I downloaded several decades worth of Hinds County tax records in an attempt to discover all the names of the previous owners of my property. But I kept hitting snags. Either the document was illegible or the address was missing. That couldn’t be true. The house had stood for some eighty years. I stared at the screen checking each address until my vision blurred and I could no longer make out the tiny street numbers. I closed the laptop and there I was at The Mark III, in my apartment, amid the stained carpet, beige walls, the fluorescent kitchen light. I looked at the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall. On one of them I’d written the word “Stuff.” I thought about Charles and wondered what his unit looked like.
The pool was, once again, covered in leaves and debris. I paced around the deck with a cup of Line 39 in my hand. I lit a cigarette. I wanted to tell Charles about Marianne, about the golf ball, about her Mercedez. Get yourself a realtor. I looked at the pool chairs again and again but they remained vacant. Then I pulled out my phone and scrolled through emails, the back and forth between me and Marianne. I considered typing out a message. About what? Outlets. Shingles? I stared at the water, the emerald glow. I watched the leaves floating listlessly. I noticed a spider desperately trying to climb out of the pool, its legs struggling to take hold against the vinyl liner. Eventually it gave up and continued its miraculous journey across the water’s surface.
There was no traffic on the road at that time of night. I pulled onto highway forty-nine and crossed its four lanes without a turn signal. My plastic cup fit snug in the cup holder and I drove with the windows down. Heat on the feet. Crosby, Stills, and Nash were coming through the car stereo, but they were continually interrupted by the artificial voice of a woman reminding me to take a slight right onto Mill Street in two miles. I passed unimpeded through a gauntlet of green traffic lights. Turtles all the way down! I thought for no reason. I’m bending time and space, I thought as the white lines elongated on my approach. I’m on a night journey, I thought as the jangle of Stephen Stills’ acoustic guitar prepared me for the coda of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” I’m on a journey home, I thought as I took a sip of Line 39 and sang along with the boys Doo doo doo doo doot, doot doot, doo doo doo doot. Then I made a series of turns and merges and slight rights toward downtown, toward a neighborhood with brown road signs, a historic designation. I was driving home.
The highway narrowed and funneled me into smaller boulevards and avenues and streets. I reduced my speed and lowered the volume of the car stereo. Quiet city, sleepy town. My car snaked around the streets of my new, yet historic neighborhood and suddenly I felt a sense of calm reverence, of peaceful vigilance. I turned the radio completely off. I turned off my navigation app too. One ought to know his way home. But my street seemed unnaturally dark. There wasn’t even a flicker from the streetlight. Only rooftops were visible against the mild glow of urban light pollution, but the houses themselves, their faces, were shadowy things. I recognized certain landmarks. The law office, a convenience store. But the houses themselves seemed to shift, their features distorted in the darkness. Was that wood or asbestos siding? Four columns or two? A rose bush or Japanese maple?
Eventually I found myself at a small public park with a walking trail that twisted and curved around a large grassy meadow. I pulled over and poured myself more Line 39 before killing the engine and embarking on my walk. Small, solar-powered lamps had been planted at measured intervals along the trail and created a haunting effect. Ghost path, I thought. I walked from light to light and tried to focus on the path rather than the surrounding darkness, which seemed infinite. I imagined it was daytime, in the future, a future in which I was living my life in my new house. I imagined a green meadow and blue sky, people on a picnic blanket, dogs chasing tennis balls. “On your left!” I jolted and spilled my wine when the runner bounded past me. He wore a blinking red light that bobbed up and down while the rest of his body disappeared into the darkness.
Back at The Mark III, I found another package at my doorstep. There was a note: Delivered to my address again. Check shipping info. C. I tore open the package and found another digital meat thermometer ($18.39/TEMU).
4
As the closing date drew near, new players in the drama of my house hunt entered the scene. Yes, there had always been Marianne, the realtor and soothsayer who showed not just houses but entire lives unfolding before your very eyes. But there was also the bank, the Mortgage Loan Originator, the home inspectors, the crawl space guy, the insurance agents, the roofing guys, the sump-pump repairmen. Somehow I’d set into motion an entire industry of professionals determined to house me.
I was in my apartment the night Marianne called to explain that my house had not passed inspection. I remember very few details from the conversation, only that my first reaction was to say That’s okay. I still want it. I still want my house. But Marianne explained my desire had been insufficient, that the people actually buying my house, those professionals involved in the transaction, had decided it was not to be. Eventually we hung up. I looked down at my laptop, which sat open on the kitchen countertop. Of the dozen or so tabs open, half of them were my home listing. I clicked one of them and saw the front porch, the Japanese maple in the front yard. Then I closed the computer.
I’m not sure why I went to Charles’ apartment. Perhaps I held him partially responsible for this, even though he’d done nothing but offer some kind advice to a neighbor. Maybe I thought I could change things by going to his apartment, by knocking on his door the way he’d knocked on mine. When I did so, when I rapped my knuckles against the vinyl door, it creaked open slightly. At first I wondered if Charles was waiting on me, if he had opened it as soon as I walked over. But it had only opened a fraction of an inch. “Charles?” I said nervously. When I pushed the door myself, I found no one there.
Charles’ apartment was nearly identical to mine. There was a beige living room, a carpeted bedroom, and a small kitchen with plenty of storage space. Charles had managed to hang a few pictures, but the only striking difference was the window in the living room. Unlike my unit, which faced the parking lot and, at some distance, highway forty-nine, Charles’ unit faced the interior of The Mark III and offered a perfect view of the pool’s emerald waters. I walked to this window and looked out into The Mark III, the tan vinyl siding, the concrete paths, the patched sod, and the blue-green light of the pool at the center of things. That’s when I noticed a tiny orange light in the darkness. The light was coming from the pool chairs in the corner of the common area. The little orange light would glow bright for just a second before fading slightly, followed by a little puff of smoke.
When I got to the pool I was out of breath from running, but I hadn’t been fast enough because I did not find Charles. I found no one. It was only me, there at the pool, late at night when the underwater lamp made everything green and yellow. It was me who, just then, noticed something at the bottom of the pool, something dark and impossible to make out because of the refracted light of the water’s surface. And it was me suddenly splashing around in the water, unable to penetrate the depths, my limbs spread out and flailing on the surface. It was me who wanted—no—who needed to see what was at the bottom of the pool. And it was me who, eventually, contorted my body and dived down. Beneath the surface, I saw a more definite shape, a dark rectangular thing down at the bottom of the pool. I kicked my legs furiously but struggled to go down, to sink into the depths. I kicked and kicked and extended my right hand toward the dark thing at the bottom of the pool. And, as I reached for it, I thought I recognized the shape, its unique angles. It looked familiar, something I’d viewed a million times. But the thing disintegrated as soon as I grabbed it. I looked at my hand, which was covered in green algae. Then I turned and looked up from the bottom of the pool. I looked to the surface and I saw the silhouettes of people standing around the edge of the pool. They were staring down into the water, dozens of vague and refracted faces, faces from the past and faces from the future, staring down from above.
J.D. Hosemann lives in Jackson, Mississippi. His work has appeared in places like The Kenyon Review Online, New World Writing, Maudlin House, ergot., hex, and elsewhere.
By Avee Chaudhuri
After a few hours of drinking it was decided, mainly by Chatterjee, who was a diabetic and who routinely ignored the advice of doctors and refused to take his medication, that it would be another pizza night. “Pizza night! That’s what’s fucking up,” Chatterjee shouted at a group of passing school children. He had been on a self-prescribed diet for over a month, eating nothing except millet and goose liver.
“Say, what’s the pizza of the week?” Darryl asked our waiter when we were seated.
Our waiter leaned in and laughed. “You know, Joe’s actually in Italy this week, so we thought we’d have a little fun and do a Hawaiian Pizza. Joe hates Hawaiian Pizza.”
Joe was the owner of the pizza joint we would frequent whenever we drank too much and none of us had exact dinner plans. Joe kept a bottle of Fireball behind the bar, just for us.
Darryl and Monica firmly came down on the side of Hawaiian Pizza. I abstained. Chatterjee lost his goddamn mind.
“I won’t be party to treachery. One way or the other, I don’t give a damn about Hawaiian Pizza, but I won’t be a party to this humiliation.”
In fact, Chatterjee said he was drafting a letter on his phone he would send to Joe when he knew Joe was safe and back in the country:
Dear Joe,
While you were away they anointed Hawaiian Pizza the “Pizza of the Week.” They being not some anonymous cabal peddling the inane wisdom that “variety is the spice of life,” but your own kitchen staff, your own people engaged in high treason, man. I was appalled for you, remain appalled, and hope that this intelligence is actionable—with extreme prejudice. First I suggest you clean house, as it were. This will require shuttering the pizzeria for, what, at least three months while you train a new platoon of chefs and waiters. I believe this economic hardship to be worthwhile for your own personal well-being and to preserve the integrity of Joe’s Pizza, which by the virtue of operating as an LLC has become a beacon of hope for those of us who dream of one day hanging out our own shingle.
Warmly,
Prem Chatterjee
After Prem wrote the letter he ordered us shots of Fireball and we decided on a classic, tastefully garnished, Pizza Bianca.
A few weeks later, Darryl wanted to go to the racecourse because he was an animal lover.
“Have you ever seen a horse at full gallop?” Darryl pulled up the race calendar on his phone.
“No.”
“It’s like they’re flying.”
“Shut the fuck up, Darryl,” Monica said.
We decided to get some pizza to smooth things over. Joe double-timed it over when he saw us.
“I gotta thank you, Prem.” He had to catch his breath.
“I just couldn’t be a party to it, Joe.”
“That was the last straw. I tell you that was the last straw.” Joe was running his hands through his hair. He looked unkempt. He hadn’t shaved. Joe was what you would call an old-school restauranteur. Always dressed like some splendid groom, in cufflinks, in a waistcoat. Now he was wearing jeans and a hoodie and our eyes followed him anxiously to the open kitchen where he began an unsuccessful attempt to remove the ink sac from a cuttlefish.
It was only then that we noticed the kitchen was empty save for Joe, who was covered in ink. He’d opted for a mallet instead of a knife.
