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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Three Prose Poems

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By Steve Gergley

1. Candied Pears

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

2. No Names

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

3. My Greatest Ambitions

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


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

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Crayon Barn Chris

VI

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By Dylan Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What year is she?”

“What year is who?”

“The station wagon, son.”

“Oh, man—I mean. Shit.”

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

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

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

“Right,” I said. 

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

“In me?”

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

I thought about that for a while. 

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

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

Under the deli door, a low wind hissing Chrisssss.  

Eventually I just didn’t respond. 

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

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

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

THE GREAT COMPETITION

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By Nathan Bogart

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

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

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

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

“I just wanted to remind you…”

“I know.” 

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

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

“He’s a difficult man.”

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

“You know it’s complicated.” 

“Tell him.”

“Okay, I’ll see you at home.”

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

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

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

“Who?” 

“Me, Pop. Your son.”

“Well, come on in already.” 

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

“Hey, Pop.”

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

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

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

“See him? On the left?”

“Yeah, Pop. I see him.”

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

“Yeah, I see it, Pop.”

His dad lit a cigarette, handed it to Artie. 

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

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

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

“Please, son. Not now.”

“Well, it’s just that—”

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

Artie’s father leaned closer to the television: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He ran towards the noise. 

“Pop, you okay? Everything okay?”

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

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

“I said I’m fine, God damn it.”

“Pop, you’re bleeding.” 

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

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

“Pop, I’ve got to put you in a home.”

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

“Fine, but I’m taking my tapes.”

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Eyes in a Jar

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By JD Clapp

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

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

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

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

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Blinds

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By Alexander Fredman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

It Wouldn’t Hurt You

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By Claire Hopple

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A shopping spree,” Mikey says.

“Something else,” I say.

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson’s wife clears her throat. Here comes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Issue 2 Issue 2 Fiction

STUMBLER

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By Alan Good

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

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

But it did stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Good is a writer from southwest Missouri.

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Issue 2 Issue 2 Fiction

DROP ZONE

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By Brendan Gillen

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

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

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

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

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

“God in heaven.”

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

“You already look better,” I said.

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

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

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

“Yeah, no thank you,” said Scarlet. 

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

“What did you eat?”

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

Alaina puffed out her cheeks. Scarlet flinched.

“Are you—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn’t tell if she was joking. 

“I’m still having fun,” I said. 

“Makes one of us.”

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

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

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

Scarlet came back with an orange Powerade.

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

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

“Tastes like Little League.”

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

“How’s that tummy?” Scarlet said. 

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

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

Scarlet and I shared a glance.

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

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

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

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

“Guess it’s your turn,” Alaina said. 

“My turn…”

“To spill your guts.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll drop you off?” I said.

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

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

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Issue 2 Issue 2 Fiction

2 STORIES BY RILEY QUINN SCOTT

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By Riley Quinn Scott

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

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

The Pleasures of Drawing

May I have that? 

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

You want my drawing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Issue 2 Issue 2 Fiction

INTRODUCTION TO A BOOK OF ART

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By Mather Schneider

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”  

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

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

I said, “Yeah, I like it here.” 

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

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

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

Everyone in the room tensed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

END

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

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

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