“Say, Joe. Where is everyone?” Monica said when she went behind the bar to grab the bottle of Fireball.
“Well, it’s like Prem said. I had to clean house. I had to take the fucking trash out. Right? Right?!” Joe started adding wood to the pizza oven, at an alarming rate. We discovered the next day while watching the five o’clock news that Joe had fired his entire kitchen staff and murdered Constantin, his head chef, burning his remains in the pizza oven. Constantin had been sleeping with Joe’s wife. It started out small, hand stuff in the walk-in, but had grown into a real relationship—weekends away, some lake house in the country—and she had become kinder to everyone, Joe included, so he had accepted the affair, but then to go ahead and make Hawaiian Pizza was too much for Joe. It was one betrayal too many.
Prem cleared his throat when the news hour ended, like he was about to say something.
“What?” I said.
“Well…” Prem started. “I cannot help but feel that we are responsible for this.”
“We!” Darryl said.
“Yeah, you wrote the goddamn note.”
“None of you stopped me! We were all drunk on the Fireball and did not think, could not think, about the consequences of our action. That’s what’s wrong with this world: people not minding their own business, imposing their own value system.”
“Jesus, Prem,” Monica said. “You’ve got to calm down. Joe would have found out eventually.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But referring back to the letter: was it entirely necessary to frame the issue of Hawaiian Pizza as ‘high treason’? ‘Extreme prejudice’ is an unfortunate turn of phrase, knowing what happened to poor Constantin. Though perhaps twas the fate of all swarthy lovers.”
“Prem, you’re being too hard on yourself,” I said.
“Well someone has to be! I mean what the hell are we even doing?”
The question hung there for the rest of the evening. Monica called up her ex-husband, and arranged to meet him at the Home Depot. They would finish putting the new siding on their house. She said she would call us when they were done, that there’d be a party. I haven’t seen her since. Darryl nursed a light beer for several hours and then left to get kebabs. Chatterjee and I polished off a bottle of white wine but that was it. At the end of the night, Chatterjee shook my hand.
“Good luck,” I said.
“Yeah, you too.”
I can’t remember when we started to refer to ourselves as the Fireball Quartet. It was probably during that full out brawl in the Haymarket. Someone asked Chatterjee if he was a Muslim. Chatterjee, a proud Bengali Brahmin, answered: so what if he was, he had every right to be in that Irish bar leering at former collegiate volleyball players.
Avee Chaudhuri teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the chef/owner of The Sepoy’s Revenge, a restaurant he runs out of his office on campus (Andrews 320).
By James Callan
Our noses smash while your tongue unfurls to probe far beyond the nubs of my tonsils. We perform our animal lust in a public setting—a food court in the airport, a city bus, the serpentine queue leading to a garish roller coaster. No one takes any notice.
This time, you’re an Asian girl, but no one I know from real life. Asian, most likely, because I watched a Kore-eda film last night—the one with the mother who abandons her children. Your face is different, but I know it’s you. We are kissing in public with a hunger that verges on panic. You stifle my airways with your cartoon tongue. I am powerless, like a child, neatly folded and stored in a traveling bag. I am carried away, going who-knows-where.
In these dreams, the taste in my mouth is awful, and when I wake, it lingers. I blink in the dark and fish a hand into my underwear. Sometimes I require a new pair. This time, I do not. I groan, knowing what’s to come next, knowing from experience and repetition that when I wake from these invasive kissing dreams, my mouth tasting like I’ve gone to town on a hyena’s asshole, you will emerge and render me your plaything. You seep into substance from nothing, clouding my room like squid ink ejected in water. You will bond my flesh to the mattress, singing in high notes, low notes, a drone that makes me nauseous and yet receptive to its sonic violation. You will hover over my useless limbs, ejaculating your cold aura.
On occasion, you gyrate, shedding your skin. More commonly, you remain perfectly still. Eventually, you press inward against my immobile body, your non-face opening up to unravel your tape-measure tongue. This is the moment when my dreams take on a new foundation. No longer dreams, they become nightmares; discarded fragments dredged up from forgotten realities.
The Big Red that we chewed in the car cannot purge the rot of our open faces. Your song is sweet, but hot and sour on your lips. The storybook that we read seems a world away on my bedside table, falling to the floorboards as a tremor ruptures the world and everything in it.
You cover me like a weighted blanket. I resist, but part of me opens up to you. No longer a woman—no longer a human—the shadowy mass in my room enters me, tasting me down to my core.
James Callan lives and writes in Aotearoa (New Zealand). His fiction has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, Burial Magazine, Reckon Review, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Those Who Remain Quiet, is available from Anxiety Press.
By Steve Gergley
Steve Gergley is the author of a bunch of books and a lot of weird writings of an indeterminate nature. His most recent book, There Are Some Floors Missing, was published by Bullshit Lit on February 20th, 2026. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. He’s also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.
I picked up my tickets at will-call and saw Robert Earl Keen’s guitarist pleading with the window to let his two guests in. They didn’t think he was in the band. I got in the door and heard an organ wailing. It was Geoff Hilhorst. It was Ryan Boldt singing soft like Orbison and the band was The Deep Dark Woods. They crushed with originals like Two Time Loser, All The Money I Had Is Gone, and a rollicking Peggy-O. REK came out and made a joke about them being from Saskatoon and their moose shitting all over the tour bus.
I kept in touch with Ryan. We bet Flyers vs. Oilers games. He said Dave The Hammer Shultz tried to pick up his mom in high school. I bought every record they put out. I paid attention to what he was playing on his Radio Hour podcast. Ryan has a Rainman-like knowledge of traditional songs, and his original arrangements bring the achingly beautiful sound of The DDWs while staying true to the song.
The new album feels very much like all the best parts of Ryan’s sound in one spot. From the early songs like Hallelujah to today’s The Circle Remains Unbroken, there feels like a throughline in his work. He writes of slain lovers and unrequited love, big cities and back alleys, whoring around and trading in your name––and, always in the background, birds softly singing.
Boldt and his many band iterations are Canadian Folk Award winners (2009, 2012), Western Canadian Music Awards Roots group recording of the year (2009, 2012), and a Susan Lucci amount of noms including Junos, Americanas, and, for Boldt himself, a songwriter of the year nod in the 2012 Western Canadian Music Awards.
Go out and buy Winter Hours and The Place I left Behind and Jubilee and lock into the groove that Hilhorst and Boldt lay down. Swipe the new album, The Circle Remains, from Victory Pool Records and go see them live.
When introducing The Deep Dark Woods to friends, it’s always one of two songs, depending on the friend. Since I don’t know what kind you are, I’ll suggest both River In The Pines and Teardrops Fell.
Thanks to Ryan for doing this. Thanks to The Deep Dark Woods for being the soundtrack of my life the past 15 years.
-Rob Kaniuk
Retsoor Asks: Ryan Boldt of The Deep Dark Woods
Retsoor: Can people change?
Ryan Boldt: Of course! I’m a different person upon return from each tour. It can be hard, sometimes I’m a person I like, and other times I can’t wait to get back on the road so I can come home again and hopefully be the type of person I like and others like, especially my wife and daughter. If I’m home too long without any scheduled tours, I start slowly changing in a negative way. I have to keep my mind straight and not watch news programs or sit on my phone looking at all the hellish garbage happening across the world. That’s the most important way to preserve the person I like when I return home.
I believe that in order to be a good artist, you have to allow yourself to age and change, or else you’ll end up like so many 1970s rock stars that still want to be 20 years old, which can be quite nauseating.
RS: Is the belief in God a choice?
RB: It starts off as inherited, and then as you age, you have to make a choice whether you believe in God or believe in nothing. I’ve made my choice, so, yes.
RS: Is everything singular or plural?
RB: We have choices throughout life, but those choices accumulate into one event.
RS: What percentage of the world is evil?
RB: It’s a lot more than I would’ve thought a couple of years ago. It’s quite depressing, to be honest.
RS: What % of your personality can you choose?
RB: I didn’t choose any part of my personality. I’m a mashup of all of my ancestors. I try to tame certain parts of my personality and nurture the good parts, but that can be hard, especially when we’re bombarded with hateful and angry internet content at all times. I have to get rid of my phone, but I keep making excuses to myself, and I never do it.
RS: How has mental health affected your creative life?
RB: It is the driving force behind most of my songs. Making music is a way to help with my mental health issues. When I’m playing music and writing, I try to achieve an almost trance-like state of mind where my body and my brain feel kind of numb and relaxed, like I’m high or something. When I’m playing piano at home, I get that feeling often. Onstage, as of late with the current band lineup, Geoff Hilhorst on organ and Mike Silverman on drums, I’m able to zone out most nights. The high I get lasts for several weeks after I return home. This is the reason I play music. It’s a hard thing to explain to someone who has never experienced it. I’m very lucky to have a very understanding wife who has also experienced that same state of mind.
RS: Which parent do you sound like when you’re angry?
RB: Both my parents are very calm when they get angry. I, on the other hand, get angry, and I’m not exactly sure who it came from.
RS: What % of utility have we lost or gained from the internet?
RB: Most of it. We’ve lost our empathy, creativity, and curiosity. We’ve lost our ability to forgive people and converse with people that we disagree with. It’s mainly the social media that has made us lazy and useless. The internet was fun when it was only available on a desktop computer in the corner of your dining room. Now we have been poisoned with a hellish anger that has been caused by the internet. I liked the world prior to the invention of the laptop computer.
RS: Do you do what you do so you don’t get sad or because you are?
RB: I started off playing music and writing songs because I was sad, but nowadays I have to play it to keep myself from being sad. I have to know that there are shows booked and recordings to be made in order to keep myself from being filled with dread. Aside from my family, it’s really the only thing that keeps me feeling sane, that and playing with electronics.
RS: Does answering questions in a public forum worry you or inspire you?
RB: It worries me. I change a lot, and I’m embarrassed by things I’ve said in the past, so I’m usually quite quiet and don’t say a whole lot. That being said, I find these questions much more inspiring than usual questions like “How did you come up with your band name?”
RS: Which list is longer: a list of everything wrong or a list of everything that isn’t?
RB: A list of everything wrong. I should probably change that and start looking at more of the positive things in life, I’d probably be a happier person. It just seems like the world is getting worse. It’s becoming harder and harder to make a living making music. I’ve been forced to work other jobs and after 15 years of being a full-time musician, that can be upsetting. That being said, my life is much happier than it was 10 years ago, I’m not sure if that’s because I’m not constantly on the road or what.
RS: If you had the choice, would you choose to live again without knowing you were given a choice?
RB: Yes. Maybe I would have become an electrician. I would’ve liked to have been an electrician.
RS: Bonus question: Drugs?
RB: No, thankfully.
RS: Bonus Jeopardy: one small regret (big ones also welcome) I have is:
RB: Wasting my time with people that have taken advantage of me over the years. I’ve realized that, unfortunately, some people aren’t as loyal as I’d hoped.
Ryan Boldt is the lead singer and songwriter of the Canadian roots band The Deep Dark Woods. He lives in Ontario Province with his wife, their child, and dog where he spends his spare time curing meats.
Jason Sebastian Russo is a founding member of Mercury Rev, Hopewell and numerous other bands and creative spaces. He holds an MFA from Bennington, was named Lead Scout, holds positions of spiritual guidance with several institutions, and runs the Retsoor accounts, worldwide.
Rob Kaniuk lives in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania with his wife, Erin, and their dog, Virgil Caine. He runs FT.
Derek Maine
March 31, 2026
At 30,000 feet in the air, on my escape from Fajardo, I began drying out and replaying certain scenes in my head. The conversation with the ferry captain, for one. I had occasion to spend several mornings and cups of coffee with the ferry captain. The ferry runs on the hour from the El Conquistador resort to their private island, Palomino. “Every day back and forth.” He hated his job, bored out of his skull. The emerald waters, craggy coastline. He hated it all with every sinew of his being. “Every day back and forth.” Here he was shepherding rich tourists each day to a private island amidst some of the world’s most serene, natural beauty and the route was poison for him. He looked at the waters and the coastline like an office worker might look at a Microsoft Teams message. I thought about this for a long time.
April 3, 2026
Back at the King’s Motel, mid-Atlantic squalor. The recession has begun.
U.S. fighter jets (2) shot down over Iran. Scant details. Conflicting reports. At least one soldier was successfully rescued and evacuated. Oil up, markets down, Easter weekend.
The United States and Israel are unsure of the new Supreme Leader’s health and have not, at least publicly, acknowledged receiving any proof of life. Iran reported he was injured in the initial strike that killed his father, the old Supreme Leader, and his wife. There has been no evidence he is alive or conscious or well. Dear Leader has mentioned, on several occasions, talking to new people in Iran. While the internal politics of the current regime, in place since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, may be incredibly complicated, shifting suddenly, roles reconfiguring, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has decidedly proven their skill, power, cohesion, and creativity. Ownership of the Strait of Hormuz is no longer a theoretical question, an incredibly powerful economic and geopolitical victory for Iran. Sanctions against Iran, levied by America, have been lifted, by America, in a desperate attempt to keep oil and jet fuel prices down (and markets up) by allowing Iranian oil to fill gaps in the market. Billions and billions of dollars, now flowing daily into the country that were entirely absent when America started the war. The war it cannot get out of and cannot win, some are saying.
War brings out the beast in people. I am certainly no exception. My ex-wife wants to see me. I do not recall where we last left off or what I last shared. I must be honest: I have been taking a lot of drugs (mostly painkillers and whippets, kratom but that’s to take the edge off, a clinically insane amount of weed but that’s prescribed to me, or was prescribed to me at a tarot reading, three different types of benzodiazepines mostly prescribed though not taken as) and have not written or followed the war or edited or sold my novel (Wartime Author, awaiting press, 2027) or even found someone interested enough to simply say “hey, saw your column. Sometimes it is good. Send me some pages and a synopsis with a couple comps but no more than twenty pages.”
So I have no recollection of what I have shared in these parts and what I have collected for myself to stew on and misinterpret ungraciously at some later date. Where we stand is: the (absurd, ridiculous, there are two sides to every story, no one is a saint, who amongst us, etc…) TRO has been lifted by her at her request. My father, or whoever was giving me shit about it last, can eat a bag of dicks. I am not a danger to myself and others, and the State of Maryland concedes this. I am codified. Look me up, Dad. Your son is so far from a danger to himself and others that there are notarized court documents attesting to such. I mailed her the storage key but I have not gone to Bethesda to claim anything yet. My work gives me occasion to travel to Washington, DC to the center of power of the failing falling American empire in its hedonistic, foul last gasps of a lion era. I will visit a storage facility in Bethesda, Maryland on my next reporting trip. Farewell Transmission covers all expenses, has been nothing but kind. She wrote me the letter. I recited the first line. I still do. I sing it around my room. The temperature changes here so suddenly and drastically in the mid-Atlantic onset of Spring, and I have to constantly change settings on the heating and air unit. The rest of the letter was not terribly incising. I have written her worse. Certainly, and always, longer, which any writer’s partner will tell you is its own suffocating, nasty punishment. We punish each other. We always have. It has at times turned us on and at times turned us off. She will meet me, she thinks, in May, on a beach in New Jersey I have never heard of and whose name I cannot recall. I immediately wonder where the wars will be when I attend to my small, personal battle in May on a beach in New Jersey and I immediately wonder what she might be wearing.
April 4, 2026
Pooh Shiesty got out of jail, linked up with his Dad and robbed Gucci Mane.
I have given up betting on basketball. I am back to my roots, betting on a fight between two men in the ring. But only the sweet science. I have never enjoyed watching men wrestle. Tonight I put two weeks rent at the King’s Motel on Sam Goodman knocking out Rodrigo Ruiz. I know nothing about either fighter. It is just what’s on television right now and I liked the look in Goodman’s eye in the corner and the +400 odds. Round 4 ends and the fight is likely tied. But it’s a twelve round fight. If I lose this I have to find a mail room gig through the office services temp agency this week. If I win I can avoid this psychic damage. Tomorrow is Easter.
The fight goes the distance. Monday I will have to call Carol. Carol controls the couriers, the mail rooms, the corporate caterers in this sputtering downtown. I will have to take whatever she can find me, and pray I do not have to shave.
The pilot from one of the downed fighter jets is being hunted by the Americans and the Iranians. The Israelis as well. The mighty American military, so far losing bigly in this war (Iran more powerful as a state regardless of regime, strained international relations and loss of any trust and faith left with all of our allies except, notably, Israel, loss of American lives, serious ongoing economic costs, etc.) claimed to have destroyed Iranian air defenses. They are apparently still able to shoot our planes out of the sky. Pray the man is found alive by his men.
Dear Leader gives a new deadline for Iran to re-open the Strait of Hormuz: 48 hours. Speculation Dear Leader is at the hospital, a recurring bit.
Conspiracies are usually leaks.
April 5, 2026
12:48 am – Dear Leader announces the missing service member has been rescued, injured but will “be just fine.” It is Easter today.
Dear Leader rises on Easter morning and proclaims to the Iranian people, and the world: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
April 7, 2026
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he promises.
He changes his mind. Announces a two week ceasefire instead. The ceasefire lasts one minute and 39 seconds.
The ten point plan being discussed to end the war calls for the United States and Israel to stop attacking Iran, for Israel to leave Lebanon, for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz and receive a $2 million toll for each ship’s passage (it will split these fees with Oman) in lieu of war reparations to further enshrine control over the rules of passage in Hormuz (prior to the war it was an Internationally governed body of water), and all sanctions will be lifted against Iran. An appropriately humiliating defeat for America and Israel.
April 8, 2026
Israel attacks Lebanon. Iran closes the Strait.
April 9, 2026
Days of bed rot, unable to shower or leave my room, I begin to suspect the world as it is and my existence are somehow incompatible. At odds. In a tussle.
An impasse, uneasy truce.
My ed. texts me an article of a parking garage collapse. 1 dead, 2 missing. Incoherent string of texts, i told them this would happen1.
April 11, 2026
There are less hours in a day then you might want, and sometimes far more.
Or else it was some phrase in German. It doesn’t matter. You forget how to write. It happens. Sometimes it happens that you forget how to write. It happens to the best of us.
The worst person you can imagine is purchasing a $1.50 pimento cheese sandwich at Augusta as we speak.
The Vice President, a certified creep, a professional loser and bestselling author (the bastard), is in peace talks with Iran this Saturday while the markets are closed and the strait is closed and my ex-wife has moved in (temporarily) with me at the King’s Motel (primarily for sexual research) and I have become obsessed with Helen DeWitt who revealed this week she turned down a $175,000 literary prize from Yale (no strings attached) because she could not make the promotional (the strings attached) demands work on account of some logistical issues with wifi and European data roaming plans in Berlin and signs of severe depressive episodes and an almost artistically enviable lack of executive function and I come up for air very little as I immerse myself in her words and work, poring over her novels, interviews, profiles, personal history.
Last month’s column was poor form, I think we can all admit this. I was more comfortable in a European war, I will admit. My editor reminds me Russia is at least partially in Asia and I hang up on him. He has left me a voice note begging forgiveness and explaining that “even the greats had bad periods! You are just in a temporary lull. The war has taken a lot out of you!” He’s not wrong, but he’s still an asshole.
Helen Dewitt never had a bad period, I text him. Of course she did, and many at that, but her work never suffered for it. She never would have submitted the putrid piece of shit column I wrote last month, purporting to cover a war and merely relaying headlines often days (sometimes weeks) behind. She would have told Farewell Transmission to go toss itself.
What interests me about Helen DeWitt and why am I fucking my ex-wife again? Both excellent questions I am in no state to answer.
My editor sends me a voice note: they are LAUGHING at you in BATH HOUSES across EUROPEAN CAPITAL CITIES.
April 12, 2026
I think Dear Leader called the Pope a piece of shit or thereabouts. I am trying my damnedest to stay away from the news. I allow myself certain periods with the phone and it must be dedicated to correspondence and crosswords (but not more than two or three a day, ideally). I break my own rules often or pretend to conveniently forget them and accidentally see the United States Navy has been ordered to block the strait of Hormuz and American leaders are talking all kinds of shit about the Pope.
April 21, 2026
We blockaded the blockade and there was a cease fire and there was a threat of decimation, desalination plants, power plants, bridges and there was another cease fire and a ship was seized and ships turned around and a ceasefire was in place and then was not until it was extended.
Dear Leader, his bottom rubbed with baby oil by Israeli Prime Minister and Raging War Criminal Lunatic Netenyahoo, started a war in Iran he can’t get out of and he can’t win. Iran’s air defenses are decimated. In exchange all sanctions are lifted and they get a toll bridge to print money and everyone in the world knows not to fuck with Iran.
These are the relevant, serious truths about the war. My serious truth is I would like to transcend the war. I would like to find a publisher and move out of this motel and I would like the Ukraine war to end so I can stop covering wars on screens, constantly a flow of massacres and human suffering, information, misinformation, lies and propaganda, images of dead schoolchildren and drone footage, missile strikes, cluster maps, and I started to write a novel where I would follow the war from beginning to end and somewhere in the middle there was no end in sight. I was sent to hospital. Now I live in a motel. My ex-wife is still staying here. She rents a co-working space downtown and makes phone calls all day. She tried to do it here once and she slapped the shit out of me for an hour (I liked it) for projectile vomiting and fucking up her call, ruining her life, being a disgusting freak and subhuman and then she left to buy some cigarettes. That was a weird week. Ultimately kratom was a mistake and things are (thankfully) different now.
April 22, 2026
Iran seized three ships in the Strait, fired on three.
April 23, 2026
Ordering bottle service at the club. Velvet booth, the DJ is playing Tom Wait’s The Earth Died Screaming. Several antelope sit down at the table next to me. It has not rained here in months.
A United States soldier on the Madura mission was caught using his classified information to make $400,000 on polymarket betting on the capture of Madura. Dear Leader announces a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon (we are in a war with Iran).
My birthday present to myself was a futures bet on the North Carolina Tarheels winning the men’s national basketball championship in April of 2027.
April 24, 2026
My ex-wife left yesterday. She will be back in a few weeks. It was amicable, very amicable. But in less than 24hrs I am back to old devices, feeling disrupted. I was supposed to copy and paste from one thought to another and forgot. This is the state of American letters. Everyone is very sorry. They gave us screens to look at that fit in our hands. It’s basically over, already. We won. We basically, it’s almost over. It’s almost over already so I don’t understand what the big deal is.
Do you know how much we lost not being present? Not accepting and learning to be bored? To sit with that. To sit with yourself without constant distraction, companion, mahjong tiles, crossword puzzles, and porn in your motherfucking pocket. Don’t worry, it will all be over soon and your services will not be needed.
April 25, 2026
The shooter at the White House Correspondence Dinner has been apprehended.
CNN reports Dear Leader and his cabinet are safe and the dinner program will resume soon.
Events of the evening at the Washington Hilton hotel.
The dinner program will not resume. Dear Leader will give his speech in the White House briefing room.
April 26, 2026
Dear Leader says this is why we need the ballroom.
In the initial wave of attacks on Iran, to kick off the war, up to fifty Iranian leaders in the regime were terminated. The new Supreme Leader is disfigured, badly burned and immobile. He receives news by post by horseback. The Iranian republican guard is firmly in control of the Strait of Hormuz and, with it, the fate of the country. Likely we have replaced one hardline violent regime with a new, more ruthless regime. The Middle East, and the world, are significantly less secure.
The White House Correspondence Dinner shooter, Cole, because history demands a failed would-be assassin in the year 2026 be a ‘Cole,’ wrote a little over a thousand words attempting to morally justify the act he set out to do, some history he saw himself performing, a hero, a moralist. Of course it was all bullshit. Political assassinations are never morally good because no one can predict the externalities, butterfly effects, landscape shifting monumental world history moving consequences. Violence is our worst communication means as humans. It does not matter what policy or person or perversion you support. Deportations and displacements are down an estimated 30% since ICE murdered two American citizens a few war columns back. The violence, while celebrated and justified by the hard right, harmed their own political project. We were violent with Iran. A country now controlled by the most extreme islamists to ever rule a country and they have a cash cow toll and world economic disrupter in the Strait of Hormuz. A man, a ‘Cole,’ a tutor from California, takes a train to Washington, DC and checks into the Hilton in DuPont Circle to assassinate the President of The United States and members of his cabinet at the lowest point of Dear Leader’s political career, fails and unifies. Violence is abhorrent even when justified (and here it was most certainly not), often igniting the aims of those you wish to eradicate.
April 28, 2026
Build the ballroom! Open the pools!
I thought I would learn something. I thought something would reveal itself to me. Nothing ever did.
At the sound bath tonight, in the Womb Room of a local yoga studio, I lie in the back, pills kicking in, sobbed silently uncontrollably and realized I cannot fight or write my way out of this, or any, war.
I have to go to bed early tonight and I have to wear my cpap machine because tomorrow I have to meet with Carol and shuffle papers in one of the dimly lit aggressively air conditioned hell box big glass buildings downtown. My gambling led me here and I deserve it. It’s even a little good for the soul, I’d argue, to simmer in the goop of it all for a while. Its numbing powers are transcendent. Perhaps that is exactly what I need? What war? What novel? I have hundreds of readers and several secret admirers. And if the North Carolina Tarheels win the national championship 11 months from now I will have seven racks. I wish someone would bet against me.
Derek Maine writes about the war for Farewell Transmission.
By Conrad Joseph Walsh
Vegas heat is oppressive. It makes shoe rubber melt into asphalt. The kind of heat that requires dog owners to put literal shoes on their canine’s paws in the summertime.
I drive to Smith’s Food King to buy some Monster Energy drinks. The white ones. I get the drinks and put them in my cart.
I slouch down a few more aisles with no real goal. The cereal aisle screams with loud colors and cartoonish fonts. I add a box of Trix to my cart. A man starts talking to me, and I wish I had my AirPods in.
“None of this stuff is good for us, but here we are, right?”
“Right.”
“Health is the most valuable thing there is. It’s not money. If we’re rich but sick, then what do we really have.”
“That’s a good point.”
“Have a good one, brother.”
“You too.”
I escape the aisle and head for checkout. Gotta get out before another impromptu conversation. Without AirPods, it’s too risky to be in here like this.
The Dalai Lama once said that the ultimate source of happiness is not money and power, but warm-heartedness. But the Dalai Lama is rich. His net worth is 150 mil––so much for that vow of poverty. And before you tell me about how it’s held in a foundation and that he doesn’t have access to it, et cetera, et cetera, what I know is this: his rent is always covered, he has book deals, and that pad in Dharamshala isn’t exactly a dump.
I feel myself atrophy in the parking lot. The palm trees look like candles on a birthday cake, waiting to be lit by the waves of heat radiating off parked cars and abandoned shopping carts on Tropicana.
Conrad Joseph Walsh writes fiction and essays exploring disillusionment, absurdity, and the quiet pressures of modern life. His work has appeared in Expat and elsewhere online. He lives in the American Southwest.
by Naa Asheley Ashitey
I’m not giving up, but I won’t lie to you: I’m starting to get really tired
It feels like we’re going backwards. No, I know we’re going backwards. Everyone believes we’re the generation that’s going to fix this, but I don’t think we will. I don’t think we ever will.
My dad might still have his November 2008 copy of the Chicago Defender, and I am still able to walk freely in the halls of these ivory towers because Brown V Board passed barely a decade after my father was born, and yet every single day I wonder if all my fuck ups are going to be the reason why the next incoming class in my med school might have no Black students.
The bold, defiant tone I speak with is somehow more hated by third-term Obama liberals I know as my fellow peers than the white man that called me a nigger when I went to pick up my chipotle order the other day. How broken must we be that when I scroll my social media I see more people crying over the fact that we will likely never live under an institution ruled by another Black war criminal. How broken must I be that I, who openly calls that man a war criminal, am still willing to waste 270 characters defending said war criminal in a tweet, because that term has been reduced to another dog-whistle; another word and phrase that I’ve come to hate, alongside “well-spoken,” “educated,” “polished.”
“Akata.”
How broken must we be that we’re going backwards because my people have always moved forward; that we are capable of occupying the spaces built by our own blood, at the cost of the morals and sufferings of our past ancestors being used in speeches about inclusion and progress, as we are now able to participate in imperialistic bombing campaigns and rewriting laws that if we had not undone, we would not be able to be the ones undoing them because we’d still be blocked.
I still hold sympathy for my people who once believed we could change the evil of this world, only to find themselves complicit. Even as I watch families torn apart and children born beneath rubble, I’m still getting text messages from my classmates who are more concerned with the language I use to fight oppression than recognizing the privilege of never having to have fight for the basic civil liberty of sitting down and studying for fifteen hours straight to take a poorly written med school midterm.
Hush little baby please don’t cry, I want you to dream of lights and stars tonight.
When I was a child, I used to have this nightmare about a dinosaur chasing me. If my mother wasn’t shaking me awake, it would often be my sudden jolt and eruption of sobs that would cause her to wake up. My dad would rush in from the living room to help my mom calm down my non-stop babbling about how I don’t want the dinosaur to kill me. Eventually, I would fall back asleep, clutching my favorite brown teddy bear, hoping she would absorb the nightmares.
When I’d wake up the next morning, I could feel how puffy my eyes were. Sometimes as an extra present, I’d have more snot than usual falling down my nose. Though most notably, once I truly was awake and aware of my surroundings, I could recognize physically and mentally that something had shifted; I felt this notable disorientated feeling. At age four I did not know nor use that word, so in four-year-old terms, I felt “crummy” and “bleh.”
Sometimes, my mom was still asleep in her bed or the couch (depending on where I was sleeping that night), or she was already in the kitchen cooking breakfast (or lunch if it was a really bad cry that tired me out). I slowly walked to the bathroom, aware that my vision was slightly worse than normal, especially when I’d bump into the corner of the brown dresser in the room. When I looked at myself in the mirror, it was more terrifying to see how a silly dream that I made up in my head could put me in such a state in which I looked so awful. I felt like I was looking at a shell of myself. I was one year shy of seeing Evanescence’s “Everybody’s Fool” music video but it’s almost uncanny how I created the mirror scene on my own—minus smashing my hand and cutting myself. I’d touch the bags under my eyes, thinking if I pushed down hard enough, the bags would deflate. I’d try to smile and bring back the image of myself that I was used to seeing; one that wasn’t this disheveled. It was futile. The smile would dissipate, and it felt like I was looking at a horror scene. I knew if my mom saw how I looked, she’d worry. So I’d splash cold water on my face (I didn’t know about the ice-cube/spoon-in-freezer trick yet) to reduce the puffiness. Once my mom was awake or done in the kitchen, I’d call her to help me brush my teeth and get ready for the day. She never really asked me more about the nightmares. In retrospect, I’m glad she never did; it almost felt quite nice to leave the nightmare behind and simply move on. She’d walk away to get an extra towel for my bath, but in the seven seconds she was gone, I’d look back in the mirror, touch those eyebags once more and turn away.
I couldn’t swear away nightmares, but I certainly wanted to do whatever I could to avoid them. So, my bright idea: constantly do things that made me happy in the day. I would beg my mom to let us go on a walk in the park across the street or head to the playground two blocks away from the Jewel-Osco we bought groceries at. It was the distraction I needed. If we couldn’t get time to go out, I’d reread some of my favorite books (while complaining to my mom we needed another dollar tree or library run) to my teddy bears and barbies till it was TV time and I could watch Cyberchase. Ultimately, I was distracted, and it felt freeing. I felt so sure that as long I kept this routine up, the nightmares would cease.
And then I joined the gifted program in kindergarten and learned that nightmares could happen in the day and come in the form of other kids. In 1st grade, the arguments turned into yelling, and I started to fall in love with silence. In 2nd grade, I looked for new coping mechanisms and found sharpening a pencil and digging it into my right arm gave me the relief I needed. In 5th grade, I started hoping and begging my mind to give me the dinosaur nightmares in place of watching my home fall apart, and the fast-growing apathy and hate I felt towards myself.
I don’t remember when I stopped being afraid to see what I looked like in the mirror. All I know is that I started to become grateful to wake up and see my disheveled state.
It meant that I was still alive.
I want to be a mother
I want to be a mother. I want to be a good mother. I want to be a better mother than my mother was, not that she wasn’t good or that she didn’t love me, but that I don’t want my daughter to end up like me. I want my daughter to never think about the number of calories in a frappe. I want her to never fear telling me how she feels. She should be able to complete her sentences and not just fall into silence, keeping her true feelings to herself. I want her to always believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, maybe not forever, but longer than age 6. Maybe till she’s 10. That might be too old. I don’t know what age you’re supposed to stop believing in those things, but I know I didn’t believe long enough. I want her to walk in sneakers and heels, or whichever one she likes more, I’ll get her as many as possible in all her favorite colors. I want her to never wake up with the walls of her bedroom rumbling from audio vibrations, if so, it must only come from the TV, never from my voice or her dad’s. I want to nurse all her tummy aches, sing her songs even after she’s fallen into REM, and dance with her even when I don’t want to get up from the ground. I hope she never finds my pill bottles. I hope she never asks about the girls in old photos of mine that I don’t know anymore, and I can spare her from learning the complicated dynamics of friendships and the heartbreak that it can come with. Maybe she’ll know how to make friends better than me, so she’ll never have to learn how to heal from losing what you thought would be life long-friendships. Maybe she won’t have to learn that it will take about a year before you can talk about those people and recall memories without feeling that ache in your stomach and tears welling up in your eyes. Frankly, I hope she wakes up from nightmares about dinosaurs and unintelligible objects, and never from the things I said to her, or the things she says to herself in her head. I want to be a mother. I want to be a good mother. I want to be a better mother than my mother was, not that she wasn’t good or that she didn’t love me. I just don’t want my daughter to wish that her mother would’ve taken SSRIs and believed in therapists as much as she believed in the Lord. I don’t want my daughter to end up writing stupid prose poems at 11:28pm on a Saturday about how she hopes she doesn’t fuck up as a mother, not because I think my mother fucked up. But because I am fucked up, for a lot of reasons. Some of those reasons just happen to include my mother.
Dread without the Jenga Pieces
1:23am:
I can sometimes be a scaredy-cat. Isn’t everyone? No, well, okay then. No, it’s fine, I might as well just be honest here. Yes, I am a scaredy-cat. Anytime I play Mario Kart with my cousins, I request levels that don’t have any of the chain-champers or whatever those fucking creepy blocks are called that fall on your head. Thwomps? Thwamps? Whatever. It is not even fear in a jumpscare manner. It’s just, like, seeing a face turn angry and move quickly to attack that freaks me out. I’m not explaining this right but whatever. Overall, I’m not into scary games or scary movies, though I know a lot about the Five Nights at Freddy’s games from watching all my favorite YouTubers play it. Their reactions to the jump scares are funny so it seems weird that I can handle that type of content, but I can never play any of the complicated Mario Kart levels with the things that scare me or I’ll cry.This is a really stupid confession. I don’t know, I have so many other things that I’m scared of, but I feel like they are things I bring up that inevitably separates myself from people. I’d rather confess about Mario Kart than all the intrusive thoughts I’m fighting back acting on every single moment. But it’s so hard, you know?
You’re supposed to be able to talk to your friends about how you’re doing. I want to tell people that I’m not doing okay. I want to tell people that I’m not really suicidal. I’m not suicidal, like, I’m not. I guess there are times that I just want everything to stop and be silent, but not in a dead kind of way. Or sort of in a dead kind of way. I know they say to reach out to your friends and be honest, but I think I share too much that it scares people or stresses them out. I become the stressful friend, instead of the strong friend confessing I’m having a rough time and I just want someone to know I’m working on it but I’m struggling. I don’t want to push people away, but I also don’t want to keep being open and honest with people about how I’m doing, just to wake up the next morning to discover I’m blocked. It’s a double-edged sword. When I keep everything in, I get hurt. When I decide that I need to free up some gigabytes of storage, I let the choir sing, echoing in a long, empty hall. I share, I laugh, I sob, and end up alone. I get even more hurt waking up to find out that the people I thought I could trust decided I was too much and completely deleted a relationship like it was nothing. Like those years of laughs and hugs was all for nothing. Like my honesty was some kind of contagious disease people needed to protect themselves from.
I just want to be like everyone else who has these struggles but can maintain friendships. What is wrong with me? Was there just some unspoken guideline everyone else got at the beginning of adulthood that never got updated for me? I really want to tell others how I’m doing but it’s nice having people to text and I don’t want my phone to go dry again. Please, I just need someone to tell me what the fuck I should do so this doesn’t dissolve once more.
“…… [chat gpt generating a response].”
Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian-American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging.
Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth.
Her creative work appears or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, BULL, Hobart, Michigan City Review of Books, and editorials for The Xylom, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction. More at NaaAshitey.com.
Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social
By Jenn Salcido
The DJ has just started a new job on a new radio station that plays Tori Amos and makes people in the small town very angry.
The reporter lives in the small town and has noticed that the radio is playing Tori Amos instead of oldies.
One of the things the DJ likes about the radio station is how he simply projects into cars and rooms he will never see if he doesn’t want to, which mostly he does not.
The reporter clandestinely listens to him in one of these rooms. It is the Computer Room. The reporter is 14.
#
The DJ lives in one of those townhome developments off the highway. He doesn’t yet know anybody in town, and his life is a vector between his townhome and the station. He is a little lonely but mostly fine.
The reporter lives in a different development on the other side of town, one that is lush with sodded bluegrass carpets and Bartlett pear trees that shower rubbery leaves all over the damp sidewalk on days like today.
The reporter’s parents have taken the modem from the Computer Room. I hate them, she thinks.
Across town the DJ is cozy at work in the studio, sipping herbal tea between the different little on-air bits he does. “Hey, I’m The Oracle and that was Tori Amos, of course, with ‘Crucify.’”
The DJ likes that record but honestly he’s a little pissed off about the new mandate he’s gotten from the media conglomerate who bought the station. He looks with disdain at the printout that lists the mandatory top 25 rotation, all of which he must fit in “organically” during his slot. “And next up? We’ve got Suzanne Vega with ‘Tom’s Diner.’”
The reporter comes home and stomps up to her room and turns on her radio and she is SO HAPPY when she hears “Tom’s Diner.”
The DJ looks at his watch and is worried that if he doesn’t have enough time left to get through the mandatory top 25 rotation, he’ll get put on DJ probation. This would not be good; it has happened to him once before. In that case he was simply reading a public service announcement and made some unfortunate flourishes with language that were not appropriate for the time of day.
The reporter is pacing around her room, thinking about all the instant messaging she could be doing were the modem not in modem jail. Recently, she has obtained an internet boyfriend and is now more eager even than usual to hear that clickity clack static and the “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!”
Sometimes when her father wants to make her angry he teases her by announcing “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” whenever he enters a room.
#
After school the next day the reporter comes home to find that her parents have relented and the modem is plugged back in. No one is home to tell her otherwise so she logs in, finds no mail, clicks around a bit.
Inspired by her growing stack of SPIN magazines, she has started to make her own website, accessible via the World Wide Web. She has figured out that she can make Word documents and save them as .html files. She likes trying out different backgrounds. She has learned how to loop an image over and over and over. She can, for example, make a page with a background that looks like stars in an infinitely scrolling sky. It’s hard to read the writing on that particular background, though.
Once she has her home page arranged enough, she opens her email and writes the DJ. He is going to be the first interview for her new online magazine on the World Wide Web.
#
The DJ wakes up to start his Saturday, and feels the paunch of middle age sliding down his hips when he gets up from the couch. He thinks he should start exercising soon, probably. He lights a cigarette and gets coffee going.
He goes over to the computer and logs in. “WELCOME! YOU’VE GOT MAIL!”
TheOracle107@aol.com clicks on his inbox. He skims the subject lines, deletes some scams. There is a note from an address he hasn’t seen before. He opens the email.
Dear Mr. The Oracle, I am looking to interview respected figures in music culture for my magazine. I really enjoy listening to your show and have found a lot of my favorite artists because of you. Do you think I can interview you? We can do this over IM. Respectfully, Laurel M.”
He cackles. Dear Mr. The Oracle!
“Sure,” he writes the reporter. “Call me Dave, though. IM is fine. I’m around today.”
Sent. Whoosh.
“YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” comes the call to the reporter’s post in the computer room. After she opens her mailbox and reads the note, she checks and sees that TheOracle107 is online!
“Hey,” she types into the void.
“Hi,” the DJ answers back.
They get to talking. The morning zips by. The reporter’s questions are a bit timid. The DJ imagines she’s maybe just out of college, doing her first internship at a radio station somewhere.
The reporter cannot believe her luck. What a coup for the first issue.
They chat for a while, mostly about the music itself but a little about themselves, what they like, what movies they’re watching lately. The flow of their rapport makes the DJ relax a little bit too much and he catches himself complaining about work, about how that’s changed. He realizes he’s holding his breath when he thinks about that.
After the conversation winds down, the reporter copies and pastes the chat transcript into a Word doc, which she plans to edit later.
The reporter asks the DJ if he has a bio.
“Sure,” he types. “All celebrity DJs do.”
#
Later that night, the reporter is still situated in the Computer Room when she hears the shrill demand for her to appear at the dinner table “right this minute.” She complies.
“I will take this to go,” she says, grabbing the Schwann’s breaded chicken patty with rice pilaf accoutrement. “I am working.”
Back in the Computer Room, enraptured by the sallow light of the cathode ray tube, the reporter can feel a piece of herself float up from the top of her head and dissipate into a realm that knows neither time nor space. This piece bears little relation to the crepuscular creature in the chair.
She opens the 30 second sample clip of “I’ll Be There For You” by the Rembrandts that she downloaded and plays it a few times in a row.
The DJ is alone again in his apartment. I should try harder to make friends, he thinks. Instead, he makes his way to his desktop and clicks the icon.
“WELCOME!”
There is always a little pause between the welcome and the announcement of mail. In this pause, hopes and dreams are made and crushed; the reporter knows this as well, if not better, than the DJ. The reporter is in the throes of a full-blown internet addiction, whereas the DJ is just a bit bored.
The DJ has no mail, but sees the reporter’s handle in the chat box.
The reporter is busily typing a very long-winded fiction to her internet boyfriend about her daily activities. In the fiction, she has been invited to a party, and she’s going to the mall with some friends to pick out an outfit. It’s hard sometimes to keep the reality from straining into the fiction, especially when she’s nearing the time of day when she has to shut everything down and prepare for the next morning. The mornings are firmly grounded in a horrible reality, with no room for the fiction.
Because she is no dummy, she also includes a critique of a long, old book she has not read.
Satisfied and clicking “send,” she is surprised when she sees a new window, an invitation to converse with Mr. The Oracle.
“Hey!” she writes.
“Sorry to bug.”
“Not bugging.”
“Wondering if you needed anything else. For the magazine.”
“Hmmm I haven’t really finished the article just yet. Been really busy at work.”
The reporter re-enters her body. Her eyes flash around the room, as if some source of information could possibly leak details of her appearance or her life through IM.
“Oh yeah cool cool,” he says.
The DJ thinks he sounds dull. Why does he care?
“I’m really close though, like going to finish it soon. It’ll be great.”
“Yeah.”
“How are you? Are you doing well, or are you also staring directly into the meaningless nothing?”
He laughs, out loud, at that, and starts typing again.
#
For a few days in a row now, the reporter has been corresponding with the DJ in short bursts on instant message. They haven’t gone too deep on any one thing; mostly she talks to him about music she likes. She gets some recommendations from him and tells him a few lies to make her reading life sound smart.
She tells him about how, at Circuit City, she sometimes hides CDs in the wrong alphabetical order so that they will be there the next time she comes, and that is when he asks her: “Do you want to grab a drink?”
She blinks.
Her cheeks redden. Even though she knows the doors are closed, she looks over her shoulder. She is smart! She is desirable! She is, as her internet boyfriend told her while they were having “cyber” yesterday, “so sexy.” The DJ wants to go get a drink with her.
Don’t worry. This is not that kind of story.
Her mind doesn’t go to the after school special place where older men take advantage of girls, kidnapping them from sleepy midwestern towns and making them their slaves in some creepy cabin in the woods. She’s not even thinking about age at all, or questioning the DJ’s motives, or remembering that she’s been frequently told she comes off as older and more mature in her writing.
Instead, her thoughts go to a different place, a softer place. There is heat there, and she feels some possibilities opening up to her that she’d never before considered. In her life, there is an unbreakable wall that separates her from the notions of desire, and from being desired. In her internet life, she is the recipient of genuine feelings from her internet boyfriend, and also she begins to inhabit the life that she projects to him. When she wakes up in the morning, there is a small, clouded window of time when she is no longer inhabiting her life, but her other life, and her other life is exactly how she wants it.
When her internet boyfriend ::leans in and plays gently with hair::, she feels the flutters in her heart that all the adult contemporary radio programming has promised there would be.
She feels that finally, here in the other space, she has become desired, desirable.
“Soooo ummmm” she types, and adds a smiley face with a nose, which seems less flirtatious than the smiley face without the nose. “I have a boyfriend actually, sorry.”
Across town, the DJ is listening to the new Soundgarden record and flipping between windows of his web browser when he registers the sound of her response. He had gotten deep into a Usenet forum rabbit hole and had totally forgotten he had offered the reporter a date.
It bloops again. “Sorry, r u mad?”
“Oh no haha all good,” he assures her, then closes the window.
Jenn Salcido is a writer from Los Angeles. Her short fiction has appeared in Vlad Mag, Zac Smith’s Chrismzine, X-R-A-Y, JAKE, and Back Patio Press. You can read her work at www.jennsalcido.com.
X: @jenneralist
Derek Maine
March 1, 2026
Here we plumb the depths of human misery, the shape of our national boredom.
For the second time in a week bad actors have taken control of my social accounts, this time on the convenient cusp of my new war column. I have too many things to do to pay their ransom or fight this intrusion. My glasses, for one, are broken. I have to call the glasses company and make an appointment. Life is filled with such indignities. I am also, of course, keeping a pulse on the international mood, shipping routes, airspace, the flow of capital, oil, and human atrocities. Some take to the streets to celebrate, some to protest. Reports of a school being bombed in Tehran. A council of clergy has convened, called to select the new Supreme Leader of Iran.
Outside my room at the King’s Motel, on the Lord’s Day and before noon at that, I ask a suspiciously clean, well-dressed teenaged boy, clearly lost or trying his hand at a weekend runaway, what his people on the ground were saying about the war in Iran. Instead of answering my question, he looked at me with cold, fish scale eyes, and said “There’s a healthy debate to be had, but I take the side that Clavicular was not brutally frame mogged by the ASU frat leader.” I immediately went inside my room and took more drugs.
March 2, 2026
America struck a girl’s elementary school in Iran over the weekend, killing at least 50 schoolchildren.
Operation Epic Fury. The Department of War. Everything sounds like a bad marketing slogan for a failed video game in this reactionary circus world, here in the early days of the second quarter of the century. It is impossible to follow a war on the local news these days, I can promise you. My phone is submerged in the bathtub. I am still locked out of all my social media accounts and have been since Operation Epic Fury began.
Dear Leader said the war will end when our objectives are met. The drunk Secretary of War rambled incoherently when asked what the objectives of the war are, stumbling through a mealy mouthed response of nonsense, first ignoring the question until mid-monologue he’d clearly forgotten it entirely. The largest American military operation in a generation. Objectives unclear.
Dear Leader, last night, on a phone call, says he got the Supreme Leader before the Ayatollah could get him. He said they tried twice and failed.
A shooter in Austin wearing a shirt with the Iranian flag and the words “Property of Allah” in large font initiated a mass casualty event at the center of Austin’s joyous, raucous, West Six Street, hits sixteen, three deceased (as of this hour) and thirteen injured and, the shooter, a 53 year old Senegalese man, naturalized American citizen, is killed on scene by the responding officers. A man with almost no past. In 2022 a vehicle collision in Texas. Warrants out at a home in Pflugerville.
March 3, 2026
Instructions to American citizens stranded in Israel while airspace is closed were to listen to evacuation orders and shelter in place, delivered cheerfully by the white-bearded GLP-1 goober and absolute boob Mike Huckabee, U.S. Ambassador to Israel. The Italians chartered a plane to bring their citizens home.
“Objective? You don’t need no objective in war,” Charles laughed at me tonight when I suggested America’s lack of objectives in the war we just started was concerning. “War is the objective,” he told me. “Always.”
The spam calls are increasing by the hour. I turn my phone over and stare at a larger screen instead. Maps, hot zones, cluster graphs, topologies, troop movements, casualty counts sear into me. I take several doses of gummy bear drugs at once before I swallow a pill then a second. The rest of my ex-wife’s letter was thematically consistent with its first line. My war is small and over and I lost resoundingly.
March 4, 2026
There are so many insane people, delusional, just certified whackos and it’s so beautiful. These are the prophets.
March 5, 2026
For our 250th birthday, the 250th anniversary of a country, born of conquering and colonization, that still became an idea, a promise, a dream, a super power, will celebrate by fighting war in the Middle East. I have only lived 44 of those 250 years (17.6%) but most of them my country has spent tax dollars and blood in the Middle East. I have been thinking about this lately.
The people came to the Oval Office to lay their hands on Dear Leader and pray. The camera crew, the whole production. We watched so much television, in America, we became television.
I shut it all off and spend the day reading BLT, the website listing all BASE jumping deaths.
March 6, 2026
The influencers are under fire in Dubai.
March 8, 2026
There are signs of spring everywhere, even in the cracks of the sidewalks. The dogwood trees are in full bloom. You will come to understand, if you stick with me on this ride1, how important the seasons are to me. I structure my life around them.
Iran has selected the Supreme Leader’s son to be the new Supreme Leader. You will see, these things happen. The son usually inherits the father’s friends, enemies, debts public and private, and wars.
The United States will, of course, be asking OpenAI, the once non-profit large language model artificial intelligence institute, to precisely locate and kill the son.
March 9, 2026
Hundreds of young girls, schoolchildren, under ten.
They are talking about “drinking water and AI” on Bloomberg News tonight. “But first, Stacy, let’s take a look at the headlines. Of course there’s a war in Iran, we’ll get to that, but it is an election year and we had our first primary…” I hang up and eat three cigarettes. I make a Manhattan to calm myself down. I am expecting a young dame to call for my help finding her husband any day now. I put a sign on my red door, room 26, “Private Investigations.”
The rest of the letter didn’t hurt as much as the first line, which always was her problem as a writer. She’s a quipper. She quips. She listed her demands. I may have listed them here already. I forget them just now. She has every right to, of course. All these things and more are under serious consideration. I need time to consider. Space, your therapist called it.
Sudden realization that I cannot run for office.
Too much heat.
Dear Leader tells the news station the “war is pretty much over now.”
The war is done basically almost, he says. We have destroyed them. We double tapped a girl’s school on the first day, killing 165. First the children and then the parents that came running for their children. We did this on the first day of the war we started against Iran alongside Israel. Iran elected the Supreme Leader’s son, the hardline 57 year old whose wife and father were just killed by American and Israeli strikes to set off the war, on the same day of the school strike, to be the new Supreme Leader. Dear Leader says it’s almost done (basically is) but also there will be strikes TWENTY TIMES HARDER if they fuck with the Strait of Hormuz. Dear Leader does not fuck around when it comes to oil, the market, and real estate. ‘Death, Fire and Fury will reign upon them,’ he says and I believe him.
All of life, too, is energy, of vastly varied sizes and configurations, bouncing off each other, just as we bounce off each other and it is painful and beautiful, incredibly difficult, true suffering and true love, but it is a temporary dance for us souls, as we bounce off each other, our ultimate destination a return to the one soul, and we will see separateness is a cosmic illusion along with time, but a real one we feel here on earth, all of us, and a real clock we deal with on earth, all of us, least of which is our own mortal countdown, the agony, despair, hatred, and contempt we feel down here is real but we shall one day, hopefully long after I have sold Wartime Author to a publisher, reunite with all other bouncing souls as one energy, one love, unshackled from the tyranny of time and space.
March 10, 2026
“Very complete, pretty much.”
In the last few hours America destroyed ten ships in the Strait of Homuz, with Dear Leader publicly boasting more to follow. Inactive mine laying boats. And/or ships. Who knows? It’s war.
America is always the insurer of last resort. Often of their own crimes.
March 11, 2026
The FBI warns Iran may strike California with drones2.
Pentagon reports to Congress the first week of the Iran war cost “more than $11.3 billion.” Gas prices are up. There has been no regime change. California is under warning. Sleeper cells are being activated as we speak, the news screams at me. We started this war.
March 12, 2026
A Lebanese American rammed his vehicle into a Michigan synagogue. There were no injuries. Mahomed Bailor Jalloh, who spent eight years in prison for giving aid to the Islamic State, yelled “Allahu Akbar” in a classroom and starting shooting at Old Dominion University. He was subdued and killed by ROTC students. The news channel reports “the domestic terrorist was unalived by the unarmed students.”
Even our language is embarrassed by our bloodlust, necessary as it sometimes may be. Iran’s new Supreme Leader gives his first statement, not appearing on camera after being injured in the first strikes of the war. He assures everyone that Iran will not refrain from avenging the blood of their martyrs.
March 15, 2026
I have been spending my life outside of the trenches, actively avoiding the war. I bought new designer Italian sunglasses instead. A season is getting ready to turn over and I operate on a seasonal schedule. My employers know this. My bosses at Farewell Transmission are kind, supportive souls. The publisher, the top guy who sits behind the desk and everything, he calls me himself the other day and says, “It’s a twelve month contract, Derek. You can be forgiven a bad month or three. Nobody’s expecting Graham Greene. But we do need copy, we need something. You’re the wartime author, but you cannot just use the pages of this publication, and steal the time of our valued readership, to say nothing of our advertisers and various benefactors, using our space to try and sell your novel. Give me news of the war!”
The beginning of the message was quite kind and soft. By the end I was terrified. Too terrified to write. Research was out of the question. Too terrified to be jumping into a war screen. Unsettled. It’s nothing some magnesium a Klonopin and a little weed won’t cure.
Peter Thiel is in Rome prophesying about the Antichrist.
Dear Leader says we’ll handle Cuba next. He has a prominent Cuban-American in his cabinet. Iran warns the UAE to evacuate ports. America is attacking Iran’s Kharg Island, an important oil hub. Outside of a steady, healthy oil flow to China, still no shipping going through the Strait of Hormuz, choking the global energy economy. Japan, Korea are suffering. Their oil flows through the Strait. Russian oil is off-limits. Can we interest our Asian allies in Venezuelan black gold?
March 16, 2026
The Strait has never been fully closed. Numerous threats to close it, and partially closed during the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s. It was not closed during the war in Afghanistan. It was not closed during the Lebanese Civil War, the First Intifada, either Gulf War. It closed officially on March 2nd, two weeks ago. America is back, this time with Israel officially, to war in the Middle East. It likely never ends in my lifetime. America comes and kills, sows chaos, leaves a whole wake of destruction, radicalizes some, frees others, gets her dirty hands in religious, political, tribal, and regional rivalries she’s is in no position to resolve or speak on, and America accidentally strikes elementary schools twice, and America is not directly threatened by Iran. Iran is just a murderous, evil regime in a world full of them. America should know.
March 17, 2026
Twenty-five hundred American marines, boots on the ground, are headed to Kharg Island. American allies have refused to join the war. The press secretary said yesterday Iran was not a threat to America and today she said it was, or perhaps the other way around. I refuse to recall at this late hour.
Dubai arrests anyone reporting on the war, an influencer reports.
Western tax evaders are leaving their pets behind in Dubai.
March 18, 2026
I wake up to the news: Cinnabon has cut ties with “The Bachelorette”
March 19, 2026
Israel and America are targeting energy infrastructure and desalination plants in Iran. Israel is also, in its war with Iran, bombing Beirut (in Lebanon).
Iran strikes Saudi Arabia and Qatar energy infrastructure in kind.
Supreme Leader tried to kill Dear Leader, failed, and then Dear Leader killed Supreme Leader. Now he’s stuck in a war, fighting for Israel’s aims. It is a global economic crisis. Dear Leader needs to find a way to claim victory and get the fuck out. Likely the markets will force his hand.
March 21, 2026
There is war and I am supposed to be covering it. But there are so many and I’m usually tired. I need distilled water for my CPAP machine, but have been too depressed to leave my room for at least sixty hours, likely more. I am surviving on a bulk purchase of freezer pops and benzos. A modern cliche. A middle-aged divorce man with a room at The King’s Motel and a monthly column. I keep waiting to wake up and realize I am living my life.
March 22, 2026
The war in Iran is causing fissures in the downtown scene.
Dear Leader issued an official warning to the Iranian state. Iran has 48 hours to re-open the Strait of Hormuz or he will obliterate their power plants, starting with the biggest one first. 48 hours in all capital letters. From this exact time, it says, released by the White House at 8:40 pm yesterday. Everyone loves a countdown. The world stage plays out like a network reality show because America is run by a network reality show host and America always places her thumb on the world stage’s scale.
March 23, 2026
Nevermind. Dear Leader rescinds the threats mere moments before the oil market opens. Cites productive conversations with Iran.
Iran says there have been no conversations.
You would think the markets, by now, would not move at every Dear Leader pronouncement or threat. He is the Boomer’s P.T. Barnum and the Doomer’s idea of anarchy. Of course he is a thief, a liar, a conman, grifter, and is losing his mind live on television (‘and it wasn’t such a great mind to begin with,’ he’d quip), controlling an army (several at once), and now of course he is sending ICE agents to the airports five days before I take a flight to Puerto Rico. This concerns me, keeps me up at this late hour. I tend to travel with drugs. Dear Leader was in Graceland today. He signed a replica of a guitar Elvis used in his 1973 ‘Aloha from Hawaii’ concert. I forget why I am needed in Puerto Rico, but I’m sure I’ll find out when I get there.
March 24, 2026
Dear Leader announces the war is over. Israel seizes part of Southern Lebanon. 1,000 U.S. troops from the 82nd airborne are being deployed to the Middle East. The United States is also increasing the maximum military enlistment age from 34 to 42.
A present from the Iranians arrived today according to Dear Leader. It has to do with oil and gas. He does not want to say what it is. It has to do with oil and gas. It is an extremely nice prize. Now we know we’re talking to the right people, he said.
To keep gas prices down, to hide the cost of war in a midterm election year, Dear Leader lifts sanctions on Iranian oil, an estimated $14B windfall for the country America is at war with.
We don’t know who we are talking to, but we know they are the right people.
March 25, 2026
I wake up free of the war. Who am I to quibble? Who am I to argue with the man who started the war? Am I not a model citizen? Dear Leader says the war is over and we won. Excellent news. The cost of winning included, among other losses, the elementary school we bombed twice on the first day and now clear certainty that Iran does, in fact, control the Strait of Hormuz. What was once a theoretical question is now resolved and Iran’s power as a nation, in proving its ability to disrupt global trade and economics, increases greatly. We managed to kill the Supreme Leader (86) and have him quickly replaced by his son, the more hardline of the two and a man whose wife and father we just killed. Israel says the war goes on, and will go on until Iran’s military capabilities are entirely decimated. Dear Leader says the war is over, and we won. Most suspect the troops headed there will attempt to take Kharg Island over the weekend, when the markets are closed. It’s over and we won. You can just say things. You can say anything. Say it with your chest. Anyone who disagrees is an enemy and will be treated as such. Another war won for America in its continued, moral mission to make the world in its image.
Thank God for this country.
I recall screaming most of this as I was being forcibly removed from the vape shop. I recall little else of last night, and today has been spent sleeping it off. I depart for Puerto Rico in three days, basically two. I have been avoiding my editor, but he will be on my ass sooner rather than later for copy.
March 26, 2026
Dear Leader extends his deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz (again). My editors are not as pliable. My own deadline is tomorrow, regardless of the state of international shipping.
The White House official social media accounts are posting cryptic highly pixelated images of Dear Leader and his deputies. It’s almost the weekend for the war and it’s almost Puerto Rico for me.
March 27, 2026
Tiger Woods was always a tragic figure.
Iran’s missiles strike America’s Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, wounding ten American soldiers. Dear Leader demands Tiger Woods be pardoned immediately. Two of the soldiers are critically wounded.
March 28, 2026
In a cabinet meeting, amidst the backdrop of our war in Iran, Houthi rebels striking Israel from Yemen, anxious global markets, tolls for safe passage through Iran’s Strait of Hormuz, Dear Leader extolls the virtues of the humble sharpie.
My flight is boarding. Walls close in. The air pressure. An unsettling realization I have let my readers down, my editors down, and am floating through the whims of history uselessly, noticing everything, capturing nothing.
Derek Maine writes about the War for Farewell Transmission.
by Tyler Plofker
September 2, 2026
Robert D. Manfred Jr., Commissioner
The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball
1271 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY, 10020
Dear Mr. Robert Manfred,
I hope you and your family are well and looking forward to the Labor Day weekend. The sun is so warm this time of year. This is Jimmy Granes of the Baltimore Orioles. The reason for this letter is to apprise you of my efforts in identifying the Fifth Hit. I hope you will be patient with me; I do not want to leave anything out or anything unclear.
Being a student of the game yourself, you will recall that during Game 1 of the 1886 World’s Championship Series, Chicago White Stockings’ cleanup hitter Fred “Dandelion” Pfeffer was thrown out at second base trying to stretch his RBI single into a double. It is my contention that Pfeffer’s mistake was not an unintentional baserunning blunder, but rather, the first public attempt at finding the Fifth Hit. Before Game 7 of the 1925 World Series between the Washington Senators and the Pittsburgh Pirates, the infield dirt was doused in gasoline and set on fire; ostensibly to dry the rain-soaked diamond, however, contemporaneous records paint a different picture. The diary entry of William McKeen (second-in-command groundskeeper) for October 15th, 1925, reads simply, “It did not work.” Again and again, these trials show up. Aparicio’s fall at third. Germany Schaefer and his steals of first. Manny being Manny? More accurately, in my view: Manny being an astute and diligent investigator of the Fifth Hit.
Single, Double, Triple, Homerun. Single, Double, Triple, Homerun. When did the thought of a fifth emerge? Infielder Mike McGeary and Third Baseman Warren White’s letter correspondence from the years 1885–1891 provides the earliest written evidence. McGeary writes of his ideas (“[A] plump Belgian Draught, salivating on an autumn day”) and White gives his own. McGeary rails against the fools who accuse him of “game-fixing.” White writes, “Time is no longer of a benefit to us.” I have seen these letters, have been allowed to study them through the goodwill of their descendants. White’s great-great-great-grandson, Paul, is a fabulous baker, a wonderful baker; the man can really bake.
In the 1930s, there were a number of ballplayers—dimwits, morons—who argued that the Fifth Hit was merely an inside-the-park homerun; i.e., that the homerun can and must be separated into inside-the-park and outside-the-park and, therefore, five hits. But this was rightfully and forcefully mocked by their successors, and is clearly absurd—inside-the-park and outside-the-park are two different manifestations of one kind of hit, in the same way as one can have a ground-rule double and a traditional double, or a single and a bunt single. These are different flavors of the hit they correspond to, not entirely new ones. Dobermanns and Shih Tzu are both types of dogs. I am sure you agree, Mr. Manfred.
I learned of all of this—though unconsciously, I feel it must have been with me from the start, from the very beginning—only this past off-season. Reading Christy Mathewson’s 1912 baseball history/instruction manual/collection of anecdotes, “Pitching in a Pinch; Or, Baseball from the Inside,” I was struck by this passage:
Then Lobert, the tantalizing Teuton with the bow-legs, whacked out a home run into the left-field bleachers and slowed at third with a mocking smile on his face which would have gotten the late Job’s goat. You would have thought he’d done something more than knock a four-bagger.
“[S]omething more than knock a four-bagger.”
From there, I simply followed the thread. Clear on the history, from the first day of this year’s spring training, I began.
I have attempted more than could possibly be listed here. I have concluded a triple by springing up on my left foot and then striking the base with the intermediate phalanx of my right pinky. I have—and I’m sure you’ve seen the footage—I have hit a bouncing single up the middle and marched, half-step, straight from the bag to the bleachers in center, pulling up my uniform, revealing my pale belly, slapping it as if a dholak drum. I have hit a smoking line drive while visualizing the preposterous mustache of Dr. Thomas Wang (more on the languid doctor later). I have smashed (absolutely barreled) balls with all manner of things in my mouth. A grape. A roofing nail. A hornet. One night, with no one else in the ballpark, I sliced a ball down the line, slid prone into second base, and slowly and meticulously gyrated my groin against it until fruition; but, while a pleasurable double, the hit remained, no less and no more, a double.
Once, on an off day, I thought I found it in the maneuvers of a gas station attendant. I had hit what appeared to be an infield single the day before—could every moment since then, every step and every breath, the shoveled putout in the bottom of the inning, the bumper-to-bumper drive home, the morning coffee with too much Sweet’n Low, could it all have been part of it, part of the Fifth Hit which had now just ended with my gas station attendant, a Mr. Francisco Marcello Capionne—whose hair leaves a lot to be desired—a Mr. Francisco Marcello Capionne, jiggling the aluminum nozzle free, letting the gasoline drip and drip and drip onto the back wheel of my 2024 Lincoln Navigator? But the thought left me as quickly as it came. No, not this time. I paid the man in banknotes.
You know, of course, that I am slashing .314/.427/.658, good for a 193 wRC+, Mr. Robert Manfred? I am leading the league in fWAR by a two-win margin. Over the last three seasons combined, I have accrued almost 28% more value than the man behind me. This is to say: the manager lets me do what I want. Old Tony Mansolino does not believe, but he does not stop me. “Keep it mostly in blowouts,” he says. “I’ll try, skip,” I say, winking. Yesterday I licked home plate clean.
Sometimes I have doubts. Sometimes I wallow. Sometimes the thought pops into my head that this life is nothing but an inexhaustible maze of horrors. But then I remember Mike McGeary’s 28th letter to Warren White, McGeary’s 28th letter to White in which he states, “I know it in its absence.”
In the 17th chapter of the first Book of Samuel it is written, “And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had, even in a scrip; and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near to the Philistine.” Plato claims the five regular polyhedra—tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron—to be the fundamental building blocks of the physical world. The Hadith enumerate five distinct pillars of Islam. The Pandava brothers (Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula, Sahadeva) of the Mahabharata number five. The Fir Bolg chieftains of the Lebor Gabála Érenn number five. Celestial mechanics describes five points, referred to as Lagrange points, where the gravitational pull and centripetal force between any celestial masses are necessarily and always in perfect equilibrium. There are five basic human senses. Five fingers to a hand, five toes to a foot. The Five Holy Wounds of Christ.
Let us not beat around the bush any longer, my esteemed, handsome, well-groomed friend. Let us put all the marbles from the bag onto the end table. The fact is this: My languid, hilariously-mustachioed Dr. Thomas Wang, he of the curled, trembling upper lip and eyes like golden rubies, told me a week ago what I already knew: I am dying. My pancreas is not cooperating with the rest of my body. My remaining time is best denominated in months. You, as such an intelligent baseball man, Mr. Manfred, may have noticed the 193 wRC+ mentioned above, while exceptional, is a whopping 34 points lesser than what I was running as of the end of July. My production will continue to dip and soon I will no longer be able to play; soon I will be counting scuffs on the ceiling and my only hits will be into the bedpan.
Really, this letter is not a briefing; it is a request. If I do not find the Fifth Hit in my dwindling inhales—and I may not, I have no doubt I may not—this letter is a request. Open the fields, Mr. Robert Manfred. Open the fields. That is my request. Fields across this great, lush, green country; men and women and children swinging, experimenting. Making the rules up as they go. New rules no one has ever thought of and old ones no one is left to remember. Thousands and thousands of baseball diamonds, at every school, at every campground, at every workplace. At every prison and every hospital courtyard. In the abandoned alley behind P.S. 112 and in the middle of the White House South Lawn. Long-tressed women snorkeling in Chesapeake Bay. Maybe there is a horseshoe crab. Men of all sizes giving yellow-throated birds something nice. Perhaps a small bear filled with sand. Young girls eating cotton candy through their nose and wiggling out their last baby tooth, tossing it, hitting it real good alright with a metal bat. Little boys hopped up on Shirley Temples, so many Shirley Temples, outrageously above any reasonable serving size recommendation of Shirley Temples, jitterbugging wild to Songs of the North American Bullfrog. A film projector that doesn’t work well. Big-time scrapes, thorn bites left unbandaged. Pencils. Become the commissioner of the Fifth Hit, Mr. Robert Manfred, help us find it. It will require a great deal of funding, I understand. I understand that. Start at the top. Reach out to the President. If the fool can get but one thing right, let it be this. And if he refuses, turn to local government, private money. Problems there, then turn to the charity and the goodwill of the people. The people, Mr. Manfred. Get the funds however you must and build. If you don’t want to admit what the push is for, that is okay. If you don’t think the public is ready for that, that is alright. Just say the initiative is to “grow the game” or to “positively impact health.” The people will understand, intuitively, what needs to be done. You, Mr. Robert Manfred, born into a family of five—mother, father, brother, sister, and you, born a boy and now the commissioner of the Major Leagues—you, Mr. Robert Manfred, know that better than anybody.
Grass is something to smell. The sun is so warm this time of year.
With love and sincerely yours,
Jimmy Granes
Tyler Plofker is a writer in NYC.